Weird Tales volume 42 number 04 (13 page)

"Years later, I traced, by exhaustive trial and error, the cause of another haunting— in a residential house on Putney Common —to the presence of (of all things!) a paper-fastener. A triangular one. I took careful measurements of this, and compared them with the dimensions of that remembered prism. I knew I had hit upon something when I found that its angles—though not the area enclosed by them—corresponded absolutely exactly with the angles of one of the (naturally) triangular ends of the prism, the end I had broken.

"I'm afraid I didn't keep my evidence long. I was so troubled by 'dreams and visions' as long as it was in my possession that I was finally driven to bending it out of shape. That made it harmless. A simple little action like that.

"But I found plenty of confirmatory evidence. That haunted riverside bungalow at Teddington: I removed and destroyed one of those common triangular shelf brackets, and got the credit for exorcising the spirits! Do you know why Burlham Rectory is still known as 'the most haunted house in Britain"? Because I couldn't get permission to attack a beam completing a triangle of one of the gables!

"I tell you, you've only got to look around any of these 'haunted' houses, and know what you're looking for, and you'll find the cause of the trouble sooner or later. It may be a fortuitous triangle of scratches on the

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-hanger, or even the side of a pepper-pot! But it's always there.

"When I was making researches into the history of the Pythagoreans, I found the secret was known to them centuries before the time of Christ, only they mistook the pentagram for the cause and not just the triangle contained therein. They used to practice the rites of raising these unpleasant apparitions, and then conquering them by destroying the sign. They felt purified by the struggle with evil and uplifted by the symbolic victory over it. I'm not sure, though, that they always had the victory . . .

c Naturally, they kept these dark secrets from common men, but the people gradually got wind of it, feared and hated them as sorcerers and tried to expunge them. The persecution reached its height in the middle of the 5th century B.C.; everywhere the meeting houses of the Pythagoreans were burned down and any Pythagoreans found there slain.

"You're probably wondering why a particular kind of triangle should cause such phenomena, anyway. So am I. I'm still investigating.

"My own theory at the moment goes like this: Firstly, these devils and demons which appear have no material existence, and, in fact, no existence at all— outside your otw mind! They exist in our unconscious mind, memories we are born with, handed down from our most primitive ancestors.

"Do you remember when you were a child, alone in your own bedroom, trying to sleep, those uneasy times when you imagined you saw faces—nasty, glare-eyed, frightening faces—in the darkness of your room? And when you shut your eyes to escape them, there they were behind your eyelids, clearer than ever? They are the things our terror dreams are built upon.

"Children see them more than we do, for the imagination is so much more active in childhood. In adults it gradually grows moribund and we become creatures of habit. But very sensitive and imaginative people, who live more in their unconscious mind than their conscious one, the introverts, still see them.

"Very sensitive and imaginative people,

I repeat—like artists, poets, composers . . . like Blake, Shelley, Schumann. You

the idea? 'The musk-tbe dreamers of dreams.'

"Far more strongly than extrove: . terialistic people—I can't imagine business men having much troubl their pentagrams, even if by a remote chance they hit upon a Pythagorean one—they react to this touchstone of a triangle. It acts as a sort of gateway through which seep ever more strongly the images and ; waves of the unconscious, until they tlood over and submerge the conscious mind altogether. And when that happens to a man we say he is mad. The conscious mind weighs and judges, it is our critical faculty, it keeps us in balanced relation to the material world. But when it is gone, we are helpless. We will believe in anything that our unconscious mind believes in, for that wholly possesses us now.

"Why haven't all great men, like Beethoven, Shakespeare, da Vinci, gone mad? Why only a small proportion? I anticipate your questions. Well, simply because they never happened to come into juxtaposition with one of these triangles. But the ones I have listed, and many others that I have not, must have had that triangle somewhere about their houses. Or, quite conceivably, within their own physical body—a bone structure or vein formation or some such freak effect.

