The Ghost Club

by William Meikle

  The tubby Droose was excited now, and almost skipping along, eager to lead us further, but I held back, stunned into immobility by the vast cavernous space into which we strode. I have stood under the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and felt something of the same awe. This was vaster and stranger by far, though, a black hollow that seemed to suck up the light, full of shifting shadows and whispers that echoed—almost sang—around and inside us. And as in London, I felt something rise up in me, a sense of wonder almost religious in nature. I have never been a superstitious man, but in that single moment I felt that my place in the greater scheme of things might just amount to more than a mere speck of dust at the mercy of the wind. The sense was so overpowering it brought tears to my eyes—of joy, of awe—and not a small touch of fear. I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see that Ms. McGowan had been similarly touched, and large, glistening tears ran down each of her cheeks as she smiled at me.

  I had thought that this was what the Droose had brought us to see, but now we were surrounded by the small folk. They almost herded us, through the vast darkness then out, onto a wide balcony that looked over a sun setting on a blue lagoon, with the mountains beyond. I was so entranced with the wash of color and light I did not notice that the fat Droose was trying to draw my attention to something else. It was only when he grabbed my hand, hard, and started to drag me to one side that I went with him. He led me to the center of the balcony, and pointed to the floor. The steep angle of the sun’s last light showed a relief carved there, but I could not bring myself to believe what it showed me. For there we were—five tall people among a throng of Droose, and depicted just as such on the stone beneath my feet. The carving was exquisite and perfectly done, even down to the small particulars. There was the knot of hair at the back of the woman’s head, the Martini rifle in my hand, and the three Germans, slightly off to one side, glowering in displeasure both in the sunset above and on the face of the stone below.

  “We knew,” the Droose said. “We have always known, in the dream time.”

  That was another word that I cannot fully convey the depth of the meaning of, but it was obvious that the Droose considered us messengers—divine messengers at that—sent to them from their pagan gods, and written as a promise below our feet in the stone. I have come across many beliefs in prophecy and the power of divination in my travels across the continent, but here, on this balcony above the blue lagoon, here was the first place I started to have doubts about my life long skepticism on such matters.

  The Droose was so happy he was almost laughing now.

  “I have dreamed you, longtime,” he said. “I told my people to prepare for your coming and they have not believed. But now look—I saw you, and you are here. Now the Droose shall go to the dream time together.”

  “I’m sorry, old chap,” I replied. “I don’t have the foggiest idea what you are on about.”

  “It is very near now. You will see. I am the way and the truth.”

  “Blasphemy,” I heard Ms. McGowan whisper at my side, but I had no time to form a reply as the Droose led me, once again, back inside the vast black sepulcher of the ziggurat.

  Now that the sun was almost gone, the place was darker still, and the shadows were blacker, the whispers somehow more menacing. I saw, away to my left at the entrance, that the moon was rising, its rays being cast through the block of emerald, lending a green glow around the doorway—a glow that was spreading with the rising moon to cast itself across the floor. It would soon reach our feet.

  “Enough of this nonsense,” Klinsmann said. “Our countryman was here years ago and said there were jewels—and gold—mounds of each he said. Ask this degenerate savage where they are.”

  The Droose kept his eyes on me, and smiled.

  “I sent that man’s man on his way, seeing what he needed to have seen, telling what he needed to be told. All is as it should be. All things are well.”

  “What did he say,” Klinsmann demanded. He had taken out his pistol, and was waving it around menacingly. I moved to reach for my Martini, but the Droose stopped me with his free hand.

  “It is time to dream,” he said, and smiled broadly.

  “What did he say, God damn you,” Klinsmann shouted, and pointed the pistol straight at me. In that same instant the Droose stepped between the gun and me, and grabbed at Klinsmann’s weapon, which so startled the German that he fired involuntarily, the shot taking the rotund chap right in the heart and felling him instantly. I bent to check on him but it clear that he had died on the spot.

