Stolen Away

Marinelli’s smile was faint and condescending. “You are under a basic misapprehension, Mr. Heller. Sister Sarah is not a physical medium. You’ll hear no bell ringing, table rapping, nor experience any table tilting or other unexplained transportation of objects. Sister Sarah is a trance medium—she materializes no trumpets and summons no visible spirits. She wanders the landscape of her own mind, listening with an inner ear to spirit voices.”

“Joan of Arc got burned at the stake for that,” I reminded him.

“Ah yes,” he said, raising a forefinger heavenward. “But these are more enlightened times.”

Tell that to the Scottsboro boys.

“Sister Sarah,” he went on, “is what we call a ‘sensitive.’ She has a control, a spirit guide, who frequently speaks through her.”

“This ‘spirit guide,’” Breckinridge said, interested despite himself, “is a specific entity?”

Marinelli nodded momentously. “His name is Yellow Feather.”

“Yellow Feather?” I asked. And I looked at Breckinridge and said, again, “Yellow Feather?” How bad did I want this room, anyway?

“Yellow Feather,” the bald spiritualist continued, “was a great warrior. An Iroquois chief.”

“Dead many moons,” I said.

“That is correct,” he said, ignoring my sarcasm. “If you have no other questions, Mr. Heller, Mr. Breckinridge…I will summon Sister Sarah.”

“Yeah, I have one more question,” I said.

“Yes, Mr. Heller?”

“Do you shave your head?”

Breckinridge kicked me under the table.

Marinelli only smiled. “No. My hair fell out when I was a youth. It was a psychic sign. It signaled my psychosexual awakening.”

“Just wondering,” I said.

Marinelli closed his eyes, bowed his head slightly. The incense-scented room was an eerie study in shadows and shapes as the wavery candlelight, and a modicum of streetlight from the sheer-curtained windows, turned the mundane hotel furnishings into Caligari-like onlookers. Those windows were rattling as the wind crept in over their sills. Maybe our medium wasn’t of the flying horn and floating disembodied head variety, but this was a séance all right.

Our host, hands folded, began to hum monotonously.

A door opened and a figure in black and crimson seemed to glide in. She was standing next to me before I knew it, a small, beautiful woman with large, dark unblinking eyes, a pale cameo of a face and full, sensuous lips made scarlet by dabs of lip rouge. Her dark eyebrows, unlike her husband’s, were thick and unplucked and somehow the effect was exotic; she was caught up in a rose-scented cloud that banished the sandalwood. She looked like a whore, and she looked like a Madonna.

And, what the hell, I have to tell you: I liked it. There was no sign that my hair was falling out, but I was having a psychosexual awakening myself.

Like her husband, she wore a floor-length flowing black robe; but she also wore a hood, lined with blood-red satin. Unlike her husband’s robe, hers was not loose; rather it was contoured to her shape, clinging as if wet to a slender, high-breasted figure. Her nipples were erect and looking right back at me. Maybe she wasn’t a physical medium, but if I didn’t cool off, this table was going to rise.

“Good evening, gentle friends,” she said, in a small, musical voice; she looked to be about twenty-two. “Please don’t get up.”

Thanks for that much.

Her husband pulled out the chair reserved for her, and, she primly sat. She drew her hands out of the long sleeves of the gown like a surgeon preparing to wash up; she placed her small, delicate hands, the nails of which were long, razor sharp and as red as a gaping wound, flat on the table. The candle wax that had dripped onto the wood was damn near the same color as her nails. This pair was good. They were worth whatever they charged.

“Thank you for your presence,” she said. Her hair, what I could see of it under the hood, was jet-black and pulled away from her face; she wore a single, circular gold earring, the one overtly gypsylike touch. “You are Mr. Breckinbridge.”

Breckinbridge, she said.

But Colonel Breckinridge did not correct her; it isn’t polite to correct a psychic.

“You are a police officer,” she said to me, smiling as sweetly as a shy schoolgirl.

“That’s right,” I said. Breckinbridge, Schmeckinbridge, if this babe said she was psychic, she was psychic by me.

“And your name?”

“Nathan Heller,” I said. Christ, she smelled good.

“Mr. Heller, will you take my hand?”

Is the Pope Catholic?

She joined hands with me, and squeezed. Yowsah.

“When my companion has induced my trance state,” she said, “please clasp hands with Mr. Breckinbridge. And Mr. Breckinbridge, please clasp hands with Martin. And Martin will take my hand, and the psychic chain will be established. Please do not break the psychic chain.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said.

Marinelli slowly, pompously, removed the golden, jeweled cross from around his neck. Holding it by its chain, he began to slowly pass it before the great big beautiful brown peepers of his wife.