***
Alexi arrived back at the family estate in late summer. His mother was still grieving—might never stop grieving—and the running of the estate itself had been left to an elderly retainer who did not quite have the vim and vigor required for the task. Alexi took on the responsibility, and found, to his surprise, that he had an aptitude for managing workers, negotiating produce prices, and ensuring the olive and grape harvest was as profitable as it needed to be to ensure the family survived the coming winter without hardship. He did not enjoy the work overmuch, but at least he ensured that the estate continued to be run as a viable business.
He worked himself so hard that when there were two further occurrences of man-like shifting shadows in his bedchamber, he was able to dismiss them as having been brought about by the stress and strain of work. Indeed, the work had made him forget all that he learned on his long journey prior to his father’s death, and in particular he had forgotten the words of the pale stranger he had met on the desert road in the astral.
He was only given cause to remember them towards the end of the year. His mother proved unable to live without the strength of her husband beside her and her health was failing rapidly as November drew into December. The local doctor was called for after she took to her bed, and it only took him a matter of minutes to give a prognosis that Alexi did not want to hear—his beloved mother was unlikely to see out the year.
Alexi spent most of the next month at her bedside, catering to her every whim, mopping her brow and listening to her whispered entreaties to her lost love as she slipped slowly from this plane to the next. And no matter how tightly he held on to her hand, he felt her getting ever further from him, ever nearer to crossing over, until the night came when she was ready.
She was lucid then, for a time, telling him a long tale about how she met his father. It distressed Alexi greatly to find that she drifted in and out of some kind of delirium where she thought that he was, in fact, her husband, Marcos. But she was so near to going that he could not leave her, and stayed at the bedside, holding her hand, trying to prepare himself for what must inevitably come.
The night came on, and candles were lit at the bedside, and still his mother clung to him, still she whispered. Then, all at once, her eyes opened wide and she sat up abruptly, so much so that she almost knocked Alexi away and off the bed entirely. It was only when he followed her gaze that he saw what had caused the reaction. A , dark figure stood in the corner, wreathed in shadow, but the pale—too pale—face more than visible, dark eyes peering from under heavy brows. Alexi even felt that he might recognize the features, if the light had been better. He was about to remonstrate with this newcomer when his mother whispered.
“Marcos?”
That was her last word, for when Alexi turned back to her she had fallen back on her pillow, and had already passed over. He turned quickly again, looking into the corner where the intruder had stood, but there was no one else in the room beside himself and the body.
***
Alexi had little time to think on the death bed apparition, although being Greek he was only too aware of the power of the old tales on the local populace, so did not speak of the matter to anyone, preferring to keep his own council. He was kept busy with both the legal matters to do with the transfer of the estate to his name, and in the arrangements that must be made for the funeral.
Four days later, on a cold morning in early December, he stood at the graveside as head of the family while the staff, and many of the townsfolk from the village in the valley below, paid their respects. After they had all shuffled past, the priest said the words, the grave was filled in, and the crowd slowly dispersed. After a time, only the priest and Alexi were left at the graveside.
“Who was it that stood beside you today, Alexi?” the priest asked. “I did not recognize him.”
“I have been only too alone all day, Father,” Alexi replied. “And I shall be so from this day forward. No one has stood with me, for there is no one else in the family now but I.”
The priest shook his head.
“I was sure it must have been a family member—a cousin perhaps? He was as tall as you are yourself, and he had your eyes.”
Alexi started at that, remembering the death bed apparition, and after the priest was gone he felt quite exposed to be standing alone on the hillside. But although he turned and looked every which way, he saw no one. He was indeed alone with his grief.
***
Or so he had thought.
His grief was so sore that Alexi could not bring himself to leave the house for several weeks. But the servants who brought him his meals also brought stories—tales that he had been seen—standing by his mother’s grave for hours, or wandering the hills raving like a madman, or striding through the olive groves and vineyard, weeping and forlorn. Despite all his protestations to the contrary, his staff were adamant.
“It could be no one else, sir,” the elderly manservant said in a whisper. “Everyone around knows you only too well for there to be any mistake.”
Alexi’s grief was such that he could not bring any concentration to bear to consider the matter. Instead, he once again sought solace in opiates, taking to a bottle of laudanum that had been prescribed for his mother and letting it send him down and away to a place where the material world seemed misted and clouded.
He was looking for surcease and escape, but instead he found a wailing, empty darkness where vast nebulae swirled; shadows and dust and his mortality writ all too clearly in his future.
He woke screaming.
The shadowy figure that stood in the corner of his bedchamber screamed silently in time.
***
Thereafter it was with him at all times, standing at his shoulder or lying alongside him in his bedchamber like a chaste companion. He confined himself to his rooms and had his meals left at the door, for should the staff see what accompanied him, they would surely consider it the work of the devil and take flight.
As hours became days, the thing seemed emboldened and grew more distinct. Alexi did not need the use of a mirror to tell when what he already knew—it was his double in every way; not only did it have his eyes, it shared his wispy beard, his too-large nose and even the furrows on his brow when they both frowned. It seemed that he had a new companion, with little idea from whence it had come, until one night, some ten days after the funeral, he remembered his encounter in the astral, and the words of the pale stranger with the staff.
