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yes! Angna went into trance sitting just where you are, her entire body dusted with a special powder, the
tracks and distant smudges of which later revealed the ectoplasm s movements and origin chiefly in
the genital area. The test was conclusive and led to further researches, very interesting and quite
revolutionary, none of which I have published; my professional colleagues froth at the mouth,
elaborating an opposite sort of foam, whenever I mix the psychic with psychoanalysis they seem to
forget that hypnotism gave Freud his start and that for a time the man was keen on cocaine. Yes indeed,
an historic chair.
I naturally looked down at it and for a moment I thought I had vanished, because I couldn t see my legs.
Then I realized that the upholstery had changed to a dark gray exactly matching my suit except for the
ends of the arms, which merged by fine gradations into a sallow hue which blotted out my hands.
 I should have warned you that it s now upholstered in chameleon plastic, Slyker said with a grin.  It
changes color to suit the sitter. The fabric was supplied me over a year ago by Henri Artois, the
French dilettante chemist. So the chair has been many shades: dead black when Mrs. Fairlee you recall
the case? came to tell me she had just put on mourning and then shot her bandleader husband, a
charming Florida tan during the later experiments with Angna. It helps my patients forget themselves
when they re free-associating and it amuses some people.
I wasn t one of them, but I managed a smile I hoped wasn t too sour. I told myself to stick to business
Evelyn Cordew s and Jeff Grain s business. I must forget the chair and other incidentals, and
concentrate on Dr. Emil Slyker and what he was saying for I have by no means given all of his
remarks, only the more important asides. He had turned out to be the sort of conversationalist who will
talk for two hours solid, then when you have barely started your reply, give you a hurt look and say,
 Excuse me, but if I can get a word in edgewise  and talk for two hours more. The liquor may have
been helping, but I doubt it. When we had left the Countersign Club he had started to tell me the stories
of three of his female clients a surgeon s wife, an aging star scared by a comeback opportunity, and a
college girl in trouble and the presence of the bodyguard hadn t made him hold back on gory details.
Now, sitting at his desk and playing with the catch of a file drawer as if wondering whether to open it, he
had got to the point where the surgeon s wife had arrived at the operating theater early one morning to
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publish her infidelities, the star had stabbed her press agent with the wardrobe mistress scissors, and the
college girl had fallen in love with her abortionist. He had the conversation-hogger s trick of keeping a
half dozen topics in the air at once and weaving back and forth between them without finishing any.
And of course he was a male tantalizer. Now he whipped open the file drawer and scooped out some
folders and then held them against his belly and watched me as if to ask himself,  Should I?
After a maximum pause to build suspense he decided he should, and so I began to hear the story of Dr.
Emu Slyker s girls, not the first three, of course they had to stay frozen at their climaxes unless their
folders turned up but others.
I wouldn t be telling the truth if I didn t admit it was a let-down. Here I was expecting I don t know
what from his desk and all I got was the usual glimpses into childhood s garden of father-fixation and
sibling rivalry and the bed-changing Sturm und Drang of later adolescence. The folders seemed to hold
nothing but conventional medico-psychiatric case histories, along with physical measurements and other
details of appearance, unusually penetrating precis of each client s financial resources, occasional notes
on possible psychic gifts and other extrasensory talents, and maybe some candid snapshots, judging
from the way he d sometimes pause to study appreciatively and then raise his eyebrows at me with a
smile. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]