The vampire nemesis and other weird stories of the China coast by Dolly Read Free Book Online Page A

and I think I understood.

    I told my darling Ethel nothing of these interesting experiments at first, but the subject had such a deep fascination for me that, in order to be able to carry out some lesser investigations at home, I had to take her partially into my confidence. She understood but little of the matter, but what interested me interested her, and she did her best to understand the explanations I vouchsafed. For four nights running I tried, with remarkable success, Mesmer's experiment with the black spot on a white ground. I had my mosquito net lowered until the top was within two feet of my head. To this I affixed a small circle of black velvet, and having first asked Ethel to shake me at a given hour and try if she could wake me, I kept my eyes staring unblinkingly at the black spot.
    " I shook you," she said afterwards, " I screamed into your ear, and rubbed your face with a rough towel. I even," with a mischievous twinkle, "pinched you horribly hard, but not the tiniest bit of notice would you take until early morning.
    The next night, to my satisfaction, I went off in less than five minutes, and the two following ones almost instantaneously.
    But the trances were mere spells of utter oblivion and not nearly so interesting as the experiments I had conducted with Rawdon. Fool! Blind fool that I was! Little did I dream that in thus tampering with my mind I was making the hellish task of Arnold Rawdon easier of accomplishment ! And yet there came to me at times a dim, fleeting suspicion that I was not doing right. A thought woven on the fragile gossamer filaments of fancy that dissolved away ere it could shape itself into words, yet in its going left me filled with a vague disquiet.

    VI.
    It was perhaps this disquietude that prompted me to call one evening after dinner on an old friend of mine—Fred Armstrong. It had been my custom, in my bachelor days, to drop in on him for a smoke and a game of chess, and to discuss the news of the day, touching sometimes on deeper topics. Armstrong belonged to the Idealistic school, and was an ardent follower of Berkley and Hume. He retained, however, sufficient belief in the reality of the existence of matter to be wishful of accumulating a pile of it in the form of gold, in which laudable endeavour he had been by no means unsuccessful. Withal Armstrong was a deeplyread man, and a man who never turned over the page before he had a thorough mastery of its contents. He received me with open avowals of delight.
    "Just the man above all others I should have wished to see ! " he remarked gaily. " I am so glad the wife has consented to spare you for a few hours to lighten the dreary evening of a lone bachelor. I am fairly dying for a game of chess."
    As he spoke he was busily pulling the pieces from a neighbouring drawer and drawing up an inlaid table to the fire.

    I expressed myself in no mood for chess just then; but he would hear of no denial, so we sat down to our game.
    I think I played about the most idiotic game it has been my lot to play since first I learned the moves. I advanced my queen into the most absurdly unprotected positions, until Armstrong had frequently to caution me of her danger. I moved the king into the check fully a dozen times, and scattered my pieces over the board without method or reason. At last, on the first pretence of a serious attack, for the opportunity of which Armstrong had not long to wait, I resigned the game and pushed the board fretfully aside. I was in no fit mood for chess; I found it impossible to concentrate on the pieces the thoughts that were so busy elsewhere.
    We lit our pipes and smoked for awhile in silence; then, " Armstrong, do you believe in hypnotism ? " I asked.
    He looked at me in silence. I repeated my question.
    " Why, of course I do. It is one of the forces of nature, just as much as gravity or electricity."
    " And yet," I remonstrated, " science takes no cognisance of it."
    " Science," quoted Armstrong sententiously,