Strange Conflict (8 page)

Simon, whose previous experiences had taught him something of pentacles, remembered certain of them as cabalistic signs taken from the Sephirotic
Tree—Kether, Binah, Gebirah, Hod, Malkulth
and the rest—and others, like the Eye of Horus, that were of Egyptian origin; but others, again, were in some ancient Aryan script which he did not understand.

When the skeleton of this astral fortress was completed the clean bedding was laid out in its centre. The Duke selected Richard to keep first watch so the two of them now went upstairs to change into new night-things while Marie Lou, Simon and Rex made up the bed and blew up one of the spare Li-Los for Richard to sit on.

They had not long finished when the other two returned, de Richleau carrying a glass jug of freshly drawn water. This he set down and charged with Power by placing the first and second fingers of his right hand in a line with his eye so that the invisible force which he was drawing down flowed from it, along his fingers into the water. After the operation, which took some moments, he unpacked further impedimenta from his case. Telling them all to watch his movements carefully, he sealed the windows and a door concealed in the bookshelves, which led to the room above, each at both sides and at the tops and the bottoms, with lengths of asafœtida grass and blue wax, making the sign of the Cross with the charged water over every seal as he completed it. He then produced five little silver cups which he filled two-thirds full with the water and placed one in each valley of the pentacle. Next he took five long, white, tapering candles and set them upright, one at each apex of the five-pointed star. Having charged five brand-new horseshoes he placed these in the rear of the candles with their
horns pointing outwards, and beyond each vase of charged water he set bunches of certain strong-smelling herbs.

These complicated formulas for the erection of outward barriers being at last completed, the Duke turned his attention to his friends.

‘Richard will remain with me until one o'clock,' he said, ‘Simon will relieve him at that hour and remain on duty until four o'clock, Rex will take on then until I wake, which will probably be soon after seven, but he is not to rouse me unless danger threatens; which, of course, also applies to Richard and Simon. You understand that?'

Rex nodded, and the Duke went on: ‘You have all seen how the sealing is done. When you others have left us, Richard will seal the door to the hall, but, naturally, Simon will have to break the seals when he comes in to start his watch, so he will re-seal the door when Richard has gone out and Rex will re-seal it again after he has relieved Simon.'

‘Where do I come in?' asked Marie Lou.

‘You don't, Princess, for the moment.' The Duke smiled. ‘I purposely gave Richard first watch so that he would not disturb you after one o'clock; but I shall certainly need your help later on. We must now see to our personal protection.'

He moved over to his case again and produced some long wreaths of garlic flowers, Rosaries with little golden Crucifixes attached, medals of Saint Benedict, holding the Cross in his right hand and the Holy Rule in his left, and phials of salt and mercury. Having charged the crucifixes and medals he placed one set of this strange regalia about Richard's neck and another round his own while he gave instructions that Richard was to pass his set on to Simon, and Simon to Rex, as they relieved one another.

As the Duke closed his case Richard remarked: ‘It's only just on ten o'clock, so isn't it a bit early to turn in?'

De Richleau shook his head. ‘No. It's impossible to guess what time the Admiral will go to bed. If by chance he was working very late last night, it's quite on the cards that he might turn in early tonight and it's essential that I should be with him when he leaves his body, otherwise I might not be able to recognise him in his spirit form and the whole night would be wasted.'

‘Right-oh, then; off you go, people.' Richard kissed Marie Lou fondly and smiled at the others. ‘I'll be seeing you, Simon, around one o'clock, but if by chance you fall asleep I'll carry on till Rex puts in an appearance.' He flourished some clean sheets of paper and a brand-new pencil. ‘This is just the opportunity I've been waiting for to write an article on substitute foods for poultry in war-time, and as I'm not much of an author it will keep me busy for hours.'

‘You won't get more than three hours,' Simon smiled; ‘I shall be here on the dot of one. You know I never go to bed before two, in any case.'

