In the Shadow of Blackbirds (16 page)

JULIUS PARKED THE CADILLAC IN FRONT OF A FIFTH
Avenue hardware store. The shop was wedged between a toy store and a restaurant that smelled of juicy grilled hamburgers. The sign in front of the eatery claimed the place specialized in “Liberty Steaks,” but that was simply paranoid speak for
We don’t want to call anything a name that sounds remotely German, like “hamburger.” We’re pro-American. We swear!

A glass door led us to a dark interior staircase that clattered with the echoes of our dress shoes as we climbed the steps. Another door, plain and chipped and brown, waited at the top. Julius knocked.

Someone opened the door a crack and stuck out her head: an unmasked girl, a year or two older than me at most, with
long golden ringlets crowned by a sparkling jeweled band. Her eyes were lined in black kohl, her lips rouged a deep red.

“Hello, Julius.” She opened the door farther, enough for us to see her wine-colored dress and gargantuan breasts that seemed at odds with the innocent Goldilocks look of her hair. “I didn’t know you were bringing two guests.”

Julius took off his hat. “Does that throw off your numbers?”

“Sadly, no. Not at all. Francie died over the weekend. We’re not sure if Archie and Helen are still alive. Roy saw an ambulance at their house on Monday.”

Julius wrinkled his brow. “That’s disturbing.”

We entered a dim, bare hallway, and the girl shut the door behind us.

“Welcome.” She offered her hand to Aunt Eva. “I’m Lena Abberley.”

“I’m Eva Ottinger. And this is my niece, Mary Shelley Black.”

“Ahh.” Lena shook my hand and grinned at Julius. “You’ve brought your muse, Julius. ‘Beauty resides within the sacred studio of Mr. Julius Embers, Spiritualist Photographer.’”

I reddened and let go of her hand, tasting a flavor that stung sharp and hot. “I didn’t know he was going to put me on that handbill.”

She winked at me. “Don’t be modest about the great Julius Embers’s interest in a pretty young thing like you. He and I refer clients to one another. You’ll find a stack of those handbills next to my donation jar in the parlor. Come along.” Lena
beckoned with her index finger. “Roy is already here.” She swished through a doorway to the right of the entry hall with her curls bouncing and her hips swinging beneath her dress.

We followed her into a small living room decorated in fringed electric lamps and paintings of mustard-yellow flowers that weren’t particularly pretty. A blond young man with cloudy eyes puffed on a cigarette at a round wooden table in the center of the space. Julius closed the room’s door.

“This is my fiancé, Roy.” Lena nodded toward the young man at the table. “Roy, this is Julius’s muse and her aunt.”

“I’m not his muse,” I told Roy, who looked straight through me like he didn’t care one way or another.

“I have a homemade anti-influenza remedy for you to snack on.” Lena picked up a bowl of sugar cubes from the table. “You’re going to need to take off your masks for the séance. The gauze scares away the spirits who died before the flu attacked. They worry surgeons are sitting around the table, waiting to operate on them.”

Julius snickered. “You just don’t want to wear your own mask, Lena. You hate how it looks on you, so you blame the helpless spirits.”

“I don’t see you spoiling your handsome face with the gauze, either, Mr. Embers.”

“If Death is coming for me,” said Julius, lifting his chin, “I want him to see my entire face. He’s not going to find me cowering behind anything.”

Aunt Eva massaged her masked cheek. “Are you sure we
need to take off our gauze? The flu just arrived on my block tonight.”

“The flu is
everywhere,”
said Roy, sucking on his cigarette.

“That’s what I told her.” Julius scooted chairs out for each of us. “Sit down, ladies. Take off your masks and eat Miss Abberley’s snack so we can begin.”

Aunt Eva took the seat next to Julius, so I positioned myself in the chair between her and Roy and dropped my coin purse next to my aunt’s bag. I pulled down my mask until it dangled around my throat like a necklace and watched Aunt Eva do the same. Lena presented us with the bowl of sugar cubes, which smelled like my father’s hands after he’d fill cans of kerosene in the back storeroom of Black’s Groceries.

