On a November evening, the London Adventurers gathered at King's Cross Station to be led by Mark Samuels around the sites in that quarter where still lingers some faint and melancholy memory of M. P. Shiel, poet and prophet, and heir to the island Kingdom of Redonda.
Since it was a grim November night, there were to be heard the whistles and bangs of fireworks, which burst over the rooftops of the crooked London streets. These, too, sparse though they were, seemed a ghostly celebration of the now half-forgotten author. For, as our guide explained, these sad explosions recalled the apocalyptic novel that many believe to be Shiel's finest work, to wit, The Purple Cloud. The hero of this Baroque masterpiece (perhaps as purple as its title suggests), one Adam Jeffson, appears to be the only human survivor of the eponymous cloud, a mysterious toxic vapour that arises from the Pole and lays waste the Earth. In his loneliness and despair, Adam Jeffson torches the city of London, and many other cities, becoming the vandal sultan of the entire globe. And it was Acton Street where first the Adventurers stopped, and where Shiel had completed his tale of Armageddon and ultimate redemption.
From Acton Street, the Adventurers pursued the ghost of Shiel along Frederick Street, through Guilford Place, past the St. Peter's Italian Church on Clerkenwell Road, and eventually to Grays Inn Place. Along this route, Samuels did, by act of necromancy, conjure up that ghost as seen through the eyes of Arthur Ransome. It was a feverish vision. A figure "in a dressing gown open at the neck, and showing plainly that there was nothing but skin beneath it, was writing at a desk, throwing off his sheets as fast as he covered them… (the novelist imperiously commands the landlady to bring up a bottle of wine) and the untidy bed, the unclean room were as if they had never been. In spite of his unwashed hands, in spite of his dressing gown, he won his way back to greatness."
By the same means, outside the Italian Church, the Adventurers were granted a vision of Shiel praying fervently that the Lord above might make his a certain creature he had spied. This creature was none other than Carolina Garcia Gomez, who, by God's mercy, became Shiel's wife when he was 33 years old, and she 18.
When the Adventurers arrived at the heart of their journey, at Grays Inn Place, where Shiel had in former times established his dream-palace, they learnt of the tales that were born therefrom - of Prince Zaleski, the brilliant indolent sleuth who seldom rose from his chaise-longue, of Shapes In the Fire, of "Xelucha", and of "The House of Sounds", upon reading which, H. P. Lovecraft exclaimed, "God! But after that story I shall never try to write another of my own. Shiel has done so much better than my best, that I am left breathless and inarticulate."
Thence the Adventurers parted with the ghost of Shiel and made company with other spirits at The Cheshire Cheese public house.
Quentin S.Crisp