by Brian Lumley
By that time we had settled ourselves down in front of the fire in Aunt Hester’s living-room and I was able to scan, as she talked, the paraphernalia her “group” had left behind. There were old leather-bound tomes and treatises, tarot cards, a ouija board shiny brown with age, oh, and several other items beloved of the spiritualist. I was fascinated, as ever I had been as a boy, by the many obscure curiosities in Aunt Hester’s cottage.
“The first I knew of the link between George and myself,” she began, breaking in on my thoughts, “as apart from the obvious link that exists between all twins, was when we were twelve years old. Your grandparents had taken us, along with your mother, down to the beach at Seaton Carew. It was July and marvellously hot. Well, to cut a long story short, your mother got into trouble in the water.
“She was quite a long way out and the only one anything like close to her was George—who couldn’t swim! He’d waded out up to his neck, but he didn’t dare go any deeper. Now, you can wade a long way out at Seaton. The bottom shelves off very slowly. George was at least fifty yards out when we heard him yelling that Sis was in trouble…
“At first I panicked and started to run out through the shallow water, shouting to George that he should swim to Sis, which of course he couldn’t—but he did! Or at least, I did! Somehow, I’d swapped places with him, do you see? Not physically but mentally. I’d left him behind me in the shallow water, in my body, and I was swimming for all I was worth for Sis in his! I got her back to the shallows with very little trouble—she was only a few inches out of her depth—and then, as soon as the danger was past, I found my consciousness floating back into my own body.
“Well, everyone made a big fuss of George; he was the hero of the day, you see? How had he done it?—they all wanted to know; and all he was able to say was that he’d just seemed to stand there watching himself save Sis. And of course he had stood there watching it all—through my eyes!
“I didn’t try to explain it; no one would have believed or listened to me anyway, and I didn’t really understand it myself—but George was always a bit wary of me from then on. He said nothing, mind you, but I think that even as early as that first time he had an idea…”
Suddenly she looked at me closely, frowning. “You’re not finding all this a bit too hard to swallow, Love?”
“No,” I shook my head. “Not really. I remember reading somewhere of a similar thing between twins—a sort of Corsican Brothers situation.”
“Oh, but I’ve heard of many such!” she quickly answered. “I don’t suppose you’ve read Joachim Feery on the Necronomicon?”
“No,” I answered. “I don’t think so.”
“Well, Feery was the illegitimate grandson of Baron Kant, the German ‘witch-hunter’. He died quite mysteriously in 1934 while still a comparatively young man. He wrote a number of occult limited editions—mostly published at his own expense—the vast majority of which religious and other authorities bought up and destroyed as fast as they appeared. Unquestionably—though it has never been discovered where he saw or read them—Feery’s source books were very rare and sinister volumes; among them the Cthaat Aquadingen, the Necronomicon, von Junzt’s Unspeakable Cults, Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis and others of that sort. Often Feery’s knowledge in respect of such books has seemed almost beyond belief. His quotes, while apparently genuine and authoritative, often differ substantially when compared with the works from which they were supposedly culled. Regarding such discrepancies, Feery claimed that most of his occult knowledge came to him ‘in dreams’!” She paused, then asked: “Am I boring you?”
“Not a bit of it,” I answered. “I’m fascinated.”
“Well, anyhow,” she continued, “as I’ve said, Feery must somewhere have seen one of the very rare copies of Abdul Alhazred’s Necronomicon, in one translation or another, for he published a slim volume of notes concerning that book’s contents. I don’t own a copy myself but I’ve read one belonging to a friend of mine, an old member of my group. Alhazred, while being reckoned by many to have been a madman, was without doubt the world’s foremost authority on black magic and the horrors of alien dimensions, and he was vastly interested in every facet of freakish phenomena, physical and metaphysical.”
She stood up, went to her bookshelf and opened a large modern volume of Aubrey Beardsley’s fascinating drawings, taking out a number of loose white sheets bearing lines of her own neat handwriting.
