by Patrick Guinness, Ithell Colquhoun, Peter Owen, Allen Saddler
There followed several pages of recipes, ranging from ‘How to make a white milkie substance from the Raies of the Moon,’ to the most gruesome instructions for the fabrication of the Homunculus. I was dismayed at this fanaticism, which made such a disagreeable impression on me that I hardly knew how to continue my investigations.
I was now convinced that his ultimate aim was the conquest of death itself; and to this end he would undertake no matter what, from experiments apparently the most trivial, and certainly innocuous, to those involving the final extremes of complexity and ruthlessness. To this pursuit he must have devoted many years; and I could not but feel an unwilling pity for one who, so palpably nearing the grave, was yet driven to spend his last energies in a futile attempt to evade it.
From my delvings in the library I gathered that he had already approached the problem from numerous angles; but that at the time of his invitation to me, it was the transcendental aspect of alchemystic philosophy that principally engaged his thought and practice. No doubt he believed that my jewels, many of which were heirlooms of ancient and wonderful design, could provide some link in his quest for the hidden nature of gems and precious metals, and ultimately, perhaps, for that Medicine of Metals which is the elixir of life itself. What more he fancied I cannot say, but I would set no limit to the bizarre dreams that may have whirled through his mind in its frenetic race with time. He may have speculated as to whether part of my jewellery was not made of alchemical gold, or a particular piece even contain the very Lapis Philosophorum; or yet again, whether I myself could not somehow be made the focus of unknown power and knowledge, and act as a burning-glass through which might stream some insufferable light.
‘Un no rompido sueño –
Un dia puro – allegre – libre
Quiero –
Libre de amor – de zelo
De odio – de esperanza – de rezelo.’
– Luis Ponce de Leon.
In one of my evening conversations with the Anchorite, he suggested to me a walk in a direction I had not hitherto essayed, and described a half ruined homestead, all that remained of an ancient manor, whose architectural peculiarities he thought might interest me. At least, this was the reason he gave for the projected excursion to Troubh, but I could never be sure that his simplest remarks did not conceal a double intention. As he declared that it was impossible for him to accompany me, I had no choice but to discover for myself whatever was hidden; and accordingly set out alone the next afternoon. Something in his evasive manner as he bade me Goodbye, caused me to wonder whether it was against my Uncle’s wishes that he had given me any directions at all.
It was towards evening when, after a long and exhausting walk, I at last came within sight of the lonely barton of Troubh. Owing to the undulating nature of the country, I had not been able to catch even a glimpse of the buildings from a distance; and now, massed around as they were by immense elms, I could see only a cornice here and a gate there, half hidden by the branches.
As I hurried along the wide pathway – it could hardly be so formally styled as ‘avenue’ – that led deviously towards the mouldering walls, more of the edifice revealed itself by degrees. It seemed to be very ancient – part-manor, part-farmhouse; and something in the architecture of the house itself, and of the various barns and stables surrounding it, made me think that at one time the whole place had been fortified. Now, however, there was not even a trace of habitation, let alone of readiness to receive, whether enemy or friend. The entire farmstead seemed to be given over to rook and jackdaw, whose strident calls filled the chilly gold of the sky.
I approached the front door and knocked. As I waited, full of curiosity as to what manner of being might open it, I determined that should my reception prove unsympathetic, I would merely say that I had lost my way and demand re-direction.
What was my surprise and delight, then, a few minutes later, when the door was opened by my beloved sister Victorina!
‘Darling!’ I cried, enraptured, flinging myself into her arms, ‘how is it you are so near? And I did not know.’
‘And how is it you are here?’ she answered, equally astonished, though not so overjoyed. ‘I thought you at least were safe,’ she added, kissing me quietly.
‘Safe?’ I protested, ‘I am almost a prisoner; and very lonely without the rest of you. Where are the others?’
‘Hush, not so many questions: we are all within,’ she whispered, drawing me indoors. ‘You must stay here for the night; darkness will fall now before you can return.’
