Chapter 8

Saoirse stares at the phone like it’s a snake and the ring an ominous rattle from the bushes, an urgent and unambiguous warning. She’s seized by the fierce desire to lift the phone’s heavy-looking body, certain there will be a battery compartment underneath. But before she can, Mia follows her gaze and lays one hand on the receiver. Saoirse forces herself to focus on the faces around the table, forces the dizziness to recede. Mia’s hand remains on the receiver, but she doesn’t lift it.

“The Divine Poet,” Mia says, then looks at Lucretia, Roberto, and Saoirse in turn, “asks us to heed her call. Over the next few minutes, pay close attention to whatever thoughts, ideas, or visions present themselves, visions that will carry us forward toward something we need or away from something we need to abandon. Sarah’s done a great deal of the work for us, reaching through time and space, beyond the great divide of the living and the dead, to present us with this opportunity. It is time to do our part. To answer the call by letting go of our doubts and preconceived notions of what we might receive from this ritual. Prepare yourselves to be open to whatever Sarah shows you.”

Mia stops, then turns to Saoirse. “It’s a bit like meditating,” she whispers. “Just clear your mind and wait until something pops into it. And it will. You just need to have patience. Do not judge yourself—or Sarah—with regard to what is delivered to your waiting mind, and be open to going in whatever direction the idea or vision takes you.”

Saoirse nods. She tries to persuade herself that, with this simple act of instruction from Mia, the otherworldliness of the past few minutes has dissipated, but she cannot do it. Not completely. The warm, floating aura still lingers, as if the four of them are sealed within a gentle, temperate, patient cyclone, the inward-spiraling mass of air separating them from the rest of the world as completely as if a wall of stone has been erected around them.

She’s distracted from her thoughts by a swirl of steam curling from the spout of the teapot. Saoirse tracks its progress toward the ceiling with disbelieving eyes and remembers last Friday, when she thought she saw the Ouija board lift off the table. It is impossible to convince herself that this, too, is a trick of the candlelight—though, how could a teapot produce steam without stove or flame to heat it up?—but everyone else appears unfazed.

Roberto leans under the table, and Saoirse hears the rustle of the drawstring bag. He comes up with a stack of four tiny teacups, teacups that might be at home in a fairy garden, set atop a birch tree stump. “Good thing I brought these,” he whispers to Saoirse. “You never know through which tools Sarah’s guidance will flow.” Saoirse stares back at him mutely.

He pours an inch’s worth of liquid into each cup and distributes them around the table. “What is it?” Saoirse asks, but Lucretia furrows her eyebrows at her and shakes her head. Saoirse stares into the cup. The liquid is tea-colored and steaming but produces no smell.

Mia raises her cup to the center of the table, one hand still on the telephone receiver. The others follow her lead, with Saoirse hurrying to meet them in the impromptu toast. None of them go so far as to touch the others’ cups; they lift them toward the ceiling, close their eyes, then bring the cups to their lips and down the contents. Saoirse is a beat behind them but manages to swallow the liquid a fraction of a second after Mia lifts the receiver.

“Hello,” Mia says. It’s not a question but a statement. Of readiness. Of acceptance. Of carefully restrained excitement. Mia knows who will be on the other end of the line.

Saoirse returns her gaze to the table, but at the conclusion of that single word, her head is thrown back as if she’s been struck in the shoulders. The bitter, burnt-tasting concoction coats her throat and tongue, and she feels the hand holding the teacup slide from the table, the porcelain handle slipping from the hook of her finger as unceremoniously as if she has released a handful of sand.

Saoirse’s eyes, wide and unblinking, take in the darkness above her, the shifting shadows, as if the aura she perceived earlier is visible now, oscillating like smoke, like a murmuration, like a hungry tidal wave, lacey strands of seaweed and hard-shelled marine life appearing like cryptids in the cresting surf, disappearing as the massive shelf of water crashes. Then, the shifting, breathing, living aura vanishes or, rather, changes yet again, morphing, rearranging, solidifying, though that’s not quite right. There’s nothing solid in what Saoirse sees, nothing scientific about the electrical signals traveling through her optic nerve from retina to brain. This new image is a cloudy film reel superimposed onto the ceiling not by her mind, but by some projector on another plane of reality. It’s a ghost haunting a ghost haunting a ghost.

