The Spiritualist

by Noah Alexander

  “It’s a spirit I tell you,” reiterated the professor.

  “Allow me to make that decision professor. For now, tell me something about the candle on the table. The deposition of the molten wax around the candle tells me it had been recently lit for at least a couple of hours. There is also mud on its base, the same fine red mud as of the footsteps. Did you light that candle?”

  The professor stepped forward to examine the candle. “No, I don’t think I did that.”

  “And was it lit when you entered the room yesterday night.”

  “I don’t think so,” said the professor, “I am positive that the room was completely dark when I entered”

  “This candle then was brought by the intruder as he came into the house as there is no way that he could have been in this room for more than a few minutes. It had been with him when he got the mud upon his feet. Where does this mud come from? It’s not the mud from the garden outside, that is much coarser and black in color, this mud is much finer and red.” Maya looked at it again but reached no conclusion.

  “Have you gone through this room,” asked Maya to the professor, “I mean do you think you have lost any possession?”

  “I did go through the room and the only thing missing is the future telling orb of Teten II that I got from Thebes in Egypt. It was a beautiful piece from the 12th century, I miss it dearly. I don’t see why spirits would want to know about their future. I have no clue if the idea of future holds true for the spirits. It seems a bit ludicrous if you ask me. Spirits should not be concerned about their future, that worry should be left for the humans.”

  “I don’t think you have lost that orb professor,” said Maya lying down on the carpeted floor and putting her hand under the wooden cabinet to fish out a glass ball with a hole at the top. She gave the glass orb to the professor, “This is what I suppose you were missing.”

  “Indeed it is,” remarked the professor in glee, “but it’s no longer the smoky white that it was earlier, I am sure its magic is now gone.”

  “It wasn’t magic, professor, which made it smoky white but a simple chemical, a closer examination by a chemist would give you the exact composition. What I can say with certainty, though, is that the same chemical caused the smoke that you reported in this room.”

  “Nonsense,” said the professor, “it was a spirit! No, a collection of spirits. The smoke passed right through me.”

  “What is clear now,” said Maya ignoring the professor’s concerns, “is that the intruder in your house was not after anything. The stuff that you see on the floor fell from the cupboard because the person kept a foot upon one of the lower drawers to reach to the top where I suppose there was a box of chalk. You can see the mud marks on the drawer here. This gives us a fairly accurate idea of the man’s height as well. I think we are looking at a man not more than 5 and a half feet in height. The man entered your house to draw these symbols on the window. He wanted to show you something.”

  Maya went to the window to erase the strokes drawn by the professor to get the original 8 characters.

  “Do these symbols mean anything to you, sir?”

  “Well, they are Armenian for ‘Death comes to all’.”

  “I mean, do they mean anything other than that?”

  The professor shook his head. Maya copied the symbols in her notebook and packed her bag. It had grown dark outside and the day was Wednesday, her turn to clean the dishes. If she was late, her roommate Maisie might poison her food.

  “So what do make of it all?” asked the professor as Maya prepared to take her leave.

  “It seems you had an intruder in the house. A man who could slip through closed windows and doors.”

  “A spirit you mean,” corrected the professor.

  FOUR

  Breakthrough

  The chiming of the large clock atop St. Sebastian Cathedral snapped Maya awake from her reverie. It was 12 in the noon and she was in the office of Messrs. Grington and Basse, an accounting firm where she worked as a Junior clerk for 5 days a week. Her job was to pore through the account books of clients – shops and offices and find out irregularities and errors. She hated the work but it paid her enough to make ends meet while giving her reasonable time to pursue other interests. Two dozen people sat across a long table in the hall, bent over files, pen in hand, or chatting idly with their neighbors. Lethargy had begun to spread its claws over the office and soon yawns would be widespread. Her gaze shifted to the account book open in front of her and she could not help a shriek of horror. Between the rows of numbers – expenses and payments for the Kirorimal Spice Traders, she had absently scribbled the symbols upon the window of Prof. Mortemius Chinew’s room. They loomed large amid the tiny ant-like numbers crammed upon the page. Since yesterday evening when she had first examined the room and found the symbols, she had been unable to take her mind of the mystery. The disheveled room, the fine red mud of the footsteps, and the strange symbols upon the window floated all over her head blocking other thoughts. The symptoms were not new, Maya was used to them now. If she hung onto an unresolved puzzle for too long, her mind began to itch. Painfully. And the only way to get rid of the itch was to locate the answer to the problem, the solution to the mystery. She had not slept the whole night, twisting and turning in her bed, thinking about the case. It was more complex than it had appeared at first glance. The mystery was certainly worth more than a 50 Cowrie bet. Someone had broken into the professor’s house in the dead of the night, in a room locked from outside, drawn strange symbols upon the window and then disappeared all of a sudden. There was no explanation of how he had entered or indeed gotten out of the closed room and why he had drawn the symbols. The symbols themselves were the strangest part of the mystery, they made no sense whatsoever. Maya had ventured to the Emilia Public library in the morning and borrowed dictionaries of Armenian as well as half a dozen other languages prevalent in Cardim. Hindi, which she already knew to a large degree, Kannada, Mandarin, Tamil, Arabic, Portuguese and French. She had then tried to locate the symbols in the dictionaries but to no avail. The efforts were futile, the symbols were present in none of the books. The texts now lay upon her table in a tall tower of failure. If Mr. Grington, the chairman of the firm, saw her solving word puzzles while in office he would have surely chucked her out of the building along with the dictionaries. But fortunately for Maya, he was sick today and not in the office.

