June 10, 2025 • 18 mins
When English professor William A. Porter unexpectedly inherits a grand seaside mansion from his late Uncle Horace, his curiosity is piqued by the unexplained circumstances surrounding his uncles death. Along with his wife and niece, he decides to spend the summer in the propertys lodge, renting out the main house. As darkness falls, the quiet seaside neighborhood takes a sinister turn, with strange occurrences and eerie events becoming the norm. At the heart of these mysteries is an ominous red lamp, a subject of local folklore and believed to cast a malevolent spell. Can Professor Porter unravel the truth behind these oddities, or will he himself become a suspect in this webs of mysteries?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Section twenty of The Red Lamp by Mary Roberts Reinhardt.
This the Brivox recording, is in the public domain conclusion,
chapter four. Who are we to judge him? If a
man sincerely believes that there is no death, the taking
of life to prove it must seem a trivial thing
he may feel. And from his book manuscript hastily hidden
(00:20):
behind the wall of the den, we gather he did
feel that the security of the individual counter does nothing
against the proof of survival to the human race, but
that he was entirely sane in those last months. None
of us can believe cruelty is a symptom of the
border land between sanity and madness. So too is the
weakening of what we call the herd instinct. It is
well known at the university that for the year previous
(00:42):
to his death he had been distinctly antisocial. Certainly too,
he fulfilled the axiom that insanity is the exaggeration of
one particular mental activity, and that he combines this single
exaggeration with a high grade of intelligence only proves the
close relation between madness and genius. Kant unable to work
unless gazing at a ru and tower Hawthorne cutting up
(01:02):
his bits of paper. Wagner's periodical violences, the very audacity
of his disguise, the consistency with which he lived the
part he was playing, points to what I believe is
called dissociation. Towards the last. There seems to have been
a genuine duality of personality. During the day, Old Simon
Bethel dragging his helpless foot and without effort, holding his
(01:22):
withered hand to its spastic contraction. At night, the active
Cameron making his exits on his nocturnal adventures by the
gun room window, wandering a foot incredible distances, watching the
door of Gordon's room and locking him in, learning from
me of Holliday's interest in the case, and trying to
burn him out very early, realizing the embarrassment of my
own presence at the lodge, and warning me away by
that letter from Salem Ohio. It seems clear that he
(01:45):
had not expected me at the lodge. Larkin apparently told Gordon,
but Gordon neglected to inform him just what he felt.
What terror and anger when I greeted him at the
house on his arrival will never be known. I remember
now how he watched me wrapp at me through his
disguising spectacles, with the beef cube in his hand and waiting, waiting.
(02:06):
But the disguise held my own very slight acquaintance with him,
my near sightedness, my total lack of suspicion over in
his favor, and of the perfection of the disguise itself.
It is enough to say that Gordon apparently never suspected it.
He did suspect the paralysis. He moved his arm today,
he wrote once in the diary. He knows I saw it,
(02:26):
and he has watched me ever since. Takes very little
change in appearance beyond casual recognition. Halliday tells me the
idea is to take a few important points and substitute
their opposites. Take a man with partial paralysis, one side
of his face drops, you see, Well, he can't imitate that,
but he can put a fig in the other cheek
and raise it. Put hair on a bald headed man
(02:48):
and watch the change. And there are other things eyebrows. Now,
only once did I come anywhere near the truth, and
then it slipped past me, and I did not catch it.
That was on the night he sent for me, after
he had struck Gordon down. He was frightened that night.
We know now Gordon was suspicious, might even have gone
to the police, and that night he tested his disguise
(03:10):
and me. I have recorded the revolt I felt after
his attack on the Christian faith, and that I had
the feeling of having heard almost the same thing eons
ago I had heard the same thing from Cameron on
the first occasion of my meeting him. Much of the
explanation of that tragic summer becomes mere surmise. Naturally, there
is no surmise, however necessary, as regards Cameron's coming to
(03:33):
the Third Seance at my invitation. So far as he knew,
we still believed that Simon Bethel was dead, that our
circle so innocent, an appearance so naive, was a cleverly
devised trap, seems not to have occurred to him. My frankness,
the product of my ignorance, would probably have reassured a
man less driven by necessity than he was. But even
(03:53):
had he suspected something, I believe he would have come.
