Death on the Lizard (27 page)

“Right.” Sir Oliver rubbed his hands together. “Now, ladies, if you will draw up chairs, we shall begin. Jenna, my dear, I shall sit here at your left, Lady Sheridan at your right. Miss Marsden, you shall be our observer, just opposite.”

“A silent observer,” Patsy said, suppressing a nervous giggle. She sat down.

Really, Patsy,
Beryl said reproachfully, as Kate took her place.

Sir Oliver smiled and held Jenna's straight-backed armchair as she sat down, pulling a garnet-red knitted shawl around her shoulders. He took a large, plump pillow from the sofa and put it to her back so that she could sit with some comfort.

“Now, Jenna,” he said. “We shall put the paper on your right”—he shifted the stack of paper—“and ask Lady Sheridan to be sure that you are supplied with it, and additional pencils, if you should need them. As you fill one sheet with writing, I shall take it from you, and Lady Sheridan will slide another in front of you. Once in trance, you see, most mediums write very quickly, and often with a much larger script than usual. We may need a great deal of paper.”

Jenna's face looked pinched and very pale, and her eyes were round and luminous. “Perhaps we shan't need any,” she said in a low voice. “I have no confidence in my ability to do what you want, Sir Oliver.”

“It must be what
you
want, my dear.” Sir Oliver sat down and put his hand gently over Jenna's. “Do you want to contact your daughter?” He was looking directly into her eyes and his voice had taken on a different, deeper resonance, Kate thought, almost the resonance of a hypnotist's. “Do you want to reach Harriet, Jenna? Do you want to know what Harriet has to say to you? to us? Do you want to bring some measure of peace to your soul?”

There was a silence. The fire made a soft hissing sound, punctuated by an occasional pop and crackle. Outside, not far away, thunder muttered. Jenna's eyes went to the photograph in the center of the table. She clasped her hands.

“I . . . do,” she said simply. “I'm . . . afraid, but I . . . do.”

“Very well, then, my dear,” Sir Oliver said in a comforting tone, “you have only to relax, close your eyes, and allow it to begin. A sheet of paper and a pencil, Lady Sheridan, if you please.”

Kate slid both in front of Jenna, who sat stiffly upright against the pillow, her hands folded on the table in front of her like an obedient schoolgirl, her eyelids lowered, the dark lashes sooty against her pale cheek. Outside, the rain slid down the window with a liquid plashing, while the ruby-tinted light washed the room. Against the wall, a tall clock ticked hollowly: toc toc toc. There was no other sound but the soft in-and-out sighing of four people's breaths, which seemed now to be synchronized. Kate felt the tenseness in her neck and shoulders relax and a kind of fog seemed to settle on her. She was indeed glad that Charles had gone, for she would feel his active, analytic intellect at work, turning and testing, measuring and evaluating and questioning, while the four minds here were merely open, quiescent and receptive.

Beside Kate, the stiffness seemed to go out of Jenna's figure and she softened into the chair, dropping her chin on her breast and becoming very still. After another few moments, as Kate watched, she raised her head and opened her eyes, staring at the photograph of the little girl. But the pupils of her eyes were dilated, her gaze was unfocussed, and there was no conscious awareness in it.

She's in a trance!
Beryl exclaimed, and Kate, surprised into alertness, saw that Beryl was right. Jenna's movement was languid as she reached for the pencil and began to spiral it across the paper, not forming words, only drawing a lazy, curving shape. Opposite, Patsy drew in her breath in a little gasp, and Sir Oliver shook his head warningly. There seemed to be a new kind of energy in the room—
A presence!
Beryl hissed—or perhaps it was just that the wind outside had risen, and a tree beside the window had begun to lash the glass.

