Strange Conflict

by Dennis Wheatley

  De Richleau knew that for his enemy to be able to leave is body in such a manner, without his astral appearing in human form, he must be extremely powerful. Worse: the wisp of smoke had dissolved in a second so that the Duke, to his consternation, was left there without any trace of his antagonists and with no means of guessing what form the astral attack would take.

  For what seemed a long time de Richleau waited, his every nerve keyed up to resist a sudden devastating assault. But nothing happened, and although he did not relax his vigilance his tension gradually eased. Then, gathering courage, he went out into the compound and called aloud:

  ‘I am here, Saturday, ready to give battle. Why do you evade me? Is it that you are afraid?’

  There was no answer to the challenge and the Duke’s mind became troubled with a new anxiety. But with his swift transference from the physical to the astral plane his enemy had given him the slip. In due course the Satanist would be compelled to return to his body, but that might not be for many hours, and long before he did so de Richleau would be forced to return to his. Once again it seemed that he would be undone unless he could find the Satanist and conquer him before that happened; and searching for an individual who was unwilling to meet one on the astral is like looking for a particular grain of sand on all the beaches of all the oceans of the world.

  In the compound other astrals were now moving; those of some of the dwellers in the Hounfort and of other natives who were asleep in the vicinity. Most of them were ‘Blacks’ and shrank away at the sight of the Duke, knowing him to be their enemy and far more powerful than they; but some were merely almost blind creatures in a very low state of advancement. Presently there appeared from among those nebulous dusky shades a clear, distinct form and the Duke saw that it was the astral of his old friend with whom he had talked in China, when he had gone out to follow the Admiral.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he exclaimed with eager interest, immensely cheered by the unexpected arrival of his powerful friend.

  ‘I came to see how you were getting on,’ replied the other. ‘You’re looking a bit worn, so I imagine you’ve been having a pretty hard time of it.’

  De Richleau sighed and, rallying himself, swiftly related what had happened, then he described the critical situation in which he now found himself.

  His friend immediately expressed sympathy and promised his aid. ‘I’ll tell you, though, what we ought to do,’ he said. ‘There’s little to choose between us in the matter of spiritual strength, as we’re both almost equally advanced upon the great journey. Either of us could, I feel certain, hold the adversary at bay for a few moments, and both of us together could overcome him. He may be able to remain in hiding away from his body for twenty hours, or even more, so the best way to arrange matters would be for me to watch while you rest. Sooner or later this Devil Doctor must appear; then I will immediately call you, and with our united strength we will defeat him.’

  This plan seemed an excellent one to de Richleau, and on his friend asking how long he had been asleep, he replied:

  ‘It was about two o’clock yesterday afternoon when I put myself into a self-induced trance, so I’ve done over fourteen hours.’

  ‘That’s a fair time,’ mused his friend, ‘so I think you’d better take a spell now and leave me to hold the fort until I can get your help should the enemy suddenly put in an appearance.’

  It was now more than two hours since the Duke had been lured into returning to his body by Pan but the narrowness of his escape was still fresh in his mind. There was nothing unnatural in his friend’s having come to look for him, as spirits that are linked by the bonds of love have little difficulty in ascertaining each other’s whereabouts, yet the very suggestion that he should return again to his body put him instantly upon his guard. As he thought of it there formed in his mind a definite conviction that he was not meant to receive help from gods or men. It was his battle—and he must fight it unaided.

  In turning to thank his friend but to tell him that he had decided to see the business through alone, he suddenly realised that the other was wearing the shovel hat of a priest, the brim of which cast a shadow over his eyes.

  On an impulse which seemed to come from right outside himself, he grabbed the brim of the hat and tore it off. Then he knew that the thing he had suspected, only in that last second as his arm had shot out, was true. A powerful astral may assume the form of any human, perfecting its resemblance to the last hair and wrinkle; it can also copy a voice to the fraction of a tone; but it cannot change its eyes. The eyes of the astral before him were not those of his friend—they were those of Doctor Saturday.

