Séance for a Vampire, Fred Saberhagen [win 10 ebook reader txt] 📗

much louder than a whisper: “I dinna remember much o’ what happened after that. I dinna really want to know.”

“It’s nae good tryin’ to put me off, Abe. I ken you remember more than you let on, because I see you’re worried now. I tell ye we maun talk aboot it afore we try tae dae anither sittin’, and we’ve got one on the docket for tonight.

“Now–you told me it was one o’ those times when you really go into a trance. You really went somewhere–inside your own head, I mean. Right?”

Abraham muttered something.

“What’s that?”

“I said, I began t’ see things.”

Moving closer to her brother, Sarah petted him, hugged and comforted him, while she pursued him with more questions.

In effect she started over, discussing some of the preliminary effects– the ghostly rappings from under the table, the table itself moving without apparent physical cause–she had used during their last sitting– “afore things started to go queer.” She also said a few uncomplimentary things about the old woman of the house, Mrs. Altamont.

“Are you listening t’ me, Abe?”

“Aye, I’m listenin’.”

“We did a’ that–and a’ went weel eno’–and then it happened–right?”

Abraham nodded slowly. Now he was looking at his sister hopefully, as if waiting to be provided with an explanation.

Sarah sighed. “What happened was, there came–from somewhere– another woman, a girl, into the room–aye?”

“Aye.”

“’Twasna me, movin’ aboot the room in white. Ye ken that?”

“Aye.”

“A’ th’ doors t’ th’ room stayed closed, and so did a’ the windows–as far as I could tell. Dark as it was, I saw her plain enough to ken that she was there. And I heard her talk. And you saw her too.”

“Aye.” It was a whisper barely audible.

“Aye, I thought y’ did.

“And the auld bitch saw her too, and she let go both our hands and jumped up and ran and clutched at the one who’d just come in– remember?–a’cryin’ and a’screamin’ oot Louisa, Louisa–she had nae a moment’s doot that nicht, an’ t’ this day she still thinks’twas really her daughter. The auld woman’s convinced we can bring her dead girl back again.”

Abraham muttered: “We brocht up...”

“What’s that y’say? Coom, lad, speak up now.”

“We really brocht up... something, last time.” Abraham’s voice was a defeated whisper. “We really did. Maybe ’twas that girl–Louisa.”

“Dinna gie me none o’ that!” Sarah was unshaken. Her contempt was quiet, but implacably firm. “Neither o’ us are seeing ghosts an’ bogles!”

The haunted, pleading eyes of Abraham had turned at last to fasten fully on his sister’s eyes, where they remained. His dry lips formed the silent query: Then who–?

She patted his arm. “Aye, who? And why was she there? That’s what we maun think aboot, and find an answer. I dinna ken who she was! Or how she got in an’ oot! All I can be certain of, is that’twas a girl, a real girl.

“She came in wearing a white dress, nightgown, something of the kind.”

“Aye.” Abraham was still seeking grounds for hope, not really finding any. “Likely’twas the white gown she was buried in.”

“Enough o’ that, I say!” Sarah brooded, glowering, tension in her face spoiling her real prettiness. “First I thought it must be someone tryin’ to play a prank on us. but’twasn’t that. Not the old woman anyhow. She took this girl for her own bairn come back, right enough. No play-acting there. Hugged her and kissed her... you listenin’ to me?”

“Wot you think?” Abe’s voice was suddenly much louder and cruder than it had been until now.

Sarah was relieved at this new tone, taking it as a sign of recovery. “You saw her plain? You’d know her again?”

“’Course I saw her plain. First with my eyes shut. Then–”

Abe broke off suddenly, and in the same instant turned his face away from Sarah, toward the tomb in which Louisa Altamont had been laid to rest with some of her ancestors. A moment later, clutching at his sister’s arm, he exclaimed: “Shh! Someone’s there...”

Biting off whatever words she had been about to utter, Sarah turned, half expecting to see again the girl in white, up to some new prank. but Sarah was surprised. No more than ten feet away, just at the corner of the Altamont mausoleum, as if he had come up soundlessly along its far side, was standing a tall, red-bearded, pale-faced man, apparently thirty-five or forty years of age. The newcomer was tastefully and elegantly dressed in the style of an Edwardian gentleman–except that he wore a countryman’s broad-brimmed hat, as if he sought protection from even today’s mild daylight.

The red-bearded man was not so much confronting the Kirkaldys as looking just past and above them–his expression was at the same time remote and forbidding, and he had materialized as quietly as a ghost. There was something remote in his gaze, too. From where he was standing now, close beside the old stones wreathed in their summer vines–or from just a little farther off, around the corner–he might have heard a great deal.

In the silence Sarah became aware of droning summer insects–there was something at once sleepy and vicious in the sound–and of the small noises made by the shallows of the Shade, which was murmuring over a bank of pebbles just behind a wall of streamside greenery.

Fighting back a sensation of faintness, Sarah took it upon herself to start the conversation. Years of training in service threatened to take over; she actually curtsied. “Guid afternoon, sir,” she heard herself say humbly.

“Good afternoon.” It was a deep voice, speaking clear and excellent English tinged with a foreign accent of some kind she could not immediately identify. “Why are you here?” The greenish eyes still looked past the Kirkaldys rather than at them; the demand sounded proprietary, brusque and unconditional. This was evidently some relative of whom she had not yet been informed.

Stumbling and stuttering, Sarah tried to come up with some reasonable explanation for her presence, and her brother’s, in the family plot. Fighting free of her old servant’s manners, she remarked how interesting were the