"It seems that physical vision of the triangle is not necessary. Extra-sensory perception is pretty firmly established, and I am inclined to believe that the design is perceived extra-sensorily if it is close at hand. It seems to exert an hypnotic effect on the subject's mind, but in just what manner is yet to be discovered. What are thought-waves, anyway, and may not they react only against certain designs, as a certain design of antenna? is needed to catch television waves? Come to that, what is imagination?

"It is because you are a writer and therefore have some amount of imagination that I sent you my little pu22le—and pentagram. It should have had some amusing results, However, I don't think they will have been

WEIRD TALES

harmful— I had read your books and assessed the quality of your imagination, and I don't think you need fear the fate of the writers I have mentioned.

"After all, once you fully realize that these phantoms only emerge from your own mind, it should—

THE letter ended there, in mid-sentence, which I thought a little odd.

This was the first I had heard of Spencer carrying out practical investigation of haunt-ings—any sort of action seemed so unlike him. Had he been called away to one now, I wondered?

If Spencer had judged the quality of my imagination solely from my books, he was at fault. I'm not nearly so matter-of-fact as the style of those books suggests. That style is a pose to cover up an almost morbid sensitivity. I may not be as highly-strung as were any of the writers Spencer had listed, but I certainly didn't think last night's results "amusing," and I shouldn't have lied to predict the outcome if I hadn't destroyed the pentagram in time.

No, when Spencer returned, he was going to find that in me he had reaped a whirlwind.

Meanwhile, I would give him another half-hour before I went and had lunch.

I sat down pondering upon the incredible revelations of the letter. Yet from my independent experience, I could not doubt the truth of them.

I wondered whether it was possible to cure cases of madness caused that way. There was a chance of—

At that moment I caught sight of something that sent an electric shock through me. The sole of a shoe, just under Spencer's large bed, partially hidden by the carelessly flung bedclothes. And this sole was balancing upright on its toe, a position impossible unless that shoe contained a human foot. There was somebody lying face-downwards under the bed.

I had to force myself to go over and investigate. It was Spencer, as I had feared, and he was dead. He had forced himself under the bed as far as his bulk would allow, and I had a strenuous time getting

him out—there was a sort of horrible lu-

dicrousness about those efforts.

But when I saw his face I didn't think there was anything in the least funny about it. Both mouth and eyes were wide open. (Something about the countenance reminded me of the cast in the Pompeii Museum of the poor unfortunate who was suffocated in terror beneath the ashes of the eruption which buried his city.) And the irises of the eyes were turned slightly in and upwards like those of a man in an apoplectic fit. It was a ghastly effect.

And I knew he had been seeking refuge in a blinding animal fear from something which had literally scared the life out of him. Poor Spencer—what an impossible and ridiculous refuge he had flown to! What awful presence had unbalanced such a scholarly mind, broken such a firm character, made a tragic clown out of such a mature and wise man?

Of course, according to his own theory he would be very susceptible to these frightening visions from the unconscious, because he lived so largely in the recesses of his own mind and was usually more than semi-oblivious to his surroundings and his company.

Yes, his own discovery must have destroyed him.

And then I was struck by an appalling realization. This couldn't have happened without the imminent presence of that terrible triangle. It must still be somewhere about, in all probability somewhere in this room.

If I weren't careful . . , ! Panic thoughts chased about in my brain. I attempted to get a grip upon myself. I stood up. It was quite obvious what I must do—I must go straight away and inform the police.

Was that something moving over there by the door?

TT7HETHER it was or not, fear suddenly VV closed in upon my soul. I felt sick in the stomach, and my whole body began to tremble. A secondary reaction from last night's horror now joined forces with the shocks of these fresh discoveries. Images of the triangle I feared kept trying to shape

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61

in my too lively imagination. I fought to keep it out of my mind.

"I must get out of here, I must get out of here," I was muttering to myself. I essayed a rather shaky step towards the door, and then stopped with an indrawn gasp as though a bucket of very cold -water had been thrown over me.