  Instantly the Doctor changed his appearance and re-became the big Negro in which form the Duke had first seen him on that night when he and Marie Lou had hunted him back, over the Atlantic, to Haiti.

  The Negro made no gesture of defence or attack. He only smiled and spoke through his spirit.

  ‘Congratulations, my friend. You have passed every test. I am proud to have the honour to be selected as your opponent.’

  De Richleau spoke sternly. ‘You admit your defeat and are prepared to surrender to me?’

  The other only laughed and said: ‘There is no occasion for that, since I have done no more than play my part in a trial that was ordered to test your courage. You have come out of it with flying colours, and when you get back to Earth you will wake with all your friends, safe and sound in the launch, to find that your more recent experiences have been no more than a dream. The burial ceremony that you witnessed, the ghoulish rites and the happenings at the Hounfort occurred after you had left your body. They did not, in fact, take place at all—they were only scenes created in your mind by the Great Ones who have power, as you know, to make us Lesser Ones believe in the reality of anything which they care to present to us.’

  Slowly de Richleau shook his head. ‘That will not do. If such a trial as you suggest had been planned for me, and I had passed through it successfully, the Great Ones would not have sent the personality whom they had chosen to act as my adversary in the test to inform me of my victory.’

  The Negro shrugged his big shoulders. ‘I am only obeying orders and, personally, I’m not surprised that you’re somewhat sceptical; but even caution can be overdone. It may be that this is yet another test. Of course, if you refuse to believe me, that is your affair; but I shall be extremely sorry for you, because the maintenance of such pig-headed-ness against an obvious acceptance of the known law will bring you into great peril.’

  ‘Why?’ asked the Duke in a hard voice.

  ‘Because, my poor friend, although you don’t appear to realise it, in your desperate endeavour to escape—as you thought—being turned into a Zombie you are at the moment in the process of committing suicide.’

  ‘Your statement needs a little explanation,’ said the Duke, but as he spoke he already had a vague and disquieting presentiment as to the other’s meaning.

  ‘Consider your situation for a moment,’ the Negro went on quietly. ‘Because you feared to die, by an act of your own will you threw yourself into a self-induced trance and left your body before the poison could affect you. There would be no harm in that if you intended to return to it; but apparently you refuse to do so; and if you fail to return your body must then obviously decompose until it is no longer fit for use as a human garment. You will then, arbitrarily and by your own act, have brought about the end of your recent incarnation. Can you deny that such a course would be suicide?’

  ‘No,’ the Duke admitted, and he saw at once that he was now between the devil and the deep sea. If for their own good reasons the Great Ones had indeed put him through a very severe test, it had obviously been their intention that he should become a Zombie and pay off some past debt in that form. But he had evaded that, and to do so he had virtually committed suicide: the worst sin against the spirit of which any individual can be guilty.

  If, having been warned, he now failed to return to his body, for hundreds
of years he would suffer the penalty of living over and over again the awful hours through which he had passed since leaving the launch. Innumerable times he would again feel the same helplessness and misery as when he had seen his friends buried, and the same fear and horror that he had experienced while he had watched by his corpse in the sanctuary behind the altar. On the other hand, to go back now, whatever the astral who was talking to him might say—be it good or bad—seemed to him to be an act of surrender.

  With a colossal effort he made up his mind, and said firmly: ‘This test is beyond my judgment; but it is not beyond my will. Even if I suffer the penalties of suicide for countless years to come, I still refuse to re-enter my body.’

  The Negro’s eyes flickered and fell. In that instant the Duke knew that his decision had been right. Launching himself forward, he hurled himself upon his adversary at the second that the evil entity turned to flee. Suddenly he felt an enormous surge of new power rise up in him, and with a shout of triumph he streaked away in pursuit.

