“ Mors: means ‘dies’ in French, doesn’t it?” someone behind Serge mumbles.
“Is that right?” Audrey whispers in his ear.
Serge, veins still tingling, shakes his head. “Dies” is meurt. Mors is “bit.” He thinks of the birds in the woods after he was shot down: the grey, fleshy crumbs they all had in their beaks. Miss Dobai’s hand twitches back into action and traces an E.
“Was he a telegraphist?” someone calls out.
His question goes unanswered as the hand sketches two more letters, an N and a T
“Tilly,” the secretary says, “I’ve got MORSENT. Do you mean that more men were sent to rescue him, when he was choking?”
Her last few words are drowned out by the gasps of another couple, two of the people who stood up when Miss Dobai first started talking about photos.
“It’s us!” they shout. “Morsent’s our name. The photograph arrived last week!”
Tilly’s voice breaks out of Miss Dobai’s mouth again:
“Photo-graph, that’s it. He’s in the front row, in front of the stick-man: Raifle.”
“Oh, Matthew: it’s our Ralph!” the woman shrills, hugging her husband. She pronounces it “Rafe.” “It’s true: there’s a man with a walking stick behind him in the photo!” she adds, for the enlightenment of others in the audience. Addressing herself first to Miss Dobai, then, shifting her aim slightly, to the air above her, she continues: “Ralph! Are you okay now?”
“Oh, Raifle’s happy as a boy can be,” Tilly responds. “He has a house, all built of bricks, and there are trees and flowers, and the ground is solid, not all mud. He’s met a girl.”
“A girl?” the mother asks. “What girl?”
“Ralph wasn’t very polite to her when he first came over,” Tilly says, giggling. “He didn’t expect a grown-up sister here. He asked me: am I a little brother, or is she my little sister? She calls me her big brother, but she’s like little sister. What’s that, Yafe? You can’t have two. Now Tilly doesn’t understand.”
“Can you ask him-” the father now assumes the role of questioner-“if he’s still missing any parts?”
Miss Dobai’s head bobs around a little, as though looking Ralph up and down. “Has he got legs and a head?” Tilly asks, answering almost immediately: “Oh yessie-yes! And ears, and eyelashes and eyebrows, all just like before; mouth and tongue too. It all got rear, rear, sembled.”
“And his house?” the father pursues his line of enquiry. “If it’s built of bricks, then what are the bricks built of?”
“Emma,” Tilly begins. “Emma…”
“Is there someone else with you?” the secretary interjects.
“Emma-nations,” Tilly finishes the word with difficulty. “Raifle says things rise up, atoms rising, and consol, consolidate when they get up here. We collect them, and make them solid again. There’s always something rising from your plane; when it comes through the aether, other qualities gather round each atom, and our people manor-factor solid things from it.”
A man to the hall’s left stands up now:
“I have a question,” he says. “If you need the atoms of living things to reconstitute them, why do those things not disappear from our world?”
“Oh, your world sheds bulk,” Tilly responds. “You’re losing weight right now, so that I and the others may borrow it in order to become present to you.”
People in the audience look down at their bodies. Serge raises his back, to see if it feels lighter. Oddly enough, it does. Tilly continues:
“And think of all the things that die, and decay: they’re not lost. They may form dust or manure for a while, but that gives off an essence or a gas, which ascends in the form of what you call a ‘smell.’ All dead things have a smell. That’s what we use to produce duplicates of the forms they had before they were a smell. So decayed flowers make new flowers; rotting wool makes tweeds; dung makes food…”
Throughout this little lecture Tilly’s register and tone have both become elevated, like so many atoms, gathering scientific gravitas. She catches herself now and, giggling once more, says:
“Yes, all right, Yafe: Tilly will go back now. Table-talkie can take over. She’ll have sweets, because she did, and she said she could if she did.”
The static hissing rushes through Miss Dobai’s lips again; then the lids slide down over her rolled-up eyeballs, and she slumps back in her chair and stays there, seemingly unconscious. The audience remain completely still, waiting to see what will happen next. It’s the master of ceremonies who makes the first move. Rising from his own chair, he addresses them:
“My friends, these channellings have quite exhausted Miss Dobai. Nonetheless, her comatose state indicates that she is still receiving. With your help, we shall, as the control suggested, move on to the table-tilting method.”
He strides across the stage towards the large round table, behind which Miss Dobai sits collapsed and, laying his hand upon its surface, continues:
“First, to dispel any suspicions that the table is mechanically controlled, I would request that a member of the audience, a gentleman rather than lady, step onto the stage and help me lift it.”
There’s a pause; then a man near the front rises from his chair, mounts the stage and, grabbing the table top’s rim while the master of ceremonies clasps the thick stem-leg, helps him raise the whole thing from the floor. The two of them then walk the table round the stage.
“As you can see,” the master of ceremonies says to the audience, his voice a little strained by the exertion, “no strings or wires or any other mechanism connect this object to a point from which lever or switch might influence its movement.”
He motions to his volunteer to set the table down again, in its original spot. When they’ve done this, but before the volunteer has left the stage, he tells him: “Stay here, sir, if you will-just here, beside the blackboard.” He positions him accordingly, between the table and his own spot at stage right, in front of the easel-mounted board, before continuing: “And if a second volunteer would be so kind as to make him- or herself available…”
Two people rise from chairs: one male, one female.
“We will use the lady,” the master of ceremonies says. “Your task, madam,” he continues as he leads her by the hand onto the stage and places her beside the secretary, “will be to call out, slowly and clearly, all the letters of the alphabet, in the correct sequence. Should the table respond at any point during your recitation, you shall pause; the gentleman shall mark down the letter you’ve just called out; then you shall recommence pronouncing all the letters, beginning once more with A. Have I made the procedure clear to both of you?”
Both gentleman and lady nod. The master of ceremonies moves back to his spot at stage right, casts a glance across the now quite populated stage-the blackboard-staffing gentleman with chalk in hand, the soporific medium behind her table, the mousey secretary at her desk and the nervous lady standing beside her-and, satisfied, instructs the lady to begin. Blushing, she calls out:
“A, B, C, D, E, F, G…”
Serge shifts his gaze back and forth between the table and Miss Dobai. Both seem perfectly inanimate. The nervous lady moves on through the alphabet’s middle stretch:
“L, M, N, O, P, Q…”
Still nothing’s happening. When she pronounces Y though, the table top dips-unmistakeably, a clear forward tilt towards the audience, who gasp in amazement.
“Mark it down,” the master of ceremonies instructs the man at the blackboard. He does so, drawing a Y in its upper left corner. The table top tilts back until it’s even again.
“How can it do that?” Serge asks. The tingling in his blood is growing stronger. It’s not a sensation he’s experienced before; nor is it pleasant: it’s a bad type of tingling, as though he’d been injected with a mixture that was somehow not quite right.