by H. F. Heard
I was gazing dumbfounded at this object, more like some huge, horrible bird, half plucked while still alive, when I heard my leader say, “Kneel, kneel.” I knew the order was for me. I obeyed, watching him but also keeping one eye on his opponent. He took that chalice from under his cloak. He unwrapped it, while with his left hand he put aside a small case on a table just short of where he stood. He raised the cup, and, as he did so, the woman, who had been writhing, rising to the full stretch of the rope and then falling back, stopped still and began to scream with a volume of violence I had never thought any human throat could compass. It was literally deafening. It did not, however, last long but suddenly modulated into a baying. Her head shook like that of a mad dog. At that I heard, out in the yard, the house-dog set up the most pitiful howling of abject terror. A moment after, though, this hell-hound noise modulated again, and a wild neighing sounded through the room, only to give way in its turn to something that sank me into an even deeper fear—that queer cackling laugh I had heard when I came through the Druid Grove, what seemed years ago.
With the chalice held at the level of his throat, the priest asked, “Who are you?”
The question met with a scream of laughter, “We! He asks who we are? Legions of us, legions, legions!”
“You must go. You are defeated,” he replied, as calmly as a rent officer telling a defaulter that he must evacuate his lodging. She drew back till she was sitting on the bed and then sprang up again. Her lips drew back until all her teeth were exposed, and from her throat came, immensely magnified, that tearing, rending noise made by a cornered cat. The rasping, tearing sound went on till it rose to a rattle almost like a kettle-drum, then broke into a cough, and a hemorrhage burst from the throat, pouring down over the body. On this thick, black flow constantly alighted fresh whirling down and featherlets. The tar-and-feather effect became irresistible. Suddenly I was seized with an attack. As I knelt there peering up at this grotesque quick-change artist, looking at this poor sack of greasy flesh all smeared with the thickening black blood and floured over with chicken down, I felt a convulsion of laughter, cruel as a cramp, seize my diaphragm. I shook as though I were going to have a fit. I knew I must struggle with it, for if it ever got hold of me it would shake me into some sort of epilepsy. I would literally laugh myself to death. I was laughing from sheer horror. There wasn’t a spark of humor in the blaze of insane elation. This was the laughter of Hell, composed only of contempt, disgust, nauseating repellence. A moment more and I would have broken, burst. For this thing worked in me like a boa constrictor, twisting my entrails in order to tear itself free. Then I heard my leader say, “Look with pity.” And I was able to see the object crouching against the bed and feel for its desperate pass. The deadly cramp left me. But horror remained. That was the third horrible thing I saw that night, and I believe, for me at my state then, it was the worst. That awful Gap in things—I think I really couldn’t grasp the full horror of that. But this was still human. A decaying corpse of someone we have known, though it is a cadaver smaller than a whale’s, gives us greater horror. What I had seen in the lane was, of course, quite inhuman. This was still partly so, and so struck me more horribly.
My leader, after that, moved quickly. He raised the chalice still further, and now once more I could see the glow coming in it and mounting like a beam on his face. In a voice of a volume which I had never heard him use—indeed, could not have believed he could command—he said slowly and with intense emphasis, “I tell you to go.” This started the whole round of rage again. He waited until it was spent, until each one of those faucets and mouths of evil had discharged its filth. Then, with still greater weight, he said, “I warn you to go.” Three times, with unbelievable agility, the body leaped up right to the limit of its rope and was brought down with a crash as a hooked tarpon plunges. Finally, coming within a foot of her and leaning over her, he said, very slowly with a pause at each word, “In the Name that is above every name, I command”; he paused for some three seconds, “Go hence, get out, begone—forever!” A cackling scream of cries broke out at this, and the body rolled round and round on the bed.
In the pandemonium I could hear every now and then, “Not the Void, not the Void, not the utter Deprivation; some mercy, some shelter, some purchase; not to fall forever; not the ultimate emptiness, no, no, no!”
