The Ka of Gifford Hillary (16 page)

The moon was now up and by it I could see the silent prospect of the Solent as clearly as if I had still been living. Like most people, I had always assumed that to die was to solve the great mystery, yet to me death had so far revealed
nothing. All the same, I found it impossible to believe that I should continue in my present state for long; and as I heard the grandfather clock in the hall strike midnight, I wondered a little grimly what strange experience the new day would hold for me.

In the Age of Faith, when religion played a major part in everybody’s life, and a belief in the powers of saints and devils was accepted as naturally as the fact of life itself, ninety-nine people out of every hundred had fixed convictions about death. They accepted without question the teaching that at the moment of dissolution their souls were either carried triumphantly away by waiting angels or dragged off to eternal torment by remorseless fiends. In consequence those who led godly lives could meet their end with complacency and sinners generally had the opportunity of making a deathbed repentance which enabled them to rely with some confidence on forgiveness and mercy.

But, apart from the few who still faithfully follow the Christian precepts, the Age of Reason has deprived us of this happy certainty of our fate in the hereafter. Even so, the idea has become pretty generally accepted that while we need no longer fear hell-fire, and that punishment for our shortcomings will probably be no more drastic than having to suffer a certain period of distressing remorse, our personalities will continue after death and we shall be received on the other side by loved ones who have preceded us.

I was, of course, brought up in the Christian faith, but from the time of leaving school had never been a regular churchgoer and, like most men of this bustling, highly competitive modern age, had given little thought to religion. In consequence, had I been told the previous morning that I was to die that night I should certainly not have expected to be wafted away either by angels or devils; but I should have expected somebody or some power to do something about me. Could I have reconciled myself to being so suddenly snatched from those I loved on earth, I think I might even have looked forward to death as a great adventure, and I should certainly
have counted on meeting again friends who had gone before me.

Yet here I was, a ghost—even if an invisible one—a wraith, a spirit, utterly alone, with no means of communicating with either the living or the dead, and no indication whatever that I might shortly be taken care of.

It was a most unhappy situation and there came into my mind a frightening thought. What if the God in whom I had been taught to believe at my mother’s knee watched over only those who proved faithful to Him? As I had abandoned Him perhaps He had abandoned me, and I was condemned to wander the earth alone until some far distant day when there was a final judgement. Such a possibility was utterly appalling.

Bordering on panic, I took refuge in the Christian teaching that the Mercy of God was infinite. Although I could lay no claim to having led a saintly life mine had certainly not been an evil one. My neglect of religion was not a sin of commission but omission; so surely He would not inflict such a drastic punishment upon me.

Yet of that hope I was promptly robbed by the beliefs I had formed since becoming adult. It had seemed to me highly questionable that the Christian teaching was a reliable guide to the hereafter. What of the millions who placed their faith in Mahomet and Krishna? And to me, the impersonal philosophies of the Buddhists and Confucians appeared much more plausible. Admittedly I had never thought about the matter really seriously, but I had more or less subconsciously come to the conclusion that God in the image of Man did not exist at all, and that the affairs of mankind were directed by some remote power, who left it to each individual to create his own place in some future existence.

Again I was chilled by the possibility that I had been right; for, if so, I could not hope to be pardoned and rescued by a merciful God who was aware of all things, even to the fall of a sparrow; but must somehow work out my own salvation, despite the fact that I had not the faintest idea how to set about it.

One comforting thought came to me; there must be countless thousands of people in the same boat as myself. In Europe and America and in every part of the world in which
white communities of some size were established people must be dying every minute; and a high proportion of them, although brought up as Christians, must have died with the same lack of positive faith in the Church’s teachings as I had. Therefore it could be only a matter of hours before I should meet some kindred spirit in a like state of puzzlement who, for lack of a better phrase, had also recently ‘passed over’.

That theory seemed sound and reassuring until I suddenly remembered that I had actually been present at Evans’s death. Although I had never discussed these matters with him, at odd times during general conversations he had let drop enough for me to be quite certain that he was an agnostic. That being the case, our spirits should have had enough in common to meet with more or less similar treatment in the ‘great beyond’.

Therefore it was only reasonable to suppose that as his left his body he would have been aware of my presence, and that I should have realised that he too, although now invisible, was still in the lab and also watching with the keenest interest what Ankaret would do next. The different backgrounds which had given us so little in common while alive, and even any antipathy we felt for one another owing to each of us, in a sense, having been the cause of the other’s death, should surely have been submerged in mutual concern for our futures, and an instinctive urge to get together and compare notes about our sensations.

But nothing of that kind had occurred. When Ankaret had finished with Evans I had regarded him only as a repulsive and bloody mess. Not a whisper, or even a thought, had impinged on my consciousness to suggest his spritual survival and arrival on this same ‘plane’ as myself. And that having been so in the case of a person with whom I was at least well acquainted, there did not seem any great hope that I would shortly run into some elderly person who had just died in a neighbouring village, or one of the several people who during the past twenty-four hours must have given up the ghost in so large a city as Southampton.

While I was gloomily pondering this—no doubt because certain terms used by spiritualists, such as ‘passed over’ and the ‘great beyond’, had recently drifted through my mind—
another idea occurred to me. From the little I had read of such matters, most occultists were of the opinion that on leaving the body a spirit rarely sped direct to its new field of activity. Some even failed for a time to comprehend fully that they were dead, while the majority were still so deeply concerned with the people or projects and possessions that they had left behind that, for varying periods, they remained earthbound. The period, according to this belief, depended on the strength of the emotional ties, and it was only when these had weakened to a point at which the craving of the spirit for fresh interests submerged the old ones that it could move onward to a higher sphere.

