The Singular & Extraordinary Tale of Mirror & Goliath: From the Peculiar Adventures of John Lovehart, Esq., Volume 1 (Notebooks of John Loveheart, E)

by Ishbelle Bee

  “And so we begin.” He steps light footed around the stage, whipping up air under his cloak and with one hand rested on his brow and another pointing to the ceiling he cries, “Come forth spirits this night. Use me as your conduit. Give these poor people some advice. Aid them during this dark age. Enlighten us with your wisdom.”

  His eyeballs freeze into a trance-like state and he sighs a long, feminine sigh. He steps towards the front of the stage. “Ah yes, I can sense a man’s name: John. There is a message for John.” Three men stand up, presumably all named John. Nightingale points to the largest of the three. “You sir, within one full year you will be afflicted with the gout. Take measures to prevent this sir. No more puddings and pies. Listen to the spirit world. You may sit down.” And so he does.

  Nightingale gives a little whimper while Goliath hands me another bonbon. Nightingale points at a very elderly lady in the front row. She has some troubled standing up but holds herself steady with the back of her chair. She must be nearly a hundred years old.

  “Madam. I sense your mother is in the spirit world.” At this remark Goliath bursts into laughter and has to cover his mouth up with his hand. He swallows his bullseye in one mighty gulp. Nightingale thankfully ignores him and continues, “Madam, I have a message from your mother. She says get yourself a cat to keep yourself company. And she’ll see you soon.”

  Poor Goliath’s eyes are watering with laughter and I give him a cuddle. He is a big soft bear. He is my big soft bear.

  Nightingale eyeballs a young boy near the edge of the stage. “You, young lad. Sometimes you hear bad noises at night. Say your prayers and be good. For you are hearing the ghosts of your grandparents wander about.”

  The young boy scratches his head. “Me granny is still alive sir.”

  “Yes, I’m still alive!” an elderly voice cries from the audience.

  Nightingale moves backwards and moves a leaver attached to the side curtain, a puff of smoke and several black ravens fly out of the side. “They are the messengers of the other worlds.” One flies onto the ceiling beam and craps into the audience. The audience claps.

  Nightingale speaks, his voice excited. “Tonight there is a young lady in the audience who needs my assistance. She has a demon within her and I am going to exorcise it from her.”

  The audience looks curiously about the room. Mr Nightingale points in my direction. “Young lady, please come onto the stage.”

  I stand up and walk through the audience onto the stage, looking back and catching a glimpse of Goliath. He is anxious. Mr Nightingale stands next to me and I examine his sequinned silver moon cloak. A thousand tiny fingers have embroidered that cloak. The fingers of a fairy seamstress, such minute needlework. It is quite magnificent close up, and shifts like black liquid, dribbling elegantly like ink over the stage.

  “This young girl,” Mr Nightingale continues, “came to me for help. A dark spirit resides inside her. It speaks to her. Tonight on this very stage with the assistance of the spirit world I will draw that demon out and free her.”

  The audience claps, transfixed by the charlatan.

  “Right, little miss.” He waggles a bony white finger under my nose. “Stand very still.” He positions me in the centre of the stage like a statue, whilst the wooden floorboards creak theatrically under his footsteps. He waggles his finger again, this time somewhat violently.

  “I command you, spirit of the underworld, leave this girl’s body.”

  The audience mutter and shift in their seats. I gaze out at them. A sea wave of faces mesmerized with Mr Nightingale, eyeballs popping like boiled eggs. Goliath, huge, standing at the back and watching me, rather concerned. I can see Mr Nightingale fumbling pathetically with his cloak, whilst mumbling some nonsense incantation. My eyes drift lazily to the side of the stage where the dead wait, quiet as church mice. They all start to smile at me. It is the wrong sort of smile. The dead are like photographs hanging on the wall. I wonder why they are here. What do they want? I want to send them back to the land of the dead. I think about fire, flames as red as dragon scales to make them disappear. I imagine the audience turned to charcoal matchstick men.

