Mesmer’s Lot

by Jack Croughwell

part 1

The show was over, and the general clientele of the Canary Hotel’s Golden Lounge had filtered out and stumbled home after the wonderful Humphrey Sulloway had once again entranced the masses. Sulloway must have thought himself something special. His name was proclaimed at the top of the marquee, and then again in lights above the gilded proscenium. He was proud to tell the barwoman, “Leave the bottle,” when she came to freshen the drinks.

Seated around a copper table, clinking glasses with Sulloway, were Gemma and Casper Cosper, who had the honor of The Confounding Cospers pronounced in black, block letters just under Sulloway’s name on the marquee, as well as The Great Orland Babjack who had not been invited to perform.

The lounge murmured at the quieting edge of the night. The tobacco smoke faded with the crowd. Sulloway told Babjack, “You have to do chicken. Crowds expect chicken. They know how to do a chicken.”

“Good God, where’s your self-respect?” Babjack rebuked. “Where’s the creativity?”

This roused the company’s good humor. Sulloway sat forward, pre-emptively pleased with what he was about to say. “Creativity? I once saw a man bring a woman on stage and attempt to convince the woman she was a lemur. Can you imagine that? A lemur. She watched the pendulum, drifted, and when he snapped his fingers, what did she do? Nothing. How was she to know what sound a lemur made?”

Babjack tensed. “That was my show, Sully.”

“Ah,” Sulloway drank. “Was it now?”

Gemma Cosper added, “We like to do it with dogs.”

“Yes, yes, that was excellent. They loved that tonight. Dogs bark, chickens cluck. This we know.” Sulloway reached across the table to refill Babjack’s glass. Babjack allowed the pour.

Compared to the Great Orland Babjack, Humphrey must have seemed an overeager puppy. He was animated, charming, though no more handsome than himself. Well, Babjack had to admit that Sulloway had some rather clean, straight teeth and audiences must really enjoy that.

Sulloway had not yet surmounted his twenties, and already his hair was speckled with grey. His three-piece was all white and, rather salaciously, he rolled up his shirtsleeves on stage before raising his silver pocket watch before the audience.

Was that it? Babjack wondered. The clothes? He had a personal affinity for red onstage, a pink carnation in his breast pocket. Gemma and Casper, too, adorned themselves in scarlet variations: she, a ballgown, and he, with a tie and suspenders to match.

“Are you performing with anyone?” Babjack posed the question to the table. “Your next show, or shows, even, will it just be you or are you sharing the stage?”

Both Sulloway and the Cospers looked to their drinks. Sulloway cast his gaze anywhere that could warrant a change in subject. To the hypnotist’s luck, he spied the host attempting to bounce a man from the Golden Lounge.

It would not have been an uncommon sight, a roustabout with a taste of the good life overstaying the welcome, but this man was of ragged hair and haggard expression. Unmatching patchwork covered a once-tan overcoat. He was holding in his hands a Tiffany lamp.

The lamp’s base was a stark, black wrought iron, that curved as though it had hips. The base’s plainness drew the eye to the magnificence of its stained-glass lampshade. The glass had been cut, colored, and shaped like a willow’s canopy, catching light as though the sun perpetually set through its crystalline leaves.

A magnificent tree, a suggestion of the sky, shrunken down so this browbeaten man in the ragged coat could fight the lounge’s host for the chance to shepherd it inside. The man in the coat stamped on the host’s polished shoe and broke away. He bounded across the lounge, wove between the shining tabletops, all the while cradling his curio as one might a newborn. Sulloway’s interest piqued.

“Pardon, sirs, ma’am,” the man said arriving at their table. His words heaved between labored breaths. “If I might trouble you for but a moment of your time.”

The lounge’s host, with a hasty hobble, appeared beside them. He hurriedly apologized for the man’s intrusion, but Sulloway dismissed it. “This man is an old friend,” Sulloway told the host. He removed his pocket watch and ran the chain through his fingers. “Just catching up.”

