Chapter Text
No matter how far he went, there was always the Belasco House. He had lived in the inescapable length of its shadow for his entire adult life and now, God help him, he was going back.
It had been a long time since anyone came looking for Benjamin Franklin Fischer, boy medium. He was Ben Fischer. A thin man with ragged hair and a hunted way of looking over his shoulder, and a deliberate avoidance whenever a stranger said his name. People assumed he had been to prison. People assumed worse.
He kept moving. Sought out places where the edge of things grew thin, despite himself. A brief stint as a meat packer in a town so filled with dust and fire smoke he never saw the sun; working as a night janitor in a mortuary school; archiving historical paraphernalia that thrummed with life and power in his hands; washing dishes in a sprawling hotel in Colorado, where he had handed in his notice on his very first day and kept driving until he hit the state line.
The power lay dormant in the back of his mind like the ever-looming, faceless house. It warned him when he needed warning—so why, why, was he going back when every fibre of his being was screaming at him to go to ground, disappear, find a quiet place to lie low until Deutsch’s henchmen let him be?
It wasn’t like he hadn’t slammed the door in the face of opportunity so many times before: televised specials, grasping fanatics, research studies, countless other money-grabs and sales pitches. He had left all that behind him. The parapsychic community of Northern America could weep for its golden boy, for all he cared; he was free, he was out, it was nothing more than a bad dream, one with a roof and dark walls and a door locked tightly shut against the endless tide of memory that had tried and failed to pull him under for thirty years.
Fischer turned up the collar of his coat and watched Deutsch’s plane slowly turn down the runway, the red lights flashing out a warning against the early morning sky. Going back. A few hours and he would be on the other side of the country, in Maine, where the house had sat waiting for him with patient predatory anticipation, secure in the knowledge that he would allow himself to be drawn back under its roof with the same helpless fascination of a car-wreck victim returning to the site of a near fatal crash.
Back to Hell House.
An hour passed inside the house and it was already turning out like the last time. The bickering. The pointed division, the skepticism, the fact Fischer wanted nothing to do with Doctor Barrett’s know-it-all expertise or Miss Tanner’s holier-than-thou bible talk. It wasn’t like they weren’t decent, good-intentioned authorities in their field—he’d read several of Barrett’s snappier papers over the years, and who hadn’t heard of Florence Tanner’s Spiritual Temple of Love?—but being decent and good intentioned wouldn’t get you anywhere in Hell House, except dead. Shame, really.
He’d already made up his mind to go at it alone. There was one thing bothering him: Barrett’s wife, who sat there beside her husband, pale and wide-eyed, gawking around the dining room as if the shadows aimed to grow teeth. Why the fuck had he brought her?
Barrett was following the same train of thought, in a different direction.
“I can understand why Deutsch would request the talents of Miss Tanner,” he mused. “But, well, with Mr. Fischer it seems—”
“Too obvious?” Fischer asked, before he could help himself.
“I was going to say cruel.”
Florence frowned. “There’s nothing here Ben hasn’t faced before. He’s here of his own volition, on his own strength. It would be crueler not to give him this chance to end Hell House’s power once and for all.”
“That’s not what the good doctor meant by that,” Fischer commented, filling his coffee cup. “It’s not asking me to step foot in this house he finds unkind. It’s, ah, how would you phrase it? The idea of throwing a crippled boxer back into the prizefighting ring. I’m past it. Out to pasture. Worn out.”
A chagrined look slipped across Barrett’s stolid face.
“You must admit, it’s been nearly thirty years since any sign of active mediumship,” he pointed out. “I’m not sure how much use you can be, with that in mind.”
“Mr. Fischer’s ability far exceeds my own.” Florence sounded appalled. “How can you say that, knowing what he’s capable of? You think his ability diminished?”
“Worse than that. Your husband thinks I’m a fraud,” confided Fischer, tipping his cup to Edith. “It’d be a shame if he didn’t.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Considering all the work I put in. Do you know how much effort the average con-artist puts into a grift, all the bells and whistles? String, hair, puffs of air, phosphorescence—I never had to think about any of that in my life. No matter how badly I did, people kept coming away believing what they’d seen was genuine.”
All the mediums and psychics on the western seaboard hadn’t been able to help him, terrified when faced with the real thing. Their own frail make-believe crumbled away and left him a half dozen parlour tricks which he used when he had to, for too long, until the game finally let him go.
Until you broke down and accused an audience of ninety people of being fools and cretins, said Barrett’s face. Until the parapsychic league effectively blacklisted the name of B. F. Fischer, which was what he’d been angling for the entire time.
“You admit to the fraud, then,” Barrett asked.
Fischer shrugged.
“Gave me half a lifetime spared from the likes of you. No offence meant, Miss Tanner.”
An awkward pause filled the room. Fischer lit another cigarette and sucked in the smoke, ignoring the look that passed between the doctor and his wife; the pitying glance from Florence that creased her unblemished face.
Worry about your own skin and I’ll look after mine, he wanted to say. No point of course. By the time they figured out there was no making it out of the Belasco House with their grand ideas and minds in one piece, it would be too late.
“Fischer,” Barrett said, fixedly staring at some point beyond Fischer’s head. “Is that Lutheran?”
“No, Jewish.”
Some obstinate streak made him lie. It wasn’t like he knew much about his father, who had wisely skipped out before the shitshow started. Jewish, Lutheran—for all he knew he may well have been wayward a Trappist monk.
Barrett, politely, refrained from comment. That was just fine as far as Fischer was concerned, who finished his dinner and brooded by the fireplace for the rest of the evening. The recording of Belasco’s voice had spooked him harder than he was willing to admit.
Bastard. Games and designs. The whole place was a maze, ready to suck them into its clever traps and pitfalls laid out by a deviant egomaniac whose greatest ambition was to put de Sade to shame; to influence.
Fischer grimaced. Don’t go down that route.
He heard a noise and turned, but it was only Florence, her long hair pinned up and her hands hidden in an oversized hand-knitted sweater. She looked at him a long while before moving closer to crouch at his side.
“You’re afraid of what you are,” she said kindly.
Fischer looked at her with barely repressed surprise, thinking she can’t know that, she doesn’t know, it’s not possible, fists clenched and twisting in his coat pockets, until he realised what she meant and the dregs of panic eased from his mind.
