A Victim of Higher Space
by Algernon Blackwood
“There’s an extraordinary gentleman to see you,
sir,” said the new man.
“Why ‘extraordinary’?” asked Dr. Silence, drawing
the tips of his thin fingers through his brown beard.
His eyes twinkled pleasantly. “Why ‘extraordinary,’
Barker?” he repeated encouragingly, noticing the perplexed expression in the man’s eyes.
“He’s so—so thin, sir. I could hardly see ‘im at all
—at first. He was inside the house before I could ask
the name,” he added, remembering strict orders.
“And who brought him here?” “He come alone,
sir, in a closed cab. He pushed by me before I could
say a word—making no noise not what I could hear.
He seemed to move so soft like—” The man stopped
short with obvious embarrassment, as though he had
already said enough to jeopardise his new situation,
but trying hard to show that he remembered the
instructions and warnings he had received with
regard to the admission of strangers not properly
accredited.
“And where is the gentleman now?” asked Dr.
Silence, turning away to conceal his amusement.
“I really couldn’t exactly say, sir. I left him standing in the ‘all—”
The doctor looked up sharply. “But why in the
hall, Barker? Why not in the waiting-room?” He fixed
his piercing though kindly eyes on the man’s face.
“Did he frighten you?” he asked quickly.
“I think he did, sir, if I may say so. I seemed to
lose sight of him, as it were—” The man stammered,
evidently convinced by now that he had earned his
dismissal. “He come in so funny, just like a cold
wind,” he added boldly, setting his heels at attention
and looking his master full in the face.
The doctor made an internal note of the man’s
halting description; he was pleased that the slight
signs of psychic intuition which had induced him to
engage Barker had not entirely failed at the first trial.
Dr. Silence sought for this qualification in all his
assistants, from secretary to serving man, and if it
surrounded him with a somewhat singular crew, the
drawbacks were more than compensated for on the
whole by their occasional flashes of insight.
“So the gentleman made you feel queer, did he?”
“That was it, I think, sir,” repeated the man stolidly.
“And he brings no kind of introduction to me—
no letter or anything?” asked the doctor, with feigned
surprise, as though he knew what was coming.
The man fumbled, both in mind and pockets, and
finally produced an envelope.
“I beg pardon, sir,” he said, greatly flustered; “the
gentleman handed me this for you.”
It was a note from a discerning friend, who had
never yet sent him a case that was not vitally interesting from one point or another.
“Please see the bearer of this note,” the brief message ran, “though I doubt if even you can do much to
help him.”
John Silence paused a moment, so as to gather
from the mind of the writer all that lay behind the
brief words of the letter. Then he looked up at his
servant with a graver expression than he had yet
worn.
“Go back and find this gentleman,” he said, “and
show him into the green study. Do not reply to his
question, or speak more than actually necessary; but
think kind, helpful, sympathetic thoughts as strongly
as you can, Barker. You remember what I told you
about the importance of thinking, when I engaged
you. Put curiosity out of your mind, and think gently,
sympathetically, affectionately, if you can.”
He smiled, and Barker, who had recovered his
composure in the doctor’s presence, bowed silently
and went out.
There were two different reception-rooms in Dr.
Silence’s house. One (intended for persons who imagined they needed spiritual assistance when really
they were only candidates for the asylum) had padded walls, and was well supplied with various concealed contrivances by means of which sudden violence could be instantly met and overcome. It was,
however, rarely used. The other, intended for the
reception of genuine cases of spiritual distress and
out-of-the-way afflictions of a psychic nature, was
entirely draped and furnished in a soothing deep
green, calculated to induce calmness and repose of
mind. And this room was the one in which Dr.
Silence interviewed the majority of his “queer” cases,
and the one into which he had directed Barker to
show his present caller.
To begin with, the arm-chair in which the patient
was always directed to sit, was nailed to the floor,
since its immovability tended to impart this same
A VICTIM OF HIGHER SPACE — 1 of 10
excellent characteristic to the occupant. Patients
invariably grew excited when talking about themselves, and their excitement tended to confuse their
thoughts and to exaggerate their language. The
inflexibility of the chair helped to counteract this.
