"A Case of Spirits," Part 1
Sep. 11th, 2020 08:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blue_azothFor Pluralthon in response to a prompt by sinistmer about a plural system working as a medium.
I wrote this as deliberate pastiche of older styles, which I hope I haven't carried to excess, and imagine the setting to be sometime around 1920. In doing so, I also found it couldn't fit the standard "plot skeleton" expected of most modern stories and is more episodic in nature, and violates a lot of modern standards in writing like "show, don't tell"... but I really like writing in this style. There will probably be a few historical inaccuracies, though I did my best.
I. THE BROKEN PROMISE.
Do such things as wandering spirits truly exist? It would surely seem to some who are much intrigued by the topic that I, who put these words to paper, must be uniquely well situated to understand the nature of spirits, and whether a spirit is the full essence of a once-living person released from its body, and how many a body might hold to begin with. To that I can only reply that while I have a great many more questions about such matters than most people, owing to the unusual circumstances of my existence, I have not many more answers than they. I have experienced things that were beyond my ken, but so too have many who do not share my circumstances. I have only the story of my own experience, and that of my dearest companions, to weigh as evidence in any way on the matter of spirits. But to call them merely my companions is to do them an injustice; and in order to properly convey that singular episode in our life, I must start where it began, and let the reader draw what conclusions from it they will.
By cleverness, deception, and above all, our careful skills of working as a team and acting in coordinated fashion, we were able to escape from the asylum in which we had been confined. You will find many people nowadays who will tell you that such places are much kinder to "lunatics" like us than they used to be; that treatments of the past were based on quackery and medieval superstition, but the treatments of today are grounded only in the most solid science. We, having experienced them, do not agree; we imagine that a well-intentioned observer of a century ago would have said the same things, and a century hence people will say them still.
I have said that we escaped the asylum. By that, I do not mean that a host of bodies gathered together and managed to escape sight unseen, without alerting the guards or attracting the notice of the press. Rather, one body entered that building, so cleverly disguised as a place of healthfulness with its gardens, sunlit rooms, and courtyards, and one body walked out of it, in broad daylight with no guards on their heels.
We were six in number: but we shared yet a single body, and by that deception, which we practice daily upon hundreds of people who move around us in the fabric of humanity, and know no better than to assume one person present when there are many, was half of how we effected the escape of six patients from an asylum.
You may now think me mad who pens these words, but I plea that you stay the course, and read my narrative in its entirety. We have encountered persons of far more unstable mind than ourselves, and some of them I describe in the following pages. Even if one is not religious, I think still that quotation from the Bible, "by their fruits ye shall know them," is a fine motto by which to judge those who embody what is strange and unknown and curious, and that the worth of a thing is best measured by its outcomes, rather than by society's judgement of it. There are doctors of worse mind than their patients, and politicians with morals lesser than many vagabonds.
In that period of our lives when we were committed to the asylum, bleak times had fallen upon us. We had quite recently revealed the secret of our existence to our fiance, the son of New York socialites of mediocre standing, who until that moment had imagined himself engaged to a single person. Though we tried by many long conversations, over the course of our acquaintance, to lead his mind along paths of questioning which we hoped might culminate in his acceptance of us -- and even drew upon points in the works of William James (ugh! I shall never understand how Victor can bear to read the bloviating of that man, using twenty words when one would suffice) -- still he remained uninterested and indifferent upon the questions of identity we posed to him.
At length, after much argument amongst ourselves (which we did not conduct aloud in his presence, of course! We can speak to one another just as a person may speak her thoughts aloud in her own mind, in order to clarify and refine them), we felt we had no choice but to make our existence known to him in the bluntest fashion possible, as we sat one night in the front room of his apartment, which was paid for and furnished by his family, and far too lavish to be of much use to a bachelor who spent most of his time outside it.
When the conversation waxed towards matters philosophical, we found that no subtle suggestions had any effect upon him, so at last our only course of action was to tell him outright our secret, and thence introduce him to a few of us beyond the mask of our public face and voice. He erupted into fits of terrible passion, calling us a madwoman and a lunatic, and broke off our engagement on that same night. Even Rosalind, who loved him with a truly romantic spirit and had looked forward ardently to being his wife, pleaded with him to understand her affections. For all the most momentous events of our relationship she had held the body. But he would have none of it.
