Society for Paranormals, Page 2

  “Well, Mrs. Steward, I… You see…” Mr. Steward tugged at his cravat again, his forehead damp, his confidence crumbling under the scrutiny of his family. “It’s just that…” and he mumbled something.

  “What did he say?” Lilly asked Bobby, who shrugged his shoulders, having lost interest in the conversation since it didn’t revolve around him.

  “I’m sure I misheard him,” Mrs. Steward said as she daintily sipped at her teacup with the chip in it. “Your confused father didn’t really just say we can’t afford for any of us to stay here.”

  Mr. Steward gulped. “Ah… Well, I mean to say… Exactly.”

  A second chip joined the first as the cup slammed onto the plate with such a force that I was sure the whole set would crack and shatter into numerous, irreparable shards.

  Mr. Steward held up his hands as if he could placate his wife with such a useless gesture, when only a pot of gold to pay off all debts could suffice at that point.

  “My dear wife,” he pleaded, “I’m completely bankrupt and was forced to sell all our properties, including this very house, to cover the arrears. But don’t fear, we’ll be provided with housing and an adequate salary once in Nairobi.”

  In the ominously deep silence that followed, the silence before the great storm, I paused in my breakfasting and pondered the situation. I shuddered to think what sociable options we might find on the shores of that dark continent.

  Not that I had so many options in London, mind you.

  With no title, property, or inheritance to my name and only a humble savings, dependent on the charity of my relatives and widowed to boot, I could hardly claim to have so many options in the world.

  As if to prove the point, the exact moment Mr. Steward was pronouncing our sentence, Bloody Mary floated through the kitchen wall. I detested when phantoms did that. As I always reminded my dead husband, “Just because your body dies doesn’t mean your manners have to die as well.”

  Needless to say, I was distracted by the sight of her and missed some of the drama unfolding around the table. I’d seldom seen Bloody Mary up close before, despite my tragic past. The gossipy specter liked to appear as a premonition of bad news, although she usually went to Prof. Runal.

  But there she was, floating in front of me, her head bobbing about precariously, it having been partially severed from her neck at the time of her death.

  “You’re aware of what they’re saying in the papers?” Mrs. Steward demanded as she grabbed up the newspaper and slapped it against the table. “There’s a war raging on that continent. A war! They call it the…” And she paused to scan the page. “The Boer War. Our valiant British troops are being slaughtered by those heathens in Africa. Slaughtered, Mr. Steward!”

  She calmed herself enough to add with a sniff, “Not that I have any doubt our brave soldiers will root them out. But will you really condemn us to live on a battlefield?”

  Mr. Steward cleared his throat. “That’s in South Africa, dear. We’re going to East Africa. That’s a good distance away. We should be adequately safe.”

  “Should be?” Mrs. Steward raised her voice further.

  Meanwhile, Bloody Mary pointed a thoroughly unclean finger at me—really, how rude could she be?—and grimaced.

  “Oh dear,” I murmured.

  “Exactly,” Mrs. Steward said. “Even Bee agrees with me.”

  I stared at the finger. It was Bloody Mary’s way of telling the world (or those who could see her) that trouble was in my near future, and it was of the deadly kind.

  Being in the company of humans who were devoid of the capacity to see the supernatural, I couldn’t tell her to float off. So I turned away from her, as there was really nothing I could do to avoid whatever fate awaited me.

  Mr. Steward was still valiantly trying to explain the intricacies of the situation. Only later did I conclude that on that fateful day he not only lost his business, but his confidence too, not to mention his precarious position of authority in the family.

  Speaking of the family, no one was particularly interested in the poor man’s business.

  For her part, Mrs. Steward resorted to a near faint and couldn’t be fully revived for the remainder of the day, which wasn’t as disastrous as it sounds.

  Lilly bemoaned her plight with the statement, “I’m almost eighteen. My grand debut is in a few months. If we go to that God-forsaken place, I shall die a spinster. That is, if a lion doesn’t eat me first.” She made it abundantly and loudly clear that death by lion was the preferred option before dashing away to her room.

