Very much as though he were entering a disreputable place, Matthew
Kerrigan slipped furtively from the taxicab into the hallway of the old
New York mansion made over into an apartment-house. He stood at the
door, portly, important, wrapped in his fur coat. He pushed the button
marked "Mr. Sergius." A young Russian butler admitted him.
"Just say a Mr. Smith," Kerrigan announced importantly. Across the
Russian boy's harsh features there was the shadow of contempt. He
reappeared in an instant and held open a door for Kerrigan.
Kerrigan had been expecting something of the dark, perfumed, cheap
interior of a palmist's studio; or the meretricious mystery of a
clairvoyant apartment with its crystal glass on faded velvet. Even
Kerrigan's untrained Broadwayish mind was awe-struck by the huge,
somber living-room into which he was ushered. He sensed, rather than
understood, the richness of the pictures and hangings, the beautiful
ceiling. Only in books and papers had he seen anything like the great
white borzoi lying before the roaring fireplace like a patient cat.
The man he had come to see was sitting by the fire; dead-white features
against a black background. Lean, emaciated, with his full black
beard, black cassock, and high black headdress of the Greek monk, he
seemed more spirit than body. He looked at Kerrigan with the insolence
of a prince.
"Yes?" He did not ask Kerrigan to sit down.
Kerrigan had planned a neat speech, somewhat humorous, cynical,
patronizing, but it had fled from his memory. He felt a sort of vague
terror, as though this man were probing, uninvited, inside his soul and
mind.
"I heard--down-town--" he muttered.
"Yes!" the monk said impatiently. "What do you want me to do?"
"I wondered, Mr.--ah, Mr.--"
"Brother Sergius!"
"I wondered, Brother Sergius, if it were possible to hold converse--or
see--or have some communication--some certain communication--with a
person who 's been dead some time, some fourteen years--"
The monk was looking at him keenly. What had this well-fed business
man, with the sweeping mustache and obviously massaged face, to do with
the dim inhabitants of Death?
"How did this man die?" the monk Sergius asked.
"By accident," Matthew Kerrigan answered. "He drowned himself."
"What interest have you in him?"
"They say he killed himself on account of me," Kerrigan's voice broke
out as though he were pleading to a judge. "It's not true!"
"You don't know whether it's true or not?" The Greek monk was studying
Kerrigan's terrified features.
"Can it be done?" Kerrigan was surprised at himself, so hoarse his
voice sounded, so sincere his tones. "I must know about it. Can it be
done?"
"It can be done." The monk nodded.
"If there 's any fee--" Kerrigan suggested.
"There is no fee." The monk laughed contemptuously. "I act for the
good of souls, when it is necessary." He watched Kerrigan intently for
some minutes. "On Monday morning--at two in the morning--if the
weather is clear, I will send for you. Leave your name and address
with the butler." And he turned again to the book he was reading,
oblivious of Kerrigan, as a great lord might be of the peasant standing
awkward and awe-stricken in his presence.
Financial agents admire Matthew Kerrigan. He is the sort of person who
gives them no trouble. They are more cordial toward him than they are
toward great bankers or great Wall Street men. For great
bank-presidents and stock-manipulators wage terrific and lyrical
battles on the terrain of commerce, and though there are great Leipzigs
and Jenas, there are also great Waterloos. But Kerrigan is safe. He
takes no chances. His factories in Yonkers purr, day in, day out,
making by the million that simple fastening device for women's corsets
that has made him several fortunes.
"That's the way to make money," they will tell you. "Just hit upon
something simple and necessary, like a hair-pin or a shoe-horn, that no
other person has thought of. Make it and sell it to the public and
bank your money in gilt-edged securities. Look at Matthew Kerrigan!
And not fifteen years ago he was a clerk in an accountant's office."
Along Broadway, too, he is known favorably, in that happy-go-easy
circle of minor actors, wine-merchants, and women aspirants for the
stage and movies. Head waiters are deferential, and slightly
contemptuous toward him. He is a good spender, and yet-- There is
something repulsive, unhealthy in the way he enjoys food and drink and
looks at women.
