Plutonic Rainbows

This week The Information reported that OpenAI could drop a new Astra, a new Sol and a cybersecurity model as soon as Friday, which is today. The leak-watchers call them GPT-6.2 Astra and Sol, though OpenAI hasn’t announced either. There was never a 6.1 Astra, because OpenAI scrapped it over safety concerns. ArtificialWatch’s release log puts OpenAI’s median gap between frontier models at 41 days, and 41 days after GPT-6.1 Sol was 9 November. My call is GPT-6.2 Astra and Sol before 13 November.

Anthropic’s median frontier gap is 22 days, and it’s already 39 days since Claude Sonnet 5.5, so the median is no use here. That figure comes from a burst across tiers. The tier that’s due is the top one, and it runs slower: Fable 5.1 came 84 days after Fable 5, and 84 days from 1 September is 24 November. Opus 5.5 also performs at the level of Fable 5.1 on most work, by Anthropic’s own account, and a flagship the tier below has caught isn’t much of a flagship. So the next Fable model lands in the last week of November. LLM Countdowns says 30 November, close enough that I won’t argue.

The trackers have been wrong already this autumn. Forkast counted projections for Anthropic and OpenAI on 28 and 29 October, and neither lab shipped a frontier model that week. I got a Thursday wrong myself in September.

Laura Dale was seven when George Churchill photographed her towing her Guy along a London pavement in 1970, a glass jar in one hand and a length of string in the other. The caption that travels with the picture reads “Rattling her can: Laura Dale, seven, from Hampstead, pulls a pram chassis with a guy collecting for Bonfire Night in 1970”, which is nearly right. It isn’t a can. It’s a glass jar, empty or close to it, and she’s swinging it towards the camera as if Churchill might be good for a coin.

The Guy rides in what’s left of a pram, the body long gone and only the frame and its spoked wheels remaining, and he’s better dressed than you’d expect: a roll-neck jumper under a heavy coat tied at the waist with string, and a pair of real shoes at the end of his legs. His face is the strange part. Someone has painted it with real care, the curled moustache and pointed beard of every schoolbook Fawkes, and then topped it with a mop of pale, straggling hair that looks like unravelled rope. He sits slumped and patient, like an old man being taken out for an airing. Laura is all movement by comparison, hair flying, a woollen jumper too big for her, an Alice band, white socks and patent shoes. Behind her, half hidden in a shop doorway, another child is watching.

I should say which of those details I trust. The copy I found was 306 pixels wide, so I ran it through Topaz’s Wonder 4 to enlarge it fourfold, and software like that doesn’t recover detail so much as guess at it. The jar, the painted face and the child in the doorway are all there in the small original. The cables of the jumper and the weave of the Guy’s coat are mostly the software’s best estimate, which means I’ve been studying the incidental details of 1970 with an almost archaeological fascination when some of the artefacts are reconstructions.

Nothing in the picture has been arranged to look picturesque. The pavement is blotched and stained, the shopfront is scuffed, and the window is crowded with handwritten cards and notices, the kind of window that once did the work of a local noticeboard. A newspaper bill hangs from the frame, and the whole enterprise has the cheerful untidiness of an ordinary English afternoon in autumn, with none of the faint menace that so much seventies imagery seems to pick up at this distance.

The custom itself has gone. The London Museum’s page on penny for the Guy sets out the routine: children stuffed old clothes or pillows into a figure, took it round the neighbourhood “often in a pram or wheelbarrow”, and asked people for money. In theory the money bought fireworks, though “more often than not, it was just kept as pocket money”, which I find entirely believable. Then the Guy went on the bonfire. Effigies of Fawkes have burned since at least 1790, and before that it was the Pope, a piece of history nobody mentioned to me when I was seven. Henry Grant photographed the custom across London from the 1950s to the 1970s, so Churchill’s picture is one of a great many, but the Grant photographs on the museum’s page show children in groups, gathered round their Guys, where Laura is caught mid-stride. By the end of the century the tradition had faded out, and nowadays, as the museum puts it, it’s trick-or-treating that sends children onto the streets, “asking for sweets, not cash”. Even the cash was about to change. Decimal Day came on 15 February 1971, so the pennies Laura was asking for were the old ones, with a few months left to run.

