Weiser Book of Horror and the Occult

by Lon Milo DuQuette

  My host smiled. “I am afraid,” he said, “that you were making up your mind to be murdered. I ought to have explained to you the nature of my habitation. I am so used to it myself, that it does not seem to me that it may appear strange to others. It is an old smuggler's lair that I have adapted to my use, and being made of the living rock, it has peculiar advantages for the work on which I am engaged.”

  We sat down to the meal that was already upon the table, and I had an opportunity to study the appearance of my host. Whether he was an elderly man who had preserved his youth, or a young man prematurely aged, I could not tell, but the maturity of his mind was such that I inclined to the former hypothesis, for a wide experience of men and things must have gone to the ripening of such a nature as his.

  His face had something of the lawyer about it, but his hands were those of an artist. It was a combination I had often seen before in Taverner's friends, for the intellectual who has a touch of the mystic generally ends in occultism. His hair was nearly white, in strange contrast to his wind-tanned face and dark sparkling eyes. His figure was spare and athletic, and well above middle height, but his movements had not the ease of youth, but rather the measured dignity of a man who is accustomed to public appearances.

  It was an interesting and impressive personality, but he showed none of the signs of distress that his letter had led me to expect. After-dinner pipes soon led to confidences, and after sitting for a while in the warm fire-lit silence, my host seemed to gather his resolution together, and after crossing and uncrossing his legs several times uneasily, finally said:

  “Well, doctor, this visit is on business, not pleasure, so we may as well ‘Cut the cackle and come to the ‘osses.’ I suppose I appear to you to be sane enough at the present moment?” I bowed my assent.

  “At 11 o'clock you will have the pleasure of seeing me go off my head.”

  “Will you tell me what you are experiencing?” I said.

  “You are not one of us,” he replied (I had probably failed to acknowledge some sign), “but you must be in Taverner's confidence or he would not have sent you. I am going to speak freely to you. You are willing to admit, I presume, that there is more in heaven and earth than you are taught in the medical schools?”

  “No one can look life honestly in the face without admitting that,” I replied. “I have respect for the unseen, though I don't pretend to understand it.”

  “Good man” was the reply. “You will be more use to me than a brother occultist who might encourage me in my delusions. I want facts, not fantasies. Once I am certain that I am deluded, I can pull myself together; it is the uncertainty that is baffling me.”

  He looked at his watch; paused, and then with an effort plunged in medias res.

  “I have been studying the elemental forces: I suppose you know what that means? The semi-intelligent entities behind the potencies of nature. We divide them into four classes—earth, air, fire and water. Now I am of the earth, earthy.”

  I raised my eyebrows in query, for his appearance belied the description he gave of himself. He smiled. “I did not say of the flesh, fleshly. That is quite a different matter. But in my horoscope I have five planets in earth signs, and consequently my nature is bound up with the formal side of things. Now in order to counteract this state of affairs I set myself to get in touch with the fluidic side of nature, elemental water. I have succeeded in doing so.” He paused and packed the tobacco in his pipe with a nervous gesture. “But not only have I got in touch with the water elementals, but they have got in touch with me. One in particular.’ The pipe again required attention.

  “It was a most extraordinary, exhilarating experience. Everything I lacked seemed to be added to me. I was complete, vital, in circuit with the cosmic forces. In fact, I got everything I had sought in marriage and failed to find. But, and here's the rub, the creature that called me was in the water, and it was in the water that I had to meet her. Round this headland the tides run like fury, no swimmer could hold his own against them, even in calm weather; but by night, and in a storm, which is the time she generally comes, it would be certain death; but she calls me, and she wills me to go to her, and one of these nights I shall do so. That is my trouble.”

  He stopped, but I could see by the working of his face that there was more to come so I kept silence. He bent down and took from the side of the hearth an object which he handed to me. It was a small crucible, and had evidently been used to melt down silver.

  “You will laugh when I tell you what I used that for. To make silver bullets—silver bullets to shoot with.” He hid his face in his hands. ‘Oh, my God, I tried to murder her!’ The flood-gates of emotion were open, and I could see his shoulders heave to the tide of it.

  “I could see her as she swam in the moonlight, and as her shoulder rose to the stroke, I shot her in the round white curve of it, white as foam against the black water. And she vanished. Then I thought I had killed the thing I loved. I would have given heaven and earth to bring her back and to swim out there to her in the tide-race and drown with her. I was like a madman, I wandered on the shore for days, I could neither eat nor sleep. And then she came again, and I knew that it was my life or hers, and I, being of the earth, clung to the life of form, and I shot her again. And now I am in torment. I love her, I long for her, I call to her in the unseen, and when she comes to me, I wait for her with a rifle.”

  He came to an abrupt stop and remained rigid, gazing into the heart of the dying fire, his empty pipe in his hand. I glanced surreptitiously at my watch, and saw that the hands were pointing to 11. His hour was upon him.

