by Z. A. Duffy
June 1877
The pamphlet you now find yourself in possession of has been assembled out of the author’s sense of great personal responsibility to reveal to the public the existence of what can only be termed a dimension of being heretofore unrecognized by science. This dimension was made known to me through a series of coincidences that I now read as events intended by beings wishing to make themselves known to me. Had I any suspicion that these beings possessed nefarious designs, I would surely despair at the ingenuity with which they managed to put themselves in communication with me, but I rest assured that their purposes are at the very least benign if not beneficent and that any person who has the good fortune of contacting them will leave the experience with a psychology and constitution much improved by the exchange.
It should come as no surprise that that community of scientists has, on the whole, been unwilling to entertain the underlying reality of the experiences herein described. Likewise, the mainstream press has refused to publish my report. More surprisingly, perhaps, has been the reluctance of the spiritualist press to disseminate this discovery. Offers to the Sun, the Times, the Spiritualist, and the Banner of Light went either unanswered or politely rejected. In the case of the Banner, I suspect the recent scandal caused by Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten’s report on the existence of cave-dwelling Kobolds has made them shy of printing anything outside the standard accounts of engagements with the spirits of the dead. For her part, Mrs. Britten has embraced my findings with great enthusiasm and encouraged me to proceed with my pamphlet. She would have published it herself, she said, except for the fact that her newspaper had fallen on hard times as a result of the fires in Boston.
Remarking on my melancholy mood during a recent visit to my home, my neighbor, Mrs. Cunningham, suggested that I join her at the home of a Mrs. Tremont for a dark séance scheduled to happen on the forthcoming Saturday. Figuring Mrs. Cunningham had attributed my ill humor to the recent death of my wife and intended to offer comfort in the form of a manifestation from the Summerland and not wishing to deflate her charitable spirit, I accepted.
We gathered around seven at the parlor of Mrs. Tremont. Mrs. Tremont is a widow of around seventy and lives in a quaint, rather rustic cottage across from the schoolhouse at the corner of Burlington and Crosswicks Street in Bordentown City. Expecting a performance of table-tilting or rapping, I was surprised when I first passed over our hostess’s threshold to find no table present, or at least not one of sufficient size to accommodate a séance. Instead, all of the chairs in the house, or at least so it seemed, had been brought into the parlor and arranged at odd and inconsistent angles spreading out in no particular pattern from the center of the room. A great dark stone sat on a bench in the corner of the room. I noted it as a curiosity but nobody seemed to pay it any mind, and, as it turns out, it played no discernible role in the evening’s proceedings. I took my place before the fireplace facing what I imagined to be the kitchen doorway. Mrs. Tremont drew four pairs of great, black, velvet curtains hung on each of the walls of the room, enclosing us like actors behind stage only without the customary wings through which we might otherwise escape.
Ten people had gathered, some familiar and some strange to me. After the fact I managed to gather everyone’s name and have since consulted with them to confirm the degree to which my version of events corresponds with theirs. Of what I am about to relate, there was no disagreement whatsoever and where there was any discrepancy between my account and theirs, I have elected to omit that portion of the narrative.
A Mr. MacFarland stood to address the assembly. He welcomed us on behalf of our hostess and instructed us that we should begin speaking as soon as we felt the inclination. Before I could ask what we should say, he informed us to talk no louder than a whisper, only to ourselves, and from the immediacy of the surface of our minds. To seek to follow a line of thought or concoct an expression with any sort of sophistication would run against the tenor of the exercise and corrupt our collective pursuit. He gestured to a Mr. Carslake who I hadn’t noticed because of my struggle to adjust to the novelty of the scenario. Mr. Carslake was seated at a small table with five bells of various sizes placed on the tabletop in front of him. Mr. Carslake, said Mr. MacFarland, would be sounding his bells according to his own whim. This would provide us with some degree of privacy in our expressions but also encourage their presence. Whose presence, he did not elaborate upon and before I could inquire any further on the matter, Mrs. Tremont extinguished the last of the candles illuminating the room and we were plunged into relative darkness.
Straight away the whispers began. The din was equal parts gentle prayer and intense supplication. Racing in the interiority of my mind to acclimate myself to this strange undertaking, it took me several minutes—it may have been minutes but time had grown as unfamiliar as the circumstances while I sat in that chair peering through the darkness at a black curtain—before I was able to join my voice to the others’. I don’t know what I spoke about. Nothing much, I suppose. I believe I began by listing some of the contents of my curio but then my subject switched to street names, places I had been in childhood, the shades of color in my tomato garden in late August.
Gradually, I became aware that the people speaking around me were no longer engaged in extended monologue of the sort I was at that moment dilineating. Rather, they seemed to be engaged in a sort of dialogue. Questions or statements with pauses for an interlocutor except that in those spaces no interlocutor spoke or seemed to speak. My speech continued, increasingly independent of my attention, and I attempted to focus my hearing on the pauses in the dialogue of the woman behind me, a Mrs. Ward. Surprisingly, the activity held my interest despite receiving no discernible stimulus from my concentration such that after what must have been more than a quarter of an hour I was still listening to her stillnesses. And that’s when I heard it. A faint sound much quieter than the whispers of the people gathered around me but with the distinct cadence of a language. The way it seemed to enter the spaces between Mrs. Ward’s own whispers made it feel almost like an echo.
