“First,” he continued, “you are presumably a researcher. As a scientist, you must see that these are published as records of scientific experiments. They must not be thought of as fiction or romance. They are serious and not to be taken lightly. Second, I presume that you are a gentleman. There are obviously, as in any diary, allusions to certain private matters that are to be deleted before publication. You will, I trust, see to it?”
“You may be sure,” I replied; “but why, if I may ask, have you delayed the release of these diaries for so many years if they contain valuable scientific matter?”
Sir Harold remained silent for a few moments. At length, when the silence had begun to be painful, he spoke. “You are getting too close. You fellows think that what you are doing is new and exciting, but let me assure you that we here at the Chelsea Society had done it all fifteen years ago. We, too, were scientists; and like you, we toyed with things we were not properly equipped to handle. And you people are about to make the same mistakes that we did.”
“Mistakes!” I protested. “I beg to differ. We are indeed on the verge of bridging the gap between the living and the dead, of piercing the veil.” I could hear my voice mounting with excitement. “But be sure, Sir Harold, we are doing so with the most modern scientific methods and all possible precautions.”
“Balderdash!” he shouted with a ferocity I wouldn’t have expected from such a fragile-looking old man. “Don’t prattle to me about your ‘scientific methods’. If you go to the Pole to explore, you take along an overcoat and a bottle of brandy. That’s scientific! If you go digging about in Egypt, you take along a fan and a bottle of gin. That’s scientific! But what, sir, what possible precautions can you take against the unseen and the totally unknown? Don’t you realize the tremendous power and raw forces of evil you can invoke by accident? What precautions do you take against these, sir? A raincoat? A gun? Or a cross? Believe me, sir, if there is a God, He waits until you are dead before he enters the picture. The devil is not so polite!”
I had stood during that tirade, for no man can speak to me in that manner. It was no longer the Nineteenth Century! He spoke again as I picked up my cane.
“Please sit down, sir; I’m sorry to have shouted.” He once again appeared to be a docile, harmless old man. It was a complete physical change.
“Very well,” I returned, assuming an air of wounded dignity. “But you’ll have to explain the entire business before I continue. I feel that our experiments have proven that we have nothing to fear from the darkness beyond the grave save our own superstitions and physical limitations. What I have learned through mediums is that the spirits beyond us want to help us, to teach us that we need not fear death, but should consider it as the parting of a curtain that has obscured our eyes during our earthly life.” I sat down, pleased with my pretty speech, and rested my walking stick between my knees. The light was now waning, as it was mid-winter, and with the oncoming dark came a palpable chill.
“Very well,” said Sir Harold. He wheeled himself to the liquor cabinet and withdrew two sherry glasses. After pouring a rather large measure of the amber liquid into each of them, he offered me the larger portion. I took it and began to sip it, observing a connoisseur’s silence, a respectful pause before commenting on the wine.
“Excellent sherry,” I said, falling short of poetry, anxious for Sir Harold to begin his story.
“Yes,” he answered, staring at his glass absentmindedly. “It’s old.” He turned it around in his hand for a few moments, watching the light catch its color.
“In December, 1884,” he began quietly, “the Chelsea Spiritualist Society was formed. It consisted of Jessica, my fiancée; Thomas Walters, a novelist; Dr. Edmund Vaughan, a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, and myself. At first we simply tracked down local Spiritualists and bade them come to my house; we had the cellar arranged with a large table and five chairs. The mediums, famous for remarkable feats within their own houses, provided very little of interest when taken away from their rigs, pulleys, and secret compartments. No ghosts, no spirits, no disembodied trumpets floating about in the air. But some of these so-called Spiritualists did seem to possess a certain kind of… sensitivity, shall we call it? They seemed to feel something in the cellar—and what is more remarkable, most of them expressed it in the same way: They felt a malignancy, a dark, angry thing that lived, or perhaps I should say, existed in the cellar.
“At first we felt nothing, simply darkness. But as we conducted these seances, most of us—Walters being the sole exception—began to feel a physical oppression that could not be attributed to simple fear of the dark or, for that matter, the power of suggestion.
“Once, just before we lost Jessica, Vaughan and I were trying automatic writing when the lamp suddenly went out. There had been no wind; the door is heavy oak, bolted shut, so there could have been no draft moving through the room. Afterward, we found the lamp easily three-quarters full, and the wick in perfect condition. But the lamp went out, and we sat in that total blackness before the eye accustoms itself to the shadows. I felt almost immediately a sense of overwhelming blackness—not darkness, mind you, but blackness, and worse, a sense of hate. There was something in the room that was projecting a furious driving hate, aimed possibly at me or Vaughan or both of us, but I felt at humanity—the living in general.
“I was overwhelmed, suffocated by this malignancy—now coupled with a mounting terror in myself. I tried to move, but found it wholly impossible and in desperation, trying to sound perfectly normal, I told Vaughan to light the lamp. He whispered, or I should rather say that he gasped that he could not. It was at this point that we both realized that we were in danger—just what kind of danger we were not sure then. And we just sat there all night, the two of us huddled together, shivering from terror and the cold. At length, as dawn began to penetrate the opaque glass of the cellar windows, we both found the strength to stir; as the sun began to warm the air outside, we burst out of the room, red-eyed and thoroughly frightened.
“Vaughan and I made our trembling way upstairs, and he resigned from the Society over a stiff glass of brandy.
“I think it was then that I first realized that I had some sort of mediumistic talent in me—or that Vaughan or I or both of us possessed such ability.
“Despite the fright it gave me, I continued my work, and the Chelsea Society’s work. We investigated, held seances, table taps and whatnot, with a moderate amount of success, but never with anything like the results that night with Vaughan. Then I held my last seance.
“We had decided to hold a seance just before Christmas. It was an icy cold night, and I distinctly remember that the icicles hanging in front of the cellar windows cast irregular striped shadows that looked like prison bars on the floor and table. It was late, perhaps 11:30 or 12:00, and all was deathly still—complete silence, broken now and then by a horse’s trot or a tinkling sleigh bell.
“There were five of us that night: Jessica, whom I was to marry just after the new year, Walters, and two of our new members, one a student—Cambridge, I think—named Wilson, who was home for the holiday, and a young scientist of sorts named Tice. Something to do with hydraulics, I believe. Just before the seance began, we all had a drink to toast the new year, since this was expected to be the last time we would see each other for several weeks. It was, I believe, the last happy moment I have had in my life. I remember especially Jessica, sitting directly across the table from me. Her blonde hair was done up in a bun, and she wore a topaz choker I had just given her as an early Christmas present. She was so beautiful… “Sir Harold paused as he seemed to gaze directly into the past. “Then young Wilson blew out the light and we began.