Emperor Norton's Ghost Page 2

  I did not find Patrick’s words particularly reassuring. The older I grow, the more experience has caused me to question the commonly held belief that good in the end triumphs over bad, or evil. I watched the medium—she was having a time of it, as if to prove my point. No more of that harsh laughter came from her throat, but she had begun to growl. Yes, growl, and snarl, like a dog. Her mouth simply hung open and the sounds poured out of it. The extreme oddity of this gave me the shivers. Her eyes were open too, fixed on nothing. Her head slumped in an unnatural posture against one shoulder, as if her neck had been broken, and a shudder passed through me as I remembered that awful pop.

  I closed my eyes, concentrating, willing the boy ghost Toby to come through. But it was no use; Frances distracted me with her rocking and, besides, the medium began to bark! A fierce, raucous barking that might have been funny but wasn’t. My eyes flew open. The barks apparently had jerked Mrs. Locke out of her slump; at least her neck wasn’t broken. But now she was being tossed about like a rag doll, held in her place at the table only by her hands still linked to Frances and one of the terrified middle-aged women. This was most bizarre!

  Madame Blob wheezed uncontrollably—I was becoming alarmed for her. The middle-aged sisters gawked at the medium’s antics less with terror now than consternation, and Patrick called out: “Break the circle! Drop hands immediately! Our dear Mrs. Locke is in trouble!”

  There was a good deal of gasping, plus a terminal-sounding wheeze from Madame Blob, while hands were dropped all around the table like hot potatoes. The medium continued to bark, sporadically now, and with less ferocity. But Frances would not let go my hand, nor Mrs. Locke’s. Frances still was rocking, and I whipped my head around to regard her in alarm.

  Her eyes were screwed shut, and the strain I felt in her iron grip was written on her features. Above the lace of her collar, the cords of her neck stood out. Her lips were drawn back from her teeth in a grimace, and her chin thrust forward. Suddenly, on the forward apex of her rock, she went rigid.

  I thought: She is in trance!

  The candle flame trembled and came dangerously close to extinguishing itself—although there was not a breath, not a whisper of moving air in the room.

  The medium let loose another flurry of barks.

  Patrick came hurrying around the table to plant himself between the medium and Frances, urging sotto voce, “Let go! Something has gone terribly wrong, you must let go!” He attempted to pry my friend’s fingers from Mrs. Locke’s hand, and I did not know what to do. I worried that somehow his interference might injure them in some way, as they now seemed both to be in the same unnatural state, but what did I know of these things? The very air was charged, and my skin all over little prickles. I hadn’t the slightest idea what was going on.

  As I fretted over what to do, Frances opened both her eyes and her mouth, and a deep, rough voice, not at all like her own, came from her throat: “Lazarus, come away from there!”

  This caused more gasping all around. The medium whined once and fell back in her chair, Frances fell forward onto the table, all of a sudden limp as a wet noodle, and I had my hand back. So, one assumed, must Mrs. Locke.

  Sounding the paragon of reason, at least to my own ears, I remarked, “We need more light to help us ascertain what has happened here.”

  “A moment, a moment.” Patrick hovered over Mrs. Locke, but I could not see what he was doing because his back was to me. As no one else volunteered to light the wall sconces, we still had no illumination but the one candle. I did not want to leave my friend’s side. With Patrick so solicitous of his own friend, employer, mistress—perhaps she was to him all three—I turned my attention to Frances as best I could in the near dark.

  I placed my hand on the center of her back below the shoulder blades and found that she was breathing slowly and regularly. Somebody said, “Oh dear,” and someone else said, “Well I never!” and the man next to me rumbled, “We oughter get our money back if that’s all there’s gonna be to it.” I put my head near hers and called softly, “Frances, can you hear me?” I repeated this several times, with no result whatever.

  Mrs. Locke, however, had recovered and was holding a whispered conference with her solicitous confederate. He straightened up and said, “Mrs. Locke requests that you all keep your seats.” Then he went about relighting the candles in the wall sconces. I reflected, as I rubbed Frances’s back, how much simpler it would be if they had electric lighting in this place. Or even gas, though now that I have been away from it for a while, I daresay gaslight smells rather unpleasant.

