The Plattner Story - H G Wells

0:00When you're ready to slow down, especially before bed, listen to Soul Good Sounds. We create calming audio, ambient soundscapes, and peaceful listening experiences designed to help you relax, unwind, and fall asleep. Search Soul Good Sounds wherever you listen to podcasts. That's S-O-L-G-O-O-D sounds. Soul Good Sounds rest well. The Platner Story by H.G. Wells Whether the story of God-freed Platner is to be credited or not is a pretty question in the value of evidence. On the one hand, we have seven witnesses. To be perfectly exact, we have six and a half pairs of eyes, and one undeniable fact. And on the other, we have, what is it, prejudice, common sense, the inertia of opinion? Never were there seven more honest seeming witnesses.

1:00Never was there a more undeniable fact than the inversion of God-freed Platner's anatomical structure, and never was there a more preposterous story than the one they have to tell. The most preposterous part of the story is the worthy God-freed's contribution, for I count him as one of the seven. Heaven forbid that I should be led into giving countenance to superstition by a passion for impartiality, and so come to share the fate of Usapia's patrons. Frankly, I believe there is something crooked about this business of God-freed Platner, but what that crooked factor is, I will admit is, frankly, I do not know. I have been surprised that the credit accorded to the story in the most unexpected and authoritative quarters. The fairest way to the reader, however, will be for me to tell it without further comment. God-freed Platner is, in spite of his name, a free-born Englishman. His father was an Alsacean who came to England in the sixties, married a respectable English girl of unexceptional antecedents, and died, after a wholesome and uneventful life devoted

2:03I understand chiefly to the laying of parquet flooring in 1887. God-freed's age is seven and twenty. He is by virtue of his heritage of three languages, modern languages master in a small private school in the south of England. Under the casual observer, he is singularly like any other modern language is master in any other small private school. His costume is neither very costly nor very fashionable, but, on the other hand, it is not markedly cheap or shabby. His complexion like his height and his bearing is inconspicuous. You would not notice, perhaps, that, like the majority of people, his face was not absolutely symmetrical. His right eye a little larger than the left, and his jaw a trifle heavier on the right side. If you, as an ordinary careless person, were to bear his chest and feel his heart beating you would probably find it quite like the heart of anyone else. But here you and the trained observer would part company. If you found his heart quite ordinary, the trained observer would find it quite otherwise.

3:04And once the thing was pointed out to you, you too would perceive the peculiarity easily enough. It is that God-freed's heart beats on the right side of his body. Now, that is not the only singularity of God-freed structure, although it is the only one that would appeal to the untrained mind. Careful sounding of God-freed's internal arrangements by a well-known surgeon seems to point to the fact that all the other unsymmetrical parts of his body are similarly misplaced. The right lobe of his liver is on the left side, the left on his right. While his lungs, too, are similarly controposed. But it is still more singular, unless God-freed is a consummate actor, we must believe that his right hand has recently become his left. Since the occurrences we are about to consider, as impartially as possible, he has found the utmost difficulty in writing, except from right to left across the paper with his left hand. He cannot throw with his right hand, he is perplexed at mealtimes between knife and fork,

4:04and his ideas of the rule of the road, he is a cyclist, are still a dangerous confusion. And there is not a scrap of evidence to show that before these occurrences, God-freed was at all left-handed. There is yet another wonderful fact in this preposterous business. God-freed produces three photographs of himself. You have him at the age of five or six, thrusting fat legs at you from under a plaid frock and scowling. In that photograph, his left eye is a little larger than his right, and his jaw is a trifle heavier on the left side. This is the reverse of his present living condition. The photograph of God-freed at fourteen seems to contradict these facts, but that is because it is one of those cheap, gem photographs that were then invoked, taken direct upon the metal, and therefore reversing things just as a looking glass would. The third photograph represents him at one and twenty, and confirms the record of the others. There seems here evidence of the strongest confirmatory character that God-freed has exchanged his left side for his right, yet how a human being can be so changed short

