“Tell me the number!” screamed Nancy.
At that moment, however, a greasy, blood-streaked balloon began to emerge from Josh’s wide-stretched mouth. He heaved, and heaved again, and more of it slid out. He felt so sick that all he wanted was a huge rush of vomit, but he could only force this thing out of his mouth an inch at a time, and it seemed to take for ever to slide between his lips.
“Oh God,” said Nancy. “Oh God, what’s happening to him?”
Ella leaned over Josh and rubbed his back. “Come on, now, Josh. You bring it all up. You bring it all up, man.”
Josh’s face was gray. But slowly the big slippery bulge came out of his mouth, further and further. It hesitated for a while, drooping, and then it dropped silently on to the table, like a monstrous grub. It was immediately followed by a sharp splatter of half-digested pizza.
Josh collapsed on to his knees, almost screaming for breath. He puked up a little more lunch, and some of it came out of his nose. Ella brought over a large box of Kleenex and gently wiped his face.
“What is that?” asked Nancy in horror, staring at the bloody yellow bladder on the table. “Is he sick? He’s not going to die, is he?”
Ella stood up, her bracelets and her necklace jingling. “No, girl, he’s not going to die. But I never saw that happen before, not like that. I’ve had ectoplasm, just a small blob, enough to fill an eggcup. I’ve had locks of hair. But I’ve never had the whole flesh.”
Josh tugged out another handful of tissues and wiped his shirt. He was still sweaty and shaking, but his color was coming back and his nausea was beginning to recede. All the same, he looked at the thing on the table and then back at Ella, and he couldn’t stop himself from retching.
Ella said, “Sometimes, when you call up a spirit, they want to come back to the physical world so much that they try to materialize. That’s when you see ectoplasm. It’s usually white, or gray, in clouds, or fingers, or little wisps, like chiffon.”
“But what is that?” Nancy demanded. “That isn’t a cloud, or a finger or a little wisp.”
“Well, I trained to be a nurse once, when I first left school, and I would say that’s a lung.”
“Oh, my God. One of Josh’s lungs?”
“No, no, it couldn’t be.” She took hold of Josh’s arm and helped him back on to his feet. “If that was one of Josh’s lungs, he’d be dead. That’s a lung from the other side. A message.” She paused, and then she said, “I would guess that’s Julia’s lung.”
“What?” said Josh, dabbing his mouth. He could still taste blood, like rusty iron, and he could still taste the fatty tissue that had coated the lung and made it so slippery. “How can that be?”
“Her spirit is very strong, Josh. She knows you’re here. She knows that you’ve come to England to find her. She wants to talk to you, she wants to get in touch with you. But she’s been cut to pieces. She can’t appear to you whole.”
“I can’t believe this is happening,” said Josh. “How could I bring up my own sister’s lung? It just isn’t physically possible!”
“It’s possible, Josh. Things like this have happened plenty of times before. There was a famous medium in Edwardian times, Marthe Beraud, who called herself Eva C. She was able to bring human hands out of the spirit world, out of her mouth. Hands with nails and bones that investigators could actually touch. And there have been dozens of others. Some mediums have produced whole people out of their mouths.”
“I don’t understand what it means. If she’s trying to tell me something, what the hell is it?”
“You mark my words. She’s trying to tell you that she won’t be at rest until you find out what happened to her. She can’t find peace until every part of her body is brought back together, and given a proper funeral.”
“I seriously think we should call Detective Sergeant Paul,” said Nancy. “This has gone way beyond playing detectives. If this lung is really Julia’s then it’s important material evidence, isn’t it?”
“You can’t tell the pigs,” Ella protested. “They’ll think you’re insane. Worse than that, they’ll probably think that you had something to do with her murder, even if you weren’t in England when it happened. I mean, what are you going to say to them? ‘My sister’s lung came out of my mouth’?”
“Jesus, Ella. This séance has created more goddamned problems than it’s solved.”
“Will you trust me?” Ella demanded.
Josh said, “I don’t know … trust you? I can’t even believe this is happening.”
“Trust me. You have to trust me, or this isn’t going to work.”
“But what are we going to do with this lung? We can’t just–”
“Trust me.”
“OK,” said Josh, raising both hands in surrender. “I trust you.”
Nancy said, “I’m not so sure about this.”
“If it doesn’t work, then you can go to the police. But you saw what I did before … raising Julia out of the air. Now I can get you closer.”
She went across to her sink and produced a plastic Sainsburys shopping bag from the cupboard underneath. She picked up the lung and eased it into the bag. It slid to the bottom and hung in a heavy curve, bleeding. She left it in the sink while she folded up the tablecloth and took it into the bathroom.
“I really think that we’re messing with things that we don’t understand,” said Nancy.
Ella returned and then emptied the lung into the sink and washed it. “All right, if you want to call the police, call the police. But you’d be making a mistake. The way this lung appeared, it shows that your sister’s remains are not in this world, they’re somewhere else. Somewhere close, but different.”
“So what you’re trying to say is, there is a parallel existence, and this is the proof?”
“Where else do you think it came from, man, this lung? You didn’t eat it for lunch, did you?”
Ella filled a small copper saucepan with water and put it on the gas to boil. Then she lifted the lung out of the sink and laid it on a scratched wooden chopping board. She used a triangular-bladed kitchen knife to take off three thin slices, which she cut up fine. Then she reached for some of her glass jars of herbs.
“Is this a spell?” asked Nancy, coming closer.
“You’re an Indian. You should know about spells.”
“Yes, yes I do. My grandfather used to make a powder which was supposed to make the wind die down.”
“And did it?”
Nancy didn’t smile. “Yes,” she admitted. “Maybe it was just a coincidence, but it did.”
When the water began to boil, Ella scraped the slices of lung into the saucepan, along with angelica, dill, bay leaves, mugwort, pimpernel, marigold, rue and rosemary. She stirred it three times, and then she left it to simmer. She took out a clean white tablecloth and struck it three times with her wooden spoon.
Josh sat in the corner, underneath the sloping ceiling, feeling as bruised as if he had fallen out of a moving car. His common sense told him that he and Nancy should walk out of here right now and call the police. But the image of Julia’s legs kicking in the air had been too electrifying; and the trauma of regurgitating Julia’s lung had left him emotionally weak as well as physically bruised. Nancy came and sat beside him and took hold of his hand; and after a while even Abraxas hopped out of his basket and came across to sniff at his knees and give him a reassuring whine.
The smell from Ella’s potion reminded him of his mother’s herb garden when he was young. She used to rub lemon parsley between her fingers so that he and Julia could sniff it.