He said he would not be married to a lunatic, that we ought to be locked up in an asylum, and that even if he could retain any love for us now, we would shame his family and ruin him in his social circles if we went through with the marriage. "Jane," he said (and we all cringed at that name which belonged to none of us, yet was forced to belong to all of us), "you talk of science, and what is not known about the nature of the self. But do you care anything for the science that is known, or only for the places where knowledge is lacking, so you can justify your lunatic notions with that lack of information? Do you know nothing of the science of genetics, for all that you babble about psychology? It is known to nearly every educated person now that insanity is hereditary; that being the case, how dare you be so selfish as to continue inflicting yourself upon me and my family! Our children would all be mad or criminals or both! We should have to send them to institutions to be cared for, and if word of the scandal ever got out, it would ruin my family!"
"Insanity!" I shouted in a sudden fury, and then recollected my senses, knowing that an outburst of rage would make him feel vindicated in his judgement. "What do you think insanity consists in, if not the inability to live rationally and peaceably among one's fellow men and women? Consider the evidence, as you ask us to do. Does it matter nothing to you how well we have done by ourselves? We graduated from college with excellent grades; we work for an astronomer, a man of science, who pays us well to do his calculations for him; and in both positions we were praised as a fine and diligent worker. If that doesn't suit you, consider the fact that we have never broken the law, never committed a crime, nor even entertained the thought of it, no more than any single person has likely done. We live as well as would six persons in their own bodies sharing a house, and, I fancy, get along a good deal better than many families do."
"Insanity may lie latent within a person's genes, and begin to manifest itself in curious habits and strange beliefs, which seem to be mere oddities and cause no ill effects -- at first," he retorted in a voice of bitter coldness. "But in time, the higher reasoning faculties will inevitably begin to break down; the madman or madwoman begins to display their unfitness to live in society; the mind and morals continue to degenerate, and at last there is no place to put them but the asylum." He spun on his heel and turned to face us. "Tell me, Jane -- regarding this matter of multiple personality, do you see it written of anywhere outside treatises on abnormal psychology? Do you see bankers and lawyers walking around claiming to have six people stuffed into their head, all talking in their own voices? Never, because such an idea is incompatible with sanity and reason!" He clenched his fists and paced the room recklessly for a while, and for a moment we made ready to fight or bolt, in case he made a move to strike at us. "You will break down in time, as all lunatics do; and I shall not be your husband, to stand by while it happens."
"You who call yourselves sane," I replied, managing to comport myself with a fragile calm amidst my anger, compounded with Rosalind's weeping, Victor's intellectual fury, and Annabel's cursing, and reflecting on how little this man before us could likely manage the same, "are dreadfully rude compared to us 'lunatics.' You can never manage even the smallest amount of politeness when you pass judgement on us, and pour out wrath at us for being what you say we cannot help. If this is insanity, and if it is beyond my control, can you truly fault us for having 'deceived' you? If you behaved as you claim you think, you would show us compassion and not wrath." I was trembling still with rage, the folds of my skirt clutched furiously in my hands, which were sweating from the torrent of emotions he had stirred within us. Letting a touch of rebuke enter my voice, I added, "The smallest courtesy you could do me now is to call me Sorrel, as I asked of you, and as I call you by your preferred name, while you cast me away from your life and your family."
He seemed flustered for a moment, but at last recovered himself with "I shall not be caught up in this game of indulging your delusions, Jane. Nor shall I let myself be drawn into an argument of who is mad and who is not, and whether the mad are sane and the sane are mad, that goes round and round in circles; it is precisely the sort of thing lunatics do, for they are never conscious of their own lunacy and argue against it at every turn if given the chance. It is enough to say that I wish no further association with you. The engagement is broken, and I must demand that you trouble me no more, from this point on, nor any member of my family."
"So, must one be a rude git, in order to be sane, then?" Annabel burst out through gritted teeth, and threw some choice curses at him, which caused him to pale in surprise. "I'd rather be mad, then! Better to be mad than to be such a hypocritical ass, that you go around insulting all the madmen while insisting they can't help it!" She took our engagement ring off our finger, and threw it at him, causing him to draw back as if stabbed when it hit him in the face. Of course, it was a skill borne of her pastime pitching baseballs to children at play in nearby streets and parks, but he recoiled as if we had flung a knife, which was a bitterly funny sight to see. "And don't delude yourself," we two added as one, "that we need any threats from you, in order to keep well away from you, after tonight."
