Hume pressed the handkerchief to his mouth and cleared his throat, then dropped his head dramatically. “Please allow me a moment to prepare myself.”
Conan Doyle heard Frank Podmore, sitting somewhere behind him, give a derisive snort and mutter a single word beneath his breath: “Charlatan.”
Wilde also heard it, and flung Conan Doyle a disbelieving look. Dunglas Hume, standing another fifteen feet away, should not have been able to make it out, but he raised his head, opened his eyes, and stared straight at Podmore. For once the American’s good humor deserted him, and he scorched the younger man with a look of pure hatred. But then he recomposed himself, closed his eyes, and dropped his head once more. Hume fell into a pattern of deep respiration, so that his sonorous breathing filled the room. He raised his arms like a pagan worshiping before an idol, his brows knitted in intense concentration.
The room held its breath. Members watched, rapt. A minute passed, but nothing happened. And then another. And another. After a full five minutes had elapsed, Sidgwick raised a hand to halt the proceeding. But then a tremor passed through Hume’s body, his face convulsing with effort. A vein pulsed in his forehead.
He seemed to straighten his posture further, but then Conan Doyle noticed that his shoes no longer touched the carpet. A collective gasp rippled through the room as he ascended, slowly at first, and then faster, until he hovered fifteen feet above the floor, the crown of his head bobbing within inches of the plaster ceiling.
It was a miraculous sight. SPR members looked from one to the other, mouths agape.
But it was just the beginning. Hume lowered his arms until they were against his sides. His body began a slow backward rotation until he lay supine. Then he floated silently over Conan Doyle’s and Wilde’s heads until he reached the open window—the gap was barely two feet—and glided straight out into the night.
Cries of surprise and alarm filled the room as members leapt from their seats and rushed to the windows. Dimly illuminated by the light spilling from the music room windows, Hume floated twenty feet from the building, stopped, and rotated back into the vertical. His eyes remained shut the whole time. The music room was on the second floor and Hume hung suspended motionless forty feet above the stone flags of the courtyard. Then, after perhaps a minute, he rotated to a supine position and drifted back toward the house. He floated in through the far window and reached the middle of the room, where he revolved into the vertical, arms raised above his head, and floated gently to the floor. His feet touched down and he stood, once again, between the three observers.
No one spoke or made any sound. Finally, Hume lowered his arms, raised his head, and opened his eyes.
The members of the SPR burst into wild applause. Sidgwick leapt forward and seized Hume’s hand, pumping it wildly and slapping him on the back. “Astounding, old chap,” he said. “That was simply astounding.”
Conan Doyle threw a look of amazement at Wilde, who returned it and applauded loudly, a cigarette drooping between his lips.
Sir William Crookes was shaking Hume’s hand and rabbiting on about “the most amazing spectacle he had ever witnessed.” None of the men congratulating the American psychic seemed to notice the man’s demeanor. He was deathly pale and sweating profusely. The audience cried out as the American’s knees buckled, and he would have fallen if Sidgwick and the other men had not held him up.
“I am sorry, gentlemen,” Hume rasped. “The levitation is very draining.” With their help he wobbled to his feet. “I’m afraid I must retire for the evening.”
Frank Podmore jumped up from his chair and stalked from the room without a backward glance. On his way out, he brushed shoulders with Mrs. Kragan, the Irish housekeeper. She had been standing at the open door, silently watching throughout. Her eyes were wide and crazed, both hands covering her mouth. Conan Doyle noticed the rosary clutched in her hands and heard her mutter, “Tis the work of the devil. We shall all be damned for it!” Then the housekeeper turned and fled, as if fearing contamination by such ungodly doings.
The guests applauded as Daniel Dunglas Hume left the room moments later, assisted—virtually dragged out—by Mister Greaves and two of the other servants.
“Well, well,” Wilde observed drily. “I should hate to be following that act!”
