Algernon Blackwood

“ It was Aileen, with bare feet, her dark hair tumbling down over her nightgown, her eyes wide open, an expression in them of anguished expectancy that her tender years could never possibly have known. She was walking steadily, yet somehow not quite as a child walks.
“Stop!” I whispered peremptorily to my cousin, putting my hand quickly over her mouth, and holding her back from the first movement of rescue, “don’t wake her. She’s walking in her sleep.” ”

“ Then she added frankly, looking up with grave eyes into my face, “George, I want your help⁠—your best help, please. You’ve always been a true friend.”
I gave it to her in calculated words.
“Theresa,” I said with grave emphasis, “there is no trace of insanity on either side of the family, and my own opinion is that Aileen is perfectly well-balanced in spite of this too highly developed imagination. But, above all things, you must not drive it inwards by making fun of it. Lead it out. Educate it. Guide it by intelligent sympathy. ”

“ I remember my cousin’s face of chalk with the fluttering eyes and the candle held aslant.
Then suddenly she raised her hand and pointed over my shoulder. I thought her jaw would drop from her face. And she and the child both spoke in the same breath the two sharp phrases that brought the climax of the vile adventure upon us in that silent room of night.
They were like two pistol-shots.
“My God! There’s a face watching us⁠ ⁠... !” I heard her voice, all choked and dry.
And at the same second, Aileen⁠—
“Oh, oh! He’s seen us!⁠ ⁠... He’s here! Look.⁠ ⁠... He’ll get me⁠ ⁠... ”

“ With a month’s wages in his pocket, and a considerable degree of wonder in his soul, probably⁠—for the man was guilty of nothing worse than innocently terrifying a child’s imagination!⁠—he went back to London the following day; and a few hours later I myself was travelling with Aileen and old Kempster over the blue waves of the North Sea, carrying her off, curiously enough, to freedom and happiness in the very way her “imagination” had pictured her escape in the “story” of long ago, when she was Lady Helen, held in bondage by a cruel husband, and I was Philip, her devoted lover. ”

“ Her hands resisted the pressure of my own; she drew back half a step; into her eyes rose the shallower consciousness of the present. Once awake it would drive out the profoundly strange passion and mystery that haunted the corridors of thought and memory and plunged so obscurely into the inmost recesses of her being. For, once awake, I realized that I should lose her, lose the opportunity of getting the complete story. The chance was unique. I heard my cousin’s footsteps approaching behind us down the passage on tiptoe⁠—and I came to an immediate decision. ”

“ They’re big enough still and strong enough to carry you off to bed and stroke you into so deep a sleep that when you wake in the morning you will have forgotten everything about your dark story, about Philip, Lady Helen, the iron belt, the starvation, your cruel old husband, and all the rest of it. ”

“ I was afraid to show too much sympathy lest the tears should come.
“Oh, George,” she exclaimed, “I am relieved you have come. You are really strong and comforting. To feel your great hands on my shoulders gives me courage. But, you know, truly and honestly I am frightened out of my very wits by the child⁠—”
“You won’t stay here, of course?”
“We leave at the end of this week,” she replied. “You will not desert me till then, I know. And Aileen will be all right as long as you are here, for you have the most extraordinary effect on her for good.”
“Bless her little suffering imagination,” I said. ”

“ But another discovery I made, and kept to myself, had to do with that “room of terror” in the old Norfolk house where, on the plea of necessary renovation, I had the stones removed, and in the very spot where Aileen used to beat her hands against the bricks and “talk to the wall,” the workmen under my own eyes laid bare the skeleton of a woman, fastened to the granite by means of a narrow iron band that encircled the waist⁠—the skeleton of some unfortunate who had been walled-up alive and had come to her dreadful death by the pangs of hunger, thirst and suffocation centuries ago. ”

“ My cousin sat opposite to me in a deep arm chair. We had discussed the matter pretty fully, and the deep uneasiness we felt clothed not alone our minds but the very building with gloom. The fact that, instinctively, neither of us referred to the possible assistance of doctors is eloquent, I think, of the emotion that troubled us both so profoundly, the emotion, I mean, that sprang from the vivid sense of the reality of it all. No child’s make-believe merely could have thus caught us away, or spread a net that entangled our minds to such a point of confusion and dismay. ”

“ She stared at the very place where in olden days the corridor had led into the vanished wing. The window my great-uncle had built into the wall now occupied the exact spot where the opening had been.
Theresa then for the first time came forward with a rush into the room, dropping the candle-grease over the floor. She clutched me by the arm. The three of us stood there⁠—listening⁠—listening apparently to nought but the sighing of the sea-wind about the walls, Aileen with her eyes buried in my coat. I was standing erect trying in vain to catch the new sound. ”

“ That fear chased both of us down the winding path between the bushes.
“Aileen, darling,” I cried, surrounding her with both arms and holding her very tight, “you need not be afraid. I’ll always save you. I’ll always be with you, dear child.”
“Keep me in your big arms, always, always, won’t you, Uncle⁠—Philip?” She mixed both names. The choking stress of her voice wrung me dreadfully. “Always, always, like in our story,” she pleaded, hiding her little face again in my coat. ”

“ Were I a painter I might put her upon canvas in some imaginary portrait and call it, perhaps, “Reincarnation”⁠—for I have never seen anything in child-life that impressed me so vividly with that odd idea of an old soul come back to the world in a new young body⁠—a new Suit of Clothes. ”

