by Mike Ashley
Mrs. Jarrett’s plump hand fluttered to her breast. This was so sudden; and she had really been a little bit afraid of her séances since this terror came into the house. But the doctor was already arranging the little round table and the chairs.
Without looking round, he said, “You need not be at all nervous this time. And I want your brother particularly to stay in the room, though not necessarily at the table. Jimmy, you sit aside and steno whatever comes through, will you.” And in a quiet aside to his friend, he added, “Sit near the switch, and if I holler, throw on the lights instantly and see that the sick man gets a stimulant. I may be busy.”
Under the doctor’s experienced direction everything was soon ready. Just the four sat at the table, the Jarrett family and the doctor. The sick brother sat tucked in an armchair by the window and Jimmy Terry near the light switch at the door.
Once more the doctor cautioned the brawny Terry, “Watch this carefully, Jimmy. I’m putting the sick man’s life into your hands. If you feel anything, if you sense anything, if you think anything near him, snap on the lights. Don’t ask anything. Act. Ready? All right then, black out.”
With the click of the switch the room was in darkness through which came only the petulant cough of the sick man. As the eyes accustomed themselves to the gloom there was sufficient glow from the moonlight outside to distinguish the dim outlines of figures.
“This is what you usually do, isn’t it?” asked the doctor. “Hands on the table and little fingers touching?” And without waiting for the reply of which he seemed to be so sure, he continued, “All the usual stuff, I see. But now, Mrs. Jarrett, I’m going to lay my hands over yours and you will go into a trance. So. Quiet and easy now. Let yourself go.”
In a surprisingly short space of time the table shivered with that peculiar inward tremor so familiar to all dabblers in the psychic. Shortly thereafter it heaved slowly up and descended with a vast deliberation. There was a moment’s stillness fraught with effort; then a rhythmic tap-tap-tap of one leg.
“Now,” said the doctor authoritatively, “you will go into a trance, Mrs. Jarrett. Softly, easily. Let go. You’re going into a trance. Going . . . going . . .” His voice was soothingly commanding.
Mrs. Jarrett moaned, her limbs jerked, she stretched as if in pain; then with a sigh she became inert.
“Watch out, Jimmy,” the doctor warned in a low voice. Then to the woman: “Speak. Where are you? What do you see?”
The plump, limp bulk moaned again. The lips moved; inarticulate sounds proceeded from them, the fragments of unformed words; then a quivering sigh and silence. The doctor took occasion to lean first to one side and then to the other to listen to the breathing of Mr. Jarrett and the boy. Both were a little faster than normal; under the circumstances, not strange. With startling suddenness words cut the dark, clear and strong.
“I am in a place full of mist, I don’t know where. Grey mist.” A laboured silence. Then: “I am at the edge of something; something deep, dark.” A pause. “Before me is a curtain, dim and misty—no—it seems—I think—no, it is the mist that is the curtain. There are dim things moving beyond the curtain.”
“Ha!” An exclamation of satisfaction from the doctor.
“I can’t make them out. They are not animals; not people. They are dark things. Just—shapes.”
“Good God, that’s what she said before!” The awed gasp was Mr. Jarrett’s.
The sick man coughed gratingly.
“The shapes move, they twine and roll and swell up. They bulge up against the curtain as if to push through. It is dark; too dark on that side to see. I am afraid if one might push through . . .”
Suddenly the boy whimpered, “I don’t like this. It’s cold, an’ I’m scared.”
The doctor could hear the hard breathing of Mr. Jarrett on his left as the table trembled under his sudden shiver. The doctor himself experienced an enveloping depression, an almost physical crawling of the cold hairs up and down his spine. The sick man went into a spasm of violent coughing.
Suddenly the voice screamed, “One of the shapes is almost—my God, it is through! It’s on this side. I can see—oh God, save me.”
“Lights, Jimmy!” snapped the doctor. “Look to the sick man.”
