"Join us." The Dark Man appeared to whisper, but the voice carried.
The man's gaze fell from Doyle to the boy, who turned to meet it obediently. A command passed between them. The boy reached up and grasped Doyle's hand: The fingers felt raspy and unpleasant. As Doyle let the boy draw him forward into the room, a discordant current spiked through the back of his neck and prompted the phrase You're someplace else now.
The boy led him to an empty chair between the two men. Lady Nicholson's brother looked up at him with slack puzzlement, as if his appearance represented one too many elements to process cogently.
As he accepted the Dark Man's offered hand with his right and settled into the waiting chair, the man to his left seized Doyle's free hand and clenched tight. When Doyle turned to Lady Nicholson, seated directly across from him, he encountered the ardent gaze of a woman who had just had a lifetime's polite, social dissembling torn away by the chamber's tonic of wonder and terror, awakening to find herself brazenly alive. That vitality illuminated her extraordinary beauty. Her
aquamarine eyes danced kaleidoscopically, and high color brushed her pale cheeks. Doyle summoned just enough wherewithal through his bedazzlement to notice she was wearing makeup. She mouthed the words Thank you. Doyle felt an involuntary thump and a skip in his chest: My heart, he observed with interest.
The intrusive jolt of an alien voice broke the connection.
"We have strangers here tonight."
It was a man's voice, deep-chested, round, and burnished as rocks in the bed of a cold stream, veined with a seductive, graveled tremolo.
"All are welcome." ,
Doyle turned to the medium. The woman's eyes were open, and the voice was issuing from her throat. Since the last time he'd glanced at her, it appeared to Doyle that the woman's facial structure had perceptibly changed shape, from pie-shaped to a cast more ruddy, skeletal, and square. Eyes gleaming with a reptilian glint, her mouth slithered into the salacious grin of a sensualist.
Remarkable: In his studies, Doyle could recall only two accounts of this phenomenon observed in mediums while in trance—physiological transmogrification—and had never before encountered it in situ.
The medium's lidded gaze wandered leisurely around the table, avoiding Doyle, precipitating tremors he could feel coursing through the hand of the man to his left. The medium engaged the brother until he was constrained to turn away like a shamed dog. Then the eyes settled on his sister.
"You ... seek my guidance."
Lady Nicholson's lips trembled. Doyle was uncertain she'd be able to summon a reply, when the Dark Man beside him spoke first.
"We all, humbly, seek your guidance and wish to extend our gratitude for this evening's visitation." His voice had a hiss in it, damage to a vocal cord. The accent was foreign— Mediterranean perhaps—Doyle couldn't yet pinpoint it precisely.
So this man was amanuensis, the medium's liaison to the paying customer, usually the brains behind the operation. He had clearly cultivated the fervid conviction of the true believer that served as his own best advertising. Fraud began
here; an opportunistic salesman exploiting what in many instances were mediums with some measurable facility and a childish incomprehension of the workaday world's mercantile realities. As a man in Gloucester had put it to him, describing the sensitive abilities of his own otherwise dim-witted son, "When they give you a window into another world, I warrant you forfeit a few bricks."
This was the team: medium, handler, all-purpose urchin, serving woman with child for emotional credibility, burly husband providing muscle, others unseen perhaps standing by. Clearly, Lady Nicholson was their target. Not an altogether unwitting one—she had sent Doyle the precautionary note—but one whose distress was sufficiently compelling to outweigh her misgivings. It remained to be seen how they would react to Doyle's unexpected arrival—but then, so far, unexpected didn't seem to particularly apply.
"We are all beings of light and spirit, both on this side and on your physical plane. Life is life, life is all one, life is all creation. We honor the life and light in you as you would do in us. We are all one on this side, and we wish you on your side harmony, blessing, and peace everlasting." This came from the medium in a burst, with the feel of a standard, practiced preamble, before she turned to the Dark Man and nodded politely, his cue to formally begin the proceedings.
"Spirit welcomes you. Spirit is aware of your distress and wishes to help in any way it can. You may address Spirit directly," the Dark Man said to Lady Nicholson.
Wrestling with a sudden, profound uncertainty, Lady Nicholson did not answer, as if to voice the first question were an admission that effectively laid waste to a lifetime's accumulation of inherited beliefs.
"We can go, we could go," her brother leaned in to offer.
"Begin with your son," said the medium.
She looked up, startled and instantly focused.
"You've come to ask me of your son."
Tears pooled quickly in her eyes. "Oh my God."
"What would you ask of Spirit?" The medium went through the motions of smiling, but the effect appeared simulated.
"How did you know?" Tears ran down her cheeks.
"Has your son crossed over?" The smile persisted.
She shook her head, uncomprehending.
"Has there been a death?" asked the Dark Man.
"I'm not sure. That is, we don't know...." She faltered again.
"The thing is, he's disappeared. Four days now. He's only three years old," the brother offered.
"His name is William," the medium said without hesitation. It would have been the Dark Man's job to find that out.
"Willie." Her voice brimmed with emotion; she was taking the hook.
Doyle throughout glanced surreptitiously around the room, at the ceiling, behind the tapestries, searching for suspended wires, projection devices. Nothing so far.
"You see, we've already been to the police. It's no good—"
"We don't know if he's dead or alive!" Her pent-up grief exploded. "For God's sake, if you know so much, then you know why I'm here." For a brief moment, her eyes found Doyle's and felt his sympathy. "Please. Please, tell me. I shall go mad."
The medium's smile lapsed. She nodded gravely. "One moment," she said. Her eyes closed; her head angled back again. The circle of hands remained unbroken. The silence that followed was thick and urgent.
A gasp broke from the pregnant girl. She was staring at a spot some six feet above the table where a perfect sphere of white mist was materializing, spinning like a globe on a central pivot. Expanding, fleecy extensions spun out from its core, breaking the circle down into a flat, square plane. By varying their density, the shards spread out and began purposefully assuming the dimensions of a random topography, foothills, rifts, peninsulas, all within the invisible confines of borders as rigid as a gilded frame.
A map? The shifting slowed, and the features crystallized, until with a rush of condensation the true nature of the vision appeared: a work of shadow and light, bleached of color, less precise than a photograph but more animated, suggestive of motion and distantly of sound, as if this scene were being viewed at great remove through some crude, impersonal lens.
In it, a young boy lay curled up at the base of a tree. He wore short pants, a loose tunic, stockings, no shoes. His
hands and feet were tightly bound with rope. The first glance suggested sleep, but closer examination showed the chest heaving, coughing, or sobbing—it was difficult to determine, until the ghostly and unmistakable sound of a child's pathetic, heartsick cries filtered into the chamber.