Holmes Entangled

by Gordon McAlpine

  “My name is MacNeil,” the majordomo said, his accent localized to this neighborhood. “Welcome to the home of Madam Du Lac, who is presently resting in her boudoir in anticipation of the marvels for which she will soon serve as conduit in the séance room.”

  I knew this much:

  MacNeil, or whatever his real name, was more than majordomo and Master of Ceremonies. Doubtless, he was also Madam Du Lac’s séance room collaborator (or one of them). A glance at his attire made that quite certain. I noted his black trousers, which contradicted the pin-striped grey worn by most butlers; even more unconventional was his black jacket, which was of no standard livery cut but more closely resembled a formal, East Indian sherwani, akin to the style I had worn that morning, which, when buttoned to the top, would cover him up to his chin, making his attire black from top to bottom. In all, a not unexpectedly exotic outfit for the household of a medium. But fashion was not the point of the subtle variation. While his shoes were well polished, they had rubber soles, enabling him to step silently when called upon to do so. With the addition of black gloves and a black mask, he would become virtually invisible in the darkened séance room, moving about at will, practicing what is known in theatrical circles as the dark arts, a stage effect resulting not only in the seemingly inexplicable appearance and disappearance of objects, often coated with radium paint, that seem to float through the darkness in opposition to Newton’s laws, but also the brief brushing of one’s hair with a breath from a departed loved one, or, assuming the blackened practitioner strong enough or aided by an equally invisible associate, the actual levitation of the medium’s chair.

  A uniformed policeman entered, carrying a steel lockbox.

  MacNeil continued: “The séance room will be quite dark, which, of course, is a requirement of the spirit guide who provides Madam Du Lac access to the ‘next world.’ We are thereby pleased to provide the services of Thomas B. Keene, a distinguished, off-duty officer of the City of London Police, to personally hold in his certified locked box all of your valuables for the duration of the séance, thereby insuring that in the unlikely event a pickpocket ever slipped into the darkness among our guests, your personal items would be safe.”

  An impressive maneuver . . . throwing the suspicion of corruption on us. I almost wanted to applaud.

  Next, each of the guests was provided a small velvet bag into which we dutifully placed watches, jewelry, billfolds, and whatever personal items we could not bear to lose (which included the photographs of “lost ones” we’d been instructed to bring). Finally, MacNeil asked us to jot on a piece of paper the name of one who had “passed over” and a brief question we would like to ask him or her. These too we placed into our velvet bags, all of which were then locked in the steel box that sat now in the lap of Officer Keene, who had taken a chair near the front door and looked to all the world as reliable a bobby as ever wielded a truncheon.

  Of course, this was no scheme to steal our valuables.

  How could a spiritual medium build a reputation on such gross criminality?

  Rather, the steel box would be opened by the as-yet-unseen Madam Du Lac immediately after we made our way into the séance room and the bags quickly and skillfully rifled for information, providing all that a skilled medium would need to know about her audience to make the wondrous also seem personal. It was a well-managed production, even if the clues to its corruption were evident before the séance began . . . evident, at least, to one with a doubtful mind. But therein lies the rub. People do not attend séances to look for tears in the fabric of Spiritualism’s credibility. They go to commune with their lost loved ones. And, for most, what chance does rationalism stand against that?

  Officer Keene made a great, silent show of slipping the key to the lockbox into the breast pocket of his uniform and then buttoning the pocket closed, as if that indicated a level of security equivalent to the guarding of the Crown Jewels.

  “Has anyone questions?” the majordomo MacNeil inquired.

  “Are we to join hands at the table?” asked a woman in a mink stole.

  I had instructed my operatives, who filled the room, to approach the séance with whatever curiosity they naturally brought to it. After all, there is nothing like authenticity to stand in for authenticity (admittedly, this is a sentence that will make sense only to readers who bring to it a personal understanding of guile and deceit).

