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revelation. Not to say that he was defeated. He searched
several other libraries and, in Salem, found a second book by Simon Brinklow.
This work, called The Path by Moonlight, an Investigation into Disbelieved
Realms , published in 1865, was a complete turnaround from Ghosts that
Lie . Intrigued, Pond went on to find out all that he could about the man
who wrote it.
    Who was Simon Brinklow? He was a
British fellow, a portly and headstrong banker who, in 1855, lost his wife and
three daughters in a fire. When he learned of the growing spiritualism craze
that was sweeping Europe and America, his grief got the best of him, and he
began attending seances and paying large sums to mediums who claimed they could
put him in touch with his loved ones.
    A disillusioned Brinklow soon came
to believe that the masses were being duped by charlatans, as was largely the
case. Infuriated, he set out on a personal mission to expose the fakes who
preyed on the heartsick (himself included). In 1862 his crusade took him across
the Atlantic to New York and Boston. But something ironic happened. While
meaning to discredit yet another so-called haunting, Brinklow traveled to
Lexington's Sumner Inn, where he had an experience that converted him in a
sense, and set him out on an exploration of fantastic mysteries.
    Though he still recognized the
numerous frauds for what they were, he realized that there was indeed another
side of things, an unexplored world here on Earth. He wrote and published his
second book, but it was entirely dismissed by the scientific community, scoffed
at by the religious legions, and resented by the spiritualists he had spent so
much energy debunking. Brinklow vanished in 1870 at the age of fifty-five.
    Hours passed there in the Georgian
parlor with the fireplace snapping and the candles reducing. A small mantel
clock rang twelve.
    "Midnight," Imogene
said, grinning, "That calls for brandy."
    We had been oblivious of the time,
trading conjecture. She fetched an ambery bottle and two glasses, and we drank
a toast to Dr. Pond, and another to Simon Brinklow.
    We talked about the event that had
inspired Brinklow's change of heart. He had heard stories about a certain
spirit known to pay visit to the Sumner Inn. Fractured Harry, as the spirit was
known, had been encountered as far back as 1799. Somewhere in his travels,
Simon had learned a way to (allegedly) summon the odd spirit, and he gave it a
try.
    Brinklow whispered a curious
little song into an empty glass bottle, corked it, then took it to a cemetery
about a half-mile away from the inn. The burial yard was neglected, crowded
with pitched slates and high grass, tangled in the shadow of leafless boughs.
He set the bottle down beneath a tree, returned to his room at the inn and
waited, expecting nothing more to happen.
    Sometime in the late hours the man
heard odd rhythmic sounds in the hallway outside his room. It sounded to him as
if someone were letting sopping, bunched-up towels fall to the floor,
repeatedly. The noises came up to the opposite side of his door and stopped.
Then came a faint knock. A very faint knock.
    Brinklow opened the door. He
describes the visitor in his second book: "It gave me the impression of a
ghastly puppet, this queer figure thrown together from odd bits. The head was a
tea kettle, steaming at the spout, impossibly balanced on the main body which,
in all candor, seemed no more than a man's baggy overcoat with nothing like a
frame to support it. Fantastically enough, the legs which propelled the
creature were fashioned from mop handles, while the damp, stringy heads of
those very mops comprised its feet."
    When Fractured Harry wobbled into
his room and sat down at the little table, Brinklow determined that this ghost -- or whatever it was -- could not be a hoax. "The resultant terror
at this realization," Simon wrote, "was complete."
    The creature placed its hands on
top of the table. They were old gardening gloves of battered grey, and