Episode 2.3

Introduction

Welcome to The Phosphene Catalogue no. # 15023
We see light where others see only darkness.

We don't doubt that the reader is as eagerly awaiting the London Midnight Hall as we here at The Catalogue are!

You will find us and our exhibition in the usual place, between the belfry and the alter.
Many of our valued contemporaries will be attending, as they have in previous years, though a notable exception is Howell House - their name did not appear on the exhibitors map this year.
Though of course our professional competitors, it is with personal sadness that we see yet more evidence that the old family are out of the business after all this time.

The reader may have heard rumours, our advice is to wait and see what truth comes out.
Lord Aldwick is a valued customer of ours, and we are not given to gossip and speculation.

We hope to hear something from Howell House and especially its proprietor, Rhys Howell very soon.

Not every silence must be sinister.

Side A: The Sentinel

Lot no. 9983. "The Sentinel", Audrey Pennington, 19th century. A statue of unknown size and form.

I don't know what to make of this lot, reader.
If the purpose of art is to give form to the formless, to make concrete the abstract, or to transmute thoughts and emotions into reality, then... This might not even be art.

I can tell you what it seems to me, here in one of the rooms of our vaults, under a cold strip light, and perhaps that is all my job requires of me.

The Sentinel is a 7' obelisk of stone, granite to my eyes, but Warrick disagrees, of course. It is square in cross-section, and about 10 inches across, tapering at the top to a blunt point.

Lightweight enough for me to push over onto the floor, and then put it right again.

I don't like doing that.
Touching it, I mean.

It's not something I am in the habit of doing, as curator, even in our workshop with clean cotton gloves, we handle the artwork as little as possible.
But when grasping this... Thing, to move it from room to room, as I have to do today, to get it up into The Woolf Room for viewing, it twists in my hands. Well, it remains entirely still, but...
As I reach out to touch it, I stumble. It's not quite where I expect it to be, and that makes my feet lose certainty about where THEY should be.

The Sentinel is not made of granite, according to Warrick.
"Sandstone" he told me, when I asked him for his judge of the exact stone it is made of. He laughed when he told me, like I had made an obvious mistake. We argued for a minute until we realised we were, somehow, both right.
Warrick saw a gargoyle, he said, squatting about 4' off the ground, wings curled around itself, turning a fanged smile up at the viewer.

We called in Katherine Wilson-Baines and Elizabeth Morgan and asked them what they saw in The Sentinel.
Katherine spoke first, and Elizabeth gasped as she did:
Katherine described seeing a small watercolour painting of a rose garden, with a rural cottage behind it, mounted in a lightweight wooden frame.
We turned to Elizabeth asking what she saw.
She wouldn't say.
And backed out of the room, watching The Sentinel as though it might leap at her if she turned her back on it.

Lot no. 9983 is on show now in The Woolf Room.
Viewing prior to purchase is essential.

Morwenna, I can't apologise enough for missing the appointment with Lord Aldwick this morning.
It's being... challenging, both personally and professionally at the moment.

(I'll tell you about Sarah later)

On that note, did something happen between you and Lord Aldwick?
What did you say to him? I heard raised voices from your office when I arrived late this morning.
He was quite red-faced when he pushed past me in the entrance lobby, dark red cravat in hand, not around his neck.

ANYWAY. Thank you for showing Aldwick to The Bell Room to view The Stranger, but I should have been there.
I don't have an excuse, but I do have a reason.
I was an hour late for the appointment, quite simply because I couldn't leave my room.
The tape I recorded this morning explains it.

Hi Morwenna...It's gone 8 o'clock Monday morning, and I am recording this from the floor of my attic room in Rossetti House.

Have you visited the house, Morwenna? I didn't think the Friday "Opening" parties would be quite to your taste, but some of the people I have met asked after you.
You'd like it, I think. The house is very nice, really, and Heather paid my rent, so I really shouldn't complain, and yet...
And yet.
Here I am, on the cold floorboards, unable to will myself to get dressed, or even think of breakfast, I couldn't even bring myself to touch the cold iron doorknob of my room.

