Unhappy Medium (5 page)

Ted laughed again, transforming his face from Cro-Magnon to not all that bad.

“You’ve been doing your homework!” he exclaimed, pleased. “Yeah, wow. Let me think a sec.”

He propped his feet up on the table, still clutching his hands together like they might do something nutty if he released
them.

“Well for starters, Madame Serena came to the Mountain House during the Spiritualist movement. Do you know much about the
Spiritualists?”

I didn’t know what to say about that. I considered myself somewhat of an expert on anything that had the word
spirit
in it, but I’d never heard of Spiritualists. So I curled my feet under me, got comfortable, and stared at him wide-eyed.
My plan worked, because he took a deep breath and kept talking without waiting for me to answer.

“The Spiritualist movement started up around the same time the Mountain House was built. If memory serves, people linked the
beginning of the movement to the Foxes.”

Madame Serena had said something about a fox!

“Foxes from where?” I asked.

“I think there were two or three of them,” Ted said. “The Fox sisters. Margaret was the most famous. Anyway, to totally oversimplify
things, the idea behind the movement was the belief that the spirits of dead people could be contacted by mediums.”

I didn’t mean for it to happen, but my mouth dropped wide open.

“No, no —” he said, putting his hand out in the universal “stop” position. “Don’t even say it. I’m not saying I believe in
all that stuff. I’m a historian, not a nut job. I’m just telling you what
they
believed.”

I couldn’t think of a thing to say. Part of me wanted to punch Ted Kenyon in his already squashed-down nose, but part of me
wanted to hear more of the story.

“The story goes that the Fox sisters made contact with the ghost of a murdered peddler in their farmhouse, around 1848 or
’49, I think. They said the peddler told them he had been murdered by the farmer who had lived there, and his things were
stolen and his body buried in the cellar. And the thing was, they didn’t just do it once. They could establish contact at
any time, and when they asked this spirit to make a knocking sound, it did. Hundreds of people came and witnessed it. Before
too long, people all over the country were hiring mediums and having séances. And the Spiritualists were born. The whole thing
was utterly ridiculous,” he added, shaking his head.

I thought about punching his nose again.

“Well, if hundreds of people heard it, why are the Spiritualists ridiculous?” I asked, trying to sound casual, like I didn’t
care much one way or the other what the answer was.

“The Fox sisters got really famous, and suddenly everybody wanted to be a ‘medium.’ And of course there was an unlimited supply
of kooks willing to pay good money to supposedly contact their dead loved ones. It was the thing to do, in those days. It
was a fad, a craze. Like … disco.”

DISCO?

“It was nothing more than a business venture, a scam. And a lot of these so-called mediums started making names for themselves.
Then they could really charge top dollar.”

So-called
mediums?

“And they’d develop followings, and host these gatherings called salons where they’d have tea and cakes, and then hold séances.
It became the Victorian version of the Oprah book club.

“Anyway, one of these mediums lived here at the Mountain House for about a year — she had her own room where she conducted
her so-called séances. She was apparently not even very good at
faking
being a medium. Quite the old bat, from what I’ve read. And, as you might have guessed by now, she called herself Madame
Serena.”

Then he gave me this look and he chuckled and shook his head. Like he just
assumed
that I agreed with him — that
any
sane human being would automatically and without question agree that a person styling themselves as a so-called medium was
a faker, an old bat. Insane. A laughingstock. And that anyone stupid enough to believe in mediums was a nut job.

I didn’t know I was going to say it. I just saw red.

“Who do you think you are?” I demanded, sitting up very straight and scowling. Ted drew back, like I had in fact already punched
his silly misshapen nose and was winding up for a second go.

“I’m sorry?” he asked. He looked genuinely distressed.

“I just don’t know how you can sit there and mock an entire group of people, millions of people actually, who either believe
they can communicate with the dead, or believe that someone else can. I mean, where do you get off making a decision like
that?”

Ted stared at me, his mouth open.

“I mean, did I miss some sort of global memo that was issued stating
Hey, we can cross off the old life-after-death thing from our list of ancient questions, because Ted of the Whispering Pines
Mountain House has just announced that the whole thing is
— how’d you put it —
utterly ridiculous
?”

