Paul McAuley - Doctor Pretorius and the Lost Temple

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Doctor Pretorius and the Lost Temple

by Paul McAuley

I first met the young engineer, and became entangled in the machinations of Dr.

Pretorius and the affair of the lost temple, at a seance. For three weeks, fantastic

stories of the psychic powers of a young Romanian gypsy woman had been

circulating throughout London. It was said that she could relay messages from the

dead and speak directly to the hearts and minds of the living, that her revelations

and admonitions made women faint and strong men weep. Rank and fashion flocked

to witness this latest curiosity; there had been numerous articles and sketches

about her in newspapers and magazines, and skits parodying her seances put on in

music halls and theatres.

I was newly arrived from Edinburgh, and still wore a black band for my mother and

father, but I was also young and full of misplaced confidence. I believed that I knew

more about the matter of the dead than anyone living, and was both jealous of and

intrigued by this young gypsy's fame; I knew that I must find out if she was a fraud,

a rival, or a potential ally and friend.

Her family had rented out the ground floor of a house on the northern edge of the

Holborn Rookery, and a large crowd had gathered outside to watch the arrival of

visitors to the new phenomenon. The unending procession of wonders that passes

through the great metropolis never seems to exhaust the curiosity of its

inhabitants; if the city were a theatre, it would never want for an audience, and its

angels would see their investments multiply without any of the usual risk. Young

women carrying babies or with small children clutching their skirts were begging for

alms; unshaven ruffians in battered caps and canvas waistcoats were swigging from

bottles; an old woman with greasy unbound hair and a shrewd gaze stood in a

doorway, smoking a short clay pipe. There were pamphlet and ballad sheet sellers,

orange sellers (the road was littered with the bits of tissue paper in which the fruit

was wrapped), and sellers of ginger-beer and fried fish and pies. A crew of beggars

lacking an assortment of limbs were got up as sailors in front of a sheet crudely

painted with a ship foundering in a tempest. A street preacher stood on a box under

a banner held up by his supporters, sweating into the serge of his black coat, his

face shining and his fists shaking by his face as he tried in vain to make himself

heard above the din. In short, every beastly aspect of humanity was on display, and

most of them were in some way haunted, mostly by imps of delirium or the ghosts

of dead children with faces like shrivelled apples; one old woman, bent double over

a stick, carried a dozen half-formed ghost babies on her back, squirming over each

other like blind newborn kittens trying to get their turn at their mother's teats.

It was terribly hot, the close, heavy air laden with the miasma of every taper,

candle, whale-oil lantern, and gas mantle burning in London's teeming night.

Carriages were lined up along one side of the road, their horses waiting patiently in

their traces, grazing from the nose bags strapped over their muzzles; the oaty reek

of horse piss was the cleanest smell in the crowded thoroughfare. A pair of

constables in black top hats and blue swallow-tail coats stood near a coffee stall,

watching the burlesque with a kind of baffled approval, as if it had been

unexpectedly staged for their benefit. I joined the knot of well-dressed men and

women waiting to gain admittance, paid my florin to a whiskery old rogue who

reeked of cheap gin (the grey hair tangled around his face swarmed with flea-sized

imps), and followed the others through a dark corridor, hung with cobwebby threads

and damp rags that brushed unpleasantly against my face, into a hot airless room

not much illuminated by the half dozen candles spiked to the walls. There was a

filthy piece of red velvet stretched across the rear wall, a sagging armchair set in

front of it, nothing else.

The audience was much as I had expected: a party of young swells in bright

waistcoats given to laughter and loud remarks that were far less amusing and

original than they supposed; several dignified old women in widow's weeds; a

variety of the pale, anxious, recently bereaved. The only person of immediate

interest was a white-haired man in an antique jacket and high-collared shirt, with a

faint ineradicable sneer on his face and a bright, bird-like gaze that roved around

the room. It settled on me for a moment, took note, and moved on. I was pinched

toward the back, between a slight young man with the black hair and olive

complexion of a native of Southern France or Spain, and a married couple, the

woman in black with a veil across her face, her straight-backed husband attempting

to seem dignified, but trembling with barely suppressed emotion; it was to his leg

that the dead child clung, a stout but wan little thing no more than six years old.

There were other presences in the room—blurred partial shells of the kind cast off in

moments of intense emotion, and a foggy, bloated imp that peered out of the black

shawl of a sharp-nosed old woman whom I took for one too fond of laudanum—but

the little girl was the only true ghost. She looked at me with a kind of wonder, her

eyes dark smudges, and asked in a tiny voice only I could hear if I would help her

sleep.

