curious stain, as of a shadow, on the lower part of the pillow and the
top of the sheet, definite and suggestive, and for a moment I stood
there again throttled by a nameless terror. Then taking my courage in my
hands I went closer and looked at it. Then I touched it; the sheet,
where the stain or shadow was, seemed damp to the hand, so also was the
pillow. And then I remembered; I had thrown some wet clothes on the bed
before dinner. No doubt that was the reason. And fortified by this
extremely simple dissipation of my fear, I sat down and began on my
proofs. But my fear had been this, that the stain had not in that first
moment looked like the mere greyness of water-moistened linen.
From below, at first, came the sound of music, for they were dancing
to-night, but I grew absorbed in my work, and only recorded the fact
that after a time there was no more music. Steps went along the
passages, and I heard the buzz of conversation on landings, and the
closing of doors till by degrees the silence became noticeable. The
loneliness of night had come.
It was after the silence had become lonely that I made the first pause
in my work, and by the watch on my table saw that it was already past
midnight. But I had little more to do; another half-hour would see the
end of the business, but there were certain notes I had to make for
future reference, and my stock of paper was already exhausted. However,
I had bought some in the village that afternoon, and it was in the
bureau downstairs, where I had left it, when I came in and had
subsequently forgotten to bring it upstairs. It would be the work of a
minute only to get it.
The electric light had brightened considerably during the last hour,
owing no doubt to many burners being put out in the hotel, and as I left
the room I saw again the stain on the pillow and sheet of the other bed.
I had really forgotten all about it for the last hour, and its presence
there came as an unwelcome surprise. Then I remembered the explanation
of it, which had struck me before, and for purposes of self-reassurement
I again touched it. It was still damp, but--Had I got chilly with my
work? For it was warm to the hand. Warm, and surely rather sticky. It
did not seem like the touch of the water-damp. And at the same moment I
knew I was not alone in the room. There was something there, something
silent as yet, and as yet invisible. But it was there.
Now for the consolation of persons who are inclined to be fearful, I may
say at once that I am in no way brave, but that terror which, God knows,
was real enough, was yet so interesting, that interest overruled it. I
stood for a moment by the other bed, and, half-consciously only, wiped
the hand that had felt the stain, for the touch of it, though all the
time I told myself that it was but the touch of the melted snow on the
coat I had put there, was unpleasant and unclean. More than that I did
not feel, because in the presence of the unknown and the perhaps awful,
the sense of curiosity, one of the strongest instincts we have, came to
the fore. So, rather eager to get back to my room again, I ran
downstairs to get the packet of paper. There was still a light in the
bureau, and the Sensitive, on night-duty, I suppose, was sitting there
dozing. My entrance did not disturb him, for I had on noiseless felt
slippers, and seeing at once the package I was in search of, I took it,
and left him still unawakened. That was somehow of a fortifying nature.
The Sensitive anyhow could sleep in his hard chair; the occupant of the
unoccupied bed was not calling to him to-night.
I closed my door quietly, as one does at night when the house is silent,
and sat down at once to open my packet of paper and finish my work. It
was wrapped up in an old news-sheet, and struggling with the last of the
string that bound it, certain words caught my eye. Also the date at the
top of the paper caught my eye, a date nearly a year old, or, to be
quite accurate, a date fifty-one weeks old. It was an American paper and
what it recorded was this:
“The body of Mr Silas R. Hume, who committed suicide last week at the
Hôtel Beau Site, Moulin sur Chalons, is to be buried at his house in
Boston, Mass. The inquest held in Switzerland showed that he cut his
throat with a razor, in an attack of delirium tremens induced by drink.
In the cupboard of his room were found three dozen empty bottles of
Scotch whisky....”
So far I had read when without warning the electric light went out, and
I was left in, what seemed for the moment, absolute darkness. And again
I knew I was not alone, and I knew now who it was who was with me in the
room.
Then the absolute paralysis of fear seized me. As if a wind had blown
over my head, I felt the hair of it stir and rise a little. My eyes
also, I suppose, became accustomed to the sudden darkness, for they
could now perceive the shape of the furniture in the room from the light
of the starlit sky outside. They saw more too than the mere furniture.
