AALILA (2)
By:
April 22, 2025
Christopher Blayre’s “Aalila” (1921), which may remind readers of a later work of sf horror, William Sloane’s To Walk the Night, first appeared in Blayre’s University of Cosmopoli collection The Purple Sapphire. HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize the story for HILOBROW’s readers.
ALL INSTALLMENTS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5.
I am to assume that you, who read this, know all that is necessary to be known about the equipment of a stargazer’s observatory. Markwand’s observatory was like any other in all essentials. The noticeable feature was an extremely powerful arc-light apparatus, to which the current was supplied by a powerful dynamo. This he used for his experiments in photo-telephony, and I quickly realised that he had made no idle boast when he said the subject was yet in its infancy. From his observatory he could throw a beam of light some four hundred yards into his den at the house, where, caught by the mirror and the Selenium cell apparatus, you could carry on a conversation as comfortably as if the conversant had been in the room. He could “ring up” along his beam before switching in the voice receiver, and by the same means could transmit written words, drawings, and even his own features to the receiving screen. It was positively uncanny to me who am in no sense a Physicist — it was as a Psychologist that the state of exaltation in which Markwand lived interested, and, I am bound to confess, sometimes alarmed me.
He showed me many beautiful experiments and results, but at his own research work he would never allow me to be present. He would laugh and say:
“You are too inquisitive, my dear fellow. You would fidget about and make me nervous. I should always be afraid of your monkeying with the dynamo, or touching a live wire somehow. I don’t want to have you on my hands as a horrid little burnt corpse.”
And so it went on. I was genuinely resting, but whatever may have been the nature of Markwand’s holiday researches, he certainly was not. All that I could get out of him was that he was observing certain phenomena connected with the planet Venus. He would come over from the observatory sometimes in a state of almost wild elation, at others utterly worn out and dejected, but always shrouded in a mantle, as it were, of absorbed introspection. One day when for forty-eight hours he had been more abstracted and “nervy” than usual, he startled me by saying:
“You remember my chaff about you and the dynamo? Look here, if anything of that kind were to happen to me you will know how it happened, if any enquiry should be made. But before anything of that kind happens, and people — executors, all that sort of rot you know — come messing about, take this key off my watch-chain. It opens this writing case. Take the case and pack it up in your luggage, and take it away. You can read the papers yourself afterwards, but not until I am buried.” I was very much shocked, and begged him to relax in his work, to accept my help in so far as it might be of any avail, but he only laughed queerly and said: “I am only putting a very unlikely and hypothetical case. I’m all right. But a research worker should always be prepared for the most unlikely eventualities. As for help, my work is purely personal, no one can help.”
“When shall you publish?”
“Never.”
“Why not?
He thought for a moment, and then he said “I have gone too far. The world is not yet fit to know what I know. Don’t think I am mad, I am not. I’m deadly sane. Some day someone else will happen on the same results, and who knows what may happen then? I won’t be responsible. It’s too much.” By this time he was apparently talking to himself. He had forgotten all about me.
By the way, I don’t think I have mentioned that Markwand was a bachelor.
* * *
I had been with him about a fortnight, and every day it had seemed to me that he was becoming more exalted — a stupid word, but I can think of no other. He spent the days as it were in a dream, seldom speaking except upon the most conventional subjects, rather impatient if I referred to our work at the University.
“Don’t talk shop for goodness sake, old man. That’s our work-a-day world, this is something different. Another world? Hardly, but perhaps the threshold.”
I didn’t like this. “The Threshold” is one of the cant terms in the Jargon of the Spiritualist, the Esoteric Buddhist, the Rosicrucian, and it turned me cold.
“I say, old fellow,” I said, “you know I’m broad minded, and I don’t sneer at poor old A, B, and C, who believe in spooks, and commune with those who have ‘passed over’; I look upon it as a mental disease, exploited by quacks (who are, I understand, generally charwomen when not doing the Prospero act), just as some physical diseases are exploited by the quacks of a different walk in life. But I do think the result is the same. The incurable is the quarry of the quack. But that you should have any truck with that kind of thing is unthinkable. Threshold of what?” I concluded rather inconsequently.
“Oh, don’t be afraid. I’m not disturbing the sainted spirit of my Aunt Jemima. When I said ‘threshold,’ I meant a real Threshold, like a flight of steps, or a plank. Difficult to find a word. But I can’t explain. I’m sorry.”
I thought seriously of writing in confidence to Sir George Amboyne, our Regius Professor of Medicine to ask him to invite himself down for a day or two to have a look at Markwand.
However I didn’t, and I am glad now that I didn’t. One night I woke up in his den, where I used to read, and smoke, and wait for him to come over to bed. It was just day-break, and, gadzooks, I was stiff! He hadn’t come in, so I risked his displeasure and walked over to the observatory. The east was just reddening, and the plantation was full of the little sounds that animals and birds make when they shake themselves to start the day’s work. I could see that the arc-light was burning, and I could hear purring of the dynamo. Thinking he must be asleep I reached my hand towards the door and was just about to turn the handle when the light went out and a wild cry came from beyond it — a word? A name? An exclamation? What?
“Aalila!”
Drawn out on the first syllable “A-a-lila!” I opened the door. Markwand was standing by his telescope, his arms extended over his head, looking at me. He blinked like an owl in daytime, though the struggling dawn made light hardly visible. He looked at me stupidly for a moment and then looked at the Sidereal clock.
“Good heavens,” he said quite calmly. “I am sorry. It’s daylight. I had forgotten the time, and you, and everything else. I don’t wonder either. Haven’t you been to bed? I’m a rotten host. Come and have a bath.”
And we walked back to the house as if nothing at all had happened. Markwand was in splendid form. We bathed, made coffee, fried bacon and potatoes, and went down to the stream to fish.
“You’re overdoing it, Markwand,” I said, after a rather long silence.
“Am I?” he replied laughing, and landing a trout. “Do I look like it? I’ve had a splendid night. Do I look the worn-out scientist?
He certainly did not.
Later in the day we were lazing in two chairs on the lawn under a tree. I caught Markwand looking at me in the manner which is described by story-writers as “whimsical.” I fell to an irresistible temptation.
“What is Aalila?” I said.
“If you only knew! “ he replied. “Well, you shall; I’m going to tell you.”
Then he plunged into it. Later I verified every detail of his marvellous story, and was able to fill in a mass of others which he left out or slurred over.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: James Parker’s Cocky the Fox | Annalee Newitz’s “The Great Oxygen Race” | Matthew Battles’s “Imago” | & many more original and reissued novels and stories.