I smiled down at her. Like her father, I was also possessed by emotion; a sick

anticipation revolved like a ball of hot tar in my stomach.

"I'm so tired," the poor creature said. "I want to sleep and I can't. I'm so tired."

She was too young to know what had happened to her. Like most ghosts, she was

frightened and pathetic.

I had an idea that she might prove useful, and said quietly, "Be patient, my dear,

and I'll help you sleep for as long as you like. But first, will you help me?"

She gave me a wan smile, and nodded warily. The young man beside me must have

heard me talking to her, for he frowned and seemed to be about to ask me a

question, but at that moment the grey-haired, imp-infested old man who had taken

the admission money limped around the edge of the room, leaning on a stout stick

and pinching out all but one of the candles. He took up station in front of the chair,

stamped his stick on the floor for silence, and made a long meretricious speech I

won't trouble to repeat in any detail, explaining at the end that all questions must

be directed through him, and that if anyone would like to contact 'the other side' for

the modest fee of just a half guinea, then they should now step forward, and tell

him the name of their dear departed.

Since most in the room had come there for that purpose, this took some time. The

old man wrote down their requests on a scrap of paper, licking the point of his

"permanent" pencil at every other letter, so that his lips were soon stained quite

blue. I watched with growing impatience and dissatisfaction, already suspecting that

I had squandered a florin to no good purpose. There was nothing of the matter of

the dead here; only shabby showmanship and cheap spectacle. The swells passed

around a silver flask and nudged each other; the olive-complexioned young man

impatiently consulted a pocket watch; the white-haired man and I exchanged a

glance, and his smirk grew a fraction, as if he had detected in me some impropriety.

The married couple with the ghost child were the last to murmur into the old man's

ear. He licked and wrote, then tucked the pencil behind his ear and struck the floor

with his stick. A corner of the red drapery was lifted to admit, with a great swirl of

sweet-smelling white smoke, two burly men in collarless shirts and braces, escorting

a plump girl of fourteen or fifteen in a plain black dress. She was endeavouring to

seem calm, but I saw how her gaze darted around the room, and how she flinched

when one of the men took her arm and led her to the chair.

I told the little ghost to go and stand before the lady, and when she showed

reluctance to let go of her father said, "Be brave now," and gave her the tiniest

pinch of compulsion to thrust her through the crowd.

The remaining candle went out as soon as the plump girl sat down. A woman

gasped; the swells tittered. Then someone uncovered a lantern and a ray of light

shot across the room, transfixing the gypsy girl's face. Her eyes were rolled back,

showing only crescents of white behind flickering eyelashes, but I did not for a

moment believe that was why she did not see the little ghost who stood in front of

her. Bells rang here and there in the darkness and pale shapes flew through the air.

The swells cheered; several of the women emitted muffled shrieks. The gypsy girl's

arms and then her whole upper body began to quake. Foam dripped from a corner

of her mouth and she suddenly bent double, as if punched in the stomach, and

began to chokingly regurgitate into her lap yards of white stuff. The little ghost

watched this calmly, once or twice glancing back at me. The smoke grew thicker,

defining the angled beam of the lantern. When she had spat out the last of what

was clearly meant to be ectoplasm, the girl raised her face to the smoky light, like a

burlesque of a blind Pietà, and asked in a croaking, thickly accented voice if there

was any spirit who would speak with the living.

I could no longer contain my impatience and disgust, and said loudly, "There is a

ghost already here, madam. Perhaps you could point it out."

The audience stirred, trying to discover who amongst them had spoken. The girl

repeated her question, like an actor insisting on the script after someone else

botches a line or a piece of scenery falls over, and the old man said, "Let the

unbeliever leave now, for the sake of those who want to speak with the dead."

My anger was a hot pulse behind my eyes. I said, "If you know anything about the

matter of the dead, sir, you would have your daughter describe the poor shade who

stands before her."

My eyes were adapting to the darkness. I could see that the two toughs on either

side of the girl were looking this way and that, trying to locate me. The little ghost

was looking at me too, plainly uncertain that she had done all I had asked of her.

The olive-skinned young man stepped close and dug a sharp elbow in my ribs and

whispered, more with delight than anger, "What the devil are you about, sir?"

The old man thumped his stick three times on the floor, and said, "There are many

spirits here. Let them show themselves."

