As I pondered the matter, the drift of papers at my feet stirred as if in a breeze. I shivered. I recalled that Harland had taken the attic room when he heard it had been used for seances for some three years after the First World War by the Goligher Circle, a group of spiritualists centred around one Kathleen Goligher, a medium who claimed to be in contact with those who had passed over to the Other Side, the dead that is, who would communicate through her by a series of paranormal effects. Harland had first come across the case in a book called The Psychic Structures at the Goligher Circle, published in 1921 by William Jackson Crawford, then a lecturer in Engineering at Queen’s University, Belfast, who had conducted a long series of elaborate tests on the Circle and was left in do doubt that the paranormal effects were genuine, that the world of the afterlife did indeed exist, and that those who dwelt there could indeed communicate to us by psychic rods extruded from the orifices of the medium’s body. The rods tapped out messages in a primitive Morse, displaying a range of acoustic effects whose magnitude varied in intensity from barely audible ticks to sledgehammer blows. At times they sounded like gunshots. The seance room would be lit by a red lantern, said Harland, and here he quoted from Crawford’s book: Why normal white light should prove destructive to physical phenomena is not fully understood, but an analogy with wireless helps to make it admissible. Light is the fastest vibration of the ether. Broadcasting practice demonstrates that the fast vibrations tend to nullify the slower vibrations of the radio waves as they are picked up by the wireless receiver. When the days are long and the sunlight intense, wireless reception drops down: this explains why broadcasts of cricket matches sometimes carry an accompanying charge of static, or fade from the air. With the oncoming of night reception improves again. It is probable that psychic vibrations are in the same position. The slowest light vibration is red, and its destructive effect far less. Sir William Crookes, testing the action of various light sources, found moonlight the least injurious to the phenomena. Says Crawford, said Harland. Of course it’s a load of bunkum, old man, a matter of cheap conjuring tricks, said Harland, any amateur magician could do the same. And he took a coin from his pocket and made it disappear before my eyes. It’s not the quickness of the hand that deceives the eye, it’s your own brain that deceives yourself. We don’t see what’s there, we make up stories about what we think we see. And he would touch on the notorious fallibility of eyewitness accounts, which when taken together suggest that each onlooker has seen a different event.
I looked into the mirror remembering Cocteau’s film Orphée, which I had first seen with John Harland, remembering how in that film, mirrors are the portals to the Underworld, and I thought of how I might glide through the mirror in the attic to a world where I might meet Harland once again, for all that he has been dead to me for many years. But when I looked at my watch I realised my time was short. It was nearly four o’clock and I, John Kilfeather, had another appointment to keep.
Conduit
By six o’clock of the evening after his experience in Rue du Sentier, John Kilpatrick had read all of X+Y=K, pausing here and there to take notes. The more he had read, the more had he seen uncanny resemblances between the Kilpatrick in the book and the Kilpatrick that was him. However, there were many more passages that did not tally with his own experience, and he recalled Blanqui’s proposition that the universe contains infinite other, parallel worlds, and thus a myriad of other, endlessly doubled versions of ourselves, unbeknownst to each other and to ourselves. Perhaps X+Y=K had drawn on some of those worlds, some of which corresponded to Kilpatrick’s own. He also remembered that W.H. Auden had said that every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow, and that Auden had then gone on to comment that we would be judged, not by the kind of mirror found on us, but by the use we have made of it. But what if another man’s mirror were to cross ours, thought Kilpatrick, what would happen then? Would we become a third person? And what if other men, each with his mirror, crossed our paths? We would indeed then be many. These thoughts had crossed his mind the night before, when he had tried on the trousers of the suit he had found in Rue du Sentier. They too were a perfect fit. On further examination he found that, according to the tailor’s label sewn into the lining of an inside pocket, the suit had been delivered to a Major R.E. Livingstone on the ninth of October 1966, Kilpatrick’s eighteenth birthday, which made the suit forty-four years old. But it looked hardly worn; it might have been made yesterday.
Kilpatrick was wearing the suit now, in preparation for the evening to come. He had thought of meeting Bourne with some trepidation, but the garb lent him an air of quiet authority. For all that he did not yet know what part he would play in this unfolding drama, he felt like an actor who waits in the wings composing himself to deliver the words composed by another, nervous but confident that once he treads the boards the part will take him over. He imagined he might have rehearsed it in a mirror, drawing on affective memory, speaking to his reflection as he would to an audience, and he saw himself watching himself as if from a vantage point in the auditorium, the autumnal shades of the tweed he wore flickering in the spotlight as he suited the action to the word and the word to the action, everything happening as if déjà vu. The bedside telephone rang. A Monsieur Gordon awaited him in reception. Kilpatrick took a last look at himself in the dressing-table mirror, adjusted his tie, and went down to meet the man he was to meet.
Bonsoir, mon ami, said Gordon. Bonsoir, mon ami, said Kilpatrick. Under his Crombie overcoat Gordon was dressed in a grey Donegal tweed three-piece suit, and Kilpatrick remarked on it. Yes, thank you, nice bit of cloth you’re wearing yourself. 1960s? Savile Row cut, I’d say, or maybe Conduit Street? Do as good a job in Conduit Street, half the price. Kilpatrick nodded. Gordon took a lapel between his thumb and finger. Nice hand, he said, pity about the little flaw there on the breast pocket. Kilpatrick had seen no flaw. Of course, they’ve done a great job on it, invisible menders, you wouldn’t know it was there if you weren’t looking for it. And of course, as I remarked before, we in the Profession are trained to look for these things. For all the world that looks like a mended bullet-hole, but of course you wouldn’t know until the forensics had a good look at the fibres. Well, as it turns out, said Kilpatrick, its previous owner was a Major Livingstone, so you never know. H’m … Livingstone, you say? said Gordon, there was a major of that name, one of our men, if I’m not mistaken, back in the sixties, wasn’t a major at all of course, but played the part superbly. Until the Other Side rumbled him, that is. The Other Side? said Kilpatrick. Yes, said Kilpatrick, we’re the Profession, and they’re the Other Side. Kind of dialogue, if you like, one eye always watching the other. I take it you are one of us? Of course you are, though you might not even know it. Took some of us a while to get there, too. But you get there in the end. And then of course there’s the Invisibles. The Invisibles? said Kilpatrick. Well, it’s only a theory, more of a legend, said Gordon, but it’s rumoured that whatever we and the Other Side do, there’s another power at work, one which we cannot fathom, so that for all we know there is another narrative beyond the one we occupy. Perhaps the Invisibles, if they exist, insinuate themselves into the networks of surveillance created by us and the Other Side. We’re all in the business of gathering information, you see, or disinformation. For the latter too is useful, since everything, fabricated or not, tells us something about the world we move in. Every contact leaves a trace. So we operate on the Exchange Principle. Are you with me? said Gordon. Kilpatrick nodded hesitantly. He remembered H.G. Wells’ Invisible Man in a London fog, a greasy glimmer of a human shape, and again he saw himself as the Invisible Man trying on a player’s mask and dark glasses in a theatrical costumier’s in Drury Lane, peering at a grotesque image in a cheval mirror; or he was an onlooker to the Invisible Man’s death on the pavement, the body slowly revealing itself as if infiltrated by a poison — first the little white nerves, a hazy grey sketch of a limb, then the glassy bones and intricate arteries, then the flesh and skin, first a faint fogginess and then growing rapidly dense and opaque. Finally he imagined himself scrutinizing the lost notebook which contained the invisibility formula, some of its pages washed out, the rest covered in a mixture of Russian, Greek, and mathematical symbols, full of unintelligible secrets.