The Ka of Gifford Hillary (33 page)

‘But what happened?’ he persisted. ‘Did you have a vision and actually see my uncle murdered or something?’

‘No; an apparition appeared to me. At first I thought it was just a person who had left his body in a dream. That often happens. My Mum used to call them night-walkers, and she was so psychic that she was always seeing them all over the place. I’m not bothered by them often, only now and again. But I’d seen this one before. That was on Sunday night; soon after you left me. I was undressing when he appeared and I thought he was just trying to get a cheap thrill; so I told him to get back to bed and I put out the light and shut my mind against him.’

‘What did he do this evening to upset you so?’

‘He declared he was your uncle.’

‘Lord alive! Do you really mean to say that you have just been talking to Uncle Giff’s ghost?’

‘No. I knew right away that he couldn’t be. You see, the apparition of a dead person is quite different from that of one who still has a body to go back to. This one had, and I told him so. But he continued to insist that he had been dead for four days and that he was Sir Gifford Hillary.’

Johnny drew a quick breath. ‘What an extraordinary business. Do go on.’

‘Well, I took the line then that he must be someone who had been very closely connected with your uncle, and very upset by his death. So in a dream he was imagining that he was your uncle. He wouldn’t have that, and then the truth came out.’

‘How? Did he admit to having had something to do with Uncle Giff’s death?’

‘No; but, all the same, I bet he had. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if he was your uncle’s murderer. He stuck to his guns about being Sir Gifford, and said he wanted me to give you a message. It was to the effect that he had not committed suicide, but had died owing to an accident which wasn’t anybody’s fault. Someone knows all about it, and if the truth does come out he is afraid they will get into serious trouble for having concealed what they know from the police. On that account he wanted me to persuade you to throw your hand in and let sleeping dogs lie. You can see for yourself, just as I did, how that gave the whole show away.’

‘I’m sorry, but I don’t.’ Johnny shook his head.

‘Why, he was trying to protect himself, of course.’

‘Oh come! People can’t control their dreams; much less deliberately use them to appear to someone who is awake with the object of influencing events in their own favour.’

‘Some people can. My Mum once told me that when she was studying under that mystic in Egypt he told her that anyone could if they had the guts to train themselves for long enough. Of course it’s much more common out East than it is here, because they go in for developing their psychic powers more than we do. But there are people all over the world who can do it. If you had read as many books on the occult as I have you’d know that to have been proved over and over again.’

‘You think then that this chap appeared to you with the deliberate intention of getting me to abandon my investigation?’

Daisy nodded vigorously. ‘I’m sure of it. Of course he wasn’t a dream apparition in the ordinary sense, like I’d first thought. He was someone who knows how to throw himself into a trance and project his astral out of his body, then make it appear as a vision anywhere he wants. And to use his powers the way he has shows that he must be evil. It’s horrible to find yourself in contact with the astral of an evil person, That’s what scared and upset me so.’

‘I can quite understand that,’ Johnny sympathised. ‘But I’m still a bit at sea on this question of apparitions. Why should the spirit take a different form if it comes from the body of a living person from that which it does if he is dead?’

‘Because they are not the same thing,’ Daisy replied at once. ‘The thing that goes out in sleep, and can be sent out while in a trance by those who know how, is a person’s double. Of course it has no substance, so occultists call it the etheric double; but it is semi-opaque to anyone who can see it and exactly like the body it has left behind—the same age and appearance even to the clothes the physical body had on when it left it.

‘Occultists believe that our etheric doubles leave our bodies every night, and that mostly they rove about on the lower astral plane, meeting the doubles of friends and sometimes
the spirits of the dead. But in some ways they are almost as limited as we are, and must return when their body wakes. It is supposed that they are attached to it by what is called the “silver cord”. That’s a sort of invisible telephone line that can be stretched indefinitely. Normally they go back into their body just before it is due to wake, but should some shock wake the sleeping body unexpectedly, they receive instant warnings by means of the silver cord and so are able to flash back to it extra quick. When the physical mind becomes conscious again after sleep it often holds mixed-up impressions of places and people. We call those dreams, but they are really a patchwork of memories brought back by the double of its doings during the night.’

