November, 1861
She was, I’d heard, a youngish woman.
A spirit medium, like me. She’d been unmarried all her life, not that she discouraged asking. She was pretty, they say, even beautiful, sometimes, when the lamps of the séance were burning quite right. Her showings were reputed to be “physical” in nature. Which meant that, according to hearsay, she showed as the strife of the spirits afflicted her flesh. She would, for instance, start to cough and a spirit miasma would slip from her mouth. Another time she’d offered up, in between pointer finger and thumb, shards of light.
When one day she showed in a whole other way: a flexible mound at the centre of her. She manifested all the symptoms. Her stomach was ripe in the morning—most mornings. Her breasts were painful to the touch. She hadn’t yet been with a man to her knowledge, which was of course what they asked first and when they had reckoned with all that she told them she continued to service her roll call of clients. When finally her time arrived they took her to the birthing room and she gave vent to something not dead or alive: a slithering of ectoplasm. When she returned to her previous form, she claimed to have mothered the spirits themselves.
She titled her ability what would come to be known as the New Motive Power.
And so if someone saw me now as I carried myself to the city’s north side, this story—E.H.B. and myself had agreed—would be the story that I told.
Perforant objects resulted in bleeding. Steam from a bucket would cook you inside. The pills that they gave you would tangle your guts when just as well you’d had the poke. The best you could do was curl up on a bed and, if you were lucky, decide not to die.
The woman’s name was Mrs. Luft. She had a worthwhile reputation in such matters, as they went. Her name and her address—in Boston’s North End—were given to me by Miss Moss.
Mrs. Luft worked as a seamstress by day.
The North End was warrens, ill-favoured of lamplight. Chimney smoke boiled from the tops of gaunt houses, windows weak with bedtime prayer. A man-shape approached me, his silhouette awkward until I could peg him for missing an arm. While in among the crevices that marked the beginnings of new, twisted alleys, there were parchment-and-tin dioramas of saints.
They glittered in darkness like broke-open ore.
St. Stephen’s Church, with its new clock and cross, announced a final branching on the map I carried with me. I stopped there a moment. I knew not for what but that lamplight illumined the church’s pilasters. And in fact, as I stood there, some six trembling Catholics either mounted the steps or came out through the doors.
My words, as I said them, were matter-of-fact. It was something, I think, about not dying yet. It was not a prayer but a conscious desire.
Someone bucked out of the doors and came toward me, something hunched beneath his arm. I might’ve mistaken him, say, for a beggar—many in these varied parts—or an overgrown child with a long, jagged head, but I looked closer still.
It was William Guay.
He had a clutch of bags about him. He loomed and went loping away through the lamplight.
The clock had yet to chime my time. I had gotten there early, of course, due to nerves.
And wondering what spurred him on, especially now, with the favourable verdict, I tucked the map into my dress and rounded the corner some distance behind him.
He kept straight for a time down the more major streets. He did not seem to know these regions. He had a natural furtiveness, as anxious and black as the rats underfoot.
By and by, he reached the place. I bided down the block behind him. It was a typical block in that part of the city, dark and swaybacked in its paving. The place that he had come to was a boarding house or warehouse, its higher stories all alight. He hoisted the bags that he carried and knocked.
A beat, and he was let inside.
I abandoned my post at the corner and crept. A window showed along the side. I stood at the top of the long, deranged square that the lights from inside had arrayed on the sidewalk.
The room was incredibly bright, too bright: it had the sick sheen of magnesium burning. Guay entered the room and went through it, back to me. He set his bags upon a table—a dining room table worn to shreds, as though they had salvaged it, brought it here, cleaned it. Behind the table, facing me, I saw the jeweller clad in sleeves. He looked at Guay—a vexed, red look—and commanded him something and Guay reeled away.
Now I heard the clock at ten.
The verdict had been innocent, which at first I determined had given me options, but here was I and there was he and I was not prepared for that. I had been on the verge all this time of returning, of turning around toward the CDSK but when I saw him there, enthroned:
There was something about, well, the attitude of him. The way he looked upon the scene. It was a sort of blamelessness, the innocence that children have, but also a madness somewhere near the surface, as though he could not help himself.
I rounded the edge of the light from the window.
In the corner that now came to light was Claudette. She sat there intent on the dark of her lap; I had never felt right or secure in her presence. She had a sort of faceless force, a thing that moved ahead of her, so even when you saw her near she had always been there in some sense, next to you. Her hands, above a wide-lipped bowl, were spitting out a small, white rain. Her expression was trained on the floor of the room.
Then, upon the nearest wall, a shadow flickered, rolled, was gone.
I adjusted my vantage again.
The clock ceased. This one, I said to myself, or the next one.
And there in the wake of the shadow went Hannah. She hunched, her arms held straight along. Her hair swung and parted, and parted and swung before her lightly charging face. I remembered when I’d seen her in Mount Auburn cemetery, rubbing her stomach among the grey stones and she had seemed a sort of spool that wound the coffin toward the earth. Her footsteps were short but remarkably fast, as though she went at some instruction. She looked at nobody, not even her mother, on her way to the wall I was facing onto.
Which wasn’t, quite, a wall at all; it was a sort of screen or curtain. And Hannah was testing her shadow upon it.
Guay came into view again, conveying a big, rippling cloth, which he lowered.
A cataract seemed to descend on the room, as though it were shrouded along with the camera. But it was only Hannah’s shadow, spreading like a pair of wings.
And then I saw, as in a flash, that she had never lied at all.
She had no reason to, not now. There was nobody watching her—no one but me and I did not care either way to verify the thing she was.
But Hannah was herself enthroned. The wings of her shadow extended out from her and the dark majesty of the things she would see was already with her, already among us.
Guay paid out the cloth, stepped back.
No one sat before the screen. It was to be only a picture of absence, roosting under Hannah’s shade, but there were figures in it yet like fishermen in waist-high fog.
And Hannah, as though hearing something—as though hearing me as I took in a breath—turned toward the window, emerging through hair, to show the street her sad contentment.
I will do it. Go now.
But I didn’t. I stood there.
And finally my second came.