No matter Mr. Bonner’s brave avowal, it soon became apparent that there was something in the room with them: a haze, a glow, a flickering or pulsating presence. The great grave bells of old Trinity tolled, and were silent, save for the faint echo of their sonorousness, which seemed retained in the sickroom, as if time had suddenly stopped.
“Oh, dear God!—what is it, who are you, what do you want?” the terrified Mrs. Bonner queried, looking wildly about, and seeing naught but undulating shadows, that leapt to the very ceiling, and melded dancerlike with one another, cast by the several candles that burned, and the kerosene wick-lamp on the bedside table. “You have not—have you?—come for my little girl?”
For long suspended moments the pulsating glow ranged about the room, now hovering in a corner, above an old walnut wardrobe; now snaking indolently across the ceiling; now quivering at the foot of the sick child’s bed. Mr. Bonner, as terrified as his wife, continued to clutch her hands in his, but said not a word: afterward, he would claim that he had been incapable of speaking had he wished: for his very throat was closed, and his teeth held together with an enormous pressure. (Alas, how might one address a prayer to our Heavenly Father, in such a circumstance!—for, it seems, the approach of spirits, whether blessed by God, or frankly damn’d, so disorients even the good, steadfast Christian, and unlooses all manner of infantile terrors, that one cannot act; and only in retrospect might one say, Ah, yes, I should have done thusly, why was I so paralyzed, and so impotent?) Mrs. Bonner’s voiced queries faded, too, out of very terror, perhaps, and she froze into silence, afterward concurring in her husband’s description of his state of immobility: she seemed to understand, as if instructed by a silent voice that arose, as it were, out of memory, that her agitation would communicate itself to little Deirdre, and interfere with the healing process.
And so some minutes passed, between fifteen and twenty, as Mr. Bonner calculated afterward, and the shadowy quivering haze hovered about the bed, and Deirdre’s troubled sleep became calmer, and the movement of her eyes behind her feverish eyelids ceased, and her breathing grew soft and rhythmic, and the faint but distinct odor of fever and sickness lightened; and, Mr. and Mrs. Bonner still fiercely clasping hands, their daughter suddenly opened her eyes wide, and smilingly assured them in a bell-like, limpid voice: “Dear Mother and Father, retire to your bed, and be assured—I will not die.”
And the child sank back onto her goose-feather pillow, into an altogether peaceful sleep.
(“WHO WAS IT came to visit you, Deirdre, during the night?” Mrs. Bonner asked, with caution, in the morning, as she sponged the child’s face with tepid water. “Do you recall anyone, or anything, visiting you while you were asleep?”
Deirdre blinked, and smiled at her mother, and yawned, with more energy than she had demonstrated in many days; and her cheeks dimpled with something very much—ah, how welcome!—like simple mischief. “You and Father were with me all the night,” she said. “You would have seen, would you not, if someone else had been here?”
Mrs. Bonner paused, and bethought herself for a moment (for she was, it must be said, not a very complex soul), and could only reiterate her question—whether Deirdre recalled anyone, or anything, visiting her while she slept.
Deirdre giggled, and squirmed beneath the quilt like a silly little eel, and said, with exactly the spirit of naughtiness one expects from, and hopes for, in a healthy four-year-old: “If I was asleep, Momma, how could I see! If I had my eyes closed all the while!” And she giggled, and hid beneath the pillow, and was so altogether darling, that Mrs. Bonner’s heart swelled to bursting with love of her, and simple gratitude, and she embraced her daughter’s warm lively body, and rained kisses upon her still-flushed cheeks; and the matter was closed.)
