The House of Velvet and Glass Read Online Free PDF Page A

us. No matter what happens, we pledge to honor you!”
    A low rumbling filled the room, indistinct. Sibyl’s heartbeat quickened.
    “What are you trying to say to us, spirit?” Mrs. Dee asked. “Are you sad? Could you be angry?”
    Sibyl gasped and straightened in her seat. She thought the table had shifted under her hands.
    “O spirit!” Mrs. Dee said, her voice rising. “We feel your anger! Your life was over too soon! We hear your anguish!”
    Sibyl’s heart thudded in her chest, astonished, her mouth falling open, and she fought to keep her eyes sealed shut. For the table was pressing against the backs of her hands. A sudden lurch, and without warning one side of the table lifted itself, then fell back to the floor with a thunk . Sibyl cried out, and gasps echoed around the room. Now the other side of the table rose, carrying the séance-holders’ hands with it, then threw itself back to the floor. First one side, then the other, until the table was rocking back and forth with gusto, as though on board a ship tossed at sea. The table shook into a crescendo of fury, the clutched hands of the supplicants hopping and slapping against its surface. Then, abruptly, it stopped.
    Sibyl felt her palms grown clammy with sweat. Around the table, small sighs could be heard as held breath was let go. The hands gripping Sibyl’s loosened. For a moment, silence reigned.
    “We may never know whose anger we have just seen,” said Mrs. Dee, her voice steady and reassuring. “For he has gone without a further word. But we can rest assured that merely in allowing him to share his distress with us, we’ve brought comfort to a suffering soul.”
    Murmurs of satisfaction encircled the table, and Sibyl shivered with the exquisite pleasure that comes from confronting fear. The table-tipping was the most substantial manifestation she had witnessed in all her years attending Mrs. Dee’s gatherings. She wondered whose spirit had visited them. But it was a man. It couldn’t have been Helen. Or Eulah. They would never have been so angry. In public, anyway.
    “We have such time and energy gathered here, that I feel one more spirit yearning to commune with us. Everyone, please turn your gaze to the center of the table.”
    Sibyl obeyed, excited, zeroing her gaze on the blackness before her. The harder her eyes focused, the deeper the darkness grew. The hands clutching hers on the tabletop tightened their grip, and she felt one of her knuckles shift under the pressure.
    After a time, the quality of the darkness seemed to change. She frowned. She thought she could see the faintest gathering of light, coalescing in the space just above the table. The light wasn’t strong enough to reach the faces of the supplicants, but it was there. After a time the faint light began to resolve into an indistinct shape.
    Everyone around the table was seeing it, too, Sibyl could tell, because she could hear the others breathing. She swallowed, trying to identify the shape. Could it be a face?
    Once, years ago, Helen had returned home from one of Mrs. Dee’s evenings breathless with wonder, exclaiming that they’d witnessed a full-form manifestation right there in the living room, of a tiny girl, swathed in sheets, who hovered just out of reach, and vanished. Her father scoffed from behind his newspaper, but Sibyl, a girl of seventeen at the time, first turning her mind to questions of death, was moved by the account. And Eulah! Eulah, a little girl herself then, demanded Helen tell them about the tiny girl again and again. How tall was she? Were the sheets very dirty? Did they blow in an invisible wind? Imagine—a full-figure visitation from the beyond, seen with her mother’s very own eyes! Sibyl’s breathing tightened, her eyes hunting forward in the dark.
    With wonder Sibyl perceived that it was a woman’s hand. Fully formed, hovering, attached to nothing. A gasp of awe emanated from the group around the table as the ghostly white hand hung before