the five phials of dr poliakov

[wytchcroft]

Phial One:
 
Given that a man has five senses, that the elements of our universe number in accordance five and that the number of phials left by Dr Poliakov is of that same number, it seems appropriate that there should be five of us willing to undergo this experiment, this experience.

If I hesitate in my articulations and struggle with the descriptive logos, then it should be borne in mind that I am a scientist and therefore distrustful of all that is not clarified by further investigation. Nothing in general is in need of greater analysis than words – those building bricks from which a buffoon may build a treatise or an ape construct Hamlet (so I have been told). Moreover, I am writing this after the experiment has already begun; indeed this writing is a very part of the experiment.
It is possible that I am under some effect already.

I shall attempt to note here just what (if any) changes I perceive as the experiment continues, but in the absence of anything startling I shall distract myself by recounting once again those facts so faithfully (if superficially) reported by the Gentlemen of the Press.

I can add little to the immense litter of works describing Dr Poliakov himself, and his achievements are hailed from every corner of the world, standing as he does at the very forefront of our modern renaissance in science and industry; Chemistry, Physics, Engineering – there is not a branch of scientist that the hand of Poliakov has not touched, and in so doing left an in indelible mark. 

Instead I shall begin by describing the room I am in and my general surroundings, the fabled laboratory of Dr Poliakov. To imagine such a place is almost to see it and to be there within, for all is as one might conceive; Large dark benches buckling slowly under the weight of a plethora of devices, Bunsen burners, armatures, test-tubes and large silver globes and glass weights for the production and containment of diverse energies, vats and rubberised barrels containing fluids noxious and effervescent and several machines and pieces of machinery for which we can find no fit purpose. All befitting the common conception of the place as mausoleum for a modern pharaoh of sorts whose cryptic leavings will be picked over, scrutinized, argued about and studied as much as any of the Ancients of Egypt.




Such a thing was surely not the good Doctor’s intention, the copious logs, journals and notes he left behind are testament to that, and it is the fervent wish of many distinguished gentlemen that eventually all we indeed be uncovered, explained and, most importantly, utilised.

As with the mysteries of Egypt maybe all that is required to unlock the mind and life of Dr Poliakov is a Rosetta stone of some sort, a unifying key to the otherwise maddening and abstract writings left to us. Perhaps these very enigmatic phials will render clear what is currently insurmountably difficult, the full understanding of the Doctor’s work and the laboratory that stands as monument to it.

It is a glorious opportunity at least… a piece of rare luck, of chance. Not only that I am one of those able to engage in the experiment and to record and broadcast its conclusions, but that the experiment is taking place at all. It was chance after all that lead an omnibus down the high street at just the right speed, and at just the right moment, for the antiquated sewer structure beneath to collapse entirely, revealing to an astonished public the sealed entrance of this long vanished laboratory.

I am told that in the esoteric tradition of numbers Five is the number of chance.

Five it is then, My four colleagues and I, five individual perspectives, five differing personalities.
And what of them? Their names have slipped quite suddenly from me and their faces I find strangely distant, hard to pull into focus and gaze upon, like a painting or one of the new daguerreotypes on a mantle, just out of reach, yet I know them and have an inkling they are here even now.

Perhaps this lack of mind and of memory is an effect of the phial – or perhaps the impression of their presence is false and may be attributed to the mysterious solution concocted by Dr Poliakov?

If so, then the effect of the potion is wondrous subtle for in almost all respects everything is concrete and familiar, unchanged from the moment before I drank the stuff.

Could it be so? As I scratch these words down on the yellow bill pad, as I sit at the hard desk with my body restless on the bench, I wonder. For though the pen writes and the ink dots the paper and my hand it is that holds the pen, all is quiet. It is as if the sound of quill and paper, body and bench were deadened and reaching only my ears and no further – the sounds do not travel out into the room.

Has the phial done its work in transporting my body to some aetheric realm consistent with yet divorced from our own - and to what purpose? Am I as a ghost to walk through walls like some magic lantern charade for the amusement of children? Can I even be seen?

I am dizzy with the vertigo of such a notion. Is this how Poliakov felt, standing at the threshold of discovery? Already my mind fills with possibilities – for if, and dear God let it be so, the effect is temporary and in time wears away, like the effect of a narcotic perhaps, what then?

If the very essence of my physical being is for a while rendered into a substance closer to what we might call spirit… could I within that duration be transmitted in aetheric form as one removed from and ungoverned by our natural laws, gravity, mass, distance… could the calling of a medium, one sensitive to the act, transport me on the instant halfway around the globe?

The implications are staggering, what a revolution for mankind this might be! Oh how I wish I could call to the others! Already as my skin becomes paler, translucent to my sight and the ink on the papers seems to be running opaque I am seized with trepidation – but joyously so, not in terror, but in j-