The Seance Read Online Free PDF Page A

began to speak in a gruff man’s voice, greeted by Mr Ayrton as ‘Captain Veasey’. The messages were commonplace but affecting; Mr Carmichael, for instance, was told that Lucy was watching over him as always, and that his ‘present difficulty’ would resolve itself very soon, whereupon he gave a great wheezing sigh, almost a sob, and bowed his head. Everyone in the circle received a message, and I saw how the sitters hung upon every word. The message for me was ‘Alma says you have done right’, and even though I knew that Mrs Veasey’s trance was feigned– indeed I thought her left eyelid quivered very slightly as she (or rather the Captain) spoke – it still brought a lump to my throat.
    She had ceased to speak, and I thought the séance had ended, when her eyes, which had been closed throughout the performance, flew open, apparently fixed upon an invisible object floating somewhere above the table.
    ‘Alma,’ said the Captain’s harsh voice, ‘Alma will speak through Constance.’
    There was a collective gasp from the sitters; the hair rose upon the back of my neck. Mrs Veasey started violently, and seemed to become conscious of her surroundings.
    ‘Miss Langton,’ she said hoarsely, ‘you must do as he bids. Close your eyes, and summon the image of your sister.’
    Her voice was urgent, peremptory; I could not tell whether she was feigning or not. I closed my eyes, feeling my companions’ hands trembling in mine, and tried to fix my mind upon Alma. After a little I became aware of a faint buzzing vibration running up my arms and through my body.
    ‘I can feel the power,’ said Mrs Veasey. ‘Is there anybody here?’
    It is only pins and needles, I told myself fearfully, willing the vibration to stop. But it seemed to me that words were welling up in my throat, threatening to choke me if I did not speak, and to forestall the sensation I began to chant in my Alma-voice, as I had done the other evening, sounds to the tune of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, and slowly the tension relaxed and my hands ceased to tremble.
    ‘Alma,’ said Mrs Veasey, ‘tell us why you have come.’ The hoarseness had left her voice.
    ‘For Mama,’ I piped.
    ‘You have a message for your Mama?’
    ‘Tell Mama . . .’ I paused, thinking rapidly. ‘Tell Mama . . . safe in heaven. Tell Mama to come here.’
    ‘We shall. And – would you like to speak to anyone else?’
    I did not reply, but lapsed back into my chanting, letting it gradually die away, and a few moments later pretended to wake.

    Three days later, my mother emerged blinking into the light. Though she was not yet sixty, she might have been my great-grandmother, clad in a frayed mourning-dress of rusty brown and clinging tightly to my arm. Her expression, as she gazed about her, was bewildered but strangely incurious, and I became aware that she could not actually see the things I was pointing at; she had grown so short-sighted that her world had shrunk to a circle a few feet across.
    Mrs Veasey had told me privately that she felt sure Alma would want to speak through me again, and thus it proved. I felt my mother’s hand quivering in mine as I began to sing in my Alma-voice, and though she asked more or less the same questions, and received more or less the same answers, as on the first evening in the drawing-room, she was still in tears of joy when the performance ended. We remained for some time afterwards talking to Mr and Mrs Ayrton, who had lost both their sons to the cholera, and I invited them to tea the following week, thinking that all would be well.
    And so for a while it seemed. Mama remained obsessed with Alma to the exclusion of all else – she refused to be fitted with spectacles on the ground that there was nothing she needed to see – but I was so delighted to see her in company, I did not care that the talk was all of bereavements in this world and joyful reunions in the next. The Society met twice a week, and in between