"Six things doth the Lord hate; yea, seven, which are an abomination
unto him": and the first is haughty eyes. I cannot conceive that as
denoting the light that shines from eyes lit from a sense of high and
noble lineage, of chivalrous ideals, of just power. I translate it by
the eyes of Matthew Kerrigan--those gray, full orbs which look about a
room stating that there is no man present whose equal and superior
Kerrigan is now. Eyes which tell you Kerrigan has money, and is
prepared to spend money for what he wants. You know that man will get
good measure for his money--shrewdness and sophistication gleam from
them in a wary, reptilian way.
"They may call this the Rube City," Morgenthal, the little real-estate
broker, announced at the Elks' Club, "but, believe me, there 's one guy
in town they can't put anything over on, and that's Kerrigan. He 's
wise. I tell you, boy, he 's wise. Did you hear about that baby at
the Winter Garden that tried to pull that hard-luck story on him? You
didn't, eh? Well, let me tell you something: She got hers...."
There is one other place you may collect facts about Matthew Kerrigan
and that is the down-town lunch-rooms of the financial
district--uncomfortable, clattering places where you eat on a high
stool at a counter and compute the price of your meal to the cashier as
you go out. There is a race of clerks there, old men, natty but shabby
of dress, pinched in the face, gray-headed, stoop-shouldered. Some of
them are bitter and many are garrulous. They specialize in the early
histories of well-known men.
"I remember him when he was a bum in the street," they will tell you of
nearly all of them; "when he had n't got a nickle for a shoe-shine.
Did you ever hear how he got on his feet?" And then will follow either
a sordid or a criminal story. And from them you can learn the story of
Matthew Kerrigan and Leonard Holt.
An office friend had told Kerrigan of an eccentric inventor who lived
out in his home town of Englewood, a poor, poverty-stricken,
scatter-brained mechanic who plodded in a broken-down cottage on the
outskirts of Englewood at magnificent and foolish dreams, such as
aviation and perpetual motion. When Kerrigan went out to see his
friend he was taken, on a rainy afternoon, to pass the dull hours, on a
visit to the man Holt. Beyond an occasional dunning tradesman, who
sneered at him, and an occasional equally poor friend who remonstrated
with him and urged him to take a position in a factory, Holt saw no
one. And when Kerrigan was introduced, he talked like a starved
fanatic. Tall; loosely built, as though his jointures were precarious;
stooped; with great greasy hands; sandy-haired; with burning blue eyes
and a high forehead, and a listless mouth and chin--one might have been
pardoned for believing him an impractical fool. He pointed out a large
system of wheels and pulleys, of weights and springs. It was the
perpetual-motion model on which he was working.
"But I thought perpetual motion had been given up as impossible,"
Kerrigan objected.
"They have been making strides toward it," Holt answered. "The
_Struttapparat_ was a great advance. Of course a small quantity of
radium is necessary. But, still, energy may be--it is just
possible--created mechanically. They disprove perpetual motion by the
hypothesis of the conservation of energy, which is not proven--"
And so he went on at great length in his jerky sentences, while
Kerrigan listened, picking up things and dropping them boredly--a
Bunsen burner, a pair of pliers, a tripod--what not. He lifted two
pieces of asbestos, clamped queerly together by two long pieces of
flexible metal. As he toyed with it the thing came apart in his hands.
A snap, and it was together again. Kerrigan looked up in interest.
"What's this for?"
"A little fastening trick. Of no practical use--except, perhaps, for
women's corsets!" Holt laughed. Kerrigan was silent.
"Patented?" he suggested, after a while.
"Everything I have is patented," Holt said with a touch of pride.
"May I bring it along," Kerrigan asked, "to show it to a friend?"
"Why, certainly!" Holt nodded. "Now, if you understand that the energy
develops in geometric progression--"
And very efficiently did Matthew Kerrigan show Holt's fastening device
to his friend--a prominent banker who had never heard of Kerrigan
before, but had always money to sink, at a price, in worthy
enterprises. Kerrigan returned to Holt.
"There may be something in that little thing of yours. Will you take a
hundred dollars for it outright?"
But that intuition which sometimes warns the unworldly minded, and that
mulish obstinacy which some men have, made Holt stand out for a share
of the profits, and unwillingly Kerrigan and his associate had to allow
it.
"It's a hold-up," they complained to each other bitterly, "but we can't
do anything about it!"
So Holt was admitted to the profits of his patent, and for a while he
dreamed dreams of wealth untellable; a wealth that would enable him to
send his motherless three-year-old daughter to boarding-school and
college and leave him in peace to work, with all appliances to
hand--_Stuttapparat_ and radium and everything--at the problem which
had baffled scientific dreamers since the dawn of intelligence.