5:09of a fantastic and pointless miracle. It is exceedingly hard to suggest. In one way, of course, these facts might be explicable on the supposition that Platner has undertaken an elaborate mystification on the strength of his heart's displacement. Photographs may be faked, and left-handedness imitated, but the character of the man does not lend itself to any such theory. He is quiet, practical, unobtrusive, and thoroughly sane from the Nordow standpoint. He likes beer and smokes moderately, takes walking exercise daily and has a healthy high estimate of the value of his teaching. He has a good but untrained tenor voice, and takes a pleasure in singing heirs of a popular and cheerful character. He is fond, but not morbidly fond, of reading, chiefly fiction pervaded with a vaguely pious optimism. Sleeps well and rarely dreams. He is, in fact, the very last person to evolve a fantastic fable. Indeed, so far from forcing this story upon the world, he has been singularly reticent

6:12on the matter. He meets inquirers with a certain, engaging, bashfulness is almost the word that disarms the most suspicious. He seems genuinely ashamed that anything so unusual has occurred to him. It is to be regretted that Platner's aversion to the idea of post-mortem dissection may post-pone, perhaps forever, the positive proof that his entire body has had its left and right sides transposed. Upon that fact, mainly the credibility of his story hangs. There is no way of taking a man and moving him about in space as ordinary people understand space that will result in our changing his sides. Whatever you do, his right is still his right, and his left is left. You can do that with a perfectly thin and flat thing, of course. If you were to cut a figure out of paper, any figure with a right and left side, you could change its sides simply by lifting it up and turning it over. But with a solid, it is different. Mathematical theorists tell us that the only way in which the right and left sides of

7:12a solid body can be changed is by taking that body clean out of space as we know it. Taking it out of ordinary existence, that is, and turning it somewhere outside space. This is a little of truce, no doubt, but anyone with any knowledge of mathematical theory will assure the reader of its truth. To put the thing in technical language, the curious inversion of Platner's right and left sides is proof that he has moved out of our space into what is called the fourth dimension, and that he has returned again to our world. Since we choose to consider ourselves the victims of an elaborate and motive-less fabrication, we are almost bound to believe that this has occurred. So much for the tangible facts. Now we come to the account of the phenomena that attended his temporary disappearance from the world. It appears that in the Sussexville proprietary school, Platner not only discharged the duties of modern language master, but also taught chemistry, commercial geography, bookkeeping, boardhand, drawing, and any other additional subject to which the changing fancies of the

8:14boy's parents might direct attention. He knew little or nothing of these various subjects, but in secondary as distinguished from board or elementary schools, knowledge in the teacher is very properly by no means so necessary as high moral character and gentlemanly tone. In chemistry he was particularly deficient, knowing he says nothing beyond the three gases, whatever the three gases may be. As however his pupils began by knowing nothing and derived all their information from him, this caused him or anyone but little inconvenience for several terms. Then a little boy named Wibble joined the school, who had been educated at seams by some mischievous relative into an inquiring habit of mind. This little boy followed Platner's lessons with marked and sustained interest, and in order to exhibit his zeal on the subject brought at various times substances for Platner to analyze. Platner, flattered by this evidence of his power of awakening interest and trusting to the boy's ignorance, analyzed these and even made general statements as to their composition.

9:18Indeed he was so far stimulated by his pupil as to obtain a work upon analytical chemistry and study it during his supervision of the evening's preparation. He was surprised to find chemistry quite an interesting subject. So far the story is absolutely commonplace, but now the greenish powder comes upon the seam. The source of that greenish powder seems unfortunately lost. Master Wibble tells a torturous story of finding it done up in a packet and a disused line kill near the downs. It would have been an excellent thing for Platner and possibly for Master Wibble's family if a match could have been applied to that powder there and then. The young gentleman certainly did not bring it to school in a packet, but in a common eight ounce graduated medicine bottle plugged with masticated newspaper. He gave it to Platner at the end of the afternoon school. Four boys had been detained after school prayers in order to complete some neglected tasks and Platner was supervising these in the small classroom in which the chemical teaching was conducted.

10:19The appliances for the practical teaching of chemistry in the Sussexville proprietary school, as in most small schools in this country, are characterized by a severe simplicity. They are kept in a small cupboard standing in a recess and having about the same capacity as a common traveling trunk. Platner being bored with his passive superintendent seemed to have welcomed the intervention of Wibble with his green powder as an agreeable diversion, and unlocking this cupboard proceeded at once with his analytical experiments. Wibble sat, luckily for himself at a safe distance regarding him. The four malefactors, feigning a profound absorption in their work, watched him furtively with the keenest interest, for even within the limits of the three gases Platner's practical chemistry was I understand to Marius. They are practically unanimous in their account of Platner's proceedings. He poured a little of the green powder into a test tube and tried the substance with water, hydrochloric acid, nitric acid, and sulfuric acid in succession.

