Читать книгу The Spectral City - Leanna Renee Hieber - Страница 11

Chapter Four

Antonia Morelli was the next to return, taking her seat silently, young Jenny behind her; the last of their medium quartet.

Eve didn’t need to say a word or send a wire in times of an emergency. All she had to do was open herself in a certain, clear and unmistakable way—a psychic alarm, a siren’s wail let the souls connected to hers feel her concern and they would, almost always, take their natural places around the circle as soon as was possible.

Eve and the girls didn’t know much about Antonia’s past. All they knew and cared about was the striking night they had all met, which was telling in and of itself.

Antonia had knocked on the door mid-séance, in the middle of a hunt for information about an abusive doctor. When Eve snapped out of her trance to answer the bell, there was tall Antonia, brown-black hair swept up into a bun atop her head, dressed in a lace-collared shirtwaist and a plain black skirt, sporting a bruised cheek and a half-smile. She’d worn a hint of rouge and lip color, and her hazel eyes framed by long black lashes were sharply focused.

“Hello . . .” Eve had begun, but before she could ask if she could be of service, the young woman—perhaps Eve’s age, but it was hard to tell, as it was clear the soul inside was an elder one—had explained herself in a soft, tremulous voice.

“When I . . . wasn’t what was expected, the spirits said to come here. And . . . I wasn’t in a position to argue. Sorry to interrupt you. I’m Antonia. I wasn’t born so by name, but I am Antonia. I’ve no family, as the sex they assigned to me upon my entrance into this world is not who I am and I had to part ways with them for my safety.

“The spirits told me Eve wouldn’t mind and, if I spoke forthrightly, would take me as I am, without question. You’re Eve?”

Antonia had stared at Eve, boldly willing her understanding, and Eve’s senses had warmed to this clearly feminine soul who was so very much like herself—elegant and fierce, brave enough to presume, in fact, demand her safe passage as the woman she had become.

“I am,” Eve replied. “And who am I to argue with Providence? I’m looking for a new hire, and the universe provides. Welcome,” Eve said, gesturing her in. “We’re in the midst of a séance.”

“I know,” Antonia replied with a smile that won Eve over entirely. “May I please join and prove myself?”

* * * *

That was how they’d begun. Antonia dove in and got right to work. During the séance her first night, Antonia identified and communicated with the spirits of two missing persons, one having fled home only to die of illness and one murdered. This closed two of Eve’s open cases before the precinct had even been officially codified.

Due to her nearly preternatural understanding of others and their needs, Antonia got along with everyone. The Precinct gave her purpose, belonging, and a safe haven. Now she was here at another critical juncture, and her whole being was alertness.

The same had been true of eight-year-old Jenny Friel. She had simply arrived, a bright-eyed, bronze-haired little girl in a calico dress, escorted by the ghost of her mother who had drowned in a boating accident with her Catholic parish. Jenny hadn’t been on the boat, but the trauma of losing her mother after having already lost her father when she was a baby back in Ireland cut her voice to the quick and she barely spoke.

When she had arrived on the stoop and Eve opened the door, Jenny looked up at her, wide green eyes sad but determined, her light brown hair bedraggled. Her Ma floated to her side and explained to Eve the situation, asking if she could help, as the only family she’d had here went down on that boat.

“Fellow spirits told me my girl would be understood here,” her mother said in a gentle Irish lilt. “Not just because she’s got the gift of Sight, but because she’s gone right quiet . . .”

Eve had told the spirit that her own mother stopped speaking after the death of her maternal grandmother and they were well equipped to understand and even to teach sign language if need be. Eve opened the door to little Jenny and that was that.

Lady Denbury, Eve’s mother, suffered from selective mutism when she was a child. She had been sent off to the Connecticut Asylum to learn American Sign Language. Her voice had recovered, but she instilled the value of Sign in her daughter, saying that she had a feeling she’d need it. It had proven quite true. Gran also spoke Sign, maintaining that after having learned five vocal languages she had felt it high time to learn a different kind. That had been the initial connection between Natalie and Gran; their ability to converse. Being understood created families out of orphans and the disenfranchised, communication being a shelter for a heart and mind battling the elements.

There was no taking away little Jenny’s immense grief, but at least she was championed. Natalie had agreed to teach Jenny American Sign and Jenny was eager to learn and to take her mind off the pain of loss.

Much like Eve, Jenny had grown up hearing spirits and didn’t know any different. Antonia and Cora had both opened to the gifts at thirteen. Altogether, the quartet was equally haunted and equally understood. Jenny’s face on this night, facing another loss as she strode in behind Antonia into the front foyer, was stoic.

“So our Maggie is mysteriously gone?” Antonia asked.

Eve nodded confirmation. “I don’t even need to be upset, Zofia is beside herself enough for all of us,” Eve said, trying to force a smile.

