Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Mass”

a theatre piece for singers, players and dancers

•

•

  
I. Devotions Before Mass

The bears were not especially bad in Bosnia that year.

The bears were not especially bad, and if Queen Victoria had had no occasion to remark “We are not amused,” it was almost certainly due to the departure of Mister Gladstone, glumly packing up his papers in the shapeless leather bag that would come to bear his name, making way for the dilettanteish Mister Disraeli, her favorite gossip; and he would have a great many amusing things to say that year.

That year, if one wished to travel to Chittenden, Vermont from New York City—well. Simplicity itself. One first bought a ticket on the New Haven, Hartford, and Springfield Railroad to Springfield, Massachusetts; from there, one took the Connecticut River and Vermont Railroad to Rutland, Vermont. Chittenden was (and for all one knows, still is) some seven miles further, north of Rutland; the brothers Eddy, though, were willing enough—if grudging—to give one a ride in their wagon. All told, the trip would set one back some ten dollars, assuming one paid the Eddys the two dollars necessary to secure said willingness.

Gyorg Herschberg fils wisely saved himself two hundred pennies, though he might, in the end, have proved foolish with his pounds. The Eddys were to be his hosts, after all; one bought more than just a wagon ride with those dollars. But Gyorg spared a glance—for the two dour Vermonter brothers, the dusty, unpainted farm wagon atop which they sat, into which was climbing the enormous, outlandishly dressed woman who’d snored lustily all the way from Springfield, to one side of which stood the older woman who’d sat next to her, staring resolutely out the window—and failed to connect any of it with his altogether... other purpose. Besides: a seven-mile walk, to him, was nothing. October was in the last throes of Indian summer; the sun was high and hot; the road dusty, but invitingly so; he slung his jacket over his shoulder, hefted the sack which held Leaves of Grass and his best shirt—white, though yellowed a bit about the collar—and set out.

Imagine then, his—surprise? discomfiture? befuddlement? He did stop, briefly, upon turning the last corner of the vague trail which petered out some twenty yards below the plain two-storey house, dark grey against the deepening gloom, and an eyebrow was raised, briefly, upon seeing what was unquestionably the same wagon that had been at the train station some two hours before. But his face was otherwise blank—and he may well have been reacting to the house itself: old, unpainted wood worn soft and grey by wind and rain and snow, blank windows tall and narrow, filled up with dying sunlight. Were it not for the addition, this very house might well have been the one, some years later, to inspire Lovecraft to write: “But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods regions; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.”

But Gyorg had little time and no patience for thrills of ghastliness, utterable or not, and he rarely indulged in second thoughts. He came to the end of the vague track; stopped; took in the house, the twilight, the wagon; raised an eyebrow, but to what, we know not; set down his sack, shrugged into his jacket (it was, after all, growing chill); ran his fingers through his wiry black hair; took up his sack again; sallied forth. As he climbed the rise commanded by that ancient, lonely farmhouse, he angled towards one side, and slowly, gradually, the addition hove into view.

Making the upright of a capital letter L to the unpainted, original farmhouse’s base, the addition was also two storeys, but otherwise had nothing in common with its—predecessor? progenitor? mate? It was whitewashed, and candles shone in its windows, which were of a more square and altogether welcoming ratio (“Wholesome,” Lovecraft might say, with a little sigh of disappointment), and one could hear wafting from them the sounds of a roomful of people conversing, as at a party, or the crowded dining room of a boarding house. But the whitewash sat as oddly out of place on the ruthlessly straight boards as the candles did in the windows—like one of those Vermonter farmers dressed in his Sunday best, but still wearing his gumboots; and before he could step inside to join that happy throng, Gyorg first must do battle with an Eddy: Horatio, to be precise, who loomed, Sphinx-like, in the open door.

“Eight ’backs the week,” said Horatio Eddy, by way of greeting.

Gyorg set down his sack and put one hand in his pocket. “I’m only staying the night,” he said.

“Two ’backs, then,” said Horatio. “In advance.”

Gyorg wordlessly handed over the two silver coins his walk had saved. Horatio did not so much welcome him into the house as turn slightly to drop the coins into his own pocket, allowing Gyorg a brief window of opportunity; not one to stand on formalities, Gyorg seized it, squeezing past. As he paused a moment, taking in what was, essentially, the crowded dining room of a singularly peculiar boarding house, Horatio returned, unperturbed, to his post.

