Perhaps my excitement had a bad effect on the medium. She was uneasy and complained that the threads that bound her arms were tight. She was distinctly fretful. But after a time she settled down in her chair. Her figure, a deeper shadow in the semi-darkness of the room, seemed sagged--seemed, in some indefinable way, smaller. But there was none of the stertorous breathing that preceded trance.
Then, suddenly, a bell that Sperry had placed on the stand beyond the black curtain commenced to ring. It rang at first gently, then violently. It made a hideous clamor. I had a curious sense that it was ringing up in the air, near the top of the curtain. It was a relief to have it thrown to the ground, its racket silenced.
Quite without warning, immediately after, my chair twisted under me. “I am being turned around,” I said, in a low tone. “It as if something has taken hold of the back of the chair, and is twisting it. It has stopped now.” I had been turned fully a quarter round.
For five minutes, by the luminous dial of my watch on the table before me, nothing further occurred, except that the black curtain appeared to swell, as in a wind.
“There is something behind it,” Alice Robinson said, in a terrorized tone. “Something behind it, moving.”
“It is not possible,” Herbert assured her. “Nothing, that is--there is only one door, and it is closed. I have examined the walls and floor carefully.”
At the end of five minutes something soft and fragrant fell on to the table near me. I had not noticed Herbert when he placed the flowers from Mrs. Dane’s table on the stand, and I was more startled than the others. Then the glass prisms in the chandelier over our heads clinked together, as if they had been swept by a finger. More of the flowers came. We were pelted with them. And into the quiet that followed there came a light, fine but steady tattoo on the table in our midst. Then at last silence, and the medium in deep trance, and Mrs. Dane rapping on the floor for Clara.
When Clara came in, Mrs. Dane told her to switch on the lights. Miss Jeremy had dropped in her chair until the silk across her chest was held taut. But investigation showed that none of the threads were broken and that her evening slippers still fitted into the outline on the paper beneath them. Without getting up, Sperry reached to the stand behind Miss Jeremy, and brought into view a piece of sculptor’s clay he had placed there. The handle of the bell was now jammed into the mass. He had only time to show it to us when the medium began to speak.