  He rose, and crossing the room, drew back the draperies at the far end and revealed a casement window. Flinging it open, he seated himself on the sill and gazed fixedly into the darkness without. Moving softly I took my place behind him, where I could see what was happening outside, and be ready to seize hold of him if necessary.

  For a while we waited; the clouds hurried over the moon sometimes, letting its radiance pour out in a silver flood, but more often hiding its face and leaving us in the roaring, crashing darkness of that surf-beaten coast.

  It was indeed a “magic casement opening on the foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.” I shall never forget that vigil.

  Nothing but heaving waters as far as eye could see, all flecked with foam in the moonlight where the reefs were hidden by the flood tide, which swirled below us like a mill-race. My companion's fine-cut features had the boldness and immobility of the statue of a Roman emperor, silhouetted against the silver background of the water.

  He never stirred, he might have been carven in stone, till I saw a quiver run through him and knew that he had found that for which he waited. I strained my eyes to see what it was that had caught his attention, and sure enough, right out in the track of the moonlight, something was swimming. Coming steadily towards us through the reefs, the white shoulder lifting to the stroke just as he had described it, nearer, nearer, where no living soul could have swum in that wild tide-race, till, not 30 yards from the base of the cliffs, I could descry a woman's form with the hair streaming out like seaweed.

  The man at the window leant right out stretching forth his arms to the swimmer, and I, fearing that he would overbalance, put mine gently round him and drew him back into the room.

  He seemed oblivious of my presence, and yielded to the pressure as if asleep, and I lowered him gently to the floor where he lay motionless in a trance. I stooped to feel his pulse, and as I counted the slow beats, I heard a sound that made me hold my breath and listen. It seemed as if the sea had risen and filled the room, and yet not the material sea, but its ghost; shadowy impalpable sea-water flowed in waves to the very ceiling, and the seacreatures looked in from without.

  Then I saw the form of a woman at the window. Shining with its own luminosity, it was clearly visible in the green gloom that was like the bottom of the sea. The hair floated out like seaweed, the shoulders gleamed like marble, the face was that of a Be
ata Beatrix awakened from her dream, and the eyes were like sea-water seen from a rock, and there, sure enough, were the marks where the silver bullets had wounded her.

  We looked into each other's eyes, and I am convinced she saw me as clearly as I saw her, and that she knew me, for the same faint smile that I had seen before hovered on her lips. I spoke as one addressing a sentient creature.

  “Do not try to take him in this way,” I said, “or you will kill him. Trust me, I will make things right. I will explain everything.”

  She looked at me with those strange sea-green eyes of hers, as if piercing my very soul; apparently satisfied, she withdrew, and the shadowy seawater flowed after till the room was emptied.

  I came to myself to find the quizzical eyes of my host fixed on me as he sat in his chair smoking his pipe.

  “Physician, heal thyself!” he said.

  I rose stiffly from my seat and subsided into a chair, lighting a cigarette with numbed fingers. A few whiffs of the soothing smoke steadied my nerves and enabled me to think.

  “Well, doctor,” came the voice of my host in gentle raillery, “what is your diagnosis?”

  I paused, for I realized the critical nature of that which I was about to do. “If I were to tell you that last night I was at the bedside of that girl we saw swimming out there, and that she had two bullet wounds in her shoulder, what would you say?”

  He leant forward, his lips parted, but no sound came from them. “If I told you that the bullet-wounds arose spontaneously without any external agency, and that the doctor considered them to be hysterical stigmata, how would you explain it?”

  “By Jove,” he exclaimed, “it sounds like a case of repercussion! I came across several instances of it when I was studying the Scottish State Papers relating to the witch trials in the sixteenth century. It was a thing often related of the witches, that they could project the astral double out of the physical body and so appear at a distance. I had something of that kind at the back of my mind when I made the silver bullets. Old country-folk believe that it is only with silver bullets that you can shoot a witch. Lead has no effect on them. But you mean to tell me that you have actually seen—seen in the flesh—the woman whose astral body it was we saw out there in the water? Good Lord, doctor, I am indeed out of my depth! I don't believe I ever thought in my heart that the things I was studying were real, I thought they were just states of consciousness.”

  “But aren't states of consciousness real?”

  “Yes, of course they are, on their own plane, that is the whole teaching of occult science. But I always thought they were entirely subjective, experiences of the imagination. It never occurred to me that anyone else could share them.”

  “You—we both—seem to have shared in this girl's dreams, for she escapes from her dreary reality by imagining herself swimming in the sea.”

  “Tell me about her—What is she like? Where did you meet her?”

  “Before I answer that question, will you first tell me your motive for asking it? Do you want to be rid of her? Because if so, I can probably persuade her to leave you alone.”

  “I want to make her acquaintance,” came the reluctant reply. “I was pretty badly bitten once, and haven't spoken to a woman for years, but this—seems to be different. Yes, I would like to make her acquaintance. Tell me, who is she? what is she? what is her name? what are her people like?”

