a place of honor at Jonathan Koons’s right. On Barthet’s right was his traveling companion, M. L. Their host’s custom was to give special accommodations to visitors from far away, especially those learned men who could best appreciate the phenomena. Sizing up the arrangements, Barthet noticed how crowded the room had become and how difficult it would be for anyone to get up and move around. To make matters worse, a little stove straddled the space between the smaller mediums’ table and the first bench.
Koons put out the candle, plunging the room into total darkness. Something immediately struck the mediums’ table with two violent licks. Barthet guessed that it had been the mallet for the large drum. The fiddle began to play a jig at a rising tempo as the two drums kicked in behind it, sometimes drumming together and sometimes separately. Some little bells rang too, perhaps from the vibrations of the whole assemblage. Barthet found the noise unpleasantly loud, but he thought the timing of the drums and violin impeccable. He imagined some invisible conductor leading the band through a medley of tunes. When it was time to switch to another melody, the conductor would change the rhythm, delivering a few offbeat licks. The fiddle would then commence another hornpipe or quickstep, and the drum would resume keeping time. Barthet assumed that Jonathan Koons was playing the fiddle with both hands. He wondered how anyone else could have moved to the drums so quickly without detection—or even whether one person could have managed to play both drums at once.
The drums fell silent, and a tambourine flew across the room, keeping time with the violin. Barthet got the impression that two hands were working the tambourine, one shaking it and the other hitting it. He could also hear a handbell that seemed to be aloft. The New Orleans mesmerist strained to pick up any evidence of human motion but could not. With no light at all, he was depending on his ears alone to make sense of what was unfolding.
Now it was time to test the capabilities of the acrobatic tambourine. On its first pass around the room, the instrument had lightly tapped Barthet’s knee before continuing on to touch others in the audience. Now he silently placed his hands on either side of his body at knee level, one hand next to his knee and the other 8 inches from his body. Barthet wanted the tambourine to touch his hands without groping around or brushing against his knees—a feat that he thought would be difficult for a person to do in pitch darkness. As if by magic, the tambourine returned and immediately did as he had willed.
The Frenchman placed his hand on the table palm up, and soon the tambourine fluttered down onto his hand. He could feel the side and the drumhead of the instrument. Barthet dared to push his hand forward. An alien palm came in contact with his. The temperature of the hand was unremarkable, but the outsize fingers caught his attention. Barthet wanted to palpate the strange extremity, but all too soon it flew away. He assumed that the person still playing the violin was Jonathan Koons. Common sense told Barthet that the only person who could reach him in the cramped space was young Nahum Koons, who sat opposite his father. Barthet had his doubts, though. Nahum would have had to get up from his chair and lie nearly flat on the table to touch Barthet’s hand. The mesmerist did not think Nahum could have done this without making some telltale sound; besides, the young man’s fingers were much smaller than the ones Barthet had just felt. The mesmerist had made a careful observation of Nahum’s fingers before the séance began. The only way he could imagine the teenager’s fingers being that thick was if they were swathed in heavy gloves.
The tambourine returned to the table and the violin performance stopped. Barthet’s reveries were interrupted by a high-pitched voice flowing out of the trumpet, which he surmised was now floating above them. The voice was speaking with Jonathan Koons, but at first Barthet could not make out what it was saying.
“King, play the accordion,” Koons commanded.
The instrument immediately began to sound, but to Barthet it was just noise. Whoever or whatever was behind it—the entity called King—obviously did not know how to play.
“Koons, this accordion is like a lot of people,” the voice in the horn complained. “It seems well on the outside, but it doesn’t have anything good on the inside.”
“King is jovial,” Koons said, perhaps addressing the spectators as much as the voice. “But he is right in this case because nothing good has come from this instrument that is, for that matter, very mediocre.”
The voice tried a different tack. “Koons, tell me to get the violin.”
“Very well, pick it up.”
Barthet heard the violin being plucked, rather than played with the bow. Soon the accordion joined in, but the result was no better than before. Barthet found the sound discordant. The invisible being was certainly no musician.
No sooner had the violin fallen silent than a high-pitched voice emanated from the harmonica. Barthet deduced that the harmonica was functioning as a megaphone, just as the trumpet had earlier. Although the voice sounded natural to him, he still could not make out the words. The music started up again shortly, this time a racket of accordion and harmonica that hurt Barthet’s ears. He felt something lightly tap his skull several times just above his right ear, almost like a caress. Whereas the tambourine had tapped his knee and hands, this time he thought the accordion was dancing around his head.
Now the voice in the trumpet requested a fiddle tune and began to sing, but Barthet remained unimpressed. He found the lyrics childish and the falsetto voice that delivered them unpleasant, nothing like the celestial music he had read so much about in glowing accounts of the Koons phenomena. Mercifully the singing lasted only about a minute. But the tapping soon began on the other side of Barthet’s head; he believed it was the trumpet. Annoyed as he was with the musical performances, the hypnotist marveled at the demonstrations on his person. He was convinced that only an entity that could see in the dark, or was reading his mind, could land these taps at precise locations—and, so far as he was concerned, clairvoyance did not exist.
A flash of light shot through the darkness near the back table and was quickly extinguished. Barthet heard the rustling of paper. Something that looked like a small lantern appeared 2 feet in front of him. He leaned closer. The lantern came within 8 inches of his face, and by its light he could see a hand holding a pencil as if poised to write. The hand itself was giving off a modicum of light, as if it had a glowworm in its grasp. It began scribbling on paper, first a couple of lines and then a long paragraph that filled the page. The paper flipped over, and a hand again appeared above it. Barthet did not know if it was the same hand. The writing continued on the reverse side of the paper until the light was gone. He heard what sounded like paper sliding across the table toward him and grabbed it.
“Koons, I have something to tell you,” came the voice through the trumpet.
“Well?”
“Bon soir,” said King, taking his leave with the thump of the tin horn on the table.
Jonathan Koons lit the candle, and the men pored over the document. Barthet found a message signed “King” that had been written out in a precise, backward-slanting hand on a piece of stationery:
To the friends and visitors of this assembly we glad to meet you here in this our humble retreat. Let the light illuminate your spiritual vision and perception we have afforded you on this occasion, and freely as we bestow so freely confer on those who seek.
On the back of the stationery, more words had been written in a different hand, with more space between the letters and fainter characters. The calligraphy even showed signs of corrections to some of the strokes. Barthet read:
Friends, disregard the medisance of those who dispute statements, for their manqué d’experience leads them to lamantable states dereglements.—A FRIEND
Running a critical eye over the
