Weiser Book of Horror and the Occult

by Lon Milo DuQuette

  “But you have noticed the obscurity,” Ambrose went on, “and in this particular case it must have been dictated by instinct, since the writer never thought that her manuscripts would fall into other hands. But the practice is universal, and for most excellent reasons. Powerful and sovereign medicines, which are, of necessity, virulent poisons also, are kept in a locked cabinet. The child may find the key by chance, and drink herself dead; but in most cases the search is educational, and the phials contain precious elixirs for him who has patiently fashioned the key for himself.”

  “You do not care to go into details?”

  “No, frankly, I do not. No, you must remain unconvinced. But you saw how the manuscript illustrates the talk we had last week?”

  “Is this girl still alive?”

  “No. I was one of those who found her. I knew the father well; he was a lawyer, and had always left her very much to herself. He thought of nothing but deeds and leases, and the news came to him as an awful surprise. She was missing one morning; I suppose it was about a year after she had written what you have read. The servants were called, and they told things, and put the only natural interpretation on them—a perfectly erroneous one.

  “They discovered that green book somewhere in her room, and I found her in the place that she described with so much dread, lying on the ground before the image.”

  “It was an image?”

  “Yes, it was hidden by the thorns and the thick undergrowth that had surrounded it. It was a wild, lonely country; but you know what it was like by her description, though of course you will understand that the colours have been heightened. A child's imagination always makes the heights higher and the depths deeper than they really are; and she had, unfortunately for herself, something more than imagination. One might say, perhaps, that the picture in her mind which she succeeded in a measure in putting into words, was the scene as it would have appeared to an imaginative artist. But it is a strange, desolate land.”

  “And she was dead?”

  “Yes. She had poisoned herself—in time. No; there was not a word to be said against her in the ordinary sense. You may recollect a story I told you the other night about a lady who saw her child's fingers crushed by a window?”

  “And what was this statue?”

  “Well, it was of Roman workmanship, of a stone that with the centuries had not blackened, but had become white and luminous. The thicket had grown up about it and concealed it, and in the Middle Ages the followers of a very old tradition had known how to use it for their own purposes. In fact it had been incorporated into the monstrous mythology of the Sabbath. You will have noted that those to whom a sight of that shining whiteness had been vouchsafed by chance, or rather, perhaps, by apparent chance, were required to blindfold themselves on their second approach. That is very significant.”

  “And is it there still?”

  “I sent for tools, and we hammered it into dust and fragments.”

  “The persistence of tradition never surprises me,” Ambrose went on after a pause. “I could name many an English parish where such traditions as that girl had listened to in her childhood are still existent in occult but unabated vigour. No, for me, it is the ‘story’ not the ‘sequel,’ which is strange and awful, for I have always believed that wonder is of the soul.”

  THE SEA LURE

  by Dion Fortune

  Born Violet Mary Firth, Dion Fortune (1890-1946) is known amongst occultists as a brilliant magician and esoteric scholar. Like Machen and Crowley, she was an adept of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and penned the classic modern textbook of Hermetic magic, The Mystical Qabalah (1935). Her direct and indirect influence on the revival of magic and the evolution of the hermetic thought in the twentieth century is incalculable.

  She was also a marvelous and lucid novelist whose mastery of the psychological works of Jung and Freud lifted the arts of Western Esotericism out of the pit of mediaeval superstition. “The Sea Lure,” taken from her greater collection The Secrets of Doctor Taverner, is one of a dozen stories that tell of supernatural disorders and the doctor's unconventional methods of treatment. In the introduction to the collection, she wrote:

  It may not unreasonably be asked what motive anyone could have for securing a hearing for such histories as are set forth in these tales, beyond the not unreasonable interest in the royalties of horrors; I would ask readers, however, to credit me with another motive that the purely commercial. I was one of the earliest students of psychoanalysis in this country, and I found, in the course of my studies, that the ends of a number of threads were put into my hands, but that the threads disappeared into the darkness that surrounded the small circle of light thrown by exact scientific knowledge. It was following these threads out into the darkness of the Unknown that I came upon the experiences and cases, which, turned into fiction, are set down in these pages.

  The Sea Lure

  “Do you know anything about stigmata?” said my vis-à-vis. It was a very unexpected question to have shot at one under the circumstances. I had been unable to evade an invitation to spend the evening with an old fellow-student who since the war had held the uninspiring post of medical officer at a poor law institution, a post for which I should say he was admirably fitted, and I now found myself facing him across a not very elegant supper table in his quarters in a great fortress of dingy red brick which looked out for miles over the grey wastes of sordidness which are South London.

  I was so taken by surprise that he had to repeat his question before I answered it.

  “Do you know anything about stigmata? Hysterical stigmata?” he said again. “I have seen simulated tumours,” I said, “they are fairly common, but I have never seen actual flesh wounds, such as the saints were supposed to have had.”

  “What do you attribute them to?” asked my companion.

  “Auto-suggestion,” I replied. “Imagination so vivid that it actually affects the tissues of the body.”