"The model on a big scale," he figured, "would cost ten thousand
dollars--" and on his visions went, unhampered, unselfish, unpractical.
He wanted to benefit the world by his discovery--and to get a little
applause, a little credit.
I don't know how they do these things, but they do them, and they must
do them skilfully, for they evade the law, the iron law which insists
on justice for all men. Kerrigan laid his hand feelingly on Holt's
shoulder.
"I 'm sorry, old man," he said with that sincere stop in his voice.
"We made a mistake. It's not practical."
Holt had received many blows, and was nearly impervious to them. He
smiled wistfully.
"Perhaps I can do something," Kerrigan continued. "I might get a
little for your rights from some one who will take a chance. I should
like you to get something for it. I led you to believe so much in it--"
They were very generous, for they knew there were millions ahead of
them, so they gave Holt a thousand dollars, and he buckled to again at
his grotesque machine. A few weeks later some well-intentioned
Christian told him the truth and commented fulsomely on what a fool
Holt was. The last blow was the fatal one. It split his heart in two.
Methodically he made arrangements for his child to be brought up in a
convent, and he left what money he had for the purpose. He took the
train to New York and crossing on the ferry-boat he climbed to the
upper deck. He sat huddled up in a corner, gray and shabby of clothes,
gray and shabby of face, until the boat was half-way over. He stood up
on the seat and jumped, and the noise his jump made was drowned in the
clatter of the paddles.
Tall, lank, oblivious, unpractical--your economist will tell you that
the man was of no value to the community, and was better dead. And
your religious person will tell you that the crime of suicide merits
hell-fire. But somehow I feel that for these poor men with the light
heads and the light bodies, and the heavy, heavy hearts, there is
somewhere Understanding and Great Tenderness....
All this they will tell you, the garrulous and bitter old men, and
while they inveigh against Kerrigan, you see somewhere in their eyes a
glint of admiration and of envy. The arena of Wall Street differs
little from the arena of Neronic Rome; _væ victis_ is the motto and the
rule of the game. And before you can leave them in contemptuous horror
they will tap you on the knee, gloatingly dramatic.
"And now Kerrigan is going to marry Holt's daughter! Can you beat it?
Can you beat that?"
He had gone--perhaps out of curiosity, perhaps out of the depths of
sentimentality that men of his type have somewhere in the bottom of
their hearts--with his cousin, the chubby little minister of religion,
to the prize-giving at the convent in Newark. The bishop was there,
and a play of Dunsany's was given; a few poems recited, and a song or
two sung.
His eye had been attracted all through the exercises by a tall girl in
a white dress with a blue sash--a slim girl with hazel eyes and
light-brown hair who in the distance had the profile of a Saint
Cecilia--a Saint Cecilia with a somewhat broad, honest mouth and good
firm teeth.
"That's an attractive girl," he told his cousin.
The little cherubic minister, who worried in secret about his cousin's
soul, was delighted. He dreamed often of having his cousin Matthew
reformed by the influence of some sweet woman. A Dominican religious
brought her forward.
"Miss Holt, Miss Agnes Holt." Kerrigan was introduced to her. He
talked banalities to her for a half-hour, when she shyly took her leave
of him, blushing furiously under the glances of her schoolmates. When
he was alone Kerrigan smiled queerly, with a distant look in his eyes.
At forty-five there comes always to a man of Kerrigan's type, with the
first gray hairs, the fear of age. There will be an inevitable day
when he will no longer attract women, and when, in the bars and about
the clubs, he will be referred to as an old man of another generation,
and there arises in his mind the fear of loneliness in the fifties and
the sixties, with Death hurrying breathlessly toward him day by day.
The only thing to do then is to begin anew with a young wife, far away
from the swirl of the city.
"It's the only life," they say pathetically; "a wife and kiddies, a
little bit of land somewhere, away from all this stuff." And they wave
their hands at the gleaming glasses and the pictures on the bar-room
walls. "There's nothing to it," they aver; and they drink up and have
another one.
He met the religious as he was going away.
"That Miss Holt," he said, "is a very attractive girl." It was the
only adjective he knew to fit her.
"Yes," the nun agreed. "We all like her. She 's been with us nearly
all her life. Her father died when she was young. He was an inventor;
Leonard Holt was his name."
