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gingerly (she was afraid of heights) and seemed to be talking to someone
there, though she was alone. Then she seemed to stumble (it was almost as if
she were pushed by invisible hands), and she fell to her screaming death from
the veranda of the forty-ninth-floor Penthouse Club.
She was utterly smashed in the street below. But many observers,
including myself, will swear that her scream was repeated in the high air
again and again for several minutes after her horrifying death.
Naturally, considering the close friendship of Miss Aster with the
people of this station and her frequent appearances here, her violent death of
only thirteen minutes before was the main topic on our ten-o'clock news last
night. But it was at ten twenty-seven, almost at the end of the news program,
that something almost more shocking than Evangeline's death took place.
Evangeline walked into our studio and onto camera, alive and sparkling.
Or it seemed as if she did. Something walked into the studio, possibly alive
in a gaudy way, and sparkling in a funky manner. And, at first, it looked like
Evangeline. I myself had no doubt that it was herself -- not for ten seconds
or so.
"The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated," she said. "Oh
isn't there any way to update that line? Surely a lot of fuss has been made
about an imposter. It is not I who have died, as all of you can see. Here I
am, more sparkling and radiant than ever!"
But then something went out of the apparition. It became not Evangeline
Aster, but a horrible and revolting caricature of her. What was it? What was
it? It was alive. It walked and it talked. And then it staggered and
whimpered.
"She tried to push me off," the apparition whined. "That's what scared
me. I didn't think she'd do that to me."
We closed the station down then and got the horrible situation off of
camera.
But the horrible situation has been examined all through the night, from
that hour to this, and soon there will be nothing of her left to examine. The
horrible situation has been examined by a cosmologist, a meteorologist, a
physician, and by a para-psychologist. The walking and talking apparition was,
by every basic test, Evangeline Aster. And yet it wasn't Evangeline as solidly
as was the dead body that was in police morgue. But the apparition even had
the fingerprints of Evangeline except that, ah -- change of subject.
"The weather has been good for eidolons for more than a week now," the
meteorologist said. "Rarely is the weather good for them; most of the time it
is no good for them at all. We weathermen believe that they (eidolons,
fragments, splinters, ghosts, they are sometimes called) are always present.
But most of the time they cannot be seen or heard. And in times of very
special weather they can be."
"No, it isn't alive," the physician said. "It is apparently an echo or a
mirage. It is associated with a certain amount of matter, but it's a loose and
perhaps accidental association. No, there's nothing here. It's all illusion."
"Oh it's plain enough," the parapsychologist said. "It's a 'clearly
manifest psychic splinter,' presently impaired by the destruction of its
primary. Psychic splinters are so ordinary that they are almost the rule.
They're personality fragments, no more than that. They are 'partially manifest
psychic splinters' when they are poltergeists or other ghosts or presences.
But a 'clearly manifest psychic splinter' like this one isn't encountered
often. I'd like to study her for a long time, but there's only a couple of
minutes left for it.
"There has been something going on around town lately that is almost
like a burlesque of my own work, and she's part of it," added the great
parapsychologist Dr. Otto Pankration.
"A lot of me went with her when she went," the apparition said. "It was
like turning out the light in me. She tried to throw me off the parapet. How
damned inconsiderate of her anyhow! She told me one thing: 'Keep screaming,
keep screaming.' Oh I'd forgot that she told me that. I kept it up for a while
and then I stopped. I'll start again."
"It is pseudo-organic," the cosmologist said. "It is mostly made of
glycerin and it is evaporating. Ah glycerin, like we used to put in the
soap-bubble mixture. No, there's really nothing to her, gentlemen."
"She tried to throw me off the parapet, but I threw her off instead,"
the apparition said. "I thought that was kind of a joke on her. But she told
me to keep screaming on my way down, and I'm on my way down now. I forgot, and
I stopped screaming. But I'll start again now."
The apparition has disappeared. It had become an absolutely horrifying
caricature of Evangeline at the moment of its disappearance.
But the screaming continues, continues, continues
"How long?" we asked.
"No telling," the parapsychologist said. "It!s become immaterial now,
and there is no way you can make an immaterial entity shut up, particularly if
it is obsessed by a single idea or instruction. The Hollbecker phantom in
Germany has been screaming for fifty years now, but nobody pays any attention [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]