 The Haunted and the Haunters, or the House and the Brain, of the Lock and Key Library. This is a LibriFox recording. All LibriFox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriFox.org. Read by Julifa Malchem. The Lock and Key Library, edited by Julian Harthorne. The Haunted and the Haunters, or the House and the Brain, by Edward Balvelyton. A friend of mine, who's a man of letters and a philosopher, said to me one day as if between Jess and Ernest, fancy, since we last met, I have discovered a haunted house in the midst of London. Really haunted? And by what? Ghosts? Well, I can't answer that question. All I know is this. Six weeks ago, my wife and I were in search of a furnished apartment. Passing a quiet street, we saw on the window of one of the house's bill, apartments furnished. The situation suited us. We entered the house, locked the rooms, engaged with them by the week, and left them the third day. No power on earth could have reconciled my wife to stay longer, and I don't wonder at it. What did you see? Excuse me, I have no desire to be ridiculed as a superstitious dreamer. Nor on the other hand could I ask you to accept on my affirmation, but you were told to be incredible without the evidence of your own senses. Let me only say this. It was not so much what we saw or heard, in which you might fairly suppose that we were the duped of our own excited fancy, or the victims of a posture and others, that drove us away, as it was an indefinable terror which seized both of us whenever we passed by the door of a certain unfurnished room, in which we neither saw nor heard anything. And the strangest marvel of all was that for once in my life I agreed with my wife, silly woman, though she be, and allowed, after the third night, that it was impossible to stay forth in that house. Accordingly, on the fourth morning I summoned the woman who kept the house in the Tandatonnas, and told her that the rooms did not quite suit her, and she would not stay out our week. She said, Reilly, I know why, you have stayed longer than any other lodger, few ever stayed a second night, none before you a third, but I take it they have been very kind to you. They who? I asked, affecting to smile. Why, they who haunt the house, wherever they are, I don't mind them. I remember them many years ago when I lived in this house, not as a servant, but I know they will be the death of me some day, I don't care, I'm old and must die soon anyhow, and then I shall be with them, and in this house still. The woman spoke with so dreary a calmness that really it was a sort of awe that prevented my conversing with her further. I paid for my week, and too happy where my wife had died to get off so cheaply. You excite my curiosity, said I. Nothing I should like better than to sleep in a haunted house. Pray give me the address of the one which you left so ignominiously. My friend gave me the address, and when we parted, I walked straight towards the house and thus indicated. It is situated on the north side of Oxford Street, in a dull but respectable thoroughfare. I found the house shut up, no bell at the window, and no response to my knock. As I was turning away, a beer boy, collecting pewter pots at the neighbouring area, said to me, Do you want anyone at that house, sir? Yes, I heard it was to be led. Led? Why, the woman who kept it is dead, has been dead these three weeks, and no one can be found to stay there, though Mr. J. Blank offered ever so much. He offered mother, which asked for him, one pound a week, just to open and shut the windows, and she would not. Would not? And why? The house is haunted, and the old woman who kept it was found dead in her bed, with her eyes wide open. They say the devil strangled her. You speak of Mr. J. Blank. Is he the owner of the house? Yes. Where does he live? In G. Blank Street, number Blank. What is he, in any business? No, sir, nothing particular, a single gentleman. I gave the pot boy the gratuity earned by his liberal information, and proceeded to Mr. J. Blank and G. Blank Street, which was closed by the street that boasted to a haunted house. I was lucky enough to find Mr. J. Blank at home, an elderly man with intelligent countenance and prepossessing manners. I communicated my name and my business frankly. I said I heard the house was considered to be haunted, that I had a strong desire to examine a house with so equivocular reputation, that I should be greatly obliged, if you would allow me to hire it, though only for a night. I was willing to pay for that privilege, whatever he might be inclined to ask. Sir, said Mr. J. Blank, with great courtesy, the house is at your service, for as short or as long a time as you please. Rand is out of the question. The obligation will be on my side, should you be able to discover the cause of the strange phenomena, which at present deprive it of all value. I cannot let it, for I cannot even get a servant to keep it in order or answer the door. Unluckily the house is haunted, if I may use it that expression, not only by night but by day, though at night the disturbances are of a more unpleasant and sometimes of a more alarming character. The poor old woman who died in it three weeks ago was a pauper whom I took out of a work-house, for in a childhood she had been owned to some of my family and had once been in such good circumstances that yet rented that house of my uncle. She was a woman of superior education and strong mind, and was the only person I could ever induce to remain in the house. Indeed, since her death, which was sudden and the coroner's inquest, which gave it an notoriety in the neighbourhood, I have so disbared of finding any person to take charge of the house, much more a tenant, that I would be willingly lesser-turned-free for a year to any one who would pay its rates on taxes. How long is it, since the house acquired this sinister character? That, I can scarcely tell you, but very many years since. The old woman I spoke of said it was haunted when she ratted it between thirteen and forty years ago. The fact is, that my life has been spent in the East Indies, and in the civil service of its company. I returned to England last year on inheriting the fortune of an uncle, among whose possessions was the house in question. I found it shut up and uninhabited. I was told that it was haunted, that no one would inhabit it. I smiled, at what seemed to me so ident story. I spent some money in repairing it, added to its old-fashioned furniture of few modern articles, advertised it, and obtained a lodger for a year. He was a colonel on half pay. He came in with his family, a son and a daughter, and four or five servants. They all left the house next day, and although each of them declared that he had seen something different from that which had scared the others, something still was equally terrible to all. I really could not unconscious soon or even blame the colonel for breach of agreement. Then I put him the old woman I have spoken of, and she was empowered to let the house in apartments. I never had one lodger who stayed more than three days. I do not tell you their stories. To know two lodgers have there been exactly the same phenomena repeated. It is better that you should judge for yourself than enter the house with an imagination influenced by previous narratives. Only be prepared to see and to hear something or other, and take whatever precautions you yourself please. Have you never had curiosity yourself to pass night in that house? Yes. I pass not a night, but three hours a broad daylight alone in that house. My curiosity is not satisfied, but it is quenched. I have no desire to renew the experiment. You cannot complain, you see, sir, that I am not sufficiently candid, and unless your interests be exceedingly eager and your nerves unusually strong, I honestly add that I advise you not to pass night in that house. My interest is exceedingly keen, said I, though only a coward will boast of his nerves and situate it wholly unfamiliar to him. Yet my nerves have been seized into such variety of danger that I have at the right to rely on them, even in a haunted house. Mr. J. Blank, said very little more, he took the keys of the house out of his bureau, gave them to me, and, thanking him cordially for his frankness and his obeying concession to my wish, I carried off my prize. And patient for the experiment, as soon as I reached home I summoned my confidential servant, a young man of gay spirits, fearless temper, and as free from superstitious prejudice as any one I could think of. F. Blank, said I, you remember in Germany how disappointed we were at not finding a ghost in that old castle which was said to be haunted by Hadler's apparition? Well, I have heard of a house in London which, I have reason to hope, is decidedly haunted. I mean to sleep there tonight. For what I hear, there is no doubt that something will allow itself to be seen or to be heard, something perhaps excessively horrible. Do you think if I take you with me, I may rely on your presence of mind, whatever may happen? Oh, sir, pray trust me, answer that Blank, grinning with delight. Very well. Then here are the keys of the house. This is the address. Go now, and select for me any bedroom you please, and, since the house has not been inhabited for weeks, make up a good fire, air the bed well, and see, of course, that there are candles as well as fuel. I take you with you, my revolver and my dagger. So much for my weapons, arm yourself equally well, and if we are not a match for a dozen ghosts, we shall be but a sorry couple of Englishmen. I was engaged for the rest of the day on business so urgent that I had not leisure to think much on the nocturnal adventure to which I had plighted my honour. I dined alone, and very late, and, while dining, read, as is my habit. I selected one of the volumes of Macaulay's essays. I thought to myself that I would take the book with me. There was so much of healthfulness in the style and practical life in the subjects that it would serve as an antidote against the influences of superstitious fancy. Accordingly, about half past nine, I put the book into my pocket and straws leisurely toward the haunted house. I took with me a favourite dog, an exceedingly sharp, bald and vigilant bulteria, a dog fond of prowling about strange ghostly corners and passages at night in search of rats, a dog of darks for a ghost. I reached the house, knocked, and my servant opened with a cheerful smile. We did not say long in the drawing-rooms, in fact. They felt so damn and so chilly that I was glad to get to the fire upstairs. We locked the doors of the drawing-rooms, a precaution which, I should observe, we had taken with all the rooms we had searched below. The bedroom my servant had selected for me was based on the floor, a large one with