Femme Fatale (3 page)

Someone sighs. Not me. Not even the thought of all that my mother and I and my brothers and sisters lost at the judge’s death can make me sigh for the past. Regret is for lily maids of Astelot, and I am no lily maid . . . in the sense of shrinking violet. I don’t commit myself as to my state of virtue. Modern women are much better off being mysterious about that.

Another sigh, deeper.

Now I see. Or hear and understand, rather. This is the overture to the show.

On my left, fingers tighten on mine. This is the aged Mrs. Beale, obviously not a shill with a false hand to palm off . . . unless the squeeze was to allay my suspicions before the hand was substituted. The press is cynical, they say, but we are mostly hard to fool, is all.

There is no movement in the hand on my right, and I would expect none. Mr. Flynn is a nervous reed of a young man who swallows frequently. His thin neck reveals a huge Adam’s apple that bobs when he swallows like a homely toad balancing on a reed’s swaying end. Having been instructed to join hands and be still, Mr. Flynn will remain absolutely motionless, except for the frequent swallowing of said Adam’s apple, which I hear in the darkness as loud as if it were my own nervous gesture. And except for a certain dampness I feel leeching through my cotton gloves, despite their thickness.

Oh, what a pathetic dance partner he would make, although I doubt this modern Ichabod would ever make so bold as to dance!

But I mustn’t people the darkness with stories, a weakness for one of my profession. I must be a tireless witness.

The next sigh is louder, extended, almost inhuman.

I suspect some device. Perhaps a sort of bellows?

Whatever the means, it does produce an eerie, shuddering
sound. Of course we all know the bagpipe was invented to instill fear into the Scot’s enemies in the fog-shrouded glens. Some natives of Australia, I understand, play a weird keening pipe that is quite unearthly. And even the Swiss mountaineers in their cheerful, comic opera lederhosen send sound echoing eerily across the Alpine peaks.

There are so many ways to buffalo people of any clime and place. I am not about to be alarmed by a series of sighs!

Ah. But this last sigh has become a groan, moving from a contralto to a bottomless basso tone.

I almost feel the table beneath my wrists tremble.

Now that is a nice effect!

Again, the sound. And now the floor beneath my—our—feet vibrates like one of the great bass drums in an orchestra.

The hand on my left jerks in surprise. The right one holds steady, although the grip is tighter and the Adam’s apple is held suspended for the moment.

Ah, a faint high keening. A performing flute, I think, this time. Soon some light should trickle into our tomb-dark chamber to show this brassy wand levitating in air, supposedly played by an invisible mouth breathing from dead lungs. Has anyone who attended a séance ever thought why the resurrected dead would want to join a band and what they would really look like?

Rotting, crumbling flesh and all?

Folks like to say my kind have too much imagination, and perhaps they’re right. But I’d rather have too much of anything than too little. I am given to understand that this is one of my greatest flaws. And strengths. And that is what brought the name of Nellie Bly from Pittsburg to New York City. I will not remain consigned to women’s interest news, but have investigated such topics as child labor and the miserable lot of working girls.

Well, my knees are getting pretty tired of holding my writing implements in place for ready use, and I’m developing a better
respect for the trickery of mediums, especially as it involves cracking lower joints as the famous Fox sisters did. Took patience and pain and practice, I bet. More than I have.

So. Let’s get on with the show.

Crack!

Our hands spasm in one round of shock and horror.

It was a sound like the snap of a woolly mammoth’s shoulder joint, not a woman’s; like the thick table legs breaking in unison.

Then more of the reedy flute piping funereally above us.

And we are all still in the dark.

Not all of us, I think.

At this thought, the tabletop proceeds to elevate, lifting our conjoined hands in the mockery of a Maypole dance position.

Soon our wrists are at shoulder level, and my neighbor on the left is moaning softly. Like a ghost. Or a frightened woman.

I do not have time or inclination to be a frightened woman . . . this levitation of my hands is loosening the grip of my knees. My notepad and pencil are about to clatter to the floor.

Luckily a soft, thick rug underlies us all (
and why exactly is it required
, I wonder), and I may not be betrayed by my implements.

Arrrrghhhh
.

This is a raw groan, neither instrumental nor human, but something in-between.
Could a penny whistle be so perverted to produce such an outré sound?
I wonder.

I make a very bad audience for a medium, but then a woman who can feign her state of virtue is not one to be taken in, but rather one to take in others.

I smile in the dark as I recall who knows my secret . . . and who does not.

Arrrrghhhh
.

This is getting predictable.

But then the dancing flute begins to sway and keen. Then one
ever so gradually becomes aware that the gaslight sconces on the wall are warming with light as subtly as the dawn tinting the horizon with rosy fingertips . . . .

All I can see is a faint pale mask in the dark . . . the medium herself, only a face, a luminous oval like a Greek mask of either tragedy or comedy.

Somehow the light, whatever its source, has bleached her skin to parchment, her features to holes torn in such a hide.

Her eyes are pitch-black olives. Her mouth is a black plum, bursting with ripeness into a perfect “O.”

And out of that mouth . . . drifts an airy wisp like breath made visible. A snake of smoke and fog. An endless excretion repellent in its implications . . .

