CHAPTER I

THE DEAD RAPPER


I had known Harry Carthew as a second-year man at Oxford. He never
completed his course or took a degree because family reasons, some
catastrophe of some kind or another--made it imperative for him
to earn a living at once. As an undergraduate he was an ardent
anti-Spiritualist.

He dropped out of sight of our little world and I had only heard of him
casually as having something to do with oil wells in Mexico and had not
come into contact with him for years. I was therefore rather surprised
to receive a letter from him which showed that he was in London and
knew that I was working on research subjects. His letter was couched in
rather non-committal terms, and though he was a man whom I had never
known well, he expressed an anxiety to meet me again and lay before me
certain psychical problems that were puzzling him.

I make it an invariable rule never to discuss psychic matters with
people who are ignorant or sceptical of them, unless the sceptics are
of a class sufficiently educated to be able to appreciate the absolute
facts of the phenomena associated with Spiritualism.

It is impossible to convince a non-scientific person by facts, as
he can never assure himself that the possibility of fraud has been
absolutely eliminated. A scientist or an engineer can assure himself
fairly easily of the genuineness or otherwise of phenomena provided
that he is given every latitude for research. But it is difficult to
convince either a clergyman or an ordinary medical man of the reality
of any psychic phenomena because he is not mentally trained in the
same inexorably logical processes of thought as are the engineers and
scientists.

Experience has taught me to mistrust the man who approaches with
indirect advances to the subject of Spiritualism. I prefer the
definite challenge of a critical journalist who demands facts and
judges on facts, for it is undoubtedly an axiom that the Seeker after
Truth, however sceptical he may be, has no hostile influence in a
properly constituted circle.

It has ever been a matter of regret to me that the mass of
Spiritualists hold the fallacious idea that a sceptical influence can
hinder a séance. For it is not the lack of belief or disbelief of the
one or few sceptics that weakens the influence. It is the mass belief
of the whole circle in the hostile influence of the sceptic that does
the harm.

After thinking matters over I decided that it might be wrong to
prejudice Carthew by his undergraduate views. After all, some years
had passed, and if every Oxford man held to the eccentric habits and
beliefs of his puppy days the world would be a sorry place. I wrote to
him asking him to dine with me at my club during the following week.

He had changed so much that when he entered the smoking room I did not
recognize him. Tropical sunlight had bronzed and wrinkled his skin, his
eyes had the clear hard steel-grey fadedness of the blue iris that
comes to men who have gazed long across deserts. Malaria had thinned
down his form and his hands were big-veined and tremulous with quinine.

Over the meal he told me a good deal about his life abroad, and I
realized something of the deadly loneliness of a white man’s life in
the dull oil fields of Mexico. Four other whites to speak to and for
the rest native peons, Indians and a sprinkling of Chinese coolies.

A bottle of good wine is a splendid lubricant for the human tongue, and
the Burgundy--a “Clos du Poi,” ’84--soon eased him of all awkwardness.
Over the coffee and cigars he came to his point.

“You still go on with Spiritualism, don’t you, Grey?”

“Yes,” I answered him, “but I thought that you did not believe in it.”
His answer almost shocked me with its violence.

“God! but I wish that I did not!” He was silent with emotion for a
moment, then resumed: “You know I never believed in it at the House. I
always thought you fellows were simply running it as a craze, but up
at Los Chicharras--that was the third big oil gusher that the Company
owned--there was a Cornish mining engineer, Bill Tregarthen.

“He was a queer fish, a silent man; squat-shaped, broad as he was long
and full of queer fancies. He had a little planchette board that he
used to consult about everything, and I have seen him sit there in the
patio of the office building with the little jigger dancing about over
reams of paper.

“I thought he was crazy, but he persuaded me to try the thing, _and I
got messages, too_. One day it spelt out a message from Ellen, and
Ellen has been dead for four years--she was my old nurse--Ellen----

“Even then I was only half convinced. One’s brain plays one strange
tricks down there in the Tierra Caliente, and I have seen an upturned
mountain standing on its head in the desert--mirage of course, and I
used to think the planchette mental mirage, subconscious stuff of some
kind--and I didn’t believe.

“Then Tregarthen used to laugh at me for a fool, and one night he
blazed up into a strange bit of rage and stood there in the moonlight
shaking his fist at me. ‘We Cornish folk have known the unwrit lore for
all time,’ said he. ‘Old odd people we are and we know old odd things.
I tell you. I will tell you that I am right when I am dead. You will
not listen to me now, but you shall listen then, indeed.’

