If You Are There Read online

  “Shall I go in?” Juliette asked.

  “Yes, go to her,” Charles replied urgently.

  Juliette got up and parted the curtain. “I’m here, my darling girl.”

  “Show them,” panted Alais.

  Juliette parted the curtain to show the sitters that Alais was still bound up with the ropes. She was writhing in the chair now, thrusting her breasts out and then her pelvis, moving to the limits of her constraints. “Examine me,” she gasped, pushing her pelvis against the ropes. “Show them there are no tricks. Hurry, my love, before it is too late.”

  Juliette stepped into the medium’s cabinet and closed the curtains—a shuffling of garments, whispered assurances, and the moaning began again. This time the pitch gradually climbed higher and higher while the volume intensified. The men kept their eyes averted. Perhaps if Alais Bonnet had been an attractive woman like Juliette Denis, their reaction might have been different. As it was, there was probably more than one who thought of escape that night, although no one made a move to leave. Finally Alais reached a kind of crisis, crying out as if startled by the intensity of her passion.

  Then nothing.

  In the ensuing silence an expectation seemed to take hold in the room. The men hardly moved in their seats. Outside they could hear a distant clatter of hooves retreating down the street. Juliette returned to the table, but not before closing the curtains behind her. After a moment something moved above the cabinet. Something was floating there, giving off a faint luminescence like a distant lamp. This time Gabriel was ready. He grabbed the Facile and the flash lamp and began to take pictures. By the light of the flash he was able to tell that it was the face of a woman wearing a hat, though her features were difficult to discern. The face shimmered like heat off pavement. The mouth opened slightly, showing sharp white teeth neatly spaced. Someone or something was singing an eerie melody in a child’s voice. The words made him shudder. It was a lullaby for a dead child, a call to return from the grave. A light wind blew through him and chilled him from the inside.

  When the singing stopped, the face began to fade.

  During the subsequent calm Gabriel was able to check the focus of the camera. Despite his trembling fingers he made sure that the Facile had been trained on the right spot. Everything seemed in order and he began to relax, to reflect on the wonder of it all. It all seemed so unbelievable. Yet, he had seen it, photographed it. He was not a religious man, nor was anyone in his family, but the idea that spirits existed in this world, in the world of the concrete, of boulevards and crowds, motorcars and electricity, fascinated and frightened him. He didn’t think much about death. Of course he knew that he was going to die, his brothers were going to die, and his parents and everyone he ever loved would die someday, just as Victor had. But maybe death wasn’t so final, only a transformation they had yet to understand and document.

  Gabriel remained alert to every sound: a rustling in the corner, a cool breeze on his cheek—something was waiting just out of sight. An orb began to materialize over the cabinet. It hung there, glowing like the moon behind the clouds. While the physicist wrote down every detail in his gray laboratory notebook, Gabriel took pictures from several angles. He was not so blinded by the flash that he couldn’t make out the spirit’s features: his well-tended beard, crooked nose, and shroud. His eyes were white without pupils and so brilliant they seemed to glow in the dark. They caught and held Gabriel, fearsome and penetrating. The spirit looked worried, as if he were about to voice some concern, but before he could say a word he disappeared.

  The room fell silent after that except for the hiss of the radiator. When the candles began to gutter again, Gabriel grew tense, his hand ready on the flash. Gradually, he became aware of muttering in the room. It was a male voice, deep and strangely matter-of-fact, like a member of an audience making an aside to his companion during a play. Gabriel knew it wasn’t one of the sitters. He could see them clearly and they were listening too. Charles silently signaled to the physicist and Gabriel could see him checking his pocket watch and marking down the time next to the entry. The muttering seemed to move around the room, the voice rising and falling, sounding ordinary and chilling. Then it began to grow louder; it sounded harsh, the words hard to make out. They seemed to come from another language, not Indo-European, perhaps Arabic. The sitters twisted in their seats, trying to locate the voice.

  From behind the curtain Alais began to whimper. “Turn up the lamps,” she cried. She screamed and everyone jumped.

