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and reassuring when I had come In from the outer darkness.
With a sudden resolution to face them all and be damned to them, I looked up. I caught a fleeting impression of a huge face filling the whole wall of the empty alcove beside the fireplace, but the patches of discoloration from dampness that had apparently formed it seemed almost to shift apart in that instant and become wholly innocent and of no significance.
I threw my papers down and jumped up with an oath.
"What is this?" I demanded of myself. "Am I going mad? Or is something trying to drive me mad?"
I went determinedly round the room, gazing straightly at all its contents in turn, but I saw nothing in the least out of the ordinary. Then I stood in the middle of the hearthrug and debated upon my state of affairs.
Firstly, I had no further inclination to do any more work on my book tonight. I had had enough of pondering upon the sinister.
Secondly, I wished either that I had company or was in some less lonely spot in the countryside than I was. But outside the cottage was the wood, and outside the wood stretched the wide heath under the night sky—miles of black mystery between me and the nearest glow of humanity.
Thirdly, despite my day's unusual mental and physical effort, I no longer felt tired. Nor did the thought of bed lure me—I felt that if I did sleep now, bad dreams, if nothing worse, would come.
I decided that I would write some letters. Just to hold, as I wrote them, the mental image of some of those exuberant friends of mine in London (from whom I had fled!) would provide something of a sense of company. It would give me a link with that pleasant world of everyday from which I was so utterly cut off on this stifling, electrically ominous night.
The thought of letters caused me to wonder whether any had been delivered in the evening post while I had been out. I was already opening the little door of the letter cage wjien it occurred to me that I
had deliberately withheld my address from all but Spencer.
Nevertheless, I groped irrationally in the dark interior and felt a little thrill of pleasure when my fingers encountered a letter, the only one. I felt something else, too—a mild shock which made those fingers tingle a bit. It was almost as if the letter had contained an electrical charge. I put it down to the atmosphere.
The letter was from Spencer, as I might have guessed. It wasn't very helpful looked at from any point of view. He was in his most cryptic mood.
It was in neat type-script and began without any preamble. It was signed ("Yours faithfully") by Spencer, and that seemed to me almost the only comprehensible part of it. As for the rest—well, here it is, word for word, as I remember it.
"ACLE.
The composer, Robert Schumann, long heard voices and saw things that were not
there. He went mad.
ANGLE.
As did, in like manner, the author of Gtdliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift.
AGRAM.
The poet, Shelley, was tormented all his life with dreams and visions. Once, in a waking vision, he encountered a figure shrouded in a dark cloak. It was—himself. On another occasion he heard a noise outside the country cottage where he was staying. He opened the door, and was struck unconscious by—something invisible.
AGERON.
When young, John Bunyan had 'fearful dreams and visions.' Pestilent spirits and devils appeared to him until he reached the age of seventeen. Then they disappeared for two years, during which time he gave himself up to every evil passion and led a corrupt life.
In 1651 his visions came again, and he said that he was hounded by the devil. He
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swore that he sometimes 'felt the tempter pull my clothes' and sometimes the devil 'took the form of a bull, bush, or besom.'
All the demons in the Pilgrim's Progress came out of his memories of these experiences.
ALPHA.
William Blake, the poet and artist, had dreams and visions all his life. He left a record of not only how he saw the devil but also how he drew him. He wrote: 'I was going downstairs in the dark, when suddenly a light came streaming at my feet. I turned around, and there he was, looking fiercely at me through the iron grating of my staircase window. As he appeared, so I drew him.'
Blake's sketch showed a horrible phantom glaring through a grated window— with burning eyes, long teeth, and claws like talons.
William Blake went mad.
SO, my friend, remember while you are Pent up in your little cottage, to BEWARE of 'dreams and visions.' "
NO, DECIDEDLY not a cheering communication. I cursed the man for his perverted sense of humor—if this was supposed to be humor—and his maddening obscurantism.
But it struck me as strange that the arrival of such an effort as this should coincide with a time at which I was seeing things.
I sat down and studied the typed sheet witii a frown.
"ACLE, AGRAM, AGERON .. ." What gibberish words were these? What connection was there between them?
If I guessed Spencer's twisted mind right, there was some link. Quite possibly he had put a clue in the wording. He was always searching for some such cra2y but deliberate clues in the writings of Shakespeare to indicate that the plays were actually written by Francis Bacon.
I went slowly through the wordage again. Why, I pondered, a capital "P" for "Pent"?
Wait a moment — Pent-ACLE, Pent-AGRAM . . . ?
I seized upon a volume of my encyclopedia, and sought what I soon found—this entry:
"PENTACLE, PENTANGLE, PENTAGRAM, PENTAGERON, or PENT-ALPHA.
"These various names all belong to the design of a 5-pointed star, composed of 5 straight lines, which may be formed complete without severance of the tracing medium from the recording medium, i.e., it may be drawn without the pen being lifted from the paper, for the tip of the pen returns to its starting point. Possibly for some such oddity as this the sign has long been used as a mystic symbol, first by the Pythagoreans and later by the astrologers and necromancers of the Middle Ages. It is found frequently in early ornamental art, and is still sometimes used, in superstitious regions of the world, on doorways to keep away witches and evil spirits."