Laura is entirely at home in a world that now seems almost as remote as Victorian England, and the age of the photograph isn’t the reason. The reason is how much of what she takes for granted went in such a short space of time: the old money, the bonfire built in the street or the back garden rather than at an organised display, and the idea of making a man from old clothes, wheeling him round the shops for coins and then setting him alight.

She couldn’t have known any of this. On the afternoon itself she was most likely thinking about the jar and whether it would fill, and about fireworks, and the melancholy only arrives from our side of the photograph, more than half a century later, where her quick, noisy afternoon has gone still. The Guy, presumably, went on a bonfire a few days afterwards.

“In my experience, if a jilky is involved, it usually gets put down to a mains explosion.” That’s the first sentence of “Not Even Legend”, the second story in Alan Moore’s Illuminations, and after the brothel and the split brain of Hypothetical Lizard it lands like a change of key. It runs to sixteen pages and first appeared in Uncertainties 5, which Brian J. Showers edited for Swan River Press in 2021. The speaker is a Whispering Pete, one of four kinds of creature he lists, “Snapjackets, jilkies, mormoleens and Whispering Petes”, and he’s frank about the first lot: “repulsive little insect-vegetable hybrids that can camouflage themselves as nearly anything and eat domestic pets”.

Alongside him runs a meeting. A paranormal study group gathers after hours in an estate agent’s office, Chalcombe & Bentine, because David Watkins, “always the most soberly dressed at the paranormal study group’s bi-weekly meetings”, is the branch manager. Conversations hang in the air and clatter “like atonal wind chimes”, and the narration drifts from one member to the next, as Koom Kankesan notes in his Comicon essay. Tall Brian is “proselytising about ghosts” at Adriana, “that goth media-studies lecturer who only joined, like, a few weeks ago or something”. That “like” isn’t Moore’s. It belongs to whichever head the narration happens to be in, and it’ll take on anyone’s voice for a sentence or two before moving along the table. Bloomsbury’s own blurb says the group has been “infiltrated by one of the otherworldly beings they seek to investigate”, and a point of view that slips into every member in turn is a very good place to hide one. I’ll leave the who alone.

The group calls itself CSICON, the Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal, and Moore didn’t make that up either. CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, was founded in 1976 under Paul Kurtz, and Robert Anton Wilson turned the name inside out for CSICON, which he credited to one Prof. Timothy F.X. Finnegan of Trinity College, Dublin. In Cosmic Trigger III it “still offers $10,000 to any ‘normalist’” who can come up with the goods. Moore gives Wilson’s joke name to a roomful of earnest people sitting among “Chalcombe & Bentine’s orderly appraisals of the housing market”.

William Shaw calls the story “a loving parody” in Strange Horizons, and I’d put more weight on “loving” than he does. One member arrives having walked the length of Fetter Street before “remembering that the ring binder with all her suggestions was still in the back seat”. You only write that if you’ve sat through evenings like this one and didn’t mind them. The group is petty in places, but it’s the ordinary pettiness of any club with a rota and a borrowed room.

Whispering Petes live backwards, and the narrator can’t explain the name: “Nobody has the first idea why we’re called Whispering Petes, when we don’t whisper and don’t seem to have more Petes than any other demographic group. I mean, something like 58 per cent of us are women.” The best guess going is that the name is coined around “the twenty-third century” and then “transmitted to the past as an oral tradition”, handed down, for them, from the young to the old.

Then Moore stops joking for a page. The narrator remembers “my darling Mila, and our son Jan, who had memories reaching to the twenty-second century. The two of them were Whispering Petes as well. It was a nice way to undie. Those early, elderly years were idyllic.” They felt “younger, stronger every day”, though it seemed strange when Jan “reached childhood with more life experience than either me or Mila”, and all three “knew, to the hour, where things were heading”. Jan at six is “a strapping six-year-old”, and Mila stares at him shaking her head: “Look at you!” Kathryn Adams at Pixelated Geek says that seeing what “birth, and death, and the end of relationships” look like for these people took her breath away. It’s the saddest thing in the book so far, and Moore gets there in about four sentences.

