the universal fluid that linked all creatures of the cosmos and flowed through the human body, an unseen magnetic force that might connect us to these unknown worlds.
He painted a picture of a parallel existence where the departed spirits floated in suspension, desperately waiting to be conjoined with those left behind. Waiting for a call, a hand to be stretched across the great divide.
The American even found a modicum of humour. He, Magnus, was not that hand. He held his own up in the air and waggled the fingers. There was a sharp burst of laughter but Sophia, who at that moment was sitting at the side, bowed her head and Magnus quickly returned to serious mode.
Only belief could sustain contact. The credence of those watching and the intense divination of the sensitive.
From us to them. The natural. A sublime interpreter.
Doyle was impressed, but not overly so, by the spiel. He had read deeply of the spiritual world with its phenomenal possibilities and this man reminded a little of a fairground huckster. Yet he could not dismiss the fellow because he sensed that under the delivery, and it did not escape his notice that Magnus’s magnetic power might have part source in his handsome features and flashing eyes – for the women, of course, men are not so easily swayed – under the smooth hypnotic flow of words, there seemed a core of true belief.
Almost in spite of the man himself, as if Magnus was being called to witness a more powerful force than his own being; he a mere mouthpiece who might only express itself in this somewhat florid fashion.
Or was the fellow merely a skilful actor hinting at a reality that did not exist, as actors are wont to do?
Make-believe.
Or indeed was Doyle, jealous of the man’s ability, projecting all this ambivalence upon a screen of shadows?
Because there was no doubt that Bannerman transfixed the audience when he abandoned the eloquent modulations to speak simply at the end of his address.
‘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 seance 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.
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.
