Cowan shook his head. “You sick fuck. You committed a wicked act. For that you’ll rot in hell when your time comes.” He fought to keep his composure. “You ruined Rose’s life — and mine. And you took poor Alex. But the judge was right — you’re fucked up in the head. That’s no excuse for what you did, but I think you’re suffering in your own hell.”
He shook his head and left the flat, slamming the door behind him. Almost instantly the crying kid started up again. It really did sound like it was coming from inside Fisk’s flat. The music recommenced straight away.
Cowan made his way back to the lift. Turning back, he glanced into the throat of the corridor. An indistinct shape loitered in the shadows. The singsong tone of a nursery rhyme echoed along the passage, followed by the sound of children’s laughter.
“Hello?” Cowan’s voice was taut. “Who’s there?”
The laughter rang again, this time with a malevolent edge. Brittle.
Cowan turned back to the lift. He flared his nostrils at the panel and shouldered open the door to the stairs. The air was cool. He began his descent. Raindrops on the windows warped his view. Someone was kicking a football in the stairwell far below. A child’s echoing voice recited “Baa Baa Black Sheep.” The noise felt like it was swirling around him. Monochrome colours of the décor matched his headache. He was gasping by the time he reached the ground floor, bursting from the foyer into the quadrangle. It had stopped raining.
He strode back to his car, feeling uncomfortably warm beneath his coat. Shafts of sunlight were fighting to break through the clouds. He uttered silent apologies to Rose as he crossed the playground, reminding himself that Fisk’s suffering justified the broken promise. It made him feel no better.
As he drew near to the car, he clicked his remote control. The alarm squealed its short burst and unlocked the doors. He was desperate to get back to Sheffield. He was tired of this world of graffiti and decay, of litter and filth. He took off his coat and tossed it into the back. The key slid into the ignition and he turned it, firing the engine. And it was just as he was reaching over to fasten his seatbelt that he spotted the toy mouse on the dashboard.
He picked it up carefully and studied it. The faded gingham, the worn seams, the wonky eye — all identical to the one in Fisk’s flat.
Cowan clicked the seatbelt in and released the handbrake.
He stopped in a lay-by several miles outside Leeds. A stone bridge spanned the road, under which flowed a deep waterway identified by a wooden sign as the River Aire. Cowan paused for a moment and peered at the brown water as it flowed languidly beneath. The road was deserted. He removed the plastic bag from his pocket and paused for a second before dropping it over the side. The splash was deep and satisfying. For several minutes, he watched the ripples until they died away and the surface returned to its flat, constant motion. Then he walked back to the car.
MR. SPLITFOOT
Dale Bailey
Modern Spiritualism as a popular movement began with the Hydes-ville raps…. Whether by the design of the spirits or inadvertently, Kate and Maggie Fox served as the catalyst for what believers in spiritual communication call the dawning of a new era.
That I have been chiefly instrumental in perpetrating the fraud of Spiritualism upon a too-confiding public, most of you doubtless know. The greatest sorrow in my life has been that this is true, and though it has come late in my day, I am now prepared to tell the truth…. I am here tonight as one of the founders of Spiritualism to denounce it as an absolute falsehood … the most wicked blasphemy known to the world.
1893
They have taken me to Emily Ruggles’s house to die.
I had hoped to die in my little apartment in the city, but Emily’s house is very pleasant, and will serve as well, I suppose. The March sunlight illuminates my room in the morning, and Emily is kind enough to sit up with me at night. The nights are hardest. The follies and illusions of childhood re-assert themselves at night, and it is reassuring to see a human face when you open your eyes in the gloom, in an unfamiliar house, thinking that perhaps you are already dead. Last night — was it last night? — I woke from a dream of Hydesville and Emily looked like Kate, bending to her needlework by the light of a guttering taper. For a moment, we were girls, all undone between us. Kate, I cried, Kate — then Emily took my hand and became just plain Emily once more. So I remembered that Kate was dead and had to mourn her all over again. The mind is a funny thing, playing tricks like that.
You were always playing tricks on me, too, weren’t you, Kate? Full of tricks from the day you were born. Remember how we held the stage when Leah paraded us from city to city like a pair of trained lovebirds, tapping and preening? Every girl’s dream to be a bird, feted on every side, and oh, we were feted Kate, how our names did ring upon every tongue! And even then you were a tapping, preening little thing, all dressed up in your skirts of robin’s-egg-blue. Do you remember how the people used to gather before a sitting, how they would come from near and far, crying your name aloud and reaching out to touch you? Do you remember how easy it all was, how eager they were to believe? What a glorious trick that was, Kate! That was the best trick of all! Who could have seen that it would all turn out as it has? We were children, Maggs. I can hear you say it. We didn’t know. Surely that’s something. Surely that’s enough—
You were at them again, your tricks, last night, weren’t you? Emily dozed — even the most faithful watchers doze — and as she nodded over her needlework, you were up to your old tricks, rapping and tapping and knocking oh so quietly, so only I could hear. It got cold in the room then, just like it used to when we were girls, all those years ago. Do you remember the cold, Kate? The cold of the grave, so black and deep it prickled up the hairs along the back of your neck and turned your breath to vapor?
The Summerland indeed.
And here you are with another blanket to comfort me. Look at me, Kate! Look how frail I’ve become. I’ve become old, I say, and a young girl’s melancholy creeps into my breast. How funny it is, the way we never age inside our hearts, whilst outwardly this catastrophe every day renews itself. Tutting—
— you must calm yourself, Mrs. Maggie—
— Emily — it is Emily, isn’t it? In the gloom it’s hard to see — tucks the blanket in tight around me. She means kindness, I know, dear Emily. Why, I remember when she came to us, how dumbfounded she was to be among us at last: the mothers of Spiritualism! I remember her first sitting and afterward teaching her the secrets of material manifestations. How shocked she was at this cheerful fraud! Yet I’ll admit, and I admitted then, that there is something of the illusionist’s craft in our art; it helps the sitters to suspend their disbelief, to quote Mr. Coleridge.
But there is truth, as well.
There is the matter of the cold. And of Hydesville.
That was March, too, wasn’t it? More than forty years have passed since then — I was sixteen that year, and you still a slip of a girl — yet I still remember the winter of 1848, spilling right over into spring, such a fierce year it was. At first, I thought that no one noticed the cold because it was already so cold in that house, with the wind tearing down off Lake Ontario and rattling the timbers like bones. Pop, pop, pop, went that house, like an old man cracking his joints, and it wasn’t much warmer in the house than it was standing in the street. What was a little tapping to me?