“YOU will have to go, Barbour,” said Moore heavily. “I am sorry, but there are occasions when Alicia must be humored. This seems to be one of them. Unfortunate. Very — unfortunate. Perhaps another time-”

He paused and glanced suggestively toward the door.

All the while that they had argued and quarreled over me, I had sat as apparently passive as the clay figure to which I had once compared Alicia. It was, however, the passivity not of inertia, but of high-keyed endurance. What Alicia felt I don’t know. If it was anything like the strain I suffered under, I can’t wonder that she wished to be rid of me.

“Another time,” said Moore, and looked toward the door.

I rose. Instantly Berquist was beside me. He took my arm — tried to draw me away — out of the room.

I shook him off. When I moved it was toward Alicia. Before either Moore or Nils realized my objective, I was halfway around the table. Alicia, her eyes still closed, moaned softly. She cried out, and thrust forth her hands in a resisting motion:

“Stop!”

That was Moore’s voice; but it was not for his sharp command that I halted. There was — it was as if a wall had risen between Alicia and me. Or as, if her out-stretched hands were against my chest, holding me back. Yet there was a space of at least two yards between us.

“What do you want, Barbour?” demanded’ Moore roughly. “I said you would have to go!”

“I wish,” I forced out, “to make her undo what she has done to me!”

“Then I was right!” cried Berquist indignantly.

I stood still, swept by wave upon wave of the force that willed to absorb me. The past weeks had trained me for such a struggle. Though the face of the Fifth Presence remained invisible, its identity with the intangible power I fought was clear enough to me — and I hated the face! I repulsed the enveloping consciousness of it as one strives to fling off a loathsome caress.

While I stood there, blind, silent, at war, Berquist continued:

“Now I know that I was right! Jimmy, you have let this boy suffer in some way that I neither understand nor wish wholly to understand. But believe me, you’ll answer for it. Clay, lad, come away. You are courting disaster here. Alicia can’t help you. She is a poor slave and tool for any force that would use her. Why, the very atmosphere of this house is contagious. Psychic. Many people are immune. Moore is immune. But I tell you, there has been more than one time when I have resolutely shut my senses against the influence, or Alicia would have dragged me into her own field of abnormal and accursed perceptiveness. It’s because I resist that they won’t have me at a seance. Come away!”

“No!” They could not guess, of course that I spoke from out a swimming darkness, slashed with streaks of scarlet. “No!” I muttered again. “This woman here — she can help me. She shall help me! Moore, I’ll wring your neck if you don’t make her help me.”

Through the swimming scarlet-slashed gloom I drove forward another step. Came a rush of motion. There was a vast, muffled sound as of beating wings. A trumpet-like, voice cried out loudly: “I’ll settle with you once for all!” it shouted. And then something had thrust in between Alicia and me.

Instantly the gloom lifted.

There at my right hand was the large table, with the shaded lamp and the boots and papers strewn over it. To my left the massive, empty chair in which Alicia was wont to be imprisoned during a seance.

Beyond that hung the straight, black folds of the curtains which concealed the cabinet.

Though I turned my head to neither side, I saw all these things as though looking directly at them. And also, with even more unusual distinctness, I saw what was straight ahead of me.

Between me and Alicia the figure of a man had sprung into sudden existence. In no way did this figure suggest the ghostly form one might expect from what is called “materialization.” The man was real — solid.

He was of stocky, but not very powerful build. He was dressed in gray. His face — ah! Only once before had I seen this man’s face with open gaze. But many times it had haunted my closed lids!

Smooth, boyish, pleasant, with smiling lips and clear, light-blue eyes — my own eyes, save that the amused gleam in them did not express a boy’s unsophisticated humor.

Not a bodiless face this time, afloat in mid-air or lurking behind my lids. This was the man himself — the whole, solid, flesh-and-blood man!

I could not doubt that he was real. His hand caught my arm — roughly for all that amiable gentleness the face expressed. I felt the clutching fingers tight and heavy. He clutched and at the same time smiled, sweetly, amusedly. Clutched and smiled.

“Serapion!” I whispered. And “Serapion!”

His smile grew a trifle brighter. His clutch tightened. But I was no longer afraid of him. The very strain I had been under flung me suddenly to a height of exalted courage. Instinctive loathing climaxed in rebellion.

He clasped my left arm tight. My right was free. I had no weapon, but caught up from the table a thing that served as one.

And even as I did it, that clear side vision I have referred to beheld a singular happening. As my head grew hot with a rush of exultant blood, something came flying out through the curtains of the cabinet.

It was bright scarlet in color, and about the size of a pigeon or small hawk. I am not sure that it had the shape of a bird. The size and the peculiarly brilliant scarlet of it are all I am sure of.

This red thing flashed out of the cabinet, darted across the room, passing chest-high through the narrow space between the suddenly — embodied Fifth Presence and myself and vanished.

