Nevermore

by William Hjortsberg

  He’d talked it over with Jean and she agreed with him, convinced of Houdini’s supernatural abilities. What a pity so formidable a warrior could not be enlisted in the cause of spiritism. He squeezed the white cork ball in his fist as if to wring the magic from it by sheer strength.

  Not wanting to wake his wife, Sir Arthur eased up from bed and padded barefoot out of the room. Always an early riser, finding the quiet morning hours ideal for work, he followed an unvaried routine. First, the bathroom. While urinating, Conan Doyle made a mental list of the many matters requiring his attention that day. Sadly, the schedule had no room for an afternoon ride with his wife. Friends recommended a stable nearby and he and Jean had twice gone for an invigorating gallop along the bridle path twisting through Central Park.

  Little likelihood of repeating such happiness in the days ahead. The coming fortnight promised a nightmare of appointments and timetables. Starting tonight, he had lectures scheduled for Carnegie Hall, Columbia University, Cooper Union, and the Brooklyn Academy as well as travel to New Haven, Boston, and Providence. These engagements established the pattern of his life for the immediate future: numberless strange hotel rooms, interminable luncheons, and the constant presence of the press. Sir Arthur banished such whining from his thoughts. With six months of the tour still to go, keeping up morale remained a high priority. His mission deserved no less of him.

  He looked forward with great pleasure to a spell by the sea in two weeks’ time. Especially so because the children would be joining them in Atlantic City. Much as he adored having Jean all to himself for a bit of a “honeymoon,” he was happiest when surrounded by his family. The thought of future horseplay had him grinning.

  Sir Arthur stepped from the bathroom in a very jolly mood. A pot of fresh-brewed tea waited just outside the door to the suite. Fetching the tray provided a pleasant start to his days at the Plaza. He picked the tea service off the hallway carpet, smelling the oven aroma of new-baked rolls nested beneath crisp white linen, and when he turned, closing the door behind him, he saw the figure of a man, seemingly without substance, seated in a chair by the writing table in the rotund alcove.

  Sir Arthur took a step toward the luminous figure, a creature of mist encased in a corona of moonlight. Gray dawn shadows blunted the corners of the room. Sir Arthur blinked, fearing a hallucination. The figure remained in the corner. He was dressed in the manner of a dandy from the first years of Victoria’s reign. His tousled hair and hastily-knotted cravat suggested weary dissolution.

  Sir Arthur returned the specter’s stare. He knew those doleful mourner’s eyes, the ironic brow and clipped mustache. It was a face steeped in melancholy. It was Poe.

  “I say …” The shock of recognition staggered Sir Arthur. Could the emanation have resulted from touching the portable writing desk in Houdini’s library the other evening? Was there some magic involved? He set the tray down on a coffee table by the couch. When he looked back up, the apparition had vanished.

  Even before seven o’clock in the evening, numbers of taxi-cabs and private automobiles stopped to discharge passengers on Fifty-seventh Street in front of Carnegie Hall. The first of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s scheduled lectures in New York City had completely sold out and the spiritualist audience, unlike the usual procession of concert-goers, made a point of arriving early. Those bringing topcoats out of habit carried them folded over their arms, for the eastern seaboard sweltered in the grip of a heat wave in early May and the evening felt exceptionally humid, much more like summer than springtime.

  Mr. and Mrs. Harry Houdini alighted from a Checker cab and mounted the steps to the lobby at a few minutes before eight. Long years in show business had ingrained a habit of never arriving at any performance until just before the curtain. They had spent too many idle hours backstage to ever be comfortable killing time in an audience.

  Houdini collected their complimentary tickets at the box office and headed with Bess for the auditorium. A brusque diminutive man intercepted them. His bald pate gleamed as if buffed with furniture wax.

  “Harry! Harry!” he called in a clipped British accent, rushing forward out of the last-minute crowd. “A word with you please.” Seeing Bess, he bowed in a grandiloquent manner. “Mrs. Houdini, I presume.”

  The magician bristled, adopting an icy, imperious air. “Mrs. Houdini, allow me to present to you Mr. Sidney Rammage, secretary of the Society of American Magicians.”