“Lots of the stuff he raved at us that night, but I and another man at
last calmed him down and got him off to bed. I thought little enough of
it at the time, and a week later I went back from Los Chicharras to the
Offices at Tampico.

“I suppose it was a month later that I heard the first knock. It was
past midday, right in the heart of the siesta hour. Not a soul moving,
the very dogs silent in the streets, and the whole place a blinding
blaze of sunlight.

“I knew at once--that’s the odd thing about it. _I knew instantly in
my heart that Tregarthen was dead._

“That was six months ago, and since then I keep on hearing the raps.
I know that Tregarthen is keeping his pledge, but I cannot answer him
back; I cannot get into touch with him.

“Now tell me this--with all your knowledge of these things, can you
help me?”

I asked him what he had done, and he told me a long chronicle of visits
to mediums in New York, of an attempt to talk through a voodoo woman
in New Orleans, and of honest, patient sittings in a little suburban
circle in London.

Carthew was clearly desperate and absolutely in earnest. I knew without
his telling me what was at the back of his mind.

The problem was a peculiar one, for here was a live man to all intents
haunted by a malicious spirit now on another plane. Carthew’s character
was a strong one, though of a low and violent type. This mental
persecution had produced a prodigious feeling of hatred for the dead
man--a feeling of hatred that had not existed when he was alive, for
then the hatred was all on Tregarthen’s side.

There was also the possibility that the knock was pure hallucination
and not a genuine clairaudient phenomenon at all.

I asked Carthew if he could give me particulars of how Tregarthen died,
and I was not surprised to learn that his end had been a violent one.

A small oil gusher had broken out as an offshoot from the larger one.
In order to cut off the flow and waste of oil it is the practice to
force a dynamite cartridge into these small leads. This when exploded
breaks the natural channel of the oil and blocks the outlet.

Tregarthen, through an accident or carelessness--he was a deep
drinker--had destroyed himself when preparing the charge.

I asked Carthew if he was prepared to attend a séance or two and if
he would put himself completely in my hands. He assented readily,
reasserting his dominant desire to be able to talk back to Tregarthen.

I was holding private séances twice a week then, but my little circle
was, though powerful enough for research work, quite unsuitable for
dealing with an abnormal case of undesired communication. During
the week I got into touch with a private medium whose faculty of
clairaudience was coupled with an excellent nervous system, and I
reinforced the circle by the addition of Dr. Miller,[1] who, though
not a professed Spiritualist, is no sceptic concerning occult phenomena
and is admittedly one of the most successful practitioners of curative
psychology that we have to-day.

A few days later Carthew came to my chambers in the Temple and was
introduced to the members of the circle. I placed him on the left-hand
contact side of the medium and lowered the lights.

The medium engaged in this case was under double controls, one a spirit
called “Louis,” the other a rather elusive and intermittent control
that answered to the name of “Montecatini.”

The trance state was entered almost immediately and “Louis” took
control. I asked him to find Tregarthen and he showed considerable
reluctance, insisting that he was “not there.” The control “Louis”
was then dispossessed by “Montecatini,” who answered in an entirely
different voice and showed a distinct and separate personality.

“I can find him,” said Montecatini, and almost on the echo of the words
a distinct audible rap came from the ceiling of the room.

Carthew recognized it instantly and flinched as if it were a personal
blow at him.

“Have you got Tregarthen there?” I asked.

“No, they won’t let him come here,” was the answer.

“Why won’t they let him come?”

“Afraid of him.”

“Who is it rapping, then?”

“It’s a sent rap for somebody. I didn’t do it.”

“Who is the rap for?”

“For the brown man.” (Carthew was sunburnt.)

“He wants to speak to the spirit who sends it.”

“He can’t, it’s from a bad spirit.”

“But you said you could find Tregarthen.”

“I have found him, but I can’t bring him.”

“Why not?”

“He is too heavy.”

“What do you mean?”

“Too heavy--too low down--too much hatred.”

“Can’t Louis help you bring him?”

This was answered after a pause by the voice of Louis.

“We will try if you all help--but the brown man is hindering us.”

I then determined to break the circle and set Carthew on a chair
outside. “If you want to get through to Tregarthen,” I told him, “you
must subdue that hatred of yours. I am going to try for Tregarthen by
the direct voice method.”

I placed an ordinary gramophone trumpet on a light table within the
circle, then we rejoined hands and concentrated.