His other attempts to enter the house and secure the
manuscript had failed, and any day some bit of mischance,
a mouse behind a panel, a casual repair, and this
book of his with its characteristic phrasing, its references to
his earlier works, would be in the hands of the police.
With what secret eagerness he accepted my invitation? We can
(04:15):
only guess Haliday, carefully plotting, had already discounted his acceptance
in advance. I know he would come. Of course, he says,
he wanted to get in. We offered him not only that,
but darkness to cover any move he wanted to make.
It had to work out, And here she explained the
necessity of having the criminal caught flagrante de lictu. It
(04:36):
had to be shown. He says, not only that Cameron
had written the manuscript, but that it was he who
had hidden it where it lay the case against him
stutt or fowl by that, he says. But aside from this,
much of the explanation of that tragic summer becomes pure guesswork.
We have, however, elaborated the following as fulfilling our requirements
as to the situation. We know, for instance, that on
(04:57):
old Horace Porter's developing interest in spiritism, Missus Livingstone referred
to him to Cameron, But we do not know why
that interest developed. Is it too much I wonder to say?
That the house itself led him to it. In this
I know I am on dangerous ground, and it becomes
still more dangerous if one grants that Missus Livingstone's gift
of a red lamp led him to experimenting with it.
(05:18):
We do know, however, that after he had had this
lamp for three months or so, he got in touch
with Kimeron, and it seems probable that such experiments as
were made there at night with this lamp roused Kimeron
to fever heat. Missus Livingston believes there was a pact
between them, the usual one of the first to pass
over to come back if possible. We do not know that,
but it seems plausible. Neither Halliday nor I believe, however,
(05:40):
as she does. At Cameron killed the older man in
a fit of rage over the rejection of his proposal
to carry their investigations to the criminal point. What seems
more probable is that Chimeron had very early recognized the
advantages of the house for the psychic and scientific experiments
he had in mind, and that he finally submitted the
idea to Old Horace with what growing horror and indignation
they were received. We know from his letter they turned
(06:03):
a possible ally into an angry and dangerous enemy. The
rejection of the proposition with the threat which accompanied it,
left Kimeron stripped before the world as an enemy to society.
He went home and brooded over it, but he couldn't
let it rest at that Halliday says he went back
and the old man was at his desk. There was
danger in Cameron that night, and the poor old chap
(06:25):
was frightened. We'll say. He crumpled his letter up in
his hand and Cameron didn't see it. Maybe there was
an argument. Kimeron knocked him down, but he got up again,
and he managed to drop the letter into an open drawer.
After that his heart failed and he fell for good.
We acquit him of that of the others. We are
with regard to the underlying motive, the so called experiments
(06:46):
again obliged to resort to surmise. We know, for instance,
of Kimeron's early experiments in weighing the body before it
immediately after death. He has himself recorded to them, But
in the manuscript of his book he distinctly states his
belief that the vital prince, whatever that may be, is
weakened by long illness, and his belief that those who
pass over suddenly out of full health are more able
to manifest themselves. He quotes numerous instances of murdered men
(07:10):
whom tradition believes to have returned from motives of vengeance.
But he himself believes that this ability to return is
due to the strength of the unweakened vital principle, the
whole spirit, he calls it. And although his manuscript in
itself does not deal with any discoveries he may have
made during the summer, there are accompanying at certain pages
of figures which seemed to prove that he made more
than one experiment along those lines during his occupancy of
(07:30):
the house. What waifs and strace he picked up on
those night journeys of his we do not know. Poor
wanderers probably, but no place in the world from which
they could be missed. At the same time, Howada feels
that the experiments were not necessarily to be with life
and death. He suggests that they were to lie rather
in deep narcosis pushed to the danger point, and that
it was under this narcosis that Maggie Morrison, for one,
(07:53):
succumbed Among Cameron's papers. Later on we found a curious
document entitled the Reality of the Soul through a Study
of the efects of Chloroform and corrari on the Animal Economy,
with this note in Cameron's hand, a.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Saw and the body are separated by the agency of anesthesia.