CHAPTER 11
MADAME ZHOZHOVSKY
During the rumpus when Hume was carried from the parlor, Madame Zhozhovsky remained in her seat, stroking the monkey in her lap. When calm returned, she asked in a quavering voice for a chair to be set in the middle of the room, along with a low footstool on which to rest her sore foot. Then she levered her bulk from the sofa using the crooked black walking stick and stumped to the waiting chair with her pet monkey trailing on its leash. Before sitting, she faced the room, looking left and then right without smiling, and raised a hand in a seeking gesture, staring over the heads of her audience, as if her gray gaze were penetrating the veil separating this world from the next.
“I can tell the lady practices that gaze in the mirror,” Wilde muttered, and Conan Doyle stifled a laugh in his handkerchief.
With a mystical look upon her face, she swept the uncanny gaze around the room like a searchlight before pitching her tremulous voice to its lowest register: “This is a dangerous house…” She allowed several seconds for that ominous pronouncement to sink in, and then added, “… and you are all in peril for your souls.”
She shuffled backward to the chair and dropped heavily into it, then gingerly set her sore foot on the footstool and leaned on her stick, peering around. “Before this meeting proceeds, you need to know what dangers you face and how to defend your minds against psychic attack.” She fell silent for a moment and then raised her stick and banged it on the floor, making everyone jump. “Thraxton Hall is one of the most haunted houses in England. Over the centuries, it has been the scene of much unhappiness. Sir Henry Thraxton, the first lord of the house, was murdered by a brother who coveted his wife. The second lord was sucked into a bog while stalking a wounded deer and drowned in full sight of all his retainers. There is also a ghostly child, a young girl in a blue dress: Annalette Thraxton, the youngest daughter of the second lord, thrown from an upstairs window by her crazed mother in a fit of madness, the poor child’s brains dashed upon the rocky ground.”
Conan Doyle straightened in his chair, thinking of the spectral girl he had glimpsed in the coppice of the stone circle. He was about to speak up, but Madame Zhozhovksy continued, “Whenever the blue girl is seen, death follows soon after.”
Conan Doyle’s stomach fluttered and he reigned in the words he was about to speak.
“But more recent times have seen their share of tragedy. Lady Florence Thraxton was found dead at the base of the grand staircase, her neck so badly broken her head was turned completely around—”
“That’s not a ghost story,” Wilde murmured to Conan Doyle, “that’s a tale of shoddy carpentry. Fix the bally staircase, I say.”
“And six short months later,” Madame Zhozhovsky continued, apparently just getting into her stride, “Sir Edmund Thraxton, the last sitting lord, vanished whilst walking on the moors and was never seen again. But most famously, there is the white lady—”
“Ah!” Wilde said, louder than he intended. “There is always a white lady.”
Every head turned to look. Wilde dropped his head and pretended to be picking fluff from his trousers.
“The white lady,” Zhozhovsky began again, pulling her eyes away from the Irishman, “is reputedly Mariah Thraxton, the scorned wife of the third Lord Alfred Thraxton of the 1780s.”
“And did she also die a violent death?” Conan Doyle spoke up.
Madam Zhozhovsky nodded, setting her multiple chins jiggling. “Murdered during a séance.” A cruel smile congealed on the old lady’s lips.
The news shocked Conan Doyle, who suddenly found his gaze locked with Hope Thraxton’s startled violet eyes. He looked away with difficulty. “Do we know any more of the circ
umstances?”
“Yes, indeed, we do,” Henry Sidgwick interrupted, clearly proud to show off his academic knowledge. “It’s well documented, thanks to the trial of Lord Thraxton. He caught his wife performing a séance with her maid in the turret room in the western wing; he accused her of witchcraft, produced a brace of pistols, and shot her dead on the spot.”
The room contracted with the collective catching of breath. Conan Doyle’s gaze turned back to Hope Thraxton, who was staring down at the rug, her lips quivering.
“I presume Lord Thraxton was hanged for the crime?” Wilde spoke aloud.
“Oh no,” Sidgwick countered in a cheerful voice. “Quite the opposite. At the court of inquiry, he was commended for his actions and all charges dropped.” Sidgwick chuckled from somewhere inside the white vortex of beard. “This was, after all, during the height of the witch hunting craze.”
“They would not allow her to be buried in consecrated ground,” Hope Thraxton interjected. “And so she was buried at the crossroads just outside Slattenmere.”
