here, instead of a reply we got the words, “library paste.”
Quite without warning the medium groaned, and Sperry believed the trance was over.
“She’s coming out,” he said. “A glass of wine, somebody.” But she did not come out. Instead, she twisted in the chair.
“He’s so heavy to lift,” she muttered. Then: “Get the lather off his face. The lather. The lather.”
She subsided into the chair and began to breathe with difficulty. “I want to go out. I want air. If I could only go to sleep and forget it. The drawing-room furniture is scattered over the house.”
This last sentence she repeated over and over. It got on our nerves, ragged already.
“Can you tell us about the house?”
There was a distinct pause. Then: “Certainly. A brick house. The servants’ entrance is locked, but the key is on a nail, among the vines. All the furniture is scattered through the house.”
“She must mean the furniture of this room,” Mrs. Dane whispered.
The remainder of the sitting was chaotic. The secretary’s notes consist of unrelated words and often childish verses. On going over the notes the next day, when the stenographic record had been copied on a typewriter, Sperry and I found that one word recurred frequently. The word was “curtain.” Of the extraordinary event that followed the breaking up of the seance, I have the keenest recollection. Miss Jeremy came out of her trance weak and looking extremely ill, and Sperry’s motor took her home. She knew nothing of what had happened, and hoped we had been satisfied. By agreement, we did not tell her what had transpired, and she was not curious.
Herbert saw her to the car, and came back, looking grave. We were standing together in the center of the dismantled room, with the lights going full now.
“Well,” he said, “it is one of two things. Either we’ve been gloriously faked, or we’ve been let in on a very tidy little crime.”
It was Mrs. Dane’s custom to serve a Southern eggnog as a sort of
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