Unquestionably from the moment of my own death until midnight I had been entirely absorbed by happenings connected with my past life; so there seemed fair grounds for supposing that the reason why I had so far made no contact with the spirit world was because I was still earthbound. At least such a premise had logic to recommend it, and with a slightly more optimistic outlook I began to contemplate its implications.

For Ankaret and Johnny I could do nothing; so, should I have the ability to leave their vicinity, there was really no point in remaining longer in it. On the other hand, my love for her and affection for him still filled me with deep concern for their future. Before ‘going on’ I was most anxious to know if she would escape being implicated in the crimes committed at Longshot Hall that night, and if he would succeed in persuading Admiral Waldron of his innocence concerning the leakage of those Top Secret matters to which I had been made privy by Sir Charles.

Personally, I have never believed in the old adage that ‘One cannot have one’s cake and eat it’. Like most successful men, by the tactful handling of affairs I have, on most occasions during my life, succeeded in deriving benefit and enjoyment from the things I won without having to surrender them later. Now my personality having in no way altered on account of the loss of my body, I saw no reason why I should not attempt—literally in this case—to have the best of both worlds.

Tomorrow, unless prevented by some cosmic law that was still outside my comprehension, I would return to Longshot Hall and again become a silent witness of all that took place
there. But the night was still young; and during it I would do my utmost to leave earth and penetrate the higher plane of existence on which I now felt that a future of some kind must be awaiting me.

Since I was no longer subject to the physical limitations imposed by a body, my first thought was to make my way towards the stars. Willing myself to rise, I managed to force my consciousness up to the level of the roof of the house; but there the effort to ascend further proved such an intolerable strain that I had to give up and on abandoning the attempt I slowly sank back to my previous level, some six feet above the terrace.

Considerably disappointed in the result of my first experiment, I next decided to see how fast I could move, and facing in the direction of the beach I set off towards it. The sensation of progressing in long swift bounds was an extremely pleasant one, but I soon found that I was not going much faster than a fast run; and when I pulled up on the shore I was conscious of a denifite sense of fatigue. It was not breathlessness, for I had no lungs, but I knew instinctively that I could not have kept up that pace for very much longer, and several minutes elapsed before I felt up to trying anything else.

While I remained stationary, just above the tide-mark, to recover, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to find out what would happen if I advanced towards Cowes. I thought it probable that I should be able to move over water as easily as I could over dry land. It also seemed possible that I might be able to rove about under the surface as though I were wearing a diver’s helmet, and the prospect of exploring the sea-bottom at my leisure intrigued me greatly. In any case it was quite certain that I could not drown, so I once more projected myself forward.

Within two minutes of leaving the shore I found that neither of my ideas had been correct. As I crossed the shallows, bound by bound, I sank lower until the essential ‘me’ had dropped to within a little less than a foot above the water; but at that level it remained until I forced it under, and then, when the effort to keep it there was exhausted, it bobbed up again.

On metaphorically ‘plunging in’ I was not conscious of
any change of temperature, or pressure from the water, but my movement was slowed down to the sort of pace I would have maintained had I been swimming, although I was not consciously using my invisible arms and legs, and my range of vision was now limited to that of a bather with his head just above water.

For a time I drifted about, then I again became aware of a sense of fatigue; so I returned to the shore and went up to the beach house. As long as it was warm enough to bathe we always left several lounge chairs out on its veranda and, instinctively, I performed the equivalent of first sitting, then lying down, in one of them.

There seemed no other experiments I could try, so my thoughts turned again to Ankaret and the shattering events of the past few hours. Gradually my mind became hazy, and before I realised what was happening my consciousness had faded out.

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When I became conscious again it was morning. The sun was well up, lighting the familiar scene and sparkling on the wavelets. I heard a slight noise nearby and saw Johnny throw off his bathing robe on to one of the other chairs. It must have been his arrival that had roused me.

He was a fine figure of a man, tall and well set up, his body marred only by a long scar across the ribs where a Malayan bandit had sniped him. His resemblance to my father was much closer than my own, but his fair, slightly wavy, hair had come from the other side of his family. It was not surprising that his looks and physique, coupled with a rather reserved manner, made him very attractive to women; though as far as I knew he had never had any really serious affairs until he met Sue Waldron.

The thought that I had unwillingly been the cause of their quarrel distressed me very much. Had I only been permitted to have lived for another day I could have gone to the Admiral and given him my personal assurance that Johnny had no more to do with the proposal I put before the Board that afternoon than he had. And that was the real crux of the
matter. Old Waldron was too honest a man to endeavour to prevent Johnny acting in accordance with his convictions. His resentment was due to his belief that Johnny had made an unscrupulous use of secret information in an attempt to put a fast one over on the Navy. Sue’s attitude sprang entirely from sentiment, and I felt sure that it needed only an assurance from her father that Johnny was doing his duty as he saw it to bring her round. But now there was nothing I could do about it. I could only hope that Sue’s feelings for him would get the better of her very natural championship of the Service which she had been brought up to regard as the pride and shield of Britain.

Johnny waded into the water and when up to his waist flung himself into a crawl with such powerful strokes that he was soon nearly a quarter of a mile away from me. He had just passed a miniature cape that juts out a little way from the regular curve of the beach when, somewhat to my surprise, instead of turning and coming back he swam towards the land and splashed his way ashore. For a moment he stood there bending over something, then he straightened up and set off at a run towards the house. Not having moved from the veranda I could not see what it was that he had found, but it flashed upon me that it might be my body. Moving swiftly in that direction I saw that I was right.