William Sewell

There was absolute silence for a moment; even the owls fell silent and the wind stilled.  Then there was the soft tread of a shod foot on grass, and a young man walked into the circle of light cast by the candle.  He had floppy dark hair that fell over one eye, but his other eye was glinting and mischievous even in the candle-light.  He was wearing a white shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, and a soft red jacket that might have been velvet and was definitely too thin for the chill night air.  He showed no sign of the cold, and it was only when he turned his head to look at both of them that Janet saw the bullet hole behind his ear.

“Who commands me?” asked the young man in a voice that was both quiet and chilling to listen to.  Janet shivered, feeling as though cold fingers were walking along her spine, and her legs and arms felt unnaturally heavy.  “I am William Sewell, and I am here.  But I ask, why am I here?”

The séantist pointed a dirty finger as Janet.  “She bids you come, she would question you,” he said, his voice still firm and resonant.  “She would hear a dead man’s answer.”

“And who are you, chick?”  The man had an Irish accent she realised, but it was mostly hidden under a learned pronunciation.

“I am Janet O’Steen,” she said, lifting her head and jutting her chin forward.  “I am–“

“Ireland’s foremost logodisciplinarian,” said William, and there was a hint of admiration in his voice.  He smiled, his teeth dazzlingly white.  “I have heard of you, of course.  I am flattered that you would ask to speak with me, though this is hardly the way I would have chosen to meet you.”

“You shot yourself,” said Janet.  “It’s not like you didn’t have a choice now.”

The séantist started coughing violently, doubling up as his did so, and Janet shot him an annoyed look that he missed.  William Sewell looked a tiny bit taken aback and brushed the hair away from his face.  When he did so it revealed that his other eye was missing, all that was left was the dark socket and skin patterned as though with sooty ivy.

“I rather believe I did not have a choice,” he said, and Janet cut him off with a snort.

“Of course you had a choice,” she said.  “You had a fiancée and a brother, for all he’d run off with the fairies, and you had a wee addiction to laudanum, which I found is nothing but wine and painkillers.  You could have put the drink down, picked the pen up, and written some more.  The reviews of your poetry were getting hysterical at that point, your public would have bought any old crap you’d written.  You could have sold your shopping list for all the taste and discernment they were showing!”

“I did used to write them in hexameter,” said William nodding.  “But the addiction was a real and terrible thin–“

“It was a painkiller addiction,” snapped Janet.  “Good lord, these days everybody and his mistress has had at least two by the time they’re thirty, and there’s clinics to sort you out and send you back into the real world with a certificate to say you’re a bona fide celebrity now.  You were already a celebrity, all you had to do was put the cup down and write!”

“There were no clinics in my day!”  William was shouting now, both hands on his hips, and his hair was being mussed by a wind that neither Janet nor the séantist could feel.  “I was desperate and I was exhausted!  I didn’t want to be there anymore!”

“So you ran away and left your poor fiancée to rot in that house on the high fell, until your brother came home and married her out of sympathy.”

“What is your question, woman?  Have you summoned me here simply to berate me for the choices I made in my life, a life that is now over by fifty years, I might add?”  Out of the corner of her eye Janet could see the séantist nodding, while holding his hands over his mouth.  She suspected that his earlier coughing fit might now have been just covering up laughter.  She put her own hands on her hips, and stared William Sewell directly in his eye-socket.  Something white, it might have been a maggot, moved inside it.

“Before you died,” she said, “ you wrote a last manuscript, a suite of poems that described your feelings and why you made those choices.  That manuscript was posted to your fiancée who showed them to your brother and to a couple of other people, mostly low-class men that she was sleeping with for money, and then she put it somewhere safe.  So safe that no-one’s found it since.  I want to know where that manuscript is now.”

“Why don’t you summon my fiancée and ask her?”  William stared back at Janet, determined not to lose the staring contest.

“She did,” said the séantist suddenly, his voice still deep and resonant.  “And your brother.  And then your father, to complain about your brother.”

“You’ve spoken to daddy?” William looked suddenly uncomfortable.  “What kind of woman are you?”

“Determined,” said Janet quickly, getting in before the séantist.  He looked slightly crestfallen.  “So where’s the manuscript?”

“Why was poor Clarissa sleeping with low-class men for money when she was married to my brother?” William looked as though he was only just hearing what Janet had said for the first time.

“He ran straight back off with the fairies,” said Janet.  “He only married her so that the family name wouldn’t be tainted by your killing yourself.”

“But what he was doing was–“

“Aye,” said Janet.  “But that was less shameful, at least in his eyes.  The manuscript, ghost.  Where is it?”

“If I tell you, it cannot be published like it is.  It must be edited first.”

“Of course!  I’m not releasing the unedited version, that wouldn’t make me any money.  I will edit them myself.  You were always sloppy with your metre anyway, and I wouldn’t want to be associated with anyone who tried to make brougham and croon rhyme.”

