The Last Seance Club

The champagne was warm and tasted of copper, which was fitting, because that is exactly what the room tasted like to me—the metallic tang of a lie so large it fills your mouth before you even open it.

"Miss Frost, if I may," said Mrs. Astor-Whitney, leaning forward in her velvet chair. Her diamonds caught the gaslight and scattered it across the walls of the Long Island mansion like shards of broken glass. "My daughter—she was so young. I just want to know she is at peace."

I closed my eyes. The room dissolved. I was no longer in the mansion, no longer sitting at the round mahogany table surrounded by thirty of the wealthiest people in America, their faces pale with candlelight and hunger. I was somewhere else. Somewhere cold and dark and quiet.

And I was there. The girl. Seventeen years old, wearing a white dress I recognised from the society pages—she had been photographed at the opera, laughing, her head thrown back, her throat exposed to the chandelier light. Dead three weeks. Drowned in the Hudson. Ruled accidental.

I reached for her. I always reached. That was the job, wasn't it? That was the thing they paid me five thousand dollars a session to do. Reach into the cold dark and pull back whatever I could bring.

"She is not at peace," I said, opening my eyes.

The room went very still. Mrs. Astor-Whitney's mouth opened and closed like a fish on a dock.

"She is angry," I continued. "She is angry because she was not drowning. She was pushed. And the person who pushed her was someone she loved."

The gasps were delicious. I had learned to love the sound of shocked aristocrats. It made the money easy to collect.

After the session, as the guests filed out in clusters of hushed conversation and scandalised whispers, Thomas Wilson approached me with two glasses of bootleg gin and that smile of his—the one that used to make me think he was charming and now just made me think he was a predator who had finally found the right prey.

"Bravo, Cecilia," he said, handing me a glass. "Truly. You should be on Broadway."

"I am on Broadway. Every night."

"You're exhausted. I can see it. The dark circles. The way your hands shake when you think no one is looking."

"I'm fine."

"You're dying, sweetheart. And these people—these beautiful, stupid, wealthy vultures—they will pay to watch you do it, and then they will write about how talented you were in the obituary, and then they will forget your name by morning."

I took a drink. The gin burned in a way that almost felt real. "That's the job."

It started six months ago, when Thomas brought me to New York from London. I had been a medium in the East End of London—small sessions, modest fees, the occasional dowager duchess who wanted to speak to her dead husband. I was good at it. Not supernaturally good. Skillfully good. I had studied under a series of teachers who had taught me the techniques: cold reading, hot reading, suggestion, misdirection. I could tell what people wanted to hear and shape my words to fit. I could read body language like a book. I could make a grieving widow see her dead son in the flickering candlelight.

I was not a fraud. I was an artist. There is a difference, I told myself.

But New York was different. The clients were richer, the expectations higher, the stakes... I was not sure what the stakes were. I had begun to notice things. Small things at first—a gap in my memory after a long session, a dream that felt more like a memory, the way some of the names I spoke during séances were names I had never heard before but somehow knew.

Charles Vanderbilt II was the one who changed everything. He was thirty-two years old, heir to one of the oldest fortunes in America, and he had a face that looked carved from marble and a mind that looked sharpened on flint. He attended three of my séances in the first month, sitting in the back, watching me with eyes that were at once skeptical and hungry.

On the fourth night, he invited me to dinner.

"You're the real thing, Miss Frost," he said, over a meal that cost more than my annual London rent. "Not the stage medium. Not the parlor trick. The real thing."

"And if I told you I'm not?"

"Then I would say you're the most convincing liar I have ever met. And I would pay you the same amount."

We talked until three in the morning. He told me about his family's history—how the Vanderbilts had built their fortune on railroads and ruthless competition, and how every generation produced at least one person who looked at the inheritance and felt sick. He told me about his father, a man who had died under suspicious circumstances five years earlier, a death the family had quietly attributed to a heart attack.

"I don't believe it was a heart attack," Charles said. "I believe my father was killed. And I believe the person who killed him used the same method he used to kill everyone else in his way."

"What method?"

"Silence. The kind of silence that costs money."

That was the first time someone had used the word silence to describe what Thomas called the job. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised it was exactly right. Every séance I performed was an act of un-silencing. I took the dead who had been silenced—by grief, by scandal, by the comfortable lies of the living—and I gave them a voice, if only for an hour.

And every hour cost me something.

It started with small things. A face I should have recognised but didn't. A conversation I had had that morning that I could not recall. A photograph on Thomas's wall of a woman I knew was my mother, but whose name I could not remember.

Then it started with bigger things. The night I came home from a session and found my apartment ransacked. Not robbed—ransacked. Drawers pulled out, cushions slashed, books torn from shelves. Something was looking for something. Or someone was trying to remind me that I was not as safe as I thought.

I confronted Thomas that night. He was sitting at our kitchen table with a bottle of whiskey and a sheaf of papers—client lists, payment records, something else I could not read.

"Who was in my apartment?"

"Nobody you need to worry about."

"Thomas."

"Some of my clients have become... concerned about your sessions. About what you've been saying. About the names you've been mentioning."

"What names?"

"The same names I've been telling you to stop mentioning."

I had been speaking names during sessions that I did not understand. Names of people who had not died—the way the other dead had died. Names of living people. Powerful people. Men and women whose names, when spoken in the context of a séance, carried the weight of something far beyond grief.

"Thomas, what am I doing?"

He looked at me for a long time. Then he said: "You're the best I've ever had, Cecilia. The best. And that's why this is going to hurt the most when it's over."

"The most when it's over? What are you talking about?"

"The séance next week. The big one. Mrs. Astor-Whitney is hosting it at her mansion. Thirty clients. Five thousand dollars each. And you're going to do what you always do—you're going to reach into the dark and bring back whatever you can find. And you're going to do it so well that they will never stop coming. And you're going to lose something in the process that you can never get back."

"What am I losing?"

He stood up and walked to the window and looked out at the Long Island sound, gray and endless in the winter light. "Yourself."

I did the séance. Of course I did. The money was too good, the momentum too strong, the momentum of a machine that had decided what it was going to do and would not be stopped.

In the hours after, as I sat in my apartment with a bottle of gin and a face in the mirror that I barely recognised—pale, hollow-eyed, a stranger wearing my skin—I tried to remember my mother's name.

I could not.

I tried to remember where I had been before London. Before Thomas. Before the séances and the champagne and the warm wine and the smell of diamonds and decay.

I could not.

I closed my eyes and reached for the dark the way I always did, not for a client, not for a name, but for myself.

And in the dark, I found her. Not the girl I had been, but something older, something that had been waiting in the space between my memories like a cat in a dark room, patient and still and completely alone.

She had no name. She had no face. But she had a story, and it was my story, and she was waiting for me to pick it up and carry it out into the light.

I did not pick it up that night. I was not ready. But I knew, with the certainty of a woman standing at the edge of a cliff, that someday I would have to climb down and find out who I had been before the world had decided what I should be.

The Last Seance Club opened the following week. I performed one more time. I brought back three more dead souls. I collected fifteen thousand dollars. And when it was over, I walked out of the mansion and into the New York night and did not look back.

I left Charles a note. I left Thomas nothing. I left myself everything I had, which was not much, but was mine.

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