The Clairvoyant Curse Read Online Free PDF Page A

door after them and then began fussing over the dressing
table, straightening the ivory combs and silver hair brushes,
smoothing the elaborate hair pieces, including a stunning scarlet
wig, tidying the maquillage, the ribbons, and the various glittery
bits and bobs arrayed in velvet trays. Ah, yes, the spirit world
provided for a comfortable material existence.
    Reclining presciently on a silk
divan was the porcelain-cheeked Empress still wearing her stage
make-up in a stage-crafted scene: the languid aristocrat in repose.
Draped across her outstretched legs was a paisley cashmere shawl,
heavily fringed, artfully arranged.
    “Please be seated,” purred
Madame Moghra. “I have been expecting you.”
    “And we have been expecting you
to expect us,” parried the Countess with more than a trace of
irony, picturing a mythical chimera concealed beneath the regal
blanket, a hybrid creature with the head of a lion, the body of a
goat and the tail of a serpent, a grafted goddess who knew how to
appeal to the dark side of human imagination. Khimaira originally
meant she-goat, before the connotation became unflattering, long
before this tripartite She-creature came down from the mountain and
chose to dwell in the world of the living-dead, making death her
life’s work.
    Madame Moghra was a woman of
indeterminate age, anywhere between fifty and eighty, a woman who
had lavished several lifetimes of care upon herself. Her head was
held aloft like the noble head of a lion crowned by a bouffant mane
of white hair, piled up right-royally like Marie Antoinette before
her untidy fall from grace. The less flattering might have likened
the fanciful coif to a puffy meringue or fluffy choufleur ,
but none could have denied it was a chimerical work of art. Her
voice was a soft purr but the Countess could easily imagine when
the goddess was displeased how the purr might morph into a
devouring growl. Her shoulders were slender for she was not a heavy
set woman, yet neither frail, she looked strong and hardy and had
that determined, stubborn look of the goat in her eyes. Her legs
were crossed at the ankles making the two seem like one, like a
serpent’s tail, or perhaps a fish’s tail, for that was the other
meaning of Chimaeridae – it denoted a member of the fish
family.
    “We meet again, Dr Watson.” The
lioness purred in such a way as to pack the innocent observation
with obscure meaning.
    The doctor returned a politely
rictus grin. It made him look like a smiling corpse. The Countess
was as yet unaware that it was the skulduddery of Madame Moghra
that had prompted her friend to join the Ghost Club and he had
never forgiven himself nor forgotten her.
    The lioness had inflicted the
first wound, it was a coup de grace. She smiled vindictively and
turned to her next victim.
    “Countess Volodymyrovna, it is
both an honour and a pleasure to meet you at long last. I was
acquainted with your late step-aunt, Countess Zoya Volodymyrovna. I
met her in St Petersburg the year I toured Russia and then again a
second time in Montenegro a few years later. She was a great
believer in the spirit world.”
    “Indeed,” smiled the Countess
beatifically. “How else could mad monks hold such sway over the
nobility? Superstition is the lifeblood of the Slavs. Pagans at
heart, they see gods in everything. The forest and the river, the
birch and the oak, will always hold more awe for them than a Greek
temple or Roman basilica. Why else would Homer have called Ukraine
the country of dreams? Why else would Ovid have designated it the
Gateway to Hades? Why else would he have believed it to be the land
where Cerberus dwelled and where Medea collected aconites for her
poison potions? Why else would Donn be the name of the Celtic god
of the Underworld? And when the Vikings wanted somewhere to stage
their myths, why, where else but west of the river Don – the
playground of the gods, where the Vanir battled it out with Aesir?
It is where the mythic meme was