The Second Haunts & Horrors MEGAPACK®: 20 Tales by Modern and Classic Authors

by Fritz Leiber

  And his wife sat there, inert as a porcelain doll, her enormous eyes wide open and fixed on me in perfectly unswerving contemplation.

  “All really great mediums will trick you if they can,” said Moore coolly. “Don’t need any object for fraud. Unless you should call the trickery itself an object. Alicia is a great medium. Very—great!”

  Suddenly every decent impulse I had rose to revolt. That was a woman in the chair—Moore’s wife—and he treated her, talked about her, as though she were some peculiarly trained and subject animal.

  I rose sharply. “Mrs. Moore, is this affair proceeding with your consent?”

  “Don’t address the psychic!” snapped her husband over one shoulder.

  But I wasn’t afraid of him. At that moment I could have thrashed the man cheerfully—and with ease, for I carried no superfluous flesh in those days, and had inches the better of him in height and reach. Roberta was suddenly at my side, and I knew by the excited shine of her eyes that she sensed my emotion and approved it.

  “Mrs. Moore,” I repeated, “are you enduring this of your own free will? Moore, attempt to intimidate her, and you’ll be sorry!”

  He straightened, and turned on me in earnest, but Alicia herself broke the strain.

  “Sit down, boy,” she said in her dry, toneless voice. “What James says of fraud is true. But he does not mean what you think. I am not conscious of what I do in trance, and the self then in control has no moral standards. Were my earthly limbs not bound, no phenomena could be credited, and my own guides have advised the construction of this chair. The steel bands are padded with felt, and do not hurt me.

  “I did not speak to you when I entered, because at some times the guides like me to be silent. This is tiring me. You must not quarrel with James. Violent emotion tires me. A great evil will come to you through me, but now you must sit down and be very quiet. I am tired.”

  For the first time, white lids drooped over those unnatural eyes. The closing of them seemed to rob her face of the last trace of fellow-humanity. Moore was grinning again, though rather tensely.

  “Please sit down, Barbour,” he pleaded in a very low voice. “I should have explained a few things to you in advance. Alicia will be asleep directly, and then we can talk.”

  I did sit down, and Roberta retired to her window. That toneless, indifferent voice of Alicia’s, that cool exactitude of statement, had not seemed the expression of a meek and terrorized soul. But if she were not afraid of Moore, why had she been so surreptitious in asking—in ordering me to leave? “I did not speak to you when I entered—” But she had spoken to me. “A great evil will come to you through me—” And she said it like a remark on the weather!

  I gave up suddenly. All my curiosity was submerged in a wave of healthy revolt against the obviously abnormal. A vague unhappiness came with it, and the desire above everything to take Roberta and get out.

  Alicia was breathing regularly now, in long, deep breaths, soft but audible. Leaving her, Moore drew up a chair between Roberta and me, seated himself, crossed one leg over his knee, and beamed amiably.

  “Mr. Moore,” I began, but he checked me, finger in air.

  “Shh! Trifle lower, please. I know what you’re thinking, Barbour, and I don’t blame you. Not in—the—least! My fault entirely. Now let’s drop all that and forget it. You are two very intelligent people, but I can never remember that the average man or woman knows as much about sensitives as a baby knows of trigonometry. Now, why did I invite you here, Barbour?”

  “For an interesting evening, you said.”

  “Exactly! And you’ll have it, First of many, I hope. But don’t expect any messages from your deceased grandfathers tonight, for you won’t get ’em.”

  “Very well,” I assented. “Bert, do you hear that? Our revered ancestors won’t speak to us!”

  “And don’t imagine this is a matter for joking, either,” reproved Moore, but still amiably. “I did not say that purely spiritual forces would not be involved. But a psychic—a medium—has all the complexity of the highest type of nervous human—plus. And it’s the plus sign that complicates matters. You might get messages through from almost anyone—eventually. You’ll seem to get them tonight. But they won’t be real. Alicia has more different selves than the proverbial cat has nine lives. And all wanting a chance to talk, and parade around, and pass themselves off as anybody you’d care to name, from Julius Caesar to your mother’s deceased aunt’s nephew. Very—remarkable!”

