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Humphrey.
    Less audible were the falling heels of Mr. Forbes, Dr. Humphrey, Mr. Evarts and Carrington himself.
    They reached 328 now and, withdrawing his arm from Palladino’s hold, Carrington took the key chain from his trouser pocket and unlocked the door.
    Reaching in, he switched on the overhead light and the group entered the small office.
    As he went in, Carrington recalled momentarily, his renting of the office; how the owner had been taken back by his request for a sworn statement that the office was an ordinary one, free of trap doors or any other unusual features.
    A faint smile raised the ends of his lips as he remembered the expression on the man’s face when he said, in absolute perplexity,
“Trap doors?
In an
office?”
    Carrington had not explained.
    Quickly and efficiently, he checked the safeguards in the office: the windows sealed and connected to burglar alarms; the special bolts on the insides of the windows and the special bolt and lock on the inside of the door.
    None had been touched, of course. He had not expected that they had. Still, these preparations had to be conducted each time.
    Critics loved to pounce on any safeguard overlooked, any precaution taken.
    The cabinet—seven feet high and three feet on each side—was built into a special partition away from the back wall. It was open on the side facing the office, two curtains hanging across the opening, each made of lightweight black crepe.
    Inside the cabinet was a wooden table on top of which lay a flute, mandolin, a music box, a small bell and a tambourine.
    Even though Carrington knew that not a soul had entered this office since the previous sitting three nights past—their ninth—he, nonetheless, picked up each instrument and checked it thoroughly.
    He was a methodical man and knew that he could never afford to indulge himself in the least bit of carelessness in his preparations for these séances.
    “Very well,” he finally said, nodding at Palladino as he set down the tambourine.
    While the two women stepped inside the cabinet with the Italian medium to inspect her clothing and make certain she had nothing suspicious hidden on her person, Carrington checked the lights above the three-foot by two-foot table around which they would sit during the séance.
    There was a cluster of five globes, the first an unshaded sixteen-candle-power lamp, the second an unshaded four-candle-power lamp.
    The third lamp was the same power as the second but was shaded with tissue paper. The fourth, of similar power, was shaded with a thickness of red tissue.
    The fifth, also four-candle-power, was shaded with two red screens.
    Carrington examined them all. They varied from full illumination to a light in which the eye could make out only hands and faces.
    Palladino came out of the cabinet with the two women, smiling to herself.
    The women—especially Mrs. Humphrey—seemed embarrassed and Carrington suspected that, during the examination, Palladino had made some off-color (perhaps even lewd) remark; his wife had told him that the Italian woman was prone to such remarks during examinations.
    Carrington avoided Palladino’s dark-eyed glance at him when she sat down on her chair.
    “So,” she said. “The
strega
sits again.”
    She enjoyed referring to herself as a witch.
    Carrington regretted her attitude. It was not that he felt personally critical but it made legitimizing her abilities all the more difficult.
    What was it Mrs. Finch had called her in that editorial? “A monster of erotic tendencies?” It was scarcely that bad, but Palladino’s behavior
did
make his work more onerous than it had to be.
    It was hardly surprising that Hodgson had, so quickly, accused her of fraud. But then Hodgson always had been a pompous, waspish fool.
    Carrington switched off the overhead light and, in the full illumination of globe number one, the group took their places, Palladino’s chair with its back to the cabinet, two feet from the curtain, Mrs. Humphrey