11:21Getting no result, he emptied out a little heap, nearly half the bottle full, in fact, upon a slate and tried a match. He held the medicine bottle in his left hand, the stuff began to smoke and melt and then exploded with deafening violence and a blinding flash. The five boys, seeing the flash and being prepared for catastrophes, ducked below their desks and were none of them seriously hurt. The window was blown out into the playground and the blackboard on its easel was upset. The slate was smashed to atoms. Some plaster fell from the ceiling, but no other damage was done to the school edifice or appliances, and the boys at first, seeing nothing of Platner, fancy, he was knocked down and lying out of their site below the desks. They jumped out of their places to go to his assistance and were amazed to find this space empty. Being still confused by the sudden violence of the report, they hurried to the open door under the impression that he must have been hurt and have rushed out of the room, but Carson, the foremost, nearly collided in the doorway with the principal, Mr. Lydget.

12:24Mr. Lydget is a corpulent, excitable man with one eye. The boys describe him as stumbling into the room, malthing some of those tempered expletives irritable schoolmasters accustomed themselves to use, lest worse be fall. Wretched mum-chancer, he said. Where's Mr. Platner? The boys are agreed on the very words. Wobbler, stivaling puppy, and mum-chancer are, it seems, among the ordinary small change of Mr. Lydget's scholastic commerce. Here's Mr. Platner. That was a question that was to be repeated many times in the next few days. It really seemed as though that frantic hyperbole, blown to atoms, had for once realized itself. There was not a visible particle of Platner to be seen, not a drop of blood nor a stitch of clothing to be found. Apparently he had been blown clean out of existence and left not a rack behind. Not so much as would cover a six-penny piece to quote a proverbial expression. The evidence of his absolute disappearance as a consequence of that explosion is indubitable.

13:28It is not necessary to enlarge here upon the commotion excited in the Sussexville proprietary school and in Sussexville and elsewhere by this event. It is quite possible indeed that some of the readers of these pages may recall the hearing of some remote and dying version of that excitement during the last summer holidays. Lydgett would seem did everything in his power to suppress and minimize the story. He instituted a penalty of twenty-five lines for any mention of Platner's name among the boys and stated in the schoolroom that he was clearly aware of his assistance whereabouts. He was afraid he explains that the possibility of an explosion happening in spite of the elaborate precautions taken to minimize the practical teaching of chemistry might injure the reputation of the school and so might any mysterious quality in Platner's departure. Indeed, he did everything in his power to make the occurrence seem as ordinary as possible. In particular, he cross-examine the five eyewitnesses of the occurrence so searchingly that they began to doubt the plain evidence of their senses.

14:30But in spite of these efforts, the tale, in a magnified and distorted state, made a nine days wonder in the district and several parents withdrew their sons on colorable pretexts. Not the least remarkable point in the matter is the fact that a large number of people in the neighborhood dreamed singularly vivid dreams of Platner during the period of excitement before his return, and that these dreams had a curious uniformity. In almost all of them, Platner was seen sometimes singly, sometimes in company, wandering about through a coeroscating iridescence. In all cases, his face was pale and distressed, and in some he gesticulated toward the dreamer. One or two of the boys evidently under the influence of nightmare fancied that Platner approached them with remarkable swiftness and seemed to look closely into their very eyes. Others fled with Platner from the pursuit of vague and extraordinary creatures of a globular shape. But all these fancies were forgotten in inquiries and speculations when on the Wednesday next but one after the Monday of the explosion, Platner returned.

15:36The circumstances of his return were as singular as those of his departure. So far as Mr. Lydgett's somewhat caloric outline can be filled in from Platner's hesitating statements, it would appear that on Wednesday evening toward the hour of sunset, the former gentleman having dismissed evening preparation was engaged in his garden, picking and eating strawberries, a fruit of which he is inordinately fond. It is a large, old-fashioned garden secured from observation fortunately by a high and ivy-covered red brick wall. To see was stooping over a particularly prolific plant there was a flash in the air and a heavy thud, and before he could look round some heavy body struck him violently from behind. He was pitched forward, crushing the strawberries he held in his hand, and that so roughly that his silk hat, Mr. Lydgett, here's to the older ideas of scholastic costume, was driven violently down upon his far head, and almost over one eye. This heavy missile which slid over him sideways and collapsed into a sitting posture among

