Then, after the books were printed, the entire printing plant was dynamited, and the books destroyed in the resulting fire. I had taken the proofsheets home with me, however, and from these I dictated the entire manuscript again to a typist.
I know there are plenty of people who will sneer at the recital of these accidents, calling them coincidences. That word covers a multitude of strange, inexplicable happenings. I know too much about those powers who are averse to publishing broadcast the message contained in Miss Delorme’s manuscript to call these occurrences coincidences.
As I write this, I know that Miss Delorme’s message of warning will go out into the world as she intended, a message for those who can understand. It may be only a piece of fiction for those who are ignorant of what the most casual students of psychic phenomena now consider everyday occurrences. The declaration that there "ain’t no ghosts" today is nothing but a display of the speaker’s deplorable backwardness in current news, alone.
I wish to state, before closing my little foreword, that I have not touched Miss Delorme’s manuscript except to try to separate it into parts, not chapters. It was a single long narrative, as it came to my hands; the writer evidently considered it more important to get her message on paper than to divide and subdivide it in the manner of modern letters. I found it awkward to draw any dividing lines in the text, myself.
There is little doubt in my mind that that fine and noble woman lost her life because she was not sufficiently instructed in psychic phenomena to protect herself against invasions from the darkness on the other side of the veil that separates the human entity from the mysterious and too often malevolent entities of the astral plane. Fortunately for the world—at least for that portion of the world that can understand—she had secured with careful foresight the printing and distribution of her weird and terrible experience, even to the final detail of a large check made out to me and enclosed with the manuscript in the tin box. That she was safeguarded until her work was finished and passed on to me, is proof that other and higher powers of good watched over her while her presence on this plane was necessary.
It is my earnest hope that her sacrifice and devotion will not have been in vain.
- —Greye La Spina.
PART 1
THERE is no real reason for the inside history of that summer to remain unrecorded and there are strong reasons why it should be made public. I understand fully that many will pronounce the whole affair one of sheer fabrication on my part, but on the other hand there are those in America, in the world, who will know that my story is not only possible but probable. It is for these last I write, that the knowledge of those strange happenings may put them on their guard; that they may realize the full extent of the danger in this terrible invasion of our dear country by the potent influences of evil that have for centuries flourished in the wild spots of Europe and Asia.
The world ought to know that these forces of the dark are organizing for the advancement of their own individual and collective purposes, just as the forces of the light are co-operating for the advancement of humanity; that invasions from the dark will periodically be made—slyly, subtly, whenever opportunity offers; that embodied and disembodied evil is marching upon the New World, intent on conquest. And most terrible of all, the New World is ignorant of these potent influences upon mind and body, at-
