The motor stopped with a deep purring sound, as though a great black panther lay concealed within its hood, and the doctor—the “psychic doctor,” as he was sometimes called—stepped out through the gathering fog, and walked across the tiny garden that held a blackened fir tree and a stunted laurel shrubbery. The house was very small, and it was some time before any one answered the bell. Then, suddenly, a light appeared in the hall, and he saw a pretty little woman standing on the top step begging him to come in. She was dressed in grey, and the gaslight fell on a mass of deliberately brushed light hair. Stuffed, dusty birds, and a shabby array of African spears, hung on the wall behind her. A hat-rack, with a bronze plate full of very large cards, led his eye swiftly to a dark staircase beyond. Mrs. Pender had round eyes like a child’s, and she greeted him with an effusiveness that barely concealed her emotion, yet strove to appear naturally cordial. Evidently she had been looking out for his arrival, and had outrun the servant girl. She was a little breathless.
“I hope you’ve not been kept waiting—I think it’s most good of you to come—” she began, and then stopped sharp when she saw his face in the gaslight. There was something in Dr. Silence’s look that did not encourage mere talk. He was in earnest now, if ever man was.
“Good evening, Mrs. Pender,” he said, with a quiet smile that won confidence, yet deprecated unnecessary words, “the fog delayed me a little. I am glad to see you.”
They went into a dingy sitting-room at the back of the house, neatly furnished but depressing. Books stood in a row upon the mantelpiece. The fire had evidently just been lit. It smoked in great puffs into the room.
“Mrs. Sivendson said she thought you might be able to come,” ventured the little woman again, looking up engagingly into his face and betraying anxiety and eagerness in every gesture. “But I hardly dared to believe it. I think it is really too good of you. My husband’s case is so peculiar that—well, you know, I am quite sure any ordinary doctor would say at once the asylum—”
“Isn’t he in, then?” asked Dr. Silence gently.
“In the asylum?” she gasped. “Oh dear, no—not yet!”
“In the house, I meant,” he laughed.
She gave a great sigh.
“He’ll be back any minute now,” she replied, obviously relieved to see him laugh; “but the fact is, we didn’t expect you so early—I mean, my husband hardly thought you would come at all.”
“I am always delighted to come—when I am really wanted, and can be of help,” he said quickly; “and, perhaps, it’s all for the best that your husband is out, for now that we are alone you can tell me something about his difficulties. So far, you know, I have heard very little.”
Her voice trembled as she thanked him, and when he came and took a chair close beside her she actually had difficulty in finding words with which to begin.
“In the first place,” she began timidly, and then continuing with a nervous incoherent rush of words, “he will be simply delighted that you’ve really come, because he said you were the only person he would consent to see at all—the only doctor, I mean. But, of course, he doesn’t know how frightened I am, or how much I have noticed. He pretends with me that it’s just a nervous breakdown, and I’m sure he doesn’t realise all the odd things I’ve noticed him doing. But the main thing, I suppose—”
“Yes, the main thing, Mrs. Pender,” he said, encouragingly, noticing her hesitation.
“—is that he thinks we are not alone in the house. That’s the chief thing.”
“Tell me more facts—just facts.”
“It began last summer when I came back from Ireland; he had been here alone for six weeks, and I thought him looking tired and queer—ragged and scattered about the face, if you know what I mean, and his manner worn out. He said he had been writing hard, but his inspiration had somehow failed him, and he was dissatisfied with his work. His sense of humour was leaving him, or changing into something else, he said. There was something in the house, he declared, that"—she emphasised the words—"prevented his feeling funny.”
“Something in the house that prevented his feeling funny,” repeated the doctor. “Ah, now we’re getting to the heart of it!”
“Yes,” she resumed vaguely, “that’s what he kept saying.”
“And what was it he did that you thought strange?” he asked sympathetically. “Be brief, or he may be here before you finish.”