  Mr Nightingale continues. “Hear me, foul spirit,” and at this he rests his hand on my head. “Leave her and return to the foul pit from whence thy came.”

  The floorboards squeak under his feet. The dead are chuckling to themselves, whispering. One of those ghosts says, “I’m embarrassed for him. Some sort of brain damage,” and he taps the side of his head.

  I think about the Egyptian princess and her flowers of flames. I imagine her lying in her tomb, love charms placed at her feet, the hearts of birds put in little pots for her. All those hearts for her. And then I hear the screaming.

  The curtain behind us is on fire, flames dancing up the walls. Mr Nightingale shrieks like a child. “How? How has this happened?”

  I have no answer for him.

  Goliath thunders down the aisle, throwing spectators aside. His great paws lift me up and carry me through the audience to safety outside. I see the ravens fly out of the church doors, followed by great lumps of people panicking and screaming onto the street. I can see Mr Nightingale putting out his beautiful cloak, which is flickering with flames, with a dirty puddle. A raven cackling at him, amused, from a nearby rooftop.

  As Goliath carries me through the streets I keep thinking about Egypt and the orange moon at nights. I can hear Goliath’s heart beating like a great clock. His father had a voice as rich as butter and was as big and dark-skinned as Goliath. I remember his hands, which were covered in ink stains from his writings on the tomb of the princess, his obsession. I remember the long conversations they had together, while drinking black coffee that smelt of syrup and the honey cakes we all ate, sweet and delicious. They would talk about the symbols painted on her tomb – the dung beetles, the magic eye for protection, the birds with rainbow wings – while the lemony sunlight drizzled over them. Those colours of Egypt were so deep and startling it was as if they had painted over me like oil on a canvas. Smeared into my veins.

  Tonight, Goliath brings up mugs of hot chocolate and sits in a great armchair, cuddling me.

  “Become a bear,” I say.

  And so he does. Around me are huge furry arms with claws, which squeeze. His snout is wet and his mouth displays many pointed teeth. Softly he growls and I fall asleep on my great bear. The smell of hot water bottle fur and his great heart beating lull me asleep.

  I dream that Mr Nightingale is stewed in a pot and served up to the seamstress who embroidered his cloak.

  II: Whitby

  The Séance with Mrs Pigwittle

  The train heaves and splutters to Whitby like a great beast through the moorlands, juddering and shaking. The morning air is crisp and bright and the moorland wild, ghost-haunted and dotted with electric blue wildflowers, like the eyes of imps. The sky is lapis lazuli blue, the colour of Goliath’s waistcoat, which is embroidered with forget-me-nots. His great hands grip a copy of The Times, the front page in bold lettering reads:

  * * *

  Jack the Ripper sends letter from Hell

  to baffled Scotland Yard.

  * * *

  “Who is Jack the Ripper?” I ask.

  Goliath looks at me carefully, peering over the newspaper. “He’s a very bad man.”

  I stare out onto the moorlands. I can see a fox, the same colour as my hair, running through the grasslands chasing a rabbit. I put my finger to the window as though I am touching it.

  “What does he do that is so bad?” I say, still staring at the fox, whose teeth now sink into the rabbit.

  “He kills women,” Goliath says quietly.

  The train chugs past the fox. He becomes an orange speck on the horizon.

  “Why?”

  “Because he enjoys it,” Goliath says sadly.

  I jump on his knee and cuddle him, squashing Jack the Ripper in the process. “I love you. I love you, I love you,” I say, snuggling into his beard.
The train pants and shunts along, shaking us like eggs in a basket.

  It is then I think of the word love and remember my sisters are both dead. I think about my grandfather, the one who went mad, the one Goliath rescued me from. It seems like another world and yet it has only been a year, so Goliath tells me. When I think of my past I feel I have been awoken from deep sleep,

  a

  magic

  little

  coma.

  * * *

  I remember only pieces of my former life, like a half-done jigsaw puzzle. My name was Myrtle and I had two older sisters, Rose and Violet. We lived with our grandfather in a small terraced house in south London.