There followed representations of the Pentacle, etc., and ''The Hexagram—two interlaced equilateral triangles—with which it is often confused."
While I had the "P" volume in my hand, I thought I might as well look up Pythagoras, of whom I knew nothing except that he had been a Greek philosopher with a theorem.
His time, it appeared, was the sixth century B.C., and he travelled around quite a lot, passing through Egypt among other places, and went to Italy in 529 B.C. and founded there a religious brotherhood for the reformation of mankind, through practising certain rites. Reaction against him began in his life-time and reached a head in the middle of the fifth century B.C. His movement was violently trampled out, meeting houses of Pythagoreans were everywhere sacked and burned and Pythagoreans persecuted and slain.
Well, all that was fairly interesting, I supposed, but I still didn't see any point to the letter. Yet there was still the coincidence of its arrival and my fit of the willies.
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I lay back in my chair with half-closed eyes, pondering on the dreams and visions of the illustrious people Spencer had listed. I was a writer of sorts—-an artist in my own particular line, I prided myself—but I had no illusions about my name living any longer than I did. A hundred years hence no one would be the slightest bit interested to learn that I had died in a mad-house or had regular bouts of delirium tremens.
For some time my mind dwelt upon the ephemerality of the second-rate writer's little fame, and then began to work in its usual way of putting two ideas together and fashioning from them something fresh. The slow shaping of a new story about a brilliant writer who went mad at the height of his fame-went on in my imagination. I was lost in it.
Detachedly I became aware that the illumination of the room appe
ared to be slowly changing in its quality. The normal yellowy-white light of the oil lamp was taking on a faint tinge of green. I was still deep in abstraction, and paid little heed to it at first, but presently it became so pronounced that I took an absent-minded look at the lamp. It was very low. I remembered in a vague sort of way that I had forgotten to get any more paraffin. The greenish light was coming from somewhere on my left, wiere the window was, and I thought it was some queer effect of the moonlight shining in. I glanced over at the window, and my heart gave a bound that I thought had displaced it. A sort of silent screaming horror held me paralyzed.
The window was a square of greenly translucent light, as though it were the side of an artificially illumimiated aquarium, and glaring through it at me was William Blake's nightmare vision of the devil.
The eyes burned into mine, the fangs were revealed in a tiger's grin—the whole effect was that of a monster aflame with sadistic appetite measuring its distance for a pounce at my throat.
I'm afraid I fainted. It's a weakness no man likes to admit to, but it does happen. It happened to me, and I'm very iiiankful it did.
When I came to, the oil lamp was but
a mere glimmer, reflected like a star in the black opacity of the window before me. For there was no trace left of my frightful visitant. The night outside was as dark as a cavern deep in the earth, and no shape of anything, not even the adjacent pines, could be discerned.
I got up, shaking like an ancient car, and had to lean on the table for a few moments while I cured my knees of their curious tendency to give. Then in a trembling but swift manner I became urgent with action.
First, I slammed home the bolts of the door. I didn't now why the thing hadn't come in after me that way, but I wasn't going to give it the advantage of any second thoughts.
THEN I pulled the thick curtain over the window. I was afraid to go near the window to do this; I might suddenly find myself literally face to face with the thing, and I didn't think my heart would stand it. So I hooked the curtain over with the end of a broomstick, and I was holding myself well away from the other end of it.
Then I laid the poker on the table ready for emergencies. It was a comfortably heavy length of iron.
And then I had a couple of neat whiskies.
There was nothing I could do about the lamp. There wasn't any more oil and I wasn't going out to search for any at this time of night. The very thought of feeling about among the unseen trees out there again made me shudder. I found a stub of candle and lit it, but it wasn't going to last long.
So I built a huge fire. On that sultry summer night I had a blaze going that near melted me. But I didn't mind feeling warm so long as I could feel more secure. And bright firelight was a sight better than absolute darkness.
I sat close by the fire, streaming with sweat, my poker at hand, and I resolved not to let that light fail nor myself sleep until dawn and the blessed daylight came.
My eye fell on Spencer's letter on the table. I had had enough of that sort of thing. I reached over and grabbed it, and was about to drop it into the fire when I
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noticed for the first time a diagram traced do the back of it.
It was a pentagram, executed with extremely neat draughtmanship in very thin lines of what appeared to be green ink. .
As I studied it, it seemed to stand out from the paper as though it were embossed. And then the paper appeared to fade away from around it, leaving the pentagram like a green wire frame. And the wire began to glow until the center nf my vision was nothing but a blankness in which the pentagram glowed like a green neon sign, which grew bigger and bigger.
The friendly firelight was being blotted out. -And now there were faces, faces, grinning and leering faces pressing all about me, an increasing crowd, and a green light brightening and glowing over everything.
The last dwindling remnant of my will just managed to snap the spell, like the wrench with which one sometimes breaks out of the hypnosis of a nightmare. And in that snap, the horrors vanished, and there I was sitting in the firelight with just an ordinary piece of paper in my hand.