“You can’t hide from it forever, Ben,” Florence said, gazing at him with saintly compassion. He thought she might try to touch his face. “Mediumship isn’t the curse you think it is.”
“Well.” Fischer coughed. “That’s your opinion.”
He was almost embarrassed that he had allowed himself to be caught off guard like that, very nearly bringing it all up to the surface for her to poke and prod and gently tell him what he was as if he had any reason to be grateful for yet another target on his back.
Part of him still wondered if he’d been contaminated somehow. That the exposure to such a depraved force at a vulnerable age had warped him at his essence, corrupted him. Those stained glass windows in the chapel, the unwelcome visions that had fixed him to the spot unable to look away from straining flesh and muscle, the black and white pictures, the accounts of the plays in Belasco’s private theater: they’d had an effect, surely, on his sheltered existence. Had he always been this way, or had Hell House perverted him into something—the exact kind of influence the sick old schemer had been trying to achieve with his own guests?
Stupid. He’d known exactly what he was before the first signs of mediumship changed the trajectory of his life. He was being a stupid, overthinking bastard.
Florence was still looking at him expectantly. Fischer excused himself, retreated to his room, lit a cigarette and flopped back on the mildewed bed. He stared blankly up at the ceiling. It was the same room as before, which felt important somehow. The same floral pattern moulded into the plaster. He remembered being so afraid lying in bed at night listening to the low grunts of the two entwined long-dead figures rutting on the floor, trying not to look, failing, terrified by how much he wanted to know how it was done and wondering why he felt so hot in the pit of his stomach despite the frigid air, wondering if he had already found himself in hell.
“Fuck off,” Fischer said out loud to the empty room. “No voyeurs this time. Bet that takes the fun out of it, right?”
Somewhere, a door creaked. Florence was wrong; he wasn’t afraid. He was furious.
The house settled and moved around him like the bowels of some stranded ship. It knew it was only a matter of time. Fischer knew it too, and paced, and roamed the darkened halls as if the others were already lost to him, searching for—what? The house’s shrivelled, beating heart?
He kept himself shut off. Nothing as flashy as the groping confidence of his youth. He’d wanted to touch everything. See everything. Let it move through him. Shake off the cobwebs and make them dance and send them on their way. This was safer.
Everywhere he went the peeling walls conjured up Rand’s curdled face. Lauter’s slashed throat. Finley’s garbled laughter in the dark. The sound of Doctor Graham trampling through the woods, his own breath sharp like a knife in his chest, the drunken voice muffled by the heartbeat pounding an iron post through into his head—
He wasn’t going to let anything in this house hurt him again. He was closed off. Safe everywhere except his dreams.
The power kept shifting in the back of his mind, the lightest of touches of awareness as he moved through the house—but in the steam room it screamed, setting his teeth on edge as he burst through the door to find Doctor Barrett lying on his back on the tile, fully naked, face red, gaping up at the ceiling with frozen horror. At first he’d thought he was dead, but then Barrett’s hand gripped him by the wrist with surprising strength and Fischer did his best to haul him into the changing room, coughing as the choking steam billowed from the smashed door.
First Barrett, then his wife. The house was moving fast. Fischer should have kept his distance, after the ordeal with Edith, but the blazing look on Barrett’s face as he’d carried Edith to bed had unsettled him badly.
“Can I help?” he asked, looking at Barrett’s back.
Barrett turned, wincing. It was clear both of them were picturing the events of last night: Edith’s leer as she advanced on Fischer with her breasts thrust into both hands (“Suck them, you fairy bastard!”), the terrible ferocity of her voice, her dark and taunting smile.
“No. I’m all right, thank you.”
“Right.”
Fischer hovered in the doorway, trying to figure out how best to discuss Edith as he watched Barrett at work. He was a tall man, broader than Fischer had realised under his vests and sweaters. His sandy beard was a shade lighter than the hair on his chest and back, Fischer remembered, and blinked at the thought. Stupid.
He wondered if Barrett had heard Edith’s accusation and if he cared; if it would bother him that another man knew what he looked like naked, how his skin felt under his hands. That it had been years since Fischer had touched anyone like that.
Barrett knocked a stack of papers to the floor and let out a curse. Fischer leapt at the distraction and crossed the room in a few strides, bending to collect the scattered notes.
“I am not inadequate, thank you!” Barrett barked.
Fischer flinched, taken off guard by the sudden naked fury in Barrett’s voice. He hadn’t realised the other man’s patience had worn so thin.
“Doctor…” Fischer began, “No one’s saying that. I’m just—”
The doctor’s cane prodded Fischer on the shoulder, accusatory, nearly sending him toppling off balance.
“But they’re damn well thinking it, isn’t that right? Old Lionel, the cripple. Can’t take care of himself, let alone his wife. No, I need you to do that for me. Any man’d do the same—if he has the working equipment, that is!”
Fischer baulked.
“You can’t honestly believe that I’d—”
“I don’t know what I believe of you, Mr. Fischer. I don’t know you at all, and neither, dare I remind you, does Edith. I don’t know what a man like you is capable of.”
Barrett shoved Fischer with the cane tip again, underscoring his point.
Fischer wanted to think Barrett wouldn’t actually strike him, but this was Hell House. People acted counter to their best intentions here. It was clear this thread of jealousy had been worming its way through Barrett’s mind for some time, contrary to Fischer’s actions. To reason.
Hadn’t he seen how he’d recoiled under Edith’s advances? Didn’t he know he wouldn’t—couldn’t—act that way? Fischer allowed himself to feel a small flare of annoyance.
“Stop acting like a child. If you honestly think that of your wife, why don’t you ask her? Why don’t you ask me? Serves me right, for trying to help.”
“That will do, Mr. Fischer.”
“I saved her life and all you can think is your own damned wounded paranoia—”
Barrett lashed out with the cane, cracking him around the face. Fischer felt the polished wood deal a glancing blow against the left side of his jaw, a sudden burst of blood on his lip, his balance off-kilter as he threw his hands up belatedly to shield his head. He hit the floor. The cut on his lip stung, but not as much as the knowledge that he had seen the blow coming and let it happen, like some world-class idiot without an ounce of self-preservation. Like a man who walks back into a house that he knows would like to eat him alive.
Barrett stumbled backwards. He looked down at the stick in his hand, clearly appalled.
