exchange of sorts. Tears streamed down the woman’s face. This was not an act. Not for her.
The child vanished, others took her place; some found no recognition in the watchers and were elbowed aside by clamouring rivals; behind the veil Sophia’s face contorted further and it seemed to Conan Doyle as if these sounds were being wrenched out of her, as if she was giving birth.
Birth of any kind is a painful proposition. He had witnessed such with women as part of his studies and found it a terrifying process; indeed he was anything but sure whether men, medical or not, should be anywhere near the event. It was a dark and bloody passage.
He would write about it someday.
At times Sophia was like an animal growling; guttural, then yelping as if chased by the very hounds of Hell, then through the gibberish a sudden clarity as if a curtain had parted. A man’s voice sounded; his wife was not to concern herself, she was to marry again and live a happy life. He had died at sea when the ship went down.
An old woman closed her eyes and smiled bitterly to herself. Fine advice, my buckie , but a wee bit on the late side.
These were not necessarily happy visitations but as full of ambiguity and sorrow as life itself.
Which made them all the more real.
The force field inside the small room was charged with a raw intensity beyond the meagre experience of the diminished reality doled out to us as life.
The atmosphere was thick with untold stories and no-one dared meet another’s eye lest they see the naked emotion of a heart stricken with regrets.
For do not we all hide these feelings as if they were unwanted children, pale ghosts that follow us through existence?
Even Robert Roach had a momentary fear that he might hear his father’s admonishing tones cataloguing the many parental disappointments in an ungainly son, but the lieutenant pulled himself together and awkwardly attempted to calm his wife who was fluttering like moth to candle as she waited to recognise a dead ancestor that had departed with no warning and might return in the same fashion.
Her family specialised in sudden death.
As Roach searched in the little chamber of his emotions for a rarely expressed affection that might assuage his wife’s palpitations, another disbelieving member of the audience received a lightning bolt of sorts.
His name was Gilbert Morrison, one of two brothers in the shipping business. A dry stick with a cruel streak, it was an accident of sorts that he had found himself in these quarters.
Accidents do happen.
He had been walking along George Street when struck by a poster outside the hall that housed the Spiritualist Society.
An image of Sophia Adler met his narrow gaze, with fulsome tribute in words below as to her abilities in the realm of cryptaesthesia. Her face was partly in shadow, the eyes hidden, but it had a susceptible, waiflike air that provoked a whiplash sentiment in Mister Morrison normally expressed in very different surroundings.
On an impulse, Gilbert, this rare occasion, let his darker compulsion influence the public persona.
Fate works that way sometimes.
Yet before that he was intercepted, as all the attendance including an irritated Roach had been, by a gaunt figure with long white hair who stood at the entrance of the hall with a placard raised high.
The message was succinct enough. This is against God!
The man’s name was Jupiter Carlisle. He was to be found in front of most theatres in Edinburgh most nights railing against the sins of the flesh as depicted by lewd actresses and seemed to have transferred his implacable hatred of evil over to mesmerism for this evening.
Jupiter was haggard with rectitude and fixed Gilbert with pale blue, washed-out eyes gleaming with a zealot’s fire. There was an unhinged quality to the man, and though he was mocked and reviled by the very folk he sought to save from sin, he inspired a strange trepidation. No-one wanted him too close lest lunacy contaminate.
The
The child vanished, others took her place; some found no recognition in the watchers and were elbowed aside by clamouring rivals; behind the veil Sophia’s face contorted further and it seemed to Conan Doyle as if these sounds were being wrenched out of her, as if she was giving birth.
Birth of any kind is a painful proposition. He had witnessed such with women as part of his studies and found it a terrifying process; indeed he was anything but sure whether men, medical or not, should be anywhere near the event. It was a dark and bloody passage.
He would write about it someday.
At times Sophia was like an animal growling; guttural, then yelping as if chased by the very hounds of Hell, then through the gibberish a sudden clarity as if a curtain had parted. A man’s voice sounded; his wife was not to concern herself, she was to marry again and live a happy life. He had died at sea when the ship went down.
An old woman closed her eyes and smiled bitterly to herself. Fine advice, my buckie , but a wee bit on the late side.
These were not necessarily happy visitations but as full of ambiguity and sorrow as life itself.
Which made them all the more real.
The force field inside the small room was charged with a raw intensity beyond the meagre experience of the diminished reality doled out to us as life.
The atmosphere was thick with untold stories and no-one dared meet another’s eye lest they see the naked emotion of a heart stricken with regrets.
For do not we all hide these feelings as if they were unwanted children, pale ghosts that follow us through existence?
Even Robert Roach had a momentary fear that he might hear his father’s admonishing tones cataloguing the many parental disappointments in an ungainly son, but the lieutenant pulled himself together and awkwardly attempted to calm his wife who was fluttering like moth to candle as she waited to recognise a dead ancestor that had departed with no warning and might return in the same fashion.
Her family specialised in sudden death.
As Roach searched in the little chamber of his emotions for a rarely expressed affection that might assuage his wife’s palpitations, another disbelieving member of the audience received a lightning bolt of sorts.
His name was Gilbert Morrison, one of two brothers in the shipping business. A dry stick with a cruel streak, it was an accident of sorts that he had found himself in these quarters.
Accidents do happen.
He had been walking along George Street when struck by a poster outside the hall that housed the Spiritualist Society.
An image of Sophia Adler met his narrow gaze, with fulsome tribute in words below as to her abilities in the realm of cryptaesthesia. Her face was partly in shadow, the eyes hidden, but it had a susceptible, waiflike air that provoked a whiplash sentiment in Mister Morrison normally expressed in very different surroundings.
On an impulse, Gilbert, this rare occasion, let his darker compulsion influence the public persona.
Fate works that way sometimes.
Yet before that he was intercepted, as all the attendance including an irritated Roach had been, by a gaunt figure with long white hair who stood at the entrance of the hall with a placard raised high.
The message was succinct enough. This is against God!
The man’s name was Jupiter Carlisle. He was to be found in front of most theatres in Edinburgh most nights railing against the sins of the flesh as depicted by lewd actresses and seemed to have transferred his implacable hatred of evil over to mesmerism for this evening.
Jupiter was haggard with rectitude and fixed Gilbert with pale blue, washed-out eyes gleaming with a zealot’s fire. There was an unhinged quality to the man, and though he was mocked and reviled by the very folk he sought to save from sin, he inspired a strange trepidation. No-one wanted him too close lest lunacy contaminate.
The
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