by Gary Lovisi
He lay back in his chair, laughing to himself and holding up his hands at the thought of it, and at the sight of him Dr. Silence laughed too.
“Go on, please,” he said, “I quite understand. I know something myself of the hashish laughter.”
The author pulled himself together and resumed, his face growing quickly grave again.
“So, you see, side by side with this extravagant, apparently causeless merriment, there was also an extravagant, apparently causeless, terror. The drug produced the laughter, I knew; but what brought in the terror I could not imagine. Everywhere behind the fun lay the fear. It was terror masked by cap and bells; and I became the playground for two opposing emotions, armed and fighting to the death. Gradually, then, the impression grew in me that this fear was caused by the invasion—so you called it just now—of the ‘person’ who had wakened me; she was utterly evil; inimical to my soul, or at least to all in me that wished for good. There I stood, sweating and trembling, laughing at everything in the room, yet all the while with this white terror mastering my heart. And this creature was putting—putting her—”
He hesitated again, using his handkerchief freely.
“Putting what?”
“—putting ideas into my mind,” he went on, glancing nervously about the room. “Actually tapping my thought-stream so as to switch off the usual current and inject her own. How mad that sounds! I know it, but it’s true. It’s the only way I can express it. Moreover, while the operation terrified me, the skill with which it was accomplished filled me afresh with laughter at the clumsiness of men by comparison. Our ignorant, bungling methods of teaching the minds of others, of inculcating ideas, and so on, overwhelmed me with laughter when I understood this superior and diabolical method. Yet my laughter seemed hollow and ghastly, and ideas of evil and tragedy trod close upon the heels of the comic. Oh, doctor, I tell you again, it was unnerving!”
John Silence sat with his head thrust forward to catch every word of the story which the other continued to pour out in nervous, jerky sentences and lowered voice.
“You saw nothing—no one—all this time?” he asked.
“Not with my eyes. There was no visual hallucination. But in my mind there began to grow the vivid picture of a woman—large, dark-skinned, with white teeth and masculine features, and one eye—the left—so drooping as to appear almost closed. Oh, such a face—!”
“A face you would recognize again?”
Pender laughed dreadfully.
“I wish I could forget it,” he whispered, “I only wish I could forget it!” Then he sat forward in his chair suddenly, and grasped the doctor’s hand with an emotional gesture.
“I must tell you how grateful I am for your patience and sympathy,” he cried, with a tremor in his voice, “and—that you do not think me mad. I have told no one else a quarter of all this, and the mere freedom of speech—the relief of sharing my affliction with another—has helped me already more than I can possibly say.”
Dr. Silence pressed his hand and looked steadily into the frightened eyes. His voice was very gentle when he replied.
“Your case, you know, is very singular, but of absorbing interest to me,” he said, “for it threatens, not your physical existence, but the temple of your psychical existence—the inner life. Your mind would not be permanently affected here and now, in this world; but in the existence after the body is left behind, you might wake up with your spirit so twisted, so distorted, so befouled, that you would be spiritually insane—a far more radical condition than merely being insane here.”
There came a strange hush over the room, and between the two men sitting there facing one another.
“Do you really mean—Good Lord!” stammered the author as soon as he could find his tongue.
“What I mean in detail will keep till a little later, and I need only say now that I should not have spoken in this way unless I were quite positive of being able to help you. Oh, there’s no doubt as to that, believe me. In the first place, I am very familiar with the workings of this extraordinary drug, this drug which has had the chance effect of opening you up to the forces of another region; and, in the second, I have a firm belief in the reality of super-sensuous occurrences as well as considerable knowledge of psychic processes acquired by long and painful experiment. The rest is, or should be, merely sympathetic treatment and practical application. The hashish has partially opened another world to you by increasing your rate of psychical vibration, and thus rendering you abnormally sensitive. Ancient forces attached to this house have attacked you. For the moment I am only puzzled as to their precise nature; for were they of an ordinary character, I should myself be psychic enough to feel them. Yet I am conscious of feeling nothing as yet. But now, please continue, Mr. Pender, and tell me the rest of your wonderful story; and when you have finished, I will talk about the means of cure.”
Pender shifted his chair a little closer to the friendly doctor and then went on in the same nervous voice with his narrative.
“After making some notes of my impressions I finally got upstairs again to bed. It was four o’clock in the morning. I laughed all the way up—at the grotesque banisters, the droll physiognomy of the staircase window, the burlesque grouping of the furniture, and the memory of that outrageous footstool in the room below; but nothing more happened to alarm or disturb me, and I woke late in the morning after a dreamless sleep, none the worse for my experiment except for a slight headache and a coldness of the extremities due to lowered circulation.”
“Fear gone, too?” asked the doctor.
“I seemed to have forgotten it, or at least ascribed it to mere nervousness. Its reality had gone, anyhow for the time, and all that day I wrote and wrote and wrote. My sense of laughter seemed wonderfully quickened and my characters acted without effort out of the heart of true humor. I was exceedingly pleased with this result of my experiment. But when the stenographer had taken her departure and I came to read over the pages she had typed out, I recalled her sudden glances of surprise and the odd way she had looked up at me while I was dictating. I was amazed at what I read and could hardly believe I had uttered it.”