We left his apartment, closing the door only a little roughly, and from there the building, thinking we had done ourselves a favor, even if poor Rosalind was still inconsolable. Still, she was a sensible woman at heart, and it was the shattered image of her lover as a kind and noble man who would love her as herself, that she was mourning, as much as the fate of the engagement. As for the rest of us -- save the children, Clover and William, to whom we would break the news in the morning -- we walked amongst the seemingly endless rows of Manhattan townhouses, aiming vaguely in the direction of home, feeling that mixture of powerful emotion and of curious removal from our body, as though we were standing outside of it watching another person, that so often attends the conclusion of moments of great distress. We had many fleeting thoughts which passed through our head amidst mixtures of varying people's anger, wishes to see him exposed for a hypocrite and ruined, shame over our conduct, sorrow for what might have been, embittered reflections upon our naivete in accepting his proposal of engagement, and resolute thoughts of how we should begin our new life now that the certainty of a financially secure marriage had fallen apart, as we walked from block to block, streetlamp to streetlamp.
Surely, it was a foolish thing to walk home alone during that hour; we did not even think to check our purse to see if we might have money to hail a cab; but I suppose we must have been walking with a firm certainty and anger which deterred rabble from our path. And, too, though we were scarcely cognizant of it at the time, in some part of our thoughts we now counted ourselves as one of the downtrodden of the streets, fallen on hard times with none to help lift them out of it, and felt that our place ought to be among those who slept in doorways and filthy flop-houses, or that we would find our way there soon enough. In some manner, we spoke to the damp and dirty New York night, with the movements of our body and the look in our eyes, that we were a member of its wretched masses rather than its respectable society and had little left to lose. Had we not, after all, been called a lunatic and told there was no place for us outside an asylum, by a member of that respectable society? Who but other downtrodden exiles would listen to our word above his?
Whatever the cause, we were somehow able to make several miles' walk without incident, through neighborhoods far less reputable than the one we had come from, and our innumerable steps, attended by our rushing thoughts alternating with that sense of detachment, seemed to take place in the span of no more than half an hour, though we knew well that far more time had elapsed. At last we gained the direction of the street on which we then dwelled, and made our way to our humble room in our boardinghouse, where we locked and barred the door, stumbled to our bed, and fell down upon it in the dark, without bothering even to turn on a light. Settling down to sleep, we thought to ourselves that surely we had hit the lowest point in our life as an adult so far, but would find a way to climb out of it soon enough; we should forge our own path forward unencumbered by a man who thought us a lunatic; for who, after all, now stood to restrict our choices and tell us what we ought and ought not to do?
Alas, though we were finished with our fiance, he was not yet finished with us. And the time would swiftly come when the question of who might now restrain and restrict us, would receive a most grim answer indeed.
sinistmer about a plural system working as a medium.I wrote this as deliberate pastiche of older styles, which I hope I haven't carried to excess, and imagine the setting to be sometime around 1920. In doing so, I also found it couldn't fit the standard "plot skeleton" expected of most modern stories and is more episodic in nature, and violates a lot of modern standards in writing like "show, don't tell"... but I really like writing in this style. There will probably be a few historical inaccuracies, though I did my best.
I. THE BROKEN PROMISE.
Do such things as wandering spirits truly exist? It would surely seem to some who are much intrigued by the topic that I, who put these words to paper, must be uniquely well situated to understand the nature of spirits, and whether a spirit is the full essence of a once-living person released from its body, and how many a body might hold to begin with. To that I can only reply that while I have a great many more questions about such matters than most people, owing to the unusual circumstances of my existence, I have not many more answers than they. I have experienced things that were beyond my ken, but so too have many who do not share my circumstances. I have only the story of my own experience, and that of my dearest companions, to weigh as evidence in any way on the matter of spirits. But to call them merely my companions is to do them an injustice; and in order to properly convey that singular episode in our life, I must start where it began, and let the reader draw what conclusions from it they will.
By cleverness, deception, and above all, our careful skills of working as a team and acting in coordinated fashion, we were able to escape from the asylum in which we had been confined. You will find many people nowadays who will tell you that such places are much kinder to "lunatics" like us than they used to be; that treatments of the past were based on quackery and medieval superstition, but the treatments of today are grounded only in the most solid science. We, having experienced them, do not agree; we imagine that a well-intentioned observer of a century ago would have said the same things, and a century hence people will say them still.
I have said that we escaped the asylum. By that, I do not mean that a host of bodies gathered together and managed to escape sight unseen, without alerting the guards or attracting the notice of the press. Rather, one body entered that building, so cleverly disguised as a place of healthfulness with its gardens, sunlit rooms, and courtyards, and one body walked out of it, in broad daylight with no guards on their heels.
We were six in number: but we shared yet a single body, and by that deception, which we practice daily upon hundreds of people who move around us in the fabric of humanity, and know no better than to assume one person present when there are many, was half of how we effected the escape of six patients from an asylum.