The swift flood of illumination showed Mr. Jarrett grey and beaded with perspiration; the boy in wild-eyed terror; Terry, too, big-eyed, and nervously alert. All of them had felt a sudden stifling weight of a clutching fear that seemed to hang like a destroying wave about to break.
The sick man was in paroxysm of coughing from which he passed into a swoon of exhaustion. Only the woman had remained blissfully unconscious. The voice that had spoken out of her left her untroubled. In heavy peacefulness she slumped in her trance condition.
The doctor leaped round the table to her and placed his hands over her forehead in protection from he did not know exactly what. A chill still pervaded the room; a physical sense of cold and lifting of hair. Some enormous material menace had almost been able to swoop upon a victim. Slowly, with the flashing on of the lights, the horror faded.
The doctor bent over the unconscious lady. Smoothly he began to stroke her face, away from the centre towards her temples. As he stroked he talked, softly, reassuringly.
Presently the woman shuddered, heaved ponderously. Her eyes opened blankly, without comprehension. Wonder dawned in them at the confusion.
“I must have been asleep,” she murmured; and she was able to smile sheepishly. “Tell me, did I—did my guides speak?”
That foolish, innocent question, coming from the only one in the room who knew nothing of what had happened, served to dissipate fear more than all the doctor’s reassurances. The others began to take hold of themselves. The doctor was able to turn his attention to the sick man.
“How is his pulse, Jimmy? Hm-m, weak, but still going. He’s just exhausted. That thing drew an awful lot of strength out of him. It nearly slipped one over on me; I didn’t think it was through into this side yet.”
To his hosts he said with impressive gravity, “It is necessary to tell you that we are faced with a situation that is more dangerous than I had thought. There is in this thing a distinct physical danger; it has gone beyond imagination and beyond ‘sensing’ things. We are up against a malignant entity that is capable of human contacts. We must get the patient up to bed and then I shall try to explain what this danger is.”
He took the limp form in his arms with hardly an effort and signified to Mrs. Jarrett to lead the way. To all appearances it was no more than an unusually vigorous physician putting a patient to bed. But the doctor made one or two quite extraordinary innovations.
“Fresh air to the contrary,” he said grimly. “Windows must remain shut and bolted. Let me see: iron catches are good. And, Johnny, you just run down to the kitchen and bring me up a fire iron—a poker, tongs, anything. A stove lid lifter will do.”
The boy clung to the close edges of the group. The doctor nodded with understanding.
“Mr. Jarrett, will you go? We mustn’t leave our patient until we have him properly protected.”
In a few moments Mr. Jarrett returned with a plain iron kitchen poker. That was just the thing, the doctor said. He placed it on the floor close along the door jamb. He herded the others out and, coming last himself, shut the door, pausing just a moment to note that the lock was of iron, after which he followed the wondering family down to the living-room. They sat expectant, uneasy.
“Now,” the doctor began, as though delivering a lecture. “I want you all to listen carefully, because—I must tell you this, much as I dislike to frighten you—this thing has gone so far that a single mis-step may mean a death.”
He held up his hand. “No, don’t interrupt. I’m going to try to make clear what is difficult enough anyhow; and you must all try to understand it because an error now—even a little foolishness, a moment of forgetfulness—can open the way for a tragedy; because—now let me impress you with this—the thing tha
t you have felt is a palpable force. I can tell you what it is, but I cannot tell you how it came to break into this side. This malignant force is”—he paused to weigh his words—“an elemental. I do not know how the thing was released. Maybe you had nothing to do with it. But you, madam”—to the trembling Mrs. Jarrett—“you caused it by playing with this séance business, about the dangers of which you know nothing. Nor have you taken the trouble even to read up on the subject. You have opened the way to attract this thing to your house; you and the unfortunate, innocent sick man upstairs. You’ve actually invited it to live among you.”
The faces of the audience expressed only fear of the unknown; fear and a blank lack of understanding. The doctor controlled his impatience and continued his lecture.
