Veronica was aware of a curious sense of buoyancy and freedom ; she seemed to have been relieved of a great weight, a load had rolled from her shoulders. Life pulsed within her, and yet she was heavy with sleep. Like one roused in the middle of the night, she was refreshed, yet ready to turn over again and sink back into the depths of slumber whence she had been recalled.
Veronica lit her candle, and with unsteady feet went up to bed, as yet she did not seem to be fully back: in the flesh after her far journey ; her soul still desired to move without her body, and made no allowances for its limitations.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
SHE AWOKE IN THE MORNING CONSCIOUS OF having dreamt, but her dreams were vague and fugitive, as dreams usually are, yet somehow she had the impression that these dreams were not as other dreams, there was a different quality about them, and the dream-images that floated vaguely through her memory were of a type she had never known before. And yet they were vaguely familiar ; like forgotten childhood memories, they drifted elusively and would not be linked on to the chain of her history. Somewhere, at some time, she had known those tall, slow-moving figures, distinguished by the colours of their cloaks ; somewhere she had heard the deep resonant tones of their speech, and their language was not strange to her.
The wind had fallen, and the day was still with the warm stillness that sometimes comes in the late autumn, and Veronica, walking in the garden, sought to piece together her broken memories. But they resisted all her efforts; sought, they fled before her ; but left to their own devices as in dreamy abstraction she gazed at the blue distances, they thronged and pressed about her as if seeking to attract her attention. The corner of some grey mediaeval cloister faded into the high white pillars of a great temple, and these again gave place to the clear bright radiance of last night's dream scene.
Sometimes the sound of the voices returned to her ears. Someone had told her to place herself in his hands and trust him ; she was to trust unreservedly, and she would be guided ; something was to be made plain to her, someone was to be sent, but who, and what, remained obscure ; broad general impressions lingered in her mind but details eluded her. She gathered that the struggle she had hitherto waged unaided had been taken in hand by higher powers which were in some way concerned in what was going on, as if Lucas had intruded upon their territory and outraged them. He had often hinted to her of other forms of existence, none the less real and potent because they are imperceptible to our senses. It seemed to her that, even as these forms of life are unreal to us, so must we be unreal to them, but upon this occasion, deflected from the normal by the machinations of Lucas, she had become aware of their existence, and they, equally, had become aware of hers. She realized their wisdom and power to aid, and they were aware of her defencelessness and danger. A link, slender and uncertain, but still a link, had been formed between the two phases of existence, and across the gulf they could signal to each other.
She was no longer alone and unfriended ; solitary though her life might appear, yet the unseen was close about her and she was aware of it. There are some people who, once having become aware of the existence of a supernatural reality, attribute everything to its agency ; the mouse in the skirting, the wind in the chimney, are ministering spirits, and a special providence attends upon all their affairs ; or, contrariwise, malignant devils lurk in creaking furniture and have to be chivvied with elaborate rituals. To neither of these types did Veronica belong ; when the Unseen obtruded itself upon her, she was forced to accept it, but as soon as it receded into the background again, she questioned the truth of her memories and attributed them to dream or imagination. Veronica did not wish to believe in the Unseen, but she had had it forced upon her.
She queried persistently the reality of last night's experience ; there was no means by which she could test its truth, no trace was left by the presences that had come and gone. There was but one thing she could test them by, in her memory there lingered a feeling that a definite promise had been made that someone would come to her upon the physical plane, that the Unseen could communicate with others as well as herself, and that one of these others had been told to come to her and help her. She gathered that she had found her way into some great organization that had branches upon many planes of existence, and that its members would come to her assistance in case of need, and at the same time had the right to demand service of her. They differed entirely from the dark, cold, forces that companioned Lucas, these seemed to belong to something old, subhuman, that mankind had left behind and forgotten ; that aspect of the Unseen which now approached her seemed to belong to a kingdom that mankind had as yet hardly glimpsed. Lucas resuscitated the dead past ; through Veronica there came to birth the living future.
The day passed away uneventfully, Lucas's hour had not yet: come, it was not till after dark that he could function. Veronica knew the time of his manifestation, and awaited him. As before, the deepening of the twilight heralded his arrival, and with the passing of the last light a presence made itself known in the room. Again the same process was repeated, the available life forces were divided, till these two met upon common ground, half way between the unseen and the seen.
The cowled figure formed itself and spoke : “Veronica, we must come to an understanding. Are you going to help me or not ?”
Veronica faced him as she had often faced him in life. “I will do anything I can to help you,” she said. “But you shall not do that ghastly thing to the children again if I can prevent it.”
“What else can I do ?” said the cowled figure. “If I do not replenish my vitality I cannot hold even this form together, and then I go to the Second Death. You do not know what that is, do you, Veronica ?”
She shook her head, “I know nothing about these things.”
“Just as well for you. All the same, we are in for them now, and have got to cope with them as best we can. But I can tell you this, I do not wish to go to that Second Death. You will not send me to that, will you Veronica ?”
