The spirit did not generally behave like a poltergeist—that species of household nuisance who slams doors and windows, and throws china about, and causes tables to heave into the air—but rather like a melancholy ghost of old, disturbing, and, as it were, contaminating, the happiness of the living, with a spiteful sort of persistence, not unlike that of a cranky and bilious guest who ruins a social occasion by his mere presence yet will not go away. She gave off emanations of flat dead air—indeed, the rank air of the tomb—and made sounds so peculiar, and so indefinable, as to cause a chill in this chronicler, merely as I transcribe them! Moans, and sighs, and stifled outcries of pain, and near-inaudible protestations, and gurgling noises, and chokings, and wild lunatic laughter, and panting, and hysterical weeping: she caused doors to swing slowly, and creak on their hinges; an invisible harp to sound its ethereal notes with a crazed repetition; a slithering and rustling sound, best identified as snakelike, to arise, in odd corners of the house, including the mistress’s drawing room, and the master bedchamber. And she sang and hummed to herself: the which many witnesses found most repellent of all, her voice being distinctly unmelodious, and the repetition of the simple tunes she chose to sing, quite unnerving.
Upon occasion, it is true, this unhappy spirit’s venom discharged itself in more dramatic ways: she caused large sparks to leap from the wood-fire stove in the kitchen, onto the floorboards, or onto one of the terrified servants; she worked some unspeakably cruel magic, so that the hounds might suddenly tear at one another, in a frenzy of dog lust, and one of the most majestic of the copper beeches sickened and died within a fortnight, and the quaintly picturesque golden carp in the garden pond turned upon one another, and, in a very short period of time, before any of the groundsmen guessed what was transpiring, gobbled one another up! At the first formal dinner party given by General Fairbanks’s grandson and his bride, some eighteen months before Deirdre of the Shadows was summoned to Fishkill, the spirit wantonly disturbed the convivial gathering by stealing the ladies’ gloves one by one (these gloves resting, as is customary, upon the ladies’ knees, during dinner); and causing the atmosphere to be “perfum’d” by her peculiar odor of rankness, and interrupted by the scarce-audible ghost harp; and, most unforgivably, o’erturning an antique French sideboard in the dining room, so that, to the terror of the diners, hundreds of pieces of china and glassware crashed to the floor, and may very well have injured someone, had not one or two quick-witted gentlemen acted with extreme alacrity, to shield the ladies from flying chips of glass!
That, in general, the spirit did restrain herself, as I have noted, from behaving with the buffoonish caprice of the poltergeist, is surely to her credit: but one can sympathize with the Fairbanks family, in having conceived so great a repugnance for their ancestral abode, that they scarce wished to visit it, let alone dwell within it, despite its princely grandeur, and the bucolic splendor of the Fishkill countryside!
So for some twelve or fifteen years the magnificent house remained untenanted, until, given as a wedding present to one of the General’s grandsons, it was refurbished, and reopened, in the early spring of 1895. Young Darius Fairbanks III and his pretty bride, of the Maryland Nashes, were courageous enough, or impetuous enough, to establish their household in the midst of the spirit’s domain; or, it may have been, their good-natured “modern” skepticism (shaped in outline, if not in detail, by the corrupting Darwinism of the times) prevented them from grasping the magnitude of the situation. “How quaint!—how wonderfully eccentric!” young Mrs. Fairbanks exclaimed. “To own a haunted house! Why, there is nothing like it in Baltimore; and surely not in New York City.”
The brave young couple moved into Fairbanks House, bringing with them a number of servants new to Fishkill, and, for some weeks, perhaps because she was disoriented by their presence, and the busyness of the household, the spirit kept her distance: with naught but the ethereal harp sounding, very late at night, and so indistinct that Mr. and Mrs. Fairbanks had to talk themselves laughingly into hearing it. “There! There it is, Darrie!” Mrs. Fairbanks cried. “You do hear it now, don’t you?” And the fresh-cheeked young man cocked his head, and listened hard, and finally allowed that he did hear something: tho’, most likely, it was nothing but the wind in the beech trees. “The wind in the trees!” Mrs. Fairbanks exclaimed laughingly. “Why, it is nothing of the sort: it is your family’s renowned ghost. And I will not have the poor thing belittled.”