The saul was not a breath, but an entity of
the nature of the further tests made. We have no
idea Howiday believes that shown the space behind the wall
by Horace Porter, he later utilized it to conceal such
apparatus as he used in his experiments. It seemed to
be full of stuff, he says, the night I found it,
(08:28):
but later on, as the chase narrowed, he got rid
of it bit by bit at night, probably throwing it
into the bay. This is borne out by the fact
that late that following autumn, going back to Twin Hollows
to look over the property with the real estate dealer,
I found washed up on the beach the battered fragments.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Of a camera. Only a portion of the lens remained
in the frame. But this lens had been of quartz.
As nearly as I can discover. The theory of quartz
used in such a manner is to photograph the ultra violet.
In other words, I dare say, to make visible that
strange world which may lie beyond spectrum in our normal vision.
Did he obtain anything? We shall never know. But sometimes
(09:04):
I wonder. Suppose a man to have done what he
had done to prove the immortality of the soul, to
have taken lives and have risked his own to give
to the world's survival after death, It so pathetically craves
and he fails. There is nothing his own conviction has
not weakened, but his proofs are not there. Then in
the twinkling of an eye, he himself breaks through the veil,
(09:24):
with that idea dominant. He passes over to the other side,
perhaps to the long sleep, perhaps not, But in that instance,
between waking and sleeping, to prove his point, to make
good his contention, to justify his course, I wonder, and
I wonder too if at that moment of realization supreme
irony of the situation could have occurred to him that
the wounded hand, the one injury poor Gordon had managed
(09:47):
to inflict on him, was the factor which had shot him,
had foremost into eternity, was Kimberon or sheep killer. We
believe so with certain reservations. We know he was at
Basque Cove under an assumed name at the time, probably
looking over the ground. At the same time. It seems
unlikely that he killed the first blot of Nielly's sheep,
that we believe was an act of revenge on the
(10:07):
part of a man night he had recently discharged, but
that the idea seized on his imagination seems probable. He
was planning that mad campaign of his, and it fell
in well with what was to come. It prepared the
neighborhood in a sense, but it set them looking for
a maniac with a religious mania, and it was an
effective alibi for him, occurring before his arrival at the house.
(10:28):
Jane's always believed that he added the symbol and chalk
deliberately to incriminate me. I do not he added it
after Helen a leir had told him of it, as
he added the stone altar. A madman's conception of a
madman's act. Kearraway's murder was incidental for that preparation of his,
But in view of all we know, we can reconstruct
it fairly well. Thus we have the boy tiring of
(10:49):
carrying his rifle, putting it away in the darkness, and
possibly dozing. We have the appearance of the killer and Karraway,
unable to look at his rifle, quickly following him to
the waterfront and reaching it too late underneath our float.
The killer should have found his knife, but as we know,
Holiday had taken it away. They were two unarmed men then,
who met that night on the quiet surface of the bay,
(11:10):
and one of them, although nobody knew it, was not sane,
unarmed only in one sense, however, for Cameron had an
oar and used it. When it was over, He apparently
rode back quietly to the creek beyond Robinson's Point, left
his boat there, and walked to Bass Cove. The proprietor
of the small hotel there seems never to have known
that he was out at night. He was a very
(11:31):
quiet gentleman, he says, and always went to better ely.
One thing which had puzzled us in the Morrison case
was that the girl had stopped her truck at a
time when the nerves of the countryside were on edge.
It seems probable, therefore, that on some nights at least
it was not the square, muscular Cameron who went forth,
but an old and crippled man shown to her. But
(11:52):
the lightning flashes that night, aged infirmity by the roadside,
and a storm going What wonder that she stopped? The
only marvel is that this bate, having proven successful, it
does not appear to have been used again, and now
postponed as I may, I have come to that portion
of our summer to which I have early referred as
the X in our equation. We have solved our problem,
(12:13):
we may say, quite properly quaderrat demndstrandum. But there remains
still the unsolved factor. Much that impressed me strongly at
the time has lost its impression. Now it is a
curious fact that a man may see a ghost at
many believe that they have done so without any lasting
belief in so called survival after death. And so it
is with me. On editing my journal, however, I find
(12:35):
myself confroning the same questions which confronted me during that
terrible summer. Have I a body? Or is my body
all there is of me? In other words, am I
an intelligence served by certain physical organs? Or am I
certain physical organs actuated by an intelligence as temporary as they.
