by E. F. Benson
Suddenly from the garden there sounded the jubilant scamper of running feet, and next moment a great grey ape sprang on to the veranda beside them, and looked eagerly, with keen dog’s eyes, at Hugh, as if intent on obeying some yet unspoken command. Julia gave a little shriek of fright and clung to him.
“Oh, that horrible animal!” she cried. “Hughie, take care of me!”
Some sudden ray of illumination came to Hugh. All the extraordinary fantastic things that Rankin had said to him became sober and real. And simultaneously the girl’s clinging fingers on his arm became like the touch of some poisonous, preying thing, snake-coil, or suckers of an octopus, or hooked wings of a vampire bat. Something within him still shook and trembled like a quicksand, but his conscious mind was quite clear and collected.
“Go away,” he said to the ape, and pointed into the garden, and it scampered off, still gleefully spurning and kicking the soft sandy path. Then he quietly turned to the girl.
“There, it’s gone,” he said. “It was just some tame thing escaped. I saw it, or one like it, the other day on the end of a string. As for the horses, I shall be delighted to let you and Lord Paterson have them. It is ten now; they will be round.”
The girl had quite recovered from her fright.
“Ah, Hughie, you are a dear,” she said. “And you do understand?”
“Yes, perfectly,” said he.
Julia went to dress herself for riding, and presently Hugh saw them off from the gate, with courteous wishes for a pleasant ride. Then he went back to his bedroom and opened the little box where he kept his scarabs.
An hour later he was walking out alone on the road to Karnak, and in his pocket was the image of Tahu-met. He had formed no clear idea of what he was meaning to do; the immediate reason for his expedition was that once again he could not bear to lose sight of Julia and her companion. The moon was high, the feathery outline of palm-groves was clearly and delicately etched on the dark velvet of the heavens, and stars sat among their branches like specks of golden fruit. The caressing scent of bean-flowers was wafted over the road, and often he had to stand aside to let pass a group of noisy tourists mounted on white donkeys, coming riotously home from the show-piece of Karnak by moonlight. Then, striking off the road, he passed beside the horseshoe lake, in the depths of whose black waters the stars burned unwaveringly, and by the entrance of the ruined temple of Mut. And then, with a stab of jealousy that screamed for its revenge, he saw, tied up to a pillar just within, his own horses. So they were here.
He gave the beasts a wide berth, lest, recognizing him, they should whinny and perhaps betray his presence, and, creeping in the shadow of the walls behind the row of great cat-headed statues, he stole into the inner court of the temple. Here for the first time he caught sight of the two at the far end of the enclosure, and as they turned, white-faced in the moonlight, he saw Paterson kiss the girl, and they stood there with neck and arms interlaced. Then they began walking towards him again, and he stepped into a dark chamber on his right to avoid meeting them.
It had that strange stale animal odour about it that hangs in Egyptian temples, and with a thrill of glee he saw, by a ray of moonlight that streamed in through the door, that by chance he had stepped into the shrine round which sit the dog-faced apes, whose secret name he knew, and whose controlling spell lay in his breast-pocket. Often he had felt the underworld horror that dwelt here, as a thing petrified and corpse-like; to-night it was petrified no longer, for the images seemed tense and quivering with the life that at any moment he could put into them. Their faces leered and hated and lusted, and all that demoniac power, which seemed to be flowing into him from them, was his to use as he wished. Rankin’s fantastic tales were bursting with reality; he knew with the certainty with which the night-watcher waits for the day, that the lordship of the spirit of apes, incarnate and discarnate, would descend on him as on some anointed king the moment he thrice pronounced the secret name. He was going to do it too; he knew also that all he hesitated for now was to determine what orders their lord should give. It seemed that the image in his breast-pocket was aware, for it throbbed and vibrated against his chest like a boiling kettle.
He could not make up his mind what to do; but fed as with fuel by jealousy, and love, and hate, and revenge, his sense of the magical control he wielded could be resisted no longer, but boiled over, and he drew from his pocket the image where was engraven the secret name.