  “A very great pleasure,” Rammage purred unctuously, shaking hands.

  “I’m surprised we haven’t met before,” replied Bess with a modest smile.

  “My loss entirely. Harry, I wanted you to see this deck.” Rammage produced a pack of cards, handing it to Houdini. “In England, it’s called ‘Instanto.’ The invention of one Billy O’Conner. Bills himself as the ‘King of Kards.’ “

  “Easy enough. I was a card king myself once upon a time back in the nineties.” Houdini opened the pack, fanning the cards with a deft flourish. “What’s the gag?”

  “The deck is rigged. You can call any card before you cut to it.”

  “Marked edges?”

  “No. It’s a variation on Walter Gibson’s ‘New Spelling Trick.’ I thought you might like to have it for your collection.”

  “Very thoughtful of you, Rammage. Many thanks.” Houdini slipped the deck into his pocket. The lobby lights blinked off and on.

  “Don’t mention it. There’s the warning. Better get to our seats.” Rammage gave a short bow. “Delighted to have met you at long last, Mrs. Houdini.” The bald man turned to leave, then paused, seemingly on the spur of the moment. “Say, Harry. You’re friends with Conan Doyle, aren’t you?”

  “I have that distinct honor,” Houdini replied.

  “Think you might introduce me to him?” Rammage twisted his lips into an expression more grimace than smile, as if even he found his servile toadying unpleasant.

  Houdini felt trapped by the slight weight of the trick deck in his jacket pocket. Rammage bought this requested favor cheaply and he resented him for it. “Sir Arthur and Lady Conan Doyle are to be my guests at the S.A.M. banquet,” he said without enthusiasm. “I’ll present you to him then at the McAlpin.”

  “Righty-o.” Rammage clicked his heels and hurried off into the dwindling crowd.

  The magician and his wife followed an usher down the aisle. With every seat taken, the capacity audience numbered over thirty-five hundred. An almost palpable heat filled the thirty-year-old concert hall.

  “What a distasteful little man.” Bess broke a tense silence.

  “An utter cad,” Houdini agreed as they sat down.

  “Why do you put up with him?”

  “Politics.”

  She patted his arm. “Harry, dear, you were never much good as a politician.”

  “Nor am I getting any better at it now. Rammage is secretary of the Society and I must treat him square, although I opposed his nomination. Fate is a curious thing, Bessie. Before he left England for keeps, Sidney Rammage performed as Ali ben Haroun, the Wizard of the Rif.”

  Concentration creased her brow as she sifted through memories twenty years old. “Wasn’t he the one who…?”

  “The very same. Tried to steal my thunder with a handcuff challenge act during our first European tour.”

  “I thought he was supposed to be some kind of Bedouin.”

  “He was an Arab like William Ellsworth Robinson was a Chinaman. A little greasepaint turns any man into the League of Nations.”

  “Too bad Rammage didn’t do a bullet-catching act.” Bess referred to Robinson’s accidental death onstage five years earlier while performing as Chung Ling Soo.

  “Mike …” Using his wife’s nickname softened Houdini’s stern moral tone. “Dear, sweet Mike… . Never wish evil on another. Remember what Mama said.” The houselights dimmed as the curtain rose. All around them, the murmuring of the audience fell away to an expectant hush.” ‘Every dark thought returns to your heart,’ “ he whispered,” ‘as
surely as swallows return in the spring.’ “

  Pale blue light bathed the stage area. A committee of dignitaries sat like a small congregation behind the podium, their features barely visible in the crepuscular dim.

  “Who are they?” Bess’s breath tickled Houdini’s ear.

  “Well-known mediums.” The magician strained to make out the faces. “There’s Leonora Piper …” He held his breath when he recognized Opal Crosby Fletcher. “… and V. T. Podmord …”

  “Isn’t the woman in black that Isis person?”

  Houdini cleared his throat with a half-cough. “I … believe you’re right.”

  “You’d think she wouldn’t have the nerve to show her face in public after you exposed her as such a fake.”

  The applause greeting Conan Doyle’s entrance spared Houdini the necessity of a reply. The front-row crowd reached out. Pausing on the apron, the gracious knight touched their beseeching hands. Hamlin Garland stepped from his position of prominence on the platform and welcomed Sir Arthur.

