This was wholly different from the apparitions of ghosts and spirits I’d known in the past. And I had seen some powerful ghosts and spirits—including the spirit who had called himself Memnoch the Devil—in differing forms. But they had been hallucinations, those ghosts and spirits with their clothes being a part of the illusion, and even the scent of blood and sweat or the sound of a heartbeat had been part of the illusion. When they’d smoked a cigarette or drunk a glass of whiskey or given off the sound of a footstep it had been part of the apparition. The whole vision had been of a different texture than the world around it, the world I inhabited and from which I’d seen it. Oh, so I believed.

Not so at all with this spirit. His body, whatever it was made of, was occupying three-dimensional space, and had weight, and I could hear the sounds of simulated organs inside it, hear the distinct beating of a heart, hear the respiration. I could see the light of the room actually falling on the planes of this spirit’s face, see it glittering in his eyes, see the shadow of his arm on the table. No scent, however, except that of incense and perfume which clung to its clothes.

Maybe I had in fact seen such spirits as this—but only fleetingly in the past, and never close enough or long enough to realize that they could be touched, that they were being seen by others.

I felt sure this one had never been a human being. He wasn’t a ghost. No, he had to be something originating in some other realm for the simple reason that his body was wholly ideal, like a work of Greek classical art, and there was nothing about it that was particular.

In sum, this was the best spirit body I’d ever beheld. And he was smiling at me, apparently pleased with my quiet but obvious fascination.

He had dark and wavy and perfect hair framing his face in a classical Greek style, and the face could easily have come from a Greek statue. Yet this thing lived and breathed in the body it had assembled for itself. I had no idea how it could have a heartbeat, how the blood could rush to its face now, or appear to do so, as I smelled no actual blood, but it was a splendid spirit.

We had come to the edge of the table. It was perhaps three feet wide, of a wood so old I could smell the generations of oil worked into it. There were playing cards out on the wood, bright pretty glittering playing cards.