  When that uncanny film was projected before him Grover seemed unwilling to believe the testimony of his eyes. “It simply could not be,” he declared. “That film was taken from a brand new shipment, wasn’t it?” “Yes,” Roger asserted. “And there were no animals in the laboratory.” “Not animals we could see,” said Doctor Ryder meaningly. Grover, rather sharply, demanded his exact reason for saying that. “I have heard the voices that seem to come out of nowhere,” the experimenter explained. “I have traveled in the Oriental countries. I have heard strange things; and I have seen things even more odd. In India, in China, and all the more in Tibet, there is what they call the sect of the Bon—Black Magicians.” “Nonsense!” exclaimed Grover. “To a scientific mind—yes. To an ignorant native of a country without educational facilities or communication such as our radio, telephone and so on—not so nonsensical. Besides, I have heard and I have seen curious things.” “Like what?” Tip demanded. “In India, a seed planted and an orange bush growing before my eyes. Or a rope flung into the air, staying aloft as if hooked to some invisible support, while a boy clambers up and seems to vanish. “In Tibet, as well as in India, men who can apparently walk on water. Of course, our science explains it as hypnotism—the man who performs the feats is able to secure control over some part of the onlooker’s mind, impress his thoughts on the other mind, and make one believe the trick is a real occurrence.” “I have read about men who can walk on pits of live coals,” Roger added. “Those tricks or those marvels do not explain this film,” Grover was not satisfied, Roger knew by his tone. “How about telepathy? Thought transference?” “I believe,” Grover answered, “there is some ground for accepting that as possible. It might be reasonable to admit that if a man, by years of practice, can train himself and also treat his feet so that he can walk on fiery coals, a man might become able to impress a powerful idea on another without words. But—on a film!” “In the sect of the Bon, or manipulators of the darker forces of Nature and of man’s superstition which is half of black magic,” the experimenter declared, “strange powers exist. I have read of a French scientist who has succeeded in developing a film so sensitive that a powerful thought, held by his trained mind, seemed to cause some changes in the film. This is a similar situation produced by some Oriental master mind, probably.” “Or it could be that things like ghosts are true,” Potts volunteered. “What do we know about the unseen things? Even science is finding things like bacterions——” “Bacteria,” Grover corrected, smiling. “—In the air and water and blood. Well—I went to a spirit-meeting once. The woman threw a fit and talked awful funny about my ‘deceased aunt on the other side’ and told me things—now, if we brought in one of them there test mediators——” “Test mediums,” Roger knew the right word. “They pretend to be able to communicate with spirits of people, but has it been verified?” Potts was too eager to argue that. He stuck to his suggestion: “All right. If we call in a trance medium, she’d tell us them spooks is around us, right now.” “Just because the appearance seems to be that,” Grover stated, “is no basis for accepting the explanation of telepathy. In that case, Doctor, we would have seen the objects, the animals. We did not. You and Roger are sure you saw nothing. There are only two possible ways the phenomenon could happen.” “How?” Potts was anxious, eager. “First: the film had been exposed, previously. Second: some one hiding in the dark-room, while Potiphar was not closely observing the developing tank, changed for the original film in its rubber wrapping, this one.” “I used a deep tray, full of pyro,” Potts stated, “wound the negative around in the rubber, but didn’t use a tank, on account of them bein’ stained, and you was so positive about fresh stuff, I got a deep tray, never used before, and watched every step of developin’. The second way of it happening is ‘out.’” “Then we will test the possibility of the first,” Grover beckoned to Roger. “Telephone downstairs for a taxi, and meanwhile, plug in the telephone in the screening room for me.” When Roger had summoned a night-hawk car, his cousin reported his own activity. “I got the night-watchman at the Bizarre Theatre, where the animal act finishes its engagement tonight,” he said. “The white rats and dogs, and several monkeys are quartered at a pet shop near the theatre. There is a kangaroo, and it stays in a stable. Here is the address, Roger. I want you to talk to the keeper, or some stable attendant who can say when the animal was taken out and when returned.” Roger, when the taxi arrived, sped to his task. He found a sleepy attendant, surprised at the time, so near dawn, for a visit from a young fellow who wanted details about the kangaroo. “She ain’t been out this night,” the youth assured Roger. “How about last night? Or the night before?” “Neither time.” “Oh, but she must have been.” “Well, she wasn’t.” “Well, then, was the ape?” “What ape?” “Doesn’t the man who has the trained animals use an ape?” “Never saw nor heard of no ape.” Roger was puzzled. “Well—” He recalled a flash of inspiration that had been all his own. He pulled from his pocket the tiny, compact camera, small magnesium-flash gun, and tripod folding like a pocket ruler, very slender, but sturdy when unfurled. “Can I snap her picture? Our laboratory wants it to study.” “Cost you—how much you want to pay?” “A quarter.” “Go to it, buddy.” Roger, with the hand of the youth clutching the coin, got a good snap just as the flash startled and almost stampeded the kangaroo and several horses and a few mules quartered there. He returned