The Petes don’t get choices. “There’s just things we’re definitely going to do, and how we feel about it doesn’t make a scrap of difference. This is our existence, working backwards through a diary that’s already written, from romance to massacre.” Read it in the order the Pete lives it and the love comes first and the killing after. Read it the way the rest of us keep a diary and the massacre comes first and the romance follows it, which is a strange sort of consolation and possibly the only kind on offer. Shaw says the investigators “meet a tragic end at the hands of a real-life cryptid”, which suggests whose massacre this is. Kankesan points out that the Pete’s sections can be read in reverse, each one starting where the next one ends.

Moore has done a backwards life before. Kankesan brings up “The Reversible Man”, a four-page 2000 AD short from Prog 308 in March 1983, drawn by Mike White, and Aditya Bidikar, writing on his blog, says the formal idea here is “pretty much a combination of two of his 2000 AD shorts from the early 80s”. He doesn’t begrudge Moore “a bit of recycling”, and neither do I.

I went looking for the title and found it in Kafka. In the Muirs’ translation of “The Burrow”, the animal in its tunnels is afraid of enemies from the inner earth, and says “not even legend can describe them”. I’ve no idea whether Moore had it in mind, and none of the reviews I read mention it.

Som-Som’s operation is described before it happens, in a careful future tense: “She would be blinded, but not exactly. Her hearing would remain, after a fashion, and she would even be able to speak. But she would be Silenced.” The House Without Clocks severs the link between the two halves of her brain, fixes a porcelain mask over the right side of her face and a thick glove on her right hand, and from then on the wizards who pay for her can say whatever they like in bed. She hears it, and nothing she hears can get back out.

“Hypothetical Lizard” opens Alan Moore’s Illuminations, his first book of short stories, and it’s the oldest thing in it by more than twenty years. He wrote it in 1987 for Liavek: Wizard’s Row, a shared-world anthology edited by Will Shetterly and Emma Bull, and William Shaw’s review in Strange Horizons calls it his “first serious attempt at short prose fiction”. It was up for a World Fantasy Award the following year, when Ursula K. Le Guin won. Somewhere between then and now it lost its first word. It used to be “A Hypothetical Lizard”, and I think the article was better, because it admits there might be others.

Liavek has a rule for magic that’s worth knowing before you go in. According to Wikipedia’s summary of the setting, everyone’s luck surfaces on their birthday for as long as their mother was in labour, and in that window you can invest it in an object that powers your spells for the rest of the year. (So a hard birth makes a stronger wizard, which is a bleak thing for a group of fantasy writers to have agreed on.) A wizard’s power is sitting in a ring or a cup or a button somewhere, and anyone who learned which one would know exactly where to hurt them. I’d guess that’s what makes a wizard’s pillow talk worth the surgery.

The neurology is real, or near enough. Roger Sperry had shared the 1981 Nobel Prize for work on what each hemisphere of the brain does on its own, and Moore takes split-brain research and turns it into a brothel’s business model. I’m not sure the mask and the glove add up exactly, nerve by nerve, but the passage Kathryn Adams quotes at Pixelated Geek is about how it feels rather than how it works: “Silence, massive and absolute, surrounded her and would not permit her to make the smallest sound. She was embedded in silence, a tiny bubble of consciousness within an infinity of solid rock, mute and grey and endless.”

It’s dense. Paul Di Filippo, reviewing the book for Locus, calls it the most conventional piece there and gets the flavour right with “Huysmans-via-Tanith-Lee”, decadence and cruelty in sentences that won’t let you skim. The courtyard is “the gargantuan inkblot”, and one arrival rattles into the House “in a small cart lined with cushions”. Moore’s later prose, all the way to The Great When, keeps that appetite for ornament. Here it’s younger and not always under control, but a plainer style would sit oddly in a brothel where every resident has been altered to suit somebody’s taste.

Som-Som can still talk, though not to any purpose. What comes out are non sequiturs about the life before. When her friend Rawra Chin visits, Som-Som sips “her floral infusion through the left corner of the mouth”, the side the mask leaves free, and Rawra learns to wait “until Som-Som had finished her non sequitur” before going on. Rawra’s introduction is the sentence most reviewers stop on: “The visitor’s name was Rawra Chin, and she was a man.”

