The Séance Job

The email said the hackathon was at a piano restoration shop, which I figured was some kind of joke until I looked it up. Brighton Piano Restoration, back room, Manchester. A Victorian ballroom that somebody had stuffed full of soldering stations and folding tables. I'm sixty-three, retired from full-time work but still doing consulting, and I had nothing better to do on a Saturday, so I signed up as a volunteer. Mostly that meant showing people where the toilets were and fixing their laptops when they'd broken them doing something stupid.

The place smelled like varnish and old felt. There was a grand piano under dust cloths near one wall, half taken apart, strings sticking up out of it like the ribs of something that had died at sea. Somebody had hung a banner over it that said HACK THE PAST in mismatched letters. The whole thing had been organized by a local tech collective, the kind of people who put milk crate seating in their offices on purpose.

I got a volunteer lanyard and a cup of terrible tea and settled in. Around eleven in the morning I did my first lap of the room to see what teams were building. Solar phone chargers. A thing that tweeted when a vending machine got stuck. All the usual stuff.

Then I stopped walking, because across the room there was a woman crouched over a folding table, holding a mason jar full of water up to the light. Inside the jar was a little sensor on a wire, and she was watching a laptop screen like it owed her money.

I knew that woman. Her name was Fatima and I hadn't seen her in three years.

Here's the short version, so nobody's confused later. I met her at a tech conference when she was thirty-six and I was sixty. She was there for the marine tech track and I was there because they still paid me to show up and talk about old code. We got talking, then we got dinner, then we dated for six months. It was good. Then she got a job offer, an aquarist position up north at a big public aquarium, and I wasn't going to ask a thirty-six-year-old to tie herself to a man twenty-four years older just because the sex was good and the conversation was better. So we shook hands like adults and it was settled. No drama. I thought about her more than I meant to, but I never once picked up the phone, and neither did she.

And now she was standing in a piano shop holding a jar of water.

I must have stood there like an idiot for a solid ten seconds, because she looked up from the jar and saw me. Her face did a thing. Surprise first, then something warmer.

"Al?" she said. "Al, is that you?"

"It's me," I said. "Unless you're seeing a ghost, in which case I'm flattered."

She set the jar down and came around the table. We did that awkward thing where neither of us was sure if we were hugging people now. We settled on a hug. She still smelled the same, some kind of clean soap, and she was thirty-nine now and looked good, same dark curls, same laugh lines.

"What are you doing here?" she said, stepping back. "I thought you retired."

"I retired from having a boss. Not from being nosy. I'm volunteering. I fix laptops when people break them."

"You always were the person everyone ran to when their build broke." She waved at her table. "I'm with the fish tank team. We're doing water quality monitoring. PH, temperature, ammonia, all of it, live to a dashboard."

"That's the mason jar?"

"That's the mason jar, yes. It's standing in for a tank because we couldn't bring a tank on the tram." She looked a little embarrassed about it, which was funny. "The sensor kept giving us garbage readings all morning and I just figured out why. There's caffeine in the water."

"There's what?"

"Somebody on the team rinsed the probe in the tea urn water. Don't ask. But that's why it thought the pH was going insane." She grinned at me. "I'm telling you this because you're the only person in this building who'd appreciate it."

"I appreciate it very much," I said. "Also I'm glad the water in your jar isn't haunted."

That got a laugh out of her. Three years and the laugh was exactly the same.

We stood there a second while I tried to think of a way to keep the conversation going that didn't sound desperate. She beat me to it.

"Listen, do you want a coffee? There's an espresso machine in the back that I'm told predates the laptop. It looks like a bomb with a portafilter. I've been scared of it all morning."

"You had me at espresso," I said. "Or bomb. Either one."

The machine was in a little alcove near the kitchens, chrome gone brown at the edges, a brass handle worn smooth by decades of hands. She worked it like she'd done it a hundred times, which I doubted, and produced two cups that were mostly foam and mostly too hot. We took them to a bench by the window that looked out on a brick wall.