  Twelve-year-old Robert Junior was the only one genuinely thrilled with the prospect. “Shall we hunt lions?” he demanded of Mr. Steward.

  “Well, Nairobi is expected to become a transit point for big game hunters,” Mr. Steward said, avoiding a direct answer and thus another possible confrontation. “It’s viewed as a perfect base from which to go on safaris and game hunts.”

  “Hip hip!” Bobby shouted. “I’m going to hunt elephants and lions and tigers.”

  I was fairly certain there were no tigers in Africa, but I didn’t bother to point that out. He was too excited about the prospect of butchering unarmed animals. The little monster.

  I don’t mean that literally, of course. I wasn’t sure I could tolerate a member of my family being a monster. With respect to Bobby, I meant the term more as a description of character, rather than of biology.

  On the bright side, I thought as I contentedly sipped at my third cup of tea, I should be free of smelly werewolves. For surely werewolves were only to be found in northern climes where wolves naturally roamed.

  As far as I knew, Africa was inhabited mainly by lions and elephants, which were bad enough but at least had the manners to stay in the wild and not move into the house down the street.

  I didn’t consider myself a prejudiced person, but wolf-type creatures were at the top of my list of Least Favorite Beasties. When I was a child, one large and nasty dog bit me quite viciously and almost tore my right ear off, confirming in me a distinct distrust and dislike for all things canine.

  At the thought of the bite, I checked that a thick lock of hair was still placed strategically over the ear.

  Back to the point: no more smelly werewolves, which just goes to prove that there’s always some good even in the grimmest of news.

  Or so I firmly believed.

  Chapter 4

  My own personal and rather tragic history has proven time and again that good luck and I aren’t on close terms at all. Therefore, I really shouldn’t have been overly surprised when a werewolf showed up at the house.

  The next day during breakfast, there was a knock at the front door, and the person was most insistent. Surely if no one answered, he should know better and leave? It was unacceptable to be so persistent, especially so early in the morning.

  “Oh, who can it be, disturbing our period of mourning?” Mrs. Steward wailed.

  “It’s probably just…” Mr. Steward said in what I was sure he meant to be a calming tone.

  Mrs. Steward continued as if he wasn’t there. “None of our acquaintances know our tragic news yet, for why else would anyone come knocking at this uncivilized hour except to gloat.”

  She glared at Mr. Steward, who at that moment took an unusual interest in the amount of butter smeared on his toast.

  “A railroad,” Mrs. Steward hissed. “We’re abandoning all civilization to build a railroad.”

  “Now, Mrs. Steward, I won’t actually be building the rails myself,” Mr. Steward ventured to clarify, but Mrs. Steward pressed on.

  “And where will we be living? Where, I ask you?” Before any of us could think of answering, she all but shouted, “In. A. Swamp.”

  She wagged a finger at Mr. Steward, who was slouched in his chair. “Did you know that, Lilly? Nairobi is in an African swamp. That’s where your father is taking us.”

  Lilly glanced up from her breakfast, realized it was only her mother ranting, and resumed eating.


  Mrs. Steward didn’t notice the lack of response. “We’re going to be living in a railroad construction camp in the middle of a swamp in the middle of some God-forsaken colony in Africa. A part of history, he says. A pox on history!”

  “Perhaps it’s just a neighbor coming to call,” Mr. Steward said without any hope.

  “In our current condition, we must see as little of them as possible,” Mrs. Steward declared.

  The sound of the bronze door rapper echoed through the house again.

  “Well, don’t just stand there,” Mrs. Steward said, turning her irritated gaze on me. “Go answer. But if it’s a neighbor, tell them we’re out. Or better yet, dead.”

  I hurried away and could hear “swamp” and “cursed railroad” and “making history” reverberating behind me. As relieved as I was to exit the breakfast parlor, the moment I opened the door, I knew I was in even more trouble.

  “Good morning, dear Beatrice, a fine morning,” Prof. Runal bellowed. “I heard the news and came as quick as I could, quick I say.”

