Page:Weird Tales Volume 7 Number 3 (1926-03).djvu/86

372 I turned and looked up slowly, and that which I sensed so distinctly seemed to shift just beyond my normal line of vision, then to follow it as precisely back as I returned to my former position. The impression was as elusively exotic as that in a dream, and the faintest of whispering melody seemed to move with it across the grass. A faint luminosity it appeared, so far as I can tangibly express memory of it, and it was unobtrusively delightful in its spriteliness.

Whenever I directed my thoughts actively toward the apparition, the impression it gave me grew fainter and fainter until it gradually disappeared; but just as surely, when I addressed myself wholly to the task of weeding, it returned, lending a wholesome sense of company such as I had never in my life before experienced. But a few minutes it lasted, then it suddenly flickered from my fancy, leaving a sense of deadness behind that I could scarcely credit as my normal existence.

I went back into the house in deep conjecture. Perhaps I was going mad, I thought, but if this were madness I was prepared to abandon myself to it. Who can prove that madmen—genuine madmen—are not happier in the fancies that are real to them than the happiest of the superficial sane?

That same evening, which was only last evening, though it seems ages ago tonight, there was a recurrence of the phenomenon. I was seated before a grate fire in my study with the lights unlit, and, thus watching the flickering flames, had drifted into what is commonly called a brown study—that dreamy state where the thinking, reasoning brain is lulled to semi-insensibility and the philosophical, intuitive mind becomes acutely active.

At last conscious memory I had been pondering upon the puzzling symptoms of an intricate case I had then in hand, when a silent, filmy presence entered the room. It had not substance, but it had form, and its form was the form of a man.

Into the flickering play of the grate glow it moved with noiseless, timid steps until it was by my left side. I remember no uncanny fear, not even an awakening of uncanny apprehension on my part. This visitor seemed quite familiar to me and his visit as natural as day's light.

Slowly the thing sank into a crouching posture at my side until it was seated exactly as I was beside the fire, with the right elbow upon the knee and the hand to the tip of the chin. Then it seemed to glide ever so slowly closer and closer to me until it touched my left side, and there it seemed to merge ever so gradually with my physical being.

I turned my head slowly toward it, and as I did so, the head of the other turned exactly as mine did. Something momentarily attracted my gaze beyond it to a wall mirror upon which the refracted glow of the fireplace fell. There came a discovery that made me leap to my feet with a startled cry.

I was looking upon the reflection of two startled faces that were exact replicas of my own.

At my shout there was an instant shrinking away of the apparition, and with a draft that for the moment drew out of the flames from the fireplace and left the room in darkness, it vanished.

The telephone in the next room jangled violently, and five minutes later I was being whisked away to the life-or-death case I had previously been studying so deeply. This patient called for all my attention through all of last night and half of today. By noon the sick man had passed his zero hour and was on the certain road to recovery.