Under a Watchful Eye(57)
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Voice inside my head said, ‘Come out of there! Gentlemen don’t mooch through ladies’ things!’
I couldn’t turn around and go back through the bedroom. Knew the bed wasn’t empty any more and I became frightened. Could sense that it had become occupied. Don’t like the tricks at all.
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I tried to end the experience but couldn’t. Have tried before in those rooms. Not possible to get off that floor of the building at all, unless I am inside the corridor of the black doors. It ends only if HE lets it end. That’s what I suspect. But I had to walk through the bedroom, past the bed, to get back to the corridor of black doors to have any chance of getting out. I kept my face turned away from the bed.
Feelings of loathing and revulsion and rage filled the room, but these were not my emotions or my projections.
Bad scene. Angry room. Angry woman inside.
Why wasn’t I told about her?
Saw a bit of her in the mirrors on a dark cabinet at the end of the bed as I left. Very pale, very thin form. Dark glasses like HE wears, and her head was covered by a headscarf. She was sitting up in bed with the bedclothes pulled down to her waist, but showing her little breasts. Nipples and fingertips were black.
Was that Diane?
The experience only ended when I’d returned to the corridor of the black doors.
In the morning I refused to go upstairs in the building again. No way.
They said that was okay. They said I could go outside instead.
Very surprised by that. But I do want to try the next sphere. I told them that I came here for that.
The final two segments that Seb translated suggested to him that Ewan had placed himself in grave danger by continuing with the unpleasant trials, and that he was, more or less, being played with or tormented by his guides, or hosts, or whatever they were. This made Seb wonder at Ewan’s motivations for arriving in Brixham. Perhaps Ewan had reneged on some agreement, or even an association with something that he’d realized was not in his best interests as a projector, but too late.
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Don’t like the house at all now. Really bad feeling inside and it makes me feel ill. There is no light at all, even in the windows. Just very grey outside, or completely black, or a heavy fog curls and breaks on the window panes. So how can that be the next sphere outside, and this the entrance? There is no light.
They’ve been saying ‘Patience, patience, patience,’ so why are they letting me go outside now?
Tired of the trials though, and the tricks.
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Spent the day reading the files again. So many. Incredible. But this is not the same place it was once. Those still here don’t know exactly, or won’t tell me, where all of the others are now [Text illegible]
Some of them are in the highest sphere, I am told. They must be because they were already old in the 1960s.
‘Some still come here. You’ll meet them soon.’ But they won’t say when.
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Just us here, and what comes into the second floor. Something not right about the whole deal.
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While taking breaks from Ewan’s papers, Seb conducted internet searches for the Society for Psychophysical Research. His slender breakthrough came in the form of comments referencing the society in relation to other similar organizations in the 1960s. But the same secondary articles also led him to the eureka connection with the writer, M. L. Hazzard.
The SPR had no entry on Wikipedia, but was mentioned as a footnote in a long entry on ‘Astral Projection’. It seemed the SPR had been one group, amongst scores of similarly titled societies and organizations, that had flourished from the late Victorian interest in travelling clairvoyance until the 1970s. Many were purely occult organizations, like the Golden Dawn. Others had blended psychology with science and the supernatural. The SPR took its place in the latter category.
On most sites that referenced the SPR, the information never progressed beyond the approximate dates of its existence, in the sixties. There was no mention of the society’s dissolution or start date.
Three commentaries did mention its founding by ‘a writer, M. L. Hazzard’. On an occult site, Hazzard’s theories about ‘planes and spheres’ were referred to once, but without expansion.
Two postings on ‘Astral Projection’ websites were critical of the SPR. But the dismissal in the first piece never extended beyond a reference to it being ‘discredited and disreputable’. The second post commented on Hazzard’s ‘disgrace’ without specifying more than ‘embezzlement’ and of ‘defrauding members of the society’.
No publications seemed to have been produced by the society either, nor were there any available records that tried to formally define its practices or aims. The group appeared to have left almost no trace of itself, at least within the public domain.
It struck Seb that the publications of the British organizations of the time that bore similarities to the SPR may have contained more information on Hazzard’s group, but without recourse to the indexes of the books they’d produced, he’d never know. Nor would he ever reach the end of the published journals and annals from the groups that operated in the same period. There were hundreds of these publications for sale on used-book sites.
He’d also developed an impression that academia’s interest in the phenomenon had never waned. But it repeatedly and comprehensively dismissed, or attempted to dismiss, all of the ideas posed by astral projectors, occultists and pseudo-scientists, like the SPR. Extensive research into the subject had been conducted by several British and American universities, including Cambridge, and recently too. A broad range of physiological causes for the phenomenon were cited. A damn shame, it seemed in hindsight, that they never put the SPR in a laboratory.