The bells rang again; again, pale shapes shot through the near dark, crossing the

room in one direction and then the other. I whipped the blade from my cane and

swiped at one of the filmy shapes; the two toughs must have seen the blade

glancingly catch the lantern's light, for they began to move toward me.

I said, as loudly as I could, "This is a fraud, sir! A shameful sham! If she cannot

even see the ghost that stands plainly before her, how can she raise any spirits?"

The swells cheered; the toughs pushed through the crowd and took hold of my

arms; there was a brief and undignified struggle as they wrestled me toward the

door. For an instant, I managed to turn back and catch the gaze of the little ghost

and give her the oblivion she so badly desired. One of the toughs tried to wrench

my blade from my hand, but I would not let it go, and carried it high before me,

with the captured scrap raised above my head like a battle flag. Behind me, the old

man was thumping his stick on the floor and saying loudly that his daughter's

trance was broken and the session was ended. I shouted again that she was a

fraud, that she could not even rid him of his infestation, and then I was borne out of

the room.

I suppose that the toughs would have found a quiet spot where they would have

taught me a short, sharp lesson, but the young man followed on their heels, loudly

protesting at my treatment, and got the attention of the two constables as we all

tumbled out into the street. The blue-coats started toward us, and the two toughs,

suddenly uncertain, loosened their grip. I shook myself free, and the young man

took hold of my elbow and pulled me through the crowd of onlookers. A police

whistle squealed hoarsely, people cheered, a flung bottle turned twice in the air and

smashed against a wall, and we both ran.

We did not stop until we had put two or three turns of the narrow lanes behind us,

and leaned against a wall, out of breath and helpless with laughter.

"I hope, sir," the young man said, when he was able to speak, "that you have good

evidence that those people are charlatans."

I showed him the scrap of muslin caught on the end of my blade. "Pulled through

the air on wires," I said. "Likewise, wires worked the bells concealed in the ceiling."

"And the stuff she choked up?"

"Muslin also. Performers learn to swallow stuff and bring it back up again. The whole

thing was no more than a theatrical trick, got up to gull the desperate and the

unwary."

The young man studied me. He was a good foot shorter than me, and slightly built,

but was possessed by a restless, barely contained energy. His eyes were very dark,

almost black, and his gaze burned with purposeful intelligence. "If it is a charade,

then what of you, sir? Are you a journalist from one of the newspapers, sent out to

expose it? And if so, are you truly in mourning, or is that arm band as much a sham

as the show you so effectively wrecked?"

"I know something of these matters, that's all. And I can assure you that I am

genuinely in mourning: for my parents."

My anger had quite gone, although a few imps clung to me still. I brushed my hand

through my hair, dismissing them, and felt foolish and ashamed. One of the most

important disciplines in the matter of the dead is to learn to control the baser

emotions, and in my disappointment and frustration I had let them master me.

"I am sorry to hear of your loss," the young man said, "but I think that you did not

come here to contact your mother and father, for you did not step forward and pay

the half guinea."

"Neither did you, sir."

"I was cursing myself for a fool as soon as I entered that room. I imagine that

anyone who can truly speak with the dead, if there is such a person, needs no

theatricality."

"That's very true."

"You mentioned a ghost."

"The couple who stood next to us had lost their first child. I should not have spoken

of it. I really should not have spoken at all. Most of the people there were so

undone by the loss of a loved one that they were willing to believe in anything, as

long as it gave them a little comfort. I took away even that."

The young man studied me for a moment more, and then, as if coming to a

decision, suddenly thrust out his hand. "My name is Brunel, sir. Isambard Kingdom

Brunel." He paused, head cocked, as if expecting me to recognise the name, then

said, "I suppose that I came here because I am also desperate."

I took his hand and told him my name, and thanked him again for his help. "You

risked your life in saving mine," I said, "and I will be more than happy to give you

any help I can. But I must say that you do not appear to be haunted, or troubled in

any way that I can detect."

"I have lost no relation, Mr. Carlyle," Brunel said. "What I have lost is my

reputation, such as it is. I came here because of a murder. I hoped—"

A police whistle shrilled, far off; another answered, much closer.

Brunel took my arm. "We'll get out of this," he said. "I will tell you why I came here,

and then we'll see if you can't be of some help to at least one poor foolish

supplicant."

He hailed a cab under the flaring gas lamps at the corner of Oxford Street and

Tottenham Court Road, and after a brief argument with the driver, who swore that

he could not travel south of the river because he would find no fare to get him back

again, we climbed aboard and rattled away toward Waterloo Bridge.