Frankly I do not know. But any careful analysis of
(12:56):
the extra normal phenomena of the summer seems to show
every so often some other world in colligence struggling to
get through to us, as though we have never had,
as I have said, any explanation of the coming of
the book during the second seance, nor the sounds from
the library. While much of the physical phenomena of the
first two sciences was deliberately engineered by Missus Livingstone in
pursuance of Holliday's planned to get Kimeron into the house,
(13:18):
these two things remain without explanation. The same thing is
true of my finding of the letter, of the lighthouse apparition,
of the sitting at Evanstone, and of Jane's clairvoyant visions,
none of which, by the way, she has had since,
and yet all of which had their part, large or
small in our solving and understanding of the crimes. Peter
geissened the figure in the fore rigging of the sloop
(13:40):
my own vision of Kmeron at the foot of the stairs,
when he lay dead behind the panel. What am I
to say of these? Am I to accept them? As
I do Jane's vision without eyes as no more extraordinary
than the feats of somnambulists who go through their curious
Netley progressed with closed eyelids. Am I to accept them,
refute them, or evade them. There are, however, certain incidents which,
(14:02):
puzzling as they were at the time, lend themselves to
very simple explanation. Among these are the cough I heard
more than once, and Hadley's story of the materialization in
the Oakvale Cemetery. Throughout Gordon's diary here and there were
the letters S and g T. There was also in
one place a sentence which translated became the GP stuff
went great last night. Howaday believes that Gordon was what
(14:25):
we know what's a medium, and that it was in
that capacity primarily that Cameron took him to the country.
The S he therefore translates as sitting and the GT
as genuine tRNS. After the g T there almost invariably
follows the rather pathetic entry we all written today or ah.
In Hadley's ghost then, in all probability, was a secretary
(14:47):
securing data for the sittings, which he so carefully differentiates
from the knights. When he went into genuine trnts, being
honest with himself, poor boy, and honest nowhere else. And
the same was no doubt true as to the dry
cough which you acticed on me the night I was
in the garage, almost to my undoing. It was during
those sittings, too, almost certainly, that under pretended control from beyond,
(15:09):
he began to ferret out, with the cunning of his kind,
the story underneath, to bring back Horace Porter, and watch
the reaction, to mention the boat he had discovered, and
see the men cross from him in the dim red light,
twitch and tremble, to play him, to fool him, and
at the last to threaten and blackmail him, and in
the end to die. But there remain these things I
(15:30):
cannot explain. One of the most curious is the herbal
odor that this was not a purely subjective impression, as
shown by the fact that both Hayward and Edith noticed
it during the second seance. The scent of flowers is,
I believe, not unusual during certain psychic experiments. Warren speaks
of the impression of trouberses being waved before him in
the dark by some ghostly hand. Of this as of
(15:52):
the other inexplicable phenomena. I can only say that at
the time I did not doubt them, leaving them again
as I prepared this manuscript, I accept them once more,
but I do not explain them. You wish, said Cicero,
to have the explanation of these things very well. I
might tell you that the magnet is a body which
attracts iron and attaches itself to it. But because I
(16:15):
could not give you the explanation of it, would you
deny it? In closing this record, I cannot do better
than copy the following extract from my journal made the
following June June first, nineteen twenty three. Our little Edith
was married to Day hey Ho, and again, hey Ho,
I have done the proper thing, let her up the
(16:35):
aisle to Halliday, and would as leaf have knocked him down,
as not stepped back out of the picture on her life,
and feeling for my handkerchief like the besotted old fool,
I am pulled out a washcloth instead. Fortunate perhaps, as
I was on the verge of loud and broken sobs.
How we begrudge the happiness of others when it is
at our expense? How I hated holiday when once in
(16:57):
the house, he put his arms round to it, halter
her close, however, resented that calm air of possession with
which he took its place in the line beside her,
and shook hands smilingly with the hysterical crowd that kissed
and blessed them on the way to the dining room
and food. And yet how happy they are, and how
safe she is my wife, he said, forever and ever amen,
(17:19):
old glass and new glass, china, silver and linen, the
leader's kindlesticks, every corner of the house, filled with guests
and gifts and jock, And for the two of them,
nothing and nobody, just a space filled with shadows which
smiled and passed themselves. The only reality, and perhaps they are.