Jenny signed to Eve that she could hear Zofia’s sob from what felt like a mile away. Eve nodded.

“Don’t worry,” Antonia said to Jenny. While Antonia hadn’t fully learned Sign, she had taken to Jenny like an older sister and the two were intuitively connected. “I know you and Maggie are close.” Antonia gestured towards the direction where Zofia had wafted. “I know she’s like your sister too. We’ll find her. She’d never go on to the undiscovered country without telling you. Without telling all of us.”

Eve nodded. “She wouldn’t go without warning. That’s why we’re all worried.” Eve tried to hold back a torrent of emotion but she had no artifice around these women and she allowed a few tears to fall as she sat a moment with a cup of tea. Jenny slid next to Eve, her small body only taking up a part of the cushion next to her and grabbed her hand and held it as memories of Maggie overtook Eve.

Eve was young when the ghost of Margaret Hathorn had first come to say hello. The ice had been broken in the house about her seeing ghosts for three years by this point, her first interaction with the dead having been her grandmother Helen, who’d died pushing Eve’s mother Natalie out of the way of an oncoming carriage when Natalie was only a toddler. From the first black-eyed-Susan flower that her grandmother’s ghost had mysteriously placed on the Whitby mantle, to Eve’s present employment, Eve’s gifts had been a source of tension with no resolution—only a battle-tested knowledge of what would and wouldn’t upset her parents at the dinner table.

“Don’t tell your mother that I’ve come to you,” Maggie had said to Eve that first day. She had appeared in full greyscale, her image very potent, her hair up in a coiffure and dressed in a beautiful, trailing ball-gown of early eighties French style, with a prominent bustle and layers of frills everywhere.

“Oh, so you know she doesn’t like my talking to ghosts?” Eve asked with a wary eye.

“I don’t want to make it any harder for her. It was . . . hard for her when I died. She blames herself. Gran too.” Maggie batted a hand and laughed. “They’re so stupid about it.”

There was a long pause. “Care to elaborate?” Eve pressed. This ghost clearly knew her family but she didn’t know her.

“I was Evelyn’s niece,” the ghost explained, wafting over to hover at Eve’s vanity, taking a look at herself in the tall oval mirror and frowning, reaching up a translucent hand to tuck a floating lock of hair back into her coiffure. “I wasn’t very nice to Natalie in life. It was complicated and I was a complete snot, but remember the ‘horror’ that brought your parents together?”

“One of the many things they won’t talk about?” Eve asked.

“Yes.” The ghost swiveled around to face Eve, bobbing gently as she perched on the velvet vanity stool. “I got caught up in all that too. I made it worse for us all. It became the death of me.”

“I’m sorry,” Eve said. “So why haunt me? Is our family unfinished business?”

“I came to your mother after I died and we forgave each other. I thought I’d move on for good. But truth be told, I was drawn back to you. I had been in a pleasant ‘between’ for some time when I saw a light and I followed. Right before I stepped through, from the Corridors and into this world again, your grandmother Helen was there. She grabbed my hand, helped me step across and told me she was confident you’d welcome me.”

Eve had done exactly so, just as she had with each medium and spirit who had been drawn to her. This magnitude of purpose had driven Eve right to a legislator to ask for that purpose to be given a job. The feeling of water on her hand, her own tear, roused Eve back to the moment.

“It’s so odd . . .” Eve murmured. “You understand, friends, why this is so strange. When one works with the dead and becomes so very fond of them, as we all have of Maggie, there is a comfort in the idea that they would never be gone. Grief here is so changed, specific and hollow. I’ve never felt anything like it.”

“What do we do, beyond the usual?” Cora asked.

Eve gestured for her fellows to follow her to the single round table perfect for a small séance.

“I don’t know,” Eve replied. “But we can begin with our usual rite whenever searching for information on a missing person. We treat Maggie just like we would any living soul gone without a trace.”

Her mediums nodded, taking a seat and placing their palms flush upon the black tablecloth and allowing their gaze to move to a soft focus before them. At the center of the table sat a box of matches and a white taper on a silver candlestick, at the base of which sat a wreath of juniper berries. To the right of this was a small silver bell.

Eve took in a deep breath and released it slowly. As she did, she struck the match and lit the taper. “Heavens, grace us,” she murmured.

In response, Antonia murmured something private, Jenny made the sign of the cross, and Cora bowed her head. Picking up the small bell, Eve rang it once, a glitteringly sharp, pure little sound that echoed around the room.

She sat, placing her hands flush upon the table too, taking another deep breath. Leaning into the table, she extended her hands, one to each of her compatriots, who did the same, creating a circle of held hands.