“Very small things, but significant it seemed to me. He changed his workroom from the library, as we call it, to the sitting-room. He said all his characters became wrong and terrible in the library; they altered, so that he felt like writing tragedies—vile, debased tragedies, the tragedies of broken souls. But now he says the same of the sitting-room, and he’s gone back to the library.”
“Ah!”
“You see, there’s so little I can tell you,” she went on, with increasing speed and countless gestures. “I mean it’s only very small things he does and says that are queer. What frightens me is that he assumes there is some one else in the house all the time—some one I never see. He does not actually say so, but on the stairs I’ve seen him standing aside to let some one pass; I’ve seen him open a door to let some one in or out; and often in our bedrooms he puts chairs about as though for some one else to sit in. Oh—oh yes, and once or twice,” she cried—"once or twice—”
She paused, and looked about her with a startled air.
“Yes?”
“Once or twice,” she resumed hurriedly, as though she heard a sound that alarmed her, “I’ve heard him running—coming in and out of the rooms breathless as if something were after him—”
The door opened while she was still speaking, cutting her words off in the middle, and a man came into the room. He was dark and clean-shaven, sallow rather, with the eyes of imagination, and dark hair growing scantily about the temples. He was dressed in a shabby tweed suit, and wore an untidy flannel collar at the neck. The dominant expression of his face was startled—hunted; an expression that might any moment leap into the dreadful stare of terror and announce a total loss of self-control.
The moment he saw his visitor a smile spread over his worn features, and he advanced to shake hands.
“I hoped you would come; Mrs. Sivendson said you might be able to find time,” he said simply. His voice was thin and needy. “I am very glad to see you, Dr. Silence. It is ‘Doctor,’ is it not?”
“Well, I am entitled to the description,” laughed the other, “but I rarely get it. You know, I do not practise as a regular thing; that is, I only take cases that specially interest me, or—”
He did not finish the sentence, for the men exchanged a glance of sympathy that rendered it unnecessary.
“I have heard of your great kindness.”
“It’s my hobby,” said the other quickly, “and my privilege.”
“I trust you will still think so when you have heard what I have to tell you,” continued the author, a little wearily. He led the way across the hall into the little smoking-room where they could talk freely and undisturbed.
In the smoking-room, the door shut and privacy about them, Fender’s attitude changed somewhat, and his manner became very grave. The doctor sat opposite, where he could watch his face. Already, he saw, it looked more haggard. Evidently it cost him much to refer to his trouble at all.
“What I have is, in my belief, a profound spiritual affliction,” he began quite bluntly, looking straight into the other’s eyes.
“I saw that at once,” Dr. Silence said.
“Yes, you saw that, of course; my atmosphere must convey that much to any one with psychic perceptions. Besides which, I feel sure from all I’ve heard, that you are really a soul-doctor, are you not, more than a healer merely of the body?”
“You think of me too highly,” returned the other; “though I prefer cases, as you know, in which the spirit is disturbed first, the body afterwards.”
“I understand, yes. Well, I have experienced a curious di
sturbance in—not in my physical region primarily. I mean my nerves are all right, and my body is all right. I have no delusions exactly, but my spirit is tortured by a calamitous fear which first came upon me in a strange manner.”
John Silence leaned forward a moment and took the speaker’s hand and held it in his own for a few brief seconds, closing his eyes as he did so. He was not feeling his pulse, or doing any of the things that doctors ordinarily do; he was merely absorbing into himself the main note of the man’s mental condition, so as to get completely his own point of view, and thus be able to treat his case with true sympathy. A very close observer might perhaps have noticed that a slight tremor ran through his frame after he had held the hand for a few seconds.
“Tell me quite frankly, Mr. Pender,” he said soothingly, releasing the hand, and with deep attention in his manner, “tell me all the steps that led to the beginning of this invasion. I mean tell me what the particular drug was, and why you took it, and how it affected you—”
“Then you know it began with a drug!” cried the author, with undisguised astonishment.
