She did not move like a living person; it was something like it, and yet nothing like it at all. Her chin seemed to angle one way, her eyes another; her shoulders turned, but her waist did not. Her legs did not walk, yet the hem of her skirt brushed the floor in cold silence. The curtain did not stir with the slightest breath as she vanished through it. And then she was gone.
“Wait,” my mother said, and even through the aftermath of my horror I could hear the relief in her voice. “She is here. She is here! Speak, spirit! Speak to your loved ones!”
I didn’t stay for the rest; I’d had more than enough. I left my crawl space on silent feet, the tea biscuit a lump in my stomach. The itch was leaving my brain in a slow trickle, an uncanny feeling that left a throb in its wake. I went to my room and curled up on my bed, even though it was three o’clock in the afternoon and I was supposed to be doing my lessons. I fell asleep almost instantly.
I awoke to find the sun setting and my mother in my room. She lowered herself onto the edge of my bed, as slow and exhausted as a woman a decade older than her thirty years. She was already untying the scarf from her hair.
“That was you, wasn’t it?” she said to me without preamble.
I rolled to my side, facing her, and pulled my knees to my chest. I still had my shoes on, which was absolutely forbidden in bed, but my mother didn’t seem to notice. I said nothing.
She sighed, as if I’d spoken. “I felt something. Dear God, I’ve always thought . . . I’ve always wondered—” Her words seemed to choke her and she dropped the scarf into her lap, her narrow shoulders drooping. “I never knew whether I would be happy or horrified if it was true.”
“That I’m like you?” I asked.
I wanted badly for her to turn to me, to run her palm and her warm fingers over my cheek, to gently kiss my temple as she did when she put me to bed at night. But she stayed staring at nothing, her back turned to me as if she’d forgotten me. I stared at the line of her shoulders, the thin bones of her arms in the sleeves of the black dress, the mass of red-gold hair that she’d gathered at the nape of her neck.
“You mustn’t tell your father,” she said at last. She ran her hand over the scarf in her lap, smoothing it against her legs. Then she squared her shoulders a little. “I’ll have to teach you. There are techniques you can learn. We can handle it at the end of your lessons, while your father is at work. You must not let on when he’s home—you must be normal. I expect you to practice and to follow my directions exactly. You will have to watch my sessions from behind the curtain. I expect you to be observant and obedient, and you must not be afraid.” She turned her head just enough to glance at me over her shoulder. “Do you understand?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“This will not be easy for you, so do not expect it to be. I admit I’ve anticipated this possibility, which is why I did not put you in school. Now I see I was right. A girl of your abilities cannot go to school.”
I blinked away tears. Who needed school, anyway? I didn’t want the company of other girls, who would probably be mean and stupid. “Yes, Mother.”
She looked away from me again, as if the sight of me, even from an angle, somehow pained her. “Once you begin to see the dead, Ellie, you must learn to maintain control. It is a doorway that has cracked ajar. The dead will take advantage of it; they cannot help it. It is in their nature, especially if they are being called. But the dead are dead, and they cannot hurt you. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Mother,” I said.
She nodded and stood. “Do not put your shoes on the bed again,” she said, and left the room.
But I left my shoes where they were and stayed on the bed, listening to the clock ticking as twilight stole the light from the room. My mother loved me; I knew that without a doubt. It was because she loved me so much that she was concerned. It was because she loved me so much that she expected more of me. I could help her. She hadn’t been able to call that old woman; I had. Perhaps she was tired, but I was not. I had been born with her talent, and instead of going to school I would learn to use it. The thought both excited and horrified me.
The next day, we began our lessons.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I sat in front of the vanity in my small bedroom, wearing my mother’s dress and tying her scarf into my hair. I wore my blond hair bobbed, one of the many things I’d horrified her with just before she died; I’d cut it to follow a fad, but discovered I loved the style. Still, it was difficult to wind the scarf through hair so short.
You must be normal.
I’d come home the day before to find my disapproving neighbor, Mrs. Weller, at my door with news that a Scotland Yard inspector had come looking for me and questioning my neighbors. “He was dressed respectably enough, I suppose,” Mrs. Weller had said, “but these policemen are low sorts. Not the kind of people we want in this neighborhood.” She’d handed me a note left in her care for me and gone off home in a righteous huff.
The note sat on my vanity now, its dark, masculine handwriting mocking me:
PLEASE CONTACT INSPECTOR MERRIKEN, SCOTLAND YARD, AT YOUR MOST URGENT CONVENIENCE. REGARDS.
The clock ticked softly from its place on the wall, where it rested against my mother’s rose wallpaper. Outside my window, a bird sang in my small back garden. I looked at myself in the mirror. I was tired. I’d barely slept, and when I had, my dreams had been about mud and stark terror under a cold canopy of trees and a man named Fenton screaming beside me. It was possible that James Hawley would never speak to me again. Psychic mediums had only clients, not friends; displays like the one I’d shown James the day before drove people off—even psychical investigators. And so there I was, alone in my mother’s room, with only the police interested in my whereabouts.
You must be normal, my mother had said.
I rose and left the bedroom, leaving the note behind on the vanity. My first appointment of the day was about to arrive. A girl has to make money, after all.