Preston descended hurriedly from upstairs, fastening his robe, evening the sides about his pale belly before drawing them together. He worked at the lock for a long moment and then pulled open the theatre door. “Hi, Mr. Collinger.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve arrived a little prematurely.”
“That’s all right. I was just …” Preston waved vaguely in the direction of his sleeping quarters upstairs. “Come in, Mr. Collinger. Come on in.”
Preston pulled open the door slightly and Collinger, ever a slim man and these days even more so, slipped through. As he passed by Preston he noticed an acrid, musky odour. It reminded him of something, although he couldn’t quite place his trembling finger on it. “I’ve brought two things,” said Collinger, getting down to business. “One is a cassette recording of what was actually heard on the evening in question. The other is a transcript of the same, translated into English.”
Preston shook his head slightly. “Okay. Now, I didn’t quite follow this on the telephone. This was a seance, last Thursday …”
“Hallowe’en.”
“Sure.” Preston nodded. Hallowe’en was, of course, the most popular night for seances, seeing as ghosts were out and about and looking to drop by for visits. Many people held seances, chanting low invitations to disembodied spirits. Mind you, some people were more particular in their incantations and awaited only the arrival of Ehrich Weiss.
Many know this story: in Montreal, in the year 1926, Ehrich Weiss was reclining on a sofa in his dressing room in the Princess Theatre. Two young men burst in, eager to meet the great Houdini. One of them, a McGill student named Whitehead, asked Weiss if it were true that punches to the stomach did not hurt him. Houdini pursed his lips and shrugged with what little modesty he could muster. Popular legend has it that Whitehead then struck him without warning; historians have it that Houdini did prepare himself, but rather ineffectually. He did not rise from the couch, for example, and Whitehead was able to shower blows from above, striking Weiss hard on his tiny stomach. Something inside Houdini burst. Some believe that something was already broken, that Whitehead’s blows merely exacerbated the situation. At any rate, Houdini left Montreal, took a train to Detroit, even managed to give a show: a newspaper reported that he looked “more than a little tired.” Afterwards, he was rushed to the hospital, where doctors attended to him frantically. Houdini slipped in and out of consciousness. Once, he looked at the young man caring for him and whispered, “I wanted to be a doctor. When I was young. I wish I had become a doctor.”
“But, you’re Houdini.”
“But what you do is real. I am just a fake.”
Houdini died on Hallowe’en.
Ehrich Weiss had stated on many occasions that if there were some way of getting back from the Other Side, he would find it. Since then, people have assembled every Hallowe’en and awaited his return.
Theodore Collinger took a deep breath and managed to get his shaking hand into his trouser pocket, pulling out a folded piece of paper and a small cassette tape. He waved these in front of Preston, who took a few moments to judge the speed and modulation, then pinched thumb and forefinger together, stabbed out and intercepted the stuff.
Collinger’s attention was now drawn once more to the staircase where a young woman was descending. She was measuring out the sides of her robe, giving the terry cloth a little shimmy before drawing it closed across her nakedness. Collinger’s innards were suddenly molten. He was so shaken that his hands were stilled. He lifted one, as though in greeting, although he was really holding it in front of his eyes to block the view, much as one would if forced to stare into the sun.
“Hiya,” said this young woman, making a knot in the sash. The robe split high to allow her legs to take the last couple of stairs. “I guess you must be Theodore Collinger.”
Collinger nodded; the name sounded familiar.
Preston, meanwhile, had lumbered behind the snack counter where there was a small tape recorder. Mrs. Antoinette Kingsley had long ago grown bored with Preston’s Show and preferred to spend the time sitting behind the counter listening to Tony Anthony tapes. Preston plugged in the cassette, placed his thick forefinger on the “PLAY” button and pressed.
The tiny speakers issued forth a silence thick with static and human breath.
“There were four of us,” said Collinger. “Myself, Kenny Bental, Louisa Hoyle and Freddy Myztyk.”
“Oh, yeah.” Preston scowled. Of the three people named, Bental was the most sane, and he was only allowed out on weekends. Louisa Hoyle was rich enough to avoid hospitalization; Freddy Myztyk was so loopy that his presence caused radio interference and local blackouts.
“Listen!” said Collinger suddenly, pointing at the tape recorder. “There’s the first voice.”
The “first voice” was laden with zizz and cackle, hard to distinguish beneath the ethereal roar. “Hallo,” it said.
