“After I had made Bains drink a glass I laid him on the bed.
“ ‘Now,’ I said, ‘look into my eyes fixedly. Do you hear me? You are going off to sleep safely and soundly, and if anything troubles you, obey me and wake up. Now, sleep—sleep—sleep!’
“I swept my hands down over his eyes half a dozen times, and he fell over like a child. I knew that if the danger came again he would obey my will and wake up. I intend to cure him, partly by hypnotic suggestion, partly by a certain electrical treatment which I am getting Doctor Witton to give him.
“That night I slept on the couch, and when I went to look at Bains in the morning I found him still sleeping, so leaving him there I went into the test room to examine results. I found them very surprising.
“Inside the room I had a queer feeling, as you can imagine. It was extraordinary to stand there in that curious bluish light from the ‘treated’ windows, and see the blue circle lying, still glowing, where I had left it; and further on, the ‘defense’, lying circle within circle, all ‘out’; and in the centre the glass-legged table standing where a few hours before it had been submerged in the horrible monstrosity of the Hog. I tell you, it all seemed like a wild and horrible dream as I stood there and looked. I have carried out some curious tests in there before now, as you know, but I’ve never come nearer to a catastrophe.
“I left the door open so as not to feel shut in, and then I walked over to the ‘defense’. I was intensely curious to see what had happened physically under the action of such a force as the Hog. I found unmistakable signs that proved the thing had been indeed a Saaitii manifestation, for there had been no psychic or physical illusion about the melting of the violet circle. There remained nothing of it except a ring of patches of melted glass. The gutta base had been fused entirely, but the floor and everything was intact. You see, the Saaitii forms can often attack and destroy, or even make use of, the very defensive material used against them.
“Stepping over the outer circle and looking closely at the indigo circle I saw that it was melted clean through in several places. Another fraction of time and the Hog would have been free to expand as an invisible mist of horror and destruction into the atmosphere of the world. And then, in that very moment of time, salvation had come. I wonder if you can get my feelings as I stood there staring down at the destroyed barrier.”
Carnacki began to knock out his pipe, which is always a sign that he has ended his tale, and is ready to answer any questions we may want to ask.
Taylor was first in. “Why didn’t you use the Electric Pentacle as well as your new spectrum circles?” he asked.
“Because,” replied Carnacki, “the pentacle is simply ‘defensive’ and I wished to have the power to make a ‘focus’ during the early part of the experiment, and then, at the critical moment, to change the combination of the colours so as to have a ‘defense’ against the results of the ‘focus’. You follow me.
“You see,” he went on, seeing we hadn’t grasped his meaning, “there can be no ‘focus’ within a pentacle. It is just of a ‘defensive’ nature. Even if I had switched the current out of the electric pentacle I should still have had to contend with the peculiar and undoubtedly ‘defensive’ power that its form seems to exert, and this would have been sufficient to ‘blur’ the focus.
“In this new research work I’m doing, I’m bound to use a ‘focus’ and so the pentacle is barred. But I’m not sure it matters. I’m convinced this new spectrum ‘defense’ of mine will prove absolutely invulnerable when I’ve learnt how to use it; but it will take me some time. This last case has taught me something new. I had never thought of combining green with blue; but the three bands of green in the blue of that dome has set me thinking. If only I knew the right combinations! It’s the combinations I’ve got to learn. You’ll understand better the importance of these combinations when I remind you that green by itself is, in a very limited way, more deadly than red itself—and red is the danger colour of all.”
“Tell us, Carnacki,” I said, “what is the Hog? Can you? I mean what kind of monstrosity is it? Did you really see it, or was it all some horrible, dangerous kind of dream? How do you know it was one of the outer monsters? And what is the difference between that sort of danger and the sort of thing you saw in the Gateway of the Monster case? And what...?”
“Steady!” laughed Carnacki. “One at a time! I’ll answer all your questions; but I don’t think I’ll take them quite in your order. For instance, speaking about actually seeing the Hog, I might say that, speaking generally, things seen of a ‘ghostly’ nature are not seen with the eyes; they are seen with the mental eye which has this psychic quality, not always developed to a useable state, in addition to its ‘normal’ duty of revealing to the brain what our physical eyes record.
“You will understand that when we see ‘ghostly’ things it is often the ‘mental’ eye performing simultaneously the duty of revealing to the brain what the physical eye sees as well as what it sees itself. The two sights blending their functions in such a fashion gives us the impression that we are actually seeing through our physical eyes the whole of the ‘sight’ that is being revealed to the brain.
“In this way we get an impression of seeing with our physical eyes both the material and the immaterial parts of an ‘abnormal’ scene; for each part being received and revealed to the brain by machinery suitable to the particular purpose appears to have equal value of reality that is, it appears to be equally material. Do you follow me?”
We nodded our assent, and Carnacki continued:
“In the same way, were anything to threaten our psychic body we should have the impression, generally speaking, that it was our physical body that had been threatened, because our psychic sensations and impressions would be super-imposed upon our physical, in the same way that our psychic and our physical sight are super-imposed.
