Nonsense Novels | Page 5

light upon the
nature of our communications with beings of another world, that I feel I
am not entitled to withhold it from the public.
I had gone over to visit Annerly at his rooms. It was Saturday, October
31. I remember the date so precisely because it was my pay day, and I
had received six sovereigns and ten shillings. I remembered the sum so
exactly because I had put the money into my pocket, and I remember

into which pocket I had put it because I had no money in any other
pocket. My mind is perfectly clear on all these points.
Annerly and I sat smoking for some time.
Then quite suddenly--
"Do you believe in the supernatural?" he asked.
I started as if I had been struck.
At the moment when Annerly spoke of the supernatural I had been
thinking of something entirely different. The fact that he should speak
of it at the very instant when I was thinking of something else, struck
me as at least a very singular coincidence.
For a moment I could only stare.
"What I mean is," said Annerly, "do you believe in phantasms of the
dead?"
"Phantasms?" I repeated.
"Yes, phantasms, or if you prefer the word, phanograms, or say if you
will phanogrammatical manifestations, or more simply
psychophantasmal phenomena?"
I looked at Annerly with a keener sense of interest than I had ever felt
in him before. I felt that he was about to deal with events and
experiences of which in the two or three months that I had known him
he had never seen fit to speak.
I wondered now that it had never occurred to me that a man whose hair
at fifty-five was already streaked with grey, must have passed through
some terrible ordeal.
Presently Annerly spoke again.
"Last night I saw Q," he said.

"Good heavens!" I ejaculated. I did not in the least know who Q was,
but it struck me with a thrill of indescribable terror that Annerly had
seen Q. In my own quiet and measured existence such a thing had
never happened.
"Yes," said Annerly, "I saw Q as plainly as if he were standing here.
But perhaps I had better tell you something of my past relationship with
Q, and you will understand exactly what the present situation is."
Annerly seated himself in a chair on the other side of the fire from me,
lighted a pipe and continued.
"When first I knew Q he lived not very far from a small town in the
south of England, which I will call X, and was betrothed to a beautiful
and accomplished girl whom I will name M."
Annerly had hardly begun to speak before I found myself listening with
riveted attention. I realised that it was no ordinary experience that he
was about to narrate. I more than suspected that Q and M were not the
real names of his unfortunate acquaintances, but were in reality two
letters of the alphabet selected almost at random to disguise the names
of his friends. I was still pondering over the ingenuity of the thing when
Annerly went on:
"When Q and I first became friends, he had a favourite dog, which, if
necessary, I might name Z, and which followed him in and out of X on
his daily walk."
"In and out of X," I repeated in astonishment.
"Yes," said Annerly, "in and out."
My senses were now fully alert. That Z should have followed Q out of
X, I could readily understand, but that he should first have followed
him in seemed to pass the bounds of comprehension.
"Well," said Annerly, "Q and Miss M were to be married. Everything
was arranged. The wedding was to take place on the last day of the year.

Exactly six months and four days before the appointed day (I remember
the date because the coincidence struck me as peculiar at the time) Q
came to me late in the evening in great distress. He had just had, he
said, a premonition of his own death. That evening, while sitting with
Miss M on the verandah of her house, he had distinctly seen a
projection of the dog R pass along the road."
"Stop a moment," I said. "Did you not say that the dog's name was Z?"
Annerly frowned slightly.
"Quite so," he replied. "Z, or more correctly Z R, since Q was in the
habit, perhaps from motives of affection, of calling him R as well as Z.
Well, then, the projection, or phanogram, of the dog passed in front of
them so plainly that Miss M swore that she could have believed that it
was the dog himself. Opposite the house the phantasm stopped for a
moment and wagged its tail. Then