Three John Silence Stories
Page 34
Our whispers sounded hollowas they echoed overhead among the rafters.
"I'm glad you are here," he said. "Not all would have the courage. Keepyour thoughts controlled, and imagine the protective shell roundyou--round your inner being."
"I'm all right," I repeated, cursing my chattering teeth.
He took my hand and shook it, and the contact seemed to shake into mesomething of his supreme confidence. The eyes and hands of a strong mancan touch the soul. I think he guessed my thought, for a passing smileflashed about the corners of his mouth.
"You will feel more comfortable," he said, in a low tone, "when thechain is complete. The Colonel we can count on, of course.Remember, though," he added warningly, "he may perhaps becomecontrolled--possessed--when the thing comes, because he won't know howto resist. And to explain the business to such a man--!" He shruggedhis shoulders expressively. "But it will only be temporary, and I willsee that no harm comes to him."
He glanced round at the arrangements with approval.
"Red light," he said, indicating the shaded lamps, "has the lowest rateof vibration. Materialisations are dissipated by strong light--won'tform, or hold together--in rapid vibrations."
I was not sure that I approved altogether of this dim light, for incomplete darkness there is something protective--the knowledge that onecannot be seen, probably--which a half-light destroys, but I rememberedthe warning to keep my thoughts steady, and forbore to give themexpression.
There was a step outside, and the figure of Colonel Wragge stood in thedoorway. Though entering on tiptoe, he made considerable noise andclatter, for his free movements were impeded by the burden he carried,and we saw a large yellowish bowl held out at arms' length from hisbody, the mouth covered with a white cloth. His face, I noted, wasrigidly composed. He, too, was master of himself. And, as I thought ofthis old soldier moving through the long series of alarms, worn withwatching and wearied with assault, unenlightened yet undismayed, evendown to the dreadful shock of his sister's terror, and still showing thedogged pluck that persists in the face of defeat, I understood what Dr.Silence meant when he described him as a man "to be counted on."
I think there was nothing beyond this rigidity of his stern features,and a certain greyness of the complexion, to betray the turmoil of theemotions that were doubtless going on within; and the quality of thesetwo men, each in his own way, so keyed me up that, by the time the doorwas shut and we had exchanged silent greetings, all the latent courage Ipossessed was well to the fore, and I felt as sure of myself as I knew Iever could feel.
Colonel Wragge set the bowl carefully in the centre of the table.
"Midnight," he said shortly, glancing at his watch, and we all threemoved to our chairs.
There, in the middle of that cold and silent place, we sat, with thevile bowl before us, and a thin, hardly perceptible steam rising throughthe damp air from the surface of the white cloth and disappearingupwards the moment it passed beyond the zone of red light and enteredthe deep shadows thrown forward by the projecting wall of chimney.
The doctor had indicated our respective places, and I found myselfseated with my back to the door and opposite the black hearth. TheColonel was on my left, and Dr. Silence on my right, both half facingme, the latter more in shadow than the former. We thus divided thelittle table into even sections, and sitting back in our chairs weawaited events in silence.
For something like an hour I do not think there was even the faintestsound within those four walls and under the canopy of that vaulted roof.Our slippers made no scratching on the gritty floor, and our breathingwas suppressed almost to nothing; even the rustle of our clothes as weshifted from time to time upon our seats was inaudible. Silencesmothered us absolutely--the silence of night, of listening, the silenceof a haunted expectancy. The very gurgling of the lamps was too soft tobe heard, and if light itself had sound, I do not think we should havenoticed the silvery tread of the moonlight as it entered the high narrowwindows and threw upon the floor the slender traces of its pallidfootsteps.
Colonel Wragge and the doctor, and myself too for that matter, sat thuslike figures of stone, without speech and without gesture. My eyespassed in ceaseless journeys from the bowl to their faces, and fromtheir faces to the bowl. They might have been masks, however, for allthe signs of life they gave; and the light steaming from the horridcontents beneath the white cloth had long ceased to be visible.
