The Intoxicated Ghost, and other storiesBates, Arlo
Science
The Intoxicated Ghost, and other stories
Bates, Arlo
Short stories, American; United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
"You mean," interrupted Carroll, "that the normal person is the first
and the hypnotized is the second?"
"Yes. The personality that comes to the surface in hypnotism, the
subliminal self, knows all about the normal person, but the normal
person has no idea of the existence of the secondary, the subliminal
personality."
"It's so cheerful to think of yourself as a sort of nest of boxes,"
Carroll commented grimly, "one personality inside of the other, and you
only knowing about the outside box."
"Or you _being_ only the outside box, perhaps," the specialist
responded, with a smile. "Well, what we don't know would fill rather a
good-sized book."
The suggestion of hypnotism remained in Carroll's mind, and it was not
many days before he had a sufficiently plain but altogether disagreeable
confirmation of the specialist's theory. He was with Alice in the old
drawing-room, a place of quaint primness, with fine, staid Copley
portraits, and an air of self-respecting propriety utterly at variance
with psychical mysteries. He stood gazing out of the window, while Alice
moved about the room looking for a book of which they had been speaking,
and his eye was caught by a sparkling point of light on the sunlit wall
of the house opposite. He made some casual remark in regard to it, and
Alice came to look over his shoulder.
"What is it?" she asked.
"It must be a grain of sand in the mortar, I suppose," he answered. "It
is making a tremendous effect for such a little thing."
She did not answer for an instant. Then she burst into a laugh which to
him sounded strange and unpleasant, and clapped her hands.
"Well, I've come," she said joyously.
He wheeled quickly toward her. Her face seemed to have undergone a
change, slight yet extraordinary. She was laughing with a glee that was
not without a suspicion of malice, and she met his look with a boldness
so different from the usual regard of Alice as to seem almost brazen.
He could see that his evident bewilderment amused her greatly. A
mischievous twinkle lighted her glance.
"Oh, of course you think I'm she; but I'm not. I'm a good deal nicer.
She's a tiresome old thing, anyway. You'd like me a great deal better."
Carroll was entirely too confused to speak, but he was a physician, and
could not help reflecting instantly upon the cause of this strange
metamorphosis. He naturally thought of hypnotism, and he came in a
second thought to realize that Alice had with amazing rapidity been
sent into a hypnotic condition by looking for an instant at the
glittering point on the wall of the house across the street. What the
result might be, or what the words she spoke meant, he could not even
conjecture.
"Don't stare at me so," the girl went on. "I'm Jenny."
"Oh," he repeated confusedly, "you're Jenny?"
"Yes; I'm Jenny, and I'm worth six of that silly Alice you're engaged
to."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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