Page:Weird Tales volume 42 number 04.djvu/83

 recovering she claimed she knew nothing of the episode, being quite unable to explain her attack of hysteria.

With this episode the story took form and spread through the community. I was called in, though my examination brought nothing positive to light. For the record, the story that the doughnuts in the bowl on the kitchen table flew onto the coat hangers against the kitchen wall is the invention and whole cloth embroidery of some absent party—a village loafer, probably,—for both Mr. Brainerd and Anne Orne deny any such occurrence.

June 6, 1949—In return for a couple of weeks with a limited practice, I had to put in more time at the hospital. Evenings were more apt to be free, and so far I have managed to be on hand most evenings, though nothing has yet happened during my stay. This evening the four of us were seated at the kitchen table reading—or in Eliza's case, writing a letter to a Portsmouth chum.

A mouse had been scampering in the walls, though I had not been particularly conscious of it until I happened to notice Eliza reflecting a moment over her letter. I could almost see her attention caught by the creature's slight scuttlings and squeakings. Perhaps a sudden muffling of the atmosphere was responsible, as if a focus of attention of some sort were being established. Then all at once Eliza's face changed, taking on the wholly tense preoccupied expression of a cat about to spring. A full, taut minute thus, and then she gave a slight forward thrust, just the shadow of a lunge I would call it. From the wall a shrill, agonized mouse-cry piped. The Ornes looked up in surprise at the blank wall, and its hidden, strangely-racked victim. Neither Eliza nor I turned a heeding head; I of course being concerned with her reaction. While she—well, I think I must yield my medical judgment and say she acted as one possessed, as if the "person within her personality" were supplanted, her mind being temporarily tenanted by a diabolical force. No, this poltergeist is no mere prankster's connivance.

A moment following the mouse's last cry, soon reached in rapid diminuendo, Eliza thrust the very tip of her tongue briefly between her teeth, and in doing so seemed to be released to herself and regain her own personality. Seeing the three of us watching her (rather than the blank wall behind which was a still mouse) she shook her head slightly.

"Gosh, I must nave dozed off. I feel awfully tired. I didn't snore, did I?"

I assured her that she hadn't, that we were merely looking up because we thought we had heard a mouse in the wall.

"Yes, I guess I must have heard him scampering around. Funny, you hear a noise like that and hardly realize it."

Shortly after that she retired for the night

UNE 7, 1949—I've been thinking a good deal today about the human brain as an organ. Now the heart is fairly plainly a pump—one can comprehend its function upon inspecting it, as in dissection. And so on with all the other organs, their functions can be readily comprehended upon examination. But the mass of gray matter which comprises the brain cannot be thus comprehended as the source of thought process. One cannot see where or how this viscera-like mass permits one to pilot an airplane and carry on a conversation at the same time, or to cope with a novel problem such as the present one of conjecture concerning poltergeists. Since we cannot yet look into the brain and get very far by induction, all we know about it is what we feel and experience ourselves, or what we observe in others. Therefore, I conclude, if phenomenal accomplishments are directed by the brain, of which the brain's possessor is wholly unaware, the fact that these functions were directed by the brain would defy detection.

Thus, for example, the recent experiments at Duke University with cards, regarding "mental telegraphy," or the age-old business of making a divining rod indicate the subterrene presence of water—these in the human brain—or the homing instinct in the pigeon's brain, suggest that certain functions of the brain may exceed anything we have yet ascertained.