 ads heard during the podcast that are not in my voice are placed by third-party agencies outside of my control and should not imply an endorsement by Weird Darkness or myself. Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. Welcome Weirdos, I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. Coming up with this episode, it's Thriller Thursday and this time I'm bringing you a short story from H.G. Wells about what we would probably consider today remote viewing, but in a more permanent and unintentional manner. It's a story he wrote back in 1895, entitled The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes. If you're new here, welcome to the show. While you're listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com for merchandise, to visit sponsors you hear about during the show, sign up for my newsletter and her contests. Connect with me on social media. Hear my other podcasts, including Church of the Undead and a sci-fi podcast called Auditory Anthology. Listen to free audiobooks I've narrated. Plus, you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you're struggling with depression, dark thoughts or addiction. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com. Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness. The transitory mental aberration of Sidney Davidson, remarkable enough in itself, is still more remarkable if Wade's explanation is to be credited. It sets one dreaming of the honest possibilities of intercommunication in the future, of spending an intercalary five minutes on the other side of the world, or being watched in our most secret operations by unsuspected eyes. It happened that I was the immediate witness of Davidson's seizure, and so it falls naturally to me to put the story upon paper. When I say that I was the immediate witness of his seizure, I mean that I was the first on the scene. The thing happened at the Harlow Technical College, just beyond the highway archway. He was alone in the larger laboratory when the thing happened. I was in a smaller room where the balances are, writing up some notes. The thunderstorm had completely upset my work, of course. It was just after one of the louder peals that I thought I heard some glass smash in the other room. I stopped writing and turned around to listen. For a moment I heard nothing. The hail was playing the devil's tattoo on the corrugated zinc of the roof. Then came another sound, a smash. No doubt of it this time. Something heavy had been knocked off the bench. I jumped up at once and went and opened the door leading into the big laboratory. I was surprised to hear a queer sort of laugh and saw Davidson standing unsteadily in the middle of the room with a dazzled look on his face. My first impression was that he was drunk. He did not notice me. He was clawing out at something invisible a yard in front of his face. He put out his hand slowly, rather hesitatingly, and then clutched nothing. What's come to it, he said. He held up his hands to his face. The fingers spread out. Great Scott, he said. The thing happened three or four years ago when everyone swore by that personage. Then he began raising his feet clumsily, as though he had expected to find them glued to the floor. Davidson, cried I, what's the matter with you? He turned around in my direction and looked about for me. He looked over me and at me and on either side of me, without the slightest sign of seeing me. Waves, he said, in a remarkably neat schooner. I'd swear that was Bellow's voice, hello! He shouted suddenly at the top of his voice. I thought he was up to some foolery. Then I saw littered about his feet the shattered remains of the best of our electrometers. What's up, man, said I, you smashed my electrometer. Bellow's again, said he. Friends left if my hands are gone, something about electrometers. Which way are you, Bellows? He suddenly came staggering towards me. The damned stuff cuts like butter, he said. He walked straight into the bench and recoiled, none so buttery that, he said, and stood swaying. I felt scared. Davidson, said I, what on earth's come over you? He looked round him in every direction. I could swear that was Bellow's, why don't you show yourself like a man, Bellows? It occurred to me that he must be suddenly struck blind. I walked round the table and laid my hand upon his arm. I never saw a man more startled in my life. He jumped away from me and came round into an attitude of self-defense. His face fairly distorted with terror. Good God, he cried. What was that? It's I, Bellows. Confounded, Davidson. He jumped when I answered him and stared. How can I express it? Right through me. He began talking, not to me, but to himself. Here in broad daylight, on a clear beach, not a place to hide in. He looked about him wildly. Here, I'm off. He suddenly turned and ran headlong into the big electromagnet, so violently that, as we found afterwards, he bruised his shoulder and jawbone cruelly. At that, he stepped back a pace and cried out with almost a whimper, What in Heaven's name has come over me? He stood, blanched with terror and trembling violently with his right arm clutching his left, where that had collided with the magnet. By that time, I was excited and fairly scared. Davidson said, I don't be afraid. He was startled at my voice, but not so excessively as before. I repeated my words in as clear and as firm a tone as I could assume. Bellows, he said, is that you? Can't you see it's me? He laughed, I can't even see myself. Where the devil are we? Here, said I in the laboratory. The laboratory, he answered in a puzzled tone and put his hand to his forehead. I was in the laboratory till that flash came, but I'm hanged if I'm there now. What ship is that? There's no ship, said I. Do be sensible, old