There was standing by the wash-stand between the two windows a figure,
clothed only in night-garments, and its hands moved among the objects on
the shelf above the basin. Then with two steps it made a sort of dive
for the other bed, which was in shadow. And then the sweat poured on to
my forehead.
Though the other bed stood in shadow I could still see dimly, but
sufficiently, what was there. The shape of a head lay on the pillow, the
shape of an arm lifted its hand to the electric bell that was close by
on the wall, and I fancied I could hear it distantly ringing. Then a
moment later came hurrying feet up the stairs and along the passage
outside, and a quick rapping at my door.
“Monsieur’s whisky, monsieur’s whisky,” said a voice just outside.
“Pardon, monsieur, I brought it as quickly as I could.”
The impotent paralysis of cold terror was still on me. Once I tried to
speak and failed, and still the gentle tapping went on at the door, and
the voice telling some one that his whisky was there. Then at a second
attempt, I heard a voice which was mine saying hoarsely:
“For God’s sake come in; I am alone with it.”
* * * * *
There was the click of a turned door-handle, and as suddenly as it had
gone out a few seconds before, the electric light came back again, and
the room was in full illumination. I saw a face peer round the corner of
the door, but it was at another face I looked, the face of a man sallow
and shrunken, who lay in the other bed, staring at me with glazed eyes.
He lay high in bed, and his throat was cut from ear to ear; and the
lower part of the pillow was soaked in blood, and the sheet streamed
with it.
* * * * *
Then suddenly that hideous vision vanished, and there was only a
sleepy-eyed waiter looking into the room. But below the sleepiness
terror was awake, and his voice shook when he spoke.
“Monsieur rang?” he asked.
No, monsieur had not rung. But monsieur made himself a couch in the
billiard-room.
THE THING IN THE HALL
The following pages are the account given me by Dr Assheton of the Thing
in the Hall. I took notes, as copious as my quickness of hand allowed
me, from his dictation, and subsequently read to him this narrative in
its transcribed and connected form. This was on the day before his
death, which indeed probably occurred within an hour after I had left
him, and, as readers of inquests and such atrocious literature may
remember, I had to give evidence before the coroner’s jury. Only a week
before Dr Assheton had to give similar evidence, but as a medical
expert, with regard to the death of his friend, Louis Fielder, which
occurred in a manner identical with his own. As a specialist, he said he
believed that his friend had committed suicide while of unsound mind,
and the verdict was brought in accordingly. But in the inquest held over
Dr Assheton’s body, though the verdict eventually returned was the same,
there was more room for doubt.
For I was bound to state that only shortly before his death, I read what
follows to him; that he corrected me with extreme precision on a few
points of detail, that he seemed perfectly himself, and that at the end
he used these words:
“I am quite certain as a brain specialist that I am completely sane, and
that these things happened not merely in my imagination, but in the
external world. If I had to give evidence again about poor Louis, I
should be compelled to take a different line. Please put that down at
the end of your account, or at the beginning, if it arranges itself
better so.”
There will be a few words I must add at the end of this story, and a few
words of explanation must precede it. Briefly, they are these.
Francis Assheton and Louis Fielder were up at Cambridge together, and
there formed the friendship that lasted nearly till their death. In
general attributes no two men could have been less alike, for while Dr
Assheton had become at the age of thirty-five the first and final
authority on his subject, which was the functions and diseases of the
brain, Louis Fielder at the same age was still on the threshold of
achievement. Assheton, apparently without any brilliance at all, had by
careful and incessant work arrived at the top of his profession, while
Fielder, brilliant at school, brilliant at college and brilliant ever
afterwards, had never done anything. He was too eager, so it seemed to
his friends, to set about the dreary work of patient investigation and
logical deductions; he was for ever guessing and prying, and striking
out luminous ideas, which he left burning, so to speak, to illumine the
work of others. But at bottom, the two men had this compelling interest
in common, namely, an insatiable curiosity after the unknown, perhaps
the most potent bond yet devised between the solitary units that make up
the race of man. Both--till the end--were absolutely fearless, and Dr
Assheton would sit by the bedside of the man stricken with bubonic
plague to note the gradual surge of the tide of disease to the reasoning
faculty with the same absorption as Fielder would study X-rays one week,
flying machines the next, and spiritualism the third. The rest of the
story, I think, explains itself--or does not quite do so. This, anyhow,
is what I read to Dr Assheton, being the connected narrative of what he
had himself told me. It is he, of course, who speaks.