Love at least is real, the one reality. Perhaps quote
(17:42):
love Thou art absolute, sole lord of life and death
close quote So they have gone, and to night, Jane
and I are alone, safe and quiet and alone, alas
behind the drain pipe. Hey ho. The end end of
section twe End of the Red Lamp by Mary Roberts Reinhardt,
(18:04):
read by Zack Hoyt in Orwell, New York, twenty twenty one.
Section twenty of The Red Lamp by Mary Roberts Reinhardt.
This the Brivox recording, is in the public domain conclusion,
chapter four. Who are we to judge him? If a
man sincerely believes that there is no death, the taking
of life to prove it must seem a trivial thing
he may feel. And from his book manuscript hastily hidden
(00:20):
behind the wall of the den, we gather he did
feel that the security of the individual counter does nothing
against the proof of survival to the human race, but
that he was entirely sane in those last months. None
of us can believe cruelty is a symptom of the
border land between sanity and madness. So too is the
weakening of what we call the herd instinct. It is
well known at the university that for the year previous
(00:42):
to his death he had been distinctly antisocial. Certainly too,
he fulfilled the axiom that insanity is the exaggeration of
one particular mental activity, and that he combines this single
exaggeration with a high grade of intelligence only proves the
close relation between madness and genius. Kant unable to work
unless gazing at a ru and tower Hawthorne cutting up
(01:02):
his bits of paper. Wagner's periodical violences, the very audacity
of his disguise, the consistency with which he lived the
part he was playing, points to what I believe is
called dissociation. Towards the last. There seems to have been
a genuine duality of personality. During the day, Old Simon
Bethel dragging his helpless foot and without effort, holding his
(01:22):
withered hand to its spastic contraction. At night, the active
Cameron making his exits on his nocturnal adventures by the
gun room window, wandering a foot incredible distances, watching the
door of Gordon's room and locking him in, learning from
me of Holliday's interest in the case, and trying to
burn him out very early, realizing the embarrassment of my
own presence at the lodge, and warning me away by
that letter from Salem Ohio. It seems clear that he
(01:45):
had not expected me at the lodge. Larkin apparently told Gordon,
but Gordon neglected to inform him just what he felt.
What terror and anger when I greeted him at the
house on his arrival will never be known. I remember
now how he watched me wrapp at me through his
disguising spectacles, with the beef cube in his hand and waiting, waiting.
(02:06):
But the disguise held my own very slight acquaintance with him,
my near sightedness, my total lack of suspicion over in
his favor, and of the perfection of the disguise itself.
It is enough to say that Gordon apparently never suspected it.
He did suspect the paralysis. He moved his arm today,
he wrote once in the diary. He knows I saw it,
(02:26):
and he has watched me ever since. Takes very little
change in appearance beyond casual recognition. Halliday tells me the
idea is to take a few important points and substitute
their opposites. Take a man with partial paralysis, one side
of his face drops, you see, Well, he can't imitate that,
but he can put a fig in the other cheek
and raise it. Put hair on a bald headed man
(02:48):
and watch the change. And there are other things eyebrows. Now,
only once did I come anywhere near the truth, and
then it slipped past me, and I did not catch it.
That was on the night he sent for me, after
he had struck Gordon down. He was frightened that night.
We know now Gordon was suspicious, might even have gone
to the police, and that night he tested his disguise
(03:10):
and me. I have recorded the revolt I felt after
his attack on the Christian faith, and that I had
the feeling of having heard almost the same thing eons
ago I had heard the same thing from Cameron on
the first occasion of my meeting him. Much of the
explanation of that tragic summer becomes mere surmise. Naturally, there
is no surmise, however necessary, as regards Cameron's coming to
(03:33):
the Third Seance at my invitation. So far as he knew,
we still believed that Simon Bethel was dead, that our
circle so innocent, an appearance so naive, was a cleverly
devised trap, seems not to have occurred to him. My frankness,
the product of my ignorance, would probably have reassured a
man less driven by necessity than he was. But even
(03:53):
had he suspected something, I believe he would have come.
His other attempts to enter the house and secure the
manuscript had failed, and any day some bit of mischance,
a mouse behind a panel, a casual repair, and this
book of his with its characteristic phrasing, its references to
his earlier works, would be in the hands of the police.