Shaw winces at that line, though he finds Rawra’s portrayal sympathetic, and he notes that it survived “revisions to the original text”. The snippets I could compare show how fine-grained those revisions were. Foral Yatt’s greeting was “cooly inoffensive” in the 1988 reprint in The Year’s Best Fantasy and is “coolly inoffensive” now. Somebody fixed the spelling of an adverb and left that sentence standing, and it was the one most worth changing.

Foral Yatt is an actor, Rawra’s lover and then the person she leaves, and Rawra isn’t simply the wronged party. There’s a moment where she “gazed icily down at the figure on the bed”, irritated past bearing by “that unbearable little-girl voice”, and the Brazilian critic Luiz Santiago, writing at Plano Crítico, is clear that both of them do wrong at different points.

The title arrives partway through as a ball that can’t be opened and might or might not have a small lizard inside it. Di Filippo quotes the best image of it, with Foral holding it: “The copper ball turned between his fingers, a miniature planet rolling from day into night.”

The ending is where readers split. Santiago admits he couldn’t say for certain what crime is committed in the last pages, offers a guess involving poison and Foral leaving in Rawra’s carriage, and asks anyone who understood it to explain in the comments. Adams settles for “a revenge that’s epic in its scope and its pettiness”. I’m not going to settle it either, and I don’t think the story means me to.

Santiago puts his finger on why without quite meaning to. The crime goes unresolved although there’s a witness, because the witness was shaped precisely so that she couldn’t tell secrets. Moore has built a viewpoint that’s physically unable to testify and then made it the only witness. Whatever happens at the end, Som-Som takes it in and can’t give it back, and the reader is left where she is, holding a closed copper ball and being told there might be a lizard in it. John Pistelli prefers Antony Johnston’s comic adaptation for Avatar Press because it “clarifies its central conflict”, which seems to me the one thing this story shouldn’t have done for it.

American Vogue ran its new grey dress for day across a four-model spread on page 663 of its September 1986 issue. The copy is pleased with itself in the way fashion copy used to be: the dress is back “in a big way”, and it’ll take you to work and out after.

From the left, Lauren Helm wears Mary Ann Restivo, Jo Kelley wears Donna Karan, Lisa Kauffmann wears Bill Blass and Jacquie Page wears Byblos. It’s the same brief four times over, a long skirt and a belted waist, and the prices run from about $230 for the Restivo to $1,100 for the Blass, a wool jersey turtleneck dress with a trumpet skirt. Karan’s comes in two pieces, a bodysuit and a skirt, with a shawl that wraps and belts. Byblos adds a pinstriped shirt collar and otherwise keeps to charcoal, which is restrained for a label known for its colour; two years later it spent a whole Vogue page on a single red.

The grey is the odd part. The text promises “new muted greys” and calls the Restivo charcoal, but on the page the two dresses on the left print as black, or close enough that I can’t tell them apart. Only the Blass and the Byblos read as grey. It could be the paper or the scan, or charcoal under studio light just goes that way. I’m not sure.

Everyone’s in gloves and everyone’s mid-stride, chins up, except Page on the right, who’s laughing with her mouth wide open, the only face on the spread that isn’t arranged. Helm left modelling at 31 and went through Columbia’s postbac premed programme; the college says she now runs a private practice treating eating disorders.

On the thirty-eighth step down Abbot Thomas’s well, with the cement knocked away, Mr Somerton uncovers a slab “upon which was engraven a cross” and feels “Disappointment again”. He has spent weeks over his tracings, worked through Trithemius and Bacon on secret writing, and counted the commonest letters in Latin and then in German, and the thing he came for is in front of him and he can’t see it. His valet Brown, holding the lantern, can: “It’s a funny cross: looks like a lot of eyes.” Somerton snatches the lantern out of his hand. Earlier, in the stripped abbey church, he’d found a scrap of the Abbot’s glass left in the tracery, a small figure with a scroll reading Oculos habent, et non videbunt (“They have eyes, and shall not see”), and he took it for “a hit of the Abbot at his Canons”. It’s from the psalm about idols, Psalm 115 in the King James numbering: “Their idols are silver and gold”, and then “eyes have they, but they see not”. The verse after that has noses that “smell not”, and the guardian of this gold announces itself by a smell of mould.

