Four Weird Tales

by Algernon Blackwood

  V

  She was leaning closer to him, her face suddenly glowing and alive.Through the stone figure coursed the fires of a passion that deepenedthe coal-black eyes and communicated a hint of light--of exaltation--toher whole person. It was incredibly moving. To this deep passion was duethe power he had felt. It was her entire life; she lived for it, shewould die for it. Her calmness of manner enhanced its effect. Hence thestrength of those first impressions that had stormed him. The woman hadbelief; however wild and strange, it was sacred to her. The secret ofher influence was--conviction.

  His attitude shifted several points then. The wonder in him passed overinto awe. The things she knew were real. They were not merelyimaginative speculations.

  "I knew I was not wrong in thinking you in sympathy with this line ofthought," she was saying in lower voice, steady with earnestness, and asthough she had read his mind. "You, too, know, though perhaps you hardlyrealise that you know. It lies so deep in you that you only get vaguefeelings of it--intimations of memory. Isn't that the case?"

  Henriot gave assent with his eyes; it was the truth.

  "What we know instinctively," she continued, "is simply what we aretrying to remember. Knowledge is memory." She paused a moment watchinghis face closely. "At least, you are free from that cheap scepticismwhich labels these old beliefs as superstition." It was not even aquestion.

  "I--worship real belief--of any kind," he stammered, for her words andthe close proximity of her atmosphere caused a strange upheaval in hisheart that he could not account for. He faltered in his speech. "It isthe most vital quality in life--rarer than deity." He was using her ownphrases even. "It is creative. It constructs the world anew--"

  "And may reconstruct the old."

  She said it, lifting her face above him a little, so that her eyeslooked down into his own. It grew big and somehow masculine. It was theface of a priest, spiritual power in it. Where, oh where in the echoingPast had he known this woman's soul? He saw her in another setting, aforest of columns dim about her, towering above giant aisles. Again hefelt the Desert had come close. Into this tent-like hall of the hotelcame the sifting of tiny sand. It heaped softly about the very furnitureagainst his feet, blocking the exits of door and window. It shrouded thelittle present. The wind that brought it stirred a veil that had hungfor ages motionless....

  She had been saying many things that he had missed while his mind wentsearching. "There were types of life the Atlantean system knew it mightrevive--life unmanifested to-day in any bodily form," was the sentencehe caught with his return to the actual present.

  "A type of life?" he whispered, looking about him, as though to see whoit was had joined them; "you mean a--soul? Some kind of soul, alien tohumanity, or to--to any forms of living thing in the world to-day?" Whatshe had been saying reached him somehow, it seemed, though he had notheard the words themselves. Still hesitating, he was yet so eager tohear. Already he felt she meant to include him in her purposes, and thatin the end he must go willingly. So strong was her persuasion on hismind.

  And he felt as if he knew vaguely what was coming. Before she answeredhis curious question--prompting it indeed--rose in his mind that strangeidea of the Group-Soul: the theory that big souls cannot expressthemselves in a single individual, but need an entire group for theirfull manifestation.

  He listened intently. The reflection that this sudden intimacy wasunnatural, he rejected, for many conversations were really gatheredinto one. Long watching and preparation on both sides had cleared theway for the ripening of acquaintance into confidence--how long he dimlywondered? But if this conception of the Group-Soul was not new, thesuggestion Lady Statham developed out of it was both new andstartling--and yet always so curiously familiar. Its value for him lay,not in far-fetched evidence that supported it, but in the deep beliefwhich made it a vital asset in an honest inner life.

  "An individual," she said quietly, "one soul expressed completely in asingle person, I mean, is exceedingly rare. Not often is a physicalinstrument found perfect enough to provide it with adequate expression.In the lower ranges of humanity--certainly in animal and insectlife--one soul is shared by many. Behind a tribe of savages stands oneSavage. A flock of birds is a single Bird, scattered through theconsciousness of all. They wheel in mid-air, they migrate, they obey thedeep intelligence called instinct--all as one. The life of any one lionis the life of all--the lion group-soul that manifests itself in theentire genus. An ant-heap is a single Ant; through the bees spreads theconsciousness of a single Bee."

