The Conjurer's Half-Crown: An Entertainment for All Ages

By L J Carr

In a London street in 1948 an unidentified girl was found costumed as a fairy-tale princess. Being profoundly unconscious, she was immediately admitted to a hospital where she is to remain until 2034; and the mystery of her arrival is further compounded by the enigma of her not appearing to age whilst being locked into her perpetual coma.
On one level The Conjurer's Half-Crown is a fantastical fairy-tale and yet it is also a ghost story and a mystery; its logic, that of knowing there is no single certainty and that Reality is not whatever you presume it to be.
This 'entertainment' is one of riddling games in which elements of Lewis Carroll - together with other kinds of imaginative and speculative fictions - are all compounded into a profundity of Nonsense which is distinctive and different.

• Language: English
• Publisher: L J Carr
• Release date: Feb 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370919499

L J Carr

Senior Lecturer in Drama & Literature

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE:

When the Perigee and a Full Moon coincide, December 2017

'AND WHAT EXACTLY do you mean by a conjurer's half-crown?'

'Exactly that!' replied Drosselmeyer without so much as wrinkling his bulbous nose: 'A paradox...A logical contradiction...A riddle...In short, an enigma like the Egyptian Sphinx...A conundrum!'

'Please explain,' demanded his colleague, both his eyes narrowing sharply.

'One of those several strange patients that I inherited - and who had originally been admitted as the result of a street accident of some sort - was first admitted because she'd been found lying in the street; she was just there in the road or on the pavement; she had been found knocked out. That girl, who is now my patient, was deeply and profoundly unconscious in what those who first omitted her recorded as a condition of profound - '

'Having been knocked over by a big, red bus?' sneered Stahlbaum somewhat facetiously, completing his elder colleagues statement-of-fact by transposing it into his sarcastic question.

The senior consultant continued: 'With regard to this particular, inherited patient, I don't know now what to do. She, a mere child, was admitted long before I took up my current post. All I have to go on is that she was first admitted through having been found in the street; and at that time she was bizarrely dressed in all the finery of a fairy-tale princess. Or so it says in her notes.'

'How strange!..Perhaps your patient was on her way to the royal palace in her very own golden carriage?' sneered Stahlbaum as he swallowed his third lunchtime brandy.

'Very likely,' agreed Drosselmeyer as he signalled for another round...There was then a significant pause.

'You're surely not suggesting - ?'

'Yes! I am!' snapped Drosselmeyer.

'Explain!' demanded Stahlbaum, no longer amused.

'Certainly: but first, my esteemed colleague, let us remind ourselves of the most common kinds of comas.'

Stahlbaum laughed, and then in the voice of a textbook rehearsed: 'Metabolic encephalophy; anoxic brain injury; locked-in syndrome; and ultimately brain-death with an irreversible cessation of all brain functions.'

'Caused by?' prompted Drosselmeyer.

'Trauma...From being knocked over by that big, red London bus!' sneered Stahlbaum chortling to himself. Drosselmeyer was not amused by Stahlbaum's facetiousness.'

'And?'

'And of course, there is nowadays a medically induced kind of coma used to protect a patient's brain from swelling or further injury.' Another pause. Neither man spoke.

'Look here, Drosselmeyer,' said Stahlbaum, ' you know as much about clinical practice as I do.' Another pause. Then he continued: 'A patient receives a controlled dose of anaesthetic and so a state without feeling or awareness is induced: a straightforward - '

'Exactly so!' said Drosselmeyer, his voice rising sharply like an off-key operatic tenor's: 'And you, esteemed Professor and my old friend, you know as well as I do that thereafter an unconscious patient is held within the hospital's Intensive Care Unit where he or she is monitored for vital symptoms, brain activity and all such -'

'Please don't raise your voice,' said Stahlbaum, who was embarrassingly well aware that their private conversation was now attracting a great deal of unwelcome interest from others who were also in the same dining-area of a City pub; which, incidentally, neither man had ever visited previously. They were not men who liquid-lunched; and it this was for both men a very unusual situation.

