The Devil in Detail, page 6
“That’s not implausible,” Lionel put in, “and it’s probably sensible to look for natural explanations before going on to the supernatural ones.”
“Unfortunately,” Penny said, “I have to agree. Much as I’d like to discover evidenced of a genuine paranormal presence here, I have to concede that what I actually feel at present could well be a slight nausea caused by something material in the air.”
“Which doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not interesting,” I pointed out, dutifully. “The unusual coal from Glofeydd Diafol might well warrant the kind of analysis that a modern mass spectrometer can supply, to see whether there’s anything unique among its impurities. Even very simple organic molecules can produce marked psychotropic effects, including methane, and other possible pollutants, like nitrous oxide, can have quite dramatic effects. It wouldn’t be at all surprising if people working down pits did see things occasionally, including quite elaborate tricks of the mind.”
“Which is not to say,” Penny put in, “that all paranormal phenomena can be dismissed as ‘mere tricks of the mind.’ We mustn’t lose sight of the fact that there really are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in a purely materialistic philosophy.”
“Amen to that,” Lionel added.
“Well,” Martin conceded, albeit grudgingly, “If a couple of days of letting the dust settle, airing out the rooms an’ some serious elbow-grease with the vac really will get rid of the problem, I’ll certainly be happy to do the work. Going to be difficult to persuade the wife, though…an’ it might be best to have the exorcism as well, just to be on the safe side.”
I wasn’t entirely sure that performing exorcisms really did qualify as “the safe side” in terms of potential mental health issues, but that wasn’t my call.
Lionel was right, of course, about there being a long stretch of night still ahead of us. I did my bit, and never closed my eyes for a moment.
For a while, I chatted to Lionel about anything and everything except religion. We remembered a few old times and a few old friends; he told me all about Fortean TV and I told him about all the stories and articles I’d written lately. I expect the others found it more than a little boring, although Lionel kept bringing them into the conversation at every possible opportunity. He likes to be the life and soul of every party, and he sometimes succeeds in that, even when it seems to be an uphill struggle. He was the commanding presence in the bookshop during that interval; his was the personality that filled it.
All the while, I watched the three of them. I watched them watching the surroundings, waiting for something that always seemed to be on the brink of arriving but never quite did. For a while, at least, they still seemed to feel echoes of a darker presence—of that I was sure, although they made no elaborate attempt to describe or discuss it—but they had no idea what it was. They would probably have liked it to become more clamorous, not so much because that would reveal it more fully and more clearly, but because they thought that the clamor might somehow contain its own explanation—but it wouldn’t oblige.
It seemed to all of them, I think, that Martin’s hope that a little patience and cleanliness would be the crucial virtues overcoming the presence might well be justified. The brief hold that the liminal presence had exerted on the atmosphere of the shop was loosening by degrees, perhaps simply by virtue of our human presence; it needed no exorcism to persuade it to slip away into oblivion. Hour by hour and inch by inch, Martin’s haunted bookshop seemed to me to be becoming dispirited.
So far as I could tell, we did nothing to encourage the slow decay of the presence, but we did nothing to prevent it. None of us had the least idea how to encourage it, and three of us would have not wanted to do so had we known how. In the absence of such assistance, it seemed to give up and go away.
As the night dragged on wearily to its end I watched my three companions become sleepier as habit tested their resolve. I heard their voices slow and slur as dreams reached out for them even while they struggled to stay awake—but wakefulness won the war, and the dreams that might have claimed them had they been alone evaporated into the increasingly empty air. The dust stirred up by Martin’s exertions and my excursion upstairs was already beginning to settle out and to settle down, adsorbed on to the surfaces of walls and windows, carpets and ceilings. Even when I had first sat down the air had no longer qualified as vintage air; as the morning progressed it became flatter and more insipid, increasingly soured by the faint odors of living flesh.
By the time dawn broke, Martin and Penny were agreed that the presence had gone—that its hold was broken. Martin was slightly anxious that it might return as soon as it could find him on his own again, but Lionel assured him that he would be more than willing to come back if Martin thought it necessary, and would be happy to spend the night alone on the premises if that was the only way to bring the presence out. The way he said it told me that he didn’t expect any such thing to occur; without quite knowing why, he seemed convinced that the presence had loosened its grip and lost its hold.
We all had breakfast in a local cafe before the three of us who were returning to Cardiff set forth. Lionel drank lots of black coffee to make sure that he was in no danger of falling asleep at the wheel, although he was no stranger to all-night vigils.
“By the way,” Lionel said to Penny and me, after Martin had said his goodbyes and returned to the shop. “A couple of other people have asked me to recruit subjects for an experiment they’re doing, and I wondered whether the two of you might be interested.”
“What sort of experiment?” I asked, warily. Lionel has fingers in a lot of pies, very few of which are the run-of-the-mill steak-and-kidney variety, so I was ready for almost anything.
“It’s all above board,” he assured me. “The people in charge have degrees from respectable universities, in psychology and computer science, and they’re based at the University of Glamorgan.”
