“Not unless you make your own fears affect yourself and so play into their hands,” he said earnestly.
Veda looked at him a moment, then shook her head mournfully. “I have seen Dr. Vaughn,” she said slowly.
Dr. Gilbert Vaughn, I recollected, was a well-known alienist in the city.
“He tried to tell me the same thing,” she resumed doubtfully. “But—oh—I know what I know! I have felt the death thought—and he knows it!”
“What do you mean?” inquired Kennedy, leaning forward keenly.
“The death thought,” she repeated, “a malicious psychic attack. Some one is driving me to death by it. I thought I could fight it off. I went away to escape it. Now I have come back—and I have not escaped. There is always that disturbing influence—always—directed against me. I know it will—kill me!”
I listened, startled. The death thought! What did it mean? What terrible power was it? Was it hypnotism? What was this fearsome, cruel belief, this modern witchcraft that could unnerve a rich and educated woman? Surely, after all, I felt that this was not a case for a doctor alone; it called for a detective.
“You see,” she went on, heroically trying to control herself, “I have always been interested in the mysterious, the strange, the occult. In fact my father and my husband’s father met through their common interest. So, you see, I come naturally by it.
“Not long ago I heard of Professor and Madame Rapport and their new Temple of the Occult. I went to it, and later Seward became interested, too. We have been taken into a sort of inner circle,” she continued fearfully, as though there were some evil power in the very words themselves, “the Red Lodge.”
“You have told Dr. Vaughn?” shot out Kennedy suddenly, his eyes fixed on her face to see what it would betray.