“You have a wicked tongue in you head, chick.”  William shook his own head.  “Well then, I shall tell you, and you shall promise never to summon me back from the dead again.”

“Fine,” said Janet.  “Hanging around graveyards in the middle of the night isn’t my cup of tea anyway.  Tell me.”

Turning tables I

Madame Sosotris huffed and puffed as she scrubbed the wooden table.  The table rocked and rattled; its legs were uneven after years of being dragged around a rough-planked floor with no consideration.  Madame Sosotris didn’t particularly mind, as its occasional tilts and jolts added atmosphere when she was reading Tarot cards for people.  It was more of a nuisance when she was eating soup, but she’d taken to eating that standing up in the kitchen as the soul of a chicken that she’d accidentally imbued into her cast-iron frying pan was summoned by the smell of fresh soup and would cluck around the kitchen for hours if she didn’t exorcise it immediately.  She huffed and puffed some more, scrubbing away at what she hoped wasn’t a bloodstain.  Her dress fell open and her breasts sagged across the table, but she didn’t notice.  Her mind was concentrating on the performance ahead.

The door shuddered under the weight of the blows hammering on it, and Madame Sosotris’s head snapped up like she wanted whiplash.  She looked at the grubby cloth in her hand and tossed it in the fireplace, where it sprawled across cold logs.  She swaggered to the door and flung it open, stretching her face into a slightly manic grin.

“Welcome!” she shouted.  “Welcome one and… one?”

The woman – short, dumpy, wearing a maid’s uniform – looked rather shocked, and it took Madame Sosotris several long seconds to realise that she was feeling a draft from her dress blowing yet further open in the brisk breeze.  She clutched her clothes about her, and tried hard to glare her embarrassment away.

“Who are you?” she said.  “I was expecting milords and miladies for the table turning.”

“I was sent to find out if you were ready yet,” said the dumpy woman.  Her face was scarred with ringworm and her nose looked as though it had been eaten away by something.  Madame Sosotris couldn’t get close enough to confirm her suspicions that it was rats, so she contented herself with jumping to that conclusion instead.

“I am always ready,” she said, ignoring that nagging voice in the back of her mind that said that this ugly little woman was going to go back and tell them that she was dressed now and hadn’t been before.  “Skyclad or no, womb-born or zombie, I am always ready.”

“Right,” said the dumpy woman.  “I’ll go and tell the gentlefolk that you’re not wearing any knickers and that you want to see them anyway.”  Madame Sosotris responded by slamming the door in her face, and then hastily tying her dress back together.  Something important seemed to have ripped, so she pulled the sash-cord from the curtains and tied that firmly around her waist as well.  As she coughed with the sudden constriction, someone knocked on the door again.

“Welcome?” said Madame Sosotris, peering around the edge of the door, this time applying caution.  There were a group of people, all wearing heavy, hooded cloaks and acting edgy: they switched their weight from one foot to the other, swung their hoods from side to side trying to see if anyone was watching, and pushed closer to the door when it looked like it was opening.  Recognising their need, Madame Sosotris backed away, pulling the door open, and they flooded into her room.

“You may leave your cloaks on the couch,” said Madame Sosotris, gesturing in the direction of the paired couches that faced each other.  One looked mildewed, and the other only smelled like it.  The participants muttered amongst themselves, hoods being placed close together to keep the conversations private.  Eventually a consensus was reached, and they all left their cloaks on the floor and took a chair at the table.

“Welcome,” said Madame Sosotris again.  It crossed her mind that she was sounding like a broken record.  “We are here today to contact the spirit world.  Is there anyone in particular you wish to speak to?”

The men and women, beautiful people all, looked at one another, and their gaze said the same thing: Is this woman really this stupid?  And is she really wearing a curtain sash as a belt?

“We wish to speak to the fallen City Director,” said a man, whose name was known to everyone in the room, and whose face would be instantly recognised by anyone of the street.  Madame Sosotris, her face impassive, nodded.

“Let us join our hands,” she said.

The instant the last two hands connected the table shook and jolted as though there had been a small earthquake.  The men and women around the table looked at each other, their faces grey and apprehensive, and Madame Sosotris gasped.  She had started the movement with the pedals under her chair that lifted the table from the floor, but the rest of it had come from somewhere else entirely.  For the first time in a long time she felt afraid.

“Is there anyone there?” she said, her voice thinner and more whiney that she would have liked.  As if in response the table leapt, and the circle barely managed to keep the hands joined and above it.

“Arthur?” asked a woman sat at four o’clock relative to Madame Sosotris, and the table gyrated, grinding out a low growl against the floor.  “Oh Arthur!” said the woman.

“How do you know it’s him?” said a man sat next to her, his eyelids painted with blue false eyes.

“That’s his orgasm noise,” said the woman, and everyone shifted, feeling slightly uncomfortable.