Part 3

“During the sitting keep an open mind and a closed mouth,” she replied, cheerfully.

As I said at the beginning, this is not a ghost story. Parts of it we now understand, other parts we do not. For the physical phenomena we have no adequate explanation. They occurred. We saw and heard them. For the other part of the seance we have come to a conclusion satisfactory to ourselves, a conclusion not reached, however, until some of us had gone through some dangerous experiences, and had been brought into contact with things hitherto outside the orderly progression of our lives.

But at no time, although incredible things happened, did any one of us glimpse that strange world of the spirit that seemed so often almost within our range of vision.

Miss Jeremy, the medium, was due at 8:30 and at 8:20 my wife assisted Mrs. Dane into one of the straight chairs at the table, and Sperry, sent out by her, returned with a darkish bundle in his arms, and carrying a light bamboo rod.

“Don’t ask me what they are for,” he said to Herbert’s grin of amusement. “Every workman has his tools.”

Herbert examined the rod, but it was what it appeared to be, and nothing else.

Some one had started the phonograph in the library, and it was playing gloomily, “Shall we meet beyond the river?” At Sperry’s request we stopped talking and composed ourselves, and Herbert, I remember, took a tablet of some sort, to our intense annoyance, and crunched it in his teeth. Then Miss Jeremy came in.

She was not at all what we had expected. Twenty-six, I should say, and in a black dinner dress. She seemed like a perfectly normal young woman, even attractive in a fragile, delicate way. Not much personality, perhaps; the very word “medium” precludes that. A “sensitive,” I think she called herself. We were presented to her, and but for the stripped and bare room, it might have been any evening after any dinner, with bridge waiting.

When she shook hands with me she looked at me keenly. “What a strange day it has been!” she said. “I have been very nervous. I only hope I can do what you want this evening.”

“I am not at all sure what we do want, Miss Jeremy,” I replied.

She smiled a quick smile that was not without humor. Somehow I had never thought of a medium with a sense of humor. I liked her at once. We all liked her, and Sperry, Sperry the bachelor, the iconoclast, the antifeminist, was staring at her with curiously intent eyes.

Following her entrance Herbert had closed and bolted the drawing-room doors, and as an added precaution he now drew Mrs. Dane’s empty wheeled chair across them.

“Anything that comes in,” he boasted, “will come through the keyhole or down the chimney.”

And then, eying the fireplace, he deliberately took a picture from the wall and set it on the fender.

Miss Jeremy gave the room only the most casual of glances.

“Where shall I sit?” she asked.

Mrs. Dane indicated her place, and she asked for a small stand to be brought in and placed about two feet behind her chair, and two chairs to flank it, and then to take the black cloth from the table and hang it over the bamboo rod, which was laid across the backs of the chairs. Thus arranged, the curtain formed a low screen behind her, with the stand beyond it. On this stand we placed, at her order, various articles from our pockets--I a fountain pen, Sperry a knife; and my wife contributed a gold bracelet.

We all felt, I fancy, rather absurd. Herbert’s smile in the dim light became a grin. “The same old thing!” he whispered to me. “Watch her closely. They do it with a folding rod.”

We arranged between us that we were to sit one on each side of her, and Sperry warned me not to let go of her hand for a moment. “They have a way of switching hands,” he explained in a whisper. “If she wants to scratch her nose I’ll scratch it.”

We were, we discovered, not to touch the table, but to sit around it at a distance of a few inches, holding hands and thus forming the circle. And for twenty minutes we sat thus, and nothing happened. She was fully conscious and even spoke once or twice, and at last she moved impatiently and told us to put our hands on the table.

I had put my opened watch on the table before me, a night watch with a luminous dial. At five minutes after nine I felt the top of the table waver under my fingers, a curious, fluid-like motion.

“The table is going to move,” I said.

Herbert laughed, a dry little chuckle. “Sure it is,” he said. “When we all get to acting together, it will probably do considerable moving. I feel what you feel. It’s flowing under my fingers.”

“Blood,” said Sperry. “You fellows feel the blood moving through the ends of your fingers. That’s all. Don’t be impatient.”

However, curiously enough, the table did not move. Instead, my watch, before my eyes, slid to the edge of the table and dropped to the floor, and almost instantly an object, which we recognized later as Sperry’s knife, was flung over the curtain and struck the wall behind Mrs. Dane violently.

One of the women screamed, ending in a hysterical giggle. Then we heard rhythmic beating on the top of the stand behind the medium. Startling as it was at the beginning, increasing as it did from a slow beat to an incredibly rapid drumming, when the initial shock was over Herbert commenced to gibe.

“Your fountain pen, Horace,” he said to me. “Making out a statement for services rendered, by its eagerness.”

The answer to that was the pen itself, aimed at him with apparent accuracy, and followed by an outcry from him.