  My grandfather worked as a butler in a great house for a Lord. While grandfather was at work, we were looked after by our neighbour Mrs Bumble, who had nine children and was pregnant with her tenth. We called her Bumblebee, because she wore a great yellow dress with black stripes and was as round as a ball. She had a sad and dreamy voice and was the kindest woman I have ever met. She would hold us in her arms and tell us the secret ingredients to her cakes and spin us round and round until we were dizzy. Her children were plump and pink and buzzed around her as though she was their queen, and all of them were boys.

  I remember she would rescue worms and spiders, cupping them in her hands and putting them somewhere safe. Sometimes she would sing to us, her voice sad and fluttery like wings, or make us cakes with cream and jam in the middle and then wipe all our mouths with a damp cloth before grandfather came home. She liked us because we were girls. Her hair was the colour of honey and her eyes dark and sharp like burnt sugar. Full of sweetness.

  One evening grandfather brought home a huge clock. He said it was a grandfather clock, so it was made for him. It was taller than grandfather and had a great face painted on it with impish-black eyes that moved from side to side, watching, smiling and chiming every quarter of an hour. Painted and coiling all around the clock were ladybirds: black and red and shaped like tiny hearts. I tried to touch them with my finger, but grandfather slapped my hand away.

  “Do not touch! It is a very special clock.”

  My grandfather loved that clock. He loved it more than anything. It sat in our front room next to his chair where he smoked his pipe. And he would sit for hours on end and listen to it ticking. Listen to its soft heartbeat. Rest his head against its wooden body, press his ear next to where its heart would have been. I wondered if it was stuffed full of angels beating their wings, trying to get out. There was something inside, something waiting.

  A few days after he brought the clock home he told us he had been dismissed from his employment. He said that the Lord who he had worked for had disappeared and a new gentleman had taken over the house and no longer needed servants. He said we shouldn’t be worried about money because he had some savings and the clock would save us all. We didn’t understand what he meant.

  I asked him, “How will the clock save us, Grandfather?”

  And he answered, “I have told you it is a very special clock. Never question me again.”

  And so now we spent every day with Grandfather and no longer saw Mrs Bumble. Everything changed. We used to go to church on Sundays with Mrs Bumble and her family. Grandfather would march us out in little white dresses with our shoes all scuffed, wonky bows in our hair. We would sings the hymns and listen to the vicar give long and fumbling sermons about forgiveness and wickedness, his long finger tapping on the pulpit, his great tongue lapping in and out. He had a weedy smell, as if you lifted up a rock by a pool and put your nose close to it. The church was made of cold grey stone with an enormous painting of Christ crucified, a weeping woman at his feet. Around him were a group of men who looked too puzzled or stupefied to move: they just gazed at him dying.

  “He died so we might live,” the vicar would say.

  I wondered if Christ preferred the company of the dead.

  Grandfather didn’t want us to attend church anymore. We were no longer allowed to leave the house. All day and night he would sit in his chair by the clock and listen. Listen for what, we wondered? The eyeballs of the clock moving back and forth, back and forth, ever watching and smiling.

  I remember Mrs Bumble knocking at our door and speaking to Grandfather, and he told her to go away. He told her to mind her own business.

  The night before I died, I dreamt I had turned into a ladybird.

  When I woke up, I knew this was that last time I would see my sisters. I ran to the door to get Mrs Bumble to help, but the door was locked and the windows bolted. I screamed and Grandfather put his hands round my mouth.

  He sat on his chair in front of the clock. He said that he had something very important to tell us. He said the grandfather clock was a god and had spoken to him during the night. He said that the clock wanted to turn us into ladybirds. He said he had built a wooden box under the bed.

  He has gone mad, I thought.

  He told my sisters to get into the wooden box. They were so frightened they did what he said, and then he nailed it shut.

  He opened the clock and told me to get inside.

  “No,” I said. My sisters were screaming. The clock started to chime.

  He picked me up and stuffed me inside the grandfather clock and locked me in.

  I can’t tell you how long I was in there. I remember thinking I was inside a stomach. I heard the beating of ladybird wings. I think I was being eaten.

