Seduction: A Novel of Suspense (28 page)

“It was exciting to stay up late with Grandpapa,” Minerva said. “He was so proud of us, don’t you remember that?”

“Not at all. Proud? No.”

“When did the séances finally stop?” Theo asked.

Minerva answered quickly. “When we were nine and eleven.”

“They stopped because our grandfather died,“ Eva said very softly. She took a long sip from her glass, then got up, walked over to the fireplace, picked up a poker and shoved a log so hard sparks sputtered out.

There was something not being said. Jac knew silences like these. Had lived with them in her own family, when her mother was having an affair and her father had found out. Those silences had grown longer as the marriage broke apart piece by piece. Until her mother decided to embrace that silence forever.

“And the last time you used the board was the night before Henri died?” Theo asked.

“The night he died,” Minerva said.

Without any explanation, Eva turned and walked out of the room. Jac listened to the sound of her retreating footsteps and the ice tinkling in her glass.

Minerva stood by the table, looking down at the wooden board as if it alone would resolve the tension.

Jac had thought Eva had left for the evening, but her footsteps on the parquet were returning. When she came back she was holding two glasses. In addition to her drink, she carried a small juice glass about three inches high with a floral pattern etched around its ring. It was a sweet-looking glass, the kind you’d fill with orange juice and drink in a sun-filled kitchen while fresh croissants cooked in the oven and coffee brewed.

“You’ve always wanted to do this,” Eva said, holding the glass out to her sister.

“But you don’t want to.”

“No, I don’t. I don’t need the memories. But I need you to see that nothing will happen. You’ve always wanted to believe that we’d tapped into that cosmic collective unconscious you’re forever talking about. You have held on to the belief that he was giving us some kind of gift. Once and for all you will know he manipulated us, Minerva. And you will forgive me.”

“There is nothing to forgive you for.”

“Don’t lie to me. Ever. It’s disingenuous and does not become you.”

“What are you talking about?” Theo asked.

Neither sister seemed to have heard him.

“Why would he have manipulated us?” Minerva asked Eva. “What are you talking about?”

Now the positions were reversed. She was the less sure sister, the one who seemed nervous.

“To scare us,” Eva whispered.

“Why would he want us scared?”

“You of all people should know the answer to that. You are a therapist. Are you really that blind to your own family history?”

Jac felt that she was intruding. That she shouldn’t be there. She was also confused about why this conversation was happening now. Theo had told her the two sisters had lived in this house together for the last twenty years. Eva had never married, never left. Minerva had married and moved to London and had a child, but after divorcing her husband she’d moved back to Wells in Wood in the 1990s. Was it really possible these two women had avoided this conversation for so long?

“Why did he want us scared?” Minerva asked again. Jac heard a young confused girl in the old woman’s voice.

“You really don’t know?” Eva sounded astonished.

“No.”

“He scared us so he could hold us under the pretense of comforting us. He’d been doing it to me all along. I’d become too mature for him. He was shifting his interest to you.”

Minerva stared at Eva, horrified by the suggestion.

Jac could see that she didn’t believe her.

For a few moments there was silence. Minerva got up and walked over to the windows. She stood, staring out into the darkness. The quiet continued for several more moments.

Eva was still holding on to the glass. “We need to do this, Minerva. I need to show you. We should have done it years ago.”

Minerva didn’t turn around.

Eva stood and walked to her sister. “It won’t go away. We’ll just be putting it off.” Eva took her sister by the arm, turned her around and led her toward the card table. Minerva didn’t fight her.

“Theo, come and sit down,” Eva said. She looked at Jac. “You’ll join us, won’t you?”

Eva and Theo sat on either side of Minerva. Jac faced her. Once all
four of them were seated, Minerva looked around the room as if she was searching for something.

“What is it?” Eva asked.

“If we are going to do this . . .” She got up and shut off the electric lights. Then taking a box of matches off the mantel, she lit the tapers in the candelabra. The slight smell of sulfur wafted through the air. Minerva carried the flickering flames with her toward the table. A nimbus of iridescent light haloed each candle. Suddenly the present receded into the past and Jac felt as if she’d stepped into another era. The room had been made for candlelight, she thought. For this soft glow and these shadows. For alcoves where mysteries could hide.

