by H. F. Heard
But the reassurance of this simple ratiocination was all engulfed a moment after in a horrid immediacy, an instantaneous shock. For, as I scanned the spot which lay diagonally to me, I realized that it was filling up; I saw with enough clearness so as to leave me without any refuge of doubt under which to hide. Yet what I saw was still hardly more than a penumbra. I knew that the small desk or pulpit had been of a certain mass and height. Well, now I knew that had changed—the spot was filled, the pulpit was occupied, a presence was presiding, mounted, and ranged on the all-too-small space between it and me.
All I could do was to keep on saying over and over, like a mantra, to myself, “What’s there to be afraid of? What’s there to fear?” And each time, because I knew I couldn’t say what it was, the fear mounted—yes, physical fear is really always focused, channeled, filtered to us. It can only get through the body, the little duct of the body, to us, to the real person who suffers. That is why we dread madness more than anything else, for then our defenses are turned, the pass has been outflanked, and we are enveloped.
I think my chief terror lay in this: that whereas last time I had heard whatever it was move about and take up its station, now it had, I was sure, made no physical move, it had simply materialized at that spot, looming out at me. And it was launching something, of that I was left in no doubt in a very few moments. It was not only gathering force, drawing itself together, mounting, but it was coiling itself to fling out some attack, out in the path in which I lay.
The light from the moon must have been slowly increasing. I know I could now see, if not in detail, all the main masses and shapes of the place. And I was certain that a figure was standing on that small railed pedestal perhaps not forty feet from me, and I was equally certain that it was no figure of flesh and blood. Whatever I might have reassured myself with in regard to it last week, now I had no doubt, only an utter misgiving of certainty that I was in the presence of some sort of psychic phenomenon, and one of quite unsuspected power. What was the use of asking whether it was friendly or no! I felt, as every simple primitive man feels, that such distinctions of good and bad belong to morality, to the dealings of men with men and such mediated spiritual powers whom they meet with covenant and rite and sacrament. But the real distinction, as they know, is just between force and force—between that puny force we call physical, material, visible, and that awful unlimited force which is none of those easily manageable, endurable things.
Yes, I used to smile when in my rather out-of-the-way station anthropologists used to drop in. As I was the host—and prided myself on being the better-educated man (the generally educated man who can always draw out the poor little specialist on his hobby)—I would let them talk shop. And the younger ones used to entertain me with these new theories—what then seemed to me just a relapse into superstition—about Mana (that word taken from the South Seas), about spirituality being a power, in some ways like an electric charge. If you hadn’t the right insulation or couldn’t take as high a charge as that which was being shot at you, well, it was just too bad, it shook you to pieces, whether you were good or bad, or it was good or bad. I used to laugh at that point and say with mock modesty that I was glad my insulation was fairly thick, and I used to think it was a good thing that holiness had disappeared and morality taken its place, that we had domesticated this dark Deus Abscondidus and turned him into a good little house watchdog, as our social conscience. Oh, heavens! Is anyone more superstitious, more narrow, more blind then the man who prides himself that he knows his world, that it is his oyster, and that now he has got rid of inhibitions and childish fears he’s going to tidy up the universe in the time it takes for a five-year plan to stall?
You remember, the week before, I had been startled by seeing that inner glow emanating from the figure, from what I took to be its eyes and outstretched hands? Well, this time, strain as I would, I could not make out these points, these bearings. I believe it would have been a relief if I could. Yet the sense of pressure of presence was not less; it was greater. The light, too, was certainly better. I ought to have been able to make out more, though, of course, if there were any kind of phosphorescence or photism involved, then perhaps the increased, though still indirect, lighting would have made it seem dimmer.
I was trying to rouse my mind to hold onto such definable puzzles, just to keep it on any sort of rails, so I thought I had better keep my eyes from undue strain by glancing round the building before again trying to sound the object which I felt was the center of my present chaotic world, the vortex of this psychic whirlwind. I remember experiencing a further puzzlement then. I’ve said the light was fairly good—quite the best illumination I’d experienced in that strange place. I was still master enough of my sense of time and place to know that it ought to be getting lighter as the moon swung up and round the sky and threw its light more directly into the small row of deep-set windows up aloft. Yet it was equally clear that the light was not gaining. Of course, the sky might suddenly have become overcast. But I had to own that the evening out of which I had come into this gloom was as serene a one as I’d ever seen—one that the meteorologist catalogues as “Set fair.” Besides, as I swung my eyes to and fro to get as clear an impression of my situation as night-sight would allow, I became aware of a fact that showed it was no outside change that caused this gathering shadow. For as I looked up I could see that the upper part of the building was certainly not darkening. The barrel vaulting in which dusk ought to have been able to accumulate was certainly now sufficiently lit so that I could count the simple bow-ribs that ran laterally across it. No, the darkness was partial. It was gathering, it was collecting at the ground level. I found that my mind fought against such a conclusion, but my eyes would not let me doubt it. I was being immersed in a rising tide of darkness.
