And Afterward, the Dark

by Basil Copper

  As the mist cleared from in front of his eyes he slowed to a walk and then found himself in the middle of a square; he knew where he was and had to force his nerves into a terrible, unnatural calm, just this side of despair. He walked with controlled casualness past the legend, Ninian's Revivalist Brotherhood, and this time chose the most unlikely road of all, little more than a narrow alley that appeared to lead in the wrong direction.

  Mr. Sharsted was willing to try anything which would lead him off this terrifying, accursed hill. There were no lights here and his feet stumbled on the rough stones and flints of the unmade roadway, but at least he was going downhill and the track gradually spiralled until he was in the right direction.

  For some little while Mr. Sharsted had heard faint, elusive stirrings in the darkness about him and once he was startled to hear, some way ahead of him, a muffled cough. At least there were other people about at last, he thought, and he was comforted too, to see far ahead of him the dim lights of the town. As he grew nearer, Mr. Sharsted recovered his spirits and was relieved to see that they did not recede from him, as he had half suspected they might. The shapes about him, too, were solid enough. Their feet rang hollow on the roadway; evidently they were on their way to a meeting.

  As Mr. Sharsted came under the light of the first lamp his earlier panic fear had abated. He still couldn't recognize exactly where he was, but the trim villas they were passing were more reminiscent of the town proper. Mr. Sharsted stepped up onto the pavement when they reached the well-lit area and in so doing, cannoned into a large, well-built man who had just emerged from a gateway to join the throng in the roadway.

  Mr. Sharsted staggered under the impact and once again his nostrils caught the sickly sweet perfume of decay. The man caught him by the front of the coat to prevent him from falling.

  "Evening, Mordecai," he said in a thick voice. "I thought you'd be coming, sooner or later."

  Mr. Sharsted could not resist a cry of bubbling terror. It was not just the greenish pallor of the man's face or the rotted, leathery lips drawn back from the decayed teeth. He fell back against the fence as Abel Joyce passed on—Abel Joyce, a fellow money-lender and usurer who had died in the nineteen-twenties and whose funeral Mr. Sharsted had attended. Blackness was about him as he rushed away, a sobbing whistle in his throat.

  He was beginning to understand Mr. Gingold and that devilish camera obscura. The lost and the damned. He began to babble to himself under his breath. Now and again he cast a sidelong glimpse at his companions as he ran; there was old Mrs. Sanderson, who used to lay out corpses and rob her charges; there Grayson, the estate agent and undertaker; Amos, the war profiteer; Drucker, a swindler, all green of pallor and bearing with them the charnel stench. All people Mr. Sharsted had business with at one time or another and all of whom had one thing in common; without exception all had been dead for quite a number of years. Mr. Sharsted stuffed his handkerchief over his mouth to blot out that unbearable odour and heard the mocking laughter as his racing feet carried him past.

  "Evening, Mordecai," they said. "We thought you'd be joining us."

  Mr. Gingold equated him with these ghouls, he sobbed, as he ran on at headlong speed; if only he could make him understand. Sharsted didn't deserve such treatment. He was a businessman, not like these bloodsuckers on society. The lost and the damned. Now he knew why the Corn Exchange still stood and why the town was unfamiliar. It existed only in the eye of the camera obscura. Now he knew that Mr. Gingold had been trying to give him a last chance and why he had said good-bye, instead of goodnight.

  There was just one hope; if he could find the door back to Mr. Gingold's perhaps he could make him change his mind. Mr. Sharsted's feet flew over the cobbles as he thought of this, his hat fell down and he scraped his hands against the wall; he left the walking corpses far behind, but though he was now looking for the familiar square he seemed to be finding his way back to the Corn Exchange.

  He stopped for a moment to regain his breath. He must work this out logically. How had it happened before? Why of course, by walking away from the desired destination. Mr. Sharsted turned back and set himself to walk towards the lights. Though terrified, he did not despair, now that he knew what he was up against. He felt himself a match for Mr. Gingold. If only he could find the door!