'My patient, it seemed, had been - and continued to be - properly monitored for many years, even before I was appointed to becoming her nanny,' explained Drosselmeyer: 'And then for some inexplicable reason all monitoring was discontinued on the say-so of my illustrious predecessor; as, or so it seemed to those concerned, there was then no valid purpose in continuing! At that time, there seemed no good reason for any further monitoring of my Sleeping Princess - not, that is, according to my predecessors. Because to this day that child just lies there...inertly, doing nothing! Nothing whatsoever!...Year after year!'

'Brain dead?'

'Certainly not. Yet there is something very peculiar about her condition: somehow and strangely, she seems permanently locked into that exact moment when falling asleep - that is, as if suspended between her waking consciousness and dreamland; and there she continues like an addled egg in incubation. In fact, at times her skin often feels somewhat waxy to the touch and then she looks as pale as porcelain. Sometimes she seems so insubstantial as to be luminous; it's as if she were being preserved in a shell of moonlight...Most unusual!...Sometimes - and I'm not exaggerating - she seems to glow in the dark like a will-o'-wisp.'

'Amazing!' sneered Stahlbaum: 'Is she ever aware of her surroundings? Is she capable of voluntary movements? Or incapable?...As with locked-in syndrome, in any vegetative state there are very occasionally neurological conditions in which a patient remains totally paralysed -'

'Except for the eye muscles!' interjected Doctor Drosselmeyer.

'However! '

Yet before Stahlbaum could utter a second syllable, Drosselmeyer continued: 'No! We've done everything, tried everything, utilized every test, therapy or procedure you or anyone else could possibly imagine...Somehow and strangely, that poor child seems to be spell-stopped...spell-locked...as if she'd been magically spell-struck by some peculiar sort of fairy-magic. And yes, I'm perfectly serious! And no, I've never come across anything even remotely similar, not since we first qualified as juniors...All those many years ago!'

'You're not serious?' said Stahlbaum quizzically.

'Perfectly serious,' replied Drosselmeyer: 'We've tried everything.' Another pause: 'Although I must admit there have been times when this patient appears to be concentrating or listening to -'

'Music suitable for a Sleeping Princess?' queried Stahlbaum superciliously. He was a man whose wife insisted that he accompanied her to the theatre at least once or twice every month, much to his chagrin. Stahlbaum loved music but hated opera.

'Obviously,' was the rather weak response from Drosselmeyer, who then added as an unwelcome afterthought: 'Perhaps Tchaikovsky?'

'Who else? What else!' chortled Stahlbaum: 'Your patient in her mind is most certainly dancing to some fairy-music from that saccharine ballet by Tchaikovsky.' Having said that, Stahlbaum emptied his third glass with a single swallow.

'Surprisingly, yes!' snapped Drosselmeyer. Similarly, he also gulped down yet another brandy and then paused for breath. Neither of these men was were accustomed to lunchtime drinking; and yet here they were together in a quaint, old pub not a few hundred metres from the City Hospital; it was a quaint, curiously-odd place, an old eating-house, and one where neither man had ever been before. Both men were by now well on their separate ways to being stymied, pie-eyed, perplexed, befuddled and bewildered.

'It was not until I gave up on searching for 'meanings' or for 'explanations' that I began to see what an experience is - or what an event - is in itself. And for me, that was truly a Eureka-moment; and then I understood - '

'Understood what? interrupted Stahlbaum.

'Understood what the Sphinx represents, for example.'

'And?' prompted Stahlbaum.

'And indeed! There was a pause; and then Drosselmeyer continued: 'You'll think me an irrational lunatic, yet the Sphinx is a logical absurdity; it's an improbability that exists only in art which then - '

'Which then what?' There was another pause and then Stahlbaum continued: 'But please, do continue,' he said somewhat condescendingly....'Philosophy will only clip an angel's wings.'

'Well, my dear Drosselmeyer, that's only poetry - and 'poetry' at its most ludicrous...I remember it from our schooldays...Cockney Keats?'

