"Sure I seen it," agreed Geltfin. "Like a spot—sort of."
"It wasn't on the negative when I seen it day before yesterday," stated Quinlan. "I can swear to that. A little defect from faulty printing, I guess."
"All right then," said Mr. Lobel. "Only where you got efficiency like I got it in this plant such things should have no business occurring.
"Go on, operator—let's see how goes it from now on."
Out again two shadow figures—the vampire and the vampire's prey—flashed in motion. Yes, the cloudy spot was there, a bit of murky shadow drifting between the pair of figures and the audience. It thickened and broadened—and then from the suddenly constricted throats of the four watchers, almost as though all in the same moment an invisible hand had laid gripping hold on each of their several windpipes, came a chorused gasp.
For they saw how out of the drifting patch of spumy wrack there emerged a shape vague and indistinct and ghostly, but taking on instantly the sharpened outlines of one they recognized. It was the shape, not of Vida Monte, the fabled wrecker of lives, but the shape of her other self, Sarah Glassman, and the face it wore was not the face of the stage vampire, aflame with the counterfeited evil which the actor woman had so well known how to simulate but the real face of the real woman, who lay dead and buried under a mound of fresh-cut sods seventy miles away—her own face, melancholy and sadly placid, as God had fashioned it for her.
Out from the filmy umbra it advanced to the center, thus hiding its half-naked double writhing in the embrace of the deluded lover, and clearly revealed itself in long sweeping garments of pure white—fit grave clothes for one lately entombed—with great masses of loosened black hair falling like a pall about the passionless brooding face; and now lifting reproachful eyes, it looked out across the intervening void of blackness into their staring eyes, and from the folds of the cerement robes raised a bare arm high as though to forbid a lying sacrilege. And stood there then as a wraith newly freed from the burying mold, filling and dominating the picture so that one looking saw nothing else save the shrouded figure and the head and the face and those eyes and that upheld white arm.
Cowering low in his seat with a sleeve across his eyes to shut out the accusing apparition, Mr. Geltfin whispered between chattering teeth: "I told him! I told him the dead could maybe come back!"
Mr. Quinlan, a bolder nature but even so terribly shaken, was muttering to himself: "But it wasn't in the negative! I swear to God it wasn't in the negative!"
It is probable that Mr. Lobel heard neither of them, or if he heard he gave no heed. He had a feeling that the darkness was smothering him.