“Are you all right? ” he said, haltingly. “I didn’t mean—I don’t—”
Fischer thumbed at his lip. It was going to bruise nicely, that was for certain. He was sure he struck a heroic figure, sprawled on the floor, laid out by a man ten years his senior. Some romantic rival.
He bit back a mirthless laugh.
“If that’s how you deal with people who have no intention of sleeping with your wife, Doctor, then I’d hate to see how the rest fare,” Fischer commented, not making to get up off the floor. If his tone was acerbic, then so be it.
Barrett’s face had drained to the color of curdled milk. He looked ill.
“Forgive me, Ben,” he stammered. “I never intended to let my anger get the best of me, never like that.”
He put out his hand. Fischer flinched back, regretting it instantly as fresh horror crept into Barrett’s face.
“Look,” Fischer sighed, staring at the dingy ceiling; anything to avoid looking Barrett in the eyes. “It’s very simple. I’m not a threat to your wife, or Miss Tanner for that matter—I don’t have the interest, or the inclination. Do you understand?”
Barrett’s eyes widened.
“I believe so.”
“And I’m not a threat to you, either, if that’s a concern. Is this going to be an issue?”
“I’m a man of science, Mr. Fischer,” Barrett said, with such consternation that Fischer might have found the humor in it in different circumstances. “Human behaviour in all its forms and variety can hardly be classed as a complication.”
To his credit, Barrett kept his good hand outstretched. Fischer took it, seeing the other man wince as he pulled him to his feet.
“Right,” stated Fischer, handing him the notes. It was damned humiliating, putting himself out there with his guts hanging out to soothe Barrett’s injured pride. His jaw smarted. “Well, in that case. I gather you don’t need my help to make it back to your room.”
Barrett flushed. “No, thank you. It’s good of you to ask.”
The air was tense between them. He could feel Barrett’s eyes on his cut lip, hovering between apology and a brusque forced good-will, but Fischer was halfway to the steps before the words could form.
“How did that happen, Ben?” Florence asked him later. They were in the dining room: he felt, rather than saw, Barrett glance up guiltily as she reached out to touch his face.
“It’s nothing. Carelessness.”
Fischer brushed her off. Let Barrett feel like the one with something to hide, for a change. He’d had enough of it. A glass and a bottle would set his evening back on a reasoned path; he had half a mind to hole himself up in his room until the week was out.
He’d be the last one standing. Him and his sordid secrets.
Nine years of sobriety fell away with ridiculous ease. Why had he bothered all this time? The drink was just enough to take the edge off his anger and panic, deaden his nerves and the frayed current of power pressed like a rail spike behind his eyeballs.
Not too much mind. Not like Mrs. Barrett. Just a dip. A toe. Standing at the edge of the pool watching the lights dance from its depths and thinking A drink’s all I need. Standing on the gravel with the tarn water sucking at his tennis shoes. His face was cold. He knew what would warm it.
Dogs barked out in the fog. Birds chittered and clacked. There were no shapes standing in the windows because there were no windows. A hand rose with a squelch from the dark tarn, oozing and black, and reached for his ankle. He ignored it, since it wasn’t real; it was only the drink. The drink was useful that way.
If his dreams bled into the world while he was drinking it didn’t matter so much. If Florence looked at him with desperate concern, it didn’t matter so much; if Edith and Dr. Barrett looked at him like he was a cowering, washed-up wreck, that didn’t matter so much either.
There was someone staggering around in the woods. Fischer stubbed out his cigarette, walked inside the house, and bolted the heavy wooden door shut before the shape turned into anything that might have a voice.
“He needs to leave this house. The man’s falling to pieces. Deutsch never should have brought him back here in the first place.”
“He shouldn’t be drinking like that, should he?” Edith asked, guilty glancing at the dark lure of the top shelf where the brandy lay waiting in its cut-glass decanter. “He told me himself. It’s not safe.”
Barrett shrugged. “He’s a grown man. If self-destruction’s what he wants, it’s quite in his purview.”
“Still…”
Edith didn’t know why the sight of Fischer had disturbed her so, more than his words about the failure of Lionel’s machine and dire warning. He always had been quiet. Turned inward towards himself, wary, dark eyes laced with concern; not loose and expansive and viciously cutting as he had been in the great hall.
Her husband turned, glancing at her.
“Did you know he was a homosexual?”
“Who?”
“Fischer, who else? He told me himself. To assure me that there was no, ah, threat regarding you or Miss Tanner.” He threw the words out casually, without waiting to see their effect. “I’d still prefer it if you weren’t alone with him, however. Men’s natures have been known to be changeable in this house."
Edith felt her mouth go dry. Why on earth was he telling her this? To see if she had some innate sense of recognition, as if she ought to have known this about Fischer out of some subliminal secret camaraderie?
“No,” Edith said. “I didn’t know.”
It was the truth: she’d never suspected. Perhaps she should have guessed, but what did she know about men who lived like that? He seemed normal. Was normal. If anything there was something closed off about him, like a backwater priest, celibate and deeply lonely. It was hard to imagine him loving anyone, let alone wanting to touch…be touched by…
Edith shook herself.
“I realise it’s not my place to have told you,” Barrett said, mistaking the look on her face for one of disgust. “But it goes to show: Miss Tanner is not the only one with an underlying hidden nature. The more we know, the more prepared we are.”
She realised he had told her this not to catch her out, but to discourage any future advances. How foolish she’d been, throwing herself at the only man even less capable than him to attend to her needs, his knowing voice seemed to say. Edith shuddered.
“It’s hardly hidden if he told you, is it?” she asked, a little meaner than she had intended.
“Yes. Well. It’s clear he’d rather have continued pretending otherwise. He’s not a happy man.”
In a place like this, Edith thought, looking around the high windowless room with a grimace, who could be?
The thought kept her awake through the night. Her stomach writhed itself into knots as she tossed and turned, lying uncomfortably on her back with her left wrist tied to the bedpost. She wanted desperately to go to Fischer’s room—not to proposition him again, but to talk, simply talk.
How do you know? she wanted to ask. If that’s what you are, how do you know?
The question grew and took on form. At last she carefully loosened the fabric of Lionel’s paisley tie and pulled herself free from the bed, slipping her stockinged feet into shoes. She was still dressed. It would take less than a minute to cross the corridor to Fischer’s room.