You may now think me mad who pens these words, but I plea that you stay the course, and read my narrative in its entirety. We have encountered persons of far more unstable mind than ourselves, and some of them I describe in the following pages. Even if one is not religious, I think still that quotation from the Bible, "by their fruits ye shall know them," is a fine motto by which to judge those who embody what is strange and unknown and curious, and that the worth of a thing is best measured by its outcomes, rather than by society's judgement of it. There are doctors of worse mind than their patients, and politicians with morals lesser than many vagabonds.
In that period of our lives when we were committed to the asylum, bleak times had fallen upon us. We had quite recently revealed the secret of our existence to our fiance, the son of New York socialites of mediocre standing, who until that moment had imagined himself engaged to a single person. Though we tried by many long conversations, over the course of our acquaintance, to lead his mind along paths of questioning which we hoped might culminate in his acceptance of us -- and even drew upon points in the works of William James (ugh! I shall never understand how Victor can bear to read the bloviating of that man, using twenty words when one would suffice) -- still he remained uninterested and indifferent upon the questions of identity we posed to him.
At length, after much argument amongst ourselves (which we did not conduct aloud in his presence, of course! We can speak to one another just as a person may speak her thoughts aloud in her own mind, in order to clarify and refine them), we felt we had no choice but to make our existence known to him in the bluntest fashion possible, as we sat one night in the front room of his apartment, which was paid for and furnished by his family, and far too lavish to be of much use to a bachelor who spent most of his time outside it.
When the conversation waxed towards matters philosophical, we found that no subtle suggestions had any effect upon him, so at last our only course of action was to tell him outright our secret, and thence introduce him to a few of us beyond the mask of our public face and voice. He erupted into fits of terrible passion, calling us a madwoman and a lunatic, and broke off our engagement on that same night. Even Rosalind, who loved him with a truly romantic spirit and had looked forward ardently to being his wife, pleaded with him to understand her affections. For all the most momentous events of our relationship she had held the body. But he would have none of it.
He said he would not be married to a lunatic, that we ought to be locked up in an asylum, and that even if he could retain any love for us now, we would shame his family and ruin him in his social circles if we went through with the marriage. "Jane," he said (and we all cringed at that name which belonged to none of us, yet was forced to belong to all of us), "you talk of science, and what is not known about the nature of the self. But do you care anything for the science that is known, or only for the places where knowledge is lacking, so you can justify your lunatic notions with that lack of information? Do you know nothing of the science of genetics, for all that you babble about psychology? It is known to nearly every educated person now that insanity is hereditary; that being the case, how dare you be so selfish as to continue inflicting yourself upon me and my family! Our children would all be mad or criminals or both! We should have to send them to institutions to be cared for, and if word of the scandal ever got out, it would ruin my family!"
"Insanity!" I shouted in a sudden fury, and then recollected my senses, knowing that an outburst of rage would make him feel vindicated in his judgement. "What do you think insanity consists in, if not the inability to live rationally and peaceably among one's fellow men and women? Consider the evidence, as you ask us to do. Does it matter nothing to you how well we have done by ourselves? We graduated from college with excellent grades; we work for an astronomer, a man of science, who pays us well to do his calculations for him; and in both positions we were praised as a fine and diligent worker. If that doesn't suit you, consider the fact that we have never broken the law, never committed a crime, nor even entertained the thought of it, no more than any single person has likely done. We live as well as would six persons in their own bodies sharing a house, and, I fancy, get along a good deal better than many families do."
"Insanity may lie latent within a person's genes, and begin to manifest itself in curious habits and strange beliefs, which seem to be mere oddities and cause no ill effects -- at first," he retorted in a voice of bitter coldness. "But in time, the higher reasoning faculties will inevitably begin to break down; the madman or madwoman begins to display their unfitness to live in society; the mind and morals continue to degenerate, and at last there is no place to put them but the asylum." He spun on his heel and turned to face us. "Tell me, Jane -- regarding this matter of multiple personality, do you see it written of anywhere outside treatises on abnormal psychology? Do you see bankers and lawyers walking around claiming to have six people stuffed into their head, all talking in their own voices? Never, because such an idea is incompatible with sanity and reason!" He clenched his fists and paced the room recklessly for a while, and for a moment we made ready to fight or bolt, in case he made a move to strike at us. "You will break down in time, as all lunatics do; and I shall not be your husband, to stand by while it happens."