There were no other tricks of their trade, no other divinatory devices. Eve surmised that the more contraptions one relied on, the easier it was for a medium, whether legitimately gifted or toying with the craft, to begin relying on theatrical effects to make sure an audience received what they wanted. The spirit world was unpredictable. A career in divination either meant one weathered the fits and starts, or fashioned fail-safes for consistent results and became a fraud.

Eve knew she would never attain respect for her mission or her ghosts if their Precinct was revealed as leaning on trick tables, spirit cabinets or other easily manipulated objects. They relied only on a candle, a bell, a few symbols of respective faiths and of the natural world, and their own gifted souls. She hoped in time their simple truths would prove themselves and she’d write it all down to show to the world, when ready.

“Heavens, we ask that you grant us,” Eve continued quietly, “by way of the spirits we have come to know and trust, information regarding the soul of Margaret Hathorn, our friend and colleague, absent from us this day. We wish to be connected with her or any spirit who knows something of her.”

Eve watched the candle flicker a moment. She closed her eyes and spoke more directly. “Maggie, are you there?” Eve continued. “Why have you worried us so?”

The candle went out entirely in a burst of chill breeze and the room lit with the additional eerie light of a new attendant spirit, like the glow of a bright moon against Eve’s closed eyelids.

“She’s gone, Eve,” came a worried, thickly accented voice, wafting into the room. Eve didn’t open her eyes but knew it was Olga, a young Ukrainian woman who had died in the same industrial fire as Zofia. Their spirits had found one another in the corridor between life and death that the spirits so often talked about. They agreed to stay on and haunt the earth on behalf of those who died in industrial accidents and try whatever they could think of to prevent them. While Zofia wanted to stay on as a constant Precinct haunt, Olga only manifested during a séance.

“Maggie has never missed telling us goodnight unless she’s told me and Zofia that she’s gone on a case hunt,” Olga insisted. “Something must be wrong.”

“Any idea where she might have gone that might have caused trouble for her?” Eve asked calmly, even though her own nerves were fraying.

“Yesterday she said she wanted to see something mid-town, that something didn’t feel right, and now she’s gone,” Olga exclaimed, her voice breaking.

The varied ghosts that agreed to work with the Precinct knew one another, were often called forth in a séance, and occasionally went off on their own adventures together.

Many of the Precinct spirits, whether they haunted Eve regularly or only came when called, had become close, filling in for family lost, drawn to their common causes and untimely ends. Any encounter with the spirit world offered a chance for family found and a bit of life restored.

“We’ll find her,” Eve promised, opening her eyes to comfort both Olga and Zofia as they floated before her in their plain, drab, greyscale dresses. Turning towards the small form of the eight-year-old floating at Eve’s right, where the air was cooler, Eve placed her hand supportively at the side of the draft, where Zofia placed incorporeal hands atop her open palm. “She’s the mascot and the heart of the whole Precinct. Something must be so important that it drew her away from us, but she’ll tell us all about it as soon as we find her,” Eve stated, wishing she felt as confident as she was trying to be for these young spirits who bravely went into fires and all manner of industrial accidents hoping they could do any small thing to save a life or alert help, even if every time it meant reliving the trauma of their own deaths. These spirits were so inspiring.

Cora Dupris spoke in French, reaching out to her closest and best haunt. Uncle Louis spent most of his time haunting New Orleans but was always ready to help his talented niece. After a benediction, he appeared before them, a handsome-featured man whose grey skin would once have been the same light brown as Cora’s, with close-shorn black hair, expressive eyes, and a plain dark suit.

“Bonne nuit, ma chérie,” the spirit murmured. “Ça va?”

Cora shifted to English for the sake of her colleagues. “Uncle Louis, mon cher, have you seen Maggie? She’s gone and hasn’t shown up at any of her haunts. It’s unlike her . . .”

Louis Dupris, the twin of Cora’s father, had died in a mysterious research accident. He had a complicated past relationship with assisting Gran and other acquaintances of the family, and Eve had been instructed never to bring that up; his presence might cause pain if mentioned beyond their circle.

“I’ve no additional insights,” Louis replied, “but I pledge to keep a spiritual ear tuned for her. I cannot claim closeness with Maggie, beyond awareness of her as a Precinct asset. Usually we try to allow the spirits to let go. This runs counterintuitive to the momentum that urges us onward.”

“I know, Uncle,” Cora replied gently. “But our Precinct has its own protocols. Maggie’s disappearance is antithetical to her pledge to us.”

“Anyone who is important to this divinely wrought group is important to me, tied together in soul bonds. I shall remain aware and come to you with any clues.”

“Thank you, Mister Dupris,” Eve murmured, “you are always so gracious and helpful.”

“Anything for my family,” he said, smiling at Cora. He wafted down to kiss the crown of her head with ghostly lips and vanished. Cora stared after him, turned towards the wake of his departing chill until the next ghost joined their ensemble.