two windows fronting the street. The four-posted bed, which took up no inconsiderable space, was opposite to the fire, which burned clear and bright. A door in the wall to the left between the bed and the window communicated with the room which my servant appropriated to himself. This last was a small room with a sofa bed, and had no communication with the landing-place. No other door but that which conducted to the bedroom I was to occupy. On either side of my fireplace was a cupboard without locks flushed with the wall and covered with the same dull-brown paper. We examined these cupboards, only hooks to suspend female dresses, nothing else. We sounded the walls, evidently solid, the outer walls of the building. Having finished the survey of these apartments, warmed myself a few moments and lighted my cigar, I then, still accompanied by Av Blanc, went forth to complete my reconnoiter. In the landing-place there was another door, just closed firmly. Sir, said my servant in surprise, I locked this door with all the others when I first came. It cannot have got locked from the inside, for, before he had finished his sentence, the door, which neither of us then was touching, opened quietly of itself. We looked at each other, a single instant. The scene thought he's both. Some human agency might be detected here. I rushed in first, my servant hollowed. A small blank drawer-room without furniture, a few empty boxes and hampers in a corner, a small window, the shutters closed, not even a fireplace. No other door, but that by which we had entered. No carpet on the floor, and the floor seemed very old, uneven, worm-eaten, mended here and there, as is shown by the white patches on the boot. But no living being and no visible place in which a living being could have hidden. As we stood gazing round, the door by which we had entered, closed as quietly as it had before opened. We were imprisoned. For the first time I felt a creep of indefinable horror. Not so, my servant. Why? They don't think to trouble, sir. I could break that trumpet at all with the cake of my foot. Try first if it will open to your hand. Said I, shaking of the big apprehension that had seized me, while I enclosed the shutters and see what is without. I embarked of the shutters. The window looked on the little backyard I had before described. There was no ledge without. Nothing to break the sheer descent of the wall. No man getting out of that window would have found any footing, till he had fallen on the stones below. I have blank, meanwhile, was vainly attempting to open the door. He now turned round to me and asked my permission to use force. And I should hear state and justice to the servant, that, far from evincing any superstitious terrors, his nerve, composure, and even gaity amid circumstances so extraordinary, compelled my admiration and made me congratulate myself on having secured a companion in every way fitted to the occasion. I willingly gave him the permission he required. But, though he was a remarkably strong man, his force was as idle as his milder efforts. The door did not even shake to his stoutest kick. Wrestlers and parting he desisted. I then tried the door myself, equally in vain. As I ceased from the effort, again that creep of horror came over me. This time it is more cold and stubborn. I felt as if some strange and castley exhalation were rising up from the chinks of that rugged floor and filling the atmosphere with a venomous influence hostile to human life. The door, now very slowly and quietly opened as of its own accord, reprecipitated out, out into the landing-place, with both as all large, pale light, as large as the human figure, but shapeless and unsubstantial, moved before us and ascended the stairs that led from the landing into the attains. I followed the light and my servant followed me. It entered, to the right of the landing, a small garret of which the doors did open. I entered in the same instant. The light then collapsed into a small globule, exceedingly brilliant and vivid, rested a moment on the bed of the corner, quivered, and vanished. We approached to the bed and examined it. A half-tester, such as his commonly found genetics devoted to servants, on the drawers that stood near it, he perceived an old faded silk-achieve, with the needle still left and around half-repared. The kachieve was covered with dust. Probably it had belonged to the old woman who had last died in that house. This might have been her sleeping-room. I had sufficient curiosity to open the drawers. There were a few odds and ends of female dress, and two letters tied round with narrow ribbon of faded yellow. I took the liberty to possess myself of the letters. We found nothing else in the room worth noticing, nor did the light reappear. But we distinctly heard, as we turned to go, a pattering footfall on the floor just before us. We went through the other attics, and all four. The footfall still preceding us. Nothing to be seen, nothing but the footfall heard. I had the letters in my hand. Just as I was descending the stairs, I distinctly felt my wrist seized, and a faint, soft effort, made to draw the letters from my clasp. I only held them more tightly, and the effort seized. He regained the bed-shape appropriated to myself, and I then remarked that my dog had not followed us when we had left it. He was thrusting himself close to the fire and trembling. I was a patient to examine the letters, and, while I read them, my servant opened a little box in which he had deposited the weapons I had ordered him to bring, took them out, placed them on a table-clothes of my bed-head, and then occupied himself and soothing the dog, who, however, seemed to heed him very little. The letters were short. They were dated, the date exactly thirty-five years ago. They were evidently from a lover to his mistress, or a husband to some young wife. Not only the terms of expression, but a distinct reference to the form of voyage, indicated the writer to have been a seafarer, the spelling and handwriting, but those of a man imperfectly educated, but still the language of itself was forcible. In the expressions of endearment, there was a kind of rough, wild laugh, but here and there, with dark, unintelligible hints, said some secret lot of laugh, some secret that seemed of crime. We all too loved for each other, was one of the censuses I remember, for how everyone else would execrate as if all was known. Again, don't let anyone be in the same room with you at night. You talk in your sleep. And again, what's done can't be undone. And I tell you, there's nothing against it unless the dead could come to life. Here there was an delight in the better handwriting of females, they do. At the end of the letter, latest in date, the same female hand had written these words, lost at sea the fourth of June, the same day as blank. I put down the letters and began to muse over the contents. Fearing, however, that a thrain of thoughts into which I fell might unsteady my nose, I fully determined to keep my mind in a fit state to cope with whatever of marvel as the advancing night might bring forth. I roused myself, laid the letters on the table, stirred up the fire, which was still bright and cheering, and opened my volume of Macaulay. I read quietly enough till about half past eleven. I then threw myself dressed upon the bed, and told my servant he might retire to his own room, but must keep himself awake. I bait him leave open the door between the two rooms. Thus alone, I kept two candles burning on the table by my bed-head. I placed my watch beside the weapons and calmly resumed my Macaulay. Opposite to me the fire burned clear, and on the hearth-rock, seemingly asleep, lay the dock. In about twenty minutes, I felt an exceedingly cold air pass by my cheek, like a sudden draught. I fancied the door to my right, communicating with the landing-place must have got open. But no, it was closed. I then turned my glass to my left, and saw the flame of the candles violently swayed by a wind. At the same moment, the watch beside the revolver softly slid from the table, softly, softly. No visible hand. It was gone. I sprang up, seizing the revolver with the one hand, the decker with the other. I was not willing that my weapon should share the fate of the watch. Thus armed, I looked round the floor. No sign of the watch. Three slow, loud, distinct knocks were now heard at the bed-head. My servant calls out, "'Is that you, sir?' "'No. Be on your guard.' The dog now rouse himself and set on his hauntress, his ears moving quickly backward and forward. He kept his eyes fixed on me with a look so strange that he consented all my attention on himself. Slowly he rose up, all his hair bristling, and stood perfectly rigid and with the same wild stare. I had no time, however, to examine the dog. Presently my servant emerged from his room, and if ever I saw horror in the human face, it was then. I should not have recognized him had we met in the street, so altered was every liniment. He passed me by, quickly saying in a whisper, that it seemed scary to come from his lips. "'Run! Run! It is after me!' He gained the door to the landing, pulled it open and rushed forth. I followed him into the landing involuntarily, calling him to stop. But without heeding me, he bounded down the stairs, clinging to the balusters and taking several steps at a time. I heard where I stood, the street door open, heard again, clapped two. I was left alone in the haunted house. It was but for a moment that I remained undecided whether or not to follow my servant. Bride and curiosity alike forbade so darsedly a flight. I re-entered to my room, closing the door after me, and proceeded cautiously to the interior chamber. I encountered nothing to justify my servant's terror. I again carefully examined the walls to see if there were any concealed door. I could find no trace of one, not even a semen of the dull brown paper with which the room was hung. How, then, had the thing, whatever it was, which had so scared him, obtained ingress except through my own chamber? I returned to my room, shut and locked the door, set over upon the interior one, and stood under her, expecting and prepared. I now perceived, said the door, had slunk into an angle of the wall, and was pressing himself close against it, as if literally striving to force his way into it. I approached the animal and spoke to it. The poor brood was evidently beside itself with terror. It showed all its teeth, the slave dropping from its jaws, and would certainly have bit me if I had touched it. It did not seem to recognise me, whether her seen at a zoological garden as a rabbit, fascinated by a servant cowering in a corner, may form some idea of the anguish which the dog exhibited. Finding all efforts to soothe the animal in vain, and fearing