* * * * *
“After I returned from Paris, where I had studied under Charcot, I set
up practice at home. The general doctrine of hypnotism, suggestion, and
cure by such means had been accepted even in London by this time, and,
owing to a few papers I had written on the subject, together with my
foreign diplomas, I found that I was a busy man almost as soon as I had
arrived in town. Louis Fielder had his ideas about how I should make my
début (for he had ideas on every subject, and all of them original), and
entreated me to come and live not in the stronghold of doctors,
‘Chloroform Square,’ as he called it, but down in Chelsea, where there
was a house vacant next his own.
‘Who cares where a doctor lives,’ he said, ‘so long as he cures people?
Besides you don’t believe in old methods; why believe in old localities?
Oh, there is an atmosphere of painless death in Chloroform Square! Come
and make people live instead! And on most evenings I shall have so much
to tell you; I can’t “drop in” across half London.’
Now if you have been abroad for five years, it is a great deal to know
that you have any intimate friend at all still left in the metropolis,
and, as Louis said, to have that intimate friend next door, is an
excellent reason for going next door. Above all, I remembered from
Cambridge days, what Louis’ ‘dropping in’ meant. Towards bed-time, when
work was over, there would come a rapid step on the landing, and for an
hour, or two hours, he would gush with ideas. He simply diffused life,
which is ideas, wherever he went. He fed one’s brain, which is the one
thing which matters. Most people who are ill, are ill because their
brain is starving, and the body rebels, and gets lumbago or cancer. That
is the chief doctrine of my work such as it has been. All bodily disease
springs from the brain. It is merely the brain that has to be fed and
rested and exercised properly to make the body absolutely healthy, and
immune from all disease. But when the brain is affected, it is as useful
to pour medicines down the sink, as make your patient swallow them,
unless--and this is a paramount limitation--unless he believes in them.
I said something of the kind to Louis one night, when, at the end of a
busy day, I had dined with him. We were sitting over coffee in the hall,
or so it is called, where he takes his meals. Outside, his house is just
like mine, and ten thousand other small houses in London, but on
entering, instead of finding a narrow passage with a door on one side,
leading into the dining-room, which again communicates with a small back
room called ‘the study,’ he has had the sense to eliminate all
unnecessary walls, and consequently the whole ground floor of his house
is one room, with stairs leading up to the first floor. Study,
dining-room and passage have been knocked into one; you enter a big room
from the front door. The only drawback is that the postman makes loud
noises close to you, as you dine, and just as I made these commonplace
observations to him about the effect of the brain on the body and the
senses, there came a loud rap, somewhere close to me, that was
startling.
‘You ought to muffle your knocker,’ I said, ‘anyhow during the time of
meals.’
Louis leaned back and laughed.
‘There isn’t a knocker,’ he said. ‘You were startled a week ago, and
said the same thing. So I took the knocker off. The letters slide in
now. But you heard a knock, did you?’
‘Didn’t you?’ said I.
‘Why, certainly. But it wasn’t the postman. It was the Thing. I don’t
know what it is. That makes it so interesting.’
Now if there is one thing that the hypnotist, the believer in
unexplained influences, detests and despises, it is the whole
root-notion of spiritualism. Drugs are not more opposed to his belief
than the exploded, discredited idea of the influence of spirits on our
lives. And both are discredited for the same reason; it is easy to
understand how brain can act on brain, just as it is easy to understand
how body can act on body, so that there is no more difficulty in the
reception of the idea that the strong mind can direct the weak one, than
there is in the fact of a wrestler of greater strength overcoming one of
less. But that spirits should rap at furniture and divert the course of
events is as absurd as administering phosphorus to strengthen the brain.
That was what I thought then.
However, I felt sure it was the postman, and instantly rose and went to
the door. There were no letters in the box, and I opened the door. The
postman was just ascending the steps. He gave the letters into my hand.
Louis was sipping his coffee when I came back to the table.
