by David Ashton
‘I do not ask you to give your credence lightly,’ he announced in a soft drawl. ‘There are compulsions beyond us. Beyond our mortal understanding. If we abuse them, they may take vengeance upon us.’
Here he had stopped abruptly and looked over at the quietly seated Sophia.
Conan Doyle at that moment understood where Bannerman received his ballast and belief. It was from the woman.
Everything comes from the woman. Good or bad.
Or is it all an act?
‘If we honour them,’ Bannerman ended his thought, ‘we may be blessed.’
With that he extended his hand towards Sophia and assisted her to mount the stage.
Magnus then took her place at the side, while she sat without fuss and arranged her pale blue dress, a simple cotton affair, accentuating her appearance of innocence and vulnerability.
Her arms were bare and the veil was held in place by a circlet of silver. She looked like something from a fairy tale. A princess waiting for a gallant knight.
All this had happened in the past.
Now, in the present, it seemed there was only Sophia Adler and Arthur Conan Doyle.
He felt a pull from inside as if some force was moving him towards the fragile being on the stage.
As if the complex inner being sheltered behind his massive frame had found harmony of response.
His mother Mary glanced at him from the corner of her eye. She knew her son and his passionate search for a meaning to life. They had both renounced the Catholic faith, the faith of a morbid alcoholic husband and father who now resided in an institution for such lost souls.
But it left an empty space.
And nature abhors a vacuum.
Mrs Roach, meanwhile, laid her dainty cat’s paw upon the dry saurian skin of her husband’s hand and murmured.
‘Robert. Do you not feel the spirits around us?’
Roach closed his eyes as if sensing the afterlife but in reality he was trying to control a knot of oniony wind that had gathered in his lower depths and was whipping about inside like a fireball looking for an exit.
Luckily at that moment Sophia began to utter softly and the attention of all became fixed upon her while Roach gave thanks to whatever spirit had answered his pressing need.
Many of the audience were ready to believe or already converted and some had even experienced séance phenomena.
Ghostly shapes flitting in the dark, raps on the table, musical instruments sounding in their ears, though never a trombone, raising of ponderable bodies, objects falling from the ceiling including lumps of ice, fresh flowers and fruit, which might indicate that the spirits were somewhat eclectic in their shopping; all these events dubious in origin and dependent upon the eyes being distracted or deceived.
Sophia Adler was none of these things.
For a start there were no manifestations; nothing appeared, not even ectoplasm, no oozing smoke from an obliging orifice that writhed into deceitful shapes while the female medium slumped erotically, limbs splayed.
No. That was not on show.
It was merely voices.
Sounds from her throat, soft at first, disjointed, rising and falling in pitch, not even words decipherable, as if filtered through a mesh of static interference.
They tumbled from her mouth and distorted the surface of the veil as if struggling to get free.
At one point she almost toppled from the chair, slowly lurching to the side like a newly felled tree but Bannerman leapt nimbly upon the stage and gently brought her to an upright position where she remained in better balance.
Now words began to form. Phrases. Random, questing, plaintive messages, some of which began to strike home amongst certain of the watching conscious throng.
A child searched for her mother. A wailing lost soul that had died of the fever. A woman called out in pain from the audience. It was her daughter. She named the wraith and there was an agonised exchange of sorts. Tears streamed down the woman’s face. This was not an act. Not for her.
The child vanished, others took her place; some found no recognition in the watchers and were elbowed aside by clamouring rivals; behind the veil Sophia’s face contorted further and it seemed to Conan Doyle as if these sounds were being wrenched out of her, as if she was giving birth.
Birth of any kind is a painful proposition. He had witnessed such with women as part of his studies and found it a terrifying process; indeed he was anything but sure whether men, medical or not, should be anywhere near the event. It was a dark and bloody passage.
He would write about it someday.
At times Sophia was like an animal growling; guttural, then yelping as if chased by the very hounds of Hell, then through the gibberish a sudden clarity as if a curtain had parted. A man’s voice sounded; his wife was not to concern herself, she was to marry again and live a happy life. He had died at sea when the ship went down.
An old woman closed her eyes and smiled bitterly to herself. Fine advice, my buckie, but a wee bit on the late side.
These were not necessarily happy visitations but as full of ambiguity and sorrow as life itself.
Which made them all the more real.
The force field inside the small room was charged with a raw intensity beyond the meagre experience of the diminished reality doled out to us as life.
The atmosphere was thick with untold stories and no-one dared meet another’s eye lest they see the naked emotion of a heart stricken with regrets.
For do not we all hide these feelings as if they were unwanted children, pale ghosts that follow us through existence?
Even Robert Roach had a momentary fear that he might hear his father’s admonishing tones cataloguing the many parental disappointments in an ungainly son, but the lieutenant pulled himself together and awkwardly attempted to calm his wife who was fluttering like moth to candle as she waited to recognise a dead ancestor that had departed with no warning and might return in the same fashion.
Her family specialised in sudden death.
