Avon Fantasy Reader No. 14 — page 115: what you’re looking at

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

SP ee ere Lie ~ blur, to nothingness. | raised my head and rolled over on my side, placing the - pillow back where it belonged. And as | opened my eyes on the dim room, : there stood, in faint, shadowy outline, in the opposite corner of the room, _ away from the outside wall on the market-place side, the huge, Danish hed- stead I had vaguely noted the night before, or rather, early that morning. ~ It was the most curious sensation, looking at that bed in the dimness of the room. I was reminded of those fourth-dimensional tales which are so popular nowadays, for the bed impinged, spatially, on my large bureau, and the curious thing was that I could see the bureau at the same time! [ rubbed my eyes, a little unwisely, but not enough to bring back the pelican sun-spots into them, for I remembered and desisted pretty promptly. I looked, fixedly, at the great bed, and it blurred and dimmed and taded out of my vision. Again, I was greatly puzzled, and I went over to where it seemed to stand and walked through it,—it being no longer visible to my now restercd viston, free of the effects of the sun-spots,—and then I went out into the “hall”—a West Indian drawing room is called “the hal!’—and sat down to think over this strange phenomenon. I could not account for it. If it had been poor Prentice, now! Prentice attended all the “gentlemen’s parties” to which he was invited with a kind of religious regularity, and had to be helped into his car with a similar regularity, a regularity which was verging on the monot- enous nowadays, as the invitations became more and more strained. No,— in my case it was, if there was anything certain about it, assuredly not the effects of strong liquors, for barring an occasional sociable swizzle T retained » here in my West Indian residence my American convictions that moderation in such matters was a reasonable virtue. [ reasoned out the matter of the phan- tom bedstead,—for so I was already thinking of it,—as far as | was able. That it was a phantom of defective eyesight I had no reasonable doubt. { had had my eyes examined in New York three months before, and the oculist had pleased me greatly by assuring me that there were no visible indications of deterioration. In fact, Dr. Jusserand had said at that time that my eyes were stronger, sounder, than when he had made his last examination six months before. Perhaps this conviction—that the appearance was due to my own physical shortcoming—accounts for the fact that I was not (what shall I say?) drs- turbed, by what I saw, or thought I saw. Confront the most thoroughgoing materialist with a ghost, and he will act precisely like anyone else; like any normal human being who believes in the material world as the outward and visible sign of something which animates it. All normal human beings, tt seems to me, are sacramentalists! I was, for this reason, able to think clearly about the phenomenon. My mind was not clouded and bemused with fear, and its known physiological effects. I can, quite easily, record what | “saw” in the course of the next few days. The bed was clearer to my vision and apprehension than it had been. It seemed to have grown in visibility; in a kind of substantialness, if there is such a word! It appeared more material than it had before, less shadowy. I looked about the room and saw other furniture: a huge, old-tashioned mahogany bureau with men’s heads carved on the knuckles of the front legs, 113 comicbooks.conn