Duel of the Spiritualists

Some guests arrive fashionably late, others, intrusively so.

Upon entering the ancestral mansion of the Duchy of Shrewsbury, Han Xiaoli The Great removed his green-on-black nuanmao hat and handed it to a perplexed servant. I then watched him stride into the main hall in a manner befitting his stage title: purposefully, posture-perfect, his brown eyes focused intently ahead.

He nodded to each partygoer he passed, his mouth stern, his pupils barely straying from straight ahead. He wore an immaculate emerald-green silk robe with a matching drawstring bag on his hip. He had not, as far as I knew, been invited.

I recall reading the advertisement for his spiritualist performance during a recent trip to London. I can see the flyer in my mind’s eye:

The Great Xiaoli!

The top medium in England, straight from the orient!

He tells the darkest secrets through automatic writing!

Possession by ancestors! Spirits! Demons! … and worse!

And then a close-up illustration of his face glaring straight out at the reader.

We British have many preconceptions about the Chinese: some good, some bad, perhaps all to be dismissed as stereotypes. But none of these preconceptions involve the sort of elegance, the kind of command I now witnessed. I understood how he’d become so successful.

As Xiaoli strode across the hall toward the hosts, the Duke and Duchess, the party ground to a halt. Every conversation slowly went mute, and every set of eyes turned to this new and unexpected guest. Xiaoli bowed formally to the noble pair, then made his introductions in a low voice that all could hear if they concentrated, like how a skilled actor can project a whisper such that a whole auditorium can hear.

“I beg your pardon, but I am here on a matter of grave importance. I request to see Miss Moore,” he intoned. Despite reportedly spending his formative years as a physician in the Qing dynasty, his English proved impeccable, better than mine if I’m honest, and as highly practiced as a royal heir or grammar tutor. The only flaw in pronunciation that betrayed his country of birth was the tiniest equivocation between the 'l' and 'r’.

When I heard him ask about Miss Moore, referring of course to the featured guest Madam Minnie Moore, I cast about to find her in the crowd. The prospect of these two renowned spiritualists meeting was an event not to be missed.

Madam Moore had joined the party just half an hour prior, fashionably late, and by the kitchen entrance. She wore a chartreuse dress, lower cut than most, with a matching bonnet she’d left on the kitchen table in an almost careless manner. Since then, she’d been working her way around the perimeter of the crowd, introducing herself to everyone, a light-green dot poking in and out of sight, her lilting laugh occasionally piercing through conversations across the hall.

“You’re here to see me? Well, here I am,” she called, emerging from a clutch of society ladies. Madam Moore is short, plump, and usually smiling. She’s easy to overlook, but difficult to look away from once you notice her. I’d previously attended an event she hosted, and I must say she can positively captivate a room.

Xiaoli turned and approached her, his elegant strides faster than previous. When he came within three arm lengths, he stopped and bowed low. When he straightened up, he spoke at a volume such that all could easily hear.

“Good evening to you, Madam Moore,” he said, “I hope I offend none of your English niceties by getting straight to the point. I have come to warn you.”

His words hung in the air for many seconds. The only person to move was a guard who approached the Duke and whispered something to him. The Duke waved that guard away.

“Warn me? How chivalrous… or perhaps threatening!” Her voice remained playful but the smile disappeared, her small mouth screwed up in surprise. “And don’t worry about upsetting my English sensibilities, I’m not English.”

This was true. They say Madam Minnie Moore has a Hungarian mother and an Irish father, a comfortable sort of exoticism for British society as we approach the 20th century.

“Forgive me,” Xiaoli’s intense stare wavered only slightly. “I would not normally make such a scene, but my warning is of some importance, if you shall listen.”

“Very well. Let us all hear this warning.”

Xiaoli put his heels together to stand perfectly straight. He is not a tall man, though has several inches on Miss Moore, and his posture made him appear even taller. “What I have to tell you is this: You intend to hold a seance this evening. But this is not a proper house for spiritual contact. This old mansion has seen renovations too recently, and the installation of electric lights has almost certainly disturbed the local spirits. In addition, spring is the wrong time of year. And most importantly, The European Seance is not now, and will never be, a proper method of said contact.”

“Oh, is that all?” Madam Moore placed her hands on her hips. Here and there a chuckle from the crowd. “And what terrible fate will befall us should I go ahead with my planned seance?”

“Oh, I don’t speak of danger. I simply want to spare you the shame of failure, and of disappointment in the eyes of these fine guests." He gestured at the crowd. “At best, you shall fail to generate more than annoyed grumbles from what resides in this house. And at worst… well, let’s not even speak on that.”

Madam Moore grew quiet and turned her blue eyes up toward the ceiling in thought. The Duchess made her way across the room to Madam Moore’s side and took one of her hands in both of her own. Miss Moore met her host’s empathetic gaze with a grin, then she spoke, this time to the whole room:

“Perhaps we should find out which of us is the best at our line of work: Humble old me, or Xiaoli the Great!”