  Juliette sprang to her feet. “Turn them up! Quick!” She took two long strides and whipped back the curtain. Charles rushed to the lamps and turned up the gas.

  “It’s him. He’s back.” Alais sobbed, struggling to get free.

  “Get her out of this,” Juliette said, fighting with the rope.

  Charles and another sitter worked as quickly as they could. Juliette talked to her in a soothing voice, stroking her head and eventually calming her down. When Alais was free Juliette held her while she explained to the sitters that a specter had been following them around, harassing Alais and disrupting the sittings.

  “He is such a nasty fellow. Died on the river. For some reason he has a grudge against her. He says he’s a relative, but she doesn’t believe him.”

  “He is horrible,” Alais said, her eyes filling with tears.

  “Don’t upset yourself, mouse,” Juliette murmured. She offered a hand to her companion. “Come along. It’s late. We have to get you home.”

  By the time the séance broke up, the trams had stopped running and the only way home was to walk or take a taxi. Since it was a cold September night, Charles offered to give Gabriel a room. Gabriel declined, saying he wanted to go home and develop the plates. So instead, Charles offered to pay for the taxi.

  Charles didn’t seem to notice Gabriel’s struggle as he shoved several coins into his brother’s palm, thanking him for his help. Charles was obviously pleased with the sitting; he said he was too excited to sleep that night and would probably wait up for the prints. Gabriel left his brother at the door, promising he would return in the morning as soon as he finished.

  There was the usual flurry when Gabriel got home that night and turned up the gas: Cockroaches scurried across the floor to the baseboards and disappeared into the walls. He was so used to them by now that he didn’t even bother smashing the slower ones. Instead he stepped over to the sideboard where photographic trays and bottles of chemicals sat among a chaotic jumble of books, paper, lumps of chalk, rulers, and mat knives. He shoved them all aside and got to work.

  While he measured out the chemicals for the developer and stop bath, he thought about what he had seen that night. It all seemed too histrionic to be real, and yet he couldn’t imagine how it was done. The medium seemed honest enough. Her performance, if that’s what it was called, seemed genuine. And he knew Juliette Denis. Yes, she was impulsive and frivolous, and might want to fool the scientists on a lark, but he doubted if she had the skill to put on a performance like that.

  Moreover, he wanted to believe in what he had seen. He wanted it to be true for selfish reasons. It would make a sensational story, it might even make a book, and he knew for a fact that Charles was looking for credibility for his new science. An article in Le Matin would go a long way in accomplishing that.

  Gabriel mixed the developer, measuring out the potassium bromide and the sodium hydroxide and then the acetic acid for the stop bath. After completing a series of test strips, he inserted a sheet of gaslight paper into the printing frame, laid the first plate on top emulsion side down, and turned up the gas to expose it for five seconds. After he developed the paper, stopped and fixed it, he held it with tongs and turned up the gas to get a good look. It was the face of a woman theatrically made up with a painted mouth and dark eyes outlined in heavy pencil. The features looked asymmetrical and flat, one eye was higher than the other and the mouth was unnaturally thin as if stretched too tight. Even in the photograph the skin looked incandes
cent. He was examining her hat, a cloche decorated with gold tassels, when he noticed two small letters just to the right of one of the tassels, LM.

  Charles picked up the first photograph and examined it carefully. Here was the woman in her cloche hat; here were the letters. Gabriel stood at his elbow admiring the photographs. He had to admit the print was technically good, the image was sharp, and the contrast couldn’t have been better considering the lack of available light.

  They were in Charles’s front parlor—an overstuffed affair with tasseled sofas, Japanese silk pillows, and a Chinese screen or two. Outside, the sun was high enough to make long shadows of the trees that lined the street; inside, the crisp morning light lit up the peacocks on the satin wallpaper.

  Charles brought the print over to the French doors to get a better look. “Oh yes, this is fine,” he said, holding it up. “This is good work.” It was still early and the family wasn’t yet awake. He looked tired and his clothes were rumpled for having slept in them. Gabriel felt the familiar tide of warmth that came with Charles’s praise; it was a heady sense of well-being that lasted only a moment but would be remembered long afterward.