After repeated endeavours to drag it forward, or push
it back, they ended by resigning themselves to sitting
quietly. And with the futility of fidgeting there followed a calmer state of mind.
Upon the floor, and at intervals in the wall immediately behind, were certain tiny green buttons, practically unnoticeable, which on being pressed permitted a soothing and persuasive narcotic to rise invisibly about the occupant of the chair. The effect upon
the excitable patient was rapid, admirable, and harmless. The green study was further provided with a
secret spy-hole; for John Silence liked when possible
to observe his patient’s face before it had assumed
that mask the features of the human countenance
invariably wear in the presence of another person. A
man sitting alone wears a psychic expression; and
this expression is the man himself. It disappears the
moment another person joins him. And Dr. Silence
often learned more from a few moments’ secret
observation of a face than from hours of conversation
with its owner afterwards.
A very light, almost a dancing, step followed
Barker’s heavy tread towards the green room, and a
moment afterwards the man came in and announced
that the gentleman was waiting. He was still pale and
his manner nervous.
“Never mind, Barker” the doctor said kindly; “if
you were not psychic the man would have had no
effect upon you at all. You only need training and
development. And when you have learned to interpret these feelings and sensations better, you will feel
no fear, but only a great sympathy.”
“Yes, sir; thank you, sir!” And Barker bowed and
made his escape, while Dr. Silence, an amused smile
lurking about the corners of his mouth, made his way
noiselessly down the passage and put his eye to the
spy-hole in the door of the green study.
This spy-hole was so placed that it commanded a
view of almost the entire room, and, looking through
it, the doctor saw a hat, gloves, and umbrella lying on
a chair by the table, but searched at first in vain for
their owner.
The windows were both closed and a brisk fire
burned in the grate. There were various signs—signs
intelligible at least to a keenly intuitive soul—that
the room was occupied, yet so far as human beings
were concerned, it was empty, utterly empty. No one
sat in the chairs; no one stood on the mat before the
fire; there was no sign even that a patient was anywhere close against the wall, examining the Bocklin
reproductions—as patients so often did when they
thought they were alone—and therefore rather difficult to see from the spy-hole. Ordinarily speaking,
there was no one in the room. It was undeniable.
Yet Dr. Silence was quite well aware that a human
being was in the room. His psychic apparatus never
failed in letting him know the proximity of an incarnate or discarnate being. Even in the dark he could tell
that. And he now knew positively that his patient—
the patient who had alarmed Barker, and had then
tripped down the corridor with that dancing footstep
—was somewhere concealed within the four walls
commanded by his spy-hole. He also realised—and
this was most unusual—that this individual whom he
desired to watch knew that he was being watched.
And, further, that the stranger himself was also
watching! In fact, that it was he, the doctor, who was
being observed—and by an observer as keen and
trained as himself.
An inkling of the true state of the case began to
dawn upon him, and he was on the verge of entering
—indeed, his hand already touched the door-knob—
when his eye, still glued to the spy-hole, detected a
slight movement. Directly opposite, between him and
the fireplace, something stirred. He watched very
attentively and made certain that he was not mistaken. An object on the mantelpiece—it was a blue
vase—disappeared from view. It passed out of sight
together with the portion of the marble mantelpiece
on which it rested. Next, that part of the fire and
grate and brass fender immediately below it vanished
entirely, as though a slice had been taken clean out of
them.
Dr. Silence then understood that something
between him and these objects was slowly coming
into being, something that concealed them and
obstructed his vision by inserting itself in the line of
sight between them and himself.
He quietly awaited further results before going in.
First he saw a thin perpendicular line tracing
itself from just above the height of the clock and continuing downwards till it reached the woolly fire-mat.
This line grew wider, broadened, grew solid. It was
no shadow; it was something substantial. It defined
itself more and more. Then suddenly, at the top of
A VICTIM OF HIGHER SPACE — 2 of 10
the line, and about on a level with the face of the
clock, he saw a round luminous disc gazing steadily
at him. It was a human eye, looking straight into his
own, pressed there against the spy-hole. And it was
bright with intelligence. Dr. Silence held his breath
for a moment—and stared back at it.
