Broken Meats: A Harry Stubbs Adventure

by Hambling, David

  “The phoenix, which is resurrected from its ashes, is also part of Eastern legend as it is in the West, is it not?” asked Lavinia.

  “Indeed.” Yang frowned slightly, an expression so unusual that it looked theatrical. He smoothed his beard. “To me, this resembled the occasion when the sage encountered a hermit living by a river. The hermit explained that after meditating for twenty years, he was able to walk across the water. The sage said ‘Poor fellow! Did you not know there is a ferry, just around the river bend, that will take you across for a farthing?’”

  The company laughed awkwardly.

  “There are many flower stalls in London,” Yang added.

  “It’s more about the principle of the thing—”

  “You’re quite right, Mr Yang. It's not that remarkable,” said Howard, cutting Victor off. “After all, Browne did it two hundred years ago. Palingenesis was performed in front of the Royal Society last century—Phillips reproduced a sparrow from its ashes. Even Yeats did it—WB Yeats, the Irish poet. He described his experiments to Madame Blavatsky in this very room. And, as you can see from the sixth and seventh pictures, as soon as the heat is removed, the phantom crumbles back into dust. It is insubstantial, vastly inferior to the cheapest flower-stall bloom.”

  “But it’s a phenomenon that might explain much. Robert Boyle suggested it might explain the Resurrection. Of, ah, Jesus, you know.” Victor added to Yang. “Or apparitions of the dead in graveyards, rising from their dust.”

  “It’s only a theory,” interjected Elizabeth.

  “But you see,” said Victor, “Howard has been experimenting with fixing the phantom with radium salts as one fixes a photograph.”

  “Merely a hypothesis as Elizabeth says,” Howard said carelessly. “I shall write up my experiments, such as they are, one day.”

  “I think it’s delightful to call up flowers from ash,” said Lavinia. “One day, I may be able to carry a whole garden around with me in a case and produce bouquets whenever I like. What is more important is that it gives proof positive that science and esoteric wisdom can be fruitful together. Proof positive that is portable. I am afraid we have twisted poor Howard’s arm…”

  “We persuaded him to send samples to an American gentleman,” said Victor. “A wealthy New Englander who’s absolutely crazy about European magic.”

  “Think what we could do with his sponsorship!” Lavinia beamed at Howard.

  “Please excuse my poor ignorance,” said Yang. “Why has this been neglected by Western scientists?”

  “They can’t make it work because they don’t know the words,” said Howard.

  “But it is scientific,” said Victor quickly. “Howard can tell you all about it. I understand while he’s explaining it—it’s all to do with ‘entropy not enthalpy’ of heat—but five minutes later, it’s out of my head. Tell our visitor about thermodynamics.”

  “Please do,” said Lavinia. The two were like parents coaxing a shy child to perform in front of strangers.

  “I don’t think we want to go into that now,” said Howard, adjusting his glasses. This was not enough for his audience, and he was forced to go on. He gave a slight smile. “As with many things—metallurgy, crop rotation—the ancients stumbled on the technique without understanding how it works. You know, there was a place in Spain that made excellent swords using a secret, magical recipe. The smiths used to hold the iron in the fire while reciting a certain psalm three times. Of course, what they didn’t realise was that it was the exact timing that this gave them, and not the words themselves, that was important in forming the metal to the perfect balance between hardness and flexibility. Or at least, that’s how science interprets it. But it might be the harmonic vibrations of the voice, or perhaps even the information contained in the words – there’s so much we do not know.”

  “Only Palingenesis, it’s about reversing time—and organising principles—” Lavinia prompted. “Paracelsus says it’s like magnetism…”

  “I’m simply picking away at the science behind an established phenomenon, isolating the active ingredient, like extracting quinine from the bark of the fever tree.” Howard stopped and looked down. That was all we were going to get of science.

  “Most interesting,” said Yang with the slightest of bows.

  “The boy is too modest,” said Victor. “Hides his light under a bushel.”

  “A little nurturing will see his talent flourish,” said Lavinia. “Now Elizabeth, my dear, are you quite ready to face the Otherworld?”

