Lord Terry spread his arms expansively. “Oh, my dear boy,” he said, “when I suggest that the story was based in truth, I do not mean to imply that it was a newspaper report, a dreary list of dates and statistics. For one thing, many small items, such as names and addresses, were surely changed for obvious reasons (Soho for Whitechapel, perhaps). For another thing, Stevenson was a consummate craftsman, not a police blotter. The unfinished, so-called realistic story is stylish today, but in Stevenson’s time a teller of tales had to bring a story to a satisfying and definite conclusion, like a symphony. No, no, I’m afraid I can’t allow you even a technical point.”
“If names were fabricated, what about that Jekyll-jackal business?”
“Quite right—I retract the Jekyll-jackal business. Trivial anyway.”
Hunt persisted. “Was Hyde’s nationality a fabrication of Stevenson’s, too, then?”
“No, I’m inclined to believe he was actually English…”
“Ah! But Laval and Sellig—”
“Were French? Oh, I rather think not. Both spoke English like natives, you know. And Laval drank Scotch whisky like water—which I’ve never seen a Frenchman do. Also, he mistook my name for Pendragon—a grand old English name out of Arthurian legend, not the sort of name that would spring readily to French lips, I shouldn’t think. No, I’m sure they—he—were compatriots of mine.”
“What was he—they—doing in France?”
“For the matter of that, what was I? But if you really need reasons over and above the mundane, you might consider the remote possibility that he was using an assumed nationality as a disguise, a shield from the police. That’s not too fanciful for you, I hope? Although this may be: might not a man obsessed with worship of Gilles de Rais, a man who tried to emulate his evil idol in all things, also put on his idol’s nation and language like a magic cloak? But I shan’t defend the story any further.” He looked at his gold pocket watch, the size of a small potato and nearly as thick. “Too late, for one thing. Time for long-winded old codgers to be in their beds.”
It was dismissal. He was, after all, an earl, and accustomed to calling the tune. Hunt hoped, however, that he hadn’t offended him. As they walked slowly to the cloakroom to redeem Hunt’s hat, the Earl’s guest thought about truth and fiction and Byron’s remark that the first was stranger than the second. He thought, too, about that element so essential to the reception of a strange tale whether it be true or false—the element of believability, at least the suspension of disbelief. Lord Terry had held him spellbound with his story, then had covered his tracks and filled in the chinks in his armor pretty well. If Hunt were disposed to be indulgent and generous, he could believe—or suspend disbelief—in the notion that Hyde was an actual person, that he was the maniac killer known as Jack the Ripper, even that he had sired a son who’d lived and died under the names of Laval and Sellig around the turn of the century, in a glamorous Paris that exists now only in memories and stories. All that was comfortably remote. But it was the other idea of Lord Terry’s—that Hyde’s son might still be alive today—that strained Hunt’s credulity, shattered the pleasant spell, and somewhat spoiled the story for him. By any logical standard, it was the easiest of all to believe, granted the other premise; but belief does not depend upon logic, it is a delicate and fragile flower that draws nourishment from intuition and instinct and hunch. There was something about this latter half of the Twentieth Century—with its sports cars and television and nuclear bombs and cold wars—that just did not jibe with the flamboyant alchemy, the mysterious powders, the exotic elixirs, the bubbling, old-fashioned retorts and demijohns of Dr. Jekyll’s and Mr. Hyde’s. The thought of Laval, a monster “three-quarters pure evil, with only a single thin flickering quarter of good in him,” alive now, perhaps in New York, perhaps the perpetrator of the current revolting crimes; the thought of him rushing desperately through crowded Manhattan streets to some secret laboratory, mixing his arcane chemicals and drinking off the churning, smoking draught that would transform him into the eminently acceptable Sellig—no, that was the last straw. It was the one silly thing that destroyed the whole story for Hunt. He expressed these feelings, cordially and respectfully, to Lord Terry.
