Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  Stopping her mother’s approach with a sign that I intended she should clearly understand, and which accordingly she did understand, I took immediate steps to plunge the spirit of this little sleep-walking child down again into the subconscious region that had driven her thus far, and wherein lay the potentialities of all her powers, of memory, knowledge and belief. Only the simplest passes were necessary, for she yielded quickly and easily; that first look came back into her eyes; she no longer wavered or hesitated, but drew close against me, with the name of “Philip” upon her lips, and together we moved down the long passage till we reached the door of her horrid room of terror.

  And there, whether it was that Theresa’s following with the candle disturbed the child — for the subconscious tie with the mother is of such unalterable power — or whether anxiety weakened my authority over her fluctuating mental state, I noticed that she again wavered and hesitated, looking up with eyes that saw partly “Uncle George,” partly the “Philip” she remembered.

  “We’ll go in,” I said firmly, “and you shall see that there is nothing to be afraid of.” I opened the door, and the candle from behind threw a triangle of light into the darkness. It fell upon a bare floor, pictureless walls, and just tipped the high white ceiling overhead. I pushed the door still wider open and we went in hand in hand, Aileen shaking like a leaf in the wind.

  How the scene lives in my mind, even as I write it today so many years after it took place: the little child in her nightgown facing me in that empty room of the ancient building, all the passionate emotions of a tragic history in the small young eyes, her mother like a ghost in the passage, afraid to come in, the tossing shadows thrown by the candle and the soft moan of the night wind against the outside walls.

  I made further passes over the small flushed face and pressed my thumbs gently along the temples. “Sleep! “I commanded; “sleep — and remember!” My will poured over her being to control and protect. She passed still deeper into the trance condition in which the somnambulistic lucidity manifests itself and the deeper self gives up its dead. Her eyes grew wider, rounder, charged with memories as they fastened themselves upon my own. The present, which a few minutes before had threatened to claim her consciousness by waking her, faded. She saw me no longer as her familiar Uncle George, but as the faithful friend and lover of her great story, Philip, the man who had come to save her. There she stood in the atmosphere of bygone days, in the very room where she had known great suffering — this room that three centuries ago had led by a corridor into the wing of the house where now the beeches grew upon the lawns.

  She came up close and put her thin bare arms about my neck and stared with peering, searching eyes into mine.

  “Remember what happened here,” I said resolutely. “Remember, and tell me.”

  Her brows contracted slightly as with the effort, and she whispered, glancing over her shoulder towards the farther end where the corridor once began, “It hurts a little, but I — I’m in your arms, Philip dear, and you will get me out, I know—”

  “I hold you safe and you are in no danger, little one,” I answered. “You can remember and speak without it hurting you. Tell me.”

  The suggestion, of course, operated instantly, for her face cleared, and she dropped a great sigh of relief. From time to time I continued the passes that held the trance condition firm.

  Then she spoke in a low, silvery little tone that cut into me like a sword and searched my inmost parts. I seemed to bleed internally. I could have sworn that she spoke of things I knew as though I had lived through them.

  “This was when I last saw you,” she said, “this was the room where you were to fetch me and carry me away into happiness and safety from —— him,” and it was the voice and words of no mere child that said it; “and this was where you did come on that night of snow and wind. Through that window you entered;” she pointed to the deep, embrasured window behind us. “Can’t you hear the storm? How it howls and screams! And the boom of the surf on the beach below.... You left the horses outside, the swift horses that were to carry us to the sea and away from all his cruelties, and then—”

  She hesitated and searched for words or memories; her face darkened with pain and loathing.

  “Tell me the rest,” I ordered, “but forget all your own pain.” And she smiled up at me with an expression of unbelievable tenderness and confidence while I drew the frail form closer.

  ‘You remember, Philip,” she went on, “you know just what it was, and how he and his men seized you the moment you stepped inside, and how you struggled and called for me, and heard me answer—”

  “Far away — outside—” I interrupted quickly, helping her out of some flashing memory in my own deep heart that seemed to burn and leave a scar. “You answered from the lawn!”

  “You thought it was the lawn, but really, you see, it was there — in there,” and she pointed to the side of the room on my right. She shook dreadfully, and her voice dwindled most oddly in volume, as though coming from a distance — almost muffled.

  “In there?” I asked it with a shudder that put ice and fire mingled in my blood.

  “In the wall,” she whispered. “You see, someone had betrayed us, and he knew you were coming. He walled me up alive in there, and only left two little holes for my eyes so that I could see. You heard my voice calling through those holes, but you never knew where I was. And then—”

  Her knees gave way, and I had to hold her. She looked suddenly with torture in her eyes down the length of the room — towards the old wing of the house.

  “You won’t let him come,” she pleaded beseechingly, and in her voice was the agony of death. “I thought I heard him. Isn’t that his footsteps in the corridor?” She listened fearfully, her eyes trying to pierce the wall and see out on to the lawn.

  “No one is coming, dear heart,” I said, with conviction and authority. “Tell it all. Tell me everything.”