Ted’s mouth was opening and closing a little, like he was trying to talk. He looked like an anxious fish.

“I just want to know who you think you are,” I repeated, my voice getting louder than I meant it to. But hey, I was on a roll.

“Who are
you,
Ted Kennedy, to make —”

“Ted Kenyon,” he whispered.

“What?” I spluttered.

“I’m not Ted Kennedy, I’m Ted Kenyon —” he said, in a voice barely above a whisper.

“Who are
you,
Ted
Kenyon,
to make this proclamation to the world?”

There was a pause long enough for him to assume this wasn’t a rhetorical question.

“Nobody,” he said quietly. His face was beet red.

“Okay, then!”

I got to my feet.

To be honest, I was actually kind of embarrassed at this point. I’d meant to call Ted out on his categorical dismissal of
my entire life, but I had never intended to make a scene. But I
had
made a scene, so I needed to come up with a Big Finish and get the heck out of there.

“Then you might want to keep your assumptions to yourself,” I said. “And the next time you decide to flat out dismiss a belief
system held by millions of people, the next time you get all holier-than-thou and condescending about an idea that’s been
around since the dawn of man, maybe you’ll give it a second thought!”

Then I stomped out of the room as self-righ-teously as I could. When I got to the hallway I started to sprint, and I didn’t
slow down until I got to the elevator, which was mercifully there and waiting. The last thing I needed was for Cro-Magnon
Boy to come running after me.

By the time I’d reached the hallway leading to room 505, I was feeling ridiculous. The world was full of people like Ted.
People who mocked belief in the supernatural. For years, I’d witnessed this happening to my mom — someone would find out she
was a medium and act like they had this Free Mockery card.

Before we moved, I had a friend in the third grade who was really fat. I never really thought about her size one way or another
— she was just Tessa. But sometimes the kids in class would rag on her and call her names, and nobody did anything about it.

One day I asked Tessa why she accepted this treatment without fighting back. She told me what her mom had told her — that
some people in the world felt entitled to insult fat people, that no matter how messed up someone was they could always console
themselves by feeling superior to a person who was overweight. And that she had learned to accept it, rather than waiting
for the world to change. Because inside, she knew her own worth.

I never got the impression Tessa felt like it was okay for kids to rag on her. Just that they did, that they probably always
would, and that she wasn’t going to let it get to her. Now I was starting to understand what a difficult thing that must have
been for her.

To much of the world, my mother and I would always be a source of amusement, at best, and contempt, at worst. I thought of
Brooklyn Bigelow back at school — first lady-in-waiting to the celestial entity of popularity: Shoshanna. When Brooklyn found
out my mother was a medium, she practically bubbled over with venom. She truly thought she’d found a nugget of hidden information
so scandalous it would drive us from town in disgrace.

Not everybody was as bad as Brooklyn. But there were too few Jacs in the world. Be that as it may, I couldn’t go ballistic
every time some dillweed like Ted sounded off about people like my mom and me.

Better luck next time.

By the time I unlocked my room, all I wanted was to go to bed and let sleep blot out the events of the evening. I opened the
door and hurried inside, then stopped.

Madame Serena was sitting on my bed.

Her eyes were closed, and her lips were moving. She was wearing some kind of turban, with a glittering pin fastened in its
center. Her face looked tinted by orange — as if she were illuminated by a phantom candle. I couldn’t make out what she was
chanting. I stood there and waited for her to finish, hoping it wouldn’t take too long.

I knew enough now to guess that Madame Serena had conducted séances in my room, and that she believed herself to be conducting
one now. It was a start.

I sat down on the bed next to her.

She mumbled a bit more, then I was able to pick out her words.

“Return to me, Simple Cat.”

“I’m right here,” I said quietly, so as not to disrupt the mood.

Madame Serena did not open her eyes.

“I await you,” she intoned. “I command —”

“Hello!” I barked.

