14. The Motives Of Psychic Attack. II-c

I felt like the small boy who, fishing for minnows, has hooked a pike. I had to decide whether I would try and get my articles back from the Occult Review, or whether I would let them run their natural course and take the con sequences. I had had a very strong impulse to write those articles, and now I began to see why I had had it. I shall have something to say in another chapter concerning the Watchers, that curious section of the Occult Hierarchy which is concerned with the welfare of nations. A certain section of their work is apparently concerned with the policing of the Astral Plane. Very little is actually known about them. One comes across their work sporadically and pieces the bits together. I have crossed their trail on several occasions, as I will tell later. Whenever black magic is afoot, they set to work to put a spoke in its wheels. Be that as it may, I came to the conclusion that, in view of what had now transpired, the impulse I had had to take in hand this piece of work might have emanated from the Watchers. At any rate, the work obviously needed doing. Someone had to tackle these plague spots if they were to be cleared up, so I determined to stick to my guns and see the matter through, and so left the articles in question to run their course. Very soon some curious things began to happen. We became most desperately afflicted with black cats. They were not hallucinatory cats, for our neighbours shared in the affliction, and we exchanged commiserations with the care taker next door who was engaged in pushing bunches of black cats off doorstep and window-sill with a broom, and declared he had never in his life seen so many, or such dreadful specimens. The whole house was filled with the horrible stench of the brutes. Two members of our community at that time went out to business every day, and at their offices, in different parts of London, they found the same penetrating reek of the tom-cat. At first we attributed this persecution to natural causes, and concluded that we were near neighbours to some fascinating feline female, but incidents succeeded each other which made us feel that things were not quite in the ordinary course of nature. We were getting near to the Vernal Equinox, which is always a difficult time for occultists; there was a sense of strain and tension in the atmosphere, and we were all feeling decidedly uncomfortable. Coming upstairs after breakfast one morning, I suddenly saw, coming down the stairs towards me, a gigantic tabby cat, twice the size of a tiger. It appeared absolutely solid and tangible. I stared at it petrified for a second, and then it vanished. I instantly realised that it was a simulacrum, or thought- form that was being projected by someone with occult powers. Not that the realisation was any too comforting, but it was better than an actual tiger. Feeling decidedly uncomfortable, I asked one of my household to join me, and as we sat in my room meditating we heard the cry of a cat from without. It was answered by another, and another, We looked out of the window, and the street as far as we could see was dotted with black cats and they were wailing and howling in broad daylight as they do on the roofs at night. I rose up, gathered together my paraphernalia, and did an exorcism then and there. At the end we looked out of the window again. There was not a cat in sight, and we never saw them again. The visitation was at an end. Only our normal population of local mousers remained to us. The Vernal Equinox was now upon us. I must explain that this is the most important season of the year for occultists.