by Andrew Lane
He felt his heart beating fast. A strange terror edged his thoughts. This was not what he had been expecting. Table-tapping, yes. Messages, perhaps. But a spirit materializing in the centre of the room? No – absolutely not!
He tried to focus on the shape of the spirit, but it was difficult to make out details. It kept shifting, moving around, vibrating. It was white, and it looked like smoke, but it glistened as if it was wet and it moved as if it had a mind of its own.
‘Ectoplasm!’ von Webenau breathed.
‘Poppycock!’ Mycroft murmured.
Sherlock stared at the Austrian. ‘What exactly is ectoplasm?’ he asked quietly.
‘It is the substance that spirits use to give form to themselves.’ His face was rapt. ‘It is a form of matter unlike anything we have ever seen on earth. Mediums can generate it from their own bodies. It exudes from their pores.’
‘You sound like you believe in all this.’
Von Webenau glanced sideways at Sherlock. ‘How can you not,’ he asked, ‘when you see and hear what we have seen and heard?’
Sherlock looked across to Count Shuvalov, who had remained quiet all through the séance. ‘What about you?’ Sherlock asked.
Shuvalov looked over at Sherlock and shrugged. ‘I am Russian,’ he said simply. ‘I believe what I can see, and touch, and talk with.’ He nodded towards the ectoplasmic mass of white vapour, which still hung above the table. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is outside my experience. I can see it, but can I touch and talk with it? I think not.’
Sherlock looked over at Ambrose Albano, who was half standing. His gloved hands grasped the arms of his chair. His mouth was open and he was staring wide-eyed at the ectoplasmic mass, as if surprised that it had ever emerged from his body.
The lights, subdued as they were, suddenly went out. The room was plunged into darkness. Sherlock heard gasps from around the table, and the sound of Ambrose Albano falling back into his chair.
The light suddenly appeared again: gas lamps flaring around the room, flooding it with brightness. The people around the table blinked in confusion.
The ectoplasm had vanished.
CHAPTER FIVE
After the events of the night before, breakfast was a subdued affair. All of the representatives, bar the missing American, sat quietly, wrapped in their own thoughts. Sir Shadrach Quintillan was at the head of the table, of course, and Mr Albano was absent again. Count Shuvalov was served by his own manservant, while the rest of them were served by the castle staff.
As for himself, Sherlock was intent on working out how the effects of the séance had been achieved. He could not bring himself to believe that any spirits had crossed over from the Other Side to visit them – in fact, he was pretty much convinced that there was no Other Side to begin with. What they had sat through was a set of conjuring tricks, he was sure.
Mycroft was convinced they were being fooled as well. He and Sherlock had chatted late into the night after the séance had concluded. Mycroft had summarized by saying: ‘I know that we’ve been tricked, but I am not entirely sure how. There are various possibilities, but to be sure we need to establish exactly what techniques were used. What we saw is, as far as I can determine, pretty standard for séances. Mr Albano did not deploy any events which I was not expecting.’
‘What about the other representatives?’ Sherlock had asked. ‘Do they know they were fooled?
Mycroft had shrugged. ‘Count Shuvalov is an intelligent man: I believe that he, like us, knows that confidence tricks are being stacked up, one upon another. Von Webenau, despite his formidable reputation as a statistician and logical thinker, appears to have fallen for the tricks hook, line and sinker. I suspect that he has an existing reason for wanting to believe – a dead wife that he mourns, perhaps, and wishes to contact again. Herr Holtzbrinck could go either way. I thought it interesting that he was the one chosen to receive a message from the Other Side – Mr Albano is obviously targeting him as the easiest one to sway over to a state of belief. He will presumably work his magic on me, and on Count Shuvalov, over the next few nights.’
‘Does it matter if one or more of them believe that it’s true?’
‘What do you mean?’ Mycroft asked.
‘Well, your job here is to evaluate Mr Albano’s spiritual powers on behalf of the British Government. If you decide that he can contact ghosts, then your job is to outbid any other government for his services. But if you decide that he is a fake then presumably the British Government doesn’t care if any other government buys his services. They will just be wasting their money.’
‘That is perfectly true,’ Mycroft said, nodding his large head, ‘and it shows that you are developing a good grasp of the way international diplomacy works. In fact, I would rather foreign governments wasted their money on fake psychics than on, for instance, armies or weapons. I would, however, add two codicils to what you have said: firstly, I have a personal dislike of confidence tricksters being rewarded for their efforts, even if those rewards do not come from Great Britain, and secondly it is not a healthy or stable situation for governments with large armies to be guided by fake messages from ghosts. I much prefer governments to make their decisions based on logic and fact. That makes them predictable.’
‘On the other hand,’ Sherlock pointed out, ‘knowing that a government is paying attention to a fake psychic does give you the opportunity to feed them with things you want them to believe. Fake fake messages, if you like. Presumably, if a fake psychic will take money from one government for his tricks, he will take money from anyone.’
‘The thought,’ Mycroft had rumbled, ‘is immoral and unethical, and had never occurred to me.’
‘What about Sir Shadrach?’ Sherlock asked, thinking about Niamh Quintillan. ‘Is he involved?’