What she’d do then she had no idea: it wasn’t like she could just ask him, not without the tremor in her voice betraying the fact that this was something terribly, dreadfully important. Not without his eyes softening with understanding or even worse, pity. He might even laugh. God.
No one answered at her knock. If he was out roaming the house Edith wasn’t going to look for him: a sign, perhaps, that there was no point in pursuing the matter further. Still, she pushed the door open and stepped into the dimly lit room.
A candle was guttering at Fischer’s bedside. He was sprawled across the covers, tennis shoes still on, a half-empty glass of amber liquid held loosely atop the slow rise and fall of his chest.
Edith felt a flood of compassion gazing down at his sleeping form. He looked haggard. Silver-gray stubble peppered his neck and jaw.
The hot stench of alcohol flooded her nostrils as she bent down and began carefully unlacing his battered shoes. She had removed one and was working on the other when he jerked awake, slopping the dregs of the whiskey down his front.
“Oh Christ,” he mumbled, on recognizing her. “Leave me alone. Please.”
“I’m sorry,” Edith said, stepping back. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“That’s a comfort. I don’t feel like getting ridden in my sleep, if it’s all the same to you.”
Edith’s cheeks flushed with shame.
“I wanted to apologise…for before. I said some awful things. Please believe that I never wanted to hurt you or Lionel.”
Fischer was fumbling at the sideboard. He struck a match against the wooden surface and lit a cigarette, without looking her in the face.
“You should get back to your husband.”
“I’m happily married, you know.”
“Right.”
“I didn’t know…I didn’t know that you—”
She paused.
“That I what.”
Edith realised what she really wanted to ask him was: Are you happy? She shrank from the words. She wanted him to tell her that it was all right, really, that despite it all he had carved out his own corner of the world, that he had somewhere to return to, that he was loved—even while she knew, looking down at his exhausted form, that none of it was true.
It would be intolerably cruel to ask. Even more so to receive the answer.
Tears sprang to her eyes.
“Has something happened?” Fischer asked, alert now. He cautiously reached out a hand and placed it on her shoulder. The warm comforting weight of his palm on her sweater set her off. He watched in muddled confusion as she dissolved in a flood of tears, didn’t recoil as she gripped his hand until the tears subsided and she finally pulled away, thoroughly embarrassed, wiping her eyes on the hem of her sweater.
“Good night,” she choked, and fled.
As she closed the door she saw Fischer’s drawn face staring after her with a strange mixture of worry and blank bewilderment.
“—Did you know he was a homosexual?” echoed Barrett’s voice, unwinding tinnily from the speaker.
Fischer froze. He watched the tape spin in mute horror, unable to bring himself from listening.
It was his own fault for snooping. Barrett’s machine loomed in the centre of the hall like an alien monolith—how could anyone, despite their bitter scepticism, help but let curiosity get the better of them? He’d thought Barrett might have recorded his process on the reel. It had just been lying there, waiting for someone to hit play.
“Who?”
“Fischer, who else?”
A cold knot of anger unspooled in Fischer’s stomach.That pompous ass. Of course Barrett had told his wife the first chance he got, to show how worldly he was: how knowledgable, how it was all so obvious for the discerning eye of a man of science like him.
It’s nobody’s business but mine, he thought. He felt sick imagining Mrs. Barrett’s pinched face of fearful disapproval. Florence’s meaningless smile, some perfectly apt aphorism poised on her lips. Part of him knew it was the house that had rewound the tape to that moment, that had set the machine recording in the first place, that it aimed to set them at odds with each other with perfect calculation. But the anger he felt was real.
Fischer slammed the stop button. The tape kept winding, mockingly, running backwards and then playing on its own volition. Barrett’s damned voice, tripping over his lines like a third-rate actor:
Did you know? Did you? Fischer, who else? Who else?
Christ. Fischer threw the machine across the room but it kept running, speeding up, running faster and faster until their voices were completely distorted, booming loud, contemptuous, sneering, the cadence unendurable to the ear. A burst of derisive laughter ripped through the room.
Then finally, silence.
A choked noise escaped Fischer’s throat.
He pushed open the door to the door to the great hall and stalked down the dimly lit corridor, entering the ballroom at random. The high chandelier glittered like distant icicles hanging overhead. It was here that he had found Dr. Rand, red-faced, ghastly, contorted on the floor in his final throes of death. Cerebral haemorrhage. His mouth opening and closing in a spastic groan, a burst vessel filling his left eye with blood.
Fischer didn’t need to open himself up to see the shape on the polished floor. The first man he had seen die. Helpless to do anything about it. Just as he was helpless now, letting the house drag the rest of them to their pathetic ends—
“Are you going to eat something, Ben?”
He straightened. Florence was behind him; he could smell the waft of perfume above the fetid odour of the house. He didn’t reply.
Florence approached him. The scratches on her face were vicious and swollen, turning crusted, the lacerations on her forearms visible beneath the white sleeves of her shirt. She was beaten to hell and back but here she was, still trying to look after him like he was an incapable child.
“I’m not in the mood,” he snapped. “If I’m hungry, I’ll eat.”
“Are you all right?”
“Just wonderful, thanks very much.”
She was probably waiting to strike, to kindly offer her well-meaning words of advice. Get them while they’re down. All those spiritualist types were the same. Circling pain and suffering like vultures with their talons poised: so blessed, so good. His dear mother dragging him to strangers’ funerals, telling those unmade, grieving people my boy can talk to the dead.
If she heard the acerbic edge to his voice, Florence chose not to acknowledge it. She moved to the centre of the room and lifted her arms, tilting her face toward the painted ceiling.
“Do you dance?” she asked.
“No. Never had the need.”
“God respects us when we work, but loves us when we dance,” Florence said, like she was quoting something, a small smile stretching her lips. She pivoted and moved her foot forward, then to the side, swaying in a one-sided waltz. “Let me show you.”
Fischer snorted.
“I’m not a fan of this song. Sorry.”
“Ben.”
Florence held her hand out to him, and he took it. He felt particularly foolish as she led him in a slow shuffle, her hand on his shoulder, placing his to rest on her hip.
“There you go.” She was taller than he was by about a few inches. Her smile radiant in her bruised face. “That’s not so hard, is it?”