that his bite might be as venomous in that state as in the manners of hand phobia, I left him alone, placed my weapons on the table beside the fire, seated myself, and recommenced my Macaulay. Perhaps in order not to appear seeking credit for a courage, or rather a coolness, which the reader may conceive I, etc., I may be pardoned if I pause to indulge in one or two agotistical remarks. As I hold presence of mind, or what is called courage, to be precisely proportioned to familiarity with the circumstances that lead to it, so I should say that I had been long sufficiently familiar with all experiments that had pertain to the marvellous. I had witnessed many very extraordinary phenomena in various parts of the world. Phenomenon that would be either totally disbelieved, if I stated them, or ascribed to supernatural agencies. Now, my theory is that a 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 aberration of a ghost is contrary to received opinion within the laws of nature, that is, not supernatural. Now, in all that I had hitherto witnessed, and indeed in all the wondrous, which is the amateurs of mystery in our rage record as facts, a material living agency is always required. On the continent, you will still find magicians who assert that they can raise spirits. Assume for a moment that they are said truly. Still, the living material form of the magician is present, and he is a material agency by which, from some constitutional peculiarities, certain strange phenomena are represented to your natural senses. Except again, as truthful, the tales of spirit manifestation in America, musical or rather sounds, writings on paper produced by no discernable hand, articles of furniture moved without apparent human agency, or the actual sight and touch of hands to which no body seemed to belong. Still, there must be found the medium or living being with constitutional peculiarities capable of obtaining these signs. And finally, 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 or electrobiology. 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 a 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, the ideal effect is communicated from one to the other. Hence, all that I had hitherto witnessed, or expected to witness, in this strange house, I believe to be occasioned through some agency or medium as mortal as myself. And this idea necessarily prevented the awe with which those who regard a supernatural things that are not within ordinary operations of nature might have been impressed by the advantages of that memorable night. As of 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. And I can sincerely say that I was in a tranquil temper for observation as any practical experimentalist could be in awaiting the effect of some rare, though perhaps perilous, chemical combination. Of course, the more I kept my mind detached from fancy, the more the temper of visit for observation would be obtained, and I therefore riveted I and thought on the strong daylight sun at the page of my Macaulay. I now became aware that something interposed between the page and the light, the page was overshadowed. I looked up, and I saw what I shall find very difficult, perhaps impossible, to describe. It was a darkness, shaping itself forth from the air in very only fine outline. I cannot say if it was of human form, and yet it had more resemblance to human form, or rather shadow, than to anything else. As it stood, fully apart and distinct from the air and the light around it, its dimensions seemed gigantic, the summit nearly touching the ceiling. While I gazed, a feeling of intense cold seized me, an iceberg before me could not more have chilled me, nor could the cold of an iceberg have been more purely physical. I feel convinced that it was not the cold caused by fear. As I continued to gaze, I thought, but this I cannot say with precision, that I had distinguished two eyes looking down on me from the hide. One moment I fancied that I had distinguished to them clearly, the next they seemed gone, but still two rays of a pale blue light frequently shot through the darkness, as from the hide on which I half believed, half doubted that I had encountered the eyes. 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 impression was of that of an immense and overwhelming power opposed to my volition. That sense of utter inadequacy to cope with a force beyond man's, which one may feel physically in a storm at sea, in a conflagration, 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 strengths, a storm-fired shark, a superior material force to the force of men. And now, as if this impression grew on me, now came at last horror. Horror to 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 a thing. It is an illusion. I do not fear. With the violent effort, I succeeded at the last in stretching out my hand toward the weapon on the table. As I did so, on the arm and shoulder, I received a strange shock and my arm fell to my side powerless. And now, to add to my horror, so light began slowly to wane from the candles. Some are not as it were extinguished, but their flames seemed very gradually withdrawn. It was the same with the fire. So light was extracted from the fuel. In a few minutes, the room was in utter darkness. The dread that came over me, to be thus in the dark with that dark thing whose power was so intensely felt, brought a reaction of nerve. In fact, terror had reached that climax that either my senses must have deserted me or I must have burst it through the spell. I did burst it through it. I found voice, though the voice was a shriek. I remember that I broke forth with a word like these. I did not fear. My soul does not fear. And at the same time, I found strength to rise. Still in that profound gloom, I rushed to one of the windows, tore aside the curtain, flung open the shutters. The thought was light. And when I saw the moon, high, clear and calm, I felt a joy that almost compensated for the previous terror. There was a moon. There was also the light from the gas lamps and the deserted slumberous street. I turned to look back into the room. The moon penetrated its shadow very apparently and partially. But still, there was light. The dark thing, whatever it might be, was gone, except that I could yet see a dim shadow which had seemed to shadow with that shade against the opposite wall. My eye now rested on the table, and from under the table, which was, with that cloth and cover, an old mahogany round table, there rose a hand, visible as far as a wrist. It was a hand, seemingly, as much of flesh and blood as my own, but a hand of an aged person, lean, wrinkled, small too, a woman's hand. That hand, very softly, close under two letters that lay on the table, hand and letters both vanished. There then came the same three loud, majored mocks I had heard at the bedhead before this extraordinary drama I had commenced. As though sound slowly ceased, I felt a whole room vibrate sensibly, and at the far end there rose as from the floor sparks or globules, like bubbles of light, many-coloured, green, yellow, far reds, as you. Up and down, two and through, hither, scissor, as tiny willow wists, the sparks moved, slow or swift, each at its own capris. A chair, as in the drawing room below, was now advanced from the wall without apparent agency, and placed at the opposite side of the table. Suddenly, as forth from the chair, there grew a shape, a woman's shape. It was distinct as a shape of life, ghastly, as a shape of death. The face was a thought of youth, as a strange, mournful beauty. The throat and shoulders were bare, the rest of the form in a loose robe of cloudy white. It began sleeking its long yellow hair which fell over its shoulders. Its eyes were not turned toward me, but to the door. The teams listening, watching, waiting. The shadows of the shade in the background grew darker, and again I thought I beheld the eyes cleaning out from the summons of the shadow, eyes fixed upon that shape. As if from the door, so it did not open, there grew out another shape, equally distinct, equally ghastly. A man's shape, a young man's. It was in the dress of the last century, or rather, in a likeness of such dress. Both the male shape and the female, as they were defined, were evidently insubstantial, impalpable, simulacra, fantasins. There was something incongruous, grotesque, yet fearful in the contrast between the elaborate finery, the courtly precision of that old-fashioned garb, with its ruffles and lays and buckles, and the corpse-like aspect and ghost-like stillness of the flitting wearer. Just as the male shape approached the female, the dark shadows started from the wall, all three for a moment wrapped in darkness. When the pale night returned, the two phantoms were as if in the grasp of the shadows that howled between them, and there was a bloodstain on the breast of the female. The phantom male was leaning on its phantom sword, and blood seemed trickling fast from the ruffles from the lays, and the darkness of the intermediate shadows swallowed them up. They were gone. And again, the bubbles of light shut and sailed and undulated, growing thicker and thicker, and more widely confused in their movements. The closet door to the right of the fireplace now opened. From the aperture there came the form of an aged woman. In her hand she held letters, the very letters over which I seen the hand close, and behind her I heard a footstep. She turned round as if to listen. Then she opened the letters and seemed to read, and over her shoulder I saw a livid face, the face of a man long-drowned, bloated, bleached. See, we tangled in its stripping hair, and at her feet lay a form as of a corpse, and beside the corpse the coward child, a miserable squalid child, with famine in its cheeks and fear in its eyes. And as I looked in the altar woman's face, the wrinkles and lines banished, and it became a face of youth, hard-eyed, stony, but still youth, the shadow darted forth and darkened over these phantoms, as it had darkened over the last. Nothing now was left but the shadow, and on that my eyes were intently fixed, till again eyes grew out of the shadow, malignant serpent eyes, and the bubbles of light again rose and fell, and then their disorder-deracular turbulent maze mingled with the one moonlight. And now, from these globules of themselves, as from the shell of an egg, monstrous things burst out, the egg refilled with them, larvae so bloodless and so hideous, that I can in no way describe them, except to remind the reader of the swarming life which the solar microscope brings before his eyes in a drop of water. Things transparent, supple, agile, chasing each other, devouring each other, forms like nought-hever beheld by the naked eye. As the shapes were without symmetry, so the movements were