chap. No ship, he repeated, and seemed to forget my denial, Fortwith. I suppose, said he slowly, we're both dead, but the rummy part is I feel just as though I still had a body. Don't get used to it all at once, I suppose. The old shop was struck by lightning, I suppose. Dolly, quit, thing, bellows. Don't talk nonsense, you're very much alive. You are in a laboratory blundering about. You just smashed a new electrometer. I don't envy you when voice arrives. He stared away from me towards the diagram of cryohydrates. I must be deaf, said he. They fired a gun for their goes the puff of smoke and I never heard a sound. I put my hand on his arm again and this time he was less alarmed. We seemed to have sort of invisible bodies, said he. By Jove, there's a boat coming around the headland. It's very much like the old life, after all, in a different climate. I shook his arm. Davidson, I cried. Wake up. It was just then that voice came in. So soon as he spoke, Davidson explained, oh, boys, dead too, what a lark. I hastened to explain that Davidson was in a kind of some nambulistic trance. Voice was interested at once. We both did all we could to arouse the fellow out of his extraordinary state. He answered our questions and asked us some of his own, but his attention seemed distracted by his hallucination about a beach at a ship. He kept interpolating observations concerning some boat and the Davidson sails filling with the wind and made one feel queer in the dusky laboratory to hear him saying such things. He was blind and helpless. We had to walk him down the passage, one at each elbow to Voice's private room and while Voice talked to him there and humored him about his ship idea, I went along the corridor and asked Old Wade to come and look at him. The voice of our dean sobered him a little, but not very much. He asked where his hands were and why he had to walk about up to his waist in the ground. Wade thought over him a long time. You know how he knits his brows and then made him feel the couch, guiding his hands to it. That's a couch, said Wade, a couch in the private room of Professor Voice, whores hair stuffing. Davidson felt about and puzzled over it and answered presently that he could feel it all right but he couldn't see it. What do you see? asked Wade. Davidson said he could see nothing but a lot of sand and broken up shells. Wade gave him some other things to feel, telling him what they were and watching him keenly. The ship is almost hulled down, said Davidson presently, apropos of nothing. Never mind the ship, said Wade. Listen to me, Davidson. Do you know what hallucination means? Rather, said Davidson. Well, everything you see is hallucinatory. Bishop Berkeley, said Davidson, don't mistake me, said Wade. You are alive and in this room of voices but something has happened to your eyes. You cannot see, you can feel and hear but not see. Do you follow me? It seems to me that I see too much. Davidson rubbed his knuckles into his eyes. Well, he said, that's all, don't let it perplex you. Bellows here and I will take you home in a cab. Wait a bit, Davidson thought. Help me to sit down, said he presently and now I'm sorry to trouble you but will you tell me all that over again? Wade repeated it very patiently. Davidson shut his eyes and pressed his hands upon his forehead. Yes, said he, it's quite right, now my eyes are shut and I know you're right. That's you, bellows, sitting by me on the couch. I'm in England again and we're in the dark. Then he opened his eyes and there, said he, is the sun just rising and the yards of the ship and a tumble to sea and a couple of birds flying. I never saw anything so real and I'm sitting up to my neck in a bank of sand. He bent forward and covered his face with his hands. Then he opened his eyes again. Dark sea and sunrise and yet I'm sitting on a sofa in old boys' room. God help me. That was the beginning. For three weeks this strange affection of Davidson's eyes continued unabated. It was far worse than being blind. He was absolutely helpless and had to be fed like a newly hatched bird and let about and undressed. If he attempted to move, he fell over things or struck himself against walls or doors. After a day or so, he got used to hearing our voices without seeing us and willingly admitted he was at home and that Wade was right in what he told him. My sister, to whom he was engaged, insisted on coming to see him and would sit for hours every day while he talked about this beach of his. Holding her hand seemed to comfort him immensely. He explained that when we left the college and drove home, he lived in Hampstead Village. It appeared to him as if we drove right through a sand hill. It was perfectly black until he emerged again and through rocks and trees and solid obstacles. When he was taken to his own room and made him giddy and almost frantic with the fear of falling because going upstairs seemed to lift him 30 or 40 feet above the rocks of his imaginary island, he kept saying he should smash all the eggs. The end was that he had to be taken down into his father's consulting room and laid upon a couch that stood there. He described the island as being a bleak kind of place on the whole with very little vegetation except some peaty stuff and a lot of bare rock. There were multitudes of penguins and they made the rocks white and disagreeable to see. The sea was often rough and once there was a thunderstorm and he lay and shouted at the silent flashes. Once or twice, seals pulled up on the beach but only on the first two or three days. He said it was very funny the way in which the penguins used to waddle right through him and how he seemed to lie among them without disturbing them. I remember one odd thing and that was when he wanted very