Fighters of Fear

by Mike Ashley

  He reflected a moment. “I think I could admit that explanation. Mind you, I believe in a real Power of Evil—call it the Devil for short—who has his own realm of power and acts in it.”

  “That I cannot admit,” I answered. “The universe is one, with no duality, and man and nature are alike divine, but I know that man has the power to create frightful thought forms which dominate himself and may dominate other natures weak or wicked. It is a horrible stage of evolution but the seed of good—of power is in that also. The man who can create horror will turn his creative power to good and glory one of these days when he stops at another station on the long railroad of life. Am I a heretic?”

  I quoted from the Gospel: “If Satan cast out Satan he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom stand?”

  “That is true and interesting,” he said eagerly. “You mean if a man can be stimulated to—as it were—rend his own flesh apart, endure the agony and fight the fight, he is sure of deliverance and the evil things may be cast out forever? I think that may be called Gospel teaching.”

  “If Gospel means ‘good news’ I think so too. I name these things differently—but I think we can shout across the road to each other. Have you seen such cases?”

  He laid down his pipe and told me a dreadful story and another. Men of his profession, like my own, see the dark places that the hurrying world skirts or forgets. The second one bore most singularly on the secret my own mind was guarding and related to the young man Arnold Schneiderling of whom he had told me on the way from the waterfall. In the speech of the world the lad would be called a degenerate. Deep had called to deep with a vengeance when the English girl came his way. This threw a more focused light upon my problem.

  It was late when we parted and Biedermann made a curious remark as we went upstairs.

  “One should never allow oneself to be deceived by facts. They are the veil of reality.”

  Did I not say all the faiths coalesce at a point? I had heard that doctrine elsewhere than in a Lutheran Parson-House and had known its truth.

  Facts gave way rather rudely that night—or was it the other way over? I went to sleep with the book on the table beside me and the moon looking in at the windows making two white pools of light on the black floor—a haven of peace.

  As if a blow had struck me awake, I sat up in my bed to face a horror. Groveling on the floor, crawling along it, passing in and out from gloom to gloom I saw the naked body of a woman. More snake than woman she propelled herself, lying flat with oaring hands and elbows. Humanity was obliterated in the attitude. It survived only in the head, horribly lifted, with the short hair running in a sparkling crest over the ridge of the skull. Her eyes fixed on mine without any intellect were patches of darkness in a white face above stretched lips. She wallowed in and out of light and gloom. I knew my own repulsive thought-form of the girl in the old Parson-House and with a swift spiritual gesture destroyed it. The room was empty in a second, flooded with pure moonlight. To see her thus was no way to help her. As I sat thinking I heard swift steps outside and sprang to the window to see the figure of a girl in white running fleetly up the mountain road, looking behind her now and then as she ran. She vanished round a corner.

  A moment and after her came a young man running desperately as if for his life. I could hear his gasping breath as he passed the balcony. It told of a pumping heart and bursting veins, but still he ran as if the devil were after him instead of before him. They were out of sight—a parable of many things; when I turned again there was nothing but silence, and the peace of sacred centuries filled the little house.

  Next day Biedermann brought in the news that young Franz Rieder, son of the postmaster, had disappeared. He was known to have been heavily in debt and to have been led into dissipations at the market town of Hegenburg twenty miles distant and was only at home to demand money from his father. The supposition was that he might have done a bolt towards the frontier, but the village was alive with fear and conjecture, for this was the third disappearance in four months.

  I thought it right to mention to Biedermann that I had seen a young man running up the mountain road, and ten minutes later a search party which I joined was formed, and we started for the Falkenwald, the men looking doubtfully at one another in fear and dreadful expectation. As we made the first turn we met the English girl coming down, walking lightly and gaily. She carried a long-stemmed white rose with dewy leaves in her hand and held it against her red lips to inhale the perfume. Biedermann lifted his hat and she smiled to him as she passed. I noticed two of the men whispering together and looking at her. They did not smile.

