He was permitted to handle the gazing crystals, the clear, flawless globes like temperate, neutral ice, so transparent he felt he held invisible weight. He looked through prisms, altering light as one might pull the strings on marionettes. And tried the Aurospecs, seeing other people as if they were on fire, their green and red and orange radiance exploding off them like gasses from the surface of a sun, their jeweled and kindled selves seething about their persons like rainbows boiling. And pressed his ear to the seance trumpet and heard the muted sharps and flats of invisible performance.
But it was the letters which interested him most.
“Dear Dr. N. M. M. Kinsley,
“I have been a practitioner of the Kinsley Astral Projection Method for the past five years and have had dozens of successful expeditions. I have visited the homes of several relatives at distances in excess of two thousand miles, although I am still unable to get past the Rocky Mountains.
“Always before, as your method proclaims, I have been most successful where need is greatest, when subliminal, subconscious Soul cries out to sensitized psychic Soul. These, as you well know, have not always been ‘pleasant’ experiences, the comfort I have been able to impart to a grieving cousin who has lost her young husband or a father temporarily separated from his son by the wall of death, being a fleeting, cold sort of comfort at best. I have tried, as you suggest in your superb tract, to bring them good will and the good news of immortality, but in their grief states I have noticed that they are not always, or even often, responsive. Indeed, since I am unable to take with me the departed’s actual astral imprint, I have sometimes come away feeling of no more real use to the family than the ordinary well-intentioned condolence caller from church with her cakes and casseroles. However helpless I may feel psychologically when even under the best of circumstances I am able to leave only my well-meaning spiritual calling cards, a gesture which, in terms of lasting benefits, I dismiss in the very act of writing the word ‘gesture,’ I find that I return to my bed after such dubious house calls, enervated, depleted, exhausted, and profoundly unhappy.
“Here is the burden of my complaint. I am not by nature a Diabolist, no more than yourself. I have never subscribed to the old Manichean principle of the Good/Evil, Light/Dark, Heaven/Hell contrarieties. But now, well, I’m not so sure. It’s not that my belief has been shaken, but really rather the opposite — that my belief has undergone an enhancement. Now I believe everything. There are more things, Dr. Kinsley, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. And ‘dream,’ I think, is the operative word. Those I am privy to through my nocturnal visitations have been, are, depraved. My own grandmother, a religious and even naive woman who has never harmed anyone in all her ninety-one years, has dreams which may not even begin to be described by the word ‘randy.’ They are filth, Doctor, pornographic in the most debased sense of that term. Genitalia are undisguised, not Freudian obelisks or large bodies of water, not telephone poles or dark tunnels, but swollen cocks and moistened cunts, baby dolls with curling pubic hair about their slits — I am not being ‘frank’; if anything I am glossing out of decency — erections severed from their groins and glistening in their dewy juices. My relatives’ dreams, my cousins’ and in-laws’, are the very models of lust. Sodomies are become exponential, perpetrated on dead house pets, onanism and fellatio commonplace as scratching one’s back or getting a haircut. I shan’t recount the awful details. You can’t imagine them, and I won’t describe them, but if this is what is meant by ‘Negative Life Forces with their capacity to deflect the subject’s concentration from his loss,’ then I suggest that further studies be done, that your treatise be updated. If these were simply my own observations I would be willing to discredit them, dismiss them on the grounds of anomaly and insufficient evidence rather than question fundamental scientific principles established over a lifetime of good and careful work, but the experience of other adepts confirms my own. Practitioners here in Michigan have told me at our monthly meetings of salacities which I dare not write down lest I come into conflict with the rules governing the postal service. They dream, the grieving do, of excesses and improprieties unknown even in the lowest days of the Roman Empire, unknown to history’s heathens and pagans and barbarians, unknown, I daresay, even to the great perverts, the rippers and sexual surgeons, innocents all in depravity when compared to these lechers of the hearth.
“I have an Uncle Joe in Vermont, a blacksmith by trade and, or so I would have thought, temperament, one of those red and black wool-shirted men who wear the checkerboard, who dress, I mean, like a game. A crony of a man, long underweared and gallused and wide leather belted too, one of the dark pantsed and wood stoved of earth who has the names and faces of his townsmen like a postmaster. A fisherman of a fellow, honest as a hunter, more loyal to the local woods and streams than to any nation, who has all the intricate weathers like a second language. A whittler of course, and volunteer fireman, a loresman of stone and all the materials of Nature, beech and maple, elm and ash, and all the secret, invisible grains of the human heart. Whose word is his bond — and he has many words, as comforting as honest. For children, for men with troubles and for sad ladies, for lame dogs and lamer ducks. You know the type, or if you’re lucky do, an unofficial mayor of a man, powerful of course, muscled I mean, with strength that comes as much from virtue and good will as from hammer or heat. His power great but never guarded, not held like a secret or watched like his fire, no caution catching it up or checking it in, not anything fearful. My uncle’s great strength, innocent as talent, like a good singing voice, or the gift of speed.
“And no bachelor. Uncle Joe a family man, that organic guy. The sort of man — this didn’t happen — who might have married the sister-in-law when the sister died, who found the fit of love, I mean to say, who’d find it anywhere and count it as a wonder that his loved ones, all the folks he wanted most to be with in the world, his wife and children, nephews, sisters, nieces, brothers, should live so close to home, not even in the next valley but right there in the very town, beside him in the very section of the very church he prayed in, the very lake he swam in, the store he bought his staples.
“He married Aunt Elizabeth when both were twenty-eight. They had four children, my cousins Redford and Oliver and Susan and Ben, and raised them, he and Elizabeth — I don’t mean strictly, I don’t mean by any theory, I don’t even mean good-naturedly — as naturally as Aunt Elizabeth might put up strawberries, following nothing more than the natural laws and time-honored processes of canning, first this, then that.
“Elizabeth died when the youngest, Oliver, was still in his teens.
“Fine young men, a lovely woman, whose only quarrel that I can now recall was who would get to stay with Joe. The smith profession is, of course, a languishing one, and while it was never a matter of who would make his way in the world, who would get to go off to the state university at Burlington — none would, none wanted to — but rather which would have to hire out, which would have to work the timber or the nearby farms or go to the factories where the money was, and which would remain — they wouldn’t have thought of it as behind — with the benevolent, godlike father they loved as much for his kindness and wisdom as for his paternity.
“ ‘Mother’s dead,’ Susan told him. ‘You have no woman, Father, no one to cook your meals or mend and wash or sing for you. The trade is falling on hard times. You’re only fifty-two. You don’t yet even need our young strength to help you at the forge. Send them away, dear. Let me stay.’