James had rounded the séance table while she was speaking, and now he looked down at her, his gaze on the pinpoint pupils of her eyes. “It isn’t food you need,” he said, almost gently. “It’s money for your next fix. The stage shows and the séances don’t earn enough to buy what you’re taking. Where do you get the money, Ramona?”
She only smiled up at him, and in that moment I could see the girl who had run away from home only to see her dreams of becoming an actress fall apart in bitter failure. Ramona was a survivor, even if the act of surviving was itself grim, and she no longer knew what she did it for. “Are you asking if I’m for sale?” she asked. “Name a price, handsome, and I’ll consider it.”
I pushed my chair back and rose. My head was throbbing and I couldn’t stand it anymore in this awful little flat, with its close air and shabby furniture. “There’s no point, James,” I said. “Let’s go.”
I had just reached the door when Ramona stopped me, leaning a hand on the doorframe. Up close, under the electric light, I saw that her forehead was damp. A single bead of sweat trickled down her throat to the neck of her wrapper. Her body sagged slightly, as if she fought off pain. “You,” she said to me. “You saw something tonight, something real. Don’t lie to me.”
I shrugged, not wanting her to get her teeth into how it had upset me. “Perhaps.”
“Such power,” she said softly, and even through the ache of craving her next fix, her voice carried a note of wonder. “You’re truly The Fantastique, then. You can see the dead, just like she could.”
I put my hand on the arm that blocked me; it was chilled through the thin fabric of her sleeve. “Let me leave.”
“It isn’t going to help you, you know,” Ramona said, and for a second I saw the woman I’d seen onstage, eerily commanding and pitiful at the same time. Her bleary eyes were half mad with fear, and for a second they reminded me of the inkblot eyes of the dead woman I’d seen. “Your power. It won’t help you—not with this. You have no idea what you’re dealing with.”
“Then tell me,” I said.
She only laughed and pulled her arm away from the door. “The devil is coming,” she called after us as we retreated down the hallway to the stairs. “He’s coming for you. He’s coming for me. He’s coming for all of us.”
* * *
I sat on the front stoop of Ramona’s building, the night’s chill seeping through the layers of my skirt and coat. The rain had stopped and the darkened street looked slick as a mirror, the few streetlights reflecting in yellow pools. It was late and the street was empty. I tilted my head back, breathing in the damp air and the pungent smell of rainy pavement.
James lowered himself next to me, his body large beside mine. He set his forearms on his knees. He moved with a grace that was physically uncanny; I wouldn’t have been surprised if he could climb walls.
“What exactly did you see in there?” he asked.
I sighed. “James Hawley,” I said, letting the name circle on my tongue. “James Hawley wants to know what I saw.”
“He does,” James agreed.
“Will this go into a report for the New Society?”
He looked away, his jaw tightening. “I thought we’d moved past that.”
I cannot figure out, Ramona had said, why you would associate with the likes of him. Perhaps she was right, and he couldn’t be trusted. The problem was that I could think of no one else to tell.
“The man at the séance,” I said. “His child died. And his wife . . .” I slid my arms around my knees and hugged them. “She killed herself, I think. At least, it’s possible. It’s difficult to tell.”
He was very still, and turned toward me. I knew he was looking at me but I could not look back. “What is it like?” he said at last. “Seeing the dead.”
An old woman walked by, huddled into a thick coat, her footsteps splashing through the reflected lamplight on the street. “Like plunging your hand into a bucket of worms in the dark,” I said. “Except it’s inside your mind. It’s repellent, and cold, and you don’t know what you’re touching because you can’t see—you don’t know what it looks like, and you don’t want to know.”
“Jesus, Ellie,” James said. I turned to him to find his face stark in the harsh lamplight. “Gloria did that for a living.”
“So did my mother,” I said.
So do I.
He looked tired, but a curious light lit his eyes. “I have so many questions.”
“I have no answers. At least, no one ever gave them to me.” I watched the shaky reflections of light on the street as I spoke. It was far past midnight, I realized. “I don’t know why I have the powers I have, or what they mean. I don’t know if there is anyone else like me anywhere else in the world right now—or how many there have been in history.”
“None,” James interjected flatly. “Not in this country, at least, except for Gloria. I can tell you that firsthand.”
I shrugged. “I only know who I am, and that with my mother and Gloria dead I’m alone.”
He seemed to ponder this, picking through the questions he wanted to ask. “Can you see the future?”
“No. My mother taught me that seeing the future isn’t possible, that no one can do it. She never told me how she knew.” I fought down the lump in my throat. “There were a lot of things she didn’t tell me, a lot of things I didn’t ask.”
“When you see the dead, do they see you?”
“Yes.” I chose my words, tried to explain it. “I think they see me only vaguely, through a veil. But yes, they see something.”
“Do they speak?”
I thought of the woman screaming, and suppressed a shudder. “Not exactly. There is usually some strong emotion, which I pick up. And I pick up words, images. But they don’t speak in sentences.” I was tired myself, and I didn’t want to talk about this anymore. “There’s something I want to know about what happened in there.”
“All right.”
“The old woman. How did Ramona know she was dying?”