Then, like some one moving out of deep shadow
into light, he saw the figure of a man come sliding
sideways into view, a whitish face following the eye,
and the perpendicular line he had first observed
broadening out and developing into the complete figure of a human being. It was the patient. He had
apparently been standing there in front of the fire all
the time. A second eye had followed the first, and
both of them stared steadily at the spy-hole, sharply
concentrated, yet with a sly twinkle of humour and
amusement that made it impossible for the doctor to
maintain his position any longer.
He opened the door and went in quickly. As he
did so he noticed for the first time the sound of a
German band coming in gaily through the open ventilators. In some intuitive, unaccountable fashion the
music connected itself with the patient he was about
to interview. This sort of prevision was not unfamiliar
to him. It always explained itself later.
The man, he saw, was of middle age and of very
ordinary appearance; so ordinary, in fact, that he was
difficult to describe—his only peculiarity being his
extreme thinness. Pleasant—that is, good—vibrations issued from his atmosphere and met Dr. Silence
as he advanced to greet him, yet vibrations alive with
currents and discharges betraying the perturbed and
disordered condition of his mind and brain. There
was evidently something wholly out of the usual in
the state of his thoughts. Yet, though strange, it was
not altogether distressing; it was not the impression
that the broken and violent atmosphere of the insane
produces upon the mind. Dr. Silence realised in a
flash that here was a case of absorbing interest that
might require all his powers to handle properly.
“I was watching you through my little peep-hole
—as you saw,” he began, with a pleasant smile,
advancing to shake hands. “I find it of the greatest
assistance sometimes—”
But the patient interrupted him at once. His voice
was hurried and had odd, shrill changes in it, breaking from high to low in unexpected fashion. One
moment it thundered, the next it almost squeaked.
“I understand without explanation,” he broke in
rapidly. “You get the true note of a man in this way—
when he thinks himself unobserved. I quite agree.
Only, in my case, I fear, you saw very little. My case,
as you of course grasp, Dr. Silence, is extremely peculiar, uncomfortably peculiar. Indeed, unless Sir William had positively assured me—”
“My friend has sent you to me,” the doctor interrupted gravely, with a gentle note of authority, “and
that is quite sufficient. Pray, be seated, Mr.—”
“Mudge—Racine Mudge,” returned the other.
“Take this comfortable one, Mr. Mudge,” leading
him to the fixed chair, “and tell me your condition in
your own way and at your own pace. My whole day is
at your service if you require it.”
Mr. Mudge moved towards the chair in question
and then hesitated.
“You will promise me not to use the narcotic buttons,” he said, before sitting down. “I do not need
them. Also I ought to mention that anything you
think of vividly will reach my mind. That is apparently part of my peculiar case.” He sat down with a
sigh and arranged his thin legs and body into a position of comfort. Evidently he was very sensitive to the
thoughts of others, for the picture of the green buttons had only entered the doctor’s mind for a second,
yet the other had instantly snapped it up. Dr. Silence
noticed, too, that Mr. Mudge held on tightly with
both hands to the arms of the chair.
“I’m rather glad the chair is nailed to the floor,”
he remarked, as he settled himself more comfortably.
“It suits me admirably. The fact is—and this is my
case in a nutshell—which is all that a doctor of your
marvellous development requires—the fact is, Dr.
Silence, I am a victim of Higher Space. That’s what’s
the matter with me—Higher Space!”
The two looked at each other for a space in
silence, the little patient holding tightly to the arms
of the chair which “suited him admirably,” and looking up with staring eyes, his atmosphere positively
trembling with the waves of some unknown activity;
while the doctor smiled kindly and sympathetically,
and put his whole person as far as possible into the
mental condition of the other.
“Higher Space,” repeated Mr. Mudge, “that’s what
it is. Now, do you think you can help me with that?”
There was a pause during which the men’s eyes
steadily searched down below the surface of their
respective personalities. Then Dr. Silence spoke.
“I am quite sure I can help,” he answered quietly;
“sympathy must always help, and suffering always
owns my sympathy. I see you have suffered cruelly.
A VICTIM OF HIGHER SPACE — 3 of 10
You must tell me all about your case, and when I hear
the gradual steps by which you reached this strange
condition, I have no doubt I can be of assistance to
you.”