  After a brief introduction from chairman Garland, Conan Doyle began his lecture, his voice measured and calm. Much the same talk he had delivered countless times before; at home, in France, on tour in Australia, and in the United States the previous year. Utterly down-to-earth and without pretense of any kind, he conveyed an absolute and unwavering sincerity.

  Sir Arthur spoke to them of the chemist Sir William Crookes, discoverer of the element thallium and the first resident in London to have a house lit by electricity. “A thoroughly practical man, not given to fancies. This eminent scientist used laboratory methods to investigate the Florrie Cook phenomena in 1874 and pronounced the manifestations genuine. Here we have a tangible proof instead of mere wishful speculation.”

  Telling the audience of his Catholic upbringing, Sir Arthur described his schism from the Church and eventual atheism. “I could not believe in what I was unable to experience directly.” Gradually, he became converted to spiritism, being led forward by degrees into acceptance through direct communication with loved ones on the Other Side. This contact was always facilitated by the intervention of skilled mediums. “They have something like an ‘ear’ in musicians. They are like telegraph boys bringing messages.”

  Sir Arthur went on to detail those instances of spirit contact he had experienced at séances, the many messages coming through from his son, Kingsley, and his brother, Innes, both dead of pneumonia as a result of the war. “Evan Powell is outwardly a simple man, a Welsh coal miner, yet at his best as a medium is at the top of the list. Three years ago, in the darkness at his humble cottage in Merthyr Tydfil, where the windows were ablaze with the flare of a nearby ironworks, my wife and I sat listening to the whispered voices of the dead, voices full of earnest life, and of desperate endeavors to pierce the dull barriers of our senses.”

  The sounds of sobbing disturbed the ecclesial hush in the shadow-shrouded auditorium. Sir Arthur’s countenance expressed kindness and sympathy. “There is no shame in weeping for the loss of loved ones,” he said softly. “I wept at Powell’s cottage. But they were tears of joy when I realized that our beloved dead are with us still. Is not this knowledge the supreme comfort for our bereavement?

  “My own dear mother, to me always ‘the Ma’am,’ was in life a disbeliever. When she passed over two years ago, my grief was alleviated by the knowledge that contact was possible. Last year, at a sitting in London, the estimable spirit medium Ada Bessinet of Toledo, Ohio, a woman of the first psychic quality, materialized the Ma’am, producing a spirit letter which included her private pet name for me and containing her apology for any skepticism concerning life after death. The Ma’am was there, resurrected before me. I swear by all that’s holy on-earth I looked into her eyes.”

  A startled gasp from the balcony produced a further round of sobbing and Sir Arthur suggested a moment of silence and prayer to comfort those who were disconsolate. Suddenly, an unearthly piping pierced the hush like the shriek of a demented banshee.

  “There is a spirit manifestation among you, is there not?” called out V. T. Podmord from the platform as a thin, high whistle shrilled in the darkness.

  Near-hysteria swept the audience. Sir Arthur pleaded for calm as the panic spread. Far in the back of the hall, an old man rose from his seat. “No … ,” he called in a frail, emaciated voice. “It’s not a spirit. It’s my hearing aid.”

  After a moment of incredulous silence, a sharp burst of laughter broke the tension. Even Sir Arthur smiled in his pleasant, good-natured way. “I appreciate that you didn’t wish to turn the instrument off,” he joked.

  The remainder of the lecture accompanied a series of photographic slides projected onto a large screen suspended behind the seated committee. Suitably mysterious phonograph music played backstage to accompany the presentation. The first slide showed Crookes with “Katie King,” the spirit control of Florence Cook. An ephemeral presence shrouded in phosphorescent veils seemed to float beside the stolid, earth-bound form of the black-clad scientist.

  Other slides pictured dark-haired Marthe Beraud, the famed Parisian medium known to the world as “Eva C.” Quantities of a curious amorphous substance extruded from her mouth. Sir Arthur identified it as ectoplasm. “Isn’t this, without a doubt, the most fantastic thing the mind can conceive?” His voice trembled with genuine awe. “Before such results the brain, even of the trained psychical student, is dazed.”