As Roach searched in the little chamber of his emotions for a rarely expressed affection that might assuage his wife’s palpitations, another disbelieving member of the audience received a lightning bolt of sorts.
His name was Gilbert Morrison, one of two brothers in the shipping business. A dry stick with a cruel streak, it was an accident of sorts that he had found himself in these quarters.
Accidents do happen.
He had been walking along George Street when struck by a poster outside the hall that housed the Spiritualist Society.
An image of Sophia Adler met his narrow gaze, with fulsome tribute in words below as to her abilities in the realm of cryptaesthesia. Her face was partly in shadow, the eyes hidden, but it had a susceptible, waiflike air that provoked a whiplash sentiment in Mister Morrison normally expressed in very different surroundings.
On an impulse, Gilbert, this rare occasion, let his darker compulsion influence the public persona.
Fate works that way sometimes.
Yet before that he was intercepted, as all the attendance including an irritated Roach had been, by a gaunt figure with long white hair who stood at the entrance of the hall with a placard raised high.
The message was succinct enough. This is against God!
The man’s name was Jupiter Carlisle. He was to be found in front of most theatres in Edinburgh most nights railing against the sins of the flesh as depicted by lewd actresses and seemed to have transferred his implacable hatred of evil over to mesmerism for this evening.
Jupiter was haggard with rectitude and fixed Gilbert with pale blue, washed-out eyes gleaming with a zealot’s fire. There was an unhinged quality to the man, and though he was mocked and reviled by the very folk he sought to save from sin, he inspired a strange trepidation. No-one wanted him too close lest lunacy contaminate.
The Ancient Mariner.
His voice was high-pitched and parched as if he were drying up inside.
Thus he addressed Gilbe
rt.
‘Enter into this place,’ he pronounced, ‘and you enter a palace of iniquity where the Lord dwelleth not.’
Gilbert pushed past but Jupiter persisted.
‘Only the Lord raises the dead. This woman Sophia Adler is against Christ and must suffer consequence.’
As Gilbert went through the door and was nodded past by a sleepy old gateman, the judgement followed.
‘He will strike her down. The Lord anoints, the Lord provides. This mesmerism is of Satan’s making and you will lose your soul, sir. The flesh is aye weak and you are of the flesh!’
A confused message to which Gilbert had paid no attention, the very essence of spiritualism being a lack of corporeal form; however in this case flesh was his motivating force, his darker compulsion.
So perhaps Jupiter had a point.
Gilbert had been one of the last to enter and so found a seat at the end of Conan Doyle’s row on the extremity just by the door, closed behind by an obliging usher.
There was a stronger light by this portal and so the maritime merchant was picked out by the downward shaft as if illuminated by doom or destiny.
It illustrated a long hatchet of a face with deep-set eyes, high cheekbones and a mouth that invited the inserted envelope.
None of the strange auditory happenings had made much impression upon Gilbert.
He was distant by nature, worshipping two forces – power and money – both of which he now possessed in quantity sufficient to justify the vicious greed that had driven him from one act of treachery to another.
Morrison was a ruthless man. Predatory. He gave thanks to the Almighty on Sunday and the rest of the week was his own; exemplifying the Presbyterian edict that a grim heart leads to God.
Indeed the idea of a voluptuous or delicious deity would have sent him scurrying to a hole in the ground.
As Sophia writhed in her chair, his thoughts were not of a spiritual nature but more to indulge the dark wish that put an image in his mind of acquiescent supine surrender.
Therefore it was a great surprise to Gilbert when the woman suddenly whipped her head round and stared wildly, it would seem, straight to where he was sitting, surrounded by a halo of light.
Slowly one bare arm, flesh that he had been regarding with detached relish, rose from the body and pointed an index finger towards him.
For a moment her mouth opened and closed but no words emerged, then she let out a stifled shriek and fell abruptly back in the chair exposing a flash of white throat as if to a lover’s kiss.
Or bite.
The stirring in Gilbert’s loins was matched by an agitated rustle in the audience but Magnus Bannerman announced softly that they must compose themselves, this was a delicate moment, anything might happen, the sensitive must be left to replenish her vital sources, otherwise she might be torn to pieces by the spirits.
And so they fell silent. And waited.
Then with a shocking crash the door burst open with a sound like a thunderclap and two howling figures ran inside to chase each other dementedly round the room.
One was a devil, the other a ghost, and they emitted high-pitched screeches and cursing as they moved like will o’ the wisps in the gloom.
Two young well-to-do louts in costume, who were anticipating Halloween by some days, had crept into the halls past the dozing caretaker and thought it a great diversion to join the whirling spirits in satanic caper.
To add to the mayhem, Sophia’s head snapped up, the veil fell aside, and her white face shone in the darkness.
At the same time the nonplussed Muriel heard a ghostly voice echo in her ears. Jezebel! was the message from the other world. And then for good measure, repeated once more. Jezebel!
In fact this was a distant malediction from the departing Jupiter Carlisle, out in the street, which had floated in the still air and wafted through a partly opened small high window below which she sat at the back of the hall.
