Jago (67 page)

Catriona wondered if any of the men in the company—if
Edwin
—would like Irena for a mistress. Then she mentally rapped her own knuckles for even thinking the word. She never thought of herself as Edwin’s mistress. Theirs was an equal partnership, unsanctioned by the hypocrisies of a ceremony neither regarded with anything more than an anthropological interest. He wasn’t her proprietor in the way he would be, whether he liked it or no, as her husband.

Edwin was by her side, at the head of his table, lampooning the absurdities of ritual magic to Robert Querdilion. The war poet was attracted to the dressing-up aspects of the occult, which sometimes led him into lunatic company, while Edwin was as committed a debunker as a believer. Convinced there was a plane beyond the physical, he’d devoted years to the assessment of psychic phenomena but was thoroughly scornful of the hocus-pocus of the dilettante seance-hounds and the mumbo-jumbo of the secret-society sorcerers.

She wondered if he was deliberately not looking at Irena, even though her dark-eyed gaze was almost constantly on him. Wright hammered the piano with fingers like chopsticks, playing his own ‘Chinatown Child’. Irena’s head swayed with the music, a cobra fascinated by the charmer’s flute. For a pseudo-Serbian, she had very little Holloway in her.

Catriona refilled her own glass and tasted the claret. Like everything else in Edwin’s house, it was impeccable. Casually, his hand rested under the table on her knee. The touch told her she should feel no threat from Irena. With a gulp, she washed away all silliness.

Irena dangled a long cigarette holder in front of Gussie Augustine. Flicking a flame for her from his faulty lighter, he grinned like a clot, and G-G, his flapper girlfriend, made a small, pinched mouth with her bee-stung lips. Her name, Catriona had learned, was Guinevere Guillaume, but she liked G-G. Wright began to play the song he had written for her, ‘Century Baby’, and to croon the lyric.

‘Century Baby, dancing in flame,

Century Baby, too wild to be tame…’

Wright was better at tunes than at words. Still, his song fit G-G, fast and light and over too quickly.

Catriona ran through the rest of the company, the rest of the circle. Colonel Eric Trellis, Edwin’s old commanding officer, a late Victorian if ever there was, red-faced and arguing quietly about drink and blood-pressure with his robust and overly kittenish wife. Querdilion, a sensitive skeleton in too perfect evening dress, never backward in quoting favourable reviews of
Gas and Barbed Wire,
his slim volume of sonnets. Gussie and G-G, trying everything several times, desperately keen on convincing you they simply didn’t care, darling. Poor, poor Tom Coram, a stuttering relic of the war, half his face dappled red, mind working three-quarters of the time. Edwin, who had a penetrating brain no matter how far it wandered down obscure byways. Herself, another century child, hoping the world would grow up along with her. Add half-fraud genius Irena Dubrovna-Whatever and you had an interesting guest list, if altogether too many emotional fluctuations entirely to suit the pure-science experiment Edwin intended. She’d be interested in a study of seances that tried to link phenomena observed not to the spirit world but to the current interrelations of the sitters.

Mary Jago, the housekeeper, discreetly told Edwin the room was prepared. He tapped his glass with a silver knife.

‘Madame Irena,’ he said, ‘are you ready?’

‘Of course,’ she replied, smile dazzling in the candlelight.

‘We should form the circle.’

They got up, and filed across the hall to the withdrawing room. Gussie made a spook joke, and G-G told him, after she’d stopped giggling, to be serious. Catriona saw his point. Madame Irena swanned languidly into the room with an extravagance of gesture that Theda Bara would have found excessive, and flopped into her chosen chair as if it were a throne, her dress a black pool around sparkling pumps.

‘Very theatrical,’ Edwin said, under his breath.

Catriona smiled at the confidence. They had discussed the idea of seance as theatre, and concluded that the more shadows, incenses and curtains a medium relied on, the less likely she was to be one hundred per cent. The ones who put on the best show always turned out fake. Irena, Edwin contended, was at least a partial exception.

The room had been locked since Madame Irena arrived in Alder. It couldn’t have been tampered with. As she sat, Gussie and Querdilion were close on the medium, remarkably convincing as ardent suitors. Edwin had instructed them to be attentive, to keep the woman busy fending them off so she’d have no chance to secrete apparatus about her. During the 1890s’ craze for table-rapping, false mediums had concealed a variety of devices under voluminous skirts. Irena’s clinging sheath of a dress didn’t offer much in the way of latitude for such cunning subterfuge. The high-backed chairs were arranged in a circle. They all sat down and joined hands. Gussie managed not to make a joke. Catriona found herself between Edwin and Trellis, contrasting Edwin’s powder-smooth grip with the colonel’s perspiring paw.

