Five nights at the Five Pines

by Harriet A. Gaul

“Je te conjure, O Esprit! Deparoitre dans la minute par la force du grand Adonay, par Eloim, par Ariel, par Jehovam, par Agla, Tagla, Mathon, Oarios, Almouzin, Arios, Menbrot, Varios, Pithona, Magots, Silphae, Cabost, Salamandre, Tabots, Gnomus Terrae, Coelis, Godens, Aqua, Gingua, Janua, Etituamus, Zariatnatmik, A. E. A. J. A. T. M. O. A. A. M. V. P. M. S. C. T. G. T. C. G. A. J. E. Z.”

[“I conjure thee, O Spirit, to appear instantly through the will of the great Adonay”—etc.]

The little magic book then went on to say that if this were repeated twice, Lucifer would appear immediately. I thought perhaps it would be just as well to discontinue reading.

Had they actually attempted materialization up here in this very room in the old house on the tip end of the cape? There was nothing against it. If it were possible anywhere to conjure up the shades of the dead, or the devils themselves, this was as apt a place as any—a hamlet at the tip of a barren cape that extended into the ocean a hundred and forty miles, a house separated from that hamlet by its bad repute, as well as its location, a room cut off from the rest of the house, and two people in it who had no contact with realities, to whom each was the other’s world and this world not all. If any one was able to cut through the opaque cloud of dogma surrounding metaphysical subjects to a glimpse of realities beyond, I believed that Mattie had done so. And then, I realized that I had come by a circuitous path of my own to the very same conclusion that all the townspeople had long since come to—that Mattie was clairvoyant.

Would that help her now? Did she know where her spirit would dwell more accurately than those who were orthodox? Could she return the more easily from Stygian shores? Or was that power of prevision only a mortal faculty that passed with her passing and that, while it was able to call up others from the further world, could not bring back itself?

There was a story of an old nurse of mine that I wished I had forgotten—how she was once governess in a house where a strange foreign gentleman had intercourse with spirits; how he used to talk to them as he walked about the rooms—and was happy in their friendship and sullen when they would not appear.

“That was all right for him,” she used to say; “but after he left, the spirits that he had called up to amuse him still hung around. That they did, and I could never get rid of them. Try as I would,—paint, paper, or insect-powder,—every dark night when I was alone one or the other of them would brush up against me and stay just where I could never quite see it until dawn.”

It was a dark night and I was alone. I sincerely hoped that whatever had been conjured up by Mattie would not brush past me. At any rate, I had no mind to sleep upstairs again in that little gabled room. I did not argue with myself about the headboard; it was too late at night for that. I opened up a folding sofa in the room that I was in, where the New Captain must have slept many times, and lay down. The sound of the full tide on the rising, answering the questioning of the Five Pines trees, made a lullaby.

It was with a shock and the feeling that I had been asleep a long time that I woke up, hearing some one coming down the stairs. The little kitchen-stairs, it must be, that pitched down from the upper room like a ladder, for the main stairs were too far away for me to have heard any footfall on them. And this was not the clumping step of a full-sized man. This was the stealthy, soundless tread of a body without weight. But still it was unmistakable.

I sat up in chilled terror, gathering the bed-clothes around me with that involuntary gesture known to all women surprised in their sleep, and waited for whoever it was to come through the kitchen into my room.