  “What is this?” asked Charles, indicating the letters. “A watermark?”

  “It stands for Le Matin.”

  “Your newspaper?”

  Gabriel nodded. “It’s the exact image from last Tuesday’s paper. The morning edition. That is Edna Manning.”

  “The American actress?”

  “Yes. She’s here in Paris playing the Odéon. And she is very much alive. And here, look at this one.” Gabriel handed Charles the print of the old gentleman. “This is George I, king of Greece. Here is the original. I borrowed it from the paper’s archives on the way over.”

  Charles took the print and held it up to the other one.

  Gabriel pointed to the newspaper print. “See? The same two letters.”

  “But this one is different,” Charles said, referring to Gabriel’s print.

  “Yes, a shroud has been added, the features have been altered slightly. A kind of collage has been made of it and then another picture taken. Even with the changes you can see it’s the same image. Look at the mouth and the beard. It’s the same man.”

  Charles peered at the two prints, his eyes moving back and forth, his mind whirring. Then he stopped and lifted his head. “That explains it.”

  “Explains what?”

  “The medium must have seen the photographs in the paper. They must have been in her mind during the experiment and then, somehow, she projected them into reality.”

  “Projected?”

  “She is a sensitive, after all. She has a developed sixth sense. Most of them do. They have the ability to make a physical image out of a mental one. They are sensitive to the vibrations of reality, but they can also, in some cases, project these vibrations. Think of it like a telegraph. They are both receptors and transmitters.”

  Gabriel gazed at his brother with a mixture of confusion and disappointment.

  “I know it sounds improbable,” Charles said, patiently, “but it is far more likely than the spiritistic hypothesis of the dead coming back to haunt us.”

  “Charles, they altered the photographs. They altered them and presented them as spirits in an effort to fool you.”

  “That may well be. Still, one has to look beyond the obvious and take an imaginative leap now and then.”

  “Not if it takes you out of the realm of reality.”

  “What is so incredible about the sixth sense?” Charles asked. “The existence of ghosts is far more problematic, because it contradicts all that we know about physiology. On the other hand, the hypothesis of the sixth sense, another sense that gives the medium the ability to perceive previously undetected vibrations emanating from reality, contradicts nothing we know about physiology. It is simply another sense like that of touch, sight, or smell. Only this one gives the sensitive the ability to perceive an array of vibrations, previously unknown to us, but that come from the real world. These mediums think they are gaining their knowledge from spirit guides or from the dead, but in reality it’s their ability to pick up on these vibrations, to read minds, if you will, to receive mental image pictures sent out by people halfway around the world, or to hear messages that may have been drifting in the ether for centuries that gives them their unique ability. These are not messages from the dead, but particle waves that are as real as the Hertzian waves that give us our telegrams. They are not the product of ghostly emanations, but mechanical in nature, and will someday be measured and catalogued like any other real-world phenomena.”

  Gabriel didn’t know what to say. Across the way a girl was watering geraniums on a balcony. The water cascaded down through the grate, sending two maids with market baskets on their arms scurrying out into the street to avoid the deluge. He stood there not seeing any of it. He was thinking about the two women, Juliette and Alais Bonnet. He was thinking they were probably having a good laugh at his brother’s expense and at the expense of his brother’s colleagues, these men of science, who were so high-minded they couldn’t see what was plainly in front of them.

  “We all have our theories, Gabriel,” his brother went on. “Crookes is a chemist, so he sees it as a question of a psychic force akin to the natural laws of conservation of energy and mass. Lombroso, a physician, sees the production of ectoplasm as a function of the psychic body attempting to manifest. William Crawford, an engineer, sees psychic phenomena in terms of psychical structures and talks about cantilevers and structural force.”

