For, not far
removed from the region of our human life is another region where float
the waste and drift of all the centuries, the limbo of the shells of
the dead; a densely populated region crammed with horror and
abomination of all descriptions, and sometimes galvanised into active
life again by the will of a trained manipulator, a mind versed in the
practices of lower magic. That this woman understood its vile commerce,
I am persuaded, and the forces she set going during her life have
simply been accumulating ever since, and would have continued to do so
had they not been drawn down upon yourself, and afterwards discharged
and satisfied through me. “Anything might have brought down the attack, for, besides drugs, there
are certain violent emotions, certain moods of the soul, certain
spiritual fevers, if I may so call them, which directly open the inner
being to a cognisance of this astral region I have mentioned. In your
case it happened to be a peculiarly potent drug that did it. “But now, tell me,” he added, after a pause, handing to the perplexed
author a pencil drawing he had made of the dark countenance that had
appeared to him during the night on Putney Hill—“tell me if you
recognise this face?”

Pender looked at the drawing closely, greatly astonished. He shuddered
a little as he looked. “Undoubtedly,” he said, “it is the face I kept trying to draw—dark,
with the great mouth and jaw, and the drooping eye. That is the woman.”

Dr. Silence then produced from his pocket-book an old-fashioned woodcut
of the same person which his secretary had unearthed from the records
of the Newgate Calendar. The woodcut and the pencil drawing were two
different aspects of the same dreadful visage. The men compared them
for some moments in silence. “It makes me thank God for the limitations of our senses,” said Pender
quietly, with a sigh; “continuous clairvoyance must be a sore
affliction.”

“It is indeed,” returned John Silence significantly, “and if all the
people nowadays who claim to be clairvoyant were really so, the
statistics of suicide and lunacy would be considerably higher than they
are. It is little wonder,” he added, “that your sense of humour was
clouded, with the mind-forces of that dead monster trying to use your
brain for their dissemination. You have had an interesting adventure,
Mr. Felix Pender, and, let me add, a fortunate escape.”

The author was about to renew his thanks when there came a sound of
scratching at the door, and the doctor sprang up quickly. “It’s time for me to go. I left my dog on the step, but I suppose—”

Before he had time to open the door, it had yielded to the pressure
behind it and flew wide open to admit a great yellow-haired collie. The
dog, wagging his tail and contorting his whole body with delight, tore
across the floor and tried to leap up upon his owner’s breast. And
there was laughter and happiness in the old eyes; for they were clear
again as the day. CASE II: ANCIENT SORCERIES

I

There are, it would appear, certain wholly unremarkable persons, with
none of the characteristics that invite adventure, who yet once or
twice in the course of their smooth lives undergo an experience so
strange that the world catches its breath—and looks the other way! And
it was cases of this kind, perhaps, more than any other, that fell into
the wide-spread net of John Silence, the psychic doctor, and, appealing
to his deep humanity, to his patience, and to his great qualities of
spiritual sympathy, led often to the revelation of problems of the
strangest complexity, and of the profoundest possible human interest. Matters that seemed almost too curious and fantastic for belief he
loved to trace to their hidden sources. To unravel a tangle in the very
soul of things—and to release a suffering human soul in the process—was
with him a veritable passion. And the knots he untied were, indeed,
after passing strange. The world, of course, asks for some plausible basis to which it can
attach credence—something it can, at least, pretend to explain. The
adventurous type it can understand: such people carry about with them
an adequate explanation of their exciting lives, and their characters
obviously drive them into the circumstances which produce the
adventures. It expects nothing else from them, and is satisfied. But
dull, ordinary folk have no right to out-of-the-way experiences, and
the world having been led to expect otherwise, is disappointed with
them, not to say shocked. Its complacent judgment has been rudely
disturbed. “Such a thing happened to _that_ man!” it cries—“a commonplace person
like that! It is too absurd! There must be something wrong!”

Yet there could be no question that something did actually happen to
little Arthur Vezin, something of the curious nature he described to
Dr. Silence. Outwardly or inwardly, it happened beyond a doubt, and in
spite of the jeers of his few friends who heard the tale, and observed
wisely that “such a thing might perhaps have come to Iszard, that
crack-brained Iszard, or to that odd fish Minski, but it could never
have happened to commonplace little Vezin, who was fore-ordained to
live and die according to scale.”

But, whatever his method of death was, Vezin certainly did not “live
according to scale” so far as this particular event in his otherwise
uneventful life was concerned; and to hear him recount it, and watch
his pale delicate features change, and hear his voice grow softer and
more hushed as he proceeded, was to know the conviction that his
halting words perhaps failed sometimes to convey. He lived the thing
over again each time he told it. His whole personality became muffled
in the recital. It subdued him more than ever, so that the tale became
a lengthy apology for an experience that he deprecated. He appeared to
excuse himself and ask your pardon for having dared to take part in so
fantastic an episode. For little Vezin was a timid, gentle, sensitive
soul, rarely able to assert himself, tender to man and beast, and
almost constitutionally unable to say No, or to claim many things that
should rightly have been his. His whole scheme of life seemed utterly
remote from anything more exciting than missing a train or losing an
umbrella on an omnibus. And when this curious event came upon him he
was already more years beyond forty than his friends suspected or he
cared to admit. John Silence, who heard him speak of his experience more than once,
said that he sometimes left out certain details and put in others; yet
they were all obviously true. The whole scene was unforgettably
cinematographed on to his mind. None of the details were imagined or
invented. And when he told the story with them all complete, the effect
was undeniable. His appealing brown eyes shone, and much of the
charming personality, usually so carefully repressed, came forward and
revealed itself.