Twelve Stories and a Dream (20 page)

As the outcome of their consultation the two gentlemen decided to
inquire at Scotland Yard for news of their missing friend. "He is bound
to be laid by the heels," said Mr. Hart. "He can't go on at that pace
for long." But the police authorities had not laid Mr. Bessel by the
heels. They confirmed Mr. Vincey's overnight experiences and added fresh
circumstances, some of an even graver character than those he knew—a
list of smashed glass along the upper half of Tottenham Court Road, an
attack upon a policeman in Hampstead Road, and an atrocious assault upon
a woman. All these outrages were committed between half-past twelve and
a quarter to two in the morning, and between those hours—and, indeed,
from the very moment of Mr. Bessel's first rush from his rooms at
half-past nine in the evening—they could trace the deepening violence
of his fantastic career. For the last hour, at least from before one,
that is, until a quarter to two, he had run amuck through London,
eluding with amazing agility every effort to stop or capture him.

But after a quarter to two he had vanished. Up to that hour witnesses
were multitudinous. Dozens of people had seen him, fled from him or
pursued him, and then things suddenly came to an end. At a quarter to
two he had been seen running down the Euston Road towards Baker Street,
flourishing a can of burning colza oil and jerking splashes of flame
therefrom at the windows of the houses he passed. But none of the
policemen on Euston Road beyond the Waxwork Exhibition, nor any of
those in the side streets down which he must have passed had he left the
Euston Road, had seen anything of him. Abruptly he disappeared. Nothing
of his subsequent doings came to light in spite of the keenest inquiry.

Here was a fresh astonishment for Mr. Vincey. He had found considerable
comfort in Mr. Hart's conviction: "He is bound to be laid by the heels
before long," and in that assurance he had been able to suspend his
mental perplexities. But any fresh development seemed destined to add
new impossibilities to a pile already heaped beyond the powers of his
acceptance. He found himself doubting whether his memory might not have
played him some grotesque trick, debating whether any of these things
could possibly have happened; and in the afternoon he hunted up Mr. Hart
again to share the intolerable weight on his mind. He found Mr. Hart
engaged with a well-known private detective, but as that gentleman
accomplished nothing in this case, we need not enlarge upon his
proceedings.

All that day Mr. Bessel's whereabouts eluded an unceasingly active
inquiry, and all that night. And all that day there was a persuasion in
the back of Vincey's mind that Mr. Bessel sought his attention, and all
through the night Mr. Bessel with a tear-stained face of anguish pursued
him through his dreams. And whenever he saw Mr. Bessel in his dreams he
also saw a number of other faces, vague but malignant, that seemed to be
pursuing Mr. Bessel.

It was on the following day, Sunday, that Mr. Vincey recalled certain
remarkable stories of Mrs. Bullock, the medium, who was then attracting
attention for the first time in London. He determined to consult her.
She was staying at the house of that well-known inquirer, Dr. Wilson
Paget, and Mr. Vincey, although he had never met that gentleman before,
repaired to him forthwith with the intention of invoking her help.
But scarcely had he mentioned the name of Bessel when Doctor Paget
interrupted him. "Last night—just at the end," he said, "we had a
communication."

He left the room, and returned with a slate on which were certain words
written in a handwriting, shaky indeed, but indisputably the handwriting
of Mr. Bessel!

"How did you get this?" said Mr. Vincey. "Do you mean—?"

"We got it last night," said Doctor Paget. With numerous interruptions
from Mr. Vincey, he proceeded to explain how the writing had been
obtained. It appears that in her seances, Mrs. Bullock passes into a
condition of trance, her eyes rolling up in a strange way under her
eyelids, and her body becoming rigid. She then begins to talk very
rapidly, usually in voices other than her own. At the same time one
or both of her hands may become active, and if slates and pencils are
provided they will then write messages simultaneously with and quite
independently of the flow of words from her mouth. By many she is
considered an even more remarkable medium than the celebrated Mrs.
Piper. It was one of these messages, the one written by her left hand,
that Mr. Vincey now had before him. It consisted of eight words written
disconnectedly: "George Bessel... trial excavn.... Baker Street...
help... starvation." Curiously enough, neither Doctor Paget nor the two
other inquirers who were present had heard of the disappearance of
Mr. Bessel—the news of it appeared only in the evening papers of
Saturday—and they had put the message aside with many others of a vague
and enigmatical sort that Mrs. Bullock has from time to time delivered.

