The Weiser Book of Horror and the Occult by Various, compiled by Lon Mile DuQuette. (1/2)
Title: The Weiser Book of Horror and the Occult.
Authors: Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, M. R. James, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Ambrose Bierce, Ralph Adams Cram, Aleister Crowley, Robert W. Chambers (compiled by Lon Milo DuQuette).
Genre: Fiction, literature, short stories, horror, occult, supernatural, philosophical fiction, ghost stories, death, poetry.
Country: England, U.S..
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1845, 1911, 1903, 1886, 1895, 1913, 1897.
Summary: A collection of 14 short stories and 1 prose poem dealing with the occult and the supernatural. (Stories 1-7 in this post, refer to PART 2 for 8-15). In The Haunted and the Haunters (or, the House and the Brain) (1845) by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, a scholar and a believer in the occult spends a night in an extremely haunted house, and, after experiencing its horrors, forms a belief that the source of the hauntings comes from a living human being. Casting the Runes (1911) by M.R. James is a story of Mr. Edward Dunning, a researcher for the British Museum, who realizes a curse has been put upon him, and he has little time to figure out how to lift it. In Luella Miller (1903) by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, a beautiful but apparently helpless schoolmistress, Luella Miller, gains a reputation of killing with a mysterious illness all the many people who willingly choose to take care of her. In An Inhabitant of Carcosa (1886) by Ambrose Bierce, a man whose last memory is being ill in bed wakes up in a wild and mysterious place. In No. 252 Rue M. le Prince (1895) by Ralph Adams Cram, four friends investigate a cursed, haunted house that once played host to serious occult rituals and Walpurgisnacht celebrations. In The Testament of Magdalen Blair (1913) by Aleister Crowley, a psychic woman delves into the dying, subconscious psyche of her husband, and learns horrifying things about the nature of death, illness, and damnation. In The Messenger (1897) by Robert W. Chambers, a sinister ghost of a cursed traitorous priest begins to haunt the family of one of his descendants, after an old mass grave with his branded skull is excavated.
My rating: 8/10
My Review:
♥ "You cannot complain, you see, sir, that I am not sufficiently candid; and unless your interest be exceedingly eager and your nerves unusually strong, I honestly add that I advise you not to pass a night in that house."
"My interest is exceedingly keen," said I, "and though only a coward will boast of his nerves in situations wholly unfamiliar to him, yet my nerves have been seasoned in such variety of danger that I have the right to rely on them-even in a haunted house."
♥ As I hold presence of mind, or what is called courage, to be precisely proportioned to familiarity with the circumstance that lead to it, so I should say that I had been long sufficiently familiar with all experiments that appertain to the Marvellous. I had witnessed many very extraordinary phenomena in various parts of the world-phenomena that would be either totally disbelieved if I stated them, or ascribed to supernatural agencies. Now, my theory is that the Supernatural is the Impossible, and that what is called supernatural is only a something in the laws of nature of which we have been hitherto ignorant. Therefore, if a ghost rise before me, I have not the right to say, "So, then, the supernatural is possible," but rather, "So, then, the apparition of a ghost is, contrary to perceived opinion, within the laws of nature-i.e. not supernatural.
♥ Now, in all that I had hitherto witnessed, and indeed in all the wonders which the amateurs of mystery in our age record as facts, a material living agency is always required. On the Continent you will find still magicians who assert that they can raise spirits. Assume for the moment that they assert truly, still the living material form of the magician is present; and he is the material agency by which from some constitutional peculiarities, certain strange phenomena are represented to your natural senses.
Accept again, as truthful, the tales of Spirit Manifestation in America-musical or other sounds-writings on paper, produced by no discernible hand-articles of furniture moved without apparent human agency-or the actual sight and touch of hands, to which no bodies seem to belong-still there must be found the medium or living being, with constitutional peculiarities capable of obtaining these signs. In fine, in all such marvels, supposing even that there is no imposture, there must be a human being like ourselves, by whom, or through whom, the effects presented to human beings are produced. It is so with the now familiar phenomena of mesmerism of electro-biology; the mind of the person operated on is affected through a material living agent. Nor, supposing it true that a mesmerised patient can respond to the will or passes of a mesmeriser a hundred miles distant, is the response less occasioned by a material being; it may be through a material fluid-call it Electric, call it Odic, call it what you will-which has the power of traversing space and passing obstacles, that the material effect is communicated from one to the other.
Hence all that I had hitherto witnessed, or expected to witness, in this strange house, I believed to be occasioned through some agency or medium as mortal as myself; and this idea necessarily prevented the awe with which those who regard as supernatural things that are not within the ordinary operations of nature, might have been impressed by the adventures of that memorable night.
As, then, it was my conjecture that all that was presented, or would be presented, to my senses, must originate in some human being gifted by constitution with the power so to present them, and having some motive so to do, I felt an interest in my theory which, in its way, was rather philosophical than superstitious.
♥ I strove to speak-my voice utterly failed me; I could only think to myself, "Is this fear? it is not fear!" I strove to rise-in vain; I felt as if weighed down by an irresistible force. Indeed, my impressions was that of an immense and overwhelming Power opposed to my volition; that sense of utter inadequacy to cope with a force beyond men's, which one may feel physically in a storm at sea, in a conflagration, or when confronting some terrible wild beast, or rather, perhaps, the shark of the ocean, I felt morally. Opposed to my will was another will, as far superior to its strength as storm, fire, and shark are superior in material force to the force of men.
