The Strange Experiences of Tina Malone/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI.
THE GIRL AT THE GATE WHO TALKED WITH HER EYES.
But when Monday came the "voices" were so bad again that I made up my mind to go to see Sybil to see if she could tell me what they were and how to deal with them.
I begged Kitty to go over to her with a note to ask if I could see her about some literary question.
Back came the answer to go to afternoon tea with her.
On the way over I seemed somehow to hear her voice among the many.
It said:
"I can't tell you much, I can only blink my eyes. If I blink my eyes three times it means 'yes'—if I blink once it means 'no,' but that is all I can do."
It seemed rather little but I felt like a drowning man catching at straws—I supposed it was some of the silly occult school's secret ways.
So I went over.
I had to go through the little social formality of afternoon tea with her family. I noticed that the maid looked at me with rather an amused smile in her eyes as she brought it in.
Although outwardly I was calm enough, trying to keep up the farce of social platitudes, inwardly I felt I must find some clue to these terrible, worrying, taunting voices or I should go mad.
So I watched for the blink of the eyes.
Sybil was always full of silly little artifices and liked to play the actress.
I asked a few questions in inuendo and blinked my own eyes as hard as I could.
She ducked her head under the table. I knew perfectly well she was smiling—I forgave it in her, but I did not forgive it in the maid's eyes and neither did "Patrick" for a voice said suddenly to me:
"Come away, she is not your friend."
But when I was at the gate I told her of the voices.
"You're psychic, that's what it is," she said. "I always told you you were, you know," and she leant forward to look hard into my eyes in the half-mocking way she always had—"You've become clairaudient."
"What's clairaudient?" I asked.
"You hear things that are going on round you that other people cannot hear. You're highly developed, that's what it is."
But still my mind was full of fears and I could not tell her all I was going through.
It was a comfort to me after the ignorance of my sisters though. At least she believed in such things and took me seriously.
"Yes, but what about the exercises?" I asked.
"What exercises?" she said.
I had had it so often told me by these voices that I must not tell anyone of what I was going through that I tried to draw back again.
"Oh, nothing," I said. "Well, you've comforted me anyhow, for you do believe I hear them."
"Of course I do," she said. "You've become clairaudient—You're psychic."
With the trouble still with me I went back with the comforting knowledge that I was "clairaudient"—What it meant exactly I did not know, but there it was—I was "clairaudient."
But once more in my rooms life became unendurable. The same old trouble lying awake with the incessant dinning of voices in my ears—something that forced me to talk in return, and the quick painful beating of my heart.
There was a little steady knock, knock under my pillow which I used to dread, which came and went, but generally stayed all night.
I had been frightened into thinking I was in the "Secret Service" and that far away across the sea somewhere everyone knew all about me and was taking notes.
I sometimes would feel a swaying and rocking movement and once heard a voice which said it was on a coastal boat trading between Australia and Japan. When the terrible feeling came on me that always ragged my nerves, I used to cry and implore these unseen visitors to have pity on me. They gave me such pain that I used to moan. And then I heard the voice of a friend indignantly telling them to desist.
When Tuesday came all thought of everything like appointments had gone out of my mind—I felt I must get away. I determined to go to Kitty's and put a few things together in a bag. I felt dazed and lethargic.
Why this Being who was still telepathing to me, should ever have seemed to me to be Tony I don't know, but I still thought it was and that he, who had been thought mad and put in a straight-jacket was being brought home by Mr. Hughes.
But Mr. Hughes, so Tony telepathed, would still not trust me and would neither telegraph to me nor come to see me to see if I were real.
So, impatient at last, I resolved to go to Kitty's and all the way there I telepathed to Mr. Hughes to take Tony to Sybil's home, for I knew Sybil was his friend and that her people would protect him if I could not.