When Doctor Paget heard Mr. Vincey's story, he gave himself at once with
great energy to the pursuit of this clue to the discovery of Mr. Bessel.
It would serve no useful purpose here to describe the inquiries of Mr.
Vincey and himself; suffice it that the clue was a genuine one, and that
Mr. Bessel was actually discovered by its aid.

He was found at the bottom of a detached shaft which had been sunk and
abandoned at the commencement of the work for the new electric railway
near Baker Street Station. His arm and leg and two ribs were broken.
The shaft is protected by a hoarding nearly 20 feet high, and over this,
incredible as it seems, Mr. Bessel, a stout, middle-aged gentleman,
must have scrambled in order to fall down the shaft. He was saturated in
colza oil, and the smashed tin lay beside him, but luckily the flame
had been extinguished by his fall. And his madness had passed from him
altogether. But he was, of course, terribly enfeebled, and at the sight
of his rescuers he gave way to hysterical weeping.

In view of the deplorable state of his flat, he was taken to the house
of Dr. Hatton in Upper Baker Street. Here he was subjected to a sedative
treatment, and anything that might recall the violent crisis through
which he had passed was carefully avoided. But on the second day he
volunteered a statement.

Since that occasion Mr. Bessel has several times repeated this
statement—to myself among other people—varying the details as the
narrator of real experiences always does, but never by any chance
contradicting himself in any particular. And the statement he makes is
in substance as follows.

In order to understand it clearly it is necessary to go back to his
experiments with Mr. Vincey before his remarkable attack. Mr. Bessel's
first attempts at self-projection, in his experiments with Mr. Vincey,
were, as the reader will remember, unsuccessful. But through all of
them he was concentrating all his power and will upon getting out of the
body—"willing it with all my might," he says. At last, almost against
expectation, came success. And Mr. Bessel asserts that he, being alive,
did actually, by an effort of will, leave his body and pass into some
place or state outside this world.

The release was, he asserts, instantaneous. "At one moment I was seated
in my chair, with my eyes tightly shut, my hands gripping the arms of
the chair, doing all I could to concentrate my mind on Vincey, and then
I perceived myself outside my body—saw my body near me, but certainly
not containing me, with the hands relaxing and the head drooping forward
on the breast."

Nothing shakes him in his assurance of that release. He describes in a
quiet, matter-of-fact way the new sensation he experienced. He felt he
had become impalpable—so much he had expected, but he had not expected
to find himself enormously large. So, however, it would seem he became.
"I was a great cloud—if I may express it that way—anchored to my body.
It appeared to me, at first, as if I had discovered a greater self of
which the conscious being in my brain was only a little part. I saw the
Albany and Piccadilly and Regent Street and all the rooms and places in
the houses, very minute and very bright and distinct, spread out below
me like a little city seen from a balloon. Every now and then vague
shapes like drifting wreaths of smoke made the vision a little
indistinct, but at first I paid little heed to them. The thing that
astonished me most, and which astonishes me still, is that I saw quite
distinctly the insides of the houses as well as the streets, saw little
people dining and talking in the private houses, men and women dining,
playing billiards, and drinking in restaurants and hotels, and several
places of entertainment crammed with people. It was like watching the
affairs of a glass hive."

Such were Mr. Bessel's exact words as I took them down when he told
me the story. Quite forgetful of Mr. Vincey, he remained for a space
observing these things. Impelled by curiosity, he says, he stooped down,
and, with the shadowy arm he found himself possessed of, attempted to
touch a man walking along Vigo Street. But he could not do so, though
his finger seemed to pass through the man. Something prevented his doing
this, but what it was he finds it hard to describe. He compares the
obstacle to a sheet of glass.

