Laurie King - The Language of Bees

It was the latter that held the wherewithal to transform me from drab chrysalis to full-blown butterfly; as it happened, there was one very close to hand.

I continued along the commercial streets until I came to the department store in which Holmes had built a concealed room. I let myself in by a hidden key and invisible latch. Of his various hidey-holes across the city, this was one of the more oppressive, as dim and airless as the wardrobe it resembled. But it was packed to the brim with costumes, and in minutes, I had an armful of likely garments to hold up before the looking-glass.

Or perhaps unlikely garments might better describe the raiment I wrapped myself in: a diaphanous skirt with a deliberately uneven hem-line, a gipsy-style blouse whose yoke was stiff with embroidery, a scarlet leather belt with a buckle fashioned from a chunk of turquoise, and a soft shawl that might have been attractive in a less garish shade of green. Everything on me apart from my spectacles and shoes was eye-catching, everything was bright, all the colours clashed.

I traced a line of kohl around my eyes and added a peacock-feather bandeau to my hair, then on second thought changed the half-dozen glass bangles on my right wrist for a silver chain to which were attached various tiny and esoteric shapes. As a piece of jewellery it was both ugly and uncomfortable, but on previous occasions I had found it to offer great opportunity for conversation. I studied the result in the glass, then checked the time on my lamentably mundane wrist-watch.

Twenty minutes to seven. I could by-pass the Children of Light, or Lights, as may be, ignoring the wife's interests to plunge directly on the trail of Damian himself. On the other hand, this church of hers would appear to hold very limited hours, as the other place I was headed did not.

No, I decided: I would stop briefly at the meeting hall, then go on. I could only pray that, in neither place would I meet anyone who knew me.

Of course, I could always claim I was dressed for a costume ball.

THE NARROW DOORWAY BESIDE THE STATIONERS' was now attracting people. Three young women in very ordinary dress went in, causing me to question my costume, but then a man in a dramatic black velvet cape that must have been roasting stepped out of a cab and swept inside, the woman left behind to pay the driver wearing garments only fractionally less outrageous than my own, so I kept coming.

The doorway led to a narrow, unadorned stairway, with the sound of a crowd coming from above. I climbed, and found a room twice the size of the stationers' downstairs, half the chairs filled by fifty or sixty or so professional Seekers, poetic undergraduates, bored young women, and earnest spinsters. I was by no means the most colourful.

One of the Earnest Spinsters with bad skin and dyed-black hair greeted me with a proprietary air coupled with an enthusiasm that made me uneasy. She grasped my hand in both of hers, holding it while she told me her name (Millicent Dunworthy), asserted her long history as a Child of Lights (plural, I noted), and delivered her assurance that I, too, would find myself Enlightened by the Evening and sure to have any Questions from my Heart's True Heart answered (all capital letters clear in her pronouncement). I withdrew my hand with some difficulty, accepted the brochures she thrust at me, and backed away while she was still talking.

Fortunately, some others came in then and kept her from following me to a seat in the back between a woman with a nose like a tin-opener and a young man with sloping shoulders and damp-looking hands.

The only suggestion that the evening might include a religious element was that the chairs were arranged with an aisle down the middle, to permit a sort of procession. The room itself was made up of three nondescript wallpapered walls and a fourth of new-looking wooden storage cupboards. It was this wall towards which the seating had been arranged, which seemed an odd choice, particularly as the centre doors were held together by a large, utilitarian padlock. Heavy curtains sagged alongside the three windows overlooking the street, although they were drawn back and the windows open in a vain attempt to disperse the room's heat: If the evening's entertainment included photographic lantern-slides and a closing of the curtains, I would slip away.

Since the room itself told me nothing, and the congregants seemed to me the usual gathering of cranks and other gullible sorts, I turned to the pamphlets I had been given.

The “lights”-plural-in question, it seemed, were the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars. And not necessarily in that order, I saw as I read the poorly printed but coherently written brochures. Like homeopathy, which declares dilute substances a more efficacious cure than powerful doses of the same substance, the influence of the far-distant stars was regarded as equal to that of the sun and the moon.

I sighed. Why were so many religions built upon such nonsensical foundations?

The sharp-nosed woman beside me heard my noise, and bristled. “Do you see something to disapprove of?” she demanded.

I lifted up a solemn and wide-eyed expression. “That was a sound of mourning, that I had gone for so many years without hearing this message.”

The true believer looked suspicious. Fortunately, activity at the front of the room distracted her from further accusations.

A jolly-faced woman, brisk and tidy as a nurse despite the long white robe she wore and the large gold ring on her right hand (nurses tend to avoid rings) marched to the front of the now-full room to address the padlock on the double doors. She had problems, becoming more and more flustered until a man who might have been her brother, also dressed in a robe and wearing a ring, got up to help her. Between the two of them they wrestled the thing off and pushed back the doors.

My first surprise of the evening was the back-drop thus revealed: a painting by Damian Adler.

Not that it was immediately recognisable as such. In fact, it was not even instantly recognisable as a painting, merely an expanse of black broken by tiny white specks. From my seat at the back, I could see little more than velvet darkness and a sense of depth, but having spent the past two days with his work, I had no doubt that it was from the hand of The Addler.

The two acolytes had pulled a somewhat shaky-looking table before the open doors and were now draping it with a black cloth. The woman set up a pair of incense burners and held a match to the contents, which began to weep a thick smoke that made me glad for my seat at the back. The man drew a silver candelabrum from one of the cupboards, put it onto the cloth, and started working candles into it. The candles were black.

I perked up. Was I about to become a participant in a Black Mass?

I had spent enough time in theological studies to have come across various parodies of the Roman Catholic Mass, from Fools' Feast to orgy-on-the-altar. But surely nothing too extreme would take place here, in a public meeting hall that invited strangers off the street?

No: Neither the people nor their attitudes suggested that they were about to enact an orgy atop the flimsy table. Disappointing, perhaps, but then again, I had no wish to be arrested in a raid. Holmes' rivals in Scotland Yard would never let either of us live it down.

It took the flustered brother and sister a while to get the reluctant wicks lit, but when the light was growing at the end of each dark taper, they stood back and glanced at the audience. The entire congregation-some of us belatedly-rose to its feet, and those in the know gave a ragged chorus: “Light from darkness.”