“Tahu-met, Tahu-met, Tahu-met,” he shouted aloud.
There was a moment’s absolute stillness; then came a wild scream of fright from his horses, and he heard them gallop off madly into the night. Slowly, like a lamp turned down and then finally turned out, the blaze of the moon faded into utter darkness, and in that darkness, which whispered with a gradually increasing noise of scratchings and scamperings, he felt that the walls of the narrow chamber where he stood were, as in a dream, going farther and farther away from him, until, though still the darkness was impenetrable, he knew that he was standing in some immense space. One wall, he fancied, was still near him, close behind him, but the space which was full of he knew not what unseen presences, extended away and away to both sides of him and in front of him. Then he was aware that he was not standing, but sitting, for beneath his hands he could feel the arms as of some throne, of which the seat’s edge pressed him just below his knees. The animal odour he had noticed before increased enormously in pungency, and he sniffed it in ecstatically, as if it had been the scent of beanfields, and mixed with it was the sweetness of incense and the savour as of roast meat. And at that the withdrawn light began to glow once more, only now it was not the whiteness of the moon, but a redder glow as of flames that aspired and sank again.
He saw where he was now. He was seated on a chair of pink granite, and a little in front of him was a huge altar, on which limbs smoked. Overhead was a low roof supported at intervals by painted pillars, and the whole of the vast floor was full of great grey apes, squatting in dense rows. Sometimes they all bowed their heads to the ground, sometimes, as by a signal, they raised them again, and myriads of obscene expectant eyes faced him. They glowed from within, as cats’ eyes glow in the dusk, but with an infinity of hellish power. All that power was his to command, and he gloried in it.
“Bring them in,” he said, and no more. Indeed, he was not sure if he said it; it was just his thought.
But as if he spoke the soundless language of animals, they understood, and they clambered and leaped over each other to do his bidding. Then a huddled wave of them surged up in front of where he sat, and as it broke in foam of evil eyes and paws and switching tails, it disclosed the two whom he had ordered to be brought before him.
“And what shall I do with them?” he asked himself, cudgelling his monkey-brain for some infamous invention.
“Kiss each other,” he said at length, in order to inflame the brutality of his jealousy further, and he laughed chatteringly, as their white trembling lips met. He felt that all remnants of humanity were draining from him; there was but a little left in his whole nature that could be deemed to belong to a man. A hundred awful schemes ran about through his brain, as sparks of fire run through the charred ashes of burnt paper.
And then Julia turned her face towards him. In the hideous entry that she had made in that wave of apes her hair had fallen down and streamed over her shoulders. And at that, the sight of a woman’s hair unbound, the remnant of his manhood, all that was not submerged in the foulness of his supreme apehood, made one tremendous appeal to him, like some final convulsion of the dying, and at the bidding of that impulse his hands came together and snapped the image in two.
Something screamed; the whole temple yelled with it, and mixed with it was a roaring in his ears as of great waters or hurricane winds. He stamped on the broken image, grinding it to powder below his heel, and felt the ground and the temple walls rocking round him.
Then he heard someone not far off speaking in human voice again, and no music could be so s
weet.
“Let’s get out of the place, darling,” it said. “That was an earthquake, and the horses have bolted.”
He heard running steps outside, which gradually grew fainter. The moon shone whitely into the little chamber with the grotesque stone apes, and at his feet was the powdered blue glaze and baked white clay of the image he had ground to dust.
“THROUGH”
Richard Waghorn was among the cleverest and most popular of professional mediums, and a never-failing source of consolation to the credulous. That there was fraud, downright, unadulterated fraud mixed up with his remarkable manifestations it would be impossible to deny; but it would have been futile not to admit that these manifestations were not wholly fraudulent. He had to an extraordinary degree that rare and inexplicable gift of tapping, so to speak, not only the surface consciousness of those who consulted him, but, in favourable circumstances, their inner or subliminal selves, so that it frequently happened that he could speak to an inquirer of something he had completely forgotten, which subsequent investigation proved to be authentic.