  Henriot knew what she was working up to. In his eagerness to hastendisclosure he interrupted--

  "And there may be types of life that have no corresponding bodilyexpression at all, then?" he asked as though the question were forcedout of him. "They exist as Powers--unmanifested on the earth to-day?"

  "Powers," she answered, watching him closely with unswerving stare,"that need a group to provide their body--their physical expression--ifthey came back."

  "Came back!" he repeated below his breath.

  But she heard him. "They once had expression. Egypt, Atlantis knewthem--spiritual Powers that never visit the world to-day."

  "Bodies," he whispered softly, "actual bodies?"

  "Their sphere of action, you see, would be their body. And it might bephysical outline. So potent a descent of spiritual life would selectmaterials for its body where it could find them. Our conventional notionof a body--what is it? A single outline moving altogether in onedirection. For little human souls, or fragments, this is sufficient. Butfor vaster types of soul an entire host would be required."

  "A church?" he ventured. "Some Body of belief, you surely mean?"

  She bowed her head a moment in assent. She was determined he shouldseize her meaning fully.

  "A wave of spiritual awakening--a descent of spiritual life upon anation," she answered slowly, "forms itself a church, and the body oftrue believers are its sphere of action. They are literally its bodilyexpression. Each individual believer is a corpuscle in that Body. ThePower has provided itself with a vehicle of manifestation. Otherwise wecould not know it. And the more real the belief of each individual, themore perfect the expression of the spiritual life behind them all. AGroup-soul walks the earth. Moreover, a nation naturally devout couldattract a type of soul unknown to a nation that denies all faith. Faithbrings back the gods.... But to-day belief is dead, and Deity has leftthe world."

  She talked on and on, developing this main idea that in days of olderfaiths there were deific types of life upon the earth, evoked by worshipand beneficial to humanity. They had long ago withdrawn because theworship which brought them down had died the death. The world had grownpettier. These vast centres of Spiritual Power found no "Body" in whichthey now could express themselves or manifest.... Her thoughts andphrases poured over him like sand. It was always sand he felt--buryingthe Present and uncovering the Past....

  He tried to steady his mind upon familiar objects, but wherever helooked Sand stared him in the face. Outside these trivial walls theDesert lay listening. It lay waiting too. Vance himself had dropped outof recognition. He belonged to the world of things to-day. But thiswoman and himself stood thousands of years away, beneath the columns ofa Temple in the sands. And the sands were moving. His feet went shiftingwith them ... running down vistas of ageless memory that woke terror bytheir sheer immensity of distance....

  Like a muffled voice that called to him through many veils andwrappings, he heard her describe the stupendous Powers that evocationmight coax down again among the world of men.

  "To what useful end?" he asked at length, amazed at his own temerity,and because he knew instinctively the answer in advance. It rose throughthese layers of coiling memory in his soul.

  "The extension of spiritual knowledge and the widening of life," sheanswered. "The link with the 'unearthly kingdom' wherein this ancientsystem went forever searching, would be re-established. Completerehabilitation might follow. Portions--little portions of thesePowers--expressed
themselves naturally once in certain animal types,instinctive life that did not deny or reject them. The worship of sacredanimals was the relic of a once gigantic system of evocation--not ofmonsters," and she smiled sadly, "but of Powers that were willing andready to descend when worship summoned them."

  Again, beneath his breath, Henriot heard himself murmur--his own voicestartled him as he whispered it: "Actual bodily shape and outline?"

  "Material for bodies is everywhere," she answered, equally low; "dust towhich we all return; sand, if you prefer it, fine, fine sand. Lifemoulds it easily enough, when that life is potent."

  A certain confusion spread slowly through his mind as he heard her. Helit a cigarette and smoked some minutes in silence. Lady Statham and hernephew waited for him to speak. At length, after some inner battling andhesitation, he put the question that he knew they waited for. It wasimpossible to resist any longer.

  "It would be interesting to know the method," he said, "and to revive,perhaps, by experiment--"

  Before he could complete his thought, she took him up:

  "There are some who claim to know it," she said gravely--her eyes amoment masterful. "A clue, thus followed, might lead to the entirereconstruction I spoke of."