My new friend was not only an engineer; he was also the son of an engineer. His

father, Marc Brunel, had devised an apparatus for tunnelling through soft ground or

beneath water, and had won authorization from Parliament and backing from a

group of wealthy subscribers to drive a tunnel beneath the Thames from

Rotherhithe to Wapping.

"It was an engineering wonder that excited the imagination of Europe," Brunel said,

"but it has been blocked up for three years now, owing to the pusillanimity of the

damned directors, who took fright after it flooded and let all offers of help slip by

them."

The project had got into difficulty from the beginning. Instead of the continuous

stratum of strong blue clay promised by the geologists, the Brunels had

encountered fissures and fractures where only gravel separated them from the bed

of the river. In addition to the fetid conditions, and the consequent toll of "tunnel

sickness" amongst the workers, the excavation suffered from two major

inundations. After the first, it had taken six months to seal the cavity in the river

bed with thousands of bags of clay, pump the water out of the shaft and twin bores

of the tunnel, and remove the vast mound of silt which had been washed into the

tunnel when it had been breached. Three months later, the river broke through

again, and nearly claimed the younger Brunel's life. He grew very animated as he

told me every detail of this disaster. He had been working at the face of the tunnel,

and was quickly up to his waist in water. A shifting baulk of timber trapped his leg,

and by the time he had freed himself and reached the stair at the end of the east

arch, his way was blocked by men fleeing from the flood. He was trying to reach the

visitors' stair in the west arch when a great wave broke upon him and, amazingly,

bore him up to safety.

The rush of the water was, he said, a very grand effect; he would have paid fifty

pounds toward the expenses of such a spectacle, and instead had got it gratis. He

was laid up for several months after his adventure, and by the time he had

recovered his health, work on the tunnel had stalled for lack of funds.

By now we had crossed the river and were rattling through narrow streets lined with

grim, shuttered warehouses, and my companion broke off from his story and leaned

at the open window, shouting up instructions to the cab driver. We had been

travelling for almost an hour—such was the amazing size of the city—and I was

beginning to wonder how I would ever find my way back to my lodging house when

the cab drew up by a gate in a tall fence of tarred planks. Brunel paid the driver

(who twitched the reins of his horse and clattered off in his boneshaker without a

backward glance) and hammered on the gate until he woke the watchman.

The gate opened onto a wide square waste, where heaps of bricks and sand and

gravel and timbers lay in a great confusion of shadows and moonlight. There was a

long low shed beside a rutted road, a tall narrow building of yellow brick with an

even taller chimney at one end, and a timber-framed office beside a kind of open-

sided byre one might expect to find in some remote Highland field; this rude

construction sheltered the opening of the shaft which led down to the tunnel. Brunel

unlocked the office and brought out and lit a lantern, sharpening the focus of its

lens so that its beam shone inside the rim of the shaft. One half was boarded over;

in the other, a cast iron stair screwed down into darkness.

I said, "You would like me to examine the tunnel now?"

"It's all the same down there, day or night," Brunel said, and treated me again to

his sharp gaze, and smiled. "I must seem an impatient man, Mr. Carlyle, but once

I've set my mind to a plan, I like to strike fast and sure."

"And I am not a man to go back on my word. I said that I would help you, and so I

will."

Brunel led the way down the long spiral staircase, and held up his lantern as we

came out on a platform of pine planking. The tunnel was much grander than I had

expected: a brick floor sloping away into darkness, brick walls leaning back and

meeting more than twenty feet overhead in a grand arch, with buttresses at regular

intervals, and side arches through to the parallel bore. We scrambled down a ladder

and walked along the gentle slope, our footsteps echoing dully on wet, slimy bricks,

to the edge of a great wedge of black water that stretched away to a blank brick

wall.

Brunel explained that the tunnelling shield his father had invented was bricked up

behind the wall, to prevent further inundations. It was, he said, a set of massive

cast iron frames, six frames to each arch of the tunnel, each frame divided into

three storeys to form thirty-six working cells. Experienced miners had worked in

each of the cells, taking away one of the wooden boards that formed the working

face, excavating a hand's-width of soil, replacing the board flush against the new

face, and moving on to the next. When all the boards of a cell had been extended,

the cell was jacked forward; when all the cells had been extended, the shield itself

was moved forward. Thus the excavation had proceeded a few inches at a time,

with bricklayers extending the arches behind so that only the very edge of the

excavation was unsupported.

