The Punch and Judy Murders

by Carr John

"What is it?" asked Stone rather hoarsely. "Read it!"

"It's the solution," said Murchison, without lifting his eyes. "It's dated June 15th, 3.00 P.M., and it's addressed to me. You better all come here."

He spread out the sheets on the table in the middle of the room.

This account [ran the spidery handwriting] will serve both as an explanation to you and as the test 1 mean to apply to my friend Hogenauer. You are the sole witness to the failure or the success of this experiment, which I made solely to convince my friend of his folly. I have mentioned the matter to no one: I should not, as you can understand, care to have it known that a man of facts associated himself with any such "odyllic" quackery. It has been noticed that when a man of strongly scientific mind has passed his best physical age, and is threatened by arterio-sclerosis which may end in brain-apoplexy, he very often turns to studies which are exactly the reverse of scientific. From a host of minor ailments it leads to the hardening of the arteries of the brain: it is a fact of nature we need not discuss. You have met Mr. Hogenauer, and you have seen his appearance of illness. He has been under superficial medical care for some time; and, though he has obeyed minor rules drinking only mineral-water, when he was formerly fond of stimulants; and giving up smoking, even though he kept by him the collection of pipes out of which he used to get so much enjoyment-still he remains mentally active. In short, the former scientist is now obsessed with proving the truth of Clairvoyance. It has been remarked that poets do not go mad, but mathematicians do. The poet only wishes to get his head into the heavens. It is the scientist who wishes to get the heavens into his head: and it is his head which splits. These thoughts wake self-distrust; but let us be fair to Hogenauer. His belief in Clairvoyance (1 use the term loosely) has no connection with spiritism or an other world. It is a branch of that subject called Animal Magnetism which has been under so much dispute from Mesmer to Heidenhain. It presupposes that some sensitive subject, in a hypnotic trance, can accurately describe objects in a room at some distance removed-even a room of which the subject in his waking consciousness has no knowledge. There have been apparent instances of this. I do not deny it. But, unlike Hogenauer, I should explain it in the difference between Sensory Impressions and Memory. Memory depends on the direction of the attention to sensations. If the effort of attention be strong, the recollection will be vivid; and the converse is true. Sensory perceptions come and go, like shadows of clouds on a hill, without any attempt at fixing them, and consequently with no recollection of them. The sensory perceptions may have existed for so short a time as to leave no perception behind. It is generally admitted by physiologists that the cerebral hemispheres are the seat of the higher mental operations — such as attention — although the interdependence of these hemispheres with the lower sensory ganglia, which receive all sensory impressions in the first instance, and with motor-ganglia which are the starting points of motor-impulses, is not understood. One portion of the nervous system may work without the other.-Thus, during free cerebral activity we pay little attention to what we see or hear, and consequently remember nothing. As a practical example: Hogenauer has many times visited me at this hotel. His conscious mind may be convinced that he has seen no other room except my own. But a half-open door, as he passes along a corridor, may have made a sensory record which is not (and cannot be) released until cerebral activity is destroyed by the hypnotic state. Thus Braid's old term of ysvpov-vnv or "nerve-sleep," may be an exactly literal definition. Hogenauer's theory is as old as the Egyptian belief in the ka, or the German superstition of the doppelganger. That is to say, the projection of a sympathetic subject outside material bounds — exactly as a magic-lantern, picture is thrown on a wall. Hogenauer believes that he needs no operator to put him into a hypnotic state, or direct him. I do not, of course, quarrel with this. Any medical man will tell you that self-hypnosis is easily managed in a sympathetic subject. My friend's method is this: All devices for self-hypnotism depend on a beam of light meeting a broken, polished surface, preferably a moving surface, on which the subject's eyes are fixed. This broken surface should be placed from a foot to eighteen inches above the level of the eye. Thus, in a darkened room, a thin shaft of light is caused to fall across my friend's desk directly in line with the foot of a lamp-cord hanging above the desk. At the end of the lamp-cord, where the bulb ordinarily hangs, is suspended a cluster of small bright objects-silver is the best medium-which shall present the broken surface. The string itself is of twine which may be twisted in such fashion (you have seen a similar principle in child's toys) that it shall slowly revolve. The light, passing across it, strikes back a series of tiny dazzling refractions from the silver surface; and it is upon this that the subject, sitting in his chair, fixes his eyes. I suggested this method to him. 1 leave out technical details, though I have worked out the light equations for him. He recently tells me that in only one respect is it unsuccessful. The beam of light, passing beyond the revolving surface, encounters a bookshelf on which there are some volumes highly gilded. The refraction of light from this gilt, broken as the beam is by the first surface, creates another glow which tends to distract the eye. He has informed me that, on the occasion of this "experiment," he will remove the gilt-bound books…

Someone was speaking.

"Oh, my eye," breathed Evelyn. "My own eye! Ken, is this true? Is that the way the room was arranged?"

I was thinking back on the first curious evidence I had beard in the case; the report that Sergeant Davis, who had crept up one night to look through a chink in the shutters of Hogenauer's parlour; had made to Charters: "He says that the room was dark, but that it seemed to be very full of small, moving darts of light flickering round a thing like a flower-pot turned upside down." So that, then, was how Hogenauer thought he was able to transfer himself through the air, unseen, like Albertus Magnus.

"It's just how the room was arranged," I admitted. "There was a loop in the end of that string, to hang it from the light."

"Move over," said Stone; "I can't see the foot of the page. Now turn it; next page! Yes, but what about the furniture being changed around? That — "

It will readily be understood that, in a man suffering from morbid idiopathic action, such experiments can be dangerous. Not only is my friend convinced if his own ability to project his own mind, but he is anxious to convince me that I can do the same. It is true that, both mentally and physically, we have a great deal in common; we are first cousins, and, like Hogenauer, I am a good hypnotic subject. So much, again, I have never denied. He contends that, if we were to throw ourselves into a hypnotic state at the same hour — he in his own home, I in mine — and if physical conditions were made the same for both of us, then I should be able to "pay a visit" to his rooms at the same time that he "paid a visit to mine." I replied that I had no doubt of my ability, by concentration, to attain a state of self-hypnosis. The sequel I denied, because there would be no means of proving it. While in the cataleptic state, influenced by thoughts already planted in my subconscious mind, it was possible I might receive a hallucination of having "visited" his study at Moreton Abbot. Having been there many times, I should have too vivid a memory of it. He told me-only this morning — that he would arrange a suitable test for this: viz., he would so alter the arrangement of furniture in his study that if, on waking, I could recall the position in which it stood, then there would be irrefutable proof that this could be no mere projection of memory….