At once his gaze swung to me. A smile to reassure me plucked at his parted lips. "All—right, yes." His voice a half-whisper, not stressed, almost normal; and yet it seemed to me then that a thinness had come to it.
Another moment. The putty-colored garment he wore had lost the vague sheen of its reflected light and was glowing with an illumination now inherent to it. A silver glow, bright like polished metal; then with a greenish cast as though phosphorescent. And then, did I fancy that its light, not upon it or within it, but behind it, showed the garment turning translucent?
I became aware now of a vague humming. An infinitely tiny sound—a throbbing hum fast as the wings of a hummingbird, near at hand, very clear, yet infinitely tiny. The battery—the current; and yet in a moment with a leaping of my heart, I knew it was not the current but a humming vibration from the body of Wilton Grant. A sense of fear—I have no memory adequately to name it—swept me. I rose hastily to my feet; as though to put a greater distance between us I moved backward, came upon a leather easy chair, sank into it, staring affrighted, fascinated at the body recumbent before me.
The change was upon it. A glow had come to the ruddy pink flesh of the arms and legs, bared chest, throat and face. The pink was fading, replaced, not by the white pallor of bloodlessness but by a glow of silver. A mere sheen at first; but it grew into a dissolving glow seeming progressively to substitute light for the solidity of human flesh.
And then I gasped. My breath stopped. For behind that glowing, impassive face I saw the solid outlines of the mattress taking form, saw the mattress through the face, the chest, the body lying upon it.
Wilton's eyes were closed. They opened now, and his arm and hand with a wraith-like quality come upon them, were raised to a gesture. The signal. I would have stammered so to Bee, but already she had marked it and shut the current off. And very quietly, unhurried, she bent over and disconnected the wires, casting them aside.
The humming continued; so faint, so rapid I might have fancied it was a weakness within my own ears. And presently it ceased.
Bee sat in the chair beside me. The body on the mattress was more than translucent now; transparent so that all the little tufts of the mattress-covering upon which it lay were more solidly visible than anything of the shadowy figure lying there. A shadow now; abruptly to my thought it was Wilton Grant no longer.
And then it moved. No single part of it; as a whole it sank gently downward, through the mattress, the floor, until a foot or so beneath, it came to rest. With realization my gaze turned across the room. The silent spectre was still there, standing beneath the floor, standing I realized, upon the same lower level where the shadow of Wilton Grant now was resting.