It was a long, narrow room, taking up most of the ground floor of the addition. A long narrow table took up in turn most of the room, and the long benches to either side of the table were taken up by twenty-some-odd people, men and women, in a wide though generally affluent variety of appearances. Gyorg noted the outlandishly dressed woman, her bright red shirt as hard to miss as her hair (a tangled mat of curls more blond than not, chopped criminally short) or her eyes (wide and a pale, watery blue that was nonetheless paradoxically piercing, that swept him up and down, his dusty boots, his knee-sprung wool trousers and shapeless wool jacket, his best vest and second-best shirt—blue—his hair, longer than hers but no less tangled, and his eyes, dark and small and framed with sooty, almost girlish lashes, and no less piercing than her own). But she dismissed him almost as quickly as he did her; she turned back to the woman who’d stared so resolutely out the window all the way from Springfield, and was now staring resolutely at the candle flickering on the sill of the window directly across from her; Gyorg, meanwhile, put a hand on the shoulder of the man sitting before him, who looked up, nodded, and scooted over slightly, allowing Gyorg to sit down. A plate was passed; Gyorg scooped onto it some boiled chicken and—after a moment’s hesitation—a spoonful of some dish which seemed comprised of equal parts potato, turnip and milk.

Tucked into the volume of Emerson in the sack that he'd put under the bench between his feet was a letter from Gyorg Herschberg pére. It had arrived two days before, and read, in part:

“Our differences we have had in the past and I do not wish to iterate them now except to say again that what you choose in your supposed wisdom to deny is nothing less than FACT. What I tell you now is not offered up as proof for proof to one such as you is as dry and brittle in the mouth as stale bread. I tell you this because it has been shewn to me by YAH-BUE-KIE as true as a thing that is and will be. Go to the house of the EDDYS which is described I am told in a yellow journal that goes by the name RELIGIO-PHILOSOPHICAL JOURNAL in the 26th Sept. edition. They are apostates who play at summoning the spirits of savages and you will have as little to do with them as is possible. There on the night of 14th October which is not far off will a woman be seeking something she knows not what but hopes to find there as she has not found it in the smokey rooms of spiritualists and mediums and other apostates. She is of a height and I am told pleasing to the eye with yellow hair and green eyes like the sea and her name is ANNALISE. I blush to write what comes next but must be direct as Our Lord’s PLAN depends upon it for you must before the sun rises on the 15th get her with child else all is lost.

“This THING will be done. I pray you will see its necessity. Someday you will understand.”

Gyorg took a bite of chicken, at once dry and mushy, chewed, swallowed. Then Gyorg took a deep breath and looked up.

Across from him sat a woman who was if not his age then perhaps a year or two older. She had blond hair and green eyes and a lovely smile and was, indeed, quite pleasing to look upon.

“Your pardon, miss,” he said, for he knew that the salons of spiritualists and mediums and other apostates inspired a certain laxity of morals, allowed for an otherwise unthinkable directness of approach. “My name is George Herschberg.”

“Annalise,” she said, and her smile became, somehow, lovelier. “Annalise Schuyler.”

A tall man, his narrow face overwhelmed by an heroic beard that spilled halfway down his chest, stood then and rapped his water glass with a knife. “I beg your kind indulgences,” he said, his voice high and reedy, “for I must myself prove so bold as to presume to speak for our hosts, who have retired for the nonce. But there is, traditionally, an intermezzo of one quarter-hour or so following supper, to allow us a chance to, if we like, stroll about the gardens before retiring upstairs. That time is now upon us. I do recommend the stroll; it gives one a chance to take the evening air, to prepare in one’s own way to leave the world of the phenomenal and enter, as we shall, into the sublime.” He beamed down at the outlandishly dressed woman who’d been sitting across from him; she, though, was already getting to her feet, and from the contents of her pudgy hand it appeared her preferred method of preparing to leave the world of the phenomenal involved hand-rolled cigarettes of a powerfully cheap tobacco. Gyorg took a second bite of chicken, wiped his hands surreptitiously on his trousers, and stood.

“You will not finish your meal?” said Annalise’s—Miss Schuyler’s—cousin? maiden aunt? companion? Older, at any rate, and, though pleasing enough in and of herself to look upon, her hair was not golden; her eyes a decidedly more prosaic brown; her face, unlike Annalise’s—Miss Schuyler’s—held within its mien a distinct hint of disapproval.

“I find,” said Gyorg, “I am not hungry. Shall I squire you about the gardens?” A thrum of terror shimmered along his nerves—not, perhaps, entirely unlike that thrill of unutterable ghastliness—and that, along with the general air of incongruity, here in this apostatic salon perched on the rude knees of Vermont’s Green Mountains, had lent him a bravado that did not go unrewarded. Miss Schuyler, despite the moue of suddenly sharpened disapproval that pinched her companion’s lips, bestowed on him another dazzling smile and nestled her small white hand in the crooked arm he proffered. Her eyes, so very green, looked neither up nor down but directly into his own. His heart, in the end, did not stop.

“You will have time for but a mouthful or two of the chicken if you are so inclined,” had continued his father’s letter, “but when she stands do be sure to STAND then as well and to SPEAK. All will follow after that one crucial moment. I am reliably informed that under NO circumstances should you eat of anything else as the EDDYS know less even of the culinary arts than they do of the world BEYOND."