‘You will tonight, Simon dear,' said Marie Lou firmly, ‘because you must be fresh for your turn of duty, and even if you don't sleep you're to lie down and doze in the dark. I mean to provide both you and Rex with alarm clocks so that you'll wake in good time.'

When Marie Lou, Simon and Rex had left them Richard sealed the main door of the room and made up the fire while the Duke switched out all the lights and lit the five long white candles from an old-fashioned tinder-box. They then both entered the pentacle.

The Duke performed the ceremony of sealing the nine openings of his own body with certain mystic signs and said a short prayer asking for power, guidance and protection upon his astral journey, then got into bed while Richard settled himself on his Li-Lo.

They wished each other good night and the Duke turned over on his side. The silence was broken only by the gentle scratching of pencil on paper, as Richard began his article, and the faint hissing of the fire. De Richleau had said that in this first step there was little likelihood of his running into danger, but Richard was not so sure; the leprous, sacklike Thing, crepitating with horrid laughter, which he had seen in that room in very similar circumstances some years before, had left an indelible impression on his memory. He did not want to start imagining things or to fall asleep, and that was why he had decided to attempt a little article on the extremely prosaic matter of poultry-feeding; it should keep his mind on normal things without being of sufficient interest to distract him from his watch. After
almost every sentence that he wrote he paused to give a swift glance round.

The steady ticking of a clock came faintly from somewhere in the depths of the house. Occasionally a log fell with a loud plop in the grate, then the little noises of the night were hushed and an immense silence, brooding and mysterious, seemed to have fallen upon them. In some strange way it did not seem as though the quiet, octagonal room was any longer a portion of the house. There was something a little unreal about the great chalked pentacle in the centre of which they reposed, with its vessels of charged water, bunches of herbs and horseshoes dotted here and there, but the five long, tapering candles burned with a steady flame so Richard knew that all was well.

The distant clock chimed the half-hour and Richard glanced at the Duke. His body was relaxed and he was breathing evenly. That dauntless spirit had left its mortal case of flesh and had gone out into the Great Beyond upon the strangest mission ever attempted in the Second World War.

As he dropped off to sleep the Duke hovered for a little above his own body, looking down on to it and at Richard quietly writing beside the makeshift bed; then he felt the full strength of his spiritual being fill his astral body and a simple thought was enough to cause him to pass out of the house on his way to London.

In a matter of seconds he was poised above the great, sprawling city. An air-raid was in progress and he paused for a moment to view with interest London as it must appear to a Nazi airman. The broad, curving serpent of the Thames was clearly visible, and that alone was sufficient for him to identify various districts, but away from the river it was clear that the Nazi raiders could make only the vaguest guess as to when they were over their targets except on a night when the moon was particularly bright. The black-out was undoubtedly efficient, since although pin-points of light could be seen as far as the eye could reach in every direction they were no more than glimmers, so that it was impossible to detect any pattern in their dispositions which might have given away the situation of broad thoroughfares, railway-stations or big buildings.

The gunfire was sporadic, but in certain cases the flashes were so bright that for a second they lit the whole area in which the more powerful anti-aircraft batteries were situated. Two largish fires were burning, one in the neighbourhood of Chelsea and another much further down the river, either in Bermondsey or near it, but neither was sufficiently large to give the German bombers much help and in both
cases smoke partially obscured the red glow of the flames. Occasionally there was a bright flash as a bomb exploded on the ground or an anti-aircraft shell in the sky.

One of the latter seemed to tear the air asunder with a frightful ripping sound within a few feet of the Duke, and had he been poised there in his physical body, swinging from a parachute, he would have been blown to ribbons, but, as it was, he did not even feel the faintest shock. While he was still studying the scene a Nazi murder-plane hummed past him and he would have given a very great deal to have been able to strangle its pilot and bring it crashing to earth. He could easily have entered it, but to have done so would have been pointless, since in his spirit body he could not make himself either heard or felt, and to have upset the airman's mentality by bringing psychic force to bear would have been contrary to the Law which has created all things as they are.

