Authors: Mark Latham
The séance was unlike anything I had expected. There was no table-rapping—nor was there a table to rap upon—no Ouija boards, nor crystal balls either. Instead, the four girls sat facing each other, eyes closed and hands joined together, and muttering all the time in their language. Occasionally the boy in the corner scribbled a note, or seemed to sketch something, though it was difficult to tell what he might usefully be doing in such poor light and with his eyes closed. I was reminded of the Artist, and tried to repress a shudder. A few times one of the girls would speak more loudly, sometimes in Romani, sometimes Spanish and occasionally English. To my surprise, it was Drina who took the lead, not Rosanna—the younger girl was assured and forthright in her statements, directing her sisters and sometimes crying out as if in protest, warning away some dark spirit or other that seemed to be plaguing her.
It was difficult for me to fully embrace what I was witnessing at that point. I had no doubt that the gypsies believed wholeheartedly in their endeavours, but as half an hour and more passed by in the same manner I became increasingly of the opinion that I would learn nothing of use from the sisters. That opinion very soon changed.
I remember growing very tired, and rubbing my eyes to keep sleep at bay whilst all the time the whispering and chanting filled my ears. Then I heard another voice join the throng, as if there was someone new joining in the séance. At this I looked up, and could not believe my own eyes. Elsbet sat in her place with her four sisters, between Rosanna and Nadya, illuminated only by the weak candlelight. Her back was to me, but I knew it was her. She wore the bloodied yellow dress in which she had died, and her form seemed to grow from the very shadows, almost absorbing the wan light from the candles. A chill ran through my veins. I rose to my feet and took a tentative step forward, to convince myself that I was awake and not dreaming, and that the apparition was really in the room with us.
The moment I stepped towards the circle of sisters, an icy gush of air was sucked into the tent through the flap behind me, causing me to stop in my tracks. The candles guttered and went out, one by one, leaving only the glowing wicks and a smell of sulphur on the air. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, and I glanced over my shoulder as if expecting another spirit to be looming behind me, and was relieved to find nothing but the flap of the tent rustling in the uncanny breeze. Then I heard a whisper cut the air like a knife, and I slowly turned back to the circle.
‘We are one.’
The whisper was so familiar, a phrase from my dreams. And all the sisters spoke it, in unison. They had slipped from the land of the living into a realm of shadow; I had not really believed it possible, but at that moment I was convinced of it. Elsbet was still in their midst, her ghostly hands clasped tight around her sisters. Her body, if the word applies, was almost invisible in the darkness of the tent, but her skin seemed to glow with a translucence that transferred itself to the pure white garments of her sisters, making them shimmer in the gloom as if the girls were all phantoms sent to haunt me.
The Irishman stopped scribbling abruptly, and all was silent. As my eye adjusted to the darkness, I saw my breath misting on the unnaturally cold air. I shivered. And then the sisters began to speak—sometimes together, sometimes in turn. They stared straight ahead, blankly and unblinking, focused on something that no ordinary mortal could see.
‘We are one. One against the coming storm.’
‘We will all be caught in its wrath. There is no escape. It is as certain as the tides.’
‘Unless…’ This time one voice rang out. It was Drina. ‘Unless the dragon comes.’
‘He is afraid,’ said Rosanna. ‘He cannot do the thing that he knows he must. We will be consumed. All will be flames, and the dragon will burn with the rest.’
No.
I could not see the speaker’s lips, but I heard the whisper, as soft and chill as winter’s first snow, cutting through the other voices and silencing her sisters. It was Elsbet.
He is afraid. He is a child. He is the son of the dragon. But he can succeed where others have failed. He must join us, for without knowledge he is nothing. With the Sight he is our only hope.
As Elsbet’s voice left my mind, I realised that I had been transfixed, staring into space like the gypsy girls before me. I did not know how much time had passed, but I blinked myself back to the present, and realised also that the four living sisters were now looking directly at me. The fifth, the shade, still had her back to me, but now the head turned to look over her shoulder. Her dark hair seemed to float out of the way as she moved inexorably slowly, as if she were lying in a deep pool of water. The side of her face came into view—her skin, once dark, was now pale as ivory. I saw her lips, cracked and blue, parted sensually as if she were still in a trance. And then the eyes opened… good Christ, those eyes; wide and black, like the dead eyes of a shark. They flicked upon me, and I could not suppress a murmur of fear. I was paralysed as the spirit beheld me.
