Some ten or twelve years ago, a man with whom I have since quarrelled for
sound reasons, a very singular man who had given his life to studies other
men despised, asked me and an acquaintance, who is now dead, to witness a
magical work. He lived a little way from London, and on the way my
acquaintance told me that he did not believe in magic, but that a novel of
Bulwer Lytton's had taken such a hold upon his imagination that he was
going to give much of his time and all his thought to magic. He longed to
believe in it, and had studied, though not learnedly, geomancy, astrology,
chiromancy, and much cabalistic symbolism, and yet doubted if the soul
outlived the body. He awaited the magical work full of scepticism. He
expected nothing more than an air of romance, an illusion as of the stage,
that might capture the consenting imagination for an hour. The evoker of
spirits and his beautiful wife received us in a little house, on the edge
of some kind of garden or park belonging to an eccentric rich man, whose
curiosities he arranged and dusted, and he made his evocation in a long
room that had a raised place on the floor at one end, a kind of dais, but
was furnished meagrely and cheaply. I sat with my acquaintance in the
middle of the room, and the evoker of spirits on the dais, and his wife
between us and him. He held a wooden mace in his hand, and turning to a
tablet of many-coloured squares, with a number on each of the squares,
that stood near him on a chair, he repeated a form of words. Almost at
once my imagination began to move of itself and to bring before me vivid
images that, though never too vivid to be imagination, as I had always
understood it, had yet a motion of their own, a life I could not change or
shape. I remember seeing a number of white figures, and wondering whether
their mitred heads had been suggested by the mitred head of the mace, and
then, of a sudden, the image of my acquaintance in the midst of them. I
told what I had seen, and the evoker of spirits cried in a deep voice,
'Let him be blotted out,' and as he said it the image of my acquaintance
vanished, and the evoker of spirits or his wife saw a man dressed in black
with a curious square cap standing among the white figures. It was my
acquaintance, the seeress said, as he had been in a past life, the life
that had moulded his present, and that life would now unfold before us. I
too seemed to see the man with a strange vividness. The story unfolded
itself chiefly before the mind's eye of the seeress, but sometimes I saw
what she described before I heard her description. She thought the man in
black was perhaps a Fleming of the sixteenth century, and I could see him
pass along narrow streets till he came to a narrow door with some rusty
ironwork above it. He went in, and wishing to find out how far we had one
vision among us, I kept silent when I saw a dead body lying upon the table
within the door. The seeress described him going down a long hall and up
into what she called a pulpit, and beginning to speak. She said, 'He is a
clergyman, I can hear his words. They sound like Low Dutch.' Then after a
little silence, 'No, I am wrong. I can see the listeners; he is a doctor
lecturing among his pupils.' I said, 'Do you see anything near the door?'
and she said, 'Yes, I see a subject for dissection.' Then we saw him go
out again into the narrow streets, I following the story of the seeress,
sometimes merely following her words, but sometimes seeing for myself. My
acquaintance saw nothing; I think he was forbidden to see, it being his
own life, and I think could not in any case. His imagination had no will
of its own. Presently the man in black went into a house with two gables
facing the road, and up some stairs into a room where a hump-backed woman
gave him a key; and then along a corridor, and down some stairs into a
large cellar full of retorts and strange vessels of all kinds. Here he
seemed to stay a long while, and one saw him eating bread that he took
down from a shelf. The evoker of spirits and the seeress began to
speculate about the man's character and habits, and decided, from a
visionary impression, that his mind was absorbed in naturalism, but that
his imagination had been excited by stories of the marvels wrought by
magic in past times, and that he was trying to copy them by naturalistic
means. Presently one of them saw him go to a vessel that stood over a slow
fire, and take out of the vessel a thing wrapped up in numberless cloths,
which he partly unwrapped, showing at length what looked like the image of
a man made by somebody who could not model. The evoker of spirits said
that the man in black was trying to make flesh by chemical means, and
though he had not succeeded, his brooding had drawn so many evil spirits
about him, that the image was partly alive. He could see it moving a
little where it lay upon a table. At that moment I heard something like
little squeals, but kept silent, as when I saw the dead body. In a moment
more the seeress said, 'I hear little squeals.' Then the evoker of spirits
heard them, but said, 'They are not squeals; he is pouring a red liquid
out of a retort through a slit in the cloth; the slit is over the mouth of
the image and the liquid is gurgling in rather a curious way.' Weeks
seemed to pass by hurriedly, and somebody saw the man still busy in his
cellar. Then more weeks seemed to pass, and now we saw him lying sick in a
room up-stairs, and a man in a conical cap standing beside him. We could
see the image too. It was in the cellar, but now it could move feebly
about the floor. I saw fainter images of the image passing continually
from where it crawled to the man in his bed, and I asked the evoker of
spirits what they were. He said, 'They are the images of his terror.'
Presently the man in the conical cap began to speak, but who heard him I
cannot remember. He made the sick man get out of bed and walk, leaning
upon him, and in much terror till they came to the cellar. There the man
in the conical cap made some symbol over the image, which fell back as if
asleep, and putting a knife into the other's hand he said, 'I have taken
from it the magical life, but you must take from it the life you gave.'
Somebody saw the sick man stoop and sever the head of the image from its
body, and then fall as if he had given himself a mortal wound, for he had
filled it with his own life. And then the vision changed and fluttered,
and he was lying sick again in the room up-stairs. He seemed to lie there
a long time with the man in the conical cap watching beside him, and then,
I cannot remember how, the evoker of spirits discovered that though he
would in part recover, he would never be well, and that the story had got
abroad in the town and shattered his good name. His pupils had left him
and men avoided him. He was accursed. He was a magician.
The story was finished, and I looked at my acquaintance. He was white and
awestruck. He said, as nearly as I can remember, 'All my life I have seen
myself in dreams making a man by some means like that. When I was a child
I was always thinking out contrivances for galvanizing a corpse into
life.' Presently he said, 'Perhaps my bad health in this life comes from
that experiment.' I asked if he had read _Frankenstein_, and he answered
that he had. He was the only one of us who had, and he had taken no part
in the vision.