“The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” is the last story in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, and it follows Oh, Whistle, where Parkins was offered the test the doubting apostle asked for, the chance to put his hands on the thing, and went for the window instead. Now James gives the name Thomas to the man doing the hiding. The Abbot’s device, which he worked into his cipher, is “Gare à qui la touche”, beware whoever touches it, and James admits that it “doesn’t quite fit in point of grammar”.

Touch is how this story’s horror arrives. Somerton’s elbow knocks the candle over and he draws the bag out “in complete darkness”, something “more or less like leather; dampish”, until it slips forward onto his chest “and put its arms round my neck”. He never sees it. What he gets is “a cold kind of face pressed against my own, and moving slowly over it”, and legs or arms or tentacles, he doesn’t know how many. The first thing Gregory does at the inn, knowing none of this, is run his fingers over the panels of Somerton’s door while feeling for the handle, and there’s “a terrible cry”, then “In God’s name, who is that?” Later Somerton tells him to lock his own door: “They—they like it, the people here”. He starts the sentence about the things and finishes it about the villagers. Gregory hears “a fumbling about the lower part of his locked door” two or three times before dawn, and is sure of it “to the end of his days”.

The Abbot hid his clues in Scripture he’d altered. Job’s scroll should say conflatur, where the gold is refined, and Thomas made it absconditur, where it’s hidden. He chose a good chapter to tamper with. Job 28 is about miners, the man who “putteth forth his hand upon the rock” and brings “the thing that is hid” to light, and then it asks where wisdom is to be found and answers that “It cannot be gotten for gold”. Somerton reads the first verse and stops there.

I’m less sure of the next thing, which sits in the Latin at the top of the story. The old chronicle says the Abbot would feel no grudge against whoever found the gold, “se inventuris minime invisurum”. Invisurum can come from invideo, to begrudge, or from inviso, to go and look at. The grammar wants the grudge, since the finders are in the dative, but the words will also bear the reading that he’d hardly come to see them. Brown, a step or two above his master, looks up and sees “someone’s ‘ead lookin’ over at us”, “a holdish man, and the face very much fell in, and larfin’”. Gregory’s guess is that whoever set the trap “might have come to see the success of his plan”. In Helen Grant’s history of the real abbey, Thomas is “putative”, so the sentence is very likely James’s own Latin, verb and all.

The Abbot was fussy about copying. Each robe in the window carries thirty-eight letters, and the glass-painter scratched “xxxviii” on the edge of Job’s border, with a note like it in each light, so nobody would get them wrong. Thirty-eight is also the step where the stone turns up, and I doubt James did that by accident. The Project Gutenberg text, which is the version most people will find online, prints Job’s letters twice in the cipher table and gives them to Zechariah as well, so anyone trying the puzzle from it fails on the third robe. For a story about a painter who scratched a count on the glass to stop exactly that, it’s a poor showing. The right letters appear only further down, in Somerton’s worked answer.

The real glass had its own successors. James wrote the story in the summer of 1904, Wikipedia says, to “fill up” the book, after cataloguing the old glass in Lord Brownlow’s chapel at Ashridge. His inventory, Vidimus says, credited the whole Ashridge collection to Steinfeld on the strength of the abbey’s name on some panels, much as Somerton’s book says the glass can be identified by “the numerous inscriptions in which the place is mentioned”, and when it came up for sale in 1928 only about a third turned out to be Steinfeld’s. All the same, the story did what the Abbot promised. A short notice of it in the Eifel Club’s newsletter reached Nikola Reinartz, a young priest with an interest in local history, who got into the chapel at Ashridge, with some difficulty, and then published the news that part of the cloister glass had been found. Ernest Cook bought the collection and gave it to the V&A, which has thirty-eight panels from the Steinfeld cloister, and that number really is chance. “Job, John, and Zechariah will tell either you or your successors,” Thomas used to say, and a ghost story about Job, John and Zechariah told an Eifel priest where Steinfeld’s windows had gone.

Gregory has the last word, and it’s something Somerton walked past. Somerton had decided the Abbot “carefully abstained from any of his cynical and allusive inscriptions” on the well-head. Gregory, who went down in daylight to put the slab back and smear it with mud, finds one beside “a horrid, grotesque shape—perhaps more like a toad than anything else”, a label reading “Depositum custodi”, which a footnote translates as “Keep that which is committed to thee.” The man with the Trithemius and the tracings had eyes for every scratch on the glass and none for this, and a country parson read it on his first morning. It’s 1 Timothy 6:20, and the verse goes on: “avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called.”