In an instant, my mind was filled with such visions as I could not bear. Fires burned; a pair of dragons wheeled and fought in a red sky; a great city—London, perhaps—was host to a grotesque carnival, with men and women cavorting in painted masks while all around them buildings burned; a monstrous spider rose from a burning river, bringing death to everything it touched with its massive legs. Men fought with rifle and bayonet—men of all nations died in droves. And through it all, at the heart of chaos, was a golden arc of light, a portal of such cyclopean magnitude and brilliance that no living thing could approach it—yet through it came a gibbering horde of monsters that were the bane of men, and harbingers of the end of all things. I closed my eyes tight as I wrestled with the painful succession of images, and opened them only when the visions had stopped.
Elsbet was gone. Rosanna and Nadya held out their hands towards me.
‘Come,’ said Rosanna. ‘Join us and see for yourself.’
I could not have been less inclined to sit beside two such pretty girls if I had tried, but I took my place—Elsbet’s place—all the same, and linked hands with them.
The whispering began again. The girls rocked back and forth; the Irishman scribbled. At first, I experienced nothing whatsoever, and felt rather foolish. Had I imagined the manifestation? I was certainly over-tired, and the atmosphere of the tent was frowsty and dreamlike. I very soon felt that my foolishness was not my vision, but my scepticism, as Drina shouted out:
‘He comes! He who died and has risen again—he comes to destroy our world by fire!’
She had to be referring to Lazarus. I blurted out: ‘When? Where?’ and received a hard squeeze of my hand from Rosanna.
‘He is the old dragon,’ Drina continued, in a voice that did not sound like her own. It was deep and guttural, and did not seem to come from her throat at all. I glanced at her, and saw that her eyelids flickered, and behind them her eyes were rolled back showing only bloodshot whites. ‘The old dragon is empty inside. He is the destroyer of worlds and the healer of worlds. He has seen his realm burn, and seeks to burn ours and everyone within it. Only the young dragon can stop him, but he does not have the strength. So we are doomed; it is foreseen.’
‘It is foreseen,’ the other sisters whispered in unison.
I wanted to ask further questions, but there was something terrible in the aspect of Drina, and I felt that further interruption might either break the spell or do her harm. I had heard too many tales of mesmerism gone awry, or spiritualist trances broken without a thought for the mental well-being of the medium. Whether I fully believed such reports or not, it seemed wrong to test the theory here.
‘Our doom is written,’ Drina eventually continued, almost in a whisper. ‘It comes on a most auspicious day. As the witch-fires die to embers, the dragon will come through the ancient arches, and set the very river awash with fire and death. Beyond that, there is nothing. Only darkness awaits us.’
I felt my spine tingle. The sisters were staring at me—not fully conscious, I think. Then I realised that they were not actually beholding me at all, but were looking through me, or past me. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end once more, and I am ashamed to say that I was gripped by fear. I battled the funk as best I could, and turned my head to see what they were all looking at. And then I saw the scene from earlier in reverse. I was staring towards the tent door, and standing there was a tall shadow, blurry and indistinct at first.
Where had previously been an empty tent, cast in darkness, there was now a cascade of shimmering, dancing lights, of red, purple and green. As we watched, a pinprick of brilliant white light appeared in the centre of the display, and began to widen in a circle, eating into the rest of the iridescent lights like a burning hole in a piece of paper. As the circle grew bigger, the brilliant white began to fade, until soon the entire vista was like a large window looking upon another place entirely, blurred at first as though we were gazing upon a scene through ill-matched spectacles, but eventually clearing. I rubbed at my eye, and tried to convince myself that I was hallucinating, but I was not. I stood, disengaging from the circle of gypsy girls, and stepped towards the queer image that now filled the tent, as though it had been cut in twain. The image shimmered occasionally, like a pool of water rippling in a breeze, but otherwise it was quite clear, and I was dismayed.