16:38the strawberry plants proved to be our long-lost, Mr. Godfried Platner. In an extremely disheveled condition he was collarless and hatless, his linen was dirty and there was blood upon his hands. Mr. Lydgett was so indignant and surprised that he remained on all fours and with his hat jammed down on his eye, while he exposculated vehemently with Platner for his disrespectful and unaccountable conduct. This scarcely idyllic scene completes what I may call the exterior version of the Platner story, its esoteric aspect. It is quite unnecessary to enter here into all the details of his dismissal by Mr. Lydgett. Such details, with the full names and dates and references, will be found in the larger report of these occurrences that was laid before the society for the investigation of abnormal phenomena. The singular transposition of Platner's right and left sides was scarcely observed for the first day or so, and then, first in connection with his disposition to right from right to left across the blackboard.

17:39He concealed rather than astended this curious, confirmatory circumstance as he considered it would unfavorably affect his prospects in a new situation. The displacement of his heart was discovered some months after when he was having a tooth extracted under anesthetics. He then, very unwillingly, allowed a cursory surgical examination to be made of himself, and the view to a brief account in the Journal of Anatomy. That exhausts the statement of the material facts, and we may now go on to consider Platner's account of the matter. But first, let us clearly differentiate between the preceding portion of this story and what is to follow. All I have told thus far is established by such evidence as even a criminal lawyer would approve. Every one of the witnesses is still alive. The reader, if he have the leisure, may hunt the lads out tomorrow, or even brave the terrors of the redoubtable lidgit and cross-examine and trap and test to his heart's content, God-freed Platner himself, and his twisted heart and his three photographs are producible.

18:42It may be taken as proved that he did disappear for nine days as the consequence of an explosion. That he returned almost as violently, under circumstances in their nature, annoying to Mr. Lidgit, whatever the details of those circumstances may be, and that he returned, inverted, just as a reflection returns from a mirror. From the last fact, as I have already stated, it follows almost inevitably that Platner, during those nine days, must have been in some state of existence altogether out of space. The evidence to these statements is, indeed, far stronger than that upon which most murderers are hanged. But for his own particular account of where he had been, with its confused explanations and well-nigh self-contradictory details, we have only Mr. God-freed Platner's word. I do not wish to discredit that, but I must point out what so many writers upon obscure psychic phenomena fail to do, that we are passing here from the practically undeniable to that kind of matter which any reasonable man is entitled to believe or reject as he

19:44thinks proper. The previous statements render it plausible. Its discordance with common experience tilts it towards the incredible. I would prefer not to sway the beam of the reader's judgment either way, but simply to tell the story as Platner told it to me. He gave me his narrative, I may state, at my house at Chiselhurst, and so soon as he had left me that evening I went into my study and wrote down everything as I remembered it. Subsequently, he was good enough to read over a typewritten copy so that it's substantial correctness is undeniable. He states that at the moment of explosion he distinctly thought he was killed. He felt lifted off his feet and driven forcibly backward. It is a curious fact for psychologists that he thought clearly during his backward flight and wondered whether he should hit the chemistry covered or the blackboard easel. His heels struck ground and he staggered and fell heavily into a sitting position on something soft and firm. For a moment the concussion stunned him.

20:45He became aware at once of a vivid scent of singed hair, and he seemed to hear the voice of lidgate asking for him. You will understand that for a time his mind was greatly confused. At first he was under the impression that he was still standing in the classroom. He perceived quite distinctly the surprise of the boys and the entry of Mr. lidgate. He is quite positive upon that score. He did not hear their remarks but that he ascribed to the deafening effect of the experiment. Things about him seemed curiously dark and faint but his mind explained that on the obvious but mistaken idea that the explosion had engendered a huge volume of dark smoke. Through the dimness the figures of lidgate and the boys moved as faint and silent as ghosts. Platner's face still tangled with the stinging heat of the flash. He was, he says, all muddled. His first definite thoughts seemed to have been of his personal safety. He thought he was perhaps blinded and deafened. He felt his limbs in face in a gingerly manner.