without order. In the very vagrancies there was no sport. They came round me around, sicker and faster and swifter, swarming over my head, crawling over my right arm, which was outstretched in their voluntary command against all evil beings. Sometimes I felt myself touched, but not by them. Invisible hands touched me. Once I felt the clutch of my cold, soft fingers at my throat. I was still equally conscious that if I gave way to fear, I should be in bodily peril, and I consented all my faculties in the single focus of resisting stubborn will. I turned to my side from the shadow, above all from those strange, serpent eyes, eyes that had now become distinctly visible. For there, though in all tells around me, I was aware that there was will, and will of intense creative working evil which might crush down my own. The pale atmosphere of the room began now to redden as if in the air of some near-conflagration. The larvae grew lurid as the things of that living fire. Again the room vibrated. Again I heard the three measured knocks and again all things were swallowed up in the darkness of the dark shadow as if out of their darkness all had come into their darkness, all returned. As a gloom receded, the shadow was wholly gone. Slowly, as it had been withdrawn, the flame grew again into the candles on the table, again into the fuel and the grate. The whole room came once more calmly, healthfully into sight. The two doors were still closed, the door communicating with the servant rooms unlocked. In the corner of the wall, into which he had so convulsively enneged himself, lay the dog. I called to him, no movement. I approached. The animal was dead. His eyes protruded, his tongue out of his mouth, the frost gathered round his jaws. I took him in my arms. I brought him to the fire. I felt acute grief for the loss of my poor favourite. Acute self-reproach. I accused myself of his death. I imagined he had died of fright. But what was my surprise on finding that his neck was actually broken? Had this been done in the dark? Must it not have been by a hand human as mine? Must it not have been a human agency all the while in that room? Good causes suspect it. I cannot tell. I cannot do more than state the fact fairly. The reader may draw his own inference. Another surprising circumstance. My watch was restored to the table from which it had been so mysteriously withdrawn. But it had stopped. At very moment it was so withdrawn. Nor, despite all the skill of the watchmaker, has it ever gone since. That is, it will go in a strange erratic way for a few hours and then come to a dead stop. It is worthless. Nothing more chanced for the rest of the night, nor indeed had a long to wait before the door broke. Not till it was broke daylight did I quit the haunted house. Before I did so, I revisited the little round room in which my servant and myself had been for a time imprisoned. I had a strong impression, for which I could not account, that from that room had originated the mechanism of the phenomena, if I may use the term, which had been experienced in my chamber. And though I entered it now in the clear day with the sun peering through the filmy window, I still felt, as I stood on its floors, the creep of the horror which I had first of there experienced the night before, and which had been so aggravated by what had passed my own chamber. I could not indeed bear to stay more than half a minute within those walls. I descended the stairs, and again I heard the footfall before me, and when I opened the street door I thought I could distinguish a very low laugh. I gained my own home, expecting to find my runaway servant there, but he had not presented himself, nor did I hear more of him for three days, when I received a letter from him dated from Liverpool to this effect. Honoured sir, I humbly entreat your pardon, though I can scarcely hope that you will think that I deserve it, unless, which have not forbid, you saw what I did. I feel that it will be years before I can recover myself, and as to being fit for service, it is out of the question. I am therefore going to my brother-in-law at Melbourne. The ship sails tomorrow. Perhaps the long voyage may set me up. I do nothing now but start and tremble, and fancy it is behind me. I humbly beg your honour, sir, to order my clothes, and whatever wages are due to me, to be sent to my mother's at Walworth, John Noto, address. The letter ended with additional apologies, somewhat incoherent, and explanatory details as to effects that had been under the whitest charge. This flight may perhaps warrant a suspicion that a man wished to go to Australia, and had been somehow or other fraudulently mixed up with the events of the night. I say nothing in refutation of that conjecture. Rather, I suggest it, as one that would seem to many persons the most probable solution of improbable occurrences. My belief in my own theory remained unshaken. I returned in the evening to the house to bring away in a hat-cap the things I had left there, with my poor dog's body. At this task I was not disturbed, nor did any incident worth note before me, except that still, on ascending and descending the stairs, I heard the same footfall in advance. On leaving the house, I went to Mr. J. Blanks. He was at home. I returned him the keys, taught him that my curiosity was sufficiently gratified, and was about to relate quickly what had passed when he stopped me, and said, though it much blightness, that he had no longer any interest in a mystery which none had ever solved. I determined at least to tell him of the two letters I had read, as well as of the extraordinary manner which if they had disappeared. And I then inquired if he thought they had been addressed to the woman who had died in the house, and if there were anything in her early history which could possibly confirm the dark suspicions to which the letters gave rise. Mr. J. Blanks seemed startled, and after musing a few moments answered, I am but little acquainted with the woman's earlier history, except as I before told you that her family were known to mine, but you revive some vague reminiscences to her prejudice. I will make inquiries and inform you of their result. Still, even if we could admit the popular superstition that a person had been eyes and a perpetrator of the victim of their crimes in life could revisit, as a restless spirit, the scene in which those crimes had been committed, I should observe that the house was infested by strange sounds and sounds before the old woman died. You smile. What would you say? I would say this, that I am convinced if we could get to the bottom of these mysteries we should find a living human agency. What? You believe it is all an imposture? For what object? Not an imposture and the ordinary sense of the word. If, sadly, I were to sink into a deep sleep from which you could not awake me, but in that sleep could answer questions with an accuracy which I could not pretend to when awake. Tell you what money you had in your pocket, nay, describe your very thoughts. It is not necessarily an imposture any more than it is necessarily supernatural. I should be, unconsciously to myself, under a mesmeric inference, convey to me from a distance by human being who had acquired power over me by previous report. But if a mesmeriser could say a fact another living being, can you suppose that the mesmeriser could also affect inanimate objects, move chairs, open a shop doors, or impress our senses with the belief in such effects? We never have been on rapport with a 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. It would be only a rare power in nature which might be given to constitutions with a certain peculiarities and cultivated by practice to an extraordinary degree. That such a power might extend over the dead, that is of a certain thought and memories that a dead may still retain, and compel not that which ought properly to be called the saw and which is far beyond human reach, but rather a phantom of what has been most earth sustained on earth, to make itself apparent to our senses is very ancient though opposite 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 Brusselses describes as not difficult, and which of the author of Curiosities of Literature cite as credible. A flower perishes, you burn it. Whatever were the elements of that flower while it lived are gone, dispersed, you know not whizzy, you can never discover nor recollect 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 human being. The saw has as 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 how to be the saw of the departed must not be confounded with the true saw. It is but the aidiland of that form. Hence, like the bastard has the stories of ghosts or spirits, the thing that most strikes is is the absence of what we call to be saw, that is, of superior emancipated intelligence. These aberrations come for little or no object. They seldom speak when they do come. If they speak, they utter no ideas about those of an ordinary person on earth. American spirit seers have published volumes of communications in bros and verse, which is they assert to be given in the names of the most illustrious dead, Shakespeare, Bacon, Havana's Hume. Those communications, taken the best, are certainly not a wit of higher order than would be communications from living persons of fair talent and education. They are wondrously inferior towards Bacon, Shakespeare, and Plato said and wrote when on earth. Nor was it more noticeable. Do they ever contain an idea that was not on the earth before? Wonderful, therefore, such phenomena may be, granting them to be truthful. I see much of that philosophy may question. Nothing that it is incumbent on philosophy to deny. Namely, nothing supernatural. They are but ideas conveyed somehow or other. We have not yet discovered the means from one mortal brain to another. We're so and so doing, tables walk of their own accord, or find like shapes appear a magic circle, or bodyless hands rise and remove material objects, or a thing of darkness, such as presented itself to me, frees 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 natural chemistry, and those constitutions may produce kamic wanders. In others, natural fluid, call it electricity, and these may produce electric wanders. But the wanders differ from normal science in this. They are alike, objectless, purposeless, purile, frivolous. They lead on to no grand results, and therefore the world does not heed, and true sages have not cultivated them. But sure am I, that of all I saw or heard, a man, human as myself, was a 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 experienced exactly the same dream. If this were an ordinary imposter, 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 a nicer class. My persuasion is that they originated 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 invest with its semi-substance. 