The Ghosts
In a short story by Lord Dunsany called The Ghosts, the narrator is visited by a pack of spectral hounds who, by a psychic impartation of ideas, tempt him to murder his brother in order to claim the inheritance. They even furnish him, the wily brutes, with a cunning plan: He will shoot his brother point blank and powder his face with flour so that he resembles, "a man that had been acting as a ghost." All that remains to do is convince the police that it was all the result of an innocent prank gone horribly wrong. The hapless narrator is almost seduced. He thinks of the location of his revolver. He beings half-heartedly to rise from his armchair. But no—he has a card or two up his sleeve yet. "If two straight lines cut one another," he declaims, rising now in earnest from his armchair and glowering down one of the hell hounds as though it were a poodle and had just peed on his best rug, "the opposite angles are equal!" At first the creatures seem undeterred. They almost drag him down. He makes another, automatous move for the door and the revolver—but in the next moment, masters himself: "Let AB and CD cut one another at E. Then the angles CEA and CEB equal two right angles." At this, a hideous exultation arises among them. Our narrator, unfazed, coolly delivers the death blow: "But the angle CEA is common, therefore AED equals CEB, QED!" At last he stands alone in the center of the living room. The light of reason has asserted itself over the darkness. He will not murder his brother after all.
I know very little about Lord Dunsany. It may be that he was a subtle humourist and that the absurdity of this denouement (banishing spooks by asseverating Euclidean theorems) is intentional. I don't really care. I like the story and take it as a kind of allegory. My own spooks do not tempt me to murder a sibling and they do not take the form of black hounds. But spooks there are, a whole pack. One is paranoia, another persecution anxiety. I am befuddled by apophenia and kept awake by hypochondria. Once in a while, I even have to clean up after blind rage. And just like Dunsany's wonderfully ridiculous Victorian gentleman, disturbed by dark and primitive forces while trying (probably) to enjoy some innocent lucubration in his storm-battered drawing room, the best I can do is wield reason like a rolled-up newspaper and try and shoo those naughty doggies away. |