‘My friends,’ Edwin announced, ‘this is a scientific experiment, not a game of charades. I should thank you to conduct yourselves accordingly.’

‘Thank you,’ said Irena, dipping her eyes, slipping her veil to her shoulders. While Catriona and G-G had bobbed hair, Irena’s unconfined raven tresses fell well past her shoulders. No matter what her origins, she carried herself in old-world style.

‘Would you dim the lights,’ Edwin told Mary. The servant nodded, and went around the room, dropping scarves over the electric lamps.

‘Dark is essential, I am afraid,’ Irena said, original vowels peeping through her exotic purr. ‘The spirits find light a distraction. On the other side, there is no light or dark as we know it, but to communicate with us, spirits must dip a toe into our plane.’

Catriona saw Querdilion nodding intently, thin face set. One thing about the war was that those who lived through it knew a lot of dead people, a lot of potential spirits.

‘This place—the house and its surrounding environs—is a focus,’ Irena continued, making a tidy tautology, ‘a place that holds great attraction for the other side. The barrier between the planes of existence is thin here. A little frayed, you might say.’

Mary stood in the corner, face in shadow. Catriona thought the woman a little afraid of Irena, and wondered what superstitions had been drummed into her. Although from the village, she was an outsider. Her mother had not been married, Catriona understood. She never showed much in the way of emotion, not even with her ten-year-old son, Billy. Her coachman husband, Anthony, had been killed in the war. Despite everything, Catriona usually believed Mary a strong woman, able to bear most suffering. Unlike most of the servants, she treated Catriona without a hint of incipiently gossipy disapprobation. Now, she was silently wary of her master’s pursuits.

Irena closed her eyes and swung her head, fall of hair shifting around her shoulders. She didn’t make elaborate summoning incantations. She appeared to be probing the darkness inside her mind.

Edwin was especially interested in a local myth about an apparition in the form of a Burning Man. He hoped this séance might delve into that mystery.

Irena drew in a breast-heaving breath, and looked up. Her eyes opened, and she shrieked.

‘Don’t break the circle,’ Edwin said, loudly, his hand gripping.

Irena’s scream continued. It was a single note, almost musically pure. This wasn’t the spirit voice Catriona had been led to expect. A child or a Red Indian were more usual. The scream trailed on for as much as a minute, then died. Irena’s face changed, and she looked around as if recognizing the room but finding it rearranged.

‘This is the teevy lounge,’ she said.

Teevy? Teavie? TV? What did that mean?

‘What is your name?’ Edwin asked.

‘Susan,’ said Irena, voice different.

‘Susan?’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘Have you… passed over?’

‘If you mean, am I dead? I think so.’

‘Only think?’

‘I’m not in my body. I was falling into a pool, falling into fire. His throne was burning.’

‘Is there anyone here you want to speak with?’

‘I don’t know. You’re Edwin Winthrop, aren’t you? And this is Irena Dubrovna?’

Irena’s face was subtly different as she spoke with another woman’s voice. Her features were unchanged, but her expressions were wrong. They didn’t fit on her. She’d not only dropped the Serbian rasp, but assumed a whole new timbre. If an impersonation, it was good. Much better, indeed, than her ‘Irena Dubrovna’ act.

‘You must have Catriona Kaye around somewhere, too.’

Catriona wasn’t frightened, but the spirit’s familiarity with her was unusual, an argument for her theory of unconscious influence. She looked around at intent faces, wondering which, if any, was transmitting through the medium. Tom’s face was hanging, sweat trickling down his brow, jaw twitching.

‘Are you in pain?’ Edwin asked.

‘I was. Now, nothing.’

It was a struggle for Irena to keep talking, as if the spirit were being pulled out of her, and trying to cling on.

‘Jago,’ she said. ‘He must be stopped.’

Mary Jago gasped, and dropped a lamp.

‘You may leave, Mary,’ Edwin said, sharply.

‘But—’

‘Jago,’ Irena said, face contorted, voice heavy with disgust.

‘You may leave.’

Mary picked up her lamp and backed out.

There was a scent in the room, an ozony tang that clung to Catriona’s nostrils. She’d smelled something similar at other seances, usually when ectoplasm was manifested.

