Over and over again the same experiences were described, though in ecstatic terms and with a sense of triumph that Seb could not share with these distant witnesses. How had all of this contributed to Ewan becoming an unwashed, homeless alcoholic, who was found dead in a guest house with six quid to his name?
The silver cord has begun to appear for me too. It flickered into life last night for the first time. And I sensed more than saw the slow dark river. I was delighted when I came to. I wept and embraced my friends. If I can return there, to that place, then the detachment, the sinking, the heavy, heavy sinking that they all speak of, will occur. My renunciation to the deep is possible.
At the repeated references to ‘the silver cord’, the ‘dark tunnel’, the ‘slowly flowing black water’, Seb was unable to stop imagining people being lowered into water they could not see the bottom of, by means of a disintegrating rope. Water driven by a swift current, its passage a subterranean sinus. Perhaps this was a sewer pipe beneath the afterlife, or a burrow into Hades.
Hadn’t Ewan mentioned Hades?
He had seen this place too.
Seb sensed no coercion either, only voluntary participation, and an admiration for this ‘H’ and ‘Diane’. At times, the devotion bordered upon deification.
The files were also incomplete and must have been part of a much bigger archive. 1967 alone had a file titled Volume 50, containing only the testimonies dated in July of that year.
Throughout the day, he’d gradually developed a sense of a group of people within a larger community who had come to believe themselves special, even superhuman. They were encouraged by H and Diane to believe it too. A community addicted to a process, and the concentration of their entire will was focused upon repeating it. Another thing that reminded Seb of Ewan.
The ‘inducement’ must have forced the process. Possibly drugs, but nothing pharmaceutical was ever mentioned. There was also a great deal of contextualizing these experiences as part of a ‘spiritual’, ‘mystical’ and ‘cosmic’ order, with much reference to the ‘spiritual body’, and that was indicative of the time. People had become ‘assured’ of the existence of a hierarchy involving other ‘spheres’, ‘realms’ and ‘dimensions’. A fair number of people too; he had records from at least fifty different individuals who’d participated in the SPR experiments. The names in the later files were different from those at the beginning. One woman, however, who was only ever referred to as ‘J’, seemed to have lived with ‘the Society’ for six years.
Seb also suspected a high dropout rate.
‘My psychical evolving’ and ‘My renunciation of self has been ongoing for a long time’ and ‘My concentration within passivity’ were phrases that suggested the terminology of a cult. Here was a belief system possessing its own idiom, ideology, and terminology that also postured as something scientific.
There was a great deal of ‘as H directed’ in the files too. H? Who was this ‘H’? Hazzard? Could ‘H’ be an actual reference to M. L. Hazzard, the obscure mystical writer that Ewan had been so enamoured of? Surely not. Seb was no expert on the obscure writer, but was sure that Hazzard’s connection would have been more well known within the horror and weird field. He’d never caught a whiff of it.
The collective voice of the reports irritated him. There was far too little that distinguished one person from another. The subjects of the reports appeared to be speaking in a group voice. Maybe the transcription of the notes accounted for that. But there was an obsessive and narcissistic quality to the testimonies too, until the recorded ecstasies became morbidly boring.
Seb went downstairs to bed and found himself on the verge of a profound sadness. He became tearful, but didn’t know why.
He left the house’s lights on.
The illumination in his dream was not the same as the electric light in his home.
His house featured in the dream. But his home suffered a recreation by something too alien, unpleasant and insistent to have been within his mind’s capabilities.
The nightmare was suffused with a dim, bluish light, the origins of which he had not been able to determine for a while. The glow had partially illumined his chest of drawers, the mirrored wardrobe, the steel light fittings, wooden blinds, the previous day’s clothes folded over the end of the bedstead.
His own presence within the room was unconnected to an unfolding scene typical of a dream. Dreams did not have such extended pauses either. Nor were they still-life studies.
A profound sense of expectation had made Seb as anxious as a child separated from its mother.
The floor of his room was covered with liquid. Black water that reflected no light. As soon as he became aware of the water he also heard the distant hush of a current.
The first figure to appear in the doorway of his room passed down the corridor outside without noticing him. At the sight of it, his heartbeat had occupied his mouth.