“Our sensations would blend in such a way that it would be impossible to differentiate between what we felt physically and what we felt psychically. To explain better what I mean. A man may seem to himself, in a ‘ghostly’ adventure, to fall actually. That is, to be falling in a physical sense; but all the while it may be his psychic entity, or being—call it what you will—that is falling. But to his brain there is presented the sensation of falling all together. Do you get me?
“At the same time, please remember that the danger is none the less because it is his psychic body that falls. I am referring to the sensation I had of falling during the time of stepping across the mouth of that pit. My physical body could walk over it easily and feel the floor solid under me; but my psychic body was in very real danger of falling. Indeed, I may be said to have literally carried my psychic body over, held within me by the pull of my life-force. You see, to my psychic body the pit was as real and as actual as a coal pit would have been to my physical body. It was merely the pull of my life-force which prevented my psychic body from falling out of me, rather like a plummet, down through the everlasting depths in obedience to the giant pull of the monster.
“As you will remember, the pull of the Hog was too great for my life-force to withstand, and, psychically, I began to fall. Immediately on my brain was recorded a sensation identical with that which would have been recorded on it had my actual physical body been falling. It was a mad risk I took, but as you know, I had to take it to get to the switch and the battery. When I had that physical sense of falling and seemed to see the black misty sides of the pit all around me, it was my mental eye recording upon the brain what it was seeing. My psychic body had actually begun to fall and was really below the edge of the pit but still in contact with me. In other words my physical magnetic and psychic ‘haloes’ were still mingled. My physical body was still standing firmly upon the floor of the room, but if I had not each time by effort or will forced my physical body across to the side, my psychic body would have fallen completely out of ‘contact’ with me, and gone like some ghostly meteorite, obedient to the pull of the Hog.
&n
bsp; “The curious sensation I had of forcing myself through an obstructing medium was not a physical sensation at all, as we understand that word, but rather the psychic sensation of forcing my entity to re-cross the ‘gap’ that had already formed between my falling psychic body now below the edge of the pit and my physical body standing on the floor of the room. And that ‘gap’ was full of a force that strove to prevent my body and soul from rejoining. It was a terrible experience. Do you remember how I could still see with my brain through the eyes of my psychic body, though it had already fallen some distance out of me? That is an extraordinary thing to remember.
“However, to get ahead, all ‘ghostly’ phenomena are extremely diffuse in a normal state. They become actively physically dangerous in all cases where they are concentrated. The best off-hand illustration I can think of is the all-familiar electricity—a force which, by the way, we are too prone to imagine we understand because we’ve named and harnessed it, to use a popular phrase. But we don’t understand it at all! It is still a complete fundamental mystery. Well, electricity when diffused is an ‘imagined and unpictured something’, but when concentrated it is sudden death. Have you got me in that?
“Take, for instance, that explanation, as a very, very crude sort of illustration of what the Hog is. The Hog is one of those million-mile-long clouds of ‘nebulosity’ lying in the Outer Circle. It is because of this that I term those clouds of force the Outer Monsters.
“What they are exactly is a tremendous question to answer. I sometimes wonder whether Dodgson there realises just how impossible it is to answer some of his questions,” and Carnacki laughed.
“But to make a brief attempt at it. There is around this planet, and presumably others, of course, circles of what I might call ‘emanations’. This is an extremely light gas, or shall I say ether. Poor ether, it’s been hard worked in its time!
“Go back one moment to your school-days, and bear in mind that at one time the earth was just a sphere of extremely hot gases. These gases condensed in the form of materials and other ‘solid’ matters; but there are some that are not yet solidified—air, for instance. Well, we have an earth-sphere of solid matter on which to stamp as solidly as we like; and round about that sphere there lies a ring of gases, the constituents of which enter largely into all life, as we understand life—that is, air.
“But this is not the only circle of gas which is floating round us. There are, as I have been forced to conclude, larger and more attenuated ‘gas’ belts lying, zone on zone, far up and around us. These compose what I have called the inner circles. They are surrounded in turn by a circle or belt of what I have called, for want of a better word, ‘emanations’.
“This circle which I have named the Outer Circle cannot lie less than a hundred thousand miles off the earth, and has a thickness which I have presumed to be anything between five and ten million miles. I believe, but I cannot prove, that it does not spin with the earth but in the opposite direction, for which a plausible cause might be found in the study of the theory upon which a certain electrical machine is constructed.
“I have reason to believe that the spinning of this, the Outer Circle, is disturbed from time to time through causes which are quite unknown to me, but which I believe are based in physical phenomena. Now, the Outer Circle is the psychic circle, yet it is also physical. To illustrate what I mean I must again instance electricity, and say that just as electricity discovered itself to us as something quite different from any of our previous conceptions of matter, so is the Psychic or Outer Circle different from any of our previous conceptions of matter. Yet it is none the less physical in its origin, and in the sense that electricity is physical, the Outer or Psychic Circle is physical in its constituents. Speaking pictorially it is, physically, to the Inner Circle, what the Inner Circle is to the upper strata of the air, and what the air—as we know that intimate gas—is to the waters and the waters to the solid world. You get my line of suggestion?”