'Also true, regrettably,' agreed Drosselmeyer: 'All the same, John Keats was indicating a profound insight in asking us to throw away our science and our minds and to - '

'And to what?'

'To accept that everything we think of as being 'real' is itself made of things we cannot regard as being real. Even our minds and bodies are nothing but an assemblage of sub-atomic particles having no objective substance, no empirical reality; and that's - '

'Magic?'

'Quantum physics! Quantum biology!...Quantum MAGIC! Yes, yes, yes, yes!...Eureka!...Quantum magic!'

'Calm yourself, dear colleague,' said Stahlbaum: 'Obviously you've regressed, returned in your dotage to being once again a geriatric hippy, a neurotic throwback to the Age of Aquarius.' Stahlbaum laughed: 'Next, you'll be saying, you believe in telepathy, clairvoyance, astrology, and fairies!'

'Fairies?...Seriously, yes, I do...I do now!'

'And that this earth is flat, while the moon is made of green cheese?'

'I've no certainty that anything I've ever said or done - and what I'm telling you here-and-now - is actually and factually 'true': it's real to me, in the sense that all fairy-tales are real-and-true; because their 'truth' is that of an intractable fluidity. And with all such stories, one never quite knows for certain which is what, or what is which. And I like to think of myself as a reasonably honest person whose mind is still in proper working order.'

Drosselmeyer continued: 'Yes...Let me assure you, esteemed colleague, that - yes! - my Sleeping Princess is perhaps an anomaly within all medical sciences; yet she most certainly exists in herself most definitely, just as we two are both sitting here...'

Drosselmeyer's credo was then somewhat unfortunately undercut by a series of tipsy hiccups which reduced his profound eloquence to tipsy-talk. Nevertheless, he continued: 'To me, fairy-stories are enigmatic, riddling and very mysterious: a witch flies on her broomstick; a cat swims underwater and talks to mermaids; the hero is a heroine, or the heroine a hero. In short there are no meaningful categories when nothing is as it seems or as it appears to be. Perhaps the riddle represents a higher wisdom than science: an ogre stamps its feet on thin ice; every event is a sequel to a story that has neither a definite beginning nor an end in the same domain; where journeys are a matter of who-is-where and, as one shape-shifts, so another story either does or does not narrate itself. Subsequently, each story sits over the one underneath in an infinite palimpsest: a bear or a man-from-nowhere or a girl-without-a-name is spellbound; a beautiful princess hides herself in a dirty deerskin; an old beggar dives into a bottomless lake of everlasting fire, only to tell the truth of his experience later - and then to be disbelieved by his shrewish spouse. Those who come back from the dead are forever changed; and necessarily, they are forever hiding whatever it is they now know.'

'So in spite of being completely inert, your Sleeping Princess, although being totally paralysed, still perhaps has the use of her eye-muscles?' asked Stahlbaum quite seriously.

'Perhaps. There are times when she seems to be listening - listening intently.'

'At all times? Only occasionally? Or - ?' Another pause. 'Or only on special occasions?

'Only when the moon is full,' said Drosselmeyer in the defeated tones of a man who reluctantly admits to having lost an argument.

'Then she's a - ?'

'No! This child is no lunatic...But she is a moon-gazer!'

'No! No! No! No! Again, you're talking nonsense!' asserted Stahlbaum.

'Now you listen to me, my esteemed colleague: my fairy princess is definitely and indisputably a - '

'Fruit-and-nut case!' asserted Stahlbaum; who inexplicably still found this whole conversation somewhat ludicrous, and so started humming a tune for the celeste: 'Everyone's a fruit-and-nut case...' Such was Stahlbaum's idea of being humorous.

'As far as her medical records are concerned, my patient has remained focused on each and every full moon for years and years and years! And - brace yourself! - my patient has been moon-watching compulsively - and continuously! - since she was first admitted to hospital on 26th January in 1948!'

There was a deafening silence...Stahlbaum: 'When first admitted?...By my calculation, 1948 is no less than sixty-nine years ago!'

'I kid you not! Our clinical records indicate that this Sleeping Princess was admitted for intensive care in 1948; and yesterday was December the third, 2017.'

