The Spiritualist Read online

  Contents

  Title

  Publisher's Note

  Free Stuff

  ONE Midnight Visitor

  TWO The First Case

  THREE Death Comes to All

  FOUR Breakthrough

  FIVE Second Message

  SIX Dark Night

  SEVEN Man in a Coat

  EIGHT Pick Pocket's Story

  NINE The Visitor

  TEN Three Brothers

  ELEVEN Robber's Tale

  TWELVE The Deal

  The Mayor's Abduction

  The Final Act

  The Anatomist's Secret

  Get Free Stuff

  Spread the Word

  About the Author

  THE SPIRITUALIST’S DILEMMA

  NOAH ALEXANDER

  Copyright © 2019 Noah Alexander

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this document may be reproduced , distributed or transmitted in any form by electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems without the prior written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by the law.

  Join my mailing list to get another story for Free

  Click Here to get The Banker’s Date - A Maya Mystery bonus story

  ONE

  Midnight Visitor

  House No 345 on the Mill Street had been ringing with ominous clamor of pillage for some time, but it was only when two street dogs, displeased at being disturbed in slumber, emerged in front of the door and began to bark, that the owner of the house, Prof. Mortemius Chinew, finally stirred in his bed. The old man rubbed his eyes slowly and tried to control his swelling temper. There were few things that Prof. Chinew hated more than being disturbed in bed. He jerked up finally, failing to keep calm, and cursed the people in his house with the unbridled passion of a frustrated university professor for causing the midnight pandemonium which woke him up. It took him some moments to remember that there was no one else in the house.

  His only servant Moin had taken a leave to attend to his dead mother while Nora, his mastiff, was with his sister in Cahira. House No 345, which the professor had shifted into earlier that day, was supposed to be all to himself.

  Prof. Chinew shook his head like a wet dog and slapped his cheeks to make sure that he wasn’t dreaming. His regular use of Morphine to help him sleep peacefully sometimes materialized in the form of visual and auditory disturbances. He saw things in empty rooms and heard sounds in silence. But the old man distinctly remembered not consuming the drug today. He had felt no need. Shifting to his new abode had proved to be a sufficient inebriant.

  Prof. Mortemius Chinew was a spiritualist and paranormal researcher and had traveled half the world in search of ancient wisdom about spirits and the undead. He had trekked through inaccessible mountain passes to reach the ruins of distant civilizations and forded through the Sahara desert in search of Bedouin tribes. But all those arduous journeys paled in comparison to the exercise of shifting his household. The old man had spent the whole day running after the five porters that he had employed to lug his belongings from the mule cart parked on the street to his big ancient house. So tiring had been the effort that even in the absence of morphine he had been able to sleep reasonably well. That is until the hubbub in the house had breached his slumber and stirred him awake.

  Prof. Chinew shrugged this lethargic state off and fumbled at his bedside table for a lantern. He turned the knob to increase the intensity of the light so that his small bedroom swam into view. For a moment the professor was surprised by the strange surroundings. He missed the large rack of books at his right, as well as the giant carved granite face, an artifact he had acquired in Mongolia, which hung on the wall at the foot of the bed and watched over him at night. How did he reach here? He then remembered the events of the day and the new house that he was in. The noise of his house being ransacked rung through the room again. Was there an intruder in the house?

  The professor slipped out of his bed and tiptoed out of the room. For a moment he felt confused in the darkness of the big house. Which way was the sound coming from? He figured it was wafting from the room at the end of the lobby, adjacent to the living room. He had decided to make this room his study and experiment hall, a place where he could read and write about spirits and conduct experiments with the aid of a lifetime of occult artifacts that he had collected from his travels all over the world and which he kept in a large wooden cabinet in the same room. There was someone inside, trying to destroy the artifacts that he had painstakingly collected during his lifetime. He could not let it happen. With quick silent steps, he reached the room and tried to push the door open. It was locked from outside.

  The professor hesitated, could the intruder be armed? Nervously, he felt his waist. The silver araijan chain, his safety against ill-luck still hung there. He felt prepared to deal with the intruder now. Fumbling for the hoop of keys in the pocket of his dressing-gown, he tried to fit one in but realized that his hands were shivering. That wasn’t a good sign. He kept the lantern upon the floor, took a deep breath, and tried again. This time the key found the hole. He turned the key and the lock clicked. Suddenly the sound inside stopped. Almost simultaneously through the gap between the door and the floor emerged a thick cloud of crisp white smoke. Pungent and cold. The professor stepped back as the smoke drifted past him and towards the main door on the right, then through the crevice out into the street. The professor struggled to keep his frame from shaking. He had a strange feeling that the smoke had not floated around him as normal smoke should but instead passed right through him, freezing his insides on the way. Fingers trembling more severely now, Prof. Mortemius Chinew opened the door slowly and peeked inside. It was utter dark. He picked up the lantern and stepped inside the room. The sudden chillness of the place and the lingering pungency made him feel like he was in a cavern. His eyes were quick to find the source of the noise. The wooden cabinet on one side of the room had been ransacked thoroughly, its door was ajar and its contents spilled around. The floor was littered with priceless relics which the professor had collected throughout his lifetime. Pieces of pottery, chunks of meteorites, pouches of arcane spices, and small figurines of clay and bronze lay on the thick Persian rug which covered the floor. The old man forded through the litter, casting his lantern on his ill-treated collection. Fortunately, the thick carpet had prevented any damage to the artifacts. Prof. Chinew reached the end of the room where sat an old mahogany table under the only window of the room. It was empty baring a tall white porcelain vase with a blue enameled illustration of a horned Devil upon its spotless surface. It had tumbled to one side, its lid askew.