“I can’t go into the complete theory of occultism here and now; but this much you must understand,” he said, pounding his fist on his knee for emphasis; “It is an indubitable fact, known throughout the ages of human existence, and re-established by modern research, that there exist certain vast discarnate forces alongside of us and all around us. These forces function according to certain controlling laws, just as we do. They probably know as little about our laws as we do about theirs.
“There are many kinds of these forces. Forces of a high intelligence, far superior to ours; forces of possibly less intelligence; benevolent forces; malignant ones. They are all loosely generalized as spirits: elementals, subliminals, earthbounds, and so on.
“These forces are separated from us, prevented from contact, by—what shall I say? I dislike the word, evil, or curtain; or, as the Bible puts it, the great gulf. They mean nothing. The best simile is perhaps in the modern invention of the radio.
“A certain set of wavelengths, ethereal vibrations, can impinge themselves upon a corresponding instrument attuned to those vibrations. A slight variation in wavelength, and the receiving instrument is a blank; totally unaffected, though it knows that vibrations of tremendous power exist all around it. It must tune in to become receptive to another set of vibrations.
“In something after this manner these discarnate so-called spirit forces are prevented from impinging themselves upon our consciousness. Sometimes we humans, for reasons of which we are very often unaware, do something, create a condition, which tunes us in with the vibration of a certain group of discarnate forces. Then we become conscious; we establish contact; we, in common parlance, see a ghost.”
The lecturer paused. Vague understanding was apparent on the faces of his fascinated audience.
“Good! Now then—I mentioned elementals. Elementals comprise one of these groups of discarnate forces; possibly the lowest of the group and the least intelligent. They have not evolved to human, or even animal form. They are just—shapes.”
“Oh, my God!” the shuddering moan came from Mrs. Jarrett, “the shapes that I have sensed!”
“Exactly. You have sensed such a shape. Why have you sensed it? Because somehow, somewhere, something has happened that has enabled one of these elemental entities to tune in on the vibrations of our human wavelength, to break through the veil. What was the cause or how, we have no means of knowing. What we do know about elementals, as has been fully recognized by occultists of the past ages and has been pooh-poohed only by modern materialism, is that they are, to begin with, malignant; that is, hostile to human life. Then again—now mark this well—they can manifest themselves materially to humans only by drawing the necessary force from a human source, preferably from some human in a state of low resistance; from—a sick man.”
“Oh, my—my brother?” Mrs. Jarrett gasped her realization.
The doctor nodded slowly. “Yes, his condition of low resistance and your thoughtless reaching for a contact in your séances have invited this malignant entity to this house. That is why the sick man has taken this sudden turn for the worse. The elemental is sapping his vitality in order to manifest itself materially. So far you have only felt its malevolent presence. Should it succeed in drawing to itself sufficient force it might be capable of enormous and destructive power. No, no, don’t scream now; that doesn’t help. You must all get a grip on yourselves so as calmly to take the proper defensive precautions.
“Fortunately we know an antidote; or let me say rather, a deterrent. Like most occult lore, this deterrent has been known and used by all peoples even up to this age of modern scepticism. Savage people throughout the world use it; oriental peoples with a sensitivity keener than our own use it; modern white people use it, though unconsciously. The literature of magic is full of it.
“It is nothing more or less than iron. Cold iron. The iron nose-ring or toe-ring of the savage; the mantra loha of the Hindus; the lucky horseshoe of your rural neighbours today. These things are not ornaments; they are amulets.
“We do not know why cold iron should act as a deterrent to certain kinds of hostile forces—call them spirits, if you like. But it is a fact known of old that a powerful antipathy exists between cold iron and certain of the lower orders of inhuman entities: doppelgangers, churels, incubi, wood runners, leperlings, and so on, and including all forms of elementals.
