Weiser Book of Horror and the Occult

by Lon Milo DuQuette

  “I have seen nothing, heard nothing,” I said. “Not one thought has passed from you to me.” But at that very moment what had been in his mind flashed into mine.

  “It is a blind abyss,” I told him, “and there hangs in it a vulture vaster than the whole starry system.”

  “Yes,” he said, “that was it. But that was not all. I could not get beyond it. I shall try again.”

  He tried. Again I was cut off from his thought, although his face was twitching so that one might have said that any one might read his mind.

  “I have been looking in the wrong place,” said he suddenly, but very quietly and without moving. “The thing I want lies at the base of the spine.”

  This time I saw. In a blue heaven was coiled an infinite snake of gold and green, with four eyes of fire, black fire and red, that darted rays in every direction; held within its coils was a great multitude of laughing children. And even as I looked, all this was blotted out. Crawling rivers of blood spread over the heaven, of blood purulent with nameless forms—mangy dogs with their bowels dragging behind them; creatures half elephant, half beetle; things that were but a ghastly bloodshot eye, set about with leathery tentacles; women whose skins heaved and bubbled like boiling sulphur, giving off clouds that condensed into a thousand other shapes, more hideous than their mother; these were the least of the denizens of these hateful rivers. The most were things impossible to name or to describe.

  I was brought back from the vision by the stertorous and strangling breath of Arthur, who had been seized with a convulsion.

  From this he never really rallied. The dim sight grew dimmer, the speech slower and thicker, the headaches more persistent and acute.

  Torpor succeeded to his old splendid energy and activity; his days became continual lethargy ever deepening towards coma. Convulsions now and then alarmed me for his immediate danger.

  Sometimes his breath came hard and hissing like a snake in anger; towards the end it assumed the Cheyne-Strokes type in bursts of ever increasing duration and severity.

  In all this, however, he was still himself; the horror that was and yet was not himself did not peer from behind the veil.

  “So long as I am consciously myself,” he said in one of his rare fits of brightness, “I can communicate to you what I am consciously thinking; as soon as this conscious ego is absorbed, you get the subconscious thought which I fear—oh how I fear!—is the greater and truer part of me. You have brought unguessed explanations from the world of sleep; you are the one woman in the world—perhaps there may never be another—who has such an opportunity to study the phenomena of death.”

  He charged me earnestly to suppress my grief, to concentrate wholly on the thoughts that passed through his mind when he could no longer express them, and also on those of his subconsciousness when coma inhibited consciousness.

  It is this experiment that I now force myself to narrate. The prologue has been long; it has been necessary to put the facts before mankind in a simple way so that they may seize the opportunity of the proper kind of suicide. I beg my readers most earnestly not to doubt my statements; the notes, of our experiments, left in my will to the greatest thinker now living, Professor von Buehle, will make clear the truth of my relation, and the great and terrible necessity of immediate, drastic action.

  Part Two

  The stunning physical fact of my husband's illness was the immense prostration. So strong a body, as too often the convulsions gave proof; such inertia with it! He would lie all day like a log; then without warning or apparent cause the convulsions would begin. Arthur's steady scientific brain stood it well; it was only two days before his death that delirium began. I was not with him, worn out as I was, and yet utterly unable to sleep, the doctor had insisted on my taking a long motor drive. In the fresh air I slumbered. I awoke to hear an unfamiliar voice saying in my ear. “Now for the fun of the fair!” There was no one there. Quick on its heels followed my husband's voice as I had long since known and loved it, clear, strong, resonant, measured: “Get this down right; it is very important. I am passing into the power of the subconsciousness. I may not be able to speak to you again. But I am here; I am not to be touched by all that I may suffer; I can always think; you can always read my—” The voice broke off sharply to inquire, “But will it ever end?” as if some one had spoken to it. And then I heard the laugh. The laugh that I had heard by Magdalen Bridge was heavenly music beside that! The face of Calvin (even) as he gloated over the burning of Servetus would have turned pitiful had he heard it, so perfectly did it express the quintessence of damnation.