Professor Parkins is “scrupulously polite and strictly truthful”, James tells us, and on his second morning at the Globe Inn a chambermaid reports that both his beds were slept in, “all the things was crumpled and throwed about all ways”. He says he “certainly never touched the other”. A few lines on he “may have disordered it” while unpacking, and then he adds that he expects “a friend of mine soon”, a gentleman from Cambridge, “to come and occupy it for a night or two”. The only gentleman on offer is Rogers, who proposed exactly that at dinner and was turned down. Either Parkins has just made up a friend for that bed, or after one night in the room he’s written to the man he refused. Rogers does arrive, the morning after it’s all over, “more welcome than he would have been a day before”, and nobody says who asked him.

“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” is the seventh story in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, and the second bed is there from the first page. Parkins doesn’t “quite fancy having an empty bed” in what he calls his study, and Rogers offers to take it because “it’ll be company for you” and would “keep the ghosts off”. James had ended Number 13 on a landlord offering two shaken men “a double-bedded one”. Two stories later he opens with that room and gives it to a man on his own.

The whistle comes out of a hole at the end of what may be an altar, in a ruined Templar church Parkins has agreed to look over for a colleague, and he pockets it. On the walk back the figure is already behind him on the sand, while the thing is still a nameless tube, with “an appearance of running about his movements” and no gain on him at all. It’s “stationed on the shore in front of the inn” when he opens the casement to tip out the caked earth, before he’s read a letter of the inscription. So when he works out QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT (“Who is this who is coming?”) and decides “the best way to find out is evidently to whistle for him”, the answer is outside, and the inn is “not more than sixty yards” from the sea. The other inscription is the one he can’t read, being rusty enough not to “even know the word for a whistle”. Stephen Devereux at Thresholds says it’s set out in a diamond (Gutenberg flattens it to FLA FUR BIS FLE), and that read as “fur, flabis, flebis” it means you will steal, you will blow, you will weep. That makes the blowing his second offence, and the first one was over before dinner.

That first night has the best thing in the book. He can’t sleep, he’s counting his heartbeats, and “He found a little vicarious comfort in the idea that someone else was in the same boat. A near neighbour (in the darkness it was not easy to tell his direction) was tossing and rustling in his bed, too.” James never comes back to it. When the bed does finally sit up, on the second night, the narrator lets slip something about himself: “I have in a dream thirty years back seen the same thing happen”. If that narrator is James, born in 1862, he was about twelve.

The title comes from Burns, written in 1787 and expanded in 1793, and it’s a girl telling a lover how to reach her unseen: “Syne up the back-style, and let naebody see, / And come, as ye were na coming to me”. James has hung those instructions on something that runs down a beach for most of a mile without arriving, then climbs out of a spare bed and feels over a bachelor’s pillows “in a way which made Parkins shudder as he had never in his life thought it possible”. Jonathan Miller built his 1968 BBC film on that: “one’s emotions, feelings and impulses, which one denies and represses, lie in wait and can sometimes ambush one”, he said, quoted by Nicholas Ray, and it’s a fine reading of Michael Hordern. The prose has something else going as well.

On the links Colonel Wilson calls Parkins “little better than a Sadducee”. Parkins nearly answers that they’re the most sensible people he’s read of in the Old Testament, then wonders whether they’re in it, and they aren’t. They’re in the New, as the people who “say that there is no resurrection”. In the same round the Colonel is fuming that the Vicar has announced a service for Friday, the Feast of St Thomas the Apostle. A ritualist Vicar could have annoyed him with any saint in the calendar, and James picked the doubter, as a post at Graham Crackers has noticed. St Thomas’s Day is 21 December, which puts all this golf at the shortest day of the year, under a “very bright frosty moon”. James knew that coast in midwinter: Burnstow is Felixstowe, where he often spent New Year at Felix Cobbold’s house, and another guest at those gatherings, J. K. Stephen, had the head injury thought to have worsened his mental illness. There was a suggestion, the actor Robert Lloyd Parry told the BBC, that his horse was frightened “by a whistle or by a gust of wind”.