'There must be a clerical error!'

'You think we haven't checked, double checked, contacted the police, tried to track any next-of kin, someone, anyone; and completed that whole damn rigmarole time after time after time?'

There was no response from the younger man. And now the entire dining-area was as silent as Cleopatra's sarcophagus.

'Ridiculous!' snarled Doctor Stahlbaum, now suddenly animated from previously being somewhat stupefied and nonplussed: 'How could anyone possibly have remained being a child since 1948? Your patient would surely by now be as old as you are!...Absurd!'

'Nevertheless, I tell you true, my esteemed colleague.' And there was now no cynicism or mockery in Drosselmeyer's empty voice. He continued: 'And before you ask, let me assure you there has never been any need whatsoever for any kind of life-support, not since - '

'Your patient was first admitted in 1948? Yes? So you said.'

'No doubt about it,' asserted Drosselmeyer...Inadvertently his face lost almost all its features and nothing enlightened its expression of utter emptiness: his face became a complete blank - like a jelly-mould; and so it was that, for the moment, Drosselmeyer's face looked most like that of a Buddha while contemplating the great riddle of eternity. Likewise, Stahlbaum just continued to stare vacuously, both men now being almost totally oblivious of their surroundings; and yet both doctors were now strangely preoccupied with their own thoughts.

There was a silence, broken finally by Stahlbaum saying: 'As you explained only a few minutes ago, this Sleeping Princess of yours is definitely a conjurer's half-crown. A pause.

'And what exactly do you mean by a conjurer's half-crown?' demanded Drosselmeyer...Another pause.

'I merely echo what you said earlier, my dear colleague, about your profoundly sleeping patient being an enigma, a conundrum, a riddle, an illogical impossibility - such as Wagner's silent sprites or a singing sphinx - as with those wretched Rhinemaidens!' Stahlbaum chortled without registering that, unintentionally, he had either transposed or muddled the attributives, singing and silent.

'Will you accompany me right now to examine this sleeping fairy-child? I'd like you to examine my Sleeping Princess; and I would welcome your opinion. If you please!' commanded Drosselmeyer in his distinctively-abrasive and most professorial tone-of-voice.

'My pleasure,' responded Stahlbaum, somewhat meekly.

And with that, these two men left that picturesquely quaint, old public-house. Yet completely unnoticed by those two eminent consultants as they left the inn was a sign emblazoned above its threshold: an emblem with its insignia asserting (in Latin) that these licensed premises to be known in perpetuity as: The Conjurer's Half-Crown.

CHAPTER TWO:

True Places

TRUE PLACES are not to be found on maps. Most are yet to be discovered. One such a place is the moving island of Thule, once seen far out to sea by Roman sailors in the days of Julius Caesar. Another is that flying island once seen by Welsh Druids as it floated high above their heads at Stone Henge. Another such a place is called Peter's Playground, a far-away country which we know now as Wendy's Neverland. And today, cosmonauts and astronauts are carefully mapping those mysterious spaces that fill the entire emptiness of space itself. These are all True Places. And ever since stories were first told, we have heard many marvellous tales of many such wondrous places as there are to be seen within the dark inside the Dark Inside...Another such True Place is the Kingdom of Idyllia.

For reasons which can never be explained with any degree of certainty, a certain young girl is now living in isolation somewhere in the city near to where we are now. All her toys and schoolbooks lie scattered over the floor of a White Room where she lives; and in one of her extra-special picture-books she has drawn over the illustrations of dinosaurs and other extinct creatures her own impressions of unicorns and fairies: drawings of a Sphinx and a Serpent called Lilith; and also of some rather strange creatures that look monstrously ugly and somewhat toad-like. Among all these fantastical drawings there is a cartoon of an orange-coloured cat who sadly is no longer her companion.

