The Mystery of the Invisible Dog - M. V. Carey [33]
“Ah, yes!” said Professor Lantine.
“You’ve heard of the phantom priest?” asked Bob.
“The present pastor called me about him some time ago,” said Professor Lantine. “I am often asked to look into matters of this kind. Father McGovern had never seen the ghost, but his housekeeper was in a complete state of nerves about it. The person your friend saw in the church — a thin, white-haired man dressed in clerical clothes — fits the description. The old pastor was a thin, white-haired man. His picture is in the parlour at the parish house. However, upon questioning the housekeeper, I discovered an interesting thing She comes from a small town in Ireland — Dungalway — and the church in Dungalway is famous. It is said to be haunted by the ghost of a priest who was lost at sea. I spent several nights in St Jude’s Church, and I saw nothing. I also talked to many residents of Paseo Place. Although quite a few of the older ones believed in the phantom priest, none had ever seen him. I think Mrs. O’Reilly made him up. Without quite realizing it, I believe that she reconstructed him from the tales of her own childhood.
“Your spectral visitor in the apartment is something else again.”
Professor Lantine leaned forward. “You say that he has appeared in Mr. Prentice’s apartment when you knew — as certainly as anyone could know — that he was in his own apartment sound asleep?”
“That’s right,” Bob confirmed.
Professor Lantine smiled. “Delicious!” she exclaimed. “He’s a wanderer!”
“Well, I guess he is,” agreed Bob. “But Mr. Prentice doesn’t think it’s delicious. How does Elmquist do it?”
Professor Lantine went to a file cabinet and pulled out several folders. “If he is a true wanderer,” she said, “he gets out of his body when he’s asleep and walks around.”
Bob gaped at her.
She sat down again and opened a file folder. “We don’t have many cases that have been examined under laboratory conditions,” she said. “People who do this sort of thing don’t often come into the laboratory. They keep it to themselves. They decide they’re going barmy or they think they have second sight. But a person came into the lab just last year.
“She was an ordinary housewife, living in Montrose. I can’t tell you her name because that’s confidential.”
Bob nodded.
“She’d been troubled for some time,” said Professor Lantine. “She dreamed true dreams, you see.”
Dr. Barrister leaned forward. “You mean, Eugenia, that she dreamed things and then they happened?”
“Not quite. She dreamed, for example, that she was at a birthday party in her mother’s house in Akron. She saw everything quite clearly. It was her mother’s birthday, and her two sisters were there. There was a birthday cake with white frosting and pink lettering and a single candle. She described the entire dream to her husband the next morning. He didn’t pay much attention until she got a letter from one of her sisters.
Enclosed with the letter was a photograph of the birthday party. It showed exactly what the housewife had seen in her dream. The family members were wearing the same clothes, and there was even a white cake with pink lettering and one candle. The woman’s husband became upset and urged her to come see us.
“She confessed that this sort of thing happened to her rather frequently. She didn’t like it and she tried not to think about it. But when she dreamed she often saw things that were taking place far away, where she had no way of knowing what was going on, and it would turn out later that she had witnessed a real event.”
“You said you tested this under laboratory conditions,” said Bob.
“Yes. We persuaded her to stay here at the university for a few days. She slept in a room in the lab where we could observe her through a one-way window. She knew that on a shelf above her bed — a shelf too high for her to reach — was a piece of paper with a number written on it. It was a long number — ten digits — and no one knew what the number was. A secretary in another office had typed it out by hitting keys at random.
Without looking