Fighters of Fear

by Mike Ashley

  “Possibly it can,” I said, beginning to be deeply interested.

  “Yes—but for what ends? He thought the way in was by the influence of certain drugs. He called it ‘The Drug Revelation’ and terrible people came to the house and terrible experiments were made. A woman and a man went mad under them and there was more than I ever knew. He used the brain until it broke. There’s one drug that makes all the powers flare up for a long time and then drop, as it seems, forever into idiocy. I know its name but even to you I won’t breathe it. A fearful thing. I have come into the room again and again and found him stupefied, and when he woke he would pour out horrors that turned my soul to fear incarnate. Can such things be true?”

  I would not discuss it with her though I held a strong opinion of my own. But here the case was clear. A bad man drawing into his own evil vortex all the evil influences to which he had thrown wide the door—I knew the way he had trodden, the point marked “Danger,” where disregarding every instinct and warning he had plunged to ruin and not alone—a blind guide of the blind. I said briefly:

  “Pray go on. I shall be better able to judge when the whole story is before me.”

  She sighed patiently.

  “This went on for two years and then came a change. He called me into his room one night and before I had time to speak or see caught me and pressed a sponge over my mouth and nostrils and held me down. I saw nothing, felt nothing but green meadows and immeasurable rest—green pastures, a Shepherd leading his sheep. I wished never to wake again to the unspeakable weariness of life. But I woke lying on my bed exhausted and he cursed me and told me I was no good—no good. He must find a better.”

  “You had safeguards,” I said with profound pity, “spiritual safeguards he could not break down. You need have no fear.”

  “Fear? I had nothing else. After that, he never drugged me again, but going about the house I would see strange faces, figures horrible and despairing. Thought-forms, he said, but horribly lifelike. They could speak and move but they were spectral—not human. Light did not frighten them. They went and came as they would or he bid them. Did I see them or did I not?”

  She was an image of entreaty with shaking hands held out. No words can tell my pity. A good woman in the den of the only devils that exist—if the word exist may be used to express the inexpressible. But I concentrated in listening. This related itself to certain studies of my own with a very different aim and object. She sighed again when I made no answer and went on.

  “My mother was dying and I was called to her. I left my daughter Joyselle in charge of an excellent old French governess, Mademoiselle Payot and an old servant, Margaret. Joyselle was then thirteen, unusually young for her age—her chief interest in life a lovely little West Highland terrier whom she loved almost as tenderly as she did me. A beautiful generous child. It was a sharp pull to leave her, but my mother was dying of cancer and it was no house for a girl. I had been away for two months receiving nothing but good news when a letter came from Mademoiselle Payot.”

  She drew it from her bag and laid it before me. It was in French.

  Dear Madam:

  Circumstances which I very deeply regret oblige me to leave my position without delay. I will not refer to them further than by saying that Dr. Saumarez’s manner leaves me no alternative. I should not go in this way but that I know your confidence in Margaret and my own experience confirms it. But I think you should return as soon as possible.

  There was more, relating to arrangements which I need not quote. She put it away and went on, the nerves in her face and eyelids twitching nervously. She was a patient too, if she had known it!

  “I was in Carlisle and my mother clung to me. What could I do? Joyselle’s letters were those of a child. Margaret wrote seldom and without detail. ‘Missy was well. The house was all right,’ and so forth. I wrote repeatedly to my husband. He always answered that Joyselle was in the best of health, all was well, and Mademoiselle Payot had left because her temper became unbearable. She had frightened Joyselle terribly more than once and she herself had grown alarmed at her own want of control. Several times he wrote like this. Four times he came up for a week-end and quite reassured me.”

  There was a pause. In far distance were the crystal peaks of the Wetterhorn and Schreckhorn, awful in beauty. All round us, roses, roses in the sweet old-fashioned garden, bees making a low drowsy bourdon in the air. Peace everywhere—but on a cracking surface disclosing rifts of horror beneath.