And now, as this impression grew on me, now came, at last, horror-horror to a degree that no words can convey. Still I retained pride, if not courage; and in my own mind I said, "This is horror, but it is not fear; unless I fear, I cannot be harmed; my reason rejects this thing; it is an illusion-I do not fear."
♥ And you would infer from this that a mesmeriser might produce the extraordinary effects you and others have witnessed over inanimate objects-fill the air with sights and sounds?"
"Or impress our senses with the belief in them-we never having been en rapport with the person acting on us? No. What is commonly called mesmerism could not do this; but there may be a power akin to mesmerism, and superior to it-the power that in the old days was called Magic. That such a power may extend to all inanimate objects of matter, I do not say; but if so, it would not be against nature, only a rare power in nature which might be given to constitutions with certain peculiarities, and cultivated by practice to an extraordinary degree. That such a power might extend over the dead-that is, over certain thoughts and memories that the dead may still retain-and compel, not that which ought properly to be called the soul, and which is far beyond human reach, but rather a phantom of what has been most earth-stained on earth, to make itself apparent to our senses-is a very ancient though obsolete theory, upon which I will hazard no opinion. But I do not conceive the power would be supernatural.
"Let me illustrate what I mean from an experiment which Paracelsus describes as not difficult, and which the author of the Curiosities of Literature cites as credible: A flower perishes; you burn it. Whatever were the elements of that flower while it lived are gone, dispersed, you know not whither; you can never discover nor re-collect them. But you can, by chemistry, out of the burnt dust of that flower, raise a spectrum of the flower, just as it seemed in life. It may be the same with the human being. The soul has so much escaped you as the essence or elements of the flower. Still you may make a spectrum of it. And this phantom, though in the popular superstition it is held to be the soul of the departed, must not be confounded with the true soul; it is but the eidolon of the dead form.
"Hence, like the best-attested stories of ghosts or spirits, the thing that most strikes us is the absence of what we hold to be soul-that is, of superior emancipated intelligence. They come for little or no object-they seldom speak, if they do come; they utter no ideas above that of an ordinary person on earth. These American spirit-seers have published volumes of communications in prose and verse, which they assert to be given in the names of the most illustrious dead-Shakespeare, Bacon-heaven knows whom. Those communications, taking the best, are certainly not a whit of higher order than would be communications from living persons of fair talent and education; they are wondrously inferior to what Bacon, Shakespeare, and Plato said and wrote when on earth.
"Nor, what is more notable, do they ever contain an idea that was not on the earth before. Wonderful, therefore, as such phenomena may be (granting them to be truthful), I see much that philosophy may question, nothing that it is incumbent on philosophy to deny-viz. nothing supernatural. They are but ideas conveyed somehow or other (we have not yet discovered the means) from one mortal brain to another. Whether, in so doing, tables walk of their own accord, or friend-like shapes appear in a magic circle, or bodyless hands rise and remove material objects, or a Thing of Darkness, such as presented itself to me, freeze our blood-still am I persuaded that these are but agencies conveyed, as by electric wires, to my own brain from the brain of another. In some constitutions there is a natural chemistry, and those may produce chemic wonders-in others a natural fluid, call it electricity, and these produce electric wonders. But they differ in this from Normal Science-they are alike objectless, purposeless, puerile, frivolous. They lead on to no gran results; and therefore the world does not heed, and true sages have not cultivated them. But sure I am, that of all I saw or heard, a man, human as myself, was the remote originator; and I believe unconsciously to himself as to the exact effects produced, for this reason: no two persons, you say, have ever told you that they experienced exactly the same thing. Well, observe, no two persons ever experience exactly the same dream. If this were an ordinary imposture, the machinery would be arranged for results that would but little vary; if it were a supernatural agency permitted by the Almighty, it would surely be for some definite end.
"These phenomena belong to neither class; my persuasion is, that they originate in some brain now far distant; that that brain had no distinct volition in anything that occurred; that what does occur reflects but its devious, motley, ever-shifting, half-formed thoughts; in short, that it has been but the dreams of such a brain put into action and invested with a semisubstance. That this brain is of immense power, that it can set matter into movement, that it is malignant and destructive, I believe: some material force must have killed my dog; it might, for aught I know, have sufficed to kill myself, had I been as subjugated by terror as the dog-had my intellect or my spirit given me no countervailing resistance in my will."
"It killed your dog! that is fearful! indeed, it is strange that no animal can be induced to stay in that house; not even a cat. Rats and mice are never found in it."
"The instincts of the brute creation detect influences deadly to their existence. Man's reason has a sense less subtle, because it has a resisting power more supreme."
♥ "I have been a student in the mysteries of life and nature; of those mysteries I have known the occult professors. I have the right to speak to you thus." And I uttered a certain pass-word.
"Well," said he, dryly, "I concede the right-what would you ask?"
"To what extent human will in certain temperaments can extend?"
"To what extent can thought extend? Think, and before you draw breath you are in China!"