I sniffed at the cubes again. “Sugar cubes soaked in kerosene? Is that your flu remedy?”

“Precisely.” Lena scooted an extra chair between Roy and Julius for herself. “That’s how you get rid of germs. You burn them away.”

“I’ll burn my throat away.”

“That’s the point.” She sat down. “Eat it or leave.”

I picked up a glistening cube and studied it.

Aunt Eva placed a piece of sugar on her tongue, grimaced, and swallowed it whole. Her face turned red. Her eyes watered, and I half expected her to breathe fire. “May I have a drink of water, please?”

“Roy, be a gentleman.” Lena knocked Roy’s arm with her elbow. “Get Mrs. Ottinger a glass of water.”

I raised my cube to my mouth but transferred it inside my fist at the last second and pretended to swallow. When Roy hustled back in with the sloshing glass for Aunt Eva, I flicked the cube to the floor beneath the table.

“So, tell me, ladies.” Lena leaned forward on her elbows. “Who do you want me to bring to you tonight?”

My jaw dropped. “We can’t tell you that information. How will we know whether or not you’re a cheat?”

Lena raised an eyebrow. “A cheat?”

“Mary Shelley!” rasped my aunt. “Be polite. We’re guests here.”

“If I tell you whom I want to see,” I said, folding my hands on the table, “and drop clues about what I want him or her to say, we’ll have no proof whether or not you genuinely contact the dead.”

“Are you insinuating I can’t contact the dead?”

“I’m saying, if you can, you don’t need to ask whom we want to see.”

“Good Lord.” Julius rubbed his swollen eyes. “Listen to all those proper
whoms.
No wonder Stephen couldn’t keep his hands off her.”

Lena’s eyes pounced on me. “Stephen? Is that who you want to find?”

I glared at Julius. “I didn’t want you saying anything to her about your brother and me. I don’t want her summoning him.”

“Then why did you agree to come here?” asked Aunt Eva,
her voice struggling back to life after the kerosene. “I thought you wanted to find Stephen.”

“I’m here because I’m curious. If you’re going to summon a spirit for me, Miss Abberley, I want you to pick someone obscure—someone no one here would have ever mentioned to you. If I see you’re genuinely gifted, I’ll pay you to show me how you channel your gifts. But I’m not parting with one precious cent if you’re going to sit there and ask me to feed you information.”

Lena tugged on one of her coiled curls. “Are you setting rules for me?”

“Yes. If I’m to pay you for tutelage, I’d be an employer of sorts.”

Roy chuckled and actually spoke more than four words. “You’re being challenged, Lena. It’s about time, after all that spoiling you get from your doting followers.”

“Shut up, Roy. Put out your cigarette.” Lena rose from her chair and pressed her hands against the table. “I’ve got rules for you, too, Miss Black.”

“What are they?”

“No getting out of your chair after I turn off the lights. No talking. No breaking the sacred circle. No touching the ectoplasm.”

“What’s ectoplasm?” I asked.

“Aha! So, you
don’t
know everything.” She beamed with a show of shiny white teeth. “Ectoplasm is spiritual energy, fully materialized. Imagine an umbilical cord connecting the other
side to the mortal world. My body produces ectoplasm that reaches out and moves tables and objects with the strength of human hands. Keep your fingers off it, and while you’re at it, keep your fingers off Roy, aside from holding his hand while we create the chain of energy. Are you quite clear on my rules, Miss Black?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Then let’s begin.” Lena plunked the bowl of sugar cubes on a side table that also held a donation jar and Julius’s handbills. She
clip-clopped
in her thick heels to a switch by the door and pressed the button that turned off the lights, submerging the room in blackness. Agonizing chills spread down my back and arms. The temperature seemed to drop twenty degrees. I smelled Roy’s extinguished cigarette. And mold.

Lena traveled back to her chair in the dark with the same
clip-clop
rhythm as before, which reassured me she hadn’t traded places with anyone else. A chair scraped against the floorboards, sounding like she had taken her seat.

“Join hands,” she said.

