fter the day of blood, visions came to me almost continuously. My mirror was filled with overlapping stories and conjoined threads of others’ lives. I saw the pattern that is the world, a complex but circular pattern that moves through time and through space. I saw…
It was two years after his daughter’s death before John Peacock saw her face again. It was beautiful, angelic, and glowing, a face that showed the peace and understanding that his Angel had achieved in the next world. In the pitch-black room, her face jumped out from the darkness with a burst of light so bright that it hurt his eyes. It seemed that the darker the room was, the more willing the spirits were to appear. In the darkness, he had seen hands and trumpets. In the nothingness, he had witnessed disconcerting ectoplasm rise from Augustine’s lips and hair, or from a table, or from some supernatural apparition.
He had seen amazing things in the past two years. The world of the spirits gave meaning to the material plane in a way the uninitiated could not understand. The communications with his daughter were an addiction. His Angel was his personal, private daughter. He did not need to share her with anyone, not Magdalene or Melissa. He did not want Melissa to come to the sittings. He knew, uneasily, that his behavior was selfish, but he told himself that Melissa would object, would not believe, would interfere with the open line of spirit communication.
John savored every word from his daughter. Sometimes her words were written on a chalkboard or paper. Sometimes they were spoken in a trance. Usually they were spelled out with the table. Though sometimes slow and frustrating, the table was the surest way to connect with his dear daughter.
The table was like corresponding with a friend in some far away country by telegraph. All thoughts passed through a machine in an awkward code, from a remote location. It emphasized the distance that separated them.
John Peacock sat opposite Augustine. It was a familiar feeling, a comfortable and hopeful feeling. They sat in the dark at the table. John waited for the inevitable lurch that would signal the beginning of contact.
It always began the same way: first there was a dramatic lurch. Then, there was silence for a minute or two. After that, the table would begin rocking steadily, rhythmically.
Finally, it began. The table pitched.
Augustine’s eyes opened, and her glance flew to John.
“What is it?” asked John.
“There’s something—different,” Augustine said.
Almost immediately, the table began rocking uncontrollably.
“What’s happening?” The movement stopped.
“John,” said Augustine sharply, “are you—interfering in any way with our communication?”
“Me?” asked John.
“Sometimes, unconsciously, there is interference from a sitter. John—has anything happened to you in the last week? Anything that has made you wonder or doubt about our work?”
John looked at her, dumbfounded. “No,” he said.
Augustine blinked.
“Perhaps we should put off our sitting until another time.”
“No,” said John. “Why? Can’t we try another way?”
Augustine had risen from the table and was lighting an oil lamp that sat on a dresser. John rose also and went over to her.
She looked at him critically.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Please,” he said. “I need to talk with her.”
Augustine paused, considering.
Then the table began to move, smoothly, rhythmically.
Augustine’s eyes opened wide. “My God.”
John sat down in a chair. “Angel? Is that you, Angel?”
A clear yes.
“Don’t listen,” said Augustine. “It’s a trick.”
“No,” said John. “It’s my baby. It’s spelling something.”
Slowly but smoothly and unmistakably, the table spelled out its message: M-U-R-D-E-R.
Augustine gasped and lowered herself in a chair.
“What does it mean?” asked John. “What does it mean?”
The table continued to move.
M-U-R-D-E-R. M-U-R-D-E-R.
“It’s an unclean spirit,” said Augustine. “We have attracted an unfriendly spirit. It is blocking communication. It would say anything. It only lies.”
She got up again and was moving to the door. The table flew up off of the floor and smashed into the chair behind her. The furniture fell to ruins with a crash.
Augustine screamed.
“We need to get out of here.” Augustine reached for the door and pulled on the knob, but it didn’t open.
John jumped up and joined her at the door.
The curtain in the corner of the room flew open, and a great stream of smoke spewed from it. The mirror on the far wall began to crack.
John applied his muscle to the door, steadying himself against the jam with his foot and pulling at the knob.
“Is it locked?”
“There is no lock.”
The mirror crackled and crushed itself, making a spider web pattern that spelled out: M-U-R-D-E-R.
