Mean Spirit

XVII

‘So now we know,’ Grayle said.

Laying on the cynicism like mayonnaise because she really didn’t want Marcus to think she believed any of this stuff.

The study looked tired and bleary. The fire in the stove was down to a bed of ash. Marcus put on a small log from the depleted basket and hauled his chair closer.

‘Great story, though,’ Grayle said, not allowing herself to think about it. She yawned and lay full length on the sofa, kicking off her shoes.

Around half-past midnight Callard had elected to return to the dairy, maybe realizing that Marcus and Grayle would have a lot to discuss. Standing by the bulkhead light, Marcus had watched her cross the yard under the shadows of the ruins. He’d looked tired, weak, hopeless.

‘It’s late, Marcus, and you’re sick.’ Grayle pulled a cushion under her head. ‘Go get some sleep.’

‘Not tired. Or rather, I am, but…’

‘You want some cocoa?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want to know what you really think about this.’

‘Me? You’re asking the help?’

‘Don’t piss about, Underhill.’

‘Let’s talk about this tomorrow.’

‘I want to bloody talk about it now,’ Marcus thundered, snatching off his glasses, mopping his eyes and nose, thrusting the glasses back on.

‘You really don’t.’

‘You mean you don’t.’

‘OK.’ Grayle sighed. ‘Whatever.’ Swung her feet to the floor and sat up, hands clasping on her knees like in prayer. ‘Let’s lay this thing out.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Me?’

‘I want your opinion, dammit!’

Grayle shrugged. ‘OK. Well … essence of it is, after like fifteen years as this cool, fashionable, high-society psychic, Ms Persephone Callard can’t cut it any more on account of, whenever she tries to do a seance, only one spirit comes through and this is a bad spirit and it’s real close, closer than anything she ever experienced before and she’s like … soiled and full of fear, and the next day she’s debilitated, feels like shit. How’m I doing?’

‘Go on.’ Marcus opened the stove, put on a second log to produce flames.

‘What do you want me to add? All of this goes back to a particular night at the home of this former MP, Sir Barber, who’s paid out big money for no good reason.’

‘So you didn’t find it convincing.’

Grayle didn’t reply. Callard’s evocation of the scene had thrown her a full and clear picture of this Barber’s sumptuous drawing room on an extraordinary night. A movie, with sounds: voices and a music track.

And a smell. Callard describing how several people in the room had picked it up simultaneously — distaste on women’s faces. Then the drop in temperature, as though the heating had cut out, the same women reaching for jackets, cardigans, evening shawls.

Persephone had looked up and seen a man sitting there, at the back of the room, clear as Marcus was now, she said.

The man gazing impassively into her eyes.

And his eyes were cold and cloudy and almost white, and seemed to lead nowhere. And while Callard had been describing it, Grayle was seeing it and feeling it. Deeply, deeply chilled, a cold worm in the spine, but doing her damnedest not to let it show.

As she looked into the empty space suggested by the near-white eyes, she realized she was seeing into a space where the man had been. And then Callard had felt his freaking hands on her freaking face — moist, precise, surgical hands.

Her voice cool, precise and clinical as she described it, but Grayle knew that same worm was also deep into Seffi’s spine.

So. Why couldn’t she just have lost the trance-state, dropped out of it? A medium does not become possessed; the medium remains in control. The essence, the spirit, is dependent upon the medium for energy. Whereas this …

This was so close and clear and impressively defined that even Callard had been in thrall to it. Although she knew it was entirely negative, it had an incredible … a compelling physicality, and some sick, greedy part of her didn’t want to let it go.

Grayle shuddered now and tried to smother it by leaning forward and hugging Malcolm, who, now they were alone, had sidled into the room. ‘You didn’t like her, did you, honey? Freaked you out, right?’ Dogs almost invariably picked up disturbance, whether psychic or psychological.

‘OK, what spooked me’, she said to Marcus, ‘was the way she was able to describe the face. But then I’m thinking, if you were trying to dream up a really evil face it would look something like that.’

A dark face. Thin-featured. Callard shaking her head in a swirl of lamp-lustred hair. Hooked nose. Hair flat, slicked back. When he first appeared, he was looking away from me, looking to the side, and I thought he was wearing glasses, and then he turned slowly, to face me. And then he smiled … he smiled at me. And when his face crinkled, I saw that it wasn’t glasses, it was a scar. Almost encircling one eye and running all the way back to his ear.

Marcus asking, How far away was he from you?

I should think, ten, fifteen feet…

Yet he was able to … you thought he was somehow touching you with his hands.

How fast does a thought travel?

Hmm. What was he wearing?

A grey suit. Three button, all the buttons fastened. Neat.

‘I mean, a scar?’ Grayle said to Marcus. ‘A goddamn scar?’

‘Be interesting to talk to someone who was at the party,’ Marcus said. ‘Someone else who saw … saw it.’

