Page:Weird Tales Volume 3 Number 2 (1923-02).djvu/72

 Do the Dead Return? Can We Communicate With Ghosts?

Read Doctor DeBruce By EARL LEASTON BELL

THE old Tentmaker declared that the rose, once blown, forever die Then came the Bard of Avon, who scribed the Afterland as an wunknown country from which no traveler ever returns. I used to laugh with Omar and philosophize with. Shakespeare, believing both were right.

I laughed with the Persian scoffer— now they laugh AT me when I tell them why I believe both Omar and the author of Hamlet were wrong. I am convinced the rose lives on, even as Elsie, my rose, still exists. The Afterland may forever remain an unknown strand, but Iam certain the path to it is not always a onewoy road.

Yes, I am convinced, bu I do not care to investigate. To probe too deep into such things often means a long journey from which the traveler returns sans sanity. Therefore, I, Arthur Wrens, humble barrister of Boston, will have none of it; haven't I said they already laugh at met

I LOOKED st my watch. Five minutes till closing time, As I turned the key in my office door I was interupted by a messenger. The telegram read: "Clofton, Go. "Arthur Wrens, "Boston, Mast. "Come at once.' Heaven and helt depends, "ARMON DeBRUCE."

Armon DeBruce! A man who, at the age of 27, had disappeared while resident physician of one of the largest hospitals in Boston, and whose whereabouts he had never revealed, even to his own family.

"Heaven and hell depends?" 1 perused the telegram several times, wondering the while why DeBruce at last had chosen to reveal his hiding place, and the reason for his urgency of appeal. He it was who had attended Elsie Shakleford, my betrothed, in her fatal illness, and we had become the closest of friends. I recalled the little town from which the telegram was sent—a rustic hamlet nestling in the majestic hills of North Georgia. DeBruce and I had at one time spent several days there, camping out on a hunt for small game and quail, with which the woods abounded at the time,

En route to my bachelor quarters, I fell to ruminating on DeBruce's past. He had been most successful in his chosen profession, and could not have asked for a more promising future at the time he so abruptly abandoned his career and disappeared. Though a fellow of marked eccentricities, he had a pronounced penchant for making friends,

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