We Will All Go Down Together (4 page)

The Clarke Centre for Addiction and Mental Health’s attendants had Carraclough Devize dolled up and waiting for him when Sylvester Horse-Kicker arrived, very slightly late, due to a winning combination of parking, streetcar maintenance on Spadina—
Toronto’s only got two seasons, boy, winter and construction, so watch out,
his Mum had said, when he’d told her getting into the Freihoeven Institute’s Placement Program meant he’d be moving to the City—and a plague of migrating aphids filling the downtown core with the disgusting equivalent of green hail that squirmed when you wiped it away. She stood in the corner of the room like some reversed still from a lost Kurosawa film (Kiyoshi, not Akira), both taller than you’d think yet thinner, with her colourless mass of hair hanging down and her glasses angled so the light erased her eyes.

On closer inspection, he saw that those white things poking from her sleeves weren’t cuffs, but bandages.

“Miss Devize? I’m—”

Impossible to tell if she looked up or not, her voice all-but-affectless, as ever. “We met last year. The Eden Marozzi inquiry—those diorama photos. Abbott asked me to consult.”

“Yes, absolutely, sorry. It’s just . . . we didn’t talk much. I didn’t think you’d remember me.”

A shrug, one no-brow slightly canted, as though to project:
Well, there you go.
And—ugh, could he actually
hear
the echo of those same words trace his inner ear with sticky film, like walking through a spiderweb and only noticing it later?

I’m in the wrong damn job, if psychics creep me out this much.

Devize smiled, as though he’d made the remark out loud. As though he’d meant it as a joke.

“Abbott’s note mentioned storage,” she said. “So that means an item assessment.” He nodded. “Then I’ll need to drop by my office, get my camera. It’s in—”

He held it up: a vintage Polaroid One-Step, rainbow swoosh and all. Christ knew where she got the film. “Abbott told me,” he explained, unnecessarily.

“Of course.”

In the seven years he’d worked for the Freihoeven Institute’s ParaPsych Department—two during his internship, five after—Sy was pretty sure this was the first and only time he’d ever dealt with Carraclough Devize without the presence of Freihoeven head-man Doctor Guilden Abbott, who seemed to consider himself her surrogate father cum self-elected handler.
Never forget, Sylvester:
Carra is special,
Abbott was fond of saying.
Our single best resource, the standard by which all other psychic—assets—must be judged. When Doctor and Doctor Jay were doing their initial survey of the greater Toronto area, they concluded they’d never met anyone like her, and never expected to; that’s good enough for me.

Which wasn’t completely true—certainly, Sy’d spent enough time in Records to know that Abbott continued to test Devize’s crazily high ratings bi-annually, regular as seasonalized clockwork. The latest series of arrays usually coincided with whenever she’d checked herself out of the Clarke, which she used like it was either a five-star spa or her summer cottage/winter retreat/spring and fall whatever;
special,
for sure. In all senses of the word.

Between commitments, Devize spent the bulk of her time at the Freihoeven itself, often even sleeping there (Abbott had assigned her an office, for that very purpose), with very occasional return trips to the basement apartment of her mother’s decaying Annex home. And though records showed she was at least ten years older than Sy, pushing forty harder than a Midvale School for the Gifted student at the door marked “pull,” she still drifted through life displaying all the fine social skills of the child prodigy she’d once been—the thirteen-year-old whose destitute, grief-drunk mother Gala had rented her out to any séance circuit freak seeking solace from beyond the grave. Who, on promise of $10,000 and a “consulting” job, had accompanied the aforementioned Doctor Jay and Jay—Freihoeven’s founders, Abbott’s mentors, both late and lamented—on their extremely unsuccessful final mission.

The goal: catalogue and/or exorcize Peazant’s Folly, a haunted house located on a natural gas fault up near Overdeere, Ontario. The cost: one archaeologist, one forensic psychologist, one well-established mental medium, and two noted parapsychological researchers, all removed in body-bags, straitjackets, or simple police restraints. Devize, the youngest party-member, had been listed as Glenda Fisk’s “apprentice” on the original proposal; she came back in a coma, then woke with a convulsive blast of telekinetic energy that broke all the windows on her floor of the Toronto Sick Kids’ Hospital, signifying her emergence as something entirely new: a mental medium turned physical, ghost-touched from one category straight into another, with little to show for the experience but a broken hip, a lingering limp, and a complete inability to screen herself anymore.

