But I must have conquered, for I found myself sitting up, with Bee and Will beside me.
"There, that's better." I felt the relief in Will's tone. "Hold yourself firm—you'll be used to it in a moment. It's strange, isn't it?"
Strange; scarce have I words—and even those I choose are almost futile—to picture what I saw and felt. The world I had left lay all about me—dim, transparent shadows of familiar things. The room of Will's house—we were sitting just below the level of its floor. Around the room—above it, to one side of it—the phantom house itself was visible. Beyond the house, the gardens, the sombre ghosts of trees standing about—a shadowy semblance of the winding village street—other houses—a hill in the distance—
Mingled with all these shadows—the reality I had left—was the reality in which now I existed. The Borderland, we had been calling it. A vast realm of luminous darkness. A rolling slope upon which we were sitting—a slope, something newly tangible at least, which I could vaguely see and vaguely feel beneath me. A realm of pregnant darkness, filled with the shadows of the world I had left; and filled also with things as yet unseen—things as yet unthought.... The realm of unthought things....
Will's voice seemed saying, "So strange—but you'll be used to it presently."
I turned to regard him and Bee—these spectres like myself, sitting beside me. What did I see? What was their aspect to this new mind's eye which was mine? I cannot say. I think now that my intelligence saw the intelligence which was theirs, and clothed it out of habit with a semblance of substance for a body—familiar of outline and form since there was no other aspect I could conceive. I saw—or thought I saw, which perhaps is quite the same—luminous grey ghosts of my companions as last I had seen them. Of themselves they appeared not transparent. Through them the spectral walls of the room were not visible; of everything around me, the bodies of my friends seemed the most real.
Will was smiling at me reassuringly. Bee's gaze was affectionate. Their voices, save that I knew I heard no sound, seemed not abnormal. I spoke. It was like thinking words with moving lips. But they heard me; not to read my lips, but to hear my thoughts. Heard with a result quite normal, for they nodded and smiled and answered me.
Then Will touched me; experimentally with a smile, he laid his hand upon my arm. It was not unreal, save that only dimly, as though my senses were dulled, could I feel him. Yet there was a weight to his grip. His tenuous ghostly fingers (as I would have counted them in my former state) were not ghostly of grip to me now. His fingers, my arm, were identical of substance. His fingers could not occupy the space with me; they were ponderable, real, with a dulled reality which gave me at last something to cling to; brought my scattering thoughts together. I was here—Robert Manse; alive—living, breathing—sitting beside my friends. From that moment a measure of the strangeness left me and took to itself the externals only. I was real; Bee and Will were real; it was only the things around us which were strange. The body which momentarily I seemed to have lost, was restored to me. A sense of the physical; dulled of perception, but still a body to house my mind. To house it—yet not to hold it firmly. A body which now was not a prison; shackles fallen away. Yet there was a danger to that. Already I had tasted of it—for the mind, too free, is difficult to control.