Only silence followed and one or two of the sitters shifted in their chairs, either out of embarrassment or discomfort.
Suddenly, the medium’s eyes opened—they were blue, almost faded to grey—and for a moment I thought she was looking directly at me. But before I could speak, she invoked the name again.
“Andrew?”
Now I looked over my shoulder, thinking Andrew’s spirit might be standing behind me. There was nothing there. But I thought something might have moved somewhere in the shadows.
“It is you, Andrew, I can hear you telling me your name,” came the trembling voice of the thin woman.
At the table, other eyes opened and heads turned in my direction. I returned my gaze to the shadows behind me again.
There was definite movement, something looming larger, a shadow disassociating itself from other shadows. Although impossible, I swear I felt the hairs on the back of my neck bristle. Like a slowly developing photoprint, a face began to appear, followed by the shoulders.
It was hard to focus on it at first, because the shape was nebulous, the features hazy. But with more encouragement from the medium, it began to resolve itself. Soon I was able to tell that the face belonged to an elderly man, his hair white, but his skin relatively unlined, as if the troubles of this world had not followed him into the next.
“So many,” I heard the medium say. “There are so many present today, all with messages for their loved ones.”
Sighs, gasps, even some moans came from the group around the table. I could feel a tension and it felt like a precursor to hysteria. I was pretty near the edge myself.
I half-thought that when the medium had remarked that there were so many present today she was referring to the sitters, but when I looked past the emerging apparition, I noticed that there were others taking form behind it. The leader was the clearest, even if on occasions the image wavered and threatened to disappear, along with his more timid companions, who continued to linger behind him.
“So many,” the medium said again, with something like gratitude in her shaky voice. I turned to her once more and she was smiling, mouth open, thin lips pulled back to reveal yellow teeth. The smile failed to warm her expression; in fact, the smile was almost a rictus. “Come forward,” she intoned, “we’re waiting for your communication.”
By now, I’d backed away a little, not wanting to get between the medium and her ethereal guests. But these looming ghosts had frozen in their manifestation. I saw faces, pale, wide-eyed faces, faces that most definitely were from a realm other than this, because there was nothing solid about them, nothing of substance, only vaporous incarnations. Bizarrely, they looked frightened of me.
They reversed their development, began to be absorbed by the shadows, consumed by them, their gaze never leaving me. I opened my mouth to say something, but I couldn’t think what. Call them back? Tell them I was one of them? In that instant, I knew the truth of it: I wasn’t one of them, not a ghost, not as I should be. Nevertheless, I held out a beseeching hand; wherever they were going, I wanted to go with them. But disbelief was evident on their waning faces, joining the fear already there, making me feel an abomination.
My God. It suddenly struck me that I was haunting ghosts.
“Please don’t leave us.” It was the desperate reedy voice of the medium. “Your loved ones are waiting to hear from you. Andrew, tell me what’s wrong so that I can reassure you. We are all as one in this room and wish you no harm.”
Distracted, I turned to her, and when I looked back at the apparitions, they were all but gone, just dispersing mists. Except for one.
I wasn’t sure if it had stood its ground, or if it was a new spirit, freshly arrived at the seance and had not yet become aware of my presence. But that couldn’t be, because he was looking directly at me.
There was something familiar about him and I suddenly realized why: he was the spook I’d noticed on the small rise at my funeral. He had been familiar then, but still I could not remember how I knew him. If alive, he would have been just past middle age, somewhere in his middle or late forties, because there was knowledge in his eyes, and experience in his features. His hair was full but almost colourless, and he wore a suit, a little crumpled, but not shabby; he also had on a white shirt with a dark tie (his suit and tie were too vague to suggest any other colour than grey). I knew this man. I knew this man.
A warmth denied to me since my demise emanated from him. I lost my own trepidation, if not my astonishment, as I watched the spectre become clearer, grey flushing to weak colours, the image itself more clearly rendered. I saw that his tie was red, his suit brown.
He smiled—at me—and the warmth engulfed me. His mouth opened to speak.
But the voice came from behind me.
“Jimmy.”
It wasn’t his voice, for it was female, high-pitched and querulous. I looked back at the medium once again as she spoke my name three times.
“Jimmy… Jimmy… Jimmy…”
I hadn’t been called that since I was a child.
“You must listen to me.”
Too surprised to know where to look now, my eyes went from sitters to ghost, ghost to sitters. The medium’s mouth moved again and I noticed her lips were wet with spit.
“You must go back, Jimmy,” she said and only then did it dawn on me that the apparition was talking to me through the bird-like woman, whose hands remained flat on the velvet cloth, her end-fingers still in contact with other hands around the table. It was her voice, yet it wasn’t quite the same as before when she had called to the spirit named Andrew. For some reason breath vapour was emerging from her mouth with the words, as if the temperature in the room had suddenly sunk dramatically, something I couldn’t actually feel myself.
The other sitters were looking at each other with perplexed expressions.
“Who’s Jimmy?” I heard one of them ask. There was a general shaking of heads, a few negative murmurs.
“I’m Jim—he means me,” I said, perhaps hoping that the medium, with her sensing powers, might hear me.
It was plain that she didn’t, for her head rolled round her shoulders, the pupils of her pale-blue eyes disappeared up into her head; she froze, her back arched, her scrawny neck stretched to its limit. For a moment, I thought she might topple, but her hands remained firmly on the tabletop.
“She can’t hear you, Jimmy.” The words came from the same source, the medium herself, but I knew they were from the ghostly man behind me. Turning directly to him, I saw his eyes were still on me, the woman a mere conductor for his message. Shapes cowered at his back, the other ghosts wavering in image and, apparently, wavering with fear also; I could feel it emanating from them. I should have been the one to be afraid and I couldn’t help but shake my head at the anomaly, even though I wasn’t quite without fear myself.
“What… who are you?” I asked, hardly expecting a reply—I’d become too used to being ignored nowadays.
There was a tenderness in his smile. I saw that his eyes were blue, his hair brown but greying. I knew this man.
“That doesn’t matter for now,” I heard the medium say over my shoulder, but the man’s lips forming the words. “You must go back, Jimmy. You must go back and stop him. Many others will die if you don’t.”
“Stop who? D’you mean Oliver, the friend who murdered me?”
A look of dismay swept over his ghostly features. “No. The one who lives in shadows, the one whose soul is black. You’ve already met this person, Jimmy, you must put an end to these murders. Find the person who has no face again.”
Somehow I knew instantly who he meant even before the medium spoke.
“The one with the scissors,” she said, while the apparition formed the words.
The man who clipped news stories from the papers. The man who lived in the gloomy basement flat. The man with the horribly disfigured face. Rather, the man without a face.
“No.” It was a one-word refusal from me. No way did I want to visit that grotesque again. Leave him undisturbed. Leave him to his own obsessions. Even though I was beyond harm these days, the thought of returning