"True. But my thought has no power in China."
"Give it expression, and it may have: you may write down a thought which, sooner or later, may alter the whole condition of China. What is a law but a thought? Therefore thought is infinite-therefore thought has power; not in proportion to its value-a bad thought may make a bad law as potent as a good thought can make a good one."
"Yes; what you say confirms my own theory. Through invisible currents one human brain may transmit its ideas to other human brains with the same rapidity as a thought promulgated by visible means. And as thought is imperishable-as it leaves its stamp behind it in the natural world even when the thinker has passed out of this world-so the thought of the living may have power to rouse up and revive the thoughts of the dead-such as those thoughts were in life-though the thought of the living cannot reach the thoughts which the dead now may entertain. Is it not so?"
"I decline to answer, if, in my judgement, thought has the limit you would fix to it; but proceed. You have a special question you wish to put."
"Intense malignity in an intense will, engendered in a peculiar temperament, and aided by natural means within the reach of science, may produce effects like those ascribed of old to evil magic. It might thus haunt the walls of a human habitation with spectral revivals of all guilty thoughts and guilty deeds once conceived and done within those walls; all, in short, with which the evil will claims rapport and affinity-imperfect, incoherent, fragmentary snatches at the old dramas acted therein years ago. Thoughts thus crossing each other haphazard, as in the nightmare of a vision, growing up into phantom sights and sounds, and all serving to create horror, not because those sights and sounds are really visitations from a world without, but that they are ghastly monstrous renewals of what have been in this world itself, set into malignant play by a malignant mortal.
"And it is though the material agency of that human brain that these things would acquire even a human power-would strike as with the shock of electricity, and might kill, if the thought of the person assailed did not rise superior to the dignity of the original assailer-might kill the most powerful animal if unnerved by fear, but not injure the feeblest man, if, while his flesh crept, his mind stood out fearless. Thus, when in old stories we read of a magician rent to pieces by the fiends he had evoked-or still more, in Eastern legends, that one magician succeeds by arts in destroying another-there may be so far truth, that a material being has clothed, from its own evil propensities certain elements and fluids, usually quiescent or harmless, with awful shape and terrific force-just as the lightning that had lain hidden and innocent in the cloud becomes by natural law suddenly visible, takes a distinct shape to the eye, and can strike destruction on the object to which it is attracted."
"You are now without glimpses of a very mighty secret," said Mr Richards, composedly. "According to your view, could a mortal obtain the power you speak of, he would necessarily be a malignant and evil being."
"If the power were exercised as I have said, most malignant and most evil-though I believe in the ancient traditions that he could not injure the good. His will could only injure those with whom it has established an affinity, or over whom it forces unresisted sway. I will now imagine an example that may be within the laws of nature, yet seem wild as the fables of a bewildered monk.
"You will remember that Albertus Magnus, after describing minutely the process by which spirits may be invoked and commanded, adds emphatically that the process will instruct and avail only to the few-that a man must be born a magician!-that is, born with a peculiar physical temperament, as a man is born a poet. Rarely are men in whose constitution lurks this occult power of the highest order of intellect;-usually in the intellect there is some twist, perversity, or disease. But, on the other hand, they must possess, to an astonishing degree, the faculty to concentrate thought on a single object-the energic faculty that we call will. Therefore, though their intellect be not sound, it is exceedingly forcible for the attainment of what it desires. I will imagine such a person, pre-eminently gifted with this constitution and its concomitant forces. I will place him in the loftier grades of society. I will suppose his desires emphatically those of the sensualist-he has, therefore, a strong love of life. He is an absolute egotist-his will is concentrated in himself-he has fierce passions-he knows no enduring, no holy affections, but he can covet eagerly what for the moment he desires-he can hate implacably what opposes itself to his objects-he can commit fearful crimes, yet feel small remorse-he resorts rather to curses upon others, than to penitence for his misdeeds. Circumstances, to which his constitution guides him, lead him to a rare knowledge of the natural secrets which may serve his egotism. He is a close observer where his passions encourage observation, he is a minute calculator, not from love of truth, but where love of self sharpens his faculties-therefore he can be a man of science.
"I suppose such a being, having by experience learned the power of his arts over others, trying what may be the power of will over his own frame, and studying all that in natural philosophy may increase that power. He loves life, he dreads death; he wills to live on. He cannot restore himself to youth, he cannot entirely stay the progress of death, he cannot make himself immortal in the flesh and blood; but he may arrest for a time so prolonged as to appear incredible, if I said it-that hardening of the parts which constitutes old age. A year may age him no more than an hour ages another. His intense will, scientifically trained into system, operates, in short, over the wear and tear of his own frame. He lives on. That he may not seem a portent and a miracle, he dies from time to time, seemingly, to certain persons. Having schemed the transfer of a wealth that suffices to his wants, he disappears from one corner of the world, and contrives that his obsequies shall be celebrated. He reappears at another corner of the world, where he resides undetected, and does not revisit the scenes of his former career till all who could remember his features are no more. He would be profoundly miserable if he had affections-he has none but for himself. No good man would accept his longevity, and to no men, good or bad, would he or could he communicate its true secret. Such a man might exist; such a man as I have described I see now before me!-Duke of-, in the courts of-, dividing time between lust and brawl, alchemists and wizards;-again, in the last century, charlatan and criminal, with name less noble, domiciled in the house at which you gazed to-day, and flying from the law you had outraged, none knew whither; traveller once more revisiting London, with the same earthly passions which filled your heart when races now no more walked through yonder streets; outlaw from the school of all the nobler and diviner mystics; execrable Image of Life in Death and Death in Life, I warn you back from the cities and homes of healthful men; back to the ruins of departed empires; back to the deserts of nature unredeemed!"
