harlotte Rowe’s first memory was of being shoved up against her mother’s breast in a cloud of smoke. She could recall the odor in vivid detail when she closed her eyes. Sometimes it came to her in the middle of the day, for no reason, and for a moment she couldn’t place what the smell was.
She would be washing dishes, her hands up to the elbows in warm, sudsy water, like the most luxurious bath, and for a moment instead of the smell of soap and the slight underlying stink of spoiled food, her nostrils were filled with this smell, so strange and yet so familiar.
She would breathe in automatically to gather more of the scent, not only to identify it, but because compulsively, she wanted to drink it in. Her nose would tickle and twitch with the feeling of particles mixed with the odor—a strong, sharp, metallic odor flavored with something sweet on the one hand, and something bitter underlying it. In these instances, the smell only lasted for a second or two before it faded away, leaving no trace in the ordinary air.
Recurrences of the smell persisted for Charlotte throughout her lifetime, and as she lay on her death bed, she would turn her head to the left or to the right, hoping to capture a whiff of it.
It was the smell that started everything. Not only that first child-like and hazy memory—although that started things too. It was after that first instance of the smell that the women began to come.
In Charlotte’s childhood memory, her mother was the prominent and ubiquitous figure. Charlotte’s impression of her mother was of a large woman—bustling and busy. Her mother was the final repository of all knowledge. She knew what to wear, what to eat, how to pray, and when to go to the bathroom.
“I’m raising you,” her mother told her once, “as a child of the Lord. Most people don’t know what it means to achieve Grace, because achieving Grace is a difficult thing and most people only want to achieve what is easy. When things are difficult, think to yourself, ‘I am working for the Lord’s Grace,’ and that will give you strength.”
The women were always inferior to Charlotte’s mother. They were old or young, tall or short, thin or fat, but all of them simpered and coddled and flitted around Charlotte’s mother. When a woman came, they would all go down into the basement, where the dust-ridden rubble had been shoved aside to accommodate an elegant table and amazingly soft and comfortable chairs.
That day, the woman was a tall one, tall and thin with large front teeth that made her look a bit like a horse. Charlotte held onto her mother’s skirts as Mrs. Rowe answered the door.
“Mrs. Rowe?” said the woman with the buckteeth. “I’m Beulah Bellwether, as I’m sure you can guess. A musical sounding name, my mother used to say. Although I’m sure yours is so much more elegant. It’s such a pleasure to meet you. You can’t know what your kind support means to our community.”
“I do the work of God,” said Mrs. Rowe.
“Of course, of course.”
“Now, Miss Bellwether, shall we begin?”
Miss Bellwether nodded five times in rapid succession and looked around the sitting room. Before she could speak, Mrs. Rowe continued: “Follow me.”
Mrs. Rowe turned and started toward the basement stairs. Miss Bellwether’s eye fell on Charlotte, and she favored the girl with a toothy smile.
“Follow me,” said Charlotte, raising her eyebrows and turning on her heels to follow her mother.
The three proceeded single-file down the narrow basement steps to the oasis of comfort erected there. Mrs. Rowe stood by the table and turned to face the others. Charlotte immediately sat in her favorite chair, a large armless creature upholstered in deep purple velvet.
“I presume this is suitable, Miss Bellwether.”
Beulah Bellwether looked around herself. On the floor along the longest wall were the ruins, mysteriously attractive rubble of metal, wire, and wood. The other side of the room was filled with shelves and cabinets, disused and covered in dust, but still filled with bottles, jars, instruments, gadgets, and tools of every description. A large table was shoved up against the cabinets to clear the center of the room for its newer furnishings.
Miss Bellwether made a clicking noise and nodded very swiftly six times.
“The emanations here are very strong,” she said, “very strong.”
“Sit,” said Mrs. Rowe. “Sit up straight, Charlotte.”
Charlotte shot up rigid in her chair, and Miss Bellwether sat down rather heavily with a small sigh. She straightened her dress beneath her, and looked first at Mrs. Rowe and then at Charlotte.
“We have had,” said Miss Bellwether, “truly amazing results with table turning.”
Mrs. Rowe raised her eyebrows. “I asked you here because I heard praise of your mediumship.”
“Oh, I know. But mediumship does take many forms, does it not? I mean, table turning is indeed a mediumistic venture. Not that I insist we try table turning in any way. But I do feel that we must be open to many different types of communication. I mean, the mediumistic trance is quite wonderful, quite spectacular, but also, you know, somewhat unreliable.”
There was a silence following this pronouncement, as Miss Bellwether looked earnestly at Mrs. Rowe.
Mrs. Rowe sighed a deep and dissatisfied sigh, and spoke coldly.
“We may do table turning, if you feel it is likely to be effective. But I would first like to at least attempt contact in a trance, as I had heard that you were able to do.”
“Well, of course, Mrs. Rowe,” said the medium, “of course, I never meant to imply that we could not attempt a trance. And I have every hope that, with the grace of God, we will be successful.”
There was another pause.
“We must all join hands around the table, if you please, Mrs. Rowe.”
She set her hands on the table. Charlotte took one, and Mrs. Rowe took the other.
“Please close your eyes,” said Miss Bellwether.