John took out his knife and began to pry the hinges off of the door. The nails were easily pulled out of the wood. The hinges popped out of their seats. The door stood fast. John pulled at it and shoved against it with his shoulder. The door groaned against his weight but did not budge.
“Augustine,” he said, “call on the spirit guides for help.”
Augustine was shaking her head. She was sitting on the floor by the door.
“This isn’t happening,” she chanted. “It isn’t true.”
“Augustine.” He grabbed her by the shoulder and shook her. “Come to. Augustine.” She didn’t respond. She shook her head.
“This isn’t happening. It isn’t true.”
John walked to the center of the room.
“Angel,” he said. “My baby. Help us. I know that you’re here. I know you can hear me. It’s Papa. It’s Papa.”
The objects in the room were beginning to dance and move. A vase flew by his head and crashed on the wall behind him.
“Angel,” he said. “Baby.”
Tears were rolling down his cheeks.
Augustine seemed to recover herself. She got up from the ground and came over to him.
“We have to get out,” she said.
“Angel,” he called to the air.
She went to the door and pulled at the latch again. She walked through the ravaging curtains. A swift wind was blowing through the room. Her hair whipped around wildly, stinging her eyes.
She banged blindly on the windowpane.
Her hands were icy.
The wind was cold.
A frost was forming on the windowpane.
The tips of her fingers were blue.
“No,” she said, and her breath came out in a puff of frost that was whisked away by the roaring wind.
She went back to John. He was sitting on the floor now, murmuring: “Angel, Angel, Angel.”
There was a cut on his temple, and a little porcelain figurine of a child on a swing lay broken in his hands. He was turning it over and over in his fingers. “Angel, Angel.”
“John,” Augustine said. “You have to help me. Help me break the window.”
He looked up at her, lost.
“Listen,” she said. “Listen. I know this is crazy. Just ignore it. Don’t think about it. Just break the window. Just think about breaking the window.”
“Angel, Angel.”
“Okay,” she said. “I need to tell you something.”
Her hand was on his shoulder. Her hand was cold. His shoulder was cold. The air in the room was getting colder.
“It’s all a trick,” she said. “It’s all a show,” she said. “Every time we used the table,” she said, “I was moving it. Until tonight.”
“Get up,” she said. “I can’t deal with this,” she said. “The face was molded from wax,” she said. “The hands were molded from wax.”
“Help me break the window,” she said. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, but it doesn’t matter now,” she said. “I used wires to move the curtains. I used wires. I used my feet. I used my legs. I have an assistant who comes sometimes. I am never really in a trance,” she said. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Put it all behind you now,” she said. “Angel cannot help us,” she said.
Her explanations and her pleas were coming to John in bits and pieces, breaking through the ice that had formed on his brain.
“You,” he said, looking up at her.
The wind was beginning to die down.
The room was beginning to settle.
The air was beginning to get warmer.
He stood up from the floor and stared at her.
“You,” he said. “What did you do? What did you do?”
“John,” she said. “We have to get out of here. We have to think about getting out of here.”
When he stood, he towered over her. The temperature of the room rose. The frost on the window dripped to the floor in warm droplets.
John stepped toward her, and Augustine stepped back.
She stumbled over the broken furniture that lay on the floor.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Sorry?” his voice was unnaturally high, oddly shrill. “Sorry?”
He stepped forward, and she stepped back. In this dance, they covered the few feet to the edge of the room. Her back stopped against the broken mirror on the wall.
M-U-R-D-E-R it said, in jagged edges.
The glass was hot against her skin. The glass was burning.
Sweat was pouring down his forehead.
The wind began again, a hot wind.
“You,” he said.
His hands were around her throat. His fingers burned into her neck. She could not scream. She scratched against his fingers with her long, polished nails. She tried to pry his fingers off of her neck.
A lamp smashed into the wall by her head.
The window cracked and burst in a spray of glass.
She looked at the open exit desperately. She could not loosen his grip. She could not move. She could not breathe.
The oil lamp that she had lit tipped over. The curtains burst into flame.
The air was thick and sizzling. Her eyes burned. Her throat burned.
John Peacock’s eyes were black and blank as a shark’s.
“I’m sorry,” Augustine thought, “sorry, sorry, sorry.”
She passed out.