  “My mother died and I came back. I had been away three months. At once I saw the change in Joyselle. She had been fresh and sweet as a bunch of pinks, innocent and trustful as a baby. Now her eyes held the knowledge of evil. They were quick, glancing—proud, concealing. She met me with a kind of hardy assurance. I should have hated it in any girl. It terrified me in my own. She might have been a woman of equal age, polite enough but holding me off with her reserves. Her dog Darroch was dead, she said carelessly, making nothing of a thing which would have rent her heart when I left. I had a feeling that love also was dead between us. She looked the picture of health, her lips crimson, her eyes sparkling as if with some inward satisfaction I could not fathom. She was then just fourteen.”

  “Did you make any effort to fathom it?” I asked.

  “Every effort. No use. I questioned Margaret. She answered doggedly. ‘Missy is well. Anyone can see that,’ and so forth. Then I began to watch—to spy. A mother must! She cared for no associates—no society. She was happiest in her own room—a large one on the third floor, and there she had the most extraordinary collection of books on the brain and mind. Horrible for a girl of her age, but her father would not let me interfere—All spiritual things were dead in her, but her brain-power was wonderful. It was as if”—she hesitated for a while—“as if it were breaking loose like fire. She said she was writing a story. I couldn’t keep up with her intellect. It was beyond me and she despised me.”

  Her voice trembled. We were drawing near the heart of horror.

  “One night my husband and I had been to the play—Macbeth. It was near twelve when we got back, and the street was empty with a full moon glaring down it. I looked up at the house and saw something white fluttering down from Joyselle’s balcony. You will think me mad when I say I thought for one wild minute that it was she herself coming down hand under hand on a rope. I caught my husband’s arm and pointed up, shaking from head to foot. He stood, his eyes fixed and I heard him muttering to himself ‘Clever girl!—well done!’ and madnesses like that. I got out my latch-key and flew upstairs. Her door was locked. I rattled and banged and at last she seemed to wake and came to me. I shall never forget her face. The stiff smile, the sly anger in her eyes. Doctor, she looked a criminal! Yet what could it mean? She was there in her room—had been asleep. I saw the dent in her pillow.”

  “You mean,” I said, “that her father had taught her his tricks? She could project herself.”

  “Yes—yes!” she said eagerly. “I watched. He had taught her to drug herself. He used to watch while she disengaged herself as he called it. I have seen it happen—she would fall into a drugged sleep and then leave the drugged body like a butterfly off a flower and flit about the house or out and away. I never saw where. She did awful things.”

  She stopped, shuddering with memory. To be honest I was by no means certain at the moment that her brain was not touched and a great part of her story hallucination. For though I knew the thing could be, on a very different plane, its perversion and openness were out of all my experience. If it were true the girl must be watched and rescued somehow or frightful dangers lay ahead. But how? I kept my most guarded professional manner and it steadied her a little.

  “It’s almost impossible to suppose a father would subject his daughter to the risks of drug-taking. Had he been attached to her?”

  “Never. He hated her for not being a boy. But don’t you see? He never thought all this wicked. He thought it power, riches, everything the world has to give. The magnif
icence of brain-power. There were rich women and men who simply poured out gold in return for what they called his magic. And remember I had failed as a subject and he wanted one to show off his power on. He said she was wonderful—People were beginning to talk of her when he died—”

  She gasped and moistened her dry lips with her tongue as if to enable herself to speak.

  “This went on for some years. I lost all hold of her and was afraid to complain to anyone. She was too strong for me. There was nothing she could not do. He died two years ago when she was sixteen.”

  “Had she access to the drug after that?”

  “I don’t know. But it grew worse. She began to talk quite openly about her experiences, and they were like his—ghastly and terrible beyond words. The vilest.”

  I said thoughtfully: “The brain had probably become diseased under the drug-taking.”