"It was the narrowest of gaps," Brunel said, "but it was still hazardous, and it was

made worse because the directors, damn them, grew impatient and ordered that it

should be doubled, to speed up the work. My father and I knew that the ground was

treacherous, but the directors insisted on it, and insisted on admitting sightseers

too, despite the risk. It was only by great good fortune that the waters broke

through when the arch was not full of visitors."

Brunel had been watching me narrowly as he talked. Now he broke off from his

discourse and asked if I was feeling quite well.

"There are no ghosts here, sir, if that's why you ask."

"Yet men have died here. Poor Richardson, and Ball and Collins, and the others …"

"The matter of death is not as simple as the penny dreadfuls would have it, Mr.

Brunel. You mentioned a murder. Who was it that was killed here?"

"He was not murdered here at all, although I thought … Are you all right, Mr.

Carlyle?"

"A curious singing in my ears, and a sense of oppression."

Brunel looked disappointed. "I feel it myself. I have calculated that when the

Thames is in full flood, the tunnelling shield had to support upwards of six hundred

tons."

A strange compulsion made me walk forward. My boots splashed into shallow water

and I was suddenly as thirsty as a Bedouin, and knelt and scooped up a palmful of

water and sucked it down. I felt it writhe like a worm in my throat and tasted thick

warm blood; at the same moment, the arch of brick above groaned, and I felt,

distinctly, that I was in two places at once. I was kneeling in the black water, and I

was pressed flat by a great suffocating weight, as in one of those nightmares in

which we cannot flee the frightful horror advancing upon us.

Then Brunel was hauling me up by the armpits, and the spell was broken. My right

hand hurt like the devil, the taste of blood was thick and foul in my mouth, and the

little lake was as choppy as a storm-tossed sea. The arch of the bore groaned again,

and Brunel said, "Sometimes the ground above shifts with the tide."

"Something is lost," I said, although I did not know why.

Brunel held up the lantern by his face and studied me and said, "If there are no

ghosts, you would make a passable substitute for one, Mr. Carlyle. Let's get above

ground, and find something to warm our blood."

Inside the long shed, he poked around in the drawers of a huge desk, pulled out a

bottle of brandy, poured generous libations into two tin mugs, fastened my fingers

around one, and settled a blanket around my shoulders. The brandy burned through

the thick foul taste that coated my mouth and tongue, but my hand still ached—it

was as if someone had wrapped a hot wire around the base of the forefinger. Brunel

sat in a chair opposite, his hands on his knees and his elbows square, and sipped

his brandy and watched me take in my surroundings. The space where we sat had

been made over into an office, with the desk at one end of a big, square carpet, and

a table and chests with ladders of narrow drawers below racks of pigeonholes at the

other. Beyond was a gloomy workshop, with work benches, a lathe and a drill press

and other machinery, glass and glazed ceramic carboys in wicker baskets, racks of

copper piping and sheet metal, and half-finished or half-dismantled machinery.

I said, "I must apologise once more, it seems."

"You said that something was lost, Mr. Carlyle. Can you tell me what it was?"

"I don't know why I said it. Perhaps you should tell me the rest of the story.

Someone was murdered, I believe."

Brunel got up and walked about the perimeter of the carpet for a few moments,

fingering a silver circular slide rule he had pulled from one of the pockets of his

waistcoat. I was to learn that he was always too full of energy to sit still for long. He

had to be up and doing things even while he thought.

"We employed two sorts of labourers," he said. "The men at the face of the tunnel,

working on the frames, were skilled miners, my corps d'élite. I would trust them

with my life. The rest were mostly Irish navigators, who worked the hand pumps

and transported the soil from the excavation. They were good enough fellows, and

worked hard and for the most part uncomplainingly, but they were men released

from the useful influence of domestic ties, and as a consequence were easily led

into temptation, particularly on pay day. They were much given to drinking their

pay as quickly as they could, even though we provided beer at the end of every

shift, to ease their suffering after working in such difficult conditions."

He was still walking to and fro, his hands shaping expressive gestures in the air.

"On the whole, I found them very manageable, but there were one or two rogues,

and one or two frank criminals to boot. One of these was a man by the name of

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DoctorPretoriusandtheLostTemplebyPaulMcAuleyIfirstmettheyoungengineer,andbecameentangledinthemachinationsofDr.Pretoriusandtheaffairofthelosttemple,ataseance.Forthreeweeks,fantasticstoriesofthepsychicpowersofayoungRomaniangypsywomanhadbeencirculatingthroughoutLondon.Itwassaidthatshecouldrelaymessages...

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Paul McAuley - Doctor Pretorius and the Lost Temple

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