After some weeks, however, the “poor thing” grew bolder, and began to make her presence known, both in the house and out; and not in the most palatable of ways. That her dissonant singing and humming might be characterized as “quaint” was arguable; her other pranks—causing doors to creak on their hinges, sparks to fly from fireplaces, china to shatter—were most annoying indeed, when not genuinely frightening. One by one the new servants gave notice; within a month the handsome rose garden was so sinister, no one wished to stroll in it; the carefree marital climate was o’ershadowed, and close to blighted; young Mrs. Fairbanks succumbed to purposeless bouts of weeping, and Mr. Fairbanks found himself hot-tempered, raising his voice upon the slightest provocation. “It is the spirit,” Mrs. Fairbanks said, tearfully, “your family’s spirit, that comes between us.” Whereupon her young bridegroom retorted: “Never mind such claptrap! There is no spirit on the premises; and, if there were, it is assuredly not my family’s spirit, but a stranger entirely.”
And so, indeed, it was proved to be. But only after many mishaps, and one very serious incident—this being the collapse of the antique sideboard in the dining room, which so terrified Mrs. Fairbanks that she sank into a swoon from which she could not be roused for many hours, and, upon the morn, suffered a most piteous miscarriage, which plunged all the household into mourning; and fired her young husband with a desire for vengeance against the malicious ghost.
“I will not rest until the thing is banish’d from my property,” Mr. Fairbanks vowed. “And money will be no object.”
AND SO IT came about that, in the late, and very dry, summer of 1895, Deirdre of the Shadows was approached by the estate manager of Fairbanks House, with a very simple and challenging proposition: if she should be successful in exorcising a spirit, from out of a house belonging to one of the oldest families in the state, and keep the exorcism a secret, she would be most liberally rewarded: indeed, she might set her own price.
In a medieval fortress-castle on the Rhine, and in the alabaster villa of the Marchesa di Tito, in Nice, Deirdre of the Shadows had been successful in driving out unwanted household spirits: less “driving them out” than so reasoning with them, and so cajoling them, that they left voluntarily, and crossed over into Spirit World, as they should have done upon their natural deaths. So worrisome had Deirdre’s contact spirits become of late, so unreliable Father Darien, and so unpleasant the shrill-voic’d Bianca, that Deirdre preferred an exorcism to a séance, since it would involve no other personages than herself, and the hypothetical spirit.
After some hesitation, and not a little negotiating, Deirdre accepted the challenge; and journeyed out to Fishkill in her private carriage, accompanied by her French maid, and two assistants. It must be said that her health at this time (not many weeks past her thirty-second birthday) was somewhat precarious: the delicate-boned young woman was susceptible to fainting spells, attacks of nerves, hammering headaches, and flashes of near-blindness, during which tears streamed liberally down her cheeks. And there were hours when, unbidden, her contact spirits intruded upon her, with wild garbled messages delivered out of the void, having to do with that subject so strangely familiar to all Spiritualists, in the closing years of the nineteenth century—the End of the World. (“I do not care to hear it again,” Deirdre cried, “I beg you, not again: Fire, Flood, Earthquake, Famine, Pestilence! Take yourselves thither, and leave me be, for I find that I cannot care whether the world endures beyond 1900, or no!” Yet the belligerent spirits—those known to her, and outright strangers—crowded c
lose, and made a din, that great conflagrations should o’erspread the globe, in the year 1899; that fragments of a moon of Jupiter’s should smash against the earth, annihilating entire continents; that Jesus Christ should return in glory, athirst for the blood of sinners; that the polar caps should shift, and the temperate zones freeze; that the Black Death should return, spread by rats; and Time itself would come to an end. “O sinful man,” Father Darien intoned, in a sepulchral Jesuit’s voice, “remember: from dust thou hast come, and to dust thou shalt return. Blessèd is the name of—dust!” And on and on, sometimes for hours, when Deirdre was at her feeblest, and could not resist. Until she railed at them with the fury of a fishmonger’s wife, and bade them begone, to hell if no other place would have them!—for she was heartily sick of their prattle, and wished only to be left in peace.)