•

The brothers Eddy were descended on their mother’s side from a woman executed in the Salem witch trials of 1692 (whom specifically, we are not told); on their father’s side—well. Their father, himself, was enough. In his efforts to cure them of their childhood fits (what specifically, we are not told, though their arcane nature is strongly hinted at), he would beat them, douse them in boiling water, take up a glowing coal from the grate with a pair of tongs and drop it, smoking, into Horatio’s or William’s palm to be held until they stopped. Whatever it was.

When, in 1847, the Fox sisters of Hydesville, one state over, began to command enormous fees by translating the eerie rapping and tocking sounds made in their presence by (they claimed) the spirits of the dead or (as others claimed) the cracking joints of their preternaturally prehensile toes, Eddy pére saw a main chance, and seized it. Pity poor William and Horatio: urged all their young lives to stop, they were now commanded to start, on demand and in public. Their father’s crude showmanship led to what were for New England dizzying heights of sub-Houdini sadism: bound and gagged, pricked with needles and wires, the boys were nailed into their very own little black coffins live, in person, on stage, all to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the tootling trumpets and tipping tables and jingling bells weren’t being affected by them, in the least. —Until, of course, the bottom fell out of the Spiritualist game, in the tail-end of the ’50s. And yet—but naturally enough—when Death kindly stopped thereabouts for Eddy pére, Eddys fils did the only conceivable, logical thing: they began to build a two-storey addition on the back of the ancestral farmhouse, the ground floor of which to serve as kitchen and dining room capable of feeding up to forty at a time, if not in splendor; the floor above as séance hall—certainly the largest and best appointed to be found for a hundred miles or more. (More. Definitely more.) And yet—in a country devastated by the Crash of ’73, where homeless war veterans (to say nothing of their widows and orphans) were an everyday sight, where the attention of the fickle public had long since turned from the mystical (to what? Well: money woes, the nouveau riche, the Irish, President Grant), and even the most respected figure in American Spiritualism, Andrew Jackson Davis, saw the sales of all 26 volumes of his “Harmonious Philosophy” plummet—despite all this, the Eddys managed a comfortable living for themselves, with nightly showings for as many as forty people at eight dollars a head the week or two dollars the night, and those people came from all over the country: people like Mrs. H.A. Phillips, the famous Michigan medium; Mrs. M.B. Carey, the equally famous medium from Chicago; the music professor Lenzburg, from Hartford, with his wife, a medium not quite so famous; the Spiritualist writer and lecturer James Peebles, perhaps the most famous of them all. And, well, Gyorg Herschberg. And Annalise Schuyler, and her mother’s younger sister (who, to the chagrin of parents and sibling, and admiration of niece, insisted upon the name Teresza Lukaskiewicz, instead of Theresa Lucas; hence, perhaps, her stubborn support for vegetarianism, laborers, dress reform, and the quixotic presidential campaign of Victoria Woodhull; hence also, perhaps, her status as maiden aunt). As well the outlandishly dressed woman in her red shirt, and the tall man with the heroic beard, there beneath the eaves of the Eddy house, where she voraciously smoked one little twisted cigarette after another, as their conversation floated down to Gyorg who, distracted, squired the Misses Schuyler and Lukaskiewicz about the (yes, dusty) expanse of scrubby yellow grass that, one supposes, was intended to serve as the gardens so magnanimously alluded to by the tall man with that oh, so heroic beard.

“How,” Gyorg heard the aforesaid remark to the outlandishly dressed woman, “have you come to find yourself here?”

“Oh,” said she, “I have always being interested in such things. I am reading, you know, of the Eddys in the paper the Daily Graphic, with its pictures, the edition with them in it, oh! Gone from the newsstands in an hour or less. I had to be paying a vendor one whole dollar for his last copy which he wanted to himself.”

Gyorg might have paid more attention to what Miss Lukaskiewicz was saying about Indian spirits had he not seen copies of that very newspaper piled, unsold, at the foot of a newsstand in the new Grand Central Station. (ASTOUNDING WONDERS THAT STAGGER BELIEF had cried—no, shrieked—the headline.)

“Permettez moi, Madame,” the tall man was saying to the outlandishly dressed woman. He appeared to be lighting another cigarette for her.

“Ah,” said she, puffing contentedly. “Parlez-vous Francais?”

“Eh,” said he, “non. That is, I parley Americain; that’s about enough for anyone, don’t you agree?”

“I am speaking seven languages fluently,” said she. “Do you know, I was hesitating before coming here, as I was afraid of meeting that Colonel Olcott, who was writing of the Eddys for that newspaper.”

“Why should you be afraid of him, Madame?”

“Oh! Because I am fearing he will be writing of me in his newspaper!”

“I can assure you, Madame, that he will do no such thing—unless, of course, Madame should wish it.”

“Oh,” said the outlandishly dressed woman, her guileless tone spoilt a tad by the long drag from her smoldering cigarette, “and how can you do any such thing?”

“Why,” said the tall, heroically bearded man, “I myself am that Colonel Olcott.”

