Possessed Part 1

Possessed.

by Cleveland Moffett.

DEDICATION

Whatever the defects or limitations of this story, I can a.s.sure my readers that it is largely based on truth. Many of the incidents, including the dual personality phenomena, were suggested by actual happenings known to me. The doctor who accomplishes cures by occult methods is a friend of mine, who lives and practises in New York City.

Seraphine, the medium, is also a real person. The episode that is explained by waves of terror pa.s.sing from one apartment to another and separately affecting three unsuspecting persons is not imaginary, but drawn from an almost identical happening that I, myself, witnessed in Paris, France. And the truth about women that I have tried to tell has been largely obtained from women themselves, women in various walks of life, who have been kind enough to give me most of the opinions and experiences that are contained in Penelope's diary. To them I now gratefully dedicate this book.

C. M.

POSSESSED

(_June, 1914_)

SCARLET LIGHTS

This story presents the fulfillment of an extraordinary prophecy made one night, suddenly and dramatically, at a gathering of New Yorkers, brought together for hilarious purposes, including a little supper, in the Was.h.i.+ngton Square apartment of Bobby Vallis--her full name was Roberta. There were soft lights and low divans and the strumming of a painted ukulele that sang its little twisted soul out under the caress of Penelope's white fingers. I can still see the big black opal in its quaint setting that had replaced her wedding ring and the yellow serpent of pliant gold coiled on her thumb with two bright rubies for its eyes.

Penelope Wells! How little we realized what sinister forces were playing about her that pleasant evening as we smoked and jested and sipped our gla.s.ses, gazing from time to time up the broad vista of Fifth Avenue with its lines of receding lights.

There had been an impromptu session of the Confessional Club during which several men, notably a poet in velveteen jacket, had vouchsafed sentimental or matrimonial revelations in the most approved Greenwich Village style. And the ladies, unabashed, had discussed these things.

But not a word did Penelope Wells speak of her own matrimonial troubles, which were known vaguely to most of us, although we had never met the drunken brute of a husband who had made her life a torment. I can see her now in profile against the open window, her eyes dark with their slumberous fires. I remember the green earrings she wore that night, and how they reached down under her heavy black braids--reached down caressingly over her white neck. She was a strangely, fiercely beautiful creature, made to love and to be loved, fated for tragic happenings. She was twenty-nine.

The discussion waxed warm over the eternal question--how shall a woman satisfy her emotional nature when she has no chance or almost no chance to marry the man she longs to marry?

Roberta Vallis put forth views that would have frozen old-fas.h.i.+oned moralists into speechless disapproval--entire freedom of choice and action for women as well as men, freedom to unite with a mate or separate from a mate--both s.e.xes to have exactly the same responsibilities or lack of responsibilities in these sentimental arrangements.

"No, no! I call that loathsome, abominable," declared Penelope, and the poet adoringly agreed with her, although his practice had been notoriously at variance with these professions.

"Suppose a woman finds herself married to some beast of a man," flashed Roberta, "some worthless drunkard, do you mean to tell me it is her duty to stick to such a husband, and spoil her whole life?"

To which Penelope, hiding her agitation, said: "I--I am not discussing that phase of the question. I mean that if a woman is alone in the world, if she longs for the companions.h.i.+p of a man--the intimate companions.h.i.+p--"

"Ha, ha, ha!" snickered the poet. I can see his close cropped yellow beard and his red face wrinkling in merriment at this supposition.

"I hate your Greenwich Village philosophy," stormed Penelope. "You haven't the courage, the understanding to commit one big splendid sin that even the angels in heaven might approve, but you fritter away your souls and spoil your bodies in cheap little sins that are just--_disgusting!_"

The poet shrivelled under her scorn.

"But--one splendid sin?" he stammered. "That means a woman must go to her mate, doesn't it?"

"Without marriage? Never! I'll tell you what a woman should do--I'll tell you what I would do, just to prove that I am not conventional, I would act on the principle that there is a sacred right G.o.d has given to every woman who is born, a right that not even G.o.d Himself can take away from her, I mean the right to--"

A m.u.f.fled scream interrupted her, a quick catching of the breath by a stout lady, a newcomer, who was seated on a divan, I should have judged this woman to be a rather commonplace person except that her deeply sunken eyes seemed to carry a far away expression as if she saw things that were invisible to others. Now her eyes were fixed on Penelope.