Sy remembered a piece of video footage he’d stumbled on—Abbott’s first interview with Devize after assuming control of the Institute, when she was only two months out of the hospital. Pretty much the same figure as today, barring a few more crow’s feet; downcast face hair-shadowed, eyes glasses-hidden. Blank as any given winter street, snow new-fallen over grime, just waiting for fresh defilement.

You look well, Carra. Better.

Mmm-hmm. Ready for work; that’s what Gala says, anyhow.

Oh well, there’s no immediate need—

No, it’s all right. Take a look: I’m fine, no harm, no foul. No scars . . . but then there wouldn’t be, would there?

Sorry?

Oh, Doctor.
And here she almost smiled—almost. Asking, gently:
Are you really going to tell me you haven’t noticed?

Sy could still see Abbott’s brows, already too close for comfort, attempting to knit themselves inextricably together.
I, uh . . . I don’t understand.

How I have no skin, anymore.

(That’s all.)

And that would be the attraction, right there, ever since: a wound so deep, so all-encompassing and impossible to heal, it practically counted as a super-power. Carraclough Devize, human ghost-o-meter—steer her towards anything suspected of weirdness, sit back, and take notes. By Freihoeven standards, there was no better confirmation/debunking method than letting her wander through a site and come back either edge-of-puking, a-crawl with automatic writing stigmata, or simply shaking her head in that numb, vaguely disappointed way.

The Folly, protected by Historic Site status, had finally been converted into a haphazard tourist attraction; it had endured, unoccupied except for half-hour stretches three times a day, until 2002, when the lights went out during a lecture and the tour-guide’s assistant lit a candle. Meanwhile, the Freihoeven prospered, even without the Jays. Guilden Abbott kept his job, and so long as he did—apparently—so did Carra Devize.

Incautious, that last observation. Sy felt her prying absently at the edges of his brain again, perhaps without even meaning to—her half-hearted attention in the back of his mind like grit, sanding a horrid pearl.

“Where is Abbott, anyways?” she asked, turning the camera over in her hands, rather than probe any deeper. Which was . . . nice of her, he guessed.
Jesus, I’m bad at this.

Not like he’d never dealt with psychics before, for Christ’s sake. Just not ones this strong or competent. Or unpredictable.

“He had to go to the States, on very short notice. Boston.”

“Lecture?”

“Estate sale, actually. Plus a silent auction, by the candle.”

“Huh.”

(
Fitting.
)

They were almost to the gate now, Sy waving at the orderly who’d let him in, who nodded, curtly. Turning Devize’s way, he reminded her, voice softening: “You need to be back by five, Carra.”

“I know, Paul.”

“Five, on the dot. Or we gotta put you back in the no-sharps room.”

She made a clumsy okay sign with both hands, thumbs barely meeting forefingers; tendons might be still a bit foreshortened from the patch-job, Sy supposed. “I
know
, Paul. Seriously.”

“Well, just sayin’. You been here long enough.”

As the contact gate screeched open, Sy stepped through with her on his heels, uncomfortably close. He felt, rather than saw, her give that same slight head-shake, a bit sadly.

“Not quite yet,” he thought he heard her murmur, under the alarm’s screech.

Spirit Cabinet, circa 1889,
the label read, in Abbott’s neat handwriting.
From the estate of Katherine-Mary des Esseintes/Lardner-Honeycutt crime scene (transfer handled by Wilcox Labrett Oyosolo, 2007, through Auction-House Miroux).

And: “Oh,” Devize said, behind him, to no one in particular, “
that
box.”

This was Freihoeven’s second storage unit, three whole hallways deeper inside the facility than their first. Though Sy had overseen its rental, it’d been long-distance; before today, he’d never had occasion to step inside its echoing metal shell. Beneath their feet, the concrete floor sent up enough dust to hang visible, stinging in the nose.

The cabinet was a one-slot variation on the Davenport brothers’ original 1854 model, only slightly less compact than your average Ikea dresser. Dark, burnished wood with plain brass fittings. A small window with a scrim, confessional-style. Inside, Sy assumed, there’d be a coffin-like space for the medium to sit, perhaps even a system of restraining straps—first tied down in public, doors wide, then locked away, with one of the séance-goers being given the key.

He walked around it, feeling for joins, and found none. Which didn’t prove anything, necessarily . . . but des Esseintes had had a good reputation, as he recalled, given the hotbed of fakery most 1800s Spiritualism grew out of. Like Devize, she’d worked under the care of her mother, whose chaperone-like presence served to fend off fetishists—until her demise, upon which des Esseintes’ main patron became her husband, forcing her to retire. A year later des Esseintes was also dead, predictably, in childbirth.

