“It sucked the very air when it left you,” he answered. “It’s material. I told you. It has some chemistry in the physical world. All ghosts are material in probability. But there are those who know more of this than me. I only once saw a human ghost, talked to a human ghost, spent an hour with a ghost, and it terrified me quite out of my mind.”

“Yes,” I replied, “it was Roger, wasn’t it, who came to you in the Chronicle called Memnoch the Devil. I read how you talked with him and how he persuaded you to care for his mortal daughter, Dora. I read every word. I believed it; I believed that you saw Roger and that you went to Heaven and Hell.”

“And well you should,” he rejoined. “I never lied in those pages, though it was another that took the dictation of it. I have been with Memnoch the Devil, though what he really was—devil or playful spirit—I still don’t know.” He paused. “It’s more than plain to me,” he said, “that you’ve noticed the difference between my eyes.”

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it,” I said quickly. “It isn’t a disfigurement.”

He made a gesture of dismissal along with a kind smile.

“This right eye was torn from me,” he said, “just as I described it, by those spirits who would have prevented me from fleeing Memnoch’s Hell. And then it was returned to me, here on Earth, and sometimes I believe that this eye can see strange things.”

“What strange things?”

“Angels,” he said, musing, “or those who call themselves angels, or would have me conclude that they’re angels; and they have come to me in the long years since I fled Memnoch. They’ve come to me as I lay like one in a coma on the chapel floor of St. Elizabeth’s, the building in New Orleans which was bequeathed to me by Roger’s daughter. It seems my stolen eye, my restored eye, my bloodshot eye, has established some link with these beings, and I could tell you a tale of them, but now is not the time.”

“They harmed you, didn’t they?” I asked, sensing it in his manner.

He nodded.

“They left my body there for my friends to watch over,” he explained, and for the first time since I’d seen him, he looked troubled, indecisive, even faintly confused.

“But my spirit they took with them,” he went on. “And in a realm as palpable as this very room they set me down to do their bidding, always threatening to snatch back this right eye, to take it forever if I didn’t do what they bid me to do.”

He hesitated, shaking his head.