Xiaoli squinted in puzzlement at this suggestion, but then he smiled, thin and sly. “Yes. A contest of sorts. I shall show you the proper way.”

They moved to the drawing room, too intimate a setting to fit all the party-goers, but I was quick enough to make it inside the doors before The Duke declared that they’d reached their limit. There were twenty of us: the two spiritualists, the Duke and Duchess, their closest friends, and a few inquiring chaps like myself.

You know, I never gave spiritualism the time of day until I heard that Sir Conan Doyle was a fan. If the logical mind behind Sherlock Holmes could believe, I had no excuse whatsoever for scepticism. I’ve now attended several spiritualist events, including a most charming performance from Madam Moore at the Old Birmingham Theatre where she levitated a table and spoke with the ghost of an acrobat. Very amusing.

After everyone had found a place to sit, or in my case, stand, the negotiations began.

“I believe the custom is that ladies should start,” Xiaoli offered.

“Ah, but you’re the guest! And this is all for you anyway.”

Xiaoli shrugged and placed his silken bag on the drawing room’s large oak table. From it he extracted a parchment, or scroll, and spread it across the polished wood surface. He then produced a stylus made from bamboo: thick and hollow, painted red and gold.

“With this, I shall engage in what you call ‘automatic writing’ but that my people refer to as Fuji. I shall humbly request that whatever spirits inhabit this house to emerge. They shall guide my hand, and bestow upon us whatever message they feel we need. I assure you that the spirits will clearly make their intentions known. There is every likelihood that they will instruct us to bother them no more. This building is old… but in the process of changing too much. I beg that you have no preconceptions about what will be revealed.”

And then he pulled one last object from his bag: a silken scarf of a darker shade of green, with which he blindfolded himself. “Now, if everyone grows quiet, I shall make the request.”

We had all been in rapt attention anyway, but with these words, we achieved a deeper level of quiet, free from even the natural sounds of brushing fabric. We waited perhaps a minute for Xiaoli to begin, and I realized that the electric lights the duke has so recently installed produced a low buzzing sound I hadn’t previously noticed.

Xiaoli began suddenly, splaying his hands out in front of him, causing a few in the small crowd to take a step back. Then he took up the stylus and began scribbling quite furiously on the parchment, leaving a single long, looping scrawl. He started at the top of the page and worked his way down til the pen was just an inch from his belly. Then he lifted the stylus and held it high, like a dagger. A woman seated to my right gasped. Then he brought his implement down in a stabbing motion on the parchment, straight into the middle of the long, vertical sentence he’d written. Then he lifted it again and brought it down again, a second, then a third time. Finally, he released the stylus as if it were blazing hot.

He tore off the blindfold. He was breathing hard, but his eyes remained focused, unafraid. “Worry not, such intensity is not unknown in Fuji.”

“But… What does it say?” This was the duke, who had his back to me, but he sounded insistent.

Xiaoli glared at what he’d written, as if it were alien to him. “Not familiar, not Chinese characters or-”

“Look from the side. I think you’ve written cursive English, just vertically.” It was I who spoke. I had hardly intended to.

Xiaoli directed a nod my way, then turned the parchment ninety degrees to have a better look. “Perhaps. Perhaps cursive script but… well, have a look at it yourself. And he turned the parchment around such that everyone could crowd around for a gander. It did resemble cursive, in that each loop appeared to form a letter, but the letters seemed jumbled, certainly not recognizable words. I can’t reproduce them exactly here, but the line looked something like this:

Moiknowgleockhelpppceifldiwarnnnnid

The three “i”s had all been dotted by where he’d brought the stylus down. I glanced about and noticed how people around me pointed at the letters, and murmured to each other about patterns they saw or what it all might mean. Every face bore tension and apprehension, all but the face of Madam Minnie Moore.

She smiled softly, her face thoughtful, and her eyes turned up to the top of her head as whenever she entered a deep thought. Finally she said: “Allow me to try something.” Xiaoli nodded to her, his face still perplexed.

Madam Minnie Moore invited the Duchess to sit across from her, and produced her “Ouija” board and planchet. Such a curious invention of the Americans, but most effective in producing results from what I’d seen.

The Duchess appeared gravely serious, and couldn’t take her eyes off her honored guest and new friend. But Madam Moore smiled as broadly as her small face would allow and proclaimed: “There is nothing to fear. I’ve done this many times, and there has never been the slightest lick of danger, and often barely any drama, much to my disappointment.” Chuckles from the assembled group, and I could hear several guests around me exhale audibly, reassured by her confidence.