He hadn’t held anyone this closely in a long time. His fingers felt strange pressed against the rise of her skirt; the last thing he wanted was to hurt her.
“It’s alright,” she said, as if reading his mind. “Sometimes, I wonder. How things could have been if I got married. It’s strange, but it’s not a sad feeling. I could be waltzing in some room with some other man and I still wouldn’t be as content as I am now.”
Fischer made a non-committal noise.
“Did you ever come close?” Florence asked.
“Not exactly.”
She smiled, a little sadly. “There’s a time for everything. Some people are called elsewhere. Some to marriage, others to their own path.”
“I’m sure as hell not called to be a dancer anytime soon.”
“I never wanted it either. Marriage. Love comes in many forms.”
Florence laid her head against his. He could feel some of his foul mood draining away, despite himself. Her thick red hair soft against the roughening skin of his neck, the slow draw of her breath, the drag of their feet against the polished floor. He closed his eyes.
If Dr. Barrett, on hearing voices, stuck his head around the ballroom door and gazed in perplexed wonder at the two waltzing figures, he never raised the fact in company. He withdrew. Shook his head to dispel the image of Fischer and Tanner sharing a quiet reprieve from the horrors of the house, and limped off to assure Edith that it really had been nothing. Nothing at all.
Florence really had tried to kill them.
Edith stared at the blood coursing down Fischer’s forehead: there was too much of it, too red. That look. Florence stalking at her with that twisted smile, ripping at her clothes. Her hands still shook with the cold, piercing terror of it.
Her lip was bleeding. She tried not to think why.
Fischer and Barrett were arguing, again. It took her a long time until she could focus enough to decipher the words.
“So you agree with me!” Fischer said, bounding back into the room.
Barrett winced, clutching his wounded thumb. It clearly pained him to pull his attention away from his battered machine.
“If Miss Tanner believes herself possessed, then an exorcism of sorts may have positive effects if only due to a matter of self-will. Belief in the process can be one hell of a restorative.” He turned to Edith. “What I fail to see, however, is how Mr. Fischer intends to cease the so-called possession, without the trappings and trimmings of Miss Tanner’s spiritualist faith.”
“I’m going to reach in there and pull it out by the teeth,” Fischer snapped. “If you want to start flinging holy water around, be my guest—not that it’ll do any good. Not against that.”
“Mr. Fischer, with all due respect…even assuming the veracity of the possession, six years of practice over half a lifetime ago hardly gives credibility to a prospective surgeon, if that’s what you intend. You’re also suffering from a concussion.”
Fischer flung up his hands and crossed the room to where Florence sat slumped in the high-backed medium’s chair. He began securing her wrists and ankles, his furious expression softening fractionally as he looked at her slackened face.
“You’re the one that’s been accusing me of not pulling my weight, Doctor. I admit I’ve been…reticent.” He rocked back on his heels and glowered up at Barrett and Edith. “But I can’t just sit by and watch her kill herself—watch him kill her.”
Edith realised that behind the tightly-wound anger in his face was a look of sheer, blank terror. He really believed in Florence’s possession, despite Lionel’s assurance, and was hell-bent on doing his best to help her. There was blood matting his hair and sideburns. She could have killed him. Killed them all, and he didn’t show a shred of blame.
“What can I do to help?” Edith asked.
Fischer and Barrett looked over at her in surprise.
“You can get yourself and your husband out if things go south,” Fischer said, a sickly grin flickering across his face. “As Dr. Barrett’s so kindly pointed out, it’s been a while.”
He sat down in the chair opposite Florence, stiff-backed, palms upward on his lap.
“Hang on,” Barrett interjected. “My tools, the recording equipment—”
“We don’t have any time to waste! Christ.”
Edith saw Lionel’s face color darkly, but he made no move to stop Fischer as he closed his eyes and began taking deep, measured breaths. The tension drained from his face: he looked calmer than Edith had ever seen him, suddenly ten years younger, the defensive line of his shoulders dropping while his eyes shuttered back and forth beneath closed lids.
“Okay,” he murmured, voice flat and affectless. “Here we go.”
Their breath misted before their faces. Edith could smell a sharp, clean, burning scent emanating from where Fischer sat, the fine hair on her arms standing on end, his bristling with static.
“Remarkable,” Barrett whispered. “Basic preliminary elements present without entering a full trance.”
“Please shut up,” Fischer said. “It’s hard enough opening up without…” His head tilted to one side, as if listening for approaching footsteps. “I can feel her. She’s in pain.”
Florence’s head jerked upright; Edith nearly gasped out loud. The spiritualist’s long red hair hung in front of her face like a shimmering stage curtain, her neck canted unnaturally from her body. Fischer grimaced.
A glimmer of delicate silver strands extended between the seated figures, Edith realised, barely visible in the dim light, reaching out from Fischer’s fingertips to Florence’s limp hands like fine tendrils of spun silk. She gripped Lionel’s arm and he nodded, expression filled with excitement.
“Florence,” Fischer said quietly. “It’s me.”
“Ben…” Her voice seemed to come from far away, pitching down from the high ceiling.
“Show him to me. Let me help.”
“No…I can’t.” Florence’s shoulders trembled, shaking the long sheet of her hair. “He won’t let me go.”
Fischer grunted.
“Come out, you son of a bitch. Don’t you want to show us your face? Daniel, if that’s who you really are—”
“Ben, no,” groaned Florence. “No. No.”
“What, he’s had enough already? Don’t hide from me, you bastard. This house is big enough for you to have your fun; you don’t need her. Get out.”
The tendrils tensed, coiling up Florence’s arms. She wailed a terrible, drawn-out wail, her fingers clawing at her thighs.
Edith looked down with horror to see that both chairs had risen inches from the floor, and she remembered what Lionel had said about Fischer’s boyhood abilities as power coursed through the room like lightning sparking between two rods. A vein pulsed rigidly in Fischer’s temple, the muscles in his neck taut and strained.
“I said GET OUT!
Florence’s whole body tensed against the chair, her head flying back, hair whipping around her neck to reveal the gray plasmic caul covering her face. A laugh bubbled from the shapeless mass. It shifted and grew, forming features that were not her own: a man’s face, skin rotted and peeling from high cheekbones, vicious, teeth bared in hate.
