Message From the Eocene

by Margaret St. Clair

  This was the moment Tharg had been waiting for. He had decided to try to convey, first of all, the idea of un-alarm. If Dr. Drury could perceive Tharg's efforts without fear, the battle would be half won. After that, he would try to tell him who he was, and ask for help. But one step at a time. The needlessness of fear was the first thing he must communicate.

  Tharg exerted himself. Everything he had learned in his years of trying to communicate with the Proctors was brought into play. He had a sensation of outgoing, outrushing, as if he were trying to direct the eruption of a volcano or control the movement of an avalanche.

  Dr. Drury had certainly perceived something. He abruptly sat bolt-upright in his chair. Slowly he got to his feet and looked sharply toward the left-hand corner of the room.

  Tharg couldn't tell what he was perceiving, but he didn't look frightened. Surely—it must be—Tharg's passionate injunction was reaching him.

  Was it time yet to try to tell him who he was and ask for help? No, not yet. Tharg must be quite sure that his primary message had got through. He made a final effort, a rushing of will and intellect.

  Drury drew in his breath. He took a step forward. Then he shrank back. His knees buckled. He fell sideways, his head almost in the fire, in a dead faint.

  He was still lying there when the companion came back with his jug of water. Joseph Proctor and the servants were called, there was a great running to and fro, and at last Dr. Drury sat up weakly on the floor.

  He kept yawning and shivering and rubbing his hands over his face. He could hardly talk coherently; the first words he succeeded in getting out were a plea to his companion not to leave him alone again. It was almost dawn before he was sufficiently recovered to tell what he had seen.

  From the standpoint of what was usual in the house, it was little enough. He had felt a cold wind across his back, he had heard uncouth mutterings—"like a beast trying to talk"—coming from one corner of the room. When he had stood up to see what it might be, a whitish figure had moved out of the corner toward him. It had struck him as so horribly menacing that he had, he supposed, fainted—at any rate, he could remember nothing more until they had revived him. He hoped somebody would stay with him until the sun came up.

  The failure with Dr. Drury marked a watershed for Tharg. From then on he had little real hope of being able to communicate with anybody who might be at Willington Mill. Though he kept on with his attempts at communication, it was partly because he did not want to admit to himself how hopeless it was, and partly because, perhaps as a compensation for his hopelessness, a not quite conscious corruption of his motives had occurred.

  He did not recognize this for several years. By now his attempts had become almost routine—the footsteps, the blows on the floor, the clucking and gobbling. When he made special efforts, they were apt to result in something new, like the animal shapes.

  One evening young Joseph was sitting on top of a chest of drawers, making an imaginary speech to a congregation consisting of the three younger Proctor children. Suddenly, in the middle of a word, he stopped.

  "Something pulled at my bootlace," he said wonderingly.

  The younger children, whose attention had been fixed on Joseph, looked down, and Jane shouted, "Look at the funny cat!"

  "It's not a cat, silly," said Joseph, jumping down from his perch. "Cats don't have such long tails. It's a monkey. Let's catch it!"

  Under the leadership of Joseph, the children gave chase. The funny cat was pursued under a bed. There it disappeared.

  The young Proctors, not recognizing the funny cat as related to the house's noises and muttering, were more disappointed at not being able to catch it than they were frightened. Tharg was glad of this. He was uneasily proud of his ability to impress human senses so completely but he rather disliked the idea of frightening children.

  The animal shapes continued. A white creature, "like a cat, but with a longer snout," was seen on the path near the mill. It ran into the engine room, where it disappeared into the fire. And then there was the night when Joseph Proctor, sleeping alone without any night light (members of the household usually slept with a light burning), at last directly addressed Tharg.

  Mrs. Proctor and the children were away visiting. The increasing disturbances in the house made her eager to get away from it when possible. Joseph had composed himself for slumber by some meditation upon his anti-slavery concern and was now quietly drifting into sleep when he heard, close beside his bed, a noise which he later described as "like a wooden crate being wrenched open with great force." The screech of nails, the creak of wood, the scrape of a crowbar—all were there.