"Oh, the beautiful scarlet light!" she murmured. "There! Don't you see--moving down her arm? And another one--on her shoulder! Scarlet lights! My poor child! My poor child!"

Ordinarily we would have laughed at this, for, of course, we saw no scarlet lights, but somehow now we did not laugh. On the contrary we fell into hushed and wondering attention, and, turning to Roberta, we learned that this was Seraphine, a trance medium who had given seances for years to scientists and occult investigators, and was now a.s.sisting Dr. W----, of the American Occult Society.

"A seance! Magnificent! Let us have a seance!" whispered the poet. "Tell us, madam, can you really lift the veil of the future?"

But already Seraphine had settled back on the divan and I saw that her eyes had closed and her breathing was quieter, although her body was shaken from time to time by little tremors as if she were recovering from some great agitation. We watched her wonderingly, and presently she began to speak, at first slowly and painfully, then in her natural tone.

Her message was so brief, so startling in its purport that there can be no question of any error in this record.

"Penelope will--cross the ocean," Seraphine began dreamily. "Her husband will die--very soon. There will be war--soon. She will go to the war and will have honors conferred upon her--on the battlefield. She will--she will,"--the medium's face changed startlingly to a mask of anguish and her bosom heaved. "Oh, my poor child! I see you--I see you going down to--_to horror--to terror_--Ah!"

She cried out in fright and stopped speaking; then, after a moment of dazed effort, she came back to reality and looked at us as before out of her sunken eyes, a plump little kindly faced woman resting against a blue pillow.

_Now, whatever one may think of mediums, the facts are that Penelope's husband died suddenly in an automobile accident within a month of this memorable evening. And within two months the great war burst upon the world. And within a year Penelope did cross the ocean as a Red Cross Nurse, and it is a matter of record that she was decorated for valor under fire of the enemy._

_This story has to do with the remainder of Seraphine's prophecy._

CHAPTER I

(_January, 1919_)

VOICES

Penelope moved nervously in her chair, evidently very much troubled about something as she waited in the doctor's office. Her two years in France had added a touch of mystery to her strange beauty. Her eyes were more veiled in their burning, as if she had glimpsed something that had frightened her; yet they were eyes that, even unintentionally, carried a message to men, an alluring, appealing message to men. With her red mouth, her fascinatingly unsymmetrical mouth, and her sinuous body Penelope Wells at thirty-three was the kind of woman men look at twice and remember. She was dressed in black.

When Dr. William Owen entered the front room of his Ninth Street office he greeted her with the rough kindliness that a big man in his profession, a big-hearted man, shows to a young woman whose case interests him and whose personality is attractive.

"I got your note, Mrs. Wells," he began, "and I had a letter about you from my young friend, Captain Herrick. I needn't say that I had already read about your bravery in the newspapers. The whole country has been sounding your praises. When did you get back to New York?"

"About a week ago, doctor. I came on a troop s.h.i.+p with several other nurses. I--I wish I had never come."

There was a note of pathetic, ominous sadness in her voice. Even in his first study of this lovely face, the doctor's experienced eye told him that here was a case of complicated nervous breakdown. He wondered if she could have had a slight touch of sh.e.l.l shock. What a ghastly thing for a high spirited, sensitive young woman to be out on those battle fields in France!

"You mustn't say that, Mrs. Wells. We are all very proud of you. Think of having the _croix de guerre_ pinned on your dress by the commanding general before a whole regiment! Pretty fine for an American woman!"

Penelope Wells sat quite still, playing with the flexible serpent ring on her thumb, and looked at the doctor out of her wonderful deep eyes that seemed to burn with a mysterious fire. Could there be something Oriental about her--or--or Indian, the physician wondered.

"Doctor," she said, in a low tone, "I have come to tell you the truth about myself, and the truth is that I deserve no credit for what I did that day, because I--I did not want to live. I wanted them to kill me, I took every chance so that they would kill me; but G.o.d willed it differently, the sh.e.l.ls and bullets swept all around me, cut through my dress, through my hair, but did not harm me."

"Tell me a little more about it, just quietly. How did you happen to go out there? Was it because you heard that Captain Herrick was wounded?

That's the way the papers cabled the story. Was that true?" Then, seeing her face darken, he added: "Perhaps I ought not to ask that question?"

"Oh, yes, I want you to. I want you to know everything about me--everything. That's why I am here. Captain Herrick says you are a great specialist in nervous troubles, and I have a feeling that unless you can help me n.o.body can."