She was not at all what we had expected. Twenty-six, I should say, and
in a black dinner dress. She seemed like a perfectly normal young
woman, even attractive in a fragile, delicate way. Not much personality,
perhaps; the very word “medium” precludes that. A “sensitive,” I think
she called herself. We were presented to her, and but for the stripped
and bare room, it might have been any evening after any dinner, with
bridge waiting.
When she shook hands with me she looked at me keenly. “What a strange
day it has been!” she said. “I have been very nervous. I only hope I can
do what you want this evening.”
“I am not at all sure what we do want, Miss Jeremy,” I replied.
She smiled a quick smile that was not without humor. Somehow I had never
thought of a medium with a sense of humor. I liked her at once. We
all liked her, and Sperry, Sperry the bachelor, the iconoclast, the
antifeminist, was staring at her with curiously intent eyes.
Following her entrance Herbert had closed and bolted the drawing-room
doors, and as an added precaution he now drew Mrs. Dane’s empty wheeled
chair across them.
“Anything that comes in,” he boasted, “will come through the keyhole or
down the chimney.”
And then, eying the fireplace, he deliberately took a picture from the
wall and set it on the fender.
Miss Jeremy gave the room only the most casual of glances.
“Where shall I sit?” she asked.
Mrs. Dane indicated her place, and she asked for a small stand to be
brought in and placed about two feet behind her chair, and two chairs
to flank it, and then to take the black cloth from the table and hang it
over the bamboo rod, which was laid across the backs of the chairs. Thus
arranged, the curtain formed a low screen behind her, with the stand
beyond it. On this stand we placed, at her order, various articles from
our pockets--I a fountain pen, Sperry a knife; and my wife contributed a
gold bracelet.
We all felt, I fancy, rather absurd. Herbert’s smile in the dim light
became a grin. “The same old thing!” he whispered to me. “Watch her
closely. They do it with a folding rod.”
We arranged between us that we were to sit one on each side of her, and
Sperry warned me not to let go of her hand for a moment. “They have a
way of switching hands,” he explained in a whisper. “If she wants to
scratch her nose I’ll scratch it.”
We were, we discovered, not to touch the table, but to sit around it at
a distance of a few inches, holding hands and thus forming the circle.
And for twenty minutes we sat thus, and nothing happened. She was
fully conscious and even spoke once or twice, and at last she moved
impatiently and told us to put our hands on the table.
I had put my opened watch on the table before me, a night watch with a
luminous dial. At five minutes after nine I felt the top of the table
waver under my fingers, a curious, fluid-like motion.
“The table is going to move,” I said.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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