I’d take the Thomas idea a step further, and I’m not sure I’m right. John 20 is his chapter: “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.” The same chapter opens in an empty tomb, where Peter “seeth the linen clothes lie”. Parkins throws himself at the window because he “could not have borne” to touch the thing, then “the linen face was thrust close into his own”, and when the Colonel gets through the door there’s “a tumbled heap of bed-clothes” on the floor, linen where a body was. Patrick Murphy and Fred Porcheddu, as Sam Wiseman reports, think that round Templar church is based on the Holy Sepulchre in Cambridge, which takes its name from the same tomb. James doesn’t wink once.

The Colonel is the comic turn, a man who hears of a weekday service and suspects a Jesuit, and he’s the only person at the Globe who knows what he’s looking at. He says “You know where I am if you want me during the night”, and afterwards he “asked no questions”. Only in the last paragraphs do we learn he “remembered a not very dissimilar occurrence in India”, and I’d have swapped a couple of the later collections for that story. His verdict is that “if Parkins had closed with it it could really have done very little”, since there was nothing to it but “the bedclothes of which it had made itself a body”. Parkins had been offered the test Thomas asked for, and he went for the window.

The Colonel also sends the whistle “as far into the sea as a very brawny arm could send it”, and everyone takes that as the end of the matter, though it’s the sea that “has encroached tremendously” on this coast. The Royal Commission on Coast Erosion, as Justin Sausman reports, had 518 acres of Suffolk going between 1879 and 1904. Parkins comes away unable to see “a surplice hanging on a door quite unmoved”, which is white linen, and as much Canterbury’s as Rome’s whatever the Colonel thinks. And the second bed does get used in the end. Once Parkins is back in his own, the Colonel, “wrapped in a rug, occupied the other bed, for the rest of the night”. He needed the rug, the bed’s own clothes being in a heap on the floor.

Perfect conditions tonight, with the moon half buried in cloud, a bat for company and a witch over the rooftops while everyone below keeps the lamps lit and doesn’t look up. The Irish artist Power O’Malley made her for the cover of Life on 30 October 1913, and she usually goes by “Beware the Beautiful Witch”, though one dealer’s listing gives just “Beware!”. Happy Halloween to all of you, and if something taps at the window later on, I’d leave the curtains shut.

Thirty years ago next month I bought a 15ml bottle of Yohji parfum in Broadmead, in Bristol, and I still have it. I got through about half in the first three years, left the rest in a cupboard, and sealed it with parafilm in 2014, which may well have been locking the stable a long way too late. When I opened it earlier this year the liquid had darkened and the top of the perfume had gone. There’s a faint powdery impression of the heart and base, and nothing at all of whatever used to happen in the first few minutes on skin.

Losing that from the bottle was always going to happen, but it’s gone from my head as well. I remember buying it and unwrapping the tissue paper, I remember wearing it, and none of that comes with a smell. Ask me to call up the opening and I get nothing I’d trust. In April I wrote here about “galbanum landing sharp and metallic”, but “metallic” is also the word in Raiders of the Lost Scent’s retrospective, which I quoted one paragraph later, so I can’t swear that was memory at all. I may just have been reading.

That’s the state I was in when the sample of Noir Gabardine arrived. Laurent Mazzone Parfums released it in 2011, fifteen years after Yohji, and its name turns up wherever people mourn the original. One Fragrantica commenter calls it “reincarnated juice, under a different name”. The resemblance is genuine, as far as my nose can be trusted on it, though it didn’t show up when I put it on. For a while it was simply a perfume I didn’t know, and then, some time later on my skin, it was noticeably something I did. A Reddit user says it’s “known for being almost identical” and adds, “It’s missing the magic of the original for me, though.” I’d love to be in a position to argue.