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. The same force might, for what I know, have suffice to kill myself, had I been as subjugated by terror as a dog, had my intellect or my spirit give 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 instinct of the brute creation detects influence as deadly to their existence. Man's reason has a sense less subtle, because it has a resisting power more supreme. I'm but enough. Do you comprehend my theory? Yes, though imperfectly. And I accept any crotchet, pardon the word, however odd, or rather, than embrace it once, the notion of ghosts and hobgoblins we imbibed in our nurseries. Still, to my unfortunate house, the evil is the same. What on earth can I do with the house? I will tell you what I would do. I'm convinced, from my own internal feelings, that a small and furnished room at right angles to the door of the bedroom which I occupied forms a starting point or receptacle for the influences which haunted the house, and I strongly advise you to have the walls opened, the floor removed, nay, the whole room pulled down. I observe that it is detached from the body of the house, built over the small backyard and could be removed without injury to the rest of the building. And you think, if I did that, you would cut up the telegraph wires. Try it. I'm so persuaded that I am right that I will pay half the expense if you will allow me to direct the operations. Nay, I am well able to afford the cost, for the rest allow me to write to you. About ten days later, I received a letter from Mr. J. Blank, telling me that he had visited the house since I had seen him, that he had found the two letters I had described, replaced in the drawer from which I had taken them, that he had read them with misgivings like my own, that he had instituted cautious enquiry about the woman to whom I rightly conjectured that had been written. It seemed that thirty-six years ago, a year before the date of the letters, she had married, against the wish of her relations, an American, a very suspicious character. In fact, he was generally believed to have been a pirate. She herself was a daughter of very respectable tradespeople, and had served in the capacity of a nursery-governance before her marriage. She had a brother, a widower, who was considered wealthy, and who had one child of about six years old. A month after the marriage, the body of this brother was found in the Thames, near London Bridge. There seemed some marks of violence about his throat, but they were not deemed sufficient to ram the inquest in any other verdict than that of a found drowned. The American and his wife took charge of the little boy, the deceased brother having by his will left his sister the guardian of his early child, and in the event of the child's death, the sister inherited. The child died about six months afterwards. It was supposed to have been neglected and ill-treated. The neighbors opposed to have heard at shriek at night. The surgeon, who had examined it after death, said that it was emaciated as if from want of nourishment, and the body was covered with livid bruises. It seemed that one winter night the child had sought to escape, crept out into the backyard, tried to scale the wall, fallen back exhausted, and been found at morning on the stones in a dying state. But though there were some evidence of cruelty, there was none of murder, and the aunt and her husband had sought to palliate cruelty by alleging the exceeding stubbornness and perversity of the child, who was declared to be half-witted. Be that as it may, at the orphan's death the aunt inherited her brother's fortune. Before the first wedded year was out, the American quitted England abruptly and never returned to it. He obtained a cruising vessel, which was lost in the Atlantic two years afterwards. The widow was left in affluence, but reverses of various kinds had to be fallen her. A bank broke, an investment failed. She went into a small business and became insolvent. Then she added her to service, sinking lower and lower from housekeeper down to maid of all work, never long retaining a place, so nothing decided against her character was ever leached. She was considered sober, honest and peculiarly quiet in her ways. Still nothing prospered with her. And so she had dropped into the work-house, from which Mr. J. Blank had taken her, to be a place in charge of the very house which he had rented as mistress in the first year of her wedded life. Mr. J. Blank added that he had passed an hour alone in the Infernish room, which I had urged him to destroy, and that his impression of dreads, while there, were so great, though he had neither heard nor seen anything, that he was eager to have the walls bared and the floors removed, as I had suggested. He had engaged persons for the work, and would commence any day I would name. The day was accordingly fixed. I repaired to the haunted house, we went into the blind rarer room, took up the skirting, and then the floors. Under the rafters covered with rubbish, was found a trap door, quite large enough to admit a man. It was closely nailed down with clams and rivets of iron. On removing these, we descended into a room below, the existence of which had never been suspected. In this room there had been a window and a flume, and had been wrecked over, evidently, for many years. By the help of candles, we examined this place. It still retained some mouldering furniture, three chairs, an oak saddle, a table, all of the fashion of about eighty years ago. There was a jess of drawers against the wall, in which we found, half rotted away, old-fashioned to articles of a man's dress, such as might have been worn eighty or hundred years ago by a gentleman of some rank, costly steel buckles and buttons, like those yet worn in cord dresses, a handsome cord sword, in a waistcoat, which had once been wretched with gold lace, but which was now blackened and full with dam, we found five guineas, a few silver coins, and an ivory ticket, probably for some plays of entertainment long since passed away. But our main discovery was in a kind of iron safe fixed to the wall, the lock of which it causes much trouble to get picked. In the safe were three shelves and two small drawers, ranged on the shelves with several small bottles of crystal, hermetically stopped. They contained colourless, volatile essences of the nature of which I shall only say that they were not poisons. Phosphor and ammonia entered into some of them. There were also some very curious glass tubes and a small pointed rod of iron, with a large lump of rock crystal, and another of amber, also a lodestone of great power. In one of the drawers, we found a miniature portrait set in gold and retaining the freshness of its colours most remarkably, considering the length of time it had probably been there. The portrait was a thought of a man who might be somewhat advanced in middle life, perhaps 47 or 48. It was a remarkable face, a most impressive face. If you could fancy some mighty serpent transformed into man, reserving in the human lineaments the old serpent type, you would have a better idea of that countenance than long descriptions can convey. The white and flatness of frontal, the tabering elegance of contour disguising the strengths of the deadly jaw, the long, large, terrible eye, glittering and green as the emerald, and with all a certain ruthless calm as if from the consciousness of an immense power. Mechanically I turned round the miniature to examine the back of it, and on the back was engraved a panticle, in the middle of the panticle a ladder, and the third step of the ladder was formed by the date 1765. Examining still more minutely, I detected a spring. This, on being pressed, opened the back of the miniature as a lid. Within signs the lid were engraved, Mariana to thee, be faithful in life and in death to blank. Here follows a name that I will not mention, but it was not familiar to me. I had heard it spoken of by old men in my childhood as a name born by a desling charlatan who had made a great sensation in London for a year or so, and had fled the country on the charge of a double murder within his own house, that of his mistress and his rival. I said nothing of this to Mr. J. Blank, to whom reluctantly I resigned the miniature. We had found no difficulty in opening the first drawer within the hour and save. We found great difficulty in opening the second. It was not locked, but it resisted all levers, till we inserted in the chinks the edge of a chisel. When we had thus drawn it forth we found a very singular apparatus in the nicest order upon a small thin book, or rather tablet, was placed a source of crystal. This saucer was filled with clear liquid. On that liquid floated a kind of compass with a needle shifting rapidly round, but instead of the usual points of compass were seven strange characters not very unlike those used by astrologers to denote the planets. A peculiar but not strong not as pleasing odor came from this drawer which was lined with a wood that we afterwards discovered to be hazel. Whatever the cause of this odor it produced a material effect on the nerves. We all felt it even the two workmen who were in the room. A creeping, tingling sensation from the tips of the fingers to the roots of the hair. A patient who examined the tablet I removed the saucer. As I did so the needle of the compass went round and round with exceeding swiftness and I felt a shock that run through my whole frame so that I dropped the saucer on the floor. The liquid was spilled the saucer was broken. The compass rolled to the end of the room and at that instant the walls shook too and through the giant had swayed and rocked them. The two workmen were so frightened that they ran up the ladder by which we had descended from the trapdoor but seeing that nothing more happened they were easily induced to return. Meanwhile I had opened the tablet it was bound to plain rattled leather with a silver clasp it contained one sheet of thick phallum and on that sheet were inscribed within a double pentacle words in an old mongish Latin which are literally to be translated thus On all that it can reach within these walls sentient or inanimate living or dead as moose of the needle so works my will accursed be the house and restless be the dwellers if they're in. We found no more J. Blank burned the tablet amidst anathema he raced to the foundations the part of the building containing the secret room with the chamber over it he had then the courage to inhabit the house himself for a month and acquired a better conditioned house could not be found in all London subsequently he let it to a advantage and his talent has made no complaints end of