He drew a chair up beside his interlocutor and
laid a hand on his shoulder for a moment. His whole
being radiated kindness, intelligence, desire to help.
“For instance,” he went on, “I feel sure it was the
result of no mere chance that you became familiar
with the terrors of what you term Higher Space; for
Higher Space is no mere external measurement. It is,
of course, a spiritual state, a spiritual condition, an
inner development, and one that we must recognise
as abnormal, since it is beyond the reach of the world
at the present stage of evolution. Higher Space is a
mythical state.”
“Oh!” cried the other, rubbing his birdlike hands
with pleasure, “the relief it is to be able to talk to
some one who can understand! Of course what you
say is the utter truth. And you are right that no mere
chance led me to my present condition, but, on the
other hand, prolonged and deliberate study. Yet
chance in a sense now governs it. I mean, my entering the condition of Higher Space seems to depend
upon the chance of this and that circumstance. For
instance, the mere sound of that German band sent
me off. Not that all music will do so, but certain
sounds, certain vibrations, at once key me up to the
requisite pitch, and off I go. Wagner’s music always
does it, and that band must have been playing a stray
bit of Wagner. But I’ll come to all that later. Only
first, I must ask you to send away your man from the
spy-hole.”
John Silence looked up with a start, for Mr.
Mudge’s back was to the door, and there was no mirror. He saw the brown eye of Barker glued to the
little circle of glass, and he crossed the room without
a word and snapped down the black shutter provided
for the purpose, and then heard Barker snuffle away
along the passage.
“Now,” continued the little man in the chair, “I
can begin. You have managed to put me completely
at my ease, and I feel I may tell you my whole case
without shame or reserve. You will understand. But
you must be patient with me if I go into details that
are already familiar to you—details of Higher Space, I
mean—and if I seem stupid when I have to describe
things that transcend the power of language and are
really therefore indescribable.”
“My dear friend,” put in the other calmly, “that
goes without saying. To know Higher Space is an
experience that defies description, and one is obliged
to make use of more or less intelligible symbols. But,
pray, proceed. Your vivid thoughts will tell me more
than your halting words.”
An immense sigh of relief proceeded from the
little figure half lost in the depths of the chair. Such
intelligent sympathy meeting him half-way was a new
experience to him, and it touched his heart at once.
He leaned back, relaxing his tight hold of the arms,
and began in his thin, scale-like voice.
“My mother was a Frenchwoman, and my father
an Essex bargeman,” he said abruptly. “Hence my
name—Racine and Mudge. My father died before I
ever saw him. My mother inherited money from her
Bordeaux relations, and when she died soon after, I
was left alone with wealth and a strange freedom. I
had no guardian, trustees, sisters, brothers, or any
connection in the world to look after me. I grew up,
therefore, utterly without education. This much was
to my advantage; I learned none of that deceitful rubbish taught in schools, and so had nothing to unlearn
when I awakened to my true love—mathematics,
higher mathematics and higher geometry. These,
however, I seemed to know instinctively. It was like
the memory of what I had deeply studied before; the
principles were in my blood, and I simply raced
through the ordinary stages, and beyond, and then
did the same with geometry. Afterwards, when I read
the books on these subjects, I understood how swift
and undeviating the knowledge had come back to
me. It was simply memory. It was simply re-collecting
the memories of what I had known before in a previous existence and required no books to teach me.”
In his growing excitement, Mr. Mudge attempted
to drag the chair forward a little nearer to his listener,
and then smiled faintly as he resigned himself
instantly again to its immovability, and plunged anew
into the recital of his singular “disease.”
“The audacious speculations of Bolyai, the amazing theories of Gauss—that through a point more
than one line could be drawn parallel to a given line;
the possibility that the angles of a triangle are
together greater than two right angles, if drawn upon
immense curvatures—the breathless intuitions of
Beltrami and Lobatchewsky—all these I hurried
through, and emerged, panting but unsatisfied, upon
the verge of my—my new world, my Higher Space
possibilities—in a word, my disease!