  “I should say so!”

  We glanced rather anxiously at Alicia’s quiescent figure. But no sudden procession of selves had yet appeared.

  “That, however, is beside the mark,” announced Moore briskly, “In such commonplace manifestations, Alicia dematerializes a percentage of her own fleshly bulk, externalizes and projects it from her in the shape demanded by her subliminal consciousness. Aside from proving the accepted laws of matter to be false, the phenomena are of small importance.”

  He paused again.

  “I should think,” ventured Roberta, carefully avoiding my eyes, “that disproving the laws of matter would be—might be almost enough for one evening.”

  “The accepted laws,” he corrected rather sharply. “Crooks—Oschorowicz—Lombroso—Bottazzi—Lodge—I could name you over a dozen great scientists who have already disproved them in that way. But they had only Eusapia Paladino and lesser psychics to work with. We have—Alicia!”

  A vague memory stirred in me. “Paladino?” I said “You mean the famous Italian medium? I thought she was exposed as a fraud.”

  He frowned. This was a sore subject with him, though I did not know why till much later.

  “I tell you,” he scowled, “they are all frauds—when they have the chance. The first impulse of hysteria is toward deception. Genuine mediumship and hysteria are practically inseparable. What can you expect? Paladino was as genuine as Alicia, and Alicia will fool you outrageously, given the least opportunity. Quite—scandalously—unscrupulous!”

  “You’re very frank about it,” I couldn’t help saying.

  “Why not? You heard Alicia’s own statement in that regard. She works with me to overcome the disadvantage. Mabel and Maudie are manageable enough, but Horace is a born joker. For a long time Horace fought bitterly against the idea of that chair, and only yielded when I threatened to give up the sittings.”

  “These people are friends who attend the séances?” I inquired, thinking that Moore had Nils’s habit of referring to all his acquaintances by their Christian names. Moore appeared mildly surprised.

  “Don’t you really know anything at all of spiritistic investigation?”

  “Sorry. I’m afraid I’ve never had enough faith in spooks to be interested.”

  “Never mind. We’ll correct that!” assured Moore calmly. “Mabel and Maudie and Horace are three of Alicia’s spirit guides. She believes them to be real entities of the spirit world—people who have passed beyond, you understand—but I doubt it. Doubt it—very—seriously! In fact, I have reason to be positive that those three, along with several subsidiary ‘spirits,’ are just so many phases of Alicia’s subconscious. On the other hand, Jason Gibbs, her real ‘control,’ is a spirit to be reckoned with. You will find Jason an amazingly interesting man on acquaintance. And now that I have explained fully, suppose we take a look at the cabinet?”

  Roberta and I rose and followed him, not sure whether to be amused or impressed. His statement that he had “explained fully” was a joke, as far as we were concerned. What nebulous ideas of a séance we had possessed were far removed from anything we had met tonight. To sit in a circle, holding hands in the dark; to hear mysterious raps and poundings; to glimpse, perhaps, the cheese-clothy forms of highly fictitious “ghosts”—that had been our previous conception of a “sitting,” culled from general and half-fo
rgotten reading.

  Moore was so utterly matter-of-fact and unmystical of manner that he probably impressed us more deeply than if he had attempted to inspire awe. And, I reflected, if he were a charlatan, where was his profit? Nils himself had assured me that Mrs. Moore was not a professional medium.

  The fact was that I had emerged from college almost wholly ignorant of the modern debate between the physicist and the spiritist—ignorant that science itself had been driven to admission of supernormal powers in certain “victims of hysteria,” but stood firm on the ground that these powers were of physical and terrestrial origin.

  James Barton Moore, however, was a born materialist who had accepted the spiritistic theory from an intellectual viewpoint. The result showed in his matter-of-fact way of dealing with the occult He had, moreover, one characteristic of a certain type of scientist in less weird fields. He would have put a stranger or his best friend on the vivisectionist’s table, could he by that means have hoped to acquire one small modicum of the knowledge he sought. Figuratively, he already had me on the table that night.