The University of Glamorgan had once refused even to interview me for a job teaching creative writing, and in 1997 they were the only university in the UK to attempt to offer a degree in science fiction, so I didn’t find that particular item of news at all reassuring.
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said, patiently, “but what is the experiment supposed to test, and what does it actually entail? My one invariable principle regarding experiments is that if there are needles involved, I’m not.”
“They’re experimenting with sensory stimuli on brain waves,” he said, blandly. “No drugs involved; just music, I think, although I only know the vague outlines. Axel—he’s the computer scientist—has written a program that analyzes electric reactions in the brain to various stimuli, and then works out how to reorganize the stimuli so as to provoke a hypnotic state.”
“I’m the world’s worst hypnotic subject,” I told him. “My mother was a hypnotherapist for many years before she retired to Spain, and she’ll give me a reference if you ask her. Mind like a nuclear bunker. Suggestibility, on any scale you care to name, absolute zero.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s partly why I thought of you. Axel and Claire asked me to try to find them a spectrum of subjects, ranging from the most credulous to the most skeptical. In the latter category, yours was the first name that came to mind.”
“I hope that mine wasn’t the first that came to mind at the other extreme,” said Penny, gearing up to feel insulted.
“Certainly not,” said Lionel, “but they need people in the middle as well, and a serious researcher who has a scrupulously open mind will probably be ideal. They’ll need people with fertile imaginations, obviously, but they’ll also need people to provide a check on whatever they might come up with. You have a lot of academic knowledge concerning the farther reaches of the human mind that might be very useful as background.”
“Why fertile imaginations?” I was quick to ask. “What exactly to they want to do once they’ve used their fancy software to induce a hypnotic trance.”
“Claire doesn’t like the term trance,” Lionel hedged. “From what I gather, they’re attempting to reach the collective unconscious…Alex calls it the Comic Mind, and is quick to say that he’s not talking about God in the commonly understood sense of the term, although, in my view, of course, he is.”
“They’re trying to use induced hypnosis to get in touch with God?” said Penny, sounding every bit as skeptical as me.”
“Well, no,” said Lionel. “That’s just my interpretation. Claire and Alex prefer terms like the implicate order and the collective unconscious, although I think that Alex has found Cosmic Mind more useful in trying to explain his theory in simple terms to the volunteers on whom he’s already tested his system. That preliminary phase is over now, though, and they’re ready to do a properly framed and rigorously monitored experiment.”
As a one-time teacher of methodology, I had severe doubts as to whether Alex and Claire’s experiment would measure up to my standards of experimental propriety, but that was a minor issue. The more important point was that what they seemed to be doing, according to Lionel’s vague report, sounded interesting—at least as interesting, to me, as a haunted bookshop. Penny seemed equally intrigued.
On the other hand, I thought, not only did I consider myself immune to hypnotism, but as someone who not only didn’t believe in the Cosmic Mind but would continue to disbelieve in it even if I were staring it in the face. I couldn’t imagine that I would be an ideal subject…but every conscientious experiment needs a kind of control sample.
“I’ll need more detail before I agree,” I said.
“Me too,” said Penny.
“Of course,” Lionel agreed. “Alex or Claire will ring you, if you’re agreeable and can obviously give you a better idea than I can of what’s involved—but can I tell them that you’re agreeable in principal to the idea of taking part?”
I was about to say yes when another idea struck me. “They’re not going to put us in a sensory deprivation tank, are they?” I asked, warily.
“I don’t think they could afford one,” Lionel said, “but I think their method does involve a measure of sensory deprivation.”
“What do you man by a measure of sensory deprivation?” I queried.
“I don’t know every detail, as I say,” he explained, “but you’ll be fully briefed beforehand if you want to take part. I doubt if it’s more complicated than a blindfold and earphones—as I say, they use music to assist them to obtain the hypnotic state, which they monitor by means of electrodes attached to the outside of the skull. Can I a least give them your telephone number so that they can make their own pitch? You really would be an asset to them. If they only do the experiment with the kind of people who readily line up for that kind of adventure, there’s a danger that the results will all look like self-delusion. It’s difficult enough as it is to get this kind of work through any kind of peer review.”
Penny looked slightly dubious, now that I’d raised the sensory deprivation question, and was obviously mulling it over.
“I didn’t know The Fortean Times used a peer review system,” I said, playing it for laughs while I thought it over myself. “Although I suppose it’s the only journal in the world that could run its articles past Sir Isaac Newton, Mothman, and Beelzebub. If the Cosmic Mind signs up for the team, though, I suppose you can dispense with the small fry.”
“Very funny,” said Lionel. “Can I tell them that the two of you are interested? They’ll pay your train fare to Pontypridd and back for the preliminary investigation, plus overnight accommodation and a fifty pound fee. It’s not much, I know, but…”
“But if it works I might get to chat with the Cosmic Mind,” I finished for him. “Who knows what we might have in common? I hope he doesn’t want me to put him in a book, though—I’m a serious skiffy writer. Did I say he? I meant she, of course. Or it. Or.…”
Penny interrupted to say: “When?” apparently having finished mulling, obligingly covering up the fact that I hadn’t thought of a punch line for the sarcastic monologue.