A VICTIM OF HIGHER SPACE — 4 of 10
“How I got there,” he resumed after a brief pause,
during which he appeared to be listening intently for
an approaching sound, “is more than I can put intelligibly into words. I can only hope to leave your mind
with an intuitive comprehension of the possibility of
what I say.
“Here, however, came a change. At this point I
was no longer absorbing the fruits of studies I had
made before; it was the beginning of new efforts to
learn for the first time, and I had to go slowly and
laboriously through terrible work. Here I sought for
the theories and speculations of others. But books
were few and far between, and with the exception of
one man—a ‘dreamer,’ the world called him—whose
audacity and piercing intuition amazed and delighted
me beyond description, I found no one to guide or
help.
“You, of course, Dr. Silence, understand
something of what I am driving at with these stammering words, though you cannot perhaps yet guess
what depths of pain my new knowledge brought me
to, nor why an acquaintance with a new development
of space should prove a source of misery and terror.”
Mr. Racine Mudge, remembering that the chair
would not move, did the next best thing he could in
his desire to draw nearer to the attentive man facing
him, and sat forward upon the very edge of the cushions, crossing his legs and gesticulating with both
hands as though he saw into this region of new space
he was attempting to describe, and might any
moment tumble into it bodily from the edge of the
chair and disappear form view. John Silence, separated from him by three paces, sat with his eyes fixed
upon the thin white face opposite, noting every word
and every gesture with deep attention.
“This room we now sit in, Dr. Silence, has one
side open to space—to Higher Space. A closed box
only seems closed. There is a way in and out of a soap
bubble without breaking the skin.”
“You tell me no new thing,” the doctor interposed
gently.
“Hence, if Higher Space exists and our world borders upon it and lies partially in it, it follows necessarily that we see only portions of all objects. We
never see their true and complete shape. We see their
three measurements, but not their fourth. The new
direction is concealed from us, and when I hold this
book and move my hand all round it I have not really
made a complete circuit. We only perceive those portions of any object which exist in our three dimensions; the rest escapes us. But, once we learn to see in
Higher Space, objects will appear as they actually are.
Only they will thus be hardly recognisable!
“Now, you may begin to grasp something of what
I am coming to.”
“I am beginning to understand something of what
you must have suffered,” observed the doctor soothingly, “for I have made similar experiments myself,
and only stopped just in time—”
“You are the one man in all the world who can
hear and understand, and sympathise,” exclaimed
Mr. Mudge, grasping his hand and holding it tightly
while he spoke. The nailed chair prevented further
excitability.
“Well,” he resumed, after a moment’s pause, “I
procured the implements and the coloured blocks for
practical experiment, and I followed the instructions
carefully till I had arrived at a working conception of
four-dimensional space. The tessaract, the figure
whose boundaries are cubes, I knew by heart. That is
to say, I knew it and saw it mentally, for my eye, of
course, could never take in a new measurement, or
my hands and feet handle it.
“So, at least, I thought,” he added, making a wry
face. “I had reached the stage, you see, when I could
imagine in a new dimension. I was able to conceive
the shape of that new figure which is intrinsically different to all we know—the shape of the tessaract. I
could perceive in four dimensions. When, therefore, I
looked at a cube I could see all its sides at once. Its
top was not foreshortened, nor its farther side and
base invisible. I saw the whole thing out flat, so to
speak. And this tessaract was bounded by cubes!
Moreover, I also saw its content—its insides.”
“You were not yourself able to enter this new
world,” interrupted Dr. Silence.
“Not then. I was only able to conceive intuitively
what it was like and how exactly it must look. Later,
when I slipped in there and saw objects in their
entirety, unlimited by the paucity of our poor three
measurements, I very nearly lost my life. For, you see,
space does not stop at a single new dimension, a
fourth. It extends in all possible new ones, and we
must conceive it as containing any number of new
dimensions. In other words, there is no space at all,
but only a spiritual condition. But, meanwhile, I had
come to grasp the strange fact that the objects in our
normal world appear to us only partially.”
Mr. Mudge moved farther forward till he was balanced dangerously on the very edge of the chair.
