Flames Part 16

CHAPTER IX

THE FOURTH SITTING

They turned the light off and sat down in silence. Then Julian said:

"Keep your hands well away from mine, Val."

"I will."

They had not been sitting for five minutes before Valentine felt that the atmosphere was becoming impregnated with a certain heaviness of mystery, with a certain steady and unyielding dreariness hanging round them like a cloud. They were once again confronted by a strange reality. Surely they were. Valentine felt it, silently knew it.

In this blackness he seemed at length to step forward and to stand upon the very threshold of an abyss, beyond which, in vague vapours, lay things unknown, creatures unsuspected hitherto. From this darkness anything might come to them, angel or devil, nymph or satyr. So, at least, he dreamed for a while, giving his imagination the rein. Then, in a revulsion of feeling, he jeered at his folly, mutely scolded his nerves for spurring him to such flagrant imbecilities.

"This is all nonsense," he told himself, "all fancy, all a world created, peopled, endowed with life by my desirous mind, which longs for a new sensation. I will not encourage this absurdity. I will be calm, cold, observant, discriminating. This is the same darkness in which every night I sleep, with no sense of being surrounded by forms which I cannot see, pressed upon by the denizens of some other sphere, not that in which I breathe and live."

He deliberately detached himself from his mood of keen expectation, and ardently resolved to antic.i.p.ate nothing. And at this moment the table began to s.h.i.+ft along the carpet, to twist under their hands, to rap, to tremble, and to pulsate, as if breath had entered into it. Like some live animal it stirred beneath their pressing fingers.

"It is beginning," Julian whispered.

"Animal magnetism," Valentine murmured.

"Yes, of course," Julian replied. "Shall I ask--"

"Hus.h.!.+" Valentine interrupted.

Julian was silent.

For some time the table continued its stereotyped performances. Then it tremblingly ceased, and stood, mere dead furniture of every day, wood on which lay the four hands made deliberately limp. A long period of unpopulated silence ensued, and through that silence, very gradually, came again to Valentine a growing sense of anxiety. At first he fought against it as most men, perhaps out of self-respect, fight against the entrance of fear into their souls. Then he yielded to it, and let it crawl over him, as the sea crawls over flat sands. And the sea left no inch of sand uncovered. Every cranny of Valentine's soul was flooded.

There was no part of it which did not shudder with apprehension. And outwards flowed this invisible, unmurmuring tide, devouring his body, till the sweat was upon his face and his strained hands and trembling fingers were cold like ice, and his knees fluttered as the knees of palsied age, and his teeth clicked, row against row, and his hairs stirred, and his head, under its thatch, tingled and burned and throbbed.

Every faculty, too, seemed to stand straight up like a sentinel at its post, staring into dust clouds through which rode an approaching enemy.

Eyes watched, ears listened, brain was hideously alert. The whole body kept itself tense, stiff, wary. For Valentine had a secret conviction at this moment that he was about to be attacked. By what? He was hardly master of himself enough to wonder. His thoughts no longer ran free.

They crept like paralyzed things about his mind, and that despite the unnatural vitality of his brain. It was as if he thought intensely, violently, and yet could not think at all, as a man terrified may stare with wide open eyes and yet perceive nothing, lacking for a moment the faculty of perceiving. So Valentine waited, like some blind man with glaring eyeb.a.l.l.s. And then, pa.s.sing into another stage of sensation, he found himself vehemently and rapidly discussing possibilities of terror, forming mental pictures of all the things, of all the powers, that we cannot see. He embodied, materialized, the wind, the voice of the sea, the angry, hot scent of certain flowers, of the white lily, the tuberose, the hyacinth. He created figures for light, for darkness, for a wail, for a laugh, and set them in array all around him in the blackness. But none of these imagined figures could cause the horror which he felt. He drove away the whole pack of them with a silent cry, a motionless dismissing wave of his hands. But there might be other beings round us, condemned to eternal invisibility lest the sight of them should drive men mad. We cannot see them, he thought. As a rule, we have no sensation of these gaunt neighbours, no suspicion of their approach, of their companions.h.i.+p.

We do not hear their footsteps. We are utterly unconscious of them. Yet may there not be physical or mental paroxysms, during which we become conscious of them, during which we know, beyond all power of doubt, that they are near us, with us? And, in such paroxysms, is it not possible for them to break through the intangible and yet all-powerful barriers that divide them from us, and to touch us, caress us, attack us? Valentine believed that he was immersed in such a paroxysm, and that the barriers were in process of being broken down. He seemed actually to hear the faint cry of an approaching being, the dim uproar of its violent efforts to obtain its sinister will, and gain the power to make itself known to him by some ghastly and malignant deed. He was unutterably afraid.

"The hand again!" Julian suddenly cried. "Valentine, is it yours? Why don't you answer? I say, is it yours?"

