Stubbornly, however, and against my own best judgement,
I refused. Instead, I paused, cleared my throat and spoke. "Good evening," I said. The fat woman did not reply; she did not seem to have heard me. Possibly, I reasoned, in addition to having weak eyes, she was also
hard of hearing. I moved a few steps up the front walk and nodded. "Good evening," I
repeated, loudly. Then I blinked in astonishment. The wicker chair was empty! I stopped
dead and stared at it. Momentarily I had glanced down at the walk to
make sure that I would not stumble over debris; in those scant seconds
the fat woman must have vacated her chair and slipped inside. I marveled. For one of her bulk, she moved with amazing agility. Turning, I went back to the sidewalk and started on. I supposed
that the woman was self-conscious about her continued occupancy in
the condemned house and had gone inside to avoid any necessity of
discussing it with a stranger. As I walked away, I glanced back. Once again I saw light glitter on
those thick-lensed glasses; the fat woman was back in her wicker chair. Something more than the swirling mist made me shudder. Frowning, I
hurried on. It was late, I told myself, and I had better leave these
ruined, mist-shrouded streets and go home to a good cup of hot tea. I walked rapidly, but I could not resist looking at the vacant houses I
passed. Suddenly I stopped. My heart began pounding. An icy gush of fear made
my scalp tingle. Wide-eyed, mouth agape, I gazed through that tenuous
wall of mist and felt that reason and sanity were leaving me. Nearly half of those smashed and deserted houses all at once were
occupied. I saw pale sad faces peering from a dozen different windows. Dim, mist-circled figures sat on some of the porches. An old man,
twisted with some arthritic malady, worked feebly in a tiny front
garden. A middle-aged woman, white as death, but with a kind of
hopeless fury stamped on her face, stood glaring near a broken gate. Worse than these were other sights. I saw a rocker moving to-and-fro
on a porch, although there was no one in it. I saw a claw-like hand,
tapering to a vague sleeve which in turn raveled away to nothingness,
clutching the brick side of a building. In the rear garden of a
half-destroyed house I glimpsed what appeared to be the disembodied
head of a woman in a big straw hat drifting slowly above the matted
tangle of a neglected flower plot. I felt the clutch of near madness. I no longer had any faint desire
to linger and look. Flight, immediate and imperative, became my only
object. I rushed wildly through those forsaken, yet-not-forsaken streets
with fear like a hound at my heels. I ran till my heart thumped and
dizziness overcame me. At last, away from that accursed area of peering
white faces, of clinging mist and strange pregnant silence, I collapsed
in a doorway. Hours afterward I reached home and fell into bed. For days I was ill.
My heart had been strained anew and in addition I manifested pleuritic
symptoms. As I lay in bed, I brooded over my weird experience on that
street of silent houses. I told myself that my eyes, inflamed and
super-sensitive, had played tricks on me, that the drifting fog plus my
own imagination had been at fault. But weeks later when I related my adventure to my psychic-investigator
friend, Lucius Leffing, he shook his head at my explanations. "I am firmly convinced," he told me, "that neither your inflamed eyes
nor your imagination conjured up the phantoms which you describe. "As I wrote you recently, it is inconceivable to me that any person of
reasonable perception and sensitivity could pass a long period of his
life in a specific habitation without leaving something of himself,
impregnated as it were, in the very stones, wood and mortar of the
place. "What you saw were the psychic residues of the poor vanished souls
who, in the aggregate, had spent hundreds of years in those condemned
houses. Their psychic remnants were still clinging to the only earthly
anchors that remained, and already, as you relate, some of them had
dwindled and faded to mere detached fragments."