A VICTIM OF HIGHER SPACE — 5 of 10
“From this starting point,” he resumed, “I began my
studies and experiments, and continued them for
years. I had money, and I was without friends. I lived
in solitude and experimented. My intellect, of course,
had little part in the work, for intellectually it was all
unthinkable. Never was the limitation of mere reason
more plainly demonstrated. It was mystically, intuitively, spiritually that I began to advance. And what I
learnt, and knew, and did is all impossible to put into
language, since it all describes experiences transcending the experiences of men. It is only some of the results—what you would call the symptoms of my disease—that I can give you, and even these must often
appear absurd contradictions and impossible paradoxes.
“I can only tell you, Dr. Silence”—his manner
became exceedingly impressive—”that I reached
sometimes a point of view whence all the great
puzzle of the world became plain to me, and I understood what they call in the Yoga books ‘The Great
Heresy of Separateness’; why all great teachers have
urged the necessity of man loving his neighbour as
himself; how men are all really one; and why the
utter loss of self is necessary to salvation and the discovery of the true life of the soul.”
He paused a moment and drew breath.
“Your speculations have been my own long ago,”
the doctor said quietly. “I fully realise the force of
your words. Men are doubtless not separate at all—in
the sense they imagine—”
“All this about the very much Higher Space I only
dimly, very dimly, conceived, of course,” the other
went on, raising his voice again by jerks; “but what
did happen to me was the humbler accident of—the
simpler disaster—oh, dear, how shall I put it—?”
He stammered and showed visible signs of distress.
“It was simply this,” he resumed with a sudden
rush of words, “that, accidentally, as the result of my
years of experiment, I one day slipped bodily into the
next world, the world of four dimensions, yet without
knowing precisely how I got there, or how I could get
back again. I discovered, that is, that my ordinary
three-dimensional body was but an expression—a
projection—of my higher four-dimensional body!
“Now you understand what I meant much earlier
in our talk when I spoke of chance. I cannot control
my entrance or exit. Certain people, certain human
atmospheres, certain wandering forces, thoughts,
desires even—the radiations of certain combinations
of colour, and above all, the vibrations of certain
kinds of music, will suddenly throw me into a state of
what I can only describe as an intense and terrific
inner vibration—and behold I am off! Off in the direction at right angles to all our known directions! Off
in the direction the cube takes when it begins to
trace the outlines of the new figure! Off into my
breathless and semi-divine Higher Space! Off, inside
myself, into the world of four dimensions!”
He gasped and dropped back into the depths of
the immovable chair.
“And there,” he whispered, his voice issuing from
among the cushions, “there I have to stay until these
vibrations subside, or until they do something which
I cannot find words to describe properly or intelligibly to you—and then, behold, I am back again.
First, that is, I disappear. Then I reappear.”
“Just so,” exclaimed Dr. Silence, “and that is why a
few—”
“Why a few moments ago,” interrupted Mr.
Mudge, taking the words out of his mouth, “you
found me gone, and then saw me return. The music
of that wretched German band sent me off. Your
intense thinking about me brought me back—when
the band had stopped its Wagner. I saw you approach
the peep-hole and I saw Barker’s intention of doing
so later. For me no interiors are hidden. I see inside.
When in that state the content of your mind, as of
your body, is open to me as the day. Oh, dear, oh,
dear, oh, dear!”
Mr. Mudge stopped and again mopped his brow.
A light trembling ran over the surface of his small
body like wind over grass. He still held tightly to the
arms of the chair.
“At first,” he presently resumed, “my new experiences were so vividly interesting that I felt no alarm.
There was no room for it. The alarm came a little
later.”
“Then you actually penetrated far enough into
that state to experience yourself as a normal portion
of it?” asked the doctor, leaning forward, deeply
interested.
Mr. Mudge nodded a perspiring face in reply.
“I did,” he whispered, “undoubtedly I did. I am
coming to all that. It began first at night, when I realised that sleep brought no loss of consciousness—”
“The spirit, of course, can never sleep. Only the
body becomes unconscious,” interposed John Silence.
“Yes, we know that—theoretically. At night, of
course, the spirit is active elsewhere, and we have no
A VICTIM OF HIGHER SPACE — 6 of 10
memory of where and how, simply because the brain
stays behind and receives no record. But I found that,
while remaining conscious, I also retained memory. I
had attained to the state of continuous consciousness, for at night I regularly, with the first approaches
of drowsiness, entered nolens volens the four-dimensional world.
