“What are you talking about?” said Rose’s mother. She squinted hard at me. “Who are you?”
“Are you one of them?” The sad man was staring at me, his bottomless gaze devouring me in its pain. “You can call them, too, can’t you? I can see it. Give me your hand.” He dropped the hands he was holding and lunged across the table, grabbing for me, but another hand came down hard on his wrist, pinning it.
“I’d think twice about that,” James said in a low, dangerous voice.
I leaned back in my chair, dropping Rose’s hand. “Please,” I said to the man as his grief hit me again. Or perhaps it was the smell of the candle; I could no longer tell. The itch was bad now, a crawling sensation under my scalp. “You must leave. Sometimes, when they come . . . it’s better they didn’t. Sometimes—”
But then the room dropped away, and there was only the dark, and the pinpoint of candlelight, and my breath rasping in my lungs. And sitting across from me was a woman.
She made no sound. She wore a high-necked blouse and skirt in the fashion of ten years ago, her light hair tied back in a bun. She looked perhaps twenty. She stared at me, her eyes large in her pale dead face, her form flickering in the candlelight, yet somehow waxy and real. She held a small child in her arms, its face pressed to her chest, the delicate curls of its hair the same color as hers.
Voices carried on around me, far away. I stared at the gaunt curve of the woman’s cheek, the long fingers pressed into the baby’s back. Her gaze on me held a consuming hunger that made my stomach turn again. The child’s feet dangled past the curve of her elbow, slack in their tiny shoes. It could have been a boy or a girl; it was so small, in a simple baby’s dress and a delicate dusting of curls, it was impossible to tell which. One of its arms rested against the waist of her skirt, pinned between the child’s body and hers. She held the small body tightly to her, unmoving.
Behind me, a creak of wood. A rapping on the table. A breath of air blowing. The other participants were shadows, their lips moving, but I heard nothing. A slow, deep arch of pain made its way up the back of my skull.
I mustered myself. Go, I said to the woman. Go. Not now.
She only stared at me, avid and wanting, the baby clutched to her.
Go! I commanded. It wasn’t working, and my own power was slipping from my grasp, like something warm and slimy and wet. I had been trained since that day when I was seven to keep my power under strict control, but all of that was gone now and I felt only monstrous panic as I tried harder and harder to grip it. Go away!
Her hands moved on the child, slid eerily over its back. It lay with its face buried in its mother’s chest, unmoving and still. More raps sounded on the séance table and the draft on the back of my neck meant a door had moved. This is the worst kind of visitation, I heard my mother’s voice say. The kind that comes of its own volition, the kind that cannot be controlled by a medium. They are malignant and must not be allowed through. This woman had no message to give, only pain that I felt like an echo through my body. Tears stung my eyes.
“It isn’t going to move, is it?” I said. “The baby.”
“What?” I heard the sad man’s voice clearly over the rushing in my ears. “What did you say?”
I summoned my strength. The only way to get rid of a visitation like this was to convince it to leave if you could. “I’m sorry about your baby,” I choked, a sob in my voice. “I’m sorry. Please leave.”
“What did you say?”
“Come any closer,” came James’s voice, “and I’ll lay you out. I mean it.”
The woman did not seem to see anyone in the room; still she stared at me, and again her hands moved over the child’s back. The expression in her waxy eyes seemed to shift, like ink that has had water spilled on it. Her mouth moved.
I jerked my hands up and jammed my palms over my ears. “No!” I shouted. “Please!”
“Is that my Alice?” the man cried, and the woman’s lips opened, revealing a blurry set of awful teeth, a black pit of a mouth. She gripped her baby, her eyes gone mad, and screamed, a sound of unearthly agony that split through my brain. The stench was unbearable, the sound a high keen. I opened my mouth to scream over it, to drown it out, but the woman leaned over the table, her face gray and dead in mine, her baby dead in her arms, and then the candle went out.
The scream stopped. I sagged in my chair, my hands still over my ears. A strong hand gripped my upper arm in the dark, warm and certain.
“Ellie,” came James’s voice.
The rushing sound vanished, and through my hands I could hear a flurry of voices—outrage, confusion, fear. Rose was sobbing, her face pressed into her handkerchief, her shoulders heaving as her mother soothed her. The sad man was shouting, glaring at James. The old widow had pushed her chair back and was staggering from the room, ghastly and silent. And Ramona had come out of her trance and was laughing in a throaty voice, a sound vicious and heartless and utterly without humor. James stared into my face, his concern overlaid with a mask of pure horror as he looked at me. I dashed the tears from my eyes. The woman had gone, taken her dead child and vanished into whatever hellish place she had come from.
The séance was over.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Ramona sat at her séance table, lighting a cigarette. The other guests had left and the electric lights had been turned on, highlighting the bleary pallor of her face under the makeup. “That was quite a show,” she admitted to me in a tired voice. “I should have had them come see you instead. At least everyone paid me up front.”
“Everyone always pays up front,” I said automatically.