With what secret eagerness he accepted my invitation? We can
(04:15):
only guess Haliday, carefully plotting, had already discounted his acceptance
in advance. I know he would come. Of course, he says,
he wanted to get in. We offered him not only that,
but darkness to cover any move he wanted to make.
It had to work out, And here she explained the
necessity of having the criminal caught flagrante de lictu. It
(04:36):
had to be shown. He says, not only that Cameron
had written the manuscript, but that it was he who
had hidden it where it lay the case against him
stutt or fowl by that, he says. But aside from this,
much of the explanation of that tragic summer becomes pure guesswork.
We have, however, elaborated the following as fulfilling our requirements
as to the situation. We know, for instance, that on
(04:57):
old Horace Porter's developing interest in spiritism, Missus Livingstone referred
to him to Cameron, But we do not know why
that interest developed. Is it too much I wonder to say?
That the house itself led him to it. In this
I know I am on dangerous ground, and it becomes
still more dangerous if one grants that Missus Livingstone's gift
of a red lamp led him to experimenting with it.
(05:18):
We do know, however, that after he had had this
lamp for three months or so, he got in touch
with Kimeron, and it seems probable that such experiments as
were made there at night with this lamp roused Kimeron
to fever heat. Missus Livingston believes there was a pact
between them, the usual one of the first to pass
over to come back if possible. We do not know that,
but it seems plausible. Neither Halliday nor I believe, however,
(05:40):
as she does. At Cameron killed the older man in
a fit of rage over the rejection of his proposal
to carry their investigations to the criminal point. What seems
more probable is that Chimeron had very early recognized the
advantages of the house for the psychic and scientific experiments
he had in mind, and that he finally submitted the
idea to Old Horace with what growing horror and indignation
they were received. We know from his letter they turned
(06:03):
a possible ally into an angry and dangerous enemy. The
rejection of the proposition with the threat which accompanied it,
left Kimeron stripped before the world as an enemy to society.
He went home and brooded over it, but he couldn't
let it rest at that Halliday says he went back
and the old man was at his desk. There was
danger in Cameron that night, and the poor old chap
(06:25):
was frightened. We'll say. He crumpled his letter up in
his hand and Cameron didn't see it. Maybe there was
an argument. Kimeron knocked him down, but he got up again,
and he managed to drop the letter into an open drawer.
After that his heart failed and he fell for good.
We acquit him of that of the others. We are
with regard to the underlying motive, the so called experiments
(06:46):
again obliged to resort to surmise. We know, for instance,
of Kimeron's early experiments in weighing the body before it
immediately after death. He has himself recorded to them, But
in the manuscript of his book he distinctly states his
belief that the vital prince, whatever that may be, is
weakened by long illness, and his belief that those who
pass over suddenly out of full health are more able
to manifest themselves. He quotes numerous instances of murdered men
(07:10):
whom tradition believes to have returned from motives of vengeance.
But he himself believes that this ability to return is
due to the strength of the unweakened vital principle, the
whole spirit, he calls it. And although his manuscript in
itself does not deal with any discoveries he may have
made during the summer, there are accompanying at certain pages
of figures which seemed to prove that he made more
than one experiment along those lines during his occupancy of
(07:30):
the house. What waifs and strace he picked up on
those night journeys of his we do not know. Poor
wanderers probably, but no place in the world from which
they could be missed. At the same time, Howada feels
that the experiments were not necessarily to be with life
and death. He suggests that they were to lie rather
in deep narcosis pushed to the danger point, and that
it was under this narcosis that Maggie Morrison, for one,
(07:53):
succumbed Among Cameron's papers. Later on we found a curious
document entitled the Reality of the Soul through a Study
of the efects of Chloroform and corrari on the Animal Economy,
with this note in Cameron's hand, a.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Saw and the body are separated by the agency of anesthesia.
The saul was not a breath, but an entity of
the nature of the further tests made. We have no
idea Howiday believes that shown the space behind the wall
by Horace Porter, he later utilized it to conceal such
apparatus as he used in his experiments. It seemed to
be full of stuff, he says, the night I found it,
(08:28):
but later on, as the chase narrowed, he got rid
of it bit by bit at night, probably throwing it
into the bay. This is borne out by the fact
that late that following autumn, going back to Twin Hollows
to look over the property with the real estate dealer,
I found washed up on the beach the battered fragments.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Of a camera. Only a portion of the lens remained
in the frame. But this lens had been of quartz.