“Oh, Ben,” chuckled Florence’s voice, but it was deep and mellow and darkly amused. “We’ve been waiting for you. It’s time you joined us again, isn’t it? You don’t have to be alone anymore.”
The face changed forms, faster than Edith could see: an old man, face ruddy and contorted; a bearded man with glasses and a fixed leer; a woman with curled light hair, her throat slashed wide open and peeling down toward her clavicle, tendons jumping and twitching in her neck.
“Mama’s boy,” taunted the woman’s voice, distant and sing-song. “She’s not waiting for you to come home anymore, is she? You were glad when she died, weren’t you, baby? Stay with us forever.”
Fischer flinched.
“Bait, that’s all you are, Benjamin,” came the old man’s wheeze. “Barrett knows it. I knew it. How does it feel, to be the one tied to the stake? All that power. We hoped the house would choke. Instead you ran away and let us die.”
“No!”
“Oh yes,” slurred the final figure’s voice. “You ran like a rabbit, didn’t you, my boy? Who could look at a thing like you and not want to eat it alive?”
Fischer shuddered. The air crackled around his head; Edith shielded her head as fragments of chandelier rained down from the vaulted ceiling, ground dust glittering and drifting around them.
The gray ectoplasm darted into the space between Fischer and Florence, reaching towards Fischer’s chest. Edith cried out in warning as it billowed forward with sudden intent, darting into his nostrils and coiling around his head. Fischer yelled. The tendril plunged into his open mouth and his head jerked back as it forced itself into inside, choking him, swelling as it moved further into his throat and lungs, bilious and cold, and he understood, terribly, what Florence had meant earlier that night when she whispered “Filled.”
“We have to do something,” cried Edith, clinging to Lionel with terror. “Do something, for God’s sake.”
“I don’t—”
Fischer convulsed above them, twitching and seizing as the smoke rippled from the ashen caul over Florence’s face into his nose; his contorted mouth; his ears. Edith ran to Florence’s chair and tried to tug it to the ground, beat at her legs, but it was no use.
“Stop!” she sobbed. “Let him go. You’re killing him!”
Fischer’s hands stopped their useless scrabbling at his throat and fell limply to his sides, and she thought he’s dead. It took thirty years but it finally killed him, and now it’s going to kill us too.
She let go of Florence’s ankle and turned to her husband in mute resignation, but stopped before she could venture any further. The temperature in the room had plummeted. She could feel the moisture in her nostrils hardening into tiny shards, feel her eyelashes clumping together with frost; all at once her hands felt red and chapped and pointless as clumps of ice as she stared up at Florence’s lolling figure, begging for it to end, but it wasn’t Florence’s doing at all—
Fischer’s head jolted upright with startling suddenness. When his eyes snapped open they weren’t dark but a terrifying filmy white, blind and unseeing. Icy fog swirled around his head, the room shook, and the gray coil trembled, retracting slightly, but it was too late—a wall of power blasted outwards from Fischer’s tensed body, all sound seemingly sucked from the room as Edith and Barrett were knocked to the floor and the ectoplasm shattered into so many particles, both chairs falling to land on all four legs in a dry flurry of ground glass and dust.
Edith was half-aware of Lionel crouched at her side, hands clamped over his ears; her own eardrums quivered with so much residual vibration she could barely lift her head to check if Fischer and Florence were alright. Florence lay in heap on the floor, but she was stirring, her face her own at last.
“Ben?” mumbled Edith.
He was on his hands and knees, coughs wracking his entire body. She crawled over to where he was crouched and saw with relief that his eyes had reverted to their normal dark brown, tears streaming down his face as he coughed and coughed. He tried to say something and winced.
“Florence—” he rasped. “Is she?”
“She’s alright.”
Edith fumbled for his arm and squeezed, feeling his whole body shaking under her frozen fingers. Barrett was with Florence, checking her eyes with his pencil torch. He shone the beam into Fischer’s eyes and nodded with satisfaction.
“Her vitals are normal,” Barrett informed them. “As for the possession, well…I’m afraid that’s outside my level of expertise. How do you feel?”
Fischer ignored him, stumbling to Florence’s side. She gazed blearily up at him, confusion knitting her brows into a tremulous line.
“You’ll have to try harder than than, Benny-boy,” she said, smiling beatifically up at him.
Fischer regarded her for a long moment, and her face turned pale and distant and swam before his eyes as he passed out.
In his dreams he saw Professor Rand and Grace Lauter and Doctor Graham and Professor Fenley, and he knew that he had let them down, and that they were reaching out to him with groping hands that meant to keep him with them for good. Grace Lauter looked down at him with Florence’s face, and laid a cool, chaste kiss to his burning forehead. Searing all the way down to the bone.
The house constricted itself like a coiling snake. It wanted him; not Florence, not the Barretts. It had been waiting all this time for him to open himself, so it could come inside. To show him it was stronger than he was. That little dust-up the first time round had merely been a welcome slap on the back: now it was ready to take him to pieces.
He hurt everywhere. He hurt inside. The power was coursing through him like an unregulated current, boiling up the poison. Sweating it out. He clutched his face and groaned.
There is a bright stream of light cutting through the high windows onto a blue rug. Traffic rumbles in the street below, and somewhere, he can hear a kettle boiling. A gray-haired man sits in an armchair with his back to him. A glossy journal in his hands 1..
A key scrapes in a lock. The man keeps his head bent over his reading, even as Edith Barrett enters the room clutching paper bags filled with groceries to her chest. She wears men’s slacks and a navy pea coat.
“They didn’t have your coffee,” she says, making a face. “I had to go all the way to Chinatown."
The sight of her outside Hell House bolts through him with terrible joy, and he tries to call out to her even as he turns and brandishes the journal at her with repressed annoyance, asking, “Have you seen this shit?”
Fischer jerked awake. He had been about to say something else, but he couldn’t remember what: just the warmth of the apartment and Edith’s softening amusement, as if this were a scene she had walked in on many times before. That scared him more than visions of the house. Death and rape and torture. Belasco’s unfocused face.
How could she ever look at him like that? Like anything other than a stranger?
Fischer swung his legs over the edge of the bed. His head was pounding where Florence had cracked him with the crowbar. Tiny dots of light flickered in and out at the edges of his vision.
