The Seance Read Online Free PDF Page B

large circular table, but richly carpeted. Candles burned upon the table and within an alcove in the far corner. The alcove was about six feet square, with heavy curtains draped from the ceiling to the floor, tied back at the front to show that there was nothing inside except a plain upright chair.
    When all the places had been taken (there were, I think, about fifteen of us), Miss Carver herself appeared, and all the gentlemen rose to their feet and bowed. She was certainly pretty; small and buxom and fair, with her hair plaited and wound about her head, and clad in a plain white muslin gown. Miss Lester introduced us one by one; the sitters were more elaborately and expensively dressed than Mrs Veasey’s, but the onlyname I would recall was that of Mr Thorne, a tall, fair-haired young man sitting across the table from me. Something in his expression – a hint of sardonic amusement? – attracted my attention, and I noticed that Miss Carver looked very hard at him when his turn came to be introduced.
    I knew that in these séances the medium sat within the cabinet, but I was surprised when, at a signal from Miss Carver, several of the gentlemen (but not Mr Thorne) accompanied her to the alcove and watched while Miss Lester, using what appeared to be silk scarves, tied her securely to the chair. The knots were examined; the gentlemen returned to their places; Miss Lester extinguished the light in the cabinet, drew the curtains, and asked us all to join hands. ‘You must not break the circle unless a spirit invites you to,’ she said. ‘The manifestations are a great strain for Miss Carver, and she may be harmed if you do not do exactly as instructed.’ She then invited us to sing ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’, took up the candelabra and went quietly from the room, leaving us in complete darkness.
    We had sung perhaps half a dozen hymns, led by a strong baritone voice somewhere on my right, when I became aware of a faint glow from the direction of the cabinet. It brightened into a luminous halo, hovering around the outline of a head, and seemed to unfurl downward into the figure of a woman, veiled in draperies of light. She glided away from the cabinet and began a circuit of the table. As she came nearer I could see the movement of her limbs beneath the veil, and then the gleam of eyes and the suggestion of a smile. Her effect was manifest in the quickened breathing of my companions.
    ‘Arabella,’ said a male voice from the darkness to my left, ‘will you come to me?’
    She passed behind my chair, trailing a distinct odour of perfume (and, I thought, of flesh), drifted closer to the table until the man who had spoken was faintly illuminated by the glow of her robes, and kissed the top of his bald head, prompting a deep sigh from the audience before she glided away again. She had gone about three-quarters of the wayround when I heard a muffled exclamation and the scrape of a chair, and another light floated up from the darkness in front of her: a small phial of radiance, lighting up the face of Mr Thorne as he stretched out his other hand and grasped the retreating spirit by the wrist.
    ‘There is no need to struggle, Miss Carver,’ he said drily. ‘My name is Vernon Raphael, from the Society for Psychical Research. Would you care to explain yourself to the company?’
    The room was suddenly in uproar. My hands were released, chairs were overthrown, and several matches flared, showing Mr Thorne – or rather Mr Raphael – holding at arm’s length a very angry Miss Carver, whose stays and drawers were plainly visible beneath diaphanous layers of what appeared to be butter muslin. A second later she had torn herself free and darted back into the cabinet, wrenching the curtains closed behind her.
    I expected the sitters to drag her out again, but to my astonishment several of the men seized Vernon Raphael instead, calling his intervention an outrage and a violation and a damned disgrace as they propelled him