I've had this rising feeling since I came back to London.
Since YOU brought me back to London.
My memories from that basement on the banks of the Leith that night are muddled.
I hadn't been drinking, if that's what you're thinking.
No. Not when so much had been leading up to that moment.
I had finally worked my way into getting an invitation for a meeting with the Society, Nelson Cartwright's employer.
The man who supplied Edie with Somnium, the dream drug that I also took, along with David and Jo, that let us enter the Garden, the shared dream world.
Though I blame him, of course, for supplying Edie with the drug that would eventually kill her, I know that other forces were involved...
So there I was, in the belly of the beast, in that Edinburgh basement coven under Mary King’s Close.
I thought I was just going to learn who made Somnium, maybe how it can be created, something about alchemy, perhaps.
But it was so much worse than I imagined.
I was in over my head, I don't remember how they captured me, or tied me up, I'm pretty handy with a steel hat pin, but...
You were there, Morwenna.
Weren't you?
You saved me.
I don't remember the journey back to London, it felt like a moment later I was in your room in the basement of The Catalogue, with Nimue sitting at the foot of the bed.
And now I'm back here at Rossetti house.
Again.
I know all roads lead to London, but for me, they also wind back to this place.

You were so keen for me to take up my old room, bringing it up in our chats in your basement room every day during that week I stayed there.

I hate this place! Why did you force me back? You tricked me! I don't want to be here, I want -

People show different masks to the world, don't they, just like The Sentinel.
Which one is really you?

• The mask you put on when dining with friends?
• The mask you wear at your job, talking to clients?
• Or the mask you see in the mirror, alone in your attic room in Chelsea.

What is underneath it?

Intermission

Side B: The Unquiet

We have a curious item here - even by the standards of The Catalogue.
Before me on the table, propped up on a cushion, is a large, heavy, bronze bowl, perhaps the size of a salad bowl.
When struck it rings like a bell, with a clear tone much lower and louder than one would expect from something so small.
Based on the analysis of Esther Flint, our resident metallurgist, the bowl was made using techniques common to South Asia during the 18th century, and so we have dated the piece.

The colour of the bowl surprised me when I found the right shelf, on the right rack, in the right room of our subterranean vaults.
The stated material in the paperwork supplied by our client is Bronze, so I was expecting dull gold, dusty yellow, certainly no more than green-tinted verdigris.
But this bowl is completely black.
I was unsure, then, as I looked at it under the glow of my heavy electric torch, if I had found the right item.

Aside from the age of the piece, the strange, discordant sound when struck, and the unusual colour, the reader may be forgiven for thinking that, thus far, my description has been rather mundane.

But the devil, as always, is in the details.

Morwenna, I don't know WHAT I'm going to do about Sarah Porter.

The first day of her residency started quite promisingly:
We had a little brunch together in a café on the King's road, where we talked about future collaborations we undoubtedly would undertake in this new chapter of our lives.
I imagined we might become colleagues, friends, or maybe...

We walked from the café, arm in arm, and turned the corner into Mulberry Street and the first problem presented itself:
A large removal van was parked outside the gallery, nearly empty, the contents having been unloaded by hand, and in some cases craned in using the first-floor warehouse winch. When I went inside, my beautiful gallery was in disarray.

To her credit, Sarah soon brought the ground floor gallery to rights, her works on the East wall, mine on the West, but the first floor was where our difficulties continued.

Morwenna, have you been to the Mulberry Street gallery since I took up residency?
I don't believe so, but I've heard you speak well of it. Perhaps you visited before I took it over, about 5 years ago?

The old warehouse is well-decorated on the ground floor, but upstairs in the workshop, it is cold and drafty above the bare floorboards and surrounded by the raw Victorian brick walls.
That's why I like it, of course, the aesthetic works for me, and I can make as much of a mess as I like.
Unfortunately, it seems this disorderly nature is another thing that Sarah and I share.

"The Unquiet" does not sing like the granite and tin statue of Cunning Woman from issue #14995.
When struck, a clear bell tone rings out, a low rumbling sound, lower even than the chimes of Bow Bells, which I hear regularly from my office, here at The Catalogue.
Why the resonant frequency of this modest bowl is so low baffled Esther, who muttered something about internal sound velocity while gently tapping it with a soft rubber hammer in our workshop.
Whatever may cause the effect, it is amplified greatly by rubbing its leather-wrapped beater around the edge, just under the lip of the bowl.
Like a wet finger on top of a crystal wine glass, this causes the tone to ring out, no longer able to attenuate in the air, and the sympathetic vibrations BUILD.