  CHAPTER IV

  “HORACE.”

  On pushing aside the black curtains, the cabinet proved to be a place like a square closet, with a smooth, solid wooden back, built out from the wall. In it there stood a small, rather heavy table, made of polished oak, on which reposed several objects.

  There was a thing like a small megaphone, to which Moore referred as the “cone.” There was an ordinary thin glass tumbler, nearly filled with water; a lump of soft putty; a sheet of paper blackened by sooty smoke; a pad of ordinary white paper, and several pencils, of different colors and sizes.

  “Our preparations tonight,” said Moore, “are of the simplest sort. I have passed the stage of registering Alicia’s externalized motivity by means of instruments of precision. The exact force exerted to lift a weight yards beyond her bodily reach, the regulated rhythm of a metronome’s pendulum, the compression of a pneumatic bulb ten feet from her hand—these have all been tested, proved and left behind me. Others have done that with other mediums.

  “But I go the step further that Bottazzi and many of the others dared not take. Having admitted the phenomena, I admit a cause for them outside the physical and beyond Alicia’s individuality. I admit the disembodied spirit. My experiments are no longer based on doubt, but certainty. Their culmination will mean a revolution for the thinking world—a reversal of its whole stand toward matter and the forces that affect it.”

  Roberta and I were not particularly interested in revolutions of thought. Like younger children, we wished to know what he proposed doing with the things on the table, and after that we wished to see it done. So we stood silent, hoping that he would stop talking soon and let the exhibition of Alicia’s mysterious powers begin.

  Being off on his hobby, Moore probably mistook our silence for interest. At last, however, in the midst of a dissertation on “psychic force,” “telekinesis” and “spiritual controls,” he was interrupted by a long, deep sigh from the chair. The sigh was followed by a strangled gasping, very much as though Alicia were choking to death.

  We both started toward the chair, but Moore barred the way.

  “Let her alone!” he ordered imperatively. “She’s all right. Come back to your seats.” And when we had returned to our former positions, he added: “She is going into trance now. Later you may approach closer—hold her hands, if you like. But Alicia can’t bear even myself to be very near her in the first stages. It hurts her, you understand. Gives her physical pain.”

  Judging from poor Alicia’s appearance, she was in physical pain anyway. Her peaked white face writhed in the most unpleasant contortions. She choked, gasped, gurgled, and showed every symptom of a woman in dying agonies. Then suddenly she quieted, her face resumed its lay-figure calmness, and the great eyes opened wide.

  “Differs from most psychics. Opens her eyes in trance—quite—frequently!” I heard Moore muttering; but Alicia herself began to speak now, and I forgot him.

  The queerest, silliest little voice issued from her lips. It was like a child’s voice, but an idiot child’s.

  “Pretty, pretty, pretty!” it gurgled. “Oh, such a pretty lady! Did pretty lady come to see Maudie?” Followed a pause. When it spoke again the voice had a petulant note: “Did pretty lady come to see Maudie?”

  Moore looked at Roberta. “Why don’t you answer her, Miss Whitingfield?” Before she could comply, however, another personality had apparently superseded the idiot child. A great laugh that I would have sworn was a man’s echoed across the silent library. It seemed to come from Alicia’s throat.

  “Ha, ha, ha! Oh, ha, ha! You’ve got queer taste, Jimmy Moore! Why d’you want to drag that pair of freaks in here? Tell ’em to go home! Go on home, young fellow, d’you hear? Go on, now—and take the skirt with you!”

  “That is Horace,” commented Moore imperturbably. “You haven’t any manners, Horace, have you?”

  “Not a manner!” retorted the voice. “Is that young sport going to leave, or do I have to heave a brick at him? Scat! Get out—you!”

  This was certainly outside my idea of a séance. It occurred to me abruptly that the voice was not proceeding from Alicia. Some confederate was concealed near by—had entered the cabinet, perhaps, by a concealed door. Or Moore himself was ventriloquizing.