‘G-g-g-ggasss,’ Tom said, tears running from his eyes.

‘Is Jago there?’ Edwin asked.

‘No… yes…’

‘Make your mind up,’ G-G snapped, frightened.

An electric shock passed around the circle, and Catriona’s hands stung. Everyone ouched and yelped.

‘Hold fast,’ Edwin said.

There was smoke now, choking and thick. Catriona’s eyes were watering, and Tom was practically sobbing.

‘Hell… fire,’ said the spirit.

There were lights in the ceiling, red and white. And sounds flooding in through the lights. Explosions, gunshots, shells, shouts, screams, the growl of machinery.

Tom twitched and fell into the circle, hands torn free of those either side of him. The phenomena didn’t cease when the ring was broken. Wright held the shellshock casualty, slapping him, trying to pull him back from 1917.

Gussie was shaking Irena, trying to get her to wake up.

‘Don’t,’ Edwin ordered, and Gussie stopped.

There were phantom fires in the room now. The walls and the ceiling displayed moving pictures. Explosions in darkness, and masses of people plunged into lakes of fire. Edwin was on his knees before Irena, holding both her hands, talking into her possessed face. Catriona knelt beside him and tried not to be afraid. The explosions hurt her ears. It was hard to believe the house wasn’t falling down around them.

‘Go back,’ Catriona said.

Edwin was gabbling questions together, asking about his dead coachman, the Burning Man, others he had known in the war...

‘Go back.’

Susan, the woman behind Irena’s face, looked at her for a moment. Their eyes met, across unknown years.

‘You’re right,’ the Spirit said through Irena’s lips. ‘It’s not over.’

Edwin was aghast. ‘No,’ he said, ‘explain…’

Susan nodded a salute to Catriona, and dwindled inside Irena. The medium’s true face came back. She looked frightened and exhausted. The lights went away and the noises faded. Colonel Trellis, breathing heavily, whipped the scarves from the lamps. Tom was under control again.

‘That was a powerful presence,’ Madame Irena said, fanning her throat with ringed fingers.

Edwin was quiet, controlling his anger.

‘I think we should get some brandy in here,’ Gussie said. ‘We’ve all had a bit of a turn.’

He left the room. Catriona looked around, checking everyone. No one was really hurt. All they’d had was a fright. Edwin was at the window, looking out into the dark mirror at the shapes of the garden. She went to him and laid a hand on his shoulder, afraid he’d shrug it off. She had ended the experiment before he was ready. Instead, he put his own hand over hers.

‘You were right,’ he said. ‘She had to be sent back.’

Gussie returned with a decanter and glasses on a tray.

‘Mary’s gone,’ he said, setting down the tray. ‘Cook says she took little Billy and ran into the night without more than one bag of clothes. Told her she was off to London.’

‘That’s best,’ Edwin said, pouring brandy for them all.

Catriona gave a glass to Irena.

‘Just this once,’ the medium said, throwing the liquor into her throat like a professional guzzler.

‘What happened?’ Catriona asked.

‘It didn’t
happen
,’ Irena said, ‘it
is happening.
It won’t be over ’til long after we’ve left this place, if ever…’

P
aul was almost up against what had been the walls of the Agapemone, the crowd behind pushing. There were people inside the walls, turning and changing. Near the house, the crowds stood still, looking up in adoration. He fought the flow, allowing people to stream around him, trying to keep a steady footing.

A black man in a police helmet was shot out of the press, making a space Paul shrank into. The policeman, whom he’d seen earlier, had grown polka-dot reflecting sunglasses and foot-wide-at-the-ankle flares. A hundredweight of gold chains and medallions, including his police badge, clumped against his chest. He tried to get up, using the lightwall for support, hand sinking as if pressed against wet clay. From inside, another hand appeared and took a six-fingered hold of his wrist. The policeman produced a non-regulation-issue straight razor and hacked at the arm emerging from the light. Golden blood trickled, a streak against the pulsing wall. People all around eased off, letting Paul step back a few more paces. The policeman was pinned, drawn in. He’d dropped his blade. Light crept around his body like a vertical stretch of water, filling the distended pleats of his clothes, meeting over his neck and knees. The folds of his purple-and-lemon flares stuck to the surface even as light lapped around his shouting face and closed over him. Paul wasn’t sure whether the man was drowning or being overcome by transcendental ecstasy.