I glanced covertly at Miss Shelley, whose composure was now quite recovered. I wondered about her little Charley and the place where the flowers they loved were for ever in bloom.
Madame Rosa had approached Sherlock Holmes, as if to signal that his turn had come. He walked slowly into the conservatory. A curtain was drawn across after him. I still had no idea what his hatbox and picnic hamper might contain or what his supernatural magic might be. He had not told me. In my present mood, pride had kept me silent.
*“The Case of the Yokohama Club” in Donald Thomas,
8
Holmes had disappeared behind the curtain and I knew not a soul in the room. Some had a sheepish air, as if half ashamed of having come. The rest put on confident smiles, ready to treat the whole thing as a West End show. For entertainment, they could not have done better with the Davenport Brothers or Monsieur Houdin at the Alhambra. To Madame Rosa and her confidantes, every simple-minded convert would return a profit.
Excited chatter broke out here and there but most of us kept ourselves to ourselves, sipping the cool sweetness of the lemonade. When we were called together, the curtain was still closed across the arch of the conservatory. The music-room became the darkened stalls of an intimate theatre. The blacked-out conservatory was our stage.
Madame Rosa stood before us in the gloom. She promised that an attempt would now be made by “the eminent Professor Scott Holmes” to invoke the spirit of the Lady Teshat. This obliging ghost had materialised at several London seances and answered questions put to her. Absolute silence and concentration were necessary. Our distinguished visitor came to us from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Light. His experiment carried the approval of the Society for Psychical Research. That, of course, was a downright lie.
For good measure, our hostess promised that the professor would stand well back among the onlookers. He was anxious that no grounds should be given for suspecting ventriloquism.
With a rattle of brass rings, the curtain was at last drawn back. It was difficult to see very much, though I could make out the unmistakable profile of Holmes against starlight in the conservatory windows. At that moment, he was not looking at the stage but facing his audience. His large round hatbox of polished leather was somehow fixed open upon its side on a table so that we gazed into its depths. As I grew used to the darkness, I saw by dimly reflected light that it contained an object of some kind. Perhaps it was a simple block of wood but shaped like a human head. It might be an artificial head, for no body could be attached to it. Every side of the isolated hatbox, as well as the space above, below and at the rear, was on view to some part of the audience.
The voice of Sherlock Holmes commanded attention with quiet authority.
“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half-sunk, a shattered visage lies.…
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! …’”
They listened to that voice as they had listened to none of Madame Rosa’s nonsense. If a man might work magic, it was surely the owner of that compelling delivery. His power of address and his sense of stage “presence,” acquired in his youthful theatrical career, had never left him. Now he turned to the conservatory, for all the world like a pagan priest before an altar.
The outline of the thing in the hatbox was clearer. The face itself, if it was a face, gave off a slight luminous glow. His voice came again.
“Speak to us, O, Spirit. Tell us who you are and whence you come.”
There was no response, but it was—surely it was—a severed head that the box contained. A head perhaps long defunct and long interred. Well, I suppose it is not hard to contrive a trick like that. The eyes appeared closed and the mouth sagged open a little. In other respects, the profile was reminiscent of the magazine engravings of Queen Nefertiti in the Egyptian museum at Berlin. Yet this complexion was wizened by the dust and decay of centuries, as real flesh must be.
“Open your eyes,” said Holmes in gentle command. “Open them.”
The intent silence was broken by a sharp gasp from the audience as the head in the hatbox slowly raised its eyelids. The light had intensified. Yet its pale glow must come from within the box. How? It was a small head, perhaps a child’s, but life-size. As it grew clearer, the colours appeared more natural. Then it seemed that the image wavered, as if we might be watching it though the flame or smoke of a temple altar.
“Greet us with a smile,” said Holmes more easily. He spoke with some relief, as if he had not been confident that the spirit would answer his summons.
There was another murmur from the onlookers. This head, isolated from anything outside the hatbox, assumed a faint smile. The truly startling thing was that the smile was as natural as that of a girl walking in the park and meeting a friend. The apparition—for now I caught myself thinking this pernicious word again—was three-dimensional yet somehow insubstantial. If it was a trick, which surely it must be, how the devil was it done? This was no static magic-lantern display of glass plates. It was as far beyond slate-writing and spirit photographs as an express train is beyond a horse and cart.
From where I sat, the outline of Holmes’s gaunt, motionless profile now seemed carved in ebony against the faintly-reflected night sky of the conservatory and the dimmest illumination from the hatbox itself. I looked again at the shrivelled face of a woman who was still young. Holmes resumed quietly but with the same directness of command.
“Tell us, O Spirit, who you are and whence you come.”
The following pause was so long that I was sure he had failed. But this was merely a tribute to his sense of theatre. At last she replied and stilled every movement among Madame Rosa’s guests. No one had expected to hear a voice from beyond the grave, unless by an obvious trick of ventriloquism, which this could not be. The natural movement of the spirit’s lips ruled out such a dodge. It was a young voice, the tone flat and almost indifferent, as if the words belonged to someone else and were of no concern to her. Even Holmes could not have imitated it. Her reply came with a great effort, distantly and with an intolerable weariness.
“I am called the Lady Teshat, daughter of the Eighteenth Dynasty, a child who will never be a woman. My service is to the god Amun of Thebes who is named the Hidden One. My master is Ozymandias, King of Kings. I am cast out for my fault, condemned to walk the future without rest, an exile through time in the courts of a Grecian underworld and the groves of a Roman Avernus.”
Most of them surely knew the thing was a trick but enjoyed the fun. Perhaps a few could scarcely believe what they heard but longed for this preposterous muddle of mythology to be true.
“Why do you answer our call?”
Her reply was little more than a whisper, yet not a syllable was lost.
“I bring words I do not understand to a world I do not know. I come to a woman who is a stranger to me. She is the mistress of two lovers, one dead and one still living. The blood of the dead lies upon the hands of the living.”
“From whom does the message come?”
“He who is the master of the message was once a servant. He was called among you the Fifth Stone.”
I caught my breath at this, recalling Spencer-Smith’s account of Miles Mordaunt. I followed every word as she spoke again.
