Although the ghosts hadn’t threatened her previously, Lily’s muscles twitched in preparation to run if things were different here than in Purgatory.
“Relax, Lily,” the Ouija said in her mind. “They need you.”
Before she could work out the meaning, they’d reached her.
“The Angels and Demons have forgotten they were once part of a whole,” the portly gentleman said. “Good has become evil and dark has become light.”
“They need to join together. Help us remind them. Help us build a new world so the dead have somewhere to go,” the businesswoman said.
“This is the reason we chose you through the Ouija. To be the planchette,” the little girl said. “To give us a voice.”
A surprising streak of anger rose, and Lily touched the spirit closest to her. “You used me? You had the Ouija protect me so I could give you what you wanted?”
“You got what you needed as well, Lily. Protection. Be our voice, our planchette,” the girl said. “You just have to let us in.”
Lily hesitated. A burst of Angel fire lit the sky. A Demon flew as if he moved through molasses. And Uriel’s sword slowly came down. The battle was waking up.
“What will happen if I do?” she said.
“The Earth will belong to the humans again.”
Lily let go of the ghost and nodded.
Wind kicked up. It stirred the dust, scattered ashes, and settled around her like a cyclone. From within, the first glimmers of silvery blue appeared. They grew stronger and brighter until they ensconced Lily in a spectral tornado. Then they rose high into the sky. Like a single organism, they dove into her. She drank in the power coursing through her. Instead of being the protected, she was now the protector. Lily opened her mouth. She roared.
Multitudes of voices spilled out. Languages old and new wound together. Young and old, gruff and sweet, all vibrated in the air. The Angels covered their ears and tried to slink away. The Demons smiled. The Angels screamed. The Demons laughed. The voices of the dead continued to speak.
They spoke to the Angels. Reminded them of who they once were, of the souls they once had, of what they could be. The Angels tried to run and found they couldn’t. Tried to throw fireballs that fizzed and died in their palms. The blue fire in their eyes died out. The dead spoke to the Demons then. Spoke of the return of their souls with the ascension from Hell, the compassion they now had, to remember what it was like to be one with the Angels.
The Demons raised their red fire orbs but discovered they too died in their hands. The Angels looked at them with hope. Confounded with the failure of their magic, they marched en masse toward the Angels. The dead urged them on. A Demon hurled a fist at an Angel and they merged. Sensing an escape from a brutal death, the Angels swarmed the Demons until each had absorbed the other. The dead sighed.
Before Lily stood creatures neither Demon nor Angel. Semi-transparent gossamer wings reached from shoulder blades. Blue skinned and eyes crackling with both Angel and Demon fire, they watched Lily. Waited. The voices of the dead built inside her. Her mouth stretched open even further until she thought her jaw would dislocate. A wall of sound issued forth. It surged toward the new beings, covered them. The air shimmered and they all disappeared into it.
Lily collapsed. The Mother-of-Pearl beams sucked back into her body but the faint opalescence of the letters remained. They shimmered along the smoky obsidian coating her skin. Residual power tingled along her nerves and spoke of hope. Spoke of creation, of a new world for humanity and of one for the dead.
She stood up—legs shaking but holding—and scouted around for her backpack. It lay beside a smoking patch of grass. Shouldering it, she let her gaze wander around the camp. Empty. But not completely, she felt eyes on her as she began walking toward the gate. Silently, she wished the refugees luck and slipped from the camp.
The dead had more to say.
Chris Marrs
Chris Marrs lives in Calgary, Alberta with her daughter, a cat, and a ferret. She has stories in A Darke Phantastique (Cycatrix Press-2014), the Bram Stoker winning The Library of the Dead (Written Backwards Press-2015), and in Dark Discoveries Issue #25/Femme Fatale, October 2013. Bad Moon Books published her novella Everything Leads Back to Alice in the Fall of 2013. Her novella, Wild Woman, was published in September 2015 as part of JournalStone’s DoubleDown series. Entangled Soul, a collaborative novella with Gene O’Neill, was published by Thunderstorm Books in November 2016.