The Earl chuckled good naturedly. “My story still—needs work?”
Hunt’s hat was on and he stood at the door, ready to leave his host and allow him to go upstairs to bed. “Yes,” he said, “just a little.”
“I will take that under advisement,” Lord Terry said. Then, his eyes glinting with mischief, he added, “As for those old-fashioned demijohns and other outmoded paraphernalia, however—modern science has made many bulky pieces of apparatus remarkably compact. The transistor radio and whatnot, you know. To keep my amateur standing as a raconteur, I must continue to insist that my story is true—except for one necessary alteration. Good night, my boy. It was pleasant to see you.”
“Good night, sir. And thanks again for your kindness.”
Outside, the humidity had been dispelled, and the air, though warm, was dry and clear. The sky was cloudless and dense with the stars of summer. From among them, Hunt picked out the eleven stars that form the constellation Sagittarius. The newspapers were announcing the appearance of another mutilated corpse, discovered in an alley only a few hours before. Reading the headlines, Hunt recalled a certain utterance—“This…is the Grandest Guignol of all.” And another—“La vie est un corridor noir/D’impuissance et de désespoir.” He bought a paper and hailed a taxi.
It was in the taxi, three blocks away from the club, that he suddenly “saw” the trivial, habitual action that had accompanied Lord Terry’s closing remark about modern compactness. The old man had reached into his pocket for that little gold case and had casually taken a pill.
The Demon Spell
HUME NISBET
The multitalented James Hume Nisbet (1849–1923) acted at the Theatre Royal in Melbourne, studied art at the National Gallery and South Kensington Museum, and wrote forty-six novels, as well as volumes of poetry and short stories.
Born in Scotland, he went to Melbourne at sixteen, then traveled extensively in Australia, New Zealand, and the South Seas before returning to Great Britain. An associate of John Ruskin, he exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy but found little success with his oils and watercolors, so turned to writing.
About half of Nisbet’s novels are set in Australia and the South Seas and appeal to a popular taste, with subjects ranging from swashbucklers to romance to crime. He was evidently much-influenced by H. Rider Haggard, with such lost-race adventures as The Great Secret (1895), in which an island of the dead is discovered, and The Empire Makers (1900), in which another lost race is found in South Africa. Nine of his novels involve fantasy, the genre in which he is best known, including The Jolly Roger (1891), with mass hypnotism a key element of the plot, and Valdmar the Viking (1893), in which a reincarnated Greek man is able to revive his lost love from the deep ice of the North Pole. The title story of The Haunted Station and Other Stories (1894) is a frequently reprinted ghost story.
“The Demon Spell” was first published in The Haunted Station and Other Stories (London, F. V. White, 1894).
THE DEMON SPELL
Hume Nisbet
It was about the time when spiritualism was all the craze in England, and no party was reckoned complete without a spirit-rapping séance being included amongst the other entertainments.
One night I had been invited to the house of a friend, who was a great believer in the manifestations from the unseen world, and who had asked for my special edification a well-known trance medium. “A pretty as well as a heaven-gifted girl whom you will be sure to like, I know,” he said as he asked me.
I did not believe much in the return of spirits, yet, thinking to be amused, consented to attend at the hour appointed. At that time I had just returned from a long sojourn abroad, and was in a very delicate state of health, easily impressed by outward influences, and nervous to a most extraordinary ext
ent.
To the hour appointed I found myself at my friend’s house and was then introduced to the sitters who had assembled to witness the phenomena. Some were strangers like myself to the rules of the table, others who were adepts took their places at once in the order to which they had in former meetings attended. The trance medium had not yet arrived, and while waiting upon her coming we sat down and opened the séance with a hymn.
We had just finished the second verse when the door opened and the medium glided in, and took her place on a vacant seat by my side, joining with the others in the last verse, after which we all sat motionless with our hands resting upon the table, waiting upon the first manifestation from the unseen world.
