“I can’t give you the mechanical details now; not till we’ve had time to take the joint apart. It’s going to be interesting. I saw some of their work—mingled right in with it—a ghost made by an arrangement of lights thrown up on steam rising from a padded pipe that had been pushed into a dark room through a concealed opening in the wainscoating under a bed. The part of the steam that wasn’t lighted was invisible in the darkness, showing only a man-shape that quivered and writhed, and that was damp and real to the touch, without any solidity. You can take my word for its being a weird stunt, especially when you’ve been filled up with the stuff they pumped into the room before they turned their spook loose on you. I don’t know whether they used ether or chloroform or what: its odor was nicely disguised with some sort of flower perfume. This spook—I fought with it, on the level, and even thought I had it bleeding, not knowing I had cut my hand breaking a window to let air in. It was a beaut: it made a few minutes seem like a lot of hours to me.
“Till the very last, when Haldorn went wild, there wasn’t anything crude about their work. They kept the services—the whole public end of the cult—as dignified and orderly and restrained as possible. The hocus-pocusing was all done in the privacy of the victim’s bedroom. First the perfumed gas was pumped in. Then the illuminated steam spook was sicked on him, with a voice coming out of the same pipe—or maybe there was another arrangement for that—to give him his orders, or whatever was to be given. The gas kept him from being too sharp-eyed and suspicious, and also weakened his will, so he’d be more likely to do what he was told. It was slick enough; and I imagine they squeezed themselves out a lot of pennies that way.
“Happening in the victim’s room, when he was alone, these visions had a lot of authority, and the Haldorns gave them more by the attitude they took towards them. Discussion of these visions was not absolutely prohibited, but was discouraged. They were supposed—these spook sessions—to be confidential between the victim and his God, to be too sacred to be bragged about. Mentioning them, even to Joseph, unless there was some special reason for having to mention them, was considered in bad taste, indelicate. See how nicely that would work out? The Haldorns seemed to be not trying to capitalize on these spook sessions, seemed not to know what took place in them, and therefore to have no interest in whether the victim carried out his spook-given instructions or not. Their stand was that that was simply and strictly a concern of the victim’s and his God’s.”
“That’s very good,” Fitzstephan said, smiling delightedly, “a neat reversal of the usual cult’s—the usual sect’s, for that matter—insistence on confession, public testimony, or some other form of advertising the mysteries. Go on.”
I tried to eat. He said:
“What of the members, the customers? How do they like their cult now? You’ve talked to some of them, haven’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said; “but what can you do with people like them? Half of them are still willing to string along with Aaronia Haldorn. I showed Mrs. Rodman one of the pipes that the spooks came out of. When she had gasped once and gulped twice she offered to take us to the cathedral and show us that the images there, including the one on the cross, were made out of even more solid and earthly materials than steam; and asked us if we would arrest the bishop on proof that no actual flesh and blood—whether divine or not—was in the monstrance. I thought O’Gar, who’s a good Catholic, would blackjack her.”
“The Colemans weren’t there, were they? The Ralph Colemans?”
“No.”
“Too bad,” he said, grinning. “I must look Ralph up and question him. He’ll be in hiding by now, of course, but he’s worth hunting out. He always has the most consistently logical and creditable reasons for having done the most idiotic things. He is”—as if that explained it—“an advertising man.” Fitzstephan frowned at the discovery that I was eating again, and said impatiently: “Talk, my boy, talk.”
“You’ve met Haldorn,” I said. “What did you think of him?”
“I saw him twice, I think. He was, undoubtedly, impressive.”
“He was,” I agreed. “He had what he needed. Ever talk to him?”
“No; that is, not except to exchange the polite equivalents of ‘pleased to meet you.’ ”
“Well, he looked at you and spoke to you, and things happened inside you. I’m not the easiest guy in the world to dazzle, I hope; but he had me going. I came damned near to believing he was God toward the last. He was quite young—in his thirties: they’d had the coloring—the pigment—in his hair and beard killed to give him that Father Joseph front. His wife says she used to hypnotize him before he went into action, and that without being hypnotized he wasn’t so effective on people. Later he got so that he could hypnotize himself without her help, and toward the last it became a permanent condition with him.
“She didn’t know her husband had fallen for Gabrielle till after the girl had come to stay in the Temple. Until then she thought that Gabrielle was to him, as to her, just another customer—one whose recent troubles made her a very likely prospect. But Joseph had fallen for her, and wanted her. I don’t know how far he had worked on her, nor even how he had worked on her, but I suppose he was sewing her up by using his hocus-pocus against her fear of the Dain curse. Anyway, Doctor Riese finally discovered that everything wasn’t going well with her.