  “I saw the whole of it because I could not close my eyes,” she continued. “There was an iron band round my waist fastening me in — an iron belt I never could escape from. The dust got into my mouth — I bit the bricks. My tongue was scraped and bleeding, but before they put in the last stones to smother me I saw them — cut both your hands off so that you could never save me — never let me out.”

  She dashed without warning from my side and flew up to the wall, beating it with her hands and crying aloud —

  “Oh, you poor, poor thing. I know how awful it was. I remember — when I was in you and you wore and carried me, poor, poor body! That thunder of the last brick as they drove it in against the mouth, and the iron clamp that cut into the waist, and the suffocation and hunger and thirst!”

  “What are you talking to in there?” I asked sternly, crushing down the tears.

  “The body I was in — the one he walled up — my body — my own body!”

  She flew back to my side. But even before my cousin had uttered that “mother-cry” that broke in upon the child’s deeper consciousness, disturbing the memories, I had given the command with all the force of my being to “forget” the pain. And only those few who are familiar with the instantaneous changes of emotion that can be produced by suggestion under hypnosis will understand that Aileen came back to me from that moment of “talking to the wall” with laughter on her lips and in her eyes.

  The small white figure with the cascade of dark hair tumbling over the nightgown ran up and jumped into my arms.

  “But I saved you,” I cried, “you were never properly walled-up; I got you out and took you away from him over the sea, and we were happy ever afterwards, like the people in the fairy tales.” I drove the words into her with my utmost force, and inevitably she accepted them as the truth, for she clung to me with love and laughter all over her child’s face of mystery, the horror fading out, the pain swept clean away. With kaleidoscopic suddenness the change came.

  “So they never really cut your poor dead hands off at all,” she said hesitat
ingly.

  “Look! How could they? There they are! And I first showed them to her and then pressed them against her little cheeks, drawing her mouth up to be kissed. “They’re big enough still and strong enough to carry you off to bed and stroke you into so deep a sleep that when you wake in the morning you will have forgotten everything about your dark story, about Philip, Lady Helen, the iron belt, the starvation, your cruel old husband, and all the rest of it. You’ll wake up happy and jolly just like any other child—”

  “If you say so, of course I shall,” she answered, smiling into my eyes.

  And it was just then there came in that touch of abomination that so nearly made my experiment a failure, for it came with a black force that threatened at first to discount all my “suggestion” and make it of no account. My new command that she should forget had apparently not yet fully registered itself in her being; the tract of deeper consciousness that constructed the “Story” had not sunk quite below the threshold. Thus she was still open to any detail of her former suffering that might obtrude itself with sufficient force. And such a detail did obtrude itself. This touch of abomination was calculated with a really superhuman ingenuity.

  “Hark!” she cried — and it was that scream in a whisper that only utter terror can produce— “Hark! I hear his steps! He’s coming! Oh, I told you he was coming! He’s in that passage!” pointing down the room. And she first sprang from my arms as though something burned her, and then almost instantly again flew back to my protection. In that interval of a few seconds she tore into the middle of the room, put her hand to her ear to listen, and then shaded her eyes in the act of peering down through the wall at the far end. She stared at the very place where in olden days the corridor had led into the vanished wing. The window my great-uncle had built into the wall now occupied the exact spot where the opening had been.

  Theresa then for the first time came forward with a rush into the room, dropping the candle-grease over the floor. She clutched me by the arm. The three of us stood there — listening — listening apparently to naught but the sighing of the sea-wind about the walls, Aileen with her eyes buried in my coat. I was standing erect trying in vain to catch the new sound. I remember my cousin’s face of chalk with the fluttering eyes and the candle held aslant.

  Then suddenly she raised her hand and pointed over my shoulder. I thought her jaw would drop from her face. And she and the child both spoke in the same breath the two sharp phrases that brought the climax of the vile adventure upon us in that silent room of night.

  They were like two pistol-shots.

  “My God! There’s a face watching us...!” I heard her voice, all choked and dry.

  And at the same second, Aileen— “Oh, oh! He’s seen us...! He’s here! Look.... He’ll get me... hide your hands, hide your poor hands!”

  And, turning to the place my cousin stared at, I saw sure enough that a face — apparently a living human face — was pressed against the windowpane, framed between two hands as it tried to peer upon us into the semi-obscurity of the room. I saw the swift momentary rolling of the two eyes as the candle glare fell upon them, and caught a glimpse even of the hunched-up shoulders behind, as their owner, standing outside upon the lawn, stooped down a little to see better. And though the apparition instantly withdrew, I recognized it beyond question as the dark and evil countenance of the butler. His breath still stained the window.

  Yet the strange thing was that Aileen, struggling violently to bury herself amid the scanty folds of my coat, could not possibly have seen what we saw, for her face was turned from the window the entire time, and from the way I held her she could never for a single instant have been in a position to know. It all took place behind her back.... A moment later, with her eyes still hidden against me, I was carrying her swiftly in my arms across the hall and up the main staircase to the night nursery.