  The sense of disturbance around the table subsided somewhat, and I became gradually uncomfortable from everyone’s staring at me and Frances. Everyone except Mrs. Locke, who had her hand to her head, obscuring her eyes, in a pose I thought overdramatic. My skepticism had returned; I wondered if some piece of elaborate chicanery had gone wrong, injuring an innocent in the process—for Frances was still out cold. My suspicions made me bold, and I addressed the medium directly, for surely if anyone were in charge it was she!

  “Mrs. Locke,” I said, then waited until her hand descended from its pose. Except for the fact that some of her hair had escaped its pins, she seemed none the worse for her recent experience. The blank expression had reclaimed her face; she looked like a life-sized doll. She did not look at me or in any way acknowledge my address, but I went on nevertheless: “Perhaps you can tell me what to do for my friend? She seemed to go into trance along with you. Surely we must bring her around!”

  Slowly, and a little jerkily, like one of the automatons in Mr. Sutro’s Palace, the medium turned her head upon her neck—just her head, the rest of her body did not move a jot—until her face met mine. I watched anger build up in her dark eyes, which she then proceeded to unleash on me and poor unconscious Frances.

  “Get out!” Mrs. Locke shrilled. “Get out of here, both of you! How dare you come to one of my séances under false pretenses! You have created a disruption on the etheric plane, disturbed the vibrations, and caused a breach with my contact in the spirit world. You must go. Now!”

  2

  ———

  Into the Fray

  But how,” asked my friend Michael Kossoff, who used to call himself by the pseudonymous surname Archer, “could you leave there with Mrs. McFadden unconscious, or in a trance, or whatever it was?”

  I stretched my stocking-clad feet toward the fire luxuriously, rotating my ankles. Now that the experience was all behind me, it made a good story, and from the other end of the couch Michael listened intently while I continued: “Patrick, the man with the face like a hawk, carried her to the auto. Frances was in a trance, that is for certain. It was no ordinary faint. And besides”—having toasted them sufficiently, I tucked my feet beneath me, Indian style, and leaned back in the cushions—“I heard her myself speaking in that strange voice. It really was the most peculiar thing!”

  “Hmm,” said Michael, frowning and drawing his black eyebrows together in an ominous fashion.

  “Oh dear,” I said, “I hate it when you do that.”

  “My dear Fremont,” he said, still frowning, “I am not doing anything.”

  “Well of course you are!” I reached over, stretching my arm until my fingertips touched his forehead, and then I rubbed away the puckers between his shapely brows. “You are frowning and saying Hmm in a way that means, I shall have to look into this matter. I will not have you investigating my friends, Michael! It won’t do.”

  He seized my hand and kissed my fingers. A quite delicious thrill went through me and I grew much warmer than could be accounted for by the fire alone. Then he began, by tugging on the hand he’d trapped, to pull me toward him. His frown was gone but one of those expressive eyebrows arched sharply up and he said, “With your record for making peculiar friends, the bestowing of your friendship should, in itself, be sufficient to warrant an investigation.”

  “You include yourself in that observation, of course.”

/>   “Not really.” He tucked me under his arm, and I rested my cheek upon his chest. He was wearing a smoking jacket over pajamas, having bathed while I was out at the séance with Frances, and he smelled of Pears soap.

  “Oh?” I angled my head the better to look up at his face. It is quite a distinguished face—especially since he has grown his beard back—but sometimes I miss that surprising little dent in his chin. “I suppose you think you are not peculiar?”

  He chuckled and his eyes danced. “I think, rather, that I am not about to investigate myself, and your own as yet rudimentary investigatory skills would not get you very far if you were to turn them on me.”

  “Is that so?” I reached stealthily behind me, seized upon a small needlepoint pillow, and then in one fluid motion sat up and bashed him with it. This aggressive act brought on a flurry of physical contact that ended with us both naked, sated, on the hearthrug in front of the fire.

