Then suddenly, he seemed to hear a girl’s voice beside him:
“Oh, what a darling little cat! What’s its name?”
“Smokeball,” he said, without thinking. “She’s about the color of a shrapnel-burst. …” Then he stopped short, looking about. There was nobody in sight, and he realized that the voice had been inside his head rather than in his ear.
“What the devil?” he asked himself. “Am I going nuts?”
There was a happy little laugh inside of him, like bubbles rising in a glass of champagne.
“Oh, no; I’m really here,” the voice, inaudible but mentally present, assured him. “You can’t see me, or touch me, or even really hear me, but I’m not something you just imagined. I’m just as real as … as Smokeball, there. Only I’m a different kind of reality. Watch.”
The voice stopped, and something that had seemed to be close to him left him. Immediately, the kitten stopped playing with the crumpled paper and cocked her head to one side, staring fixedly as at something above her. He’d seen cats do that before—stare wide-eyed and entranced, as though at something wonderful which was hidden from human eyes. Then, still looking up and to the side, Smokeball trotted over and jumped onto his lap, but even as he stroked her, she was looking at an invisible something beside him. At the same time, he had a warm and pleasant feeling, as of a happy and affectionate presence near him.
“No,” he said, slowly and judicially. “That’s not just my imagination. But who—or what—are you?”
“I’m. … Oh, I don’t know how to think it so that you’ll understand.” The voice inside his head seemed baffled, like a physicist trying to explain atomic energy to a Hottentot. “I’m not material. If you can imagine a mind that doesn’t need a brain to think with. … Oh, I can’t explain it now! But when I’m talking to you, like this, I’m really thinking inside your brain, along with your own mind, and you hear the words without there being any sound. And you just don’t know any words that would express it.”
He had never thought much, one way or another, about spiritualism. There had been old people, when he had been a boy, who had told stories of ghosts and apparitions, with the firmest conviction that they were true. And there had been an Irishman, in his old company in the Philippines, who swore that the ghost of a dead comrade walked post with him when he was on guard.
“Are you a spirit?” he asked. “I mean, somebody who once lived in a body, like me?”
“N-no.” The voice inside him seemed doubtful. “That is, I don’t think so. I know about spirits; they’re all around, everywhere. But I don’t think I’m one. At least, I’ve always been like I am now, as long as I can remember. Most spirits don’t seem to sense me. I can’t reach most living people, either; their minds are closed to me, or they have such disgusting minds I can’t bear to touch them. Children are open to me, but when they tell their parents about me, they are laughed at, or punished for lying, and then they close up against me. You’re the first grown-up person I’ve been able to reach for a long time.”
“Probably getting into my second childhood,” Colonel Hampton grunted.
“Oh, but you mustn’t be ashamed of that!” the invisible entity told him. “That’s the beginning of real wisdom—becoming childlike again. One of your religious teachers said something like that, long ago, and a long time before that, there was a Chinaman whom people called Venerable Child, because his wisdom had turned back again to a child’s simplicity.”
“That was Lao Tze,” Colonel Hampton said, a little surprised. “Don’t tell me you’ve been around that long.”
“Oh, but I have! Longer than that; oh, for very long.” And yet the voice he seemed to be hearing was the voice of a young girl. “You don’t mind my coming to talk to you?” it continued. “I get so lonely, so dreadfully lonely, you see.”
“Urmh! So do I,” Colonel Hampton admitted. “I’m probably going bats, but what the hell? It’s a nice way to go bats, I’ll say that. … Stick around; whoever you are, and let’s get acquainted. I sort of like you.”
A feeling of warmth suffused him, as though he had been hugged by someone young and happy and loving.
“Oh, I’m glad. I like you, too; you’re nice!”
“Yes, of course.” Doctor Vehrner nodded sagely. “That is a schizoid tendency; the flight from reality into a dreamworld peopled by creatures of the imagination. You understand, there is usually a mixture of psychotic conditions, in cases like this. We will say that this case begins with simple senile dementia—physical brain degeneration, a result of advanced age. Then the paranoid symptoms appear; he imagines himself surrounded by envious enemies, who are conspiring against him. The patient then withdraws into himself, and in his self-imposed isolation, he conjures up imaginary companionship. I have no doubt. …”
In the beginning, he had suspected that this unseen visitor was no more than a figment of his own lonely imagination, but as the days passed, this suspicion vanished. Whatever this entity might be, an entity it was, entirely distinct from his own conscious or subconscious mind.
At first she—he had early come to think of the being as feminine—had seemed timid, fearful lest her intrusions into his mind prove a nuisance. It took some time for him to assure her that she was always welcome. With time, too, his impression of her grew stronger and
