Take that case of the hand impressed on the soft dough and plaster of Paris, described in an article that he had picked up in the dentist’s office out there in Pasadena—Mersereau’s very hand, so far as he could judge. How about that for a coincidence, picking up the magazine with that disturbing article about psychic materialization in Italy, and later in Berne, Switzerland, where the scientists were gathered to investigate that sort of thing? And just when he was trying to rid himself finally of the notion that any such thing could be! According to that magazine article, some old crone over in Italy—spiritualist, or witch, or something—had got together a crowd of experimentalists or professors in an abandoned house on an almost deserted island off the coast of Sardinia. There they had conducted experiments with spirits, which they called materialization, getting the impression of the fingers of a hand, or of a whole hand and arm, or of a face, on a plate of glass covered with soot, the plate being locked in a small safe on the center of a table about which they sat! He, Davidson, couldn’t understand, of course, how it was done, but done it was. There in that magazine were half a dozen pictures, reproductions of photographs of a hand, an arm and a face—or a part of one, anyhow. And if they looked like anything, they looked exactly like Mersereau’s! Hadn’t Pringle, there in Gatchard, Miss., stated spirits could move anywhere, over long distances, with the speed of light. And would it be any trick for Mersereau to appear there at Sardinia, and then engineer this magazine into his presence, here in Los Angeles? Would it? It would not. Spirits were free and powerful _over there_, perhaps. There was not the least doubt that these hands, these partial impressions of a face, were those of Mersereau. Those big knuckles! That long, heavy, humped nose and big jaw! Whose else could they be?—they were Mersereau’s, intended, when they were made over there in Italy, for him, Davidson, to see later here in Los Angeles. Yes, they were! And looking at that sinister face reproduced in the magazine, it seemed to say, with Mersereau’s old coarse sneer: “_You see? You can’t escape me! I’m showing you how much alive I am over here, just as I was on earth. And I’ll get you yet, even if I have to go farther than Italy to do it!_” It was amazing, the shock he took from that. It wasn’t just that alone, but the persistence and repetition of this hand business. What could it mean? Was it really Mersereau’s hand? As for the face, it wasn’t all there—just the jaw, mouth, cheek, left temple, and a part of the nose and eye; but it was Mersereau’s, all right. He had gone clear over there into Italy somewhere, in a lone house on an island, to get this message of his undying hate back to him. Or was it just spirits, evil spirits, bent on annoying him because he was nervous and sensitive now? V—OCTOBER, 1906