  I expected then that we would be attacked in short order, and reached for my own weapon, although in truth we were sorely bested by weight of numbers alone and would last only a matter of minutes. But the other Droose did not seem in the least concerned by the calamity. Instead they crowded round the dead man. Items were brought from some far reach of the chamber. There were more feathers, shimmering, green now in the moonlight that came through the emerald. Hundreds of the colored feathers had been cunningly wrought into great wings that were attached to the fat Droose’s shoulders by leather straps. Two other Droose brought a headpiece—a raven’s head, with emerald eyes and a long beak of solid gold, made from more feathers sewn into a leather mask that fit snug over the dead man’s skull as if it had been made just for him. It now looked for all the world like a great bird lay on the floor below us, the shimmering glow from the emerald lending it the appearance of movement, a trembling running over the body.

  The green light grew stronger still, filling the room in washes of color. I was still watching the dead body at my feet, but Ms. McGowan had seen something else.

  “Look,” she whispered, and I could hear the mixture of excitement and sheer terror in her voice as I turned to follow her gaze. I found myself looking at scores—hundreds—of Droose bodies, all laid out in small but separate stone chambers which had been carved into the solid black rock of the walls, stretching all around us and up into as far as we could peer in the dark.

  Some of the bodies looked as if they’d been mummified—all dried up and withered—but others looked ready to get up off the slabs and walk. All were dressed like the body at my feet, with wings and a headpiece of the same multicolored feathers, all seeming to tremble as the green glow intensified, the moonlight now revealing even higher reaches of the ziggurat, and even more of the small tombs.

  There were thousands of them.

  ***

  I was still looking upwards when Ms. McGowan pulled at my arm and drew my attention to what was happening at my feet. Klinsmann had knelt by the body and was attempting to dislodge the emerald from the dead man’s headpiece.

  I started to move, meaning to drag him away from his desecration, then was suddenly unable to speak. I even forgot to breathe as the small, fat man—the small, fat, dead man—sat up, still masked, and pecked hard at Klinsmann’s skull just above his eyebrows. The gold beak went in shining, came out bloody, and the German was who now lay dead at my feet.

  The rotund Droose got to his feet and spread the huge wings as if in celebration. I heard a great whispering rise up all around the chamber as the remaining Droose came in from the city beyond in great numbers, young and old, hand in hand, all smiling. On arrival they made their way up and away into the darkness, heading high up into the ziggurat.

  “Going to dream,” I heard Ms. McGowan whisper, and I could only agree with her assessment.

  The small fat man grabbed my arm. “My friends must leave. The Droose go to dream time—it is their fate, our fate—I saw, and you came. I am the way and the truth”

  I began to argue, but he was insistent.

  “All who stay here will be taken to dream time,” he said, as the rustling bodies, some partially mummified, decrepit with great age yet somehow now alive, came down from the walls. Scores of them, feathers rustling, beaks clacking, tongues flapping in sibilant, singing whispers—a hundred at least—until they were crowded so tight around the other two Germans that the men could n
ot even raise their hands to struggle.

  I caught a last glimpse of them being swamped by a horde of feathers, gold beaks pecking, then the old one waved a farewell with a huge wing before I turned, grabbed Ms. McGowan’s hand and we fled for the steps.

  We waited at the foot of the staircase in the moonlight, but no one, German or Droose ever came back out of that black ziggurat.

  ***

  Cornwall is wetter and colder than Africa, but I have found, strangely, that my rheumatism is greatly improved. Mayhap it is the presence of my new wife that has lifted my mood. I am often reminded of that last moonlit night before the ziggurat, where she held my hand and we talked, of prophecy and of sacrifice and rebirth and the ways of the spirit.

  In the morning, quite alone, we made back for the boat, where M’kele was very pleased to see us alive and not taken by devils. Whether it was me, or whether it was what she had seen in the temple, Rosalyn expressed a desire, not to head upstream but to return home, all thought of bringing Mission to those strange lands now washed away.