Charlotte closed her eyes. She could feel the cool, smooth hand of her mother gripping her right hand and the warm, doughy hand of Miss Bellwether gripping her left. Small purple globes floated across her eyelids, and the room, the world, felt far off, way outside the boundaries of her head.
The room was hot, and she relaxed into the chair, now that her mother could no longer see her posture. They had held many of these séances. That was a French word, and it simply meant to sit. Not precisely. “To sit” was seoir. A séance was a sitting. Like sitting room. But they did not hold their séances in the sitting room, they held them in the basement. What was the French term for basement? She was quite good in French, and sure she could remember.
Miss Bellwether droned on, but Charlotte disregarded her. “We ask any spirits,” she was saying, “who dwell in this area, or in an adjacent plane, any who have information for these souls here gathered, to present themselves in our presence.”
What a loud medium Miss Bellwether was. Usually they were silent for a while, until they fell into a trance. But this one went prattling on about planes and energy and souls. That’s what it was! Sous-sol, basement. So these were not so much séances as sous-sols. ‘Pardon me, my dear, but I must be off—I am late for a sous-sol.’ ‘Yes, Mrs. Robinson, the séance is so passé (present tense passer). You simply must attend one of our sous-sols.’
Miss Bellwether had finally fallen into silence. She was now breathing rather heavily through her nose. Adenoids, perhaps. Charlotte attempted to read Miss Bellwether’s thoughts by traveling, with her mind, through Beulah’s hand, up her arm, and into her vibrating nose. Feeling nothing, she determined to read her mother’s thoughts. She felt again the cool hand, so calm and detached and perfect. She traveled up the well-draped arm, through the veins that, if you pushed back the silk fabric of the dress, were visible on the surface of her arm as blue lines. She traveled through the neck, where a pulse-pulse-pulse beat strongly and regularly. She arrived inside the head, where she could feel the presence of the closed eyes in front of her. They were dark eyes, shark’s eyes.
There was complete and total silence, and a cold emptiness. Here everything dropped away. She was neither breathing nor suffocating. Her heart was not beating. Her mind was a blank. Everything around her was blank, empty, impossible. The world dropped away and revealed itself to be illusion.
Into this total and complete absence, came the smell.
Mrs. Rowe and Miss Bellwether held hands in silence, except for Miss Bellwether’s notable stentorian breathing. Miriam Rowe did not have high hopes for this particular venture. Although some of her trusted friends had given the highest references for Miss Bellwether’s mediumistic capabilities, Mrs. Rowe felt certain that these references were based on questionable séances held in controlled circumstances. Certain rather humiliating experiences had taught her to maintain a level of caution with mediums.
At one point, Miss Bellwether’s hand gripped Mrs. Rowe’s hand strongly, and the audible breathing was interrupted by a gasp. It was followed by nothing, however, so it must have been merely a hiccup or nauseated twinge.
Mrs. Rowe was just beginning to feel that, perhaps, her rather callous distrust of this particular medium could be causing a lack of results, when a violent gust of wind whipped through the basement. Automatically, Miriam Rowe’s eyes flew open, and she saw that Miss Bellwether’s eyes had also flown open and were looking at her with a clear and distinct fright. How odd, thought Mrs. Rowe.
Then the voice came from an unexpected quarter.
“Charles?” Mrs. Rowe asked, wonderingly.
It was Charlotte who was speaking, her eyes still closed, her face expressionless. She repeated:
“The resistance of the mind to the Power of God is strong.”
“Charles,” Mrs. Rowe said, “Charles,” and she turned to the voice, breaking her handhold with the now-forgotten Miss Bellwether.
“Life is an imperfect way of recording the past. Everything we create is a hysterical symptom of the past traumas of Earth.”
“Where are you, Charles? How can we get you back?”
The girl continued to stare straight ahead and spoke with the older, masculine voice of her father: “Time is recorded on the brain, and living things are time machines, traveling backwards in their minds, as their flesh moves forward. Hysterical symptoms are the infringement of the past on the present, through our personal recording of history. The child lives in the womb, and the womb is a memory of the child. The amniotic sac holds the knowledge of the child just as your mind holds the knowledge of my self.”
Charlotte’s head turned toward her mother, who was staring at her with great horror.
“I know how to create eternal life.”
Then, all life and energy left her, and she fell to the table as if the bones were gone from her body.
Miss Bellwether screamed.
Mrs. Rowe rushed to Charlotte’s side.
“Charlotte,” she said. “Charles.”
Things become confused. They are told and retold. Recalled and remembered, and then remembered again. The experience of traveling into my mother’s mind is so vivid that I can close my eyes and be in that moment even now. I think I remember speaking in my father’s voice. I have heard about it many times, and I have seen it in my mirror. In my mirror, my face even seems to take on the aspect of his face.
Yet, even if I spoke in his voice, could it merely have been a reflection of the memories of him in my own mind? In my mother’s mind? ‘Time is recorded on the brain.’ My father was recorded on my brain. Could I not have been merely playing him back, like a recording? Or maybe it is just a story my mother believes.
Or maybe I was mad and bored and decided to show off. I was sort of that kind of a child.
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