  Elizabeth had been stifling a yawn, bored by this technical version of Theosophy. She was waiting for her moment to shine.

  “Quite ready, thank you, Lavinia. I do not think the Spirits will disappoint this afternoon.”

  “With Mr Yang’s powers added to our own, the effects should be wonderful,” said Lavinia.

  At a nod from Lavinia, Victor rearranged the furniture with the help of some others. I was directed to move some chairs; it was all very democratic.

  “We are privileged today to be joined by a distinguished visitor from China, an adept in the ways of Taoism,” Lavinia told the assembled company while Yang gazed blandly into the distance. She went on to explain how we owe gunpowder to the Taoist alchemists, and what other things they had discovered while Europe was lost in the Dark Ages.

  Elizabeth took her place at a circular table, flanked by Lavinia and Victor with Yang and Howard completing the circle, while the rest of us looked on from a row of folding chairs. Instead of just touching fingers, the five sitters joined hands—”to make a better connection,” Lavinia explained. Holding hands with Yang and touching that long fingernail might have been disconcerting, but Howard gave no sign of noticing.

  The thick velvet curtains were drawn, and the darkness of the room was relieved only by a small metal lantern in the centre of the table, which cast a low, flickering light over the proceedings. All you could make out were the faces of the sitters.

  The transformation was total. In just two minutes, an ordinary suburban drawing room had taken on the aspect of a temple crypt where some ancient ceremony was to be enacted. First, Lavinia spoke a prayer—or invocation as she termed it—in a language that I did not recognise. Then Victor uttered his own brief incantation in a high-pitched, wailing voice.

  An expectant hush fell over the room. My senses were sharpened, on the alert for trickery or stage magic.

  “I am listening.” Elizabeth's round white face was oddly distinct in the candlelight. “I am listening.”

  The silence stretched on for a minute, two minutes. My eyes adjusted to the darkness. I could make out the pale outlines of the curtains, the rounded forms of the people around me.

  “I am Flavia, wife of the governor of Londinium,” said Elizabeth. She sounded too much like a railway-station announcer for me to be impressed. Questions crowded my mind about how she could be speaking in English and why she still said Londinium rather than plain London.

  “Greetings once more, sister Flavia,” said Lavinia. “We honour you, who are our gatekeeper to the Otherworld, our guide through the tracks of eternity.”

  “Is that you, sister Lavinia? I salute you from beyond the veil.”

  “Have you others there with you? May we speak with the one from far Atlantis who you promised us before?”

  “You may,” said Elizabeth gravely. “Let it be known that I keep my vow.”

  It was too preposterous. They wanted us to believe that contacting the afterlife was like getting the girl at the switchboard to put you through to a local number. I'm as open-minded as the next man, but that performance strained my credulity.

  “Gah.” Elizabeth grunted the sound in an impossibly low voice. She lowered her eyes and started breathing deeply then began a low mutter of harsh, jagged syllables. It sounded like some simple, made-up language with many repetitions.

  “Who is there?” asked Lavinia.

  Elizabeth’s voice doubled up on itself by some trick of ventriloquism so th
at there were two voices speaking, and then many, a whole crowd of them muttering the same rhythmic phrase over and over.

  “Tell us who you are,” said Victor.

  Elizabeth’s mouth seemed to be moving independently of the sound, which made me wonder about concealed gramophone players. And then she gave a deep belch—which under other circumstances might have reduced an audience to laughter—before continuing her low gabble.

  It was less of an entertainment than I expected. I thought the séance was all about contacting people one knew to talk to them on the other side. Or at least, you might speak to known historical personages. Julius Caesar might tell you where his crown was buried or something, but this was all meaningless.

  I yawned, and the candlelight flickered and grew dimmer. The shadows across Elizabeth's features wavered, and for a moment, it seemed that she had no face at all. She started rocking backwards and forwards, chanting louder.

  “What is she saying?” asked Yang.

  “In the name of Tau-Tri-Delta,” said Victor. “I abjure you to speak your name.”