  As he reached the warm circle cast by the glow of the street lamps, Mr. Sharsted breathed a sigh of relief. For as he turned a corner there was the big square, with the soot-grimed chapel on the corner. He hurried on. He must remember exactly the turnings he had taken; he couldn't afford to make a mistake. So much depended on it. If only he could have another chance—he would let the Thwaites family keep their house, he would even be willing to forget Gingold's debt. He couldn't face the possibility of walking these endless streets for how long? And with the creatures he had seen....

  Mr. Sharsted groaned as he remembered the face of one old woman he had seen earlier that evening—or what was left of that face, after years of wind and weather. He suddenly recalled that she had died before the 1914 war. The sweat burst out on his forehead and he tried not to think of it.

  Once off the square, he plunged into the alley he remembered. Ah! there it was. Now all he had to do was to go to the left and there was the door. His heart beat higher and he began to hope, with a sick longing, for the security of his well-appointed house and his rows of friendly ledgers. Only one corner. He ran on and turned up the road towards Mr. Gingold's door.

  Another thirty yards to the peace of the ordinary world. The moonlight winked on a wide, well-paved square. Shone too on a legend painted in gold-leaf on a large board: Ninian's Revivalist Brotherhood. The date was 1925.

  Mr. Sharsted gave a hideous yell of fear and despair and fell to the pavement.

  Mr. Gingold sighed heavily and yawned. He glanced at the clock. It was time for bed. He went over once again and stared into the camera obscura. It had been a not altogether unsuccessful day. He put a black velvet cloth over the image in the lens and went off slowly to his bed.

  Under the lens, in pitiless detail, was reflected the narrow tangle of streets round Mr. Gingold's house, seen as through the eye of God; there went Mr. Sharsted and his colleagues, the lost and the damned, trapped for eternity, stumbling, weeping, swearing as they slipped and scrabbled along the alleys and squares of their own private hell, under the pale light of the stars.

  The Janissaries of Emilion

  He awoke, for the third consecutive occasion at dawn, sweating and terrified, with the details of the dream vivid in his mind. His hands were clutching the simple iron frame of the bedstead above his head and the dews of his night terror had soaked the linen of the bedding so profusely that he could not believe it was simply the result of the heat of the summer air.

  He lay quietly, taking in the soothing details of the plainly furnished room, with its restful cream walls. It was just turned five and the solitary calls of newly awakened birds were beginning to penetrate from the green wall of the garden, but his ears still seemed lapped in the soft susurrus of the surf.

  The dream had begun in a very casual and haphazard manner but its details had tended to clarify and repeat themselves on subsequent occasions, so that each repetition added a strata to his consciousness, as an artist adds pigment at the successive stages of a painting.

  It was not until much later that Farlow had been admitted to Greenmansion, which was, not to put too fine a point on it, a luxuriously appointed mental home. The Superintendent had kept copious notes on the case, which interested him very much indeed, but for obvious reasons the denouement of the affair had been kept from the attention of the larger world.

  Farlow was an old friend of mine and I have pieced the story together as it was told me over a longish space of time, both from his own lips and from those of the Superintendent, Dr. Sondquist, a psychiatrist of great sympathy and brilliance, who had been responsible for some spectacular cures. Farlow was an extraordinary man in many ways; hypersensitive perhaps, but a g
enius in his line—that of higher physics—and it was at his own request that he had been admitted as a private patient to Greenmansion, for "rest and observation." I visited him there on many occasions, as often as my own duties permitted, but I had heard the beginning of his story long before he took what his friends considered this last drastic step. It was as strange a tale in its way as I had ever heard and, considering its bizarre and horrible end, a remarkable one.

