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Margrave, who is still with me, sends all kind messages, and bade me say that he entreats you to come to the house at which he also is a guest!" I started. What had the Scin-Laeca required of me, and obtained to that condition my promise? "If you are asked to the house at which I also am a guest, you will come; you will meet and converse with me as guest speaks to guest in the house of a host!"
I have read in Scandinavian legends of an apparition called the Scin-Laeca, or shining corpse. It is supposed in the northern superstition, sometimes to haunt sepulchres, sometimes to foretell doom.
It is the spectre of a human body seen in a phosphoric light; and so exactly did this phantom correspond to the description of such an apparition in Scandinavian fable that I knew not how to give it a better name than that of Scin-Laeca, the shining corpse. There it was before me, corpse-like, yet not dead; there, as in the haunted study of the wizard Forman! the form and the face of Margrave.
Margrave, who is still with me, sends all kind messages, and bade me say that he entreats you to come to the house at which he also is a guest!" I started. What had the Scin-Laeca required of me, and obtained to that condition my promise?" If you are asked to the house at which I also am a guest, you will come; you will meet and converse with me as guest speaks to guest in the house of a host!"
Prominent amongst them all was that assertion of the madman, which had made me shudder when repeated to me: he had been guided to the murder and to all the subsequent proceedings by the luminous shadow of the beautiful youth, the Scin-Laeca to which I had pledged myself.
All foreshown to me hath ever come to pass, but in a sense other than that in which my soul read the rune and the dream, the leaf and the fount, the star and the Scin-laeca.
In a few moments I felt the floors of the room vibrate; the air was darkened; a vaporous, hazy cloud seemed to rise from the ground without the casement; an awe, infinitely more deep and solemn than that which the Scin-Laeca had caused in its earliest apparition, curdled through my veins, and stilled the very beat of my heart.
"It rises in the midst of the flame, pale as the mist on the mountain, and vast as the giants of old; with the saex, and the spear, and the shield, of the sons of Woden. Thou hast seen the Scin-laeca," continued Hilda, looking full on the face of the Earl. "If thou deceivest me not," began Harold, doubting still. "Deceive thee! not to save the crown of the Saxon dare I mock the might of the dead.
"Take up the light." I took it. The Scin-Laeca glided along the wall towards the threshold, and motioned me to open the door. I did so. The Shadow flitted on through the corridor. I followed, with hushed footsteps, down a small stair into Forman's study. In all my subsequent proceedings, about to be narrated, the Shadow guided me, sometimes by voice, sometimes by sign.
It appears that valiant resistance can inflict this possession upon hypnotists as well as the horrors of a hard and disgusting victory do. Perhaps the Scin-laeca of Bulwer's "Harold," the apparition of Cerdic, haunted the imaginations of generations of magicians. These were possibly Celts; only one witch-rune on a Saxon sword was found; that was in the Isle of Wight.
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