· · · ·

  “Did you find her?” the lantern asked. I said that I had found her now, and indeed I saw her over the woman’s shoulder, led by a tall, swaggering being of scarlet and gold. I ran to her and hugged her, and when I saw that the woman of the lamp had followed me I hugged her too. “Be careful of Thag,” she said. “You’re going—we’re—”

  And then we three—but not the man in scarlet and gold—were standing beside the furnace in the basement of my own house. But June (until she vanished last night from her own locked room, while the dark-haired woman with the white forelock, who no longer is held aloft by her lantern, slept with me in the bed that has not held two since May died) would only cry, and tell us that her father the king would allow no one to mock her, and scream for fear the old man in the picture above the mantel would imprison her in the Piombi with Casanova. The dark-haired woman, whose eyes are blue and whose name is Laurel, said, “She has broken; we all break to some extent, and you have brought the wrong fragment.”

  From the Notebook of Dr. Stein

  The patient DW was brought by her parents and an aunt. DW a girl of nineteen, tall, rather slender, of English-Scottish stock. Mother called earlier, asked I come there, see her. Nurse refused but gave her emergency appointment after hours.

  Mother says acute onset, girl normal until yesterday, naturally quiet girl, no flapper, somewhat religious, “great reader,” knew few boys. Confirmed by father. Aunt says willful, “flighty,” sometimes made unnecessary noise to disturb her (aunt). Agrees normal until yesterday.

  In interview DW appeared tense, twisted handkerchief and repeatedly picked up various small objects from my desk, replacing them whenever her attention was directed toward them. Johnson, transcribe from Dictaphone.

  · · · ·

  Dr. Stein: Now, Donna, what seems to be the trouble?

  DW: I don’t know.

  Dr. S: You know what kind of doctor I am, don’t you, Donna? I am an alienist. Why is it you think your father and mother wish me to treat you?

  DW: I have people inside me.

  Dr. S: Do you mean you are pregnant?

  DW: I have people inside me, walking around, pulling the strings.

  Dr. S: You are a marionette—is that what you’re saying? You feel you are mechanical?

  DW: No. I feel like myself, but they’re in there. The woman is looking out through my left eye now.

  Dr. S: How many of them are there?

  DW: Three unless you count the other one.

  Dr. S: Do you know their names?

  DW: The man, the girl, and the woman.

  Dr. S: The man is your father, the girl is yourself, and the woman is your mother—isn’t that right?

  DW: No, I’m outside.

  Dr. S: You are holding your arms oddly and twisting your legs. Why do you do that?

  · · · ·

  (Patient was sitting in an extremely contorted position which gave the impression that her knees and shoulders were dislocated, but seemed to suffer no discomfort.—HS)

  · · · ·

  DW: The other.

  Dr. S: The one who is not the man, the girl, or the woman—is that correct?

  DW: Doctor, this is going to be quite difficult for you to understand, but this girl is not ill; we—my friends and I—have found out that she is being used as an energy base by Thag, and we’re trying to protect her from him until we can dislodge him.

  Dr. S: You have a deep voice. I presume you are a man.

  DW: My name is Harry Nailer.

  Dr. S: Donna, what are you doing?

  · · · ·

  (Patient had left her chair and was walking about the room on all fours with a motion sometimes bestial, sometimes insectile:—HS)

  · · · ·

  Dr. S: Donna, if you don’t get back into your chair I’m not going to talk to you any more… That’s better, you may lie on my sofa if you like. Do you mind if I smoke? Does your father smoke? Do you know that my wife won’t let me smoke in the dining room at home? She says the smoke gets into the drapes, but I like a good cigar.

  DW: We could evict Thag by killing her, of course, but besides the moral issue we don’t think it would do much good—he’d probably find somebody else, and we’d have a hard time finding him. If we can cut him off…

  Dr. S: I don’t like the light way in which you dismiss the moral issue, Donna. Your life is very valuable.

  DW: You see, from our point of view she’s already dead.

  Dr. S: No, no!

  DW: What year is this?

  Dr. S: It is nineteen thirty-five, Donna.

  DW: We are from nineteen ninety-seven.

  Dr. S: I would like to talk to Donna, please.

  DW: All right, but she’s not going to be able to tell you much.

  Dr. S: Donna, you are going to break your own bones—you frighten me. Have you been practicing to become a contortionist?

  DW: No.

  Dr. S: That is better, now you sound like a pretty girl. Can you tell me who these people are?

  DW: My father’s already told you about Thag, and there’s Laurel Baker. I’m June Nailer.

  Dr. S: I have told you that I wish to speak to Donna—the voice is fine, much better, but it must be Donna. I will talk to no one else.

  DW: I could pretend to be Donna and you wouldn’t know the difference. But we need your help. In our time, you see, there were too many people, so some of them became nin—that’s what we called them. It meant that you resigned from nature to exist in a purely subjective framework. Since we exist at a lower energy level, independent of physical reality, we’ll last much longer, and fade away instead of dying…

  · · · ·

  (The man’s voice here, Doctor. I assume this is still the patient??—jj)

  The nin approach a zero energy level asymptotically. Theoretically we will remain in existence forever—or at least, indefinitely. That was my father. I was going to say that when you’re a nin you don’t consume the planetary resources. But you bounce back and forth for a long time—father and I are still bouncing, and Laurel too, now that she’s close to us.