“For a time this happened regularly, and I could
not control it; though later I found a way to regulate
it better. Apparently sleep is unnecessary in the
higher—the four-dimensional—body. Yes, perhaps.
But I should infinitely have preferred dull sleep to the
knowledge. For, unable to control my movements, I
wandered to and fro, attracted, owing to my partial
development and premature arrival, to parts of this
new world that alarmed me more and more. It was
the awful waste and drift of a monstrous world, so
utterly different to all we know and see that I cannot
even hint at the nature of the sights and objects and
beings in it. More than that, I cannot even remember
them. I cannot now picture them to myself even, but
can recall only the memory of the impression they
made upon me, the horror and devastating terror of
it all. To be in several places at once, for instance—”
“Perfectly,” interrupted John Silence, noticing the
increase of the other’s excitement, “I understand
exactly. But now, please, tell me a little more of this
alarm you experienced, and how it affected you.”
“It’s not the disappearing and reappearing per se
that I mind,” continued Mr. Mudge, “so much as certain other things. It’s seeing people and objects in
their weird entirety, in their true and complete
shapes, that is so distressing. It introduces me to a
world of monsters. Horses, dogs, cats, all of which I
loved; people, trees, children; all that I have considered beautiful in life—everything, from a human
face to a cathedral—appear to me in a different shape
and aspect to all I have known before. I cannot perhaps convince you why this should be terrible, but I
assure you that it is so. To hear the human voice proceeding from this novel appearance which I scarcely
recognise as a human body is ghastly, simply ghastly.
To see inside everything and everybody is a form of
insight peculiarly distressing. To be so confused in
geography as to find myself one moment at the North
Pole, and the next at Clapham Junction—or possibly
at both places simultaneously—is absurdly terrifying.
Your imagination will readily furnish other details
without my multiplying my experiences now. But you
have no idea what it all means, and how I suffer.”
Mr. Mudge paused in his panting account and lay
back in his chair. He still held tightly to the arms as
though they could keep him in the world of sanity
and three measurements, and only now and again
released his left hand in order to mop his face. He
looked very thin and white and oddly unsubstantial,
and he stared about him as though he saw into this
other space he had been talking about.
John Silence, too, felt warm. He had listened to
every word and had made many notes. The presence
of this man had an exhilarating effect upon him. It
seemed as if Mr. Racine Mudge still carried about
with him something of that breathless Higher-Space
condition he had been describing. At any rate, Dr.
Silence had himself advanced sufficiently far along
the legitimate paths of spiritual and psychic transformations to realise that the visions of this
extraordinary little person had a basis of truth for
their origin.
After a pause that prolonged itself into minutes,
he crossed the room and unlocked a drawer in a
bookcase, taking out a small book with a red cover. It
had a lock to it, and he produced a key out of his
pocket and proceeded to open the covers. The bright
eyes of Mr. Mudge never left him for a single second.
“It almost seems a pity,” he said at length, “to
cure you, Mr. Mudge. You are on the way to discovery of great things. Though you may lose your life in
the process—that is, your life here in the world of
three dimensions—you would lose thereby nothing
of great value—you will pardon my apparent rudeness, I know—and you might gain what is infinitely
greater. Your suffering, of course, lies in the fact that
you alternate between the two worlds and are never
wholly in one or the other. Also, I rather imagine,
though I cannot be certain of this from any personal
experiments, that you have here and there penetrated
even into space of more than four dimensions, and
have hence experienced the terror you speak of.”
The perspiring son of the Essex bargeman and the
woman of Normandy bent his head several times in
assent, but uttered no word in reply.
“Some strange psychic predisposition, dating no
doubt from one of your former lives, has favoured the
development of your ‘disease’; and the fact that you
had no normal training at school or college, no leading by the poor intellect into the culs-de-sac falsely
called knowledge, has further caused your exceedingly rapid movement along the lines of direct inner
experience. None of the knowledge you have foreA VICTIM OF HIGHER SPACE — 7 of 10
shadowed has come to you through the senses, of
course.”
