The House of Velvet and Glass (46 page)

“Wherever did you learn how to do this?” she whispered, peering down her nose as he made delicate, gentle probing movements with the pin inside the lock.

“They don’t just teach French at Andover,” he said. They heard a soft
click.
Benton reached up and turned the handle of the door. He looked at her with a small smile. “I read about it once in a book of detective stories. When I was a boy.”

She laughed and accepted his help getting to her feet.

The room was illuminated only by shafts of pale moonlight falling through the windows behind the central wooden desk. Sibyl could just make out the ghostly shapes of furniture and books. She imagined she could almost see the form of Edwin Friend, bent over the pile of undergraduate term papers still heaped before his empty desk chair. She swallowed. If only she’d understood sooner.

“Ben,” she whispered. “You’re sure Edwin wouldn’t mind?”

“I’m sure. In fact, knowing him, I think he’d enjoy it. You saw his face when I opened that cabinet at the Dee woman’s place. But all the same, I think it would be better”—he kept his voice near a whisper—“if we didn’t turn on the lights.”

“I don’t suppose the university would look kindly on a professor’s rummaging in his colleague’s office late at night,” Sibyl agreed, scanning the bookshelves, eyes narrowed.

“Better to skirt the issue entirely,” he suggested, seating himself behind the desk. He started sifting through papers. Sibyl moved to the bookshelf, squinting to read the spines of the books. She found numerous works of William James, together with other philosophers that she had never heard of. On a lower shelf, the full-bound edition of the
Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research
, and the companion volumes of the organization’s British counterpart.

“Benton,” she ventured. “How is it you and Professor Friend both studied with William James, yet you’ve come to such drastically different conclusions? I’ve never understood the feud between the two of you.”

“Feud?” Benton said, opening desk drawers for a quick look. “There’s no feud. I’d characterize it as a debate, rather than a feud. Edwin is—” He paused, and Sibyl thought he was considering his choice of verb tense. “A good friend of mine. And I had only the utmost respect for his intellect.”

“Yet every time I saw you together, you seemed to be arguing.”

Benton closed a drawer, leaned his head in his hands, and sighed. “Well, you’re right that we both studied under Professor James. But Professor James held some contradictory beliefs, you see. He was the original Pragmatist. Any idea had to be tested for truth before it should be believed. Yet parapsychology—which, to my mind, is a matter of faith rather than science, and is therefore untestable—informed everything that he thought about the human mind. I guess”— he paused—“Edwin and I, we each took hold of opposing sides of James’s thought. I espoused a pragmatic approach in the use of psychology. But Edwin, he was after something that, even if it
were
true—and I didn’t think it was—but even if it were, it wouldn’t really help anyone.”

“The séances helped me, when I believed in them,” Sibyl said slowly, dragging her fingertips along the book spines without looking at him. “I’ve never felt so soothed as when I believed Mrs. Dee was able to reach my mother. That one night, when I saw her hand . . .” She trailed off. “Well,” she finished. “It helped.”

“I know,” he said. “But the thing of it is—” Benton paused, looking for a way to explain himself. “I suppose I can understand that. I can certainly sympathize with it. Don’t you think there was a time in my life when I wanted nothing more than to live my life in the past?”

He waited. Sibyl looked at him and nodded without speaking. Benton held her gaze for a long moment, and looked away.

“But,” he continued, his hands busy among the papers on Friend’s desk, “a life spent only looking back, at the past, or ahead, after death, is a life that has no meaning. Edwin thought just the opposite. He thought that we should try to understand the beginnings and ends of a human life, the frame of it. But frankly, I’m much more interested in what happens in between.”

Sibyl held the cigarette lighter overhead, rising onto her toes to scan the higher shelves of Professor Friend’s books. “What was the title again?
Le Sang de Morphée
?” she asked, pulling a plain bound library book from a high shelf.

“That’s it,” Benton said, looking up. “Did you find it?”

“I believe I did,” Sibyl said, her eyes lit with triumph. She held the slim volume out to show him the title on the cover.