  Mortemius Chinew stopped short, drops of sweat quivering upon his forehead. The vase was a recent acquisition from an Armenian trader in Calcutta. The old merchant had claimed that it was actually a spirit catcher, and inside its long belly lurked the spirits of a thousand men and women captured more than a century ago by a celebrated medium. The professor stepped away from the table, wary of the maleficent vase and his eyes went to the only window in the room. Prof. Chinew fell back startled, for a fleeting moment he had seen a pair of eyes upon the pane. Shivering with fright he cast the lantern once more upon the window, the eyes returned but they were his own. But that was not all. Looming above his hazy face on the window were large mysterious symbols, drawn with white chalk by a shabby hand. Professor Chinew searched his pockets for his pair of spectacles but failed, so he stuttered forward and squinted his eyes trying to see properly. The symbols changed form like unstable shape-shifters, blurring and going crisp rapidly. But even in the lack of lucidity, it was clear that they were in a language that
he did not understand.

  Someone was trying to convey a message to him?

  Mortemius Chinew looked around to see if the person who had drawn the symbols was still in the room, crouching in the corners. But his eyes found no one. Apart from the residue of the crisp white smoke, which hung near the ceiling like a predator in wait, the room was empty. Prof. Chinew tried to brush aside his fear and clear his mind. The room was locked. The door was bolted from the outside, and the window jammed shut. There was no way a man could sneak into a closed room, ransack his cupboard and draw strange symbols upon the window.

  The spiritualist’s eyes fell again upon the fallen spirit catcher. He extended his fingers to touch the vase but stopped short incredulous. The old man gulped hard.

  But then, was this the work of a man at all?

  TWO

  The First Case

  A Lunatic woman kills 3 inmates in Emilia Asylum for calling her fat.

  Maya kept the newspaper upon the table, reread the asylum address, the time and date of the incident, and closed her eyes, trying to fit the article in her head. She classified the information as 'miscellaneous accidents' and tried to club it with three other pieces of news that she had read today. One was the death of a beggar who had been trampled by a rogue Elephant who had escaped from Liberty Circus. The other was the collapse of an under-construction building in Flea Market which had caused the death of four laborers and a schoolboy and the last was the fire at a cigarette factory in Anthill. In these types of incidents, the actual events were far less important than the details. Maya did not care who killed the 3 patients in the mental asylum or who was the beggar squashed to death. It was good information, though, to know that there was a Lunatic Asylum for women in Emilia and that if ever a child was kidnapped from the convent school on Prison Road nearby, it might well be a work of a grieving lunatic mother who had escaped from the asylum. It was a far-fetched proposition but in Cardim she could not discount any possibility. Stranger things were known to happen in the metropolis.

  It was Sunday morning and Maya sat in her weekend office – The Bombay Detective Agency, leaning back in her chair, her legs propped up on the small table at the reception area of the office. It was still very early and apart from a sweeper boy who moved around the large hall whistling cheerfully, a broom in hand, there was no one in the premises. It was a perfect moment to consume the first of her seven daily newspapers.

  Maya turned the Daily Harbor to the 4th page, bracing herself against the barrage of violence which she knew lay waiting for her there. The Daily Harbor devoted the 4th and the 5th pages to report petty crimes in Cardim (Wife murders husband and mixes his blood in her broth; Man buries stepdaughter alive; Deranged lover sets woman’s house on fire; A thief dressed as Mayor burgles a Jewelry shop in North bank.) Ever since she had started studying newspapers to feed the information to her mind, Maya had found these two pages the most challenging. She struggled to discern the important from the worthless, the wheat from the chaff and meat from the bone. It was paramount to do so. Mr. Henry Camleman had explained it beautifully in his “Handbook for the aspiring Detective” - the brain is not a sea but a tumbler, it fills quickly and you cannot pour anymore till you take out what is already inside. To shovel all the news inside her head was a foolish proposition, but to ignore the important bits was also imprudent. Maya read the first article on the page but found the words floating past her head, making no sense. She finished the item without getting a clue what it was about. It felt like she had already filled her glass, at least the quota of it reserved for the day. It seemed impossible to feed any more information to her brain without threatening its integrity. But the young woman exhaled deeply and repeated the article under her breath attempting to learn it like the children learned the alphabet. The sweeper boy heard her muttering and eyed her doubtfully. If she was to become a successful detective Maya had to consume information like fire consumes wood (that was also a piece of advice she had found in Mr. Camleman’s book). A detective, Camleman had written, needs to possess four indispensable qualities – the power of observation, a knack of sound logical deduction, inexorable perseverance, and a sizeable bank of knowledge. Maya liked to think she had an ample amount of the third quality, enough of the first two but was lacking severely in the last. If she hoped to become a detective (or at least an official detective), she had to enhance her vault of facts considerably. Reading, Mr. Camleman had mentioned, was the only cure to the deficiency.