“Oh!” cried the outlandishly dressed woman. “I am being undone!” Her delighted tone belied her words.

But— “Don’t you agree, Mister—ah, I’m sorry. I did not catch your name,” Miss Lukaskiewicz was saying, her tone very much suggesting that any young man whose name she had not caught was unacceptable company for her niece.

“Herschberg,” said Gyorg. “George Herschberg. My father founded a town in the state of Minnesota, and had the rather unoriginal notion to name it after himself. Well, us, I suppose. The family.”

“I see,” sniffed Miss Lukaskiewicz; her tone now suggested that a town having been named for one’s family in of all places Minnesota was so commonplace an occurrence that decent people just didn’t bring it up in polite conversation.

“You must,” said Annalise, “forgive my aunt. You see, she doesn’t trust in my angel.”

“Your what?” said Gyorg, perhaps an instant too quickly, a smidgen too loudly.

“Annalise,” said her aunt.

“My angel,” said Annalise—Miss Schuyler, “came to me once in broad daylight when I was seven years old. He told me that he would come again to me to point out the one that I would marry, when I met him. And that until then, no man would dare to harm me. None would ever even dare to speak ill of me!”

“Annalise,” said her aunt.

“It’s true,” said—Miss Schuyler, most—emphatically? resolutely? defiantly? “It was broad daylight, so I know it was not a dream. He spoke most distinctly. Like a trumpet. And you know how little Jimmy Sanford said I was spiteful at my own birthday party and died of the Prussian measles not six months later.”

“Annalise!” said her aunt.

Gyorg’s eyebrow was, again, raised. Perhaps he was contemplating what might become of the Lord’s PLAN were he to excuse himself, politely, from the company of the Misses Schuyler and Lukaskiewicz, hie himself back down the seven rocky, dusty miles to Rutland, there to sleep the night on a bench outside the train station, on the morrow to purchase a ticket to Springfield, thence to purchase a ticket to New York, where he would never again open another envelope addressed in his father’s shaky, spiky hand (to say nothing of what might become of his father, or YAH-BUE-KIE, or Annalise’s—Miss Schuyler’s—angel). Perhaps; we shall never know. Gyorg’s eyebrow was raised; he smiled a small smile and gazed off at a point somewhere between the middle distance and the far horizon, where the stars were beginning to appear. “What,” he said, to Miss Schuyler—no, to Annalise; forever and always, Annalise—“is its name? The angel, I mean.”

Annalise smiled, and her face shone in the lambent admixture of moon- and star- and candlelight. “Menelik,” she said. “His name,” and she squeezed his arm, as Miss Lukaskiewicz looked most discomfited, “is Menelik.”

“Lo,” boomed a sepulchral voice from the doorway; said voice turning out to belong to William Eddy. “Lo,” he boomed again. “For it is time.”

So it was.

•

The hall itself was dark, of course, lit only by a shaded kerosene lamp in the back. A curtained cabinet stood at the front of the hall; the audience, all twenty-some-odd of them, seated themselves on the uncomfortable straight-backed chairs so famously indigenous to the region. One of the Eddys—William (taller; older; less hair, deeper voice)—seated himself upon a chair within the cabinet and pulled the curtain closed.

What happened next is difficult to say. Séances have ever and always been the most subjective of phenomena.

Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, for instance—he of the heroic beard—has much to say of this night in his articles for the Religio-Philosophical Journal and the Daily Graphic, and in his memoirs, Old Diary Leaves and People from the Other World. (For this was the night he met for the first time Helena Petrovna Blavatsky nee von Hahn.) He tells us, for instance, that, when the shadow of a tiny Indian maiden appeared upon the curtain (after some business with faint, otherworldly music; the traditional babble of voices; disembodied hands venturing forth spectrally from the blanketed cabinet—so much more comfortable, it must be supposed, than a tiny black coffin, no matter that its chair was every bit as hard and straight as the audience’s; the brief appearance of the silhouette of a similarly tiny though much older crone who sang, badly, a folk song the title and lyrics of which no one bothered to record), who then proceeded to unbraid her hair and shake it loose across her shoulders—when this happened, the Michigan medium, Mrs. H.A. Phillips, was heard to remark, “Why, it is my Indian spirit guide, dear Awanola,” and the Chicago medium, Mrs. M.B. Carey, said in response, “But I see quite clearly the form of my Indian spirit guide, dear Wassa.” —Well. Who was he to gainsay either of them? Was the world not large and mysterious enough—or, at the very least, was Olcott not generous enough with his credulity—that they might not both be equally correct? Certainly, the room was dark; the silhouette tenuous and difficult to make out. —And when Madame Magnon—she who had stared so resolutely at the landscape which passes between Springfield and Rutland—upon seeing a silhouette which, in profile, was possessed of an aquiline nose, prominent cheekbones, rather hollow cheeks, and a full beard, and upon crying out “It is my father, Zephrin Boudreau! Papa, is it you?” and upon hearing the silhouette squeak “Oui” by way of answer, began speaking to it in French (naturally enough, for her papa had been Canadian)—ought Colonel Olcott have become suspicious when the silhouette responded only with a singularly inarticulate sequence of raps and knockings before dissolving into the shadows, to return as a spectrally generic, vaguely female form, holding a shapeless bundle immediately identified by the distraught Mrs. Dunbar as “Oh! My baby! My Charlie!” —Is not Death fickle, and might not spirits in death be as fickle, themselves? Or at least have great difficulty in piercing the fickle medium between us?

