The Séance

The Curator is pleased to admit you for a sixteenth viewing.

You will come in out of the cold to the door of a lone parlour given over to a sitting that never goes dark, all velvet and lamp-black and cold tea and stopped mantel-clocks and the table laid for one more, where every soul who could not bear to be the one no circle ever took at its word is sat down at the table at last, given the credited voice, and believed. There is a chair waiting for you at the table, a name already in the register and a whole dark gathering drawn close on your word, and the keeping of the parlour shut around you, and a circle that has learned by heart the one voice it could not do without. One reminder, with our compliments: the way off is real, and this time it asks whether you can take back every word and walk out believed by no one, scatter the circle's faith with no one at your side, and say one last true thing to no one, to an ending that is wholly your own.