Mean Spirit

XIII

Grayle sat at the end of the sofa, outside of the lamplight, watching Marcus Bacton doing this courtly minuet stuff around Persephone Callard. So annoyed at the way he was behaving — this complete reversal of the one-time teacher-pupil relationship, so that now Callard was the big guru and Marcus the humble acolyte.

Which was just so much bullshit because she was merely someone that weird things happened to. Not a spiritual person, not an exalted human being, not even an authority. Whereas Marcus’s knowledge of the unexplained, in all its aspects, was possibly unrivalled anywhere.

But maybe this was it: Marcus knew everything about paranormal phenomena except how to make them happen. He was perhaps convinced that, between them, he and this haughty broad could evolve some of the answers he’d spent most of his life groping towards. Answers he was perhaps half afraid of.

And if Grayle was less convinced, was she not just envious of Callard’s beauty and her fame and her power over the legendary curmudgeon?

Marcus was saying, ‘Persephone, you had scientists studying you at one point, didn’t you?’

He hadn’t blown his nose or wiped his eyes in a full half-hour. He was hunched at the edge of his chair, from which stuffing was leaking like the so-called ectoplasm in those phoney Victorian spiritualist photos.

‘Oh Lord.’ Callard relaxed into the full Prince Charles drawl. ‘That was frightfully tedious. They’d have one sitting in some little glass room concentrating on an object in a sealed, transparent container and trying to move it with one’s mind. Or there’d be someone in the next room concentrating on a particular image and you’d have to draw it. I mean, what’s the point? What is the point? If you succeed, someone’s always going to say it was a fix.’

‘And did you succeed?’

‘Sometimes. Sometimes I was told what the object was. And sometimes I was lied to.’

‘By the spirits?’

Callard shrugged. ‘I submitted to this nonsense for about four months, in New York and Boston, throwing various professors into paroxysms of joy and then troughs of despair.’

She was leaning against the desk, long legs stretched out in front of her, half out of a long, split skirt, bare feet in scuffed sandals. She’d changed into the skirt and a white silk blouse, for dinner — more soup and tuna sandwiches and a dusty bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon Grayle found behind the fridge.

‘Then one day I said, “That’s it, no more laboratory monkey,” and caught a plane home.’

‘Figuring it was time to start making some money out of it,’ Grayle said cynically.

Persephone Callard turned on her those deep, lazy, amber cat’s eyes. Her lip was still swollen, but otherwise she was casual and sleek and sexy. Her hair, freshly washed, was spread over her shoulders, dense and lustrous. There was a leather thong around her neck, supporting an amulet or something hidden down her blouse.

She looked rested. Cleaned up, softened, detoxified. She would accept only one glass of the wine, signalling that she did not have a drink problem.

‘You think I’m just prostituting myself, don’t you, Grayle?’

‘You made a lotta dough out of this,’ Grayle said flatly.

‘True,’ Callard said, gaze unwavering. ‘The public sittings. The television. The books. Sure. A lot of … dough.’

‘But now you’re gonna give all of that up, right?’

‘I’m apparently supposed to make one more appearance. Kurt Campbell’s international psychic festival in the Malverns around the end of the month.’

‘And after that?’

‘There isn’t an after that. I don’t think I’m going to do it.’

‘What, because you don’t feel the messages you’re relaying are genuine? Or because you’ve made enough money and now it’s becoming, like, tedious?’

‘Uncalled for, Underhill,’ Marcus said.

‘I used to be a journalist,’ Grayle snapped. ‘It’s what we do. Are you scared of what you’re doing to people, Persephone? Is that what you’re saying? All the lives you f-’

‘Look!’ Callard arched forward into the lamplight. ‘If I received a message I thought was going to seriously disturb someone without especially benefiting anyone, I kept it to myself.’

Untrue. If you read the press cuttings you were soon aware that she’d quite often had people leaving her seances in tears. It was why she was considered more convincing than the rest. Also, Grayle recalled the almost sadistic excitement Callard had given off when she was offering to contact Ersula … when she thought she had Grayle halfway to cowering in a corner.

She turned her head away from the amber eyes, tired of firing all the shots. Gave Marcus a glance. Marcus nodded.

‘Persephone …’ taking his glasses off to clean them and maybe so he wouldn’t have to face the gaze ‘has something else happened to you?’

