A Fold in the Tent of the Sky (8 page)

Llewelyn is a naughty boy.

At first she thought she had ended up at the American Society for Psychical Research by accident. Pam's feet had taken her up Broadway from Lincoln Center to a coffee shop near the Beacon Hotel—her feet and some vague memory about cheese Danish. She loved cheese Danish. She started to open the door to the place, then changed her mind, crossing the road against the light and heading east along West
Seventy
-third instead. Something was calling out to her—a thin, scratchy whisper that grew louder the closer she got to the park.

All week her apprehensions about the Calliope job inter
view had been chewing at her:
They're going to ask me about my job experience or something and I'll have nothing to show them. They'll want to know about fucking “Fortune 2000”—psychic phone line shit at six bucks an hour for telling these poor suckers they're going to meet Cindy Crawford in the subway and a day later win the New York State Lottery, crap like that—anything to keep them on the line. Then she'd get a flash of something genuine—this pathetic creature on the other end of the line like a rabbit in a leg trap, doomed, doomed. You weren't supposed to tell them bad stuff. They wouldn't call back if you told them the bad stuff . . .
But when she climbed the few steps and entered this beautiful old building just up from the park her worries fell away like dead skin. The weight of it all just lifted from her shoulders like a spooked flock of deadbeat pigeons.

She entered the lobby and found herself asking directions to the library. She made her own way from there—she knew exactly where to go—up two flights of stairs to the archives. The sign said
EMPLOYEES ONLY: DOCUMENTS; JOURNALS; PERSONAL PAPERS
but she walked right in: old book smells; she liked that. Much better than cheese Danish.

It just spoke to her, boom-box loud: “Over here!” That's what it felt like—a deep, James Earl Jones voice calling down to her from a shelf high above the transom in among some bulging accordion file folders and leather-bound journals. She climbed up on the soft seat of a swivel chair. It felt as if she were standing up in a canoe, and as she reached up she lost her balance for a second; the book fell on top of her, through a cloud of sweet, dry dust.

A diary, it looked like—with a pebble-grained cover worn at the corners to nubs of brown cardboard, a mended spine
of black fabric tape. Hand-scripted on the front of it were the words “James L. Rathburn, Ph.D: Notes and Observations—Seances and Spirit Circles, 1908–1923 . . .”

Touching it, she felt this little brain-shift thing that happened sometimes, slurring everything—that's the only way she could explain it. The turned pages tickled her fingers, fluttering against her palm like a caged cricket. She closed the book and then her eyes till the pictures, the smells subsided—the screed of voices. She sat down in the chair and chewed at her thumbnail for a second.

It all came back to her then, the weird dream—or rather half dream—she'd had the night before, and she knew why she was there. What had drawn her to this place. She had drunk a whole bottle of wine and fell asleep with her headphones on, with her CD player stuck on “repeat,” playing one song over and over again. She remembered, now, how the pulsing beat had pulled her down into a tranced funk, a strangled fitful place on the borders of sleep that had opened up into one of her out-of-body experiences, the kind that took her cruising through the dark eerie place she'd first discovered as a very young child.

The wine had put her in a goofy shit-disturbing mood and she'd ended up trying to dance to the music flat on her back in the middle of the floor. And float out of her body at the same time—doing a sort of OBE jive. Cruising the “
Never
-
Ever
-Land,” snapping her astral fingers, looking for action.

That's the name she had given the place—“
Never
-
Ever-Land
.” When she was about eight years old, right after her mother had said “Never ever do that again!” In response to what, she had no recollection anymore. She liked to just
float out there and sniff around, lock on to anything that smelled interesting. It was like surfing the Net. Only this Net reached through time as well as space. But only in one direction; she could only go downstream into the past. Cruising the present? That was easy—like doing the dog paddle. But she'd never been able to fight her way upstream and explore the future. She did have flashes of things that could be considered premonitions, but only that: flashes, vague images and sensations that came into her head at the strangest times. Like the other day in that 7-Eleven; all that stuff about the guy behind the counter having a kid some day and the kid drowning in a swimming pool.