When the roaring in his ears finally stopped, John stood in front of the mirror. On the floor at his feet, all crumpled in a pile, was Augustine’s body. Her eyes were open and staring and blank.
He looked in the mirror, and his eyes were like hers. He looked dead, wasted, spent, abandoned.
The room seemed still and motionless.
Everything seemed silent.
Clouds of smoke licked his hair and neck. He could not feel them entering his lungs, depositing soot in his nose and eyes. He could not feel anything. He was completely numb.
He stared at the mirror. He did not move. He did not try to leave.
In the glass, he saw behind him in the smoke and flame a small, glowing figure.
It was hard to see, vague and uneasy, but there was something. There was a small, red glow.
“Angel?” he asked. The glow grew bigger, expanding. He was afraid to look away from the reflection. He was afraid that he would turn, and the light would be gone.
“My Angel,” he said.
In the light, he saw a glowing face. He knew when he saw it that the other face had been false, a deception.
This face was not static. It was moving and changing. He saw in it the aspect of his own face. He saw in it Melissa’s face, her eyes, her brow, the little twist of the mouth. It was a real face, a face with energy and passion and pain.
“Angel,” he said again.
The figure came toward him, until it was hovering inside him, occupying his face and hands. In the mirror, his image shifted and changed and reformed.
There were no words.
There was an overwhelming hurt and pain and anger. Everything in the room changed, glowing a deep, bright red.
Something broke in his head.
A drop of blood came spilling from his nostril.
His body toppled to the floor.
When they found him, he was burned past recognition.
Two weeks before her death, Augustine had agreed to host a séance for a visitor from the East Coast. He had purported to be writing a book about “the wonderful work that mediums are doing across the country.” He had, he told her, a friend in Los Angeles who was hoping to contact his wife. Could she see them? He would be documenting the case for his book.
Augustine was quite pleased. She met with the two men, and they seemed completely genuine and anxious for a successful sitting.
She should have been on her guard, Augustine saw later. She should have gone into a trance, used sprawled automatic writing to generate non-substantiatable messages. She had wanted to make a good show for the book, though. She had classed these two as believers. She had been mistaken.
The whole event was a fiasco. At the worst possible moment, the sitters filled the room with light, exposing strings and revealing the material nature of a rather complex apparition she had devised.
She ordered the two out of the house, but they snapped a photograph of her contraption before they left. They got an article into the local newspaper: MEDIUM EXPOSED AS FRAUD. The photograph was not very good, but it was damaging. How well she knew how many would believe in any fuzzy photograph.
Half of her clients had stopped coming, and although she had convinced the remaining ones that these two men (called “investigators” by the local journalists) were con men and cheats looking to make some money by ruining her, she had temporarily stopped using any elements open to potential exposure.
After the fire, after Augustine’s death, authorities reconstructed the events.
John Peacock, who had been deceived by this false medium, had read about her exposure in the paper. This was highly likely. The whole town was talking about it. They couldn’t discover that he had said anything to anyone, but he might not want to look a fool. His wife didn’t know he had been to the medium.
John had attended a séance to see for himself whether he had been tricked, they surmised. He caught her in some stunt and became enraged. A struggle followed. He shattered the mirror and threw furniture around the room. It ended in him strangling the fake psychic. The doctor said she was dead before the fire got to her.
“Can’t blame him for that,” said the police detective at the inquest. “Her taking advantage of this grief the way she did.”
“I’ll warn you to keep your opinions to yourself,” said the coroner, who agreed with him.
“Yes, sir,” said the detective.
In the struggle, the police said, a kerosene lamp was knocked over.
“Weren’t these séances typically conducted in the dark?” asked the coroner.
“We think maybe he lit the lamp to expose the tricks,” said the detective.
“Ah. Go ahead,” said the coroner.
The kerosene lamp had lit the place on fire, and John Peacock had died in that fire. It was simple and straightforward, and there was nothing known to the contrary. That must have been what happened.
The official ruling was that John Peacock had died by accident in the commission of felony murder in the second degree, with extenuating circumstances. Since everyone involved was dead, there was nothing more to say.
Melissa Peacock received a large life insurance settlement on her husband.
Supporters of Augustine protested the bias and pigheadedness of the inquest and the authorities generally.
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