"O Francis, Francis, my dear brother," I cried, "what has happened to
you?"
And I listened. There was a sound of choking, and a noise like water
bubbling and regurgitating, but nothing else, and I called louder, but
no answer came.
In spite of what Dr. Haberden had said, I went to him, and with tears
streaming down my cheeks, I told him of all that had happened, and he
listened to me with a face set hard and grim.
"For your father's sake," he said at last, "I will go with you, though I
can do nothing."
We went out together; the streets were dark and silent, and heavy with
heat and a drought of many weeks. I saw the doctor's face white under
the gas-lamps, and when we reached the house his hand was shaking. We
did not hesitate, but went upstairs directly. I held the lamp, and he
called out in a loud, determined voice:--
"Mr. Leicester, do you hear me? I insist on seeing you. Answer me at
once."
There was no answer, but we both heard that choking noise I have
mentioned.
"Mr. Leicester, I am waiting for you. Open the door this instant, or I
shall break it down." And he called a third time in a voice that rang
and echoed from the walls.
"Mr. Leicester! For the last time I order you to open the door."
"Ah!" he said, after a pause of heavy silence, "we are wasting time
here. Will you be so kind as to get me a poker, or something of the
kind?"
I ran into a little room at the back where odd articles were kept, and
found a heavy adze-like tool that I thought might serve the doctor's
purpose.
"Very good," he said, "that will do, I dare say. I give you notice, Mr.
Leicester," he cried loudly at the keyhole, "that I am now about to break
into your room."
Then I heard the wrench of the adze, and the woodwork split and cracked
under it, and with a loud crash the door suddenly burst open; and for a
moment we started back aghast at a fearful screaming cry, no human
voice, but as the roar of a monster, that burst forth inarticulate and
struck at us out of the darkness.
"Hold the lamp," said the doctor, and we went in and glanced quickly
round the room. "There it is," said Dr. Haberden, drawing a quick
breath; "look, in that corner."
I looked, and a pang of horror seized my heart as with a white-hot iron.
There upon the floor was a dark and putrid mass, seething with
corruption and hideous rottenness, neither liquid nor solid, but
melting and changing before our eyes, and bubbling with unctuous oily
bubbles like boiling pitch. And out of the midst of it shone two burning
points like eyes, and I saw a writhing and stirring as of limbs, and
something moved and lifted up that might have been an arm. The doctor
took a step forward, and raised the iron bar and struck at the burning
points, and drove in the weapon, and struck again and again in a fury of
loathing. At last the thing was quiet.
* * * * *
A week or two later, when I had to some extent recovered from the
terrible shock, Dr. Haberden came to see me.
"I have sold my practice," he began, "and to-morrow I am sailing on a
long voyage. I do not know whether I shall ever return to England; in
all probability I shall buy a little land in California, and settle
there for the remainder of my life. I have brought you this packet,
which you may open and read when you feel able to do so. It contains the
report of Dr. Chambers on what I submitted to him. Good-bye, Miss
Leicester, good-bye."
When he was gone, I opened the envelope; I could not wait, and proceeded
to read the papers within. Here is the manuscript; and if you will allow
me, I will read you the astounding story it contains.
"My dear Haberden," the letter began, "I have delayed inexcusably in
answering your questions as to the white substance you sent me. To tell
you the truth, I have hesitated for some time as to what course I should
adopt, for there is a bigotry and an orthodox standard in physical
science as in theology, and I knew that if I told you the truth I
should offend rooted prejudices which I once held dear myself. However,
I have determined to be plain with you, and first I must enter into a
short personal explanation.
"You have known me, Haberden, for many years as a scientific man; you
and I have often talked of our profession together, and discussed the
hopeless gulf that opens before the feet of those who think to attain to
truth by any means whatsoever, except the beaten way of experiment and
observation, in the sphere of material things. I remember the scorn with
which you have spoken to me of men of science who have dabbled a little
in the unseen, and have timidly hinted that perhaps the senses are not,
after all, the eternal, impenetrable bounds of all knowledge, the
everlasting walls beyond which no human being has ever passed. We have
laughed together heartily, and I think justly, at the "occult" follies
of the day, disguised under various names,--the mesmerisms,
spiritualisms, materializations, theosophies, all the rabble rant of
imposture, with their machinery of poor tricks and feeble conjuring, the
true back-parlor magic of shabby London streets. Yet, in spite of what I
have said, I must confess to you that I am no materialist, taking the
word of course in its usual signification. It is now many years since I
have convinced myself, convinced myself a sceptic remember, that the old
iron-bound theory is utterly and entirely false. Perhaps this confession
will not wound you so sharply as it would have done twenty years ago;
for I think you cannot have failed to notice that for some time
hypotheses have been advanced by men of pure science which are nothing
less than transcendental, and I suspect that most modern chemists and
biologists of repute would not hesitate to subscribe the _dictum_ of the
old Schoolman, _Omnia exeunt in mysterium_, which means, I take it, that
every branch of human knowledge if traced up to its source and final
principles vanishes into mystery. I need not trouble you now with a
detailed account of the painful steps which led me to my conclusions; a
few simple experiments suggested a doubt as to my then standpoint, and a
train of thought that rose from circumstances comparatively trifling
brought me far. My old conception of the universe has been swept away,
and I stand in a world that seems as strange and awful to me as the
endless waves of the ocean seen for the first time, shining, from a Peak
in Darien. Now I know that the walls of sense that seemed so
impenetrable, that seemed to loom up above the heavens and to be founded
below the depths, and to shut us in forevermore, are no such everlasting
impassable barriers as we fancied, but thinnest and most airy veils that
melt away before the seeker, and dissolve as the early mist of the
morning about the brooks. I know that you never adopted the extreme
materialistic position: you did not go about trying to prove a universal
negative, for your logical sense withheld you from that crowning
absurdity; yet I am sure that you will find all that I am saying strange
and repellent to your habits of thought. Yet, Haberden, what I tell you
is the truth, nay, to adopt our common language, the sole and scientific
truth, verified by experience; and the universe is verily more splendid
and more awful than we used to dream. The whole universe, my friend, is
a tremendous sacrament; a mystic, ineffable force and energy, veiled by
an outward form of matter; and man, and the sun and the other stars, and
the flower of the grass, and the crystal in the test-tube, are each and
every one as spiritual, as material, and subject to an inner working.