“And here—” said Collinger. The second voice came too close upon the heels of the first for him to announce it. “Oh,” went the voice. “Du bist es. Der Typ der mich im Bauch erwischt hat.”
“German,” noted Preston. He unfolded the piece of paper he held in his hand.
“Das tut mir leid,” returned the first voice.
“Es macht nichts. Heh. Gib mir einen Spot.”
Miranda shivered suddenly and pulled the collar of her robe together, running her hand upwards like a western tie until the terry cloth was knotted around her neck.
“Ich kann nicht. Ich muss gehen.”
Preston ran his eyes over the page and found the appropriate words. “I can’t. I have to go.”
“Gehen? Keiner kann gehen.”
“Go?” translated Preston in as soft a voice as he could manage. “No one can go.”
Then there was silence, which somehow seemed much louder than the eerie, tape-recorded words. Collinger said, “That’s it,” and Preston the Adequate switched off the machine. He pulled at his face, the pasty jowls seeming to stay stretched for many moments after he removed his hand. “Well,” he said. “The German is a problem.”
“Not really,” argued Collinger. “The Weiss household spoke German. Houdini spoke German with his mother exclusively.”
“Sure, but the first voice. I mean, for this to make any sense, that first voice would have to be Whitehead’s. Wouldn’t it?”
“Point of information,” said Miranda. “What did they say?”
“Oh.” Preston read from the sheet of paper, running a finger underneath the words as if to lend them a sort of forensic rightness. “Hello.”
“I got that part,” said Miranda.
“Oh. It’s you. The guy who hit me in the stomach.”
“No shit?”
“The translator,” pointed out Collinger, “notes that the verb used is actually somewhat vague. ‘Hit me in the stomach, got me in the stomach, something like that.’ But the stomach part is clear enough.”
“So what else?” Miranda prompted.
“Let me see. I’m sorry about that. Don’t worry. Hey. Give me some scorn.”
“What the what?” repeated Miranda.
“Spott,” said Collinger, adopting a scholarly tone, “apparently means scorn. Ridicule, mockery, that sort of thing.”
“No,” said Miranda. “I bet he said spot. In English. You know. As in weightlifting.”
“Aha!” declared Collinger, and only partly because the gap between the bathrobe lapels had dropped deep between Miranda’s breasts. “More supporting evidence. Because Houdini, an adherent of the physical dynamism espoused by Eugene Sandow, spent many hours occupied with muscular training and improvement.”
“Yeah, but,” said Miranda. She fell abruptly silent.
“Yeah, but what?”
“This is wild,” she declared, with considerable enthusiasm. “Houdini pulls off the Big One.”
Preston spun around. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said slowly. “Why would Whitehead speak German?”
“Prest
on, you unimaginative schmuck,” countered Miranda, “we are dealing with the Great Beyond. I’m guessing you can speak whatever language you want.”
“But—”
“You got hold of something pretty special there, Mr. Collinger,” said Miranda.
“Oh, I don’t suppose anybody will believe it. A few, here and there. But there’s a few here and there who will believe pretty much anything.”
Preston popped the cassette out of the machine. He had to take hold of the old man’s wrist, which seemed as thin and fragile as an icicle at noon, steady the hand and tenderly slip the tape between the vibrating fingers. “Hey, Mr. Collinger,” he asked quietly. “What do you believe?”
“Me?” Collinger shrugged. “I suppose I believe that there is life after death. But I had pretty much come around to believing that, anyway. It’s easy to believe that when one is about to die.”
Miranda came close and kissed him on the cheek. “Thanks for coming and playing that for us, Mr. Collinger.”
“My distinct pleasure.” He turned and shuffled out the door of the George. The old man sailed slowly down the sidewalk, turned the corner onto Paradise Road and—having checked over his shoulder to make certain there were no eyes upon him—faltered briefly, hitching his shoulders and stumbling forward, an old man’s version of kicking up one’s heels.
“So what’s the deal?” demanded Preston.
“Hmm?”
“Didn’t you recognize the voice?”
“Sounded familiar.”
“It wasn’t Houdini.”
“That so?”
“Shouldn’t we have told Mr. Collinger?”
“The way I figure it, he’ll take that tape to a television station or something, and he’ll find someone who believes him and there’ll be someone who doesn’t—someone who says why are they both speaking German?—and in a couple of weeks everyone will have forgotten about it.”