The note lists would explain the delay, if note lists explain anything. Lower down the two perfumes nearly overlap: vanilla, musk, amber and sandalwood are in both Fragrantica’s pyramid for Noir Gabardine and Parfumo’s entry for the parfum, and Raiders describes Yohji’s coumarin as “a warm, tonka-like depth” where Noir Gabardine simply lists tonka. Higher up they part. Noir Gabardine opens on galbanum, bergamot and mandarin, and Parfumo gives Yohji those three plus blackcurrant, cardamom, green notes, peach and pineapple, so perhaps Yohji began greener and fruitier while Noir Gabardine goes straight for citrus. But Fragrantica gives Yohji only galbanum, bergamot and green notes on top, with blackberry and raspberry below, and neither berry is on Parfumo at all. That’s one perfume with two sets of paperwork. Earlier this month I said I’d be very pleased to find blackberry in the vial, as though the matter were settled.

The parfum itself has no witness at all. Parfumo shows five ratings and an invitation to “Write the first Review”, so I’m left with what people say about Yohji in general, which probably means the eau de toilette, and they can’t agree on that either. Raiders has galbanum that’s “cold, almost mineral”. Osmoz says it “opens on a forthright, reassuringly warm, amber note”, and I can’t get from one to the other. The Ayala Moriel blog says the opening “can be experienced as harsh”, with “more than a little acetone-like note”, and calls the clear box a “glass coffin”, which I could have done without. Victoria at Bois de Jasmin got a first impression “green and radiant”, and a Parfumo reviewer, in translation, could “especially remember the pineapple in the top note, which was pleasantly sweet-sour and primarily fruity.” I’ve read them all and none of them brings it back.

The research is kinder than the note lists. Herz and Engen’s 1996 review says long-term odour memory seems “unusually resistant to decay”. In Engen and Ross’s 1973 experiment, recognition was only 70% straight after smelling, and a year later it was only 5% lower. Calling a smell up on purpose is another matter. The same review says people rate their ability to “conjure an odor sensation” as poor, and a 2014 paper describes smell as the sense “with the fewest instances of volitional imagery”. So my blank may say very little about what’s stored. I know how much weight I’m putting on this. That one-year follow-up had fifteen people in it, 70% is a shaky start, and they were being asked about the smells they’d actually been given, not lookalikes. Against that, they’d only been shown those smells, and I wore this one for three years. I think that if the real opening reached me again I’d recognise it at once, not because I’d rebuilt it in my head but because some of it had survived.

Noir Gabardine’s opening rang no bell, which is harder to read than I’d like. If recognition really lasts, then either those first few minutes aren’t Yohji’s or whatever I held of Yohji’s has gone after all, and I can’t tell which from here. The later recognition isn’t clean either. I smelled what’s left in my bottle earlier this year, and what’s left is the heart and base, the same stretch where Noir Gabardine stirred something, and there’s too little now to set the two side by side. I may have matched a 2011 perfume to a 2026 residue rather than to 1996. The only qualified judge is the person who stood in Broadmead that November, who isn’t available. And every time I try the sample I’m learning it, so if some trace of the old opening does survive, I may be laying Noir Gabardine over the top of it.

An unopened bottle or miniature from the original run is the next step, and I’ve been somewhere like this before. In 2013, twenty years after binning my first bottle, I bought a replacement Pasha de Cartier from Florida, and it’s still in its sealed box, because it was never the smell I wanted from that one, only the afternoon. Yohji is the same problem turned inside out. I’ve got the actual bottle with the actual thirty years on it, and the smell is all I’d want from anybody else’s.

A sealed miniature won’t be 1996 either. Citrus goes early: limonene, the molecule behind what Premiere Peau’s chemistry explainer calls bergamot’s “electric sparkle”, oxidises into something closer to “turpentine left in a hot car”, and I’d expect a seal to slow that rather than stop it. A well-kept example could still hold more of the opening than mine does, and if several from different sellers opened alike, that would count for something, though they could agree simply because they’ve all aged the same way.

Every one of those bottles would have survived by accident. Jean Kerléo, who composed Yohji, co-founded the Osmothèque at Versailles, an archive built to keep perfumes that have left the world. I said in April that I didn’t know whether Yohji is in it, and I ought to find out, since that’s the one place the opening might have been kept on purpose.

Tomorrow is the first of November. For three years I put this perfume on without giving its first few minutes a thought, since they were only the way in, and there’d be more of them next time. Noir Gabardine has got me closer than I expected, from the middle onward, so the character of the thing hasn’t gone out of reach altogether. I’d dearly like the way in back.