21:48Then his perceptions grew clearer and he was astonished to miss the old familiar desks and other schoolroom furniture about him. Only dim, uncertain grey shapes stood in the place of these. Then came a thing that made him shout aloud and awoke his stunned faculties to instant activity. Two of the boys gesticulating walked one after the other, clean, through him. Neither manifested the slightest consciousness of his presence. It is difficult to imagine the sensation he felt. They came against him he says with no more force than a wisp of mist. Platner's first thought after that was that he was dead. Having been brought up with thoroughly sound views in these matters. However, he was a little surprised to find his body still about him. The second conclusion was that he was not dead, but that the others were, that the explosion had destroyed the Sussexville proprietary school and every soul in it except for himself. But that too was scarcely satisfactory.

22:48He was thrown back upon astonished observation. Everything about him was profoundly dark. At first it seemed to have an altogether ebony blackness. Overhead was a black firmament. The only touch of light in the scene was a faint greenish glow at the edge of the sky in one direction which threw into prominence a horizon of undulating black hills. This I say was his impression at first. As his eye grew accustomed to the darkness he began to distinguish a faint quality of differentiating greenish color in the circumambient night. Against this background the furniture and occupants of the classroom it seemed stood out like phosphorescent spectres, faint and impalpable. He extended his hand and thrust it without an effort through the wall of the room by the fireplace. He described himself as making a strenuous effort to attract attention. He shouted to lidgit and tried to seize the boys as they went to and fro. He only disisted from these attempts when Mrs. lidgit, whom he, as an assistant manager,

23:50naturally disliked, entered the room. He says the sensation of being in the world and yet not a part of it was an extraordinarily disagreeable one. He compared his feelings not in aptly to those of a cat watching a mouse through a window. Whenever he made a motion to communicate with the dim familiar world about him, he found an invisible incomprehensible barrier preventing intercourse. He then turned his attention to his solid environment. He found the medicine bottle still unbroken in his hand with the remainder of the green powder therein. He put this in his pocket and began to feel about him. Apparently he was sitting on a boulder of rock covered with a velvety moss. The dark country about him he was unable to see. The faint, misty picture of the schoolroom blotting it out. But he had a feeling, too, perhaps to a cold wind, that he was near the crest of a hill and that a steep valley fell away beneath his feet. The green glow along the edge of the sky seemed to be growing in extent and intensity.

24:51He stood up, rubbing his eyes. It would seem that he made a few steps going steeply down hill and then stumbled, nearly fell and sat down again upon a jagged mass of rock to watch the dawn. He became aware that the world about him was absolutely silent. It was as still as it was dark. And though there was a cold wind blowing up the hill face, the rustle of grass, the sowing of the bowels, that should have accompanied it, were absent. He could hear therefore if he could not see that the hillside upon which he stood was rocky and desolate. The green grew brighter every moment, and as it did so, a faint transparent blood red mingled with but did not mitigate the blackness of the sky overhead and the rocky desolations about him. Having regard to what follows, I am inclined to think that the redness may have been an optical effect due to contrast. Something black fluttered momentarily against the livid yellow green of the lower sky, and then the thin and penetrating voice of a bell rose out of the black gulf below

25:54him. An oppressive expectation grew with the growing light. It is probable that an hour or more elapsed while he sat there, the strange green light growing brighter every moment and spreading slowly in flamboyant fingers upward toward the zenith. As it grew the spectral vision of our world became relatively or absolutely fainter, probably both. For the time must have been about that of our earthly sunset. So far as his vision of our world went, platinum by his few steps down hill had passed through the floor of the classroom and was now it seemed sitting in mid-air in the larger schoolroom downstairs. He saw the borders distinctly, but much more faintly than he had seen lidkit. They were preparing their evening tasks, and he noticed with interest that several were cheating with their euclid riders by means of a crib. The compilation whose existence he had hitherto never expected. As the time passed they faded steadily, as steadily as the light of the green dawn increased.

26:56Looking down into the valley he saw that the light had crept far down its rocky sides and that the profound blackness of the abyss was now broken by a minute green glow, like the light of a glow worm, and almost immediately the limb of a huge heavenly body of blazing green rose over the basaltic undulations of the distant hills, and the monstrous hillmasses about him came out gaunt and desolate in green light and deep, ruddy black shadows. He became aware of a vast number of ball-shaped objects drifting as thistle-down drifts over the high ground. There were none of these nearer to him than the opposite side of the gorge. The bell below twanged quicker and quicker with something like impatient insistence, and several lights moved hither and thither. The boys at work at their desks were now almost imperceptibly faint. This extinction of our world when the green sun of this other universe rose is a curious point upon which Platner insists. During the other world night it is difficult to move about on account of the vividness

