In the Shadow of Blackbirds (14 page)

I braced myself for more words or movements from the other room and eyed the window as a means of escape. Was it a robber? Stephen? Another side effect of the lightning?

A squawk blasted through the silence.

Oberon.

“Oh … of course.” I sighed. It was just that silly bird talking, not Stephen or an intruder. Just a trained magpie saying what he always asked when someone entered the room.

I returned to my soup, swallowing down limp beans and
carrots that tasted like rocks, when a thought struck me: Why did Oberon ask the question he always asked when someone entered the room
if no one had entered the room?

I leapt out of my chair and charged into the living room, convinced I’d find Stephen standing by the bronze cage.

Oberon was alone, but he fluffed up his black-and-white feathers, lowered his raven-dark head, and screamed bloody murder at the empty lavender room.

“What’s wrong, Oberon?” I approached the bird with cautious footsteps. “Did something scare you?”

“Who’s there?” he screeched again.

I spun around and scanned the living room, not liking the atmosphere. I swore I heard one of Aunt Eva’s picture frames tapping against the wall.

“Everything’s OK, Oberon,” I said in a voice meant to soothe the both of us. “Everything’s fine.”

“Who’s there?”

“Please stop saying that.”

“Who’s there?”

“I said stop!” I tossed the beige cover over his cage.

“Who’s there?” Oberon rustled his wings beneath the cloth. “Who’s there? Hello. Hello. Who’s there? Who’s—”

“Stop!”

“Who’s there?”

“Shut up, you stupid bird. No one’s there. Absolutely no one’s there.”

I kicked the sofa instead of succumbing to an urge to
knock over his cage, and limped back to the kitchen, where I huddled in my chair with my hands clamped over my ears until the bird stopped yelling.

AUNT EVA TRUDGED THROUGH THE FRONT DOOR SOME
time after her whistling cuckoo announced ten o’clock. She slouched at the kitchen table as though her back ached, and her eyelids drooped, so I served her leftover soup and sat with her for five minutes, never mentioning the bird or the uneasy feeling that had settled over her living room.

“Are you all right, Mary Shelley?” she asked in a voice beaten down by fatigue.

“As right as I can be.”

“Go up to bed. Put today behind you.”

I nodded and pushed myself up from the chair.

Pots clattered in the sink from her cleaning up in the kitchen while I wandered down the hall and up the groaning staircase.

I stepped across the threshold into my bedroom. The air didn’t feel right at all.

The first objects that drew my attention were Stephen’s photographs, and I remembered something I had once read: according to everything from Christian lore to Slavic legend, butterflies symbolized the flight of the soul from the body. I felt I was looking at pictures representing him and me—the butterfly and the lightning bolt. The lost soul and the girl who toyed with electricity.

A movement in the corner of my eye distracted me.

Uncle Wilfred’s compass.

I crept closer to my bedside table and lit the oil lamp’s wick with a match. The compass’s needle spun in every direction.

“I’m going to turn off the gas after I change into my night-clothes,” said Aunt Eva, giving me a start as she padded across the hall behind me to her bedroom. “Good night.”

I blew out the match. “Good night.”

I stared at the compass for ten more minutes. It never settled down.

Close to eleven o’clock, I changed into my nightgown and crawled under my blankets, keeping the oil lamp lit beside me. The pine dresser and wardrobe looked calm and homey, but still the strange energy hummed around me. The flames of my lamp grew restless, casting shifting shadows that leapt across the wall. I held my breath in anticipation and fear, reminding myself to breathe when I felt dizzy, and it must have been well past midnight before I finally fell asleep.

I awoke, curled on my side and facing the wall, as the downstairs cuckoo announced three o’clock. The muted glow of the oil lamp still illuminated my golden wallpaper, but the blackness of night crowded around me as if it were a living creature. The scent of burning fireworks scorched my nostrils. A coppery taste lined my tongue and caused the fillings in my teeth to ache, while my heartbeat echoed inside the mattress, pounding like a second heart.

Someone was with me.

I’d experienced that sensation before, in the dark, fresh out of a nightmare—the belief that something was staring at me from across the room in the shadows of my furniture. In the past, the stranger always ended up being a doll or a chair reflecting moonlight. But this time I was positive someone would be there if I checked.

Just turn around and look,
I told myself. My breaths came out as shallow flutters of air against my pillowcase, and I could have sworn I heard that needle spinning around in the compass.

Just look.

I inhaled as quietly as possible, not wanting to disturb the room. I squeezed my eyes shut and counted silently to three.

One.

Two.

Three.

I flipped myself over. Opened my eyes. And found Stephen next to my bed.

BEFORE I HAD TIME TO FIGURE OUT HOW I SHOULD
respond to his presence, he was gone. He jerked back, as if someone had yanked him by the collar of the white undershirt he wore, and disappeared.

The buzzing energy in the room died down. The compass began following my movements again. Stephen’s photographs remained on the wall—motionless, untouched.

I trembled under my sheets, overwhelmed by a barrage of emotions—terror, shock, amazement, concern, elation, love—and unsure what I should do next. My lips tried to form Stephen’s name, but they shook too much to function. My arms and legs couldn’t move. Black and gold spots buzzed in front of my eyes. I panted until I must have passed out, for I
didn’t remember a single other thing about the night besides a dream.

A nightmare about a bloodstained sky.

A MASKED FACE SHONE IN THE LIGHT OF A CANDLE IN MY
doorway.

I gasped and sat upright.

“What’s wrong?” Aunt Eva, not a spirit, came toward me. “What is it?”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“Are you sick?”

“No.” I looked around the room for signs of Stephen in the weak light.

“What is it, Mary Shelley?” She brought the candle closer to my face. “You’re so pale. You look like you’ve seen a—”

We locked eyes. Her face blanched. The word she didn’t speak seemed to hover in the air between us:
ghost.