And as for the next silhouette, of whom Olcott is able with great confidence to say:

“He was a person of middle height, well-shaped, dressed in a Georgian (Caucasian) jacket, with loose sleeves and long pointed oversleeves, an outer long coat, baggy trousers, leggings of yellow leather, and white skull-cap, or fez, with tassel.”

It is, perhaps, uncharitable to distrust his account solely because he is able to provide so much colorful detail regarding what was, essentially, a silhouette cast by the dim and smoky light of a kerosene lantern against an old and musty curtain (a blanket, really, which would later that night take up its former occupation, covering the Eddy brothers on the narrow bed they shared). —Yes, it is indeed possible that his famously suggestible nature carried itself on something of a flight of fancy; it is also possible that the colorful details of Georgian (Caucasian) dress were filled in for him later, by Helena Blavatsky—to whom this shadowy figure was well known.

Ah. And what of her? (For the outlandishly dressed woman who smoked so many cigarettes was, indeed, she.) Is it not a tribute to her powers as a medium that upon her very first visit to the brothers Eddy, William conjured forth from the Beyond a form she readily identified as Michalko Guegidze, a servant of her aunt, Katherine Witte, knowing it was he by the long and pointed oversleeves, the baggy trousers, the skull-cap, or fez? Is it not impressive, when William had finished projecting shadows on his curtain, and Horatio adjusted the wick on the kerosene lantern so that it burned more brightly, to take his turn a-séancing in the open, with hands looming out of the shadows all about him, that one of those hands scratched out Helena’s name on a calling card in passable Cyrillic; another had wrapped about it (in the manner of Georgian peasants, as she so helpfully pointed out) a string of amber beads she recognized as having belonged to the aforementioned Michalko?

But—

Is this what happened?

Oh, one should not dispute whether shadows actually appeared, whether those assembled really saw hands cavort, heard beyond a doubt squeaked French affirmatives and faint raps on wood, if the oversleeves were indeed long and pointed, the trousers baggy, the beads amber. Faint, otherworldly music was heard; voices did babble a faint if passably traditional glossolaly; disembodied hands were seen peeping forth from the darkness surrounding the cabinet; a high-pitched and wavering voice indeed sang a folk song, and sang it badly; a small and feminine shadow was seen to unbraid its hair. Too many people were present, who later wrote down, here and there, what it was they saw, and heard, for these basic facts to be disputed.

But who—or what—stood between the kerosene lamp and the curtain? What—or who—cast the shadow? Was it the immaterial spirit of Awanola, late of Michigan’s spirit realms? Was it Wassa, having just manifested from Chicago, her ectoplasm quite tired indeed?

Or—

Was it the decidedly material form of William Eddy?

Perhaps he knelt a moment, after warbling some half-remembered folk ditty, and, safely out of that small area where the lantern would throw his shadow crisply against the blanket, swiftly shucked the shawl he’d used to round his shoulders, pulling his tall and lanky form into a stooped pose suggestive of old, of withered, of crone, and with one hand he’d set that shawl to one side (where it could quickly be grasped if needed, wadded into swaddling and held to suggest infant—in those days, with a room so full of women as that, there was bound to be someone who’d miscarried, who’d seen an infant die too, too soon, who’d cry out, “My baby!” to divert the others from, say, a séanceur who, in the end, spoke no more French than “Oui”), while with the other hand he’d plucked from the wooden crate (nailed together by their father from scraps of the lumber that had furnished their black, boy-sized coffins) a wig already braided into two long pigtails to set upon his head (and as he crouched and did these things, his shadow leaped and fluttered against the blanket, a confusing, flickering welter of darkness and light that caused Olcott to gasp audibly, already unnerved by the eerie sing-song voice he’d quite distinctly heard from Beyond)—and, having knelt and prepared himself, having taken a deep breath, perhaps he then stood slowly, coming back into the focus of the lantern’s rays, his shadow coalescing into a slight, small form, wavering in the uncertain light (and how did tall William Eddy manage the trick of seeming small? Well, he stood edge-on, to seem thinner, more indistinct. And it was, after all, the shadow of an Indian maid, was it not? And Indian maids, as we all well know, are small. —Quod erat demonstrandum), whose long hair was gathered into two pigtails which, with clumsy though practiced fingers, he began to unbraid...