You can find her at www.hauntedmarrs.com, on Facebook where she “likes” more than posts, or on Twitter.
For more information:
@Chris_Marrs
chris.marrs.14
www.hauntedmarrs.com
Gallow’s Grove
Brad C. Hodson
1
Though I'd been responsible for creating a few, I was thirteen when I first saw a ghost. That was the same day we were hired for what the papers later called "Death and Magic at Gallow's Grove." That incident would put us face to face with something, well, different than the ghost we confronted in a parlor in Chinatown that morning. As Madame Nephthys would later say, there's a certain symmetry to matters supernal, and I suppose it fitting that we began our journey by staring at the face of death.
The red paper lanterns hanging outside and exotic music playing had worked wonders with a gray November sky to put us in the proper frame of mind for something fantastic. It was no surprise that, when the phantom finally appeared, everyone gasped. There were twelve of us, thirteen counting Qin Shi Huang, each gripping another's hand around the table. The room black as midnight, the spirit had no difficulty materializing.
Silence. The air smelled of incense and old flowers.
"What is your name?" the elderly Chinese man asked with a touch of an accent.
Little more than a torso with a cherubic face hovering above it, the pale-green image stared at nothing.
"I am Marie."
She had the face of a fresh corpse and, if I hadn't been prepared for the sight, it might have troubled my sleep for the next year.
"Marie," the elderly man next to me said, his breath hitching and his hand trembling in mine.
The medium nodded as though there could have been no other outcome. "How did you die?"
"Wet lungs," she said.
The old man wept. "Influenza. My daughter died in the epidemic. Marie? It's really you, isn't it?"
She didn't look at him, continuing to stare into the dark. "Father?"
The table shook and a guitar on the wall played a few haphazard chords.
The phantom began to sink back into the table.
"Marie?" The old man stood.
"Do not break the circle," the medium commanded.
It shook harder.
Someone screamed.
And then a beam of light erupted and illuminated the room.
The ghost froze, its eyes wide.
"Well, now," Persephone said, flashlight in hand. "Would you look at that?"
The ghost, as it were, was a woman standing in a hole in the middle of the table. Dressed all in black, luminescent paint covered her chest and face and provided the pale green glow.
"How dare you?" The medium was on his feet, cheeks red with anger, the string running from his foot to the guitar ripping it from the wall. It crashed, the neck shattering and sending wooden shards across the floor.
That was my cue. I rushed to the doors, threw them wide, and whistled. Six coppers rushed in, the crowd dumbfounded.
Well, all except the old man. He wept into his hands and whatever excitement I felt at busting the charlatans slipped away. The poor guy had thought he'd been talking to the spirit of his daughter.
As they cuffed the medium, Persephone stepped up and ripped the clear tape from Qin's eyes. I have to admit, it was one of the better Oriental get-ups I'd seen, at least in the dark. Without it and the long, braided wig, the guy looked positively Irish. What do they call that these days? "Cultural appropriation?"
We just called it "crooked."
Persephone grinned. "Next time, try not to use the name of the First Emperor," she said, her Alabama purr sounding almost flirtatious. "It's a dead giveaway."
After the money had been given back to the victims and all of the props and gimmicks collected for evidence, we slipped out to let the police finish up. The old man still sat at the table, cheeks wet, staring at palsied hands. I wanted to comfort him somehow, but what could I say? The medium had conned the guy, sure, but we had been the ones who just crushed whatever helped him get through each day. As I'd come to learn, that was the downside of the job. I've rarely felt worse than those times we "saved" people from their need to see their loved ones again.
Seph grabbed my shoulder and tugged me out into daylight. The old man's grief didn't seem to bother her. Maybe she hid it well. Or maybe all those séances she'd busted up had calloused her to it. It was hard to tell with her.