This is clearly what the bowl had been used for, as the black patina, which, we believe, is caused by sulphur exposure, is worn thin around the side in exactly the line followed by the beater - indeed the leather is black with repeated use.

A beautifully crafted object, but the reason I have included it in this week's issue is due to a feature I nearly missed.

If, reader, during your appointment for this Lot, in The Woolf Room, you happen to look inside the bowl, you may see, slightly glinting against the gallery lights, a white line about halfway up.
What does that look like to you? Surely, a powder hadn't been stored in this beautiful object?

This suggested to me that it has been filled with water, and then left full, regularly.
The slight evaporation of the water, over repeated days and refillings, left this tide line of minerals.

When I first saw this, picking up the black bowl from its box in our vaults, what else was I to do? I followed suit, and filled The Unquiet with clear water.

The water became black, even under the harsh white strip lighting of the Vaults, and I noticed I could no longer see through to the bottom of the bowl.
Striking the side with the leather-covered beater surprised me - no sound rang out at all, not even the metallic thud I would have expected if the water had been muting the sound.
I then tried rubbing the beater around the side of the singing bowl, surely it's natural purpose.
First, no sound came from it. This is normal with this kind of bowl, and I continued, increasing and decreasing both pressure and speed to find the resonant frequency.
I found it swiftly, thought it required much slower revolutions of the beater than when it was not filled with water.

In hindsight, this detail might have given me a clue as to what was to come.
The clear tone of the bowl was much, much lower than the already low tone the bowl rang with when empty, and as I continued, it quickly exceeded the volume in my previous tests, I was astonished!
The resonant frequency was difficult to maintain, I found myself hunting for it as it required occasional faster or slower circles of the beater.
The black water jumped and danced in ripples that shifted between concentric circles and then geometric points and on to patterns that were not altogether regular, but certainly ordered. Like the veins on the wing of an insect.
I felt like I was being pulled down into that black mirror, I felt drawn to the water, as though looking for something inside it.

I was snapped out of the mesmerising trance I was descending into by the noise of the bowl, which was now painfully loud.
My hand was somehow reluctant to stop its action, but I pulled away from the bowl and dropped the beater on the stone floor.
The noise did not stop, but started shifting, up and down, in a way that reminded me of my own shifting speed when I was trying to find the resonance of the bowl.
I scrambled away from "The Unquiet" in a panic, my hand was soon on the handle of the metal door and turned instinctively, but I blinked and paused, even as the sound grew again to higher levels.
A fine plaster dust made me wipe my eyes. With a hand over my forehead, I looked up at the ceiling, where long cracks were stretching out across it, loosening the old plaster.
The noise was now so loud I could barely see - my eyes, my very bones were vibrating in sympathy with this cacophony. This was affecting my vision so strongly that the lights in the room seemed dimmed around the bowl, like there was a dark fog issuing forth from it.

A brick slipped from the wall behind me and broke in three pieces on the stone floor, my breath caught in my lungs and I coughed.
I had to move fast.
I stumbled across the floor, I have never witnessed an earthquake first hand until now, reader, but I assure you it is very difficult to keep your feet when the ground that SHOULD NOT MOVE is disobeying this central pact we have with it.
In bending down to grasp the bowl, I lost my balance and fell on my left side, with it at my feet.
I reached towards it, but withdrew in shock. The surface of the water was bulging above the lip of the bowl - the standing wave of sound causing five ripples to form into mountains of water.
I screamed and kicked the bowl as hard as I could. I may have broken a toe but it worked.
The silence rang in my ears so loudly that I thought, for a second, that I had failed.
The water poured out and down into the central basement drain. It looked like clear, ordinary water, but there was a LOT more than the pint or so that I filled it with, of that I am sure.

the memory of the curled shadow of a hand reaching towards me from the bowl will stay with me, Morwenna, you can be sure of that too.

Wrap up

The Unquiet is available for viewing in The Woolf Room, under strict supervision.

The Catalogue will not be supplying water.

CREDITS