“This is how I remember it looking,” Minerva said, as she set the candelabra down.

Eva gave a sour laugh. “Yes, like a stage set. Our grandfather was very much the dramatist. He played the role of a mystical seeker of wisdom so well. It was so very exotic. Other children had grandfathers who were farmers or storekeepers or bankers, but ours was an eccentric.”

“How did he die?” Theo asked. “I don’t think I know that. Is it possible you never mentioned it?”

The candlelight flickered on the walls.

Almost involuntarily, it seemed to Jac, Minerva glanced at the door to the hallway and the sweeping marble staircase.

“He tripped and fell down the stairs—” Minerva said.

Eva interrupted her sister, her voice ghostlike and far away. “And he broke his neck. He died instantly.”

“How terrible,” Jac said, “for both of you.”

“Yes, terrible,” Eva said in the same distant voice. “Grandfather’s death was terrible in every way. Except one.” She paused. “There were no more séances.”

For a long moment there was only the sound of the surf beating against the rocks.

Then Eva put the glass on the board and gave instructions. “All right. Everyone put one finger on the glass. Like this.” Her movements seemed tentative, as if she expected to be burned by its surface.

The glass was cool and smooth where Jac touched it and almost felt as if it were vibrating. Theo placed his forefinger next to hers. In his other hand was a pen poised expectantly over a pad of paper.

Minerva hesitated. “Eva, are you sure?”

“Aren’t you the one who always says we should confront our ghosts?” She laughed bitterly.

Minerva put her finger on the glass and completed the fourth.

The candles flickered. A breeze floated through the room, and with it came a cacophony of scents. There was the candle’s paraffin. Eva’s lily of the valley perfume. Minerva’s spicy Oriental. The eucalyptus, honey, cinnamon and oakmoss in Theo’s scent. Mixed in with all the perfumes and cologne, Jac smelled age. Burnt wood. Ash. Mold. Years passing. She felt as if she were speeding through a tunnel of scent. Aware of each as it whooshed by her.

“Is there . . . is there anyone here with us?” Eva asked in a hesitant voice.

“That’s exactly what Grandpapa would say,” Minerva said softly, almost as if she were a little in awe of her older sister.

“Is there? Is there anyone here with us?” Eva repeated. Her voice was a bit bolder now.

The glass didn’t move.

Eva repeated her question one more time. Now she sounded almost gleeful. As if she was proving her point.

Jac saw Theo’s eyes were focused on the board. So were Minerva’s.

For the fourth time, Eva repeated her question. Now it was mocking, strident. “Is there anyone here with us?”

The glass stayed on the edge of the board. Eva’s mouth turned up into a smug smile.

Theo seemed disappointed.

Minerva wasn’t paying attention to any of them but staring down at their fingers on the top of the glass. “I know you are here,” she whispered in a voice devoid of suspicion. “I can feel you. I remember you.”

And with that the glass began to tremble.

At first Jac thought it was Eva’s anger, which contorted her face, that was making the glass move. But no, her finger wasn’t shaking.
None of their fingers were pushing it. That was totally clear to Jac. The glass really was moving, pulling them along with it.

Racing, the juice glass slid back and forth across the board, stopping at letters so fast that Theo—who had offered to write them down with his right hand—could barely keep up.

I . . . T . . . H . . . A . . . S . . . B . . . E . . . E . . . N . . . A . . . V . . . E . . . R . . . Y . . . L . . . O . . . N . . . G . . . T . . . I . . . M . . . E . . .

Under her breath, Minerva whispered each word as she figured it out.

Jac was trying to work them out, but Minerva was faster.

“Yes,” Minerva said, “it has been a very long time.”

A . . . B . . . A . . . N . . . D . . . O . . . N . . . E . . . D . . . M . . . E . . . A . . . N . . . D . . . O . . . U . . . R . . . G . . . A . . . M . . . E . . .

The logs crackled in the fireplace. Heaved, then hissed. The room filled with the scent of damp earth. Of smoke. Of fire.

Minerva’s face was a study in exaltation. Eva was pale and looked unwell.

“Who are you?” Minerva whispered.

Y . . . O . . . U . . . K . . . N . . . O . . . W . . .