"I've never been on that side of a materialization," I said.
"That's a shame." She placed a smoke in a slim black cigarette holder and lit it. "I'm sure you made a marvelous phantom."
"Thanks, Miss Gale," one of the cops said as they shoved the grifters into a Paddy Wagon. "There's just one thing."
"Oh? And what's that?"
"Could you introduce us to Houdini?"
She laughed. "Gentlemen, I'll make certain you have front row seats to tomorrow's show."
And then we were off as though we'd left a tea party, heading to our next appointment and a whole heap of trouble.
There were two kinds of spirits Persephone Gale was interested in, as she so often declared when sauntering into a room, and only one of them real. Her drink of choice was the French 75, though she'd settle for the Bee's Knees or even a Corpse Reviver if she had to, drinking being one of the rare areas in which she ever compromised. I'd become an expert in mixing all three, not to mention Gin Rickeys and Mary Pickfords, by the time I was twelve. My taste has gone to pot and my hands tremble too much to fill a tumbler these days, but I'll be damned if I can't still catch a whiff of bathtub gin when the wind's right. Phantom memory, my daughter calls it. Fitting term.
Houdini had always admired Seph's force of will. She'd barely been nineteen when they'd met, but she'd already made a name for herself on Broadway. She even ended up in a few of Houdini's pictures, though she never cared much for movies. Thought the black and white make-up made her look like a walking corpse. But where she'd really made her name was as one of the Pyrrhonian Irregulars. She'd debunked two dozen spiritualists, mediums, and Boardwalk crystal-ballers by the time I'd met her. Tutored by Houdini himself, the Irregulars had been his protégés in a war against psychic larks and scams.
And Persephone was the best of them all.
The name had been given to them by some news hawk. Houdini hated it, but the Irregulars used it as a badge of honor. Persephone told me that Pyrrho was some ancient Greek or another who invented the philosophy of skepticism. She considered herself a skeptic through and through, but Houdini wanted to believe. That had been the biggest difference between them. After his mother croaked, he desperately needed to know that, not only did the dead survive in some form, but they could communicate with the quick.
His problem was he knew every trick in the book – hell, he'd invented half of them – and so he'd never took a gander at a medium he didn't instantly know was trying to pull the wool over his eyes. This pissed him off to no end, especially following the Great War when these charlatans popped up on every street corner to exploit hollowed out parents and grieving widows.
So he was a believer and Persephone a skeptic, which caused all sorts of good-natured arguments between the two. The funny part was that Houdini the Believer had never experienced the supernatural he so wanted to while Persephone the Skeptic had and tried her best to deny it.
I think that's why our benefactor asked to see her that day and not any of the others.
Of course, there were all sorts of reasons a man would have wanted to converse with Persephone. All anyone has to do is look at that photograph of her they ran in the papers that winter, when two people were dead and an entire town turned upside down, to see that. Being exposed to Persephone Gale's fierce beauty ruined most of the relationships in my life. At least, that's what I tell myself on particularly quiet nights when the house feels expansive and empty and my whiskey glass smaller than it should.
Our meeting was at one of the swankest hotels in Manhattan. Untold wealth flowed through the Aberdeen in those days before the stock market crash and everything about the place – the red carpet, the mahogany furniture, even the feel of the air itself in your lungs – screamed money. Especially the smell, that mixture of bourbon, cigar smoke, and high-end perfume that lingered in the halls and clung to your hair and clothes for days.
All of this had a way of making me feel small. I'd been living on the street when Persephone took me in, making a dime here and there helping mediums and fakeloos dupe the rubes. As much as I'd puff my chest out and bluster that I didn't give a damn what anyone thought of me, it was hard to shake the feeling I didn't belong in a place like that.
The man answered the door to his room himself. "Thank you for agreeing to see me," he said and ushered us in. A large man with crisp clothes and a neatly trimmed mustache, he radiated sophistication. The British accent certainly didn’t hurt.