But there was more to it than just that, though that filled me with distress. As I glanced to and fro in this fog, I perceived something which, as I put it, may seem to you in a way reassuring—but I must ask you to believe it was precisely the reverse. The rising shadow was not uniform—by that I mean it clotted. It was dotted about, like columns of heavy black smoke rising from a plain. I don’t know why I was so slow in seeing what this really meant—I suppose because I just fought against such a conclusion, however plain. So it came to me like a blow, as though it had suddenly happened, instead of slowly—how shall I put it?—condensing. You see, I was horrified, sunk to a new level of panic, because I found that, quite as mysteriously as that figure had taken up its position in the lectern, a congregation had gathered, had risen out of the ground. That’s all I knew of them—I had no idea who they were, or what they were. It was a crowd of some sort; it filled the benches, thicker and thicker.
Then I understood one more thing. The figure that stood looking down at us from the lectern was the reason—he was summoning this host, and he was holding them, holding them as an orator holds, in that worn cliché, his audience spellbound. But that word was the mot juste here and now, though never a word passed between him and his group and never a sign of response did they give. But what attention! It was an attention equal to the appalling force he put out to keep them held. They were a dark flocked and frocked muster—I could tell that. And next I could see that they were hooded; their heads were wrapped round, swathed, so that it was clear how they were all aligned, all focused on the figure ahead.
The next thing I knew had nothing to do with sight and deductions from such glimpses as I could get, but it was far clearer. I could, and had, realized the intensity of their attention by watching them. But now another sense came into play. I could gather their awful anxiety not to be distracted. How did I know that? How do I know all that followed? Well, I can no more tell you that, and at the same time I can no more doubt it, than a man whose senses are coming back to an anesthetized limb can tell you how it is that it begins to feel, or doubt that he is feeling again poignantly. For (as I gathered, their anxiety was a double one, to hold onto something ahead of them and be
at back and away something that was dragging at them) I realized my possible part in it; I realized that in a way they might be—in a way they were—aware of me, aware of me as a possible distractant. And with that knowledge another chasm of misgiving opened in front of me: I realized that my restless, ignorant, alien presence could, and to some extent did, distract them; that they were increasingly, if dimly, aware of that—and then, with a sudden snap of fear, that if they were aware that I might distract they would turn around, they would turn on me.
It was then that I knew more clearly than ever before what horror is—not terror but horror. I thought I had known terror and that it had drained me of all animal reactions, such as disgust, loathing, nauseating, flesh-creeping dread. But now it was horror’s turn to pull me down to a new depth. For I knew without being able to imagine it—had I been able, then I might have found some purchase for my courage—that if that … that congregation turned around I should see faces, but faces which just by the look of them could leave a mark forever on mine. All I then knew was just one thing: they mustn’t turn around, they mustn’t; and by no means must I disturb them, or they might; and my only method of not disturbing them was to attend, as they were attending, to that which stood ahead of us and was holding them.
I drove my attention forward. I laid hold on that center to prevent my inattention from bringing the awful attention of this group on myself. But as soon as I had done that I began to know at last, at a depth to which I trust I shall never have to go again—at least not so unprepared as I was then—I began to know that Terror is deeper than Horror. For now at last, and by my own act, by my own fright, I had thrust myself directly and deliberately into that current which till then was by-passing me. I felt the pull. I knew that the figure ahead was dragging me—us, for I was one with this dreadful group—dragging us with a pain not only to itself but to us far more intense than the pain caused by dragging a man up when your only grip on him is by a broken and half-severed limb and you are dragging him by your hand that is horribly burned. We were being racked. And the rack was so terrible because we were not free to be dragged into the place where he would hale us. We were tied, and not merely tied, we were being dragged backward by a weight, a tide of ebbing loss that swept remorselessly round us and was sucking us down. The pain of intense agony at being held by a purchase that seemed to tear body from soul was matched by a fear as awful, a fear that the engulfing tide that tore at us would tear us free from the grip and whirl us backward into the abyss. Pain and fear fought dragging at the frail link, neither able to make it wholly his, until it seemed that no consciousness could stand the strain, that the soul must snap.
Yet at that moment one realized that that, the third choice, was debarred: no, the soul could not snap. The final choice was here being wrung out of it—pain or fear, nightmare loss or tormenting struggle—and the figure ahead, at whatever cost to itself and to us (for I was now one with this awful crew), was determined that we should be dragged out of the freezing void of the bottomless pit into that fire which would flay us to the bone.
On my knowledge went, dawning over this ghastly field of conflict. Without words or definitions I knew that all of those here had somehow made a vast mistake, committed a giant treason. They had forsaken and betrayed what they truly were and had tried to make terms with the Pit; they had tried to secede into the darkness and leave the light because it seared and burned. By now my fear knew no bounds. I felt that I, too, must have become one of them. This was the real world. Outside, yes, the war and the cause and the hopes of a planned mankind—all those things, Oh, I could think of them, as a man who is dying of cancer and feels its pangs coming on him can remember reading, just before this bout, a fairy story to a child, all about ogres and brave knights and beautiful princesses. I know that is true because I noticed with a kind of casualness that bright flashes of light had been striking on the side of the walls high up for some time, and that, about the same time, there had been sharp, very sharp sounds, then broader ones and long rhythms of rushing cadences.