  MacNeil nodded. “The joining of hands serves two purposes. First, and most importantly, it focuses the psychic energy of the group, making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.”

  “You’re saying that we possess psychic energy?” asked a tall woman of advancing years (that is, about two decades my junior).

  I gave her a subtle wink, indicating good question.

  These balding, pot-bellied men and matronly, proper women, posing now as bereaved believers, were no ordinary group of hired operatives. Rather, they all had worked for me years before when, as children or adolescents, they had served as my “Baker Street Irregulars.” Starting with six dirty little scoundrels, I eventually created a structured system, rather like a Cambridge University of the streets; as the eldest “graduated” they’d be replaced by new recruits. I’d maintained contact. Yesterday, to a man and woman, they had been delighted to be summoned one more time. In the intervening decades, some had gone on to careers as bankers or businessmen or newspaper reporters, having gained from my assignments and tutelage a sufficient understanding of the malleability of identity to have passed themselves off as far more than the street rats as which they would otherwise have been dismissed. I was proud of them. Watson too had found their advancements most gratifying. Of course, my early training also had made quite adequate criminals of a few, though I can say with pride that none were murderers, rapists, or armed robbers. Tonight, in this room, there was an almost even split between the lawful and the others.

  I trusted them all.

  “Yes, psychic energy is life energy,” MacNeil said in answer to my bejeweled agent’s question. “Everyone possess it. Haven’t we all had moments of precognition? Or dreams that reveal secrets? Where do you think that comes from? Of course, few are able to channel their psychic energy all the way to the next world, as Madam Du Lac does. She is one in a million. One in ten million! However, your combined energy and faith does help her to manage such miracles of inter-world communication.”

  “And the second purpose of joining hands?” asked a military retiree in formal dress, the left breast of his jacket veritably jangling with medals. I’d known him decades before as Wiggins, who’d served as the motley crew’s chief.

  “I’m afraid this second reason is far more mundane,” MacNeil acknowledged. “But, unfortunately, ours is a cynical world. The joining of hands also serves to assure all participants that no one seated around the table can participate in any sort of trickery whatsoever.”

  A man once known among the Irregulars as Twist, in homage to the Dickens character, but now looking more like Dickens’s respectable Mr. Brownlow, with gold spectacles and a bottle-green coat, commented without irony: “Sadly, ours is an age of cynicism.”

  Meanwhile, across the room, a young woman (the daughter of a former Irregular) who sported bobbed hair, a short, tubular dress, and a cigarette in a long handle, gently touched with her free hand a two foot tall ceramic jar that was set in a line with three others on a wooden altar table. Each of the jars was sealed by a different sculpted head, specifically that of a human being, a jackal, a baboon, and a falcon.

  The copper Keene pointed to her but said nothing. He was the muscle. The majordomo was the talker.

  MacNeil turned toward her. “Ah, you’ve discovered the ancient Egyptian canopic jars.”

  She pulled her hand away as if she ought not to have touched them.

  He smiled to reassure her. “Oh, such a light, feminine touch cannot damage them. However, they are originals from the Nineteenth Dynasty, specifically the reign of Ramses the Great. More than three thous
and years old. So please don’t pick them up.” As he stepped toward the jars, our attention moved with him. “Such jars as these were used in ancient Egypt to store internal organs of the dead and were buried along with the mummified bodies.” His manner betrayed a practiced disquisition. “The sculpted heads atop the jars represent the four sons of the Egyptian god Horus.”

  I had noted the ancient looking pieces upon entering the room. They were not originals but well-crafted counterfeits. In the majordomo’s brief discourse, he had misdated the fake jars, as the use of sculpted stoppers had been discontinued by the time of Ramses the Second.

  But I wasn’t here to correct him.

  Rather, I was here to seem impressed, like the other attendees.

  “Do these ancient Egyptian objects hold particular, psychic significance for Madam Du Lac?” asked the former Wiggins, tonight known as Major Angus Spratt.

