“Just a decision,” Lilly said.
The medium introduced herself as Eudoxia—“‘You-doh-key-ah,’ you understand, yes?”—and asked if Lilly had a preference: A palm reading? The tarot? Tea leaves? An astrological chart? She could consult a crystal ball, if that’s what Lilly wanted, or even take up the Ouija board, though this last possibility she offered in a way that suggested that the option was exhausting or simply ridiculous.
Again, Lilly looked to Michael, whose attention now seemed fixed on Madame Eudoxia herself.
“Why don’t you choose?” Lilly said. “Whatever way works the best.”
EUDOXIA DIDN’T KNOW if the woman was challenging her or truly did not care. Many of her customers were simply lonely and tired of wrestling in solitude with some nagging question. Why can’t I be happy? Is she cheating on me—and what’s the mug’s name? Did my mother ever love me? They would duck through the door and spill their guts for her to augur by appealing to the tarot or the stars or the lines of their own palms. Eudoxia was good at mixing hopeful prescriptions for future success with painful truths gleaned during the time it took to offer a reliable reading: Stop expecting so much of life. Not yet, but she will stray if you do not learn to trust her. Your mother loved you but didn’t know how to tell you. For her regulars, she provided warnings of dangers easily imagined and, with a little effort, avoided. She had learned long ago that she was good at giving advice, though good advice was easy to ignore. But advice backed up by the weight of the spirit world? That was worth paying for.
So here was this woman and she had a decision to make. She had good English but was European—an immigrant like Eudoxia or perhaps only a visitor to the city. The boy, who had not spoken, behaved in an odd manner, and the two did not appear related or linked by love. More would reveal itself. It always did. Eudoxia was smart, and truth be told, she possessed more than her share of intuition. At times, she even suspected that her powers went beyond that—but she wasn’t the one who needed to believe. As long as the customer believed, then the rent got paid.
“JUST WHAT ARE you expecting, Mr. Yeats?”
Yeats returned from his inspection of the decor and stood next to the medium’s chair, which he eyed with apparent distaste. “The experience can take a variety of forms,” he said, “depending on the sensitivities of this medium. Direct drawing, direct voice, spirit photography, even levitation—I have seen all of that and more at séances past.”
“That’s not what I mean. What are you expecting to gain from all of this? How are you going to find the answers you’re looking for in here?” Michael worried that the ceiling might come down on top of them. Already it seemed to sag in the middle, and with the walls swathed in fabric, finding an exit could prove difficult.
“This is but the first step,” Yeats said. “But if we can use her to reach our host, and through her reach George, then the real work can begin.”
First they had set out to find the elusive—and possibly nonexistent—Madame Antonia, and now Yeats proposed contacting his wife, who by Michael’s guess was thousands of miles and one vast ocean to the east. “Why do we need to contact your wife?” he said.
Yeats shushed Michael and pointed to the medium. “I think she is ready.”
THIS WAS WHAT Eudoxia proposed: Lilly would write her questions on scraps of paper and then set the paper alight from the candle. As the smoke rose from the dish where Lilly was to place the burning paper, Eudoxia would consult the spirits and communicate their answers to Lilly. It had been some time since Eudoxia had used this method, but it always delivered on the mystery and wonder that most gawkers came seeking from a fortune-teller. Eudoxia also offered her standard disclaimer: that the spirits often answered indirectly, as the truth could never be approached along a straight path.
From a small table on her left, Eudoxia withdrew a sheet of paper and a fountain pen. She tore the paper into strips and handed these and the pen to Lilly. “Write what you want to know,” she said. “And then the fire, and then the plate.”
Lilly examined the pen in the dim light, then offered it to the boy. She hoped that he would find a way to involve himself in this visit—that he had his own reasons for wanting to consult a psychic. Odd enough to have taken in a voiceless stranger prone to fits of fainting and mapmaking. To have him also turn out to be some sort of prophet, nudging her toward a decision of great magnitude, was more than she could manage this week.
He waved off the pen, leaving Lilly to stare at the first blank scrap of paper. This was preposterous, she told herself, but wasn’t it just the sort of story that Josef wanted to hear? Lilly’s Adventures in New York, chapter 5: the time she consulted a basement psychic about whether to return to Prague or disappear into America.
In her jagged script, she wrote, Should I return to Prague? As the words emerged from the pen, she saw that the ink was red.
Eudoxia’s eyes were closed, her hands flat on the tabletop. She inhaled deeply through her nose and then out through her mouth in a rhythm that became like a drumbeat in the room. She looked like an ancient oracle, and Lilly let slip a whispered curse that she’d left her camera in the studio. Lilly held the scrap of paper over the candle and watched as the edges browned, then glowed, then caught. When the flame had consumed half the paper, she set it down in the dish and the smoke wound toward the ceiling.
MICHAEL BECAME AWARE of a pulsing, a rumbling, like waves against rocks, crashing and receding. He feared it was the Noise, coming to lay waste to him, but then he saw the medium inhaling so deeply that she lifted her body away from the table. “It’s her,” Michael said. “I can hear her breathing.” The sound was faint, a background noise, really. But after weeks in a kind of vacuum, even the sound of a single breath was a gift.
Yeats clapped his hands together, more gleeful than Michael had yet seen him. “A proper medium opens a window between the spirit world and the material plane so that voices can flow through her in each direction.” He leaned in close to the medium. His lips almost grazed her ear as he spoke: “You must find George!”
EUDOXIA JUMPED IN her chair. The deep breathing was meant to heighten the tension before she began speaking. A dramatic pause, followed by half statements and questions that would lead her, little by little, to a satisfying answer to the question burning on the plate. Long ago, when all of this started, the breathing had helped to ready her for what was to come, but it had been years since she had genuinely felt—what? What had she called it, in the beginning? Touched was a word she had used. Guided, even. But never called, never spoken to, never—like this.
She heard it again: George, the voice said.
She lunged across the table and gripped the woman’s hand. “Who is George?”