The Clairvoyant Curse (2 page)

Or woman!

“Indeed,” he murmured. “I will
treat your lady’s maid and manservant, Xenia and Fedir, to some
tickets too,” he added magnanimously, feeling rather pleased with
himself for pulling off that rummy bit of insouciance.

A singalong was in full swing
by the time they pulled up in a hired landau on Spen Lane and
joined the queue stretching around the corner. The Unitarian Church
Hall had once been a Masonic Lodge, evidenced by the insignia above
the door, but had become surplus to supply when the freemasons
moved to grander premises on the other side of the River Ouse. It
was an austere, windowless, grey stucco cube and the last place you
would expect would play host to the celebration of all things
godless.

Despite his croaky cough, Dr
Watson was soon swept up in the gay abandon of the raucous
chorus:

“Oh, come all you thoughtless
men,

A warning take by me,

And think upon my unhappy
fate,

To be hanged upon a tree …”

“What is the song called?”
interrupted the Countess.

“The Murder of Mary Marten,” he
wheezed asthmatically, gathering breath.

“How do you know the
words?”

“Everyone knows the words.”

“I don’t.”

“Another omission in your
education,” he teased.

“It sounds extremely merry for
a murder song.”

No sooner had the singsong
stopped than it started up again. It was clearly a favourite with
the theatre crowd. The mood was buoyant, full of excited
anticipation, and they hadn’t even passed through the doors
yet.

“Who was Mary Marten?” she
asked.

“The daughter of a
mole-catcher.”

“Mole-catcher? Is that a
profession?”

“Certainly.”

“What sort of girl was
she?”

“A chaste young milkmaid, much
loved by her family.”

“Who killed her?”

“A young man, her beau, is
singing the verse. He is repenting of his wickedness.”

“Merry murder and jolly
repentance – what next!”

“People regard the story as
they do a fairy tale or moral fable. They have sugar-coated the
good character and blackened the bad. The crime was originally
called The Red Barn Murder. You may have heard of it. The murder
was solved when Mary’s step-mother had a dream about where the body
of Mary was buried.”

“Oh, that sounds rather
suspicious. That flies in the face of rational understanding. If I
had been investigating the crime I would have suspected her
immediately. Was she ever charged with being an accomplice?”

“Of course not! She became a
heroine!”

“Really? How queer. People’s
thinking is so odd.”

He croaked out a few more bars
as they shuffled to the front of the queue and passed into the
church hall.

“Adieu, adieu, my loving
friends,

My glass is almost run,

Monday next will be my
last,

When I am to be hanged,

So all young men who do pass
by,

With pity look on me,

For murdering Mary Marten,

I was hanged upon a tree…”

The exterior of the church hall
was no predictor of the interior. The outside had been bland and
grey, the inside was like stumbling into Van Gogh’s studio straight
after he’d sliced off his ear. The balcony of the upper gallery was
painted blood red. The walls were sponged in sickly mauve. The
smoke-stained ceiling was mottled in a nauseating yellow and the
mouldings were vomit-orange. The doors were lurid pink, the
architraves were putrid green and the skirting boards were a
deranged shade of purple. At the front of the hall was a dais which
had been transformed into a stage hung with gold and silver
gaufraged velvet curtains. An old black piano stood to one side of
the stage and at the keyboard sat a young man with a whirlwind mane
of blond hair that kicked wildly against his collar as his fingers
flew back and forth furiously, pounding out the notes. A quartet of
singers was leading the singsong, two men and two women. They were
clearly meant to be dressed as characters from the ballad of Mary
Marten. The cute one with bright yellow plaits that curled outward
in such a way as to defy gravity was obviously Mary. The one
wearing a transparent negligee over some silken corsetry was
probably the step-mother. An older gent with one hand locked
manfully around a shovel and the other hand clutching a furry toy
which was probably meant to be a mole was most likely the father.
And the fourth had a hangman’s noose dangling around his neck -
clearly the remorseful beau.