  MacNeil nodded. “What ties Madam Du Lac to these particular jars, which, incidentally, were acquired for her from the Egyptian National Museum by a grateful admirer, is that the Madam’s spirit contact is, as some of you may already know, the Pharaoh Ramses the Second himself, whose internal organs remain sealed in these very jars.”

  All were appropriately impressed.

  I was more than merely impressed, but not as MacNeil would have it. Rather, I admired the bold showmanship. In the years since Howard Carter’s ballyhooed discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb, Egyptology had become wildly popular throughout England, in fashion, cinema, art, and fiction. Why not incorporate it into a Spiritualist’s presentation?

  The intestines of Ramses II in a jar? First rate!

  “But now we must return to matters of immediate importance,” MacNeil said, turning away from the “antiquities.”

  We gathered more closely around him.

  “Are there any among you who suffer from a heart condition? Visitations from the dead can be overpowering, and we wouldn’t want to add anyone to the next world prematurely, eh?”

  No one suffered from a heart condition.

  Next, he asked, “Are there any among you who propose to enter the séance room with intentions that might conventionally be described as being more aligned with the ‘demonic’ than the ‘angelic’?”

  From the majordomo’s perspective, I suspect that included all of us.

  But none of us raised our hands.

  “Good,” he said.

  At this, he opened a set of double doors through which we could see a long hallway that led to another set of double doors.

  MacNeil led us down the hallway to the second set of doors.

  These opened into the darkened séance room, into which we moved silently.

  Madam Du Lac was a woman of beauty and talent. When slumped “unconscious” in her chair, sometimes for up to five long, silent minutes during the séance, she seemed a mere wisp; yet, when “possessed” by her Egyptian spirit guide, she transformed, becoming sinewy, yellow-eyed, and seemingly capable of pharaonic violence. She’d have been a successful medium even if her séance had not been a marvel of stagecraft and new technology, which it was. I cannot pretend to have been unimpressed. The room was lit only by a candle, set at the center of the round table; sometimes, the candle flickered out, leaving us in total darkness, whereupon shimmering objects personally associated with our “departed ones” seemed to appear out of the ether, levitating, only to disappear a moment later, and the powerful male voice of Madam Du Lac’s spirit guide, Ramses II, emanated not only from her lips but from various locations in the darkened room, including the ceiling, under the table, and, most impressively, in mid-air, delivering individualized messages to our hand-holding congregation, including Mr. and Mrs. Norman and Emily Johnson, in a strange language that combined English, Egyptian Arabic, Coptic, and an unrecognizable but ancient-sounding tongue, which, I presume, was intended to stand for the unknown pronunciations of the pharaoh’s Egyptian, thereby serving to catalogue the entire linguistic history of Egypt, sometimes in a single sentence. Nonetheless, what should have been gibberish proved just exotic enough to seem supernatural while still remaining sufficiently coherent to provide the usual vaguely optimistic, from-beyond-the-grave answers to the questions we had written in the parlor and deposited in the lockbox. A well-crafted linguistic stunt that went admirably beyond the minimum requirements of a successful séance. And then, just as suddenly, the candle would relight, seemingly of its own, and in the renewed silence we would discover Madam Du Lac unconscious once more, her head tipped back, but now haloed by clouds of ectoplasm that seemed to emanate from her mouth, rippling above her as if in a breeze, though we felt no movement of air where we sat. Was the ectoplasm taking the three dimensional shape of a face from one of the photographs also included in the lockbox? Yes, a face, ten feet high.