“I’ve copied some of Feery’s quotes, supposedly from Alhazred. Listen to this one:
“’Tis a veritable & attestable Fact, that between certain related Persons there exists a Bond more powerful than the strongest Ties of Flesh & Family, whereby one such Person may be aware of all the Trials & Pleasures of the other, yea, even to experiencing the Pains or Passions of one far distant; & further, there are those whose Skills in such Matters are aided by forbidden Knowledge or Intercourse through dark Magic with Spirits & Beings of outside Spheres. Of the latter: I have sought them out, both Men & Women, & upon Examination have in all Cases discovered them to be Users of
Divination, Observers of Times, Enchanters, Witches, Charmers, or Necromancers. All claimed to work their Wonders through Intercourse with dead & departed Spirits, but I fear that often such Spirits were evil Angels, the Messengers of the Dark One & yet more ancient Evils. Indeed, among them were some whose Powers were prodigious, who might at Will inhabit the Body of another even at a great Distance & against the Will & often unbeknown to the Sufferer of such Outrage…”
• • •
She put down the papers, sat back and looked at me quizzically.
“That’s all very interesting,” I said after a moment, “but hardly applicable to yourself.”
“Oh, but it is, Love,” she protested. “I’m George’s twin, for one thing, and for another—”
“But you’re no witch or necromancer!”
“No, I wouldn’t say so—but I am a ‘User of Divinations’, and I do ‘work my Wonders through Intercourse with dead & departed Spirits’. That’s what spiritualism is all about.”
“You mean you actually take this, er, Alhazred and spiritualism and all seriously?” I deprecated.
She frowned. “No, not Alhazred, not really,” she answered after a moment’s thought. “But he is interesting, as you said. As for spiritualism: yes, I do take it seriously. Why, you’d be amazed at some of the vibrations I’ve been getting these last three weeks or so. Very disturbing, but so far rather incoherent; frantic, in fact. I’ll track him down eventually, though—the spirit, I mean…”
We sat quietly then, contemplatively for a minute or two. Frankly, I didn’t quite know what to say; but then she went on: “Anyway, we were talking about George and how I believed that even after that first occasion he had a bit of an idea that I was at the root of the thing. Yes, I really think he did. He said nothing, and yet…
“And that’s not all, either. It was some time after that day on the beach before Sis could be convinced that she hadn’t been saved by me. She was sure it had been me, not George, who pulled her out of the deep water.
“Well, a year or two went by, and school-leaving exams came up. I was all right, a reasonable scholar—I had always been a bookish kid—but poor old George…” She shook her head sadly. My uncle, it appeared, had not been too bright.
After a moment she continued. “Dates were set for the exams and two sets of papers were prepared, one for the boys, another for the girls. I had no trouble with my paper, I knew even before the results were announced that I was through easily—but before that came George’s turn. He’d been worrying and chewing, cramming for all he was worth, biting his nails down to the elbows…and getting nowhere. I was in bed with flu when the day of his exams came round, and I remember how I just lay there fretting over him. He was my brother, after all.
“I must have been thinking of him just a bit too hard, though, for before I knew it there I was, staring down hard at an exam paper, sitting in a class full of boys
in the old school!
“…An hour later I had the papers all finished, and then I concentrated myself back home again. This time it was a definite effort for me to find my way back to my own body.
“The house was in an uproar. I was downstairs in my dressing-gown; mother had an arm round me and was trying to console me; father was yelling and waving his arms about like a lunatic. “The girl’s gone mad!” I remember him exploding, red faced and a bit frightened.
“Apparently I had rushed downstairs about an hour earlier. I had been shouting and screaming tearfully that I’d miss the exam, and I had wanted to know what I was doing home. And when they had called me Hester instead of George! Well, then I had seemed to go completely out of my mind!