27:59with which the things of this world are visible. It becomes a riddle to explain why if this is the case we in this world catch no glimpse of the other world. It is due perhaps to the comparatively vivid illumination of this world of ours. Platner describes the midday of the other world at its brightest as not being nearly so bright as this world at full moon. While its night is profoundly black. Consequently the amount of light even in an ordinary dark room is sufficient to render the things of the other world invisible, on the same principle that faint phosphorescence is only visible in the profoundest darkness. I have tried since he told me his story to see something of the other world by sitting for a long space in a photographer's dark room at night. I have certainly seen indistinctly the form of greenish slopes and rocks, but only I must admit very indistinctly indeed. The reader may possibly be more successful. Platner tells me that since his return he has dreamt and seen and recognized places in

29:01the other world, but this is probably due to his memory of these scenes. It seems quite possible that people with unusually keen eyesight may occasionally catch a glimpse of this strange other world about us. However, this is digression. As the green sun rose, a long street of black buildings became perceptible, though only darkly and indistinctly in the gorge, and after some hesitation, Platner began to clamor down the precipitous descent toward them. The descent was long and exceedingly tedious, being so not only by the extraordinary steepness but also by reason of the looseness of the boulders with which the whole face of the hill was strewn. The noise of his descent, now and then his heel struck fire from the rocks, seemed now the only sound in the universe for the beating of the bell had ceased. As he drew nearer he perceived that the various edifices had a singular resemblance to tombs and mausoleums and monuments, saving only that they were all uniformly black instead of

30:02being white as most seplikers are. And then he saw crowding out of the largest building very much as people disperse from church a number of pallid, rounded pale green figures. These dispersed in several directions about the broad street of the place, some going through side alleys and reappearing upon the steepness of the hill, others entering some of the small black buildings which lined the way. At the sight of these things drifting up towards him, Platner stopped staring. They were not walking. They were indeed limbless, and they had the appearance of human heads beneath which a tadpole-like body swung. He was too astonished at their strangeness, too full indeed of strangeness to be seriously alarmed by them. They drove towards him in front of the chill wind that was blowing up hill, much as soap bubbles drive before a draft. And as he looked at the nearest of those approaching he saw it was indeed a human head, albeit with singularly large eyes and wearing such an expression of distress in anguish as

31:05he had never seen before upon mortal countenance. He was surprised to find that it did not turn to regard him, but seemed to be watching and following some unseen moving thing. For a moment he was puzzled, and then it occurred to him that this creature was watching with its enormous eyes something that was happening in the world he had just left. Nearer it came, and nearer, and he was too astonished to cry out. It made a very faint fretting sound as it came close to him, then it struck his face with a gentle pat, its touch was very cold, and drove past him and upward toward the crest of the hill. An extraordinary conviction flashed across Platner's mind that this head had a strong likeness to lidgit. When he turned his attention to the other heads that were now swarming thickly up the hillside. None made the slightest sign of recognition. One or two indeed came close to his head and almost followed the example of the first, but he dodged convulsively out of the way. Upon most of them he saw the same expression of unavailing regret he had seen upon the first,

32:08and heard the same faint sounds of wretchedness from them. One or two wept, and one rolling swiftly up hill wore an expression of diabolical rage. But others were cold, and several had a look of gratified interest in their eyes. One at least was almost in an ecstasy of happiness. Platner does not remember that he recognized any more likenesses in those he saw at this time. For several hours perhaps Platner watched these strange things dispersing themselves over the hills, and not till long after they had ceased to issue from the clustering black buildings in the gorge did he resume his downward climb. The darkness about him increased so much that he had a difficulty in stepping true. Overhead the sky was now a bright pale green. He felt neither hunger nor thirst. Later, when he did, he found a chilly stream running down the center of the gorge, and the rare moss upon the boulders when he tried it at last in desperation was good to eat. He groped about among the tombs that ran down the gorge, seeking vaguely for some clue

33:12to these inexplicable things. After a long time he came to the entrance of the big mausoleum-like building from which the heads had issued. In this he found a group of green lights burning upon a kind of basaltic altar, and a bell-rope from a belfry overhead hanging down into the center of the place. Round the wall ran a lettering of fire in a character unknown to him. While he was still wondering at the purport of these things he heard the receding tramp of heavy feet echoing far down the street. He ran out into the darkness again, but he could see nothing. He had a mind to pull the bell-rope, and finally decided to follow the footsteps. But although he ran far, he never overtook them, and his shouting was of no avail. The gorge seemed to extend an interminable distance. It was as dark as earthly starlight throughout its length, while the ghastly green day lay along the upper edge of its precipices. There were none of the heads now, below. They were all it seemed busily occupied along the upper slopes.

