Jack Maggs
“Here he slept fitfully on the settle, alert to every noise that might signal the return of the man he had come to meet. Here in these rooms he continued the letter which he intended the Thief-taker to present to the house’s absent tenant.Each morning, by dawn, he was back in Mr Buckle’s house, and as the clock at St George’s rang for Morning Prayer, he would wearily present himself at Tobias Oates’s front door. On being admitted by the taciturn house-keeper, he would carry a cup of tea up to Mr... Oates’s study where he would, at eight fifteen precisely, be mesmerized.By mesmerized he understood that he was made the subject of magnets, and that these magnets in some way tugged at his Mesmeric Fluid, a substance in his soul he could not see. He understood that, under the effect of magnets, he was able to describe the demons that swam in this fluid, and that Tobias Oates would not only battle with these beings—named Behemoth and Dabareiel, Azazel and Samsaweel—but also, like a botanist, describe them in a journal where their host might later see them.At first the convict had been astonished to read Dabareiel’s flowery speech—he could not believe that such an educated being might exist within him—but he accepted it soon enough, and with all the various explanations Oates constructed, it never once occurred to Jack Maggs that these “transcriptions”MoreLess
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