‘Have you ever tried table-turning?’ he asked. ‘It’s rather odd.’
‘No, and I have not tried violet-leaves as a cure for cancer,’ I said.
‘Oh, try everything,’ he said. ‘I know that that is your plan, just as
it is mine. All these years that you have been away, you have tried all
sorts of things, first with no faith, then with just a little faith, and
finally with mountain-moving faith. Why, you didn’t believe in hypnotism
at all when you went to Paris.’
He rang the bell as he spoke, and his servant came up and cleared the
table. While this was being done we strolled about the room, looking at
prints, with applause for a Bartolozzi that Louis had bought in the New
Cut, and dead silence over a ‘Perdita’ which he had acquired at
considerable cost. Then he sat down again at the table on which we had
dined. It was round, and mahogany-heavy, with a central foot divided
into claws.
‘Try its weight,’ he said; ‘see if you can push it about.’
So I held the edge of it in my hands, and found that I could just move
it. But that was all; it required the exercise of a good deal of
strength to stir it.
‘Now put your hands on the top of it,’ he said, ‘and see what you can
do.’
I could not do anything, my fingers merely slipped about on it. But I
protested at the idea of spending the evening thus.
‘I would much sooner play chess or noughts and crosses with you,’ I
said, ‘or even talk about politics, than turn tables. You won’t mean to
push, nor shall I, but we shall push without meaning to.’
Louis nodded.
‘Just a minute,’ he said, ‘let us both put our fingers only on the top
of the table and push for all we are worth, from right to left.’
We pushed. At least I pushed, and I observed his finger-nails. From pink
they grew to white, because of the pressure he exercised. So I must
assume that he pushed too. Once, as we tried this, the table creaked.
But it did not move.
Then there came a quick peremptory rap, not I thought on the front door,
but somewhere in the room.
‘It’s the Thing,’ said he.
To-day, as I speak to you, I suppose it was. But on that evening it
seemed only like a challenge. I wanted to demonstrate its absurdity.
‘For five years, on and off, I’ve been studying rank spiritualism,’ he
said. ‘I haven’t told you before, because I wanted to lay before you
certain phenomena, which I can’t explain, but which now seem to me to be
at my command. You shall see and hear, and then decide if you will help
me.’
‘And in order to let me see better, you are proposing to put out the
lights,’ I said.
‘Yes; you will see why.’
‘I am here as a sceptic,’ said I.
‘Scep away,’ said he.
Next moment the room was in darkness, except for a very faint glow of
firelight. The window-curtains were thick, and no street-illumination
penetrated them, and the familiar, cheerful sounds of pedestrians and
wheeled traffic came in muffled. I was at the side of the table towards
the door; Louis was opposite me, for I could see his figure dimly
silhouetted against the glow from the smouldering fire.
‘Put your hands on the table,’ he said, ‘quite lightly, and--how shall I
say it--expect.’
Still protesting in spirit, I expected. I could hear his breathing
rather quickened, and it seemed to me odd that anybody could find
excitement in standing in the dark over a large mahogany table,
expecting. Then--through my finger-tips, laid lightly on the table,
there began to come a faint vibration, like nothing so much as the
vibration through the handle of a kettle when water is beginning to boil
inside it. This got gradually more pronounced and violent till it was
like the throbbing of a motor-car. It seemed to give off a low humming
note. Then quite suddenly the table seemed to slip from under my fingers
and began very slowly to revolve.
‘Keep your hands on it and move with it,’ said Louis, and as he spoke I
saw his silhouette pass away from in front of the fire, moving as the
table moved.
For some moments there was silence, and we continued, rather absurdly,
to circle round keeping step, so to speak, with the table. Then Louis
spoke again, and his voice was trembling with excitement.
‘Are you there?’ he said.
There was no reply, of course, and he asked it again. This time there
came a rap like that which I had thought during dinner to be the
postman. But whether it was that the room was dark, or that despite
myself I felt rather excited too, it seemed to me now to be far louder
than before. Also it appeared to come neither from here nor there, but
to be diffused through the room.