  It was, I reflected, quite amazing he’d heard anything at all, given that few outside of the immediate family knew of our circumstances. Then again, Prof. Runal had a rather unusual network of informants to assist him with intelligence gathering.

  Without waiting for me to welcome him in, he squeezed through the door and made his way to the sitting room, his heavy feet thumping against the wooden floor.

  Everything about Prof. Runal was big: his voice, his height, his build, the beard that covered his large jowls. Even his nose was big, quite out of proportion even for his sizable face.

  “All the better to smell you with, my dear,” he would joke about his substantial nose, which, coming from one of his kind, was not really a joke.

  And on the subject of smell: I avoided breathing deeply, but even still his wet, doggy odor permeated my senses.

  The Director of the Society for Paranormals & Curious Animals lowered himself carefully onto the sofa, which groaned under his weight. With his thick, dark overcoat, clunky boots, and shaggy mane, he looked out of place against Mrs. Steward’s delicate, pink sofa set and the rose-patterned wallpaper.

  As was his habit whenever we met, he pulled out a pendulum, placed it on the side table, and tapped it with a large, stubby finger. The five bronze spheres began clicking against each other in a smooth back-and-forth motion, a movement that should’ve been soothing but I found distracting.

  A similar set rested upstairs in my room, a gift from him to me. I had noticed his fascination with pendulums on one of my first visits to his office. He insisted on playing with one whenever we met, for it emitted a frequency that distorted the sound of our voices to anyone outside of a private meeting.

  It was a useful contraption, if you were concerned about spies and eavesdroppers, as Prof. Runal seemed to be.

  I eyed the professor with some trepidation. An unannounced visit with him normally preceded a particularly perilous mission involving some treacherous creature that would like nothing better than to bite off the remaining portion of my right ear along with my entire head.

  And let’s not forget the matter of his body odor—no fault of his own—that compelled me to breathe in a shallow manner, inevitably leaving me feeling rather dizzy.

  “To think, you almost left without a formal send-off by the Society. Unthinkable,” he said as if this were a calamity of heart-rending magnitude.

  “I had rather hoped so,” I murmured, but he didn’t hear, or chose to ignore the comment.

  “Well,” he continued as if I’d said nothing, “it’s most fortunate, my dear Beatrice, most fortunate indeed that I heard the news.”

  “Indeed,” I said, my gaze fixed on the distracting pendulum and its gentle clicking as I wondered what new misadventure he had devised for me, and how many scars I would receive because of it. “Bad news spreads faster than mold on old bread.”

  “Bad news?” His expression reminded me of a confused dog.

  “Well, yes,” I said. “This means an end to my services for the Society, of course.”

  He snorted. “Nonsense.”

  The five bronze balls shivered at the force of his voice. In the brief silence that followed, I could hear the ting-ting of metal against metal.

  Prof. Runal leaned toward me and lowered his voice to a normal, human level. “This is a marvelous opportunity, actually, marvelous beyond measure.” He rubbed his hands together with such energy I felt sure they were in danger of instantaneous combustion. “For now we shall have an agent of the Society located so conveniently on that magnificently mysterious continent, right there.” He beamed a toothy smile.

  “We will?” I asked, wondering when the balls would stop their motion. They seemed quite content to maintain their swinging as long as we continued talking.

  “Of course we shall, of course, of course,” he said, his heavy jowls quivering, his thick eyebrows crawling up his wide forehead.

  As a child, I’d thought they looked more like a pair of plump, hairy caterpillars than a pair of eyebrows.

  “And none too soon,” he said as the caterpillars continued their upward crawl. “For I’ve learned of a rather odd mystery that would be just up your alley. It’s caused quite a stir over there, you know, quite a stir. Do you recall the incident with the two lions that insisted on eating the railway workers?”

  I frowned, wondering if lions were as smelly as werewolves. “Yes, it was a sensation in the news and in Parliament. But I thought they were shot by a British officer almost a year ago.”

  Prof. Runal rubbed his hands together. “Indeed they were, Beatrice, shot dead indeed.” He leaned further toward me and lowered his voice. “It seems though that those two lions have returned.” He paused before adding in a loud whisper, “As ghosts.”