As nearly as I can discover. The theory of quartz
used in such a manner is to photograph the ultra violet.
In other words, I dare say, to make visible that
strange world which may lie beyond spectrum in our normal vision.
Did he obtain anything? We shall never know. But sometimes
(09:04):
I wonder. Suppose a man to have done what he
had done to prove the immortality of the soul, to
have taken lives and have risked his own to give
to the world's survival after death, It so pathetically craves
and he fails. There is nothing his own conviction has
not weakened, but his proofs are not there. Then in
the twinkling of an eye, he himself breaks through the veil,
(09:24):
with that idea dominant. He passes over to the other side,
perhaps to the long sleep, perhaps not, But in that instance,
between waking and sleeping, to prove his point, to make
good his contention, to justify his course, I wonder, and
I wonder too if at that moment of realization supreme
irony of the situation could have occurred to him that
the wounded hand, the one injury poor Gordon had managed
(09:47):
to inflict on him, was the factor which had shot him,
had foremost into eternity, was Kimberon or sheep killer. We
believe so with certain reservations. We know he was at
Basque Cove under an assumed name at the time, probably
looking over the ground. At the same time. It seems
unlikely that he killed the first blot of Nielly's sheep,
that we believe was an act of revenge on the
(10:07):
part of a man night he had recently discharged, but
that the idea seized on his imagination seems probable. He
was planning that mad campaign of his, and it fell
in well with what was to come. It prepared the
neighborhood in a sense, but it set them looking for
a maniac with a religious mania, and it was an
effective alibi for him, occurring before his arrival at the house.
(10:28):
Jane's always believed that he added the symbol and chalk
deliberately to incriminate me. I do not he added it
after Helen a leir had told him of it, as
he added the stone altar. A madman's conception of a
madman's act. Kearraway's murder was incidental for that preparation of his,
But in view of all we know, we can reconstruct
it fairly well. Thus we have the boy tiring of
(10:49):
carrying his rifle, putting it away in the darkness, and
possibly dozing. We have the appearance of the killer and Karraway,
unable to look at his rifle, quickly following him to
the waterfront and reaching it too late underneath our float.
The killer should have found his knife, but as we know,
Holiday had taken it away. They were two unarmed men then,
who met that night on the quiet surface of the bay,
(11:10):
and one of them, although nobody knew it, was not sane,
unarmed only in one sense, however, for Cameron had an
oar and used it. When it was over, He apparently
rode back quietly to the creek beyond Robinson's Point, left
his boat there, and walked to Bass Cove. The proprietor
of the small hotel there seems never to have known
that he was out at night. He was a very
(11:31):
quiet gentleman, he says, and always went to better ely.
One thing which had puzzled us in the Morrison case
was that the girl had stopped her truck at a
time when the nerves of the countryside were on edge.
It seems probable, therefore, that on some nights at least
it was not the square, muscular Cameron who went forth,
but an old and crippled man shown to her. But
(11:52):
the lightning flashes that night, aged infirmity by the roadside,
and a storm going What wonder that she stopped? The
only marvel is that this bate, having proven successful, it
does not appear to have been used again, and now
postponed as I may, I have come to that portion
of our summer to which I have early referred as
the X in our equation. We have solved our problem,
(12:13):
we may say, quite properly quaderrat demndstrandum. But there remains
still the unsolved factor. Much that impressed me strongly at
the time has lost its impression. Now it is a
curious fact that a man may see a ghost at
many believe that they have done so without any lasting
belief in so called survival after death. And so it
is with me. On editing my journal, however, I find
(12:35):
myself confroning the same questions which confronted me during that
terrible summer. Have I a body? Or is my body
all there is of me? In other words, am I
an intelligence served by certain physical organs? Or am I
certain physical organs actuated by an intelligence as temporary as they.