  For the first time I had seen her eyes—they swept me in passing. Dark, extremely long and narrow. One could almost have said in the old Indian phrase that they touched her hair, and this gave her an oblique glance extraordinarily unusual and attractive. But I was conscious of a tingling along my hands and arms as she passed, and the Shakespearean line crossed my memory:

  By the pricking of my thumbs,

  Something wicked this way comes.

  I turned to look after her in a minute and saw her standing looking fixedly after me. She went on at once.

  Reaching the Falkenwald we divided and searched. I had the curiosity to climb round to the place of my last visit to the waterfall—where it made its mighty plunge from the heights. I stood there looking down for the promontory where I had seen the naked girl. Biedermann was right. It did not exist. Nothing interrupted or diverted the smooth and awful shoot of pale green water shot with flying foam, leaping to destruction leagues below. It had been mirage painted on my eyes as I saw her there. But how?

  I rejoined the men. Roped, two had clambered down beyond the point I had reached on that eventful day. On the edge of the crevasse they found a shoe, a bloody handkerchief, and recognized them. What more? Columns of print could not have better told the end. But why? That question remained unanswered.

  Biedermann, lost in thought, made but one remark as we reached Geierstein and separated—he to go to the boy’s mother, I, to the balcony.

  “The mystery of evil is at work here. We must not rest until we confront it with the Cross.”

  My own thought, but in other words. After sitting awhile on the balcony and strengthening my resolution, I got my hat, put her book under my arm, and set off to the old Parson-House. It was noon and hard sunlight dwarfed my shadow on the white road. I opened the garden gate and went in.

  Between two linden trees an orange-colored hammock was slung and in it lay the girl reading. She turned, hearing steps, and threw her legs over the side and sat facing me.

  “My mother is out!” she said, without a pretense of ordinary civility. Her manner was insolent and haughty as if something about me angered her. I was equally unconventional. Beauty blazed at me from the long narrow eyes and red lips, but I knew her and she knew it.

  “I must have a few words with you,” I said and pulled a garden chair under the tree to face her.

  “I refuse!” She sprang to her feet. I shook my head smiling.

  “You accept, for, if not, a few days will see the village break loose upon you, and if they tore you to tatters or dragged you to the asylum—and it’s a toss-up which—I for one would not blame them.”

  Silence and the light breeze fluttering the leaves. Her fierce pride did not falter. She sat down again and stared at me.

  “Are you mad? What have I to do with the village? I live my life—I go nowhere but to—”

  I interrupted. “The mountain road. The Falkenwald! Did you guess where we were going this morning when you met us? Did you see me when I looked down from the shoot of the waterfall the other day? You looked up. You waved.”

  She laughed a little. “You’re as mad as a hatter! It takes roped men, they tell me, to get down the side of the fall.”

  “It would take more than roped men to get where you stood, for in the world about us that place has no existence. Drop fencing! Come to reality. I tell you you ar
e in danger.”

  She looked at me sidelong and warily, measuring her own weapons against mine. I read her thoughts as she set her mouth so that the lips trembled piteously, like those of a child who entreats for forgiveness in all innocence. But no obedient tears obeyed the summons to her eyes. It is an old superstition that witches cannot shed tears; which is as it may be. The pose of the young and terrified girl did not deceive me for one moment. She was folding and sheathing flamboyant power—“As though a rose should shut and be a bud again.”

  “How am I to help it if men go wild for me?” she asked meekly. “It happens to other girls and nobody blames them. You’re a man. You should understand. Is it likely I’d have anything to do with these village louts? Not I. I despise them. We simply came here to have a little peace. When young Lethington shot himself—”

  She halted in a breath at the look on my face. She had made a slip and knew it. I remembered the shouting newspaper headings, the evil room where drugged men lay and dreamed their hashish dreams. Much more also, not uncommon in the great cities. No wonder they were in hiding. She saw it all in my face and flung out into her true self again, defiant, hard as steel. I considered her a moment in silence; we were face to face now, preliminaries past.

