Haggopian and Other Stories (29 page)

“Of course, I had been feverish with flu for a couple of days. That was obviously the answer: I had suddenly reached the height of a hitherto unrecognised delirious fever, and now the fever had broken I was going to be all right. That was what they said …

“George eventually came home with his eyes all wide and staring, frightened-looking, and he stayed that way for a couple of days. He avoided me like the plague! But the next week—when it came out about how good his marks were, how easily he had passed his examination papers—well—”

“But surely he must have known,” I broke in. What few doubts I had entertained were now gone forever. She was plainly not making all of this up.

“But why should he have known, Love? He knew he’d had two pretty nightmarish experiences, sure enough, and that somehow they had been connected with me; but he couldn’t possibly know that they had their origin in me—that I formed their focus.”

“He did find out, though?”

“Oh, yes, he did,” she slowly answered, her eyes seeming to glisten just a little in the homely evening glow of the room. “And as I’ve said, that’s why he left home in the end. It happened like this:

“I had never been a pretty girl—no, don’t say anything, Love. You weren’t even a twinkle in your father’s eye then, he was only a boy himself, and so you wouldn’t know. But at a time of life when most girls only have to pout to set the boys on fire, well, I was only very plain—and I’m probably giving myself the benefit of the doubt at that.

“Anyway, when George was out nights—walking his latest girl, dancing, or whatever—I was always at home on my own with my books. Quite simply, I came to be terribly jealous of my brother. Of course, you don’t know him, he had already been gone something like fifteen years when you were born, but George was a handsome lad. Not strong, mind you, but long and lean and a natural for the girls.

“Eventually he found himself a special girlfriend and came to spend all his time with her. I remember being furious because he wouldn’t tell me anything about her…”

She paused and looked at me and after a while I said “Uhhuh?” inviting her to go on.

“It was one Saturday night in the spring, I remember, not long after our nineteenth birthday, and George had spent the better part of an hour dandying himself up for this unknown girl. That night he seemed to take a sort of stupid, well,
delight
in spiting me; he refused to answer my questions about his girl or even mention her name. Finally, after he had set his tie straight and slicked his hair down for what seemed like the thousandth time, he dared to wink at me—maliciously, I thought, in my jealousy—as he went out into the night.

“That did it. Something
snapped
! I stamped my foot and rushed upstairs to my room for a good cry. And in the middle of crying I had my idea—”

“You decided to, er, swap identities with your brother, to have a look at his girl for yourself,” I broke in. “Am I right?”

She nodded in answer, staring at the fire; ashamed of herself, I thought, after all this time. “Yes, I did,” she said. “For the first time I used my power for my own ends. And mean and despicable ends they were.

“But this time it wasn’t like before. There was no instantaneous, involuntary flowing of my psyche, as it were. No immediate change of personality. I had to force it, to concentrate and concentrate and
push
myself. But in a short period of time, before I even knew it, well, there I was.”

“There you were? In Uncle George’s body?”

“Yes, in his body, looking out through his eyes, holding in his hand the cool, slender hand of a very pretty girl. I had expected the girl, of course, and yet…

“Confused and blustering, letting go of her hand, I jumped back and bumped into a man standing behind me. The girl was saying: “George, what’s wrong?” in a whisper, and people were staring. We were in a second-show picture-house queue. Finally I managed to mumble an answer, in a horribly hoarse, unfamiliar, frightened voice—George’s voice, obviously, and my fear—and then the girl moved closer and kissed me gently on the cheek!

“She did! But of course she would, wouldn’t she, if I were George? ‘Why, you jumped then like you’d been stung—’ she started to say; but I wasn’t listening, Peter, for I had jumped again, even more violently, shrinking away from her in a kind of horror. I must have gone crimson, standing there in that queue, with all those unfamiliar people looking at me—
and I had just been kissed by a girl
!

