Page:Weird Tales volume 42 number 04.djvu/87

, unabated, reached its completion.

Mr. and Mrs. Orne sat still, as I lifted the lid of the hot kettle. I had to trust them to heed my injunction not to stir.

Then the lights went out. The electricity in this part of the country sometimes does cut out when there are thunderstorms. But this was too opportune to be chance.

From Eliza's figure sprouted mushroom blobs of static light like St. Elmo's Fires, shining yet not igniting, forming at the hem of her skirt, her waist, the nape of her neck, swamp fire of the fiend's finding. With the room thus weirdly illumined, the poltergeist held both hands aloft with palms taut and fingers radiating, outstretched to the area above my head. Shrilly Eliza's strained vocal cords emitted the fiend's curses and evocations.

All around me stones fell, yet I was unhurt. I drew from the kettle the acrylic plastic figure. The action of the boiling water had fulfilled our anticipations by invoking the peculiar properties of the candlestick's substances, reshaping it into the form of a crucifix.

As I walked forward with the talisman upraised, the demoniac creature emitted a hell-rending cry as if a bottomless pit gaped beneath him. His hands lowered spasmodically to clutch idiotically about his face. His features withered and writhed, revealed as the electricity came on again when, presumably, the fiend's will power dissolved its damning block. In a moment the struggle was over. Eliza, released, collapsed into her chair, and but for my free hand would have fallen to the floor.

June 15, 1949—Chadwick explains the matter by calling the poltergeist a virulent mass and the crucifix an all-healing antibiotic which is an interesting way of putting it. Since the crucifix was dormant in the plastic (the acrylic being peculiar in that once fixed—in the form of a crucifix—it could be provisionally altered to the rough shape of a candlestick, until its "memory" was stirred by the boiling water, when it reverted to its fixed shape it could form a perfect opposite to the poltergeist.

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