A Bloodsmoor Romance (58 page)

You will not drown, Mrs. Bonner
said sternly.
You will not die.

Suicide is a sin, Father Darien
said.

A sin, Mrs. Bonner
agreed.

Deirdre continued to stare at the faded old pictures. A woman, a man. What had they to do with her? They had betrayed her by dying.
A great dark cloud. A flaming cloud.
O'ertaking the Bonners' modest house in the village, and causing it to explode into flames.

A sin, a sin, Mrs. Bonner
insisted.
Suicide is a sin.

But murder a delight!
prankish
Zachariah
said in a squeaky falsetto voice, as if in mocking imitation of poor
Mrs. Bonner.

Something shall occur within the hour, Deirdre thought clearly. All her pulses rang: an artery deep in her throat throbbed with passion. To hurt, to wound, to jab, to defile. One, two, three savage thrusts with the little crochet hook.

An axe, Zachariah
counseled, now in his own voice. He caressed Deirdre's shoulders, blew the ribbons trailing from her hat, so that they fluttered gaily as if in an innocent breeze.
An axe.

I have no axe, Deirdre protested.

An axe. Even a delicate young lady can wield an axe.

But I have none. I know of none.

Behind Kidde­master Hall, where the land slopes roughly away, hidden by that stand of handsome blue spruce, are outbuildings you have never seen: former slaves' quarters, the washhouse, the bakehouse, the meathouse, the kennels, the henhouses, the stables, the gardeners' several sheds—have you never guessed?—and in those sheds, if you make your way quietly, you will find—

“I cannot,” Deirdre whispered inwardly. “I will not.”

In the washhouse, for instance, a keen-eyed young miss will find sugar of lead, spirits of salt, ammonia, and ivory-black—all for cleaning, and all poisonous, and so wonderfully close at hand! Zachariah
gloated.

“I cannot,” Deirdre pleaded.

Many a sister, or a hateful husband, or father, or, for that matter, a hateful mother, has died in agony, as a consequence of my delicious ivory-black! Zachariah
insisted.

Impudently, his spirit-hand snapped Deirdre's locket shut.

Deirdre tried to open it, but he held it fast.

Ivory-black, Zachariah
whispered.
If the axe is too heavy for a young lady with genteel aspirations. If the crochet hook and the scissors are too fearsome.

“I cannot,” Deirdre said, the pulse deep within her throat throbbing hard, “for—you see—I do not hate them sufficiently—I do not altogether wish them
dead
—”

She looked up, blinking tears from her eyes, and so dazed was she, and so repulsed by the odium of the spirit's counsel, as well as his loathsome masculine propinquity, that for a very long time she could not concentrate upon her sister's words. Did they speak of Mr. Zinn?—one of his new machines?—“Its purpose,” Samantha was saying with pert dignity, “is to run forever.”

This innocent remark struck Deirdre so powerfully, as if a blade had entered her heart, that, without knowing what she did, very much like a somnambulist, she rose to her feet—rose to her feet, quite shocking her sisters—and let her crocheting fall—and hurried away—out of the gazebo—across the sloping lawn—half running, despite her long skirts and heavy train—stumbling—gasping and panting and sobbing for breath—leaving her sisters speechless behind her.

Yes,
said
Mrs. Dodd,
her voice as strong as Deirdre had ever heard it,
yes, come hither, take yourself out of this vale of temptation, come safely to us, come home, sweet Deirdre, do!

FORTY-ONE

D
espite how very many millennia spirits have roamed the earth, it is a curious point of information that they began to
communicate,
and to wish most strenuously to do so, only in the middle of our redoubtable nineteenth century: and that their point of entry, as it were, into the Earth Plane, was the aptly named town of Arcadia, New York, the dwelling place of the Fox family, in the year 1848.

Just as the unhappy Zinn family had, for a time, suffered the distractions of inexplicable raps, knocks, creakings, and baffling “presences” in their household, so too did the Fox family report disturbances that gradually grew in intensity, until, one memorable evening (it was in fact March 31, 1848), a gentleman bethought himself to inquire of the “presence” his identity, and what he sought in the Fox home: with the astounding results that, communicating solely by raps, in a laborious session that lasted much of the night, the spirit told a tale of having been a pedlar, murdered for money, and buried in the cellar of that very house!