“Can you get Tregarthen now?” I asked.

“Yes, he is coming--but he doesn’t want to come.”

“I want him to speak to us through the trumpet,” I told them.

Almost immediately there were three knocks on the table close by the
trumpet. Then the voice came out of the trumpet, not out of the medium,
but it was the voice of Montecatini.

“He’s a bad spirit and he won’t talk,” said the control.

“Ask him if he knows who’s here?”

“Carthew!” blared the trumpet _in the voice of Tregarthen_.

I heard the crash of Carthew’s chair falling back as he rose, and then
his words:

“Tregarthen--at last!”

The trumpet chuckled at him, a hard sardonic chuckle, and it was a
dreadful thing to hear.

“Stop that, Tregarthen,” I said sharply. “Now listen to me. You must
stop sending these knocks. You have proved to Carthew that you were
right, and for the future there is no sense in it.”

Again the trumpet began to chuckle.

“I want Carthew--here,” said the voice of Tregarthen. “I want him to
keep me company where I am now.”

The medium began to writhe uneasily, and I suddenly realized that
something dangerous had happened. The two normal controls, “Louis”
and “Montecatini,” whom we had sent to fetch Tregarthen’s spirit, had
disappeared _and Tregarthen himself had taken over control_.
Something of a spirit of uneasiness and a general sense of danger began
to spread through the circle.

I called to Carthew to come into the circle again and to cross his
hands, grasping my wrist and Miller’s, so as not to break the chain
when entering.

“Now man!” I told him, “here is your chance. We have Tregarthen here,
and we will help you all we can. You must fight him with the whole of
your will-power. Defy him, raise him to anger, and at the crucial point
I will do something which will destroy his power over you for ever!
Now!”

Carthew’s grip burnt into my wrists as he took hold of himself, and
then all the bitter, dominant hatred that was in the man flamed out.

He stood in the circle towering above us on our chairs and he poured
into that trumpet a breadth of bilingual Spanish and English invective
that would have led to murder anywhere.

He paused for breath and from the trumpet came no chuckle, but a
spluttering, stammering, furious attempt to reply. I had no need to
prompt him to go on. He laced into his ghostly antagonist as if he had
the earthly body there in front of him. All the pent-up hatred of the
past months winged his words. The consciousness of his torment made his
quarrel just, and at the height of his peroration I concentrated the
whole of my psychic energies and made the four exorcism signs of the
martinist ritual, bidding Tregarthen begone, never to return and never
to be able to send a rap, and instantly broke the circle. I then roused
the medium from the trance with a couple of simple passes.

The reaction from the violence of the séance left us all spent and
shaken. The medium recovered, remembering nothing, but feeling
unusually exhausted. Later experiments with her showed that the
domination by the Tregarthen control was purely temporary and that
“Louis” and “Montecatini” had reasserted command.

My own opinion is that nothing but the intense “hate concentration” of
Carthew toward his ghostly antagonist could have enabled Tregarthen to
assume control at all.

It was a duel of wills between the living and the dead, fought over the
narrow no-man’s land of the earth and spirit planes, and I am not sure
that it was not a duel which ended fatally for the soul of Tregarthen.
Carthew at any rate was free of all trouble afterwards, but wild horses
could not drag him to a séance.

Miller was more convinced by this astonishing séance than by far more
material phenomena that he had seen. The following day, though, he sent
me an explanation of the whole affair argued out on his own lines. He
held that Carthew was the subject of an obsession and that the whole
of the phenomena were due to subconscious hypnotism of the medium
alternatively by me as a believer in Spiritualism and by Carthew.

The direct voice he ascribed to unconscious or subconscious
ventriloquism by the medium, and he pointed out that the words uttered
by Tregarthen were precisely what one would expect Carthew to say if
Carthew were in Tregarthen’s place. In other words, we were present at
an amazing duel between Carthew’s conscious mind and an obsession of
his subconscious mind that had built itself into a malignant identity.

It is interesting as a psychological theory, but in point of fact I
hold it to be entirely wrong. We argued it out a good deal together,
but experiments in psychic science can seldom be repeated, and, as
I say, Carthew refused to submit to any further attempt to evoke
Tregarthen.

As a man I sympathize with him, and he was really very grateful to
us--but as a scientist I would have liked to try again in order to
attempt to convince Miller.


FOOTNOTE:

[1] All names of people and places have been changed, but Dr. Miller’s
cures of “shell shock” during the war have shown that one’s estimate of
his powers was perfectly correct.