Then presently, as the moon rose higher, the wind rose with it. Itsighed, like the lightest of passing wings, over the roof; it crept mostsoftly round the walls; it made the brick floor like ice beneath ourfeet. With it I saw mentally the desolate moorland flowing like a seaabout the old house, the treeless expanse of lonely hills, the nearercopses, sombre and mysterious in the night. The plantation, too, inparticular I saw, and imagined I heard the mournful whisperings thatmust now be a-stirring among its tree-tops as the breeze played downbetween the twisted stems. In the depth of the room behind us the shaftsof moonlight met and crossed in a growing network.
It was after an hour of this wearing and unbroken attention, and Ishould judge about one o'clock in the morning, when the baying of thedogs in the stableyard first began, and I saw John Silence move suddenlyin his chair and sit up in an attitude of attention. Every force in mybeing instantly leaped into the keenest vigilance. Colonel Wragge movedtoo, though slowly, and without raising his eyes from the table beforehim.
The doctor stretched his arm out and took the white cloth from the bowl.
It was perhaps imagination that persuaded me the red glare of the lampsgrew fainter and the air over the table before us thickened. I had beenexpecting something for so long that the movement of my companions, andthe lifting of the cloth, may easily have caused the momentary delusionthat something hovered in the air before my face, touching the skin ofmy cheeks with a silken run. But it was certainly not a delusion thatthe Colonel looked up at the same moment and glanced over his shoulder,as though his eyes followed the movements of something to and fro aboutthe room, and that he then buttoned his overcoat more tightly about himand his eyes sought my own face first, and then the doctor's. And it wasno delusion that his face seemed somehow to have turned dark, becomespread as it were with a shadowy blackness. I saw his lips tighten andhis expression grow hard and stern, and it came to me then with a rushthat, of course, this man had told us but a part of the experiences hehad been through in the house, and that there was much more he had neverbeen able to bring himself to reveal at all. I felt sure of it. The wayhe turned and stared about him betrayed a familiarity with other thingsthan those he had described to us. It was not merely a sight of fire helooked for; it was a sight of something alive, intelligent, somethingable to evade his searching; it was _a person_. It was the watch for theancient Being who sought to obsess him.
And the way in which Dr. Silence answered his look--though it was onlyby a glance of subtlest sympathy--confirmed my impression.
"We may be ready now," I heard him say in a whisper, and I understoodthat his words were intended as a steadying warning, and braced myselfmentally to the utmost of my power.
Yet long before Colonel Wragge had turned to stare about the room, andlong before the doctor had confirmed my impression that things were atlast beginning to stir, I had become aware in most singular fashion thatthe place held more than our three selves. With the rising of the windthis increase to our numbers had first taken place. The baying of thehounds almost seemed to have signalled it. I cannot say how it may bepossible to realise that an empty place has suddenly become--not empty,when the new arrival is nothing that appeals to any one of the senses;for this recognition of an "invisible," as of the change in the balanceof personal forces in a human group, is indefinable and beyond proof.Yet it is unmistakable. And I knew perfectly well at what given momentthe atmosphere within these four walls became charged with the presenceof other living beings besides ourselves. And, on reflection, I amconvinced that both my companions knew it too.
"Watch the light," said the doctor
under his breath, and then I knew toothat it was no fancy of my own that had turned the air darker, and theway he turned to examine the face of our host sent an electric thrill ofwonder and expectancy shivering along every nerve in my body.
Yet it was no kind of terror that I experienced, but rather a sort ofmental dizziness, and a sensation as of being suspended in some remoteand dreadful altitude where things might happen, indeed were about tohappen, that had never before happened within the ken of man. Horror mayhave formed an ingredient, but it was not chiefly horror, and in nosense ghostly horror.
Uncommon thoughts kept beating on my brain like tiny hammers, soft yetpersistent, seeking admission; their unbidden tide began to wash alongthe far fringes of my mind, the currents of unwonted sensations to riseover the remote frontiers of my consciousness. I was aware of thoughts,and the fantasies of thoughts, that I