  And it is here now we stay, taking comfort of each other’s company. I cannot speak for her—but for myself, I dream, every night, of the black temple by the blue lagoon and the birds that live there, roosting, sleeping.

  I think there will always be a part of me with the Droose, in the dream time.

  Forever in the dream time.

  Madame Blavatsky, or HPB as she prefers to be known, is the most extraordinary woman I have ever met. Her short—I hesitate to say plump—demeanor, and her thick accent might well have made her a figure of fun in London Society, but her sheer dominance of will and enthusiasm for her subject means that neither society at large or our little dining club could easily ignore her. Nor indeed would I have wished to, for her tales of ancient peoples, lost civilizations and the spiritual nature of man are subjects close to my heart in my own fiction. The fact that she does not consider her theories to be fictitious only makes them all the more intriguing.

  When we asked her for a story, weaving some of the strands of her numerous and varied works into a whole, she was only too happy to oblige.

  Here is her tale.

  BORN OF ETHER

  Helena P. Blavatsky

  Alexi Patyas was a seeker. The fact that he had not the slightest inkling as to what it was he was seeking scarcely bothered him. He only knew that he would recognize it when he found it, and that it was something that lay beyond the little world he inhabited, bounded as it was by the family estate and the tall hills in which it had been contained for as long as anyone could remember.

  Alexi had the good fortune to be born into the aristocracy in what is now Northern Greece, and as such grew up wanting for nothing when it came to worldly goods and chattels. His spiritual growth as a child was all directed toward what little mystery he could surmise in the rituals of the Orthodox Church, but Alexi found that to be thin gruel indeed; it did little to sustain him. In his teenage years he turned to music in the hope that might ease the longing he felt, but although he became quite proficient on both piano and flute, it too did little for his soul, which seemed to be set on a different path entirely. Alexi’s father suggested dryly that a couple of months working in the fields might help him get a little perspective on the matter, but Alexi’s life had been far too easy for him to relinquish his comforts so readily.

  On his twentieth birthday—the date he came able to draw an annual stipend from his family fortune—Alexi embarked on a voyage of discovery, with the intention to learn more of the secret mysteries of the world. Over the next two years he drew his father’s money and dreamed with the aboriginal peoples in Australia, chewed peyote in Mexico, communed with the singing ice of the Esquimaux in Baffin Bay, and spent six months in Lhasa with the monks looking inward. The discovery of what he found there was not so much a mystery as a surprise, for Alexi finally found in himself a capacity he did not know he possessed—one that we all possess, should we but look for it.

  Let me tell you how it came about. The monks had set Alexi to practice his breathing techniques, and once he had mastered the Pranha, they set him to visualizing his internal mandala in all its magnificent glory. Alexi found that by considering his center of power as a small star, roaming at will inside his body, he could follow its path along and through the Chakras—the focal points of his spirit. He learned the practice of examining each in turn, slowing the flow of energy until he was perfectly still—of speeding it up, to send the small star rushing through him, the light filling him and lifting him up, higher and ever higher to places previously undreamed of.

  Now, as we all know, Light is the first begotten, and the first emanation of the Supreme, and Light is Life. From gods to men, from worlds to atoms, from a star to a rush-light, from the sun to the vital heat of the meanest organic being—the world of Form and Existence is an immense chain, whose links are all connected by Light itself.

  And Alexi discovered that for himself, when he realized that if he visualized his star—his power—exiting the body and roaming free, his thoughts went with it, into the Light. Alexi’s astral form took flight on those occasions, exploring realms previously foreign to his waking mind, but many that seemed strangely familiar from his dreams. He swooped and soared over fields and dales, mountains and seas. He swam with the great whales and hunted with wolves. He danced among the stars and sang with the moon.