"The name is familiar." Kerrigan was shocked, but his self-restraint
was superb. "Died after some business depression, if I remember
aright?"
"He was murdered!" The little religious's eyes flashed magnificently.
"Murdered! In the way of business!"
Kerrigan had heard that word used of Holt's end more than once. But
the fourteen years had been full ones, and the matter had not troubled
him much--things like that happened so often. And, besides, it was not
true. A murder predicates a murderer, and he was no murderer. It was
all a business arrangement. And the man could n't stand the gaff.
That was all!
"All rotten foolishness!" he swore. But somehow, this last time,
perhaps on account of the dramatic meeting with the daughter, it would
not go out of his head.
And no more would go out of his head the thought and picture of Agnes
Holt in her white dress and blue sash, with her Saint Cecilia profile.
She haunted him night and day. At that period, peculiar in a man as
the late thirties are in women, he fell in love, or in what for him
would pass for love. In all his selfish business career he had known
intimately no woman like her, and her aloof, unrifled virginity struck
him like a blinding flash of light.
"After all," he said, in the manner of his kind, "there is nothing on
God's earth like a sweet, pure woman!"
And for days he thought about her and about love, not as a young man
might, in a burning equation with factors of living flame, but in the
smoldering symbols of maturity, which are so long in the consuming and
so hard to quench. He would go away from Broadway--"quit the whole
condemned shooting-match," as he weirdly termed it--and take a place in
Westchester or Long Island, a good, comfortable house with grounds to
it. They would be glad to have him in such a community. He would be
one of the village trustees; run for president. And he would fashion a
new life there with a young and beautiful bride, whom everybody would
envy him. There would be children, too. Undoubtedly there would be
children.
"She 'll be glad to get away from the convent," he thought shrewdly.
And, after all, perhaps he had treated Holt a bit shabbily. He would
make up for it in the way he would treat his daughter. She should wear
diamonds.
"I 'm thinking of marrying and settling down, Father John," he told the
little clergyman one day.
"I 'm glad to hear of it, Cousin Matthew," he said, rubbing his plump
little hands, his cherub's face beaming benignantly. "I 'm delighted.
I am so!" He shook his finger waggishly. "And I think I know the
young lady, too."
"It's the little Holt girl we met at the convent that day."
"You must come over and meet her again," Father John planned. "I 'll
talk to the Mother Superior."
And so, with due chaperonage, Kerrigan met Agnes Holt several times,
and each time he became more impressed with her. She would say little,
blushing mostly, and playing with something in her lap. She understood
vaguely that this portly, mustached man was thinking of marrying her,
but that denoted nothing to her, so cloistered had her life been.
"Yes," or "No," or "Thank you," was nearly the limit of her
conversation, and she had difficulty in not adding "sir." At times she
would accompany him, with Father John, to a matinée in New York to see
a carefully chosen family production, or to have tea at the
less-worldly restaurants. Occasionally she would burst out with a
naïve exclamation.
"I once rode in a Fifth Avenue bus with Sister Mary Joseph," was the
sort of thing she would vouchsafe.
"If you were n't to marry her," Father John said, "she would enter the
convent as a lay sister."
More and more as he met her Kerrigan's mind was taken up by the idea of
her father. The contour of her face; a certain look of her eye; a
light in her hair when the sun shone on it, would recall the inventor,
and immediately within him would rise a measure of uneasiness which he
could not get rid of. He once asked her if she remembered him.
"He died when I was young, very young," she said. "An accident in a
ferry-boat. I have spent all my life with the sisters."
As he went to and from the convent, he often met the religious who had
spoken of Holt's death as murder. And as often as he met her, so often
would his mind revert to that sinister word, and he would find himself
arguing about it internally, as though he were defending himself in a
court of law. He would try to shake off the mood.
"Of all the blamed foolishness!" he would tell himself angrily.
But the idea would persist, and, growing morbid about it, he found
himself reading carefully the charges of judges in cases of homicide.
He went to the public library and conned upon the subject in
encyclopedias. He read of the magnificent fair play in trial by jury.
"I guess that settles it," he told himself. "There 's nothing to it."