Dr Watson had managed to
purchase two tickets for the upper gallery and two for downstairs.
He and the Countess opted for the gallery while Xenia and Fedir
went to locate their seats in the wooden pews. The hall was already
packed and there were at least another fifty hopefuls lined up
outside. A new singsong started up - The Cat Who Ate the Canary!
Everyone bar the Countess knew the words to that one too. The
quartet had shuffled off the stage and a duo had emerged to replace
them. They were dressed as a cat and a canary and performed a
vaudevillian pantomime to the accompaniment of the words much to
the hilarity of the audience who clapped their hands, stamped their
feet and screeched with gusto. It was like no theatre the Countess
had ever encountered. From Odessa to Vienna, from Paris to Milan,
theatre-goers arrived elegantly attired, moved decorously to their
allocated seats and whispered amongst themselves until the curtain
went up and a collective hush descended. Here, it was the mayhem of
the marketplace run amok.

“Is it always this noisy?” She
shouted to be heard above the din.

Dr Watson, busy humming along,
nodded enthusiastically.

The hall was packed to the
brim. Whoever had sold the tickets must have known there would not
be enough seats. It was a case of first come-first served. Scuffles
broke out but the threat of eviction was ever present and several
young women agreed to perch on men’s laps to keep the peace. The
aisles were as packed as the pews and many preferred to stand so
that they would have a better view of the stage.

The singsong finished abruptly.
The audience cheered and stamped their feet so violently the floor
vibrated and the mauve walls shook, and just when the Countess
thought the mottled yellow ceiling was about to come crashing down
a gaunt figure dressed like an undertaker but resembling a spider
in a top hat - specifically a daddy long legs which wasn’t really a
spider at all though everyone imagined it as one and the
description suited him so perfectly because he moved like a daddy
long legs, like a double-jointed man on stilts, rather than a
scuttling spider - appeared on the stage. The hush the Countess
never expected came suddenly. The mortuary-spider projected his
voice using a megaphonic mouthpiece and it was like the voice of
the damned speaking from the grave, dry as dust, vibrating through
the centuries. He made ‘good-evening’ sound like a curse. Half the
audience shivered with fear and the other half froze with fright.
It was Master of Ceremonies: Monsieur Croquemort.

“He used to be a magician,”
someone behind them whispered loudly.

“I thought he was a mesmerist,”
came the rejoinder.

“I meant the last time he did a
show in York. He don’t do magic now.”

“Why not?”

“Something happened.”

“What?”

“All I know is that it was
something bad.”

“I heard tell he was a
hypnotist?” interjected a third.

“That’s the same as a
mesmerist.”

“His name means death-eater,” a
fourth added ominously.

“Don’t look into his eyes,”
warned another. “He has the evil eye.”

Monsieur Croquemort possessed a
soporific monotone with just the hint of a French accent that made
the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end as it lulled you
into dreamy somnolence. How else to explain the extraordinary
effect his voice had on the rioters as he outlined the order of
proceedings for the evening in the tone of a doomsayer predicting
the end of the world.

At the same time, the
wild-haired young pianist removed himself from the stage and busied
himself with setting up the magic lantern at the foot of the stage.
A small fence, a bit like a sheep-fold, had been erected around the
camera to deter incursions of curious lunatics.

Dr Watson and Countess
Volodymyrovna had a bird’s eye view of the wonderful contraption
being set up on tripod legs. This was for two reasons. The first as
already mentioned was because the hall was not as large as a
theatre and the distance from the upper gallery to the stage was
not vast. Moreover, Dr Watson had paid a premium for the tickets,
ensuring a superlative vantage spot.

“Bravo, Dr Watson,” praised the
Countess, watching with mounting interest as the painted backdrop
of a red barn planted in a rural idyll disappeared from view and a
plain white sheet unfurled to take its place just as the magic
lantern flamed to life. “We have the best seats!”

First up was another old
favourite called: The Ratcatcher. Everyone except the Countess was
familiar with the bizarre sketch and they all shrieked in
anticipation of the big black rat that would scamper across the bed
of a sleeping man snoring heavily, and scurry down his open gorge.
The comical effect was achieved using painted slides that the
wild-haired young man inserted into an aperture, which was then
projected via the lens onto the white backdrop, creating a moving
image. The audience fell about in paroxysms, clutching their sides
and slapping their knees, and did not seem to grow tired of
watching the same scene over and over and over. It was cleverly
done but once was enough for the Countess. She found the
chuckleheads more riveting than the show. Their expostulations of
childish glee were astonishing, especially as they knew what to
expect.