Eager to impress the others, Mrs. H.A. Phillips said, “Why, it is my Indian spirit guide, dear Awanola.” (She might have paid the brothers a small sum of money to ensure an Indian maid would appear, though a true cynic would not think so; Indian spirits, after all, were, in those days, standard members of the medium’s repertory.)

Not to be outdone, Mrs. M.B. Carey said (glaring at Mrs. Phillips, perhaps: think of the long train ride from Chicago, the indignity of the creaking wagon ride through a dusty Vermont Indian summer, the awful food, all endured only to hear that harridan pipe up first), “But I see quite clearly the form of my Indian spirit guide, dear Wassa.” (Perhaps she resolved to seek a refund of the money she had paid the Eddys. If so, William—for he handled all pecuniary negotiations—would grunt. “Not our fault,” he might add, if pressed.)

What, then, of Madame Blavatsky, and the shadow of her aunt’s servant? —For Georgian peasants were as rare a presence in the séance halls of 1874 as they are today.

Well.

She did bring an inordinate amount of luggage for one as slovenly and careless in appearance as she. Someone of an uncharitable nature could certainly have found room, among the welter of old and musky shirts, scarves and skirts and stockings all entangled, the unwashed underthings, papers and books and parts of books, rolling papers and sacks of tobacco and the small, oily brick of hasish—room enough to bring along a pair of baggy trousers, a jacket with loose sleeves and long, pointed oversleeves, a long coat, leggings of yellow leather. Though even that is not necessary, as Olcott’s testimony shows: “white skull-cap, or fez, with tassel.” Such uncertainty over a basic detail—skull-cap? or fez, with tassel?—bespeaks a certain uncertainty about the entire figure, which was, we must remember, nothing more than a shadow cast upon a blanket. Surely the details of customary Georgian (Caucasian) costume could have been filled in, glossed over, smoothed out by the enormous charm of Madame Blavatsky—much as the colors seem to have been. Our hypothetical cynic needs only find room enough for a small string of amber beads and a card with a name scratched on it in Cyrillic, time enough to show William how to wrap those beads about his wrist in the fashion of a Georgian peasant, skill enough to slip the pre-written card in amongst the others by sleight-of-hand, and money enough—say, twenty dollars—an expense Madame Blavatsky considered eminently worthwhile, considering the fame she would garner that night, with the respectable Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, author of numerous articles on American Spiritualism for the likes of the Daily Graphic and the Religio-Philosophical Journal, in her audience. —To say nothing of Mrs. H.A. Phillips, Mrs. M.B. Carey, the unnamed wife of the music professor, Lenzburg, the august James Peebles.

What happened next, then, is, as we have seen, difficult to say. Not even the application of Ockham’s venerable razor might help us here, for deciding the simpler of these two possibilities (and these are far from the only two possibilities) is an entirely subjective task. “When you have eliminated the impossible,” says Conan Doyle, through the mouth of his immortal character, Sherlock Holmes, “whatever is left, no matter how improbable, is the truth.” Which is fine, as far as it goes: But what is impossible? What improbable? —Doyle himself, after all, believed in spirits, and fairy photographs.

Séances, then, have ever and always been the most subjective of phenomena, but there is one thing we can say for certain, about this séance, held the night of Wednesday 14 October, 1874, in the upstairs hall of the addition built by the brothers Eddy behind their ancestral farmhouse:

It is singularly remarkable that, in all that has been written, of this night in particular and of the Eddys, of Olcott, of Blavatsky and American Spiritualism in general; by Olcott himself, by Madame Blavatsky, by James Peebles and even by the music professor, Lenzburg, whose diaries touch upon these subjects, most frequently in the context of his wife—nowhere at all in any of this does anyone who was there that night have anything to say about what Gyorg Herschberg, fils, saw. And heard.

•

The hall itself was dark, of course, lit only by a shaded kerosene lamp in the back. Gyorg, still feeling a bit—detached? unmoored? numb? He felt as if he were floating into the room on feet too far away to take notice of; when he sat on one of the hard, straight chairs arranged in ragged rows before the cabinet which stood, ominously, at the front of the hall, he scarcely felt how stiff and mean and unforgiving it was, and did not register Miss Lukaskiewicz’s murmured disapproval. “Surely,” she said, and she was not alone in thinking or even vocalizing this sentiment, “surely there could be cushions, somewhere..?”

Annalise had not let go of his arm.

Gyorg was not wholly ignorant of the mechanical nature of what, presumably, he might well be engaged in, with her, at some point in the next ten to twelve hours. But. It is one thing seemingly to wander with one’s older, wiser friend off the street into a tobacconist’s; to gaze distractedly at the half-empty box of Virginian panatelas which seemed to be the only actual item made of tobacco for sale on the otherwise empty, dusty shelves, while Isaiah (one’s older, wiser friend) murmured a few words to the matronly shopgirl, making it quite clear that he and his companion were seeking merchandise not currently displayed but nonetheless (he was given to understand) on the premises—perhaps, in a back room? and to be taken, with a gleeful grin on Isaiah’s part, an indulgent smile on the shopgirl’s, into that back room, there to—well. The point has been made. —It is another thing entirely to feel Annalise’s hand on his arm, as if he had spilled champagne there and through some obscure chemical process the alcohol were seeping into his blood­stream directly through his skin; to look into her startlingly green eyes gazing coolly, levelly into his own; to suddenly imagine those eyes beneath him, squeezing shut, as he—as she—as they—

Well.