  “You never had a chance,” I said. “Your father opened the wrong door for you when he might have opened the right one.”

  “He told me there was no other. But this is power. I’ve had a good time if I’ve had no more. I live on the desire of men. They go mad for me when I look at them. Hardly one—Where’s the harm? I’m not bad-looking, am I?”

  More than beautiful, my brain answered. A charm perilous and deadly. A bitter wine to drink. A honeyed sweetness, poison in the throat. The secrets of wicked forgotten worships were in those long agate eyes fringed with midnight. She represented what men will always find worth pursuit when the worst they can do has been done and unslaked longing seeks for more—yet more. But though my brain acknowledged her my heart was silent, my flesh revolted against her.

  “It’s no use with you,” she said savagely. “Well, then—what do you want me to do? Hands up for me this time! I never spared anyone. I can’t expect you to spare me. Give me back my book!”

  She snatched at it from under my arm.

  “What’s your amulet?” she added. “You can’t destroy my witchcraft with crosses and black cats. You know better.”

  “I want to ask you a question,” I said slowly. “Is there never a moment when you remember yourself before your father took you in hand and wish yourself—well—what you were then—or like other girls whom men love?”

  “That’s a queer question!” she said with a smile in her long eyes. “No, never! I suppose I used to sometimes, for it’s rather frightening at first when you see what you want to see and do glide out of you and take shape and force others to see it. I used to faint and cry, but he kept me up to it. I was a triumph of ‘psykes’ he said. No, I never want to go back. But I have to lie low when the papers get hold of me and sometimes I get most awfully tired and drowsy. Then I have to draw strength from other people. Not the good old blood-sucking vampire! You get into their vibration. You know.”

  A thought struck me. “That’s what you’re doing to Lili Schneiderling.”

  She nodded, laughing. “But I must have more. I have to be asleep nearly all day. See, I’ve no color. Wait till you see me with a faint, faint color like the last of the Alpenglow. I’m six times as good-looking then. I’m seedy now.”

  I ignored that and returned to my question. “If you could be set free would you prefer to remain what you are?”

  “Infinitely. Don’t let’s talk nonsense. Can’t you go away? I want to sleep and there’s nothing to be done.”

  “There’s a good deal to be done. Your mother consulted me—”

  Her eyes narrowed. Her lips drew apart dangerously. “I’ll make her pay for that!” she said under her breath.

  I shook my head and answered coolly: “I think not. Mr. Biedermann and I will remove your mother today and leave you alone in the house.”

  “But I think not!” Her teeth showed like a cat’s with retracted lips tightened above them. “She knows and you know that I can come through walls and windows while I’m asleep in my bed. There’s no part of the world where you could hide her from me, because she’d call me herself. I’ve mastered her. She’d have to build me if I couldn’t build myself.”

  She sat up facing me proudly.

  “Death?” I suggested.

  “There’s no such thing! Don’t try to frighten me with fairy tales. My father lives in this house as much as we do. Look up. You’ll see him at the window.”

  I looked up involuntarily.

  The detestable face of Saumarez was looking down upon his daughter and me. As I looked it was gone, but I had seen it. What a thought to have moving all but incarnate about one!

  “Did you think I don’t know that?” I asked coolly. “But did your father tell you of hell after death?”

  “Fire and brimstone?” She laughed aloud. “No, he knew better.”

  “Did he tell you that men make their own hells and need no other devils and that it goes on and on? That what you most hate will be your surrounding—bodily, mental——for what will seem to you forever and ever, though it will be only a moment of eternity?”

  She looked up sharply. “That’s queer! I dream that sometimes.”

  “You will dream it for a considerable time,” I said, “There’s no evading that law. That marigold could sooner come up an oak than you not reap what you sow. Now, what will you do?”

  “Sorry you don’t like me as I am!” She laughed ironically. “You should have known me as a nice little girl in pigtails adoring my dog—” She paused and added in a different tone, “I’d like him back,” and then sank into silence for a moment. Presently she lifted her head fiercely.