"No," Valentine forced himself, with difficulty, to reply.

"For G.o.d's sake then--the light!"

Valentine felt for it, but his hand shook and did not find the b.u.t.ton.

"Make haste, Val. What are you doing? Ah!"

The room sprang into view, and Julian's eyes, with a furious, sick eagerness, sought his hands.

"Valentine," he exclaimed hoa.r.s.ely, "I see nothing, but I've got hold of the hand still. I've got it tight. Put your hand here--that's it--under mine. Now d'you feel the thing?"

Julian's hand, contracted as if grasping another, was in the air, about an inch, or an inch and a half, above the surface of the table. Valentine obediently thrust his hand beneath it. He now shook his head.

"I feel nothing," he said. "There is nothing."

"Then am I mad?" said Julian. "I'm holding flesh and blood. I'll swear that. Yes, I can feel the fingers twitching, the muscles, the bones. I can even trace the veins. What does this mean?"

"I can't tell."

"You look very strange, Valentine. You are certain you see and feel nothing?"

"Nothing whatever," Valentine forced himself to answer calmly.

"We'll see this through," said Julian with a sort of angry determination.

"I won't be frightened by a hand. We'll see it through. Out with the light."

Valentine turned it off. The action was purely mechanical. He had to perform it, whether he would or no.

"Don't speak," he whispered to Julian in the darkness. "Don't speak, whatever happens, till I ask you to speak."

"Why?"

"Don't; don't!"

"All right."

They sat still.

And now the horror that had possessed Valentine so utterly began to fade away, making its exit from his body and soul with infinitesimally small steps. At length it had quite gone, and its place was taken by a numb calm, level and still at first, then curiously definite, almost too definite to be calm at all. Gradually this calm withdrew into exhaustion, an exhaustion such as dwells incessantly with the anemic, with those whose hearts beat feebly and whose vitality flickers low to fading. That was like a delicious arrival of death, of death delicate and serene, ivory white and pure, death desirable, grateful. Valentine indeed believed that he was dying, there in the darkness beside his friend, and, impersonally as it seemed, something of him, his brain perhaps, seemed to be floating high up, as a bird floats over the sea, and listening, and noting all that he did in this crisis. This attentive spirit heard a strange movement of his soul in its bodily prison, heard his soul stir, as if waking out of sleep, heard it s.h.i.+ft, and rise up slowly, noted its pause of hesitation. Then, as the vitality of the body ebbed lower, there grew in the soul an excitement that aspired like a leaping flame. It was as if a madman, prisoned in his narrow cell in a vast asylum, secluded with his company of phantoms, heard the crackling of the fire that devoured his habitation, and was stirred into an ignorant and yet tumultuous pa.s.sion. As the madman, with a childish, increasing uneasiness, awed by the sinuous approach of the unseen fire, might pace to and fro, round and round about his cell, so it seemed to this poised, watching faculty of Valentine that his soul wandered in its confined cell of the body, at first with the cus.h.i.+oned softness of an animal, moving mechanically, driven by an endless and unmeaning restlessness, then with an increasing energy, a fervour, a crescendo of endeavour. What drove his soul? Surely it was struggling with an unseen power. And the steady diminuendo of his bodily forces continued, until he was a corpse in which a fury dwelt. That fury was the soul. He had a strange fancy that he, unlike all the rest of humanity, would die, yet still retain his spirit in its fleshy prison, and that the spirit screamed and fought to be free on its wayward pilgrimage to heaven or h.e.l.l. All its brother and sister spirits had fled, since the beginnings of time, from their bodies at the crisis of dissolution, had gone to punishment or to reward. His soul alone was to meet a different fate, was to be confined in a decaying body, to breathe physical corruption, and to be at home in a crumbling dwelling to which no light, no air, could ever penetrate. And the soul, which knows instinctively its eternal _metier_, rebelled with a fantastic violence. And still, ever, the body died. The pulses ceased from beating. The warm blood was mixed with snow until it grew cold and gradually congealed in the veins. The little door of the heart swung slower and slower upon its hinges, more feebly--more feebly. And then there came a supreme moment. The soul of Valentine, with a frantic vehemence, beat down at last its prison door, and, even as his body died, escaped with a cry through the air.

"Valentine, did you hear that strange cry?"

"Valentine, what was it? I never heard any sound like that before, so thin and small, and yet so horribly clear and piercing; neither like the cry of a child nor of an animal, nor like the wail that could come from any instrument. Valentine, now I see a little flame come from where you are sitting. It's so tiny and faint. Don't you see it? It is floating toward me. Now it is pa.s.sing me. It's beyond. It's going. There, it has vanished. Valentine! Valentine!"

BOOK II--JULIAN

CHAPTER I

THE TRANCE