“What is it, then?”
“Self-hypnotism! No, don’t be angry!”—for I had turned away in disgust; I had really thought he might elucidate the mystery. “It is a pure case of materialization from the subconscious mind, drawing an image of the subconscious across the threshold of consciousness and reproducing it in sound, or motion, or color, or some other tangible form. It is the same thing that the spiritualists take for evidence of the return of the dead, but it is actually only the return, or the recall, of dead thoughts.”
“I wouldn’t use the word ‘actually,’ if I were you,” I said.
“No, but wait. I have been listening to you for half an hour, and, while it was very interesting, you must see, my dear—” Jasper looked into my eyes so earnestly that I almost laughed, for I knew he thought I was on the verge of insanity and I had a dreadful temptation to convince him of it by giggling hysterically and not listening at all. “You must see,” he repeated, “that these manifestations, these nightly hallucinations, follow a regular sequence. First you fill yourself up on the traditions of the house before you enter it. You do not share them with any one, not even me, and the first night you are subjected to a sort of dream about the headboard moving. I was here that night, but I did not see it. Then you read a lot of stuff about materialization, and when you try to go to sleep your disordered brain conjures up footsteps.”
“My what?” I demanded.
Jasper did not bother to contradict his outrageous statement.
“The third night, after you had discovered the secret room, you materialize the child who you have decided lived in it. The fourth night, after you read about auras, you contrive one of your own in the skylight. The fifth night you conjure up the scene of the murder which was suggested to you by that fraud over there on the sand-dunes. By the way, I’m going over there and have that place raided. He’s a fake. He knew all about you. He’s the same colored man that came up on the train with us last Monday.
“The only thing I’m not sure about is the cat. There is something tremendously psychic about a cat. I haven’t gone into the science of the occult very extensively, but I would not pretend to say that there is nothing in it. The theory of reincarnation is just as plausible a theory of what becomes of the spirit as any other, so far as I know. Personally, I don’t believe or disbelieve anything.”
“I have heard you say so before,” I interrupted, “but you do believe in the cat.” I was glad to point out to him that his logic was not invulnerable. “There is not a soul living who is not superstitious about something. Call it what you like. Say I am crazy and that the cat is ‘actually’ the soul of a woman who is drowned. It is all the same to me. But as the cat is left over from the régime of Mattie, her soul must have been reincarnated before she died, which is spinning the ‘wheel of life’ a little fast, isn’t it?”
Jasper grinned.