I peered not into a gypsy tent, or even into the Kentish fields beyond, but into a large hospital ward. Upon thirty or more spindly stretchers lay patients, in great distress. I could not hear them, but I could see that they were crying out, or mouthing words with a look of agony etched on their faces. All of them were strapped down, like lunatics; tubes fed into their arms, and most had a mesh of wires attached to their part-shaven heads, running to strange machinery at their bedsides. Nurses ran this way and that to attend to each patient, while men in long white coats stood next to the machines, making notes based on the sequence of flashing lights and twitching needles that perhaps only they could decipher.
My eyes was drawn through the disturbing scene to the patient nearest to me—so near that I felt I could reach out and touch her, though the thought that this ‘window’ could be a tear in the veil, such as was experienced by William James, prevented me from doing so. The patient, a young girl, was all too familiar. Though her head was shaven and her features drawn and gaunt, I recognised Elsbet at once. A girl of sixteen, imprisoned and experimented upon, screaming in terror at her tormentors. I knew that feeling; it was all too recent in my mind.
And watching over it all, in the centre of the ward with his back to us all, was a figure quite apart from the others. A man dressed all in black, with flint-grey hair poking from beneath a Derby hat. Lazarus. My breath caught as I realised at once what I was looking upon. This was not a tear in the veil; how could it be? I was seeing not the far side of my present location, but some other place entirely, and those upon whom I spied could neither see me, nor the means of my surveillance. Or so I thought.
It began with the girl. Elsbet quietened abruptly, and though her head was restrained, fixed forward by a harsh metal brace, her eyes flicked towards me. The others followed suit; every one of them—psychics all, I assumed—stopped their screaming and struggling, and stared at the corner of the ward at the invisible spy. The incorporeal mirror through which I watched began to ripple more ardently, and finally I saw, with growing dread, the man in black turned to see what had distracted his subjects so. For a moment, his eyes met mine. Lazarus saw me, or felt my presence, I was sure of it. It was then that a sound began to emanate from the mirror—a high-pitched whine. Lazarus squinted, and scowled, and through some inexplicable means I knew we were undone. Over the noise, something else caught my attention; something worse.
All around the spectral image, the shadows flurried and gathered, tendrils of smoke-like blackness forming all around it. I saw—I think I saw—tiny, clawed hands in their hundreds scrabbling at the edges of the ethereal window; at the very edges of reality. I stepped back in terror, as the mirror began to peel away, and myriad tiny eyes peered at me from the space between. Something was ripping its way into our world from another universe entirely; I could feel it, gnawing inside me, screaming in my mind.
We are one.
The cacophony of demonic howls and screeches mingled with the whining sound of Otherside devices, and I understood at last the forces with which we dabbled. The forces that the Othersiders sought to escape.
I turned at once to the sisters, and took Nadya by the shoulders and shook her, though she would not at first be roused. The noise grew louder, reaching fever pitch. Whether it was the sisters’ doing, or the psychics from the other side, I felt that the veil was about to tear, with dire consequences.
‘Wake them!’ I shouted to the Irishman, who stood gawping at the darkness; he saw something too. ‘Do it now, for God’s sake!’
He hesitated, not sure whether to flee, to resist me, or obey me. Finally, he moved between the girls, shaking them awake while muttering something in a language I could not fathom. The sisters blinked, half-awake; the whining noise subsided instantly. I breathed a sigh of relief, and turned back to find the shimmering mirror gone.
But in its place, standing in the darkness, was Elsbet. Her face, luminescent and dreadfully pale, seemed to loom from the shadows. Her movements were awkward, jerky, and she started to walk towards us, each step like a snapping motion, as though her limbs were not her own. The wraith drew nearer, and I could not take my eyes off it. My morbid terror held me, petrified. The spirit’s eyes, black as night, remained fixed on mine during her advance. Soon she stood over me, and her raven-black garb seemed nought but a cloak of mist and shadow, enveloping me, choking the breath from my body. I began to panic, as I felt caught up in a tumult of cloistering darkness and smoke.