Trick of the Light

Good before they became otherwise.

Her mother’s eyes looking into hers. Dilated, wild and wanton.

The broad back of a man. A man she recognised only too well.

She pulled herself back from memory. The hotel room was a pale peach colour, which she found restful and untainted by previous association: the place newly converted from three buildings meshed together.

The Spiritualist Society of Edinburgh, though not the main thrust of the organisation, had done them proud. It was the end of a long tour of Victoria’s kingdom and Sophia had insisted Magnus arrange that it end here. They had travelled all the main cities, word of mouth creating a hunger for what they had to offer. Another world. Where the dead spoke.

But not all of them. Some stayed hidden. Waiting for a sign. Waiting for vengeance.

She shivered with a hunger of her own and crossed back to lay her hand upon his shoulder. Corporeal comfort.

Magnus was halfway through the game. Finely poised.

‘You think it can be solved?’ he asked.

‘How would I know?’ she replied.

Something in her tone stilled his restless fingers and he remembered the moment when he had pushed open the door and entered that dirty little airless room to find a figure sat facing him in the shadows, face and hair concealed behind a white veil like a bride’s, one hand under the table, one palm upwards pointing towards him.

Like any good gambler he had established the ante, slid over his last five dollars, and waited for his future to be told. No crystal ball to look within.

The figure spoke and asked his name. He gave it. She had a soft accent, Southern hint perhaps, hard to tell.

His own had no trace of a family of ten, in Pittsburgh’s fair city, grinding poverty and empty guts.

His father all the way from Armagh found a German woman to his liking and set about recreating the very reason he had left Ireland in the first damned place.

A big man. Big hands. Michael Bannerman. Worked in the steel mills on the south side as a puddler. Magnus was the oldest. He got the knuckle first. His privilege.

Truth be told, he was probably an evil brute to have around, big like his father, violent in temperament, and, from an early age, slippery with the stair-head girls.

The breaking point had come when his devout mother Marta, back early from kissing the Pope’s backside, discovered her own first born bare-arse naked with the wife of her husband’s best friend, Sonny, who worked down the docks with an iron hook instead of a right hand.

Turned out the damned priest had keeled over, a heart attack, hence Marta back at the wrong time, hence her scream to see a decent neighbour and wife spread-eagled up against the cellar wall, hence her wastrel son hauling up his pants and rabbit-footing out of there never to look back.

Magnus sometimes wondered what had happened to the wife, Maria, Spanish blood she had running in her veins, hot to touch. Then he thought of that hook.

Spanish blood.

He was fifteen. After that, on his own.

Took on another identity. Clever with cards, words, took on another voice, buried the stink of a ferrety existence, buried the times when his father’s fist had smashed him to the floor, buried all his dark violence deep behind a smile, down forgotten deep to the entrails.

Buried the beast.

That was the past. Another life.

‘Put your hands in mine,’ the voice had said.

The figure extended both of hers, palms up, across the table and he covered the white fingers with his own great paws. He felt a jolt of sorts run up his arm and the shape opposite shuddered as if lightning had struck her down the very middle.

She whipped her hands back and regarded him through the veil. The silence brought out anger, as if she was intruding into a secret, like someone at a circus peering in a cage.

At the hidden violent animal.

‘I have paid you five dollars,’ he growled, as a bear might. ‘I demand to know my prospects.’

There was a sound behind the veil that might have been smothered laughter, then the gauze was lifted and he looked into a pair of violet eyes that pierced him to the bone.

‘You’re a dead man,’ she said, pale skin glowing in the dark. ‘You’ve run out of time. You have no prospects.’

He knew this to be the truth.

She was young, he could see that now. Might be no more than seventeen years. Or seven thousand.

That damned superstitious Irish blood; it infected him with wild belief.

He had switched away from the eyes. Down to the mouth. The lips were rosebud pink, sensuous. Forming words.

‘You have but a single chance,’ they said. ‘The only future left …is the one you have with me.’

That’s where it had started.

All this had flashed through his mind as recollection froze him in front of the spread deck.

Sophia reached forward and in a sudden movement, smashed all the cards together, foundation aces, kings, queens, treacherous one-eyed jacks, she destroyed their various citadels, then pulled his head round so that he was looking up at her.

‘The only future left,’ she said.

After such a declaration, her eyes crossed focus, a comical phenomenon that happened when she had been in the fierce grip of the other world or as a harbinger of sexual passion.

Either way, it always made him laugh. But then he delved deep into her body and the power was like nothing he had ever known.

And then he forgot the world.

6

Oh! What a snug little island,

A right little tight little island.

THOMAS DIBDEN, The Snug Little Island

Muriel Grierson lived in fear of her husband, Andrew. The fact that he was dead in no way lessened the anxiety she felt at his house being desecrated by the removal of its most valuable contents while she and the maid Ellen were out shopping for provisional salvation at Leith market.

Of course this expedition had been at Andrew’s posthumous behest, for he frowned upon money wasted over vegetables or meat – the cheapest cuts simmert lang, taste aye as guid as hutheron veal was his oft-repeated dictum.

Although it was nigh on two years since he had last glowered at her over such a repast bolstered religiously by the root vegetables in season – mair time buriet, mair flavour tae be found – she could not rid herself of the parsimonious habit of picking over the stalls that offered wrinkled provender.

So, when she returned with the laden Ellen trailing behind after such a frugal foray, her first response on opening the front door to find the furniture agley then going into the drawing room to discover drawers pulled out, contents scattered, was to look up in horror at the portrait of her husband, draped in black crepe, that scowled accusingly down at her; her second action was to scream.