hat had gone out of it. Then too,
we had spoken to him in advance of our quest; and I felt after my
uncle's going that he would understand and assist me in some vitally
necessary public explanations. He turned very pale, but agreed to help
me, and decided that it would now be safe to rent the house.

To declare that we were not nervous on that rainy night of watching
would be an exaggeration both gross and ridiculous. We were not, as I
have said, in any sense childishly superstitious, but scientific study
and reflection had taught us that the known universe of three dimensions
embraces the merest fraction of the whole cosmos of substance and
energy. In this case an overwhelming preponderance of evidence from
numerous authentic sources pointed to the tenacious existence of certain
forces of great power and, so far as the human point of view is
concerned, exceptional malignancy. To say that we actually believed in
vampires or werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive statement. Rather
must it be said that we were not prepared to deny the possibility of
certain unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital force and
attenuated matter; existing very infrequently in three-dimensional space
because of its more intimate connection with other spatial units, yet
close enough to the boundary of our own to furnish us occasional
manifestations which we, for lack of a proper vantage-point, may never
hope to understand.

In short, it seemed to my uncle and me that an incontrovertible array
of facts pointed to some lingering influence in the shunned house;
traceable to one or another of the ill-favored French settlers of two
centuries before, and still operative through rare and unknown laws of
atomic and electronic motion. That the family of Roulet had possessed an
abnormal affinity for outer circles of entity--dark spheres which for
normal folk hold only repulsion and terror--their recorded history
seemed to prove. Had not, then, the riots of those bygone
seventeen-thirties set moving certain kinetic patterns in the morbid
brain of one or more of them--notably the sinister Paul Roulet--which
obscurely survived the bodies murdered and buried by the mob, and
continued to function in some multiple-dimensioned space along the
original lines of force determined by a frantic hatred of the
encroaching community?

Such a thing was surely not a physical or biochemical impossibility in
the light of a newer science which includes the