Knowing that his father knew—had caused it to come to pass—that Yah-Buh-Kie had spoken of it; that it was part of the plans of a Lord he’d sworn never to trust again—that all he had to do to stop it was murmur a few words to her, excusing himself, get up, walk down the stairs, out the door, away—and yet, that he was not doing this; he was sitting next to her, not moving, barely breathing as William Eddy bowed stiffly to them all and took his seat within the cabinet, reaching up to pull with an impatient jerk the curtain closed—none of this made any of it easier, at all.

Not that he would ever have thought it would. If ever he could himself have imagined such a turn of events. Somewhere, far away, a flute began to tootle weirdly, mindlessly. He thought of an æolian harp; of an idiot with an ocarina. He wondered, almost idly, if Peytr would appear.

Perhaps— If he were to sit next to her, and smile when he ought to smile, and at the end of the séance, if he were to go down the hall to the room he would share with Mr. Peebles and the bookkeeper from Brooklyn, there to crawl into bed between them and to sleep, untroubled by dreams... He would have done everything expected of him: stood when she had stood, spoken when it was required. If this—thing—did not come to pass, it would not be because he had not done what he had explicitly been told to do.

Or— Was it even now too late? Would it all nonetheless “follow after,” do—or do not—what he, himself, might?

Had he so little control over himself? his actions? his very person?

Annalise—who was made bold, and smiled at him, and pressed her hand against his arm, despite her companion’s disapproval, solely because she believed her angel, and knew he would never hurt her, or even speak ill of her—Annalise leaned close, so close he could hear the small wet sound her lips made as they parted to whisper in his ear: “Look.”

A lamp somewhere within or behind the cabinet had been lit, throwing a confusing flutter of shadows against the curtain, and somehow making the darkness around it deeper and blacker. From that darkness waved hands—here, there, yonder—that seemed rather more physical than not; Gyorg’s eye was bedeviled by the sudden gleam of lantern-light on a fingernail. Did spirits have fingernails? —But Annalise meant, Look at the shadows—for it was quite clear that someone, not William, was standing in the cabinet now: short, hunched, old, somehow female (did shadows, he thought to himself, giddily, have—well, were they female? or male? necessarily?). The mad tootling had leveled out into a single thin, thready note, held much longer than anyone human could manage, and over that whining drone a high-pitched, wavering voice was singing a song Gyorg thought he recognized, though it was hard to make out the words—but it couldn’t possibly be what he thought it was. Could it?

Curieux scrutateur de la nature entiére,
J’ay connu du grand tout le principe et la fin.
J’ay vu l’or en puissance au fond de sa miniére,
J’ay saisi sa mantiére et supris son levain...

No. He shook his head. The shadows were wrong. There were too many shadows. It couldn’t possibly be.

J’expliquay par quel art l’Ċme aux flancs d’une mére,
Fait sa maison, l’emporte, et comment un pépin
Mis contre un grain de blé, sous l’humide poussiére,
L’un plante et l’autre cep, sont le pain et le vin.

There were too many shadows, and they flickered, in the corners of his eyes. He swallowed. His mouth was full of saliva, and it was bitter. “Come on,” Peytr had said, taking him by the hand. “It’s true. They come when we aren’t looking.”

Rien n’était, Dieu voulut, rien devint quelque chose,
J’en doutais, je cherchay sur quoi l’universe pose,
Rien gardait l’equilibre et servait de soutien...

There were too many shadows. A wave of—light? darkness?—passed across his vision. And again. Rippling. As if—as if something—

Lips, parted wetly; a word, breathed into his ear: #&8220;Look...” Look at me, she meant, now. He did not. He would not. The shadows—the shadows within the cabinet, the ones that had coalesced however briefly into the form of a withered old crone, had fallen apart, lost their shape with a suddenness that made the tall man with the heroic beard gasp, and the tootling had died away, but still, still the voice was singing, it would not stop until it was finished—

Enfin, avec les poids de l’éloge et du blĊme,
Je pesay l’éternel, il appela mon Ċme,
Je mourus, j’adoray je ne savais plus rien...

His arm was numb. No, not numb: full of needles, shards of glass; it burned, it shivered. The ripple passed across his vision again, and again, almost palpable, a physical deformation of his eyeballs, bulging and squeezing back into his skull, a ripple he could feel in his forehead, his temples, his cheeks—as if—

“They come when we aren’t looking,” Peytr had said, taking him by the hand and leading him out the back door and down the hill towards the springhouse. “I saw them yesterday, and papa’s in there today—”

He had not asked the obvious question.

