The Eve of All Saints’ Day
By John C. Wright
Naturally, I selected Halloween as the time for an experiment of such daring. Legend said that the boundaries between this world and other worlds beyond achieved their finest frailty on such a day, and it was my thought that separating the barriers between cosmos and consciousness, and flaying away the neurological matrix that hinders perception, required exactly such a season.
The place in which I found myself, my grandfather’s long-deserted mansion, baroque and Victorian with its folly tower and rose window and ornamental eaves, on the bald hill overlooking the town certainly was as atmospheric as the stage setting for some haunted house story, but in this case my motives were more pragmatic: I wanted a location far from the noise and traffic of the town. The old growth forest besieging the town covered many a hill too steep for logging, but not one tree was to be found on the barren hill here, bald as a witch without her wig. This I preferred, for the rustling of the leaves would be too severe should my experiment prove successful. There had never been modern plumbing nor electrical wires run to grandfather’s mansion, so even minor interference from electrical motions or traces of odor would be below the detectable threshold.
I sent Froward downstairs, to man the door in case any children would brave the lone and lonely trail that winds up the hill to the house. I gave him instructions to be as silent as possible, and to drive away anyone who insisted on seeing me.
The huge, round window, inscribed at the edges with such peculiar theosophic symbols, which loomed like the eye of a Cyclops in the folly tower, opened into a bare white upper room where Froward, my manservant, had placed a single couch. The rest of the house was boarded up, unswept, unfilled. The walls were as blank as the inner lid of a sensory deprivation chamber. Here in the circle of moonlight cast by the rose window was a small table holding my drugs and potions and phylacteries and neuroelectrical equipment, resonator and recording cylinders, amplifiers, and so on. I did not need to light the lamp when mixing the first dose—I am sure I made no mistake.
The moon shone bright and clear, and the stars were like eyes of diamond.
I took the first injection, and followed this with a drink of the forbidden mixture. The injection would suppress the inhibition centers in the medulla oblongata, allowing a full potential of neuroelectric current to flow freely in my system. The draft was meant to hinder the jerking or random motion of the limbs the investigator Annesley reports in his findings, caused by the abnormal sensitivity.
The theory, first explicated by a Boston savant named Tillinghast, but having roots in the teachings of Tibetan loremasters and Egyptian mystagogues, is that our perceptions have far more range and fineness than we consciously can know. In the same way that it is said that subconsciously we never forget the slightest detail of any perception, even prenatal influences, the theory held that we are presently aware of far more than reaches our awareness.
A region in the thalamus and hypothalamus screens out ninety percent of the signals reaching us from the outer cosmos, allowing our cortex only to see and hear those perceptions useful, as blind evolution measures use, to the survival of the species. Darwinism cares nothing for truth value, only for use value. I often wonder why our eyes allow us to see the stars, since I can imagine no chain of circumstances where seeing these tiny lights would mark the difference between life and death.
The breathing exercises help to calm the initial nightmarish sensations as I grew aware of the speed of the globe of the earth turning beneath me, its dizzying dance around the sun, and I fought back the vertigo caused by seeing the true distance to the stars, the vastness of the black abyss between.
I will not bother repeating here what previous investigators, such as Annesley, Delapore, Crawford and Tillinghast obtained. Their results have been suppressed, but a curious investigator can still uncover them.
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