“Of course not. I may not know her as you do, Ellie, but I know enough. She wants something, or she thinks she does. I think she believes that by convincing me to do this, she’s winning some sort of game.”
It isn’t personal, Gloria had said the first day she met me, but I’m afraid I’m rather competitive. In all those drunken evenings, I’d never confessed to her that it was I who managed all of my mother’s séances. Part of me had always known better. I’d had no idea she was planning something like this, and I couldn’t fathom why; I was only glad, for the moment, that I wasn’t the one in her sights. “You shouldn’t go,” I told my mother, panic in my voice. “Say no.”
“I could,” she said, “but I won’t.”
“Mother, you can’t.”
She leaned toward me, her eyes tired as they always were now. “My sweet girl,” she said so softly that tears sprang unbidden to my eyes. “My sweetling, my precious one. What do I have to prove to anyone anymore?”
“Fine.” I swiped the tears from my eyes, letting them soak into the sleeve of my cardigan. “Suit yourself. Go ahead—I don’t care.”
“But, darling, you’re coming with me.”
I stared at her, her face breaking into stars through the tears on my lashes. “What?”
“They want both of us,” my mother said. “Gloria requested specifically that you be part of the test.”
She knew. That was the only thing it could mean. She knew.
“Mother, we can’t,” I protested.
But The Fantastique smiled at me, the jet beads on her dress clicking softly. “Oh, yes,” she said, her voice low. “We can.”
* * *
We did the tests, and it went worse than I could have imagined.
We were taken to the back room of the offices of the New Society. There were three chairs in the middle of the room and three more chairs lined along the wall. “Our simplest experiment,” Paul Golding told us. “No gadgets, no tricks. You need do nothing except answer our questions. However,” he continued as two men came into the room, “it is sometimes customary for a psychic to have an accomplice giving her signals and signs. For the experiment to be pure, we have to ensure there is no chance of it. Please take a seat, Mrs. Winter, Miss Winter. This is Mr. James Hawley, my assistant.”
He was even more handsome than I remembered, now that I saw him in plain light, not in the dimness of a bar or the darkness of Gloria’s flat. He wore no hat and his short, dark blond hair was neatly groomed. He moved with the grace I recalled, even in a jacket and tie, and he nodded formally at me as if he’d never met me, his blue-gray eyes shuttered. I realized, with a shock, that he was carrying ropes and a blindfold in his hands.
Mother and I sat in two of the chairs in the center of the room placed back-to-back. I watched in dismayed silence as James Hawley knelt before me—without a word to me—and tied my ankles to the legs of my chair, the motion pushing my knees apart. His hands were warm and competent. I flushed, watching the strong column of the back of his neck as he bent to his work between my knees, the neat line where his hair ended against the skin. I felt shame and dread and a creeping, self-loathing outrage as his fingers brushed the backs of my calves, just as they had on that night that now seemed a million years ago.
“What is this?” I finally choked.
He moved upward, gently taking my hands and tying them together at the wrists. Behind me, I could hear the other man tying my mother in a similar fashion. “No foot taps,” James said softly, his voice low and familiar from my many heated daydreams. “No hand signals. No body signals at all. We have to make certain.”
“Then just send me from the room,” I pleaded, my blood pumping, to my horror, as his fingers grasped my wrists.
He shook his head. “This is part of the experiment.”
My throat closed in panic. I was part of the experiment. They thought it was me summoning the dead. The only person who could have told them was Gloria.
“Did you pay her?” I asked him, my voice a vindictive hiss. “Don’t tell me she did this for you for free.”
But he only shook his head again, rising and sliding the blindfold through his large, supple hands. The sound of the cloth against his palms made me shake in fear.
He paused for only a moment. “This won’t take long,” he said. I searched for the sound of apology in his voice, and found none. “Just hold still.” And he slipped the blindfold over my eyes.
He lied; it did take long. It took hours and hours, Mother and I tied to our chairs, blindfolded, while Paul Golding sat in the third chair and James and two others observed from the side of the room. The tests themselves, I learned, were the most basic ones they gave to people with supposed psychic powers. What is printed on the card I’m holding? What word have I just written on this piece of paper? What name am I thinking of right now? Can you move an object in this room? Take your time, Mrs. Winter.
She failed, of course. Sometimes she guessed wrongly; other times she sat wordless, or whispered, “I don’t know.” I seethed with silent anger in the darkness in my chair. She had made me promise. On the journey here, she had made me swear, to the bottom of my love and loyalty to her, not to help her with the tests. She had told me, quiet and confident, that she wanted to do them on her own. If I helped her, she said, she would never forgive me. There was nothing I could do; she was all I had. And so I sat there, in an agony of humiliation suffused by a red wave of anger, and listened to her fail.