♥ "You say right. I have mastered great secrets by the power of Will; true, by Will and by Science I can retard the process of years: but death comes not by age alone. Can I frustrate the accidents which bring death upon the young?"
"No; every accident is a providence. Before a providence snaps every human will."
"Shall I die at last, ages and ages hence, by the slow, though inevitable, growth of time, or by the cause that I call accident?"
"By a cause you call accident."
"Is not the end still remote?" asked the whisper, with a slight tremor.
"Regarded as my life regards time, it is still remote."
"And shall I, before then, mix with the world of men as I did ere I learned these secrets, resume eager interest in their strife and their trouble-battle with ambition, and use the power of the sage to win the power that belongs to kings?"
"You will yet play a part on the earth that will fill earth with commotion and amaze. For wondrous designs have you, a wonder yourself, been permitted to live on through the centuries. All the secrets you have stored will then have their uses-all that now makes you a stranger amidst the generations will contribute then to make you their lord. As the trees and the straws are drawn into a whirlpool-as they spin round, are sucked to the deep. and again tossed aloft by the eddies, so shall races and thrones be plucked into the charm of your vortex. Awful Destroyer-but in destroying, made, against your own will, a Constructor!"
"And that date, too, is far off?"
"Far off; when it comes, think your end in this world is at hand! ... And in that day every moment shall seem to you longer than the centuries through which you have passed. And heed this-after life, moments continued make the bliss or the hell of eternity."
~~The Haunted and the Haunters (or, the House and the Brain) by Sir E.B. Lytton.
♥ There was more unpleasantness, however. Either an economical suburban company had decided that their light would not be required in the small hours, and had stopped working, or else something was wrong with the meter; the effect was in any case that the electric light was off. The obvious course was to find a match, and also to consult his watch: he might as well know how many hours of discomfort awaited him. So he put his hand into the well-known nook under the pillow: only, it did not get so far. What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being. I do not think it is any use to guess what he said or did; but he was in a spare room with the door locked and his ear to it before he was clearly conscious again. And there he spent the rest of a most miserable night, looking every moment for some fumbling at the door: but nothing came.
~~Casting the Runes by M.R. James.
♥ Pondering these words of Hali (whom God rest) and questioning their full meaning, as one who, having an intimation, yet doubts if there be not something behind, other than that which he has discerned, I noted not whither I had strayed until a sudden chill wind striking my face revived in me a sense of my surroundings. I observed with astonishment that everything seemed unfamiliar. On every side of me stretched a bleak and desolate expanse of plain, covered with a tall overgrowth of sere grass, which rustled and whistled in the autumn wind with heaven knows what mysterious and disquieting suggestion. Protruded at long intervals above it, stood strangely shaped and somber-colored rocks, which seemed to to have an understanding with one another and to exchange looks of uncomfortable significance, as if they had reared their heads to watch the issue of some foreseen event. A few blasted trees here and there appeared as leaders in this malevolent conspiracy of silent expectation.
♥ An owl on the branch of a decayed tree hooted dismally and was answered by another in the distance. Looking upward, I saw through a sudden rift in the clouds Aldebaran and the Hyades! In all this there was a hint of night-the lynx, the man with the torch, the owl. Yet I saw-I saw even the stars in absence of the darkness. I saw, but was apparently not seen nor heard. Under what awful spell did I exist?
~~An Inhabitant of Carcosa.
♥ I must acknowledge that these stories did not reassure me; in fact, as Thursday came near, I began to regret a little my determination to spend the night in the house. I was too vain to back down, however, and the perfect coolness of the two doctors, who ran down Tuesday to Meudon to make a few arrangements, caused me to swear that I would die of fright before I would flinch. I suppose I believed more or less in ghosts, I am sure now that I am older I believe in them, there are in fact few things I can not believe. Two or three inexplicable things had happened to me, and, although this was before my adventure with Rendel in Pæstum, I had a strong predisposition to believe some things that I could not explain, wherein I was out of sympathy with the age.
♥ It was just ten o'clock when we came into the street. A hot dead wind drifted in great puffs through the city, and ragged masses of vapor swept the purple sky; an unsavory night altogether, one of those nights of hopeless lassitude when one feels if one is at home, like doing nothing but drink mint juleps and smoke cigarettes.
♥ "D'Ardeche, your lamented relative was certainly well fixed; she had full scope here for her traditional experiments in demonology."
"Cure me if I don't believe that those same traditions were more or less founded on fact," said Eugene. "I never saw this court under these conditions before, but I could believe anything now. What's that!"
"Nothing but a door slamming," said Duchesne, loudly.