“ And I, meanwhile, had reached the point where I had persuaded myself that the experiment I had hitherto felt unable to consent to had now become a permissible, even a necessary one. Hypnotism should win the story from that haunted mind without her being aware of it, and provided I could drive her deep enough into the trance state, I could then further wipe the memory from her outer consciousness so completely that she might know at last some happiness of childhood. ”

“ Thus she was still open to any detail of her former suffering that might obtrude itself with sufficient force. And such a detail did obtrude itself. This touch of abomination was calculated with a really superhuman ingenuity.
“Hark!” she cried⁠—and it was that scream in a whisper that only utter terror can produce⁠—“Hark! I hear his steps! He’s coming! Oh, I told you he was coming! He’s in that passage!” pointing down the room. And she first sprang from my arms as though something burned her, and then almost instantly again flew back to my protection. ”

“ Yet the strange thing was that Aileen, struggling violently to bury herself amid the scanty folds of my coat, could not possibly have seen what we saw, for her face was turned from the window the entire time, and from the way I held her she could never for a single instant have been in a position to know. It all took place behind her back.⁠ ⁠... A moment later, with her eyes still hidden against me, I was carrying her swiftly in my arms across the hall and up the main staircase to the night nursery. ”

“ Clearly it gave her a certain relief to say the things and get them out of her mind where they hid, breeding new growths of abhorrence.
“George,” she cried aloud, “there’s a limit to imagination. Aileen knows. That’s the awful thing⁠—.”
Something sprang into my throat. My eyes moistened.
“The horror of the belt⁠—” she whispered, loathing her own words. ”

“ Then, after a further pause, in which my cousin’s distress and my own affectionate interest in the whimsical imagination of my little niece combined to move me, I tried again⁠—
“Make-believe,” I observed, “is always a bit puzzling to us older folk, because, though we indulge in it all our lives. We no longer believe in it; whereas children like Aileen⁠—”
She interrupted me quickly⁠—
“You know what I feel anxious about,” she said, lowering her voice. “I think there may be cause for serious alarm.” ”

“ My mind was easily made up on one point, however.
“I’ll send him away at once, Aileen,” I told her. “When you wake up tomorrow he’ll be gone. Of course mother won’t keep him.”
This assurance seemed to bring her some measure of comfort, and at last, without having dared to win the whole story from her as I had first hoped, I got her back to the house by covert ways, and saw her myself upstairs to her own quarters. Also I took it upon myself to give the necessary orders. She must set no eye upon the man. ”

“ It was perfectly comprehensible to me now that my cousin should have cried in very helplessness before the convincing effects of the little girl’s calamitous distress. Aileen was living through a Reality, not an Invention. ”

“ Oh, her fear is dreadful, poor child. Her face gets that sort of awful grey, don’t you know? Even Kempster, who if anything is too firm, had to give in.”
“And what else, pray?” I disliked hearing these details intensely. It made me ache with a kind of anger that I could not at once relieve the child’s pain.
“The way she spoke to me after Dr. Hale had left⁠—you know how awfully kind and gentle he is, and how Aileen likes him and even plays with him and sits on his knee? ”

“ That, and my cousin’s pale visage of alarm, combined to shake me. I said, however, what seemed wise and reasonable at the moment.
“You’ll be claiming next, Theresa, that the house is haunted,” I suggested.
She shrugged her shoulders with an indifference that was very eloquent of the strength of this other more substantial terror.
“That would be so easy to deal with,” she said, without even looking up. “A ghost stays in one place. Aileen could hardly take it about with her.” ”

“ In the state of deep sleep, of course, the trance condition is very close, and many experiments had taught me that the human spirit can be subjected to the influence of hypnotism far more speedily when asleep than when a wake; for if hypnotism means chiefly⁠—as I then held it to mean⁠—the merging of the little ineffectual surface-consciousness with the deep sea of the greater subliminal consciousness below, then the process has already been partially begun in normal slumber and its completion need be no very long or difficult matter. ”

“ Isn’t that his footsteps in the corridor?” She listened fearfully, her eyes trying to pierce the wall and see out on to the lawn.
“No one is coming, dear heart,” I said, with conviction and authority. “Tell it all. Tell me everything.”
“I saw the whole of it because I could not close my eyes,” she continued. “There was an iron band round my waist fastening me in⁠—an iron belt I never could escape from. The dust got into my mouth⁠—I bit the bricks. ”

“ I Imaginative children with their odd questionings of life and their delicate nervous systems must be often a source of greater anxiety than delight to their parents, and Aileen, the child of my widowed cousin, impressed me from the beginning as being a strangely vivid specimen of her class. ”

“ I hope I never may again.
“He hangs about rather,” was all my cousin said presently. “He’s always watching us⁠—” But my own thoughts were horribly busy, and I was marvelling how it was this ugly and sinister creature had ever come to be accepted in the story that Aileen lived, and that I was slowly coming to believe in.
It was a relief to me when, towards midnight. Theresa rose to go to bed. ”

“ But the tears came the same instant in a flood that made any intelligent explanation out of the question. The terror of the mother for her own blood burst forth.
“I’m frightened⁠—horribly frightened,” she said between the sobs.
“I’ll go up and see the child myself,” I said comfortingly at length when the storm had subsided. “I’ll run up to the nursery. You mustn’t be alarmed. Aileen’s all right. I think I can help you in the matter a good deal.”
II In the nursery as usual Aileen was alone. I found her sitting by the open window, an empty chair opposite to her. ”

“ It was Aileen’s very active subconsciousness that “invented” or “remembered” the dark story which haunted her life, her subconscious region too readily within tap.⁠ ⁠... By deepening her sleep state I could learn the whole story. ”