There was silence. Callard came and sat down at the opposite end of the sofa to Grayle.

‘How did you think I could help you?’ Marcus said gently.

Grayle shuffled a cushion. She noticed that Malcolm, who would habitually curl up by Marcus’s feet or on the sofa, was not around.

‘Would you find it easier to talk to Marcus if I wasn’t here?’

‘Harder, probably.’ Callard smiled. Grimly, Grayle thought.

‘Does it have anything to do with those guys last night?’

‘I don’t know.’

Grayle said softly, letting the thought out as it formed, ‘They didn’t come to rob the place, did they? They came for you. They were gonna take you away.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Kidnap her?’ Marcus ramming his glasses back on.

‘I guess. They had her taped up like a parcel. What did you feel about that, Seffi?’

Because Callard had never spoken about what was going through her mind when it was happening. Only describing the assault in purely technical terms.

‘I don’t know.’

‘A ransom thing?’ Marcus said. ‘To get money out of your father?’

‘I don’t know, I …’ Callard shook her head violently. ‘No, that’s ridiculous, this isn’t bloody Sicily.’

‘Maybe they just needed a medium,’ Grayle said. ‘Like they wanted you to contact Blackbeard the Pirate. Find out where he stashed his doubloons.’

Marcus frowned.

‘Or something like that,’ Grayle said.

They both looked at Callard, waiting. She was half in shadow. She sat straight-backed, hands on her knees. This would be how it began at a sitting, Grayle thought, sure she could feel a change in the atmosphere like an electric current. She felt a touch nervous and was annoyed with herself.

‘I’m trying to think of the words you say.’

Callard looked up slowly, eerily showing the whites of her eyes. ‘Words?’

There was a stillness around her. Marcus, oblivious of it, finally blew his nose.

‘Like “Is there anybody there?” Only you don’t say that, do you? You have your own phrase. Like a radio phone-in host. Something like-’

‘No!’

Callard leapt up, rigid.

‘Those are not words I utter lightly.’

A hand sliding instinctively down her blouse, bringing out what was on the end of the leather thong.

Grayle, expecting an ankh or some astrological talisman, was shocked to see the dark gold cross glowing sombrely on the edge of the circle of lamplight.

Callard said, ‘I wanted to … talk. I just wanted to talk. To someone who believed in what I used to be. Who wouldn’t judge me. Who understood where I was coming from. Didn’t despise me … wasn’t jealous of me … didn’t want to get into my knickers … didn’t have a piece of me.’

She looked down at her sandals. Yup, Grayle thought, that’s Marcus Bacton.

‘I do need help.’ Fingering the cross — so alien on her. ‘Only, the people who might be able to help me are not people I’d feel comfortable going to. Old-fashioned mediums, spiritual healers I’ve slagged off, in my arrogance, over the years. Cosy old psychics bringing it down to the level of afternoon tea, I always despised that — the way sittings would begin with these ragged Salvation Army hymns, some old dear on the harmonium.’

‘Grandma’s leisure hour,’ Grayle said. ‘When the bingo hall’s closed. Uncool.’

‘I’ve cut myself off, that’s the problem. Sometimes I’d get word that they wanted to meet me — the late Doris Stokes, people like that. Well, Christ, one had one’s image to consider …’ Ruefully shaking her head. ‘I fucking wish I could talk to Doris Stokes now.’

‘Well, shit, if you really-’ Grayle bit her tongue.

Marcus leaned forward. ‘What would you ask her?’

It got weird then. Grayle found that the palms of her hands, where they were gripping her knees, had become damp.

She looked at Seffi’s cross and imagined hundreds of little crosses on the walls, formed out of the gold leaf and silver glittering from the shadowed spines of the books about poltergeists and leylines and ritual magic.

Talking in this oddly subdued tone, lightly supporting her cross in the palm of her right hand, Persephone Callard said she would ask Doris this:

What do you do, how are you supposed to react, when you achieve the strongest, most defined manifestation of your career … when the closeness and the intensity of it makes you almost cry out, at first, with wonder?

If you were becoming blase, cynical to the point of contempt for your trade, how would you handle what appeared to be clear and unambiguous proof of the reality of the spirit?

And how would you deal with it when the dead thing facing you, across a room full of living people, is also hideously and unambiguously evil?