  Dr. S: Joan! Will you come in here a moment, please? Nurse Johnson: Yes, Dr. Stein.

  Dr. S: From this girl’s parents I want the blanket release, or I’m not accepting this patient. You know the one I mean? Everything. All. If they say yes, get them to sign and show them out. If they will not sign tell me and we will give her back to them.

  Nurse Johnson: I understand, Doctor.

  DW: The bouncing—as June calls it—isn’t important. Personalities newly arrived carry a heavy life-charge that draws them back from time to time, and draws others with them. Thag and those like him are important—we don’t know how many there are.

  Dr. S: So now you are an older woman, a lady. You wish me to believe you have multiple personalities—is that not so? That is very rare, Donna. Most often we find that those who seem to have them really have other illnesses, and this is a disguise for them.

  DW: This would go better, wouldn’t you say, Doctor, if we could control her arms and legs?

  Dr. S: Also if you would control your voice. It is a good voice for an opera singer, all that vibrato, but not for a young girl.

  DW: But we cannot. It’s all that the three of us can do to hold the speech centers and the involuntary nervous system. You see, we have discovered that many of the nin are not simply human beings who have crossed over, but creatures who by the strength of their energy can assume that semblance to the others; and by some inversion we don’t understand, they attenuate into the past rather than the future. Once there they are able to seize someone—like this poor baby—devour her energies, and use them to return.

  Dr. S: You have tripped yourself up, Donna. If only the Thags, as you call them, can go back to the present, how did your other three voices get here?

  DW: We seized Thag and forced him to draw us back with him, Doctor. And I was not a singer in nature; I was a medium, and one of the first to cross.

  Dr. S: Of course. So you have been listening to the spiritualists, Donna? Or perhaps only reading their books? Nurse Johnson: Here is the release, Dr. Stein.

  Dr. S: Thank you. We will try the Cerletti treatment in a few minutes, I think. Donna, you seem to want me to do something to help you. What is it?

  DW: This is Harry Nailer again, Dr. Stein. As Miss Baker explained, we among the nin see Thag and others like him simply as powerful—perhaps eccentric—human personalities. The strength of their energies allows them to project this. As time passes and their energy level is reduced, we sometimes sense what I might call wrong notes. Miss Baker, who was a clairvoyant in nature, is very sensitive to this; and with my help and my daughter June’s she began keeping a particular watch on Thag. At first we thought that he might be an unusually strong and bad personality fragment—all personalities shatter to some extent when they make the crossing, unless they have achieved complete union, what Miss Baker calls interior peace, while in nature.

  Dr. S: So your Thag is not a human being or even a part of one, but what is he? I wish you would allow him to talk to me.

  DW: Laurel Baker again, Doctor. I doubt that we could. Never having existed as a human in nature, Thag is an unskillful operator of the human body as you have seen. He may be a creature of a different sphere, or a spiritual survivor of a prehuman race.

  · · · ·

  (The masculine voice again.—jj)

  Something that might work would be to lower this girl’s energy—that might force Thag to make some move that would let us get at him. As things are now, we’re deadlocked. If she were confined, for example, and placed on a very restricted diet; or if she were forced to donate blood.

  Dr. S: Well, we may come to confinement in time, Donna, but first we are going to try something else, something new. You would not be familiar with the work of Cerletti and Bini, in Italy, but they have developed a technique that shows great promise, and I have been using it experimentally. We place metal rods—they are called electrodes—to the temples; there is a conductive cream applied also which contains metal particles so that there are no burns. Then an electric current is passed, very briefly, through the brain.

  DW: Wait, Harry, let me talk to him. We are familiar with that treatment, Dr. Stein, but it will do no good here.

  Dr. S: I expected you to say that, Madame opera singer.

  Is it because you are above all that? So superhuman that you cannot be removed from a poor girl’s brain by mere electricity? Or is it that so much energy will raise your level and catapult you into your future again? Or will you bounce, as you call it when you speak in your natural voice, and appear to me in my surgery wearing ray pistols and rocket belts? You see I have begun to talk like Dr. Huer in the funnies, but I am going to try the Cerletti treatment just the same.

  DW: Electrical energies are far too coarse to do the things you suggest, Doctor, but what their effect will be upon our ability to protect this girl, or on ourselves, I cannot say. From what I know of Thag, the thing that is sucking her life-energies—

  Dr. S: Ah, I have it now. The way you move around the room, Donna—it had seemed to me that it was like the walking of a spider, yet there was something of the way a rat runs too, but now I know. You are a bat! In Germany, when I was a boy, we would sometimes throw things to knock them from the eaves of the coal shed, and when they are on the ground they walk just as you do. So your Thag is a Blutsauger and next you will want me to pound a stick into you, which Dr. Freud and I understand. No, Donna, but you need help with all those people inside you, and we will try the Cerletti treatment.