Someone who saw what happened when Callard twisted out of her chair. Someone who heard the loud crack in the air, like a gunshot. Who witnessed the dislodging of a large Chinese vase from a niche in a corner of the room where nobody was sitting — shards of it everywhere, panic, people leaping up and running for cover, as though they imagined everything in the room was going to start exploding.

For Callard, it must, at first, have been a merciful release of energy.

… and then, being thrown, jerked, out of trance like that, I immediately experienced a wave of self-disgust. It was as though I’d been a willing participant in some ghastly sexual violence, some perverse crime. I felt like … I don’t know … Myra Hindley or somebody.

Grayle recalled how she’d lost her lustre as she talked, had been hunched up into a corner of the sofa, her arms around her knees. Hell of an actress, if she was making this up.

What did you do? What did you do then?

I got out of there, Marcus. In the middle of the chaos, I slipped away and into the lift. I caught a taxi in Cheltenham and had him take me directly home … not to the hotel, all the way back to Mysleton.

‘And also, how come Sir Barber didn’t follow this up?’ Grayle demanded now. ‘Apart from to send the cheque … like, he actually sent the cheque.’

‘Perhaps they’d had what they wanted out of her,’ Marcus said. ‘A few moments of paranormal excitement. Something for them to gossip about for weeks.’

Grayle wrinkled her nose in disbelief.

‘And anyway’, Marcus said, ‘she sent it back. Tainted money.’

‘Tainted career. Let me get this right — in the following ten days or so, she tries two other sittings, one for this regular circle she holds in London — rich matrons and like that — and no sooner does she hit trance than …’

‘The inference being that whatever came to her in Cheltenham, she took it away with her. Like a disease. A virus.’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, but … and you know this is unlike me, Marcus, to go looking for the psychological answer … but could we not be getting a mental projection of this woman’s own increasing negativity? She admitted that when she came out of it she felt a wave of self-disgust, right?’

‘Yes, but, Underhill-’

‘Marcus, you have a good hard think about this before you blow me out the sky. Could not that scarred, evil face be an image of her own soiled inner being? A realization of herself as a psychic trickster preying on the sick and the lonely and the frightened and the bereaved?’

‘Good God, Underhill!’

She spread her hands. ‘I just throw this in, Marcus, for the sake of argument.’ And for the sake of a night’s sleep. ‘Curious that it all comes to a head the night she takes a pile of money — against even her own better judgement — for putting on a psychic sideshow.’

‘And the smell?’

‘Like a dirty dick? Interesting to think what that might be saying, hmmm?’

‘And the cold? And the Chinese vase?’

‘Look, I’m not gonna deny she may have psycho-kinetic powers. Sure, it could be coincidence, but let’s not argue about that. Think about the central issue — what do we have? We have a big karma crisis. Nervous exhaustion resulting from a major guilt trip. Of course it went with her when she left the party. It’s a part of her — an ugly reflection of her dark side. And every time she sits down to contact her friends, the dead folks, out it comes again. Wooh, gross!’

Marcus started to say something and dried up. She heard him breathing like an old steam train in an echoey station yard. Then he came heavily to his feet.

‘She really has nobody to turn to, you know, Underhill. Her father’s abroad. She has no siblings. She isn’t in a relationship. No friends she can count on. She doesn’t even trust her own agent. And now this physical assault …’

‘She still puts on an act. Like when I first found her, you’d’ve thought she was an alcoholic, the way the place stank of booze. But is she drinking that way now? Uh-huh. See, I guess that was because she thought you were gonna come in person, and you’d be like, Oh my God, Persephone, how did it come to this? How can I help? What can I do to save you from this degradation? You want my opinion, Marcus, I think there’s still major stuff she isn’t telling us. Too many things that just don’t meet in the middle. But right now I’m not thinking too hard about the big mysteries. All I want is my car back out of Justin’s garage and for Justin, whatever kind of bastard he is, to still have a face, you know?’

‘Yes.’ Marcus bent and shut the woodstove. ‘Think I’ll go to bed.’

‘Good.’

Grayle awoke under a woollen rug on the sofa, listening to the wind in the eaves and Malcolm snoring.

A cold, silky moonbeam filigreed the books on the high shelves.

She turned her head and saw by the darkness that the stove was out. She felt the weight of all the books on the walls. All that knowledge. All that speculation. You couldn’t trust anything in a book. You couldn’t trust your own memory, your own eyes, your own ears.

She’d woken up thinking, Maybe I said it out loud. Maybe I actually spoke the words.

THE BITCH IS MAKING THIS UP.

Maybe she’d said it under her breath and Callard’s hearing was incredibly acute. Whatever, twice now, the first time at Mysleton Lodge, the woman had seemed to repeat to her her own thoughts.

God-damn.

Grayle thought, We need you out of here, Ms Callard. You’re an unhappy presence. A poltergeist. Marcus can’t help you with your problems. And me — I need my car back and you out of here.

Throw that one back at me.