play. First I had to remind myself of what I was fishing for.
I touched the doll gingerly, with the tips of my fingers, and pricked up the ears of my soul. Dead Abbie’s sorrow was there again: an endless looped tape of long-ago despair, trapped behind the painted-on smile and the oddly flattened shape that time and circumstances had given to the rag-stuffed body. This time I rode with it for a while longer, paying closer attention to the nuances and the expression. With my left hand, at the same time, I picked up the cloisonné hair slide, which looked to be of more recent vintage than the doll. It had a different resonance, but still in the same general key of inexpressible sorrow.
After five minutes or so, I set both things down, picked up my tin whistle, and put it to my lips.
The opening note was low, and I held it for a long time. A second note followed, equally sustained, but then when you thought it might fade, opening out into a plangent trill that finally kicked the tune into gear. It wasn’t a tune I’d ever heard before, or one I was consciously composing as I played. My mind was as passive as I could make it, just resonating with the echoes of Abbie’s misery that were still in my head. I was turning her into music. Describing her in the medium I knew best. Putting out a psychic APB:
Have you seen this girl?
In spiritualist circles, this kind of thing usually gets called a summoning, but people in my business just call it the magic lasso. It’s the first phase of an exorcism. Before you can send a ghost away, you have to bind it; wrap your will around it like duct tape, although that’s actually a very unpleasant image and I wish I hadn’t thought of it. In any case, I was telling Abbie, wherever she was, that she had to dance to my tune now. I was telling her to come to heel.
There were two good reasons why this might not work. The first was that I just didn’t know her well enough. I’d never met her, in life or in death, and so the music was incomplete—just an unfinished sketch in sound, based on the emotions I’d sensed in the things she used to own. Those emotions were strong, but they were only a single piece from a huge jigsaw puzzle; what I was doing was analogous to trying to intuit the entire picture from that one piece, without the benefit of the box lid.
The second reason was that she could well be too far away in any case. No summoning is going to work if the ghost doesn’t hear it, and I’d never done this before for a ghost who wasn’t right there in the same space as me.
But the rules are different in all sorts of ways once you’re dead. What’s space? What’s distance? After a few moments, I felt a tremor of response—like a vibration on some strand of a web that I was spinning in the air, invisibly, all around me. I tried to keep my own emotions—satisfaction, excitement, unease—in check as I built that response into the tune, making my approximation of Abbie a little stronger, pulling her in, calling her to me. The vibration became infinitesimally more marked, more insistent.
And then, in an instant, it was gone.
Dead, blank, empty air surrounded me, like the moment after the fridge stops humming and you think the silence is a new sound.
I skipped a beat, swore under my breath, started up again. The music came more readily this time. I had a better grasp of it now, and so I was aiming better: pitching my tent where I knew she’d be.
Again, the most tenuous and hesitant of tugs on the web of sound—from over my left shoulder, which was away to the southwest somewhere. I guess direction isn’t any more meaningful than distance, but the sense of the pull coming from that physical quarter was very strong.
But again, when I reached for it, when I tried to move my mind or my soul out onto that part of the web, the sudden, instantaneous collapse—followed by a great deal of nothing at all.
A suspicion was waking up in the back of my mind, like a hibernating bear
I touched the doll gingerly, with the tips of my fingers, and pricked up the ears of my soul. Dead Abbie’s sorrow was there again: an endless looped tape of long-ago despair, trapped behind the painted-on smile and the oddly flattened shape that time and circumstances had given to the rag-stuffed body. This time I rode with it for a while longer, paying closer attention to the nuances and the expression. With my left hand, at the same time, I picked up the cloisonné hair slide, which looked to be of more recent vintage than the doll. It had a different resonance, but still in the same general key of inexpressible sorrow.
After five minutes or so, I set both things down, picked up my tin whistle, and put it to my lips.
The opening note was low, and I held it for a long time. A second note followed, equally sustained, but then when you thought it might fade, opening out into a plangent trill that finally kicked the tune into gear. It wasn’t a tune I’d ever heard before, or one I was consciously composing as I played. My mind was as passive as I could make it, just resonating with the echoes of Abbie’s misery that were still in my head. I was turning her into music. Describing her in the medium I knew best. Putting out a psychic APB:
Have you seen this girl?
In spiritualist circles, this kind of thing usually gets called a summoning, but people in my business just call it the magic lasso. It’s the first phase of an exorcism. Before you can send a ghost away, you have to bind it; wrap your will around it like duct tape, although that’s actually a very unpleasant image and I wish I hadn’t thought of it. In any case, I was telling Abbie, wherever she was, that she had to dance to my tune now. I was telling her to come to heel.
There were two good reasons why this might not work. The first was that I just didn’t know her well enough. I’d never met her, in life or in death, and so the music was incomplete—just an unfinished sketch in sound, based on the emotions I’d sensed in the things she used to own. Those emotions were strong, but they were only a single piece from a huge jigsaw puzzle; what I was doing was analogous to trying to intuit the entire picture from that one piece, without the benefit of the box lid.
The second reason was that she could well be too far away in any case. No summoning is going to work if the ghost doesn’t hear it, and I’d never done this before for a ghost who wasn’t right there in the same space as me.
But the rules are different in all sorts of ways once you’re dead. What’s space? What’s distance? After a few moments, I felt a tremor of response—like a vibration on some strand of a web that I was spinning in the air, invisibly, all around me. I tried to keep my own emotions—satisfaction, excitement, unease—in check as I built that response into the tune, making my approximation of Abbie a little stronger, pulling her in, calling her to me. The vibration became infinitesimally more marked, more insistent.
And then, in an instant, it was gone.
Dead, blank, empty air surrounded me, like the moment after the fridge stops humming and you think the silence is a new sound.
I skipped a beat, swore under my breath, started up again. The music came more readily this time. I had a better grasp of it now, and so I was aiming better: pitching my tent where I knew she’d be.
Again, the most tenuous and hesitant of tugs on the web of sound—from over my left shoulder, which was away to the southwest somewhere. I guess direction isn’t any more meaningful than distance, but the sense of the pull coming from that physical quarter was very strong.
But again, when I reached for it, when I tried to move my mind or my soul out onto that part of the web, the sudden, instantaneous collapse—followed by a great deal of nothing at all.
A suspicion was waking up in the back of my mind, like a hibernating bear
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