Fighters of Fear

by Mike Ashley

  I said: “They know. They see.”

  She said scornfully: “Devils?”

  “What else was or is meant by them? But to return: I believe you can be cured. Will you put yourself in my hands? Will you try it for a year? I know you’re no coward, so I tell you frankly you’ll go through hell while you’re learning my way and discarding your own. But if you’re game I’ll stand by you shoulder to shoulder.”

  “There’s nothing I care for except what I am, and there are things one can never drag out of one. You’re talking putrid nonsense. There’s nothing I want but what I have—I am power.”

  “Power!” I said ironically. “And afraid of being driven out of a Swiss village! Afraid of death! Afraid of life! Power! Come and get your eyes opened and you may talk of power then!”

  “Never. You drive me mad; you frighten me. Go!”

  “Wait,” I said. “I give you a few minutes to decide. You’re on an awful road. You think you’re safe because you keep your body out of it as far as you can. Fool! What strength has the body against the brain? And yours will weaken daily. You’ll be dragged in. My consulting rooms are full of people like you, damned on earth whatever they may be hereafter. In a year or less you’ll be open to man’s justice, and when he gets you he does not spare you. You’ll rot in a prison or asylum for the snake of the great cities that you are!”

  “Never. Never. Go away,” she said, and made as if to thrust me from her.

  As the words left her lips two things happened. A man looked over the fence near us, glaring at her and muttering to himself. He shook his fist at her with a curse and went on, turning and cursing as he went. It was the father of Franz Rieder. And her mother broke from behind the roses and sobbing wildly fell upon her knees before her, clasping her about the body with arms of desperate love.

  “For God’s sake—for God’s sake!” she cried, and could say no more. The girl was pale and shuddering with a fixed face above her. I cannot word that scene nor say how long it lasted. That is beyond me. I will only say that at the end she rose and stood looking at me, mocking, insolent, defiant, yet with a look like a shadowy rainbow in black skies.

  “Well—perhaps it’ll be a wow. There may be some fun. I’ll give you six months and if you fail—”

  Her mother had crept into the house weeping terribly. The dog sat and looked at us both bewildered.

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “Then go into the house and pack. We’ll start for London tomorrow.”

  She went without a look behind her. There was stuff in the devil that might yet make her a flame of pure fire. After deep consideration I told the story to Biedermann, asked his prayers for the fight and received his promise. Why? Because every prayer of true faith and belief, let it come whence it will, is a draft on the power of the universe which will be honored.

  I took them to London, settled the mother in rooms at Henford, the northern suburb, and put the girl Joyselle in the house of a doctor friend, a remarkable psychologist, who took in only one mental case at a time and had a house and garden perfectly adapted to his work. I gave him the fullest details, and she had not spared me on the way over, so that I knew of what I spoke. The arrangement was that I should visit her three times a week and oftener if necessary.

  I shall never forget the flash of fury in her eyes when she found that another beside myself was to be concerned in her cure. She defied us both openly. If Eliot had not been seasoned and armed she would have got him under her influence before my eyes. As it was he watched her with coolest professional interest. The nurse was a stolid, unimaginative woman from whom she could have no hopes and who frankly regarded her as a lunatic. Her fury was terrible when she saw herself what she called trapped—but I rejoiced to see that its very violence exhausted the powers of evil concentration on which she worked. She was draining her own reserves with every shriek and struggle. If Eliot and I had ever disbelieved the stories of demoniacal possession (with a difference) we should have been converts now. There were times when a devil and no woman struggled, swore, yelled obscenities and blasphemies, on the ground before us. I have seen Eliot wipe his forehead, pale as ash, and say:

  “Done in! The asylum is the only place for her.”

  And yet the brain was perfectly sound all the time.

  But there was another side. When I told her she must either be searched for the drug or put upon her honor that she had none, she gave her word—and cheated. We knew it next day. After I had ordered the nurse to search her I turned on her and said the one word, “Coward!”

  In a moment her face and neck were flooded with the crimson of deadly shame, as if the vessel of her heart were shattered by the insult—the only one that could touch the savagery in her, nurtured on the brutal lusts and greeds of modern life. A slur on her personal hardihood—her only ethic! She could not stand that. She made a dart for the window and would have flung herself out, but I was there before her. I had got the key to her cipher and used it.

  She stared at me as I left, a dumb fury with loathing eyes.

  I concentrated on her that night with all the power of all my knowledge and training, knowing that Biedermann would be at the same work in his own way where the stars stand sentinel on the high mountains. We had a fixed time together. Later I telephoned to Eliot. She was asleep, exhausted by her devilries.

  It is impossible that I should give all the details of that long struggle with misdirected power and the degrading influences of modern brutality. Men of my profession know; others must take it on trust. Satan was casting out Satan with a vengeance and rending himself in the process. It was ten to one whether she could live through it.