‘Mr Albano certainly requires help in order to achieve some of the effects.’ Mycroft pursed his lips. ‘If that help isn’t coming from Quintillan and at least one servant then it must be coming from elsewhere.’ He glanced across at Sherlock. ‘I presume, by the way, that you have already established in your own mind the various ways in which the chalk messages, the moving plaque and the ectoplasmic materialization could have been achieved?’
‘Yes,’ Sherlock had said quickly, but now, as he sat at the breakfast table, he found himself stumped. The wooden plaque could, he supposed, have been pushed around pretty easily by Ambrose Albano’s fingers, but the chalk messages and the ectoplasm were puzzling him. How had they been done? He had checked under the table, and there had been nothing hidden there with which messages could have been written.
Niamh was sitting opposite him, and he glanced over at her. She smiled at him, and he smiled back. He hoped he would get the chance to talk to her later. She had, as far as he knew, seen the whole thing, but from a different perspective. The séance had, he assumed, been set up to convince the people sitting around the table. Standing in the doorway, she might have seen something that none of the rest of them had.
Or, he wondered as he looked at her, did she already know how it had all been done? If Quintillan was implicated in the tricks, was his daughter also in on it? Was she part of the conspiracy? He hoped not.
He was about to ask her if she would show him more of the castle and its grounds later when one of the foot-servants unexpectedly dropped a tureen of scrambled egg on the floor. The sudden crash startled everyone. The foot-servant ran for the door, sobbing hysterically, while the other servants quickly moved to clear up the mess.
Niamh Quintillan got out of her chair and ran after her – the only person, Sherlock noticed, concerned with how the girl was feeling.
Sherlock munched on a slice of toast while he waited for her to return. Eventually she came back into the room. Her father glanced up at her questioningly, and she nodded in reassurance.
‘What was all that about?’ Sherlock asked as she sat down.
‘Oh, she’s all right. Poor Máire, she’s just worried about something she saw out of her bedroom win
dow last night.’
Sherlock raised an eyebrow. ‘Don’t tell me – she saw the Dark Beast!’
‘Actually,’ Niamh said levelly, ‘that’s exactly what she did see.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘I’m not. She said she got to bed at about three o’clock in the morning, after mopping down all the stone floors. She took a quick look out of her window before getting into bed. It was misty outside – there’s often a mist that comes in off the sea, and she said she was just about to close the curtains when she saw something. She thought at first it was one of the guests, but she said it was too big, and too bulky. Then the wind blew the mist away for a moment, and she saw it clearly.’ Niamh’s face was serious. ‘She says that it was a big, black shape, bigger than a man. Then the mist got blown across it again, and it disappeared.’
‘What did she do?’ Sherlock asked.
‘What could she do? She made sure her window was locked, and then she went to bed, but she says she couldn’t sleep. She just lay there, looking up at the ceiling, shaking with fear, thinking about what she’d seen. She got up this morning, exhausted through lack of sleep, and came down to serve breakfast, but she kept remembering what she’d seen.’
‘Do you believe her?’
‘I believe that she believes she saw something.’ Niamh glanced towards the doorway. ‘She’s obviously panicked. But if you’re asking: did she actually see the Dark Beast, or something like a deer out in the mist, or did she just dream she’d seen something? – I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. I told her to go down to the kitchen, get a glass of water and sit down for a few minutes until she felt better.’
‘What side of the castle does her window look out from?’ Sherlock asked.
‘Why?’ She smiled. ‘Do you want to go looking for tracks?’
‘If I do, do you want to come with me?’
She laughed. ‘All right. Her window looks inland. I’ll show you later where it is from the outside.’
‘It’s a . . . deal,’ Sherlock said, catching himself before he could say ‘date’. ‘But can we wait until nearer lunchtime? Your father has said that I can take a look at the books in his library, and I wanted to get straight down to doing that.’
After breakfast, Sherlock headed for the library while his brother took Count Shuvalov’s arm and engaged him in private conversation, presumably about great secrets of state. The library was empty when he pushed open the large oak door. Inside, bookcases lined the walls, running from floor to ceiling. Tall windows were covered with green baize curtains to keep the sunlight from fading the books. Ladders on wheels and runners could be pushed along the bookcases. Every spare inch of space was covered with leather-bound volumes in faded black, red and green. In the centre of the room were a couple of over-stuffed leather armchairs and side tables, along with one much larger table where bigger volumes could be opened or maps unrolled.
Sherlock spent a few minutes familiarizing himself with the arrangement of the books – local history, world history, geography, fiction and – perhaps not surprisingly – large sections devoted to the West Indies, and also to spiritualism and psychic phenomena.
Remembering what Niamh had said about the maid’s vision of the night before, Sherlock glanced out of one of the windows. The library overlooked the cliffs: there was about fifty feet of grass before an abrupt cut-off line where the cliff edge was. On a clear day Sherlock supposed that he would have seen the sea in the distance, but there was still a lot of mist around, and all that Sherlock could see was a formless grey void – much the same as he had imagined the Other Side to be during the séance the previous night. It looked pretty spooky, even by daylight, and he could see how someone staring into the coiling mist might think they saw shapes being formed. Even a tree, seen through the mist, could take on the form of a monster.