34:14Looking up he saw them drifting hither and thither, some hovering stationary, some flying swiftly through the air. It reminded him he said of big snowflakes. Only these were black and pale green. In pursuing the firm, undeviating footsteps that he never overtook, in groping into new regions of this endless devil's dike, in clamoring up and down the pitiless heights, and wandering about the summits and in watching the drifting faces, Platner states that he spent the better part of seven or eight days. He did not keep count, he says. Though once or twice he found eyes watching him, he had word with no living soul. He slept among the rocks on the hillside. In the gorge things earthly were invisible, because from the earthly standpoint it was far underground. From the altitudes, so soon as the earthly day began, the world became visible to him. He found himself sometimes stumbling over the dark green rocks, or arresting himself on a precipitous brink. While all about him, the green branches of the Sussexville lanes were swaying.

35:18Or again, he seemed to be walking through the Sussexville streets or watching unseen the private business of some household. And then it was, he discovered, that to almost every human being in our world there pertained some of these drifting heads, that everyone in the world is watched intermittently by these helpless disembodiments. What are they? These watchers of the living, Platner never learned. But two that presently found and followed him were like his childhood's memory of his father and mother. Now and then other faces turned their eyes upon him. Eyes like those of dead people who had swayed him, or injured him, or helped him in his youth and manhood. Whenever they looked at him, Platner was overcome with a strange sense of responsibility. To his mother he ventured to speak, but she made no answer. She looked sadly, steadfastly and tenderly, a little reproachfully too, it seemed, into his eyes. He simply tells this story. He does not endeavor to explain.

36:18We are left to surmise who these watchers of the living may be, or if they are indeed the dead, why they should so closely and passionately watch a world they have left forever. It may be, indeed to my mind it seems just, that when our life has closed, when evil or good is no longer a choice for us, we may still have to witness the working out of the train of consequences we have laid. If human souls continue after death, then surely human interests continue after death. But that is merely my own guess at the meaning of the things seen. Platner offers no interpretation, for none was given him. It is well the reader should understand this clearly. Day after day, with his head reeling, he wandered about this strange lit world outside the world, weary and towards the end weak and hungry. By day, by our earthly day that is, the ghostly vision of the old familiar scenery of Sussex Phil all about him, irked and worried him. He could not see where to put his feet and ever and again with a chilly touch one of these

37:22watching souls would come against his face, and after dark the multitude of these watchers about him and their intent to stress confused his mind beyond describing. A great longing to return to the earthly life that was so near and yet so remote consumed him. The unearthliness of things about him produced a positively painful mental distress. He was worried beyond describing by his own particular followers. He would shout at them to desist from staring at him, scold at them, hurry away from them. They were always mute and intent. Run as he might over the uneven ground, they followed his destinies. On the ninth day, towards evening, Platner heard the invisible footsteps approaching far away down the gorge. He was then wandering over the broad crest of the same hill upon which he had fallen in his entry into this strange other world of his. He turned to hurry down into the gorge, feeling his way hastily, and was arrested by the sight of the thing that was happening in a room in a backstreet near the school.

38:24Both of the people in the room he knew by sight. The windows were open, the blinds up, and the setting sun shown clearly into it so that it came out quite brightly at first a vivid oblong room lying like a magic lantern picture upon the black landscape and the livid green dawn. In addition to the sunlight, a candle had just been lit in the room. On the bed lay a blank man, his ghastly white face terrible upon the tumbled pillow. His clenched hands were raised above his head, a little table beside the bed carried a few medicine bottles, some toast and water and an empty glass. Every now and then the blank man's lips fell apart to indicate a word he could not articulate. But the woman did not notice that he wanted anything because she was busy turning out papers from an old-fashioned bureau in the opposite corner of the room. At first the picture was very vivid indeed, but as the green dawn behind it grew brighter and brighter so it became fainter and more and more transparent. As the echoing footsteps paced nearer and nearer those footsteps that sound so loud in

