Inexplicable but true

There was a pouring day. Rain was kissing the windowpane. It did not merely fall, but incessantly set the percussive rhythm, that seemed to demand attention. The sky was colored like bruised plum, hanging low over the local architecture of McFanry’s manor. A surge that would leave the city blind.

All inhabitants of Sheffield thought the blackout was coming. But they were wrong. The darkness they feared was non-electrical in nature. Mr. McFanry and his daughter Elizabeth were outside of their house. His little daughter was struggling from epilepsy for over 7 years. And now, it began suddenly, without any hint or warning. The spine stiffening as it was always did not disturbed her; she felt the unprecedented sensations, as she would later recount in her biography.

The silhoutte of Charlie Chaplin flashed for a second in front of her eyes - that man in a simpler black bowler hat, with the cane slicing the air around him. That man who you used to talk about.

Single father was extremely surprised by the fact that dead man was disturbing the reality at such a late hour.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Yes,” the girl answered. “I saw him right before you went to bring the folding umbrella.”

“Are you sure?” – Mr. McFanry said for the second time.

“Yes,” the girl repeated aloud.

“But why?” he asked.

“I don't know,” the daughter echoed and became calm for a moment. “I can not coil it; it is the truth.”

Her father tried to piece together conjectures in his head, but pelting rain disturbed him.

“Maybe it is a ghost,” he thought for an instant.

They both decided to consult with the neurologist, they were having a check-up with. So, the next morning the situation repeated, but without rain. They sat in the sterile, antiseptic-smelling consulting room of Dr. Joe – longtime enemy of Mr.McFanry. He listened to their account with the extraordinary attentiveness.

"How is it possible?" the doctor was bewildered by her apparition.

But then they come to the truth; they remembered that Charlie performed in Sheffield, so everything has become obvious. Epilepsy as in flickerings frequency domain lied in 14 to 24 fps (frames per second). The crux of the matter was that the technology of silent movie and medical approaches to treating epilepsy evolved in parallel.

Dr. Joe had taken out of a dusty cabinet the book with the metal tarnished clasps and discolored front cover.

The book was titled The Use of the Biograph in Medicine" (1905) by Dr. Walter Greenough Chase.

And Dr. Joe started to cite the beginning of the book, starting with the words:

“Dr. Chase went to the Craig Colony for Epileptics in New York, set up early silent-film biograph cameras, and captured 21 live epileptic seizures on film to study frame-by-frame muscle contractions.”

The yellowed, brittle pages seemed to point to the conclusion, but the truth was still far off.

The most crucial book on this topic ever found — Phonograph and Chromophotography in the Study of Diseases of the Nervous System (1899) by Dr. Gheorghe Marinescu; even it was silent.

Sometimes he kept drifting into his thoughts, and catching that he had read it somewhere before. But he could not remember when it was. So, he digged further. It was about frequency. People with epilepsy can often react to those narrow window between 14 and 24 frames per second. "In essence, cinemas were the immense laboratories for the involuntary photostimulation of susceptible minds", — the doctor remembered.

"Patients with photosensitive epilepsy experienced hallucinations", it haunted him.

“I am saying”, Dr. Joe corrected, “that the history of medicine and cinema are inextricably linked.”

Days passed, and the mystery began to resolve into a terrifying clarity. Elizabeth began to recover, but she was changed. Now she was not afraid, they discovered that the particular corner, where Elizabeth had collapsed, was once the site of the old, decomissioned nickelodeon. Elizabeth did not see a ghost. She saw a resonance. Her brain, caught in the throes of a seizure, tuned itself into the same frequency that defined those early, flickering films. She didn't see Charlie Chaplin; she saw the very 'frame' that he lived in.

The revelation hung in the air, heavy and impossible. Mr. McFanry walked home with Elizabeth, the streets of Sheffield suddenly feeling like a vast, cinematic stage. Every streetlamp seemed to hum with the memory of old projectors; every shadow cast by the soot-blackened buildings seemed to hold the potential for a flicker.

He thought back to his youth, to the dusty cinemas of his own childhood. He remembered the hypnotic quality of the screen, the way the silence of the theater made the mind fill in the gaps. He had always felt a strange, lingering malaise after the shows, a sense of having been somewhere else entirely.

Mr. McFanry, the clockmaker, spent his nights poring over the old medical journals Dr. Joe had lent them. He looked for the connection between the gear-driven precision of his own trade and the frame-driven reality of the screen. He saw it everywhere: the way a ticking clock could pace the heartbeat, the way a flickering flame could influence thought, the way the mechanical age had sought to replicate the human soul in a series of stuttering, illuminated stills.

The silhouette of the man in the bowler hat never appeared again, but his presence remained, an echo in the machinery of the city. Whenever Mr. McFanry walked past the old cinema site, he tipped his own hat, not to a ghost, but to the memory of the flicker—to the realization that we are all, in some small, susceptible way, subjects of an experiment that began in a laboratory in New York, and that continues to play out in the light and shadow of every modern day.

They were no longer afraid of the blackout. They understood that darkness was merely the absence of the flicker. And in the quiet, steady light of their new understanding, they found a different kind of peace—one built not on the certainty of logic, but on the acceptance of the inexplicable, beautiful, and sometimes violent rhythm of a life lived between the frames.

As the sun set on Sheffield one last time, casting long, dramatic shadows across the walls of their home, Mr. McFanry had to admit that Dr.Joe was right.

The diagnostic card noted signs of photosensitive epilepsy triggered by weather conditions, based on historical grounding.

Inexplicable but true.

Nonce-words footnotes:

Eventeen - the teenager in the age of 14/16/18