My sister was one such lost soul. Her husband, John, was one of the thousands who simply never returned from the Somme, and in the inconclusive limbo that followed, while the rest of the country picked itself up and went forward, Margaret developed an unhealthy addiction to séance meetings. To begin with I attended a few of these evenings. They were entertaining enough in their own way, but the novelty quickly wore off. I don't know which I found more distasteful: the obvious parlour tricks employed by the various practitioners she invited to the house on Partick Hill, or the sincerity with which she and her cronies professed to believe it all. That they were truly able to converse with their lost ones in the spirit world. A frustratingly vague practice it was, a fog of mystery threaded through with just enough teases and glimpses to feed the needy audience. It was easy to see how the table-knockers and conjurers kept the repeat business coming.
It was no coincidence that I began visiting my sister less often around the time I fell in love with Helen. Helen was the perfect antidote to the post-war depression. She was bright and beautiful, and filled with an optimism for the future that, if others could not quite see yet what she founded it on, they could still not help but be infected by it. By comparison, Margaret's stubborn adherence to the past was dispiriting to say the least.
As it happened, the day we visited her to announce our engagement, she was having yet another of her séances.
"You will stay?" Her face was pale enough against her sombre dress that it occurred to me that her obsession with the spirit world was drawing her nearer to the wraiths than them to her. "This Mr Gilfillan has a new technique that is said to work wonders."
I was disappointed, and perhaps a little angry, that she chose to indulge her obsession than help us celebrate our good news. I was of a mind to curtail our visit, but Helen's eyes brightened at the mention of a séance.
"Oh, please, Bert," she said. "I've always wanted to try this. Please, let's stay."
It was difficult to tell whether Margaret found such vibrant enthusiasm appropriate, but I could see that it was important to her to have me there. After all, I was the only other person that had known John well enough to be able to corroborate his appearance, should such a miracle transpire.
So it was that an hour later we found ourselves sitting around the dining room table. The other guests that had arrived in the interim, Margaret's hard core séance circle, perched among us like a flock of dapper crows, each with a thimble of fino and a funereal air that made me want to scream.
The odd assembly was completed by the figure at the far end of the table. In the unhealthy glow of the low-turned gas lamps, he looked to me like nothing more than a door-stepping tinker. His worsted wool suit may have been his best, but I had observed a flap of unstitched lining, a button dangling on its thread. Not for this Gilfillan the velvet cape or the crass soubriquet. He was not that kind of charlatan at least. Nor had he come with the usual bag of tricks employed by his contemporaries to enliven the business of talking to the dead. No, he sat there, ruddy faced and irritable, like a man wondering where his next pint was coming from.
Despite myself, I admit I was intrigued. In addition to Gilfillan my attention was also taken by the bulky, velvet-draped object that sat in the centre of the table, and I knew that this was not going to be the usual cut-rate son et lumiere.
"Good afternoon," the man said in a slovenly, antipodean drawl. "I sense that many of you have sought communion with the spirit before, and who knows, perhaps a few of you have made some sort of a connection. A few words of comfort from a loved one, a telling fact that convinces you that it's them talking to you from the other side." Around the table a number of heads nodded. "Well, it's a lie," he said. "A charade founded on mumbo-jumbo and wishful thinking."
The exclamations of puffed-up, put-on distress made me smile.
"What we think of as spirits," Gilfillan went on with an erudition belied by his appearance (I was beginning to think of him as perhaps a university professor fallen on hard times), "are simply echoes of personalities trapped in dislocated pockets of time. Usually the result of a sudden, unexpected death—unexpected most of all by the victim—these partials are semi-aware, but no more than a sliver of the person they once were." Margaret and her ladies were nodding sagely, even though the Australian's bunk practically equated to 'there are no such things as ghosts'. To my right, Helen disguised a snigger behind a sneeze.
"To effect a genuine communication with these spirit remnants," Gilfillan droned on, "requires them to be local in both the temporal and the spatial dimensions." His head swivelled as he regarded his audience. "Have any of you suffered a recent loss, I wonder?"
"I lost a good cashmere mitten last week," Helen said sweetly.
Margaret fired us a look, and I squeezed Helen's hand, both in gentle admonishment and in admiration.
"Well, I really would love to find it again," she murmured in my ear. "I mean, what use is a single mitten to anybody?"
Around the table a number of lace-gloved hands had gone up.
Gilfillan ignored the interruption. "Of course, by recent, I should specify, within the last week or so."
The hands went down again.
"Very well," Gilfillan said. "We shall just have to see what happens. But I will not guarantee the specificity of the results." He leaned across the table and whipped away the cloth.
The apparatus was assembled mostly of a framework of drilled struts fixed together with odd bolts, wing-nuts and washers. Within this framework was cradled a bakelite box with no features apart from the cluster of terminals that connected it to a good sized electrical motor via a ripped knitting of kinked and twisted wires. The remaining space was taken up by a large battery cell.
"What you are about to witness," the Australian declared, "is no Ouija, no ectoplasm, no moving table or any other such tricks. Stripped of mysticism, divorced from religion, this is nothing less than science. The science of temporal co-planar collocation."