Her Nurse explained this inevitability (the loss of her pet cat) by saying to the girl that what happened to Ginger Alice is exactly the same as what happened to a lost domino when, from a new set given on her birthday, one domino just disappeared mysteriously and without ever being found, no matter how long or how carefully they searched the White Room together, floor to ceiling. And although that lost domino was never found, there was in actual fact no place for a domino to have hidden itself. Yet their lost domino had vanished irretrievably. There was no doubt about it. And at that time the girl's Nurse had said that, somehow and strangely, both cat and domino had disappeared or vanished into the black Hole-of-History: which - please believe me - is definitely a True Place, yet not one from which anyone has yet returned to tell their tale.

As a special treat for the girl's last birthday, a clownish magician had climbed those one-thousand-and-one steps which lead to the White Room, the lift on that day being then out of order. He said that finding his way to the top of that ridiculous tower-block was far worse than ever having to appear in a pantomime or to climb Jack's big beanstalk.

Now on that particular birthday, one of the magician's many conjuring-tricks was to make things disappear by magic. A much more impressive trick was to watch the magician making things appear out of thin air: and when he magicked an old silver coin out of empty air, he called that special piece of his Merlin-magic his One-and-only, Now-you-DON'T-see-it, Now-you-DO, Special Mind-bending Super-trick!...Abracadabra!

Although the magician repeatedly conjured his own silver coin out of empty air, he couldn't ever bring back this child's lost domino...Oh no...To have done that would have been a really impressive piece of Merlin-magic; and would have been much more appreciated than his silly tricks with a silver half-crown coin, now long out of circulation and no longer valid!

Perhaps the most interesting of True Places is our own little Kingdom of Idyllia; and here in Idyllia is where we start this story.

Idyllia is indisputably, without question, and most genuinely a True Place. It was first founded by Abbot Richard, whose poems about his mystical choir, his fantastical books, and his own wondrous clock now form a trilogy of wonderfully nonsensical dramas, which together depict a universal story. And our little Kingdom of Idyllia has been most carefully represented by this girl in her over-drawings, one of which depicts the Silent Sphinx as blind-eyed monster in a great swirling of sand. Nurse told her patient that this sand was not Sahara-sand, nor pixie-dust, and was most probably something she called cosmic-dust: which is the stuff of Moonshadows and is not what one get whenever grit flies into one's eye or when smoke blows in from outside...Nowadays ours is a very dirty city.

Nurse could now be heard singing a strange and magical fairy-song, yet the girl, who was already in bed but not really asleep, could hear every soft note; and yet she could not see the Nurse who was tidying away toys and returning the girl's pencils and books to their proper places on shelves in the school-corner.

I wish...I wish

the World away,

so Time were somewhere else:

For then, I'd hear

the Silent Sphinx

sing of love, good health:

And all such things

as Happiness -  

plus all you wish yourself.

While the girl was listening to her Nurse's song she remembered how Idyllia is just one tiny kingdom of many; one which was hibernated by the Lilac Angel (or Fairy) when she took away the murderous curse of Carabosse, and so made it possible for the Princess Aurora to sleep for a hundred years - that is, until she was awakened with a loving kiss, married her handsome prince, and so became the first Queen of Idyllia. However, all that's by the way...Now, listen carefully.

Our story of The Conjurer's Half-crown starts during one of those magical nights when a mystical moon is floating low over still, silent waters sparkling with fairy-dust. It was certainly not one of those nights when anyone would ever feel nervous or afraid; and no one then could possibly imagine any strange creatures lurking behind empty shadows.

Surprisingly perhaps, our Perfectly Proper Princess had tonight - and for the first time ever - had put herself into bed. All by herself, although she was not yet properly asleep. She just lay looking at her toys, which although carefully tidied away by her Nurse, the girl still saw clearly as they all lay scattered across the floor: her twin rabbits, Benny Bunny and Betsy Bunny; an empty-eyed and weird-looking doll called Julie; a blue-coloured soft-toy called Mr. Chad; and any number of her dolls and toy-friends. Although all these toys and books had been properly tidied, the girl could see for herself that, for some reason tonight, her Nurse had not yet tidied the room and that all her toys and books were still as she herself had left them when she first put herself to bed. How strange! It was as if her room were in a state of time transfixed, whereas the girl herself was already in bed and looking out through an open window.