‘All that sounds reasonable enough,’ Johnny commented, ‘providing one accepts the premises on which it is based. Now what about the other kind of apparition?’

‘That is a true spirit. It is the indestructible personality; the immortal soul; the conscience that is always present to tell a person if he is doing right or wrong. It leaves the body to return to a higher plane at the moment of death.’

‘And what does that look like?’

‘It can assume any form it chooses. But they don’t often return to earth, and if they do they usually wish to be recognised by the person to whom they are appearing; so they take on a resemblance to the body they inhabited while here. Although if they die old and decrepit they often return looking as they were when in the prime of life.’

‘But how can you tell the difference between an etheric double and a spirit?’

‘A double has a grey appearance and its outline is like a living person’s; whereas a spirit has severed all connection with the body and has become a being of light. It glows with a sort of gentle radiance.’

‘Tell me, Daisy; are you speaking from personal experience or only what you believe to be the case?’

‘Oh I know what I’m talking about’; she sounded slightly huffy. ‘You can set your mind at rest on that. As I’ve already told you. I’ve seen plenty of night-walkers in my time. Spirits, of course, don’t come so frequent; but both my Mum and Dad appeared to me after they were dead; Mum several times, and twice she brought with her my young brother
who was taken off with croup when he was only five.’

After a moment’s silence, Johnny said: ‘All the same I can’t help feeling that you may be mistaken in the present instance.’

‘What makes you think so, ducks?’

‘Well, for one thing, you have admitted that a spirit can take any form; so I don’t see why Uncle Giff’s should not have assumed that of his double. For another, what he said to you about it not being suicide but an accident, and his wanting to shield innocent people who might get into trouble if I kept on playing the detective, is typical of him. He was just the generous sort of chap who would have come back for such a purpose.’

She shook her head. ‘You may be right about that. But in whatever form he appeared, if he had passed over he would have had that unmistakable glow radiating from him; and this one hadn’t.’

‘All the same, I’d like you to describe to me the apparition that you saw.’

Daisy obliged, and as she proceeded to give details of my physical appearance, Johnny’s face showed an increasing excitement. When she had done, he said: ‘The description fits; but there are plenty of men of his age and build. What was he wearing?’

‘All cats are grey at night, and so are etheric doubles. One has to depend on instinct to guess at colours. But I’d say he had on a smoking jacket and a bow tie that was either very dark or black and that his trousers were black too. There was a rather queer thing I noticed about his trousers; at the sides they had a deeper streak running down them. It might have been a stripe like officers have on their dress pants, but it looked too narrow for that and more as if it was a double line of braid or something.’

‘By Jove!’ Johnny jumped to his feet. ‘It was Uncle Giff, then! When I pulled him out of the water it struck me as Strange that he should be wearing the sort of trousers that are made only to go with tails. They have a double stripe, you know, whereas those made to go with a dinner jacket have a single broader one.’

‘I can’t help that, dear. The apparition I saw was an etheric double, not a spirit. Really it was.’

Impatiently Johnny brushed her objection aside. ‘Is there anything else you can remember? Have you told me everything he said to you?’

‘Not quite. Just before I managed to get rid of him, he said, “Tell Johnny I know that Barton saved the wrong suit-case.”’

‘Belton, not Barton, must have been what he said.’ Johnny pulled out his handkerchief and began to mop his brow. ‘Snakes alive! That clinches it! No one but myself knows about that. This is terrific!’

Daisy stuck out her chin a little, and argued doggedly. ‘A person who has the power to leave his body could. He might have been overlooking you.’

