Mean Spirit

imposed an illusion of warmth. Three walls were blotched with dark blood, brains, splintered bone, nuggets of foam rubber. Also one side of Grayle’s face and her hair. Which she didn’t yet know.

Maiden looked away, numb with shock, as Ron Foxworth’s stout copper’s heart went on pumping arterial blood through the borehole of his neck. He saw Seffi Callard pulling frantically at the door handle before turning back into the room with both hands over her face.

‘Come and sit down, love.’ Seward hooked a foot around the chair next to Grayle’s as Maiden worked out that he and Grayle and Seffi were still alive and uninjured because Seward had confined the blast by shoving both barrels hard into the fabric of the armchair, where it was plumped out into a headrest, the instant before he fired.

Seffi began to scream through her hands. Maiden wrenched in anguish at the hand locked to the dead hand of Ron Foxworth. Seffi bared her stricken face. ‘Christ, Bobby, what have I-?’

‘It’s not your fault,’ Maiden murmured. ‘Just do what he says.’

‘Bobby.’ Seward smiled again. ‘She called you Bobby. So you do know each other. Well, that helps no end, Seffi, because if you don’t come and sit down and do the business, the next one to go is Bobby hisself.’ He levelled his shotgun at Maiden, whose head snapped back instinctively. ‘Pffft!’ Seward raised the barrel, made like he was blowing away tendrils of drifting smoke. The cocktail of stenches in the room was foul. He didn’t seem to notice.

Daniel Dunglas-Home bent and pulled three feet of glowing ectoplasm from the mouth of Lady Colwall.

The cello music swelled to a shivering climax. Dunglas-Home held up the ectoplasm to applause.

It was a farce, a travesty. Dunglas-Home, as Cindy understood it, was slender and a touch camp. He was also very probably a genuine psychic, whose reputation had survived considerable scientific scrutiny.

This man was large and black-whiskered, a vulgar showman, and it was ridiculous and insulting to imagine that Dunglas-Home had done anything as cheap as producing ectoplasm tape from the orifices of a woman assistant, mediumistic or fake.

Tonight’s performance was clearly a cynical satire aimed at convincing the potential donors of tourism grants that the new Overcross enterprise was far from sinister and that Kurt Campbell and his associates remained untainted by the mystical gobbledegook purveyed by the stallholders in the grounds.

To genteel applause, Lady Colwall, middle-aged, attractive, endowed with an impressively Victorian decolletage, was assisted back into the audience.

From the doorway of the banqueting hall, with the New Age warriors behind him in the passage and the Great Hall, Cindy observed the more formal candlelit gathering.

Two long tables at right angles. The performance taking place in a dark space between and beyond them.

Here, there stood a leather chair and an octagonal table bearing a brass oil lamp, a bottle, a wineglass. The actor, the conjuror, sat down in the chair, laughed lightly as though to himself, poured himself a glass of red wine.

‘I was to make seven further appearances at Overcross, under the patronage of the hospitable, enthusiastic and — fortunately — wonderfully gullible Mr Barnaby Crole. And would have made many more had it not been for the arrival of’, the performer scowled, ‘the uncannily perceptive Dr Anthony Abblow.’

Kurt Campbell was at the head of the nearest of the two tables, his back to the doorway and to Cindy, his golden hair luxuriant over the collar of his white dinner jacket. His glass of after-dinner port half-full. There were about twenty other guests, some in Victorian costume, some in ordinary evening dress, two women in cocktail dresses. Neither of them — a last vain hope — was Grayle.

All right, then. Holding up a hand to restrain Maurice and the others, Cindy fluffed up his hair and padded across to tap Kurt lightly upon the shoulder.

Kurt turned, at first impatient and then exhibiting a delicious, slow-dawning shock.

Cindy smiled in the glow of five bright candles in a silver holder.

‘A quiet word, I think, boy,’ he said.

In wiping her mouth with her free hand, Grayle inadvertently touched something else on the side of her face and she howled in revulsion and vomited again, while aware of Seward moving silently, purposefully and taking her free hand. And when it was all gone, and her stomach felt sore and she was dry-retching, she looked up into a blurry image of Persephone Callard in the chair next to her and found that this hand was free no longer but handcuffed to Callard’s right hand and Callard’s left hand was linked to Bobby’s right.

And they were a complete circle now. Including the horrific corpse of Ron Foxworth. She couldn’t look at him, but she could feel the small hairs on the back of his hand against the back of her own.

This was a nightmare beyond all imaginable nightmares.

‘God forgive me, Grayle,’ Callard whispered. ‘I’m so very sorry. All this, I could’ve …’

‘Well, I apologize for that!’ Seward boomed. ‘It was for Clarence, really. I owed him. Gary Seward promised. You ladies can close your eyes if you want.’

The way he kept referring to himself in the third person. Like putting distance between himself and his actions — as if what Gary Seward had promised was already set in stone, out of his hands.

Seward stood outside the circle, his back to the door. Grayle heard Bobby say, ‘So you’re not joining us, then, Gary.’

‘Impractical, Bobby. Plus, Gary Seward, for all his many abilities, is not psychic. Went for these psychic lessons once, but it din’t work. This guru geezer, he says I “lacked the requisite humility”. Which was a load of old toffee. I mean, you look at Miss Persephone Callard here, how much humility’s she bleedin’ got?’

Grayle screamed, ‘Why don’t you just swallow both barrels now? ‘Cause you’re never, never, never gonna cover this one up. This is-’

England, she was going to say.

Seward ignored her anyway, addressed Callard. ‘Listen, you’d know about this. Don’t they say that lifeblood’s the great materializing agent, don’t they say that? This is gonna help even more, innit? I ain’t psychic but I can feel him coming, pushing at the curtain, know wha’ mean?’

Bobby said, ‘Why isn’t Campbell here?’

‘No need. He’s done his bit.’

‘Nothing to do with him being squeamish. Nothing to do with what he doesn’t know won’t-’

‘Shut up,’ Seward said. ‘First warning.’

‘Oh God.’ Grayle set her teeth, fighting for control.

‘You surely realize I can’t possibly do this now,’ Callard said.

Seward broke his shotgun, snapped it back together decisively. ‘You fucking will, my dear. Especially as all you got to do is say the words. You know the words. You say the words … and he’ll come.’

Except he won’t, Grayle thought. He won’t come at all. She’ll just think he’s come. This is what happens. She thinks he’s come. Kurt hypnotized her so that whenever she says that famous sentence, The lines are open, she believes he’s there. Clarence Judge.

Post-hypnotic suggestion, this was the term. And the rest of it, the smells, the cold air, the breakages were the physical results of what that suggestion triggered in Callard’s volatile psychic metabolism.

‘And because you are the best there is, you’ll make it so I can see him,’ Seward said.

Except you won’t. You can’t.

‘And when I get tired of waiting, I blow Bobby into the spirit world. Which don’t worry him greatly — he knows the way. All right. Hands on the table. Ron, too. Palms down, little fingers touching.’

Resting the gun barrel on Bobby Maiden’s shoulder, the mouth against his cheek, Seward began to separate Ron Foxworth’s fingers.

Seffi Callard shook her head. ‘You’re-’

‘And the next person here calls me insane, just to make it that little bit different, I’ll blow a hole the size of a football in Bobby’s stomach.’

He took a step back so that he could see them all. Opened the gun, peered at the cartridges, snapped it shut. Clack.

‘Persephone … don’t disappoint me.’

Seffi Callard’s mouth tightened. She looked despairingly at Bobby, then closed her eyes. In the silence, under