(The reader will forgive me my small frisson of excitement, when I report that energetic digging in the cellar
did
produce a skeleton, greatly fragmented, but believed to have been human: this no doubt being the remains of the murdered pedlar.)

So Spirit World emerged into the Earthly World, with profound consequences, as we shall see.

 

THO' IN LATER
years the Fox sisters, by then widely renowned, were to be denounced by a spiteful relative as frauds, and their mediums' powers explained away as simple parlor magic, it was nonetheless the case that, their fame spreading beyond Arcadia, and soon through all of bucolic upstate New York, they were joined, as it were, by other mediums of divers talents and skills. At first but one, in Ebenezer; and then another, in Brockport; and then, lo and behold!—some five or six, in the village of Pendleton alone—and several more, in Ithaca—and, in Syracuse, a most extraordinary Shetland pony, said to be possessed of “second sight”! In Buffalo, the Brothers Davenport soon proved more prodigious in their gifts, and even more adept at the manipulation of gullible journalists, than the Fox sisters. And, in the idyllic rolling hills of Morah, south of the Great Canal, there came to prominence not one, but two, mediumistic canines: the comely tho' shy Lupa, and her more brash, and unfailingly crowd-pleasing son, Remus: these being Labrador retrievers, of some uncertain heritage, who earned for their perspicacious master a gratifying financial reward. (Nor should I neglect to mention, by-the-by, that Joseph Smith, the esteemed founder of the Mormon Church, had dwelt in the sleepy village of Palmyra, also in upstate New York: Mr. Smith's visions and voices being a matter of historical record in some quarters, and surely not to be waved aside, or dismissed, as the babblings of a deranged mind.)

Thus, during the amazing Fifties, the denizens of Spirit World not only greatly increased their numbers, communicating through mediums of all ages, sexes, social distinctions, and species, but increased, as well, their variety of manifestations: for, very soon, mere raps, knocks, and scratchings, were supplanted by faint but unmistakable
voices,
and the vigorous
playing of musical instruments,
and
scribblings
on spirit blackboards; and, upon occasion, in the required twilit conditions—even veiled
ectoplasmic figures!
(Unbeknownst to Deirdre, who knew very little of the larger phenomenon, of which she was so hapless a part, her contact spirit
Zachariah
manifested himself to countless mediums in New York State, and to the formidable Jonathan Koons, in Ohio: this spirit complaining of his ill-treatment, in life, as a consequence of unspeakable sanitary conditions in a field hospital, in northern New Jersey, where he died a prolonged gangrenous death, as a common soldier in General Washington's Army. Whilst this unfortunate fate serves to explain much of
Zachariah
's ill-humor, it cannot hope to explain his intrinsic wickedness—the which, I am sorry to say, he most skillfully hid from most of his mediums.)

Very soon, within a brief span of months, this amazing phenomenon became known as
Spiritualism,
in the public press: and so great was popular interest in it, and so ingenious, as well, the mediums and their consorts, that, by the late Sixties, a considerable amount of money had changed hands; and the gifted Daniel Dunglas Home had swept across the face of skeptical Europe, conquering all, and reaping a most astounding harvest, with his unusual powers—the which involved not only the entire familiar battery of Spiritualist manifestations, but such fanciful variations as the elevating of heavy tables upon which observers and investigators sat. It was a matter of private knowledge to some persons, but by no means a secret, that our great President, Abraham Lincoln himself, received much valuable advice from spirits conjured up by Nellie Colburn, the famous trance medium: Daniel Webster, Cardinal Wolsey, Julius Caesar, and many others routinely gave him counsel, and it was through Miss Colburn's efforts that the Emancipation Proclamation was made in late 1863, and not delayed, as Lincoln's aides strongly advised. (Some say that the War Between the States itself was a consequence of the spirits' fervent wishes, pressed upon an initially resistant Lincoln: but as to the truth of this assertion, it is impossible for me to say.)