“You see, I wasn’t thinking like George, at all! I just wished with all my heart that I hadn’t interfered, and before I knew it I had George’s body in motion and was running down the road, the picture-house queue behind me and the voice of this sweet little girl echoing after me in pained and astonished disbelief.

“Altogether my spiteful adventure had taken only a few minutes, and, when at last I was able to do so; I controlled myself—or rather, George’s self—and hid in a shop doorway. It took another minute or two before I was composed sufficiently to manage a, well, a ‘return trip’, but at last I made it and there I was back in my room.

“I had been gone no more than seven or eight minutes all told, but I wasn’t back to
exactly
where I started out from. Oh, George hadn’t gone rushing downstairs again in a hysterical fit, like that time when I sat his exam for him—though of course the period of
transition
had been a much longer one on that occasion—but he had at least moved off the bed. I found myself standing beside the window…” She paused.

“And afterwards?” I prompted her, fascinated.

“Afterwards?” she echoed me, considering it. “Well, George was very quiet about it… No, that’s not quite true. It’s not that he was quiet, rather that he avoided me more than ever, to such an extent that I hardly ever saw him—no more than a glimpse at a time as he came and went. Mother and father didn’t notice George’s increased coolness towards me, but I certainly did. I’m pretty sure it was then that he had finally recognised the source of this thing that came at odd times like some short-lived insanity to plague him. Yes, and looking back, I can see how I might easily have driven George completely insane! But of course, from that time on he was forewarned…”

“Forewarned?” I repeated her. “And the next time he—”

“The next time?” She turned her face so that I could see the fine scars on her otherwise smooth left cheek. I had always wondered about those scars. “I don’t remember a great deal about the next time—shock, I suppose, a ‘mental block’, you might call it—but anyway, the next time was the
last
time!…

“There was a boy who took me out once or twice, and I remember that when he stopped calling for me it was because of something George had said to him. Six months had gone by since my shameful and abortive experiment, and now I deliberately put it out of my mind as I determined to teach George a lesson. You must understand, Love, that this boy I mentioned, well…he meant a great deal to me.

“Anyway, I was out to get my own back. I didn’t know how George had managed to make it up with his girl, but he had. I was going to put an end to their little romance once and for all.

“It was a fairly warm, early October, I remember, when my chance eventually came. A Sunday afternoon, and George was out walking with his girl. I had it planned minutely. I knew exactly what I must say, how I must act, what I must do. I could do it in two minutes flat, and be back in my own body before George knew what was going on. For the first time my intentions were
deliberately
malicious…”

I waited for my aunt to continue, and after a while again prompted her: “And? Was this when—”

“Yes, this was when he walked me through the window. Well, he didn’t exactly walk me through it—I believe I leapt; or rather, he leapt me, if you see what I mean. One minute I was sitting on a grassy bank with the same sweet little girl, and the next there was this awful pain— My whole body hurt, and it was
my
body, for my consciousness was suddenly back where it belonged. Instantaneously, inadvertently, I was—myself!

“
But I was lying crumpled on the lawn in front of the house!
I remember seeing splinters of broken glass and bits of yellow-painted wood from my shattered bedroom window, and then I went into a faint with the pain.

“George came to see me in the hospital—once. He sneered when my parents had their backs turned. He leaned over my bed and said: “
Got
you, Hester!” Just that, nothing more.

“I had a broken leg and collarbone. It was three weeks before they let me go home. By then George had joined the Merchant Navy and my parents knew that somehow I was to blame. They were never the same to me from that time on. George had been the Apple of the Family Eye, if you know what I mean. They knew that his going away, in some unknown way, had been my fault. I did have a letter from George—well, a note. It simply warned me ‘never to do it again’, that there were worse things than falling through windows!”

“And you never did, er, do it again?”

“No, I didn’t dare; I haven’t dared since. There
are
worse things, Love, than being walked through a window! And if George hates me still as much as he might…

“But I’ve often
wanted
to do it again. George has two children, you know?”

I nodded an affirmation: “Yes, I’ve heard mother mention them. Joe and Doreen?”