So much was perfectly genuine, but he gave, as it were, a false frame to it all by the manner in which he presented these phenomena. He pretended, at his séances, to go into a trance, during which he was controlled sometimes by the spirit of an ancient Egyptian priest, who gave news to the inquirer about some dead friend or relative, sometimes more directly by that dead friend or relative who spoke through him.
As a matter of fact, Waghorn would not be in a trance at all, but perfectly conscious, extracting, as he sat quiescent and with closed eyes, the knowledge, remembered or even forgotten, that lurked in the mind of his sitter, and bringing it out in the speech of Mentu, the Egyptian control, or of the lost friend or relative about whom inquiry was being made. Fraudulent also, as purporting to come from the intelligence of discarnate spirits, were the pieces of information he gave as to the conditions under which those who had “passed over” still lived, and it was here that he chiefly brought consolation to the credulous, for he represented the dead as happy and busy, and full of spiritual activities. This information, to speak frankly, he obtained entirely from his own conscious mind. He made it up, and we cannot really find an excuse for him in the undoubted fact that he sincerely believed in the general truth of all he said when he spoke of the survival of individual personality.
Finally, deeply dyed with fraud, and that in crude, garish colours, were the spirit-rappings, the playing of musical boxes, the appearance of materialized spirits, the smell of incense that heralded Cardinal Newman, all that bag of conjuring tricks, in fact, which disgraces and makes a laughing-stock of the impostors who profess to be able to bring the seen world into connection with the unseen world. But to do Waghorn justice, he did not often employ those crude contrivances, for his telepathic and thought-reading gifts were far more convincing to his sitters. Occasionally, however, his powers in this line used to fail him, and then, it must be confessed, he presented his Egyptian control with every trapping and circumstance of degrading device.
Such was the general scheme of procedure when Richard Waghorn, with his sister as accomplice in case mechanical tricks were necessary, undertook to reveal the spirit world to the material world. They were a pleasant, handsome pair of young people, gifted with a manner that, if anything, disarmed suspicion too much, and while futile old gentlemen found it quite agreeable to sit in the dark holding Julia’s firm, cool hand, similarly constituted old ladies were the recipients of thrilling emotions when they held Richard’s, the touch of which, they declared, was strangely electric. There they sat while Richard, breathing deeply and moaning in his simulated trance, was the mouthpiece of Mentu and told them things which, but for his indubitable gift of thought-reading, it was impossible for him to know; or, if the power was not coming through properly, they listened, hardly less thrilled, to spirit-rappings and musical boxes and unverifiable information about the conditions of life where the mortal coil hampers no longer. It was all very interesting and soothing and edifying. And then one day there occurred an irruption of something wholly unexpected and inexplicable.
Brother and sister were dining quietly after a busy, but unsatisfactory day when the tinkling summons came from the telephone, and Richard found that a loud voice, belonging, so it said, to Mrs. Gardner, wanted to arrange a sitting alone for next day. No address was given, but he made an appointment for half-past two, and without much enthusiasm went back to his dinner.
“A stranger,” he said to his sister, “with no address and no reference or introduction. I hope I shall be in better form to-morrow. There was nothing but rappings and music to-day. They are boring, and also they are dangerous, for one may be detected at any time. And I got an infernal blow on my knuckles from that new electric tapper.”
Julia laughed.
“I know. I heard it,” she said. “There was quite a wrong noise in one of the taps as we were spelling out ‘silver wing.’”
He lit his cigarette, frowning at the smoke.
“That’s the worst of my profession,” he said. “On some days I can get right inside the mind of the sitter, and, as you know, bring out the most surprising information; but on other days—to-day, for instance—and there have been many such lately—there’s a mere blank wall in front of me. I shall lose my position if it happens often; nobody will pay my fees only to hear spirit-rappings and generalities.”