  The Adversary climbed to the third plane; the Duke hurtled after him. Their progress slowed but they managed to stagger through the fourth and reached the fifth. This was the highest that de Richleau had ever achieved as a mortal man; the strain of remaining there was terrible for both of them. The Duke felt crushed, breathless, bewildered, blinded, but his enemy was in an even worse plight, and, gasping with fear, dropped like a plummet, straight down to Earth.

  The Duke pursued him now with tireless vigour; as though filled with the very essence of Light from his recent nearness to the great Beatitudes. They were back in the compound of the Hounfort, the Satanist was crouching on the ground, whimpering like a stricken animal; while de Richleau towered above him, a brilliant, glowing being surrounded by a great aura of iridescent, pulsing flame.

  ‘Mercy!’ screamed the Priest of Evil. ‘Mercy, mercy!’ But de Richleau’s heart was hard as agate and he drove the miserable wretch headlong into the sanctuary.

  ‘Into your body!’ ordered the Duke.

  For a moment the Satanist made one last desperate effort, rising up again, black and formidable; but de Richleau struck him down by the power of his will. The astral wailed in utter fear and suddenly dissolved. As it did so the eyes of Doctor Saturday’s mortal body flickered open.

  ‘Well done!’ said a silvery voice which the Duke recognised, yet without fear, as Pan’s. ‘That which I did before I was constrained to do by his enchantments; but now I will gladly do that which I promised; you have but to command me.’

  ‘Appear to him!’ cried de Richleau, in ringing tones.

  Then, as the Duke hid his eyes under a glowing shield of light which now formed at his instant will, Pan materialised in all his awful glory.

  With a screech that rang through the night the Witch Doctor leapt to his feet and dashed from the Voodoo temple; but de Richleau sped, like a Hound of Heaven, on his heels.

  Dawn was breaking as the Satanist, barefooted, raced across the compound and out on to the road beyond. His eyes were bulging in his head, his body was sweating with terror. As he fled he screamed wild imprecations and tore, with the gestures of a madman, at the heavy, ceremonial trappings which he was still adorned.

  In a few moments he had wrenched off his necklaces, which seemed to choke him, and was tearing his body with his nails as he sought to snap the belt that held up his short, full skirt.

  Suddenly it gave way, and as the skirt slid down to his knees he tripped and fell. Wriggling out of it, he sprang to his feet and raced on, now stark naked. Twenty yards further on he swerved, leapt on to a bank and began to run down its far side. It was very steep and ended in a cliff that dropped sheer a hundred feet to the sea. Like the Gadarene swine, the Satanist plunged down the slope until he stumbled and fell again; then he rolled, pitching from tussock to tussock of the coarse grass until, a raving lunatic, he pitched over the cliff and hurtled downwards, his arms and legs whirling, to be dashed to pieces on the rocks below.

  De Richleau hovered there until the spirit came forth from the mangled body. It was now quiet and submissive, with no more fight left in it. Since it had already been defeated on the astral, there was no need to take advantage of the momentary black-out which succeeds death to seize and chain it. Humbly it opened wide its arms and bowed its head in token of surrender. At the Duke’s call two Guardians of the Light appeared and as they led the captive away a triumphant fanfare of trumpets filled the air.

  When de Richleau got back to his own body he found it in poor shape. It was still suffering from the effect of the toxin which had passed into it with the water which they had drunk many hours before, but he forced it to obey him and crawled out of the sanctuary to the squalid hut into which his friends had been cast.

  They, too, were still heavy and leaden from the drug that had thrown them into a cataleptic state, but by the law of the Timeless Ones, with the surrender of the Satanist the spirits of his captives had been released. Consciousness had just returned to them. They knew one another again, and when de Richleau appeared they knew that he had been victorious.

  After half an hour they had recovered sufficiently to leave the hut. Some of the natives in the compound were setting about their early-morning tasks, and when they saw the little party walk forth, with their sight and voices unimpaired, they fled in terror.