  “I have got a case in one of my wards that I should like to show you,” he said. “A most curious case. I think it is hysterical stigmata, I cannot account for it any other way. A girl was brought in here a couple of days ago suffering from a gunshot wound in the shoulder. She came here to have the bullet removed, but would give no account as to how she came by the injury. We admitted her, but couldn't see any bullet, which was rather puzzling. She was in a condition of semi-stupor, which we naturally attributed to loss of blood, and so we kept her here. Of course there is nothing odd in all that, save our failure to locate the bullet, but then such things happen even with the best apparatus, and ours is a long way from being that. But here is the queer part of the case.

  “I was sitting quietly up here last night between 11 and 12 when I heard a shriek, of course there is nothing odd about that either, in this district. But in a minute or two they rang up on the house telephone to say that I was wanted in the wards, and I went down to find this girl with another bullet wound. No one had heard a shot fired, all the windows were intact, there was a nurse not 10 feet from her. When we X-rayed her we again failed to find the bullet, yet there was a clean hole drilled in her shoulder, and, oddest of all, it never bled a drop. What do you make of it?”

  “If you are certain there is no external agency at work, then the only hypothesis is an internal one. Is she an hysterical type?”

  “Distinctly. Looks as if she came out of one of Burne-Jones's pictures. Moreover, she has been in a sort of stupor each night for an hour or more at a time. It was while in this state that she developed the second wound. Would you care to come down and have a look at her? I should like to have your opinion. I know you have gone in for psychoanalysis and all sorts of things that are beyond my ken.”

  I accompanied him to the wards, and there we found in one of the rough infirmary beds a girl who, lying on the coarse pillow, with closed eyes and parted lips, looked exactly like the Beata Beatrix of Rossetti's vision, save that honey-coloured hair flowed over the pillow like sea-weed. W
hen she opened her eyes at our presence, they were green as sea-water seen from a rock.

  All was quiet in the ward, for infirmary patients are settled for the night at an early hour, and my friend signed to the nurse to put screens round the bed that we might examine our case without disturbing them. It was as he had said, two obvious bullet wounds, one more recent than the other, and from their position and proximity, I judged that they have been inflicted with intention to disable, but not to kill. In fact she had been very neatly “winged” by an expert marksman. It was only the circumstances of the second shot that gave the case any interest except a criminal one.

  I sat down on a chair at the bedside, and began to talk to her, seeking to win her confidence. She gazed back at me dreamily with her strange sea-green eyes and answered my questions readily enough. She seemed curiously detached, curiously indifferent to our opinion of her; as if she lived in a far-away world of her own, about which she was quite willing to talk to any one who was interested.

  “Do you dream much?” I said, making the usual opening.

  This seemed to touch a subject of interest.

  “Oh, yes,” she replied, “I dream a tremendous lot. I always have dreamt, ever since I can remember. I think my dreams are the realest part of my life—and the best part,” she added with a smile, “so why shouldn't I?”

  “Your dreams seem to have led you into danger recently,” I answered, drawing a bow at a venture.

  She looked at me sharply, as if to see how much I knew, and then said thoughtfully: “Yes, I mustn't go there again. But I expect I shall, all the same,” she added with an elfish smile.

  “Can you go where you choose in your dreams?” I asked.

  “Sometimes,” she replied, and was about to say more, when she caught sight of my companion's bewildered face and the words died on her lips. I saw that she was what Taverner would have called “One of Us,” and my interest was roused. I pitied the refined, artistic-looking girl in these sordid surroundings, her great shining eyes looking out like those of a caged creature behind bars; and I said: “What is your work?”

  “Shop girl,” she replied; a smile curling the corners of her lips. “Drapery, to be precise.” Her words and manner were so at variance with her description of herself, that I was still further intrigued.

  “Where are you going when you come out of here?” I enquired.

  She looked wearily out into the distance, the little smile still hovering about her mouth. “Back into my dreams, I expect,” she replied. “I don't suppose I shall find anywhere else to go.”

  I knew well Taverner's generosity with necessitous cases, especially if they were of “his own kind,” and I felt sure that he would be interested both in the personality of the girl and in her peculiar injuries, and I said:

  “How would you like to go down to a convalescent home at Hindhead when you leave here?” She gazed at me in silence for a moment with her strange gleaming eyes.

  “Hindhead?” she asked. “What sort of a place is that?”

  “It is moorland,” I replied. “Heather and pine, you know, very bracing.”

  “Oh, if it could only be the sea!' she exclaimed wistfully. “A rocky coast, miles from anywhere, where the Atlantic rollers come in and the seabirds are flying and calling. If it could only be the sea I should get right! The moors are not my place, it is the sea I need, it is life to me.”

  She paused abruptly, as if she feared to have said too much, and then she added: “Please don't think that I am ungrateful, a rest and change would be a great help. Yes, I should be very thankful for a letter for the nursing home—” Her voice trailed into silence and her eyes, looking more like deep-sea water than ever, gazed unseeing into a distance where I have no doubt the gulls were flying and calling and the Atlantic rollers coming in from the West.

  “She has gone off again,” said my host. “It is apparently her regular time for going into a state of coma.”