  Now then my husband's thought seemed to have changed places with the other. It was below, within, withdrawn. I said to myself, “He is dead!”

  Then came Arthur's thought, “I had better pretend to be mad. It will save her, perhaps; and it will be a change. I shall pretend I have killed her with an axe. Damn it! I hope she is not listening.” I was now thoroughly awake, and told the driver to get home quickly. “I hope she is killed in the motor; I hope she is smashed into a million pieces. O God! Hear my one prayer! Let an Anarchist throw a bomb and smash Magdalen into a million pieces! Especially the brain! And the brain first. O God! my first and last prayer; smash Magdalen into a million pieces!”

  The horror of this thought was my conviction—then and now—that it represented perfect sanity and coherence of thought. For I dreaded utterly to think what such words might imply.

  At the door of the sick-room I was met by the male nurse, who asked me not to enter. Uncontrollably, I asked, “Is he dead?” and though Arthur lay absolutely senseless on the bed I read the answering thought “Dead!” silently pronounced in such tones of mockery, horror, cynicism and despair as I never thought to hear. There was a something or somebody who suffered infinitely, and yet who gloated infinitely upon that very suffering. And that something was a veil between me and Arthur.

  The hissing breath recommenced; Arthur seemed to be trying to express himself—the self I knew. He managed to articulate feebly, “Is that the police? Let me get out of the house! The police are coming for me. I killed Magdalen with an axe.” The symptoms of delirium began to appear. “I killed Magdalen” he muttered a dozen times, then changing to “Magdalen with” again and again; the voice low, slow, thick, yet reiterated. Then suddenly, quite clear and loud, attempting to rise in the bed: “I smashed Magdalen into a million pieces with an axe.” After a moment's pause: “a million is not very many now-a-days.” From this—which I now see to have been the speech of a sane Arthur—he dropped again into delirium. “A million pieces,” “a cool million,” “a million million million million million million” and so on; then abruptly: “Fanny's dog's dead.”

  I cannot explain the last sentence to my readers; I may, however, remark that it meant everything to me. I burst into tears. At that moment I caught Arthur's thought, “You ought to be busy with the note-book, not crying.” I resolutely dried my eyes, took courage, and began to write.

  I

  The doctor came in at this moment and begged me to go and rest. “You are only distressing yourself, Mrs. Blair,” he said, “and needlessly, for he is absolutely unconscious and suffers nothing.” A pause. “My God! why do you look at me like that?” he exclaimed, frightened out of his wits. I think my face had caught something of that devil's, something of that sneer, that loathing, that mire of contempt and stark despair.

  I sank back into myself, ashamed already that mere knowledge—and such mean vile knowledge—should so puff one up with hideous pride. No wonder Satan fell! I began to understand all the old legends, and far more—I told Doctor Kershaw that I was carrying out Arthur's last wishes. He raised no further opposition; but I saw him sign to the male nurse to keep an eye on me.

  The sick man's finger beckoned us. He could not speak; he traced circles on the counterpane. The doctor (with characteristic intelligence) having counted the circles, nodded, and said: “Yes it is nearly seven o'clock. Time for your medicine, eh?”


  “No,” I explained, “he means that he is in the seventh circle of Dante's Hell.”

  At that instant he entered on a period of noisy delirium. Wild and prolonged howls burst from his throat; he was being chewed unceasingly by “Dis”; each howl signaled the meeting of the monster's teeth. I explained this to the doctor. “No,” said he, “he is perfectly unconscious.

  “Well,” said I, “he will howl about eighty times more.”

  Doctor Kershaw looked at me curiously, but began to count. My calculation was correct. He turned to me, “Are you a woman?”

  “No,” said I. “I am my husband's colleague.”

  “I think it is suggestion. You have hypnotized him?” “Never; but I can read his thoughts.”

  “Yes, I remember now; I read a very remarkable paper on Mind, two years ago.” “That was child's play. But let me go on with my work.”

  He gave some final instructions to the nurse, and went out.

