Avon Fantasy Reader No. 14 — page 116: what you’re looking at

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

Danish fashion. There is precisely such carving on pieces in the museum in Copenhagen, they tell me, those who have seen my drawing of ik. I was actually able to do that, and had completed a kind of plan-picture of the room, putting in all the shadow-furniture, and leaving my own, actual furniture out. Thank the God in whom I devoutly believe—and know to be more powerful than the Powers of Evil,—I was able to finish that rather elaborate drawing before... Well, I must not “run ahead of my story.” That night when I was ready to retire, and had once more opened up the jalousies of the front bedroom, and had switched off the light, I looked, nat- urally enough under the circumstances, for the outlines of that ghostly furni- ture. They were much clearer now. I studied them with a certain sense of al- Most “scientific” detachment. It was, even then, apparent to me that no weak- ness of the strange complexity which is the human eye could reasonably ac- count for the presence of a well-defined sct of mahogany furniture in a room already furnished with real furniture! But I was by now sufficiendy accus- tomed to it to be able to examine it all without that always-disturbing element of fear,—strangeness. I looked at the bedstead and the “roll-back” chairs, and the great bureau, and a ghostly, huge, and quaintly carved wardrobe, study- ing their outlines, noting their relative positions. It was on that occasion that it occurred to me that it would be of interest to make some kind of drawing of them, I looked the harder after that, fixing the details and-the relations of them all in my mind, and then I went into the hall and got some paper and a pencil and set to work, It was hard work, this of reproducing something which I was well aware Was some kind of an “apparition,” especially after looking at the furniture in the dark bedroom, switching on the light in another room and then trying to reproduce. I could not, of course, make a direct comparison. I mean it was impossible to look at my drawing and then look at the furniture. There was always a necessary interval between the two processes. I persisted through several evenings, and even for a couple of evenings fell into the custom of going into my bedroom in the evening's darkness, looking at what was there, and then attempting to reproduce it. After five or six days, I had a fair plan, in considerable detail, of the arrangement of this stranpe furniture in my bedroom,—a plan or drawing which would be recognizable if there were any- one now alive who remembered such an arrangement of such furniture. It will be apparent that a story had been growing up in my mind, or, at least, that I had come to some kind of conviction that what I “saw” was a reproduc- tion of something that had once existed in that same detail and that precise order! On the seventh night, there came an interruption. I had, by that time, flaished my work, pretty well. I had drawn the room as it would have looked with that furniture in it, and had gone over the whole with India ink, very careiully. As a drawing, the thing was finished, so far as my indifferent skill as a draftsman would permit. That seventh evening, I was looking over the appearance of the room, such qualmis as the eerieness of the situation might have otherwise produced re- duced to next-to-nothing partly by my interest, in part by having become ac- 114 comiclsooks.com