  My difficulty with her was, of course, while she hovered between the two states of sleep and waking, for once I got her into bed and plunged her deeply again into the trance condition, I was easily able to control her slightest thought or emotion. Within ten minutes she was sleeping peacefully, her little face smoothed of all anxiety or terror, and my imperious command ringing from end to end of her consciousness that when she woke next morning all should be forgotten. She was finally to forget... utterly and completely.

  And, meanwhile, of course, the man, when I went with loathing and anger in my heart to his room in the servants’ quarters, had a perfectly plausible explanation. He was in the act of getting ready for bed, he declared, when the noise had aroused his suspicions, and, as in duty bound, he had made a tour of the house outside, thinking to discover burglars....

  With a month’s wages in his pocket, and a considerable degree of wonder in his soul, probably — for the man was guilty of nothing worse than innocently terrifying a child’s imagination! — he went back to London the following day; and a few hours later I myself was traveling with Aileen and old Kempster over the blue waves of the North Sea, carrying her off, curiously enough, to freedom and happiness in the very way her “imagination” had pictured her escape in the “story” of long ago, when she was Lady Helen, held in bondage by a cruel husband, and I was Philip, her devoted lover.

  Only this time her happiness was lasting and complete. Hypnotic suggestion had wiped from her mind the last vestige of her dreadful memories; her face was wreathed in jolly smiles; her enjoyment of the journey and our week in Antwerp was absolutely unclouded; she played and laughed with all the radiance of an unhaunted childhood, and her imagination was purged and healed.

  And when we got back her mother had again moved her household gods to the original family mansion where she had first lived. Thither it was I took the restored child, and there it was my cousin and I looked up the old family records and verified certain details of the history of De Lome, that wicked and semi-fabulous ancestor whose portrait hung in the dark corner of the stairs. That his life was evil to the brim I had always understood, but neither myself nor Theresa had known — at least had not consciously remembered — that he had married twice, and that his first wife, Lady Helen, had mysteriously disappeared, and Sir Philip Lansing, a neighboring knight, supposed to be her lover, had soon afterwards emigrated to France and left his lands and property to go to ruin.

  But another discovery I made, and kept to myself, had to do with that “room of terror” in the old Norfolk house where, on the plea of necessary renovation, I had the stones removed, and in the very spot where Aileen used to beat her hands against the bricks and “talk to the wall,” the workmen under my own eyes laid bare the skeleton of a woman, fastened to the granite by means of a narrow iron band that encircled the waist — the skeleton of some unfortunate who had been walled-up alive and had come to her dreadful death by the pangs of hunger, thirst and suffocation centuries ago.

  Perspective

  I

  The amount of duty and pleasure combined in Alpine summer chaplaincies of a month each just suited the Rev. Phillip Ambleside. He was still young enough to climb — carefully; and genuine enough to enjoy seeing the crowd of holiday-makers having a good time. As a rule he was on the Entertainment Committee that organized the tennis, dances, and gymkhanas. During the week one would hardly have guessed his calling. On Sundays he appeared a bronzed, lean, vigorous figure in the pulpit of the hot little wooden church, and people liked to see him. His sermons, never over ten minutes, were the same four every year: one for each Sunday of the month; and when he passed on to another month’s duty in the next place he repeated them. The surroundings suggested them obviously: Beauty, Rest, Power, Majesty; and they were more like little confidential talks than sermons. Moreover, incidents from the life of the place — the escape of a tourist, the accident to a guide, and what not, usually came ready to hand to point a moral. One summer, however, there occurred a singular adventure that he has never yet been able to introduce into a sermon. Only in private conversation with souls as full of faith as himself d
oes he ever mention it. And the short recital always begins with a sentence more or less as follows — Talking of the wondrous ways of God, and the little understanding of the children of men, I am always struck by the huge machinery He sometimes adopts to accomplish such delicate and apparently insignificant ends. I remember once when I was doing summer ‘duty’ in a Swiss resort high up among the mountains of the Valais.....”

  And then follows the curious occurrence I was once privileged to hear, and have obtained permission to re-tell, duly disguised.

  In the particular mountain village where he was taking a month’s duty at the time, his church was full every Sunday, so full indeed that twice a week he held afternoon services for those who cared to worship more quietly. And to these little ceremonies, beloved of his own heart, came two persons regularly who attracted his attention in spite of himself. They sat together at the back; shared the same books, although there was no necessity to do so; courted the shadowy corners of the pews: in a word, they came to worship one another, not to worship God.

  But the clergyman took a broad view. Courtships fostered in the holy atmosphere of the sacred building were more likely to be true than those fanned to flame in the feverish surroundings of the dance-room. And true love is ever an offering to God. He knew the couple, too. The man, quiet, earnest, well over forty; the girl, young, dashing, spirited, leader in mischief, hard to believe sincere, flirting with more than one. In spite of the careful concealment with which she covered their proceedings, choosing the deserted afternoon service rather than the glare of the garden or ballroom for their talks, the couple were marked. The difference in their ages, characters, and appearance singled them out, as much as the general knowledge that she was rich, vain, flighty, while he was poor, strenuous, living a life of practical charity in London, that precluded gaiety or pleasure, so called.