  As we watched her, she took a deep inspiration, and then all breathing ceased. It ceased for so long, although the pulse continued vigorously, that I was just on the point of suggesting artificial respiration, when with a profound exhalation, the lungs took up their work with deep rhythmical gasps. Now if you observe a person's respiration closely, you will invariably found that you yourself begin to breathe with the same rhythm. It was a very peculiar rhythm which I found myself assuming, and yet it was not unfamiliar. I had breathed with that rhythm before, and I searched my subconscious mind for the due. Suddenly I found it. It was the respiration of breathing in rough water. No doubt the cessation of breathing represented the dive. The girl was dreaming of her sea.

  So absorbed was I in the problem that I would have sat up all night in the hope of finding some evidence of the mysterious assailant, but my host touched my sleeve. “We had better be moving,” he said. “Matron, you know.” And I followed him out of the darkened ward.

  “What do you make of it?” he enquired eagerly as soon as we were out in the corridor.

  “I think as you do,” I answered; “that we are dealing with a case of stigmata, but it will require more plumbing than I could give it this evening, and I should like to keep in touch with her if you are willing.”

  He was only too willing; seeing himself in print in the Lancet and possessed of that dubious type of glory which comes to the owners of curios. It was a blessed break in the monotony of his routine, and he naturally welcomed it.

  Now that which is to follow will doubtless be set down as the grossest kind of coincidence, and as several such coincidences have been reported in these chronicles, I do not suppose I have much reputation for veracity anyway. But Taverner always held that some coincidences, especially those which might be conceived to serve the purpose of an intelligent Providence, were not as fortuitous as they appeared to be, but were due to causes which operated invisibly upon the subtler planes of existence, and whose effects alone were seen in our material world; and that those of us who are in touch with the unseen, as he was, and as I, to a lesser degree on account of my association with him in his work, had also come to be, might get ourselves into the hidden currents of that realm, and thereby be brought in touch with those engaged in similar pursuits. I had too often watched Taverner picking up people apparently at random and arriving at the psychological moment apparently by chance, to doubt the operation of some such laws as he described, though I neither understand their workings nor recognize them at the time; it is only in perspective that one sees the Unseen Hand.

  Therefore it was that when, on my return to Hindhead, Taverner requested me to undertake a certain task, I concluded that my plans with regard to the study of the stigmata case must be set aside, and banished the matter from my mind.

  “Rhodes,” he said, “I want you to undertake a piece of work for me. I would go myself, but it is extremely difficult for me to get away, and you know enough of my methods by now, combined with your native common sense (in which I have much more faith than in many people's psychism) to be able to report the matter, and possibly deal with it under my instruction.”

  He handed me a letter. It was inscribed, “Care G.H. Frater,” and began without any further preamble: “That of which you warned me has occurred. I have indeed got in out of my depth, and unless you can pull me out I shall be a drowned man, literally as well as metaphorically. I cannot get away from here and come to you; can you possibly come to me?” And a quotation from Virgil, which seemed to have little bearing on the subject, closed the appeal. Scenting adventure, I readily acceded to Taverner's request. It was a long journey I had to undertake, and when the train came to rest at its terminus in the grey twilight of a winter afternoon, I could smell the keen salt tang of the wind that drove straight in from the West. To me there is always something thrilling in arriving at a seaside place and getting the first glimpse of the sea, and my mind reverted to that other solitary soul who had loved blue water, the girl with the Rossetti face, who lay in the rough infirmary bed in the dreary desert
of South London.

  She was vividly present to my mind as I entered the musty four-wheeler, which was all that the station could produce in the off-season, and drove through deserted and wind-swept streets on to the sea-front. The line of breakers showed grey through the gathering darkness as we left the asphalt and boarding houses behind us and followed the coast road out into the alluvial flats beyond the town. Presently the road began to wind upwards towards the cliffs, and I could hear the horse wheezing with the ascent, till a hail from the darkness put a stop to our progress; a figure clad in an Inverness cape appeared in the light of the carriage lamps, and a voice, which had that indefinable something which Oxford always gives a man, greeted me by name and invited me to alight.

  Although I could see no sign of a habitation, I did as I was bidden, and the cabman, manoeuvring his vehicle, departed into the windy darkness and left me alone with my invisible host. He possessed himself of my bag, and we set off straight for the edge of the cliff, so far as I could make out, leaning up against the force of the gale. An invisible surf crashed and roared below us, and it seemed to me that drowning was the order of the day for both of us.

  Presently, however, I felt a path under my feet. “Keep close to the rock,” shouted my guide. (Next day I knew why.) And we dipped over the edge of the cliff and began to descend its face. We continued in this way for what seemed to me an immense distance, I learnt later it was about a quarter of a mile, and then, to my amazement, I heard the click of a latch. It was too dark to see anything, but warm air smote my face, and I knew that I was under cover. I heard my host fumbling with a box of matches, and as the light flared, I saw that I was in a good-sized room, apparently hewn out of the cliff face, and a most comfortable apartment. Book-lined, warmly curtained, Persian rugs on the smooth stone of the floor, and a fire of drift wood burning on the open hearth, which the toe of my companion's boot soon stirred to a blaze. The amazing contrast to my gloomy and perilous arrival took my breath away.