In a state of susceptibility, Muriel received the arrow of accusation straight into her guilty heart and what had made it worse was that the reedy, querulous quality of Carlisle’s voice bore an uncanny resemblance to that of her dead husband.
Jezebel!
Meanwhile the devil and ghost had skipped nimbly under the unavailing grab of the ushers but then ran into the governance of Conan Doyle who had recovered from his surprise, having wrenched his arm away from Muriel’s panicked grip, and proceeded to exercise a rugby-honed ability to take the slippery customer in tight embrace.
He tucked the cursing, fractious hooligans, one under each arm, strode out to the street and deposited them on the cobblestones with a hefty boot in the backside to speed them on their way.
From a far point down the street Jupiter Carlisle howled some words at the scene, dismissing them all as heathens who merited burning in the fires of Hell.
As Doyle walked back inside, brushing his hands in satisfaction, because nothing pleases a man more than to mete out summary punishment, he crossed paths with a tall thin person who brushed past without acknowledgement but was recognisable as the target of Sophia’s pointed finger.
And he had met the fellow not long before when the University had put on a rowing competition, which Arthur’s boat had won.
Various shipping merchants had been invited in the vain hope that they might contribute something to the club’s coffers and this thin man and his fat brother had attended, eaten the food, drunk the beer but given damn all.
‘Good evening, Mister Morrison,’ Doyle said to the man’s back and received a mumbled, belated response.
Perhaps he was embarrassed. In truth Conan Doyle would not have placed the merchant as a seeker after truth.
When Arthur returned to the hall, the chair on stage was empty and Magnus Bannerman was soothing the startled spiritual questors who were milling around like a shoal of confused herring.
‘We shall meet again,’ he assured them. ‘There will be other times. If you have received a message from the unseen world, count it your fortune; if not, then be of good cheer and cultivate patience. Your time will come.’
He shook his mane of dark hair as if in wonder at what he had witnessed and walked with great dignity to disappear through a door behind the small stage.
Roach, attempting to hustle his excitable spouse away from the scene in unobtrusive fashion, found himself face to face with the hero of the hour and muttered a greeting of sorts to Doyle before taking his wife and indigestion home.
Arthur walked up to where the small formidable figure of his mother stood amongst the distracted crowd who were being gently guided to the door by members of the Society.
‘Well, Mam?’ he demanded with a twinkle in his eye. ‘What do you think to all that?’
Mary Doyle nodded solemnly. She had raised this great oak from an acorn and filled his thought with chivalric purpose to shield them both from the terrible strains of a bleak reality; scrimping every penny to keep the home from breaking apart as her husband Charles slid inexorably from a gentle artistic man to a bitter alcoholic wreck.
The Catholic clergy had taken the male side, advising her to bear and suffer, for that was her lot in life. And so she created a sword in her mind then cut fiercely through the thin cord that bound her to Romanism.
Her children were everything. Especially Arthur.
In common with the Camelot king, he aspired to noble deeds and though no-one’s fool in terms of the pragmatism of daily life and the vicious twists of humanity, yet he yearned to soar like an eagle above the grinding banality of everyday existence.
The idea of spiritualism chimed mightily with these high-flown idealities.
A higher plane. And in the case of Sophia Adler, a striking beauty to light the way.
Mary’s lips quirked in amusement but held a trace of concern. The Anglican Church might attract her in the future but it would not do for Arthur.
He had an inbuilt resistance to the authorities, except perhaps the sporting ones, because they spawned
injustice of which he was a ferocious, implacable opponent.
All this had flashed through her brain as she gazed from her small stature up at his giant frame.
Her knight in shining armour.
She had created him so.
And now he was his own creation.
Mary realised that she still had not answered his question, and so like many an intelligent woman, took refuge in Shakespeare.
‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio –’ she began.
‘Than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’ he ended.
Although both of a questing, combative nature, they knew enough of each other to leave it there for the nonce and turned of one accord to regard the shaken Muriel.
‘I shall never again attend to one of these events,’ she declared. ‘The language was deplorable.’
Conan Doyle burst out into a loud guffaw and Mary tried in vain to hide a smile.
‘I don’t think the bad language came from the spirits, Muriel,’ she remarked equably. ‘More from a badly raised pair of mislearnit young brutes.’
Muriel bit her lip. She had wondered whether to present herself after the day so far and now wished she had stayed put. The others had convinced her that it might take her mind away from things but the opposite had occurred.
The whole world was laughing at her.
Ravaged by burglars, accused by voices in the dark.
Luckily the shaft of Jezebel that she had felt aimed so precisely at her blameworthy core seemed not to have been heard by her companions.
She turned to Conan Doyle but he was no longer on hand. Disappeared into thin air.
This stuff was catching.
12
What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?
The round squat turret, blind as the fool’s heart.
ROBERT BROWNING, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’
Magnus Bannerman carefully poured out a measure of whisky into a large tumbler and sniffed in appreciation before downing half the liquid in a fiery gulp.