  Maya had paid great heed to his words and immediately gotten a membership of the Emilia Public Library. She hadn’t been an avid reader all her childhood and it took a lot of effort to go through books, especially the ones suggested by Mr. Camleman. Most were about criminal psychology. Voluminous leather-bound books on the functioning of the criminal mind, its motivations, and fears. She read about serial killers, rapists, occult murderers as well as compulsive thieves and dangerous psychopaths (Maya shuddered to note the similarities she shared with some of the studied specimens – an inability to conform to social norms, utter disregard for morality and a queer restlessness at passing life of monotony). Some texts were about the judicial system – criminal laws as well as laws about inheritance and property. There were books to be read about poisons and potions. Which chemical made the pupils dilate against which one made the throat blue and the limbs rigid. Maya had found the study of human anatomy the most demanding. She had never felt too interested in the human body (as evident from her own lack of personal grooming) but Mr. Camleman was particularly stringent in this respect. Without a sound knowledge of the human constitution, a person can only be a reporter of a physical crime never a detective. She was compelled to pore through expansive research papers of autopsies published by some of the renowned anatomists of Cardim.

  Maya read whenever she had time, in between her shift in Messrs Grington and Basse, where she worked as a junior clerk five days a week, while traveling to and from work, and while eating. She even read late into the night in the light of a lantern much to the displeasure of her roommate Maisie. She made careful notes on everything that she read and once a week went through them diligently.

  Two months had passed since she had started this exercise and she felt it was time now to take the plunge. She had nowhere near the amount of knowledge that Camleman demanded from detectives, but she figured that one could always learn while on the job. She was capable enough to make a start. So, today, she had resolved, when Mr. Camleman arrived in the office, she would ask him to include her as a detective in one of the cases.

  Henry Camleman, apart from being a reputed psychologist and author, was also the chief of the Bombay Detective Agency, the biggest private detective agency of Cardim. Maya worked part-time in the agency as an administrative assistant. Her role was to take care of the logistics for the weekly meetings which happened every Sunday in the office, as well as keeping track of the stationary, the bills, and the rent. The position paid her 25 Cowries a month, a decent supplement over her income from the full-time clerical role but she had not joined the agency for money. She had taken up the role six months ago with the hope of learning from the detectives employed by the agency and then one day graduating to the role of a detective herself.

  Now was the time.

  Maya heard the door to the office creak open and Mr. Camleman drifted in bearing his thick leather case and a cane. The old man was usually the first person to make an appearance at the office at exactly 9 in the morning. Maya quickly folded the newspaper that she was reading and kept it on the pile of other papers upon her table, there was still a lot of news to be read today. Mr. Camleman was dressed in his regular white cotton shirt and navy blue trousers with a white hat upon his head. He glanced curiously at the pile of newspapers on Maya’s table as she greeted her, but shrugged it off and continued to his cabin. Maya’s eyes followed the tall man drift into his cabin, then she plunged her hand into the drawer of her table and took out a bunch of papers held together by a clip. She g
lanced through them, feeling a queer mix of excitement and incredulity. She had spent the last night painstakingly documenting her credentials and suitability for the role of a detective in the agency. Though she did not have a lot of experience in the field, she did have a letter of reference from Leonard Rostom - Director of the Tripoli Force, the public crime investigative agency of Cardim, whom she had helped in a case some months ago. She also had a recommendation from Mr. Karim Hussain, a junior minister of the council whom she had helped recently to solve the mystery of the occult skulls, a hundred of which had made an appearance at his house one night. She glanced through the documents again and took a deep breath. It was time.

  Maya rapped the door to Mr. Camleman’s cabin who took his time to let her in. Henry Camleman's cabin was flush with light pouring through a large picture window. It wasn’t a big room and had space only for a comfortable couch, a wooden bookcase, and a large mahogany table. The old man sat in his plush leather armchair on the other side of a table bent over a letter, his bald sweaty head shining like a street lamp. The table was laden with a bundle of files, a row of inkwells of different colors, and some stamps. A bamboo basket full of envelopes and letters rested to his right.

  Mr. Camleman did not acknowledge Maya, instead, he kept himself busy in the letter that he was reading. After finishing the letter, he let out a deep sigh, kept it on the table, and looked up.

  “Did you post the letters that I gave you?” he asked sternly, taking up a blank paper and a pen which he dabbled in the black inkwell.

  “Yes sir,” Maya answered very softly. The excitement of her endeavor was making it hard for her to speak.

  “Good. And the bills? Did you pay the gas bill and the rent for the building? Mr. Holloway was all over me yesterday. I do not like people bothering me for such trifles.”