  It had begun, he told me, in the most prosaic and ordinary manner. It had been just six months before and he had perhaps, as he put it, been rather overdoing things; long hours in the laboratory, hurried lunches and evenings devoted to calculus had developed both nerves and mind to a high pitch of strain and sensitivity. He had come home tired out one evening and after several hours of fruitless calculation on his current abstruse problem, he had put down the elaborate figures for the night.

  By now it was past one o'clock in the morning and not the best time for a heavy meal, followed by almost a pint of black coffee. Be that as it may Farlow had eaten little since midday and he was the last man to bother about what he put in his insides. The demands of science had left him little time for seeking the company of the gentler sex, and so he had never married; his simple needs were looked after by a housekeeper of dour aspect but efficient habits, and she went off duty at nine o'clock.

  So Farlow made this heavy and ill-advised meal, swallowed the coffee, and made his way slowly to bed, his head throbbing with exhaustion, his mind chagrined at the results of his long labours over the elusive problem. Not unnaturally he slept badly, and it must have been at least 3:00 a.m. before sleep finally found him. But suddenly, it seemed to him, he was wide awake. I should imagine we have all had that sort of experience at one time or another. It is simply that we are dreaming that we are awake. We believe ourselves to be awake but subconsciously know ourselves to be still within the dream. I put this to Farlow the first time he started to unburden himself to me on the subject. That was not so, he said. Though he was within the dream he knew himself to be awake.

  Everything was so vividly real; every touch and sensation of this often-repeated dream was so actually realized that it was his own room and everyday life that afterwards seemed so dim and faded. It was as if he had at night escaped to another life which was more immediate and more exciting than the world of reality. That his dream-world was a place of terror and fear for him, was neither here nor there. Farlow also believed in the physical reality of this world, though he had subsequently studied maps and atlases of obscure parts of the world in vain.

  And despite the fact that the aspects of what I will continue to call his dream-world bore this terrible air of menace, Farlow was convinced that if he could but overcome the sinister shadows of the dream he could be happier than any man could hope to be in the everyday world of ordinary life. Now, I must emphasize, at this point, that Farlow was as sane as you or I; possibly saner, for his work as a scientist compelled him to weigh every grain of truth and to proceed to his results by empirical methods. At no time, even during his sojourn in Greenmansion, did he exceed the normal, according to Dr. Sondquist, save in this one matter of the dream.

  And that was something no one was in a position to disprove save Farlow himself; for he was the one who was experiencing the reality of this vision. Judging by the end of it all, Farlow was possibly the sanest man among us. And if that were so, what terrors lie in wait just behind the curtain of what we call consciousness may well give pause to the boldest of us, when criticizing a man like Farlow. It was my own belief that in his refined and hypersensitive way he had merely gone beyond the stage arrived at by the norm of coarser mortals, and a veil had been torn aside or breached in some unusual manner.

  To put it more simply, what happened was this. It was just ten-past three when Farlow was last awake, for he switched on the light and looked at his bedside clock. At the conclusion of his dream, for reasons which will be apparent later, he again switched on his light and the time was only twenty-past three. Yet Farlow, with all the gravity of which a scientist is capable, assured me solemnly that he had been away for more than three hours. It was a ridiculous assertion, on the surface that is, for we all know that a second or two in a dream may be stretched to eternity for the sleeper; and in the split second before awakening at a heavy noise, the brain may substitute a whole chain of events in a minute space of time, to account for the sound.

  Be that as it may and bearing in mind Farlow's own remarks on the aftermath of the dream, which I would not for one moment doubt, I am inclined to believe him. He slept and yet he awoke a short while afterwards and this is what he experienced. He was cold; he was in water and he was, or had been a little before, in deadly danger of his life. His mouth was soaked with moisture and salt and he coughed heavily as he thrashed feebly about in shallow water. He felt the rough kiss of sand between his bare toes and when he opened his eyes he found himself in the shallows of a wild, bleak shore. Exhaustedly, he started to drag himself onto a long beach of sloping white sand. He lay on his side coughing as the water receded and watched a rosy dawn fingering the sky.

