The seven faces around me had now gone as white as socks. They had ceased breathing. Save for the flickering candle, time was suspended.
“And then, slowly … carefully … she placed her fingers upon the swollen thing … gave it a squeeze, and—
“BLAZOOEY!”
I shrieked the word as loudly as I could, grabbing the arms of the girls each side of me.
Jumbo screamed gratifyingly.
Girls clung to one another in fright.
Gremly fell on her face and pulled her dressing gown over her head, moaning.
“What happened?” someone cried.
I waited for a long moment before I replied. “The damned thing burst,” I said matter-of-factly.
“And the hot-air balloon?” Jumbo asked, making a remarkably quick recovery. “What about the hot-air balloon?”
“Oh, that,” I said. “That was added to his effigy later by the miller’s wife as a sort of allegory.”
“Allegory?” Gremly croaked.
“As a civilized way of indicating to posterity that the stomach gases of the deceased had exploded, as sometimes happened in those days. It was the best excuse his wife could come up with on short notice.”
There was a scraping sound outside in the hall, and something banged.
“Shhh!” Jumbo said. “Someone’s coming! Lights out.”
She blew out the candle and we all sat stock-still in the dark.
There was a knock at the door.
“What’s going on in there?” a voice demanded. It was Fitzgibbon.
We held our collective breath, some of us with hands clapped over our mouths and noses.
We huddled there together in the dark, paralyzed at the thought of what would happen when light was restored and time resumed.
“It’s all right, Matron,” Jumbo called out after what felt like an eternity, putting on a sleepy drawl. “I was having another of those horrid nightmares. I shall be all right in the morning. Good night.”
She was a girl after my own heart.
There was a muttered response, and then footsteps shuffled away in the hall, their sound fading.
“Some story!” Jumbo said when the danger had passed. She laughed lightly, as if she had to; as if it were part of a ritual.
She lighted the candle again, and our faces flared up out of the darkness, the whites of our widened eyes as large as the polar caps.
But something had changed. We were not the same girls we had been just minutes before. In that shared eternity of fright, and in some strange and indefinable way, we had suddenly all become sisters. Sisters of the candlelight—and sisters of something else, also.
“Fetch the board, Gremly,” Jumbo ordered, as if a sudden decision had been made, and Gremly, scrambling to her feet, vanished into the shadows.
A moment later she was back with a flat red box. She opened it and, with surprising tenderness, placed a wooden playing board on the floor at the very center of our circle.
It was a Ouija board.
I was quite familiar with the game. Daffy and Feely had dug a similar one out of a cupboard at Buckshaw and had terrorized me for a time by raising the ghost of Captain Cut-Throat, a malicious spirit from the days of piracy on the high seas, who had ratted on me at every opportunity. The captain had informed my sisters, by way of the moving tablet, that I had stolen perfume from one of them (true: I had taken it for a chemical experiment involving the essential oils of civet musk) and that it was I who had caused a certain book to vanish from beneath the pillow of the other (also true: I had nicked Daffy’s copy of Ulysses because it was the perfect thickness to prop up the broken leg of my bedside table).
Letter by letter, word by word, and interspersed with his beastly “Har! Har! Har!,” the dead captain had caused the planchette to creep across the board on its three little legs, laying bare, one by one, some of my best-kept secrets—including several of which I was not very proud—until I happened to notice that the old sea dog misspelled the word “cemetery” with the ending “a-r-y”—in exactly the same way as Daffy did in her diary!
I couldn’t help smiling now as I recalled how sweet—and how swift!—my revenge had been upon my smug sisters. Daffy, in particular, had been afraid to close her eyes for a month.
“All fingers on!” Jumbo commanded, and we all pressed the first two fingers of each hand onto the heart-shaped wooden pointer. It was a tight fit.
Someone giggled.
“Shhh!” Jumbo said. “Show the spirits some respect.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “O spirits,” she said, “we bid you come among us.”
There was a nervous silence.
“O spirits,” she repeated, her voice a tone higher, “we bid you come among us.”
I remembered from my sisters’ use of the Ouija board that, like the characters in fairy tales, the spirits needed to be told everything three times.
I could easily relate to that.
“O spirits,” Jumbo said again, this time in a whisper, “we bid you come among us.”
Something electric was in the air. The hair at the back of my neck was already standing on end as it did when, in my laboratory, I rubbed an ebonite rod on my woolen jumper and waved it behind my head.
“Is someone here?”
With startling speed, the cursor jerked to life and began to slide. Across the board it flew, without the slightest hesitation, and stopped at “Yes.”
Jumbo had opened her eyes to take a reading. “Who are you?” she asked in a conversational tone.
There was no reply and she repeated her question two more times.
Now the cursor was on the move again, sliding silkily to and fro across the board’s smooth surface, picking out letters, one by one, pausing only briefly at each before moving on to the next.
D—A—R—K—H—E—R—E, it spelled out.
“We understand,” Jumbo said, snapping her fingers. “We light a light for you.”
Snap!
She had obviously done this sort of thing before.
“Is that better?”
The cursor scurried across the board and stopped at the word “YES.”
“Do you have a message for someone here?”
“YES.”
For just an instant, my blood ran cold. Could this be the ghost of my mother, Harriet? She had, after all, once been a student at Miss Bodycote’s. Perhaps a part of her was attached to the place forever.
In truth, I hoped it wasn’t Harriet. I had received from her once before a message from beyond the grave: a message telling me that she was cold and wanted to come home.
I didn’t think that I could bear another.
Please don’t let it be Harriet!
As uncharitable as that might seem.
Get a grip, Flavia! I thought, and not for the first time.
“Who are you?” Jumbo asked, three times and slowly. “What is your name?”
It came in a rush. The pointer scuttled back and forth across the board like a panicked lobster.
L—E—M—A—R—C—H—A—N—D
Gremly, who had been writing down the results with the stub of a lead pencil, gasped. “Le Marchand!” she cried.
It was the name of one of the girls who, according to Collingwood, had gone missing from Miss Bodycote’s.
I looked round the circle of blanched faces. It was obvious from their haunted eyes that each one of them had already made the connection.
“Oh, my God!” someone whispered.
I have to give Jumbo credit. She was on to it like a terrier on a rat.
“We are prepared for your message.”
I noticed that even at a moment so tense as this, Jumbo spoke to the spirit in a grammatically correct manner. Again, she repeated her words three times.
The pointer fairly flew across the board.
O—N—E—O—F—Y—O—U—K—N—O—W—S—M—Y—K—I—L—L—E—R
“One of you knows my killer!” Gremly gasped, reading aloud the words she had just scribbled down.
With a sweep of her hand, the tiny blonde across from me sent the planchette flying to the far corner of the room.
“Enough!” she said. “This is stupid.”
“Steady on, Trout,” Jumbo said. “If you’ve busted the thing, it’s coming out of your pocket money.”
Trout. So that was her name.
I looked round the circle.
One of the girls—on my left—had made a puddle.