“Ah, I shall leave you in peace, sirs.” The host departed. His gait was healed abruptly, until he returned to the podium by the entrance and the memory of a crushed toe spread once more across his face.

Sulloway raised his glass to his companions. The Cospers nodded, impressed. Babjack crossed his arms.

To the man in the patchwork coat, Sulloway welcomed, “Come, man, sit with us. You’ve brought a lamp with you?”

“That’s the matter at hand, as it were,” his voice quavered. He set the lamp beside Casper Cosper, but when the hypnotist reached for it, the man gathered it up again. “Sorry, sirs, you see this is no lamp at all. This is my wife.”

“Ha!” Babjack’s incredulity betrayed no sense of compassion, as it was clear from the gravity in the stranger’s visage that there was no doubt in his belief that the Tiffany lamp in his hands was, as a matter of fact, his wife.

Sulloway raised his hand by way of shushing the amateur.

“I know you will think me a few cards short of a full deck, but I’ll say my piece and, hopefully, you will help. My wife was... is; sorry.” The man in the patchwork coat turned away for a moment to collect himself. “My wife is a shapeshifter, you see. We travelled with the circus for a while. I would feed the elephants and she would perform.

“They did this act at the circus where we would have two proper elephants stepping to the music, rolling on a hard rubber ball, and the like. Then, my wife went out there looking like an elephant, and she would stand on her hind legs and walk the tightrope. Some nights, we would have flowers and she would use her trunk to hand a bouquet to a pretty young thing in the front row. The ringmaster hollered to that woman, ‘Oh, I think he likes you!’ and we’d have a real laugh about it.”

The man’s voice cracked; the joy of his remembering had its own shade of sadness. “The ringmaster loved my wife. Not pure or holy, no, he loved her like a gambler loves a bet. We did the shifting tricks with all the animals. Elephants, lions, and we had bears doing the ballet, if you can believe that. Ringmaster asks her, ‘Can you translate yourself into anything?’ And she said, ‘Anything.’ He told her to become a dog, so she was a dog. He told her to become a man, so she was a man.

“Then, he tells her to become a lamp. She doesn’t like this much. She tells him that she could, but she won’t. You need to be something with a mind, so’s you can bring yourself back. He didn’t buy it. He asked her if she’d ever tried it. And she said, ‘No,’ and he said, ‘So, you don’t know, really know, that you can turn into anything.’ She held true, though, getting all angry like. Told him no, she could do it. The ringmaster was always real convincing. You might’ve liked himself yourself, sirs. He tells her to show him a lamp, and here she is.”

A deathly quiet came over the party at the end of man’s tale.

What was this unfortunate fairytale? A grift for the circus, Sulloway could understand perfectly well, but a shapeshifter? Supposing there even were such creatures walking the earth, there wasn’t a single hypnotist of the company that believed such magic would be wasted quite literally working for peanuts.

The man in the patchwork coat read the disbelief on their faces. He pled, “There hasn’t been a soul I haven’t petitioned, good sirs. I first was laughed out of the hospital, then threatened with the asylum. I went to the fortunetellers after that and, after them, I went to the lamp-makers, jewelers, museum curators. I spoke with travelling troupes, clockmakers and historians and, my good sirs, as much as I would say you are my final hope in this affair, I would only seek another, hopefully pitying, soul to take my wretched case on themselves.”

Babjack ruffled. He asked, “What could we do for this lamp that God’s horses and men couldn’t?”

The man, desperate, said, “She’s a table lamp now, but I’m hoping you could convince her to be otherwise?”

“Alright,” said Sulloway. They all turned to him. He was dangling his silver watch before his face. “Leave her with us; we will see what we can do.” The man in the patchwork coat set her back on the table and then, stiffly, hinging on the unnatural, he backed away from the table. He found a seat at the bar, not once turning his back.

The green room for the Golden Lounge matched the lounge proper. All glitz. Black leather sofas and checkerboard floors. It was accessible by a narrow flight of stairs descending at a curve to occupy the basement level below the lounge.

