It was a week later when John Silence called to see the author in his
new house, and found him well on the way to recovery and already busy
again with his writing. The haunted look had left his eyes, and he
seemed cheerful and confident.
“Humour restored?” laughed the doctor, as soon as they were comfortably
settled in the room overlooking the Park.
“I’ve had no trouble since I left that dreadful place,” returned Pender
gratefully; “and thanks to you----”
The doctor stopped him with a gesture.
“Never mind that,” he said, “we’ll discuss your new plans afterwards,
and my scheme for relieving you of the house and helping you settle
elsewhere. Of course it must be pulled down, for it’s not fit for any
sensitive person to live in, and any other tenant might be afflicted
in the same way you were. Although, personally, I think the evil has
exhausted itself by now.”
He told the astonished author something of his experiences in it with
the animals.
“I don’t pretend to understand,” Pender said, when the account was
finished, “but I and my wife are intensely relieved to be free of it
all. Only I must say I should like to know something of the former
history of the house. When we took it six months ago I heard no word
against it.”
Dr. Silence drew a typewritten paper from his pocket.
“I can satisfy your curiosity to some extent,” he said, running
his eye over the sheets, and then replacing them in his coat; “for
by my secretary’s investigations I have been able to check certain
information obtained in the hypnotic trance by a ‘sensitive’ who helps
me in such cases. The former occupant who haunted you appears to have
been a woman of singularly atrocious life and character who finally
suffered death by hanging, after a series of crimes that appalled the
whole of England and only came to light by the merest chance. She came
to her end in the year 1798, for it was not this particular house she
lived in, but a much larger one that then stood upon the site it now
occupies, and was then, of course, not in London, but in the country.
She was a person of intellect, possessed of a powerful, trained will,
and of consummate audacity, and I am convinced availed herself of the
resources of the lower magic to attain her ends. This goes far to
explain the virulence of the attack upon yourself, and why she is still
able to carry on after death the evil practices that formed her main
purpose during life.”
“You think that after death a soul can still consciously direct----”
gasped the author.
“I think, as I told you before, that the forces of a powerful
personality may still persist after death in the line of their original
momentum,” replied the doctor; “and that strong thoughts and purposes
can still react upon suitably prepared brains long after their
originators have passed away.
“If you knew anything of magic,” he pursued, “you would know that
thought is dynamic, and that it may call into existence forms and
pictures that may well exist for hundreds of years. For, not far
removed from the region of our human life, is another region where
floats the waste and drift of all the centuries, the limbo of the
shells of the dead; a densely populated region crammed with horror and
abomination of all descriptions, and sometimes galvanised into active
life again by the will of a trained manipulator, a mind versed in the
practices of lower magic. That this woman understood its vile commerce,
I am persuaded, and the forces she set going during her life have
simply been accumulating ever since, and would have continued to do so
had they not been drawn down upon yourself, and afterwards discharged
and satisfied through me.
“Anything might have brought down the attack, for, besides drugs,
there are certain violent emotions, certain moods of the soul, certain
spiritual fevers, if I may so call them, which directly open the inner
being to a cognisance of this astral region I have mentioned. In your
case it happened to be a peculiarly potent drug that did it.
“But now, tell me,” he added, after a pause, handing to the perplexed
author a pencil-drawing he had made of the dark countenance that had
appeared to him during the night on Putney Hill--“tell me if you
recognise this face?”
Pender looked at the drawing closely, greatly astonished. He shuddered
a little as he looked.
“Undoubtedly,” he said, “it is the face I kept trying to draw--dark,
with the great mouth and jaw, and the drooping eye. That is the woman.”
Dr. Silence then produced from his pocket-book an old-fashioned woodcut
of the same person which his secretary had unearthed from the records
of the Newgate Calendar. The woodcut and the pencil drawing were two
different aspects of the same dreadful visage. The men compared them
for some moments in silence.
“It makes me thank God for the limitations of our senses,” said
Pender quietly, with a sigh; “continuous clairvoyance must be a sore
affliction.”
“It is indeed,” returned John Silence significantly, “and if all
the people nowadays who claim to be clairvoyant were really so, the
statistics of suicide and lunacy would be considerably higher than they
are. It is little wonder,” he added, “that your sense of humour was
clouded, with the mind-forces of that dead monster trying to use your
brain for their dissemination. You have had an interesting adventure,
Mr. Felix Pender, and, let me add, a fortunate escape.”
The author was about to renew his thanks when there came a sound of
scratching at the door, and the doctor sprang up quickly.
“It’s time for me to go. I left my dog on the step, but I suppose----”
Before he had time to open the door, it had yielded to the pressure
behind it and flew wide open to admit a great yellow-haired collie.
The dog, wagging his tail and contorting his whole body with delight,
tore across the floor and tried to leap up upon his owner’s breast. And
there was laughter and happiness in the old eyes; for they were clear
again as the day.