badly to smoke. We put a pipe in his hands, he almost poked his eye out with it and lit it but he couldn't taste anything. I've since found it's the same with me. I don't know if it's the usual case that I cannot enjoy tobacco at all unless I can see the smoke. But the queerest part of his vision came when Wade sent him out in a bath chair to get fresh air. The Davidson's hired a chair and got that deaf and obstinate dependent of theirs, Wigery, to attend to it. Wigery's ideas of healthy expeditions were peculiar. My sister, who had been to the dog's home, met them in Camden Town toward King's Cross. Wigery trotting along complacently and Davidson evidently most distressed, trying in his feeble blind way to attract Wigery's attention. He positively wept when my sister spoke to him. Oh, get me out of this horrible darkness, he said, feeling for her hand. I must get out of it or I shall die. He was quite incapable of explaining what was the matter, but my sister decided he must go home and presently as they went uphill towards Hampstead, the horror seemed to drop from him. He said it was good to see the stars again, though it was then about noon and a blazing day. It seemed, he told me afterwards, as if I was being carried irresistibly towards the water. I was not very much alarmed at first. Of course, it was night there, a lovely night. Of course, I asked, but that struck me as odd. Of course, said he. It's always night there when it is day here. Well, we went right into the water, which was calm and shining under the moonlight, just a broad swell that seemed to grow broader and flatter as I came down into it. The surface glistened, like a skin. It might have been empty space underneath, for all I could tell, to the contrary. Very slowly, for I rode slanting into it, the water crept up to my eyes. Then I went under and the skin seemed to break and heal again about my eyes. The moon gave a jump up in the sky and grew green and dim, and fish, faintly glowing, came darting around me and things that seemed made of luminous glass, and I passed through a tangle of seaweeds that shone with an oily luster. And so I drove down into the sea and the stars went out one by one, and the moon grew greener and darker, and the seaweed became luminous purple-red. It was all very faint and mysterious and everything seemed to quiver, and all the while I could hear the wheels of the bath chair creaking and the footsteps of people going by and a man in the distance selling this special palmole. I kept sinking down deeper and deeper into the water. It became inky black about me. Not a ray from above came down into that darkness and the phosphorescent things grew brighter and brighter. The snakey branches of the deeper weeds flickered like the flames of spirit lamps, but after a time there were no more weeds. The fishes came staring and dipping towards me and into me and through me. I never imagined such fishes before. They had lines of fire along the sides of them as though they had been outlined with a luminous pencil, and there was a ghastly thing swimming backwards with a lot of twining arms, and then I saw, coming very slowly towards me through the gloom, a hazy mass of light that resolved itself as it drew nearer into multitudes of fishes, struggling and darting around something that drifted. I drove on straight towards it and presently I saw in the midst of the tumult and by the light of the fish a bit of splintered spar looming over me and a dark hull tilting over and some glowing phosphorescent forms that were shaken and writhed as the fish bit at them. Then it was I who began to try to attract witchery's attention. A horror came upon me, I should have driven right into those half-eaten things. If your sister had not come, they had great holes in them, bellows, and never mind, but it was ghastly. For three weeks, Davidson remained in this singular state, seeing what at the time we imagined was an altogether phantasmal world and stone blind to the world around him. Then one Tuesday when I called, I met old Davidson in the passage. He could see his thumb, the old gentleman said in a perfect transport. He was struggling into his overcoat. He could see his thumb, bellows, he said, with the tears in his eyes. The lad will be all right yet. I rushed into Davidson. He was holding up a little book before his face and looking at it and laughing in a weak kind of way. It's amazing, said he. There's a kind of patch come there. He pointed with his finger. Among the rocks is usual and the penguins are staggering and flapping about as usual and there's been a whale showing every now and then, but it's got too dark now to make him out. But put something there and I see it. I do see it. It's very dim and broken in places, but I see it all the same, like a faint specter of itself. I found it out this morning while they were dressing me. It's like a hole in this infertile phantom world. Just put your hand by mine. No, not there. Ah, yes, I see it. The base of your thumb and a bit of cuff. It looks like the ghost of a bit of your hand sticking out of the darkling sky. Just by it, there's a group of stars like a cross coming out. From that time, Davidson began to mend. His account of the change, like his account of the vision, was oddly convincing. Over patches of his field of vision, the phantom world grew fainter, grew transparent, as it were, and through these translucent gaps, he began to see dimly the real world about him. The patches grew in size and number, ran together, and spread until only here and there were blind spots left upon his eyes. He was able to get up and steer himself about, feed himself once more, read, smoke, and behave like an ordinary citizen again. At first, it was very confusing to him to have