Now, although I thought all this performance very ridiculous, there was something in the silence and the dim light, for the gas had been turned low down, and the room seemed filled with shadows; something about the fragile figure at my side, with her drooping head, which thrilled me with a curious sense of fear and icy horror such as I had never felt before.
I am not by nature imaginative or inclined to superstition, but, from the moment that young girl had entered the room, I felt as if a hand had been laid upon my heart, a cold iron hand, that was compressing it, and causing it to stop throbbing. My sense of hearing also had grown more acute and sensitive, so that the beating of the watch in my vest pocket sounded like the thumping of a quartz-crushing machine, and the measured breathing of those about me as loud and nerve-disturbing as the snorting of a steam engine.
Only when I turned to look upon the trance medium did I become soothed; then it seemed as if a cold air wave had passed through my brain, subduing, for the time being, those awful sounds.
“She is possessed,” whispered my host on the other side of me. “Wait, and she will speak presently, and tell us whom we have got beside us.”
As we sat and waited the table had moved several times under our hands, while knockings at intervals took place in the table and all round the room, a most weird and blood-curdling, yet ridiculous performance, which made me feel half inclined to run out with fear, and half inclined to sit still and laugh; on the whole, I think, however, that horror had the more complete possession of me.
Presently she raised her head and laid her hand upon mine, beginning to speak in a strange, monotonous, far-away voice, “This is my first visit since I passed from earth-life, and you have called me here.”
I shivered as her hand touched mine, but had no strength to withdraw it from her light, soft grasp.
“I am what you would call a lost soul; that is, I am in the lowest sphere. Last week I was in the body, but met my death down Whitechapel way. I was what you call an unfortunate, aye, unfortunate enough. Shall I tell you how it happened?”
The medium’s eyes were closed, and whether it was my distorted imagination or not, she appeared to have grown older and decidedly debauched-looking since she sat down, or rather as if a light, filmy mask of degrading and soddened vice had replaced the former delicate features.
No one spoke, and the trance medium continued:
“I had been out all that day and without any luck or food, so that I was dragging my wearied body along through the slush and mud, for it had been wet all day, and I was drenched to the skin, and miserable, ah, ten thousand times more wretched than I am now, for the earth is a far worse hell for such as I than our hell here.
“I had importuned several passers-by as I went along that night, but none of them spoke to me, for work had been scarce all this winter, and I suppose I did not look so tempting as I have been; only once a man answered me, a dark-faced, middle-sized man, with a soft voice, and much better dressed than my usual companions.
“He asked me where I was going, and then left me, putting a coin into my hand, for which I thanked him. Being just in time for the last public-house, I hurried up, but on going to the bar and looking at my hand, I found it to be a curious foreign coin, with outlandish figures on it, which the landlord would not take, so I went out again to the dark fog and rain without my drink after all.
“There was no use going any further that night. I turned up the court where my lodgings were, intending to go home and get a sleep, since I could get no food, when I felt something touch me softly from behind like as if someone had caught hold of my shawl; then I stopped and turned about to see who it was.
“I was alone, and with no one near me, nothing but fog and the half-light from the court lamp. Yet I felt as if something had got hold of me, though I could not see what it was, and that it was gathering about me.
“I tried to scream out, but could not, as this unseen grasp closed upon my throat and choked me, and then I fell down and for a moment forgot everything.
“Next moment I woke up, outside my own poor mutilated body, and stood watching the fell work going on—as you see it now.”
Yes, I saw it all as the medium ceased speaking, a mangled corpse lying on a muddy pavement, and a demoniac, dark, pock-marked face bending over it, with the lean claws outspread, and the dense fog instead of a body, like the half-formed incarnation of muscles.
“That is what did it, and you will know it again,” she said, “I have come for you to find it.”
“Is he an Englishman?” I gasped, as the vision faded away and the room once more became definite.