“And why?”
“It was so distorted. The words, indeed, were mine so far as I could remember, but the meanings seemed strange. It frightened me. The sense was so altered. At the very places where my characters were intended to tickle the ribs, only curious emotions of sinister amusement resulted. Dreadful innuendoes had managed to creep into the phrases. There was laughter of a kind, but it was bizarre, horrible, distressing; and my attempt at analysis only increased my dismay. The story, as it read then, made me shudder, for by virtue of these slight changes it had come somehow to hold the soul of horror, of horror disguised as merriment. The framework of humor was there, if you understand me, but the characters had turned sinister, and their laughter was evil.”
“Can you show me this writing?”
The author shook his head.
“I destroyed it,” he whispered. “But, in the end, though of course much perturbed about it, I persuaded myself that it was due to some after-effect of the drug, a sort of reaction that gave a twist to my mind and made me read macabre interpretations into words and situations that did not properly hold them.”
“And, meanwhile, did the presence of this person leave you?”
“No; that stayed more or less. When my mind was actively employed I forgot it, but when idle, dreaming, or doing nothing in particular, there she was beside me, influencing my mind horribly—”
“In what way, precisely?” interrupted the doctor.
“Evil, scheming thoughts came to me, visions of crime, hateful pictures of wickedness, and the kind of bad imagination that so far has been foreign, indeed impossible, to my normal nature—”
“The pressure of the Dark Powers upon the personality,” murmured the doctor, making a quick note.
“Eh? I didn’t quite catch—”
“Pray, go on. I am merely making notes; you s
hall know their purport fully later.”
“Even when my wife returned I was still aware of this Presence in the house; it associated itself with my inner personality in most intimate fashion; and outwardly I always felt oddly constrained to be polite and respectful towards it—to open doors, provide chairs and hold myself carefully deferential when it was about. It became very compelling at last, and, if I failed in any little particular, I seemed to know that it pursued me about the house, from one room to another, haunting my very soul in its inmost abode. It certainly came before my wife so far as my attentions were concerned.
“But, let me first finish the story of my experimental dose, for I took it again the third night, and underwent a very similar experience, delayed like the first in coming, and then carrying me off my feet when it did come with a rush of this false demon-laughter. This time, however, there was a reversal of the changed scale of space and time; it shortened instead of lengthened, so that I dressed and got downstairs in about twenty seconds, and the couple of hours I stayed and worked in the study passed literally like a period of ten minutes.”
“That is often true of an overdose,” interjected the doctor, “and you may go a mile in a few minutes, or a few yards in a quarter of an hour. It is quite incomprehensible to those who have never experienced it, and is a curious proof that time and space are merely forms of thought.”
“This time,” Pender went on, talking more and more rapidly in his excitement, “another extraordinary effect came to me, and I experienced a curious changing of the senses, so that I perceived external things through one large main sense-channel instead of through the five divisions known as sight, smell, touch, and so forth. You will, I know, understand me when I tell you that I heard sights and saw sounds. No language can make this comprehensible, of course, and I can only say, for instance, that the striking of the clock I saw as a visible picture in the air before me. I saw the sounds of the tinkling bell. And in precisely the same way I heard the colors in the room, especially the colors of those books in the shelf behind you. Those red bindings I heard in deep sounds, and the yellow covers of the French bindings next to them made a shrill, piercing note not unlike the chattering of starlings. That brown bookcase muttered, and those green curtains opposite kept up a constant sort of rippling sound like the lower notes of a woodhorn. But I only was conscious of these sounds when I looked steadily at the different objects, and thought about them. The room, you understand, was not full of a chorus of notes; but when I concentrated my mind upon a color, I heard, as well as saw, it.”
“That is a known, though rarely-obtained, effect of Cannabis indica,” observed the doctor. “And it provoked laughter again, did it?”
“Only the muttering of the cupboard-bookcase made me laugh. It was so like a great animal trying to get itself noticed, and made me think of a performing bear—which is full of a kind of pathetic humor, you know. But this mingling of the senses produced no confusion in my brain. On the contrary, I was unusually clear-headed and experienced an intensification of consciousness, and felt marvellously alive and keen-minded.
“Moreover, when I took up a pencil in obedience to an impulse to sketch—a talent not normally mine—I found that I could draw nothing but heads, nothing, in fact, but one head—always the same—the head of a dark-skinned woman, with huge and terrible features and a very drooping left eye; and so well drawn, too, that I was amazed, as you may imagine—”
“And the expression of the face—?”
Pender hesitated a moment for words, casting about with his hands in the air and hunching his shoulders. A perceptible shudder ran over him.
“What I can only describe as—blackness,” he replied in a low tone; “the face of a dark and evil soul.”
“You destroyed that, too?” queried the doctor sharply.