"Any friend of Harry's." Persephone walked straight to the locked mini-bar.
"There's nothing in there," he said. "It's illegal, you know."
"Uh-huh." She pulled a nail file from her purse and jammed it into the lock. "And you'd never break the law, would you?" She jimmied the file for a moment before stepping back and kicking it. A loud snap echoed in the room and the door swung open to reveal several bottles of booze.
He shook my hand, a smile on his doughy face. "And what's your name, young man?"
"Connie," I said and he blinked. Most men his age did, though he seemed too high-brow to follow it up with the usual insults on my young masculinity.
"Short for Constantine, I take it?"
No one had ever guessed that. "How'd you know?"
"Connie, my dear," Persephone said as she poured a drink, "this man can probably tell you what you had for breakfast."
"You skipped it this morning," he said and smiled. "Though you're regretting that action now and hoping for a late lunch when this meeting is over."
Persephone stirred her drink. "Constantine Lloyd, meet Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle."
I about soiled my slacks at that. "Sherlock Holmes Conan-Doyle?"
"The same." He smiled. "You've read my work?"
"Had it read to me."
"Connie can't read," Persephone said.
"Yet," I added. "Seph has been teaching me a bit."
That was the winter I fell in love with books. Reading changes a man, and it wasn't long until I considered myself somewhat of a scholar. Still, college was years off then and I had more street urchin in me than academic.
"You'll love reading," he said and motioned me toward a plush sofa. "One of the great joys in life. I've always said a man only needs four things to be happy, and a good book is one of them."
"What are the other three?"
"A good brandy, a good cigar, and," he winked, "a woman who will lie and say you're a good man."
On first glance, I figured a fella like him to be a bluenose, but he didn't judge me for my illiteracy. I got the impression he rarely judged anyone. I took an instant liking to him for that.
Lighting a cigar, he sat on the sofa opposite and offered me one. "How old are you, Connie?"
"Thirteen," I said and took the gasper. "Never smoked one of these before."
"Filthy habit," Persephone said and joined us. "You men and your fire sticks." She lit a cigarette. "I didn't see you at last night's performance."
"I wasn't certain I'd be welcome. The last time Harry and I spoke, the conversation did not go well."
"So I've r
ead in the Times," she said. "The Margery Crandon incident."
His face went red and he pretended to fiddle with a loose thread on his jacket. "After our journalistic antagonism, I fear Harry and I may never speak again." The slight tremble in his voice gave away how much that rattled him.
Margery Crandon had been one of the biggest names in Spiritualism, holding séances for every rich and famous person in the world at one point or another. She had been the real deal. Or so it seemed until Houdini went after her. He was able to reproduce every bit of her "act" through common parlor tricks and put an end to her career. Doyle, a fervent believer in things that go bump in the night, had been her biggest supporter. He took Houdini to task in the Times for the whole thing. Houdini hadn't taken that well and soon the two waged a war by proxy, publishing editorials attacking the other.
Years later, after Houdini died, his wife Bess told us he'd always regretted taking things so seriously and had hoped to bury the hatchet with his old friend. Like with most of life's tragedies, he'd simply run out of time.
Persephone sipped her drink. "And why did you want to speak to me, then? I have nothing to do with Mrs. Crandon or your silly little feud."
"You had one of her disciples arrested this morning," he said.
She laughed. "Are you talking about Seamus MacChinaman? He studied with Crandon?"
"Not one of her better pupils, from my understanding. That's the problem with Spiritualism, Miss Gale. While there are many ardent and faithful mediums, there are also those who seek only to exploit the practice for their own gain."
"In my experience, Sir Doyle, those exploiters are the whole kit and kaboodle."
He shook his head. "Have you ever heard of Madame Nephthys?"
"Can't say as I have."
"What about a town called Gallow's Grove?"