  Eliot dealt with her on material lines and the influence of a fine personality. I, on the psychic. I brought to bear upon her the oldest system of psychology known and focused its withering light on her aberration, and at first with no result whatever. She grew more hardened. She defied us, tried to bribe the servants, made cunning efforts at escape. I began to think we must give her the status of a certified lunatic, for the position was fast becoming untenable, and yet Eliot and I agreed that with her brain-power cool as ice it might be difficult to carry that matter through.

  “She’s so poisoned in every fiber that I see uncommonly little hope,” Eliot said one day. “There are moments when I wish she could be reduced to imbecility and built up from the beginning if it were possible. Is there any hell hot enough for the devil who brought her to this!”

  I agreed, but added:

  “Look at the force in her! She’s a perfect wellspring of misdirected psychic power. A cataract that destroys but may yet make light and warmth for the world. Don’t despair. It’s the fight of our lives, old man. Don’t crab it.”

  He was stanch as steel. Besides he had moments of real pity and liking for her misspent courage. So one may sympathize with a rat showing its teeth in a corner in the last despairing struggle against death.

  She would talk with me when I came—and that was a useful influence. I harped upon the note of courage and that always whipped her failing strength. She would not be beaten if she loathed the victory. But I began to realize the possibility of her death in the trenches. She looked a dying woman.

  One day a very unexpected aid reached us. There was a high wall round the garden, unclimbable (for Eliot occasionally had certified lunatics), and a well-guarded lodge at the only entrance; therefore I cannot tell how this thing happened. As she and the nurse walked along the shady south walk at the end of the garden they saw a dog lying dead, as they thought, on the grass border. The head had been brutally clubbed, so far as we could judge. A West Highland terrier. The nurse said she fell on her knees beside it in a paroxysm not of pity but rage, threatening the brutes in language that made the woman’s blood run cold. Finally she looked up.

  “You damned fool, go and get stuff to wash him. No, I’ll carry him in. Tell Eliot to come.”

  “Can’t leave you!” the nurse retorted,
with not unreasonable anger.

  “I’m coming. Get on.”

  She lifted the dog in her arms with his blood dropping over her dress and carried him into the surgery. No animal had ever come near her since she went down to hell, nor would this have done so had he been conscious. She held him with fierce tenderness while Eliot removed a fragment of bone pressing on the brain and dressed and bandaged the little head. He was quick to see the points of the situation and, while he washed his hands afterwards, said artfully:

  “Nurse is too busy to look after him. We’ll send him to the Vet to take his chance.”

  I had better not record her words. She would nurse him herself. After a show of resistance, it was granted. We had gained a powerful ally.

  Again I must condense. I believe that but for that living interest she would never have fought through the agony of disusing the drug. Eliot and I appreciated this and left neither that nor any other way of help untried, but it was agony under which I say deliberately I think she would have died but that she was fighting for the dog’s life. I gave that up more than once; she never.

  He was lying in a box one day when I came in and she had just dripped some milk and brandy through his teeth. Kneeling beside him she looked up quickly, and the picture impressed itself on my mind.

  The dog breathed. That was about all, and you could not say much more for her. She was deadly ill. Her eyes burned with a waning fire in the long hollow eye-caverns into which they had sunk. All beauty was gone. The face was more like a death’s head than a living one, every bone jutting through sickly skin drawn taut over it. Her body was shrunk to such emaciation and weakness that she lay on her bed all day. What wonder? She was fighting on, but against what odds! Nightly she walked through the hells of insomnia, daily through the hells of tortured nerves. Food and drink were like ashes in her mouth. I will not swear that she always kept her promise to withhold her evil powers of concentration, but on the whole she held them down. A strange and terrible sight.

  Only one energy survived beside the fighting instinct—her passionate care for the dog. She called him Darroch after the dog she had had as a child and once gave a hint that she believed he had come back to her. A piteous thing to see, and yet her one hope. She would crawl to tend him. No one else must touch him, and though she cried out for the drug while Eliot allowed the graduated doses, the moment he told her that stage was past she never asked for it again. I have seen the blood run down her chin from the teeth-marks on her lip, but she endured savagely. I could respect the strength in her, if no more. There was always that background to the horrors and degradations through which she dragged herself and us, and of those I dare not speak out of my own profession.

  Now as she crouched by the dog he stirred and moaned. He laid a paw unconsciously on her hand as she stroked his little breast. She bent over him and I could not see her face. I said:

  “He’ll live. You’ve saved his life.”

  She said, so low that I could scarcely hear: “Must he have died? Did I save him?”

  “Certainly. You saved him.”

  Silence. I saw a dreadful trembling begin in the poor bony hands and arms. It flowed like water up her body, up into the rope-like throat muscles. It reached the quivering nerves of her face, and shook her fiercely like a storm from head to foot. She collapsed into a heap on the floor, sobbing wildly. Dry rending sobs at first. Then merciful tears to relieve the frightful tension. They poured down her face; she was too weak to raise a hand to dry them, but it was to my thought as if the granite of her heart had softened and was pouring away in rivers of living water. We laid her on the sofa, her heart’s action so feeble that if it had given up the struggle I could not have wondered.