"Well, I wish doors wouldn't slam in houses that have been empty eleven months."
"It is irritating," and Duchesne slipped his arm through mine; "but we must take things as they come."
♥ From this we passed to another room, and here we nearly dropped our lanterns. The room was circular, thirty feet or so in diameter, covered by a hemispherical dome; walls and ceiling were dark blue, spotted with gold stars; and reaching from floor to floor across the dome stretched a colossal figure in red lacquer of a nude woman kneeling, her legs reaching out along the floor on either side, her head touching the lintel of the door through which we had entered, her arms forming its sides, with the fore arms extended and stretching along the walls until they met the long feet. The most astounding, misshapen, absolutely terrifying thing, I think, I ever saw. From the navel hung a great white object, like the traditional roe's egg of the Arabian Nights. The floor was of red lacquer, and in it was inlaid a pentagram the size of the room, made of wide strips of brass. In the centre of this pentagram was a circular disk of black stone, slightly saucer-shaped, with a small outlet in the middle.
The effect of the room was simply crushing, with this gigantic red figure crouched over it all, the staring eyes fixed on one, no matter what his position. None of us spoke, so oppressive was the whole thing.
♥ It had come at last. My body was dead, I could no longer move my eyes. They were fixed in that last look on the place where the door had been, now only a deepening of the dark.
Utter night: the last flicker of the lantern was gone. I sat and waited; my mind was still keen, but how long would it last? There was a limit even to the endurance of the utter panic of fear.
Then the end began. In the velvet blackness came two white eyes, milky, opalescent, small, far away,-awful eyes, like a dead dream. More beautiful than I can describe, the flakes of white flame moving from the perimeter inward, disappearing in the centre, like a never ending flow of opal water into a circular tunnel. I could not have moved my eyes had I possessed the power: they devoured the fearful, beautiful things that grew slowly, slowly larger, fixed on me, advancing, growing more beautiful, the white flakes of light sweeping more swiftly into the blazing vortices, the awful fascination deepening in its insane intensity as the white, vibrating eyes grew nearer, larger.
Like a hideous and implacable engine of death the eyes of the unknown Horror swelled and expanded until they were close before me, enormous, terrible, and I felt a slow, cold, wet breath propelled with mechanical regularity against my face, enveloping me in its fetid mist, in its charnel-house deadliness.
With ordinary fear goes always a physical terror, but with me in the presence of this unspeakable Thing was only the utter and awful terror of the mind, the mad fear of a prolonged and ghostly nightmare. Again and again I tried to shriek, to make some noise, but physically I was utterly dead. I could only feel myself go mad with the terror of hideous death. The eyes were close on me,-their movement so swift that they seemed to be but palpitating flames, the dead breath was around me like the depths of the deepest sea.
Suddenly a wet, icy mouth, like that of a dead cuttle-fish, shapeless, jelly-like, fell over mine. The horror began slowly to draw my life from me, but, as enormous and shuddering folds of palpitating jelly swept sinuously around me, my will came back, my body awoke with the reaction of final fear, and I closed with the nameless death that enfolded me.
What was it that I was fighting? My arms sunk through the unresisting mass that was turning me to ice. Moment by moment new folds of cold jelly swept round me, crushing me with the force of Titans. I fought to wrest my mouth from this awful Thing that sealed it, but, if ever I succeeded and caught a single breath, the wet, sucking mass closed over my face again before I could cry out. I think I fought for hours, desperately, insanely, in a silence that was more hideous than any sound,-fought until I felt final death at hand, until the memory of all my life rushed over me like a flood, until I no longer had strength to wrench my face from that hellish succubus, until with a last mechanical struggle I fell and yielded to death.
~~No. 252 Rue M. le Prince (1895) by Ralph Adams Cram.
♥ Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) is worshipped by thousands of devotees throughout the world as the Prophet of the magical religion/philosophy Thelema, and Logos of the Aeon of Horus.
It is impossible to acknowledge even a fraction of the highlights of the life of this larger-than-life personage. Even if we were to focus exclusively on his literary output-his poetry, his essays, his magazine articles, his reviews, his novels, his short stories, his plays-we would soon run out of space allotted us for the production of this book. Even if we were to rashly judge that he was a mad, wicked scoundrel and con-man, we would still be forced to conclude by the sheer weight of evidence that he was the most magnificently brilliant madman-wicked-scounrel con-man to appear on earth since the Apostle Paul.
If "The Testament of Magdalen Blair" is to be your first taste of Crowley, I respectfully suggest that you keep in mind the most exquisitely delicious delicacies are often an acquired taste, but a state well worth cultivating.
~~from The Introduction to The Testament of Magdalen Blair by Aleister Crowley, by Lon Milo DuQuette.
♥ I have the heart of a child and the consciousness of Satan, the lethargy of I know not what disease; and yet, thank-oh! there can be no God!-the resolution to warn mankind to follow my example, and then to explode a dynamite cartridge in my mouth.
♥ Those who have never made scientific experiments cannot conceive how numerous and subtle are the sources of error, even in the simplest matters. In so obscure and novel a field of research no result is trustworthy until it has been verified a thousand times. In our field we discovered no constants, all variables.
