Laura

It started like any other sitting. I retreated from view when the first of our guests arrived. The customary tea was served and coins, never asked for but always expected, were pressed into the medium’s hand. But by the end everything had changed, and three months later the celebrated Mrs Crosby, or Mamma as she was known to me, was dead.

There were only four in attendance at that last seance, the snow having kept many of our regulars at home. Those who’d braved the slush and ice stood in our too small parlour with steaming cups, their eyes brightened by anticipation and the lick of flames in the grate. And on the eight o’clock chime, Mamma gestured to the table. The Misses Brink, their eyelashes a-flutter, settled on either side of stout Mrs Manley. Mrs Hunt, as usual, commandeered the chair nearest the fire on account of her rheumatism.

The hymn came next, Mrs Manley’s robust contralto drowning out the younger Miss Brink’s tuneless effort. That concluded, Mamma’s gaze passed over her audience, and satisfied that all was ready, leaned over to turn down the oil lamp, but only a little because Mrs Crosby would have none of the dark circle. Oh no. She had nothing to hide, she insisted. If only, I thought as I placed an ear at the metal grill on the wall beside me, waiting for my cue.

*

The hidden compartment where I crouched, lay to the side of the parlour and had never been discovered, not even by the man who came one night from The Psychical Society to observe one of Mamma’s sittings. Oh, how his steely whiskers had twitched that evening, though I thought it was as much because of the proximity of young ladies as from excitement over Mrs Crosby’s apparent prowess.

I smiled, lost for a few moments in the memory of the show we put on that evening, how we duped the man, and how later we had cleared our debts following his stamp of approval. But then a cough brought me back to the present, and I peered out through the grill once more to see all hands on the wooden planchette. There was just time to adjust my position before those booming theatrical tones mamma reserved entirely for these occasions sounded. “Does anybody wish to speak from spirit?” I waited, and words issued again, louder. “Is there anybody there? Make yourself known to us. We await a sign.”

*

This was my cue, and I lifted my fist as far as space would allow. But that night, it did not come down to sound two raps for yes. It merely hung in the air above my drum. For two thuds had sounded from within the parlour. And not even a breath broke the silence as the table around which all were sitting lifted several inches from the floor, shuddered and came down, splinters of wood breaking away from its legs to land about. A quick, wide-eyed glance in my direction and then Mamma’s spoke once more. “Who… Who are you? Speak to us through the planchette.” Her voice was breathless and weak.

Her knuckles were as white as my own as I gripped my drum. They lined up against her neighbours’ on the small, wheeled panel as she waited for a response. One second passed. A creak from the table that made us all start. Two. Three. And suddenly all was frenzied movement. The circle rocked this way and that as the planchette dragged the sitters with it. From letter to letter it hurtled, everyone silently mouthing each one. Then, just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped, and the communication’s end was punctuated with a collective gasp. For several seconds, the only sound was a fizzing coal that hurled out of the fire to clatter to the grate. No one noticed, for all eyes were turned to the medium. All mouths agape.

Mamma’s voice bit into the expectant hush, causing the misses Brink to flinch. “You are Laura. You seek your mother,” she said, one hand at her breast, which rose and fell rapidly beneath it. A murmuring now from the sitters and Mamma spoke again. “There is no one here who knows that name. No one! That is all!” And she pushed the planchette away and brought her hands down on the table with a loud slap.

*

After that, Mamma complained of a severe headache and ended the evening’s entertainment early. Later, when I took a glass of brandy to her, she was staring solemnly into the dying fire in the parlour. The fine lines across her forehead were dark furrows in the unforgiving light.

“Perhaps we should end our little charade,” she said presently. “No more pretence.”

“Pretence? Mama, we just enjoyed our first success,” I said, lightly. “The tips were very generous tonight,  and we have bills to pay.”

I flinched as she grabbed my arm, pulling me to her. And a sudden current of icy air brightened the embers, which sent out a lash of flame just as Mamma’s words flew at me. “No one came tonight. Do you understand? The table creaks. It tipped because it was pushed. There was no spirit!”

“But the table rose from the ground and…”

Mama pressed her hand on my mouth now and so hard I gasped for breath. And thereafter, all talk of spiritualism was forbidden. There were no more circles. Even when our income became so meagre, local shopkeepers refused us credit, Mamma would not take up the old business again. We lived on what remained of the money Papa had left us and the charity of clients who hoped once Mrs Crosby was strong enough, she would continue with her circles.

*

The weeks passed, but while for me the only change was some loss of pinkness from my cheeks, Mamma grew so weak that I feared she had some terrible disease. Her bed was brought downstairs, and no longer able to keep my presence at the house a secret, I posed as a niece come to town to help look after the ailing medium. The doctor was called and left small bottles of dark liquid, which sedated so heavily that Mamma hardly moved from the back parlour.

And through the lonely days and nights of those months, one question repeated in my mind. Who was this Laura who had rid my mother of her vitality and had her confined to her room? And finally, the ban on further forays into the spirit world was overcome. My curiosity could no longer be dampened. There was only one way to proceed.