“That’s right,” she nodded. “They’re hardly children any more, but I think of them that way. They’ll be in their twenties now, your cousins. George’s wife wrote to me once many years ago. I’ve no idea how she got my address. She did it behind George’s back, I imagine. Said how sorry she was that there was ‘trouble in the family’. She sent me photographs of the kids. They were beautiful. For all I know there may have been other children later—even grandchildren.”

“I don’t think so,” I told her. “I think I would have known. They’re still pretty reserved, my folks; but I would have learned that much, I’m sure. But tell me: how is it that you and mother aren’t closer? I mean, she never talks about you, my mother, and yet you are her sister.”

“Your mother is two years younger than George and me,” my aunt informed me. “She went to live with her grandparents down South when she was thirteen. Sis, you see, was the brilliant one. George was a bit dim; I was clever enough; but Sis, she was really clever. Our parents sent Sis off to live with Granny, where she could attend a school worthy of her intelligence. She stayed with Gran from then on. We simply drifted apart…

“Mind you, we’d never been what you might call close, not for sisters. Anyhow, we didn’t come together again until she married and came back up here to live, by which time George must have written to her and told her one or two things. I don’t know what or how much he told her, but—well, she never bothered with me—and anyway I was working by then and had a flat of my own.

“Years passed, I hardly ever saw Sis, her little boy came along—you, Love—I fell in with a spiritualist group, making real friends for the first time in my life; and, well, that was that. My interest in spiritualism, various other ways of mine that didn’t quite fit the accepted pattern, the unspoken thing I had done to George…we drifted apart. You understand?”

I nodded. I felt sorry for her, but of course I could not say so. Instead I laughed awkwardly and shrugged my shoulders. “Who needs people?”

She looked shocked. “We all do, Love!” Then for a while she was quiet, staring into the fire.

“I’ll make a brew of tea,” she suddenly said, then looked at me and smiled in a fashion I well remembered. “Or should we have cocoa?”

“Cocoa!” I instinctively laughed, relieved at the change of subject.

She went into the kitchen and I lit a cigarette. Idle, for the moment, I looked about me, taking up the loose sheets of paper that Aunt Hester had left on her occasional table. I saw at once that many of her jottings were concerned with extracts from exotic books. I passed over the piece she had read out to me and glanced at another sheet. Immediately my interest was caught; the three passages were all from the Holy Bible:

“Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them.” Lev. 19:31.

“Then said Saul unto his servants, Seek me a woman that hath a familiar spirit, that I may go to her and enquire of her. And his servants said to him, Behold, there is a woman that hath a familiar spirit at En-dor.” I Sam. 28:6,7.

“Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men.” Acts 19:19.

The third sheet contained a quote from
Today’s Christian
:

“To dabble in matters such as these is to reach within demoniac circles, and it is by no means rare to discover scorn and scepticism transformed to hysterical possession in persons whose curiosity has led them merely to attend so-called ‘spiritual séances’. These things of which I speak are of a nature as serious as any in the world today, and I am only one among many to utter a solemn warning against any intercourse with ‘spirit forces’ or the like, whereby the unutterable evil of demonic possession could well be the horrific outcome.”

Finally, before she returned with a steaming jug of cocoa and two mugs, I read another of Aunt Hester’s extracts, this one again from Feery’s
Notes on the Necronomicon
:

“Yea, & I discovered how one might, be he an Adept & his familiar Spirits powerful enough, control the Wanderings or Migration of his Essence into all manner of Beings & Persons—even from beyond the Grave of Sod or the Door of the Stone Sepulchre…”

I was still pondering this last extract an hour later, as I walked Harden’s night streets towards my lodgings at the home of my friend.

• • •

Three evenings later, when by arrangement I returned to my aunt’s cottage in old Castle-Ilden, she was nervously waiting for me at the gate and whisked me breathlessly inside. She sat me down, seated herself opposite and clasped her hands in her lap almost in the attitude of an excited young girl.