“Gallows Hill,” Conan Doyle murmured to his companion. “The very crossroads we passed through just this morning.”
“It is a very lonely place,” Hope Thraxton continued, her gaze focused on something far in the past. “Even in the realm of the spirits, the centuries pass slowly.…”
Madame Zhozhovsky banged her stick on the floor to jerk everyone’s attention back to her. “Mariah Thraxton did not die immediately but lived long enough to utter a curse against her husband and the house of Thraxton. Her husband followed her in death soon after. Thrown from his horse whilst riding to hounds, his spine was severed. Alfred writhed in screaming agony for a full week before death released him—the first victim of Mariah Thraxton’s curse, a curse that lingers to this very day.”
Wilde turned to Conan Doyle with a wide-eyed, mocking look and whispered, “Not very cheery is she?”
Madame Zhozhovsky overheard Wilde’s flippant remark and lashed him a scorching look that curdled the air between them.
“This house is filled with ghosts, revenants, inchoate spirits, and what some call…” She added in a voice that set the syllables trembling, “… the lower intelligences.”
Oscar Wilde’s hand shot up. “I should know this, coming from the Emerald Isle—the land of spooks and banshees—but what exactly is a revenant?”
Madame Zhozhovsky shifted forward in her chair, leaning heavily on the walking stick. She thrust out a hand, her penetrating gaze once again seeming to pierce the veil between this world and the next. “A revenant is a ghost or a corpse that rises from its grave and walks among the living. Sometimes, when death is sudden, the soul is expelled violently from the body. Incorporeal, confused and frightened, it drifts in shock. It does not know it is dead, so it clings to the places it knew in life. In other cases, an unconfessed soul returns, animated by all the wickedness it did in life, to do harm to the living.”
“If it’s a ghost, how can it possibly do any harm?” It was Sir William Crookes, his speech slurred by 95 proof.
Madame Zhozhovsky pushed on the gnarled stick, straining to heave her bulk up from the chair. “All malevolent ghosts are a threat. Revenants are the most dangerous form of spirit. They appear as solid and human as you and I, but they are here to deceive the living. To lead them to death and ruination. The lower intelligences are fragments, broken pieces of the psyche absorbed by the stone and wood of a building. They are the residue of violent emotions: love, lust, fear, anger, rage. If you open yourself to them, if you allow yourself to be vulnerable, such strong emotions can enter you and poison your mind. A revenant cannot enter a house unless it is invited in. But malicious spirits are full of tricks and cunning. Amateurs who dabble in necromancy do so at the peril of their immortal souls.”
While she had been talking, the monkey had scampered a circular path, winding the leash tight around her legs.
“You are all in terrible danger,” Madame Zhozhovsky added. “All of you.”
Conan Doyle happened to look down and saw the leather strap wrapped around the elderly lady’s legs. He raised his hand and started to speak. “Madame—”
“All of you!” she said. “Fear for your souls. I can offer you a protective spell—”
“Madame,” Conan Doyle said aloud. “If I might—”
“For the danger is near, Very near—” Madame Zhozhovsky tried to take a step forward and the leash cinched tight. She fell full length and somersaulted over the footstool, hitting the floor with a tremendous thump, horrifying the watching Society members and sending the monkey into a shrieking frenzy. Members leaped to their feet and rushed to assist, but the monkey hissed and flashed its fangs menacingly, keeping everyone at bay.
Wilde pushed back the red fez on his head and regarded Conan Doyle archly. “The deuce,” he said. “I’ll wager that is the first time her feet have been higher than her head in decades. This truly has been a diverting evening. First a floating American and then an acrobatic old lady with a monkey. I’m very happy now I didn’t stay home.”
CHAPTER 12
DARK ENCOUNTER
After the first SPR meeting adjourned for the evening, it took the two friends twenty minutes of wrong turns and backtracking before they finally located the third floor landing where their rooms were located. As they trudged along the hallway, each carried a glowing paraffin lamp (this older part of the house had never been plumbed for gas jets). Both men sagged with fatigue, and even Oscar Wilde’s continuous narrative of the day’s events had dried to dust. When he arrived at his room, Conan Doyle fumbled in his pockets and brought out his large key. It turned in the lock with a brassy clunk. But as he pushed the door open his eye was drawn to a folded sheet of paper lying on the rug.