  The suffering of Arthur was at this time unspeakable. Chewed as he was into a mere pulp that passed over the tongue of “Dis,” each bleeding fragment kept its own identity and his.

  The papillae of the tongue were serpents, and each one gnashed its poisoned teeth upon that fodder.

  And yet, though the sensorium of Arthur was absolutely unimpaired, indeed hyperaesthetic, his consciousness of pain seemed to depend upon the opening of the mouth. As it closed in mastication, oblivion fell upon him like a thunderbolt. A merciful oblivion? Oh! what a master stroke of cruelty! Again and again he woke from nothing to a hell of agony, of pure ecstasy of agony, until he understood that this would continue for all his life, the alternation was but systole and diastole; the throb of his envenomed pulse, the reflection in consciousness of his blood-beat. I became conscious of his intense longing for death to end the torture.

  The blood circulated ever slower and more painfully; I could feel him hoping for the end.

  This dreadful rose-dawn suddenly greyed and sickened with doubt. Hope sank to its nadir; fear rose like a dragon, with leaden wings. Suppose, thought he, that after all death does not end me!

  I cannot express this conception. It is not that the heart sank, it had no whither to sink; it knew itself immortal, and immortal in a realm of unimagined pain and terror, unlighted by one glimpse of any other light than that pale glare of hate and of pestilence. This thought took shape in these words:

  I AM THAT I AM.

  One cannot say that the blasphemy added to the horror; rather it was the essence of the horror. It was the gnashing of the teeth of a damned soul.

  II

  The demon-shape, which I now clearly recognise as that which had figured in my last “dream” at Cambridge, seemed to gulp. At that instant a convulsion shook the dying man and a coughing eructation took the “demon.” Instantly the whole theory dawned on me, that this “demon” was an imaginary personification of the disease. Now at once I understood demonology, from Bodin and Weirus to the modems, without a flaw. But was it imaginary or was it real? Real enough to swallow up the “sane” thought!

  At that instant the old Arthur reappeared. “I am not the monster! I am Arthur Blair, of Fettes and Trinity. I have passed through a paroxysm.”

  The sick man stirred feebly. A portion of his brain had shaken off the poison for the moment, and was working furiously against time.

  “I am going to die.

  “The consolation of death is Religion. “There is no use for Religion in life.

  “How many atheists have I not known sign the articles for the sake of fellowships and livings! Religion in life is either an amusement and a soporific, or a sham and a swindle.

  “I was brought up a Presbyterian.

  “How easily I drifted into the English Church! And now where is God?

  “Where is the Lamb of God?

  “Where is the Saviour?

  “Where is the Comforter?

  “Why was I not saved from that devil?”

  “Is he going to eat me again? To absorb me into him? O fate inconceivably hideous! It is quite clear to me—I hope you've got it down, Magdalen!—that the demon is made of all those that have died of Bright's disease. There must be different ones for each disease. I thought I once caught sight of a coughing bog of bloody slime.

  “Let me pray.”

  A frenzied appeal to the Creator followed. Sincere as it was, it would read like irreverence in print.

  And then there came the cold-drawn horror of stark blasphemy against this God—who would not answer. Followed the bleak black agony of the conviction—the absolute certitude—“There is no God!” combined with a wave of frenzied wrath against the people who had so glibly assured him that there was, an almost maniac hope that they would suffer more than he, if it were possible.

  (Poor Arthur! He had not yet brushed the bloom off Suffering's grape; he was to drink its fiercest distillation to the dregs.)

  “No!” thought he, “perhaps I lack their ‘faith.’

  “Perhaps if I could really persuade myself of God and Christ—perhaps if I could deceive myself, could make believe—”

  Such a thought is to surrender one's honesty, to abdicate one's reason. It marked the final futile struggle of his will.

  The demon caught and crunched him, and the noisy delirium began anew.

  My flesh and blood rebelled. Taken with a deathly vomit, I rushed from the room, and resolutely, for a whole hour, diverted my sensorium from thought. I had always found that the slightest trace of tobacco smoke in a room greatly disturbed my power. On this occasion I puffed cigarette after cigarette with excellent effect. I knew nothing of what had been going on.