Vera was the next to arrive, an old woman who had been brought to New York as a child from Mexico City. She’d found her passion and calling late in life studying at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where many women found fulfilling instruction at an elite level in the school. She’d died at a ripe old age on the far Upper East Side and loved the raucous metropolis so much she simply didn’t want to leave. Manifest in the room, white-haired and floating behind Antonia, her favorite of the Precinct mediums, she drew her large, greyscale, once-colorful floral shawl over her bony shoulders. Antonia didn’t know Spanish, but she was fluent when Vera was around.

“Amigas,” she began gently, speaking through Antonia, her youthful voice transformed to something gravelly, old, and warm. Vera had an accent but had learned English well during life and spoke it today for the benefit of the group. “You know the ways of the spirit world do not concur with the timelines of your own,” she said. “A friend missing for only a day, and there’s this much fuss?” She scoffed and laughed.

“It’s her patterns being off that concern us, Vera dear,” Eve replied. “I know ghosts to be creatures of habit.”

“She never misses saying a goodnight,” Zofia insisted, floating from her place beside Eve over towards Vera, tugging on the old woman’s spectral shawl. “I can always feel her. Or I could. Until today. She’s gone,” the child murmured, trying not to burst into tears again.

“I’ll walk the Corridors and look,” Vera said.

“Thank you,” Eve stated. “Be careful they don’t draw you too close.”

Vera laughed. “The Walks cannot have me. I am not done with New York yet and it is not done with me any more than it is with Maggie.”

Gran had always called the space between life and death “the two walks”, a corridor where souls came and went from between worlds, “for better or for worse.” She had described seeing her life flash before her eyes in a near death experience as a sequence of still moments, like pictures at an exhibition, hanging on the walls of that corridor. In one brief moment of candor her mother expressed having seen the same thing.

This place had been further verified by the spirits that worked for her, something akin to a long hallway, although everyone’s experience was slightly different. It was best not to spend too much time in the Corridors. Nightmares lurked there, forces and energies that the living and the dead could not quite explain. The darkest of negativities that had coalesced all the way into demonic form could come and go from them too . . .

“What else can we do?” Antonia asked the spirits.

“Hold on to her,” Vera replied. “Find things of hers—relics, special places—think of her, and magnetize her to you.”

“There’s such a sadness,” Zofia said. “Not just mine. It’s . . . it’s like I can’t breathe . . .” Olga, who had been quiet so that other spirits could speak, wafted closer to the child.

The candle guttered and there was a sob from the spirit world, a soft, aching cry from many spirit voices, echoing in the room in an uncanny reverberation, and then silence. Silence in the dark. An otherworldly echo of a bell ringing meant the spirit world was closing its door, as if the ringing of the bell had a parentheses, a closure of thought.

“Goodnight, Eve,” Zofia said, grabbing Olga’s hand and fading. “See you tomorrow.”

Vera waved to the group and faded. Antonia blew Vera a kiss.

That was the end of the session.

“Thank you, spirits, for your services,” Eve murmured. “Good night.”

Everyone was silent for a long time. The room warmed. Eve got up, moving slowly in the dim gaslight to the sconce where she turned the key and brightened the flames.

“Tomorrow we’ll haunt her haunts,” Eve instructed, trying to sound more hopeful than she felt. “For now, get some rest.”

Her colleagues filed upstairs while Eve wandered to her library. There, she kept a small box of Maggie’s things that had been given to her via Gran’s intervention, things Maggie had wanted Eve to have of the few things left of her, before her family moved out of New York.

Sitting at her writing desk she pulled out an engraved fountain pen that had been, in life, Maggie’s favorite writing instrument for letters, diary entries and the occasional ill-advised love note. Eve sat with it in her hand, weighing its heaviness, picturing Maggie writing with it, dreaming with it, exorcising her old demons with it.

Plucking a fresh sheet of paper, Eve closed her eyes and let the pen take her hand. Maggie had imbued part of herself into the implement. She called upon the echo of her friend that had conversed so much in paper and ink with this vital object.

True mediums might engage in any number of methods to transcribe messages from the spirit world. Eve employed any of them that struck her and in the moment, automatic writing seemed the only salve for the sharp, distinct pain that was growing just behind her forehead, as if her third eye were weeping and the tears were swelling up beneath her skin . . .

If a migraine resulted from overwork or undue pressure, so be it.

“Where are you, Margaret Hathorn?” Eve murmured to the air. “Give me a sign.”

As Eve wrote the first phrase, her hand moving before she even had a grasp of the words, she heard a thousand murmurs echo a repetition of the earlier chilling warning that came softly from dead lips:

Don’t let anything in . . .

Then there was no sensation at all.