I was puzzled by Victorina’s manner, for though she was pleased to see me, she seemed so preoccupied with disquieting thoughts as to be almost disconcerted by my arrival. When I asked her to explain her presence here and above all her strange manner, her replies were far from reassuring.
It appealed that immediately after my departure from home on a visit to my Uncle, my mother had arranged to take this desolate country house on the same island, but did not wish me to be told of the plan. After mysterious negotiations, she had finally installed herself here a few days since, with my four sisters and my half-brother Rohan. If I had managed to return to our old home on the main island, I should have found it a habitation of spiders.
‘I am sleeping in the haunted wing to-night,’ said Victorina. ‘We take it in turns. You will not mind sharing it with me?’
‘No,’ I answered. ‘I shall not be afraid with you;’ and I really felt that my elder sister would be a protection against whatever ‘the night side of nature’ might produce.
Nevertheless, the hours of darkness did not pass peacefully for me, since I could not keep my attention from the creaks, sighs and sounds as of footsteps which nightly exude from the walls and furnishings of a chamber long disused. Victorina and I occupied two biggish rooms with a communicating door and a double bed in each. My windows looked upon the garden, and moonlight would have poured through them had I not taken the precaution of curtaining them closely. Even so, certain phosphorescent shafts contrived to penetrate them by sliding in between the edges of the blinds and window-frames, and above the pelmets. Victorina’s room gave on to a deserted roadway at the back of the house, and so was darker.
The disturbances seemed to come from the contents of my own room; but next morning Victorina also complained of sleep disturbed, and by much more definite manifestations. Three times during the shadowed hours had she been aroused from her dozing by a visitant who had lain down beside her; and after a few minutes had vanished as unaccountably as he had come. I planned, therefore, to lie the next night across my bed rather than along it in order, as I hoped, to discourage similar attentions.
During the morning I gathered that my mother had found some means of informing my Uncle of my whereabouts; how this news was conveyed to him I cannot say, though I guessed that the Anchorite had been questioned when I was missing, and sent upon an unwilling errand. I more than suspected, however, that my mother and my Uncle shared the telepathic faculty which I mentioned before, and that by putting into practice certain techniques, were able to communicate with one another at will. There had always been an unnatural link between them as long as I could remember, a bond much closer than had ever existed between my mother and father. A suspicion that had long troubled the background of my mind now forced itself into consciousness.
On the day that ensued, my youngest sister Angelica, a frail dark-haired girl with the face of a changeling, was taken seriously ill. Our mother called in the doctor, but my sisters and I did not like him. He was a youngish, sandy-coloured man with nothing especially sinister in his appearance, but we all sensed that he was associated in some way with the hauntings, and we distrusted him, feeling that his ministrations could do Angelica no good.
The invalid’s room also opened out from mine, but at right-angles to Victorina’s and so was not, strictly speaking, to be included in the haunted wing. It was in close proximity, though, for as well as by a door, the connecting-wall was pierced by a window; but th
is was so thickly covered with whitewash that one could scarcely see through it.
When the doctor arrived with his little bag, he had to pass through my room in order to reach Angelica’s. My sisters assembled there with me, and as he went through we hissed him. Presently I peeped through a scratch in the whitewash: my youngest sister was lying almost naked in the middle of her huge bed. I could see her small breasts and tapering shanks quite well; and from one side the doctor was bending over to examine her, while on the other my mother stood guard.
The moment the doctor finally emerged, my half-brother attacked him with a sword. The doctor avoided his thrusts for a few seconds, then pulled out a revolver and aimed. Immediately I dashed between them, striking at the doctor with a tray; the revolver went off and a bullet penetrated the flesh of my right upper-arm. The doctor dressed the wound contemptuously and left.
I did not know what was wrong with Angelica, nor whether she was likely to recover, but I was certain that the doctor’s visit had only made her worse. It was growing dusk, and as there seemed nothing I could do to help her, and as I did not feel too ill myself, despite the throbbing of my arm, I decided to go out for a stroll, partly to ease my perturbation, partly to discover something of the countryside in the vicinity and of its so-far-hidden inhabitants.