♥ On the third day I received a telegram from Professor Blair, "Will you be my wife?" I had never realized myself as a woman, or him as a man, till that moment, and in that moment I knew that I loved him and had always loved him. It was a case of what one might call "Love at first absence."
♥ Had I known in what all this was to culminate, I suppose I should have gone mad. Thrice fortunate that I can warn humanity of what awaits each one. The greatest benefactor of his race will be he who discovers an explosive indefinitely swifter and more devastating than dynamite.
♥ There was something in him that was not he! The indifference had appeared transitory; I now became aware of it as constant and increasing. I was at this time twenty-three years old. You wonder that I write with such serious attitude of mind. I sometimes think that I have never had any thoughts of my own; that I have always been reading the thoughts of another, or perhaps of Nature. I seem only to have been a woman in those first few months of marriage.
♥ "I have been looking in the wrong place," said he suddenly, but very quietly and without moving. "The thing I want lies at the base of the spine."
This time I saw. In a blue heaven was coiled an infinite snake of gold and green, with four eyes of fire, black fire and red, that darted rays in every direction; held within its coils was a great multitude of laughing children. And even as I looked, all this was blotted out. Crawling rivers of blood spread over the heaven, of blood purulent with nameless forms-mangy dogs with their bowels dragging behind them; creatures half elephant, half beetle; things that were but a ghastly bloodshot eye, set about with leathery tentacles; women whose skins heaved and bubbled like boiling sulphur, giving off clouds that condensed into a thousand other shapes, more hideous than their mother; these were the least of the denizens of these hateful rivers. The most were things impossible to name or to describe.
♥ The suffering of Arthur was at this time unspeakable. Chewed as he was into a mere pulp that passed over the tongue of "Dis," each bleeding fragment kept its own identity and his.
The papillae of the tongue were serpents, and each one gnashed its poisoned teeth upon that fodder.
And yet, though the sensorium of Arthur was absolutely unimpaired, indeed hyperaesthetic, his consciousness of pain seemed to depend upon the opening of the mouth. As it closed in mastication, oblivion fell upon him like a thunderbolt. A merciful oblivion? Oh! what a master stroke of cruelty! Again and again he woke from nothing to a hell of agony, of pure ecstasy of agony, until he understood that this would continue for all his life, the alternation was but systole and diastole; the throb of his envenomed pulse, the reflection in consciousness of his blood-beat. I became conscious of his intense longing for death to end the torture.
The blood circulated ever slower and more painfully; I could feel him hoping for the end.
This dreadful rose-dawn suddenly greyed and sickened with doubt. Hope sank to its nadir; fear rose like a dragon, with leaden wings. Suppose, thought he, that after all death does not end me!
I cannot express this conception. It is not that the heart sank, it had no whither to sink; it knew itself immortal, and immortal in a realm of unimagined pain and terror, unlighted by one glimpse of any other light than that pale glare of hate and of pestilence. This thought took shape in these words:
I AM THAT I AM.
One cannot say that the blasphemy added to the horror; rather it was the essence of the horror. It was the gnashing of the teeth of a damned soul.
♥ At that instant a convulsion shook the dying man and a coughing eructation took the "demon." Instantly the whole theory dawned on me, that this "demon" was an imaginary personification of the disease. Now at once I understood demonology, from Bodin and Weirus to the modems, without a flaw.
♥ "I am going to die.
"The consolation of death is Religion. "There is no use for Religion in life.
"How many atheists have I not known sign the articles for the sake of fellowships and livings! Religion in life is either an amusement and a soporific, or a sham and a swindle.
"I was brought up a Presbyterian.
"How easily I drifted into the English Church! And now where is God?
"Where is the Lamb of God?
"Where is the Saviour?
"Where is the Comforter?
"Why was I not saved from that devil?"
Is he going to eat me again? To absorb me into him? O fate inconceivably hideous! It is quite clear to me-I hope you've got it down, Magdalen!-that the demon is made of all those that have died of Bright's disease. There must be different ones for each disease. I thought I once caught sight of a coughing bog of bloody slime.
"Let me pray."
A frenzied appeal to the Creator followed. Sincere as it was, it would read like irreverence in print.
And then there came the cold-drawn horror of stark blasphemy against this God-who would not answer. Followed the bleak black agony of the conviction-the absolute certitude-"There is no God!" combined with a wave of frenzied wrath against the people who had so glibly assured him that there was, an almost maniac hope that they would suffer more than he, if it were possible.
(Poor Arthur! He had not yet brushed the bloom off Suffering's grape; he was to drink its fiercest distillation to the dregs.)
"No!" thought he, "perhaps I lack their 'faith.'
"Perhaps if I could really persuade myself of God and Christ-perhaps if I could deceive myself, could make believe--"
Such a thought is to surrender one's honesty, to abdicate one's reason. It marked the final futile struggle of his will.
♥ I felt that he was not only disintegrated mechanically, but chemically, that his being was loosened more and more into parts, that these were being absorbed into new and hateful things, but that (worst of all) Arthur stood immune from all, behind it, unimpaired, memory and reason ever more acute as ever new and ghastlier experience informed them. It seemed to me as if some mystic state were super-added to the torment; for while he was not, emphatically not, this tortured mass of consciousness, yet that was he. There are always at least two of us! The one who feels and the one who knows are not radically one person. This double personality is enormous accentuated in death..