“Excellent!” Benton exclaimed. “Now I propose we take it back to my laboratory. Then if anyone happens upon us, at least we won’t have to explain ourselves.”

“
You
won’t, at any rate,” Sibyl muttered. “Come to think of it, wasn’t Harley expelled for a similar offense? Who’d think that Harvard would give so much more leeway to its junior faculty than it does its senior undergraduates?”

“I don’t think it was quite the same set of circumstances.” Benton grinned.

Benton restored Professor Friend’s desktop to its undisturbed state, and the two of them crept out of the office. He paused in the doorway, taking a last look around the bookshelves and the desk, Sibyl’s hand on his shoulder.

“Well,” he whispered. “I guess that does it.”

Her hand tightened.

“Thank you, Edwin. It’s been my privilege, working with you.” His voice caught, and he cleared his throat.

Benton and Sibyl glanced at each other, and she nodded to reassure him. He relocked the door, and Sibyl found his hand in the darkness, weaving their fingers together, their warm palms meeting with sureness as they hurried away.

“Well?” Sibyl asked from inside the crook of her elbow. Her head drowsed in her folded arms on the cool soapstone of the laboratory table. The pipes in the psychology department clanked, the noise in the otherwise empty building causing her to twitch back to consciousness. Benton pored over the French book, reading, his mouth sounding out the words.

Sibyl sighed and sat up.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather I read it?” she asked.

“No, no,” he said, waving her off. He continued reading.

She crossed her arms, impatient. “I’ll wager you a dollar my French is better. Is it a bet?” She held out her hand, trying to tempt him to shake on it.

“I have no doubt you’re right,” he said, pointedly refusing to take her hand. “But unfortunately, for the experiment to work, I must be the one to read it. We must keep you in the dark.”

She sighed again, exaggerating the sound to indicate her boredom, and dropped her head back to the table.

“What sort of book is it, anyway?” she asked, voice muffled within her arms.

“Well,” he said, flipping a page and jotting notes. “It seems to be a sort of report-cum-travelogue. Written, I think, by an anthropologist. The publication date is given as 1888.”

“Mmhmm,” she said, eyelids drooping. “And what’s it got to say about scrying?”

“Some interesting things,” he said, keeping coy. “Mostly it catalogues the cultural uses of opium. There’s a long chapter on China. Indochina, also. The wars with Britain in the last century. Afghanistan. California, interestingly, especially San Francisco. I wouldn’t have thought of that at first, but of course they have quite a lot of Chinese there. And then it goes into the uses. Medicinal. Spiritual. Escape. Pleasure.”

She half raised her head to look at him, but the loose ribbon of hair freed by her stolen hairpin drifted into her eyes, and so she rested her head back down.

“You know, it’s curious, Benton. I can’t tell whether you believe it’s true, what I’ve been seeing.”

He laid his pen to the side and rubbed his fingertips over his eyes, under his spectacles. Then he dropped his hands to the laboratory table and looked at her.

“I can’t tell, either,” he confessed. “My heart is shocked that Edwin has likely died, in such a tragic and spectacular way, and astonished that you might have seen it before it happened. My mind, of course, knows this is impossible. And now your vision has changed. My mind tells me that the change is merely a result of suggestibility, of the changes within your psyche in response to shock and nervous strain. My heart—” He trailed off, gazing beyond Sibyl into an undefined middle distance.

Sibyl placed her hand on his forearm. Her touch brought him back to himself, and he picked up the pen, turning to his notes, leaving his unfinished thought hanging in the air.

“Now then,” he said. “One of the reasons paranormal skills are so difficult to test is that they often take place outside of a laboratory setting. They happen in a medium’s parlor, say, which as you know can feature all sorts of sophisticated gadgetry. Surrounded, furthermore, by people with a vested interest in the outcome, which can cause a subject to behave, consciously or not, in a way designed to please the spectators. Further, in settings such as that, a naïve subject—”

“Naïve!” she protested.