"So," I said. "Three years. How's the aquarium?"

"It's good. It's very good. I run the quarantine wing now, which means I get paid slightly more to be sad about fish diseases." She blew on her coffee. "How's retirement?"

"Retirement is me doing consulting three days a week and calling it retirement because I turned down a full-time offer."

"That's the most Al thing I've ever heard."

We caught up properly for a while. Her mum had a new hip. My knee had a new opinion about stairs. The usual. And then she got this look, like she was saving something up.

"Okay, so, funny thing," she said. "The collective running this thing, the ones with the banner? They're doing a séance tonight. At dusk. In the back room."

"A séance."

"For the lulz," she said. "That's the actual stated reason on the schedule board. There's a subgroup of them that's into this stuff. Old radios, Victorian parlour tricks, they've got a Ouija board they apparently found in the loft of this building. They're calling it a séance but I'm fairly sure it's a bit with candles."

"In a piano shop," I said.

"In a piano shop. There's a rumour a piano tuner died here in the nineteen twenties but I think they made that up for atmosphere."

"Are you going?"

She looked at me over the rim of her cup, and there was a little glint in her eye I remembered well.

"I was going to," she said, "but it's more fun with a crowd. Are you asking?"

"I'm asking," I said. "You, me, a ghost and a board game. Sounds like a Saturday."

"Then it's a date," she said, and then she went a bit pink, like she'd heard the word she'd used. "A date to a séance. A séance-shaped appointment."

"A séance-shaped appointment," I agreed. "Strictly non-romantic, obviously."

"Obviously," she said, and neither of us believed her, and that was fine.

* * *

Dusk came late because it was summer, but it came. The organizers turned the main lights off around nine, and someone had strung up fairy lights along the shelves of piano parts, which gave the whole back room a soft orange glow that did a lot of work for zero effort. There were candles too, real ones, in jam jars, which felt like a fire hazard but nobody asked me.

Six of us ended up round the board. Fatima next to me, which I noticed and did not mention. The mystic crowd turned out to be three people from the collective, a lad with a mustache he clearly grew that week, a woman called Ivy who narrated everything like she was describing a nature program, and a quiet man everyone called Tuna who said maybe six words the whole night. Then Fatima, me, and another volunteer, a woman in her fifties who'd come with the vending machine team and just wanted to see what happened.

The Ouija board itself was genuinely old. Thick, warped, felt on the feet of the planchette, letters worn down at the edges from use. Dust sat on it in a film, and someone had wiped a swathe through the middle so you could read it.

"Okay," said the mustache lad, in a voice he'd clearly been practicing. "Welcome, everyone. Rules are simple. Hands on the planchette, fingers only, light touch. Nobody pushes. If anything happens, it happens."

"Or nobody pushes and nothing happens and we all have a nice sit-down," said Ivy.

"Also possible," he admitted.

Fatima put her hand on one side of the planchette and looked at me. "Come on, then," she said. "Sit next to me, you're not scared, are you?"

"Terrified," I said, and sat down, and put my fingers on the other side of the little wooden heart.

The lights dimmed. Somebody turned the fairy lights down to almost nothing. The candles did the rest, six small flames around a dusty board, and the room went so quiet I could hear the varnish smell, if that makes sense, the old wood settling on itself. The half-built piano sat under its cloths at the edge of the candlelight like an audience.

"Is anybody there?" said the mustache lad.

Nothing happened for a good minute. Ivy narrated the silence. "The board remains still. The spirits, if present, appear to be on break."

Then Fatima's hand moved. Not the planchette. Her hand, on the table, her little finger sliding across mine like it was an accident, which it was not, because she did it twice more after that.

The planchette moved.

It went smooth and quick, no jerking, no hesitating, straight across the worn letters to the corner where YES lived. The mustache lad made a sound like a