  But he still did not find that which he sought, for although his newfound sight was indeed wondrous, it only brought more questions and few answers. And he soon grew restless, and with that became earthbound in his astral travels, walking dusty roads through desert landscapes in forlorn search of ancient secrets that always seemed to elude him.

  It was then, at the very moment when he least expected it that he met a traveler on the road; a tall, strangely pale man who seemed to be waiting, patiently on Alexi’s approach.

  “Greetings, fellow traveler. Where are you headed?” the pale man said. His voice was soft and smooth, like honey warmed to golden liquor.

  “In truth,” Alexi replied, “I do not know.”

  “Then perhaps it is best if you go nowhere?” the tall figure answered.

  “But I seek the truth. Where is it to be found?”

  “It is everywhere and nowhere, present and absent, within you and without you,” the pale one replied, and that answer did not help Alexi in the slightest, for he knew not what he had already found. He was in the presence of a new teacher, should he think to learn. The pale one was a Dhyan-Chohan, who are called the first-born of Ether and was a higher and exalted being from a race that have watched over the childhood of Humanity and act as Masters to teach us of the ways of the ancients. Indeed he spoke now to Alexi as if he were but a child.

  “I will put you on the path you seek,” he said softly. “It will be there for you when you need it, if you only have eyes to see.”

  And with that he rapped Alexi on the head with the end of his tall staff, and Alexi woke, as if from a month long dream, sitting on his prayer mat in the high temple in Lhasa.

  ***

  After that night the monks of Tibet would have no more to do with Alexi, despite all his protestations and, telling him that his learning was deemed complete, they sent him away from the temple. Being bitterly disappointed, Alexi started to make his slow journey back to his homeland, but was delayed for a time in Beirut. There he took to the delights of the fleshpots and opium dens with gusto in an attempt to trick his mind into returning to that desert plain where he had met the ascended master. He journeyed far and wide in the astral once more, but now there was no joy in it—the ethereal planes proved dark and cold and unfriendly, and no amount of opium would suffice to make them any less so. He had not learned.

  To make matters worse, when Alexi went to the bank to draw from his allowance, it was to find that there were no funds available. It was only when he sent a telegram inquiring after the reason that he discovered himself to be now fatherless, the older man having died a
bed of the black rot some six weeks previously. All other thoughts left Alexi’s mind for a time as he made his way posthaste back to Greece. His mother would need him.

  There is one other small matter to note of his return journey, and it took place in Nicosia where he had to spend two nights waiting for a boat to take him across the Aegean and northward to home. He took lodgings in a tavern on the quay and drank far more of the local ouzo than was good for him, in an attempt to mask the grief and worry that threatened to overwhelm him completely.

  It was a moonless night, and as the town fell quiet he only had the soft lap of the sea on the quayside for company. He lay on his back, watching the play of shadow on shadow on the ceiling, unable to calm his mind sufficiently to allow him to sleep, and certainly having no chance of approaching any meditative state that might help in the matter. It was only when he rolled onto his side that he became aware of a deeper shadow, darker than any other, in the corner furthest from the window. A tall, thin shade swayed from side to side, as if it might be performing a curious dance, just for him. The more Alexi looked at it, the more he thought it might be more than a mere dark area—he came to think there was some sinister personage in the room with him, standing in the corner, silent, watching. And the more he thought it, the deeper and darker the shadow became until Alexi was convinced he had an intruder in his bedchamber.

  He threw back the covers and leapt out of bed, intent on chasing this new stranger away, but when he reached the corner there was nothing there but shifting darkness—although it felt markedly colder in that spot alone compared to the rest of the room.

  Alexi retired once more to bed, and sleep still would not come, for he could not draw his gaze from the spot where he thought the intruder had stood. He lay there like that for the longest time, and it was only when dawn started to light the sky outside that he managed to fall into a fitful sleep. If he dreamed at all, he did not remember it later, although an observer might have noted his legs and arms kicking and punching in frantic motions, as if he was involved in hand to hand battle with some unseen assailant.