  “She is, as you have seen, of very unusual appearance. Many people would not consider her beautiful, others would rave about her. She is somewhere in the twenties. Intelligent, refined, her voice is that of an educated woman. Her name I do not know, for she was lying in an infirmary bed, and was therefore just a number. Nor do I know what her people are. I don't fancy she has any, for I gathered she was entirely destitute. She is a shop girl by trade—drapery, to be precise.”

  During this recital my host's face had changed in an indefinable way. The cheeks had fallen in, the eyes had lost their brilliancy and become sunken, and a network of lines sprang up all over the skin. He had suddenly become worn and old, the burntout cinder of a man. I was at a loss to account for this appalling change till his words gave me the clue.

  “I think,” he said in a voice that had lost all resonance, “that I had better let the matter drop. A shop girl, you say? No, it would be most unsuitable, most unwise. It never does to marry outside one's own class. I—er—No, we will say no more about the matter. I must pull myself together. Now that I understand the condition I am sure I have the willpower to return to the normal. In fact I feel that you have cured me already. I am sure that I shall never have a return of my dream, its power over me is broken. If you will give me your companionship for just a few more days till I feel that my health is quite re-established I shall be all right. But we will not refer to the matter again; I beg of you, doctor, not to refer to it, for I wish to banish the whole experience from my mind.”

  Looking at him as he crouched in his chair, the broken, devitalized wreck of the man whose fine presence I had admired, it seemed to me that the remedy was worse than the disease. He had, by an effort of his trained will, broken the subtle magnetic rapport that bound him to the girl, and with the breaking of it, the source of his vitality had gone.

  “But look here,” I protested, “are you sure that you are doing the right thing? The girl may be quite all right in herself, even if she has to work for a living. If she means all this to you, surely you are throwing away something big.”

  For answer he rose, and going silently out of the room, closed the door behind him, and I knew that argument was useless. He was bound within his limitations and unable to escape out of them into the freedom which is life. Of the earth, earthy. I wrote a full account of these transactions to Taverner, and then settled down to await his instructions as to future procedure.

  The situation was somewhat strained. My host looked like a man whose life had fallen about his ears. Day by day, almost hour by hour, he seemed to age. He sat in his rock-hewn room, refusing to move, and it was with the greatest difficulty that I succeeded in coaxing him out daily for a walk on the smooth hard sands that stretched for miles when the tide receded. When the water was up he would not go near it; he seemed to have a horror of the sea.

  Two days passed in this way, with no word from Taverner, till on our return from our morning walk, we found that a slip of paper had been pushed under the door of our cavern. It was the ordinary post office intimation to say that a telegram had been brought in our absence, and now awaited me at the post office. Not sorry for a break in our routine, though a little uneasy about my patient, I immediately set off on the three-mile walk to the town to get my telegram. I went up the perilous path cut out of the face of the rock, and then along the cliff road, for though it was possible to walk into town on the sands, the tide was coming in, and it was doubtful if I would be able to round the headland before the undercliff was awash, at any rate my host thought it was too risky for a stranger to attempt it.

  As I went up over the turf of the headland, a thrill ran through me like wine to a starving man. The air was full of dancing golden motes; the turf, the rock, the sea, were alive with a vast life and I could feel their slow breathing. And I thought of the man I had left in the dwelling in the cliff face, the man who had come so far in his quest of the larger life, but who dared not take the final step.

  At the post office of that desolate and forsaken watering-place I duly received my telegram.

  “Am sending stigmata case. She arrives 4.15. Arrange lodgings and meet her. Taverner.” I gave a whistle that brought the postmaster and his entire staff to the front counter, and taking counsel with them, I obtained certain addresses whither I repaired, and finally succeeded in arranging suitable accommodation. What the upshot would be could not imagine, but at any rate it was out of my hands now.

  At the appointed time I presented myself at the station and soon picked out my protégée from the scanty handful of arrivals. She looked very tired with the journey; frail,
forlorn, and shabby. What with the fume of the engine and the frowst of the cab, there was no smell of the sea to revive her, and I could hardly get a word out of her during the drive to the lodgings, but as she disembarked from the crazy vehicle, a rush of salt-laden wind struck her in the face, and below us, in the dusk, we heard the crash-rush of the waves on the pebbles. The effect was magical. The girl flung up her head like a startled horse, and vitality seemed to flow into her, and when I presented her to her landlady, there was little to indicate the convalescent I had represented her to be.

  When I returned to the rock-hewn eyrie of my host, his courtesy forbade him to question me as to the cause of my long absence, and indeed, I doubt if he felt any interest, for he seemed to have sunk into himself so completely that his grip on life was gone. I could hardly rouse him sufficiently to make him take the evening paper I had brought from the town; it lay on his knee unread while he gazed into the driftwood fire with unseeing eyes.

  The following day the tide had not receded sufficiently for a morning walk, so it was not till the afternoon that we went for our constitutional. We had left it rather late, and on our way back in the early winter twilight we had to ford several gathering pools. We swung along over the sand barefoot, boots slung over our shoulders and trousers rolled to the knee, for it was one of those mild days that often come in January—when out on the edge of the incoming surf we saw a figure.