You had to give him his due. He made this baffling drivel sound impressive.
From the speed that he went about making his apparatus actually do something, however, I surmised that this must have been the bit of his spiel that patrons usually started asking for their money back. With a shower of fat, acrid-smelling sparks he connected the motor to the battery and it emitted a whirring sound, quickly winding itself up into a whine that vibrated the table and rattled the drops of the chandeliers.
Then I felt a tugging sensation, a lurch similar to that felt on a train that is leaving a station. One of the ladies gave a small cry.
"No worries," Gilfillan half-shouted above the din. "We're just getting up to speed so that the apparatus can locate the nearest available spook."
I felt the lurch again and it seemed to me that I must have been straining my eyesight in the dim light for too long because I began to see gold sparkles, similar to the bright dust motes that get illuminated by a shaft of sunlight. Only, there was no such light in the dining room's brown gloom.
Before long the room was filled with cascading showers of the golden sparks.
"Ooh, pretty." I heard Helen murmur, but her voice seemed disorientatingly distant.
The whine of the motor rose in pitch and I felt that lurch again, stronger than before, a yank to the guts that made me feel dizzy and quite nauseated.
And then the apparatus ceased. Someone gasped in the vacuum, a sort of wordless sigh of surprise.
"Ah," Gilfillan said. "Here we are now."
I suppose, that was the moment that I could have done something. Disconnected the machine, whatever, just made it stop. I was certainly no longer enjoying the experience, and I wish I'd had the presence of mind to take Helen by the hand and leave. If I choose to believe Gilfillan's explanation of the theory of his machine, it would have made no difference to what was to follow, but I can never escape the feeling that I allowed it to happen.
The sparks faded from the air, and in their place a bright figure coalesced
above the table: a shining blur, accompanied by a sound that to me, even without the knowledge of hindsight, was like the hiss of heavy rain. The apparition dazzled too much to be able to make out more than that its shape was female, and that it was as frightened as all hell.
"Who are you, spirit?" Gilfillan asked it.
I saw Margaret lean forward in her chair, face lit with wonder, although she must have known that this was not John.
Its voice was a whisper, and even though the rain sound masked it, I recognised it instantly. It was the voice that whispered love in my ear in the flickering darkness of the Salon cinema. The voice that had lit up with delight, and said, 'yes, yes, I will.'
"Nelly," it said.
My Helen? Only I called her 'Nelly'.
Close by, I heard a muffled sigh, a bump, a thump, and only then realised that Helen had fallen to the floor.
I carried her out of the dining room. I knew it was probably unwise to move her, but I wanted her away from that apparatus, and the inexplicable thing it had conjured. Lying her on the settee in the parlour, I feared the worst when I saw how pale, how still, she was... and I hugged her with relief when she finally responded to my fevered pinching with a spirited, "all, right! I've not passed over yet!"
To Margaret's credit, she cleared the house of guests and spiritualist alike and made Helen comfortable until she recovered sufficiently from her faint for me to take her home. The apparition was mentioned only by Helen, who later miraculously rationalised the whole affair.
"Well he was getting his own back on me, of course," she told me a day or so later as we wandered through a frosty Kelvingrove. "Putting the wind up the unbeliever. Very effective too. That'll teach me to cross swords with a spiritualist. Decent piece of mimicry too, don't you think? Sounded just like me."
It had sounded far too like her. For a horrible minute that piece of mischievous ventriloquism had convinced me of the impossible. But I could feel the heat of her hands through her new cashmere mittens. My Helen was no ghost, and we went home that day to begin planning our wedding.
Then she was killed.
Went out for messages in a rainstorm. Slipped on loose cobbles on the Broomielaw and drowned in the Clyde.
Simple as that. It was ten days since she and I had seen her ghost hovering above Gilfillan's Time Machine. What else would you call that apparatus? A device that searches for the nearest sundered spirit. Nearest in time. Backwards or forwards. Past or future.
I have said that I don't believe in ghosts, but over the years there have been times... There are times still, when I visit the house on Partick Hill, and Margaret lays the board out on that same table, and we dim the lights and place our two paper-thin hands on the planchette. And we take turns asking our questions of the night, but no-one is there to answer.
~
I went through a Weird Engineering phase a few years ago. For this story I started with the idea of a machine that could conjure ghosts, and that naturally suggested the post-war boom in séances, spiritualism and charlatans.
The Bennie and The Bonobo
George Bennie watched the future glide to a halt on the track above his head. He smiled. Waiting at the foot of the gantry stairs as the invited dignitaries and potential investors disembarked from his gleaming railplane, he grinned. And he beamed at the excited chatter that he could hear over the purr of the fore and aft prop screws easing down to a lazy birl.
He was going to be vindicated. Applauded. Rich.
It was 1930 and, with the wounds of the Great War beginning to heal at last, the country was ready to move on. And what better way to do that than replace the ponderous, dirty railways with this sleek, elevated wonder? People had a right to travel in speed and comfort.
The queue of passengers reached him. Hands pumped his, faces glowed, lips spilled excitable platitudes.
Such a smooth ride.
Bennie felt the charge off them, the genuine thrill.