We all nodded, and Camacki resumed.
“Well, now let me apply all this to what I am leading up to. I suggest that these million-mile-long clouds of monstrosity with float in the Psychic or Outer Cirde, are bred of the elements of that circle. They are tremendous psychic forces, bred out of its elements just as an octopus or shark is bred out of the sea, or a tiger or any other physical force is bred out of the elements of its earth-and-air surroundings.
“To go further, a physical man is composed entirely from the constituents of earth and air, by which terms I include sunlight and water and ‘condiments’! In other words without earth and air he could not BE! Or to put it another way, earth and air breed within themselves the materials of the body and the brain, and therefore, presumably, the machine of intelligence.
“Now apply this line of thought to the Psychic or Outer Circle which though so attenuated that I may crudely presume it to be approximate to our conception of aether, yet contains all the elements for the production of certain phases of force and intelligence. But these elements are in a form as little like matter as the emanations of scent are like the scent itself. Equally, the force-and-intelligence-producing capacity of the Outer Circle no more approximates to the life-and-intelligence-producing capacity of the earth and air, than the results of the Outer Circle constituents resemble the results of earth and air. I wonder whether I make it clear.
“And so it seems to me we have the conception of a huge psychic world, bred out of the physical, lying far outside of this world and completely encompassing it, except for the doorways about which I hope to tell you some other evening. This enormous psychic world of the Outer Circle ‘breeds’ if I may use the term, its own psychic forces and intelligences, monstrous and otherwise; just as this world produces its own physical forces and intelligences—beings, animals, insects, etc., monstrous and otherwise.
“The monstrosities of the Outer Circle are malignant towards all that we consider most desirable, just in the same way a shark or a tiger may be considered malignant, in a physical way, to all that we consider desirable. They are predatory—as all positive force is predatory. They have desires regarding us which are incredibly more dreadful to our minds when comprehended than an intelligent sheep would consider our desires towards its own carcass. They plunder and destroy to satisfy lusts and hungers exactly as other forms of existence plunder and destroy to satisfy their lusts and hungers. And the desire of these monsters is chiefly, if not always, for the psychic entity of the human.
“But that’s as much as I can tell you tonight. Some evening I want to tell you about the tremendous mystery of the Psychic Doorways. In the meantime, have I made things a bit clearer to you, Dodgson?”
“Yes, and no,” I answered. “You’ve been a brick to make the attempt, but there are still about ten thousand other things I want to know.”
Carnacki stood up. “Out you go!” he said using the recognised formula in friendly fashion. “Out you go! I want a sleep.”
And shaking him by the hand we strolled out onto the quiet Embankment.
Other Tales of
Mystery and Suspense
The Goddess of Death
It was in the latter end of November when I reached T—worth to find the little town almost in a state of panic. In answer to my half-jesting inquiry as to whether the French were attempting to land, I was told a harrowing tale of some restless statue that had formed a nightly habit of running amuck amongst the worthy townspeople. Nearly a dozen had already fallen victims, the first having been pretty Sally Morgan, the town belle.
These and other matters I learnt. Wherever I went it was the same story. “Good Heavens! what ignorance, what superstition!” This I thought, imagining that they were the dupes of some murderous rogue. Afterwards I was to change my mind. I gathered that the tragedies had all happened in some park nearby, where, during the day, this Walking Marble rested innocently enough upon its pedestal.
Though I scouted the story of the walking statue, I was greatly interested in the mat
ter. Already it had come to me to look into it and show these benighted people how mistaken they had been; besides, the thing promised some excitement. As I strolled through the town I laughed, picturing to myself the absurdity of some people believing in a walking marble statue. Pooh! What fools there are! Arriving at my hotel, I was pleased to learn from the landlord that my old friend and schoolmate, William Turner, had been staying there for some time.
That evening while I was at dinner, he burst into my room and was delighted at seeing me.
“I suppose you’ve heard about the town bogey by now?” he said presently, dropping his voice. “It’s a dangerous enough bogey, and we’re all puzzled to explain how on earth it has escaped detection so long. Of course,” he went on, “this story about the walking statue is all rubbish, though it’s surprising what a number of people believe it.”
“What do you say to trying our hands at catching it?” I said. “There would be a little excitement, and we should be doing the town a public benefit.”
Will smiled. “I’m game if you are, Herton—we could take a stroll in the park tonight, if you like; perhaps we might see something.”
“Right.” I answered heartily. “What time do you propose going?”
Will pulled out his watch. “It’s half-past eight now; shall we say eleven o’clock? It ought to be late enough then.”
I assented and invited him to join me at my wine. He did so, and we passed the time away very pleasantly in reminiscences of old times.
“What about weapons?” I asked presently. “I suppose it will be advisable to take something in that line?”
For answer Will unbuttoned his coat, and I saw the gleam of a brace of pistols. I nodded and, going to my trunk, opened it and showed him a couple of beautiful little pistols I often carried. Having loaded them, I put them in my side pockets. Shortly afterwards eleven chimed, and getting into our cloaks, we left the house.
The House on the Borderland and Other Mysterious Places Page 39