  III

  Arthur, stung by the venomous chyle, was tossing in that vast arched belly, which resembled the dome of hell, churned in its bubbling slime. I felt that he was not only disintegrated mechanically, but chemically, that his being was loosened more and more into parts, that these were being absorbed into new and hateful things, but that (worst of all) Arthur stood immune from all, behind it, unimpaired, memory and reason ever more acute as ever new and ghastlier experience informed them. It seemed to me as if some mystic state were super-added to the torment; for while he was not, emphatically not, this tortured mass of consciousness, yet that was he. There are always at least two of us! The one who feels and the one who knows are not radically one person. This double personality is enormously accentuated at death..

  Another point was that the time-sense, which with men is usually so reliable—especially in my own case—was decidedly deranged, if not abrogated altogether.

  We all judge of the lapse of time in relation to our daily habits or some similar standard. The conviction of immortality must naturally destroy all values for this sense. If I am immortal, what is the difference between a long time and a short time? A thousand years and a day are obviously the same thing from the point of view of “for ever.”

  There is a sub-conscious clock in us, a clock wound up by the experience of the race to go for seventy years or so. Five minutes is a very long time to us if we are waiting for an omnibus, an age if we are waiting for a lover, nothing at all if we are pleasantly engaged or sleeping.21

  We think of seven years as a long time in connection with penal servitude; as a negligibly small period in dealing with geology.

  But, given immortality, the age of the stellar system itself is nothing.

  This conviction had not fully impregnated the consciousness of Arthur; it hung over him like a threat, while the intensification of that consciousness, its liberation from the sense of time natural to life, caused each act of the demon to appear of vast duration, although the intervals between the howls of the body on the bed were very short. Each pang of torture or suspense was born, rose to its crest, and died to be reborn again through what seemed countless aeons.

  Still more was this the case in the process of his assimilation by the “demon.” The coma of the dying man was a phenomenon altogether out of time. The conditions of “digestion�
�� were new to Arthur, he had no reason to suppose, no data from which to calculate the distance of, an end. It is impossible to do more than sketch this process; as he was absorbed, so did his consciousness expand into that of the “demon”; he became one with all its hunger and corruption. Yet always did lie suffer as himself in his own person the tearing asunder of his finest molecules; and this was confirmed by a most filthy humiliation of that part of him that was rejected.

  I shall not attempt to describe the final process; suffice it that the demoniac consciousness drew away; he was but the excrement of the demon, and as that excrement he was flung filthily further into the abyss of blackness and of night whose name is death.

  I rose with ashen cheeks. I stammered; “He is dead.” The male nurse bent over the body. “Yes!” he echoed, “he is dead.” And it seemed as if the whole Universe gathered itself into one ghastly laugh of hate and horror. “Dead!”

  IV

  I resumed my seat. I felt that I must know that all was well, that death had ended all. Woe to humanity! The consciousness of Arthur was more alive than ever. It was the black fear of falling, a dumb ecstasy of changeless fear. There were no waves upon that sea of shame, no troubling of those accursed Waters by any thought. There was no hope of any ground to that abyss, no thought that it might stop. So tireless was that fall that even acceleration was absent; it was constant and level as the fall of a star. There was not even a feeling of pace; infinitely fast as it must be, judging from the peculiar dread which it inspired, it was yet infinitely slow, having regard to the infinitude of the abyss.

  I took measures not to be disturbed by the duties that men—how foolishly!—pay to the dead; and I took refuge in a cigarette.

  It was now for the first time, strangely enough, that I began to consider the possibility of helping him.

  I analysed the position. It must be his thought, or I could not read it. I had no reason to conjecture that any other thoughts could reach me. He must be alive in the true sense of the word; it was he and not another that was the prey of this fear ineffable. Of this fear it was evident that there must be a physical basis in the constitution of his brain and body. All the other phenomena had been shown to correspond exactly with a physical condition; it was the reflection in a consciousness from which human limitation had fallen away, of things actually taking place in the body.