The stained glass windows are darling.
And every single one of these people had influence, would carry away the message that the Bennie Railplane was the mode of tomorrow, and anyone not on board with a sizeable investment would be left behind in the past.
Imagine, Glasgow to Edinburgh in twenty minutes.
And all this from a public demonstration in a sidings in Milngavie. There was so much more he could do to refine the design. The engines for instance, now just a pair of standard, noisy diesels...
"It'll never happen."
The voice—soft, female, American—snapped him out of his thoughts. The rest of the passengers, having made their congratulations were now trudging back towards the offices, leaving a lone figure: really no taller than a child, shawled and bonneted so that her face could not be seen, and hands in a muff, which Bennie though odd for July. Mentally he scanned the passenger list—of course, it was the widow from New York, the late addition: Mrs... Mrs... Blanchflower, that was it.
It seemed she alone had not been impressed by the railplane's demonstration. Well, that was hardly surprising for an American. They were never impressed by anything they hadn't made themselves.
Bennie adopted his most reassuring tone. "I guarantee you, Madam, the concept is sound, and the vehicle perfectly safe."
"Oh, I know it is," replied the voice from the bonnet. "But even still your dream will be strangled. You will die a broken and destitute man."
With that outburst, the tiny woman hirpled away, as if plagued by bad joints, in the direction of an open workshop door. Bridling, but beginning to suspect this antagonism as that of a competitor's investor come to inspect the opposition and finding it frustratingly superior, Bennie followed. It took a moment to spot her in the dimness, but there she was, in the lee of a stripped-down engine block.
"I should warn you," he began, "that my designs are fully patented—"
She removed a hand from her muff, holding it up to stop him. He stared at the hand. It was long-fingered and covered in thick black hair.
The hand loosened the ties of the bonnet, slipped it back. If she had not silenced him, the face which was revealed would have left him speechless anyway. Huge chocolate eyes under bony brows, a toothy mouth, wide nostrils, and more of that strange hair.
In his astonishment Bennie couldn't help himself. "You're a mon— "
The visitor bared impressive teeth with a soft growl.
Bennie realized his taxonomical mistake. "Sorry, a chim— "
"If I had been a 'chim', I'd have bitten your testicles off at 'mon'." She sighed. "The word you are looking for, George, is bonobo. Other side of the Congo River from the chims. Look, we don't have time for lengthy explanations, but I can see you will need an explanation of me before we can progress to the matter at hand." The ape stroked the hair under her chin, as if choosing her next words with care. "In the future," she said, "humans will find ways to make modifications to the body that would make your hair stand on end. Literally, if that's what you desire."
Bennie's hand went reflexively to smooth his receding Brylcreemed hair.
"Where I come from, they can—and you'd better believe they do—boost and alter any physical human attribute you can name."
The obvious question dutifully formed on his lips. "Then you're not really a mon...?"
She was ready for it. "A bonobo," she repeated. "Yes, I am. Of course, they had to experiment on someone else before they were allowed to go to town on human bodies, didn't they? I may be fourth-generation enhanced, but I'm still one hundred per cent bonobo, thank you."
Bennie, not yet close to appreciating any of the bewildering volley of concepts that had been hurled at him in the last few minutes, did manage to catch the inference in this. Four generations of radical genetic experimentation must have produced a lot of dead-ends before they got it right. "I'm sorry," he said.
"Don't be," she said matter-of-factly. "I'm more intelligent than the average human. And I've got my own apartment in the East Village, not to mention a research grant.
I've even got the vote, although given that it's still only white human males that ever make it to the election platform it's frankly no use to me at all. They'd be better off with chimps."
"Did you say, the future?"
The bonobo scratched her nose. "Catch on fast, don't you? How else would I know that your beautiful railplane is doomed to failure?"
"Please don't keep saying that." Bennie felt unwell. His head was light and his stomach was hollow, and he felt as if, just as he had been gathering momentum down the gleaming railway track of his life, someone had switched the points and diverted him into a most peculiar siding. In such circumstances there was only one thing for an engineer to do: throw the vehicle into reverse, and back up carefully to rejoin the main line.
"Well, Mrs Blanchflower," he said. Ignoring the disturbing question of who Mr Blanchflower might be, he smiled more brightly than he felt able and took one step, two, back towards the door. "Many thanks for coming to my little demonstration. I'm sorry you've come so far only to be disappointed. However, you will understand that I have a number of other guests, who I seem to be neglecting—"
"Nineteen fifty-seven."
"I'm sorry?" The ape had the rather irritating habit of blowing up the tracks in front of his train of thought.
"I didn't mean to put it so bluntly," she said softly, "but that's the year you will die. Having spent all of your money on travelling the world looking for investors in the railplane, you eventually give up and take over the running of a small shop to make ends meet. The year before you die, this demonstration track, along with the carriage that sits on it right now, which will have been rusting flake by brittle flake among the gorse bushes and weeds for more than twenty-five years, will finally be dismantled. That's when the dream that has been worn down to a hard nugget inside your heart will finally wear so thin that it'll break and vanish. You won't live another year after that."
The Ephemera Page 15