  Elizabeth gave a convulsive jerk as though she was being sick. At first, I thought she really was sick, but what came out of her mouth was not vomit but a peculiar greyish substance. The only thing I could compare it to would be frogspawn ejected underwater by the female frog: billowing, gelatinous stuff, and lumpy, but with no real substance. Except that this was alive, stretching and easing itself into a snake that reached halfway across the table before rearing up slowly and dissolving in the air.

  “Stop it,” said Lavinia.

  Elizabeth twitched again, and this time, a double stream of ectoplasm rolled out, uncoiling and reaching like a pair of serpents or tentacles. It looked, frankly, quite menacing, and Yang leaned back in his seat away from it. Seemingly, he could not, or would not, let go of the hands of the other two.

  The ectoplasm fell apart again into a smoky slush that dribbled off the table in all directions and disintegrated into nothingness. Already, a third and greater wave was coming. Elizabeth’s jaws were opened wider than I would have thought possible, as though they were being forced apart from inside, but still she was gargling that low, rhythmic chant.

  “Break the circle!” Victor was calm and forceful, but there was urgency in his voice.

  “I can't!” said Howard.

  All the sitters all started talking together in a chaotic babble. Like a man who accidentally takes hold of a high-voltage cable and finds himself unable to let go, the sitters were locked together. The ectoplasm surged out into a great puddle that flexed itself, a grey snail emerging from its shell, sliding forwards, and dividing into triple streams that each wriggled toward Yang.

  “Stop it! Stop it!” Lavinia's howl was clearly audible above the hubbub.

  There was consternation among those in the audience. Clearly, this was not a regular part of the séance. I hesitated then stood up. Taking hold of someone being electrocuted is a dangerous thing to do. The sitters had more experience—more psychic resilience—than me; the force that ran through them might burn out my nerves. There seemed little alternative though.

  Yang had quietly pushed himself back as far as he could go. A grey cobra reared up before him, taking on definition and form like a magic-lantern picture gradually coming into focus. I took Yang’s wrist in one hand and Victor’s in the other and tried to pull them apart. It was more difficult than I expected. A grey form was writhing and splitting in the corner of my eye. I gave a sharp wrench and pulled their hands apart.

  The room went dark, and the chanting halted as suddenly and completely as though Elizabeth had been struck with a hammer. There was a moment of silence before the turmoil erupted.

  Someone had the presence of mind to turn on the electric light. Elizabeth was slumped forwards, face down on the table, her hair in disarray.

  Victor was flapping his hand about, not the one that I had pulled but the one Elizabeth had held. He seemed to be in some pain. Lavinia was still working to extract her own hand from Elizabeth's grip. Howard shook his head to clear it and looked dazed.

  “Is anybody hurt?” asked Yang imperturbably.

  “Can someone look at Elizabeth, please?” Lavinia asked.

  Yang went to look at Elizabeth. There was a triangle chalked on the back of his chair that I had not seen before.

  Elizabeth was unconscious. One of the ladies wafted smelling salts under her nose, and she twitched and came to, blinking and rubbing her face as though it had been stretched out of shape. The maid was on hand with a glass of water.

  “I’m fine,” Elizabeth said bravely. “I think.” She looked pale and drained—literally drained, as though substance had been sucked out of her and she had lost pounds of weight.

  “Did you catch any of the words?” Howard asked Victor.

  “A few, I think. We'd better write them down as soon as possible. Or you had—don't think I can write just now.” Victor was still rubbing his wrist.

  “He's more powerful than we thought,” said Howard.

  “A doctor for this woman would be advisable,” said Yang, taking the glass from Elizabeth before she dropped it.

  “Oh, dear.” Something had gone out of Elizabeth's face, as if it were a lightbulb burned out by too much current. “I don’t feel well. What happened?”

  Victor said something to Howard in an undertone, inclining his head towards Yang. Evidently, they wondered if he might be connected with the séance running out of control.

  “Excuse me, but I'm afraid I may need a doctor, too,” said Lavinia, holding the hand that had been crushed in Elizabeth's grip. “I’m afraid I may have broken some fingers.”