  It was a sore, weary, crippled group that limped along the road until they came upon a Negro who agreed to give them a lift in his market-cart down to the British Consulate in Port-au-Prince. There, de Richleau felt, they would be safe from any unwelcome attentions which their reappearance in the town might cause, and, if necessary, cables could be sent to Sir Pellinore, who would use all the power and prestige of Britain to ensure them a safe conduct out of Haiti back to the United States.

  It was Simon who remarked, as the cart jogged on in the early-morning light: ‘I wonder if the Nazis will be able to find another Black Magician powerful enough to carry on Doctor Saturday’s work?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ replied the Duke; ‘otherwise they would never, in the first place, have utilised an occultist who was living as far away as Haiti.’

  ‘Then can we take it that we’ve broken the Nazi menace on the astral?’ murmured Marie Lou.

  De Richleau smiled but sadly shook his head. ‘No, no, Princess. That will never cease until Totalitarianism in all its forms is destroyed root and branch. Whether or not Hitler and Mussolini themselves are great masters of Black Magic, nobody can possibly contest that it is through such ambitious and unscrupulous men, German, Italian and Japanese, that the Powers of Darkness are working and in recent years have acquired such a terrifying increase of strength upon our earth.

  ‘The New World Order which they wish to bring about is but another name for Hell. If through them Evil prevailed, every man and woman of every race and colour would finally be enslaved, from the cradle to the grave. They would be brought up to worship might instead of right and would be taught to condone, or even praise, murder, torture and the suppression of all liberty as “necessary” to the welfare of “the State”.

  ‘Incontestable proof of that has already been given us by the way in which the young Nazi-educated Germans have behaved in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France. They butchered old men, women and children who did not even seek to oppose them. That was part of the Plan, and they obeyed the order to commit these murders in cold blood without a single recorded instance of any protest against them by officers or men. Seven years of the Totalitarian poison has been enough for the Evil to grip five million German youths and with it their hearts have gone cold and stony. If they triumph, within seventy years such words as justice, toleration, freedom and compassion will have ceased to have a place in the vocabularies of the races of mankind.

  ‘In the New World Order all family life will be at an end, except for the conquerors, and only the worst elements, spiritually, will be allowed to procreate fresh generations to populate a world divided into master
s and slaves. The right to homes and children of their own would be reserved to the Overlords; the rest would be herded into barracks and reduced to the level of robots without the right to read or speak or even think for themselves. There could be no revolt, because every officer, priest, deputy, editor, magistrate, writer and other leader of free thought and action in the conquered countries would already have been executed by the firing-squads; and leaderless herds cannot prevail against tanks, tear-gas, bombs and machine-guns.

  ‘And unless men are free how can they progress upon the great spiritual journey which all must make?

  ‘This war is not for territory or gain or glory, but that Armageddon which was prophesied of old. That is why all the Children of Light, wherever they may be, captive or free, must hold on to their spiritual integrity as never before and must stick at nothing, physically, in the fight, lest the whole world fall under the domination of these puppets who are animated by the Powers of Darkness.’

  As he ceased speaking they knew that although it would be many days before their burns, weals and wounds were healed there had come into their hearts a little glow of warmth. The Battle was still far from being over, but they had done the thing which they had set out to do. Their Victory was an episode—no more—in the Titanic struggle that was in progress, but the flame which animated their spirits was burning all the brighter for it, and they were returning to fight on for the England that they loved.

  It seemed that the Duke guessed their thoughts, for he spoke again. ‘As long as Britain stands the Powers of Darkness cannot prevail. On Earth the Anglo-Saxon race is the last Guardian of the Light, and I have an unshakable conviction that, come what may, our island will prove the Bulwark of the World.’

  A Note on the Author

  DENNIS WHEATLEY

  Dennis Wheatley (1897 – 1977) was an English author whose prolific output of stylish thrillers and occult novels made him one of the world's best-selling writers from the 1930s through the 1960s.