  “Perhaps so best!” Eliot said, looking down upon her as she lay, tears still pouring like thunder-rain down the jutting bones of her face. Yet even then, when the dog stirred and uttered a cry to his only friend, in a moment she was dragging herself across the floor to the rescue, half sitting, half crawling with her hands. It reminded me of my horrible vision of her crawling along the pools of moonlight in my room at Geierstein. Like; but the width of heaven and hell was between the two. We did not stop her. She reached him, tended him, and then fainted. We thought she was gone.

  I draw near the end. A strong soul greatly sinning is easier to redeem than a weak one when a certain stage is past. We passed it that day. Darroch recovered first and was power and strength, for he loved her—her first revelation of selfless Love, the Great Seducer whose flute all must follow when they hear its heart-piercing music. He would not leave her, so it became worth the up-hill climb to strength that she might hope one day to take him into the garden. But it needed all our pull—including the dog’s—to get her through, and I would not have had her die then. She was not fit to face that problem before she had mastered this.

  Then came the moment when by two minutes at a time I began to reverse her father’s evil lessons and teach her the true approach to power. I dared not neglect it. She knew too much to be left with any weapons lying about which she had not been trained to handle. No dangerous vacuum must be there. Power she would have; then she must have the best.

  I have never seen so apt a pupil. That was natural. I had only to reverse her learning, and the Way began to open. It interested her profoundly; in her clear, merciless mind the majesty of unalterable law presented itself as awe-striking and utterly desirable. She had the mathematical instinct and I put the right books into her hands, which connect it, for those who can see, with the ancient science now building up all her waste places. She leaped at that learning. The marshaled beauty of order presented itself to her. But, no—it would need a book to record the stages of evolution which she passed through, pressing steadily onward to her goal. She was fighting on my side now. Satan had cast out Satan, and how could his power stand?

  I came one day to find her sitting in the garden with Darroch, now as healthy a little fellow as you would wish to see, at her feet. Her extraordinary education along psychic lines made communion between them possible in a way I have never seen before, but into that I have no space to enter. She lifted him and he lay in her lap while we talked.

  “Tell me this,” she said slowly. “Should I remember the things I did? For I can’t. They’re all blurring—they’ll go. What about remorse? Is it another angle of my callousness?”

  “Not it. It’s a sign that the strength in you looks to the future. Why look back? You have tremendous reserves of power. You’ll do great things yet. I back you against the world.”

  She smiled faintly, then:

  “Do you remember the Maskim—the seven Assyrian devils? I’m like the Magdalen that had seven devils cast out of her. Mine are getting as unreal to me as dreams. Did hers, I wonder? I’d like to ask her. What happened to mine?”

  “You know best. You cast them out yourself.”

  “No, not I. Love,” she answered quickly. “Love’s the conqueror whether you get it in a Christ or a little dog. I never knew such a thing existed, and now—I see nothing else. Who can stand against it? It sweeps you away like that great green glide of the waterfall at Geierstein. Nothing has a chance against it. It broke me.”

  At the beginning of the talk I should have dreaded that memory. Now we were swept on together. There was nothing to fear. She stroked the dog’s coat gently while she spoke, and the movement of her hand was not more tranquil than her face and voice.

  “I remember it all so well. No animal would ever look at me. It’s strange, but I always wanted them to like me. I think now that was the only instinct that kept me human, though I could have tortured them one and all because they hated me. Not that I did. I was not devil enough for that. There are other things I shan’t remember until I can laugh at their folly, and then perhaps they’ll have gone right out of my head.”

  Her strength and curative power were astounding. I had seen what the world might call a miracle wrought under my eyes. To what shall we put a limit?

  �
�And don’t I know what I owe you? That’s one of the things I’ll work for—to be your victory. But I owe more to this than even to you. You are Wisdom. This is Love.”

  She lifted the little dog, looking into his eyes and he into hers, and added slowly:

  “For in the clay of man is kneaded the blood of God.”

  Is it worthwhile to give any outer details of her triumph? Scarcely. The world knows her name but only a tithe of her greatness. The story can be told thus far, but like all true stories the best is hidden and there are no words for it.

  DR. CUMMINGS IN

  THE THOUGHT-MONSTER

  AMELIA REYNOLDS LONG

  Amelia Reynolds Long (1903–1978) was one of a handful of women writers who contributed material to the early science fiction magazines as well as being a regular contributor to Weird Tales. Her first appearance was with “The Twin Soul” in 1928, but her best known story is the following, which was her second sale, and appeared in the March 1930 Weird Tales. It features an occult detective, Dr. Cummings. It is surprising that she did not use him again in other stories, especially when she moved on, more profitably, to crime and detective fiction in the 1930s, writing more than thirty books. “The Thought-Monster” was made into the horror film Fiend Without a Face in 1957 but the plot diverges considerably from the story. Long persevered as a writer and poet into the 1950s, and she also wrote radio scripts. She eventually ceased writing and became a museum curator. Despite many good stories and books, this is the one story for which she is remembered, although you only need one to make you immortal.