  These slides had an unsettling effect on the audience. Excited screams punctuated Conan Doyle’s calm presentation. A woman fainted in the front row. Throughout the hall, general commotion indicated a level of discomfort exacerbated by the stifling heat.

  “I should like to conclude with a remarkable series of spirit photographs.” Sir Arthur spoke in a soothing tone, trying to quell the unease the way one quiets an angry dog. “These are the work of William Hope, who is employed as a carpenter in Crewe.”

  There followed a number of slides showing men and women in formal studio portrait poses. Above their heads, disembodied faces floated in the air, hovering in individual cloudlike nimbi. With each successive image, the audience grew increasingly restless. The moans and screams multiplied. Many wandered aimlessly up and down the aisles. Several fainted.

  Houdini watched this spectacle in amazement. “Remarkable how easily crowds are duped,” he whispered to his wife. “A simple double exposure is all it takes.”

  Bess smiled in the darkness. “Not so very different from what you’ve been doing all these years.”

  “I never claimed to be supernatural,” came his quick, indignant reply. “Everybody knows what I do are tricks.”

  Bess said nothing but her smug smile remained unchanged.

  The abrupt end of the lecture seemed almost an anticlimax. A final slide faded from view. Sir Arthur thanked his dazed audience for coming, gave a short bow, and walked off the stage. He received only a smattering of applause. Even this much seemed inappropriate, like clapping in church.

  Backstage, the crush surrounding Conan Doyle’s dressing room prevented Houdini and Bess from any immediate attempt to get near. The magician knew enough of personal fame and had no desire to intrude on Sir Arthur’s glory. While Bess excused herself to seek out a ladies room, Houdini lounged against an ornate cast-iron radiator, ironically the coolest object in the ovenlike heat.

  “Why have you been avoiding me?” The soft, melodic voice took the magician by surprise. Opal Crosby Fletcher fixed him with her penetrating gaze. She looked indescribably lovely in a sequined black Molyneux frock.

  Houdini glanced about nervously. “I haven’t been avoiding you. What gives you that idea?”

  “Your manager never got back to my secretary. About a séance …? Remember?”

  The magician stammered. “Well … I mean … there must’ve been some mix-up.”

  Her knowing, confident smile disarmed him. “You forgot all about it, didn’t you?”

  “No. Certainly not.”

  “I took you
for a fair man, willing to be an impartial judge.” Isis reached up and straightened his bow tie. He flinched at her touch. “Evidently, I was misinformed.”

  “Look … Mrs. Fletcher, I am—”

  “Isis.” Her voice rang clear and cold as crystal.

  “I beg your pardon…?”

  “My name is Isis.”

  Houdini looked away from the penetrating cat-green eyes.

  “Isis it is then… . Please understand, I am a man of my word.

  If I said I would attend a séance, well, then—”

  “It’s not a question of if. When is more to the point.”

  “Whenever you say.”

  “Tonight…?” The mysterious, mocking smile was more than a little bit wicked.

  The magician drew back from her burning intensity. Who was this woman? “I have a prior engagement,” he said.

  “Break it.”

  Houdini felt a loss of equilibrium, as if the floor opened up beneath him. No one ever spoke to him in this manner. His fuse burned extremely short and any opposition to his will invariably detonated a temper tantrum. Vickery, Collins, and the rest of the staff had long ago learned to tolerate his extreme bursts of uncontrollable anger. This time confusion, not rage, gripped him. By nature chivalrous, he felt unsure how to react to such a bold feminine challenge. “I … ,” he started, managing no better than, “I’m afraid that’s impossible.”

  “I thought you were the master of the impossible.” Her mocking smile transfixed him, like a pin through the butterfly’s heart.

  “Look,” the magician said, “I don’t know how to put it any plainer: I have another engagement and can’t get out of it.”

  Isis laughed. “Something you can’t get out of. Must be a first for the great escapologist.”

  His exaggerated sense of his own dignity normally could not allow him to tolerate being teased, but something about her dancing eyes and the musical chime of her laughter charmed him, scribing a mooncalf’s grin onto his usual stern expression. “If it were possible, believe me, I would change my plans to accommodate you, but unfortunately—”