“The timetable can be fixed to suit you,” Lionel said. “It won’t be for at least a week, but after that, you can probably book the slot that’s most convenient.”
“There’s no harm in listening to the pitch,” I said, giving in, “but I will need more details before making a final decision.”
“Me too,” Penny agreed, “but it does sound like the sort of thing the Society ought to be interested in, so there’s a good chance I’ll agree to do it on their behalf, provided that they’ll let me report back to the society as well as to them.”
“Thanks,” said Lionel. “They’ll be in touch.”
The black coffee had obviously worked, at least until we got to the railway station, where Lionel dropped me off before ferrying Penny back home.
“You didn’t have a wasted journey, anyhow,” Lionel said, as I got out of the car. He was looking at my overnight bag, which was bulging with the books I’d bought at a pound apiece—a perfectly reasonable price, considering that they were only reading copies—from the parsimonious Martin.
“Not in the least,” I said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think any of us did. Sometimes, all it takes to exorcise a presence is to fill a place with people for a while and talk about ordinary matters. Perhaps Martin will feel more at home in the shop from now on.”
“Let’s hope so,” said Lionel. “Thanks for coming down.”
I waved goodbye as the car pulled away.
I slept on the train, dreamlessly, all the way back to Reading, and woke up feeling reasonably fit and well in spite of the long night. I had a faint headache and I slight feeling of disorientation, but I put that down to the disruption of my circadian rhythm.
When I got up to leave the train I noticed that the orange upholstery was noticeably stained with black, and felt suitably guilty. I suspected that my jacket would have to go to the dry-cleaners, in spite of the fact that I hadn’t taken it upstairs, and I knew that my jeans would definitely have to go into the washing-machine as soon as possible, but I had every faith in the ability of modern technology to clear away the last residues of the dust of Glofeydd Diafol.
Ours is an inhospitable world for matter out of place, I told myself, as I left the station and walked to the bus stop, and, for that matter, mind out of time. Unable to foretell the future, I had no idea of what was to come.
CHAPTER VII
Lionel’s friends at the University of Glamorgan were obviously keen, because they certainly didn’t waste any time following up his feeler.
I got back to the house at lunchtime, had a quick snack and then went up to the study to work. I was toying with the possibility writing an absurdist comedy called “The Bookworms,” in which a high-minded genetic engineer named Bowdler manufactures a new kind of literate worm that eats and excretes ink, with a view to training it to substitute sets of asterisks for expletives. When he’s successful, though, other interested parties are quick to move in. Genetic engineers working for the Iranian mullahs start mass producing a subspecies that can convert every text in the world into the Quran, forcing the scientific community to close ranks and produce a host of antidote species to reverse the process. Then, natural selection kicks in, and the struggle for intellectual hegemony begins in earnest. The Quran-producers soon fall by the wayside because they’re unable to adapt, but the ones that colonize the Bible-munching niche soon evolve to the point at which everything from Genesis to Revelation is converted into trails of excreta representing the complete works of Voltaire, David Hume and Richard Dawkins—which, of course, forces all the Biblical fundamentalists to start singing from a new hymn-sheet. I hadn’t actually started, because I still hadn’t worked out an ending and strongly suspected that it was far too silly ever to see print, so I wasn’t unduly upset when the phone rang.
“Dr. Stableford,” said a male voice. “This is Alex Castle, speaking from the psychology department at the University of Glamorgan. Lionel Fanthorpe said that I might call you about our research project.”
“He did,” I confirmed. “Before I volunteer to be a guinea-pig, though, I’d like to know more about what it entails. I take it that you’ll be observing the principle of informed consent, and that you’ll at least tell me what you’re actually going to do to me, even if you don’t go into details about the theory you’re testing in case it prejudices my expectations.”
“Oh, I don’t mind telling you a little bit about the theory,” Axel said, blithely. “And the experimental design is really quite simple, although I have to admit that the equipment can seem a trifle intimidating at first glance. We can’t afford a full-scale sensory deprivation tank, so it’s basically just a comfy chair in a bare room. You’ll have headphones, of course, to play the hypnostream and the preliminary music, and we’ll tape two halves of a ping pong ball over your eyes to cut out visual stimuli. We’ll put an electrode net over your skull, but it’ll feel just like a hairnet—nothing heavy.”
“Hypnostream?” I queried.
“That’s what we call the initial relaxation tape. Lionel tells me that your mother’s a hypnotherapist, so you must have heard dozens of them. We’ll play that for a little while, until the electroencephalograph tells us you’ve acquired conscious relaxation; then we’ll add in the music, very discreetly. We don’t play it loudly, of course—just above the threshold of audibility. There’s a further phase, but it’s not invasive and it’s perfectly harmless, and that doesn’t come in until the second session.”