“Yes, I know. But say your name. Grandpapa always made you say your name.”

S . . . H . . . A . . . D . . . O . . . W . . . O . . . F . . . T . . . H . . . E . . . S . . . E . . . P . . . U . . . L . . . C . . . H . . . E . . . R . . .

The glass was moving too fast. Minerva had stopped saying the words. Jac leaned over to read what Theo had written down on the pad.

Shadow of the Sepulcher.

“You gave us a different name before,” Minerva said. “What was that name?”

O . . . F . . . T . . . H . . . E . . . T . . . O . . . M . . . B . . .

“Why did my grandfather want to reach you? What did he want from you?” Minerva asked.

H . . . E . . . W . . . A . . . N . . . T . . . E . . . D . . . M . . . Y . . . A . . . N . . . S . . . W . . . E . . . R . . . S . . . T . . . O . . . K . . . N . . . O . . . W . . . S . . . E . . . C . . . R . . . E . . . T . . . S . . .

“What secrets?” Minerva asked.

Suddenly the glass stopped moving. Jac thought the air in the room and the flames in the fireplace had stilled too.

And then suddenly, the glass took off. Skittering across the board as if it had some kind of palsy. Theo barely kept up as he tried to catch every letter.

A log in the fireplace cracked and crashed. A window frame creaked. The glass kept racing. A door slammed. The glass zigzagged back across the board. A high keening seemed to seep from the floor, almost as if the house were moaning.

“It’s the wind,” Eva murmured, but she sounded as if she were trying to convince herself. “It’s just the wind.”

Jac watched the glass jerking from right to left and then back again. Beneath her fingers, it felt alive. With a mind of its own.

After another twenty or thirty seconds, the glass slid all the way to the left, past the edge of the board, right off it and onto the table and then off the table. They all lost touch with it. It should have fallen. But it didn’t. Not yet. For a few seconds the simple floral-patterned juice glass floated in the air.

Another moan escaped from the parquet. The glass fell and crashed. Dozens of shards caught in the candlelight, sparkled.

On the other side of the room, a framed photograph fell off the wall almost at the same time. Smashing on the floor, its glass shattered too.

Eva let out a small shriek and began to whimper.

Minerva leaned over and put her arms around her sister, speaking to her softly, trying to comfort her. Eva was crying now. Like a child, Jac thought.

Theo rose, hurried across the room and switched on the lights. Then he picked up the photograph and stared down at it. His brows knit. His eyes narrowed.

Jac walked over to look.

It was a very old and faded back-and-white photograph. A man wearing a formal suit stood on the rocks, looking off into the distance. Behind him was a view of the sea. Something was not right with the image, but Jac couldn’t figure it out for a few seconds. Then she
realized. His right foot was positioned strangely. Bent at the ankle, it was angled in an unnatural way. It couldn’t have been easy to balance on the rocks to begin with—but even more difficult to do it with a foot positioned like that, pointing down.

Along the bottom of the image were four words written in script in faded ink.

Victor Hugo in Exile.

Minerva was helping her sister, who was still crying, out of the room. Once they had left and were well out of earshot, Jac asked Theo what the glass had spelled out in that last burst of frenzied activity.

Still holding the photograph, Theo went back to the table. As he figured out the words, he read them.

He scared . . . you to . . . comfort you. That was how . . . I seduced him. I have other ways to seduce other men. Some have succumbed . . . some I have lost. I will not lose you.

I am a rational man. I live in exile because of what I believe: that the church and the clergy are evil oppressors. That they use the fear of the unknown to control those who are uneducated. I believe in the rights of the individual and that the government is corrupt and not dedicated to its citizens.

And yet I am seeing ghosts and am talking to spirits. I believe Lucifer himself is visiting me. I am certain that I have opened a door to another realm where spirits live and somehow are able to speak through me. I write what they say with this ink on this paper, but I hear it first.

I am in dire emotional and mental trouble and do not know where to turn.

I have a responsibility to those who have followed me to this island, who have left behind all that was comfortable. In Paris, I relinquished a library of a thousand books, paintings, sculptures, furniture and money—millions of francs—because of my protest against injustice. It cannot come to pass that I have done all this to myself and others only to lose my ability to reason, to think, to make some sense of existence.