Pepper’s Ghost (Aquae)

Up from the cellar depth to shimmering Victorian avenues, murk jewelled with phosphorus, ambiguous dusk, the Eastern steams and perfumes of a street bazaar.

The city's pleasure hill, its Venus mound, venue for lost weekends, atilt over the sexual edge, gin-blur and brothel frenzy, an erogenous zone shades into the Twilight Zone.

Old smokes linger. 1381, Peasants’ Revolt. St John's Priory at Highbury, home of Robert Hale, who raised the Poll Tax, is burned down, a blood and torchlight drama.

Rising from the priory's ash, the Highbury Barn, a tavern in five-acre grounds with bowling greens and trap-ball alleys; haunt for Walter Raleigh, for Oliver Goldsmith on his walks to Islington. In 1861 a defrocked clown, Giovanelli, buys the barn, imports a freak show, builds the Alexandra Theatre, and crams the fog with lamps and voices.

Giovanelli launches eel-pie fairs, sewer scampi served en croute, rat-killing contests, ballrooms, and the magical perfume of quim upon the breeze.

A million lights.

His freak show opens 1869. The city’s dreams and visions are precipitated in an eerie haze.

Namatar the Man-Frog in his grotto, hyperthyroid eyes upon the women, spawning ritual. He spots the most susceptible, flushed in this chilly hall of monsters.

Chang and Eng stroll by, fused at the chest, the first Siamese twins, while Leotard, the acrobat, in his remarkable costume, tumbles above us through the frosted air.

Henry Dirks, inventor of the Dirksian Phantasmagoria, an optical effect, meets showman Joseph Pepper, swamps the barn with lantern spooks in an ethereal mob. Pepper's Ghost, depending only on a lamp, a sheet of angled glass, will nightly conjure raves accompanying performances of Hamlet. Couples hug each other in the hush. Entranced by men of light in a refracted afterlife, reality becomes imagined death in an unsilvered mirror. All the boundaries begin to slide; even the human body is unfixed. Manifestations of the double-headed Hackney Brook, Chang and Eng seem to be attempting to walk through each other, gaseous as Pepper's phantoms. Namatar the Man-Frog lets the woman touch his webbed hand. Anything could happen.

Highbury becomes a high-risk borderland, a mauve zone, a condition that could spread, infect the city, spectre epidemic. Pepper's Ghost suggested as a culprit in the Spring Heeled Jack plague of the eighteen-seventies, blamed for the rowdy orgies, for the ghost sex current spilling out through Highbury Barn.

The venue is closed down as an intolerable nuisance, as a danger to the health and safety of the young. The luscious creepiness is dissipated, and the area becomes a void; invites untested energies; invites a new miasma…