As I attempted to glean some semblance of meaning from these sounds, it became apparent—in a sudden and almost jarring way—that I was not, in fact, listening to the pauses in Mrs. Ward’s speech but rather the pauses in my own. And the unearthly ████ insofar as it was speaking to anyone was speaking to me. I was no longer thinking of myself but rather of the ████. It felt as though I, along with each of the others at this whispering séance, had ceased to speak. And the sounds I heard were only those of the echoes, quietly intoning to me and to my fellows in words beyond speech. My head spun with a kind of cosmic vertigo and I felt as though I could hear the thing very clearly now addressing me in language I could not recall if I was taking dictation right there and then. And yet, the message this ████ had to share was all too plain to me. It spoke of purpose and healing and a higher calling. I felt refreshed at the sound of it, encouraged, lifted up.
I wanted the séance to continue but Mr. Carslake’s bells suddenly stopped. I hadn’t been aware of the bells at any time throughout the course of the proceeding except in that moment at the conclusion when they stopped. Silently, Mrs. Tremont lit a match and passed the flame to a single candle which she used to show her way to opening the four sets of curtains at each of the walls. Also silently, Mr. MacFarland walked to the front door, opened it, and, with a calm smile, showed our way out into the night. No one spoke as we left the room. I didn’t speak again until the following morning at breakfast when my daughter came down the stairs. “Daddy,” she said, “Did you speak with a █████ last night?” She had no intimation of the evening I had passed and was expecting news of a message through a medium’s planchette. But I couldn’t be sure what I spoke to or what it had to say, and that’s what I told her.
The following week, I arranged a lunch with Mrs. Tremont. Knowing that I wished to inquire about my experience in her parlor room in order to develop some publishable reflection on the event, she invited Mr. MacFarland along. Mr. MacFarland, as it turns out, was a kind of scholar on the subject of the echoes. Before we began, MacFarland warned me that if I learned the true nature of the voices from him I should not be able to speak with them again. MacFarland had made several attempts himself, but, although he hosted Mrs. Tremont’s whispering séances, he had not heard a single syllable from the echoes since he’d uncovered their origins several years ago.
The closest any culture had come to identifying them, he said, was in the Slavic tradition where they were called █████, also known in Sweden under the name ████████. These █████, according to legend, surfaced at times of crisis as vessels of meaning, refocusing the attention of a community or individual on the higher questions of being which are often lost in the press of creatural problems associated with earthly trauma. They were, perhaps, one class of a larger subset of elemental spirits, but MacFarland had not been able to identify just exactly what that higher classification might be if one was even conceivable.
The Norwegians as well as the Swedes and Danes believed the █████ were independent entities like the elementary spirits spoken of by Madame Blavatsky and Mrs. Britten’s Chevalier Louis de B. For his part, MacFarland did not necessarily accept this conceptualization, preferring to label them as emanations of the individual’s own consciousness. MacFarland had been introduced to the whispering séances by a Dutch mesmerist named Vandermeer while on holiday in France. For his part, Vandermeer claimed to have learned the practice from a group of Rosicrucians in Greece, but the way MacFarland communicated this aspect of the history led me to believe that he doubted its veracity. Rosicrucians have a way of popping up whenever someone wishes to conceal the true origins of their understanding and this, I suspect, was the source of MacFarland’s distrust.
MacFarland participated in Vandermeer’s rites weekly for almost three months before bringing them home to Trenton. Vandermeer had given him the same warning he had shared with me, but eventually MacFarland wrote him demanding to know all the dutchman could share of the voices and their message.
MacFarland said that his experience had been most powerful when he was working directly with the dutchman whose guided instruction seemed to render the veoka’s arrival both more imminent and more palpable. Vandermeer, it seemed, was the only man who could claim to be able to both speak on the nature of the voices and make contact with them. After several weeks of practice, MacFarland began to feel as though a portion of his mind was separating like a bubble rising up to the surface of a pond. This, he believed, was the hushed tones that he heard as the voice of the █████. The voice was no disembodied entity, or, rather, the disembodied entity was some sort of astral sound emanating from MacFarland himself. It was, he said, the same voice that I had heard the Saturday previous and the same voice everyone who engaged in the whispering séance eventually heard if they allowed their conscious faculties the opportunity to separate into their component parts.
I did attempt a second séance at Mrs. Tremont’s, but, as MacFarland had warned, I had no success this second round. This may have been, as MacFarland suggested, a product of my foreknowledge of the supposed beings communicating to the whisperers, or it may have been a sort of self-suggestion through which I convinced myself—via MacFarland—that it would not be possible. In any event, all I heard was the low hush of ten whispering voices slowly dissipating over the space of an hour into an intermittent and then almost but never complete silence.
The Veoka Archive 