Author of "The Tortoise-Shell Cat," "The Remorse of Professor Panebianco," etc.
FOREWORD
SOME time during the latter part of May, 1924, I received a communication from a well-known publishing house, a communication sufficiently out of the ordinary to merit my immediate attention. I had sold these publishers considerable fiction treating of the occult and supernatural; they wrote me to inquire if I were an actual student of the occult, or if I had merely gone into the subject. superficially to give more color to my stories. They intimated that there was a special reason back of their inquiry.
I wrote back that I was a serious student of the occult, but that the more I studied it the more I found to learn and the more I realized that I had only scratched the surface of the subject. The publishers wrote back that they had been requested to get in touch with a student of the occult and to ask such a person to communicate immediately with Miss Sophie Delorme, Differdale House, Meadowlawn. Lynbrook. (It is understood, of course, that I am using the fictitious names furnished in the manuscript written by Miss Delorme.)
I was naturally interested and wrote to Miss Delorme at once. The lady informed me that she had a manuscript of about fifty thousand words which she had written to explain an extremely strange matter that had occurred in her neighborhood. She believed this story to be vitally important and insisted that she dared not entrust the manuscript to any other than a person instructed along occult lines, as she had every reason to believe that efforts would be made to reach and destroy the papers before their message could be transmitted to the world. She asked me to call on her and take over the manuscript personally, and see to it that it was printed.
I ascertained that Miss Delorme was a responsible person, quite able and willing to defray the costs of printing her book, in case it proved to be out of the line of the regular publishing houses. I arranged to visit her home on June 18th, an easy matter, as I found I could get there by subway. On June 18th, therefore, I walked across the fields to the great wall which she had described in her letters, and rang the bell of the bronze gate. From that moment, I began to