  Maya crossed the symbols that she had drawn on the account book and set the work amidst the pile of other unfinished files kept upon her table. There was no way that she would be able to focus on work today, it was not worth even trying. She decided to concentrate on the mystery instead.

  She took up a blank piece of paper to study the symbols once more, they had to mean something. She was of the opinion that it wasn’t all too complicated, that she was missing something simpler, the symbols were not in some exotic language, there must be some other explanation for it. She had drawn the symbols so many times since yesterday evening that she no longer needed the help of her notes to reproduce them. There were eight characters. Each was different from the other but they made no sense whatsoever. She tried to join two together to form something coherent, then did away with a few strokes in a means to simplify the characters but still came up short. At the end of a grueling half an hour she had made no progress and her failure had left her frustrated and restless. As if she had an itch but someone was holding her hand, not allowing her to scratch herself. No! She had to keep calm and composed. Patience and perseverance are paramount to success, she remembered the text from Henry Camleman’s book.

  “Patience, perseverance,” she muttered under her breath, “Patience. Perseverance. Patience. Perseverance…”

  But these symbols are bound to mean something! She suddenly brought her pen down violently upon the paper that she was working on so that the nib of the fountain pen broke, splattering ink on the sheet as well as the table. People working on the long bench around her looked up to s
ee the sudden outburst. They grinned at each other nodding.

  As a principle, her colleagues did not talk to Maya directly, preferring instead to discuss her amongst themselves, as if she was a piece of news in a newspaper. That was partly due to her own lack of interest in talking to people. She struggled to be a part of a conversation. With no talent for idle chatter, it was just too much effort. Even those who tried to socialize with her out of sympathy tended to give up quickly, tired of her snappish replies and awkward silences. It felt like traveling on a road with potholes.

  Maya did not particularly mind being left alone. That gave her peace of mind. But she would have preferred if her colleagues truly left her alone – not discuss her in soft voices among themselves, or pass remarks behind her back. That was too distracting. Now they looked at the ink spluttered paper and the broken pen in front of her and nodded understandably. Such things happened regularly with Maya.

  Maya ignored their stares, crumpled the paper into a ball, wiped the table of ink, and threw the ball in the dustbin under the table. She looked outside the large window to see the street outside and take her mind off the symbols. It was a quiet afternoon, St. Sebastian Square was lounging lethargically. Forlorn hansoms waited under tamarind trees, stray dogs loomed near the drains, and pedestrians moved in and out of the shops with languidness peculiar to the afternoon. Maya’s gaze suddenly went to a shop on the far side of the street. It was a spice shop and a fat man in an absurd dress had just ventured out lugging a sack of turmeric upon his shoulders. It wasn’t the man, though, who had piqued Maya’s interest. It was the shop itself, in fact, the glass door of the shop.

  “World’s Best Spices and Condiments” was written in large gold letters upon the door.

  That was it! Maya realized jumping with excitement, she had been reading the symbols wrong. They were not meant to be seen by the professor, they were supposed to be seen by someone on the street. Bubbling with her newfound knowledge, Maya perched back upon her chair and tried to redraw the symbols as they would seem from outside the window. A mirror would be of aid. She searched futilely for one in her bag knowing fairly well that she had never invested in anything faintly related to cosmetics. She had never felt the need to look at herself in a mirror and adjust her appearance. But the lady who sat in front of her often sunk her hand into her leather purse and produced a small mirror with which she checked herself at regular intervals. The woman had now ventured over to chat with a friend on the other side of the hall. Maya slyly extended her hand across the table and took out the mirror. It was a beautiful round piece with a wood carved frame. Maya held the mirror to the symbols and copied as they looked in the mirror.

  It was clear. The symbols were in English. They were alpha-numerals. That is why she felt that she knew that she had seen the symbols before but just couldn’t figure them out. But even though the characters now made sense, they still did not mean anything explicitly clear. It was obvious that they were some sort of code, to be deciphered by whoever the code was meant for. The intruder had found a code from somewhere inside the professor’s house and written it on the window. But what did the code mean and where did he find the code from? There was nothing that Maya could hypothesize without the benefit of some more information.

  She needed more facts and data. But from where? She had examined the room thoroughly, there were just three other people who had anything to do with the professor, one was the servant Moin who was in his village and the other two were the twin daughters who were away in Bombay. She doubted they had anything to do with the symbols. She knew that the footsteps in the room were of five and a half feet tall person but nothing else. There was no other lead. It was frustrating.