“I will put you on the path you seek. It will be there, if you only have eyes to see.”
Alexi turned to the companion.
“Are you what I sought? I have no need of you now. You may leave.”
But he got no answer, for although it was alike him in every other manner, it seemed that his new shadow was to remain mute. After many further attempts at conversation proved equally fruitless, Alexi realized that the only answer must lie within—or without—on the astral plane where it seemed the matter had begun.
He brought to mind the training he had received from the Lhasa monks, and set to finding a calm point in himself from where he could launch his journey. At first, and for several days, the presence of the mute companion at his side proved too large a barrier against concentration. But finally Alexi was able to call up the spark, the bright sun in his chest that he sent spinning, first slowly, then ever faster, up through the Chakras before exiting through the top of his head and setting him loose, joyously, flying through the astral.
Any joy that he felt was, however, short lived.
His shadow flew at his side.
***
It seemed that Alexi traversed the astral plane for eons. At all times he was aware of his physical body, lying abed in his room in Greece, but that seemed ever more distant as he flew over lands rich and strange. Wondrous creatures grazed on vast plains under a purple sky. The great civilizations of Mu and Atlantis rose, flourished, then were washed away. Gigantic pyramids grew and fell as man worked and t
ime destroyed. Stars were born, stars died, and the cosmos sang as everything rolled along in the merry dance of the Great Wheel.
And still his shadow flew beside him, and still Alexi was not content.
He brought to mind the desert lands in which he had walked before, blinked, and was there again, traveling the dusty road. He turned, hoping against hope that he might now be alone, but his companion walked beside him, shoulder to shoulder, mute and unyielding. Alexi gave in to his lot, and started along the road, remembering features of the landscape that filled in as he brought them to mind, as if his very thought was an act of creation, here in this place.
Finally, after what seemed like another age, he spotted a figure ahead in the road, wavering and flickering in the haze and only becoming firmer as they approached to within hailing distance.
“Hail traveler, well met,” the tall, pale figure said, and raised his staff as if in greeting.
Alexi stopped as he reached the Master.
“I do not understand what you have given me,” he said, indicating the figure at his side. “He does not speak, and he will tell me nothing.”
“And yet, in not speaking, he tells you everything you need to know,” the pale figure said.
“What is he?” Alexi demanded.
“He is Tulpa—born of ether, made as you have made him, as purposeful and without purpose as you have made him.”
“Do not speak in riddles,” Alexi said.
“I could ask the same of you,” the master replied. “The Tulpa asks the same of you.”
“How do I get rid of it?” Alexi asked.
“You defined its purpose, not I,” the pale one replied. “It is of your world as much as you are, and so it will remain, as long as you will it. As above, so below, as it ever was and will be.”
“I made it?”
“Did you not? You were shown the way—this is where it led. This is where it leads. This is where it will lead.”
Alexi was beginning to see a certain logic in the pale one’s answers, but before he could quiz him further he felt a tug, as if a rope attached to his back was being jerked by someone far off. As if coming from a great distance he heard the sound—a key turning in a lock—someone was attempting to enter his bedroom.
He felt the tug again. Then it was as if he was being reeled in like a fish on a line. He was pulled ever faster up and away and off the desert, through the sky, into the stars then down a hole, too tight, too snug, to pop back into his body like a cork being rammed into a bottle.
***
The Tulpa had returned with him of course, and Alexi only just managed to stop the servant entering the room and seeing what it had become—his twin, and every bit as firm and alive as himself. But Alexi had been given some inkling of its making now, some clue as to its purpose.
That very next day he set to with a vengeance, determined to rid himself of the shadow, and to reclaim what he could of his life.
I made it. I can unmake it.
He believed, if he had understood the pale master in the astral correctly, that it was merely a matter of will—his will. As such he brought all his concentration to bear on his shadow companion. He sat, cross-legged on the floor of his room, shut all else from his mind in the manner the monks had shown him, and drove all his energy through his Chakras. His will sped out of him, poured over and around the Tulpa, as he imagined its demise, imagining it falling apart into nothing but black ash and drifting dust.
But when he opened his eyes again, after what felt like hours of effort, he was quite spent, as weak as an invalid, and the Tulpa was still there, sitting cross-legged opposite him, as solid—if not more so—than ever.
It had a smile on its face now.
***
So began a battle that was to consume Alexi all through the winter. He poured his will and intent into fashioning the removal of the Tulpa, and in its turn it sat there, mute, and defied his attacks. Alexi deployed every piece of arcane knowledge he had ever received, but nothing so much as dented the Tulpa’s smile, which was wide and somehow disheartening now.
Alexi knew that things were not going his way when he started a chant—an ancient exorcism ritual he had seen performed in Persia. He was so lost in his mental concentration that it took him several minutes to realize that there was not just his voice raised in the song—the Tulpa too was chanting, in perfect mimicry.