There was an unmanned, understocked bar, packed up for the evening, separating them from a billiards table. At the farthest edge was a row of dressing rooms, each marked by a metal plaque. One for Casper Cosper, one for Gemma Cosper, and the final and most capacious for Humphrey Sulloway.

Babjack walked over to the billiards table. He tried to roll the eightball into the corner pocket, and missed.

There was a round, squat table cloaked in crimson silk on which Gemma placed the Tiffany lamp. Her husband, Casper, who had been the most laconic of their party, was the first to speak reason to the matter at hand. “So, what now? Are we to convince a lamp she’s human? Supposing that this piece of... of furniture was once able to breathe the air, what’s to say she would still be alive after this ordeal? Suppose it’s all some prank?”

“A prank on whom, Cas?” asked Sulloway. “On us? If this were all some great joke, you would think the man would gamble with a less beautiful piece than this. Who would like to begin? Gemma?”

It was Babjack who stepped in front of her. He said, “I rather thought I would give it a go.” Hoping to be respected for offering to go first, Babjack struggled to read the expressions of his fellow hypnotists. He anticipated some inherent derision from Sulloway, though it was the furtive, unspoken exchange from the Cospers he perceived to be more annoying, and the assenting step back from Sulloway to be, if anything, shockingly supportive.

Babjack sucked in air and pulled over a wicker chair. A performance: he draped his coattails over the chair’s back, sitting down as if to play the lamp as if it were a piano.

“I’d’ve started with the watch,” Sulloway said.

“Yes,” Babjack was curt. “Good God, man, where’s your sense of imagination?” He donned a pair of white gloves that Sulloway assumed Babjack just carried on himself, even on days when he had no show in which to perform.

Babjack placed his palms flat against the table’s surface on either side of the lamp. He began to hum some nondescript tune that seemed familiar, though not a single one of his companions were able to place it. He pressed his forehead to the stained-glass shade and, telepathically, communicated, We know you are in there. We welcome you to rejoin us in the world of the animate. He sat back, thereafter, loathing that there was no change.

The lamp was, lamentably, still very much a lamp. He nodded to Sulloway and the Cospers as though this were all part of the plan. He resumed humming his song, with a few intermittent vocalizations to give the appearance of a longer, more sophisticated spell.

He pressed his forehead to the glass again and transmitted, These people are watching us, my friend,.Would you do me this kindness? If you are in there, somewhere, humor me. Babjack tapped his right middle finger against the tabletop three times, which he hoped made it appear deliberate and not some means of soothing his own anxieties.

He felt the call of the pendulum, the spiral, the workaday tricks of hypnotists to meet their ends. He was better than that, surely. Babjack was attuned to the occult. This was his life. He merely needed to ask, and the spirits willed it.

“I fear this might just be... a lamp,” he conceded.

“Give the rest of us a go, then,” said Sulloway.

Gemma folded her arms. She held herself as if the table lamp was a direct insult to her sensibilities. At the beginning of Babjack’s attempt, she had sunk into the leather sofa, mired with ennui, but the others could tell it was a front, as her glances from the corner of her eye betrayed her alleged disaffection. “Come now, Sully, it’s a lamp. What’s there to be done? A lonely, loony man can’t dictate how we spend our night.”

“You’re not too afraid to try?” Babjack prodded. He wanted the Cospers to tap out. Whether he believed the lamp was a lamp or a woman was secondary, it was the possibility that it could be real that excited him. If Gemma would forfeit her efforts, that was fine by him. He would revel to her face at his next victory. Casper Cosper reclined beside his wife. He was tired, and comfortable, as he looped his arm through hers.

Casper said, “You’re in the market for a magician, Babs. Or, better yet, a wizard. Certainly not a hypnotist.” The Cospers found this hilarious, apparently, as they flitted sleepily into a fit of giggling that would not abate no matter how grim Babjack’s scowl. “Plus,” Casper followed, “you wouldn’t get anywhere simply pressing your forehead to the shade.”

Proceed to part 2...