  "And the method?" he repeated faintly.

  "Evoke the Power by ceremonial evocation--the ritual is obtainable--andnote the form it assumes. Then establish it. This shape or outline oncesecured, could then be made permanent--a mould for its return atwill--its natural physical expression here on earth."

  "Idol!" he exclaimed.

  "Image," she replied at once. "Life, before we can know it, must have abody. Our souls, in order to manifest here, need a material vehicle."

  "And--to obtain this form or outline?" he began; "to fix it, rather?"

  "Would be required the clever pencil of a fearless looker-on--some onenot engaged in the actual evocation. This form, accurately madepermanent in solid matter, say in stone, would provide a channel alwaysopen. Experiment, properly speaking, might then begin. The cisterns ofPower behind would be accessible."

  "An amazing proposition!" Henriot exclaimed. What surprised him was thathe felt no desire to laugh, and little even to doubt.

  "Yet known to every religion that ever deserved the name," put in Vancelike a voice from a distance. Blackness came somehow with hisinterruption--a touch of darkness. He spoke eagerly.

  To all the talk that followed, and there was much of it, Henriotlistened with but half an ear. This one idea stormed through him with anuproar that killed attention. Judgment was held utterly in abeyance. Hecarried away from it some vague suggestion that this woman had hinted atprevious lives she half remembered, and that every year she came toEgypt, haunting the sands and temples in the effort to recover lostclues. And he recalled afterwards that she said, "This all came to me asa child, just as though it was something half remembered." There was thefurther suggestion that he himself was not unknown to her; that they,too, had met before. But this, compared to the grave certainty of therest, was merest fantasy that did not hold his attention. He answered,hardly knowing what he said. His preoccupation with other thoughts deepdown was so intense, that he was probably barely polite, uttering emptyphrases, with his mind elsewhere. His one desire was to escape and bealone, and it was with genuine relief that he presently excused himselfand went upstairs to bed. The halls, he noticed, were empty; an Arabservant waited to put the lights out. He walked up, for the lift hadlong ceased running.

  And the magic of old Egypt stalked beside him. The studies that hadfascinated his mind in earlier youth returned with the power that hadsubdued his mind in boyhood. The cult of Osiris woke in his blood again;Horus and Nephthys stirred in their long-forgotten centres. Thererevived in him, too long buried, the awful glamour of those liturgalrites and vast body of observances, those spells and formulae ofincantation of the oldest known recension that years ago had capturedhis imagination and belief--the Book of the Dead. Trumpet voices calledto his heart again across the desert of some dim past. There were formsof life--impulses from the Creative Power which is the Universe--otherthan the soul of man. They could be known. A spiritual exaltation,roused by the words and presence of this singular woman, shouted to himas he went.

  Then, as he closed his bedroom door, carefully locking it, there stoodbeside him--Vance. The forgotten figure of Vance came up close--thewatching eyes, the simulated interest, the feigned belief, the detectivemental attitude, these broke through the grandiose panorama, bringingdarkness. Vance, strong personality that hid behind assumed nonentityfor some purpose of his own, intruded with sudden violence, demanding anexplanation of his presence.

  And, with an equal suddenness, explanation offered itself then andthere. It came unsought, its horror of certainty utterly unjustified;and it came in this unexpected fashion:

  Behind the interest and acquiescence of the man ran--fear: but behindthe vivid fear ran another thing that Henriot now perceived was vile.For the first time in his life, Henriot knew it at close quarters,actual, ready to operate. Though familiar enough in daily life to be ofcommon occurrence, Henriot had never realised it as he did now, so closeand terrible. In the same way he had never _realised_ that he woulddie--vanish from the busy world of men and women, forgotten as though hehad never existed, an eddy of wind-blown dust. And in the man namedRichard Vance this thing was close upon blossom. Henriot could not nameit to himself. Even in thought it appalled him.