Florence. Florence was—
The chapel blazed in front of his eyes. He seized handfuls of his own hair. Blood. The crucifix. A shower of red hair spread across the black flagstones of the nave.
And he knew none of his visions could come to any good.
He couldn’t leave. Not now. Barrett’s body soaked his clothes and shoes as he dragged him from the pool and deposited him in the trunk of the car as tenderly as he could. He closed the doctor’s eyes and felt a great swell of nausea unseat him.
That goddamned house. It had tricked him yet again, made it seem like Barrett’s machine had worked when it had just been laying in wait, killing Barrett while he was assured of his own success. And Edith was—
Where was Edith?
Fischer felt an icy claw of panic spear his gut. He couldn’t be the last one again, not now, she had to be alive somewhere, trapped in one of the many rooms of the house. It would want to toy with her first. Nothing sweeter than despair. The desperate whimpering of an ensnared mouse, its back already broken.
The heavy door bruised his hands as he shoved it open and ran through the corridors calling her name. The Barretts’ room was empty. So was his. Florence’s, the great hall, the ballroom.
He sprinted to the chapel without thought. Blood still lay thick and wet on the tiles and he nearly slipped stepping over the dismembered cat, distracted momentarily, and when he looked up a wave of relief coursed through him. She was at the altar. Alive.
“Edith?” he said, and paused.
Edith crouched by the broken crucifix on the floor. At his voice, she looked up, eyes unfocused and glassy.
“Ben?”
“Edith.” He didn’t know how to tell her. “Your husband—”
“Where’s Lionel? Where is he?”
“He’s dead."
“That can’t be true. He brought me here.” Edith turned, pointing at the empty front pew. “He was right there. He wanted to watch.”
She was stroking the statue’s emaciated legs, deliberately working her way towards the obscene phallus. Looking at the bloodstains sickened him.
“Let’s go,” Fischer said. “The car’s waiting.”
Edith shook her head. She rubbed her thumb in light circles over the tip of the carved wood, a slow smile stretching her face.
“I rather liked the sight of you choking on cock,” she said dreamily. “It’s the most I’ve ever liked you, in fact.”
“What?”
“Did you like it?”
“You saw it. That thing was trying to kill me.”
“What’s it like to suck a cock? Does it taste good? Does it feel like it belongs there, in the warmth of your throat? Does it make you hard?”
Fischer kept silent.
“If I had one would you want to fuck me?” Edith turned around, shimmying down her shirt to expose her thin, flat back. “Lionel says I look like a boy from behind. And we know you’re not a tit man, no sir, Mr. B. F. Fischer quails before a well-formed tit: it’s a nice leaking hard-on that gets his motor going, if it goes at all—which it might as well not, for all the use it gets.”
Fischer felt his face burn, despite himself. So much for closed off. So much for closed book. She was ripping him to tiny shreds, and delighting in it.
“We’re friends, aren’t we, Ben? You’d give a friend a hand, wouldn’t you? How about your cock? Just as a loan, mind you.” She advanced towards him, swinging her hips. He didn’t know where to look. “We’re all pals here.”
She moved closer and he backed away, until the back of his knees hit the altar rail. Her hands came to rest against his chest, sweet and easy.
“Edith,” he pleaded. “You can stop now. Wake up.”
Her expression contacted: she blinked, then gazed up at him with a shiver of confusion.
“Ben,” Edith gasped. “I don’t—”
“You don’t want to do this.”
“I’m sick to death of being told what I want,” she hissed, and her fingernails dug into his collarbone. He raised a hand to slap her, to pull her back as he had done before, but she seized his wrist in an impossibly strong grip and twisted until he cried out in shock. She shoved him with both hands and he fell down onto the stone steps.
This wasn’t happening. He tried to sit up but she was straddling him, forcing him back down, grinding herself against his thigh.
“That’s it,” she commanded, while he struggled beneath her. “Now, stay still and be a good boy.”
A pang of horror curled into his gut as he heard the same words echo from the darkened recesses of his mind, this time in the reasonable voice of his old mentor and friend Doctor Graham.
“Now stay still, Ben, there’s a lad, stay still and be a good boy.”
Oh God, he thought. Thirty years of it.
They had found him outside, half-conscious on the porch; he remembered those panicked hours of hiding in the bushes, listening to the screams inside the house, clutching his shaking knees while his toes turned purple and blue against the mud-gray bracken, but for the life of him he could not remember losing his clothes in the first place.
Doctor Graham frozen to death in the woods. His own near death from exposure.
“No,” he choked. “No.”
All these years he thought he’d escaped from the house—chewed up and battered, but alive. That he’d crawled with bloody fingernails from inside a hungry, gaping mouth, leaving the terror and the panic behind its dark walls. But that wasn’t what happened.
He had been banging on the door, begging to be let back in.
“Yes!” Edith crowed. She pressed her hand below his belt. “Don’t worry. We have to know everything’s in working order, don’t we? I’m trying to help.”
There was something wrong with him. His hands were like iron weights had his side; he couldn’t move, he just lay there and watched as she tugged down his zipper with deliberate slowness, grinning down at him like a prize hunter with a wriggling fish hooked at the end of her line. He couldn’t tell where Edith’s voice ended and Graham’s began, and beyond that—
It was like listening to a faded recording, crackling in and out of focus. A wax cylinder on an ancient phonograph. The words printed by the same hand.
“You’ve been waiting all this time to come back inside, and here we are, at last. I want you to come. You can do that, can’t you? Not like my dear wreck of a husband. Show me.”
She raked his sweater up over his chest and took his left nipple in her teeth, sucking until it hurt. He pictured the purple teeth marks on Florence’s breasts and shuddered.
“Fight it. You’re not him.”
“That old thing?” she asked, pausing. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes gone dark. “What did Doctor Graham do that I can’t? I’ll make it better.”
“No. Belasco.”
A quiver passed over her face as he said the name.
Graham was dead. Edith was a pawn. There was a shape behind it all, which he finally beginning to see, that Florence had seen in her final agony: the puppet master behind the nightmare thirty years ago and the nightmare now. Emeric Belasco.
Edith screamed in anger, her hands clawing at his throat. Her face blurred before him as she squeezed his neck and the blood pulsed like a bass drum in his head; he could see green eyes flashing in the darkness, and he knew he was going to die.
Fischer and Florence, fools together.