  Then I realized that Alicia’s eyes were again fixed on my face, and their expression was not that of a woman entranced. They were keen, bright, intelligent. Her lips moved.

  “Get! Get out!” adjured that brutally vulgar voice. Then it changed to a whining, female treble: “You are young, Clayton Barbour; young and soft to the soft, cruel hand that would mold you. You are easy to mold as clay—clay—Clayton—clay! Evil hangs over you—black evil! Flee from the damned, Clayton Barbour. Go home—you!”

  Moore was frowning uneasily.

  “Subliminal,” he said shortly. “Pay no attention to these voices. They emanate from the subconscious—Alicia’s dream self. Similar to delirium, you know.”

  “Ah!” I murmured, and settled back in my chair. Not that I agreed with Moore, though I had dismissed thought of either a confederate or my host’s ventriloquism. The ventriloquist was Alicia herself. I had no doubt that she could have caused the voices to sound from any quarter of the room as easily as from her own throat. As for trance, her eyes were entirely too wakeful and intelligent. Nearly everything said so far had been mere repetition, in different phrases and voices, of that first, brief, fierce little demand that I leave.

  But by that time I was more than a trifle annoyed. It was hardly pleasant to sit in Roberta’s presence and hear rude puns made on my name—to hear it implied that I was a mere nonentity with no character of my own. I rather plumed myself that Alicia would not find me so pliable. If she really wished me to depart, she had gone the wrong way about it.

  “Ah,” I said, settled back, and—the vulgarity of “Horace” may have been contagious—deliberately winked at Alicia. It was a crude enough act, but her methods struck me as crude, too.

  A blaze of fury leaped into those too-attentive eyes. Her features writhed in such an abominable convulsion as I had never believed possible to the human countenance. Purple, distorted, terrible—with a flashing of bone-white teeth—and out of it all a voice discordant, and different from any we had heard.

  “Fool—fool—fool!” it grated. “Protect—try—can’t protect fool! Slipping—it’s got me—I’m slip—Oh-h-h! Oh-h-h-h!”

  Even Moore seemed affected this time. We were all on our feet, and he was beside his wife in three long strides. As the last, long-drawn moan died away, however, the dreadful purple subsided from Alicia’s countenance as quickly as it had risen. She was again the queer, white porcelain doll, leaning back with closed lids in her imprisoning chair.

  Moore straightened, wiped his fo
rehead, and laughed shakily.

  “Do you know,” he said, “with all the experience I’ve had, Alicia still gives me an occasional fright? But I never saw her pass into the second stage quite so violently.”

  “Don’t these horrible convulsions hurt your wife, Mr. Moore?”

  Roberta was deeply distressed, and no wonder! I felt as if I had brought her to watch the seizures of an epileptic.

  “She says they don’t,” replied Moore. “But—never mind that. Listen!”

  Alicia’s lips writhed whitely. “Light!” came her barely audible whisper.

  Promptly Moore reached for a wall button. Two of the three lights burning went out. The third was a shaded library lamp on a table not far off. I expected him to extinguish that also, for everything in the room was plainly visible, but he let it be.

  “You may hold Alicia’s hands, if you wish,” he offered generously.

  We shook our heads. Presently the hushed whisper was heard again.

  “Many shadows are here tonight,” it said. “Shadows living and dead. Dead-alive and living dead. They crowd close. An old, old shadow comes. Blood runs from his lean, gnarled throat. He speaks!” The whisper became a ghastly, bubbling attempt at articulation. There were no words. The result was just an abominable sound.

  “Man with his throat cut might speak like that,” observed Moore reflectively. “She must mean old Jenkins, who was murdered next door. That’s the reason we have this house, you know. The other half’s supposed to be haunted—and is.”

  Now I wanted to get out in earnest. Fraud or epileptic, Alicia was entirely too horrible, and Moore, with his calmness, almost worse. I tried to draw Roberta toward the door, but she held back.

  “Not yet, Clay. I wish to see what will happen.”

  Now the horrid gurgle had merged into a man’s voice. It was loud and distinct as Horace’s, but otherwise slightly different—as different, say, as tenor from high baritone.