Madam Moore began with a series of questions, and then the two of them would guide the planchette, a small wooden slab like a chunk of bark, around the board in search of answers from the rows of letters and numbers, presumably at the direction of whatever spirits were in the room. The Duchess, as I understand it, hosted the party hoping to contact her grandparents, whom she’d barely known as a girl, and so the early questions were directly in that area.

But the answers the planchette settled on… were strange. Madam Moore began by asking for the spirit’s name, and it started to spell what might be a name, then got off track, looping around to repeat the same letter over-and-over: “Jimmm” “Anasss” “Cryyy.”

They switched to yes/no questions: “Are you a family member?” “Are you willing to talk to us?” That sort of thing. And the planchette drifted toward one answer or the other, only to shoot off in the opposite direction unexpectedly. After some minutes of these peculiar results, the Duchess began to cry and Madam Moore gave her leave to fly to the arms of her husband.

It was Madam Moore’s turn to look perplexed. I noted no fear in her eyes, more a squinting frustration. But this is the first time I’d noticed her friendly countenance break.

Xiaoli approached her, and spoke in a confident voice similar to before, but this time his tone was softer, more reassuring. “There is another technique I could try,” he said.

She nodded, and yielded her chair at the table to him. She brushed off a consoling hand to her shoulder from the Duke, and went to lean against a bookshelf with a hand to her forehead.

After Xiaoli had reclaimed the seat, he turned in my direction: “Sir, I would ask that you move to that electric light switch behind you. When I give the signal, turn the light down to almost total darkness. Do you agree?” I nodded. “Good man,” he said.

I moved to the switch. I was still so unused to electric lighting. From what I knew, this mansion was the first in the area to have such installed. A technology as magical as any supernatural phenomena I’d ever witnessed.

Xiaoli held his arms up to either side, then met my gaze. I turned the lights low, such that I could only just see his eyes shining in the darkness. Next, he closed his eyes and spoke: “I will now ask for the principle spirit in this room to enter me. I open my mind to you, spirit. It appears you have difficulty finding the words to communicate. Free yourself to speak. Speak through me.”

Many moments passed. In the dark, Xiaoli appeared to rise, almost like he was levitating. Surely an optical illusion. Then his eyes opened, his pupils turned upward into his head, the low light glinting off pure white eyes. Then his jaw dropped slack, and a strange, sibilant sound escaped: “Sssssaaaaassssiiissss.”

I froze in fear, my eyes glued to this bizarre scene. Slowly the hissing sound coalesced into a voice, a guttural voice that chilled me to the bone. He spoke: “None here. None. There is no one here. Not even you.”

Then a loud bang, like a heavy door slammed shut! Screams and calls from all over the room! I reached for the knob that controlled the light, revealing a scene of shocked figures. Xiaoli’s irises had reemerged but his eyes were wide, and his breathing came in great gasps. Most of the guests had gone white with fright, the couples finding comfort in each other’s arms.

I looked around for the source of the slam, it felt too real to be supernatural or imagined. It sounded like it came from off to my right... “Oh, it’s a book!” I cried out. “Look, it fell off the shelf.

I stooped to retrieve what turned out to be a hefty dictionary, which I returned to the empty spot. “Well, that’s one mystery solved at least.”

No one seemed relieved. “I think we should go,” a noblewoman said to her husband in a low voice. Everyone started murmuring agreement and getting to their feet.

“You shouldn’t leave,” Madam Minnie Moore said, and strode past me. Every eye in the room snapped onto her. “No one should leave until this is resolved.”

She claimed the seat across from Xiaoli and met his gaze. He was breathing slower now, but fear remained in his eyes as he spoke: “I’ve never felt a spirit so strong. I knew something was wrong with this house: the old bones, the new technology. The spirit here is dangerous. It calls out to us but can’t explain…”

“Perhaps if we worked together.” Minnie reached a hand across the table. Xiaoli took it in one of his. Under many circumstances, this would have been a considerable scandal.

“Yes. Yes, if we ask together, if we speak clearly. If we ask with fortitude. A polite, but firm request.” Xiaoli released her hand and sat up straight in his chair. “I’m going to have to ask you to lower the lights again, good sir.”

I did so. In the darkness, Xiaoli and Madam Moore closed their eyes. Xiaoli asked the spirit if it would kindly show itself. Then they both began to hum.

That’s when the knocking started: a hollow, wooden sound that seemed to come from every corner of the room. Then the table began to rise. All around me, noble guests suppressed gasps and cries. An excited shiver ran up my spine, I had to get closer.

Under cover of shadows I slipped across the room. I wanted a more detailed look at the proceedings without bothering anyone. Without a sound I crouched perpendicular to the two spiritualists, apparently deep in meditation. They’d stopped humming.

I stared at these two faces. My eyes adjusted to the dark, and I could make out their features clearly. Their eyes weren’t closed, not completely. They stared across the table at each other intently. And on their lips were the knowing, sly smirks of conspirators.