By the late Seventies, when Madame Blavatsky emerged to prominence in occult circles, the phenomenon of mediumship, tho' by no means a commonplace, and angrily attacked from the pulpit, had established itself with admirable alacrity as a respectable source of wisdom; its powers to entertain, and to console the bereft, being implicitly understood. The reader will not be surprised, I hope, to learn that many a Rationalist fell under the sway of the Spiritualists, and so eminent a gentleman as Nathaniel Hawthorne, observing the extravagant manifestations of Mr. Home, in Florence, recorded that
the soberly attested incredibilities
were proven, to his skeptical satisfaction,
to be sober facts.
Statesmen and politicians consulted the spirits of Napoleon, Alexander the Great, and Genghis Khan; Conan Doyle became a proselytizer, with embarrassing enthusiasm; Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate of England, was discovered to have been reading Madame Blavatsky's mystical poem, “The Voice of the Silence,” on his very deathbed. Such prominent scientists as Alfred Russel Wallace and William Crookes were active believers. The lecturer, pamphleteer, and militant Fabian Socialist Mrs. Annie Besant not only converted to Theosophy, but, with much determination, took over the Holy Cause in Madame Blavatsky's declining years. And Thomas Alva Edison, our American Wizard, was an enthusiastic member of the Theosophical Society . . . to his shame be it known!

In so very peculiar and morbid an atmosphere, then, in which the solemn truths of Protestant Christianity were judged, perhaps, not sufficiently exotic, or not sufficiently entertaining, to hold the concentration of shallow personalities, it is not to be regarded as implausible, that a girl of less than twenty years of age, known to the public only as “Deirdre of the Shadows,” should emerge from absolute obscurity, and, within a few fevered years in the early Eighties, win the acclaim of so wide and divers a Spiritualist populace, that she was to be called—for a time, at least—the equal of D. D. Home himself, and a veritable
Princess of the Shadow World.

 

(“THE MORE FANTASTICAL
a belief,” Madame Blavatsky was to confide in her Lolo, with her hoarse throaty chuckle, and many a squeeze of her nicotine-stained fingers, “the more
they
rush to believe! It is a law of nature, my dear child,” Madame averred. “It is not to be
wondered at,
but only
applied.
”)

 

DEIRDRE'S RECOLLECTION OF
the immense black silken balloon, and the sombre-garbed personage who manned it, was always to remain clouded, doubtless confused with the floating dreams and visions she so frequently experienced, as a young girl. One shard of memory would have had her believe that she had been borne away by her bridegroom, across the Atlantic Ocean, bade a loving farewell by her bridesmaid sisters, attired in pastel chiffon, and weeping to lose her; another, that the
Raging Captain
himself, his chest wound miraculously healed, and every tear, tatter, and stain in his handsome uniform vanish'd, had not only carried her from that place of temptation, but had spoken kindly to her, and placed a chaste kiss on her burning brow.

Precisely how she was carried, senseless, out of the Bloodsmoor Valley, to awaken upon the morn hundreds of miles away in the scenic wilds of northwestern Massachusetts, unhurt, but gravely fatigued, on a grassy knoll in a park belonging to the estate of the late millionaire F. Holtman Strong; precisely how the alleged
violet-radiance
of her
aura
brought her at once to the excited attention of the Countess Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (then in residence, with her
chela
-companion Hassan Agha, at the Strong manor house); and how, assured on all sides of her mediumistic gifts, and given a carefully orchestrated
début
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a small and élite circle of believers, Deirdre gradually grew—nay, blossomed—into so confident a trance medium, as to feel no apprehension of the formidable Society for Psychical Research itself!—how these extraordinary events came to pass, I have some slender knowledge, at secondhand; but fear to burden my chronicle with an excess of historical detail, lest it become o'erlong.

Withal, it happened that Madame Blavatsky's most trusted
chela,
the dusky-skinned young Hassan Agha (of Madras, India—or so it was claimed: detractors within the Society placed his origins firmly, in the West, in Sicily or Athens, or even Liverpool), meditating at dawn, in the park, chanced upon the unconscious young woman; and necessarily sounded the alarm, that help should be summoned; noting, even in the confusion of the moment—as Madame would soon confirm—that the strange black-haired girl, even in her stuporous state, possessed an aura of such magnificent luminosity, violet and iridescent blue, and all the lovelier hues of the rainbow, as to suggest her psychic powers—freely admitted by Madame to be in excess of her own.