In his urgency he swayed towards her, and a hand that was as real as in life was laid upon her arm.
Veronica put out her hand, and the soft smooth draperies under her touch were like no textile she had ever felt. “I do not want to do you any harm, Mr. Lucas, I would not do you any harm for the world, but I cannot let you hurt those children, I must protect them. It is all so horrible. Why must these things be ?”
“Because they cannot be helped,” answered the man. “I have got to feed or die, and I don't propose to die if I can help it.”
“But you are dead,” cried Veronica.
“There is no such thing as death in the way you mean,” answered the man. “I have lost the machine that was given me to work before such time as the forces that drive it are withdrawn. The forces are there, intact. I am alive, very much alive, and if I can once succeed in building myself a machine, I will live as you live, and then I will come for you, Veronica ! But at present I am only half way there, I must have more life, and I have got to take it where I can get it.”
“You shall not take it from the children again,” said Veronica. “I will not fail you ; I promised, and I shall keep my word. What I can do for you I will do, but the children you shall not have.”
She faced him : young, and even for her years curiously immature, yet with a force that was as old as Nature shining through her. Motherhood incarnate represented itself through that childish figure ; she was the immortal female defending the young of her kind, the fiercest thing alive. Even the man she loved might not touch the children. And Lucas knew it. Veronica moved blindly, as her instincts prompted her, but Lucas knew what forces they were that drove her ; he knew that he had sought to revive a thing that evolution itself had stamped out, the power of the strong to break away from the herd and feed upon the helpless young of their own species, and Nature herself had risen up and said : “This shall not be,” and found a ready means of expression in the pliable young girl whom he had himself taught to be a medium. The an
ti-cyclone had set in, and the principalities and powers that Lucas had outraged were coming into action.
Veronica spoke again. “I do not understand these things, Mr. Lucas, but I am willing to do whatever I can to help you, I am not afraid ; and although I do not understand them, yet I seem to know something about them.”
“I dare say you do,” said Lucas. “And you will know more before you have finished. There is only one thing I ask of you, to lend me enough of your subtle ethers to enable me to collect material for a body through which I can function, and if you will not do that, then there is nothing to be done, we are at a deadlock.”
“I am willing to lend you my forces,” said Veronica. “But I will not let you touch the children.”
“And it is only from the children that I am strong enough at present to take the forces right out and keep them,” he answered. “If I persist in drawing upon your forces, I shall draw you over to my phase of existence—death in life—Veronica, and even I draw the line at that. I do not draw the line at much, but I draw it at that. You won't let me come to you, and I won't draw you over to me. So there we are, and I hope you can see a way out of it, for I cannot.”
Veronica had no answer to offer. The grey form before her swayed like the blown flame of a candle as emotions that were still human coursed through it.
Lucas spoke again. “If I did not love you it would not matter, but I love you, and I cannot do this thing. Why is it that my love for you—the best thing I have ever known—should be the thing that has dragged me down? If I had not cared what happened to you, I could have let the brethren strike you and escaped myself as I had always intended to, but when it came to the point I couldn't do it. I should have lived, but I should have been alone, and that was no good to me. Now, again, I could draw myself back on to the life-plane by using your forces, but then I should have pushed you out here, we should only have changed places, and I should be alone again. Why didn't I meet you before I got myself mixed up in these things? I do not believe I should have wanted to do them if I had had you ; and now it is too late, there is no path of returning from the place I have come to save by the use of other people's lives, and that you will not let me do, and I'm damned if I am going to use your life, Veronica. I am damned already, so it probably would not make much difference, but, anyway, I am not going to do that.”
The room, dimly ht by the dying fire, was a cave of darkness ; no stars looked in through the uncurtained windows, for the night was clouded without. The lamp was unlit, and the fire, that form of life which is not of our evolution, seemed repressed and made sinister by the presence of this being who had intruded upon a world where he had no right to be. Something of his nature had entered into the fire and influenced its burning ; it was no longer the cheery hearth of human comfort, but a flickering witch-light that ministered to spells. Lucas, when he returned from the unseen, did not come alone, but a multitude of others slipped through the door that opened to admit him. Beings of another order of life, penetrating to our world with the eager curiosity with which the psychic investigator intrudes upon theirs.
The thinning of the veil had set up a process of spiritual osmosis, and the more vigorous forms of the unseen were beginning to absorb the life of the plane of manifestation. Lucas had known all along that herein lay the danger. By refusing to pass on to the place appointed, the Judgment Hall of Osiris, as it is called, he had taken up his abode in the antechamber between the unseen and the seen, the realm of that which has no form, whence the root-substance of matter is drawn and to which it returns when the ensouling life has outworn it. Herein function creatures of another order of creation to our own, whose nearest analogy is in the saprophytic life of the bacteria ; the scavengers of creation, they have their place in its processes, but, should they obtrude beyond their appointed sphere, they are the most horrible of phenomena.