“They’re better than nothing,” said Julia.
“Very little. They help to fill up, but I hate using them. Don’t you remember, when we began investigating, just you and I alone, how often we seemed on the verge of genuine supernatural manifestations? They appeared to be just round the corner.”
“Yes; but we never turned the corner. We never got beyond mere thought-reading.”
He got up.
“I know we didn’t, but there always seemed a possibility. The door was ajar; it wasn’t locked, and it has never ceased to be ajar. Often when the mere thought-reading, as you call it, is flowing along most smoothly, I feel that if only I could abandon my whole consciousness a little more completely, something, somebody would really take control of me. I wish it would; and yet I’m frightened of it. It might revenge itself for all the frauds I’ve perpetrated in its name. Come, let’s play piquet and forget about it all.”
It was settled that Julia should be present next day when the stranger came for her sitting, in order that if Richard’s thought-reading was not coming through any better than it had done lately, she should help in the rappings and the luminous patches and the musical box. Mrs. Gardner was punctual to her appointment, a tall, quiet, well-dressed woman who stated with perfect frankness her object in wishing for a séance and her views about spirit-communication.
“I should immensely like to believe in spirit-communication,” she said, “such as I am told you are capable of producing; but at present I don’t.”
“It is important that the atmosphere should not be one of hostility,” said Waghorn in his dreamy, professional manner.
“I bring no hostility,” she said. “I am in a state, shall we say, of benevolent neutrality, unless”—and she smiled in a charming manner—“unless benevolent neutrality has come to mean malevolent hostility. That, I assure you, is not the case with me. I want to believe.” She paused a moment.
“And may I say this without offence?” she asked. “May I tell you that spirit-rappings and curious lights and sounds of music do not interest me in the least?”
They were already seated in the room where the séance was to be held. The windows were thickly curtained, there was only a glimmer of light from the red lamp, and even this the spirits would very likely desire to have extinguished. If this visitor took no interest in such things, Waghorn felt that he and his sister had wasted their time in adjusting the electric hammer (made to rap by the pressure of the foot on a switch concealed in the thick rug underneath the table) behind the sliding-panel, in stringing across the ceiling the invisible wire
s on which the luminous globes ran, and in making ready all the auxiliary paraphernalia in case the genuine telepathy was not on tap. So with voice dreamier than before and with slower utterance as he was supposed to be beginning to sink into trance, he just said:
“I can’t foretell the manner in which they may choose to make their presence known.”
He gave one loud rap, which perfectly conveyed the word “No” to his sister, indicating that the conjuring tricks were not to be used. Subsequently, if really necessary, he could rap “Yes” to her, and the music and the magic lights would be displayed. Then he began to breathe quickly and in a snorting manner, to show that the control was taking possession of him.
“My brother is going into trance very quickly,” said Julia, and there was dead silence.
Almost immediately a clear and shining lucidity spread like sunshine, after these days of cloud, over Waghorn’s brain. Every moment he found himself knowing more and more about this complete stranger who sat with hand touching his. He felt his sub-conscious brain, which had lately lain befogged and imperceptive, sun itself under the brilliant clarity of illumination that had come to it, and in the impressive bass in which Mentu was wont to give vent to his revelations he said:
“I am here; Mentu is here.”
He felt the table rocking beneath his hands, which surprised him, since he had exerted no pressure on it, and he supposed that Julia had not understood his signal, and was beginning the conjuring tricks. One hand of his was in hers, and by the pressure of his finger-tips he conveyed to her in code, “Don’t do it.” Instantly she answered back, “I wasn’t.”
He paid no more heed to that, though the table continued to oscillate and tip in a very curious manner, for his mind was steeped in this flood of images that impressed themselves on his brain.
“What shall Mentu tell you to-day?” he went on, with pauses between the sentences. “Someone has come to consult Mentu. It is a lady, I can see her. She wears a locket round her neck, below her coat, with a piece of black hair under glass between the gold.”