‘No, no!’ Johnny brought his mind, trained to assess chances, to bear on the evidence. ‘That would make too many coincidences. Even if someone’s etheric double was out of its body early in the afternoon, the odds against its having been at Longshot, observing me, are enormous. Then there are the trousers with the double braid; and the description of Uncle Giff that you’ve given me. You have said that a double always takes the form of the body which it has left; therefore it could tell you that it was Uncle Giff, but it couldn’t assume his appearance. It was Uncle Giff you saw. I haven’t a doubt of it.’

‘Johnny, it can’t have been! Your uncle has been dead four days, and I’ll swear this was not his spirit.’

‘Since you are so certain of that there must be some other explanation. You know much more about this sort of thing than I do. Think hard. See if you can think of one.’

For a few moments Daisy was silent, then she said: ‘We still have no details about how your uncle died—or the Professor. It’s all still shrouded in mystery. Perhaps your uncle isn’t dead. Maybe he has succeeded in pulling the wool over your eyes. Perhaps it was he who killed the other fellow, and to save himself from the gallows dressed up his victim’s body in his clothes, so that it was thought to be his.’

‘No,’ Johnny declared, ‘that’s right out of the question. Damn it all, it was I who fished the body out of the Solent. I couldn’t possibly be mistaken about its being that of my uncle.’

She shrugged. ‘I give up then. But I don’t care what you
say. If it was your uncle that I saw tonight it was not his spirit. It was his etheric double. So he must still be alive.’

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It can be imagined with what intense interest I followed these arguments and speculations, and the effect that Daisy’s conclusion, spoken with such unshakable conviction, had on me.

When, during our first brief contact, she had told me that I was dreaming, I had been so certain that I was not that I had immediately rejected her contention as absurd, putting it down to the sort of error into which an amateur medium might easily fall. But now that I had heard her reasons for her belief I felt compelled to give it serious consideration.

Could she possibly be right? I did not think so. All my limited experience of dreams weighed with me against the acceptance of such a belief. Yet I had never felt any change in my mentality which might have been taken as evidence that I was dead. My natural expectations that some power would waft me to a higher sphere had proved unfounded, and I had prayed in vain for guidance. I was still as deeply concerned for the welfare of my friends as I had ever been when I had had a body, and the fact that my movements continued to be limited to a little more than those of a living human being showed beyond question that I was, in any case, earth-bound. In short, my state bore no resemblance whatever to that of those beings of light whom Daisy had described when speaking of the spirits of the dead.

Against one statement of hers there was certainly no argument. She had said that a person who is dreaming is incapable of judging time. That being so it was at least possible that I was still in the middle of a long and agonising nightmare. At the thought that I might yet wake up in my comfortable bed with Ankaret beside me I was almost overcome by nostalgia. For me, at that moment, it would have been more truly heaven than entering any of the promised paradises of the world’s religions. Yet, again, all that I knew of dreams debarred me from putting any real hope in such a joyous prospect. My own dreams, and those of everyone with whom I had ever discussed the subject, had been brief, muddled,
illogical and often composed of a series of scenes having little relation to one another. Whereas this, if it were a dream, had already lasted longer than all the other dreams I had ever had in my life put together, had contained nothing absurd or fantastic and, broken only by lapses into unconsciousness, was complete in its continuity.

While I had been thinking on these lines, Johnny and Daisy had been continuing their argument, but doing little more than repeat themselves; so getting nowhere. My full attention was brought back to them by Johnny saying:

‘You know there is a possible explanation for all this. It’s so terrible that I can hardly bear to think of it. But just supposing … just supposing that Uncle Giff has been buried alive.’

The shock and horror with which his suggestion hit me beggars description. It was the very thing that had been the nightmare of my youth. Yet in an instant I realised that it could account for everything. Johnny had seen me dead and buried, but my etheric double was still free to roam the world and appear to people with psychic gifts, like Daisy. Had it not been for those words ‘still free’, which my mind had just formed, I think the thought would there and then have robbed me of my sanity. But a merciful Providence had spared me the awful torture of lying consciously entombed, and, realising that, I was able once more to turn my mind to the scene before me.