The Spectral City. Leanna Renee Hieber

Denbury, Eve’s mother, suffered from selective mutism when she was a child. She had been sent off to the Connecticut Asylum to learn American Sign Language. Her voice had recovered, but she instilled the value of Sign in her daughter, saying that she had a feeling she’d need it. It had proven quite true. Gran also spoke Sign, maintaining that after having learned five vocal languages she had felt it high time to learn a different kind. That had been the initial connection between Natalie and Gran; their ability to converse. Being understood created families out of orphans and the disenfranchised, communication being a shelter for a heart and mind battling the elements.

      There was no taking away little Jenny’s immense grief, but at least she was championed. Natalie had agreed to teach Jenny American Sign and Jenny was eager to learn and to take her mind off the pain of loss.

      Much like Eve, Jenny had grown up hearing spirits and didn’t know any different. Antonia and Cora had both opened to the gifts at thirteen. Altogether, the quartet was equally haunted and equally understood. Jenny’s face on this night, facing another loss as she strode in behind Antonia into the front foyer, was stoic.

      “So our Maggie is mysteriously gone?” Antonia asked.

      Eve nodded confirmation. “I don’t even need to be upset, Zofia is beside herself enough for all of us,” Eve said, trying to force a smile.

      Jenny signed to Eve that she could hear Zofia’s sob from what felt like a mile away. Eve nodded.

      “Don’t worry,” Antonia said to Jenny. While Antonia hadn’t fully learned Sign, she had taken to Jenny like an older sister and the two were intuitively connected. “I know you and Maggie are close.” Antonia gestured towards the direction where Zofia had wafted. “I know she’s like your sister too. We’ll find her. She’d never go on to the undiscovered country without telling you. Without telling all of us.”

      Eve nodded. “She wouldn’t go without warning. That’s why we’re all worried.” Eve tried to hold back a torrent of emotion but she had no artifice around these women and she allowed a few tears to fall as she sat a moment with a cup of tea. Jenny slid next to Eve, her small body only taking up a part of the cushion next to her and grabbed her hand and held it as memories of Maggie overtook Eve.

      Eve was young when the ghost of Margaret Hathorn had first come to say hello. The ice had been broken in the house about her seeing ghosts for three years by this point, her first interaction with the dead having been her grandmother Helen, who’d died pushing Eve’s mother Natalie out of the way of an oncoming carriage when Natalie was only a toddler. From the first black-eyed-Susan flower that her grandmother’s ghost had mysteriously placed on the Whitby mantle, to Eve’s present employment, Eve’s gifts had been a source of tension with no resolution—only a battle-tested knowledge of what would and wouldn’t upset her parents at the dinner table.

      “Don’t tell your mother that I’ve come to you,” Maggie had said to Eve that first day. She had appeared in full greyscale, her image very potent, her hair up in a coiffure and dressed in a beautiful, trailing ball-gown of early eighties French style, with a prominent bustle and layers of frills everywhere.

      “Oh, so you know she doesn’t like my talking to ghosts?” Eve asked with a wary eye.

      “I don’t want to make it any harder for her. It was . . . hard for her when I died. She blames herself. Gran too.” Maggie batted a hand and laughed. “They’re so stupid about it.”

      There was a long pause. “Care to elaborate?” Eve pressed. This ghost clearly knew her family but she didn’t know her.

      “I was Evelyn’s niece,” the ghost explained, wafting over to hover at Eve’s vanity, taking a look at herself in the tall oval mirror and frowning, reaching up a translucent hand to tuck a floating lock of hair back into her coiffure. “I wasn’t very nice to Natalie in life. It was complicated and I was a complete snot, but remember the ‘horror’ that brought your parents together?”

      “One of the many things they won’t talk about?” Eve asked.

      “Yes.” The ghost swiveled around to face Eve, bobbing gently as she perched on the velvet vanity stool. “I got caught up in all that too. I made it worse for us all. It became the death of me.”

      “I’m sorry,” Eve said. “So why haunt me? Is our family unfinished business?”

      “I came to your mother after I died and we forgave each other. I thought I’d move on for good. But truth be told, I was drawn back to you. I had been in a pleasant ‘between’ for some time when I saw a light and I followed. Right before I stepped through, from the Corridors and into this world again, your grandmother Helen was there. She grabbed my hand, helped me step across and told me she was confident you’d welcome me.”

      Eve had done exactly so, just as she had with each medium and spirit who had been drawn to her. This magnitude of purpose had driven Eve right to a legislator to ask for that purpose to be given a job. The feeling of water on her hand, her own tear, roused Eve back to the moment.

      “It’s so odd . . .” Eve murmured. “You understand, friends, why this is so strange. When one works with the dead and becomes so very fond of them, as we all have of Maggie, there is a comfort in the idea that they would never be gone. Grief here is so changed, specific and hollow. I’ve never felt anything like it.”

      “What do we do, beyond the usual?” Cora asked.

      Eve gestured for her fellows to follow her to the single round table perfect for a small séance.

      “I don’t know,” Eve replied. “But we can begin with our usual rite whenever searching for information on a missing person. We treat Maggie just like we would any living soul gone without a trace.”

      Her mediums nodded, taking a seat and placing their palms flush upon the black tablecloth and allowing their gaze to move to a soft focus before them. At the center of the table sat a box of matches and a white taper on a silver candlestick, at the base of which sat a wreath of juniper berries. To the right of this was a small silver bell.

      Eve took in a deep breath and released it slowly. As she did, she struck the match and lit the taper. “Heavens, grace us,” she murmured.

      In response, Antonia murmured something private, Jenny made the sign of the cross, and Cora bowed her head. Picking up the small bell, Eve rang it once, a glitteringly sharp, pure little sound that echoed around the room.

      She sat, placing her hands flush upon the table too, taking another deep breath. Leaning into the table, she extended her hands, one to each of her compatriots, who did the same, creating a circle of held hands.

      There were no other tricks of their trade, no other divinatory devices. Eve surmised that the more contraptions one relied on, the easier it was for a medium, whether legitimately gifted or toying with the craft, to begin relying on theatrical effects to make sure an audience received what they wanted. The spirit world was unpredictable. A career in divination either meant one weathered the fits and starts, or fashioned fail-safes for consistent results and became a fraud.

      Eve knew she would never attain respect for her mission or her ghosts if their Precinct was revealed as leaning on trick tables, spirit cabinets or other easily manipulated objects. They relied only on a candle, a bell, a few symbols of respective faiths and of the natural world, and their own gifted souls. She hoped in time their simple truths would prove themselves and she’d write it all down to show to the world, when ready.

      “Heavens, we ask that you grant us,” Eve continued quietly, “by way of the spirits we have come to know and trust, information regarding the soul of Margaret Hathorn, our friend and colleague, absent from us this day. We wish to be connected with her or any spirit who knows something of her.”

      Eve watched the candle flicker a moment. She closed her eyes and spoke more directly. “Maggie, are you there?” Eve continued. “Why have you worried us so?”

      The candle went out entirely in a burst of chill breeze and the room lit with the additional eerie light of a new attendant spirit, like the glow