“So powerful is this antipathy that these hostile entities cannot approach a person or pass a passage so guarded. There are other forms of deterrents against some of the other discarnate entities: pentagons, Druid circles, etc., and even the holy water of the Church. Don’t ask me why or how—perhaps it has something to do with molecular vibrations. Let us be glad, for the present, that we know of this deterrent. And let each of you go to bed now with a poker or a stove lid or whatever you fancy as an amulet, which I assure you will be ample to protect a normal healthy person who does not contrive to establish some special line of contact which may counteract the deterrent. In the case of the sick man I have taken the extra precaution of guarding even the door.
“Now the rest of you go to bed and stay in your rooms. If you’re nervous, you may sleep all in one room. Dr. Terry and I will sit up and prowl around a bit. If you hear a noise it will be us doing night watchman. You can sleep in perfect security, unless you commit some piece of astounding foolishness which will open an unguarded avenue of contact. And one more thing: warn your brother, even if he should feel well enough, not in any circumstances to leave his room. Good night; and sleep well—if you can.”
Hesitant and unwilling the family went upstairs; huddled together, fearful of every new sound, every old shadow, not knowing, how this horror that had come into the house might manifest itself; hating to go, but worn out by fatigue engendered of extreme terror.
“I’ll bet they sleep all in one room like sardines,” commented the doctor.
Terry caught the note of anxiety and asked, “Was that all the straight dope? I mean about elementals and so on? And iron? Sounds kind of foolish.”
The doctor’s face was sober, the irises of his indeterminate eyes so pale that they were almost invisible in the artificial light.
“You never listened to a less foolish thing, my boy. It sounds so to you only because you have been bred in the school of modern materialism. What? Is it reasonable to maintain that we have during the last thin fringe of years on humanity’s history obliterated what has been known to humanity ever since the first anthropoid hid his head under his hairy arms in terror? We have but pushed these things a little farther away; we have become less sensitive than our forefathers. And, having become less sensitive, we naturally do not inadvertently tune in on any other set of vibrations; and so we proclaim loudly that no such things exist. But we are beginning to learn again; and if you have followed the trend you will surely have noticed that many of our leading men of science, of thought, of letters, have admitted their belief in things which science and religion have tried to deny.”
Terry was impressed with the truth of his friend’s statement. The possibilities thus opened up made him uneasy.
“Well, er-er, this—this elemental thing,” he said uneasily, “can it do anything?”
“It can do”—the i
ndeterminate eyes were far-away pinpoints—“it can do anything, everything. Having once broken into our sphere, our plane, our wavelength—call it what you will—its malignant potentiality is measured only by the amount of force it can draw from its human source of supply. And remember—here is the danger of these things—the measure is not on a par ratio. It doesn’t mean that such a malignant entity, drawing a few ounces of energy from a sick man, can exert only those few ounces. In some manner which we do not understand, all the discarnate intelligences know how to step-up an almost infinitesimal amount of human energy to many hundreds percent of power; as for instance the ‘spirits’ that move heavy tables, perform levitation and so on. A malignant spirit can use that power as a deadly, destructive force.”
“But, good Lord,” burst out Terry, “Why should the thing be malignant? Why, if it has broken through, got into tune with human vibrations, why should it want to destroy humans who have never done it any harm?”
The doctor did not reply at once. He was listening, alert and taut.
“Do these people keep a dog, do you know, Jimmy? Would that be it snuffling outside the door?”
But the noise, if there had been any, had ceased. The silence was sepulchral. The doctor relaxed and took up the last question.
“Why should it want to destroy life? That’s something of a poser. I might say, how do I know? But I have a theory. Remember I said that elementals belonged to one of the least intelligent groups of discarnate entities. Now, the lower one goes in the scale of human intelligence, the more prevalent does one find the superstition that by killing one’s enemy one acquires the good qualities of that enemy, his strength or his valour or his speed or something. In the lowest scale we find cannibalism, which is, as so many leading ethnologists have demonstrated, not a taste for human flesh, but a ceremony, a ritual whereby the eater absorbs the strength of the victim. And I suppose you know, incidentally, that militant modern atheists maintain that the holy communion is no other than a symbol of that very prevalent idea. An unintelligent elemental, then . . .”
