Three John Silence Stories | Page 9

heart of
true humour. I was exceedingly pleased with this result of my
experiment. But when the stenographer had taken her departure and I
came to read over the pages she had typed out, I recalled her sudden
glances of surprise and the odd way she had looked up at me while I
was dictating. I was amazed at what I read and could hardly believe I
had uttered it."
"And why?"
"It was so distorted. The words, indeed, were mine so far as I could
remember, but the meanings seemed strange. It frightened me. The
sense was so altered. At the very places where my characters were
intended to tickle the ribs, only curious emotions of sinister amusement
resulted. Dreadful innuendoes had managed to creep into the phrases.
There was laughter of a kind, but it was bizarre, horrible, distressing;
and my attempt at analysis only increased my dismay. The story, as it
read then, made me shudder, for by virtue of these slight changes it had
come somehow to hold the soul of horror, of horror disguised as
merriment. The framework of humour was there, if you understand me,
but the characters had turned sinister, and their laughter was evil."

"Can you show me this writing?"
The author shook his head.
"I destroyed it," he whispered. "But, in the end, though of course much
perturbed about it, I persuaded myself that it was due to some
after-effect of the drug, a sort of reaction that gave a twist to my mind
and made me read macabre interpretations into words and situations
that did not properly hold them."
"And, meanwhile, did the presence of this person leave you?"
"No; that stayed more or less. When my mind was actively employed I
forgot it, but when idle, dreaming, or doing nothing in particular, there
she was beside me, influencing my mind horribly--"
"In what way, precisely?" interrupted the doctor.
"Evil, scheming thoughts came to me, visions of crime, hateful pictures
of wickedness, and the kind of bad imagination that so far has been
foreign, indeed impossible, to my normal nature--"
"The pressure of the Dark Powers upon the personality," murmured the
doctor, making a quick note.
"Eh? I didn't quite catch--"
"Pray, go on. I am merely making notes; you shall know their purport
fully later."
"Even when my wife returned I was still aware of this Presence in the
house; it associated itself with my inner personality in most intimate
fashion; and outwardly I always felt oddly constrained to be polite and
respectful towards it--to open doors, provide chairs and hold myself
carefully deferential when it was about. It became very compelling at
last, and, if I failed in any little particular, I seemed to know that it
pursued me about the house, from one room to another, haunting my
very soul in its inmost abode. It certainly came before my wife so far as

my attentions were concerned.
"But, let me first finish the story of my experimental dose, for I took it
again the third night, and underwent a very similar experience, delayed
like the first in coming, and then carrying me off my feet when it did
come with a rush of this false demon-laughter. This time, however,
there was a reversal of the changed scale of space and time; it shortened
instead of lengthened, so that I dressed and got downstairs in about
twenty seconds, and the couple of hours I stayed and worked in the
study passed literally like a period of ten minutes."
"That is often true of an overdose," interjected the doctor, "and you
may go a mile in a few minutes, or a few yards in a quarter of an hour.
It is quite incomprehensible to those who have never experienced it,
and is a curious proof that time and space are merely forms of thought."
"This time," Pender went on, talking more and more rapidly in his
excitement, "another extraordinary effect came to me, and I
experienced a curious changing of the senses, so that I perceived
external things through one large main sense-channel instead of
through the five divisions known as sight, smell, touch, and so forth.
You will, I know, understand me when I tell you that I heard sights and
saw sounds. No language can make this comprehensible, of course, and
I can only say, for instance, that the striking of the clock I saw as a
visible picture in the air before me. I saw the sounds of the tinkling bell.
And in precisely the same way I heard the colours in the room,
especially the colours of those books in the shelf behind you. Those red
bindings I heard in deep sounds, and the yellow covers of the French
bindings next to them made a shrill, piercing