"For a time this happened regularly, and I could not control it; though
later I found a way to regulate it better. Apparently sleep is
unnecessary in the higher--the four-dimensional--body. Yes, perhaps. But
I should infinitely have preferred dull sleep to the knowledge. For,
unable to control my movements, I wandered to and fro, attracted, owing
to my partial development and premature arrival, to parts of this new
world that alarmed me more and more. It was the awful waste and drift of
a monstrous world, so utterly different to all we know and see that I
cannot even hint at the nature of the sights and objects and beings in
it. More than that, I cannot even remember them. I cannot now picture
them to myself even, but can recall only the _memory of the impression_
they made upon me, the horror and devastating terror of it all. To be in
several places at once, for instance--"

"Perfectly," interrupted John Silence, noticing the increase of the
other's excitement, "I understand exactly. But now, please, tell me a
little more of this alarm you experienced, and how it affected you." "It's not the disappearing and reappearing _per se_ that I mind,"
continued Mr. Mudge, "so much as certain other things. It's seeing
people and objects in their weird entirety, in their true and complete
shapes, that is so distressing. It introduces me to a world of monsters. Horses, dogs, cats, all of which I loved; people, trees, children; all
that I have considered beautiful in life--everything, from a human face
to a cathedral--appear to me in a different shape and aspect to all I
have known before. I cannot perhaps convince you why this should be
terrible, but I assure you that it is so. To hear the human voice
proceeding from this novel appearance which I scarcely recognise as a
human body is ghastly, simply ghastly. To see inside everything and
everybody is a form of insight peculiarly distressing. To be so confused
in geography as to find myself one moment at the North Pole, and the
next at Clapham Junction--or possibly at both places simultaneously--is
absurdly terrifying. Your imagination will readily furnish other details
without my multiplying my experiences now. But you have no idea what it
all means, and how I suffer." Mr. Mudge paused in his panting account and lay back in his chair. He
still held tightly to the arms as though they could keep him in the
world of sanity and three measurements, and only now and again released
his left hand in order to mop his face. He looked very thin and white
and oddly unsubstantial, and he stared about him as though he saw into
this other space he had been talking about. John Silence, too, felt warm. He had listened to every word and had made
many notes. The presence of this man had an exhilarating effect upon
him. It seemed as if Mr. Racine Mudge still carried about with him
something of that breathless Higher-Space condition he had been
describing. At any rate, Dr. Silence had himself advanced sufficiently
far along the legitimate paths of spiritual and psychic transformations
to realise that the visions of this extraordinary little person had a
basis of truth for their origin. After a pause that prolonged itself into minutes, he crossed the room
and unlocked a drawer in a bookcase, taking out a small book with a red
cover. It had a lock to it, and he produced a key out of his pocket and
proceeded to open the covers. The bright eyes of Mr. Mudge never left
him for a single second. "It almost seems a pity," he said at length, "to cure you, Mr. Mudge. You are on the way to discovery of great things. Though you may lose
your life in the process--that is, your life here in the world of three
dimensions--you would lose thereby nothing of great value--you will
pardon my apparent rudeness, I know--and you might gain what is
infinitely greater. Your suffering, of course, lies in the fact that you
alternate between the two worlds and are never wholly in one or the
other. Also, I rather imagine, though I cannot be certain of this from
any personal experiments, that you have here and there penetrated even
into space of more than four dimensions, and have hence experienced the
terror you speak of." The perspiring son of the Essex bargeman and the woman of Normandy bent
his head several times in assent, but uttered no word in reply. "Some strange psychic predisposition, dating no doubt from one of your
former lives, has favoured the development of your 'disease'; and the
fact that you had no normal training at school or college, no leading by
the poor intellect into the culs-de-sac falsely called knowledge, has
further caused your exceedingly rapid movement along the lines of direct
inner experience. None of the knowledge you have foreshadowed has come
to you through the senses, of course." Mr. Mudge, sitting in his immovable chair, began to tremble slightly. A
wind again seemed to pass over his surface and again to set it curiously
in motion like a field of grass. "You are merely talking to gain time," he said hurriedly, in a shaking
voice. "This thinking aloud delays us. I see ahead what you are coming
to, only please be quick, for something is going to happen. A band is
again coming down the street, and if it plays--if it plays Wagner--I
shall be off in a twinkling." "Precisely. I will be quick. I was leading up to the point of how to
effect your cure. The way is this: You must simply learn to _block the
entrances_." "True, true, utterly true!" exclaimed the little man, dodging about
nervously in the depths of the chair. "But how, in the name of space, is
that to be done?" "By concentration. They are all within you, these entrances, although
outer cases such as colour, music and other things lead you towards
them. These external things you cannot hope to destroy, but once the
entrances are blocked, they will lead you only to bricked walls and
closed channels. You will no longer be able to find the way." "Quick, quick!" cried the bobbing figure in the chair. "How is this
concentration to be effected?" "This little book," continued Dr. Silence calmly, "will explain to you
the way." He tapped the cover. "Let me now read out to you certain
simple instructions, composed, as I see you divine, entirely from my own
personal experiences in the same direction. Follow these instructions
and you will no longer enter the state of Higher Space. The entrances
will be blocked effectively." Mr. Mudge sat bolt upright in his chair to listen, and John Silence
cleared his throat and began to read slowly in a very distinct voice. But before he had uttered a dozen words, something happened. A sound of
street music entered the room through the open ventilators, for a band
had begun to play in the stable mews at the back of the house--the March
from _Tannhäuser_. Odd as it may seem that a German band should twice
within the space of an hour enter the same mews and play Wagner, it was
nevertheless the fact. Mr. Racine Mudge heard it.