I endeavoured to calm his visibly increasing agitation, and told him that he must not despair.
While we talked the night had overtaken us. The filmy moonlight was wide over the scene which the window commanded, and I said:
“Perhaps you would prefer having candles. This light, you know, is odd. I should wish you, as much as possible, under your usual conditions while I make my diagnosis, shall I call it—otherwise I don’t care.”
“All lights are the same to me,” he said: “except when I read or write, I care not if night were perpetual. I am going to tell you what happened about a year ago. The thing began to speak to me.”
“Speak! How do you mean—speak as a man does, do you mean?”
“Yes; speak in words and consecutive sentences, with perfect coherence and articulation; but there is a peculiarity. It is not like the tone of a human voice. It is not by my ears it reaches me—it comes like a singing through my head.
“This faculty, the power of speaking to me, will be my undoing. It won’t let me pray, it interrupts me with dreadful blasphemies. I dare not go on, I could not. Oh! Doctor, can the skill, and thought, and prayers of man avail me nothing!”
“You must promise me, my dear sir, not to trouble yourself with unnecessarily exciting thoughts; confine yourself strictly to the narrative of facts; and recollect, above all, that even if the thing that infests you be as you seem to suppose, a reality with an actual independent life and will, yet it can have no power to hurt you, unless it be given from above: its access to your senses depends mainly upon your physical condition—this is, under God, your comfort and reliance: we are all alike environed. It is only that in your case, the ‘paries,’ the veil of the flesh, the screen, is a little out of repair, and sights and sounds are transmitted. We must enter on a new course, sir—be encouraged. I’ll give to-night to the careful consideration of the whole case.”
“You are very good, sir; you think it worth trying, you don’t give me quite up; but, sir, you don’t know, it is gaining such an influence over me: it orders me about, it is such a tyrant, and I’m growing so helpless. May God deliver me!”
“It orders you about—of course you mean by speech?”