E. F. Benson: Complete Short Stories Collection (70+ Classic, Ghost, Spook, Supernatural, Mystery & Haunting Tales). Эдвард Бенсон
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 fingertips, 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 fireflies 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 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 seances, 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.”
** * * *
What followed I thought then might easily be an invention of the imagination, but what I believed to have happened was this. A piano with music on it was standing at the far end of the room by the door, and a sudden draught entered the room, so strong that the leaves turned. Next the draught troubled a vase of daffodils, and the yellow heads nodded. Then it reached the candles that stood close to us, and they fluttered burning blue and low. Then it reached me, and the draught was cold and stirred my hair. Then it eddied, so to speak, and went across to Louis, and his hair also moved, as I could see. Then it went downwards towards the fire, and flames suddenly started up in its path, blown upwards. The rug by the fireplace flapped also.
“Funny, wasn’t it?” he asked.
“And has the Elemental gone up the chimney?” said I.
“Oh, no,” said he, “the Thing only passed us.”
Then suddenly he pointed at the wall just behind my chair, and his voice cracked as he spoke.
“Look, what’s that?” he said. “There on the wall.”
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