Next to me, James sighed.
“Silence!” The Great Evelina shouted, as if she’d heard him. “The spirits are speaking! I am hearing something . . . a name. There is . . . a J. The name has a J.”
“That’s Jane!” The old woman who was with her faux husband sprang from her seat. “That’s my daughter!”
The audience went quiet. “I should have bet you a pound,” James murmured to me.
“Don’t be cocky,” I replied. “Two psychics, two plants.”
“Jane!” The Great Evelina proclaimed from the stage, her eyes still closed. “Yes, Jane speaks to me. She uses me as her instrument to communicate with her beloved parents. I obey.”
“Jane!” the old woman warbled, distressed. If she was acting, she was rather good.
“She speaks,” said Evelina. “The voice is very strong. She says she died of influenza. It was quick and she did not suffer. She had brown hair. An innocent angel.”
“It’s true!” The old woman gasped. “My child! Oh, Jane, I miss you so much!”
The group of drunk men hooted again, bored of the sentimentality, while an elderly woman in the front row dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief.
I felt James’s shoulders lift and sag as he sighed again. “Do you have any premonitions?” he whispered in my ear.
“Yes,” I said, ignoring the fact that I could feel his warm breath on my neck. “I predict that it’s going to be a long evening.”
“That sleeping fellow has the right idea,” he replied, putting on his hat and pulling the brim over his eyes. “Wake me when Ramona comes on, if she ever does.”
I glanced at him, at the relaxed line of his mouth under the hat brim, his muscular arms crossed over his chest, but I couldn’t relax. I was jumpy with tension, with a sick feeling. Something about the entire display bothered me, and it wasn’t just the terrible quality of The Great Evelina’s act. It was the crassness of it, of the performer and the audience both—all of them using death for a night’s cheap entertainment. I thought of the old woman I’d seen when I was seven, the horrible stench of her. I looked at the woman weeping quietly in the front row.
“This is wrong,” I said softly.
Next to me, James shifted in his seat.
I watched Evelina continue her dreary, faked conversation with the imaginary Jane, using the empty chair as a prop, the girl’s imaginary parents chiming in. “I can’t stand it.”
“I thought you said you’d seen shows like this before?” James’s low voice came from beside me.
“I have. But it was with Gloria.” I struggled with the memory, struggled with the words. “Everything was different with Gloria. This—this is just horrible.”
“This,” James said casually, “is why I hate people.”
He reached up and tilted his hat back a little, fixing his gaze on the stage. Despite his careful pose, I saw he was not relaxed at all. There was something deadly serious and steely in his eyes, something I understood. “This is why you do what you do, isn’t it?” I asked him. “You debunk people like this. People who cheapen all of the death you saw.” He did not reply, and a chill of horror went down my back. “Did you ever equate me with this? Did you think this was me?”
For a moment I thought he wouldn’t answer. “I didn’t know,” he finally admitted. “You have no idea how many liars I’ve met in my lifetime.”
It threatened to close in on me again, the disappointment of failing him, but this time I fought it. “This is not me,” I said, my voice fierce even to my own ears beneath the whisper of it. “This was never me.”
Finally he looked at me. The steeliness left his expression, and the lines of his face were almost amused, almost relieved. “I know.”
The lights dimmed again, and Evelina, finished with her show, tottered off. James sat up in his chair and took off his hat again, his attention evaporating like water. I was still giddy from the look he’d given me, but I felt my own pulse of excitement as I followed his gaze.
On the stage, a dark shadow appeared from the wings. It took its place in the center.
“Finally,” James said. “Here comes a hell of a show.”
* * *
The lights came up to reveal a woman with a sleek black bob in the distinctive style of Louise Brooks, dressed in a midnight black dress. Her eyes were lined with heavy kohl, but beneath the elegant fashion even I could see that her face had a haggardness to it, an age beyond her years. The hungry lines of her cheekbones and the sunken sockets of her eyes only made her look more commanding.
The chairs had been removed from the stage, and Ramona raised her arms from her sides, as if beckoning to us. “Death,” she said in a husky, mannish voice that carried to the back of the auditorium, “is the final act. The final obscenity of our short, pointless lives. The brutality that ends it all. Or so we are told.”
I felt James go very still.
“What have you been told?” Ramona lifted her chin. “That you must do good deeds, and you’ll be rewarded in the afterlife? That angels watch over your soul? That you must pray to God, and read his book, to gain entry to heaven? That if”—her voice seemed to catch for a moment—“you went to war for your King and country, you would die a good death? A proper death? Is that it?”
The room was silent. I could hear James breathing.
Ramona lowered her hands again. She almost seemed to be swaying. “You have been lied to, all of you. By your country, by your religion. By your teachers, by your parents. By everyone. Death is not beautiful; it is brutal. Beyond life is only a wasteland, where souls wander in pain. The devil is coming for you. He is coming for me. He is coming for everyone.”