39:26that other world and come so silently in this, Platner perceived about him a great multitude of dim faces gathering together out of the darkness and watching the two people in the room. After before had he seen so many of the watchers of the living, a multitude had eyes only for the sufferer in the room, another multitude in infinite anguish watched the woman as she hunted with greedy eyes for something she could not find. They crowded about Platner, they came across his sight and buffeted his face, the noise of their unavailing regrets was all about him. He saw clearly only now and then, at other times the picture quivered dimly through the veil of green reflections upon their movements. In the room it must have been very still and Platner says the candle flames streamed up into a perfectly vertical line of smoke, but in his ears each footfall and its echoes beat like a clap of thunder. And the faces, two more particularly near the woman's, one a woman's also white and

40:28clear featured, a face which might have once been cold and hard but which was now softened by the touch of a wisdom strange to earth. The other might have been the woman's father. Both were evidently absorbed in the contemplation of some act of hateful meanness so it seemed which they could no longer guard against and prevent. Behind were others, teachers it may be who had taught ill, friends whose influence had failed, and over the man too, a multitude but none that seemed to be parents or teachers. Faces that might once have been coarse now purged to strength by sorrow, and in the forefront one face, a girlish one, neither angry nor remorseful but merely patient and weary, and as it seemed to Platner waiting for relief. His powers of description fail him at the memory of this multitude of ghastly countenances. They gathered on the stroke of the bell. He saw them all in the space of a second. It would seem that he was so worked on by his excitement that quite involuntarily his

41:31restless fingers took the bottle of green powder out of his pocket and held it before him, but he does not remember that. Abruptly the footsteps ceased. He waited for the next and there was silence, and then suddenly cutting through the unexpected stillness like a keen, thin blade, king the first stroke of the bell. At that the multitudinous faces swayed to and fro and a louder crying began all about him. The woman did not hear. She was burning something now in the candle flame. At the second stroke everything grew dim and a breath of wind icy cold blew through the host of watchers. They swirled about him like an eddy of dead leaves in the spring, and at the third stroke something was extended through them to the bed. You have heard of a beam of light? This was like a beam of darkness, and looking again at it Platner saw that it was a shadowy arm and hand. The green sun was now topping the black desolations of the horizon and the vision of the room was very faint. Platner could see that the weight of the bed struggled and was convulsed and that the

42:34woman looked around over her shoulder at it startled. The cloud of watchers lifted high like a puff of green dust before the wind and swept silently downward toward the temple in the gorge. Then suddenly Platner understood the meaning of the shadowy black arm that stretched across his shoulder and clutched its prey. He did not dare turn his head to see the shadow behind the arm. With the violent effort and covering his eyes he set himself to run, made perhaps twenty strides then slipped on a boulder and fell. He fell forward on his hands and the bottle smashed and exploded as he touched the ground. In another moment he found himself stunned and bleeding sitting face to face with lidgit in the old walled garden behind the school. There the story of Platner's experience ends. I have resisted I believe successfully the natural disposition of a writer of fiction to dress up incidents of this sort. I have told the thing as far as possible in the order in which Platner told it to me. I have carefully avoided any attempt at style, effect or construction.

43:35It would have been easy for instance to have worked the scene of the deathbed into a kind of plot in which Platner might have been involved, but quite apart from the objectionableness of falsifying a most extraordinary true story, any such trait device would spoil to my mind, the peculiar effect of this dark world with its vivid green illumination and its drifting watchers of the living, which unseen and unapproachable to us is yet lying all about us. It remains to add that a death did actually occur in Vincent Tarris just beyond the school garden, and so far as can be proved at the moment of Platner's return. Deceased was a rate collector and insurance agent, his widow who was much younger than himself married last month a Mr. Wimper, a veterinary surgeon of all pleading. As the portion of this story given here has in various forms circulated orally in Sussex ville she has consented to my use of her name, one condition that I make it distinctly known that she emphatically contradicts every detail of Platner's account of her husband's

44:37last moments. She burnt no will, she says, although Platner never accused her of doing so. Her husband made but one will, and that just after their marriage. Certainly from a man who had never seen it, Platner's account of the furniture of the room was curiously accurate. One other thing, even at the risk of an irksome repetition I must insist upon, lest I seem to favor the credulous superstitious view. Platner's absence from the world for nine days is, I think, proved, but that does not prove his story. It is quite conceivable that even outside space hallucinations may be possible. That at least the reader must bear distinctly in mind. The Platner Story by H.G. Wells