A note.
He quickly deduced someone had slipped it under the door. Bending, he scooped it up, unfolded the paper with one hand, and held it close to the lamp glass. The note was short. A few brief sentences. He recognized instantly the feminine hand.
I knew you would come.
Conan Doyle’s heart lurched at the words. The next line fired a jolt of excitement through him.
The ballroom. Midnight.
H
He tilted the paper to the light. A phoenix watermark floated up from the surface.
“Ah, one more thing, Arthur!”
His head snapped up. Wilde had not gone into his room after all and was sauntering toward him. Conan Doyle crumpled the note and jammed it into a jacket pocket, but his friend had already seen it.
“What was that note you were reading?”
“Note? Ah … nothing, nothing. Just … some ideas I was jotting down … for a story.”
The Irishman cast an insinuating look at Conan Doyle’s pocket and raised his bushy eyebrows; a supercilious smile twitched the corners of his mouth. “Ah, I see. Notes for a story. I think I know exactly what kind of story.” He tapped the side of his ample nose with two fingers, throwing Conan Doyle a knowing wink. “Don’t worry, shan’t ask again.”
Conan Doyle felt his face flush hot. Wilde turned toward his room, but then turned back again. “Ah yes, I was going to remind you that I’m leaving in the morning. If you hear a strange noise coming from my room, do not be alarmed. It will be me stripping the wallpaper from the walls. It is far too loud to permit any sleep.”
* * *
Conan Doyle lay on the bed fully dressed, pocket watch laid on his chest, waiting for time to push the hands around to midnight. As he rested, the stuttering light of the paraffin lamp on the bedside table made the creatures watching from the wainscoting jerk and tremble. When the Witching Hour finally struck, he slid from the bed, pulled on his tweed jacket, and stole quietly from the room.
He had only a vague idea of where the ballroom was: in the ruined west wing of the house that guests were encouraged to stay away from. He crept down the grand staircase to the first floor, stepping on the very edge of the treads to avoid creaks.
In the
entrance hall, a single lamp had been left burning. Conan Doyle stood still for several long minutes, listening, but nothing stirred. Even the servants were abed at this hour. He liberated the lamp from the hallway table—the house would be unnavigably dark without it—and crept down a long gallery lined with portraits of dead Thraxtons, whose luminous eyes followed his progress. The portrait gallery terminated in a set of massive double doors. He gratefully noted that the key had been left in the lock and the handle turned freely in his hand. He stepped through into a large, dark, echoing space—the ballroom. Conan Doyle paused a moment, setting the lamp down at his feet to peer around.
Moonlight, milky and diffuse, flooded in through the tall windows. And then he noticed a glowing white figure standing at one of the windows, looking out.
The white lady, he thought, believing, for a heart-stopping moment, he was looking upon a specter, but then the woman turned from the window and looked straight at him.
It was no ghost. It was H—Lady Hope Thraxton.
Instead of her black lace dress, she wore a diaphanous white nightgown. Lit from behind by moonlight, it glowed translucent, revealing that she was quite naked beneath; he could see the contours of her body, the pert, small breasts, curvy hips, and shapely legs.
He reasoned she must not realize how exposed she was. He knew that, as a gentleman, he should protect her modesty by averting his gaze. But his heart was drumming and he could not tear his eyes away. Her face illuminated with happiness when she saw him. She broke free of the window and floated across the ballroom floor to meet him, as silent and light as a filament of smoke. The white nightgown, without the backlit moonlight, regained its opacity and became, once again, just a white nightgown.
Her long hair was unpinned for bed and fell in a cascade of auburn ringlets about her shoulders. She reached the glow of his paraffin lamp, and for the first time he saw her face unconcealed. He knew she was young, but without the veil he could see she was still a girl: a fetching beauty with pale skin, fine cheekbones and full lips, elegantly arched brows, and the most astonishing violet eyes. In the dim light, her pupils were madly dilated, and when he raised his lamp to splash light across her face, she winced and turned away as if in pain.
The Revenant of Thraxton Hall: The Paranormal Casebooks of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Page 10