"You who call yourselves sane," I replied, managing to comport myself with a fragile calm amidst my anger, compounded with Rosalind's weeping, Victor's intellectual fury, and Annabel's cursing, and reflecting on how little this man before us could likely manage the same, "are dreadfully rude compared to us 'lunatics.' You can never manage even the smallest amount of politeness when you pass judgement on us, and pour out wrath at us for being what you say we cannot help. If this is insanity, and if it is beyond my control, can you truly fault us for having 'deceived' you? If you behaved as you claim you think, you would show us compassion and not wrath." I was trembling still with rage, the folds of my skirt clutched furiously in my hands, which were sweating from the torrent of emotions he had stirred within us. Letting a touch of rebuke enter my voice, I added, "The smallest courtesy you could do me now is to call me Sorrel, as I asked of you, and as I call you by your preferred name, while you cast me away from your life and your family."
He seemed flustered for a moment, but at last recovered himself with "I shall not be caught up in this game of indulging your delusions, Jane. Nor shall I let myself be drawn into an argument of who is mad and who is not, and whether the mad are sane and the sane are mad, that goes round and round in circles; it is precisely the sort of thing lunatics do, for they are never conscious of their own lunacy and argue against it at every turn if given the chance. It is enough to say that I wish no further association with you. The engagement is broken, and I must demand that you trouble me no more, from this point on, nor any member of my family."
"So, must one be a rude git, in order to be sane, then?" Annabel burst out through gritted teeth, and threw some choice curses at him, which caused him to pale in surprise. "I'd rather be mad, then! Better to be mad than to be such a hypocritical ass, that you go around insulting all the madmen while insisting they can't help it!" She took our engagement ring off our finger, and threw it at him, causing him to draw back as if stabbed when it hit him in the face. Of course, it was a skill borne of her pastime pitching baseballs to children at play in nearby streets and parks, but he recoiled as if we had flung a knife, which was a bitterly funny sight to see. "And don't delude yourself," we two added as one, "that we need any threats from you, in order to keep well away from you, after tonight."
We left his apartment, closing the door only a little roughly, and from there the building, thinking we had done ourselves a favor, even if poor Rosalind was still inconsolable. Still, she was a sensible woman at heart, and it was the shattered image of her lover as a kind and noble man who would love her as herself, that she was mourning, as much as the fate of the engagement. As for the rest of us -- save the children, Clover and William, to whom we would break the news in the morning -- we walked amongst the seemingly endless rows of Manhattan townhouses, aiming vaguely in the direction of home, feeling that mixture of powerful emotion and of curious removal from our body, as though we were standing outside of it watching another person, that so often attends the conclusion of moments of great distress. We had many fleeting thoughts which passed through our head amidst mixtures of varying people's anger, wishes to see him exposed for a hypocrite and ruined, shame over our conduct, sorrow for what might have been, embittered reflections upon our naivete in accepting his proposal of engagement, and resolute thoughts of how we should begin our new life now that the certainty of a financially secure marriage had fallen apart, as we walked from block to block, streetlamp to streetlamp.
Surely, it was a foolish thing to walk home alone during that hour; we did not even think to check our purse to see if we might have money to hail a cab; but I suppose we must have been walking with a firm certainty and anger which deterred rabble from our path. And, too, though we were scarcely cognizant of it at the time, in some part of our thoughts we now counted ourselves as one of the downtrodden of the streets, fallen on hard times with none to help lift them out of it, and felt that our place ought to be among those who slept in doorways and filthy flop-houses, or that we would find our way there soon enough. In some manner, we spoke to the damp and dirty New York night, with the movements of our body and the look in our eyes, that we were a member of its wretched masses rather than its respectable society and had little left to lose. Had we not, after all, been called a lunatic and told there was no place for us outside an asylum, by a member of that respectable society? Who but other downtrodden exiles would listen to our word above his?
Whatever the cause, we were somehow able to make several miles' walk without incident, through neighborhoods far less reputable than the one we had come from, and our innumerable steps, attended by our rushing thoughts alternating with that sense of detachment, seemed to take place in the span of no more than half an hour, though we knew well that far more time had elapsed. At last we gained the direction of the street on which we then dwelled, and made our way to our humble room in our boardinghouse, where we locked and barred the door, stumbled to our bed, and fell down upon it in the dark, without bothering even to turn on a light. Settling down to sleep, we thought to ourselves that surely we had hit the lowest point in our life as an adult so far, but would find a way to climb out of it soon enough; we should forge our own path forward unencumbered by a man who thought us a lunatic; for who, after all, now stood to restrict our choices and tell us what we ought and ought not to do?
Alas, though we were finished with our fiance, he was not yet finished with us. And the time would swiftly come when the question of who might now restrain and restrict us, would receive a most grim answer indeed.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-12 01:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-12 10:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-13 12:54 am (UTC)Love this. This kind of irony about the writer's time period is one of the things I think historical fiction does best.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-13 03:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-02-12 01:14 am (UTC)