I am seeing the spirit substance called ectoplasm.

Yes, I am seeing it. But how?

While I watch, I feel the hands on either side clutch on mine like fleshly manacles that will never release. This visible thread—of breath or life or illusion—weaves like the pipe-enchanted cobra in an Egyptian marketplace, upward and obliquely and never stopping in its motion. It seems that something from our very feet and hands and throats is climbing to the ceiling on the staircase of our conjoined souls.

Enough!

I do not withdraw my hands, or my eyes, but I retract my suddenly childish desire to believe. The judge is dead. I am a woman grown. I will deceive, not
be
deceived.

I feel my knees weaken and my precious pencil and pad slip unheard to the carpet.

My eyes remain fixed on the flute around which the ectoplasm twines like rambling rose over trellis.

The medium’s mask of a face still floats on the dark.

“I hear the dead,” she intones, her voice as mechanical as one of those heard on Edison’s “talking machines.” “She is back! The Outcast. The Dancer among the Dead. She will never die!”

And then I notice a strange occurrence in this room dedicated to producing the strange . . . the ectoplasm is weaving back down, as if a thread on a loom were to retrace its path.

A voice without sound executing a glissando of motion, it curls back upon itself, upon its originator. It coils softly around the dark beneath the disembodied face, around the invisible neck.

Then it tightens like a snake quite different from a striking cobra, a boa constrictor made of feathers and fog.

It winds and tightens, tightens and winds . . .

. . . until the face is lost behind its disembodied coils, like a mummy’s . . .

. . . until the voice that issues from that disembodied face screams and sighs and sighs and screams.

Finally we stand, screaming as one, drowning out the sound effects, ending the delusion, finally acting not as an audience, but as a sort of demented Greek chorus.

Someone—who knows where? who knows what?—makes the gaslights flare to full brilliance.

The table crashes back to floor. Someone cries in tribute to a wounded toe.

I can hear my fallen pencil snap under the force.

After that dramatic plunge, and the thump of the table creaking back to earth, the room is quiet.

Our medium’s face has fallen like a rose blossom too heavy for its stem.

It lies upon the tabletop, open-eyed.

Around its neck is wrapped coil after coil of stringy ectoplasm, now oddly solid and dormant, lifeless.

No one moves.

Then I do.

I approach the dead departed.

I touch the ectoplasmic scarf at her unmoving throat.

It is . . . damp, fragile yet strong, as ropy as an umbilical cord, and I have seen such in my checkered career.

It is also teasingly familiar, this limp, wet rag.

I remember now. Some mediums are regurgitators who can expel yards and yards of consumed cheesecloth at will, like sword-swallowers.

One expects a sword to serve as a weapon.

One does not expect cheesecloth to serve as a garote.

Here it has.

I lift my head. The séance attendees remain assembled, standing, hands still locked, save for mine.

By their faces I can see that they still see spirits.

I see something different.

I see a very clever and puzzling murder.

1.

Duet

He was an enthusiastic musician, being himself not only a
very capable performer but a composer of no ordinary merit
.

—DR. JOHN H. WATSON, “THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE,” 1891,
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

at Neuilly, near Paris
August, 1889

“I cannot believe,” I told Irene, “that you would agree to such a shocking thing without telling your husband!”

“Which can you not believe, Nell, that I would agree to a ‘shocking thing’ or that I would not tell Godfrey?”

I had long since learned that my friend Irene Adler Norton was fashioned from an impossible human amalgam resembling iron brocade: apparently decorative but, in truth, nigh impossible to ruffle or bend. I might better exercise my lungs by attempting to blow out the fire in the grate as to move her resolve with the feeble zephyrs of my words.

I shifted ground. “I cannot believe that you would invite That Man to our common home without telling me.”

“But I have told you.”

“Just now . . . when he could arrive any moment! I am not prepared to receive a guest, even if you are.”

I lifted my embroidery hoop from my lap in a gesture of exasperation. The trailing threads immediately attracted the snagging claws of the Persian cat, Lucifer, whose instincts for mayhem were as black as his long, silky coat. In an instant he was tangled in my rainbow skeins.

“Obviously,” Irene continued, watching my struggle to unwind embroidery silks from Lucifer’s claws with a certain clinical interest, “Sherlock Holmes is not a guest, in your estimation, but an intruder. You must understand that he comes here at my invitation, for a bit of very simple business. I merely have to honor my word and give him the English translation I have had made of the Yellow Book.”

“Of course,” I said grimly, my shredded threads tugged free of their attacker at last. “It is bad enough that demonic diary fell into our hands at the end of the Ripper affair. I still shudder when I think of the Unholy Trinity that was allied against us then. I doubt that the world will ever be safe from them, however obscurely, and deeply, and securely they are imprisoned. Now you only perpetuate that dreadful time by passing on the demented creature’s scribblings to Sherlock Holmes.”

“I promised him I would, Nell. And my making the translation allowed me to . . . protect any mention of my dear ones by what you rightly call a ‘demented creature.’ If Mr. Holmes’s presence is so undesirable, you could withdraw upstairs. I don’t expect him to remain long.”