42. Sam Summoning
Sam: Summoning
The spirits who dwell between the wall and the first isle are still, in some ways, attached to the living world. They watch the living, they think about the living, and they wait in hope of being contacted by the living.
—Wister Amsel, A True Account of Explorations in the Realm
In the next few days, the weather turned cold.
Rime appeared on the broad lawn behind Keel House.
The dahlias and sunflowers, which had been resplendent as queens in the kitchen garden, were suddenly transformed into sagging wretches.
The river birches began to turn yellow. Pumpkins sat on the brick wall bordering the garden, observing us with their bland, watchful faces, and the air carried a sharp, cold undercurrent, a mingling of sea salt and wood fire.
The novelty of the living world still astounded me.
Colors, smells, and textures that had once been ordinary now filled me with pleasure and even wonder; when Clementine took her meals, I often stood motionless by the kitchen door, simply staring at the world around me with admiration.
I understood better now the uncommon stillness of thews.
Roy Marcel came daily, usually in the afternoon.
He had undertaken a painstaking retrieval of information from a list of names that I’d given him—a list of ropers—and the going was slow, for heartbreak is not recounted quickly.
He questioned shopkeepers and coach drivers and housemaids and delivery men and clerks, listening quietly to tragic tales whispered through handkerchiefs or between sobs, speaking in doorways and under bridges with characters who had the frantic air of being oft disbelieved, who smelled of fear and whose eyes shifted with an inexhaustible furtiveness.
He plodded on, gathering and gathering, slowly filling his notebook.
At Keel House, Clementine seemed still mired in a state of impassivity.
Often when I considered her thoughts, I saw the vast, stony expanse of the realm.
Sometimes she sat at her window and looked out over the small, fenced cemetery of Keel House that lay in the shadow of a massive oak.
The white stones embedded in the plot emanated a full, suggestive silence in the midst of the falling autumn leaves.
She didn’t speak about Rosetta. I could feel her mind worrying at the thought of her, like an animal fretting over an embedded thorn, but I didn’t press the thorn.
When she did—perhaps inadvertently—think of Rosetta, it was always the same way: looking happy, holding hands with Walter on the steps of a grand estate.
It was, I thought, a consoling fantasy, a scene she had conjured of an imaginary future.
As a thew, I could reach easily into a living mind and pull out thoughts, just as I would reach into a pool of cold water and retrieve a pebble—but I began to understand that this was a form of trespass.
Some thoughts Clem made evident to me, and others she strained to conceal; now I could tell the difference, and I was careful not to plunge in unwanted.
Only the thoughts that floated on the surface of her consciousness, like petals on the water, did I take up and consider.
This, too, was the mechanism with summoning.
I realized almost at once that the difficulty in summoning lay not in the act itself—reaching into the realm of the dead to find and commune with a spirit—but with the unwillingness of the subject.
Most spirits have no inclination to appear among us briefly, much less for the kind of interrogation practiced at the Grand Séance every month at the Salem Lyceum.
They are barnacles fastened to the bottom of the pool, immovable and closed fast. The spirits of loved ones are more willing to venture outward, eager to offer words of comfort and affection.
And so the act of summoning was mostly an exercise in judicious selection: of finding a spirit who wished to speak.
Our first several attempts were unsuccessful.
Then Wister recommended to me a text by an enchanter who, in a rare burst of good sense, had written about the practice of summoning by including the guidance of his spirit thew.
She advised “perceiving the spirit realm as you once perceived the living realm, with undemanding curiosity and open awareness.” This analogy allowed me to understand the disposition I should take toward the endeavor.
Once I was able to reach the realm, we found that Clementine’s stamina did not last long enough for me to venture far. She was, after all, still recovering.
Success occurred at last on the day the residues vanished.
Clem’s mood hadn’t lifted; she still moved through the day as if forcing herself to complete each task.
But with the residues gone she seemed less burdened, and she proposed that we attempt a summoning in the front parlor for the benefit of Gertie, Meg, and Wister.
The audience assembled after breakfast, and with the smell of molasses buns still filling the air, we sat down at the study table to begin.
Wister reclined patiently in one of the upholstered chairs by the window, as if anticipating slow progress.
Meg and Gertie clearly thought otherwise; they perched near the bookcase, both upright and alert.
I sat with my eyes closed at the table and Clementine stood behind me, her hands resting on my shoulders, a gentle pressure I did not mind in the least. As she began calculating dead worth, I sensed before me the open expanse that now appeared easily each time we practiced.
I allowed myself to sink in through the opening.
For a time, I could sense only wan light, like a distant sun obscured by heavy clouds.