Madame Serena shrieked and jumped half a foot in the air. If she’d been a living person of that size, I would have been propelled
across the room when she landed back on the mattress. But her phantom bulk had no effect, though her turban was now slightly
askew on her head. I thought it looked kind of sporty that way.

“Oh!” Madame Serena exclaimed, pressing her hand to her chest. Sitting so close to her, I noticed the enormous rings she wore,
dwarfing even her ample-sized fingers.

“Simple Cat,” Madame Serena said. “You have returned.”

“Just Kat,” I said. “You can call me just Kat, okay?”

“Oh Simple Cat,” Madame Serena said, talking right through me. “I welcome you to the world of the living. There are humans
on this side of the veil that are most eager to connect with their loved ones.”

I sighed, and arranged myself with legs crossed under me, facing Madame Serena on the bed.

“About the world of the living … that’s something I need to talk to you about,” I said carefully. “The … side of the
veil that you’re on, and all that.”

“Yes!” Madame Serena said excitedly. “You are urgently needed here, Simple Cat. I feel most obliged to begin with the Colonel’s
wife. She has been to see me each week for almost a year now, hoping to contact her Loretta. Her situation is most desperate.

“The loss of Loretta almost killed the poor woman, and I’m afraid her health is still dangerously delicate. I have promised
to reunite her with Loretta, and I fear that my failure to do so may prove catastrophic to her heart. Do you see Loretta,
Simple Cat? Has she joined you there?”

“Just Kat,” I said, very slowly and deliberately.

Madame Serena looked agitated.

“Simple and Just Cat, of course. Do you see Loretta? Is she nearby?”

Right. I better drop my attempts to correct my name before I ended up Simple and Just and Wise and Slightly Fat in the Butt
Cat, or worse. As for Loretta, she was not nearby. The only spirit in the room was Madame Serena, which was lucky for me.
Madame Serena was just about all I could take at the moment.

“Um, about this … Colonel’s wife?” I asked.

Madame Serena nodded gravely.

“Well, I don’t, uh … where exactly is she, Madame Serena?”

The medium sighed deeply, and looked on the point of tears.

“It’s most vexing,” she told me. “Now that you have come, Simple and Just Cat, now that I have finally raised a Guardian of
the Sacred Portal of Transmigration after trying for so many months, I’m afraid the Colonel’s wife has given up on me.”

“Given up on you?” I asked.

Madame Serena nodded again.

“I can only assume this is the case. The Colonel’s wife, as I said, has kept our appointment each week for almost one full
year. She travels by coach from Rochester to the Mountain House — so it is no small trip for her. But she has not arrived
today. I fear, Simple and Just Cat, that she has given up trying to see her Loretta on the very day you have come across the
veil to assist her!”

“I … I’m sorry about that,” I said. “And let’s just stick with Simple Cat, okay?”

I was really trying to buy time, because it was all very confusing. The Colonel’s wife, whoever she was, would of course be
long dead by now. So technically, she was on Madame Serena’s side of the veil, as she put it. With Loretta. Why both of them
couldn’t simply let Madame Serena know this was confusing.

The key had to be that Madame Serena didn’t know
she
was dead. Presumably both the Colonel’s wife and Loretta
did
know they were dead, and had moved on to wherever they were supposed to be, while Madame Serena was still hanging around
room 505 conducting her séances.

Or her séance.

Just one séance. A séance she was now reliving. Probably the last one. Madame Serena said the Colonel’s wife came every week
for almost a year, so that would make around fifty séances where she’d attempted to contact the spirit of Loretta. And failed.
And finally, say on week fifty-one, the poor Colonel’s wife finally gave up and didn’t come back. This was the loop in time
in which Madame Serena was stuck.

But why couldn’t Madame Serena contact this Loretta? Given fifty tries, Madame Serena ought to have been able to get some
sort of result. Unless Ted had been right about one thing.

Maybe Madame Serena was a fake.

“Loretta,” Madame Serena was calling in a singsong voice. “Loretta — come to the Simple Cat. She will guide you to the Colonel’s
wife, who loves you deeply and mourns your passing with a cavernous anguish of grief!”