Page:Weird Tales Volume 9 Number 5 (1927-05).djvu/40

 time and money were lavished like water on that veiled woman for whose smile he forsook her he had sworn to love and cherish!"

"Then there really was a liaison between him and Madame Naîra?" I asked.

"Yes—yes, and no," he replied ambiguously. "For the touch of her lower lip he would have walked barefoot over miles of broken glass, yet he knew not what he did while doing it. His state was something akin to that of one under hypnosis—conscious of his acts and deeds while doing them, entirely unaware of them afterward. A sort of externally induced amnesia, it was.

"These things puzzled me much, but still I was unwilling to concede the woman possessed more than ordinary powers. 'We shall see this Veiled Prophetess,' I tell me. 'Friend Trowbridge and I shall interview her under assumed names, and prove to ourselves that she is but a charlatan.'

"Eh bien, we did see much. We did see the loss of our hats and overcoats!"

"But if Madame Naîra knew at once who you were and that you were fighting her, how was it she could not avoid the trap—and, by the way, what was that trap?" I demanded.

"I can not say," he responded. "Perhaps there are limitations on her powers of divination. It may well be that she could read my thoughts even to my name, when we were face to face, yet could not project herself through space to observe what I planned while away from her. Were not those other witches of olden times unable to say when the officers of the law were descending on them, and so were taken to perish at the stake?

"As for the trap we set, my friend, it was simple. That was not the Veiled Prophetess herself you did behold in Madame Penneman's room, but her simulacrum—her projection. It is possible for those people, by taking thought, to project their likenesses at great distances, but always they must be where there is sympathetic atmosphere. This the witch woman already had, because she had bound Benjamin Penneman in her spell. At will she could assume the likeness of herself in his room, or anywhere he happened to be, while her living body lay, as though locked in sleep, miles away. That explains how it is she vanished so mysteriously after warning Madame Penneman on her previous visits.

"But, grâce à Dieu, for all ill there is a remedy, if we can but find it. I bethought me. 'Is it not likely,' I ask me, 'that the things which charm away those other evil people, the werewolves and the vampires, will also prevent the free movement of the projection of a witch?'

Morbleu, but it is most probable,' I reply to me, and so I set about my work.

"First I did give to Madame Penneman a harmless drug—a hypnotic—to mix with the food and drink of her husband. That will induce a seemingly natural sleep, and hold him fast away from the wicked Madame Naîra. Very good. The first night the plan did work well, the second and third, also.

"Heretofore this woman have come in her spiritual likeness to charm her lover back when he have returned to his wife. I make sure she will do so again, and I have prepared a barrier which I think she can not pass. It is made of the wicks of blessed candles and on it are strung many leaves and twigs of holly—holly, the Christmas bloom, the touch of which is intolerable to evil spirits and over which they can not pass.

"When the projection of Madame Naîra comes to Penneman's house tonight, Madame Penneman does surround it suddenly with the ring of