everyone in the room seemed familiar with the form. Someone said, ‘What is twenty times thirty?’ and someone else said, ‘Who is your control?’
Each time there was a pause then a scraping sound like chalk being dragged across slate. Tom, straining to see through the gloom, thought that Flask’s hands stayed without movement on the rim of the table with the slate between them. Oddly, the whole thing was more unnerving than the cabinet display, perhaps because he was only a couple of yards away from Flask or perhaps because the scraping noises set his teeth on edge. More questions were invited by the medium, who spoke now with a queer trembling unlike his usual oily tone.
‘Have you a message for me?’
This was Helen. Tom was amazed that she should have asked something and faintly alarmed when her question was followed by more scratching. Then Aunt Julia asked, ‘Whom should I trust?’ Further scraping sounds.
Flask began to wobble his head violently as if an invisible person had seized him by the back of the neck. The slate clattered to the floor. Someone — Ambrose or Kitty? — turned up the gas, signalling the end of the session. By the better light, Flask looked paler than ever, as if he had just woken from a deep and unpleasant sleep. He seemed to come to himself. He picked the slate up from the floor. He displayed both sides of it to the room. They were blank. Tom was relieved — and a fraction disappointed. The man was a charlatan after all and an incompetent one at that.
But then Eustace Flask unhinged the slate to reveal some writing on the inside. He nodded as he scanned the words before handing the slate round the people in the room who were pressing closer. They treated it reverently, passing it from group to group. When the slate got close to Tom he saw the following answers, written in capital letters and on separate lines.
The number: ‘600’
A scrawl that looked like: ‘RUNNING BOOK’ or possibly ‘BROOK’.
The sentence: ‘BELIEVE HELEN.’
The words: ‘LIKE A SON’.
Apart from the first answer to the arithmetic question, none of these made much sense but it gave Tom a jolt to see Helen’s name scrawled on the tablet for everyone to read. Now Kitty took the slate and, for the benefit of those who hadn’t yet seen it or did not understand the responses, explained that ‘Running Brook’ was the name of an Indian maid who was Flask’s ‘control’. Indeed, the maid had already manifested herself that evening. Yes, it was Running Brook’s white limbs that had appeared through the cabinet doors. Kitty, with a voice straining to be genteel, said she believed that Helen was the lady sitting next to her uncle and that the message to her was plain. She must place her trust in the reality of the spirit world. She should ‘BELIEVE’. As for the final answer — the cryptic ‘LIKE A SON’ — Kitty was not sure of the application of these words but no doubt all would become clear in the fullness of time.
‘I know what it means,’ said Julia Howlett. ‘It was I who asked the question ‘Whom should I trust?’ and the answer has come from Running Brook. I should trust my dear Mr Flask here. I should treat him like a son.’
Flask put his hand on his shirt-front as if to say, ‘Who? Me?’ But his surprise, and everyone else’s, was greater when the spruce, moustached gentleman stepped forward and snatched the slate from Kitty.
‘Wait a moment, Mr Flask. I think you should explain first of all how the writing on the slate is in blue chalk when there is plainly a white piece on the table.’
All eyes swivelled from the blue lettering on the tablet to the stick of white chalk on the table top. It was strange, thought Tom, that he hadn’t noticed the inconsistency in colour.
‘The spirit moves in mysterious ways, sir,’ said the medium, perfectly self-possessed. ‘What matters is the message not the colour of it.’
‘You might also explain, Mr Flask, how you have left blue marks on your shirt…’
Flask gazed down at where he’d just patted his chest in his ‘Who? Me?’ gesture. There were smears of blue on his starched front. Automatically he glanced at his fingertips and there too were traces of blue chalk. For a moment he looked baffled. Then he looked angry as he saw the other man holding up a stick of blue chalk.
‘I was standing near the table just before you started your folderol and your fiddle-faddle, Mr Flask, and I switched the white chalk for the blue. Then at the end of your performance, I switched them back again.’
‘And what follows from that, sir?’ said Eustace Flask.
It was fairly obvious what followed. Flask had written the words himself. By now Helen had come back from the table to stand next to Tom and they turned to look at each other. The same thought was in both their minds: was this another police exposure as in Tullis Street? Yet although the moustached man had an odd air of authority he did not seem to be a policeman. What he did next made it even less likely that he was one. He dived for Flask’s ankles — the medium had not risen from his chair — and tugged at the bottom of the man’s trousers like an angry dog. A shower of flour rained on to Julia Howlett’s carpet.
‘There we are,’ said the man, standing up and gazing round the room, his own hands now white and floury. The guests looked bemused and shocked. ‘I ask you why a man should need to keep flour in little secret bags at the bottom of his trousers. There is no sane explanation unless it is to replace the flour that the same man has let drop while he is fiddling with his knots and jangling his instruments.’
When they discussed it afterwards, Tom and Helen both confessed to a touch of admiration at the way Flask responded, even if it was only admiration at his impudence. In their eyes, he’d been caught red-handed, or rather caught with a piece of blue chalk and with piles of concealed flour.
Instead of shrivelling up or admitting defeat, as Ernest Smight had done, Flask rose from the table. Ambrose shouldered his way towards him but the medium lifted a ringed hand, the tips of his fingers still tinged with blue chalk. It was like the benediction of a bishop. The gesture said, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.’ Flask paced slowly towards the gentleman with the fine moustaches, who did not shift one inch. He halted when he was within striking distance. When he spoke next it was not to his opponent but to the rest of the company.
‘Our Lord tells us that when our enemies assail us, we should turn the other cheek. I do not know what your reasons are for coming here tonight, sir, but you have fallen among people who seek no quarrel with you and rather wish the scales to fall from your eyes.’
There were nodded heads at this and whispers of agreement. Tom realized that, whatever the exposer’s motives, he had badly misjudged the occasion. Apart from the Ansells and possibly Mr Sheridan, Julia Howlett’s guests were true believers. It would take more to convince them than the uncovering of a trick or two. They blamed the accuser and not the accused, who was adopting the role of injured innocent. The man with the moustache understood this. He smiled. He bowed in a way that was slightly stagey. His departing remark too had a melodramatic ring. ‘Next time, Mr Flask, we shall do battle on a ground of my choosing.’
He turned smartly on his heel and strode from the morning room. There was a pause and then a woman began to clap and soon Eustace Flask had earned a round of applause for the way he stood up to the outsider. Aunt Julia clasped him by the arm and other women gathered round him with praise and reassurance. Everyone seemed to have forgotten the business of the blue chalk and the surplus flour, even though there were little mounds of the stuff on the floor by Flask’s seat. There was some talk about the identity of the impertinent fellow who’d tried to ruin their evening but no one seemed to have an idea of who he was. Yet, equally, Tom and Helen had the impression that, in the spiritualist community, such hostility and persecution were routine matters. These things were to be expected and, in a perverse way, they fortified the true believer.
Ambrose started to dismantle the cabinet and Kitty to pack away the curtains and muslin. Aunt Julia was sitting and writing at a roll-top desk in the corner of the room and Flask was standing over her like a shield. She handed a slip of paper to the medium who promptly tucked it away. Tom would have bet a month of his own salary that the medium was receiving his reward for the evening. The task which Helen’s mother had entrusted to her, that of weaning the aunt away from her devotion to the medium, seemed more impossible than ever.
Flask’s Family
Eustace Flask and Ambrose Barker and Kitty were renting a tiny end-of-terrace house outside the city walls in the old borough of Elvet. The medium and his companions were better dressed and kept odder hours than most other inhabitants of the borough, which lay to the north-east across the River Wear. If anyone asked, the trio was a