Her latest journey into Never-Ever-Land had taken her back through layers of time and space to somewhere close to the turn of the century. Her astral body had been drawn like a moth to the flame of a phony séance of fumbling spiritualists reaching out into the ethereal void.

She picked up the book carefully this time, by one page with two fingers, letting it fall onto her knapsack, which was in her lap now. The diary opened on an entry made on the tenth of June, 1919. The pages were dense with a neat longhand; minuscule notations filled the margins. After a time of reading she looked up at the door, at the light from the library coming through the frosted transom. A moment later footsteps passed the door and moved on.

“God, I
did
this shit,” she said to herself, her index finger in her mouth now, the nail absently finding its favorite perch.
I made this happen—sort of. Karaoke from the inside out.

Pam looked down at the page again, at the precise italic script, and she found herself reading what had been playing on
her CD player the night before—the lyrics right there, neatly recorded, with ink that had dried almost eighty years ago.

“Perfect,” she said to herself. “Credentials.”

A table: round, bare, its veneer rippled and stained with the faint ghost of an overflowing plant pot. And centered on a half ream of foolscap, a planchette—a small, heart-shaped board of light basswood on two small legs with tiny wooden wheels as feet. A short pencil was affixed to the tapered point of the heart—the crux of the tripod, the meeting place, the business end.

“Conjuring up the spirits of the dear departed may be cause for celebration in your circles, Mr. Rathburn; but to me, as a scientist, it is no more than the vestigial squirmings of our primitive past.” The parlor was stiflingly small, dimly lit—the lamp on the roll-top desk in the next room shod a muddy umber light; but even so, the globe of Dr. Stuart's balding head glinted in its glow. Wisps of gray hair, like striations of cirrus, veiled continents of lividity.

“Why are you with us tonight, then, Dr. Stuart? A sitting with Sarah Pope is a rare event even for us believers.” Mr. James Rathburn put his fountain pen back in his waistcoat pocket and closed his notebook. He placed his two beefy forearms on the table and let his teeth work at the stem of his pipe.

“My curiosity got the better of me,” Stuart replied. “Or should I say, I came along at the urgings of my dear wife, whose curiosity sometimes gets the better of both of us.” He chuckled to himself, sending a smile out amongst his fellow sitters and without turning to look at her, reached over
and touched the hand of the woman next to him—this unconscious gesture an economical but insincere apology, it seemed to Rathburn, who proceeded to vent his disapproval of Dr. Stuart by drawing on his pipe till it faintly gurgled. As he inhaled he felt the fabric of his jacket tighten across his back. The jacket of a suit he had owned since his college days. Around a body that had expanded over the years with his interest in Spiritualism—as if his growing convictions about Cartesian dualism had prompted his subconscious to wrap his precious soul in a blanket of flesh.

With a cryptically anthropomorphic swirl, the smoke from his pipe rose into the faint light from the doorway. Lavinia Stuart raised her hand to her face, delicately dabbing at her nose with an embroidered handkerchief. There was an earnest sadness to the line of her mouth, Rathburn thought, the fall of her shoulders, that he realized now must be the only ammunition she had left.

They were all waiting for the entrance of Sarah Pope. Dr. Stuart, his wife, Lavinia, and a businessman from Boston Rathburn had only just met—“Edward Smith,” the mill owner had said from under his mustache, his handshake dry and firm. There was a carnation in his buttonhole, as if he'd arrived for a more festive occasion than a séance in the somewhat damp and threadbare parlor of a modest walk-up on the Upper East Side.

“I would think,” Stuart continued, “with all the controversy over the notorious Fox sisters and other so-called mediums, you would welcome the likes of me—a skeptic, a scientist.”

Rathburn chuckled and shook his head. “Materialists like yourself, by their very nature, cannot tolerate the inexplicable, and when they
are
presented with an explanation—the
product of controlled experiments by the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, no less—”

Dr. Stuart interrupted him: “I think Mr. Doyle should stick to his penny dreadfuls.”

“—a defensible theory of postmortem survival, that too is relegated to the dustheap of superstition.”