“No; I have kept the drawings,” he said, with a laugh, and rose to get them from a drawer in the writing-desk behind him.
“Here is all that remains of the pictures, you see,” he added, pushing a number of loose sheets under the doctor’s eyes; “nothing but a few scrawly lines. That’s all I found the next morning. I had really drawn no heads at all—nothing but those lines and blots and wriggles. The pictures were entirely subjective, and existed only in my mind which constructed them out of a few wild strokes of the pen. Like the altered scale of space and time it was a complete delusion. These all passed, of course, with the passing of the drug’s effects. But the other thing did not pass. I mean, the presence of that Dark Soul remained with me. It is here still. It is real. I don’t know how I can escape from it.”
“It is attached to the house, not to you personally. You must leave the house.”
“Yes. Only I cannot afford to leave the house, for my work is my sole means of support, and—well, you see, since this change I cannot even write. They are horrible, these mirthless tales I now write, with their mockery of laughter, their diabolical suggestion. Horrible! I shall go mad if this continues.”
He screwed his face up and looked about the room as though he expected to see some haunting shape.
“The influence in this house, induced by my experiment, has killed in a flash, in a sudden stroke, the sources of my humor, and, though I still go on writing funny tales—I have a certain name, you know—my inspiration has dried up, and much of what I write I have to burn—yes, doctor, to burn, before anyone sees it.”
“As utterly alien to your own mind and personality?”
“Utterly! As though someone else had written it—”
“Ah!”
“And shocking!” He passed his hand over his eyes a moment and let the breath escape softly through his teeth. “Yet most damnably clever in the consummate way the vile suggestions are insinuated under cover of a kind of high drollery. My stenographer left me, of course—and I’ve been afraid to take another—”
John Silence got up and began to walk about the room leisurely without speaking; he appeared to be examining the pictures on the wall and reading the names of the books lying about. Presently he paused on the hearthrug, with his back to the fire, and turned to look his patient quietly in the eyes. Pender’s face was grey and drawn; the hunted expression dominated it; the long recital had told upon him.
“Thank you, Mr. Pender,” he said, a curious glow showing about his fine, quiet face, “thank you for the sincerity and frankness of your account. But I think now there is nothing further I need ask you.” He indulged in a long scrutiny of the author’s haggard features, drawing purposely the man’s eyes to his own and then meeting them with a look of power and confidence calculated to inspire even the feeblest soul with courage. “And, to begin with,” he added, smiling pleasantly, “let me assure you without delay that you need have no alarm, for you are no more insane or deluded than I myself am—”
Pender heaved a deep sigh and tried to return the smile.
“—and this is simply a case, so far as I can judge at present, of a very singular psychical invasion, and a very sinister one, too, if you perhaps understand what I mean—”
“It’s an odd expression; you used it before, you know,” said the author wearily, yet eagerly listening to every word of the diagnosis, and deeply touched by the intelligent sympathy which did not at once indicate the lunatic asylum.
“Possibly,” returned the other, “and an odd affliction too, you’ll allow, yet one not unknown to the nations of antiquity, nor to those moderns, perhaps, who recognize the freedom of action under certain pathogenic conditions between this world and another.”
“And you think,” asked Pender hastily, “that it is all primarily due to the Cannabis? There is nothing radically amiss with myself—nothing incurable, or—?”
“Due entirely to the overdose,” Dr. Silence replied emphatically, “to the drug’s direct action upon your psychical being. It rendered you ultra-sensitive and made you respond to an increased rate of vibration. And, let me tell you, Mr. Pender, that your experiment might have had results far more dire.
It has brought you into touch with a somewhat singular class of Invisible, but of one, I think, chiefly human in character. You might, however, just as easily have been drawn out of human range altogether, and the results of such a contingency would have been exceedingly terrible. Indeed, you would not now be here to tell the tale. I need not alarm you on that score, but mention it as a warning you will not misunderstand or underrate after what you have been through.
“You look puzzled. You do not quite gather what I am driving at; and it is not to be expected that you should, for you, I suppose, are the nominal Christian with the nominal Christian’s lofty standard of ethics, and his utter ignorance of spiritual possibilities. Beyond a somewhat childish understanding of ‘spiritual wickedness in high places,’ you probably have no conception of what is possible once you break down the slender gulf that is mercifully fixed between you and that Outer World. But my studies and training have taken me far outside these orthodox trips, and I have made experiments that I could scarcely speak to you about in language that would be intelligible to you.”
He paused a moment to note the breathless interest of Pender’s face and manner. Every word he uttered was calculated; he knew exactly the value and effect of the emotions he desired to waken in the heart of the afflicted being before him.
“And from certain knowledge I have gained through various experiences,” he continued calmly, “I can diagnose your case as I said before to be one of psychical invasion.”
“And the nature of this—er—invasion?” stammered the bewildered writer of humorous tales.
“There is no reason why I should not say at once that I do not yet quite know,” replied Dr. Silence. “I may first have to make one or two experiments—”