  Charles collapsed on the sofa and stretched out with a sigh. “All these theories have some validity, I suppose,” he said, reaching for a pillow. He laid his head back and closed his eyes and then added dreamily: “Of course, none of them explain the phenomena as completely as the sixth sense. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Up to now, Gabriel had always respected Charles. He knew him to be a man of solid convictions, especially about something that had taken up so much of his life for the past five years. Charles was not usually wrong about such matters. And yet, Gabriel knew the kind of people who came to his brother’s séance room. Gabriel lived in their world and knew a thing or two about their tricks. They were cunning, often ruthless. His brother, even with his extensive knowledge of the body, was an innocent. The fact that he was eager to prove his theories and to justify all the years spent on this new “science” made him an easy mark.

  So now it was Gabriel’s turn to take care of his brother. He would protect him. He would bring him proof and make him see clearly that he had been duped. He would go to the brothels and the café-concerts in Pigalle and Montmartre, he would talk to his contacts, bribe the grisettes, investigate rumors, follow leads, in short, ply his craft as a journalist. In this way he would save his brother’s reputation, his position in the scientific community, and finally do something right. In return his brother would be grateful and proud of him. He might even mention it to their father. In any case, it would restore Gabriel’s confidence in his brother’s judgment, a strength he had come to rely on all of his life.

  CHAPTER 3

  Paris, March 1902

  Lucia learned early on that everyone in Monsieur Babineaux’s house had their place. Monsieur Babineaux sat at the head of the table and went off to the law courts every morning. Madame Babineaux sat at the foot, gave orders to the cook, and was at home every Thursday. The nursemaid had her meals in the nursery with the children, the cook cooked, and the housemaid made up the rooms.

  Lucia’s place was on her knees washing the kitchen floor, cleaning the ovens, and scrubbing the front steps. She was the kitchen maid, responsible for all the tasks that required soap and soda, black lead and polish, emery powder for the knives, bootblack for the boots, and a strong back for the coal chute. The worst job was polishing the marble threshold at the top of the front steps because she had to stoop at a certain angle, which put her backside on display for any passing tradesman. For this reason she tried
to get this chore done early, before they arrived, so she wouldn’t have to endure their hoots and hollers.

  Even so, she was lucky to have the situation. Babusia had said as much when she sent her to the agency in Senatorska Street. There she was told that Monsieur Babineaux was a famous lawyer and that Madame Babineaux a renowned beauty, and if Lucia worked hard and was a good girl, she would enjoy the respect that comes from working in such a household. Lucia felt honored to be working for such a venerated family.

  Venerated.

  It was a testimony of sorts to Lucia’s faith in God that she abandoned her folding chair at the railway station on the morning she arrived in Paris. It was true that she was too exhausted and hungry to drag it through the city and this more than anything may have caused her to lean it up against a pillar and walk away. Still, she liked to think that God had a plan for her, that she was about to make something of herself.

  A determined rain had been falling all that morning, flooding the street corners and causing at least one traffic accident. When the rain stopped, umbrellas were lowered and men in homburgs and ladies in large hats hurried past Lucia without a glance. She did not know where to look first: at the street full of people; at the passing carriages, belching automobiles, and clanging omnibuses; at the dairyman on the corner; or the dog barber with his tub and brushes. The city was a wave of sight and sound, a consuming presence, clamorous and frightening, a vibrant organism that was set to absorb her and transform her into what she did not know.

  Babusia had told her to stop a policeman and ask for directions, warning her against asking strangers, who could be white slavers. Lucia had been on the lookout for one for the last quarter of an hour, but so far hadn’t had any luck. She was just about to go back to the station to find help when she happened to spot an old man shambling up the street with her chair.

  He didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry. Sometimes he even stopped to scratch his crotch. Never mind that she had abandoned the chair; now that it was going away, she wanted it back. It didn’t take her long to catch up with him. When she told him straight out that he was stealing her chair, he didn’t seem to understand her at first, even though she was speaking perfectly good French. So she repeated herself and this time she tried to grab it away from him. He looked shocked and insulted; nevertheless, he held on to it. He was surprisingly strong.