  Joseph Proctor was a brave man. He had been through a great deal. He sat up in bed and shouted commandingly into the darkness, "Begone, thou wicked spirit!"

  Tharg heard the words with a lively astonishment. He wicked? A spirit he might possibly be considered to be, but wicked? It was a judgment he must protest.

  He made the protest. He could not, of course, hear the sounds his victims heard, since they were subjective; he could only try to pick up their thoughts about their experiences. So he could not know that Mr. Proctor had heard another noise, even louder and more intimidating than the first, immediately following his injunction to Tharg. Tharg's protest had got through to him as another appalling crash.

  Joseph Proctor got out of bed and made a light. He spent the rest of the night in a shallow, uneasy doze. But Tharg made no more trouble. He had been given something to think about.

  Mr. Proctor had called him a "wicked spirit". Wicked? No, no, never. And yet—what had he become?

  He was only trying to communicate. Yes, but he had been trying for ten years. He had terrified children, driven away servants, set the household by the ears. A fine way to communicate!

  He had tried to communicate at first. He stuck to that. But when his attempts had failed, his motives had turned bad. He had learned to batten on the dark taste of their fear, and relish it. He had become proud of his ability to make them afraid.

  Had it been entirely his fault? No, their fear had corrupted him. The greater their fear the more unpleasant his manifestations had become. Their fear had doomed him to be misunderstood. But he ought to have realized this a little earlier.

  In the end, Joseph Proctor's judgment had to stand—"wicked" was what he had become.

  Well, it was not too late. He would leave the Proctors in peace. He would go elsewhere, withdraw himself.

  And now he found what he might have foreseen: he couldn't leave. The Proctors' fear and the house itself had interlocked to make a combination that held him helplessly.

  If before he had been like a fly with one foot caught in glue, now he was like the same insect embedded in amber. His utmost efforts accomplished nothing at all.

  He would never be able to leave Willington Mill. He was trapped.

  -

  Chapter Seven

  Now Tharg himself grew afraid. The house became horrible to him. At first Tharg had been corrupted by the Proctors' fear, had learned a perverse relish for its taste. Now he was infected by it. Fear was a disease he had contracted from them.

  He could not get rid of it. Their fear increased his fear, and in turn his fear increased theirs. By now he and the Proctors were locked together in a downward spiral, a horrid mutual embrace.

  When he had first realized that he was trapped at Willington Mill, he had resolved to make the manifestations cease. He had reasoned that if they stopped, the Proctors' fear would diminish, and finally die away altogether. Half of the trap that was holding Tharg would be sprung. He might be able to extricate himself.

  It had not happened so. Though Tharg was no longer willing any kind of contact with the Proctors, the manifestations went on happening.

  Tharg the disembodied had ended by acquiring a sort of body—the house at Willington Mill. Now it twitched and jumped and muttered with no volition of his. His attempts to make the manifestations stop decreased them very slightly, at best. He h
ad no more control over them than a man has over an attack of hiccoughs.

  Tharg often wondered why the Proctors did not simply move away. The house was pleasant enough in itself, but the manifestations were making it almost uninhabitable. But the Proctors were members of the Society of Friends. They were possessed of an invincible mildness, a remarkable patience and fortitude. As Quakers, whose forebears had opposed to Oliver Cromwell and Charles II alike the same passive resistance (and had won, in the end, complete judicial toleration for all their scruples of conscience), the Proctors were hardly to be expelled from their home by the mere malice of a wicked spirit.

  Yet there must, Tharg thought, be limits even to their powers of resistance. Sick with loathing, he set out to find what they were. The Proctors must be driven away, so that the house could revert to being merely a house. Then Tharg would have a chance to extricate himself.

