furies and
frenzies, as violent lusts and mad, strange impulses, rejoicing in the
body they have won. For Mr. Bessel was not the only human soul in that
place. Witness the fact that he met first one, and afterwards several
shadows of men, men like himself, it seemed, who had lost their bodies
even it may be as he had lost his, and wandered, despairingly, in that
lost world that is neither life nor death. They could not speak because
that world is silent, yet he knew them for men because of their dim
human bodies, and because of the sadness of their faces.

But how they had come into that world he could not tell, nor where the
bodies they had lost might be, whether they still raved about the earth,
or whether they were closed forever in death against return. That they
were the spirits of the dead neither he nor I believe. But Doctor Wilson
Paget thinks they are the rational souls of men who are lost in madness
on the earth.

At last Mr. Bessel chanced upon a place where a little crowd of such
disembodied silent creatures was gathered, and thrusting through them
he saw below a brightly-lit room, and four or five quiet gentlemen and a
woman, a stoutish woman dressed in black bombazine and sitting awkwardly
in a chair with her head thrown back. He knew her from her portraits to
be Mrs. Bullock, the medium. And he perceived that tracts and structures
in her brain glowed and stirred as he had seen the pineal eye in the
brain of Mr. Vincey glow. The light was very fitful; sometimes it was a
broad illumination, and sometimes merely a faint twilight spot, and it
shifted slowly about her brain. She kept on talking and writing with one
hand. And Mr. Bessel saw that the crowding shadows of men about him,
and a great multitude of the shadow spirits of that shadowland, were all
striving and thrusting to touch the lighted regions of her brain. As one
gained her brain or another was thrust away, her voice and the writing
of her hand changed. So that what she said was disorderly and confused
for the most part; now a fragment of one soul's message, and now a
fragment of another's, and now she babbled the insane fancies of the
spirits of vain desire. Then Mr. Bessel understood that she spoke
for the spirit that had touch of her, and he began to struggle very
furiously towards her. But he was on the outside of the crowd and at
that time he could not reach her, and at last, growing anxious, he went
away to find what had happened meanwhile