  “I don’t think that!” she said eagerly. “She had a strong brain always and even her father did not dominate her. She hated him. But he opened a door and let her in to all the horrors of the ages. A kind of form of him haunts her, and she would drive it away but cannot. I have seen it in the room staring at her as if he had slipped behind and she was the teacher now. But I tell you—and it’s true, believe me if you will, that the will in her, the desires in her, can slip out of her body in her own shape and do what she chooses while she lies drugged on her bed. She is off and away all night and often in the day.”

  I said slowly: “The saints and divinities have had that gift and we call it miracle.”

  She said: “Ah yes—yes!” with a smile sadder than any tears. “If her power could be turned into the spiritual channel! But that could never be; with her the brain is everything. And what terrifies me is that I see her body being drawn into it too. The flesh longs to share in the mental creations. And that means—open ruin. She’s shaved it more than once.”

  There was a long silence. Then she half rose.

  “Will you come up and see her?”

  “But you said she was up in the mountains!”

  “So she is. Do you think I don’t know the stories of the waterfall? I’m coming to that. But her body is asleep upstairs. Come up.”

  Can I express the feelings with which I followed her upstairs into the quaint low-browed room looking out upon the guarding Alps? The scent of the garden made it sweet as a bower of roses. The curtains were white, the bed draped with white—a girl lay on the square white pillows as in the chalice of a lily. I stood beside her, lost in thoughts for which I can find no name.

  She was a slim maid of eighteen, white as pearl, no tinge of color in her cheeks, lips ardently crimson as hibiscus blossom. She had that look of decadent divinity which appears to be the last word in fashionable and intellectual beauty. One might picture her as the evil goddess Ashtoreth of the Zidonians, stiff in a golden shrine glittering with encrusted jewels, the winged doors half open that her rigidly outspread hands might rain abominations on her worshipers. The shut eyelids and black lashes sealed on the marble cheek gave her the air of stiff hieratic mystery seated above all human law, unmatchable in evil.

  “You could touch her and she would not wake,” whispered the trembling woman beside me. “It’s a trance. Not sleep.”

  I stooped again and close to the delicate nostrils where the faint breath fluttered. Yes—there was the smell of a drug which I dare not name. And very soon she would need no outer help of that sort but could set herself free, unaided, to roam the world, a danger more dreadful than a wandering tiger to every human being who crossed her path. The case was plain to me now. I followed her mother down into the garden.

  There in haste as the sun neared the mountains she repeated to me the stories of the young men which I had heard from Biedermann.

  “There’s no kind of magic of all the ages she doesn’t know!” she ended. “Look!” she picked up a book and showed it to me.

  That too I knew. It has been the source of deadly dreams to the world for millenniums—“The Book of the Lady of the Great Land.” It opened at the Invocation of the Maskim—the seven evil spirits before whom Assyrian men and women trembled in the guardian shadow of their winged bulls known as the Kirubu—later to become our cherubim and be hymned in Christian churches that little guessed their origin. Into what deadly perfumed evil, long hidden, mummied in nard and cassia, bandaged and bound and hidden in temple vaults and bricked tombs, and now awaking insolently in the sunshine of a later day, had I stumbled?

  The invocation stood out in black capitals before my eyes:

  THE MASKIM, THE EVIL ONES, THEY ARE SEVEN. THEY ARE SEVEN. SEVEN THEY ARE! TO OUR WILL WE MAY BIND AND HOLD THEM, FOR IN THE CLAY OF MAN IS KNEADED THE BLOOD OF GOD!

  The beauty of the last phrase caught me. The perverted truth that might yet save the miserable girl. Seven Evil Ones—and I remembered how in the Christian Scripture seven devils were cast out of the Magdalen leaving her snow-white and virgin-pure.

  We went slowly through the garden and stood for a moment each thinking our own very different thoughts. Then Mrs. Saumarez said hurriedly—the old look of panic upon her face:

  “You must go. She’ll be waking. But come again when I send for you and tell me what to do.”