*

So, one night, while mamma lay in that deep sleep that only laudanum can bring, I took her keys from a bedside table and opened the tallboy that held the tools of her former trade. Carefully, I gathered the planchette and lettered cards into a puce velvet tablecloth and set them out on the parlour table, just as I’d seen Mamma do so many times before. Then, by the light of a single candle, I settled myself down to make my request. “Will the spirit who is Laura come to speak with me?” I whispered, my breath hardly causing a flicker in the candle’s flame.

I repeated the words, and again, and with my shaking fingers placed on the polished top of the planchette, I waited, the doleful tick of the mantle clock marking time. The minutes passed. I was close to giving up when the hairs on my arms prickled to attention. Something was afoot. There was something there.

A shuffling sound, hardly audible at first, was becoming louder. Soon there was the pad of footfall, followed by the plaintive whine of unoiled door hinges. The shuffling again and the wheeze of laboured breathing and a figure in white, shrunken, head lolling backwards, appeared in the doorway. “Mamma!” I exclaimed as her night-clothed figure approached. At the table, she stopped, her glazed eyes unseeing. “Mamma,” I said, now at her side, stroking her ice-cold skin, “are you awake?”

Her lips parted as if to speak, but no words came, only a shimmering mist, which swirled gently as she breathed. I stumbled back and edged into the corner. The mist began to coalesce above the tabletop. And now smudges of darkness showed and the face of a young girl became discernible on the globe’s shining surface. From my huddled position, I whispered. “Who are you?”

The apparition brightened. Its eyes turned to mine. Its mouth opened. “I am Laura. I am your sister.”

My voice came in a stuttering whisper. “I…I have no sister.”

The spirit’s face grew suddenly large, and I covered my eyes to shut out its terrible countenance. “You did!” it cried. “I lived until a few short weeks ago in a hellhole of an asylum. But do not cower there. I will not hurt you.”

I stood then. Went closer. The movement of air sending the spirit’s face reeling. “What?”

“Our parents gave me away while still an infant,” it said as the face reformed afresh, bursts of hoary mist spurting from its mouth with every word. “Now I know my true history, someone must pay, dear sister. My father passed before I could help him on his way, but our dear mother still lives, I see – as yet.” The head turned towards Mamma’s body, draped now like an old under-stuffed rag doll over the table. She might have been dead already. “She left me to savages,” hissed the spirit, “because of my deformities.”

More glowing vapour oozed from Mamma’s mouth, at first slowly, and then gushing like steam forced from a boiling kettle spout. As the vapour flowed, so the apparition grew and took on a more human shape. But all was not as it should be. There was a torso and there were arms and legs of sorts, but they were as short as an infant’s. At the end of each stump, there was nothing.

“You see me as I looked before I died. Can you imagine what my life has been?” The spirit screeched now like a trapped bird, and Mamma’s body crumpled to the floor.

“Please,” Laura,” I said. “She is all I have.”

The spirit inclined her head a little to one side. “Not all you have, sister. And I cannot let her live the rest of her days in comfort. Let us see, however. I will take what I need from her, and if she lives still, then you are welcome to what is left.”

*

The following morning, I woke slumped over the parlour table, just as the hall clock chimed the hour of nine. One second passed before barbs of fear plunged into my heart and nausea all but overwhelmed me. Yet there was no sign of any disturbance in the room, no sign of Mamma.

Then a muffled cry from her bedroom sent me in a stumbling rush to her door. She lay atop her narrow, curtained bed like the carved stone skeleton of the cadaver tomb in our local church. Her death’s head turned to me as I approached, her mouth an anguished circle of black. I went nearer just as a movement in a dark recess at the other side of the room caught my attention. I squinted into the gloom. There was a silhouette of a woman, and she was coming towards me. “Look at me now, Mamma,” my sister hissed as she approached. “You have given birth to me anew.”

No longer translucent, the spirit that walked to the bedside had substance, and arms and hands, just like my own. Mamma made to speak but only managed a whisper, too weak to be understood. “See, she lives still,” Laura said, smiling, her outline becoming fainter by the second. “And now I will say farewell. My work is done. At least, for now. Adieu, dear sister.”

*

Ma lived a few weeks more, her enfeebled body rejecting every attempt to nourish it. I nursed her to the end, and, after her funeral, went to live with relatives in a spa town. The doctors talked of a malignancy; a cancer had ended Mama’s life. I nodded when they spoke of it, unable to tell the truth. And with time, the nature of her death became less painful, and I began to rebuild my life. Not for me the charity of strangers and distant family.

*

A year later, I am strong enough to begin afresh. The celebrated Mrs Crosby’s talented niece says my advertisements. And all that is left of my old life is before me on the small table in the parlour now. The planchette. The lettered cards. A low fire burns in the parlour grate. Candles flicker. My visitors have settled. Everything is ready and I begin. “Is there anybody there? Give us a sign.”

The table shakes with the force of her reply. “Laura.” It is almost a sigh. “Come to me.” And there my sister is at the door and the spectacle begins.