Then the curious revolving of the table ceased, but the intense, violent
throbbing continued. My eyes were fixed on it, though owing to the
darkness I could see nothing, when quite suddenly a little speck of
light moved across it, so that for an instant I saw my own hands. Then
came another and another, like the spark of matches struck in the dark,
or like fire-flies crossing the dusk in southern gardens. Then came
another knock of shattering loudness, and the throbbing of the table
ceased, and the lights vanished.
* * * * *
Such were the phenomena at the first séance at which I was present, but
Fielder, it must be remembered, had been studying, ‘expecting,’ he
called it, for some years. To adopt spiritualistic language (which at
that time I was very far from doing), he was the medium, I merely the
observer, and all the phenomena I had seen that night were habitually
produced or witnessed by him. I make this limitation since he told me
that certain of them now appeared to be outside his own control
altogether. The knockings would come when his mind, as far as he knew,
was entirely occupied in other matters, and sometimes he had even been
awakened out of sleep by them. The lights were also independent of his
volition.
Now my theory at the time was that all these things were purely
subjective in him, and that what he expressed by saying that they were
out of his control, meant that they had become fixed and rooted in the
unconscious self, of which we know so little, but which, more and more,
we see to play so enormous a part in the life of a man. In fact, it is
not too much to say that the vast majority of our deeds spring,
apparently without volition, from this unconscious self. All hearing is
the unconscious exercise of the aural nerve, all seeing of the optic,
all walking, all ordinary movement seem to be done without the exercise
of will on our part. Nay more, should we take to some new form of
progression, skating, for instance, the beginner will learn with falls
and difficulty the outside edge, but within a few hours of his having
learned his balance on it, he will give no more thought to what he
learned so short a time ago as an acrobatic feat, than he gives to the
placing of one foot before the other.
But to the brain specialist all this was intensely interesting, and to
the student of hypnotism, as I was, even more so, for (such was the
conclusion I came to after this first séance), the fact that I saw and
heard just what Louis saw and heard was an exhibition of
thought-transference which in all my experience in the Charcot-schools I
had never seen surpassed, if indeed rivalled. I knew that I was myself
extremely sensitive to suggestion, and my part in it this evening I
believed to be purely that of the receiver of suggestions so vivid that
I visualised and heard these phenomena which existed only in the brain
of my friend.
We talked over what had occurred upstairs. His view was that the Thing
was trying to communicate with us. According to him it was the Thing
that moved the table and tapped, and made us see streaks of light.
‘Yes, but the Thing,’ I interrupted, ‘what do you mean? Is it a
great-uncle--oh, I have seen so many relatives appear at séances, and
heard so many of their dreadful platitudes--or what is it? A spirit?
Whose spirit?’
Louis was sitting opposite to me, and on the little table before us
there was an electric light. Looking at him I saw the pupil of his eye
suddenly dilate. To the medical man--provided that some violent change
in the light is not the cause of the dilation--that meant only one
thing, terror. But it quickly resumed its normal proportion again.
Then he got up, and stood in front of the fire.
‘No, I don’t think it is great-uncle anybody,’ he said, ‘I don’t know,
as I told you, what the Thing is. But if you ask me what my conjecture
is, it is that the Thing is an Elemental.’
‘And pray explain further. What is an Elemental?’
Once again his eye dilated.
‘It will take two minutes,’ he said. ‘But, listen. There are good things
in this world, are there not, and bad things? Cancer, I take it is bad,
and--and fresh air is good; honesty is good, lying is bad. Impulses of
some sort direct both sides, and some power suggests the impulses. Well,
I went into this spiritualistic business impartially. I learned to
“expect,” to throw open the door into the soul, and I said, “Anyone may
come in.” And I think Something has applied for admission, the Thing
that tapped and turned the table and struck matches, as you saw, across
it. Now the control of the evil principle in the world is in the hands
of a power which entrusts its errands to the things which I call
Elementals. Oh, they have been seen; I doubt not that they will be seen
again. I did not, and do not ask good spirits to come in. I don’t want
“The Church’s one foundation” played on a musical box. Nor do I _want_
an Elemental. I only threw open the door. I believe the Thing has come
into my house, and is establishing communication with me. Oh, I want to
go the whole hog. What is it? In the name of Satan, if necessary, what
is it? I just want to know.’
* * * * *