an
of singularly atrocious life and character who finally suffered death by
hanging, after a series of crimes that appalled the whole of England and
only came to light by the merest chance. She came to her end in the year
1798, for it was not this particular house she lived in, but a much
larger one that then stood upon the site it now occupies, and was then,
of course, not in London, but in the country. She was a person of
intellect, possessed of a powerful, trained will, and of consummate
audacity, and I am convinced availed herself of the resources of the
lower magic to attain her ends. This goes far to explain the virulence
of the attack upon yourself, and why she is still able to carry on after
death the evil practices that formed her main purpose during life."

"You think that after death a soul can still consciously direct--"
gasped the author.

"I think, as I told you before, that the forces of a powerful
personality may still persist after death in the line of their original
momentum," replied the doctor; "and that strong thoughts and purposes
can still react upon suitably prepared brains long after their
originators have passed away.

"If you knew anything of magic," he pursued, "you would know that
thought is dynamic, and that it may call into existence forms and
pictures that may well exist for hundreds of years. For, not far removed
from the region of our human life is another region where float the
waste and drift of all the centuries, the limbo of the shells of the
dead; a densely populated region crammed with horror and abomination of
all descriptions, and sometimes galvanised into active life again by the
will of a trained manipulator, a mind versed in the practices of lower
magic. That this woman understood its vile commerce, I am persuaded,
and the forces she set going during her life have simply been
accumulating ever since, and would have continued to do so had they not
been drawn down upon yourself, and afterwards discharged and satisfied
through me.

"Anything might have brought down the attack, for, besides drugs, there
are certain violent emotions, certain moods of the soul, certain
spiritual fevers, if I may so call them, which directly open the inner
being to a cognisance of this astral region I have mentioned. In your
case it happened to be a peculiarly potent drug that did it.

"But now, tell me," he added, after a pause, handing to the perplexed
author a pencil drawing he had made of