"But the time came when my share of the dust was at last exhausted. Naturally I went to Crane. I think I hinted to you that he was a superstitious fool. He had bought that vial, the Cerberus, and he dumped out the absurdly impossible relic of Dante, replacing it with Power's stuff. 'Dust from the Rocks of Purgatory' appealed to him, I suppose, as better applicable to this powder than to the very earthy dust the vial had before contained.
"Well, I found Crane utterly unapproachable on the subject. I begged, pleaded, threatened, offered him all in my power to give; but he would not let me have it. At his death I was wild with rage when I learned of its sale to a mere collector of curios. You know the rest of that episode. Can you blame me now?
"To-day science herself is steadily approaching the magic boundaries of those realms which were once my familiar playground. Soon she can no longer ignore the actual, material existence of the 'astral plane' as it has been misnamed by investigators who only recognize it as a Psychical possibility.
"But I-in the flesh, I have known such adventures as only you in all the world would credit! There, ever changing, continually forming, are born the nuclei of events, conditions, inventions, ideas, which later 'break through' as it were and recreate this more stable world to which we are born. The inspiration of the poet, the philosopher, or the inventor, is no more than a flicker from that swifter, different vibration within our own.
"And those lands have their monsters-devils, even. The spirit can at times attune itself and in our world a prophet arises. But let him beware! They are wild realms which he glimpses, neither good nor bad, but alive with their own never-ceasing, half-aimless, half-purposeful activities. I know them as no other man save Andrew Power alone. Many times have I sought him there. Many times has his name come up in some such fantastic connection at it came to you. I have seen, as it were, the shadow of his thought sketched in the tangible phantasmagoria which surrounded me. But either he eludes me purposely, or he is dead, and only his mind endures as an invisible force. But if he still lives and we meet, he can make this stuff that I can't make; I can show him the way back to our own world; and after that the door will be open for all to pass!
"Think of the discoveries that will be hastened-the miracles that may be wrought by knowledge acquired at first hand across that threshold! I could almost kill myself for sheer rage when I think how I wasted glorious opportunities in the pursuit of mere unprofitable adventure! Why, you yourselves brought back at least one idea-the idea of matter-destroying sound waves. Had it been Andrew Power or I, we would have searched those archives until we found the formula by which the Red Bell was made. We would have brought that back, instead of the bare and useless idea!"
"And a fine lot of good that would have been to the world!" exploded Trenmore. "I'd as soon give matches to a child and bid it go play in the nice powder mill, as turn loose the men of this world in that one we've come from, if all you say is true. This dust here I'll toss in the river, so no man shall go that road again. 'Tis not right nor decent, Mr. Scarboro, that one should so thrust oneself into the very workshop of the Almighty!"
By the gleam in Scarboro's eye hostilities threatened.
Drayton intervened. "Before we discuss the ultimate fate of the dust, Mr. Scarboro, won't you run over our own experience and explain a few little things? Now, in the first place you say that Andrew Power placed the powder on his tongue and disappeared! I am sure none of us even tried to taste the stuff."
"I said," corrected Scarboro, "that it must enter the system of a living creature! It is equally effective when breathed into the lungs. That is the way every one of you went. As to what you found, Ulithia is a place, or rather a condition, which is the one invariable prelude to every adventure I have had. Its phantasmagoria are well-nigh as fixed in their nature as what we please to call 'reality.' But of the character of its inhabitants or of the laws which govern its various phenomena, I can tell you but little.
"After living in this commonplace world of ours so many thousand centuries, mankind stands blank-faced before its greater mysteries. How can I, then, who have but one lifetime, and of that have spent but a small proportion in this other world, be expected to explain Ulithia? It is there. Every one present has seen it. We have seen its starry sky that is like our own sky; its sun that is not our sun; its moon that is a mystic gateway. While in our world the sun set once, you passed three days and two whole nights in Ulithia and the next inner world. Our astronomy is not theirs, however much it may resemble it in appearance. And we have all talked with Ulithia's ghostly, phantasmal inhabitants. Spirits? Demons? Elves? I do not know. That they are more familiar with our nature than we with theirs is certain. In Ulithia they recognize our alien passing. As the whim pleases them, they speed or hinder us. But, just as happened to all of you, one always does finally pass through there.
"What lies beyond varies. Those worlds are real. Their matter is solid while it lasts. But the form passes. 'The hills are shadows and they flow from form to form and nothing stands. They melt like mists, the solid lands; like clouds they shape themselves and go!' That was written of earth as we know it. How much better it applies to those inner, wilder realms!
"To one who knows the conditions, who has power to go and come at will, their perils are negligible; their wonder and delight inexhaustible. But 'woe to the stranger in the Hollow Lands!' You people were singularly fortunate. By a millionth chance, when the great Red Bell dissolved the astral vibrations, you were restored to your own. The distance which you had moved through space, even the direction was the same. In traversing Ulithia you actually traversed Philadelphia. When you went through the moon gate, you turned inward upon another plane and came back through the false city as if it were the real one. Thus, because your temple occupied the same space as the real city hall, it was there you finally found yourselves.
"That girl who returned with you came because she was temporarily in contact with a thing of this world-the Cerberus. When contact with that particular object ceased she went. I say 'she,' but she was nothing-a phantasm-the materialized figment of a dream. All those phantasmagoria which you met, touched, which might and would have slain you had not the Red Bell been one of them-they were the changing forms of a world which may be created and recreated in a single day.
"A prophecy of the actual future of this city and nation? Perhaps. More likely some one of the forces that rule there, for its own sardonic amusement, twisted the fluent astral matter into a distorted and mocking reflection of the real city. Oh, yes, there are forces there, as here, at whose nature we can only guess. Matter does not form or vivify itself, either in those worlds or in this.
"As to the general moral tone of your Philadelphia in the year A.D. 2118-pardon me-but that moral tone seems to have been a distinct reflection of your own. At least, you met guile with treachery, and the inference is not hard to draw!"
At this gratuitous and unexpected insult, Drayton flushed uncomfortably, Viola drew herself up with great dignity, and Trenmore rose from the table so violently that his chair crashed over.
"You old scalawag-"
Just here the door was flung open. There stood Martin, panting and stammering incoherently.
"What is it now?" demanded his employer.
"Is it Mr. Bertram, Martin?" queried Viola, turning quite pale. A vision had flashed up of the disconsolate burglar, lying in a pool of blood, slain by his own hand in excessive grief for the loss of his phantasmal sweetheart.