CHAPTER VI
THE MIND SET FREE
I did not faint, and in a moment I felt better. My vision cleared; the room regained almost its normal aspect. But the nausea persisted. I felt a desire to lie down. Will was sitting erect, but beyond him I saw Bee lying on her side, facing us. I reclined on one elbow, holding up my head that I might look around me.
The faintness was gone. The sweat of weakness was upon me, my forehead cold and clammy; but I could feel my heart beating strongly. When was the change to start? It seemed ages since I had taken those pellets.
Then I heard the hum. It sounded as though apart from me; but I knew it was not for I could feel it. A vibration. Not of my knitted suit; a vibration within me; within the very marrow of my bones.
My gaze was fixed upon the table across the room. Its outlines were very sharp and clear, unnaturally so, with that sharpness of detail which sometimes comes to the vision of one who is ill. Now they began to blur—an unsteadiness as though I were looking through waves of heat. Had the change started? I raised my hand, examined it. No change, save that the receding blood had made it a little pale.
The nausea was now leaving me. A sense of relief, of triumph that I was not ill, possessed me. With every alert faculty I determined to remark my sensations.
The vibration within me grew stronger, though to my ears it was unaltered. And then, abruptly the change began. My whole being was quivering. Not my muscles, my flesh, my nerves, but the very matter which composed them suddenly made sensible to my consciousness. The essence of me, trembling, quivering, vibrating—a tiny force, rapid beyond conception. It swept me with a tingling; grew stronger, possessed me until for a moment nothing of my consciousness remained but the knowledge of it.
Frightening, horrible. But the horror passed. Again my brain and vision cleared. My whole being was humming; and then I realized that I could no longer hear the hum, merely felt it. The knowledge of sound, not the sound itself. And an exhilaration was coming to me. A sense of lightness. My body growing lighter, less ponderable. But it was far more than that. An exhilaration of spirit, as though from me shackles of which I was newly conscious, were melting away. A lightness of being. A freedom.... A new sense of freedom, frightening with the vague wild triumph it brought.... Frightening too, for in the background of my mind was the realization that all my physical perceptions were dulling. My elbow was resting sharp against the rough mattress. I dragged my arm a trifle; and dull, far away as though detached from me, I could faintly feel it. I moved my leg. It was not numb. The reverse, it was thrilling in its every fibre. It moved, but I could only feel it move as in a dream. I even wondered if I felt it move at all. Was it not, perhaps, only my knowledge that it moved?
Abruptly I became aware that the table across the room had changed. My mental faculties, with all this morbid change of the physical taking place about them, were still alert. I had vaguely expected the table, the room, the visible, material objects of the realm I was leaving, to remain unaltered of aspect. But they did not. The table had lost its color; a monochrome of greyness possessed it. The table, the chairs, the whole room, had turned flat and grey. Flat of tone; and flat of dimensions as well. The flat printed picture of a room.
But in a moment even that had changed. The grey outlines of the table were dim and blurred; the grey substance of it, no longer dull and opaque, seemed growing luminous. Faintly phosphorescent. Translucent, then transparent. Through the table leg, through the wavering grey image of the room-wall, I saw opening up to me the vast darkness of an abyss of distance. A phantom room in which I lay. The shadow of a room hovering in empty space.
There was no horror within me now. That thrilling sense of lightness, that vague unreasoning triumph of loosened shackles had no thought of horror; and to me came a faint contempt for this phantom room, these imponderable shadows which once had been solid chairs and walls.
Then I heard Will's voice. "The battery! Turn off your current, Rob!"
Heard his voice? I believe I barely heard it—physically a thin wraith of human voice striking my ear-drums. Yet, mingled with that realization, was the sense that he was speaking quite normally. With my mind's ear, the memory of his normal voice made me hear his hurried, anxious admonition. "Turn off your battery. Rob! Rob!"