I heard Alicia crying: “Bad — bad! It has come!”

And then, in all the young strength of my right arm, I struck at the Fifth Presence. My aim was the face I hated. The weapon — a queer enough one, but efficient, sank deep, deep-buried half its length in one of those smiling, light-blue eyes.

He let go my arm and dashed his hand to his face. The weapon remained in the wound. From around it, even before my victim fell, blood gushed out — scarlet — scarlet. Below the edge of his clutching hand that would clutch me no more I could see his mouth, and — Heaven help me! — the lips of it smiled — still.

Then he had writhed and crumpled down in a loose gray heap at my feet.

“Barbour! For mercy’s sake!”

The man I struck had sunk without a sound. That hoarse, harsh shout came from Nils. Next instant his powerful arm sent me spinning half across the room. I didn’t care. He dropped to his knees. When he tried to straighten the gray heap, his hands were instantly bright with the grim color that had been the flying scarlet things.

But I didn’t care!

I had killed him — it! The Fifth Presence had dared embody itself in flesh and I had slain it!

Nils had the body straight now, face upward. The light of the lamp beat down. Creeping tiptoe, I came to peer over Nils’ shoulder. The lips. Did they still smile?

Then —

But there is an extremity of feeling with which words are inadequate to deal. Leave my emotions and let me state here bare facts.

The gray suit in which I had seen the Fifth Presence clothed was the same faintly checked light suit I had wondered at Moore’s wearing in November.

And the face there in the lamplight, contorted, ashen, blood-smeared, was the face of James Barton Moore!

Though I had a few obscure after memories of loud talking, of blue uniforms that crowded in around me, of going downstairs and out into open air, of being pushed into a clumsy vehicle of some kind, and of interminable riding through a night cold and sharply white with snow, all the real consciousness of me hovered in a timeless, spaceless agony, whereby it could neither reason nor take right account of these impressions.

Thrust in a cell at last, I must have lain down and, from pure weariness of pain, fallen asleep. Shortly after dawn, however, I awoke to a dreary, clear-headed cognizance of facts. I knew I had killed.

When I threatened, Moore had sprung in between me and his wife, intending, no doubt with that hot temper of his, to put me violently from the house. His physical intervention had stocked me out of the shadows, then rapidly closing in, and the Fifth Presence had chosen that opportunity for its most ghastly trick.

The face I had struck at was a wraith — a vision. My weapon — one of those paper files that are made with a heavy bronze base and an upright, murderously sharp-pointed rod — had gone home in the real face behind. Instead of slaying an embodied ghost — a madman’s dream — I had murdered a living man!

Last night the killing and the atrocious manner of it had been enough. This morning, thought had a wider scope. I perceived that the isolated horror of the act itself was less than all. I must now take up the heavy burden of consequences.

The hard bed on which I lay, the narrow walls and the bars that encompassed me — these were symbols by which I foreread my fate.

I, Clayton Barbour, was a murderer. In that gray, early clear-headedness I made no bones about the word or fact.

True, I had been tricked, trapped into murder; but who would believe that? Alicia — perhaps. And how would Alicia’s weird testimony be received in a court of justice, even should she prove willing to give it?

I perceived that I was finished — done for. Life as I was familiar with it had already ended, and the short, ugly course that remained to be run would end soon enough.

Then for the first time I learned what the love of life is. Life — not as consciousness, nor a state of being, nor a thought; but the warm, precious thing we are born to and carry lightly till the time of its loss is upon us.

Afterward? What were dim afterwards to me? Grant that I, of all men, had reason to know that the dying body cast forth its spirit as a persistent entity. Grant that the shadow of ourselves survived the flesh. That was not life!

Let me grow old in life, till its vital flood ran low, and its blood thinned, and its flesh shriveled, and weariness came to release me from desire, Then, perhaps, I should be glad of that leap into the cold world of shadows. Now — now — I was young.

The injustice of it! I sprang up, driven to express revolt in action. For lack of a better outlet, I beat with closed fists against the wall — the bars. A lumpish, besotted creature in the cell next to mine roused and snarled like a beast at the noise.

Presently one of the keepers came tramping along the narrow alley between wall and cages.

I had retreated a little from the bars. I was not sure how this warder would look at me, a murderer. My new character was strange to me. Instinctively I shrank from being seen in it.

He peered through.

“C’m here!” he hissed softly. Puzzled, I moved nearer. “Take this!”

Then I saw that through one of the square apertures of cross-grating a folded bit of paper had been thrust. I drew it through to my side, though with no notion of what it could be. The man drew off again.

“I’ll see that ya get some coffee, Barbour,” he said, in a loud, offhand voice. “Morning, Mike! Early, ain’t ya?” He turned to me again. “This here’s Mike Megonigle. Slip him a dollar fer me as ya pass out, an’ then ya won’t owe me nothin’.”

A red-faced, bull-necked individual had tramped into view. He............