It seemed his companion was no longer mute.
***
Alexi began to weaken.
He was still able to muster up periods of intense concentration, but more and more he found that he had to take to his bed, utterly exhausted.
He slept, and sometimes when he woke the Tulpa was no longer there, and he began to have hope that he might have succeeded. But on his next awakening it would be back again, sitting cross-legged on the floor or lying beside him in the bed, feeling heavier now even as he seemed to be wasting away with ill health and exhaustion.
Finally a day came in early spring when Alexi heard voices out in the hall beyond his bedroom door. His manservant—a man he had known his whole life—was taking orders from another, a loud, somewhat stern voice that Alexi thought he almost recognized.
When the conversation was over, the bedroom door opened and the Tulpa walked in. It was Alexi now, in all but name, rosy of cheek, full of health, and quite recovered from the mourning of his parents—lord of the estate, master of all he surveyed.
The shadow lay on the bed, trying to speak, but no words would come, all energy drained and diffused until the will was all that remained.
He understood now, as the mist came down and he floated, as light as the air itself, up and away from a shadowy shell he no longer required, up and into the sky, soaring. Someone stood on the balcony of the house and waved, but Alexi did not know it, did not care to know it, for he had everything he had ever wanted, everything he had searched for. He was free, finally free.
Even now, he dances in the stars in his delight.
My good friend Henry is one of the most reticent chaps I have ever met. He belongs to that particular brand of writers who sees his failures as being of far greater import than his successes, no matter how many of the latter he might have written—or indeed have yet to write.
When it came his turn to tell a story at table, at first he wished to plead that he was all dried up—done with the story form completely and determined only to focus on his stage plays from that day forward. But we hectored him to such a length that he finally relented. And very glad I am of it to, for I liked both the story, and his telling of it in his soft colonial accent a great deal.
Here is his tale.
THE SCRIMSHAW SET
Henry James
As soon as John Galloway saw the scrimshaw chess set in the bazaar in Boston, he knew that he had to be its owner; no other man must be allowed the pleasure of having such an object but he. The overly obsequious salesman overseeing his purchase seemed to be in perfect agreement.
“If I may say so, sir has an excellent eye of craftsmanship. See how the king—the great Cachalot—seems to swell up out of a bed of waves ready to engulf anyone brave enough to confront it? Or how the knights are cunningly wrought as dolphins? Just look for a moment at the marvelous attention to detail on the main mast and rigging that are the rooks. And note the exquisite black lacquer work on the opposing ranks. I have been led to believe that each piece was carved from a separate tooth—all of which were taken from the same Sperm whale—one that was harpooned off the coast of Newfoundland in the Grand Banks in ‘54. And if you would like to take a lens, you can further note that . . . ”
Galloway had stopped paying attention to the man, having already decidedly made up his mind that the set would indeed be in his possession before he departed the premises. In the end the salesman finally noticed that the deal was sealed and stopped talking. The set cost Galloway twenty dollars—and that was after he refused to pay the original quote of twenty-five—a large sum, but Galloway was sure tha
t he had purchased something that would be the talk of the town. Even after handing over his money, he was not to be allowed to depart hastily, for the salesman made great show of wrapping each piece in tissue paper, while all the time expounding on the quality and workmanship that was self-evident in the set. Then, of course, Galloway was treated to a discourse on the board on which the pieces were set, and invited to examine more bone, more lacquering, more scrimshaw work. And just as he thought he might finally be able to escape, out came a stout timber chest to contain the board and pieces—and the chest itself, of course, had a history that just had to be told, at great length. Galloway was quite exhausted by it all by the time he bid farewell to premises, and the salesman, and if the man seemed strangely keen to usher Galloway out of the shop, it could be put down to the fact that the sale had finally, completely been made.
As soon as he arrived home to his townhouse on Upper Street, Galloway wasted no time in unpacking the set. He placed it, pride of place, on a small table in his library, set up so that any visitors could not help but take note of it, and such that he could pull the table forward to make use of it himself while sitting in his favorite chair. The chest in which the set was stored held some decorative value of its own, so he left it sitting in the corner by the bay window overlooking the street, where he could bring it to the attention of his guests. He lit a fire, treated himself to a large glass of brandy and one of his better cigars, and settled down to take a closer look at his new purchase.
The salesman had already mentioned some of the pieces—all of the figures apart from the rooks depicted Cetaceans of one sort or another; sperm whales for kings, fin whales for queens, breaching humpbacks for bishops, leaping dolphins for knights and graceful porpoise for pawns. Only the rooks were different, tall, intricate masts of sailing vessels at full sail with delicate, spider-webbed rigging. Every piece, even the black, lacquered opposition, was etched over every visible surface with intricate scrimshaw work. Galloway had been too vain while in the salesroom to admit that his eyesight, at his age, was not up to the task of deciphering the tiny words inscribed there. But now that he was safely home and alone, he had no qualms about taking a large hand-lens from his drawer and studying each chessman in detail. He was rather disappointed to find the same words—some kind of verse or possibly a song—carved in every piece.
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