HOW THE GOD-FEARING Bonners, simple folks as they were, would have been astounded to see into the future, and to learn that their child would mature into one of the most celebrated trance mediums of the Eighties!—compared by Spiritualist aficionados (whether devout believers, or objective observers), to the incontestably greatest medium of all time, Daniel Dunglas Home; and greatly preferred to her rivals Mrs. Whittaker, Mrs. Guilford, and Ambrose Tollers. For tho’ little Deirdre did exhibit in childhood a number of queer talents, and appeared to be the center, and perhaps even the occasion, of inexplicable phenomena, she was never so disturbing a presence as the boy Home (who so upset the household in which he resided, he was accused of bringing the Devil into it, and expelled), or the infant Mrs. Guilford (née Parshall, who, in her beribboned cradle, was said to have been sung to sleep by a veritable choir of angel voices, and rocked by invisible hands, and even given suck by invisible means); nor did legends accrue to her, as to the child Helena Petrovna Hahn (who was said to have caused the death of a fourteen-year-old serf when only four years old herself: she called down russalkas, or Russian fairy-nymphs, upon him, and he was drowned in a river).
Deirdre was a shy, excitable, sensitive child, of the type called “high-strung”; clearly above average in intelligence; fairylike, wistful, and grave; at times remarkably mature, and at other times babyish and prankish. The schoolmaster of the Bloodsmoor common school praised her as his best scholar, and even worried that she spent so much time buried in books, and compiling long lists of spelling and vocabulary words (for the little girl dearly loved words—their sounds as much as their meanings); but he did report to the Bonners that she could be, upon occasion “devilishly” naughty. She told lies, for instance. She made up elaborate and utterly fraudulent stories. And while she did not steal things, she hid them; and would never admit what she had done.
Mr. and Mrs. Bonner so cherished Deirdre, they were loath to punish her, or even to discipline her harshly. She was susceptible to turbulent dreams and nightmares, and sudden frightening thoughts (or actual visions); and, for a time, the Bonners feared she might be consumptive. (It is interesting to recall that D. D. Home was consumptive, stating openly that his spirits came to him most readily, when the physical side of his nature was diminished.) She saw things, she heard things, she even appeared to smell and touch and taste things, not evident to anyone else; and yet it was problematic, whether she understood that these things inhabited only an invisible or internal world—for children are so trusting of experience, they rarely question themselves, as to the reality about them. And many are the normal children, after all, who engage in spirited dialogue with invisible playmates, and romp, and disport themselves, in imaginary kingdoms.
Once, at the age of seven, Deirdre ran to Mrs. Bonner and babbled to her, in great excitement, about a “shining” figure in a long white robe, with a “circle of light” about his head, and “wings crookèd like a hawk’s”: an archangel, by the sound of him, and taller than Mr. Bonner by far. Not long afterward she astounded a Bloodsmoor neighbor by remarking casually that her son was on a “boat all in flames”: which, it turned out, referred to the fact that the young man, a sailor in the Navy, en route to Russian America (Alaska), lay abed with a high fever, but subsequently recovered. Upon more than one unsettling occasion the child, always speaking in a spontaneous, lucid voice, said matter-of-factly that someone would be “crossing over” before long: which is to say, dying. (And she was never mistaken—tho’ the Bonners deliberately made little of it, not wanting to excite Deirdre, or to call attention to her ostensible powers amongst the villagers, who might misunderstand.)
She could find lost objects around the house; and if an object was brought to her, that had been found (a woman’s ring, for instance, discovered in the road), she could describe its owner, and even stammer out a probable name. Once, turning the tattered pages of an old copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress, which had been in Mr. Bonner’s possession for as long as he could remember, she closed her eyes and described, with a cherubic little smile, the white-haired man with the gnarled cane and the strange red speck in his left eye, who had been Mr. Bonner’s grandfather—and who had died twenty years before. She astonished her parents by tell
ing them, one winter afternoon, that she had met “the nicest old man” down by the river: proceeding to describe a personage in what must have been a Dutch costume, dating back to no later than the 1660’s, when the Kiddemasters had conquered the area, for the British Crown; upon another, more disturbing occasion, she ran to them in tears, and told of a “Raging Captain” whose uniform was soaked in blood, and who shouted at her from atop a hill to come to him at once, else he would punish her and the Bonners. “Little Deirdre,” he called her, “little daughter—come to me at once!” Unlike the other presences this “Raging Captain” was horrific, and Deirdre ran in tears from him, tho’ she did not seem to recognize that he had no substance: that he was, in short, what is vulgarly called a ghost.
“You must not come home from school that way ever again,” Mrs. Bonner cautioned, calming her; “you must walk with the others, and not wander off alone.”