“I only know from what I observe in you, and in its effect upon myself. You are in a surprising psychical condition. Certain portions of your atmosphere are vibrating at a far greater rate than others. This is the effect of a drug, but of no ordinary drug. Allow me to finish, please. If the higher rate of vibration spreads all over, you will become, of course, permanently cognisant of a much larger world than the one you know normally. If, on the other hand, the rapid portion sinks back to the usual rate, you will lose these occasional increased perceptions you now have.”
“You amaze me!” exclaimed the author; “for your words exactly describe what I have been feeling—”
“I mention this only in passing, and to give you confidence before you approach the account of your real affliction,” continued the doctor. “All perception, as you know, is the result of vibrations; and clairvoyance simply means becoming sensitive to an increased scale of vibrations. The awakening of the inner senses we hear so much about means no more than that. Your partial clairvoyance is easily explained. The only thing that puzzles me is how you managed to procure the drug, for it is not easy to get in pure form, and no adulterated tincture could have given you the terrific impetus I see you have acquired. But, please proceed now and tell me your story in your own way.”
“This Cannabis indica,” the author went on, “came into my possession last autumn while my wife was away. I need not explain how I got it, for that has no importance; but it was the genuine fluid extract, and I could not resist the temptation to make an experiment. One of its effects, as you know, is to induce torrential laughter—”
“Yes: sometimes.”
“—I am a writer of humorous tales, and I wished to increase my own sense of laughter—to see the ludicrous from an abnormal point of view. I wished to study it a bit, if possible, and—”
“Tell me!”
“I took an experimental dose. I starved for six hours to hasten the effect, locked myself into this room, and gave orders not to be disturbed. Then I swallowed the stuff and waited.”
“And the effect?”
“I waited one hour, two, three, four, five hours. Nothing happened. No laughter came, but only a great weariness instead. Nothing in the room or in my thoughts came within a hundred miles of a humorous aspect.”
“Always a most uncertain drug,” interrupted the doctor. “We make very small use of it on that account.”
“At two o’clock in the morning I felt so hungry and tired that I decided to give up the experiment and wait no longer. I drank some milk and went upstairs to bed. I felt flat and disappointed. I fell asleep at once and must have slept for about an hour, when I awoke suddenly with a great noise in my ears. It was the noise of my own laughter! I was simply shaking with merriment. At first I was bewildered and thought I had been laughing in dreams, but a moment later I remembered the drug, and was delighted to think that after all I had got an effect. It had been working all along, only I had miscalculated the time. The only unpleasant thing then was an odd feeling that I had not waked naturally, but had been wakened by some one else—deliberately. This came to me as a certainty in the middle of my noisy laughter and distressed me.”
“Any impression who it could have been?” asked the doctor, now listening with close attention to every word, very much on the alert.
Pender hesitated and tried to smile. He brushed his hair from his forehead with a nervous gesture.
“You must tell me all your impressions, even your fancies; they are quite as important as your certainties.”
“I had a vague idea that it was some one connected with my forgotten dream, some one who had been at me in my sleep, some one of great strength and great ability—of great force—quite an unusual personality—and, I was certain, too—a woman.”
“A good woman?” asked John Silence quietly.
Pender started a little at the question and his sallow face flushed; it seemed to surprise him. But he shook his head quickly with an indefinable look of horror.
“Evil,” he answered briefly, “appallingly evil, and yet mingled with the sheer wickedness of it was also a certain perverseness—the perversity of the unbalanced mind.”
He hesitated a moment and looked up sharply at his interlocutor. A shade of suspicion showed itself in his eyes.
“No,” laughed the doctor, “you need not fear that I’m merely humouring you, or think you mad. Far from it. Your story interests me exceedingly and you furnish me unconsciously with a number of clues as you tell it. You see, I possess some knowledge of my own as to these psychic byways.”