The two were ascending the circular stairs, leaving terry cloth bathrobes in their wake.
“And that would be good? That would be preferable to conclusive proof of life after death?”
Miranda tsked her tongue. “Man, you know that better than anyone.”
“I do?”
“It’s about wonder, right? Wonder. We need it.”
“We?”
“Humanoids.” She took the stairs two at a time now, drawing ahead of him. She mounted to the top and then dove for the fusty daybed. Preston swayed by the perimeter, breathing heavily—winded by the stairs, despite the fact he’d given up smoking—and staring hard. “Yeah,” he agreed, “we need it.”
“Come on, Preston,” said Miranda, “we’ve got work to do.”
“Work?” Preston waddled forward and fell, bouncing his bedmate into the air. “This isn’t work.”
“That’s what you say now,” said Miranda, landing on top of Preston’s belly. “But let’s hear from you in an hour or so.”
“An hour? What are we going to be doing for an hour?”
“We,” said Miranda, wedging her hand between their bodies, guiding Preston inside her, “are going to be creating little Preston. Preston the Wonderful.”
“Right,” grunted the Adequate. “Preston the Improbable.”
“Preston,” whispered Miranda, “the Splendiferous.”
“Preston the, uh, Marvellous.”
“Preston, uh, Preston, uh, the Stunning.”
“Uh Preston uh the Uh.”
“Uh the Uh.”
“Uh.”
And in that region of the blue world known today as Sri Lanka (but known once as Cingal, from the Indian word sing, for lion) two peasants, a young couple of the ancient Veddahs, crouch by the side of a snakelike, dusty road. In a small mesh basket before them is their son, a few months old. The child is pale and labouring for breath. They have been to see the old woman who knows about remedy and ritual, but she told them nothing. The old woman merely touched the baby’s forehead, pursed her wrinkled lips until they vanished from sight, and then turned and hobbled away on the sides of her twisted feet.
So the couple are returning to their village. All will has abandoned them, leaving them hunkered, desolate and beyond tears, in the middle of nowhere.
Over a rise in the road comes a man wearing only a soiled loincloth, so loose and thinned by time that it does virtually nothing to hide his nakedness. The man’s body is odd; it is improbably muscled, every group, subgroup and ligament clearly visible just beneath the skin. And the skin itself is strange; it seems as smooth as glass or porcelain. The sunlight explodes on the man’s body; the Veddah couple shade their sore eyes with trembling palms.
The man’s face is ageless, or at any rate, the age is impossible to determine. There is evidence of decrepitude—hairlessness, chiefly, except for a thin topknot of gossamer hair—but there are no wrinkles on the brow or at the corners of the mouth, even though the mouth is pulled into the widest of grins. The man’s features are heroic somehow, his beauty all but perfect. The only thing amiss is a peculiar colouration around and across the eyes, where the skin tone changes from bronze to an ill-looking purple. The eyes themselves are shut, the lids sealed by a gum made of rheum and tears. The man carries a staff, working it along the road, displacing rocks that lie in the path of his naked feet. The young couple dismiss the man as a blind beggar; they turn away and look down to the ground, although they are both really looking into the deep pools of their own sadness.
The blind man stops before them. The young man and woman catch their breath. They try to remain as still as possible, praying that the beggar will soon shrug and continue on his way. But the baby betrays them. Its breath breaks through a windpipe squeezed tight by illness. The wheeze is whisper-quiet, far softer than the breeze, but the blind man cocks his head and turns.
“Our son—” the young man begins by way of explanation, but he is cut short. The beggar opens his eyes, slowly lifting the mulberry lids. The couple is startled, almost panicky. The beggar’s eyes are not milky and lifeless, they are a radiant silver. At their centre are dots of denser metallic stuff like beads of mercury.
The beggar lowers his head, aiming these eyes at the baby. The woman starts forward, reaching toward the basket, but her husband places a hand on her arm. They exchange looks, and the wife slowly withdraws her hand. As she does so, the basket begins to rise.
The beggar’s face is set in concentration. Although his brow does not yet wrinkle, the skin itself seems to crack, marbling with taut veins. The old bruises that surround the beggar’s eyes become darker; the eyes themselves glow more intensely, giving out lambent pulsations.
The basket rises high into the air, above the hands of humankind, and begins to spin slowly. The silence is then broken by a sound, strange to the young couple because they haven’t heard it in such a long time. It is the child laughing.
The Spirit Cabinet Page 31