“Of course, I had been feverish with flu for a couple of days. That was obviously the answer: I had suddenly reached the height of a hitherto unrecognised delirious fever, and now the fever had broken I was going to be all right. That was what they said …
“George eventually came home with his eyes all wide and staring, frightened-looking, and he stayed that way for a couple of days. He avoided me like the plague! But the next week—when it came out about how good his marks were, how easily he had passed his examination papers—well—”
“But surely he must have known,” I broke in. What few doubts I had entertained were now gone forever. She was plainly not making all of this up.
“But why should he have known, Love? He knew he’d had two pretty nightmarish experiences, sure enough, and that somehow they had been connected with me; but he couldn’t possibly know that they had their origin in me—that I formed their focus.”
“He did find out, though?”
“Oh, yes, he did,” she slowly answered, her eyes seeming to glisten just a little in the homely evening glow of the room. “And as I’ve said, that’s why he left home in the end. It happened like this:
“I had never been a pretty girl—no, don’t say anything, Love. You weren’t even a twinkle in your father’s eye then, he was only a boy himself, and so you wouldn’t know. But at a time of life when most girls only have to pout to set the boys on fire, well, I was only very plain—and I’m probably giving myself the benefit of the doubt at that.
“Anyway, when George was out nights—walking his latest girl, dancing, or whatever—I was always at home on my own with my books. Quite simply, I came to be terribly jealous of my brother. Of course, you don’t know him, he had already been gone something like fifteen years when you were born, but George was a handsome lad. Not strong, mind you, but long and lean and a natural for the girls.
“Eventually he found himself a special girlfriend and came to spend all his time with her. I remember being furious because he wouldn’t tell me anything about her…”
She paused and looked at me and after a while I said “Uhhuh?” inviting her to go on.
“It was one Saturday night in the spring, I remember, not long after our nineteenth birthday, and George had spent the better part of an hour dandying himself up for this unknown girl. That night he seemed to take a sort of stupid, well, delight in spiting me; he refused to answer my questions about his girl or even mention her name. Finally, after he had set his tie straight and slicked his hair down for what seemed like the thousandth time, he dared to wink at me—maliciously, I thought, in my jealousy—as he went out into the night.
“That did it. Something snapped! I stamped my foot and rushed upstairs to my room for a good cry. And in the middle of crying I had my idea—”
“You decided to, er, swap identities with your brother, to have a look at his girl for yourself,” I broke in. “Am I right?”
She nodded in answer, staring at the fire; ashamed of herself, I thought, after all this time. “Yes, I did,” she said. “For the first time I used my power for my own ends. And mean and despicable ends they were.
“But this time it wasn’t like before. There was no instantaneous, involuntary flowing of my psyche, as it were. No immediate change of personality. I had to force it, to concentrate and concentrate and push myself. But in a short period of time, before I even knew it, well, there I was.”
“There you were? In Uncle George’s body?”
“Yes, in his body, looking out through his eyes, holding in his hand the cool, slender hand of a very pretty girl. I had expected the girl, of course, and yet…
“Confused and blustering, letting go of her hand, I jumped back and bumped into a man standing behind me. The girl was saying: “George, what’s wrong?” in a whisper, and people were staring. We were in a second-show picture-house queue. Finally I managed to mumble an answer, in a horribly hoarse, unfamiliar, frightened voice—George’s voice, obviously, and my fear—and then the girl moved closer and kissed me gently on the cheek!
“She did! But of course she would, wouldn’t she, if I were George? ‘Why, you jumped then like you’d been stung—’ she started to say; but I wasn’t listening, Peter, for I had jumped again, even more violently, shrinking away from her in a kind of horror. I must have gone crimson, standing there in that queue, with all those unfamiliar people looking at me—and I had just been kissed by a girl!
“You see, I wasn’t thinking like George, at all! I just wished with all my heart that I hadn’t interfered, and before I knew it I had George’s body in motion and was running down the road, the picture-house queue behind me and the voice of this sweet little girl echoing after me in pained and astonished disbelief.
