The Movement's stated objective: Confirm the existence of realms of being beyond the physical, by direct communication with the spirit world through mediums—also known as sensitives—individuals attuned to the higher frequencies of noncorporeal life. Having discovered and developed this ability, the medium invariably struck up a "relationship" with a spirit guide, who served as interlocutor of a cosmic lost and found: Since most of the medium's supplicants were survivors of some recent death, they aspired to little more than reassurance that their dearly departed had arrived intact on the far side of the Styx. It was the spirit guide's task to authenticate the contact by retrieving proof from Aunt Minnie or Brother Bill, usually in the form of some hermetically private anecdote shared exclusively by both bereaved and lamented.
In response to these simple inquiries, information flowed from the spirit through rapping, a series of knocks on tables. More accomplished mediums entered a trance during which the spirit guide "borrowed" the host's vocal cords, assuming the voice of the loved one with startling accuracy. A few manifested an infinitely rarer talent: producing large volumes of milky, malleable vapor from their skin, mouth, or nose, a substance with all the appearance but none of the properties of smoke: It did not disperse or react to atmospheric conditions, behaving rather as a three-dimensional tabula rasa able to assume the shape of any idea or entity. It was one thing to
hear Aunt Minnie knock on the table, quite another to see her take shape before one's eyes in a cloud of clotted, autonomous fog. This strange stuff was called ectoplasm. It was photographed on countless occasions. No adequate debunking for it emerged.
Beyond the hordes of the grieving and confused, two other, smaller subsets consistently sought out the services of the mediumistically inclined. Motivated by similar impulses— albeit with diametrically opposed ends in mind—they divided along an obvious line of demarcation; seekers of light and worshipers of darkness. Doyle, for example, was driven by a conviction that if one could pierce the appropriate sphere of knowledge, the eternal mysteries of health and disease would fall within our reach. He researched the exhaustively documented case of one Andrew Jackson Davis, an illiterate American born in 1826, who while still an adolescent discovered an ability to diagnose illness through the use of his spirit eyes, perceiving the human body as transparent and the now visible organs as centers of light and color, the hues and gradations of which corresponded to their well-being or lack thereof. In this talent, thought Doyle, one could glimpse the once and future genius of medicine.
Worshipers of darkness, on the other hand, were striving to unlock the secrets of the ages for their own exclusive benefit, as in: Imagine the pioneers of electromagnetism deciding to keep that discovery to themselves. Regrettably, as Doyle was about to discover, this group was considerably more unified than their opposite number, and they had traveled a good deal closer to achieving their objective.
On this same night, at that same moment, less than a mile from the events about to unfold at 13 Cheshire, a poor and wretched streetwalker stumbled out of a pub in Mitre Square. Boxing Day had been a bust; what few coins she'd collected for services rendered had been quickly spent attempting to quench her unquenchable thirst.
Her livelihood depended on the urgency induced by cheap-jack gin in unfortunates like herself for the meager dollop of human comfort afforded by three minutes of intercourse in alleyways redolent of rubbish and raw sewage. Her looks were
long gone. She was indistinguishable from the countless others in her trade teeming through London's lowlife.
Her life began in some rural Arcadia where she was once her parents' joy, the prettiest girl in the village. Did her eyes sparkle, her skin aglow with health, when she opened her legs to the passing swain who planted the glamour of the city in her head? Had she arrived with hope intact? Did her sweet dreams of happiness die slowly as the liquor devoured her cells, or did a single catastrophic heartbreak snap her will like a clay pipe?
Cold bit through her decomposing coat. She thought dimly of families glimpsed through frosted windows eating Christmas dinner. It could have been an actual memory or a woodcut on a half-forgotten greeting card. The image fell away, replaced by thoughts of the squalid room across the river that she shared with three other women. The idea of sleep and the paltry comforts of that room animated her; her legs lurched numbly forward, and in that diminished state she decided that once across the river she would use the shortcut to Aldgate that crossed the abandoned lot near Commercial Street.
chapter three A TRUE FACE
LADY Nicholson spotted Doyle first, framed in the open doorway. He saw recognition, a rapidly rising blush of relief, instantly dampened to ward off discovery. A nimble mind, he concluded, slightly preceded by the thought, Here is the most beautiful face I have ever seen.
The table was round, covered in pale linen, in the center of the shadowy room. Light pooled from two candelabra flanking the table east and west, walls falling away into darkness. The cloying musk of patchouli hung heavily in the air, along with a dry crack of static electricity. As his pupils dilated, against a backdrop of dense brocaded tapestries suspended in the air, Doyle could make out six figures seated at the table, holding hands; to Lady Nicholson's right was her brother, the pregnant serving girl to his right hand, then the man Doyle identified as her husband, to his right the dark man from the window, and finally the medium, whose right hand held Lady Nicholson's left. Mediums borrowed most of their theatrics direct from the standard liturgical repertoire: smoke, gloom, and grave, incomprehensible gibberish. This assembly had produced the chanting he'd heard, an incantation of call and response initiated by the medium, ritualistic prologue to create the proper atmosphere of dread and ceremony.
The medium's eyes were closed, her head inclined back to the ceiling, exposing the fleshy wattles of her throat: the short, round woman in the new shoes, her accumulation of shawls discarded. Over the years, Doyle had catalogued the city's many practitioners, genuine article and charlatan alike: This one was unknown to him. She wore black, a wool weave, neither cheap nor extravagant, with a white bib collar, sleeves bulging with flesh buttoned to her wrists. Her face was bloodless and as studded with moles as cloves in an Easter ham. The woman's solar plexus palpitated in a violent cycle of respiration. She was on the threshold of entering, or effectively simulating, trance.
Lady Nicholson's color was high, her knuckles white, caught up in the performance, flinching in response to the progressive stranglehold applied by the medium's hand. Her brother's frequent, solicitous looks to her prevented his wholesale purchase of the game, as did, Doyle suspected, his habitually sardonic disposition. The way the pregnant woman's head postured upward signaled the traditional abandon of the blindly devout. Seen in profile, his jaw muscles working furiously, her husband's narrowed gaze fixed on the medium—agitation or anger?
The Dark Man saw Doyle next. His eyes pierced the air between them. Obsidian black, set like jeweled stones in deep round holes. Sallow cheeks the color of polished teak, pitted with pocks down to a sleek jaw and chin. Lips like razors. The expression in the eyes was fervent but unreadable. He released the hand of the man to his left and extended it toward Doyle, fingers paddled together, thumb extended.