"I felt as a kitten may feel," he said, "when it goes for the first time
to pat its reflection in a mirror." Again and again, on the occasion
when I heard him tell this story, Mr. Bessel returned to that comparison
of the sheet of glass. Yet it was not altogether a precise comparison,
because, as the reader will speedily see, there were interruptions of
this generally impermeable resistance, means of getting through the
barrier to the material world again. But, naturally, there is a very
great difficulty in expressing these unprecedented impressions in the
language of everyday experience.

A thing that impressed him instantly, and which weighed upon him
throughout all this experience, was the stillness of this place—he was
in a world without sound.

At first Mr. Bessel's mental state was an unemotional wonder. His
thought chiefly concerned itself with where he might be. He was out of
the body—out of his material body, at any rate—but that was not all.
He believes, and I for one believe also, that he was somewhere out of
space, as we understand it, altogether. By a strenuous effort of will
he had passed out of his body into a world beyond this world, a world
undreamt of, yet lying so close to it and so strangely situated with
regard to it that all things on this earth are clearly visible both from
without and from within in this other world about us. For a long time,
as it seemed to him, this realisation occupied his mind to the exclusion
of all other matters, and then he recalled the engagement with Mr.
Vincey, to which this astonishing experience was, after all, but a
prelude.

He turned his mind to locomotion in this new body in which he found
himself. For a time he was unable to shift himself from his attachment
to his earthly carcass. For a time this new strange cloud body of
his simply swayed, contracted, expanded, coiled, and writhed with his
efforts to free himself, and then quite suddenly the link that bound
him snapped. For a moment everything was hidden by what appeared to be
whirling spheres of dark vapour, and then through a momentary gap he saw
his drooping body collapse limply, saw his lifeless head drop sideways,
and found he was driving along like a huge cloud in a strange place of
shadowy clouds that had the luminous intricacy of London spread like a
model below.

But now he was aware that the fluctuating vapour about him was something
more than vapour, and the temerarious excitement of his first essay
was shot with fear. For he perceived, at first indistinctly, and then
suddenly very clearly, that he was surrounded by FACES! that each roll
and coil of the seeming cloud-stuff was a face. And such faces! Faces of
thin shadow, faces of gaseous tenuity. Faces like those faces that glare
with intolerable strangeness upon the sleeper in the evil hours of his
dreams. Evil, greedy eyes that were full of a covetous curiosity, faces
with knit brows and snarling, smiling lips; their vague hands clutched
at Mr. Bessel as he passed, and the rest of their bodies was but an
elusive streak of trailing darkness. Never a word they said, never a
sound from the mouths that seemed to gibber. All about him they pressed
in that dreamy silence, passing freely through the dim mistiness that
was his body, gathering ever more numerously about him. And the shadowy
Mr. Bessel, now suddenly fear-stricken, drove through the silent, active
multitude of eyes and clutching hands.

So inhuman were these faces, so malignant their staring eyes, and
shadowy, clawing gestures, that it did not occur to Mr. Bessel to
attempt intercourse with these drifting creatures. Idiot phantoms, they
seemed, children of vain desire, beings unborn and forbidden the boon of
being, whose only expressions and gestures told of the envy and craving
for life that was their one link with existence.

It says much for his resolution that, amidst the swarming cloud of these
noiseless spirits of evil, he could still think of Mr. Vincey. He made
a violent effort of will and found himself, he knew not how, stooping
towards Staple Inn, saw Vincey sitting attentive and alert in his
arm-chair by the fire.

And clustering also about him, as they clustered ever about all that
lives and breathes, was another multitude of these vain voiceless
shadows, longing, desiring, seeking some loophole into life.

For a space Mr. Bessel sought ineffectually to attract his friend's
attention. He tried to get in front of his eyes, to move the objects in
his room, to touch him. But Mr. Vincey remained unaffected, ignorant of
the being that was so close to his own. The strange something that Mr.
Bessel has compared to a sheet of glass separated them impermeably.