The aura grows, lengthens, becomes an ethereal specter: Jonathan. His eyes are somehow empty pits and hawkishly discerning, piercing through to the marrow of her soul in a single glance. Before she can react to this terrifying vision of her dead husband, it collapses in on itself. Again, the tidal wave rises, this time containing not seaweed and skates and the limbs of a thousand spider crabs but the features of Jonathan’s face. Eyes, nose, mouth, hair, ears, jawbone—each is thrown haphazardly as the wave crashes against the shore, but as the next wave rises, the features rearrange themselves. Saoirse stares in horror at Edgar Allan Poe.

At the top of the wave, the dark bags under the writer’s eyes grow so concave that Saoirse feels she’ll be sucked up into them. The aura undulates, stretching the writer’s mouth grotesquely. He appears to be shouting at her from beyond the grave, but then the mouth disappears, a black hole that’s swallowed itself. The wave falls, and Poe’s features fall with it, scrambled like so many seashells, the bones of seabirds, the rotten carcasses of porpoises. Saoirse wants to scream. She wants to run, but she’s pinned to the chair by whatever unseen force pins these ghostly men to the ceiling. By moving to Providence, Saoirse knows she’s now a resident of the Ocean State, but the sea, the cosmic, endless feel of it, terrifies her.

A new wave rises. The features within it rearrange themselves, and the man from the Athen?um now stares down at Saoirse from the black depths—or heights?—of the ocean, from the beyond, from some hell Saoirse cannot conceptualize. Struck with fresh terror by the man’s concentrated stare, Saoirse prays for this specter to pass quickly, as the others did. But the wave does not crash. This time, the revolving visions cease as if the wave really is a mere projection and someone has hit the pause button. It strikes Saoirse as somehow worse for everything to be held in suspension, for this stranger—who somehow recalls both Poe and her husband while occupying an entirely other body, an entirely other space—to be as paralyzed as she is. Summoning all her strength, all her motivation, Saoirse forces her mouth to expel a single word: “What?”

What do you want? What is happening? What am I doing here? What are you? The lone “what” can stand for any one of her desperate questions. She no longer feels the aura is benign, if it ever was. She’d initially believed it to be the spirit of Sarah but knows she was wrong. It is angry. Aggressive. Possessive . Before she can attempt to form a second word—or force out a scream—the man from the Athen?um changes. As fast as a cartoon figure in a flip-book, the image stutters, a vessel possessed and in need of an exorcism.

The man becomes Jonathan again. And then Poe. Then the man from Athen?um. Jonathan. Poe. Athen?um. Jonathan. Poe. Over and over, faster and faster, until the three faces, the three bodies, become one obscene, flickering vision of madness. The mouth opens, but the image continues to stutter, resulting in a display of horrible, unnatural movement, as if the mouth is controlled by insects that squirm and writhe in a mindless attempt to replicate speech. Saoirse’s mind threatens to collapse under the weight of her terror. The flickering of the three specters becomes so fast, the mouth no longer convulses imperceptibly. It responds to her “What?” with a word of its own:

“Miiiiiiinnnnnnne.”

Fear as sharp as the stab of a knife explodes in her stomach at the threat in this single word, the implications of it, what it means coming from each of the three flickering figures: the dead husband who won’t stay dead; the ghost of a historical figure whose haunting has become personal; the stranger who stares at her as if he is anything but. What happens next, however, is so sudden, the word leaves her brain as quickly as it entered it. The flickering body drops from the crest of the aura-wave straight down toward her.

The figure’s mouth is still open, as if it will swallow her whole. The arms are outstretched, as if to engulf her. Though the distance should be no more than four feet, it seems to take a lifetime for the falling specter to reach her. It’s enough time for her vision to flash red, then blue, then red again, and Saoirse recalls the parade of police officers, telling them how she returned to their home in Cedar Grove, New Jersey, to find the house preternaturally quiet, how she’d listened at the door of each room in her quest to find her husband. Her dread had grown with each passing second, and her shoes thudded hollowly against the floorboards. The single fly that buzzed past her, a portent of the dozens more, the horror to come.

The flickering figure falls over her like a shroud. She’s released from her paralysis just in time. She ducks, screaming.

The world goes gray.

Then black.

Then everything is quiet.