♥ We all judge of the lapse of time in relation to our daily habits or some similar standard. The conviction of immortality must naturally destroy all values for this sense. If I am immortal, what is the difference between a long time and a short time? A thousand years and a day are obviously the same thing from the point of view of "for ever."
There is a sub-conscious clock in us, a clock wound up by the experience of the race to go for seventy years or so. Five minutes is a very long time to us if we are waiting for an omnibus, an age if we are waiting for a lover, nothing at all if we are pleasantly engaged or sleeping.**
We think of seven years as a long time in connection with penal servitude; as a negligibly small period in dealing with geology.
But, given immortality, the age of the stellar system itself is nothing.
**It is one of the greatest cruelties of nature that all painful or depressing emotions seem to lengthen time; pleasant thoughts and exalted moods make time fly. Thus, in summing up a life from an outside standpoint, it would seem that, supposing pleasure and pain to have occupied equal periods, the impression would be that pain was enormously greater than pleasure. This may be controverted. Virgil writes: "Forsitan haec olim meminisse juvabit," and there is at least one modern writer thoroughly conversant with pessimism who is very optimistic. But the new facts which I here submit overthrow the whole argument; they cast a sword of infinite weight on that petty trembling scale.
♥ This sea, though infinitely cold, was boiling like tubercles. Itself a more or less homogeneous slime, the stench of which is beyond all human conception (human language is singularly deficient in words that describe smell and taste; we always refer our sensations to things generally known) it constantly budded into greenish boils with angry red craters, whose jagged edges were of a livid white; and from these issued pus formed of all things known of man-each one distorted, degraded, blasphemed.**
**This is my general complaint, and that of all research students on the one hand and imaginative writers on the other. We can only express a new idea by combining two or more old ideas, or by the use of metaphor; just so any number can be forced from two others. James Hinton had undoubtedly a perfectly crisp, simple, and concise idea of the "fourth dimension of space"; he found the utmost difficulty in conveying it to others, even when they were advanced mathematicians. It is (I believe) the greatest factor that militates against human progress that great men assume that they will be understood by others.
♥ I realized that the putrefactive changes in the dead man's brain were setting in motion every memory of his, and smearing them with hell's own paint.
I timed one thought, despite its myriad million details, each one clear, vivid and prolonged, it occupied but three seconds of earthly time. I considered the incalculable array of the thoughts in his well-furnished mind; I saw that thousands of years would not exhaust them.
But, perhaps, when the brain was destroyed beyond recognition of its component parts. We have always casually assumed that consciousness depends upon a proper flow of blood in the vessels of the brain; we have never stopped to think whether the records might not be excited in some other manner. And yet we known how tumour of the brain begets hallucinations. Consciousness works strangely; the least disturbance of the blood supply, and it goes out like a candle, or else takes monstrous forms.
Here was the overwhelming truth; in death man lives again, and lives for ever. Yet we might have thought of it; the phantasmagoria of life which throng the mind of a drowning man might have suggested something of the sort to any man with a sympathetic and active imagination.
♥ Through it all I seemed to hear the real Arthur's thought. "Though all this is I, yet it is only an accident of me; I stand behind it all, immune, eternal."
It must not be supposed that this in any way detracted from the intensity of the suffering. Rather it added to it. To be loathsome is less than to be linked to loathsomeness. To plunge into impurity is to become deadened to disgust. But to do so and yet remain pure-every vileness adds a pang. Think of Madonna imprisoned in a body of a prostitute, and compelled to acknowledge "This is I," while never losing her abhorrence. Not only immured in hell, but compelled to partake of its sacraments; not only high priest at its agape, but begetter and manifestor of its cult; a Christ nauseated at the kiss of Judas, and yet aware that the treachery was his own.
♥ The madness of the living is a thing so abominable and fearful as to chill every human heart with horror; it is less than nothing in comparison with the madness of the dead!
♥ Creeping, winding, embracing, the Universe enfolded him, violated him with a nameless and intimate contamination, involved his being in a more suffocating terror.
Now and again it drowned that consciousness in a gulf which his thought could not express to me; and indeed the first and least of his torments is utterly beyond human expression.
It was a woe ever expanded, ever intensified, by each vial of wrath. Memory increased, and understanding grew; the imagination had equally got rid of limit.
What this means who can tell? The human mind cannot really appreciate numbers beyond a score or so; it can deal with numbers by ratiocination, it cannot apprehend them by direct impression. It requires a highly trained intelligence to distinguish between fifteen and sixteen matches on a plate without counting them. In death this limitation is entirely removed. Of the infinite content of the Universe every item was separately realized. The brain of Arthur had become equal in power to that attributed by theologians to the Creator; yet of executive power there was no seed. The impotence of man before circumstance was in him magnified indefinitely, yet without loss of detail or of mass. He understood that The Many was The One without losing or fusing the conception of either. He was God, but a God irretrievably damned; a being infinite, yet limited by the nature of things, and that nature solely compact of loathliness.
♥ I have little doubt that the cremation of my husband's body cut short a process which in the normally buried man continues until no trace of organic substance remains.