Not far away from the house, but beyond the cincture of its grounds, stood a dark lake with a forest of giant laurels covering the declivity of its farther verge. A steep and narrow pathway, with steps, had been cut in the trunk of the largest tree, and led up towards its top. As I laboriously mounted this path, I noticed that small houses were perched at intervals where the main houghs branched off. I tried to look into one of these cottages but it was not possible, peer as I would, to see far, because inside each window, a foot or two from the pane, some kind of screen or interior shutter had been drawn across.
The whole scene was now bathed in a greenish radiance having its source in some hidden luminary. Gazing about me, I suddenly perceived that I had wandered into the Green-Light district; that the woman whom we thought of as ‘Mother’ was no less a person than ‘Madame’, and the doctor’s cynical attentions a formal measure which she was obliged to take. Small wonder he had barely even considered our display of hostility; for living as we were, it would be extraordinary if occasional scenes of disorder did not occur, and anyone engaged in his type of work would soon come to regard them lightly. They were probably taken as much a matter of course as a prisoner’s impotent batterings on the door of his cell.
I was puzzled about the presence of Rohan, but could only assume that perversion was not extinct amongst my mother’s phantom clientéle.
The quiet and the peculiar illumination combined with the appearance of the shuttered houses to flood a beam of clear if menacing light upon me. It seemed certain that our mother had made a bargain, if not with the underworld then with the other world; though what personal profit could accrue to herself from these transactions it was diffi cult to guess. Could it be that she sought merely our humiliation, that to watch our gradual and painful destruction was for her sufficient reward? If not, how did the ghosts pay her, and what did they require in return for their disbursements? Did they somehow, while feasting an incubus-appetite, supply its provider with free-passage to hidden regions?
I fell to speculating anew on the functions of the young doctor attached to this uncanny establishment. Were his duties purely a matter of form, or did the lecherous ‘revenants’ demand freedom from spiritual syphilis? Or again, was he a cannibal-suigeon of the mind, a veritable ‘mangeur de rêves?’
I imagine that I indulged in considering these practical problems simply in order to distract myself from full realisation of our horrible predicament. What future hope could my sisters and I entertain? Cooped together like pullets, we must either become lesbian, or resort to the quasi-inces-tuous touches of Rohan. Unless, indeed, some of us could bring ourselves to give consent, complete or partial, to the infernal bargains made on our behalf, and even grow to enjoy the demonic embraces.
I next tried to guess at the desires of the ghosts themselves; were they condemned to sterile indulgence, or did they think to forge a race of goblins, vampires, lycanthropes? Had Angelica an intuition of these terrors so keen that she preferred for herself the prospect of death? Victorina, too, was puzzled and suspicious, though her more placid nature forbade her Angelica’s extremes; and my twin-sisters, though at present merely uneasy, might fall at any moment upon the devastating truth. I resolved somehow to convince them all of their danger, and then to liberate them from it; though how I was to accomplish this latter project I had no idea. I was handicapped by my scanty knowledge of the phantom lechers’ proclivities, though I obs curely felt that I must myself undergo their exigences before I could hope to rescue my sisters. But how at the same time keep my will and senses intact, was the appalling problem with which destiny now faced me.
I descended the tree-path and returned to Troubh. That night my twin-sisters were sleeping in the haunted wing, while Victorina and I shared a smaller room in another part of the house. As soon as we had gone to bed, I laid bare to her all my conclusions; she listened in silence until I had finished.
‘I am afraid that what you say is all too true,’ she admitted. ‘I have guessed at something of the kind from my own experiences, but did not like to think –’
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘it is already too late for hesitation, we must act at once. You must explain the position to the others tomorrow, and I will return to our Uncle’s and find some way of rescuing you.’