“I was shaking with such violent laughter,” continued the narrator, reassured in a moment, “though with no clear idea what was amusing me, that I had the greatest difficulty in getting up for the matches, and was afraid I should frighten the servants overhead with my explosions. When the gas was lit I found the room empty, of course, and the door locked as usual. Then I half dressed and went out on to the landing, my hilarity better under control, and proceeded to go downstairs. I wished to record my sensations. I stuffed a handkerchief into my mouth so as not to scream aloud and communicate my hysterics to the entire household.”
“And the presence of this—this—?”
“It was hanging about me all the time,” said Pender, “but for the moment it seemed to have withdrawn. Probably, too, my laughter killed all other emotions.”
“And how long did you take getting downstairs?”
“I was just coming to that. I see you know all my ‘symptoms’ in advance, as it were; for, of course, I thought I should never get to the bottom. Each step seemed to take five minutes, and crossing the narrow hall at the foot of the stairs—well, I could have sworn it was half an hour’s journey had not my watch certified that it was a few seconds. Yet I walked fast and tried to push on. It was no good. I walked apparently without advancing, and at that rate it would have taken me a week to get down Putney Hill.”
“An experimental dose radically alters the scale of time and space sometimes—”
“But, when at last I got into my study and lit the gas, the change came horridly, and sudden as a flash of lightning. It was like a douche of icy water, and in the middle of this storm of laughter—”
“Yes; what?” asked the doctor, leaning forward and peering into his eyes.
“—I was overwhelmed with terror,” said Pender, lowering his reedy voice at the mere recollection of it.
He paused a moment and mopped his forehead. The scared, hunted look in his eyes now dominated the whole face. Yet, all the time, the corners of his mouth hinted of possible laughter as though the recollection of that merriment still amused him. The combination of fear and laughter in his face was very curious, and lent great conviction to his story; it also lent a bizarre expression of horror to his gestures.
“Terror, was it?” repeated the doctor soothingly.
“Yes, terror; for, though t
he Thing that woke me seemed to have gone, the memory of it still frightened me, and I collapsed into a chair. Then I locked the door and tried to reason with myself, but the drug made my movements so prolonged that it took me five minutes to reach the door, and another five to get back to the chair again. The laughter, too, kept bubbling up inside me—great wholesome laughter that shook me like gusts of wind—so that even my terror almost made me laugh. Oh, but I may tell you, Dr. Silence, it was altogether vile, that mixture of fear and laughter, altogether vile!
“Then, all at once, the things in the room again presented their funny side to me and set me off laughing more furiously than ever. The bookcase was ludicrous, the arm-chair a perfect clown, the way the clock looked at me on the mantelpiece too comic for words; the arrangement of papers and inkstand on the desk tickled me till I roared and shook and held my sides and the tears streamed down my cheeks. And that footstool! Oh, that absurd footstool!”
He lay back in his chair, laughing to himself and holding up his hands at the thought of it, and at the sight of him Dr. Silence laughed, too.
“Go on, please,” he said, “I quite understand. I know something myself of the hashish laughter.”
The author pulled himself together and resumed, his face growing quickly grave again.
“So, you see, side by side with this extravagant, apparently causeless merriment, there was also an extravagant, apparently causeless terror. The drug produced the laughter, I knew; but what brought in the terror I could not imagine. Everywhere behind the fun lay the fear. It was terror masked by cap and bells; and I became the playground for two opposing emotions, armed and fighting to the death. Gradually, then, the impression grew in me that this fear was caused by the invasion—so you called it just now—of the ‘person’ who had wakened me: she was utterly evil; inimical to my soul, or at least to all in me that wished for good. There I stood, sweating and trembling, laughing at everything in the room, yet all the while with this white terror mastering my heart. And this creature was putting—putting her—”
He hesitated again, using his handkerchief freely.
The Algernon Blackwood Collection Page 310