Angelica A Novel (Arthur Phillips) by Arthur Phillips

Author:Arthur Phillips [Phillips, Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Spiritualism, Domestic Fiction, Psychological Fiction
ISBN: 9781921640926
Google: AJOPc-eJJwsC
Amazon: 0812972600
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2007-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

IV

More often than not, the dead were frustrated or simply bored, and, in sinister vengeance, they often bored Anne Montague in turn. The wood of furniture imprisoned them, and their only solace was to make the sideboard groan in darkest night or throw open a cabinet door with a bang again and again, even when the living latched it securely. It fell to Anne to expel them, sometimes with the help of an actor-turned-carpenter posing as an expert of the occult and paid handsomely for all his skills.

Usually, when the dead were able to speak, they did not appear; when they did appear, smelling of lavender water, attar of rose, or mold, they were mute and then either desperate to communicate something they could not, or so serene as to be almost unrecognizable as loved ones once known for wit or nervous energy. Anne had seen countless ghosts of once wild people now grim-faced and slow, blurred at their edges, looking only for a place to sit but comfortable nowhere.

The dead had messages to transmit, with an urgency that made Anne’s ears sting and her legs swell and her blood rush to her visibly pulsing temples, but when she offered them the opportunity to speak through her throat, when she had arranged every element of a parlor to their known tastes in light and silence and closed eyes and hands gripping in a circle, what did the dead finally have to say for themselves? “Where am I?” or “Remember me.” Nothing more, and often much less. “I do not like your bride.” “Do not wear my dresses.” “This is too oily. Take it away.” They were often rude. “I never liked you. Or you. Or you. Or you,” the skittering shade of a child told a circle of her grieving survivors. The dead were often tired, confused, petulant, distractible. “That’s not where I kept the sugar,” said a baker dead from syphilis, pointing to the ceiling. “I liked the sugar in my bed. It made the feathers align.”

Or they were pointlessly cryptic, knocking over the same candelabra every eight minutes precisely for eighty-eight minutes on the eighth of August beginning at eight o’clock, on the eighth anniversary of…nothing that anyone could recall, no death, no carriage accident, no fatal fire. At times their messages had no discernible meaning even to their nearest family, unable to decipher pressing dispatches of gibberish, as the dead wrote again and again with an invisible finger in the silver dust of a looking glass: “Remember to blaze!” and the family would have been glad to do so, if they had known how.

But yes, very occasionally, the departed would glint with malice. Death did not evaporate the anger or evil in some of them, only condensed it into a syrup that flowed in their translucent veins and seeped onto the pillows and meals of the living. They approached the living, leering and furious, until the living fell backwards down staircases. They pointed at knives until the living cut their own throats for them.

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