“Altogether my spiteful adventure had taken only a few minutes, and, when at last I was able to do so; I controlled myself—or rather, George’s self—and hid in a shop doorway. It took another minute or two before I was composed sufficiently to manage a, well, a ‘return trip’, but at last I made it and there I was back in my room.
“I had been gone no more than seven or eight minutes all told, but I wasn’t back to exactly where I started out from. Oh, George hadn’t gone rushing downstairs again in a hysterical fit, like that time when I sat his exam for him—though of course the period of transition had been a much longer one on that occasion—but he had at least moved off the bed. I found myself standing beside the window…” She paused.
“And afterwards?” I prompted her, fascinated.
“Afterwards?” she echoed me, considering it. “Well, George was very quiet about it… No, that’s not quite true. It’s not that he was quiet, rather that he avoided me more than ever, to such an extent that I hardly ever saw him—no more than a glimpse at a time as he came and went. Mother and father didn’t notice George’s increased coolness towards me, but I certainly did. I’m pretty sure it was then that he had finally recognised the source of this thing that came at odd times like some short-lived insanity to plague him. Yes, and looking back, I can see how I might easily have driven George completely insane! But of course, from that time on he was forewarned…”
“Forewarned?” I repeated her. “And the next time he—”
“The next time?” She turned her face so that I could see the fine scars on her otherwise smooth left cheek. I had always wondered about those scars. “I don’t remember a great deal about the next time—shock, I suppose, a ‘mental block’, you might call it—but anyway, the next time was the last time!…
“There was a boy who took me out once or twice, and I remember that when he stopped calling for me it was because of something George had said to him. Six months had gone by since my shameful and abortive experiment, and now I deliberately put it out of my mind as I determined to teach George a lesson. You must understand, Love, that this boy I mentioned, well…he meant a great deal to me.
“Anyway, I was out to get my own back. I didn’t know how George had managed to make it up with his girl, but he had. I was going to put an end to their little romance once and for all.
“It was a fairly warm, early October, I remember, when my chance eventually came. A Sunday afternoon, and George was out walking with his girl. I had it planned minutely. I knew exactly what I must say, h
ow I must act, what I must do. I could do it in two minutes flat, and be back in my own body before George knew what was going on. For the first time my intentions were deliberately malicious…”
I waited for my aunt to continue, and after a while again prompted her: “And? Was this when—”
“Yes, this was when he walked me through the window. Well, he didn’t exactly walk me through it—I believe I leapt; or rather, he leapt me, if you see what I mean. One minute I was sitting on a grassy bank with the same sweet little girl, and the next there was this awful pain— My whole body hurt, and it was my body, for my consciousness was suddenly back where it belonged. Instantaneously, inadvertently, I was—myself!
“But I was lying crumpled on the lawn in front of the house! I remember seeing splinters of broken glass and bits of yellow-painted wood from my shattered bedroom window, and then I went into a faint with the pain.
“George came to see me in the hospital—once. He sneered when my parents had their backs turned. He leaned over my bed and said: “Got you, Hester!” Just that, nothing more.
“I had a broken leg and collarbone. It was three weeks before they let me go home. By then George had joined the Merchant Navy and my parents knew that somehow I was to blame. They were never the same to me from that time on. George had been the Apple of the Family Eye, if you know what I mean. They knew that his going away, in some unknown way, had been my fault. I did have a letter from George—well, a note. It simply warned me ‘never to do it again’, that there were worse things than falling through windows!”
“And you never did, er, do it again?”
“No, I didn’t dare; I haven’t dared since. There are worse things, Love, than being walked through a window! And if George hates me still as much as he might…
“But I’ve often wanted to do it again. George has two children, you know?”
I nodded an affirmation: “Yes, I’ve heard mother mention them. Joe and Doreen?”