You may be the judge yourself, Reader: as to whether the young medium was wise, her health being so precarious, to undertake so arduous a task as the exorcism of a malevolent spirit.
Once at Fairbanks House, Deirdre questioned the estate manager, and the housekeeper, and one or two of the more articulate servants, that she might form some notion of the history of the phenomenon: whether the identity of the spirit was known to anyone, whether there was a story or romance behind the situation, which might account for it. A spirit trapped on this side of the barrier being, in the medium’s words, “one who is trapped in an old legend he or she has spun about himself, whereof he cannot break the bands, to breathe freely again.” The estate manager professed to be new to Fishkill, having come into the elder Fairbanks’ employ but ten years previous; the housekeeper, tho’ filled with the wildest of tales, pertaining to the ghost, could offer very little by way of factual information, save that there had been a story, many years ago, when she was but a young woman new in service at the house, to the effect that a crazed girl had scaled the walls of the garden, one moonlit midsummer night, to drown herself in the lily pond!—but this was many years back, and might even have been a century ago, in the days of Federalist rule.
(If Deirdre of the Shadows felt the slight to her esteemed personage, that neither Mr. Fairbanks nor his comely wife condescended to greet her, as if she were but a hireling, naturally she gave no indication: her manner being impeccable and assured at all times, so far as observers might note.)
“A drowning,” mused Deirdre, “a suicide by drowning: no very pretty death, and one I cannot envy. No wonder she remains bitter.” And then, aloud, she queried the housekeeper as to whether there might be, in the records of the local church, any notation concerning this death: but was told that, assuredly, there was not; for no gentleman of the cloth would care to register, for posterity’s eyes, so unspeakable a sin. The which did not surprise Deirdre, but grimly amused her. “Of course, you are correct,” she said, but with a slight ironical twist of her lips, “our deaths must not be recorded, else our lives too will demand rumination.”
It was on the third day of her domicile in the austere old house, after a particularly troubled night, in which unbidden spirits promiscuously mingled with dream personages, and much incoherent exhortation was voiced, that Deirdre of the Shadows confronted the first manifestations of the Fairbanks House spirit: these being but the mild phenomena I have already noted. That Deirdre evinced little surprise at these uncanny developments, and no alarm, quite impressed the household servants, whose custom it had been to rush shrieking out of the room—a response exactly as extreme, and as demeaning, Deirdre sought to explain, as the unhappy spirit wished to provoke. “A spirit trapped on the Earth Plane,” Deirdre said, in her low, level, near-inflectionless voice, “is not unlike a spiteful child, who wishes to punish others by punishing himself: one must be on guard against the spite, but ever aware that it is a child with whom we deal.”
Ah, how calmly Deirdre of the Shadows lectured her frightened little audience!—how assuredly, how resolutely, she comported herself, in those final days of her mediumship! If the staff of Fairbanks House thought her extraordinary, and not very unlike the spirits with whom she traded, they could not help but think, too, that, in her black silk-and-muslin dress, with its fashionable long bodice, and loosely draped sash of braided satin, she was incontestably of good breeding: for all her independence, and rumored eccentricity, a lady.
“No spirit can harm us—” Deirdre spoke with equanimity—“save with our complicity.”
So she strolled in the rose garden, which did indeed contain a scent—near-imperceptible, but distressing nonetheless—of corruption, and contamination, and grave wrong. So sear was this August, in its days of pitiless heat, and no rain, that when she strayed from the tiled path, the earth crumbled beneath her feet; and the many rosebushes, tho’ assiduously watered by the bravest of the gardeners, turned limp-petaled and mournful countenances upon her, and seemed hardly blooms, but papier-mâché, molded by a distracted hand.
The sighing grew louder, and was suddenly very close: but Deirdre wisely did not turn, nor even give much indication of awareness. She opened her fan, which was made of fragrant sandalwood, painted in black arabesques, and adorned with tiny puffs of black swansdown: this elegant accoutrement having been a gift from the late Madame Blavatsky, at the peak of Madame’s affection for her wayward Lolo. She opened the fan, and fanned herself languidly; and tho’ the smallest hairs on the back of her neck did stir, as if of their own volition, she truly felt no alarm, and surely no sense of danger, at the approach of this creature who was neither living, nor peaceably dead!—the very thought of which, I am bound to confess, fills me with extreme agitation.
