“Library paste!” he said. “It rolls into a soft, malleable ball. It could quite easily be used to fill a small hole in plaster. The paper would paste down over it, too.”
“I’m not thinking at all. The thing she described may have taken place in Timbuctoo. May have happened ten years ago. May be the plot of some book she has read.”
“On the other hand,” I replied, “it is just possible that it was here, in this neighborhood, while we were sitting in that room.”
At midnight, shortly after we reached home, Sperry called me on the phone. “Be careful, Horace,” he said. “Don’t let Mrs. Horace think anything has happened. I want to see you at once. Suppose you say I have a patient in a bad way, and a will to be drawn.”
I listened to sounds from upstairs. I heard my wife go into her room and close the door.
“Just this. Arthur Wells killed himself tonight, shot himself in the head. I want you to go there with me.”
“Yes. I say, Horace, did you happen to notice the time the seance began tonight?”
“It was five minutes after nine when my watch fell.”
“Then it would have been about half past when the trance began?”
There was a silence at Sperry’s end of the wire. Then:
“He was shot about 9:30,” he said, and rang off.
I am not ashamed to confess that my hands shook as I hung up the receiver. A brick house, she had said; the Wells house was brick. And so were all the other houses on the street. Vines in the back? Well, even my own house had vines. It was absurd; it was pure coincidence; it was--well, I felt it was queer.
Nevertheless, as I stood there, I wondered for the first time in a highly material existence, whether there might not be, after all, a spirit-world surrounding us, cognizant of all that we did, touching but intangible, sentient but tuned above our common senses?
I stood by the prosaic telephone instrument and looked into the darkened recesses of the passage. It seemed to my disordered nerves that back of the coats and wraps that hung on the rack, beyond the heavy curtains, in every corner, there lurked vague and shadowy forms, invisible when I stared, but advancing a trifle from their obscurity when, by turning my head and looking ahead, they impinged on the extreme right or left of my field of vision.