  DW: Dr. Stein—

  · · · ·

  (End of cylinder.—jj)

  The electrical treatment was administered to the patient as described on pp. 16–17. She convulsed satisfactorily and lapsed into normal sleep as soon as the current was discontinued. About one hour later I visited her bedside; she appeared rational but exhausted and not inclined to converse.

  Nurse reports she had said earlier, “I feel something gnawing at my heart.” I left and a few minutes later nurse, who had gone to get patient soup, found her dead. I am preparing an account of this case for forwarding to Drs. Cerletti and Bini.

  Thag

  Once upon a time there was a boy named Eric who had a tame raven and a ragged cap and no boots, and lived with his mother in a cottage in the forest. Eric and his mother were very poor, but nonetheless they possessed a great treasure, a charm ancient and powerful. This was a bear’s skull, and hung from the roofbeam of their little house on a chain of iron. Eric’s great-grandfather had made it long ago, choking the bear with moonlight and filling his skull with the cottony tales of rabbits, and the urine of shadows, and black feathers snatched at great risk from the left foreleg of an eagle, and many other things. The bear’s skull was the home of Thag, as a beehive is the home of bees; and Thag was a powerful spirit though he was often away.

  One day when Eric and his mother were picking mushrooms in the damp spring woods, he asked her to tell him—again—about the last time Thag had returned home; for this had been the winter after Eric was born, and he had been too small to remember. So Eric’s mother told him, and it was a story that grew better with each telling, just as the hilt of a scramasax learns to glow beneath its owner’s hand. For Eric’s father had, with the aid of Thag, made the trees to dance down the highroad, and built a great hall of glass on Nine Men’s Meadow through whose dome the stars could be seen by daylight, and forced certain rich men in the town to disgorge a part of what they had won by law from the poor country folk, and for this last, after Thag had gone again, had been hanged.

  There had been a great fair on the gallows hill (as Eric’s mother explained to him) for the hanging, with jugglers and gingerbread, and beer given free so that men filled their caps with it and set them on their heads. She and Eric had been the cynosure of all eyes, the only time in her life that she had felt so important, so that she swore if she could she would marry tomorrow if only her new husband could be hanged too; and it was then that Eric decided that if ever Thag came home to the bear’s skull again he would use him, and surpass all the exploits of his father, both for wonder and boldness.

  Now that very night Thag returned. Eric was lying asleep in his little three-sided loft beneath the roof when he dreamed he saw a running man in crimson and gold who carried a naked falchion. Eric knew it was the custom of Thag to appear as a man in dreams and otherwise in reality, and he knew that this was Thag. Behind Thag, very dimly seen and small in the distance, were three figures; but Eric paid them little attention. He woke, and the whole house was quiet as the wind in the wood. Then Gnip the raven stirred on his perch and said, “Mystery,” and Eric heard a humming in the bear’s skull outside his window and knew Thag was back. In the morning it would be necessary to propitiate Thag, and then he could do whatever he wanted.

  · · · ·

  Now the king of that country was named Charles the Wise, and he was sleeping late of the morning following the day following the night Thag had returned at last, when he was waked all at once by three things together. The first was that the queen ran into his bedroom screaming; and the second was a great shouting in the bailey, accompanied by the clashing and smashing heard when polearms and partisans and halberds and brown bills are let fall to the cobbles; and the third was that the whole castle had begun to rock back and forth beneath him, so that when he looked out the window he saw the watchtower tossing against the sky like the mainmast of a galleass in a gale. Then the queen (a tall, fair, fine-featured woman just settling into solid flesh after her girlhood, with no more brains than a sack of groats) cried, “Charles, save me!” and when he asked her what was wrong she explained that they were set upon by the mitred powers of Hell, and every knight in the castle who could throw a leg over a horse was already ten days’ ride off, and the men-atarms had dropped them and were hiding in the cistern, and the archers were all unstrung as well. And she concluded by saying that if he did not flee this minute they were doomed.

  Then the king took thought, and particularly upon his father’s maxim, given him when he was but young, that kings sat three-legged stools—the legs being their armies, their castles, and their treasuries. And it came to him that as his army was already scattered, if he should leave his castle and the gold and silver therein he should have nothing and would be a king no longer. And also that the tax rolls of the kingdom were long and complex, and the windings of the castle passages of great elaboration; and that the conquerors (whoever they were) might welcome someone who could explain these things, and that in time they might even be persuaded to go a-conquering elsewhere leaving the affairs of this kingdom in the hands of that trusty vassal Charles, who was already so well suited to direct them. And so he bade the queen drink a flacon of wine and be quiet, and dressed himself in hose, and a jerkin rich and impressive but without presumption, and went out to confront his conquerors. But he found no one there but Eric.

  “Well,” said the king, “how do you do, boy? Where has everyone gone?”

  “I believe most of them have run away,” Eric told him. “But a good many have been eaten.” Then the raven, Gnip, came and settled on his shoulder.

  The king dropped to his knees at once. “I perceive you are a magician,” the king said, “and that that bird is your puissant familiar; and I confess that it has always seemed to me that were I a magician I would choose to return to that very age at which you manifest yourself; but I would think you must find the raiment you have selected rather chill—I can show you better.”