—What do they do if we look?

Light, and shadow. Ripple. Flicker. Flutter. Something was forming in the heart of all that chiaroscuro, something boiling up out of the shadows—as if—

Ripple, and flutter—

—as if great wings were beating—

“Why,” said one of the women to his left, “it is my Indian spirit guide, dear Awanola.”

Merciful Christ, thought Gyorg. That’s your spirit guide?

—For he had looked, and still, it had come.

It opened its mouth from which poured a blazing white light like pure and elemental fire and in the voice which had sung that blasphemous, alchemical sonnet it began to murmur—

“...early spring warm and sultry glowed the afternoon the very breezes seemed to share the delicious langour of universal nature are laden the various and mingled perfumes of the rose and the jessamine the woodbine and its wildflower...”

—Annalise, it also said, somehow at the same time, the name coalescing out of the flow of almost-nonsense that tumbled from its lips.

“...they slowly wafted their fragrant offering to the open window where sat the lovers the ardent sun shoot fell upon her blushing face and its gentle beauty was more like the creation of romance...”

—Annalise: I promised, and I deliver upon that promise. I spoke, and I bear out the truth of my words. I am come as it was foretold.

Peytr had not let go of Gyorg’s hand, even as he had insisted on being the first to climb up on the crate to peer in through the high and narrow window to see. He had taken in a deep breath. And when his hand turned cold in Gyorg’s grasp—so cold—it was so sudden that Gyorg had not realized, had not understood, had not let go, and so when Peytr’s hand tore free from Gyorg’s, it peeled away rough patches of skin where his flesh had frozen to his brother’s, as he tumbled from his perch and fell to lie there, in the dust—cold? dead?

Dead?

“...or the fair inspiration of a dream than the actual reality on earth tenderly her lover gazed upon her as the clusterous ringlets were edged by amorous and sportive zephyrs and when he perceived the rude intrusion...”

—Annalise, hear me well, for I speak, and my words are true: he is the one promised to you.

Gyorg goggled. His hand—his arm—

He could hear her smile—

“...of the sunlight he sprang to draw the curtain but softly she stayed him no no dear Charles she softly said much rather yould I have a little sun than no air at all...”

—Annalise, I am Menelik, and I have spoken. My words are true. Heed them, and—

She squeezed his arm—

“But,” said someone loudly, “I see quite clearly the form of my Indian spirit guide, dear Wassa.”

And indeed, there was quite clearly, quite distinctly on the curtain printed the shadow of a small and lissome Indian maid, loosening her hair, flinging it back from her shoulders.

—heed them, breathed something unseen in his ear, heed them and be well...

Gyorg then turned to look at Annalise.

She, in turn, had turned to look at him.

Had anyone else been paying attention at that moment, they might then have witnessed a most indecorous kiss; they might, even, have seen Gyorg’s eyes widen in surprise, as Annalise’s tongue licked quickly across his lips, just as had done the girl’s, in the back room of the tobacconist’s. But all of them, even Miss Lukaskiewicz, were watching, intently, as the shadow of an old man appeared in the cabinet.

“Papa! Is it you?” cried someone, as Gyorg pressed close to Annalise, to kiss her, again.

“Oui,” squeaked the shadow.

•

In the (roughly) nine months they would have together, Gyorg never mentioned to Annalise the letter his father had sent.

•

Much (much) later, when he had returned to the town that bore his family’s name—and more importantly, when he said “Gyorg” to those who asked him who he was, and not “George”—Gyorg would go to his father’s house one afternoon and sit on the steps which led down from the back door to the path that meandered up the hill to the springhouse; off to the left, below the oak heavy with summer leaves, dark and green, he could see the small stones that marked the graves of his mother, his uncle, his sisters and his brother.

Gyorg pére would sit next to him, the massive family Bible on his skinny knees.

“I,” said Gyorg fils, and then he stopped.

“You must look,” said Gyorg. He unlocked and opened the Bible, and there, on the inside of the front board, and spread along the flyleaf, the frontispiece, crammed into the margins of this page, of that, covering the end papers, in a shaky, spiky hand, it was all written out—all of it—

“You must look,” said Gyorg, and Gyorg looked. There, near where Peytr’s life was snipped off, below that and beneath his own name, his name and Annalise’s, was written the name of his—their—daughter: Wentschuer. Gyorg looked, and read what was written there.

“She will never return,” said Gyorg, his voice old, and broken. “But her children—the children of her children’s children—they will. Look...”

“Is it,” said Gyorg fils, and then he took a deep breath, and began again. “Was it necessary? All of it? Any of it?”

Gyorg pére nodded. “It was,” he said. “It is. All of it.”

He closed the Bible and set it to one side.

•

As for the bears, well. That’s another story.

•

(continued)

•

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