  After that, spirits and séances did not seem at all important.

  ———

  I awoke in my own bed, with that distressing feeling of having slept too late—though how one knows one has slept too late before even being awake enough to see the clock, I have no idea. It is one of life’s little mysteries that has yet to yield itself to my assiduous probing. A glance at the clock provided confirmation; nevertheless I took the time to gaze fondly at the tousled, dark head on the pillow beside me before I nudged its owner with my elbow.

  “Michael, wake up. We’ve slept too long!”

  He growled and groused, but as he was making little noises I knew he was awake. Regretfully—I do so hate getting up in the morning—I slipped from under the covers before he could reach for me, for if I did not, we would soon make ourselves even later. I thrust my feet into my slippers and grabbed my robe from the bedpost, belting it around me as I went to the window and looked out.

  Fog still shrouded the hills, but from this north-facing window I glimpsed a glow through the mist, proof that the sun would soon break through. Every morning when I got up, the first thing I did was to come to this window and give thanks for being back in San Francisco. While the Monterey Peninsula had been an interesting and beautiful place to spend most of the previous year, this was better. This was my true home. Even if our big, Italianate double house at the north end of Divisadero Street did belong mostly to Michael.

  Michael shuffled over to me, wrapped his arms around my rib cage just below my breasts, and dropped his head into the curve between my neck and shoulder. His lips fastened on my skin and he rumbled like a rusty old cat: “If you would marry me, Fremont, I wouldn’t have to spend so many blasted mornings going clear back to my side of the house to get dressed.”

  “Hush!” I replied affectionately, giving him a peck on the head and a little shove toward the door. “If you were at all serious, you’d never mention marriage at this time of day, when I’m most likely to refuse whatever’s on offer. I’ll make our coffee downstairs in the office this morning. We don’t want to miss any clients.”

  “God forbid!” Michael yawned and stretched and rubbed his eyes, but I did not feel in the least sorry for him. I knew once he’d washed his face and brushed his teeth he would be wide awake and bursting with energy much sooner than I. In the doorway he turned and said, “I suppose I’m elected to go to the bakery for muffins, then? No chance of a real cooked breakfast?”

  “There isn’t time.”

  Michael went off into the hallway muttering something about changing the hour of opening to ten o’clock, but I knew he would never do it. A certain percentage of the (admittedly few) clients we have already had find it necessary to stop by our office before going to their own work. Therefore we open every day, except Sunday, at eight-thirty. I myself would prefer a later hour, but it is not practical.

  Our business, which has been in existence for roughly six months, is called the J&K Agency: J and K standing for Jones and Kossoff, of course. Our card, and the brass oval on the front door at my side—the north side—of our double house provide slightly more information about the nature of our business:

  THE J&K AGENCY

  DISCREET INQUIRIES

  J&K was Michael’s idea: He claims that with the agency we can capitalize on my natural talent and his own acquired skills. (For complex reasons having to do with family and circumstance, Michael has been a spy for most of his life; but for the past couple of years he has been trying, with some success, to extricate himself from spying.) I cannot argue with his reasoning, and have been happy that he is teaching me the rudiments of the investigatory process—though I daresay I could learn quite a lot faster than Michael is willing to teach. It is only the discreet part of this inquiry business that consistently gives me trouble.

  Fortunately we have one already well-trained employee, a young man (well, I suppose he is about my own age, but somehow he seems younger) named Aloysius Stephenson. He prefers, for obvious reasons, to be called Wish. Wish is one of those rare individuals who are too honest for their own good, and therefore it was not difficult for Michael and me to lure him away from his job with the San Francisco Police Department, where he was forever getting himself into hot water.

  The three of us do well together. Michael is, as it were, the head honcho of our little outfit, being both chief adviser and principal investor. I am more or less an indentured servant, having signed a promissory note to Michael for one third of the house (corresponding to the part I live in) and one half the cost of starting up the business. This was necessary if we were to be partners, for I have no means of my own until I come into my inheritance—a thought not to be borne as in itself it implies my father’s death. Sometimes the one-sidedness of our supposed partnership does bother me.