Some minutes passed, with a sullen slowness—as, indeed, the entire exorcism would proceed very slowly, requiring, in all, some twenty-five hours of continuous concentration, on the part of the medium: the which doubtless contributed to her emotional collapse. But we must remember that Time evidently possesses no value, and, indeed, no meaning, in Spirit World, and that five minutes, five hours, or five days might very likely seem, from that vantage point, identical. Deirdre of the Shadows was so accustomed to the vagaries of spirit behavior, so familiar with the curious oscillations between reasonable conduct, and totally bizarre conduct, that, it may be, she had become somewhat complacent, as to her ability to determine the contours of an exchange; nor did she take cognizance of these extreme durations of time, as if, in all unconscious vanity, she fancied herself but an ethereal spirit—requiring no rest, no sleep, and no human nourishment.
“I wish you no harm, and come here as a friend,” Deirdre said softly, “for, I have been told, you are greatly unhappy.”
Again some minutes passed, it may have been with coy resistance: and then there was a stirring, to Deirdre’s left, and an emanation of dank odoriferous air, which gravely offended Deirdre’s fastidious nostrils. She made, of course, no sign of displeasure, but, seating herself on a stone bench, close by the lily pond, continued to fan herself with the handsome black fan, in slow precise motions. Scarcely raising her voice, she repeated her words: her sensitive eyes darting about, yet discerning nothing, save the rosebushes in their pleasingly regular pattern, and the pond, and a stone bench that faced her across the pond, some seven or eight feet away; and the vine-bedecked stone wall beyond.
How many times Deirdre repeated these simple words, I cannot say; but surely they induced a hypnotic calm, in both the spirit and herself, which, tho’ disrupted from time to time by a shrill fit of giggling, or an explosion of incoherent curses, did serve to reduce the spirit’s suspicion of her, and to establish some modicum of rapport.
“I am your friend,” Deirdre whispered, “your friend, your friend. And I have been told you are greatly unhappy; and that your heart is very bitter. But I come as no enemy, tho’ in their arrogant hire: I come as a friend.”
Abash’d silence; and ostentatious sighs; and a spell of coughing, which shaded into such a spasm of choking, and gasping, and the unmistakable sounds of suffocation, that Deirdre’s impenetrable poise was all but shaken. But then
silence returned: and a considerable period of time passed, during which any but so seasoned a medium as Deirdre of the Shadows, would have concluded that the spirit had gone away.
But Deirdre remained where she was, immobile save for the slow, sombre, mesmerizing motion of her fan; and the heat of the afternoon began at last to slacken, in its ferocity; and the first intimations of dusk heralded themselves. “Your friend, your friend,” Deirdre intoned, her eyes somewhat glazed with the strain of this long vigil, and her throat hoarse, “your friend who wishes you no harm; but only to alleviate your suffering.”
As twilight deepened, Deirdre’s vision grew more acute: and, as the minutes passed, she began to see the spirit, or at any rate a brooding, motionless form, on the stone bench which faced her, across the dark pond. This figure had not the irregular density of the ectoplasm that ofttimes materializes itself, at séances, and which has been, in fact, photographed: it was rather to be characterized as a uniformly dark aura, transparent, yet unmistakable: and unmistakable, too, as the figure of a young girl.
At this materialization Deirdre noted in herself the involuntary physical responses that might have belonged to a less courageous, or a less practic’d individual: the subtle raising of the hairs on the back of her neck, and an acceleration in her pulse. (For so we respond in the presence of the uncanny—whether there is actual danger to us, or no.) Yet she indicated no alarm, and sat quietly, her gaze avidly affixed to the vaporous, and darkly pale, countenance of the spirit, which defined itself with exasperating slowness, yet withal a regularity, moment by moment, and minute by minute, until it was as substantial as the laws of nature would allow it to become. “Ah!” Deirdre exclaimed; and, startl’d, she allowed the fan to slip from her loos’d fingers, and to clatter to the stone beneath her feet.