No More Learning

He could see it moving a little
where it lay upon a table. At that moment I heard something like little
squeals, but kept silent, as when I saw the dead body. In a moment more
the seeress said, 'I hear little squeals. ' Then the evoker of spirits
heard them, but said, 'They are not squeals; he is pouring a red liquid
out of a retort through a slit in the cloth; the slit is over the mouth
of the image and the liquid is gurgling in rather a curious way. ' Weeks
seemed to pass by hurriedly, and somebody saw the man still busy in
his cellar. Then more weeks seemed to pass, and now we saw him lying
sick in a room up-stairs, and a man in a conical cap standing beside
him. We could see the image too. It was in the cellar, but now it could
move feebly about the floor. I saw fainter images of the image passing
continually from where it crawled to the man in his bed, and I asked
the evoker of spirits what they were. He said, 'They are the images
of his terror. ' Presently the man in the conical cap began to speak,
but who heard him I cannot remember. He made the sick man get out of
bed and walk, leaning upon him, and in much terror till they came to
the cellar. There the man in the conical cap made some symbol over
the image, which fell back as if asleep, and putting a knife into the
other's hand he said, 'I have taken from it the magical life, but you
must take from it the life you gave. ' Somebody saw the sick man stoop
and sever the head of the image from its body, and then fall as if he
had given himself a mortal wound, for he had filled it with his own
life. And then the vision changed and fluttered, and he was lying sick
again in the room up-stairs.
He seemed to lie there a long time with
the man in the conical cap watching beside him, and then, I cannot
remember how, the evoker of spirits discovered that though he would in
part recover, he would never be well, and that the story had got abroad
in the town and shattered his good name. His pupils had left him and
men avoided him. He was accursed. He was a magician.

The story was finished, and I looked at my acquaintance. He was white
and awestruck. He said, as nearly as I can remember, 'All my life I
have seen myself in dreams making a man by some means like that. When
I was a child I was always thinking out contrivances for galvanizing
a corpse into life. ' Presently he said, 'Perhaps my bad health in
this life comes from that experiment. ' I asked if he had read
_Frankenstein_, and he answered that he had. He was the only one of us
who had, and he had taken no part in the vision.


III

Then I asked to have some past life of mine revealed, and a new
evocation was made before the tablet full of little squares. I cannot
remember so well who saw this or that detail, for now I was interested
in little but the vision itself. I had come to a conclusion about the
method. I knew that the vision may be in part common to several people.

A man in chain armour passed through a castle door, and the seeress
noticed with surprise the bareness and rudeness of castle rooms.