The Satanist by Dennis Wheatley Read Free Book Online

said that the seventh child of a seventh child is often endowed in this way; and Lothar and I stood in this relation to my mother, who had been a seventh child. She, too, was psychic to some degree. To a limited extent she could see things in a crystal and tell fortunes by cards, and she had had several death warnings that proved true foreknowledge of the event. But her psychic faculties were not so highly developed as those of Lothar and myself.
    We could assess people’s characters by the colour of the auras round their heads, which are invisible to the great majority of persons, but were perfectly visible to us. We
had hunches about matters which would affect ourselves that invariably proved correct, and could often foretell good or ill fortune that would come to our friends.
    We could ‘see’ things. Our first experience of this was when we were quite young, and was the spirit-form of a dog with which we used to play, without thinking there was anything strange about it, in our bedroom at night. Later we saw several ghosts, and for that reason neither of us would ever pass a cemetery after dark, although in due course we found out that ghosts are more generally pathetic than malignant.
    These psychic faculties came to us quite naturally. When young we accepted them as normal and made no special effort to develop them, except in one particular; this was the ability to hypnotise. Both of us possessed it, but Lothar in a much greater degree than myself; perhaps because from the beginning he used to practise on me. To incite me to do ordinary things in this way was, of course, easy, because without any special effort he was able to convey to me his thoughts. But the test of his powers came when he willed me to do things that I was naturally averse to doing. Often he failed, but he was extraordinarily persistent and gradually he gained an ascendancy over me in all things except matters about which I felt particularly strongly.
    Lothar and I were both clever and ambitious: We did well at school and later secured degrees with honours in maths and chemistry at the University of Chicago. Our father had been a young professor of mathematics at Leipzig before he decided to emigrate, and afterwards held a post as a senior examiner in the employ of the Chicago Schools Board. In our early days we owed a lot to his private tuition but in due course we entered fields which were beyond his sphere, and after we had taken our finals promising careers were open to both of us.
    I secured a well-paid appointment with Weltwerk Schonheim Inc., the big industrial chemists, but Lothar, to most people’s surprise – as such posts are not well paid – accepted a junior professorship at the University. His
reason for doing so was, however, no secret from me. Beyond all things he loved power; and whereas had he gone into industry he would, for some years at least, have had to knuckle under to his seniors, by becoming a professor he at once achieved a position in which he was able to dominate and mould the minds of a group of mostly intelligent young people.
    In the mid-1930s, while still in our ‘teens, we had both become members of the Youth Corps of the Deutscher Bund, which was particularly strong in Chicago and was then rapidly expanding there, owing to the vigorous activities of a group of pro-Nazis. Lothar rapidly became prominent among them and by the time the war broke out in Europe, our age then being twenty-one, he was recognised as one of its leaders
    Naturally our sympathies were with Germany, but Lothar felt much more strongly on the matter than I did. He threw himself into a campaign aimed at giving Germany all the help that was possible; whereas my attitude was isolationist, and I maintained that as American citizens we ought to use such influence as we possessed to keep the United States strictly neutral.
    In America the repercussions of Pearl Harbour were terrific. Isolationism disappeared overnight and almost to a man the