We did as she asked. Roy took my gloved hand tenderly, and Aunt Eva clamped down on my healing fingers until I fidgeted enough for her to loosen her hold.

Lena drew air through her nose and released it through her lips with a slight whistle. “I’m going to fall into my trance now.” She breathed in and out again. “Open your mind. Leave your doubts at the door. Turn your thoughts to loved ones who’ve left this world for the Summerland.” She continued her long,
audible breaths, each exhalation punctuated by a soft moan that caused Roy’s fingers to twitch against mine. I tried to see the outlines of my companions’ heads, but the darkness penetrated the room completely. Lena must have sealed off the windows to keep even the slightest hint of moonlight from peeking through the shades.

I didn’t turn my thoughts to any loved ones.

The perfume and cigarettes and mold in the air gave the séance a dirty feel. We were not attending a formal social event, as Aunt Eva had said we would. I’d been tricked into another theatrical show, courtesy of Mr. Julius Embers, whose impenetrable emotions reminded me again of Stephen’s warnings about opium. Hazy Roy, who sounded like he was starting to snore next to me in the dark, was probably an addict, too.

“Spirits, are you with us?” Lena’s new, deep trance voice rumbled up from her belly. “Knock once for yes, twice for no.”

Aunt Eva’s hand flinched in anticipation.

“Are you with us?” asked Lena again.

SLAM.

A solid knock walloped the table and made me jump.

“How many spirits have joined us tonight?”

SLAM SLAM SLAM SLAM SLAM.

“Five spirits. Marvelous. Do you see your loved ones sitting at this table, spirits? Once for yes, twice for no.”

SLAM.

“Do you want to show your beloveds you’re here?”

SLAM.

“Then play for us, spirits. Play.”

The table vibrated under our hands, as if an electrical current buzzed beneath the wood.

“Join us, spirits. Play. Show us you’re here.”

The vibrations strengthened, rattling up my arms, jolting my neck, and trembling down my spinal column. The table creaked and shook and tilted back and forth, gaining momentum. Wood crashed against my rib cage, tipped away, and banged against me again. I couldn’t breathe. Pain and fear crippled me.

No, no, no,
screamed the rational voice inside my head.
This is not what Stephen’s spirit feels like.

The table hit me so hard it knocked the wind out of me. I regained my breath, kicked off my right shoe, stretched out my stocking-covered toe, and felt around in the dark for signs of fraud. After another blow to my ribs, my toes met with something soft and curvy and covered in smooth fabric: a pair of female legs, wrapped around the center post, shaking the table with all their might.

One of the feet gave me a swift kick in the fleshy part of my calf.

“Ow!” I cried.

“Shh,” hissed Aunt Eva.

The shaking stopped and Lena called out, “Don’t touch the ectoplasm. Keep all hands and legs to yourselves. Behave like proper ladies and gentlemen or you’ll do irrevocable harm to the one you want to see.” She exhaled five more of her
drawn-out breaths, probably to calm herself after my investigative toes. “Close your eyes. Turn all thoughts to the dear souls you miss so much. Don’t allow anything else inside your head. No doubts. No fears.
Nothing.”

I closed my eyes and played along, even though my expectations had soured as much as when Stephen had told me about Julius’s photography tricks. I turned my thoughts to Mae Tate, the first student at my high school to die of the Spanish flu. No one in the séance room would have known about her. Mae had worn her dark brown hair in loose braids that hung a full foot below her backside, and she always sat at the front of the classroom because her father couldn’t afford to buy her eyeglasses. She collapsed on the floor during the first week of English literature, while we were studying William Collins’s “The Passions” in our McGuffey Readers. Mrs. Martin rushed us out of the room, as if the girl had caught fire, and we all stared with open mouths at the way Mae convulsed on the hard wooden floor like the victim of a witch’s curse.

That’s all I could remember about Mae Tate at that moment. My mind clouded over. Other memories—stronger, richer ones; memories that wanted me to see and feel and taste them—invaded my brain.

A room wallpapered in peacock green.

Stephen’s mouth on mine.

Mr. Muse.