Between the door and myself stood a tall, yet slightly hunched, creature out of the worst of my childhood nightmares. A mad drooling thing, with a face rotten with corruption, with dead blinkless eyes that seemed to be gazing past me and yet I knew that they were not: in reality, the thing's whole attention was upon me. But it was not an intelligent attention. It was the unthinking, unreflecting, but blindly eager attention of the slavering and snuffling village idiot who slowly and deliberately pulls the legs off a spider or takes a knife to a captive sparrow and works unimaginable cruelties upon it.

And this thing was after me.

Cold sweat broke out upon me.

My conscious mind was hammering away: "It isn't real. It isn't real. It won't hurt you. It's just your own imagination. You're becoming hypnotized. Break the spell. Look away."

I dragged my eyes from it, and my gaze fell full upon Spencer lying dead at my feet, on his back, his queer eyes seeming to strive to see his own forehead. With a sob, I stumbled across him , and gained the fireplace. I dung to the mantel-shelf, still keeping my gaze averted from the direction of the door.

The stained coffee pot on the hearth was —looking up at me. It had become a face, with a grotesque spout of a nose—it was one of the leering faces I had seen last night.

With a quite uncalculated action, like a reflex kick, I lifted it violently with the toe of my shoe and it went smashing into frag-against the farther wall.

That was an unexpected relief. In sudden hope I dared a glance towards the door.

But the slobbering, staring thing was as real and as potentially murderous as ever. It had advanced considerably towards me,

and now I could see details of it that I wished I could not. Its dead-white hands were reaching out ready to clutch and grip. It seemed inexorably sure of itself. And, adding to my terror, it moved with absolute soundlessness. If it breathed, I could not hear it. It approached me like an image from an old silent nln% a moving shadow.

"It is a shadow," said one part of my mind. "Only a shadow that you are throwing."

And another voice was shouting, "The window! Escape by the window!"

And another voice was saying, "The window is jammed. You can't open it."

My mind was a roaring confusion of divided impulses, all overridden by the dominating rush of fear.

I knew that it was disintegrating. That my conscious mind was going to pieces under the strain, and when that salivating horror got me I should go screaming mad. As others had gone mad.

I made one last desperate effort to clear a space in that chaos in which to think connectedly.

The triangle. This was all happening through the medium of the triangle. I must find it. There was not a moment to lose. I must destroy it.

Quick, where— what —could it be?

Was it a bracket of that pipe rack? I tore it down and smashed it. But without looking, I knew that I was still pursued.

God, there were a thousand things in this room that might contain it!

I went through a biief fury of breaking every suspicious thing I could lay my hands upon, within my limited radius. But still I was forced to retreat, until I was pressing against the desk in the far corner from the door and, shaking like a paralytic, I could retreat no further.

I think I was beginning to scream voice-lessly as I scrabbled in mad desperation among the books and papers on the desk, my eyes literally bulging with anxiety in their baffled search for something triangular.

In one convulsive sweep I shot a whole heap of the clutter from the desk. It revealed the blotting pad that pile had cov-

WEIRD TALES

ered. In the center of the blotting pad was a familiar outline in green ink. The pentagram.

I knew it was what I sought. I pounced on it like a wild animal and ripped it across. And ripped again. Then I turned around weakly with the pieces in my hand.

The thing which had almost had its fingers on my throat was gone.

I began to chuckle feebly, and kept tearing the blotting pad across and across again, tossing the small pieces in the air; they fluttered to the floor like a miniature stage snowstorm.

Like Wellington after Waterloo, I kept saying to myself: "A near run thing! A near run thing!"

And all because of the fact that when

old Spencer had drawn so carefully that representation of the pentagram he sent me, he had blotted it on his pad, and never noticed that he had left a perfect reproduction of those dangerous angles among his papers.

That was his undoing. I suppose. I suppose he was frightened to death.

The doctor diagnosed coronary thrombosis, and the coroner saw fit to agree with him. Sometimes these days I catch myself trying to agree with him, too. It is human to rationalize.

But I do know that I am never under any conditions, going to play about with any triangles that include one angle of 36° 47' 29". In fact, I am allergic to triangles of any kind.

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