The death-eater reappeared to
announce the next act – a ghost story.

This is what magic lanterns did
best. They lent themselves rather wonderfully to the supernatural.
Whatever their original purpose, this is what they had become –
‘lanterns of fright’.

An eerie country churchyard
came into focus. Hoary gravestones and an old yew framed the
foreground while in the background stood a village church with a
slender steeple. A full moon began rising behind the old church.
The scene was rife with ominous foreboding and everyone felt the
unnerving thrill of fear. Soon there appeared the lone figure of a
young man traversing the spook-haunted yard. He came to rest by one
of the graves, head bowed in quiet contemplation. This was where
the beauty of the tri-unal lens worked its occult magic best,
projecting one image over another, layering the effect, creating
stillness and movement at the same time. Everyone watched with
bated breath as the moon sailed slowly across the night sky,
tracing a golden arc, compliments of some clever lighting to aid
imagination. When the moon disappeared behind some riffling clouds
in the shape of gauzy shrouds lowered by means of invisible wires
that sometimes caught the light to no ill effect, a pale shroud
appeared to emanate from the grave where the man stood. It hovered
momentarily above the young man’s head before fluttering back and
forth across the graveyard to the haunting accompaniment of a harp,
ably played by an ethereal young woman who emerged from behind the
curtain and now sat on the edge of the stage strumming some harp
strings, and as the cloth floated to and fro the image of a female
ghost miraculously appeared on the shroud.

“How the deuce is that ghost
image being projected onto the moving cloth?” whispered Dr Watson
who was
au fait
with magic lanterns of the bi-unal and
tri-unal type.

“Magic,” teased the Countess
whose imagination was now totally electrified.

“Not possible,” he
muttered.

“Shhh!” someone hissed.

He lowered his tone
accordingly. “One lens is projecting the churchyard, the second is
projecting the young man, and the third is projecting the
moon.”

“The moon has disappeared
behind some clouds,” she reminded. “So the third is now projecting
the ghost onto the cloth.”

“Not possible,” he repeated.
“The cloth is fluttering back and forth. Lenses cannot move
willy-nilly. If one lens moves they all have to move but the
churchyard remains stock still.”

“He must have another camera
hidden behind the curtains.”

“Shut-up!” someone
threatened.

Dr Watson shook his head
stubbornly. “Not possible,” he whispered behind a cupped hand. “The
cloth is moving not only back and forth but up and down. A slide
can go back and forth but a fixed lens cannot. And neither of them
can go up and down.”

“All right! The image was on
the cloth in the first place.”

“That cannot be right. It
wasn’t there when it first appeared.”

“Lighting,” she said simply.
“Someone backstage manoeuvred the cloth so that you couldn’t see
the image until the light hit it at just the right angle.”

He was still thinking about
this latest suggestion when the lovely harpist started to sing a
melancholy refrain. It was the familiar ballad of Mary Marten but
sung in the most sublimely haunting tones ever heard, like a Celtic
hymn of infinite sadness. Before long half the audience was sobbing
while the other half, mostly men, were sniffing back manly tears,
pretending that their tougher heartstrings were not being tugged,
though one by one, hard hearts melted and turned to mush. Even the
Countess, who cared nothing for Mary Marten, wept. And even the
shroud-obsessed doctor could be seen to wipe away a tear or
two.

No one noticed Monsieur
Croquemort reappear. They heard his doom-saying voice before they
saw his spidery outline darkening the gaufrage curtains on the
opposite wing. He was calling for a volunteer to step up to the
stage, a brave soul willing to be hypnotised. Dozens of hands
immediately shot up, including that of the Countess’s manservant,
Fedir, but the death-eater chose a young woman with throbbing red
hair and lips to match. Exuding an air of virtuous vulnerability
despite the scandalously out-of-control tresses, she clambered
gracefully onto the stage and turned to smile winsomely at the
audience, immediately endearing herself to the rough-necks in the
crowd who whistled and whooped and threw their hats in the air.