But not for long. In a spasm of fear and rage I screwed it into a ball and threw it into the heart of the fire. There was a brief spurt of green flame. It might have been a pinch of some chemical in one of the logs.
I stayed awake all night, but I was not troubled further by visions.
rj THE morning, I packed my things and fled back to London. Dear old dirty— but safe—Bloomsbury, with the shabby temple of the British Museum, and the little streets full of foreign dining-rooms and bookshops, and the captive trees in the grimy squares!
As soon as I had got resettled in my apartment, I marched round to Mecklen-burgh Square to demand of Spencer what the hell?
Though callers for him were few and far between, he had fitted a Yale lock to the door of his big bed-sitting-room at the top of the gray house, and he kept the door shut and himself on the other side of it. But he had long trusted me with a key.
I got no answer when I knocked, so I let myself in.
There was his desk in the far corner, littered with books and papers as usual, and there was his old-fashioned wing armchair, in which he spent more time asleep than in his bed, but there was no sign of him.
Of course, he might be doing some research in the Museum Reading Room. On the other hand he might be out eating in one of the neighboring cafes. I presumed he did eat sometimes, though I had never seen him at it. But those were the only reasons that I could imagine would ever take him out of this room.
He took no exercise and had no use for fresh air. How he managed to find the oxygen to breathe in this place I could never understand. The door and window were always shut. I walked over to and had a struggle with the window, but it was quite immovable; through years of neglect, window and frame had amalgamated.
I sat myself in his armchair glancing idly about the room. Every available wall space, from floor to ceiling, was taken up with laden bookshelves—the famous library on the black art, demonology, spiritualism, and every aspect of the supernatural. There was his large double bed in the corner, unmade as always, its tangled clothes draping down on the carpet. The stained old coffee pot stood on the hearth, and there were cigarette stubs thrown anywhere about the floor.
Standing like a rock in the sea of documents, letters, files, clippings, pamphlets and allied paper matter which flowed over the desk was Spencer's typewriter. There was a sheet of paper in it half filled with typescript. Curious to learn what Spencer was working on now, I got up and had a look at it.
I found it was page four of a letter obviously addressed to me, so I looked on the desk for the previous sheets and found them. As far as the letter went, I read it with absorption:
"Dear Bill,
"1 suppose when this reaches you, you will be cursing me for a sleepless night. Probably you will have found the immediate
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cause of it. If not, this letter will enlighten you, so that you can destroy the said cause and sleep the sleep of the innocent.
"Consider the humble pentagram. It's become a jolly little figure of fun now— good luck, and all that sort of thing. You might get it in the form of a lucky charm from a Christmas cracker or see a dozen of it representing stars in the illustrations to children's fairy story books.
"Business men who like playing at secret societies (which are also good for business) use it for a secret recognition symbol between one member and another. They copied that trick from the Pythagoreans. But the Pythagoreans were alive to the dread secret they shared, and which they kept from the ordinary people. Yet even these philosopher-geometricians were a bit astray upon one point.
"Because they traced manifestations to the presence of a pentagram of a certain size and shape, they thought that the secret lay in that certain size and shape. And certainly the same effects were brought about through using exact duplicates of that original pentagram
.
"But the whole secret really lies in just one triangle of that figure. The surface size is irrelevant, and the rest of the pentagram frame redundant. It's the angles of that one triangle which are important. Fashion a triangle with its three angles of sizes I could give you (though an error amounting to a second will suffice to make it impotent) and you will have a triangle of terror indeed.
"I'll tell you that one angle is 36° 47' 29" if you want to play games with trial and error. When you hit upon the right one and leave it about, you'll start seeing things sooner or later. But your chances are small. It is not an isosceles triangle, but a scalene. The original pentagram was a very rough effort, far from symmetrical, and only by a fluke did it contain this dangerous triangle.
"How did I discover all this? It began with my investigation of the haunting of a cottage in Norfolk. I connected the phenomena with a small glass prism which had been lying about the place (the former
occupant was a spectroscopist—until he went mad and was put away). On a couple of occasions when the spooks were about to appear, I noticed that this prism took on a palely translucent quality of green. Proceeding according to scientific method, I found that the cottage was not haunted if the prism was taken away from it. But the vicinity of the prism was, wherever one took it. I had a rather unpleasant time discovering that—I must tell you about it sometime.
"T TNFORTUNATELY, I dropped the
I—J prism one day and broke a corner off. And it was never the same again. It became just another piece of glass. But I had taken exact measurements of it, and I kept them.
"Years later, I traced, by exhaustive trial and error, the cause of another haunting— in a residential house on Putney Common —to the presence of (of all things!) a paper-fastener. A triangular one. I took careful measurements of this, and compared them with the dimensions of that remembered prism. I knew I had hit upon something when I found that its angles—though not the area enclosed by them—corresponded absolutely exactly with the angles of one of the (naturally) triangular ends of the prism, the end I had broken.
Weird Tales volume 42 number 04 Page 8