Another shapeless spiral or two, and the paper was full. The pencil lagged. Sir Oliver slid the page away and nodded to Kate to supply another. Jenna leaned forward over the clean sheet, her breath coming shorter and harder, her hand moving with a renewed urgency. Kate felt herself pulled forward, watching the flowing marks on the page, still formless, still shapeless. And then, as the pencil moved faster, a word emerged, then another, and another, all curiously rounded, almost childlike: 

For an instant, Kate's heart seemed to stop, and a wave of something like fear broke over her. Her senses seemed suddenly heightened. The flickering fire cast a kaleidoscope of colors—orange and red and blue—upon the faces of the people around the table. There was a metallic bitterness in her mouth, and she could almost taste the strong odor of Sir Oliver's pipe tobacco, Patsy's exotic Arabic perfume, the summery scent of Jenna's hair. The wind seemed louder, the lash of leaves against the window more insistent, the thunder more ominous, Jenna's troubled breathing a dire rattle. Kate felt as if she were watching through a telescope held the wrong way round, watching from a great distance but at the same time too near, oh too too near to whatever power propelled the moving pencil. She wanted to push back her chair and run, but something held her there, something—

Sir Oliver had pulled the filled paper away and Jenna was writing on the table, her pencil sliding over its polished surface without leaving a mark. He nodded sharply at Kate. Chastised, she complied, sliding another paper under Jenna's pencil, which continued without stopping. 

 
Patsy was sitting forward in her chair, her lower lip caught between her teeth, the expression on her face a mixture of terror and astonishment as she watched the swift tracery of the moving pencil. Sir Oliver's eyes were wide and staring and there was a strong tic, almost a jerk, at the corner of his mouth. It occurred to Kate that he had not really expected this to happen, that he had thought tonight would be just another in a fruitless string of dead-end experiments and encounters with mediums who practiced fraud. Now that he seemed to be confronted with the success he had sought—with evidence for the survival of personality beyond the grave—he was so stunned that he could scarcely comprehend the impenetrable, unfathomable mystery of it.

But perhaps this is something else,
Beryl whispered significantly.
What do you suppose His Nibs would say, Kate?

At the thought of Charles, some of the mystery went out of the moment—just as it might have done if he were here. This writing, odd and intriguing as it was, might not be a message from the after-world at all, but only a compelling manifestation of Jenna's troubled mind, her repressed guilt seeking the same kind of release it sought in her hallucinatory moments. It could be rather like what Sigmund Freud described as hysterical manifestations of the unconscious, filling the very air around them with restless ghosts.

But while Kate was considering this in something like a rational way, Jenna—under the spell of whatever forces gripped her from within or without—was continuing to write. Her face was twisted with the effort, her wrist had stiffened, and her fingers grasped the pencil with a white-knuckled ferocity. The sheets seemed to fly out from under her hand, one after another, all with the same repeated words. The writing came faster and faster, the letters less rounded, more angular and slanting, larger and darker: 

 
Jenna was weeping now, rivulets of tears streaming from tight-shut eyes, her shoulders shaken with suppressed sobs. And then, as Kate watched, there seemed to be something like a struggle, the hand holding the pencil pushing jerkily, producing sharp lines, crooked lines, jagged shapes, but no recognizable words. Jenna was breathing in little gasps, her bosom heaving, her face a sickly gray-white, her head flung back, her eyes open, staring, unseeing, her lips moving in incoherent, inaudible, muttering whispers, as if trying to frame words her pencil refused to write, and all the while her pencil was moving, forming no words at all, only giant, jagged scrawls, like silent screams across the paper.

Patsy put out a protesting hand. “But she's ill!” she exclaimed in a low voice. “Sir Oliver, you must put a stop to—”

“No!” Sir Oliver commanded harshly. “More paper, Lady Sheridan. Quickly!”

Kate supplied another sheet. There was a pause, the space of several breaths, long enough to hear the wind shouting around the corner of the house and feel a searing flash of lightning at the window, followed almost immediately by a bone-jarring clap of thunder. Jenna seemed to gather herself, and began again, forming words, but these were scrawled, almost illegible, and the point of her pencil attacked the paper with such an angry force that it gouged holes. 

