Fighters of Fear

by Mike Ashley

  Jones had no more to tell. Poor Mr. Jennings was very gentle and very kind. All his people were fond of him. I could see that the servant was very much moved.

  So, dejected and agitated, I passed from that terrible house and its dark canopy of elms, and I hope I shall never see it more. While I write to you I feel like a man who has but half waked from a frightful and monotonous dream. My memory rejects the picture with incredulity and horror. Yet I know it is true. It is the story of the process of a poison, a poison which excites the reciprocal action of spirit and nerve, and paralyses the tissue that separates those cognate functions of the senses, the external and the interior. Thus we find strange bed-fellows, and the mortal and immortal prematurely make acquaintance.

  CONCLUSION: A WORD FOR THOSE WHO SUFFER

  MY DEAR VAN L——, YOU HAVE SUFFERED FROM AN AFFECTION similar to that which I have just described. You twice complained of a return of it.

  Who, under God, cured you? Your humble servant, Martin Hesselius. Let me rather adopt the more emphasised piety of a certain good old French surgeon of three hundred years ago: “I treated, and God cured you.”

  Come, my friend, you are not to be hippish. Let me tell you a fact.

  I have met with, and treated, as my book shows, fifty-seven cases of this kind of vision, which I term indifferently “sublimated,” “precocious,” and “interior.”

  There is another class of affections which are truly termed—though commonly confounded with those which I describe—spectral illusions. These latter I look upon as being no less simply curable than a cold in the head or a trifling dyspepsia.

  It is those which rank in the first category that test our promptitude of thought. Fifty-seven such cases have I encountered, neither more nor less. And in how many of these have I failed? In no one single instance.

  There is no one affliction of mortality more easily and certainly reducible, with a little patience and a rational confidence in the physician. With these simple conditions, I look upon the cure as absolutely certain.

  You are to remember that I had not even commenced to treat Mr. Jennings’ case. I have not any doubt that I should have cured him perfectly in eighteen months, or possibly it might have extended to two years. Some cases are very rapidly curable, others extremely tedious. Every intelligent physician who will give thought and diligence to the task, will effect a cure.

  You know my tract on “The Cardinal Functions of the Brain.” I there, by the evidence of innumerable facts, prove, as I think, the high probability of a circulation arterial and venous in its mechanism, through the nerves. Of this system, thus considered, the brain is the heart. The fluid, which is propagated hence through one class of nerves, returns in an altered state through another, and the nature of that fluid is spiritual, though not immaterial, any more than, as I before remarked, light or electricity are so.

  By various abuses, among which the habitual use of such agents as green tea is one, this fluid may be affected as to its quality, but it is more frequently disturbed as to equilibrium. This fluid being that which we have in common with spirits, a congestion found upon the masses of brain or nerve, connected with the interior sense, forms a surface unduly exposed, on which disembodied spirits may operate: communication is thus more or less effectually established. Between this brain circulation and the heart circulation there is an intimate sympathy. The seat, or rather the instrument of exterior vision, is the eye. The seat of interior vision is the nervous tissue and brain, immediately about and above the eyebrow. You remember how effectually I dissipated your pictures by the simple application of iced eau-de-cologne. Few cases, however, can be treated exactly alike with anything like rapid success. Cold acts powerfully as a repellant of the nervous fluid. Long enough continued it will even produce that permanent insensibility which we call numbness, and a little longer, muscular as well as sensational paralysis.

  I have not, I repeat, the slightest doubt that I should have first dimmed and ultimately sealed that inner eye which Mr. Jennings had inadvertently opened. The same senses are opened in delirium tremens, and entirely shut up again when the overaction of the cerebral heart, and the prodigious nervous congestions that attend it, are terminated by a decided change in the state of the body. It is by acting steadily upon the body, by a simple process, that this result is produced—and inevitably produced—I have never yet failed.

  Poor Mr. Jennings made away with himself. But that catastrophe was the result of a totally different malady, which, as it were, projected itself upon the disease which was established. His case was in the distinctive manner a complication, and the complaint under which he really succumbed, was hereditary suicidal mania. Poor Mr. Jennings I cannot call a patient of mine, for I had not even begun to treat his case, and he had not yet given me, I am convinced, his full and unreserved confidence. If the patient does not array himself on the side of the disease, his cure is certain.

  JOHN DYSON IN

  THE SHINING PYRAMID

  ARTHUR MACHEN

  Early in the emergence of the occult detective theme we encounter several investigators who were amateurs and became involved in cases out of curiosity or by involvement with others, but who nevertheless developed a profound understanding of a world beyond. One such hapless soul was John Dyson, a failed artist, a man of letters and a devotee of tobacco who, thanks to a small inheritance, is able to wander London or sit at a fashionable café and observe the world. We first encounter him in “The Inmost Light” (1894) where he and his friend Charles Salisbury become interested in the case of Dr. Black and his dead, possibly murdered, wife. Dyson’s true nature comes through in the second story, presented here, where we learn much about Machen’s theories of another race of beings, which we usually regard as the fairy-folk, but which are far more dangerous and sinister. Dyson also provides the framing device for the episodic volume The Three Impostors (1895) where he remarks how he likes to “go forth, like a knight-errant in search of adventure,” but admits that the adventures usually find him, and that he only need wait, like a spider in its web, “responsive to every movement and ever on the alert.”