Mrs. Stuart straightened up, the contentiousness of the discussion seeming to galvanize her spine; the hand clasping her handkerchief hovered shakily above the table, the lace trim brushing for an instant the neat stack of paper under the planchette as if she were conjuring up her own voice. “But what of Sir Oliver Lodge, dear? His son Raymond, died in the war like our Richard. The evidence was overwhelmingly—”

“My wife's dear brother was reported missing in action; that of course, is one of the reasons we are here.”

The man from Boston spoke up then: “I just hope, Doctor, that Mrs. Pope's spirit guide Llewelyn doesn't—I mean, he may find your presence somewhat off-putting.” His hand came up to his mustache for an instant, then out to the planchette. His touching it was a way of confirming something in himself. Automatic writing: the machinery of the spirit world. “I've come all the way down here, and—I don't want to go back, shall we say, empty-handed.” He smiled and glanced at each of them in turn, seeking something from them. He pulled his hand back and his wedding band scuffed the edge of the table with a gentle tap.

A shadow passed in front of the lamp in the next room and they all turned to look. A woman entered with the abruptness of a servant coming to clear away dishes. The men got to their feet with barely enough time to detach themselves from their seats before she was in her place at the table. Rathburn intro
duced his fellow sitters, pointing with the stem of his pipe, then quickly sitting down as if he were about to play the piano. Instead he opened his notebook and made a few entries.

The lady before them smiled and pressed her two small hands palms down on the table for an instant, then pulled the paper and the planchette toward her. She gave off the scent of roses; her eyes, when she gazed around at her guests, seemed big for her face, her nose too small. She wore nothing on her head and her dress was as plain as a man's work shirt: long-sleeved, charcoal gray, unadorned except for a small gold brooch at her throat.

“Are you there, Llewelyn?” she said after they had all joined hands—Mrs. Stuart, still holding tightly to her handkerchief, grasped Mr. Smith's hand with two fingers only.

“What is it today, Llewelyn? The planchette? Rap for us, Llewelyn.” Nothing, except the faint hollow hiss of Rathburn's pipe, the distant gunning of an engine. “Are you there? I
know
you are. Come on. Just a little knock so we know you're there.” She spoke in a singsong, as if to a child.

Nothing.

“Our guests are waiting, Llewelyn. Rap for us.”

Sarah Pope shifted in her chair and whispered something under her breath. She bowed her head and closed her eyes, her lips moving as if in silent prayer. Mr. Rathburn's pipe smoke drifted near Mrs. Stuart's delicate nose; her eyelids flickered in response.

All of a sudden Dr. Stuart snorted and got to his feet—at first they all assumed it was out of impatience, the tantrum of someone who would rather make a fuss than doubt in silence; but then he fell back in his chair, his arms rigid at his sides.
His head shot back, flinging spit from his open mouth. He began to pant and jerk as if he were being prodded with a stick. Rathburn rose to his feet but stood frozen as the planchette jumped from the ream of foolscap and landed bottom-side up on his notebook. Stuart's hand spasmed out toward it as he slumped forward.

He let out a heavy, croaking gasp of bubbling breath as a quaking rumble of something like words emerged from his mouth: “MEE-OOWWWR. MEEEOOW, MEOWRRRRush Limbaugh sound biting on White Watergate . . . Iran-Contra. Ken Starr Chambergate all that shit from CNN . . . Tupac's closing night in Vegas . . . now, what did Beavis and Butthead have to do with it? That's what
I'd
like to know!” He stood up again; his eyes were closed, the lids fluttering. “How about a track from Spin da' Spool K's latest on Spam Kan Records to heat things up—” His thighs bumping the table now, his body gyrating in a St. Vitus dance as he began to chant in the drawling, clipped twang of a carnival barker:

I'm the puppet
MAST
er .
.
.
I break all the
RULES,

I pull the strings, suffer no
FOOLS,

I skirt dis
AST
er. Icono
CLAST
er

I know the color of
BLOOD.
the taste of
MUD.
Like
YOU . . .

I walk in the fat man's
SHOES,

No
LACES.
Just
STRINGS,
and dangly
THINGS