  It took him more than a year to drive them to the point of moving out. Twice during that time, before he actually managed it, he thought they were on the edge of leaving: once after Jane Carr, sleeping under the "haunted room", heard footsteps going around her bed, saw the light of her candle obscured, and felt the bed curtain pressed in upon her arm; and once when Elizabeth Proctor, in bed beside Joseph, heard a footstep and felt a hard icy pressure on her forehead over her left eye. For some reason, this distressed her more than anything else that happened to her in that house. But both Elizabeth and her sister Jane were calm, cheerful women, with great tenacity: the Proctors stayed on.

  Tharg's emotions during this period were increasingly unpleasant. If he had been alive, he would certainly have killed himself to escape from so painful a situation. As it was, he could only harden himself to inflict yet more distress on the wretched Proctors—a distress which he invariably experienced later himself, and in augmented form. Their fear was faithfully reflected back to him, magnified in transmission.

  What finally undermined the Proctors' fortitude was anxiety about their oldest child. One night Joseph Jr. begged his parents piteously to be allowed to sleep in their room. The footsteps going around his bed and the breathing, he said, frightened him and kept him awake most of the night.

  The Proctors consulted each other and decided, not without some qualms, that young Joseph had better sleep in his own bed. Next morning he was feverish and listless. He complained of headache, and showed much unwillingness to let his mother out of sight.

  When bedtime came that evening, he departed for his room without protest. But Elizabeth Proctor, stooping over to kiss him goodnight, was startled to find tears silently flowing down his face.

  Elizabeth Proctor asked him why he was crying. Was he afraid of the footsteps he had mentioned? No, he seemed not afraid of the footsteps now. But somebody had stood by the head of his bed all night, muttering.

  The Proctors were tender and affectionate parents in an era when severity to children was the rule. A bed was made up for Joseph in his parents' chamber. And next day Mr. Proctor set about looking for another house.

  With inexpressible joy Tharg saw them prepare to move. Their china was packed in barrels, their household goods corded baled, small breakables wrapped in cotton wool. He did not dare to relax his harrassment of them. If the house appeared to be quieting even a little, their Quaker stubbornness might make them change their decision even now. So the haunting had to continue, and even increase in intensity.

  The night came when Elizabeth and Joseph Proctor were alone in the house. The children and servants had gone on ahead to the new dwelling; tomorrow the carters would come for the few pieces of heavy furniture that were left. Tonight was the last night the Proctors meant to spend in the house at Willington Mill.

  "Joseph," said Elizabeth, "does thee hear the noises?" They were sitting side by side on the sofa in her lodging room. It was not quite bed time, and in any case there seemed little use in going to bed when the house was so noisy. Tharg, in fear that the Proctors might change their minds at the last moment, was outdoing himself.

  "Yes, dear heart. The spirit was never more noisy."

  "Joseph, what—what does thee think they sound like?"

  The Proctors looked at each other for a moment. Then Joseph said, "It sounds as if box after box were being packed with goods, nailed or tied shut, and then dragged across the floor. It sounds ... as if the spirit were packing up its goods."

  Elizabeth Proctor nodded. For a moment her face puckered up and tears stood in her eyes. "Joseph! Does thee think the wicked spirit is preparing to move out with us?"

  Tharg felt a sudden stab of alarm. If the Proctors thought the "wicked spirit" would follow them to their new house, they would probably abandon the idea of moving. There would be no point in their jumping from one frying pan into another, especially since the house at Willington Mill was theirs rent-free. Had he overreached himself?

  Joseph Proctor laid his hand over his wife's. "We must try it, dear heart. I cannot believe that God would allow so much power to wickedness. We must try it and see."

  Elizabeth Proctor nodded, a little reassured. Next morning the carters came for the rest of the goods.

  At last they were gone. Tharg was in possession of the empty house.

  He could not withdraw himself yet, of course. He was still caught in a sort of psychic bear trap. An odd confusion of subjectivity and objectivity had taken place. Tharg was the haunter of the house, but to him the house was horrifyingly haunted. Too much had been built up in his years of attempted communication to be dissipated easily. Still, he felt better than he had when the Proctors had been physically present. Their fear had continually held up a mirror to him in which he had seen, not himself, but an alien, terrifying face.