The girl's nursery-nurse, had been - once upon a time when she was then a much younger woman - a ballerina with a great ballet company and, in some great theatre in Russia, she had danced in many spectacular ballets; and almost every night in the nursery it was one of those wondrous stories from a fairy-ballet that usually entranced our Perfectly Proper Princess and so put her soundly to sleep.

Tonight, in the Kingdom of Idyllia, our Perfectly Proper Princess, was only almost asleep in her room...Perhaps she was imagining what it would be like to fly as fairy-ballerina across a full moon as, on such a beautiful night, she must have been imagining herself as a silvery Moonshadow dancing across that night-sky, now dressed in its own star-cloud of cosmic light.

And as our Perfectly Proper Princess lay wondering why her Nurse had not tidied the toys, it seemed to her that, somehow and strangely, her Nurse was no longer a nurse but that tonight she was none other than Little Red Riding Hood herself, going bravely alone into the forest in order to take a basket of goodies to her own widowed grandmother. And in that deep, dank, dark wood were to be found all those now-extinct creatures, whose likenesses are now to be seen only in those many picture-books which our princess had left lying untidily scattered across the nursery floor.

Our Perfectly Proper Princess looked over the scattered toys and bric-a-brac and tried to see into the activity-corner where her paint-brushes and crayons were usually kept on a shelf. However, not even a Perfectly Proper Princess can actually see into the dark inside the dark inside of the Dark Inside; and yet, somehow and surprisingly, she could! And in a far corner of her White Room were (she knew) a cat's empty drinking-dish and the cat's feeding-bowl, no longer needed now because the princess's very own and most magical, ginger companion-cat had sadly left this White Room to be with those happy people who now all live somewhere in a topmost turret of the Twirky Tower.

Nurse had explained to our princess how it is that all creatures must one day climb the Twirky Tower in order to reach that special place which (like Idyllia) is never to be found on any map, no matter how long one searches through a magnifying glass. Both the cat's water-dish and food-bowl were now dry of water and empty of food; in fact, both bowl and dish were now coated with cosmic-dust; which is what falls mysteriously from the night when a full moon is shining and when all the twinkling stars are just holes in a night-sky where starlight comes through.

It was only at such a special time - and when all the royal household was fast asleep - that our Perfectly Proper Princess saw - literally, she saw out of a corner of one eye - her own magical cat which (as she well knew) had already been called away to live with all those happy people in a True Place which is not to be found on any map, no matter how long one searches.

One such a night, our Perfectly Proper Princess was watching pretty moonlight scattering its sheen of fairy-dust all about the ceiling of her royal nursery when, quite surprisingly, Zingiberi Rubicunda - that same magical, pet cat she once knew as her very own Ginger Alice - danced upside down across the nursery ceiling.

Ginger Alice had always performed that unusually clever trick of disappearing in one place only to reappear somewhere else: it was a trick she was first taught by that truly talented Cheshire who originally came over on the boat with Julius Caesar and who, later, lived for a long time in Victorian Oxford with none other than a special little girl called Alice.

Our Perfectly Proper Princess always knew that her own Ginger Alice was - as we well know - a remarkably clever cat, in having learnt all her clever tricks from both Merlin and his apprentice, Houdini, a wonderful American wizard who tried unsuccessfully for many years to find a way into the Kingdom of Idyllia. And our Perfectly Proper Princess well knew her own Ginger Alice had this special night magically re-appeared with a full moon out of the blackness of the dark inside the Dark Inside; and tonight this remarkably clever cat had somehow come down from her Twirky Tower especially to have a special game or another magical adventure with our princess. This - you understand - is exactly the sort of thing that still occasionally happens in our long-ago and far-away Kingdom of Idyllia.

Idyllia is a pleasant little land in a sunny, springtime world: in Idyllia it is always spring and its woods and lakes are always full of the most beautiful creatures all living together harmoniously - for the most part.

Our little country of Idyllia is now the kingdom of King Florizel and Queen Aurora, who live permanently in a grand palace of music and laughter, which is - as you well know - a