  Arthur Machen (1863–1947) was a giant of supernatural fiction, though never fully grasped his true capabilities, spending much of his life as a journalist and, for a while, as an actor. He was not unlike Dyson in that he too enjoyed rambling through the streets of London looking for the awesome. In his autobiography Far Off Things (1922), he wrote: “the whole matter of imaginative literature depends upon this faculty of seeing the universe, from the aeonian pebble of the wayside to the raw suburban street as something new, unheard of, marvellous, finally, miraculous.” His best work was written in the 1890s although not all was collected in book form at the time, so the full impact of his writings became rather diffuse. For a while he was best known for “The Bowmen” (1914) that created the legend of the Angel of Mons, namely that the spirits of Britain’s historic longbow men had come to the aid of soldiers in the Great War. Besides the various collections of his work, of which Tales of Horror and the Supernatural (1948) assembles the best, are his novels The Hill of Dreams (1907), The Great Return (1915), The Terror (1917), and The Green Round (1933). The John Dyson stories have more recently been reassembled as The Dyson Chronicles (2014).

  1. THE ARROW-HEAD CHARACTER

  “HAUNTED, YOU SAID?”

  “Yes, haunted. Don’t you remember, when I saw you three years ago, you told me about your place in the west with the ancient woods hanging all about it, and the wild, domed hills, and the ragged land? It has always remained a sort of enchanted picture in my mind as I sit at my desk and hear the traffic rattling in the Street in the midst of whirling London. But when did you come up?”

  “The fact is, Dyson, I have only just got out of the train. I drove to the station early this morning and caught the 10.45.”

  “Well, I am very glad you looked in on me. How have you been getting on since we last met? There is no Mrs. Vaughan, I suppose?”

  “
No,” said Vaughan, “I am still a hermit, like yourself. I have done nothing but loaf about.”

  Vaughn had lit his pipe and sat in the elbow chair, fidgeting and glancing about him in a somewhat dazed and restless manner. Dyson had wheeled round his chair when his visitor entered and sat with one arm fondly reclining on the desk of his bureau, and touching the litter of manuscript.

  “And you are still engaged in the old task?” said Vaughan, pointing to the pile of papers and the teeming pigeon-holes.

  “Yes, the vain pursuit of literature, as idle as alchemy, and as entrancing. But you have come to town for some time I suppose; what shall we do tonight?”

  “Well, I rather wanted you to try a few days with me down in the west. It would do you a lot of good. I’m sure.”

  “You are very kind, Vaughan, but London in September is hard to leave. Doré could not have designed anything more wonderful and mystic than Oxford Street as I saw it the other evening; the sunset flaming, the blue haze transmuting the plain street into a road ‘far in the spiritual city.’”

  “I should like you to come down though. You would enjoy roaming over our hills. Does this racket go on all day and night? It quite bewilders me; I wonder how you can work through it. I am sure you would revel in the great peace of my old home among the woods.”

  Vaughan lit his pipe again, and looked anxiously at Dyson to see if his inducements had had any effect, but the man of letters shook his head, smiling, and vowed in his heart a firm allegiance to the streets.

  “You cannot tempt me,” he said.

  ‘Well, you may be right. Perhaps, after all, I was wrong to speak of the peace of the country. There, when a tragedy does occur, it is like a stone thrown into a pond; the circles of disturbance keep on widening, and it seems as if the water would never be still again.”

  “Have you ever any tragedies where you are?”

  “I can hardly say that. But I was a good deal disturbed about a month ago by something that happened; it may or may not have been a tragedy in the usual sense of the word.”

  “What was the occurrence?”

  “Well, the fact is a girl disappeared in a way which seems highly mysterious. Her parents, people of the name of Trevor, are well-to-do farmers, and their eldest daughter Annie was a sort of village beauty; she was really remarkably handsome. One afternoon she thought she would go and see her aunt, a widow who farms her own land, and as the two houses are only about five or six miles apart, she started off, telling her parents she would take the short cut over the hills. She never got to her aunt’s, and she never was seen again. That’s putting it in a few words.”

  “What an extraordinary thing! I suppose there are no disused mines, are there, on the hills? I don’t think you quite run to anything so formidable as a precipice?”

  “No; the path the girl must have taken had no pitfalls of any description; it is just a track over wild, bare hillside, far, even from a byroad. One may walk for miles without meeting a soul, but it is perfectly safe.”

  “And what do people say about it?”

  “Oh, they talk nonsense—among themselves. You have no notion as to how superstitious English cottagers are in out-of-the-way parts like mine. They are as bad as the Irish, every whit, and even more secretive.”