The Haunted and the Haunters of the House and the Brain by Edward Bulberleiden Part one of the incantation of the Lock and Key Library this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org read by Jullifa Mullachem The Lock and Key Library edited by Julian Harthorne The Incantation by Edward Bulberleiden Part one Chapter one I believe that for at least 12 hours there will be no change in the state I believe also that if she recover from it calm and refreshed as from asleep the danger of death will have passed away and for 12 hours my present would be hurtful rather say fatal my diagnosis be right I wrung my friend's hand and reparted to lose her now now that her love and her reason have both returned each more vivid than before futile indeed might be Margrave's boasted secret but at least in that secret was hope in recognised signs I saw only despair and the thought the dearest visitor vanished all anxiety to question more of his attributes or his history his life itself became to me dear and precious what if it should fail me in the seps of the process whatever that was by which the life of my Lillian might be saved the shades of evening were now closing in I remembered that I had life to Margrave without even food for many hours I still round to the back of the house filled the basket with elements more generous than those of the former day extracted the fresh drugs from my stalls and thus laden hurried back to the hut I found Margrave in the room below seated on his mysterious cover leaning his face on his hand when I entered he looked up and said you have neglected me my strength is waning give me more of the cordial for we have work before us tonight and I need support he took for granted my sin to his wild experiment and he was right I administered the cordial I placed food before him and this time he did not eat with repugnance I poured out wine and he drank it sparingly but with ready compliance saying in perfect health I looked upon wine as poison and now it is like a foretaste of the glorious elixir after he had thus recruited himself he seemed to acquire an energy that's startingly contrasted with his languid the day before the effort of breathing was scarcely perceptible the collar came back to his cheeks his bended frame rose elastic and erect if I understood you rightly said I can be accomplished in a single night in a single night this night command me why not begin at once what apparatus or chemical agencies do you need ah said Margrave formally how I was misled formally how my conjectures blundered I thought when I asked you to give a month to the experiment I wished to make that I should need the subtle skill of the chemist I then believed with an helmet that the principle of life is gas and that the secret was but in the mode by which the gas might be rightly administered but now all that I need is contained in this coffer save one very simple material fuel sufficient for a steady fire for six hours I see even that it is at hand piled up in your outhouse and now for the substance itself to that you must guide me explain near this very spot is there not gold in mines yet undiscovered and gold of the purest metal there is what then do you with the alchemist blend in one discovery gold and life no but it is only where the chemistry of earth or man produces gold that the substance from which a great fabulum of life is extracted by firm and can be found possibly the attempts at that transmutation of metals which I think your own great chemist Sir Humphrey Davy allowed might be possible but held not to be worth the cost of the process possibly those attempts some scanty grains of this substance were found by the alchemist and the crucible with grains of the metal as negatively shielded by pitiful mimicry of nature's stupendous laboratory and from such grains enough of the essence might perhaps have been drawn false to add to few years of existence to some feeble grey beard granting what Reston's no proves that some of the alchemists reached an age rarely given to man but it is not in the miserly crucible it's in the matrix of nature herself that we must seek in prolific London's nature's grand principle life as lodestone is rife with the magnetic virtue as ammo contains the electric so in this substance to which we yet want a name is found the bright life giving fluid in the old gold mines of Asia and Europe the substance exists but can rarely be met with the soil for its nutriment may there be well nigh exhausted it is here where nature herself is all vital with youth that the nutriment of youth must be sought near their spot is gold guide me to it you cannot come with me the plage which I know as a riferous is some while distant the way wracked you cannot walk to it it is true I have horses but do think I have come this distance and not foreseen and foresawed all that I want the object trouble yourself not with conjectures how I can arrive at the place I have provided the means to arrive at and leave it my litter and its bearers are in reach of my call give me your arm to the rising ground 50 yards from your door I obeyed mechanically stifling all surprise I had made my resolve and admitted no thought that could shake it I reached the summit of the grassy hillock which is sloped from the road that led to the seaport Margrave, after pausing to recover breath lifted up his voice in a key not loud but shrill and slow and prolonged half cry and half chant like the nighthawks through the air so limpid and still bringing near far object far sounds the voice pierced its way heartfully pausing till wave after wave of the atmosphere bore and transmitted on in a few minutes the call seemed to re-accode so exactly so cheerily that for the moment I saw that a note was a mimicry of the shy mocking lyrebird which mimics so merrily all that it hears in its covers from the were of the loggers to the howl of the wild dog what king and as he spoke he carelessly recited his end on my shoulder so that I trembled to feel that his dread son of nature godlas and saulers who had been, and my heart whispered who still could be my bane and mind darkener leaned upon me for support as a spoiled younger born on his brother what king said this cynical mocker with his beautiful boyish face what king in your civilised Europe has a sway over chief of the east what link is so strong between mortar and mortar as is that between lord and slave I transport you poor fools from the land of their birth they preserve here their old habits obedient and all they would wait till they staffed in the solitude wait to hear can and answer my call and I who thus rule them or charm them I use and despise them they know that and yet serve me between you and me my philosopher there is but one thing worth living life for oneself is it age is it youth that thus shocks all my sense and my solemn completeness of man perhaps in great capitals young man of pleasure will answer it is youth and we think what he says young friends young friends I do not believe you chapter 2 along the grass-track I saw now and the damoon just arisen a strange procession never seen before in Australian pastures it moved on noiselessly but quickly we descended the hillock and met it on the way a sabre-letter born by four men in unfamiliar eastern garments more bravely dressed with yetigans and silver-heltered pistols and their belts receded this sombre recupage perhaps margrave, divine the disdainful thought that passed through my mind vaguely and half unconsciously for he said with the hollow bitter laugh that had replaced the lively peel of his once melodious mirth a little leisure and a little gold and your raw columnist too will have the tastes of a pacha I made no answer I had ceased to care who and what was my tempter to me his whole being was resolved into one problem had he a secret by which death could be turned from Lillian but now as Litter halted from the long dark shadow which he had cast upon the turf the figure of a woman emerged before us the outlines of her shape were lost in the loose folds of a black mantle and the features of her face were hidden by a black veil except only the dark bright solemn eyes her stature was lofty her burrowing majestic whether a movement or a pose margrave a cast at home or in some language or known to me she replied in what seemed to me the tones of her voice were sweet but inexpressibly mournful the words that they uttered appeared intended to warn or deprecate or dissuade but they called to Margrave's brow a lowering frown and drew from his lips a burst of unmistakable anger the woman rejoined in the same melancholy music of voice and Margrave then leaning his arm upon her shoulder as he had leaned it on mine far away from the group into a neighbouring corpse of the flowering eucalyptus mystic trees never changing the hues of their pale green leaves ever shifting the tins of the rash grey shedding bark for some moments I gazed on the two human forms dimly seen by the glinting moonlight through the gap-synth foliage then turning away my eyes I saw standing close at my sight a man whom I had not noticed before his footstep as it still to me had fallen on the sword without sound his dress though oriental differed from that of his companions both in shape and colour fitting close to the breast leaving the arms bare to the elbow and of a uniform ghastly wide as are the sermons of the grave his visage was even darker than the serions or Arabs behind him and his features with those of a bird of prey the beak of the eagle but the eye of the vulture his cheeks were hollow the arms crossed on his breast were long and fleshless yet in that skeleton form there was a something which conveyed the idea of a serpent suppleness and strength and as a hungry watchful eyes I recoiled impulsively with that inward warning of danger which is conveyed to man as inferior animals in the very aspect of the creatures that sting on devour as my movement the man inclined his head in the submissive easter salutation and spoke in his foreign tongue softly, humbly fallingly to judge by his tone and his gesture I moved yet farther away from him with loathing and now the human thought flashed upon me was I in truth exposed to no danger entrusting myself to the mercy of the weird and remorseful master of those hylings from the east seven men in number to at least of them formidably armed and docile as bloodhounds to the hunter who has only to show them their prey but fear of man like myself is not my weakness I found its way to my heart it was through the doubts of the fancies in which man like myself disappeared in the attributes dark and unknown which we give to a find or a spectre and perhaps if I could have paused to analyse my own sensations the very presence of the zest-court creatures of flesh and blood lessened the dread