  It was bothering me now, as I twisted my reddish-brown hair into a coil and pinned it into a figure eight at the nape of my neck. I frowned at myself in the mirror, feeling suddenly giddy and disoriented by the riskiness of my refusal to marry. For Michael could change his mind, withdraw his support, dissolve our partnership at any time, without damage to himself; whereas I …

  “No,” I said aloud, “this train of thought will not do!” I finished dressing, took a last look in the mirror, pinched my cheeks to give them color, and headed downstairs. As I went, I reminded myself that, even should the worst happen and Michael grow tired of me, I would be no worse off than I had been before accepting his proposal that we make a partnership of our lives and our work. Actually, I should be better off for the excellent training Michael was giving me—soon I should be able to snoop and spy and detect along with the best of the professionals. And of course I still had my typewriter.

  I trailed my hand over that dear machine as I passed the desk where I kept the records and typed up the reports. When my training period was over, and we had sufficient business to warrant it, we would hire a secretary. But for the moment I served in that capacity as well as junior investigator. Wish was senior investigator. Michael preferred to remain behind the scenes, in his advisory capacity.

  The downstairs of my side of the double house constituted J&K’s office suite. The front parlor was for reception and initial interviews, the dining room provided a conference room, the morning or breakfast room had become Michael’s private sanctum; but the kitchen was still a kitchen and that was where all three of us—Michael, Wish, and I—spent most of our time. The hands of the big Regulator clock on the kitchen wall clicked into the eight o’clock position as I spooned ground coffee into the percolator, and I thought, In half an hour Wish will be along, and I will ask him what he knows about Mr. McFadden, Frances’s husband.

  ———

  “Jeremy McFadden,” Wish Stephenson said, then paused to blow across the top of his coffee cup, “lives in one of those big houses over thataway a few blocks.” He waved his long, lanky arm vaguely in the direction of Van Ness Avenue.

  “I know where they live, Wish,” I said impatiently. “I want to know more about the man himself. What he’s like. What he does f
or a living, who his friends are, that kind of thing.” And why his wife is so afraid of him, I added silently.

  There was a part of the séance story that I had not told Michael the previous night. With some help from the redoubtable Patrick, Frances had come out of her trance shortly after we had arranged her, sitting upright, in the passenger seat of Michael’s Maxwell automobile. She had seemed fine, yet I’d insisted on accompanying her into her house for a restorative cup of tea. I wanted to be sure she was completely well before going on my way. And she had seemed to be, aside from the curious fact that she could not remember anything about the medium’s barking, or her own odd utterance of “Lazarus, come away from there!” I was, of course, dying to know more about this Lazarus. In my imagination I saw him shrouded, emerging from the grave; but the words associated with that vision were “Come forth!” not “Come away.”

  At any rate, Frances became quite animated as we drank our tea. Her cheeks regained their color and her eyes their usual spark. I was reassured, until we heard the sound of a door—a heavy one, probably the front—opening, followed by ponderous footsteps in the hall, at which point all color drained from my friend’s face. She said, “Oh no!” in a strangled voice, shoved her tea—the cup rattling in its saucer—onto the table, grabbed my arm in a hard grip, and pulled me close.

  “He wasn’t supposed to be back for hours! You mustn’t tell him where we’ve been,” she said in a terrified whisper. “He can’t know, he must never know I left the house after dark!”

  Frances stood up just as those heavy steps reached the arched entry to the parlor where we sat. Before my very eyes I watched a remarkable transformation in her countenance as she composed herself. Though her skin remained pale, her face smoothed out into placidity, she lifted her chin and turned as she clasped her hands together in front of her to stop their trembling. “Mr. McFadden,” she said formally to her husband, and as I rose I wondered if she always called him thus, “this is my friend Mrs. Jones, who has stopped by on an errand of mercy.”