The first kiss of the furnace awoke an activity so violent and so vivid that all the past paled in its lurid light.
The quenchless agony of the pang is not to be described; if alleviation there were, it was but exultation of feeling that this was final.
Not only time, but all expansions of time, all monsters of time's womb were to be annihilated; even the ego might hope some end.
The ego is the "worm that dieth not," and existence the "fire that is not quenched." Yet in this universal pyre, in this baranthrum of liquid lava, jetted from the volcanoes of the infinite, this "lake of fire that is reserved for the devil and his angels," might not one at last touch bottom? Ah! but time was no more, neither any eidolon thereof.
♥ Where was Arthur?
His brain, his individuality, his life, were utterly destroyed. As separate things, yes: Arthur had entered the universal consciousness.
And I heard this utterance; or rather this is my translation into English of a single thought whose synthesis is "Woe."
Substance is called spirit or matter.
Spirit and matter are one, indivisible, eternal, indestructible. Infinite and eternal change!
Infinite and eternal pain!
No absolute; no truth, no beauty, no idea, nothing but the whirlwinds of form, unresting, unappeasable.
Eternal hunger! Eternal wart Change and pain infinite and increasing.
There is no individuality but in illusion. And the illusion is change and pain, and its destruction is change and pain, and its new segregation from the infinite and eternal is change and pain; and substance infinite and eternal is change and pain unspeakable.
Beyond thought, which is change and pain, lies being, which is change and pain.
There were the last words intelligible; they lapsed into the eternal moan, Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe! Woe!
~~The Testament of Magdalen Blair by Aleister Crowley.
♥ I thought of the relic hunters and the relic buyers on the battlefields of our civil war.
"Seventeen hundred and sixty is long ago," I said.
"Respect for the dead can never die," said Fortin.
"And the English soldiers came here to kiss your fathers and burn your homes," I continued.
"They were murderers and thieves, but-they are dead," said Tregunc..
♥ Then he slowly produced a tobacco pouch, a bit of flint and tinder, and a long-stemmed pipe fitted with a microscopical bowl of baked clay. To fill such a pipe requires ten minutes' close attention. To smoke it to a finish takes but four puffs. It is very Breton, this Breton pipe. It is the crystallization of everything Breton.
♥ As the twilight fell for a moment over ocean and moorland, a wistful, restless happiness filled my heart, the happiness that all men know-all men who have loved.
Slowly the purple mist crept out over the sea; the cliffs darkened; the forest was shrouded.
Suddenly the sky above burned with the afterglow, and the world was alight again.
Cloud after cloud caught the rose dye; the cliffs were tinted with it; moor and pasture, heather and forest burned and pulsated with the gentle flush. I saw the gulls turning and tossing above the sand bar, their snowy wings tipped with pink; I saw the sea swallows sheering the surface of the still river, stained to its placid depths with warm reflections of the clouds. The twitter of drowsy hedge birds broke out in the stillness; a salmon rolled its shining side above tidewater.
The interminable monotone of the ocean intensified the silence. I sat motionless, holding my breath as one who listens to the first low rumor of an organ. All at once the pure whistle of a nightingale cut the silence, and the first moonbeam silvered the wastes of mist-hung waters.
♥ I stood an instant contemplating her blissfully, thinking, "My boy, you're the happiest fellow in the world-you're in love with your wife".
♥ As I did so the chain lightning split the zenith, the thunder crashed, and a sheet of rain swept into the room, driving with it something that fluttered-something that flapped, and squeaked, and beat upon the rung with soft, moist wings.
We bent over it together, Lys clinging to me, and we saw that it was a death's-head moth drenched with rain.
♥ "Don't, Lys."
"I shall suffer every moment you are away."
"The ride is too fatiguing, and we can't tell what unpleasant sight you may come upon. Lys, you don't really think there is anything supernatural in this affair?"
"Dick," she answered gently, "I am a Bretonne." With both arms around my neck, my wife said, "Death is a gift of God. I do not fear it when we are together. But alone-oh, my husband, I should fear a God who could take you away from me!"
♥ I recovered my reason, and understood that the man was human and was probably wounded to death. Ay, to death; for there at my feet, lay the wet trail of blood, over leaves and stones, down into the little hollow, across to the figure in black resting silently under the trees.
I saw that he could not escape even if he had the strength, for before him, almost at his very feet, lay a deep, shining swamp.
As I stepped forward my foot broke a twig. At thew sound the figure started a little, then its head fell forward again. Its face was masked. Walking up to the man, I bade him tell where he was wounded. Durand and the others broke through the thicket at the same moment and hurried to my side.
"Who are you who hide a masked face in a priest's robe?" said the gendarme loudly.
There was no answer.
"See-see the stiff blood all over his robe," muttered Le Bihan to Fortin.
"He will not speak," said I.
"He may to too badly wounded," whispered Le Bihan.
"I saw him raise his head," I said, "my wife saw him creep up here."
Durand stepped forward and touched the figure.
"Speak!" he said.
"Speak!" quavered Fortin.
Durand waited a moment, then with a sudden upward movement he stripped off the mask and threw back the man's head. We were looking into the eye sockets of a skull.
~~The Messenger by Robert W. Chambers.