of my incrom behensible tempter rather a hundred times front and defy those seven eastern slaves I, haughty son of the Anglo-Saxon who conquers all races because he fears no odds and have seen again on the walls of my threshold the luminous bodyless shadow besides Lillian Lillian for one chance of saving her life however wild and chimerical the chance might be I would have shrunk not a foot from the march of an army thus reshort and thus resolved I advance with the smile of disdain to meet Margrave and his veiled companion as they now came from the moonlit corpse well, I said to him with an irony that unconsciously mimicked his own have you taken advice with your nurse I assume that a dark form by your scientist is that of Ayesha note of author Margrave's former nurse and attendant and of note the woman looked at me from her sable veil with her steadfast solemn eyes and said in English though with a foreign accent the nurse born in Ayesha's but wisely through her love the pale son of Europe is wise through his art the nurse says do you say adventure peace exclaimed Margrave stamping his foot on the ground I take no counsel from either it is for me to resolve for you to obey and for him to aid now it is come and we waste it move on the woman made no reply nor did I he took my arm and walked back to the hut the barbaric escort followed when we reached the door of the building Margrave said a few words to the woman and to the little bearers they entered the hut with us Margrave pointed out to the woman his coffer to the man the fuel stowed in the outhouse both were born away and placed within the litter meanwhile I took from the table on which it was carelessly thrown the light hatchered that I have truly carried with me in my rambles do you think you need that I had a weapon said Margrave do you fear the good face of my swarzy attendants nay take the hatchet yourself it is used it is saffered the gold from the quartz in which we may find it embedded or to clear as a shovel which will also be needed from the slight soil above it the ore was at a mine in the mountain flings forth as the sea cast its waves on the sands give me your hand fellow labourer said Margrave joyfully ah there is no faltering terror in this pulse I was not mistaking them the man what rests but plays in the hour I shall live I shall live Chapter 3 Margrave now entered the litter and the veiled woman drew the black curtains round him I walked on as a guide some yards in advance the air was still heavy and parched with the breath of the Australagian Siraco we passed through the meadowlands studded with slumbering flocks we followed the branch of the creek which was linked to its source in the mountains by many a trickling waterfall we threaded the gloom of stunted misshapen trees gnarled with a stringy bark which makes one of the sounds of the straighter that Norwich called and at length the moon now in all her pump of light mid-heaven among her subject stars gleamed through the fissures of the cave on whose floor laid the relics of anti-diluvian races and rested in one flood of silvery splendor upon the hellos of the extinct volcano with tufts of dank herbage and wide spaces of pebbles and the slumbering flocks of herbage and wide spaces of paler sword covering the gold below gold, the dumb symbol of organized matter's great mystery storing in itself according his mind the inform of matter can distinguish its uses evil and good bane and blessing hitherto the veiled woman had remained in the rear with a white-robed skeleton-like image unaware with its noisest step thus, in each winding turn of the difficult path at which the convoy followed behind me came into sight I had seen first the two gaily dressed armed men next of the black, beer-like litter and last the black-filled woman and the wide-robed skeleton but now, as I hold it on the table-and, backed by the mountain and fronting the valley the woman left a companion passed by the litter and the armed men and paused by my side at the mouth of the moonlit cavern there, for a moment, she stood silent the procession below mounting upward laboriously and slow then she turned to me and available to be withdrawn the phase on which I gazed was wondrously beautiful and severely awful there was neither youth nor age but beauty, mature and majestic as is that of a marble demeter do you believe in that which you seek? she asked in a foreign melodious, melancholy accent I have no belief, was my answer true science has none true science, questionable things takes nothing upon credit it knows but three states of the mind denial, conviction and that vast interval between the two which is not belief but suspense of judgment the woman let fall her veil moved from me and seated herself on a crack above that cleft between mountain and creek to which when I had first discovered the gourd that the land nourished the rain from the clouds had given the rushing life of the cataract but which now in the draught and the hush of the skies was but a dead pile of stones the litter now ascended the hide its bearers halted a lean hand tore the curtains aside and Margrave descended leaning this time not on the blackfield woman but on the wide-robed skeleton there, as he stood the moon shone full on his wasted form on his face razzle it cheerful and proud despite its hollowed outlines and sickly tues he raised his head spoken the language unknown to me and the armed men the litter bearers grouped round him banding low, their eyes fixed on the ground the veiled woman rose slowly and came to his side motioning away with the mute sign the ghastly form on which he leaned and passing round him silently instead her own sustaining arm Margrave spoke again a few sentences of which I could not even guess the meaning when he had concluded the armed men and the litter bearers came nearer to his feet knelt down and kissed his hand they then rose and took from the bear-like vergal the coffer and the fuel this done, they lifted again the litter and again, preceded by his armed men the procession descended down the sloping hillside down into the valley below Margrave now whispered for some moments into the ear of the hideous creature who had made way for the veiled woman the grim skeleton bowed his head submissively and strode noiselessly away through the long grasses the slender's terms trampled under his stealthy feet relifting themselves as after a passing wind and thus he too sank out of sight down into the valley below on the table-end of the hill remained only we three Margrave, myself and the veiled woman she had receded herself apart on the grey crag above the dry torrent he stood at the entrance of the cavern round the sight of which clustered prosider plants with flowers of all colours some among them opening their paddles and exhaling their fragrance only in the hours of night so that as his form filled up the jaws of the dull arch obscuring the moon-beam that strove to pierce the shadows that slept within he stood now, when, implied it as I had seen it first radiant and joys literally framed in blooms Chapter 4 So, said Margrave turning to me under the soil that spreads round as lies a gourd which to you and to me is at this moment of no value except as a guide to its twin-born the regenerator of life you have not yet described to me the nature of the substance which we are to explore nor the process where which the vertices you impure to it are to be extracted Let us first find the gourd and instead of describing the live umber to let me call it I will point it out to your own eyes as to the process your share in it is so simple that you will ask me why I seek aid from a chemist the life umber went found as butters be subjected to heat fermentation for six hours it will be placed in a small caldron which that cover contains over the fire which of that fuel will feed to give a fact to the process certain alkalis and other ingredients are required but these are prepared and mine is a task to commingle them from your science as chemist I need and ask naught in you I have sought only the aid of a man if that be so why indeed seek me at all why not confide in those swalls the attendants who doubtless are slaves to your orders confide in slaves when the first husk in joint to them would be to discover and refrain from perloining gourd seven such in scrupler's naives or even one such and I thus defenceless and feeble such is not a work that wise masters confide to fierce slaves but that is the least of the reasons which exclude them from my joys and fix my joys of assistant on you do you forget what I told you of the danger which the dervish declared no bribe I could offer could tempt him a second time to brave I remember now those words had passed away from my mind and because they had passed away from your mind I chose you for my comrade I need a man by whom danger is scorned but in the process of which you tell me I see no possible danger unless the ingredients you mix in your cauldron have poisons fumes it is not that the ingredients I use are not poisons what other danger except you dread your own eastern slaves but if so why lead them to these solitudes and if so why not bid me beyond the eastern slaves fulfilling my commands wait for my summons where their eyes cannot see what we do the danger is of a kind in which the boldest son of the east would be more craven perhaps than the dangerous Siberid of Europe who would shrink from a panther and laugh at a ghost in the creed of the dervish and of all who would venture into that realm of nature which is close to philosophy and open to magic there are races in the magnitude of space unseen as animalcules in the world of a drop for the tribes of the drop signs, hazards, microscope of the hosts of Yonnas Yoh infinite magic gains side through them gains command over fluid conductors that link all the parts of creation of these races some are wholly indifferent to men some benign to him and some deadly hostile in all the regular prescribed conditions of mortal being this magic realm seems as blank and talentless as Yon vacant air but when a seek of powers beyond the roots functions by which man piles the clockwork that measures his hours and stops when its chain reaches at the end of its coil strives to piles over those boundaries at which a philosophy says knowledge ends then he is like all other travellers in regions unknown he must propitiate or brave the tribes that are hostile must depend for his life on the tribes that are friendly though your science discredits of the alchemists dogmas your learning informs you that all alchemists were not ignorant in postures those whose discoveries prove them to have been the nearest allies to your practical knowledge and in the mystical works at the reality of that realm which is open to magic ever hint that some