The List Of Seven Read Free Page A

Nicholson—the full name leapt immediately to mind. Husband's father in government. Hereditary peerage, Topping their ancestral manse, somewhere in Sussex.
    Which knock to use? The covert: three raps, a pause, then a fourth. Get someone to the door, then sort it out. He raised the cudgel end of his walking stick, but before he made contact, the door swung open. He couldn't recall hearing the latch disengage. Probably not closed properly; the cant of the doorframe, a gust of wind.
    He entered. The center hall was dark, bereft, bare boards underfoot that never knew a rug. Closed doors to the left, right, and straight ahead. Stairs straining upward like bad teeth. The boards protested underfoot with every cautious step. After three such steps, the open door behind him swung shut. This time he distinctly heard the latch engage. Doyle reassured himself by recalling a gust of wind that preceded the closing of the door, of sufficient force to initiate the securing of the latch.
    Except that the single candle on the table, its sallow flame now alone between Doyle and total darkness, had not flinched or faltered in its ovoid capsule. Doyle passed his hand over the flame; it danced agreeably, then he noticed that beside the candlestick on the table was a glass bowl, ensnaring stark ebon highlights from the flickering flame.
    The bowl's mouth spanned the breadth of both his hands. The glass was dense, smoky, richly textured with a pattern. This filigree depicts a scene, Doyle realized as he traced a pair of conical horns sprouting from an upright animal's head. His eye drifted to a dark mass of something wet and charry in the bowl; flaked and blackened, it gave off a disagreeably ripe tang. Fighting an instinctive wave of revulsion, he was
    about to insert an exploratory finger into the fluid when with a moist glug something shifted beneath its surface, something not inert. The bowl began to vibrate, its edges rimming the table, giving off a high glassine hum. Right, well, we can come back to this, he thought, backing away.
    Low voices from behind the door directly ahead of him, soft, rhythmic, almost musical, consonant with the vibration, perhaps responsible for it. Not a song: more like a chant, the words indecipherable—
    The door to the right opened. The boy he'd seen before stood there, looking up at him without surprise.
    "I'm here for the seance," Doyle said.
    The boy's brow furrowed, scrutinizing, enigmatic. Older than originally estimated, small for his age. Quite a bit older. Grime smudging his face, a mobcap pulled low over the ears, but dirt and cap not entirely obscuring wrinkles at the brows and corners. Quite a mass of wrinkles. And there was nothing of the child in those unnerving eyes.
    "Lady Nicholson is expecting me," Doyle added authoritatively.
    Calculation occurred behind the boy's look, and his eyes suddenly went alarmingly vacant, as in vacated. Doyle waited a long ten seconds, half expecting the boy to keel over—a petit mal seizure perhaps—about to reach out to him when his presence snapped crisply back into place. He opened the door and bowed stiffly, waving Doyle through. An epileptic, clearly much abused, growth stunted by malnutrition, perhaps a mute. East End streets play host to legions of these lost ones, Doyle allowed himself unsen-timentally. Bought and sold for less than the coins in my pocket.
    Doyle moved past the boy into the parlor, the chanting voices closer now, issuing from behind closed sliding doors directly ahead. The door snicked shut behind him, the boy gone. Doyle treaded softly to the doors, and as he listened, the voices within went silent, leaving only the sibilant hiss of the gas jets.
    The doors slid open. The boy stood on the other side now, waving him forward. Behind him, across a surprisingly commodious room, the seance was already in progress.
    The modern Spiritualist Movement began with an act of fraud. On March 31, 1848, mysterious rapping sounds were heard in the home of