  I went off, carrying the book with me unconsciously, and a little way up the steep mountain road, looking out over the blue lake as from the ramparts of a great castle. I could not go straight back to the Biedermanns’ quiet circle after that experience. I must have time to assemble my thoughts and fit them to a line of action opening before me.

  The hell that Mrs. Saumarez must have lived through! And I could predict with certainty that the time would come when she would either be drawn herself into the orbit of the evil or go raving mad. Those who meddle with the perversions of the mental processes little know the ghastliness that lies in wait for them at a certain turn of the road. They will learn when they near it how frightfully the surface of power and pleasure cracks, disclosing beneath it illimitable woe. For if within us is the Kingdom of Heaven (and that is God’s truth) within us also is the Kingdom of Hell. Not indeed that which frightened our parents in grim sermons and mechanically repeated prayers but that which set our ancestors half mad with tales of witchcraft and dreadful rites where the polarities of good and evil meet—the deathly clay of man mingled with the blood of outraged divinity—to use the parable in the book in my hand. I opened it again.

  “My Father,” it cried a page farther on, “the disease of the thought has issued from the abyss! How shall the man find healing?”

  How? For man too is a creator, and if in his thoughts he creates forms of terror and wickedness they will surround him living and clear, walking in sun or moonlight, visible to those who have eyes to see—his own self-chosen companions dooming him to the Pit in this life and a terrible future in others.

  I reached a height where the road turned and stood meditating these things in their innermost. My work had been directed in part by a great psychologist from whom I had heard true tales which exceeded in deeps and heights of mental process the heavens and hells of our early imaginings. He had his own methods of healing for some such cases, but all differed, all needed different handling. Could I dare to thrust my hands into the delicate machinery of a brain working on lines I knew, strong with its own evilly trained power?

  As I stood considering this problem I heard steps approaching the corner behind me—a woman coming down from Donnerstein; I thought no more of it than that.

  But they rounded the corner. They were close on me, invisibly—and then I knew. They stopped beside me. Unseen eyes surveyed me sharpened by evil to wicked, almost spiritual power of perception. I felt the cold vibration play over me like a wind of frost. It held me for a moment—perhaps longer—and then the steps went slowly down the road. It was as though a spirit had lifted up the curtain of the dark, held me with glittering eyes for a moment, dropped it and gone on its way.

  I stood to watch the dying glory of the afterglow flush th
e sky, dye world and heaven into a divine rose, then slowly furl its petals and abandon the world to night and the creatures who walk in dark places. I went stiffly down the hill to the Biedermanns’ home, looking up as I entered to the old legend carved along the front:

  Wer Gott vertraut,

  Hat wohl gebaut.

  Yes, that is true. Man holds the talisman of safety in his own divinity—the blood of God is kneaded into the clay of man. He need not drop it unless he will. That house will stand.

  The question in my mind was—should I consult Biedermann? I did not forget the doctor’s obligation of secrecy, but none the less the woman had demanded help, and if I could reinforce my own powers the obligation lay on me to do it. But I would approach the subject cautiously and so make my decision. I have indicated already that he was a man of much spiritual power; of deep piety; and, though my own inspirations do not lie along the Lutheran path, power is power, meet it where you will, and all the streams have their source in the skies.

  Frau Biedermann went up early to bed, with a headache. We lit our pipes and sat in the great shadowed balcony beneath the eaves where the mountains stood bathed in moonlight, gemmed with stars, their own glory of eternal strength submerged in a greater. I led the talk with care to the point I chose, so that my question was natural when I asked it:

  “Biedermann, do you believe in what is called possession?”

  He turned mild blue eyes of astonishment upon me. “Naturally. Is it not in the Bible?”

  “It certainly is, and yet modern science might have other explanations to offer. Would you accept the theory that a man could be so saturated with evil that his will could obey none but the evil presences formed by his own thoughts and that objective devils of his own creation dwelt in him and used his body and brain as their vehicle?”