  Maya looked up to find the people around staring at her again. She realized she had been muttering quite audibly. Abruptly, Maya got up and started towards the bathroom. It was hard to focus on work in this office.

  FIVE

  Second Message

  Maya held the wrought iron gate to Mortemius Chinew’s garden panting like a dog. She was dripping with sweat, the bun upon her head was loose, with strands of hair falling all over her face, while her white blouse clung to her skinny frame as if she had been out in the rain. She looked behind slyly to see if there was any trace of the man who was chasing her. The street was deserted apart from a single hansom waiting a few dozen yards away. She seemed to have lost her pursuer. The man had been on her heels for the large part of a mile from the Office of the Vasco Land Registry to the Mill Street. The pursuit had cost Maya one of her shoes and left her feet bloodied. Maya ignored her feet and glanced at the paper in her hand. This was the object which had led to the eventful adventure - a history of the ownership of Prof. Mortemius Chinew’s house.

  After spending some more time in trying to decipher the codes that she had found on the window of the professor’s room, she had resigned to the fact that it wasn’t possible to make any progress without the aid of some ore data and facts. The existing threads for analysis had all been exhausted and it had occurred to her that looking at the previous owner of the professor’s house might give her some insight. The professor had shifted to the house only recently. Perhaps all this strange business had to do with the previous owner. But she had realized it too late.

  The Vasco Land Registry Office closed at 5 in the evening and just as she hurriedly made her way to the office, she found the attendant closing the inquiry window. To get any details, she was told, she needed to be early the next day and with a referral letter from a gazetted officer. She certainly had no time for that (she doubted she would have been able to sleep properly if she had an unexplored thread in her head). So, she got hold of a cleaner who worked at the place, Maya had found in her work that sweepers were the most resourceful of people, and with the help of a crisp 5 Cowrie note got access to the archives of the Registry office after all the workers had left. The archive was a long damp hall full of old dusty documents and it took her an hour to find the register belonging to the Steel Mill Street. But just when her tired fingers turned over to the page of Prof. Chinew’s House No. 345 she heard a shrill watchman’s whistle ring outside the hall. The guard of the office had seen the door to the archive open, as well as the light pouring through it and suspecting a break-in had decided to examine the place. Maya tore a couple of pages from the register, blew the candle in her hand, and tiptoed to the door. When the watchman entered the hall, she pushed him inside and bounded through the door out of the building. But the watchman, a young and brawny fellow, did not give up easily and decided to give the thief a chase. He ran after Maya shouting raucously through the crowded by-lanes of Vasco, clattering into hawkers and passersby. He followed her till the Temple Bridge, at which point Maya found a beggar she knew and covering herself in his borrowed rags she joined a group of tramps sitting on the pavement. When the guard passed by, mistaking her to be one of the beggars, she got rid of the rag and turned to Mill Street.

  Maya hadn’t yet studied the records of the house but she was positive that she could find something worthwhile there. She had decided to discuss it with the professor as well, but the thought slipped out of her mind as soon as she reached the professor’s house.

  “The spirit has returned,” announced Prof. Chinew grimly opening the door. Maya was taken aback by the old man’s appearance. He was dressed in a loose bright red robe embroidered with oriental gold motifs. Upon his neck were slung numerous beaded garlands of varying length, the longest of which reached below his paunch, while on his head rested an ornate turban with a bird feather. In his left hand, the old man held a curiously engraved bronze staff with a crystal head. Maya eyed the professor with incredulity, wordlessly inquiring about his strange appearance, but the professor seemed to have other things upon his mind. He led her straight to the living room where the two had sat yesterday. Some of the space in the room had been cleared by dragging the wooden boxes to one side. In the clearing, a star and a concentric circle had been drawn with white chalk. In th
e middle of the illustration was an oil lamp and all the corners of the star were lit by candles.

  “I’ve been trying to perform an ancient Slavic ritual to communicate with spirits,” said Prof. Chinew, explaining the presence of the arcane diagram on the floor of the room, “I need to know what they are trying to communicate with me. It is clear that we are having little success in written communication.”

  “You are talking about the symbols you found yesterday?” asked Maya.

  “Yes,” said the professor, “but it seems like the spirits have other things to tell me as well.”

  The professor pointed to the window on the far side of the room. The pane was covered in symbols similar to the ones she had found in the other room yesterday.

  “I found these in the morning,” said the Professor, “you have to agree now that this is the work of spirits. They are just adamant to tell me something. In that hope, I had spent the whole day in this ritual but to no avail, I was able to contact no one.”

  But Maya had not heard a word. She rushed out into the lawn to read the symbols from outside. They were in the exact same pattern as on the adjacent window.

  Maya noted the symbols in her notebook, then took out her magnifying glass to study the footsteps in the lawn. There were some marks all over the lawn. But Maya knew instantly they were not of the intruder, who had much smaller feet.

  “Did you trample all over the lawn today,” she asked the professor going back into the room.

  “Yes,” said the professor, “I was trying to weed out the lawn. I like to live surrounded by flowers. It is a proven fact that spirits like fragrant environment.”