  That was all on this occasion. He awoke, or rather he then returned to the normal twentieth-century world and the nightmare of his own position. Farlow had become aware of the difficulties of his "dream," from the very first moment he had, as he continued to say, pierced the curtain. For in his terror, as he fumbled to switch on the light and look at the clock, he found sand between his toes and his pyjamas were soaked with cold, salt water.

  The reaction of Farlow to the bizarre and terrible situation in which he found himself may easily be imagined; certainly no one but Farlow himself could comprehend the shock to mind and system. It was months before he could bring himself to speak to me of this first "expedition beyond the veil," as he termed it. For two nights following this extraordinary awakening he did not dare to sleep. And on the third night his exhaustion was too great for dreaming.

  For over a week his sleep was normal and then he had the second experience. He had retired soon after midnight and went straight from a sleeping to an "awake" state. Once again he was struggling in a shallow sea, once again he dragged himself painfully ashore, but this time the vision, call it what you will, went on a little longer. Farlow lay on the beach, coughing out salt water and intermittently opening his eyes; he saw dawn creep slowly up that wild and beautiful shore and knew himself to be somewhere in the East. But it was not the East as known today, but at a time of great antiquity.

  And then, as the sun came up through the mist, the scene changed like the opening of a door and Farlow awoke in his own bed, once again soaked to the skin with salt water. It was about that time that he consulted a doctor friend who was, of course, unable to help. Farlow somewhat naturally did not tell him the whole story, not wishing to be thought insane, and without the terrible awakenings, the matter seemed no more to the doctor than a dream which repeated itself, as sometimes happens to many people.

  It was difficult for an outsider to conceive the torment of Farlow's mind at this time; it would have been bad enough for a normal person but Farlow was a scientist and his mind rejected such things automatically. It was against all the known laws of nature, and yet it was happening. The third dream was a repetition of the others but to Farlow's relief it began with him already lying on the beach. The sun was a little higher in the sky and the mist was beginning to disperse. Strangely, he retained his fear of drowning in the dream state, but he noticed vividly that he appeared to have recovered from the experience of being in the sea. With this so-called evidence and the heat of the sun on the beach, he estimated that he had been lying on the sand for about three hours.

  Thus it appeared to him that the dreams were progressive in time and that if they continued, the incidents would overlap in the manner of a cinema film projected over and over again, with the difference that a little more of the action would be revealed each time. It took him quite a long while to work this out, of course, for his
waking self at first rejected the implications. In the fourth dream the sun was higher in the sky, the mist was thinning out a little, and when he awoke to his own room in the twentieth century he had been able to see that he was dressed in some sort of open-necked blouse made of linen of an antique cut.

  The lower half of his body was clad in baggy pantaloons of some dark material of a type quite beyond his experience, and as he had noticed on the first occasion, his feet were bare. The most extraordinary thing about this fourth dream was that though he had awakened on the three previous occasions drenched in what appeared to be sea-water, he woke this last time with his skin barely damp. Farlow then argued that his experience in the dream state had a physical or rational basis, and from this he deduced that the sun beating on his other self was drying him out.

  At this stage he was still trying to rationalize his terrors and one thing which greatly exercised his mind was the minor curiosity of how the physical situation of his dream self could be carried over into real life in one case and not the other. He was referring, naturally, to the water on his skin which was physically evident on awakening and the fact that he was still dressed in his pyjamas. If the same rules applied in transferring one substance from the dream to another dimension, then in theory he should have still been dressed in the shirt and trousers. At least so he argued.

  His analytical powers were beginning to be affected at this stage, and there was the additional problem of what happened to his pyjamas while "he" was on the beach. Or were there two selves existing in different planes? But however he argued it, Farlow met with a breakdown of all logical rules, whenever he applied them to one set of circumstances or the other—the dream-world or the real. The line between the two was becoming very blurred.