Mr. Mudge, sitting in his immovable chair, began
to tremble slightly. A wind again seemed to pass over
his surface and again to set it curiously in motion like
a field of grass.
“You are merely talking to gain time,” he said
hurriedly, in a shaking voice. “This thinking aloud
delays us. I see ahead what you are coming to, only
please be quick, for something is going to happen. A
band is again coming down the street, and if it plays
—if it plays Wagner—I shall be off in a twinkling.”
“Precisely. I will be quick. I was leading up to the
point of how to effect your cure. The way is this: You
must simply learn to block the entrances.”
“True, true, utterly true!” exclaimed the little
man, dodging about nervously in the depths of the
chair. “But how, in the name of space, is that to be
done?”
“By concentration. They are all within you, these
entrances, although outer cases such as colour, music
and other things lead you towards them. These
external things you cannot hope to destroy, but once
the entrances are blocked, they will lead you only to
bricked walls and closed channels. You will no longer
be able to find the way.”
“Quick, quick!” cried the bobbing figure in the
chair. “How is this concentration to be effected?”
“This little book,” continued Dr. Silence calmly,
“will explain to you the way.” He tapped the cover.
“Let me now read out to you certain simple instructions, composed, as I see you divine, entirely from my
own personal experiences in the same direction. Follow these instructions and you will no longer enter
the state of Higher Space. The entrances will be
blocked effectively.”
Mr. Mudge sat bolt upright in his chair to listen,
and John Silence cleared his throat and began to read
slowly in a very distinct voice.
But before he had uttered a dozen words,
something happened. A sound of street music
entered the room through the open ventilators, for a
band had begun to play in the stable mews at the
back of the house—the March from Tannhäuser. Odd
as it may seem that a German band should twice
within the space of an hour enter the same mews and
play Wagner, it was nevertheless the fact.
Mr. Racine Mudge heard it. He uttered a sharp,
squeaking cry and twisted his arms with nervous
energy round the chair. A piteous look that was not
far from tears spread over his white face. Grey shadows followed it—the grey of fear. He began to
struggle convulsively.
“Hold me fast! Catch me! For God’s sake, keep me
here! I’m on the rush already. Oh, it’s frightful!” he
cried in tones of anguish, his voice as thin as a reed.
Dr. Silence made a plunge forward to seize him,
but in a flash, before he could cover the space
between them, Mr. Racine Mudge, screaming and
struggling, seemed to shoot past him into invisibility.
He disappeared like an arrow from a bow propelled
at infinite speed, and his voice no longer sounded in
the external air, but seemed in some curious way to
make itself heard somewhere within the depths of
the doctor’s own being. It was almost like a faint
singing cry in his head, like a voice of dream, a voice
of vision and unreality.
“Alcohol, alcohol!” it cried, “give me alcohol! It’s
the quickest way. Alcohol, before I’m out of reach!”
The doctor, accustomed to rapid decisions and
even more rapid action, remembered that a brandy
flask stood upon the mantelpiece, and in less than a
second he had seized it and was holding it out
towards the space above the chair recently occupied
by the visible Mudge. Then, before his very eyes, and
long ere he could unscrew the metal stopper, he saw
the contents of the closed glass phial sink and lessen
as though some one were drinking violently and
greedily of the liquor within.
“Thanks! Enough! It deadens the vibrations!”
cried the faint voice in his interior, as he withdrew
the flask and set it back upon the mantelpiece. He
understood that in Mudge’s present condition one
side of the flask was open to space and he could drink
without removing the stopper. He could hardly have
had a more interesting proof of what he had been
hearing described at such length.
But the next moment—the very same moment it
almost seemed—the German band stopped midway
in its tune—and there was Mr. Mudge back in his
chair again, gasping and panting!
“Quick!” he shrieked, “stop that band! Send it
away! Catch hold of me! Block the entrances! Block
the entrances! Give me the red book! Oh, oh, oh-h-hh!!!”
The music had begun again. It was merely a temporary interruption. The Tannhäuser March started
again, this time at a tremendous pace that made it
sound like a rapid two-step as though the instruments played against time.