  * * * * *

  He undressed hurriedly, almost with the child's idea of finding safetybetween the sheets. His mind undressed itself as well. The business ofthe day laid itself automatically aside; the will sank down; desire grewinactive. Henriot was exhausted. But, in that stage towards slumber whenthinking stops, and only fugitive pictures pass across the mind inshadowy dance, his brain ceased shouting its mechanical explanations,and his soul unveiled a peering eye. Great limbs of memory, smothered bythe activities of the Present, stirred their stiffened lengths throughthe sands of long ago--sands this woman had begun to excavate from somefar-off pre-existence they had surely known together. Vagueness andcertainty ran hand in hand. Details were unrecoverable, but the emotionsin which they were embedded moved.

  He turned restlessly in his bed, striving to seize the amazing clues andfollow them. But deliberate effort hid them instantly again; theyretired instantly into the subconsciousness. With the brain of this bodyhe now occupied they had nothing to do. The brain stored memories ofeach life only. This ancient script was graven in his soul.Subconsciousness alone could interpret and reveal. And it was hissubconscious memory that Lady Statham had been so busily excavating.

  Dimly it stirred and moved about the depths within him, never clearlyseen, indefinite, felt as a yearning after unrecoverable knowledge.Against the darker background of Vance's fear and sinister purpose--bothof this present life, and recent--he saw the grandeur of this woman'simpossible dream, and _knew_, beyond argument or reason, that it wastrue. Judgment and will asleep, he left the impossibility aside, andtook the grandeur. The Belief of Lady Statham was not credulity andsuperstition; it was Memory. Still to this day, over the sands of Egypt,hovered immense spiritual potencies, so vast that they could only knowphysical expression in a group--in many. Their sphere of bodilymanifestation must be a host, each individual unit in that host acorpuscle in the whole.

  The wind, rising from the Lybian wastes across the Nile, swept upagainst the exposed side of the hotel, and made his windows rattle--theold, sad winds of Egypt. Henriot got out of bed to fasten the outsideshutters. He stood a moment and watched the moon floating down behindthe Sakkara Pyramids. The Pleiades and Orion's Belt hung brilliantly;the Great Bear was close to the horizon. In the sky above the Desertswung ten thousand stars. No sounds rose from the streets of Helouan.The tide of sand was coming slowly in.

  And a flock of enormous thoughts swooped past him from fields of thisunbelievable, lost memory. The Desert, pale in the moon, was coextensivewith the night, too huge fo
r comfort or understanding, yet charged tothe brim with infinite peace. Behind its majesty of silence lay whispersof a vanished language that once could call with power upon mightyspiritual Agencies. Its skirts were folded now, but, slowly across theleagues of sand, they began to stir and rearrange themselves. He grewsuddenly aware of this enveloping shroud of sand--as the raw material ofbodily expression: Form.

  The sand was in his imagination and his mind. Shaking loosely the foldsof its gigantic skirts, it rose; it moved a little towards him. He sawthe eternal countenance of the Desert watching him--immobile andunchanging behind these shifting veils the winds laid so carefully overit. Egypt, the ancient Egypt, turned in her vast sarcophagus of Desert,wakening from her sleep of ages at the Belief of approachingworshippers.

  Only in this insignificant manner could he express a letter of theterrific language that crowded to seek expression through his soul....He closed the shutters and carefully fastened them. He turned to go backto bed, curiously trembling. Then, as he did so, the whole singulardelusion caught him with a shock that held him motionless. Up rose thestupendous apparition of the entire Desert and stood behind him on thatbalcony. Swift as thought, in silence, the Desert stood on end againsthis very face. It towered across the sky, hiding Orion and the moon; itdipped below the horizons. The whole grey sheet of it rose up before hiseyes and stood. Through its unfolding skirts ran ten thousand eddies ofswirling sand as the creases of its grave-clothes smoothed themselvesout in moonlight. And a bleak, scarred countenance, huge as a planet,gazed down into his own....

  Through his dreamless sleep that night two things lay active and awake... in the subconscious part that knows no slumber. They wereincongruous. One was evil, small and human; the other unearthly andsublime. For the memory of the fear that haunted Vance, and the sinistercause of it, pricked at him all night long. But behind, beyond thiscommon, intelligible emotion, lay the crowding wonder that caught hissoul with glory:

  The Sand was stirring, the Desert was awake. Ready to mate with them inmaterial form, brooded close the Ka of that colossal Entity that onceexpressed itself through the myriad life of ancient Egypt.