A WEIRD STORY
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_."