My battery. Of course, the moment had arrived when I must turn it off. I glanced down at it. A shadowy, unreal, phantom battery lying beside me; my grey hand resting upon it seemed to my vision far more ponderable. And then I received my first real perception as to the nature of this change. My fingers groped for the switch, found it. But this shadow battery, of which even then I was dimly contemptuous, was solid beyond all solidity of which I had ever formed conception. My fingers fumbling with it—dulled as were my physical sensations, I could feel those fingers groping as though the adamant steel of that switch were penetrating them. A feeling indescribable—uncanny, morbidly horrible, though the incident was so brief the horror scarce had time to reach my confused consciousness. My fingers, not the battery, were shadow—half-ponderable fingers, feeling their way within the solid steel of that tiny switch. For a terrifying instant I thought I could not move it. Then—it moved; the current was off. I sank back, exhausted of spirit with the effort. But at once Will's voice aroused me.
"Disconnect the wires. Can you do it, Rob? Quickly—or it will be too late."
I fumbled for the wires; cast them off—gigantic cables they might have been to the futile wraiths of my fingers. Will helped me, I think; and at last I was free, lying back upon the mattress. Dimly I could feel it beneath me, my thrilling, vibrating body resting upon it as though I were a feather newly drifted down.
Moments passed; I do not know how long, I could not have told for my thoughts were winging away unfettered, untrammelled as in a dream.... A dream ... the past, the present—all of it savoured of a vaguely pleasant unreality.
And presently I realized that I was moving; my body—could I indeed call this vanished consciousness of the physical, a body?—my being was floating, drifting gently downward, I could no longer feel the mattress; I saw it—a blurred, grey, transparent shadow, coming upward. Beside me, within me; then over me as I sank through it a foot or two and came to rest.
Beneath me now, there was a dull sensation. I could feel myself lying upon something apparently solid. Feel it? The feeling was barely physical; rather was it a mere knowledge that I was lying there.
I tried to keep my scattering thoughts together. It was an effort to hold them—an effort to think coherently; an effort to cling to anything—even mental—of reality. I told myself that the change must be nearly complete. I was the spectre; this phantom mattress, this wraith of a room—those ghost-like chairs and table floating in space above me—that was my own real world, lost and gone.
A silence had fallen. The hum within me no longer sounded. It was a shock to see that little phantom clock; the movement of its pendulum was visible, but its ticking heart gave no sound. A preternatural silence hung like a grey shroud over a universe of shadows. Then I heard Will's soundless voice—heard it clearly now with the knowledge that it was wholly mental, a transference of thought which only my imagination and memory endowed with a familiar physical timbre.
"Rob. Come back to us! Hold your thoughts. Stay here with us."
And Bee's imploring voice, "We are here, Rob. All here together. Sit up—look at us—speak to us."
Was I indeed, nothing now but a mind? Were my thoughts all that remained of me? I fought for reality; for stability; fought for anything real that I could clutch, to which desperately I might cling. Where were Will and Bee? Somewhere here in the shadows. An abyss of shadows everywhere. I thought I could see a thousand miles into that pregnant darkness. I could wander in it at will; my thoughts could wander everywhere.
But I must have conquered, for I found myself sitting up, with Bee and Will beside me.
"There, that's better." I felt the relief in Will's tone. "Hold yourself firm—you'll be used to it in a moment. It's strange, isn't it?"
Strange; scarce have I words—and even those I choose are almost futile—to picture what I saw and felt. The world I had left lay all about me—dim, transparent shadows of familiar things. The room of Will's house—we were sitting just below the level of its floor. Around the room—above it, to one side of it—the phantom house itself was visible. Beyond the house, the gardens, the sombre ghosts of trees standing about—a shadowy semblance of the winding village street—other houses—a hill in the distance—
Mingled with all these shadows—the reality I had left—was the reality in which now I existed. The Borderland, we had been calling it. A vast realm of luminous darkness. A rolling slope upon which we were sitting—a slope, something newly tangible at least, which I could vaguely see and vaguely feel beneath me. A realm of pregnant darkness, filled with the shadows of the world I had left; and filled also with things as yet unseen—things as yet unthought.... The realm of unthought things....
Will's voice seemed saying, "So strange—but you'll be used to it presently."
I turned to regard him and Bee—these spectres like myself, sitting beside me. What did I see? What was their aspect to this new mind's eye which was mine? I cannot say. I think now that my intelligence saw the intelligence which was theirs, and clothed it out of habit with a semblance of substance for a body—familiar of outline and form since there was no other aspect I could conceive. I saw—or thought I saw, which perhaps is quite the same—luminous grey ghosts of my companions as last I had seen them. Of themselves they appeared not transparent. Through them the spectral walls of the room were not visible; of everything around me, the bodies of my friends seemed the most real.