“It is neither man nor woman, but it lives as I do, it is with me now and may be with you tonight, still if you will have me instead of it, I can keep it back, only you must wish for me with all your might.”
The séance was now becoming too horrible, and by general consent our host turned up the gas, and then I saw for the first time the medium, now relieved from her evil possession, a beautiful girl of about nineteen, with I think the most glorious brown eyes I had ever before looked into.
“Do you believe what you have been speaking about?” I asked her as we were sitting talking together.
“What was that?”
“About the murdered woman.”
“I don’t know anything at all, only that I have been sitting at the table. I never know what my trances are.”
Was she speaking the truth? Her dark eyes looked truth, so that I could not doubt her.
That night when I went to my lodgings I must confess that it was some time before I could make up my mind to go to bed. I was decidedly upset and nervous, and wished that I had never gone to this spirit meeting, making a mental vow, as I threw off my clothes and hastily got into bed, that it was the last unholy gathering I would ever attend.
For the first time in my life I could not put out the gas, I felt as if the room was filled with ghosts, or as if this pair of ghastly spectres, the murderer and his victim, had accompanied me home, and were at that moment disputing the possession of me, so instead, I pulled the bedclothes over my head, it being a cold night, and went that fashion off to sleep.
Twelve o’clock! and the anniversary of the day that Christ was born. Yes, I heard it striking from the street spire and counted the strokes, slowly tolled out, listening to the echoes from other steeples, after this one had ceased, as I lay awake in that gas-lit room, feeling as if I was not alone this Christmas morn.
Thus, while I was trying to think what had made me wake so suddenly, I seemed to hear a far off echo cry “Come to me.” At the same time the bedclothes were slowly pulled from the bed, and left in a confused mass on the floor.
“Is that you, Polly?” I cried, remembering the spirit séance, and the name by which the spirit had announced herself when she took possession.
Three distinct knocks resounded on the bedpost at my ear, the signal for “Yes.”
“Can you speak to me?”
“Yes,” an echo rather than a voice replied, while I felt my flesh creeping, yet strove to be brave.
“Can I see you?”
“No!”
“Feel you?”
Instantly the feeling of a light cold hand touched my brow and passed over my face.
“In God’s name, what
do you want?”
“To save the girl I was in tonight. It is after her and will kill her if you do not come quickly.”
In an instant I was out of the bed, and tumbling my clothes on any way, horrified through it all, yet feeling as if Polly were helping me to dress. There was a Kandian dagger on my table which I had brought from Ceylon, an old dagger which I had bought for its antiquity and design, and this I snatched up as I left the room, with that light unseen hand leading me out of the house and along the deserted snow-covered streets.
I did not know where the trance medium lived, but I followed where that light grasp led me, through the wild, blinding snow-drift, round corners and through shortcuts, with my head down and the flakes falling thickly about me, until at last I arrived at a silent square and in front of a house, which by some instinct, I knew that I must enter.
Over by the other side of the street I saw a man standing looking up to a dimly-lighted window, but I could not see him very distinctly and I did not pay much attention to him at the time, but rushed instead up the front steps and into the house, that unseen hand still pulling me forward.
How that door opened, or if it did open I could not say, only know that I got in, as we get into places in a dream, and up the inner stairs, I passed into a bedroom where the light was burning dimly.
It was her bedroom, and she was struggling in the thug-like grasp of those same demon claws, with that demoniac face close to hers, and the rest of it drifting away to nothingness.
I saw it all at a glance, her half-naked form, with the disarranged bedclothes, as the uniformed demon of muscles clutched that delicate throat, and then I was at it like a fury with my Kandian dagger, slashing crossways at those cruel claws and that evil face, while blood streaks followed the course of my knife, making ugly stains, until at last it ceased struggling and disappeared like a horrid nightmare, as the half-strangled girl, now released from that fell grip, woke up the house with her screams, while from her relaxing hand dropped a strange coin, which I took possession of.
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 144