"You will perhaps wonder, Haberden, whence all this tends; but I think a
little thought will make it clear. You will understand that from such a
standpoint the whole view of things is changed, and what we thought
incredible and absurd may be possible enough. In short, we must look at
legend and belief with other eyes, and be prepared to accept tales that
had become mere fables. Indeed, this is no such great demand. After all,
modern science will concede as much, in a hypocritical manner. You must
not, it is true, believe in witchcraft, but you may credit hypnotism;
ghosts are out of date, but there is a good deal to be said for the
theory of telepathy. Give a superstition a Greek name, and believe in
it, should almost be a proverb.
"So much for my personal explanation. You sent me, Haberden, a phial,
stoppered and sealed, containing a small quantity of a flaky white
powder, obtained from a chemist who has been dispensing it to one of
your patients. I am not surprised to hear that this powder refused to
yield any results to your analysis. It is a substance which was known to
a few many hundred years ago, but which I never expected to have
submitted to me from the shop of a modern apothecary. There seems no
reason to doubt the truth of the man's tale; he no doubt got, as he
says, the rather uncommon salt you prescribed from the wholesale
chemist's; and it has probably remained on his shelf for twenty years,
or perhaps longer. Here what we call chance and coincidence begins to
work; during all these years the salt in the bottle was exposed to
certain recurring variations of temperature, variations probably ranging
from 40° to 80°. And, as it happens, such changes, recurring year after
year at irregular intervals, and with varying degrees of intensity and
duration, have constituted a process, and a process so complicated and
so delicate, that I question whether modern scientific apparatus
directed with the utmost precision could produce the same result. The
white powder you sent me is something very different from the drug you
prescribed; it is the powder from which the wine of the Sabbath, the
_Vinum Sabbati_ was prepared. No doubt you have read of the Witches'
Sabbath, and have laughed at the tales which terrified our ancestors;
the black cats, and the broomsticks, and dooms pronounced against some
old woman's cow. Since I have known the truth I have often reflected
that it is on the whole a happy thing that such burlesque as this is
believed, for it serves to conceal much that it is better should not be
known generally. However, if you care to read the appendix to Payne
Knight's monograph, you will find that the true Sabbath was something
very different, though the writer has very nicely refrained from
printing all he knew. The secrets of the true Sabbath were the secrets
of remote times surviving into the Middle Ages, secrets of an evil
science which existed long before Aryan man entered Europe. Men and
women, seduced from their homes on specious pretences, were met by
beings well qualified to assume, as they did assume, the part of devils,
and taken by their guides to some desolate and lonely place, known to
the initiate by long tradition and unknown to all else. Perhaps it was a
cave in some bare and wind-swept hill; perhaps some inmost recess of a
great forest, and there the Sabbath was held. There, in the blackest
hour of night, the _Vinum Sabbati_ was prepared, and this evil graal was
poured forth and offered to the neophytes, and they partook of an
infernal sacrament; _sumentes calicem principis inferorum,_ as an old
author well expresses it. And suddenly, each one that had drunk found
himself attended by a companion, a shape of glamour and unearthly
allurement, beckoning him apart to share in joys more exquisite, more
piercing than the thrill of any dream, to the consummation of the
marriage of the Sabbath. It is hard to write of such things as these,
and chiefly because that shape that allured with loveliness was no
hallucination, but, awful as it is to express, the man himself. By the
power of that Sabbath wine, a few grains of white powder thrown into a
glass of water, the house of life was riven asunder, and the human
trinity dissolved, and the worm which never dies, that which lies
sleeping within us all, was made tangible and an external thing, and
clothed with a garment of flesh. And then in the hour of midnight, the
primal fall was repeated and represented, and the awful thing veiled in
the mythos of the Tree in the Garden was done anew. Such was the
_nuptiæ Sabbati_.
"I prefer to say no more; you, Haberden, know as well as I do that the
most trivial laws of life are not to be broken with impunity; and for so
terrible an act as this, in which the very inmost place of the temple
was broken open and defiled, a terrible vengeance followed. What began
with corruption ended also with corruption."
* * * * *