I waited. The clouds remained thick; the light did not brighten.
Then, to my alarm, I heard a sound I hadn’t heard in days, though already it seemed months ago: the low, dismal wail of the Oarings.
I started, and if Clementine hadn’t pressed on my shoulders I would have recoiled, pushing away from the table and breaking the summoning.
But her touch reassured me, and as the sound of the Oaring rang in my ears, the mist began to clear.
I found myself at the impossible vantage point that I had reached each time in previous attempts: far above the stony ground of the spirit realm, looking down upon it from on high.
I was there but not there: present with the senses and nothing more.
The sound of the Oaring, which I couldn’t see, was slowly receding.
I turned my attention to the stony, gray expanse below.
I had now spent more time observing the realm than I had on prior attempts.
I pushed downward with my consciousness.
A curved, wavering line marked the stone wall that separated the inner realm from the Weer.
Here and there, I saw the dark bundles that were the safe houses, the outposts of stone.
The mooring lines made geometric shapes upon the ground, denser and smaller toward what I realized was the first isle.
I could see it quite clearly, and the sight of it was breathtaking: a small city in a sea of stone.
Shaped of luminous white rock marbled with gray, it appeared to me as a maze of concentric circles, with openings and pathways everywhere.
It rose steadily from the outer walls to the inner, where a single tower rose high over the isle.
Spirits were everywhere, bundled in their nets of rope and stone, swaying in the currents as their eyes sought the living.
I found that I couldn’t come as close to them as I wished, though I pushed deeper with my awareness, seeking proximity.
I could hover above them, as I would at the height of a bell tower, but I couldn’t penetrate the lower stratum.
From that distance I could only just perceive their individual faces.
A woman with long, black hair was closest to me, teetering in her roped cocoon, her eyes wide and fixed with concentration.
For a moment I experienced a strange kind of vertigo, knowing that she was watching the world of the living where I, in this very moment, was observing her in the realm of the dead.
Had she seen me? No, surely I wasn’t visible to her.
But something had disturbed her, either in the currents of the realm or in the vision of the living world.
She curled up against the ground, hiding herself.
I had spent enough time in this exploratory wandering. Clementine was taxing herself, and I had a spirit to find. I focused my intention, and suddenly I heard a voice that I thought came from the library in Keel House: “Wister? Wister, is that you?”
Something—a force I couldn’t name—dragged me rapidly through the Weer toward a distant figure that stood by the stone wall. The voice that called me came not from Keel House, I realized, but from her.
“Wister?” she said again. “And is that…Gertie?”
My swooping flight came to an abrupt halt, and I found myself face to face with a woman I’d never met. She looked at me eagerly, her eyes bright. “I can see you, Wister,” she said, peering over my shoulder.
“Bess?” I heard Wister ask.
“It’s Bess!” Gertie burst out. “Oh, Bess,” she cried, “we miss you so very much, dearest.”
“Do you still remember me, then?” Bess asked, her eyes filling with tears.
“Of course we do, Bess!”
I had the uncomfortable sensation, as the spirit of Bess looked over my shoulder, that I was serving as a kind of window between the spirit realm and Keel House. Bess could see me, but she could also see through me into the living world.
“I light a candle for you every seventh of January,” Gertie was saying.
“And your rhubarb, the one you planted in the corner…” She went on, but her words grew indistinct.
I felt a blurring of my vision that accompanied the muffling of Gertie’s voice.
And then, as if I’d rolled to the edge of a precipice and could feel my weight tipping forward, I felt myself falling. I couldn’t remain in the spirit realm.
Clementine was tiring.
My return was swift. One moment I was gazing at Bess, and the next I found myself sitting at the table in the Keel House library.
Clementine’s hands on my shoulders were heavy; she wasn’t resting them there, but propping herself up.
I rose swiftly from the seat and eased her into it.
“There,” I said, letting her rest her head upon her arm. “Well done.”
“That was so short,” Gertie protested.
“Hush, Gertie,” Wister chided. “It was an admirable first summoning.”
“Was it difficult?” Clem asked me quietly.
“Once I reached her, no. Not a bit.”
“Good.” Clem nodded.
“Take a rest in the lilac room,” Wister suggested.
Silently, Clem acquiesced, and I followed. She seemed not to mind my presence as she rested. On the contrary, she reached out for my hand and I, sitting beside the bed, gladly held hers. “We did it, Sam,” she whispered, closing her eyes.
“We did it,” I agreed. We’d accomplished a summoning. Now we had only to find the spirit we sought before the next Grand Séance at the Salem Lyceum.