The Novel of the White Powder | Page 9

women,
seduced from their homes on specious pretences, were met by beings
well qualified to assume, as they did assume, the part of devils, and
taken by their guides to some desolate and lonely place, known to the
initiate by long tradition, and unknown to all else. Perhaps it was a cave
in some bare and windswept hill, perhaps some inmost recess of a great
forest, and there the Sabbath was held. There, in the blackest hour of
night, the Vinum Sabbati was prepared, and this evil gruel was poured
forth and offered to the neophytes, and they partook of an infernal
sacrament; sumentes calicem principis inferorum, as an old author well
expresses it. And suddenly, each one that had drunk found himself
attended by a companion, a share of glamour and unearthly allurement,
beckoning him apart, to share in joys more exquisite, more piercing
than the thrill of any dream, to the consummation of the marriage of the
Sabbath.
It is hard to write of such things as these, and chiefly because that shape
that allured with loveliness was no hallucination, but, awful as it is to
express, the man himself. By the power of that Sabbath wine, a few
grains of white powder thrown into a glass of water, the house of life
was riven asunder and the human trinity dissolved, and the worm which
never dies, that which lies sleeping within us all, was made tangible
and an external thing, and clothed with a garment of flesh. And then, in
the hour of midnight, the primal fall was repeated and re-presented, and
the awful thing veiled in the mythos of the Tree in the Garden was done
anew. Such was the nuptioe Sabbati.
"I prefer to say no more; you, Haberden, know as well as I do that the
most trivial laws of life are not to be broken with impunity; and for so
terrible an act as this, in which the very inmost place of the temple was

broken open and defiled, a terrible vengeance followed. What began
with corruption ended also with corruption."
Underneath is the following in Dr. Haberden's writing: Ñ
"The whole of the above is unfortunately strictly and entirely true. Your
brother confessed all to me on that morning when I saw him in his
room. My attention was first attracted to the bandaged hand, and I
forced him to show it to me. What I saw made me, a medical man of
many years' standing, grow sick with loathing, and the story I was
forced to listen to was infinitely more frightful than I could have
believed possible. It has tempted me to doubt the Eternal Goodness
which can permit nature to offer such hideous possibilities; and if you
had not with your own eyes seen the end, I should have said to you--
disbelieve it all. I have not, I think, many more weeks to live, but you
are young, and may forget all this.
JOSEPH HABERDEN, M.D.
In the course of two or three months I heard that Dr. Haberden had died
at sea shortly after the ship left England.
2 RTEXTR*ch

White Powder
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