“Will he get me, then?” the trembling child asked; “if I go off alone?”
“He won’t get you,” Mrs. Bonner replied, “no one will get you, for your Heavenly Father watches over you; but it is most prudent to stay with the other children, and not to take a shortcut through the fields, or through the cemetery.”
“Does he live in the cemetery?” the child asked doubtfully. “I see him atop a hill. His horse is dead beside him.”
“He lives in numerous places,” Mrs. Bonner said. “But you must obey me, Deirdre: and come home directly from school. Do you hear?”
“Will the Captain get me,” Deirdre asked, gazing at her mother with enormous gray imploring eyes, “if I am naughty? If I disobey?”
“I have said the Captain will not ‘get’ you—or anyone,” Mrs. Bonner said, embracing the frightened child, “but you must obey, Deirdre, do you understand? Otherwise—otherwise—I cannot promise—I do not know what will happen!”
ALAS, AS IT turned out, both Mr. and Mrs. Bonner were to be carried off, in the typhoid epidemic of 1873, along with some thirty other hapless persons in Bloodsmoor; and the nine-year-old Deirdre was to become, within a fortnight, an orphan—albeit one under the protection of the Reverend Hewett and his wife, who had vowed to the dying Mrs. Bonner (a piteous sight, with her mouth an angry mass of fever blisters, and her eyes deepset in their dark sockets, and her body wasted away to mere skin and bones with the merciless high fever, and the intestinal hemorrhaging) that they would not allow the civil authorities to place Deirdre in an orphanage. “She must be provided for—she is of noble blood—she cannot—cannot—be thrown into the abyss,” the delirious woman raved; and it was all the nurses could do, to quiet her, and to restore her soul to some semblance of calm, that she might die in peace.
Poor Deirdre!—poor bereft child!
Yet it had not been many weeks before, after a long Sunday ramble with Mr. and Mrs. Bonner, when the three of them happened upon John Quincy Zinn, that Deirdre had seen, in a waking dream of a particularly vivid sort, the vast Shadow World o’ertaking her belovèd parents, tho’ of course the innocent child could not have known the import of the vision, at that time, or the terrible suffering and grief it would entail for all.
Their joyful Sunday ramble had taken them along the river, somewhat farther than their customary walk (for the March air was agreeably temperate, and the sunshine encouraging, and little Deirdre would run ahead, shouting and laughing, and forcing her parents to follow), so that, without knowing it, they found themselves in the area called Kiddemaster Common, not very distant from the Bloodsmoor Gorge: private land, strictly speaking, yet open to the public for such rambles and hikes and Sunday excursions. (Hunting of any kind was naturally forbidden, and the Judge’s several gameskeepers were quite justified in expelling from the territory any persons who struck them as undesirable: there having been, during the course of many decades, a number of unfortunate shooting accidents—the Kiddemaster gameskeepers being somewhat o’erzealous in their wish to protect their masters’ property, and their masters’ game, against incursions from commoners.)
Deirdre ran ahead, an enchanting sight in her pretty yellow coat and lambswool bonnet, and little brown boots, and Mr. and Mrs. Bonner followed, Mrs. Bonner’s arm linked firmly through Mr. Bonner’s, in the very image of family contentment. Indeed, Herman and Catherine Bonner, of whom so relatively little is known, save their ages (forty and thirty-seven, respectively), and their religious devotion, and love for their daughter, struck those villagers who happened to see them, at such times, besporting themselves in innocent familial bliss, as upstanding and excellent Christians: not physically handsome, perhaps (for Mr. Bonner was decidedly undersized, with a very narrow, as it were pushed-in countenance; and Mrs. Bonner was hefty and foursquare, with a moon face, and a rather mottled complexion—so very different, one cannot help but observe, from little Deirdre!), nor what might be called, in vulgar parlance, sharpness of mind or wit. Nonetheless, they were God-fearing Christians, and faithful members of Trinity Church parish, and Mr. Bonner was said to have acquitted himself fully, and without complaint, of his managerial responsibilities at the Kiddemaster factory—earning an unusual measure of praise from his rather exacting superiors, and, upon the occasion of his untimely death, the expression of deep regret, and the observation that “it would be difficult indeed, to replace so dutiful, and so loyal, an employee.”