To which like an antiphon and like a tolling passing bell I heard his voice, “Go, go, go.” And at the last “Go,” there was a silence of such utter blankness, of such complete emptiness and end of any pressure that one thought one would die. The whole pressure of things had suddenly been allowed to escape into space.
I was roused by his voice now again addressed to me. “Get that sheet over there. It looks intact. Put it round her.” She was sagging over the edge of the bed, the cord alone holding her from falling on the floor. I threw the sheet over her; she must have thrown it to that side of the room before she started tearing up the others and the rest of the bedding. She lay as though dead, and how a human body could stand what this one had been through is a mystery. As I arranged the sheet round her, I came on the cord. Martin had been right.
She was held by a simple slipknot. She could have taken it off with a single rational movement. I eased up the bulk of the body and the cord came loose from the deep furrow it had made in the flesh of her torso. The other end had been secured round a low beam. Any less firm purchase, she certainly would have dragged free. As I wrapped the sheet round her legs and trunk, my leader took her shoulders.
“Get her onto the bed,” he ordered, and with another surprising show of strength he hoisted his end of the body as I raised mine, and we swung her onto the burst mattress.
“Now go downstairs and wait with Martin till I call for you. She has about half an hour to live. She will come to in some five minutes, after which I must receive her confession. Then I shall send for both of you. Be ready.”
I turned, went through the door, shut it, and shambled down the stairs: I have never felt so spent in my life. I found Martin by a small fire in the hearth of his knees. I told him our instructions. He said nothing and didn’t move. It could not have been more than ten minutes before we were called. I went first. Martin followed. When we entered we could see that the woman was conscious. There was the remnant of a pillow behind her. To the left on the small table two candles had been lit, a small white cloth spread. Communion was going to be celebrated. We were told to kneel down but had done so already. The woman was given the elements. After the blessing there was a short silence. Then I heard her voice, her real voice, for the first time. She was asking her husband to forgive her. On his assent she sighed twice, and at the second sigh my leader began to say under his breath, “Go in the name of.… Go into the presence Eternal. Go in peace, into the peace everlasting; go into the fire of light that purifies; go steadfastly; dare behold the Light perpetual; Go.” At the last “Go,” there was a third sigh from the bed, and the steady breathing, which had grown longer and longer, abruptly ceased.
The parson knelt down, and there was a complete and, strange to say, utterly restful silence in the room—the complete calm that follows a cyclone. After a while he rose. He collected the vessels, put out the candles, folded the small white cloth, and one by one put away these things in the wrapping and the case he had with him. Not till then did he turn to us. He asked me to go on downstairs, and I could hear his low voice speaking above me for about five minutes. Then he came down, and behind him Martin, who showed us to the door with mumbled thanks. We went out down the hill. I followed like a beaten dog, a dead-beat animal. He left me, saying nothing but striding along ahead at a pace and with a strength that even in my dulled sense awoke some wonder. When we reached where the way hollowed as the path made its cutting through the very crest of the ridge, as we came to the spot with the overhanging tree where so little time before, as sure and stupid as a beast of prey, I had hung waiting, I came even closer. For now I was facing the spot, just going to pass over the
actual site where I had seen the firm crust of things, the bright ice on which we skate, split and yawn at my feet. I could not help feeling that the ground sounded menacingly hollow under my feet. I felt we were on something thinner than ice, that we were in a little tight-stretched balloon of painted tissue, and around us, pressing in on it, was that absolute Zero. It was ready to penetrate at any instant, snatch this frail cover from us and leave us naked—worse, evaporating out into that ultimate cold, dissipated into nothingness by that utter inexhaustible Vacuum, that ultimate Deprivation, so hungry, so insatiable, as to be the most ravening, consuming thing that could ever threaten man’s existence.