At that moment the plane released a heavy bomb and de Richleau, deciding that he must not hang about up there but get on with his own business, dropped swiftly with it to within twenty feet of the dark roof-tops. The bomb struck a block of flats; brick, glass and cement were hurled high into the air and one corner of the block dissolved in flaming ruins. That it had killed several people the Duke knew, as he saw their spiritual bodies rise up from the smoking debris. One—evidently that of a person who in life had been conscious of the hidden truths—gave a shout of joy, which was perceptible to de Richleau, and made off at once, full of happy purpose. The others remained hovering there, forlorn, unhappy and bewildered, evidently not fully understanding yet what had happened to them and that they were dead; but they were not left in that state for long.

Even before the fire-fighters and rescue-squads came clattering into the street below to aid the still living, if there were any such pinned beneath the smoking heap of rubble, the spiritual rescue-squads appeared to aid those from whom life had been stricken. Some, as the Duke knew, were helpers who had no present incarnation, while others of them were just like himself—spirits whose Earthly bodies were sleeping; but there was no means to distinguish which was which. It was part of the duties of the enlightened to
help the unenlightened over to the other side immediately after they had sustained the shock of death, and the Duke himself had often performed such work, leaving his body while he slept to travel in spirit to places where large numbers of people were being wiped out, without warning, through war or great disaster. He would have helped on this occasion had his own business not been urgent and had it not been apparent that ample helpers were already busy leading the bewildered newly dead away.

Although the jumble of dark roof-tops would have been incredibly confusing to the physical eye, the Duke knew not only that he was in Kensington, but his exact whereabouts. Flashing over the great, flattened dome of the Albert Hall he turned north across the Park and, coming down a little, arrived in Orme Square.

His method of travel never failed to give him a pleasurable exhilaration and it is one which most people have experienced from time to time in their dreams. He moved quite effortlessly, as though he was flying some feet above the pavement, with his head held forward and his legs stretched out behind him, but he was not conscious of their having any weight, and was able to direct himself to right or left without any motion at all but by the mere suggestion of his mind.

As he entered the Square he noted that the house on its north-west corner had already been demolished by a bomb; then he suddenly remembered that he did not know where No. 22 was situated and that it would be impossible for him to find it by normal means in the black-out, since he could not ask any policeman or air-raid warden who might be about. However, the matter presented no great difficulty, as by focusing his spiritual retina he could see perfectly clearly in the darkness, and he soon discovered No. 22.

Passing through a curtained window on the ground-floor, he found himself in an unlit dining-room where a number of naval prints decorated the walls. The hall was dimly lit and, adjusting his sight again, he saw that on the hall-stand were a few letters addressed to the Admiral, which satisfied him that he was definitely in the right house. He then drifted, silent and invisible, up the stairs.

The drawing-room was in darkness, so he travelled up
another flight to the best bedroom, which was above it, and there he found an elderly lady, whom he assumed to be the Admiral's wife, sitting up in bed reading. Apparently the Admiral had not yet got home, and after verifying this by a swift inspection of the other rooms, the Duke returned to the bedroom.

He did not sit down in a chair, as he would have done had he been in the flesh, because there was no necessity whatever to rest his limbs, and he remained effortlessly poised near the ceiling, perfectly content to await the Admiral's return. The grey-haired lady was, of course, entirely unaware that a strange presence had entered her bedroom and she continued quietly reading.

For three-quarters of an hour they both remained almost unmoving. Only once, when some bombs crumped in the near distance, the Admiral's wife gave a little wriggle of her shoulders. She was evidently a woman of that fine breed which refuses to admit fear and had decided that if she was to be killed in an air-raid she much preferred that it should be in her own bed rather than in the cold discomfort of the basement.