—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.
'God in heaven, it's him, it's him,' Lady Nicholson moaned. The sight leveled her, not into despondency but a rapt, febrile alertness.
More details of the unearthly daguerreotype emerged: A small stream ran through the forest bed a few feet from where the boy was lying on a frost-tinged carpet of leaves. The rope that held the boy's wrists extended to a low-lying branch of the adjacent tree. The woods thickened behind him, clustering, evergreens. An object lay on the ground near the boy's feet: small, square, man-made: a can, bearing the letters ... GUI...
'Willie!' she cried.
'Where is he? Where is he?' the brother demanded, his attempt to generate outrage mitigated by dumbstruck astonishment.
Lost inwardly, the medium offered no response.
'Tell us!' the brother demanded, and he meant to speak further, but the air in the room was rent by a shattering, discordant blast of trumpets, an insane trilling, bound by no discernible harmony or rhythm. Doyle felt stunned, assaulted, pinned down by the oppressive weight of the vibrations.
'The horn of Gabriel!' shrieked the man to Doyle's left.
Now something black and odious crept into the edge of the image suspended above them: A shadow felt more than seen, oiled, foul and malignant, gathering mass without seeming to coalesce, the presence insinuated itself into the vision, seeping through the spectral wood, advancing toward the helpless child.
An inescapable conviction that he had witnessed this entity the night before in the hall outside his door left Doyle groping vainly for some rational causation. His mind snouted at him: This means not Death but Annihilation.
The cacophonous nightmare grew deafening. A long brass horn appeared in the air, opposite the picture, bobbing erratically. Now that's their first mistake—Doyle seized purchase
on the thought. Could he detect a telltale flash of filament at the trumpet's bell?
Drawing itself into a hungry spiral around the boy, the phantom sucked the last bit of light from the vision, swallowing the sound of his cries, on the verge of consuming him whole. Lady Nicholson screamed.
Doyle sprang to his feet and yanked his hands free. He picked up his chair and hurled it at the image; it shattered like liquid glass, dispersing and sputtering into emptiness. Its suspending cables severed; the brass trumpet clattered noisily onto the table.
Rolling to avoid the blow he knew was coming, Doyle felt the fist of the man to his left connect sharply below his shoulder blade. In one swift move, Doyle snatched the trumpet from the table and swung it viciously up and around, catching the man square on the side of the face. Blood spurted from a gash as he stumbled and fell to his knees.
'Villains!' Doyle shouted, galvanized. He reached into his pocket for the revolver when a heavy blow landed on the right side of his neck, paralyzing his searching hand and arm. He turned to see the Dark Man lift a leaded truncheon to strike again and raised his left arm to fend it off.
'Fool!' The voice issued from the medium. Grinning maliciously, eyes blazing, she swiftly rose straight up into the air above the table. Distracted, the Dark Man turned to face her, truncheon still raised. Doyle felt the hands of the wounded man grab him roughly from behind.
'You fancy yourself a seeker of truth?' the medium mocked him.
She held out her palms, the skin roiled and rippled with hideous subcutaneous congestion. When she opened her mouth, a flowing volume of gray aqueous vapor billowed forth from both mouth and hands. Suspended in the air, the vapor traced the outline and then filled in the image of a full-length frame mirror. As the surface of the mirror refined itself, the medium's reflection appeared in the spectral glass.
'Then behold my true face.'
Out of the void behind her likeness in the mirror floated another form, dim and indistinct, which settled on and then imposed itself over the medium's reflection, pouring into it like water saturating sand, until all that remained was an en-
tirely new visage: a skull-like creature with red, runny, abscessed sockets for eyes, skin gray and in many places gnawed down to the bone, writhing pockets of black stringy hair sprouting from more than the usual places. Independent of the medium, who remained still, merely smiling, the creature looked down at Doyle and opened the spoiled cavity that served as its mouth. Its voice was the one they had been hearing all along, but it now came