We got past that spot, and then once again I was cowering in the wake of this little mild man as we reached the grove. But this time no voice suddenly laughed. The place was as though struck dumb, sealed up by a word of power which could silence all Pandemonium. I followed him right on and up to his door. Not till then did he turn around and, as his housekeeper, who evidently had been waiting with some anxiety, opened to him, without a word waved me in front of him. I caught sight of the baffled look on the housekeeper’s face.
I had stuffed my muffler into my pocket and had the rough cap I’d worn crumpled in my hand in the shadow, away from her prying eyes. My coat collar was down, and my white starched shirt collar and silk tie properly in place. But I felt those eyes of hers, no doubt now armed with her “long specs,” on my back till we had gone down the whole hall passage, through which I think you must have come, for, since the hall door is always only latched, that’s the direct way here. And here we ended up. Still he didn’t pay any more attention to me but spent time with his holy vessels, disposing of them. Finally he closed that little rite by putting this cup where you see it now, and where it always stands, and where, if I may glance at the future, I believe it will continue to stand. Then only, when this rite had been gone through with the quietude and method of a good surgeon putting away his instruments after an operation, did he turn to me. I learned after how careful he always was at such times. He waved me to sit beside him, and I did. I thought I was too beat for any further excitement and that nothing now could rouse or surprise me, least of all this dull little haven, which you will own is anything but awe-inspiring. Perhaps I could be further shocked just because now again I seemed to be back in the commonplace world, in which I thought I was a master of the low-down. Here was the formal parade, the dull routine of that religion which appears so unreal because part of it is a hangover from archaeological art (that cup for instance; at least as it appears to the eye) and part, as the chief butler said, the barricade against attack from the dispossessed. It was the utter incongruity of all this prim little setting, and the man to match, that made what he began to say so disconcerting, so that I was shocked right back into my original state of alarm.
Straightaway he began to speak to me, without looking at me or seeming to care in the slightest how I was taking it or what I would do. Indeed, all the while he kept his eyes on that cup and spoke in a dim, rather dreamy voice. I was seated beside him so I could watch him obliquely. And did, till my eyes dropped to the floor after his first dozen sentences. For what he was telling me, without pause, padding, or error, was my life. He told me what a coward I had been always, what a rotten little shirker trying to make myself out to be too fine to do the common works of kindness, of helpful livelihood, trying to make myself out to be the delicate and yet daring genius that has a right to exploit and fool and finally to rob and despoil the brutish louts, too base to understand my exquisite quality—I the aristocrat and they the canaille, the carrion, though, evidently, I did not mind eating carrion and being a parasite. On he went. He gave no names or dates; they did not interest him. But the actual detailed case history of that leprous, deformed thing he still insisted on calling my soul, that he gave with every one of its collapses, fresh lesions, and further outbreaks, and its spreading decomposition. He brought me right down to that night and there stopped for a while.
Then in a voice perhaps a little less distant—at least I hoped it was—he added, “You know what I say is true, but later you may need to know in a colder or more callous fit. And whatever you decide to do—for you still have free will—those colder fits will come on you. You will then need to know how it is that I know as I do. I have found that these flashes of light come out of the deepest darkness. For all I have told you now, and you know that has taken a considerable time, came to me of course in a split second, timelessly, and I have simply had for all this while to let it run out, expand out into the temporal and the wordy. The fourteenth-century Anchoress Julian of Norwich had a trance vision that seems to have lasted some five minutes, during which she saw the entire universe, she says, ‘as a hazel nut.’ She spent the next twenty years fruitfully, getting into thought and phrase her flash of the Timeless. All that I have told you came to me when, as you saw me, I was in my agony in the lane on the hill. I was in double distress. For not only did I know that I was beleaguered by a force that had permission to do all but the one ultimate thing, and that was to tear my will out of me, but I could not understand why I was allowed to face such ultimate horror and so be reduced until there was nothing left of me, no memory, no character, no personality; only the naked will, that final thing which, in the final gasp of death, when all else has been stripped from us, we shall offer as our final act of faith; this the one unique thing we have, His reason for making us, which we shall hand back then to God Himself.
