As soon as we were all together in the front room we were friends, by tacit agreement. There was an air of professionalism, as at a seminar. We were there to experience a particular thing and without having to be told in any pointed fashion we knew that Top was the facilitator.
Neal had not changed his clothes but Top wore the grey robe and turban. Neal stood back from the rest of us, watching Top with a sly smile and staring intently at Roberta whenever she asked a question or made a statement.
Top regarded her with polite interest. He said nothing to Joe but he smiled and nodded at him frequently, as a means of including him in the circle of participants. I felt like an outsider who happened to stumble into this situation and would go along with it just to be sociable. Moira was controlling her excitement by hugging herself and bumping Joe playfully with her hip, her eyes alive and absorbant, glancing around at the shades of darkness. The big candle on the mantelpiece painted gold outlines of her animated features. The logs in the fireplace glowed hellishly with a pungent ashen smell hardly masked by the fragrance of the incense sticks in three ceramic turtle shells arranged on the lampstand between the two couches. The dining table was bare. Six chairs surrounded it.
Ricardo had taken the two servants back to the house. On the counter near the sinks was their handiwork: a bowl of punch and a tray of crackers topped with devilled meats and cheese.
I stood with an elbow on the mantle thinking about the secrets in the five minds. I wondered what Roberta and Joe might know of the mystic confrontation, the game of nerves, between Top and Neal. Moira had told Joe that the seance was about raising the ghost of a girl whose lover had murdered her. Moira had said little more about it, since she herself was confused over the strange psychological elements of the case. She had not mentioned Neal as the suspected killer because it was all tangled up in a subject she knew virtually nothing about, although she was aware that her own intuitive sense had something in common with the events of the murder.
I could not really believe that Top and Neal had deadly intentions toward each other, despite their apparent sincerity to carry them out. There was something deeper to this seriously enigmatic game, this dark amusement, that Top had planned and to which Neal had agreed. Certainly it concerned the bizarre death of Alicia, an act of cruelty that Neal readily confessed to, but which might have been an 'act' after the fact. Frankly, I didn't think Neal was responsible for Alicia's suicide. It was a twisted bravado that prompted him to hint to Top of his involvement in Alicia's gruesome fate. But of course I couldn't be positive. Maybe Top was right and Neal was indeed guilty. It was the unlikely strangeness of it all that made this whole thing hard to swallow.
What I was confident in knowing was Moira's hope that the seance would somehow fix things for her; that the ghost, if there was to be anything like a ghost, would be her own spirit of the past, here to change that past into something tolerable, a healing presence. As for what Joe hoped to achieve, I could only assume that it was concerned with his need to manifest himself as herself. But his reversion back to a male attitude puzzled me. I didn't know what to make of it. I thought it might've been his mother's influence. She wanted to keep her child a son and not see him morph into a daughter.
I didn't much care what happened with Joe. I was looking at Moira and Roberta, noting their covert glances at each other. I was disturbed by the dilemma Roberta had raised in her account of the bathtub experience that I had been led to believe was the cause of Moira's neurotic behavior, her odd psychopathy. If Roberta was innocent, as she claimed, then what was the true cause of Moira's oddness? What was she hiding from me? Why had she told Joe on the phone that first morning in the Topeka motel room that Roberta deserved what Moira had done to her by drowning her cat? 'I would do it ten times over,' she had said angrily. 'She deserves it!' If Roberta was not responsible for Moira's punctured maidenhood, then what had Joe's mother done that so angered her? And whatever it might have been, was it the cause of her 'issues,' or simply her chosen excuse for them? I didn't know who, or what, to believe.
I do believe in apparitions. I have the sort of mind that either conjures them or attracts them. So I was quite sure I'd see one that night. I wondered if I would be 'paralyzed' by its appearance or have full muscle tone and be free to move. I had experienced both types.
My theory was that a loss of voluntary motor activity was due to one of two causes: a wakeful dream state, or fear on the part of the ghostly entity that it would be assaulted by the percipient if this person were able to move. Regarding this fear, it is not the physical attack that the entity fears, but the altered state of consciousness that provides the attack with a psychic force that could harm the entity in a spiritual sense. When the percipient has full muscle tone in the presence of an apparition, then this indicates that the entity has a benign attitude and does not expect the percipient to hate and attack it.
In my experience, the friendly apparition in whose presence I could move freely and interact with was a particular female adult, quite beautiful in appearance, but with a nature I regarded as morally evil. I didn't trust her, but although a little disturbed by her presence I had no fear of her. She expressed a desire for sex with me and for marriage. I have no clue as to whether this entity is a living person in bilocation (a well-documented psychic phenomenon), or the ghost of a woman who lived in the Victorian Age (judging by her frequent style of dress).
While I was mulling these things over, Top passed around the refreshments, Moira assisting him. There was some inconsequential small talk, and then Top said, "Shall we get started? I do feel that the time has come."
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