  Oh, I could describe additional elements of the production, but, beyond simply establishing the exemplary competence of the sitting, which I believe the previous paragraph accomplishes, to further detail such “wonders” seems a waste of ink, particularly as the most dramatic moment actually occurred when I removed the army-surplus flare I had strapped to my calf and lit it, thereby illuminating the room, capturing in flagrante delicto the two men dressed head to toe in black, each with a bag of props slung over his shoulder, looking like a pair of soot covered Father Christmases, and in their free hands short wave radio speakers, their bodies tangled in wires. Madam Du Lac remained in character, “losing consciousness” in the sudden illumination. Meanwhile, the ten-foot-high sculpted ectoplasm that had shimmered above her was now revealed to be a back-lit silk sheet suspended by dozens of tiny, intricately placed strings to produce the three dimensional effect of a face that I doubt the Palace Theatre could manage as cleverly. I understood how a man such as Conan Doyle, intelligent but naturally inclined toward the imaginative (consider his novel about still-existent dinosaurs, The Lost World), could have been fooled by the skillful ministrations of Madam Du Lac and her capable assistants.

  By now, everyone at the table was standing.

  Officer Keene burst through the double doors, a pistol drawn. His expression indicated that he’d never encountered a situation like this.

  I turned to him. “What are you going to do, shoot all of us?”

  He considered. “I might just have to.”

  One of Madam Du Lac’s assistants removed his black balaclava, revealing his face. It was the majordomo MacNeil. “Put the gun away, Keene,” he said, indicating with a nod of his head the weapons in the hands of three of my conspirators at the table, including the jewelry bedecked matron.

  The muscle did as he was instructed.

  At last, Madam Du Lac opened her eyes, the only one still sitting. She spoke in her own voice, but with a vehemence that her physical fragility belied. She pointed at me, undaunted, fire in her eyes. “You are the devil. I deny you! Your wiles have turned a true Spiritualist experience into a travesty, into the illusion of fraud. Prince of liars, get thee back to hell!” She looked at the others gathered around the table. “Do not be deceived by the evil magic of this unbeliever. All is altered. The seeming tricks you see around you are not mine, but Satan’s illusions, turned against me to destroy my reputation because of the heavenly blessings I bring to the world.”

  Ah, the backstage machinery and the black-clad assistants were illusions of the devil . . . She was asking us to disbelieve our lying eyes. When all is lost, invoke Satan, human frailty, and then deny, deny. It had worked before, for thousands of years. It still worked, every day, in nearly every human endeavor. I admired her seeming earnestness, her professionalism. What sangfroid!

  “You are both talented and tenacious,” I said to her. “Please accept my compliments, Madam Du Lac. But you may dispense with the infernal explanations, as no one here believes you.” I moved the flare in a slow circle to highlight the others standing about the table. “They all work for me.”

  She noted the nods and grins of my former Irregulars. Only then did she come out
of character, turning her leonine head to me with a begrudging smile. “So, what do you want from me, Sherlock Holmes?”

  I was taken aback. How could she know ?

  Fortunately, before I revealed my surprise, I realized that she was using the name in jest, as a generic reference to any private investigator or detective. She considered me a Sherlock Holmes. The realization came as a relief, despite the accompanying thought that it meant I had lost the proprietary use of my own name, which, apparently, had entered the lexicon as a type.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Sherlock Holmes,” I answered without hesitation, doing away with the American accent.

  “And her?” she asked, indicating Mrs. Watson. “That’s Watson, I suppose.”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. I am Holmes and she is Watson.”

  Madam Du Lac sighed at my apparent unwillingness to come clean about my true identity (the whole world “knew” that Holmes was long retired).

  “What do you want me to do, Madam Du Lac?” asked the faux copper, stepping further into the room, his hand still on the revolver.

  “Be quiet and put the gun away, Keene,” she told him. Then she turned to me. “So, you’ve come to ruin me?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  She indicated with a wave of her hand the roomful of witnesses to her deceit. “Well, it seems you have.”

  I shook my head. “If, Madam Du Lac, you agree to answer truthfully a few of my questions, which involve matters of far greater import than mere charlatanism, then my agents gathered here will keep private the revelation and techniques of your fraudulence, thereby allowing your spectacular theatrical to continue, as well as the ‘donations’ you receive from your wealthy, deluded clientele.”