It was long before my mind could even fumble these things together, so numbed was it to that world. Then I knew, in a dull, indifferent way, that out there, up there, in the world of physical forces and economic horizons, of course quite a big air raid must be going on. It made no more difference to me than would boys playing with firecrackers and toy rockets. What did defeat and physical pain and bodily death matter beside this second death? For that, out there, I saw, and I can still sense it as I recall it now, was simply superficial, symptomatic; while what I was in was the primary thing, the ultimate reality. I am not a physically brave man and don’t enjoy the risk of wound or mutilation. But I know that at that time I felt as though liberty, yes, and safety, lay outside, down in the attacked town, in contrast to the abysmal peril which like a psychic maelstrom was spinning round me in this awful rent in the safe net and curtain of the everyday world. I felt this vortex must soon erode away whatever it was that still gave me a frail protection from its awful suction and I should be swept out and down.
No words can give my fear of that abyss—I can only repeat that beside its inhumanness every human activity—yes, war and hatred and cruelty—seemed childish and familiar. As I sank deeper, as the frail barrier thinned, I kept on feeling as I suppose a condemned criminal feels. What do the things matter about which men, who can still go on being men, fuss and quarrel? If only I could get back into that silly world, how fully, how sanely, how well would I live; what seeming hardships, what limitations would I endure for that security!
For the state I was plunged in was getting worse. I could gauge that with fair exactness; it was not merely a feeling. Or, rather, the awful feeling had confirmatory symptoms to show me that the external risk was increasing. I could see that the place was getting fuller. The moon must now have been high, and the flashes of lights of all sorts lit up the place at times quite brightly—some houses must have begun to burn in the town. But though the upper level of the building was now quite clear to sight, the floor level was darker than ever—it was crowded with darkness. The congregation of dark shapes was flocking, packing. To my terrified mind they seemed intent on one thing only: to drag from its station the figure which was holding them in agony—his and theirs and now even mine—against the driving undertow of the dark current that with mounting force was bearing us all backward toward some invisible brink. Once I had thought they were hanging onto him in desperation. But now the anguish had become so great that it seemed they would rather drag him down than suffer the torture of being held by him against such a drag. Perhaps, though, those nearest him were still set with a passionate determination not to be distracted, not to be drawn away from their grip on him. They longed for him to hold fast at whatever cost to themselves. But round me, I could now sense, in the growing press were others. Dreadful, horrible as those ahead had seemed, much as I loathed and feared that they might turn on me in their exasperation at my possible distraction, and show me what they were, this new rising, this new surge of darkness, was worse. They seemed pouring out of the ground like a foul, dense smoke. And I knew that when that became dense enough, when it was quite opaque, then the force, the sharp cutting force, that lacerated us with its tensile strength but which held us above the Pit, would be cut off and we should fall, a hideous volume of corrupt wreckage, down, down into deeps more horrible even than ourselves.
For this new recruitment seemed composed wholly of a passionate despair, a despair that was raised to fury by the suggestion of any hope, any salvage. It had gone over wholly to the blackness and the depth, and its entire nature now only clamored to drag down everything into the void and destroy all resistance to the darkness. I still had a sense of my own position so I still knew that this increasing pressure could come closer. The place was now packed; the crowding which had begun around the figure on the plinth had spread out from that until it was dense around me. But it had not yet actually pressed in on me. Somehow a minute slip of space—no m
ore, as far as I could judge, than that which just permitted my body to crouch in this farthest southwest corner of the place—that ledge was still uninvaded, though hopelessly beleaguered. And I knew, as clearly as I am sitting in this quiet room, that when that force, or those forces, did invade the actual spot, when they actually touched me, then my last insulation would be stripped from me, my last purchase with the outer world of physical things would be torn away, and, if I were not to perish, then my soul, my soul would have to be able to stand that pressure nakedly, consciously, and through virtue of its own powers and its power to call on, as a friend, force greater than this enemy force that then would see me clearly as its prey.
I, the sane, economically interested, materially minded civil servant, I to become in a moment a spiritual Herakles that I might fight and conquer this dark hydra! I who till this hour had dismissed the very idea of spirituality as the most faded of human fancies! A kind of insane humor swept me at the thought. The kind of wild laughter you hear coming from a lunatic asylum at night when the moon is full shook me like an oncoming epileptic fit.
There was one other alternative, I knew; and, just to keep off the spasm of laughter which I sensed would be a kind of capitulation and the end of me—at least in this life—I worked it into my mind, though it hurt like a knife. I could, of course, cease to be the defeated stoic. I could call for help. Yes, there was help, help adequate, ample. I was drowning, but just ahead of me there was a grapple that could, if I called even as the flood gripped me, could lay hold and drag me out. But the only way I can show my desperate pass is by a crude illustration. If you were drowning in dark water and then just over your head you saw a grapple coming down, would you let it get fast purchase on your flesh if you realized that it was of white-hot metal? Yes, it could drag you up, you would not drown, but wouldn’t drowning be better than that searing agony?