means less familiar than Furness and bellows are essential to him who explores the Alexia of life he who wants quaffs that Alexia obtains in his very veins the ride fluid by which he transmits the force of his will to agencies dormant in nature to giants unseen in the space and here as he passes the boundary which divides a lot at a normal mortality from the regions and races that magic alone can explore so here he breaks down the safeguard between himself and the tribes that are hostile is it not ever thus between man and man let's erase the most gentle and timid and civilized dwell on one side a river on one turn and another have home in the region beyond each, if it pass not the intervening barrier may with each live in peace but if ambitious adventurers scale the mountain or cross of the river was designed to subdue and enslave the population they boldly invade then all the invader to rise and rest and defines the neighbors are changed into foes and therefore this process by which a simple though rare material of nages may to yield to immortal the boon of a life which brings with its glorious resistance to time desires and faculties to subject to its service beings the dwell in the earth and the air and the deep has ever been one of the same peril which an invader must rave when he crosses the bounds of his nation by this key alone you unlock all the cells of the alchemist lore by this alone you understand how a labor which a chemist's crudest apprentice could perform as baffle the giant fathers of all your dwarfed children of science nature that stores this rice's boon seems to shrink from conceding it to man the invisible tribes that are poor in oppose themselves to the gains that might give them a master the duller of those who were the life seekers of old which have told you how some chance trivial, unlooked for foiled their grant hope at the very point of fruition some dull-tish mistake some improvident oversight a defect in a sulphur a wild overflowing the quicksilver or a flaw in the bellows or a pupil who failed to replenish of the fuel by falling asleep by the furnace the invisible foes seldom fight save to make themselves visible where they can frustrate the bungalows a mock at his toils but the mighty adventurers equally foiled in despite of their patience and skill which are said not with us, rest is the fort we neglected no caution we failed from no oversight but out from the cauldron dread faces arose the spectres or demons is made and baffled us such then is a danger which it seems so appalling to a son of the east as it seems to assume the dark age of Europe but we can deride all its a threat you and I for myself, I own frankly I take all the safety that charms and resources of magic bestow you for your safety have the cultured and disciplined reason which reduces all fantasy to nervous impressions and I rely on the courage of one who has questioned unquailing the luminous shadow and rested from the hand of the magician which consented the wonders of will to this strange and long discourse I listened without interruption and now quietly answered I do not merit the trust you factor my courage but I am now on my guard against the cheats of the fancy and the fumes of a vapor can scarcely bewilder the brain in the open air of this mountain land I believe in no racists like those which who tell me life fuel is in space as do gases I believe not a magic I ask not its aid and I dread not its terrors for the rest, I am confident of one mournful courage the courage that comes from despair I submit to your guidance whatever it be as a sufferer whom college is doomed to the grave submits to the quack who says take my specific and live my life is nought in itself my life lives in another you and I are both brave from despair you will turn death from yourself I will turn death from one I love more than myself both know how little aid we can win from the colleges and both therefore turn to the promises most audaciously cheering dourers of magician alchemists of phantom what care you and I and if they fail us well then they cannot fail us more than the colleges do chapter 5 the gold has been gained with an easy labour I knew where to seek for it whether under the turf or in the bed of the creek but Margrave's eyes hungrily gazing round every spot from which the ore was disparate could not detect the substance of which he alone knew the outward appearance I had begun to believe that even in the description given to him of this material he had been credulously duped that no such material existed when coming back from the bed of the water-calls I saw faint yellow gleam amidst the roots of a giant parasite plant the leaves and blossoms of which climbed up the site of the cave with its scented diluvian relics the gleam was a gleam of gold and on removing the loose earth round the roots of the plant we came on I will not I dare not describe it the gourdig would cast it aside the naturalist would pause not to heed it and did I describe it and chemistry deigned to subject it to analysis could chemistry alone detach or discover its boasted virtues its particles indeed are very minute not seeming readily to crystallise with each other each in itself of uniform shape and size spherical as yag which contains the germ of life and small as yag from which the life of an instinct may quicken but Margrave's keen eye caught sight of the atoms upcast by the light of the moon he exclaimed to me found I shall live and then as he gathered duped the grains with tremlous hands he called out to the veiled woman his ado still seated motionless on the crag at his word she rose and went to the place hard by where the fuel was piled busying herself there I had no leisure to heed her I continued my search in the soft and yielding soil the time and the decay of vegetable life had accumulated of the pre-edimid strata on which of the arch of the cave rested its mighty keystone when we had collected of these particles about thrice as much as a man might hold in his hand we seemed to have exhausted their bed we continued still to find gold but no more of the delicate substance to which in our sight gold was as dross enough that said Margrave reluctantly desisting what we have gained already was suffice for a life thrice as long as legend attributes to her own I shall live I shall live through the centuries forget not that I claim I share your share yours true your half of my life it is true he paused with low ironical malignant laugh and then added as he rose and turned away but the work is yet to be done Chapter 6 while we had thus laboured and found Ayesha had placed the fuel where the moonlight fell fullest on the sword of the table-and a part of it already piled as for a fire the rest of it heaped confusedly close at hand and by the pile she had placed of the coffer and there she stood her arms folded under her mantle her dark image seeming darker still as the moonlight whitened to all the ground from which the image rose motionless Margrave opened his coffer the veiled woman did not aid him and I watched him in silence while he, as silently made his weird and wizard-like preparations Chapter 7 on the ground a wide circle was traced by a small rod tipped apparently with a sponge saturated with some combustible nafta-like fluid since at a pale lamb and flame followed the cause of the rods as Margrave guided it burning up the herbage over which it played and leaving a distinct ring like that which, in our lovely native fable-talk recall the fairies ring but yet more visible because marked in phosphorescent light on the ring thus formed were placed twelve small lambs fat with a fluid from the same vessel and lighted by the same rod the light emitted by the lambs was more vivid and brilliant than that which circled round the ring within the circumference and immediately round the wood-pile Margrave traced certain geometrical figures in which, not without a shudder that I overcame at once by strong effort of will in murmuring to myself the name of Lillian I recognised the interlaced triangles which my own hand in the spell enforced on a sleep-walker had described on the floor of the wizard's pavilion the figures were traced like the circle in flame and at the point of each triangle a foreign number was placed a lamp brilliant as those on the ring this task performed the cauldron, based on an iron tripod was placed on the wood-pile and then the woman before inactive and unheeding slowly advanced knelt by the pile and lighted it the dry wood crackled and the flame burst forth licking the rims of the cauldron Margrave flung into the cauldron the particles we had collected poured over them first liquid Colourless as water from the largest of the vessels drawn from his coffer and then, most baringly drops from small crystal files like the files I had seen in the hand of Philip Durville having surmounted my first impulse of all, I watched of these proceedings curious, yet disdainful as one who watches the memories of an enchantment on the stage if, sought I these are but artful devices to inebriate and fool my own imagination my imagination is on its guard and reason shall not this time sleep at a post and now, said Margrave I consigned to you the easy task by which you are to marriage your share of the Alexia it is my task to feed and replenish the cauldron it is Ayesha's to feed the fire which was not for a moment relaxed in its measured and steady heat your task is the lightest of all it is but a renew from this vessel the fluid that burns in the lamps and on the ring observe the contents of the vessel must be thriftly husband there is enough but not more than enough to sustain the light in the lamps the lines draced round the cauldron and on the father ring for six hours the compounds dissolved in this fluid are scarce only obtainable in the east and even in the east months might have passed before I could have increased my supply I had no months to waste replenish and send the light only when it begins to flicker or fade take heed, above all that no part of the outer ring no not a ninge and no lamp of the twelfth that outweighs the zodiac-like stars fade for one moment in darkness I took the crystal vessel from his hand the vessel is small said I and what is yet left of its contents is bascanty whether it stops the fires to replenish the light I cannot gas I can but obey your instructions but more important by far than the light to the lamps in the circle which in Asia of Africa might scare away the wild beasts known to this land more important than light or lamp is a strength to your frame, weak magician what will support you through six weary hours of night watch hope answered Margrave with the ray of his old dazzling style hope I shall live I shall live 10% And of part one of The Encantation by Edward BalwellITon