  “But what do they say?”

  “Oh, the poor girl is supposed to have ‘gone with the fairies,’ or to have been ‘taken by the fairies.’ Such stuff!” he went on, “one would laugh if it were not for the real tragedy of the case.”

  Dyson looked somewhat interested.

  “Yes,” he said, “‘fairies’ certainly strike a little curiously on the ear in these days. But what do the police say? I presume they do not accept the fairy-tale hypothesis?”

  “No; but they seem quite at fault. What I am afraid of is that Annie Trevor must have fallen in with some scoundrels on her way. Castletown is a large seaport, you know, and some of the worst of the foreign sailors occasionally desert their ships and go on the tramp up and down the country. Not many years ago a Spanish sailor named Garcia murdered a whole family for the sake of plunder that was not worth sixpence. They are hardly human, some of these fellows, and I am dreadfully afraid the poor girl must have come to an awful end.”

  “But no foreign sailor was seen by anyone about the country?”

  “No; there is certainly that; and of course country people are quick to notice anyone whose appearance and dress are a little out of the common. Still it seems as if my theory were the only possible explanation.”

  “There are no data to go upon,” said Dyson, thoughtfully. “There was no question of a love affair, or anything of the kind, I suppose?”

  “Oh, no, not a hint of such a thing. I am sure if Annie were alive she would have contrived to let her mother know of her safety.”

  “No doubt, no doubt. Still it is barely possible that she is alive and yet unable to communicate with her friends. But all this must have disturbed you a good deal.”

  “Yes, it did; I hate a mystery, and especially a mystery which is probably the veil of horror. But frankly, Dyson, I want to make a clean breast of it; I did not come here to tell you all this.”

  “Of course not,” said Dyson, a little surprised at Vaughan’s uneasy manner. “You came to have a chat on more cheerful topics.”

  “No, I did not. What I have been telling you about happened a month ago, but something which seems likely to affect me more personally has taken place within the last few days, and to be quite plain, I came up to town with the idea that you might be able to help me. You recollect that curious case you spoke to me about on our last meeting; something about a spectacle-maker.”

  “Oh, yes, I remember that. I know I was quite proud of my acumen at the time; even to this day the police have no idea why those peculiar yellow spectacles were wanted. But, Vaughan, you really look quite put out; I hope there is nothing serious?”

  “No, I think I have been exaggerating, and I want you to reassure me. But what has happened is very odd.”

  “And what has happened?”

  “I am sure that you will laugh at me, but this is the story. You must know there is a path, a right of way, that goes through my land, and to be precise, close to the wall of the kitchen garden. It is not used by many people; a woodman now and again finds it useful, and five or six children who go to school in the village pass twice a day. Well, a few days ago I was taking a walk about the place before breakfast, and I happened to stop to fill my pipe just by the large doors in the garden wall. The wood, I must tell you, comes to within a few feet of the wall, and the track I spoke of runs right in the shadow of the trees. I thought the shelter from a brisk wind that was blowing rather pleasant, and I stood there smoking with my eyes on the ground. Then something caught my attention. Just under the wall, on the short grass; a number of small flints were arranged in a pattern; something like this”: and Mr. Vaughan caught at a pencil and piece of paper, and dotted down a few strokes.

  “You see,” he went on, “there were, I should think, twelve little stones neatly arranged in lines, and spaced at equal distances, as I have shown it on the paper. They were pointed stones, and the points were very carefully directed one way.”

  “Yes,” said Dyson, without much interest, “no doubt the children you have mentioned had been playing there on their way from school. Children, as you know, are very fond of making such devices with oyster shells or flints or flowers, or with whatever comes in their way.”

  “So I thought; I just noticed these flints were arranged in a sort of pattern and then went on. But the next morning I was taking the same round, which, as a matter of fact, is habitual with me, and again I saw at the same spot a device in flints. This time it was really a curious pattern; something like the spokes of a wheel, all meeting at a common centre, and this centre formed by a device which looked like a bowl; all, you understand done in flints.”

  “You are right,” said Dyson, “that seems odd enough. Still it is reasonable t
hat your half-a-dozen school children are responsible for these fantasies in stone.”

  “Well, I thought I would set the matter at rest. The children pass the gate every evening at half-past five, and I walked by at six and found the device just as I had left it in the morning. The next day I was up and about at a quarter to seven, and I found the whole thing had been changed. There was a pyramid outlined in flints upon the grass. The children I saw going by an hour and a half later, and they ran past the spot without glancing to right or left. In the evening I watched them going home, and this morning when I got to the gate at six o’clock there was a thing like a half moon waiting for me.”

  “So then the series runs thus: firstly ordered lines, then, the device of the spokes and the bowl, then the pyramid, and finally, this morning, the half moon. That is the order, isn’t it?”

  “Yes; that is right. But do you know it has made me feel very uneasy? I suppose it seems absurd, but I can’t help thinking that some kind of signalling is going on under my nose, and that sort of thing is disquieting.”