  Chapter Five: Of the Sorcerer Roslyn D’Onston

  “You have read the leaflets on Theosophy,” Yang said.

  As usual, he was driving, and I was navigating. He was wearing a new salt-and-pepper suit in the American style with a dark-red bow tie, and a Fedora. And alligator shoes, and dark glasses, an affectation I had only seen in pictures of Hollywood actors.

  Yang never said as much, but I had finally twigged that he did not, could not, read a single word of English. In spite of his obvious education and literacy in his own language, he had a sort of word-blindness when it came to the English alphabet. That made it even more curious that he had come alone without any assistant. It was not my place to ask questions. I simply made sure I was available to do any reading that was necessary without causing embarrassment.

  “I read some of them,” I said. “It's strange to me, all that business about Lemuria and Atlantis and Hyperborea and those other old kingdoms. It's worse than the Bible with the Moabites and the Elamites and the rest of them. If you know that lot.”

  “Please go on.”

  “Atlantis sank under the waves in a battle between good and bad magicians, so they say,” I said. “According to Theosophy, every so often the bad magicians get the upper hand, and the whole lot goes under one way or another. The thing is, though— this ‘magic’ is a cosmic force called Vril, a bit like electricity…”

  “Indeed?”

  “But Vril was just a made-up thing. I don't know if the novels of Mr Edward Bulwer-Lytton have been translated into Chinese? Bulwer-Lytton invented Vril in a book called The Coming Race, as a matter of fact.”

  I would never have believed that reading adventure novels would give me the chance to sound learned, but this was a topic on which I could be authoritative. I wanted to add that Bulwer-Lytton was the originator of the phrase about the pen being mightier than the sword—a doubtful proposition, to my mind—but felt that this would be lost on someone from China.

  “It seems to me—only from reading those pamphlets—that Theosophy mixes up fact and fiction all higgledy-piggledy. Vril isn’t real, and I’m sure Atlantis was never a real place. They have these dreams and visions, and they write them down as if they’re true. On top of that—and they don’t say it in as many words—Mrs Blavatsky cheated with at least some of her psychic effects.�
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  Yang took his time before replying. At length, he took out his cigarette case; instead of taking a cigarette, he passed it over to me.

  “Look.”

  The case was worked with an intricate pattern, a circle made up of curved shapes like two fish wrapped around each other: a dark fish with a light eye, and a light fish with a dark eye.

  “This distinction is false. Night and day give rise to each other. Good and evil are not opposites but complementary. Shadow cannot exist without light. What you call fact and fiction are intertwined and cannot be separated. They support each other. They are ‘two sides of the same coin,’ as you say in English.”

  This might have been ancient Oriental philosophy, but it seemed like muddled thinking to me, and dangerous at that.

  “Good and evil are two different things.”

  “Indeed? As a boxer, you fight people who you do not hate. In your work, you take money from people who you pity to give to rich people you despise. You deal with criminals like Mr Renville and do not report them to the police.”

  Yang smiled faintly as my discomfiture. I did not know where he had heard the name of Arthur Renville, but it was not from me. Nor had I mentioned that I collected debts.

  “What did you make of that séance then?” I asked quickly, handing the case back to him.

  I had gone over the events in my mind a hundred times and was less sure than ever about what I had seen. Lavinia’s enthusiasm for getting patronage from a wealthy American was plain. Yang was also moneyed. Perhaps they had planned to stage an event to impress him. Theatrical smoke and sound effects, along with the power of suggestion, might have explained everything I witnessed. It is not unknown for mediums to be overcome with hysteria, perhaps even an infectious hysteria. That was more or less the version of events that I had agreed on with Arthur and Reg at our evening debriefing.

  Perhaps it was my previous experience that made me think that magic is not so unlikely as all that, or maybe it was working in a Law firm. A man can stand up in court and say ‘Habeas Corpus’ and it changes everything. The right ‘Hocus Pocus’ might work just as well, with the laws of the natural world rather than human laws. Arthur and Reg maintained these laws they were two different things, but I was not so sure.