  After the darkness, time unravelled, deep, soft and black as ink. I became full of emptiness. It coiled into me like liquid, oozing through me, replacing me. Something was eating my eyes.

  I remember hearing voices of men shouting and banging. I remember trying to cry out but my voice was gone. I remember the door of the grandfather clock opening and sunlight as bright as fire burning my face as I was lifted gently out by a policeman, whose name was Goliath. I was five years old and all my sisters were dead.

  My grandfather was arrested and committed to an asylum. It was Mrs Bumble who had gone to the police and demanded they do something. If only you had gone sooner, Mrs Bumble. My grandfather claimed at his trial that the clock whispered in his ear. Said terrible, dreadful, wonderful things to him. He said he had no choice.

  Goliath was a detective with Scotland Yard, then. When he carried me out of the grandfather clock, I begged him never to leave me. I screamed when he left my side, even for a moment. And so he stayed and vowed to protect me from that day forth. And he has kept his promise.

  We arrive at Whitby station. Orange and brown butterfly wings dance over the hedges at the platform. We grab our bags and shuffle outside where great puffs of steam billow out of the train.

  “I’m hungry,” I say, and Goliath grins and produces sausage butties from his bag and hands me one. I sink my teeth into it as a vampire into a human neck; delicious!

  We sit on a bench and I can hear the seagulls crying, and smell salt and smoked kippers. My nostrils suck it all in. I love the smells here. Goliath tells me that we are going to be visiting a lady called Mrs Florence Pigwittle. He says that Mrs Pigwittle is a medium and she performs séances. He hopes she may be able to help me. He says that she is a celebrity of sorts and apparently has made contact with Lord Byron and Napoleon, and one of her guests last year was Arthur Conan Doyle, who praised her spiritual gifts. He seems sad when he tells me this; he doesn’t want to let me down.

  I give him a big cuddle. “You are the bravest man in the world, Mr Goliath Honey-Flower and I love you.” And his smile is enormous.

  We head through the streets of Whitby, passing the smoked kipper shop whose occupants hang upside down, dead eyes following us. The fish remind me of Captain Mackerel and his cat and I imagine them in their little boat exploring the oceans of the world, searching for mermaids. We wander past a cake shop with gypsy tarts and sticky buns. Goliath’s dark skin and huge size attracts some attention from the locals, and an old woman mistakes Goliath’s silver cane for a trident and declares him the God Neptune come from the
sea. When we get to the beach, we sit on a large rock and feed the seagulls with pieces of cake from Goliath’s pockets.

  The sun lowers itself, and we sink into starlight on the mile walk to the Pigwittle Estate. I hold Goliath’s big hand. When he was in Scotland Yard he won many medals for bravery. He saved a little boy from a fire and tore down a door and part of a wall to reach him. When he carried him out his beard was singed black and his hands burnt. His hands still have those marks from the fire lines etched into him like an artist’s drawing, and I love those lines.

  It was he who found my sisters dead under the bed and he said it had broken his heart. I imagine him carrying them in his arms, like Egyptian princesses, and covering them in moon flowers and daisies. Safe in his arms. When he arrested my grandfather he told me that he had nearly broken his neck with his giant hands he was so full of rage and sorrow; other police officers had to pull him off.

  I wish he had done it. I wish he had done it.

  The path to the Pigwittle estate is lined with small yellow flowers and strange weed grasses that shift in the wind like strands of hair. We see two carriages move past us through the gates, carrying guests for the dinner and séance. The first carriage is pulled by two great big brown horses and carries a handful of guests, laughing and chatting colourfully. The second carriage that follows is smaller , pulled by two beautiful black horses whose manes and tails are decorated with purple feathers. Goliath watches carefully as it passes. We both sense something strange about the occupant of that carriage. A white-gloved hand rests on the window ledge.

  We wander down the path. The house is impressive, with many red lanterns hanging outside, containing little flames dancing like tiny devils. Goliath knocks on the front door, and an elderly butler opens it and examines us with interest.