  He settled back into the sofa and nodded his head with great satisfaction. “Thus far, they’ve eaten only goats.”

  “Goat-eating ghosts?” I queried skeptically.

  “Exactly,” he said. “And soon enough they’ll start on people…”

  “How delightfully morbid of you,” I interrupted.

  “Thank you, my dear, thank you,” he said, patting his bulging stomach. “Imagine, Beatrice: people disappearing, body parts scattered all over the place. Brilliant stuff, brilliant.”

  I sighed deeply. Body parts. Trust a werewolf to be thrilled by blood and gore and scattered body parts. Brilliant, indeed.

  Personally, I’d never been too fond of some of the paranormal and supernatural creatures we dealt with, specifically those that cause people to disappear and body parts to appear in their place. On the other hand, I was curious about what I would find in East Africa.

  “Very well, sir,” I said, finally looking up at him and his hairy caterpillar eyebrows.

  “Marvelous,” he said with great gusto, almost knocking a porcelain ornament off the side table with his elbow. “On the trip down, you’ll have plenty of time to prepare for your next, and possibly most exciting, mission yet, plenty of time indeed. Oh, and I’m sure you’ll meet some interesting passengers to entertain you.”

  He chuckled as if this was a highly amusing statement. I clearly didn’t catch the humor.

  As I stood to escort him from the room, I glanced at the pendulum. It had finally and abruptly stopped swinging. The bronze balls hung there, ominously still, their absolute lack of motion disconcerting, considering they’d been clicking away energetically a few seconds ago. I shivered even as a gust of unseasonably warm air puffed in through a window.

  Prof. Runal scooped up the set and placed it carefully in a small wooden box he then slipped into a jacket pocket before following me out. “It’ll be a great opportunity,” he called back to me as he lumbered down the stairs to the sidewalk. “You’ll see, my dear Beatrice, you shall see. I anticipate great things from you, great things indeed. Good luck.”

  But my thoughts were still caught up with the motionless spheres.

  Chap
ter 5

  It is, I believe, a sensible place for an intermission, during which I shall explain how I became acquainted with Prof. Runal and the Society for Paranormals & Curious Animals. And, in so doing, you will also understand how I came to be with the Steward family. It’s a most convenient arrangement: two stories for the space of one.

  From a tender age, I had exhibited a rather robust and socially unacceptable imagination that startled my parents and their numerous visitors. “Harmless delusions,” some would say to cover up the awkward moments.

  Initially, my parents tolerated my creative outbursts while I was a child. After all, it wasn’t so unusual for young children to have imaginary friends (albeit mine were considerably more successful in causing mayhem). But when there was no indication that these flights of fantasy would cease, action was taken.

  Shortly after my tenth birthday, my father took me to see a learned man renowned for his ability to diagnose and cure difficult cases of mental disturbance. It was, in my father’s opinion, the last opportunity to rid the family of my fantasies.

  “If this fails,” he informed me as he pulled me along behind him, “I’m not sure what we shall do. Your mother is far too lenient on you, that’s for certain, but action will need to be taken.”

  Even at my youthful age, I had some ideas what that action might entail. I’d overheard my father and his aunt arguing with my mother one evening.

  “We have no choice but to send her off to a convent after a good dosing of holy water,” my father huffed, paused, and added, “And maybe an exorcism or two.”

  Before my mother could respond, his aunt—a large and bossy lady who smelled of mothballs and liquor—added, “That isn’t nearly sufficient, dear boy. You’re far too soft. She must be permanently institutionalized. You can then tell all who know you that she died of influenza.”

  Before either of these alternatives was seriously explored, I was taken to see Prof. Runal.

  The good professor, upon reassuring my father that there was really nothing too wrong with his child, requested a private interview with me. While he escorted my father out the room, I glanced about and noticed the corner of a metal frame jutting out from behind a curtain on the wall nearest me. I shifted the curtain aside to reveal a framed piece of fancy writing. I peered closer and read something that made no sense at the time: