Moïse. “Yes. How?”
Spook (angrily). “Do it! Or I will not help. Blow your own nose! Don’t worry me with trifles!”
Moïse. “A candle covered with paper?”
Spook (interrupting angrily). “In a tin, in a tin!”
Lest he should make any mistake over the “beam of light” Moïse decided to write in the dark. He sat at a table at one side of the room, while Hill and I sat at the other side. For some time there was dead silence. Then Hill and I began to grunt, and make strange noises in unison. The noises changed gradually from grunts to groans, and from groans to guttural sounds, thence to some unknown tongue, and finally into English. When we had practised together in private (it took a lot of practice to get grunt-and-groan perfect) we had never been able to proceed very far without laughing. Indeed it was the most ridiculous farmyard concert that mortal man ever listened to, and Hill had objected that we ran a great risk of laughing or being laughed at and spoiling everything. But what is ridiculous in daylight may be intensely eerie in the dark. And so it proved. The unhappy Pimple nearly fainted with fright, but he stuck to his post and his note-taking with a courage that roused our unwilling admiration. He showed us his notes afterwards—the paper was wet from the clamminess of his hands, and the writing showed clear traces of his jumpiness.
We pretended to be describing a scene before our eyes. We were following a man who carried a letter. We described how the messenger passed through a door into a garden. He had great difficulty in closing the door, for something was wrong with the latch. We followed him through the garden—past the trees and flowers and well, all of which we described—into a house with a curious window that stood out four-square to the right of the door. Thence up the steps, inside, through a small hall, up a staircase and into a bedroom, detailing the furniture and the pictures as we passed each article. We gave a minute description of the bedroom, the red carpet, the two ottomans, the position of the bed and the cupboard, and we were much struck by the enormous footstool on the right of the door, the wicker bag on the floor near the bed, and the sword on the wall between two pictures. The messenger gave the letter to someone on the bed, whom we could not see clearly. We heard him call, and a lady came in—a lady with very beautiful hands. They went out together, carrying a lantern. Another man joined them, with pick and shovel. Then everything turned black. There was a pause in the trance-talk for perhaps a minute. Then we cried out that we saw the group again. They had been digging. We could see the hole by the lamplight. They were pulling things out of the hole—boxes they looked like! Yes, boxes! The man with the pick raised it above his head and smashed open a box, and—“Gold! Gold! Gold!” (so loud and so suddenly did we shout together that the Pimple leapt to his feet). Then blackness again, and a reversal of the opening proceedings—we lapsed first into the unknown tongue, and thence through the guttural sounds to the groans and the little farmyard grunts with which we had begun. A few minutes’ silence, and Hill spoke in his natural voice:—
“I am afraid it’s no good!” he said, “nothing is going to happen.”
The Pimple struck a match with shaking fingers, and lit the lamp.
“Something has happened,” he said, “you’ve both been in a trance. It was terrible!”
“Have we?” said I, and looked as dazed as I could. (It is easy to look dazed in a sudden glare of light.) “I feel just as usual, only very, very tired.”