Frankly I do not know. But any careful analysis of
(12:56):
the extra normal phenomena of the summer seems to show
every so often some other world in colligence struggling to
get through to us, as though we have never had,
as I have said, any explanation of the coming of
the book during the second seance, nor the sounds from
the library. While much of the physical phenomena of the
first two sciences was deliberately engineered by Missus Livingstone in
pursuance of Holliday's planned to get Kimeron into the house,
(13:18):
these two things remain without explanation. The same thing is
true of my finding of the letter, of the lighthouse apparition,
of the sitting at Evanstone, and of Jane's clairvoyant visions,
none of which, by the way, she has had since,
and yet all of which had their part, large or
small in our solving and understanding of the crimes. Peter
geissened the figure in the fore rigging of the sloop
(13:40):
my own vision of Kmeron at the foot of the stairs,
when he lay dead behind the panel. What am I
to say of these? Am I to accept them? As
I do Jane's vision without eyes as no more extraordinary
than the feats of somnambulists who go through their curious
Netley progressed with closed eyelids. Am I to accept them,
refute them, or evade them. There are, however, certain incidents which,
(14:02):
puzzling as they were at the time, lend themselves to
very simple explanation. Among these are the cough I heard
more than once, and Hadley's story of the materialization in
the Oakvale Cemetery. Throughout Gordon's diary here and there were
the letters S and g T. There was also in
one place a sentence which translated became the GP stuff
went great last night. Howaday believes that Gordon was what
(14:25):
we know what's a medium, and that it was in
that capacity primarily that Cameron took him to the country.
The S he therefore translates as sitting and the GT
as genuine tRNS. After the g T there almost invariably
follows the rather pathetic entry we all written today or ah.
In Hadley's ghost then, in all probability, was a secretary
(14:47):
securing data for the sittings, which he so carefully differentiates
from the knights. When he went into genuine trnts, being
honest with himself, poor boy, and honest nowhere else. And
the same was no doubt true as to the dry
cough which you acticed on me the night I was
in the garage, almost to my undoing. It was during
those sittings, too, almost certainly, that under pretended control from beyond,
(15:09):
he began to ferret out, with the cunning of his kind,
the story underneath, to bring back Horace Porter, and watch
the reaction, to mention the boat he had discovered, and
see the men cross from him in the dim red light,
twitch and tremble, to play him, to fool him, and
at the last to threaten and blackmail him, and in
the end to die. But there remain these things I
(15:30):
cannot explain. One of the most curious is the herbal
odor that this was not a purely subjective impression, as
shown by the fact that both Hayward and Edith noticed
it during the second seance. The scent of flowers is,
I believe, not unusual during certain psychic experiments. Warren speaks
of the impression of trouberses being waved before him in
the dark by some ghostly hand. Of this as of
(15:52):
the other inexplicable phenomena. I can only say that at
the time I did not doubt them, leaving them again
as I prepared this manuscript, I accept them once more,
but I do not explain them. You wish, said Cicero,
to have the explanation of these things very well. I
might tell you that the magnet is a body which
attracts iron and attaches itself to it. But because I
(16:15):
could not give you the explanation of it, would you
deny it? In closing this record, I cannot do better
than copy the following extract from my journal made the
following June June first, nineteen twenty three. Our little Edith
was married to Day hey Ho, and again, hey Ho,
I have done the proper thing, let her up the
(16:35):
aisle to Halliday, and would as leaf have knocked him down,
as not stepped back out of the picture on her life,
and feeling for my handkerchief like the besotted old fool,
I am pulled out a washcloth instead. Fortunate perhaps, as
I was on the verge of loud and broken sobs.
How we begrudge the happiness of others when it is
at our expense? How I hated holiday when once in
(16:57):
the house, he put his arms round to it, halter
her close, however, resented that calm air of possession with
which he took its place in the line beside her,
and shook hands smilingly with the hysterical crowd that kissed
and blessed them on the way to the dining room
and food. And yet how happy they are, and how
safe she is my wife, he said, forever and ever amen,
(17:19):
old glass and new glass, china, silver and linen, the
leader's kindlesticks, every corner of the house, filled with guests
and gifts and jock, And for the two of them,
nothing and nobody, just a space filled with shadows which
smiled and passed themselves. The only reality, and perhaps they are.
Love at least is real, the one reality. Perhaps quote
(17:42):
love Thou art absolute, sole lord of life and death
close quote So they have gone, and to night, Jane
and I are alone, safe and quiet and alone, alas
behind the drain pipe. Hey ho. The end end of
section twe End of the Red Lamp by Mary Roberts Reinhardt,
(18:04):
read by Zack Hoyt in Orwell, New York, twenty twenty one.
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