 
Ain't fair?
Beryl said blankly.
What ghost is this?

Kate's heart was thumping in her chest as she stared at the words, incredulity turning to fear. It was as if a different mind had seized the pencil, a different, angry energy, a different— 

 
Jenna's face was twisted, her body writhing, as if she were wrestling with whatever power was driving the pencil, as though a fierce desperate power had seized her hand and would not let it go until it had howled out all it wanted to say, all it could say. 

 
There was a loud crash of thunder, so near that it rattled the window. Kate felt her heart stop. Sir Oliver started wildly. Patsy gave a piercing shriek and leapt to her feet, her chair falling backward with a sharp clatter onto the stone floor. On the wall, the clock began to chime, as if it were a pealing bell, although it was nothing near the hour.

Jenna had slumped back in her chair, her head to one side, the pencil fallen from her fingers. She was breathing with long, shuddering gasps, her eyes closed. Kate rose and went to pour a glass of port, but her fingers were cold and her hand shook so that she dropped the glass. It shattered into fragments against the stone floor. By the time she returned to the table with another glass, Jenna's eyes were open and she was struggling to sit up. Patsy had gone to the clock and stopped its chiming with her hand.

“Bavaria?” Sir Oliver muttered, staring at the sheaf of papers he held in his hand. “Back to Bavaria? But—”

Beware?
Beryl asked.
Beware of what?

Patsy joined Kate, and between them, they managed to get Jenna to the sofa, where she lay back exhausted, her breathing shallow, her face very white.

“Is she all right?” Patsy asked worriedly.

“Back to Bavaria,” Jenna said, her voice expressionless and dull. “Back to . . .” She closed her eyes. “Harriet,” she whispered. “Thank you, Harriet. Thank . . .”

“I'm sure she'll be fine,” Kate said, tucking a pillow under her head and spreading the garnet shawl over her. “We should just let her rest.” She looked at Sir Oliver. “What happened, do you think?”

“I don't know,” Sir Oliver said. “I don't understand any of it. I thought we were hearing from the daughter, from Harriet.” He shuffled the papers, and put one down on the table. “You see there? ‘Mother dear so sorry not your fault.' Exactly what we'd expect to hear from the little girl, don't you see?” His voice grew excited, and the hand holding the papers trembled. “It's evidence. It's evidence! No doubt about it, it's evidence of the survival of the child's personality beyond the grave!” He gave an enormous sigh. “At last. Oh, at last!”

“But what's that business about Bavaria?” Patsy asked, puzzled. “Harriet was never in Bavaria, at least to my knowledge. Nor Jenna. And the cursing—that's not Jenna. Those aren't her words, nor Harriet's.”

“And look at the handwriting.” Kate pointed to the page Jenna had written last, its hard, slashing strokes gouging into the paper. “It's not the same at all. If what Jenna received was a message from her daughter, this one must be . . . it must be something else entirely. From
someone else.
”

“But who?” Patsy asked, bewildered. “Damn
whose
bloody eyes?”

And “beware”?
Beryl asked ominously.
It sounds like a warning
.

There was an expression in Sir Oliver's eyes of baffled incredulity, as if the thought, the question, was so staggering in its implications that he could scarcely grasp it. “It is another soul coming through,” he said, “another spirit. It had such a powerful message to relay that it broke into the transmission of the child's message, exactly as would a powerful wireless signal overmaster a weaker.”

Kate thought of the Kipling story she had read. Perhaps, after all, it was not so fanciful and far-fetched. “I hope,” she said tentatively, “that you aren't discouraged.”

Sir Oliver stared at her. “Discouraged? Discouraged, Lady Sheridan? Oh, no! Not in the slightest. This is proof, do you see? Proof of the survival of the soul—of two souls! And we are all witnesses!”