Bloodsmoor Gorge, as the reader might know, is a region of notoriously craggy terrain, susceptible to sudden fog, chill winds, and inexplicable drops of temperature. There are eerie chasms that appear to open into the very bowels of the earth, and severe cliffs and overhangs, and towerlike abutments of granite and flint, stirring to the eye, but formidable as well, and oft disturbing. It is, in short, as picturesque a place as one, nursed on romantic expectations, might wish: rather too picturesque, in fact, if one’s sensibilities naturally curve toward the moderate and the civilized, and flinch from the boldly savage.
The nine-year-old Deirdre ran all unheeding into this place of brute exposed boulders, and her parents, having called after her to no avail, were obliged to follow. Their mood was sunny and good-hearted, for the March day was remarkably warm, and they saw no danger in their impetuous little girl’s unleashed energies, for they oft hiked and rambled in fairly rough fields, and, upon more than one occasion, imagined themselves lost—or nearly so—in the oak and beech and ash forests that surrounded Bloodsmoor Village.
So they followed, Mrs. Bonner’s arm still linked with Mr. Bonner’s, in a gesture of wifely dependency, and harmless public affection, and had no serious thought of Deirdre’s becoming lost; until such time as they realized that the cheery yellow coat was not in view, and that, as they called out, “Deirdre! Deirdre!” their voices were drowned out by the low dull thunderous roar of falling water.
Naturally Deirdre’s parents became immediately concerned, and Mrs. Bonner, being of a somewhat excitable temperament, inclining, it may be, toward the hysteric, upon the occasion of what she conceived to be a physical threat to her child, shouted most vociferously: for what if Deirdre should slip and twist her ankle, or break her fragile leg, on the brute outcropping of rock; what if—God in His mercy forbid!—she should lose her footing, and tumble head-on into one of the cavernous tunnels in which chill foaming water plunged, and quite disappear from view!
The Bonners hurried after their impetuous child, calling her name again and again, oft imagining they had caught sight of her just ahead—her yellow coat, her pretty white bonnet—and then bitterly disappointed, and their strenuous efforts redoubled. “Deirdre! Deirdre! Do you hear? Where are you? Our dear child—do you hear? Are you hiding? Deirdre—”
The queerest vegetation grew in the gorge, or along its steep sides—nameless gnarled trees, great spiky bushes and shrubs, and rushes, and sere grasses of all kinds, in appearance as sharp as swords—vegetation that looked, to the botanically untrained eye at least, uncannily o’ersized, as if looming out of a dream landscape. Yet there was beauty withal—I am obliged not to mislead the read
er: a lush barbaric beauty of falls, and steep chasms, and shadowed granite cliffs, and enormous beech trees that seemed to possess, in their innumerable branches, and sturdy trunks, the magical authority of mythic creatures of old . . . giants, or gods of a kind, sheerly pagan, and unspeakable to envision. . . .
Just as the Bonners’ concern threatened to heighten to panic, they emerged from the boulder-strewn terrain, to a sort of plateau, composed of flat granite outcroppings, and there saw, to their immense relief, the yellow coat of their child!—with what exclamations of joy, we can well imagine, whether parents ourselves or no. And yet, in the very next instant, they were alarmed to see that the child was not alone, but engaged in conversation with a stranger: an extraordinarily tall and sturdily built man, with striking fair hair, and a prominent beard, not immediately recognizable by his attire as a gentleman. (For this personage not only wore a somewhat rustic costume, consisting of a leather jacket, and untapered trousers, but was hatless—indeed, his blond hair shone brilliantly in the sunshine, and seemed, of a sudden, almost preternatural.)
Little Deirdre and the tall stranger spoke together with evident animation, the child chattering happily away, no doubt in her usual airy prattle, and the strange man bent over her, fingers outspread on his thighs, bearded face bobbing in amused agreement. A warm scene; a scene affording vast relief, and not a little joy; and yet, in the next moment, both the Bonners were seized with a sudden terror . . . for this masculine figure had about it a quality not quite normal.