As he rounded the cabinet’s left wing, a dry kissing noise and flashbulb-pop made Sy start. Once again, he found Devize so close he almost collided with her. “Wouldn’t’ve thought they’d let him have this, after what happened,” she remarked, shaking her first shot out and squinting at the result. “But then again, I guess that’s what the acquisitions budget’s for.”

“People were pretty generous this year, at the fundraiser.”

“I can see that. Sorry I had to miss it.”

“We, uh, missed
you
, obviously. But—”

“Oh, I’m sure the demo went off like a charm; Abbott’s building a nice little roster of alternates. I vetted most of them. Who was it—Jodice Glouwer, Suzy Shang? Janis Mol?”

“Miss Glouwer’s hard to reach, these days.”

“Janis, then—that’s good. She needs the work.”

Two more shots in quick succession, seemingly intentionally angled to give Sy a headache. He moved off, looked away, studying the wall; she brushed past, still clicking and shaking. A fistful of slimy-faced, sharp-smelling squares already fanned out between her fingers, like cards from some weird deck. Indicating them, he asked: “Anything interesting?”

She shook her head. “Not yet.” Another shot. “‘The Thanatoscopeon,’ that’s what she called it; called herself a ‘thanatoscope,’ and mediumship as a concept ‘thanatoscopry.’ Loved to concoct those pseudo-Greek words, back when.” And one more, for an even eight. “Kate-Mary was one of the first Ontario mediums to allow photography at her meetings.”

Sy nodded. “I catalogued a bunch of reproductions, like thirty different variants. Those plates done in Peterborough, where she’s making hands out of ectoplasm. . . .”

“I saw that—Gala had copies of the whole trading pack, used them as teaching aids. Creepy.”

“Because she was making ectoplasmic hands?”

“Because those hands were
feeling her up
, in public, and somebody else was making a plate of it. Think about how long that would
take.
”

Sy tried not to, and immediately found himself thinking of the fact that he’d already seen Devize in much the same position, instead: spinning what looked like wads of dirty string from nose, mouth, ears and eyes, her head thrown back, hair lifting slightly on some invisible current. Remembering it with her in proximity was weirdly embarrassing, as though he’d seen her naked—not least because he sort of had, considering how sheer those lab-conditions leotards tended to be, and the fact that you couldn’t let subjects wear underwear, for fear they’d try to pack quick-set packages of glue, wax, or paraffin in their bras.

“
Ektos
, ‘outside,’ plus
plasma
, ‘something formed or moulded,’” Devize said, squinting down at the Polaroids. “People used to think it came from the spirit world, but it’s all just made out of whatever’s handy—bits and pieces of the medium, herself. Almost always
her
self. Water, dander, skin-cells, fat . . . the stuff you don’t want, mainly, which makes it easier to let it go. There’s a reason the Freihoeven’s main stock-in-trade tends to be a rotating list of little girls with eating disorders.”

As with so much she said, Sy didn’t know how to answer that, or if it really required answering. So he kept quiet, and waited.

“She was legendary, Kate-Mary. Every other aspiring medium’s pin-up. My Dad’s great-grandmother. . . .” Devize shook her head, wonderingly. “If Spiritualists had groupies, she’d’ve been following Kate-Mary ’round the country, trying to plaster-cast her soul; that’s what Gala says.” Then added, slightly softer, correcting herself: “Said.”

Well, yeah.

Sy’d placed the obituary himself, at Abbott’s instigation:
Geillis Carraclough Devize, 1944-2012, in her home, after a long illness.
He wasn’t sure whether the illness in question was supposed to be alcoholism, agoraphobia, or hoarding, though granted, it could’ve been a Venn Diagram convergence of the three. All he knew was that his brief visit to Gala Devize’s erstwhile home to pick up “fresh” clothes for her momentarily dazed daughter had been both frustrating and disgusting. The minute she’d checked herself back into the Clarke, Abbott had called in a cleaning service and 1-866-GOT-JUNK?; Sy could only hope she wouldn’t be too wrenched when she finally went “home” to discover all the mouldy, staple-gunned velvet had been removed from the bathroom walls, the food-encrusted plates from every kitchen surface (including the tops of cabinets), and the teetering six-foot stacks of newspapers from the living room, where they’d created a maze whose narrow passages were prone to sudden collapse.