Will was smiling at me reassuringly. Bee's gaze was affectionate. Their voices, save that I knew I heard no sound, seemed not abnormal. I spoke. It was like thinking words with moving lips. But they heard me; not to read my lips, but to hear my thoughts. Heard with a result quite normal, for they nodded and smiled and answered me.
Then Will touched me; experimentally with a smile, he laid his hand upon my arm. It was not unreal, save that only dimly, as though my senses were dulled, could I feel him. Yet there was a weight to his grip. His tenuous ghostly fingers (as I would have counted them in my former state) were not ghostly of grip to me now. His fingers, my arm, were identical of substance. His fingers could not occupy the space with me; they were ponderable, real, with a dulled reality which gave me at last something to cling to; brought my scattering thoughts together. I was here—Robert Manse; alive—living, breathing—sitting beside my friends. From that moment a measure of the strangeness left me and took to itself the externals only. I was real; Bee and Will were real; it was only the things around us which were strange. The body which momentarily I seemed to have lost, was restored to me. A sense of the physical; dulled of perception, but still a body to house my mind. To house it—yet not to hold it firmly. A body which now was not a prison; shackles fallen away. Yet there was a danger to that. Already I had tasted of it—for the mind, too free, is difficult to control.
I was saying, "I'm—all right.... I was dreaming—I got confused."
Bee said whimsically, "We're here. Will, there is so much I want to ask you—"
"Not now, Bee." His voice was full of its old decisiveness. "We must start. Keep together—you understand now, Rob, what I meant. Keep together—keep thinking, firmly, what you are doing. And do—what I do. We must start."
He drew himself erect. As though I were dreaming—or thinking of the act—I felt myself standing erect. Then walking—vaguely I could feel the substance of the slope beneath my feet—walking with a lightness, a lack of effort weird but pleasant. And I clung physically to Will, and saw Bee on his other side clinging to him also—as though a breath of wind might blow us all away.
The thought was whimsical. There could be no wind. Wind was moving air. I had the sense that I was still breathing, of course. But how could there be air? Air itself was infinitely more solid than these, our bodies. Yet I was breathing something. Call it air. The word of itself means nothing—and there are no words with which to clothe the realities of any unthought realm....
We were walking through the phantom room which had been the reality of Will's home—through its wall—out through its garden. Our slope was rolling, uneven. The shadowy ground of the garden was above us, then below us; then, for a moment, we seemed standing exactly on its level. I remembered. This was the place Will had mentioned to which we could safely return.
We spoke seldom; Will did not seem to care to talk. I realized he knew where he was going—had some definite purpose in his mind. Alert now with every mental faculty, I wondered what it was, yet would not question him.
We stalked onward. The shadowy village lay about us, above us now. Soundless, colorless phantoms, these streets, trees and houses. I saw the railway station—the ghost of a train stood off there and then moved forward soundlessly. I was touched with a faint amusement to see it—a luminous ghost sliding along its narrow enslaving rails. It could not go up or down, or sidewise. And it seemed so imponderable I would fearlessly have walked into it.
This Borderland, full of these shadows of our other world, yet seemed empty. Nothing of its own reality was visible. In every direction I could look into seemingly infinite distance; and overhead was a vast darkness—the emptiness of infinite space. Was nothing here with us in this Borderland? Those other spectres—those beings coming out from their world as we were coming in from ours?...
A thrill of quite normal excitement swept me at the thought. We had come in to encounter those spectres. And now they would be spectres no longer. Ponderable beings upon an equality with ourselves; and we were here to thwart them of their purpose....
I heard Bee give a faint, alarmed cry. Ahead of us a shape had appeared! It became visible and I felt that perhaps it had been hiding behind some unseen obstacle. It stood, solid and grey, with the shadow of a barn, a haystack above and behind it. Stood directly in our path, as though waiting for us.
I pulled at Will, but he ignored me. Hastened his pace.
We stalked forward with that waiting thing standing immobile in our path!