He went on, however, and, reading farther, he came on the ancient
custom of trial by ordeal of justice--of the test of a man's innocence
by touching the dead body of a murdered man. If the person suspected
were guilty, blood would exude from the corpse. A couplet of
Shakespeare's was quoted--from the play of "Richard III":
O, gentlemen, see, see! dead Henry's wounds
Open their congeal'd mouths and bleed afresh!
The thing made his flesh creep. He read of the grisly test of the dead
hand, and of the ordeal by fire and the ordeal by poison.
"There 's no sense to that!" he muttered angrily, and little beads of
perspiration gathered on his brow. Even the innocent would waver under
such a test. Trial by jury--that was the sensible way.
And then, one day, in a bleak sitting-room in the convent, he proposed
to Agnes Holt.
"Agnes--" he cleared his throat, and he was honestly husky--"I suppose
you have understood that my intentions toward you had a wedding in
view. I can make you very happy."
"I must talk to the Mother Superior," she said, blushing furiously, her
voice low.
He took her hand, and, opening a case, put a ring on her finger.
"I have talked to the Mother Superior, myself," he told her, "and that
is all right." He drew her toward him, trembling a little, and on her
forehead, with his mustached lips, he kissed her. He was suddenly
still, and strangely cold. The touch of that skin reminded him of his
last hand-shake with Leonard Holt.
"I must put an end to this obsession!" he told himself angrily, that
night at his hotel, and he poured himself stiff drinks of Bourbon.
Should he tell Father John? No! he decided. He knew Father John well
for a relative and a friend and a genial companion with lovable
peccadillos. But he knew, too, that the little clergyman could thunder
with the thunder of Sinai. Marry the daughter of a man in whose death
he was implicated! Never would Father John consent. The cleric would
not understand. What could a priest know of business?
"It's no use going to him," Kerrigan decided.
He stopped a moment, thinking. And, half-laughing and half-nervous, he
remembered a conversation with a friend of his, a great Wall Street
operator, who combined the shrewdness of his kind with his kind's
superstition, and had recourse in moments of tension to clairvoyants
and tarot cards. He told Kerrigan of M. Sergius.
"He's a Greek monk--been expelled from Mount Athos for practising
magic. What that man can tell you--"
"I suppose the next thing you 'll tell me is that he raises spirits."
"Listen! You just ask Cabot Montgomery how they found that will of Van
Vleet's. Just ask him."
"There's one born every minute," Kerrigan laughed, "and some of 'em
live."
"Listen, brother," Kerrigan was told, "this man does it for nothing.
Do you get me? For nothing! If it's important enough he 'll do it.
If not, outside. This is none of your country-fair crystal-gazers."
In Kerrigan, too, was that strain of superstition that all men laugh at
and all men have. And right now as he sat in a mental, spiritual
whirlwind, the memory of that conversation came to him as a preserver.
After all, if he put things to the test-- Of course it was foolish; it
was ridiculous, but still-- Nothing could come of it, by any manner of
means, and yet--
"What's the harm?" he laughed.
At his time of life, he smiled, to put himself in the hands of a
charlatan, to conjure up a spirit! In this century, with the telephone
by his bedside, with the electric light overhead, to patronize a
mumming magician! Nothing would, could happen.
But that nothing would be his answer. It would mean that his life was
free forever, purged of the foolish innuendos, the lunatic accusations
of outsiders; the morbid worries of his own abnormal mind. Free to go
ahead and be married, and to live happily ever after.
When the butler had come for him silently, in the big blue limousine,
one fine night of stars, he had gone with a little tremor in his veins.
What would Father John and the gentle nuns and his little betrothed
think of this mad excursion? Well, he had thrown down a gauntlet to
Fate, and he would go through with it, regardless of the empty issue.
There was a witticism on his lips as he entered the apartment; but the
witticism froze.
Silently the butler ushered him into a dim room lighted by tapers. In
a corner, silent, were Sergius and four young men. In the middle of
the floor was a strange geometric design of circles and squares.
"Your butler just came for me--" Kerrigan felt the need of saying
something, no matter how banal. In a sort of awe Kerrigan noted the
white garments of the former monk, and of his disciples; the white
shoes embroidered in red; the white crowns with the Hebrew letters.
"Do you still wish to go ahead with this?" the Russian asked him.
"Of course," Kerrigan uttered. His own voice seemed strange in his
ears.
"You are to obey me in all things." The ex-monk's voice had a terrible
hidden menace in it, "and if you move out of that circle you are worse
than a dead man! Follow me."