“It’s not a judgment on your character,” he assured her. “It means in this case only that you are not actively trying to fool the researcher. You aren’t, are you?” He smiled at her in good-natured collusion, and his foot nudged hers under the laboratory table.

“Of course not,” she said, straightening in her chair.

“Well, all right,” he said. “As I say, the challenge lies in conducting the experiment in a controlled setting, free of suggestion. And in your case, there’s also the question of . . .” He trailed off.

“Of ?” she pressed.

“Well,” he said. “Of dosage.”

“Ah.” She looked down at her hands.

They trembled. Just a little.

“The book has a chapter which posits that whereas most people under a heavy dose of opiate experience vivid flights of fancy, a select few acquire unusual self-knowledge. Which raises an interesting question.”

“Yes,” Sibyl said, uncertain.

“That is, what, exactly, are you seeing? How do these events, if that’s what they truly are, relate to yourself specifically?” He watched her.

Sibyl twisted her fingers together in her lap and looked with worried eyes into Benton’s face.

“I don’t know,” she said in a small voice.

“All right. Perhaps that’s something we’ll find out, then. Are you ready to begin?” he asked.

Sibyl squared her shoulders and tucked the loose strand of hair out of her eyes.

“Yes,” Sibyl said. “I’m ready.”

Interlude

Shanghai
Old City
June 8–9, 1868

“Me,” Lannie breathed.

There inside the tea leaves stood himself, dressed in his present clothes, feet planted apart, holding a dripping knife. His left arm wiped across his forehead, smearing grime. Lannie’s pale eyes glowed an unsettling blue. At his feet lay two men, one curled up, leg twitching, and the other, Johnny, stretched out on his stomach, motionless.

Lannie stared into the teacup, overwhelmed with horror, insensible to everything but the imperative that he must change what he’d just seen. He squinted his eyes closed, but the image lingered behind his eyelids as if burned there.

“Hmmmm?” inquired an unconcerned voice. Lannie wrenched an eye open. He was met with the scholar’s dangling arm over the edge of his bunk.

“I told you not to spend too long in the pipe dream. Not always so pretty, is it.”

“But you don’t understand,” Lannie started to protest. His hands clutched the teacup so hard that his knuckles were white.

“No, don’t tell me,” the young man said, waving his arm back and forth like a pendulum. “I have no desire to see into the twisted soul of a Yankee barbarian. Less than no desire.”

“It seemed so real. . . .” Lannie trailed off. Johnny’s arm swam in and out of focus.

“That’s the funny thing about lotus eating,” the scholar mused. “What’s real, and what’s not real, turns out to be more fluid than we expect.” He paused, as though weighing whether or not to say more. “Once, I spent too long in a pipe dream. I saw my father’s house explode in a giant ball of hellfire. I could hear my mother screaming. I saw my sister run out the door with her hair in flames. I screamed and wept, I was so persuaded it was real. For hours, I was inconsolable. They threw me out of the den because I was upsetting the others. I roamed the streets, blind with grief.”

“And did your father’s house really explode?” Lannie asked, in a remnant of the voice from when he was a child.

“Of course not. He lives to this day, in the same fine house as always. Spending his days counting his money and wondering why I haven’t married. It’s just a dream, you know. Called up from your mind. And easily changed. Look again, you’ll see what I mean.”

“I couldn’t,” Lannie said, his voice breaking. “It’s too horrible. I can’t stand it.”

“Nonsense,” the young man said. “Look again. Maybe hold the glass differently this time. It’ll change your point of view.”

“What do you mean, change my point of view?”

“Parallax,” said the voice from overhead. “Boy, you must be one terrible navigator. Remind me never to go sailing with you.”

Frowning, Lannie looked back into his teacup. Parallax. Objects seeming to move or change position based on the perspective from which they were viewed. It was an important part of celestial navigation. He swirled the watery tea in the bottom of his cup, watching the light scatter across its surface. This time, he tipped the glass toward his face, elongating the surface area of the water, causing the leaves to swirl together in a subtly different way.