He walked across to the shelves devoted to spiritualist and psychic phenomena. There were two entire floor-to-ceiling sections, with books ranging from those recently published to those dating back hundreds of years. Sherlock scanned the titles quickly, looking not so much for a book that talked about psychic phenomena as if they were true, but one that listed all the tricks and techniques that could be used to fake the effects. He was soon disappointed. The authors of the many and various books on the shelves were all, as far as he could tell, complete and total believers.
It made sense, he supposed. If Sir Shadrach Quintillan was taking part in a confidence trick then he would hardly leave books lying around that would give everything away. If he had such books, and Sherlock suspected that he did, then they were likely to be hidden somewhere. Sherlock made a mental note to continue looking in the rest of the castle – even in Sir Shadrach’s own rooms, if he had to. He was, after all, working for the British Government!
Given that he was currently in a different country, he supposed that made him some kind of spy. He found the thought strangely exciting.
Perhaps he was looking for the wrong thing. Rather than search for books specifically on how to fake psychic phenomena, perhaps he ought to be looking more widely, for books on illusions and magical tricks. He walked all around the library, using the ladders to check the upper shelves, but there were none.
He gave up on looking for books on psychic trickery or magic – in the library, at least. On a whim, he crossed to the section covering local history, and looked for any books that might have listed any local legends or stories. There were a couple on the shelves; he pulled one out and took it to the nearest chair. Sitting, he flicked through the volume to see if anything was said about the Dark Beast. He half suspected that Niamh had made the whole thing up to fool him. She seemed to have that kind of challenging sense of humour.
Surprisingly, he found an entire chapter devoted to the supernatural creature. It had, he found, been seen in and around the local area for hundreds of years. Nobody had seen it clearly – it apparently mainly came out at night, or when the weather was particularly misty.
Tired of sitting and reading, he prowled around the edges of the library. He had heard about secret passages in old castles, sometimes hidden behind bookshelves that would swing out on hidden hinges, so he pulled experimentally on a couple of shelves but only succeeded in knocking a few books on to the carpet. He felt silly, and so he stopped. Remembering things that his American tutor Amyus Crowe had taught him, he turned his attention to looking for small signs, tracks and trails, things that were out of context. If there were hidden doors in the bookshelves, and if they opened into the library rather than in the opposite direction, then they might leave some traces of wear on the carpet. He got down on to his hands and knees, looking for any evidence that a bookshelf might have swung out and rubbed against the carpet, but there was nothing. Again, he just felt silly.
‘What are you doing?’
He glanced up, trying to look casual rather than surprised and embarrassed. Niamh was standing in the open doorway, gazing down at him with a puzzled smile on her face. ‘I dropped a coin,’ he said.
‘What did you need a coin for in a library? The books are free.’
‘I couldn’t decide what subject to research next,’ he said smoothly, ‘so I was going to toss a coin.’
‘Oh. All right.’ She put her head on one side and stared at him silently for a long moment, obviously not convinced. ‘I’m bored. Did you want to go outside and look for tracks now?’
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I’d rather take a look around the inside of the castle first.’ Standing up, he shrugged casually. ‘You live here, so you’re used to it, but I’ve never been inside a castle before. I’m curious.’
As he suspected, appealing to Niamh’s sense of curiosity worked. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Let’s start at the top and work our way downward. I’ll give you the guided tour.’
She led him out into the main hall and then, ignoring the ascending room, raced him up the stone stairway that ran around the edges of the hall, all the way to the top floor. Together they head
ed along one of the two corridors that led in opposite directions away from the hall.
The castle, Sherlock remembered, was in the shape of a rough square, with the tower of the keep located halfway along one of the sides. The sides themselves were formed by the castle walls, which on the inside had a central corridor and rooms off to either side. The castle’s ‘corners’ were formed by three small towers and one larger one. It took them almost fifteen minutes to walk all the way around the castle walls and back to the hall again. Most of the rooms were bedrooms, or storage rooms, or were empty. Nothing startling or intriguing.
‘Can we get out on to the top of the castle walls?’ Sherlock asked. ‘On to the battlements?’
Niamh smiled. ‘Of course,’ she said, and led him to a small doorway off to one side of the hall, from where a stone stairway spiralled upward. It ended in two heavy doors set opposite each other. Niamh pushed one of them open and gestured him through.
Sherlock found himself on a long, flat, stone roof, covered with wet moss and edged with battlements that had been worn down by centuries of wind and rain into shapes like rotten teeth. At the far end of the roof was another tower, with its own heavy door. The wind whistled across the roof, snatching the heat from his body and sending cold drops of rain splattering against his face. He could see, from this high vantage point, the Irish countryside extending into the distance: green and brown, undulating gently to form low, wide hills. Undergrowth surrounded the castle, copses of trees stood out as dark green clumps, and stone walls separated fields. The clouds were low, brushing the tops of the hills.
In the distance, rising from a clump of trees, he could see a stone tower, a folly of some kind. Apart from the castle it was the only other dominating feature of the landscape, and he made a mental note to visit it, if he could find it from ground level.
