5 Detective Novels Magazine Cover — page 116: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

116 Waldo, I saw, was sitting on the edge of his chair, all excited attention. He rma Scollini as a mouse might watch a cat. The magician cleared his throat. “We'll try to duplicate the procedure and precautions which I’ve been told you used at those seances. Two of you— let’s say Waldo and Pollock—may search me and examine my clothing, while the rest of you search the room. You brought rope to tie me with, Wegs?” Zenas Wegs nodded. “The same rope we used on Crowley.” We all went into the empty room and subdivided among us the work of ex- amining and sealing the room. Mean- UR Waldo and Pollock frisked Scol- ini. At Scollini’s instructions, we put the phonograph in a corner of the room and near it the other objects that had been on the table. I saw now that they were a speaking trumpet and tambourine. Then the table went into the center of the room and the seven chairs in a circle about it. Wegs and Pollock then tied Scollini in the arm chair, using thin clothesline and tying his wrists tightly to the arms of the chair and his ankles to the legs. “All but one of you sit down now,” Scollini directed. “You, Pollock, start the phonograph, then turn off the light. Be sure you can find your way to the empty chair before you push the switch.” The phonograph started grinding out eed ey Light, and the light switch clicked. TER darkness. The phonograph played about a minute, then stopped abruptly as though someone had lifted off the needle. The sudden silence was almost startling. Utter silence and utter blackness. as seemed to have no existence in that void. One’s imagination began to play tricks. One’s eyes tried to make shapes out of darker splotches of darkness. And this, I thought, is an avowedly fake seance. What must be the psychological effect of the real thing upon those who believe in it? The phonograph started again, taking up at just the point where it had broken FIVE DETECTIVE NOVELS MAGAZINE off before. I heard someone whisper, yee table!” and I reached forward for it. It wasn’t where it should have been. I raised my hands, and the backs of them touched the bottom of it. It had evident- ly been made to levitate and seemed to be rocking. The tambourine in the corner rattled, and the table fell, thudding against the carpet. The phonograph reached the end of Lead Kindly Light and stopped. Some- where in the room a bell tinkled softly. Again, utter silence and blackness for a while. Then a voice. Not Scollini’s voice. Oh, it must have been his, of course, but it didn’t sound like it at all. It was a rough, coarse voice, with a plaintive whine in it. “Why’d he do it to me, I ask you,” it said. “Killed me, just like that. To kill a guy for nothin’.” | “Who are you?” asked Waldo’s voice. “You wouldn’t know my name, mister. He didn’t kill me because of who I was. He just killed me. That’s what gets me.” The whine was stronger now. “If I’d done anything, it’d been different. Even if I’d had any dough to get bumped off for, then there’d be some reason, see?” I was looking toward Scollini—I guess we all were—or toward the place where Scollini ought to be if he were still in the chair. : There was something white in the darkness. A white, misty substance. Something that shimmered as though it were faintly luminous. It looked vaguely like a human face—not Scollini’s face. Waldo’s voice: “Can you materialize? Can you show yourself to us?” ~ Lord, I thought, is Stanton Waldo nuts? Can he be believing in this, de- spite the fact that he knows Scollini is putting on a show for us? Then I got the answer. They had probably been told to act as they had at the seances with the medium, Crowley. Waldo must have acted as an interlocutor at those seances and was taking the same part now. “I’m tryin’, mister. He killed me first, see, and then we was on the stairway to the attic. Him and me, and me dead. When a train goes by, see? And out we come.” A white shimmer that might have been a face, a shimmering blank in CoOnniclooo SJ (CO) mM