Абрахам Меррит - Creep, Shadow!

"It is a symptom of their condition. Nothing more. Am I right, Dr. Lowell?"

Lowell said: "You are."

I said: "As for what Charcot's subjects told him – who knows what they had heard their grandmothers say? Stories passed down by the family – heard when children, treasured by the sub-consciousness. Built up, improvements suggested, by Charcot himself. Charcot finds two or three points true, naturally. There is none so credulous as he who seeks evidence to support his idйe fixe, his pet theory. So these few points become all. Well, I am not so credulous as Charcot, Dr. de Keradel."

He said: "I read your interviews in the newspaper. I seemed to detect a certain amount of credulity there, Dr. Caranac."

So he had read the interviews. I felt Bill press my foot again. I said:

"I tried to make plain to the reporters that belief in the hokum was necessary to make the hokum effective. I admit that to the victim of his belief it doesn't make much difference whether it was hokum or reality. But that doesn't mean that the hokum is real or can affect anybody else. And I tried to make plain that the defense against the hokum is very simple. It is – don't believe it."

The veins on his forehead began to twitch again. He said: "By hokum you mean, I assume, nonsense."

"More than that," I said, cheerfully. "Bunk!"

Dr. Lowell looked pained. I drank my wine, and grinned at the Demoiselle.

Helen said: "Your manners aren't so good tonight, darling."

I said: "Manners – hell! What're manners in a discussion of goblins, incarnation, ancestral memories and Isis, Set and the Black God of the Scyths who looked like a frog? Now I'm going to tell you something, Dr. de Keradel. I've been in a lot of out of the way corners of this globe. I went there hunting for goblins and demons. And in all my travels I've never seen one thing that couldn't be explained on the basis of hypnotism, mass suggestion, or trickery. Get that. Not one thing. And I've seen a lot."

That was a lie – but I wanted to see the effect on him. I saw it. The veins in his temples were twitching more than ever, his lips were white. I said:

"Years ago I had a brilliant idea which puts the whole problem in its simplest form. The brilliant idea was based on the fact that the hearing is probably the last sense to die; that after the heart stops the brain continues to function as long as it has enough oxygen; and that while the brain does function, although every sense is dead – it can have experiences that seem to last for days and weeks, although the actual dream lasts but a fraction of a second.

"'Heaven and Hell, Inc.' That was my idea. 'Insure yourself an immortality of joy!' 'Give your enemy an immortality of torment!' To be done by expert hypnotists, masters of suggestion, sitting at the bedside of the dying and whispering into his ear that which the brain was to dramatize, after hearing and every other sense was dead – "

The Demoiselle drew a sharp breath. De Keradel was staring at me with a strange intentness.

"Well, there it was," I went on. "For a sufficient sum you could promise, and actually give, your client the immortality he desired. Any kind he wanted – from the houri-haunted Paradise of Mahomet to the angel choirs of Paradise. And if the sum were sufficient, and you could gain access, you could whisper into the ear of your employer's enemy the Hell he was going into for aeon after aeon. And I'll bet he'd go into it. That was my 'Heaven and Hell, Inc.'"

"A sweet idea, darling," murmured Helen.

"A sweet idea, yes," I said, bitterly. "Let me tell you what it did for me. It happens that it's entirely feasible. Very well – consider me, the inventor. If there is a delectable life after death, will I enjoy it? Not at all. I'll be thinking – this is just a vision in the dying cells of my brain. It has no objective reality. Nothing that could happen to me in that future existence, assuming it to be real, could be real to me. I would think – Oh, yes, very ingenious of me to create such ideas, but after all, they're only in the dying cells of my brain. Of course," I said, grimly, "there is a compensation. If I happened to land in one of the traditional hells, I wouldn't take it any more seriously. And all the miracles of magic, or sorcery, I've ever beheld were no more real than those dying visions would be."

The Demoiselle whispered, so faintly that none but I could hear: "I could make them real to you, Alan de Caranac – either Heaven or Hell."

I said: "In life or in death, your theories cannot be proven, Dr. de Keradel. At least, not to me."

He did not answer, staring at me, fingers tapping the table.

I went on: "Suppose, for example, you desired to know what it was that they worshiped among the stones of Carnac. You might reproduce every rite. Might have your descendant of priestess with the ancient ghost wide-awake in her brain. But how could you know that what came to the great cairn within the circle of monoliths – the Gatherer within the Cairn, the Visitor to the Alkar-Az – was real?"

De Keradel asked, incredulously, in a curiously still voice, as though exercising some strong restraint: "What can you know of the Alkar-Az – or of the Gatherer within the Cairn?"

I was wondering about that, too. I couldn't remember ever having heard those names. Yet they had sprung to my lips as though long known. I looked at the Demoiselle. She dropped her eyes, but not before I had seen in them that same half-amused triumph as when, under the touch of her hand, I had beheld ancient Carnac. I answered de Keradel:

"Ask your daughter."

His eyes were no longer blue, they had no color at all. They were like little spheres of pale fire. He did not speak – but his eyes demanded answer from her. The Demoiselle met them indifferently. She shrugged a white shoulder. She said: "I did not tell him." She added, with a distinct touch of malice: "Perhaps, my father – he remembered."

I leaned to her, and touched her glass with mine; I was feeling pretty good again. I said: "I remember – I remember – "

Helen said, tartly: "If you drink much more of that wine, you're going to remember a swell headache, darling."

The Demoiselle Dahut murmured: "What do you remember, Alain de Carnac?"

I sang the old Breton song – to the English words:

There was a queer silence. Then I noticed that de Keradel was sitting up oddly rigid and looking at me with that same expression he had worn when I had spoken of the Alkar-Az – and the Gatherer in the Cairn. Also that Bill's face had bleached. I looked at the Demoiselle and there were little dancing orchid sparks in her eyes. I hadn't the slightest idea why the old song should have had such an effect.

Helen said: "That's a weird melody, Alan. Who was Dahut the White?"

"A witch, angel," I told her. "A wicked, beautiful witch. Not a torched- tressed witch like you, but a blonde one. She lived twenty centuries or more ago in a city named Ys. Nobody knows quite where Ys was, but probably its towers rose where now the sea flows between Quiberon and Belle Isle. Certainly, it was once land there. Ys was a wicked city, filled with witches and sorcerers, but wickedest of all was Dahut the White, the daughter of the King. She picked her lovers where she would. They pleased her for a night, two nights – seldom three. Then she cast them from her… into the sea, some say. Or, say others, she gave them to her shadows – "

Bill interrupted: "What do you mean by that?"