But that couldn’t be right. There was an apartment somewhere, coffee on a stove, and he knew with a sudden burst of delight that it hadn’t been a vision from the house after all: it had been Florence, reaching out with a kind hand to tell him this was possible, if only he wanted it.
All those years couldn’t have been wasted time. A lifetime of scraping through dead-ends and empty rooms and the trapped voice of a house that had wanted to kill him if only he would have paid it any mind—all he needed to do was—
Survive.
Fischer could move again, and so he did. He threw away Edith’s groping hands and scrambled to his feet, his head pulsing a mainline to hell, and he felt the old anger surge into his chest like a gift from the dead.
“Belasco!” he yelled, throat sore but that was okay by him. It meant he was alive. “You bastard! You cheap, whoreson fraud! Can’t do it yourself, can you? You impotent fuck!”
A bell fell off the altar and cracked on the tile. Fischer wheeled around, laughing. He knew what he had to do.
On the ground, Edith moaned. She could hear Fischer calling to the house and his voice was raw and taunting and unafraid. He came and crouched by her side, and held out a hand. There was no disgust or blame in his face.
“You’re not like that,” he said softly, and she knew it was true.
She was like him. Not half as brave, or kind. But she could try to be.
Edith took Fischer’s hand and let him pull her to her feet. She swayed, clutching his side.
“We’ve got a ghost to kill,” he told her, and for the first time since setting foot in the house she believed that if anyone could do it, it would be him.
When they stumbled out of the house they looked around in surprise at the dark night sky. It was snowing. Flakes loomed out of the air and fell spiralling onto their upturned faces, melting in wet spots on their hair.
The car was hidden under a heavy blanket of white. Fischer tried the door but it was frozen shut.
“Of course,” he laughed. “Of course.”
He kicked at the car, sending snow showering in thick clumps to the ground. Edith shivered and clutched the bag of Lionel’s manuscript to her chest. Beyond them, the tarn sat slate-shined and still with ice. She walked to the edge and stared down at the faint shadow of her reflection.
“I can’t leave,” she murmured. “Not without Lionel. He got me after all, Ben—don’t you see there’s no where for me to go but back inside that house?”
Fischer stood silently at her shoulder. She could feel his eyes on her face.
“I don’t know how to be alone. I’ve never—I can’t—”
“You’re talking to an expert,” he replied, taking off his jacket and draping it over her shoulders. “I’ve got nowhere to be. I can show you, if you’d like.”
She knew he needed medical help. That both of them were shell-shocked, bleeding, hungry, and now freezing. The couple from Caribou Falls would only arrive in the morning. From the pitch-black horizon it looked like that would was some hours off.
Fischer took out a cigarette and lit it with shaking fingers before handing her the battered lighter. “We’ll have to keep ourselves warm somehow,” he said, looking up at the blank walls of the house.
The metal lighter was warm in Edith’s fingers. She laced her free hand with his and stared at the wooden door of the house and imagined it in flames, fire crumbling Belasco’s corpse to a benign charred powder, licking up the stone until it was black and ash mingled with the snowfall until the whole valley was coated in a sign that the sickness had been purged.
Beside her, Fischer caught her eye. He looked sick and drawn, the lines of his face seemed deeper somehow, his shoulders thin and starved beneath the collar of his shirt. His cigarette glowed like a furnace light.
And behind that pinprick of flame, his mouth curled in a grin.
Notes:
1. You mentioned in-universe documents in your letter: this journal review was the first thing I wrote but I couldn't find a place for it in the story. I've included it on its own in the following chapter for the laughs. Journal of Parapsychology, hire me.
Chapter Text
Journal of Parapsychology: Reviews of Books
Borders of the Human Faculty. By Dr. Lionel Barrett. (New York, Routledge, 1971. $19 cloth, $14.95 paper)
Reviewed by Dr. Josephine Bishop.
Scholars of parapsychology will likely be familiar with the work of Dr. Lionel Barrett (Man, Mind, Matter: Psychokinesis and the Realm of the Real (Hammer, 1958), The Dark Side of Mental Phenomena (Jackson Press, 1963), Externalisation of Somatic Cognition (Routledge, 1966)), though the average tabloid newspaper reader may have a passing awareness of the author due to the unfortunate circumstances regarding his death in December of last year. His most recent work was written in the months preceding his demise, and indeed it was the pursuit of untapped parapsychic knowledge that led him to the most renowned, yet most un-investigated, locale of psychic phenomena in North America: that of Belasco House—more commonly known as “Hell House” to those of a certain lurid imagination.
The first half of Borders of the Human Faculty is a fine discourse on the limitations of current scientific response to the field of parapsychology as a whole. Barrett’s proposals are rational, grounded, and will be of interest to those already seeking to expand the possibilities of experimental approach. Regrettably, the latter section detailing the doctor’s fatal hypothesis and investigation of the Belasco House is sadly unfinished, and readers may be unsatisfied to find such promising material truncated by the tragedy that befell its writer.
It is clear the final chapter was compiled through notes and outlines by amateur hand, and while we cannot fault the author’s wife for her dedication in seeing her husband’s final work in published form, it is a disappointing departure from the clear, concise style preceding it. The concept of electromagnetic “clearing” of psychic energy as described in the book’s epilogue comes across as fanciful and incomplete; if Mrs. Barrett had enlisted the help of her husband’s colleagues or peers to decipher the doctor’s posthumous composition, instead of relying on the well-meaning but unscientific view of her own interpretation and that of an uncredited contributor, the overall impression of the book may have been one of forceful convincing research instead of a sadly abbreviated post-script.
One’s final sense is that of work of genius held hostage by a latter-day Kinbote, whose misguided interjection serves only to warp the conclusion and integrity of a potentially ground-breaking investigation into the unexplored avenues of so-called haunting phenomena. That said, Borders of the Human Faculty serves as a poignant farewell to one of the leading minds in parapsychology, and creates a clear path down which the minds of questing scholars, old and new, may follow.
3.5/5.
skazka on Chapter 1 Mon 26 Dec 2022 11:36PM UTC
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fullborn on Chapter 1 Wed 04 Jan 2023 10:22PM UTC
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Snickfic on Chapter 2 Sat 31 Dec 2022 12:54AM UTC
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Edonohana on Chapter 2 Sun 01 Jan 2023 06:27AM UTC
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