  “What else am I to do? Even if I didn’t like it—and I do—there’s no turning back. You know enough to know that. When you can do as you like and herd men like sheep and dip your hands in their pockets you don’t go back to the maundering jealousies and helplessness of the average woman.”

  “There’s no turning back. True. You have learned one secret of power. You can’t unlearn it, but you can go past it and on. You must decide now. This place is finding you out; and if they lynched you who could be surprised? Such things have happened and will again. You’re nearing it.”

  Her eyes dilated on me with terror. This kind fears death very exceedingly, knowing enough to know certain things. But this kind also does not own it. She shot a look of hatred at me.

  “I’m always being hunted from pillar to post. I might do better in Asia. They understand better there. But go on. You’ve got me—in a way.”

  “Naturally. You don’t want your brain—your instrument of power—broken and scattered. But it’s coming. One way or another it comes to women like you. You’re the curse of great cities—you and your like. You drench your victims with the false occult—the intellectual, and of the spiritual you know nothing. You trade on vices and fears. You waken the devils in your victims’ hearts with your obscene magic that you may wring gold and power from them and trample them into the mud. And then one day—these women and men like you—they make some fatal slip, and the law gets them and holds them up in public for the devils they are, and the prison doors shut on them.”

  I could only appeal to her fears, but every word I said was God’s truth. The world knows too well the trader on hidden evil cults and influences. That would be her escape when the pulse of beauty flagged in her and life ran low.

  She looked up and said violently: “What could I do?”

  “You could throw away your drug. You could come to London and be my patient.”

  “Oh—I see. Money!” she said impudently. “Well, I could be a profitable patient! I have lots of money. Good for you, but I don’t see what you have to bribe me with. You don’t know these things. And I shall get
more power as I get experience. I made you see my father now. I got your brain, though I couldn’t get more. But I may later.”

  She laughed dangerously. I also, but to another tune. The scene had its humor—the rival magicians before Pharaoh, let us say! I told her in a few words that I was ahead of her there. That where she could make thought-forms to play upon the vilest strings of human nature I could command spiritual resources that were powerful to create and restore. Her instrument was the brain swayed by the primitive consciousness of forbidden things; mine was the spiritual and evolutionary consciousness of the universe mighty to unfold and develop the divine in man.

  “Match yourself against me and try!” I said. “Try, though I acknowledge myself a beginner in a school that takes ages to perfect its pupils.”

  “It all sounds mighty dull!” she said and yawned. “Haven’t we gassed long enough?”

  I was silent a moment, considering, for an inspiration had shot through me—an answering flash, as I thought, to the indent I had made for a sword in the struggle. But could I speak to a debased creature like this of the most sacred experience of my life, founded on a lower consciousness and rising to infinity from the story of two dogs to the heaven-height of the woman I loved?

  What is one’s own but to be shared with the needy?

  I told her the story in simple terms. At first she sat, marble hard, presently the sullen obstinacy of her face stirred, became more human, finally she listened intently. I ended.

  “I like that,” she said. “I can swear that’s true. I love animals, but I can’t get it in on them, have no pull on them. I can’t even ride—Horses go mad if I try to touch them. They don’t register me a bit, and I wish they did. Look now at that beast”—She pointed to a fox-terrier belonging to the next house down the road—“I’ve given him bones, biscuits. He’ll not touch them. It’s queer, for I want to make friends.”

  “Try,” I said. I wanted to see, but I could have told her what would happen. Animals, especially dogs, have a very highly developed instinct against spiritual evil. That has been a common experience in all countries and times. It is not for nothing they lead a dog at the head of a Parsee funeral procession. I gave her a biscuit. I had always a supply for dog friends. He growled low and deep, disclosing shining teeth. The hackles along his back rose stealthily as he edged towards me for shelter. She flung it at him, and he leaped at her furiously. I dragged him back by the collar and he looked up in amazement that I should avert righteous judgment, then, sheltered beneath my knees, watched her steadily.