They moved forward through an opening into the strange geometric
design, and behind them on silent feet came the four attendants.
Kerrigan noticed in a sort of daze the sword they carried, the trumpet,
the book, and the lighted taper. About him, outside the circle, were
strange paper symbols that seemed to cut him off from the world of sane
and living men. The Magus lit a circle of censers about the outer
square. He closed the circle and lifted one on high. He swung it
toward the four corners of the square. An attendant handed him a
sword. He stuck it in the ground. Another handed him a trumpet. He
blew it brazenly.
"O Lord! Hear my prayer, and let my cry come unto Thee...."
Queer little whorls of smoke mounted through the air from the censers.
The attendants had retired to the four points of the compass. The
Magus raised the bare sword. His voice vibrated like an organ:
"O ye spirits! Ye I conjure by the power, wisdom, and virtue of the
Spirit of God ... by the Holy Name of God Eheith ... by which Adam,
having invoked, acquired the knowledge of all created things ... by the
invisible name Yod, which had Abel invoked he would have escaped from
the hand of Cain, his brother...."
It seemed to Kerrigan, standing there that about this circle was
something that was not life, and that it was cut off from the security
of things without as an island is cut off by water. About it the
incense rose in shadowy vapors. The lights of the candles became
dulled to a pale, diaphanous gold. There was something terrible about
it all. He had imagined a grisly, morbid thing of quackery. This he
could have stood smiling. But cold, stern majesty of ritual made his
heart contract, as it might be oppressed in the nave of some great
cathedral.
"... By the Two Tables of the Law; by the Seven Burning Candlesticks;
by the Holy of Holies where only the High Priest may go..."
He wanted to raise his voice, to tell the man to stop this mummery. He
wanted to walk to the door and slam it contemptuously, and to walk home
through the cool mundane air. That would be an end for him of all this
morbidness. But somehow he could not go. It was as though he were
held by hypnosis to the spot.
"... That spirit who was known here as Leonard Holt, and with whom this
man, for a sufficient reason, would converse. I conjure and invoke him
in the name of the Lord Adonai. I conjure him in the name of the god
El, strong and powerful...."
Fear arose in Kerrigan like a cold marsh vapor. He had come there in a
braggadocio test of fate, to something whose being and name he knew
not; to face it man to man, and to abide by the result. But he seemed
now to be, as it were, in a dock, not to argue but to be judged, by
that vagueness against which he had thrown down the gauntlet.
The Magus had fallen to his knees. Before him a disciple held an open
book and a taper.
"In the name of Him who hath made the heavens and the earth, and who
hath measured them in the hollow of His hand, enclosing the earth in
three of His fingers..."
Without those circles now, Kerrigan imagined, things were hovering with
a force as of a great wind. Things hurtled themselves against the
mystic, powerful symbols like troopers against an impregnable
fortalice. No longer was he certain that nothing could happen. If in
a minute now, at any instant, the Thing that was being called would
come, not the vacuous, impractical body, but a terrible being armed
with the awful majesty of the dead, standing before him accusingly,
with terrible eyes--standing like a flaming weapon between Kerrigan and
the daughter who was flesh of him, who they said was murdered ... If!
If! If! If! His skin contracted in a tense horripilation. His
breath came shallow and panting, like that of a strained dog.
The Magus stood up. Again the sword flashed in his hand. He laid his
hand on his heart. His voice rang vibrant with power. The acolytes
bowed their heads.
"Here be the symbols of secret things--the standards, the banners, the
ensigns of God the Conqueror; the arms of the Almighty One to compel
the aerial potencies. I command absolutely--"
Across Kerrigan's mind thoughts raced like skipping rabbits; like reels
of living pictures. He was being tried! His wrists shook as the blood
pulsed through. Tried! Tried by ordeal of justice! By the terrible
thing that made a dead man's wounds open when you touched him. By
ordeal of justice! That was it. He felt his face contract into a
horrible grimace. By ordeal of justice! There was a weight on his
chest of as huge granite blocks, very cold. He could n't breathe.
Through his heart there ran a pain like a knife....
"... By their power and virtue that he come near to us, into our
presence from whatsoever part of the world he may be in--"
"Master!" An acolyte stepped forward and touched the exorcist's white
samite sleeve. He pointed to the crumpled figure in the circle.
"Master, this man is dead!"