‘What can you do?’ wailed Victorina. ‘Do stay there quietly; if you meddle with things here, you will only make one more victim.’
‘But I am in no better case than you,’ I returned. ‘I am imprisoned within his demesne,’ and I des cribed to her my pitiful attempts at escape. ‘If it were not for my jewels,’ I concluded, ‘I should indeed be with you here; but he has some use for them, evidently, and, strangely enough, some compunction about how to obtain them. In this lies the only hope for any of us.’
‘It has always seemed curious to me,’ mused Viotorina, ‘that you should have inherited the jewels, though I am the eldest. Do not think, dear, that I want you not to have them.’ she added. ‘They are not the kind of thing I ever wear, and they look lovely on you. But it is unusual.’
‘It is indeed,’ I agreed. ‘And you have been most generous about it. But these gems are heavy with fate, not mere pretty trinkets. Now I must go back, but be sure that I shall not rest until the mystery is unravelled, and you are set free.’
I had been dressing myself again during our conversation, and with these words I kissed Victorina goodbye. My wounded arm scarcely pained me as I swung myself over the ledge of the open window, and scrambled to earth by the aid of a tangle of Old Man’s Beard growing up the side of the house. The night was not dark, and I started out swiftly on the return journey to my Uncle’s.
‘The myrrh sweet-bleeding in the bitter wound.’
– Spenser.
I have remarked earlier upon the visitation which, since living in my Uncle’s house, I occasionally experienced. Particularly between sleep and waking would this feeling of attempted possession overtake me; and the very next evening, when I was, I suppose, unusually tired after my adventures at Troubh, I found myself unable to withstand the insidious onslaught.
I can scarcely tell through which sense, if through any, the attack was begun; but I think I first became aware of a faint dizzying perfume that seeped, it may be, through chinks in the wainscot, or under the door. So potent was the scent of this burning drug that I could no longer command my limbs or even raise my head from the pillow; nor could I trust my sight, so dim and contorted did the familiar shapes of my bedroom appear, and this not merely because of the misty wreaths which seemed to form themselves from the air it contained, but because the intoxicating perfume, in filling my nostrils, also disturbed my vision.
Presently it seemed that
the door opened without sound and admitted a robed form which might have been that of the Anchorite. This figure glided towards my bed, bent over me and drew back the covers. Hands with scarcely perceptible touch passed along my limbs and torso, making my skin absorb, in the form of an unguent, the same aromatic ingredients the smoke of whose combustion filled the air. Unable to protest, and now even deliciously abandoned to the exciting yet enervating tide, composed of substance so evanescent as to be almost sensation, and feeling so palpable as to be all but substantial, I rapidly swooned.
I must have been borne away beyond the confines of the house, for when I next knew anything I was lying upon some eminence, centre of a grassy open space surrounded with trees, in a remote part of the grounds. The moon was invisible, but it must have been shining, for its pearly light was diffused through a sky of thin cloud. Sound’s equivalent to the aromatic odour, a droning music produced from I know not what instruments, arose from the nearby bushes, where a circle of dimly-distinguishable figures crouched in the longer grass. Among these I thought I could at various moments discern my sisters, and then the taller shapes of my Uncle and the Anchorite; in the shadows I seemed to glimpse the inmates of the monastery, and the women I had encountered while making my way towards this island. Later I thought I could see the more sinister or equivocal inhabitants of Troubh – my mother, the doctor, Rohan; and female forms that I took to be dwellers in the tree-houses of the Green-Light district, beckoning to their half-materialised customers. All was shifting; I could not tell whether I saw or fancied I saw these people, even whether I was awake or asleep. Dazed by the phantasmagoria, I turned my eyes away and looked upwards to a still and solid shape towering above me. This was a worn statue, such as often grow in old and neglected gardens, antique in design without, perhaps, being very ancient, a rectangular pillar unhumanised but for a surmounting bearded head of faun or silen, and a tail curling out of the panel furthest away from me. Glancing down at myself, I saw that I was naked except for my jewels.