  The house stood vacant for several months. Tharg thought his entrapment in it was becoming a little less tight, but he couldn't be sure. Then Thomas Mann, the foreman at the flour mill, moved in with his family.

  They heard and saw things. But the Manns were altogether coarser-grained and less sensitive than the Proctors had been. Also, Tharg was refraining rigorously from any attempts at communication. As the Manns went on living in the house, the disturbances gradually quieted.

  After five or six years, Joseph Proctor sold the mill. The house stood vacant for a month. Then two young German engineers, who were to supervise the operation of the mill, moved their goods into the house.

  Almost as soon as they stepped over the threshold, the disturbances began. Tharg did not will them, of course; it was the new tenants' characters. They were hyper-sensitive, rather hysterical people—better educated than the Proctors, but much less amiable.

  As the sun rose after their first night in the house—a night of footsteps, cluckings, bell ringing and inarticulate mumbling—Tharg felt a sickening apprehension. Was what he had experienced with the Proctors to be repeated? And repeated even more distressingly? The downward spiral, the mutual embrace of horror, would be even more loathesome with these men.

  For once Tharg had a bit of luck. After the second night, a night on which neither of the engineers went to bed at all, they decided to quit their employment rather than remain in the house. The building, they told their employer, was a plague spot and ought to be burned down.

  This was something Tharg had never contemplated. It did not happen. After standing vacant for several months more, the house was divided into four flats, and several working class families moved in. They had more than a dozen children among them, as busy and quarrelsome as sparrows. The house rang all day long to the shouts of children and the sounds of their running feet.

  The new tenants had been attracted to the house which still had a bad reputation, because the rent was cheap. They were all people to whom tuppence saved on the bacon mattered more than a universe of "spiritual creatures". The men worked hard all week and tended to get drunk on Saturday night. The women gossiped, spatted, and assisted each other in emergencies. They all disliked the jargonelle pear trees because, as they said, the trees made the rooms dark in the da
ytime. The trees were cut down. The children's pounding feet had already made short work of the flower beds.

  There was nothing here for the house's uncanny faculties' to attach themselves to. Time passed. Gradually rather than abruptly, Tharg realized that he was free.

  Free? To go where, do what? To return to what he had been before he embroiled himself with the Proctors? It was better, certainly, to be a cold, uninvolved intelligence than it was to suffer as he had suffered at the height of the disturbances. But his former ataraxia was something he could not easily resign himself to again. He still had hopes for help from human beings. He would try again.

  His mistake had been to attempt communication before human beings were advanced enough to be able to understand him. It was partly a matter of technological development—the Proctors lived in a culture where the steam engine was just coming into general use—and, more importantly, one of general intellectual enlightenment.

  The Proctors and most of their contemporaries believed that the world had been created from scratch in 4004 B.C.

  To deal with the idea of an intelligence surviving for billions of years, an intelligence that had originated billions of years before the beginnings of earthly life, a certain amount of mental sophistication was required. In their early Victorian naiveté, the Proctors could only assume him to be an evil spirit.

  Tharg would have to wait until human beings were more advanced. But he was resolved to try again.

  -

  Chapter Eight

  Spring had begun. The beach at Anse Vata was dotted with bathers. Not that winter, here in the South Pacific, meant much: July was only a little cooler than January, the height of summer. But the difference tended to keep people away from the beaches. The mid-July wind in New Caledonia could be uncomfortably cool.

  Denise raised herself on one elbow and looked out across the water. How beautiful it was!—far out, the wonderful deep royal blue of the Pacific, and closer in a whole peacock's tail palette of turquoise, emerald, sea green, aquamarine, apple green and cobalt blue. The color lightened as the water shoaled. One could always tell where the rocks were from the color of the water over them.