“That question ate deeper than I have ever had pain eat into me, to the last fiber of the will itself. For the question was right against the raw, agonizing edge of doubt. And doubt, at such a pass and on such a brink, is despair. The ‘Eloi, Eloi’ was on my lips, yet I felt I had no right to utter it. For how could I claim that I was redeeming anything? At best I was but carrying reinforcements to a besieged person. Believe me, at that point I wasn’t thinking of attempting an exorcism, that we should find a spiritual tumor so ripe for the knife, a crisis in which everything must turn on a swift and deep incision. But you see I had forgotten, in my self-centered agony, that God might be using me and my pain, not for myself, for whom He was of course caring completely, but for someone who, to the best of my knowledge, I had never seen and who was crooked up in the tree above and behind me, on the point of dropping down and committing robbery and possibly murder. And at that, my dangerously self-centered moment, down like Zaccheus at the call of the Master, you tumbled out of the tree.
“Then I did dimly understand why I had been so put to it and why that wonder with that cup was worked on the heart of darkness that had formed against us and had closed those jaws. I saw darkly that this awful force of denial had been exposed, laid bare, let gape and drag, not for me, or for me least. The Divine Power, especially when using the demonic and letting evil have expression—expressly that against its will it shall work good—never acts for one purpose but for many. The dark revelation was mainly for you; then, for the maniac woman as well; and she and you for each other—Divine economy wrought out of the very fire of Hell, out of its blackness bringing light and salvation. For Heaven’s compassionate plan for you was to draw you away by letting you, over my shoulder, have a glimpse of the ultimate horror, which would otherwise never have shown itself to you, at least not until you were helplessly and perhaps hopelessly trapped. It came out from cover, thinking it could strike at me and prevent me from aiding the woman it felt it now had. And so it showed its hand prematurely to you. So, and so only, could you by a counter-pull—for goodness could have no purchase on you at that stage of lowness to which you had sunk—be pulled from those mean squalid everyday childish fears that had captured you from boyhood up: the fear of hard work, of having to respect others, having to serve them, of having to earn the right to be thought the equal of others, of having to reverence others, who, less well endowed, had done nobly with what they had been given. Only by major terror could you be shown how mean were your defeating timidities and how contemptible
you had been to be defeated by them. So horror could in the end give you the saving reaction of shame, saving shame.
“I knew this in a flash when you dropped at my feet, but in a vague outline as one sees an out-of-focus picture. I could see all the masses but no detail. But I also knew that I would know more and that you must come along with me to the fuller light for us both. For in Martin’s house I came to know further that there was to be a kind of double extraction, or birth. I began to see that as my agony and yours were interlinked, so your further restoration-respiration pains would be intertwined with the deliverance of that poor woman, who is now being given the strong cordial restorative of the pure fire of purgatory. My next clearing of the light, when it suddenly came from diffusion into clear-cut detail, came to me when celebrating, as such have come before, at the moment when, having consecrated, I communicate from that cup. I know the clarity is going to dawn when I begin to say the great initial collect of the office: ‘To whom all hearts be opened, all desires known, from whom no secrets are hid.’ As I continue and I keep my central attention on that great mystery of Light arising on our darkness, I can see, as it were on the periphery of my vision, in concentric-lit circles around that holy and healing flame, the souls of all who are worshiping with me. And their sins and struggles are shown more clearly lit and defined than if I read them in a book. It was then I saw all of you, as it were in that condensing mirror made by the cup’s bowl, but really, of course, by the eye of the spirit. I saw the woman’s life and fate and rejoiced in her salvation. I saw the poor farmer and how his tired and puzzled patience was now to win him peace. I saw, too, all your long, worming, shirking, little life, all your mean escapism as you tried to live by gnawing at the roots that others drove patiently into the hard earth for livelihood; how you tried to bury meanly your talent and soul in your cowardly retreat and betrayal of life, and at others’ expense.”