by taxi as the East streaked rosily to the rising of the sun. “There was the kangaroo, but she had not been out—at least, the attendant vowed she hadn’t,” he said. “But I’ve got her picture to compare with the ghost-one.” “Clever head,” commended his older cousin. He went away, pleased, to develop, print and fix his prize. While negative and contact print were being fixed and washed, he sat at the table in the adjoining room where the mysterious voice and roaring cry had been located, thinking hard. “I wonder,” he mused, “if it could be that the film I used had some sort of emulsion that would be sensitive to rays we don’t see. You can take a picture through a quartz lens in a room that seems to be pitchy black. I’ve done it, with our special equipment. Maybe a film coating that has some light-sensitive ingredient sensitive to high-frequency vibrations of light, could catch what we don’t see, and—who can dispute this?—there may be in the air, all around us, forms of things that we can’t see.” Science, he reflected, had managed to develop instruments so delicately adjusted that they caught earth tremors and recorded them, when the disturbance might be hundreds, thousands of miles away from the seismograph. Their own Mr. Ellison, the cleverest and best informed man in the city, on electrical matters, was preparing a camera that ran its film at high speed past an aperture: a light more actinic than sunshine alternately lit and was out, but so rapidly that its flashes impressed pictures lit by it on the film, as many as a half million or more a minute, he believed. The papers had written it up as that many. And scientific instruments pictured, in graphs, of course, such invisible things as electrical waves; yes, and radio made audible the inaudible electrical frequencies sent by an aerial, caught by another, transformed into sounds by other invisible agencies. Grover, when appealed to, nodded. “Anyone who has operated a modern laboratory knows better than to make fun of any theory,” he admitted. “What our Pilgrim ancestors would have called a witch talking to Satan, we see as an old crone listening to her radio.” “They had their witches-on-broomsticks,” Roger chuckled. “We see airplanes. That’s so.” “It doesn’t pay to scoff at your theory. It may be a scientific possibility to prove it correct, some day. But, just yet, let’s not take it as the only explanation of our ghosts. I realize that the film can was one of our last shipment, that you had to break the label, proving it had not been tampered with, apparently. Still, some test made at the film plant could have been inadvertently packed. We got it.” “My snap of the kangaroo will prove or disprove that.” Roger went to get the force-dried bromide enlargement and the camera film taken in the haunted room. Comparison showed, apparently, the same animal, in one case sharply defined, a solid object; and in the other, just a shadowy specter. They looked to have the same proportions, though. “My theory is that someone hired the animal trainer to send his rats here, so they could be removed. He could have read notes of the Doctor’s planned experiment in a science column of the papers.” “Then where did the ape come from? The attendant was sure the act did not have any ape in it.” Roger was still unconvinced. “That may have been the trainer, an agile man, in a masquerade costume of Tarzan-type.” “It might.” “I will admit that Doctor Ryder tells a story that makes wilder theories possible,” Grover added. “The policemen are gone, now. He gave me an outline that made me discard the theory about danger to our camphor substitute. Suppose you listen with me to the full recital.” The narrative the man spun was amazing. “Shortly after I left college,” Doctor Ryder began, “I became interested in study of medicinal herbs, because an old Indian in up-state New York, who had earned a reputation as an occult doctor, had made some astonishing cures of seemingly incurable cases. A friend and I got into an argument. I supported the Indian’s claims; and my chum argued it was impossible, that it was pure medication and not at all due to magical powers as the people claimed. “I went to the Indian to study,” he went on. “He took a liking to me, and after a long time, teaching me secrets of wayside weeds and the properties of common plants in medication, he confided that in the Far East there were schools in which full knowledge of herbal medication could be learned by those qualified to share the secret—a dangerous one, because knowledge of it might enable some evil-doer to procure enough deadly poison among common wayside flowers and herbs to destroy a city’s populace.” Skipping his explanations of how he finally secured the Indian’s help in reaching some one who knew more, and of how he finally found himself an accepted student journeying toward a Lamasery in far-away Tibet, Roger’s next intense interest came with the declaration: “I learned something about what Ponce de Leon spent his time seeking, the secret of eternal youth. I learned much about marvelous properties of common plants—and then, through a desire to view with my own eyes the greatly revered Eye of Om—a precious jewel set in the forehead of a sacred statue of Buddha—I became a hunted man, suspected of a theft I never dreamed of committing, then. The Eye disappeared. I was suspected. My perils were many. I finally escaped from the land. But twice, since I began my private researches, I have been reached by that strange warning, the Voice of Doom—just as you, who have been my friends, heard it tonight.” He bent forward in his chair, earnest, eager. “I know who took the Eye of Om. If only you would help me to restore it—if only you could.” |
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