these two pictures overlapping each other, like the changing views of a lantern. But in a little while, he began to distinguish the real from the illusory. At first, he was unfainedly glad and seemed only too anxious to complete his cure by taking exercises and tonics. But as that odd island of his began to fade away from him, he became clearly interested in it. He wanted particularly to go down into the deep sea again and would spend half his time wondering about the low lying parts of London trying to find the waterlogged wreck he had seen drifting. The glare of real daylight very soon impressed him so vividly as to blot out everything of his shadowy world. But of a nighttime and a darkened room, he could still see the white splashed rocks of the island and the clumsy penguins staggering to and fro. But even these grew fainter and fainter. And at last, soon after he married my sister, he saw them the last time. And now to tell of the queerest thing of all. About two years after his cure, I dined with the Davidson's and after dinner a man named Atkins called in. He is a lieutenant in the Royal Navy and a pleasant talkative man. He was on friendly terms with my brother-in-law and was soon on friendly terms with me. It came out that he was engaged to Davidson's cousin and, incidentally, he took out a kind of pocket photograph case to show us a new rendering of his fiance. And by the by said he, here s the old Fulmar. Davidson looked at it casually and suddenly his face lit up, good heavens, said he, I could almost swear, what, said Atkins, that I had seen that ship before. Now let s see how you can have, she hasn t been out of the South Seas for six years and before but began Davidson and then, yes, that s the ship I dreamt of. I m sure that s the ship I dreamt of. She was standing off an island that swarmed with penguins and she fired a gun. Good Lord, said Atkins, who had now heard the particulars of the seizure, how the deuce could you dream that? And then bit by bit it came out that on the very day Davidson was seized, HMS Fulmar had actually banned off a little rock to the south of the Antipodes Island. A boat had landed overnight to get penguins eggs, had been delayed, and a thunderstorm drifting up. The boat s crew had waited until the morning before rejoining the ship. Atkins had been one of them and he corroborated word for word the descriptions Davidson had given of the island and the boat. There was not the slightest doubt in any of our minds that Davidson has really seen the place. In some unaccountable way, while he moved hither and thither in London, his sight moved hither and thither in a manner that corresponded about this distant island. How is absolutely a mystery. That completes the remarkable story of Davidson s eyes. It s perhaps the best authenticated case in existence of real vision at a distance. Explanation, there is none forthcoming, except what Professor Wade has thrown out. But his explanation invokes the fourth dimension and a dissertation on theoretical kinds of space. To talk of there being a kink in space seems mere nonsense to me. It may be because I m no mathematician. When I said that nothing would alter the fact that the place is 8000 miles away, he answered that two points might be a yard away on a sheet of paper and yet be brought together by bending the paper around. The reader may grasp this argument, but I certainly do not. His idea seems to be that Davidson, stooping between the poles of the big electromagnet, had some extraordinary twist given to his retinal elements through the sudden change in the field of force due to the lightning. He thinks, as a consequence of this, that it may be possible to live visually in one part of the world while one lives bodily in another. He even made some experiments in support of his views, but so far he has simply succeeded in blinding a few dogs. I believe that is the net result of his work, though I have not seen him for some weeks. Laterally, I ve been so busy with my work in connection with the St. Pancras installation that I ve had little opportunity of calling to see him, but the whole of this theory seems fantastic to me. The facts concerning Davidson stand on an altogether different footing. I could testify personally to the accuracy of every detail I have given. Thanks for listening. If you like the show, please share it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like you do. You can email me and follow me on social media through the Weird Darkness website. WeirdDarkness.com is also where you can find information on sponsors you heard during the show, listen to free audio books I ve narrated, get the email newsletter, find my other podcasts, including Church of the Undead, and a sci-fi podcast, Auditory Anthology. Also on the site, you can visit the store for Weird Darkness t-shirts, smugs, and other merchandise. Plus, it s where you can find the Hope in the Darkness page if you or someone you know is struggling with depression, addiction, or thoughts of harming yourself or others. And if you have a true paranormal or creepy tale to tell of your own, you can click on Tell Your Story. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com. All stories on Thriller Thursday episodes are works of fiction and you can find links to the stories or the authors in the show notes. The remarkable case of Davidson s Eyes was written by H. G. Wells. Weird Darkness is a registered trademark. Copyright, Weird Darkness. And now that we re coming out of the dark, I ll leave you with a little light. Proverbs 25 verse 25. Like cold water to a weary soul is good news from a distant land. And a final thought, all the freaky people make the beauty of the world. I m Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.