The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen

She looks at me like she can’t quite believe I’m as stupid as I look.

“You know. Sight. Someone who cares enough to see them,” she explains. Which doesn’t explain anything at all, but whatever.

“Okay. So, once they show up. How long’ve they got?” I press.

“Depends”—she takes another long drag of her cigarette—“on what they’ve done. Or what they’re trying to do.”

“What do you mean?” Tyler asks, and I’m surprised to hear him sound worried.

“Most people,” Sheila says, interrupting herself with a hacking cough. “Everybody does stuff they regret, in life. But sometimes, there’s that one special thing. That one thing that stands out from the rest. Something you’ve got to resolve. And that need to make things right, is even stronger than death. But you don’t get a lot of time to do it.”

“Why not?” I ask, my eyelids blinking rapidly as I start to understand the gravity of what she’s saying.

“How long do most important things take, in life? An hour? A day? A week, tops?” Sheila says with a shrug that exposes a few more inches of sun-stained shoulder inside the kimono. “You don’t get any longer in the afterward than you did the first time around.”

Tyler and I exchange a look, and I can see in his face that he knows what I know.

Annie is running out of time.

“What happens if you can’t do it?” I ask, trying not to choke on the words. “Like, what happens if you can’t fix whatever that thing is, that you did?”

Sheila’s penciled eyebrows go up.

“Then you’re stuck,” she says.

“What does ‘you’re stuck’ mean, in this context?” Tyler presses her.

The medium smiles slowly, and says, “You should really be paying me, for this.”

“Listen,” I say, digging in my shorts pocket for my wallet, hoping twenty bucks and a coupon for a free fro-yo will be enough of a bribe. “I need you to hold a séance.” I lean nearer, until my nose is only a few inches from her face. So close that I can smell the cigarette on her breath. “Please?”

Sheila MacDougall stares long and hard at me, and then throws her head back with a braying laugh. She’s missing a couple of teeth.

“Oh, honey!” she says, placing a mottled hand on my arm. “You poor dumb jerk.”

I exchange a worried glance with Tyler, who looks as confused as I am.

“What?” I say.

“Kid,” she says. “It’s a scam! Come on.” She aims her next comment at Tyler, which is, “You knew that, right?”

Tyler looks panicky. “What do you mean?” he asks, his voice tight.

“A scam! You know. Tricks. There’s a button on the floor, turns the candles on and off. See?”

Without warning, all the candles in the sconces along the wall flame into life. I’m so startled that I jump. I can smell a whiff of natural gas. In the clear truth of daylight her tricks look obvious and cheap.

“But what about all those people I filmed?” Tyler asks. He sounds genuinely distraught. After all, he wanted to film people in transcendent states. That was his whole project.

“Who, them? Oh, what difference does it make.” Sheila MacDougall grinds her cigarette out on the sole of her bedroom slipper, and drops the squashed butt on the floor. “People believe what they want. If I didn’t take their money, somebody else would.”

“Okay,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady. “But the thing is, what if it actually worked, one time?”

“What do you mean, worked?” She gives me a suspicious glare.

“I mean,” I say, dropping my voice. “It worked. I have proof. And I need you to do it again.”

She gives me a long look, presumably to see if I’m joking. I try to make myself look authoritative and serious.

“We’ll pay you,” Tyler breaks in.

She glances at him.

“Those’re the magic words,” she says. “Hit the lights.”