It was in this world of the abyss that Lucas was dwelling, and to whose influences he was exposing the only being he had ever cared for. He knew, both from the teaching of the occult school in which he had been trained and by his own experiences since he had quitted the physical body, what cold hell of disintegration it was to which he had come ; he also knew that, should he fail to keep his footing in the world of manifestation—should he no longer be able, through depletion of vitality, to hold his tenuous form together, then he would be drawn again into the flow of the cosmic laws, and the process of death, which by his knowledge he had been able to hold in abeyance, would continue its course, the last shred of etheric substance which served to anchor him to the world of matter would fall away, and his naked soul would depart to the place of judgment to face its reckoning. For there is a balancing of accounts at the end of each incarnation ; the books are made up, that which we owe the universe is demanded of us and that which the universe owes us is paid over ; these two transactions constitute the experiences known as Purgatory and the Lesser Heaven. Then, the balance having been adjusted, as far as it can be adjusted, by subjective realization, the soul is ready to embark upon a new venture in the world of matter ; experience having been transmuted into faculty and a balance struck between the good and evil of its nature ; it has, as it were, gone into voluntary liquidation, realized its assets and acknowledged its debts. Lucas was an absconding debtor, he dared not present: himself for examination because his transactions in the unseen powers had been fraudulent, he had converted trust monies to his own use when he employed cosmic powers for personal ends ; an account would be demanded of him which he could not give, and he had little mind to face the consequences.
Having no physical organs that could draw energy from the animal and vegetable kingdoms by the processes of ingestion and digestion, he had to obtain his energy ready-made from those who had—he thus became a parasite, living upon the vitality of others, and what happened to those others we have already seen. Had such mysterious child-deaths taken place in the Middle Ages they would have been recognized for what they were, and a vigorous vampire-hunt set on foot ; the body of the suspect would have been dug up, and if it were found to have resisted decomposition, as would be the case if the soul that had inhabited it were maintaining its hold upon the world of form, it would have been burnt to ashes, for fire alone can break the hold of the semi-dead upon their house of flesh.
No such knowledge was available in our enlightened day, neither coroner nor undertaker guessed the significance of the unmarred body of Lucas, and so the drama of life-in-death was allowed to work itself out. The forces of the Outer Dark were taking part in the events of human life; it remained to be seen if the forces of the Inner Light could cope with them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
VERONICA AWOKE TO FIND THE FIRE SHROUDED in grey ash and the dawn-light looking in at the windows. It had frozen hard in the night, and the sun rose upon a silver world. Lucas was gone, but the atmosphere of his presence still hung about the room. The girl flung open the windows and stepped out into the clean coldness of the autumn dawn ; the grey light was fast changing to a rosy radiance and, late in the year though it was, there were murmurings in the tree-tops. Veronica stood, face to the east, waiting for the sun to clear the hills, for though the sky was alight, the valley lay in the shadow of the earth-bend. She was a very different girl to the one who had watched sunrises among the Surrey hills ; naturally of a sensitive disposition, as Lucas had divined when the employment agency sent her, among dozens of others, in response to his bogus request for a secretary, the experiences through which she had passed were rapidly awaking her psychic vision, and things which, though all about us, pass unperceived by ordinary mortals, were fast coming into the focus of her consciousness ; and so, in that clear, frosty winter dawn she heard one of the most wonderful things in the world—the cosmic powers changing guard as the sun forces ‘ take over ’ from the darkness, the manifest alternating with the unmanifest ; she heard the great humming musical rhythms by which the sensitive can recognize the potencies that are manifesting, just as the experienced mechan
ic can tell the make of a car by its engine-note ; she felt the wind of their passing and could see the great rivers of light up and down the sky that marked their path. The ebbing tide of night gave place to the flood of daybreak and all creation rejoiced, but she did not forget that the relaxation of evening would be equally welcome to a tired world. Light is good and darkness is good, if so be they keep their just proportions ; ebb and flow, action and reaction, all equal and opposite, through which, and by means of which, evolution mounts its spiral.
For a while she listened until the cosmic rhythms settled down to their new motif and the world took up its day's work. Cocks crowed on distant farms, and a clop-clop of heavy hoofs on the high-road showed that the plough teams were going to their labours. Man's day had begun. The still, mist-laden air of the valley began to throb with the sound of human activities. The harsh panting of a locomotive as it breasted the grade out of Beckering Junction gave the rhythm of the age of iron, and Veronica, back once more in the world of matter, set herself to pace the terrace until such time as her ancient domestic should elect to serve breakfast.
Time never hangs upon the hands of those who have once penetrated into the subjective world of mind, for there is ever work to be done with the mental images, and Veronica had much to think about. As she walked, she reviewed the transactions that had led up to her present situation ; to her mind had come a lucidity it had never before possessed, and behind the train of memory-pictures she could discern the causes that linked them together. Some door within her consciousness had been opened during the night's experiences, and it seemed as if she had gained access to chambers in her house of mind which hitherto had been barred to her.
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