“I …” I searched my brain for a new subject, unwilling to let the conversation veer anywhere near Julius’s conception of spirits when I was grappling to understand my own. “Is it morning now? Are you heading to work?”

She drew the candle away from my face. “Yes, and I want you to stay inside all day. You’ve been out of this house too many times since you’ve been here. Don’t open the windows.”

“Are you sure you don’t have any books left in the house besides the dictionary? I really need to read.”

“That’s all I have besides cookbooks. I had to get rid of all
the Swiss and German texts I used in my translation work. Even Wilfred’s family Bible was in German.”

“How
did you get rid of them?”

“I gave them away.”

I scowled. “Did you burn them?”

“It doesn’t matter how I got rid of them. Neighbors had seen them on my shelves. They would have questioned my loyalty to the country if I had left them there.”

“What type of world are we living in if we’re destroying books? Isn’t it the Kaiser’s job to annihilate German intellectualism?”

“Shh! Don’t talk like that.” She waved at me to be quiet and glanced at the window, as if the neighbors had climbed the walls and were eavesdropping from behind the lowered panes. “You sound like your father. You’ve got to keep opinions like that to yourself.”

I flopped back down to my pillow with a huff and pulled my blanket over my shoulders.

“I’m sorry you’re stuck like this, Mary Shelley. I know you have no one to keep you company.”

Ah, but I do. If that wasn’t just a dream.

“You’ll find a deck of cards in the living room. Why don’t you play some solitaire?” Her footsteps retreated across the floorboards, out of my bedroom. She closed the door, leaving me behind in the near darkness.

Her feet pitter-pattered down the stairs. The front door shut. I sat up, relit my bedside lamp, and drew a deep breath.

The compass’s arrow pointed at me.

I looked toward the butterfly and lightning photographs on my wall and remembered the burning air from the night before, the distressed movements of the compass, the restlessness, the fear.

“Stephen? Are you here? Are you safe?”

A mourning dove cooed its five-note song outside my window, but nothing else stirred.

“Stephen?”

The compass remained fixed on me. I slouched back down on my bed and felt as alone as Aunt Eva had thought I was.

THE BELLS ON MY AUNT’S WOODEN TELEPHONE RANG ON
the kitchen wall as I scrounged around for breakfast in the icebox. I slid the horn-shaped receiver off the side latch and held the cold metal to my ear.

“Hello. Ottinger residence,” I said into the gaping black mouthpiece that always reminded me of the lips of a person shouting “Oh!”

Crackling static met my ears. My heart leapt.

Stephen is somehow on the other end of the line.

“Is this Mary Shelley?” asked a male voice that could have been his.

“Yes.”

“This is Julius.”

“Julius? Oh.” I settled back down on my heels, not even realizing I had risen to my toes.

“I’m in between sittings right now,” he said, “and I have a line of customers spilling out to the street again, but I wanted to talk to you a moment.”

“About what?”

“How are you?”

“I’m all right.”

Static buzzed through the silence again before he asked, “Did you really hear him whisper?”

I swallowed. “Yes.”

“Do you believe in spirits now?”

I leaned my forehead against the telephone’s glossy oak and debated my answer.

“Mary Shelley?”

Another swallow, one that scraped against my throat. “I don’t know about other spirits, but I think … I might believe … I can communicate with Stephen.”

“Do you want to come to a séance with me?”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“I know a spirit medium. She holds séances in an apartment over her grandparents’ hardware store downtown. Her circles are legitimate—there’s no hanky-panky, no flimflamming, no reason to be afraid. She’s an upstanding girl who attends the local Spiritualist church.”

“I don’t want to contact Stephen through a medium.”

“You don’t have to contact him. Just come as a learning experience and witness the way other people summon spirit phenomena. You’re a smart girl, right? Come see what Spiritualism
is all about. You’ll fit in with everyone else there. You’re like them, Mary Shelley.”

I bit my lip, troubled by how much I wanted to go, to find people like my strange new self.

“Are you home alone right now?” he asked.

“Why?”

“That’s an awful way to live, sequestered like that, hiding from the flu until you die.” His voice sounded louder, as if he had moved his lips closer to the mouthpiece to speak more directly into my ear. “Come with me tonight. These people are all well educated and inquisitive. Everyone’s young and eager to learn more about the connection between the living world and the afterlife.”

“Aunt Eva would have to come, too.”

He paused. “Yes, of course.”

“What time?”

“The circle doesn’t start until nine o’clock. I’ll pick you up at eight thirty.”

“I’ll try it once, but if I find the experience upsetting, I don’t want you to ever talk to me about spirits again.”

“You have a deal, Mary Shelley. I’ll see you this evening. Dress nicely. No goggles.”

He hung up.

AFTER BREAKFAST, I STARED AT STEPHEN’S PHOTOGRAPHS
in my bedroom and dared myself to contact him as if I were a Spiritualist medium. Maybe a trance was what I needed to
understand these teasing glimpses of his life after death. A spiritual state of mind. Full belief in the other side.

I knelt in front of his photos with my eyes closed and my mind open. I even laid my hands against the picture frames and called his name.

“Stephen. Stephen. Are you there? Stephen Elias Embers.”

No. Not quite right. I felt like one of those questionable people who advertised public séances in the newspaper.

TODAY ONLY!
MISS MARY SHELLEY BLACK
A REMARKABLE DEMONSTRATION OF SPIRIT COMMUNICATION
HEAR SHAKESPEARE HIMSELF RECITE
MACBETH
!

I opened my eyes. “You’re not like that.” I got off the floor and plopped onto my bed. “You’ve got to approach this more like … an experiment. Like … Phantom.”