Three John Silence Stories | Page 8

it, but
it's true. It's the only way I can express it. Moreover, while the
operation terrified me, the skill with which it was accomplished filled
me afresh with laughter at the clumsiness of men by comparison. Our
ignorant, bungling methods of teaching the minds of others, of
inculcating ideas, and so on, overwhelmed me with laughter when I
understood this superior and diabolical method. Yet my laughter
seemed hollow and ghastly, and ideas of evil and tragedy trod close
upon the heels of the comic. Oh, doctor, I tell you again, it was
unnerving!"
John Silence sat with his head thrust forward to catch every word of the
story which the other continued to pour out in nervous, jerky sentences
and lowered voice.
"You saw nothing--no one--all this time?" he asked.
"Not with my eyes. There was no visual hallucination. But in my mind
there began to grow the vivid picture of a woman--large, dark-skinned,
with white teeth and masculine features, and one eye--the left--so
drooping as to appear almost closed. Oh, such a face--!"
"A face you would recognise again?"
Pender laughed dreadfully.
"I wish I could forget it," he whispered, "I only wish I could forget it!"
Then he sat forward in his chair suddenly, and grasped the doctor's
hand with an emotional gesture.
"I must tell you how grateful I am for your patience and sympathy," he
cried, with a tremor in his voice, "and--that you do not think me mad. I
have told no one else a quarter of all this, and the mere freedom of
speech--the relief of sharing my affliction with another--has helped me

already more than I can possibly say."
Dr. Silence pressed his hand and looked steadily into the frightened
eyes. His voice was very gentle when he replied.
"Your case, you know, is very singular, but of absorbing interest to
me," he said, "for it threatens, not your physical existence but the
temple of your psychical existence--the inner life. Your mind would
not be permanently affected here and now, in this world; but in the
existence after the body is left behind, you might wake up with your
spirit so twisted, so distorted, so befouled, that you would be spiritually
insane--a far more radical condition than merely being insane here."
There came a strange hush over the room, and between the two men
sitting there facing one another.
"Do you really mean--Good Lord!" stammered the author as soon as he
could find his tongue.
"What I mean in detail will keep till a little later, and I need only say
now that I should not have spoken in this way unless I were quite
positive of being able to help you. Oh, there's no doubt as to that,
believe me. In the first place, I am very familiar with the workings of
this extraordinary drug, this drug which has had the chance effect of
opening you up to the forces of another region; and, in the second, I
have a firm belief in the reality of supersensuous occurrences as well as
considerable knowledge of psychic processes acquired by long and
painful experiment. The rest is, or should be, merely sympathetic
treatment and practical application. The hashish has partially opened
another world to you by increasing your rate of psychical vibration, and
thus rendering you abnormally sensitive. Ancient forces attached to this
house have attacked you. For the moment I am only puzzled as to their
precise nature; for were they of an ordinary character, I should myself
be psychic enough to feel them. Yet I am conscious of feeling nothing
as yet. But now, please continue, Mr. Pender, and tell me the rest of
your wonderful story; and when you have finished, I will talk about the
means of cure."

Pender shifted his chair a little closer to the friendly doctor and then
went on in the same nervous voice with his narrative.
"After making some notes of my impressions I finally got upstairs
again to bed. It was four o'clock in the morning. I laughed all the way
up--at the grotesque banisters, the droll physiognomy of the staircase
window, the burlesque grouping of the furniture, and the memory of
that outrageous footstool in the room below; but nothing more
happened to alarm or disturb me, and I woke late in the morning after a
dreamless sleep, none the worse for my experiment except for a slight
headache and a coldness of the extremities due to lowered circulation."
"Fear gone, too?" asked the doctor.
"I seemed to have forgotten it, or at least ascribed it to mere
nervousness. Its reality had gone, anyhow for the time, and all that day
I wrote and wrote and wrote. My sense of laughter seemed wonderfully
quickened and my characters acted without effort out of the