I was summoned to Fernsby’s quarters far too early for my taste. The man spends half the night awake and is up again early as a farmer — yet another proof of his abnormal existence. Initially I wanted to ignore the telephone’s eager tinny voice, so painful to me at that early hour, but somehow I ended up going anyway.

     Fernsby’s room is at the top of a building that at any moment may finally return to dust from whence it came. Each time I climb the stairs, I’m certain my foot will pierce the thinned boards and I’ll go, tumbling over and again, until I find myself in a dark recess with only two dead princes for company. Yet, each time I climb the stairs, I arrive unharmed. It is a strange sensation that gives a dose of relief as well as dread. Relief, for I have survived yet another bout with the stairs of death. Dread, for surely this most recent ascent will break the camel’s back and on the descent I am sure to discover what really lies beyond the veil. How Fernsby stomps up and down the stairs with those small but heavy feet of his is an unending mystery.

     When I opened the door, Fernsby looked up from his desk with a gasp, his eyes wide and frantic. Never before in the history of human forms has one eye contained so much white. I have never seen his top lid touch the iris — much as I have never seen the man eat, though he drinks like a fish. Perhaps his body cannot calm itself enough to digest nourishment.

     Upon my entry, at the same instance as the pitiable gasp, Fernsby moved his yellowed fingers to cover something sitting on the desk in front of him. From my place at the door I saw he had a piece of card, but what was pinned to it, I could not see. Perhaps I would find the fruits of a spirit-writing session (though I knew his customary paper for the task: thick French paper, so that the skittering motions of his entranced hands wouldn’t wrinkle the pages) or another photograph of a ghost-lover perched atop a lady’s shoulder (though I told him he was wasting his money on such an obvious hoax — everyone in the world knew spirit photography was bunkum except Fernsby. I had even taken him to a demonstration of the practice and still he believed. If he had called me from my warm bed to show me another one of these heinous fakes I would not speak to him for a week).

     “Good, Callow, I need your eyes on this.” Fernsby moved his hands away from the card and I saw a shred of fabric there, pinned down like an exotic insect. “I captured it last night. It was only three of us: Simon and O’Neal have only just left.”

     That meant he hadn’t slept at all. O’Neal lived by the ministrations of cocaine, and few in his orbit could resist the pull of that liquor. I tried to avoid the man after a particularly bad night the year previous. I should have seen the effects of O’Neal’s influence as soon as I stepped in: those surprised eyes, bloodshot from lack of sleep and regular blinking. That hair, though never in a state of order, now rising from his scalp in black snarls like an inked hedge. I wanted to grasp it and pull hard.

     “We would have invited you, but I knew you had other commitments.”

     “Don’t remind me.” It had been a ghastly night. Sophia insisted on my attendance at the home of some of her particularly silly friends, and for my fiancée, that was saying quite a lot. How a girl managed to know every insipid, witless, or squawking girl in New York I could never discern. The night had been spent as if I were a prize animal or a child in a Van Dyke costume, paraded as I was in front of her friends or — even worse — her mother. Thank God she was rich.

     “What is it you have there?” I asked, hoping to get over the inevitable disappointment.

     My colleague turned his attention to the card. “What do you suppose it is, Callow?”

     “A scrap of fabric.”

     “Yes, but where do you suppose it came from?”

     “From a vendor who knows you have more money than sense.”

     “No, I told you, we captured it last night. We summoned the spirit of a lady and I tore it from her gown.”

     Now I sat down. Fernsby pushed the card across the desk and I examined the fabric. It was white, but somehow less than white; it was the color of a cobweb. The individual fibers seemed thinner than the hairs on a child’s head. A pattern wove through the fabric, some dancing of forms too delicate for modern hands to craft.

     “It’s muslin, I suppose, of the sort they used to produce in India. Was her gown very narrow?”

     “It was rather dark, but I’d say so. Somewhat Grecian.”

     “Napoleonic?” I asked.

     “You know more of that world than I.”

     “And you tore it?”

     “She stayed merely a moment, said something I couldn’t hear properly, and as she slid back into the shadows I seized her skirts in my hand. I meant to keep the whole lady there, but the cloth tore easily and this is the only evidence of her presence. Although, it’s diminished in the hours since then.” He pointed to what I had mistaken for part of the weave. “See these missing threads? They were still there when I tore the piece away. They’re turning back into air.”

     His breath caused the fabric to tremble. It seemed to shudder under the impalement of those thick pins, far too large for such a delicate scrap.

     “When I tore it away,” he said, “You might not know it from another piece of cotton except by its delicacy. But now, see how it fades? It’s going away right before our eyes.”

     Perhaps it was a trick of the eyes, but I estimated that the fabric was thinner than it had been upon my entry. I reached out and stroked the substance with my finger — my good, clean finger, more worthy than Fernsby’s stained paws to touch an artifact like this. I could barely feel the ethereal substance against my skin. It was like touching the whiskery threads of a down feather. A tremor climbed my spine.

     “What will you do with it now?” I asked. As I spoke an entire yarn of the piece disappeared in an instant. The movement was not abrupt — not this ghost-scrap — but soft and quick, as if the world breathed out and that fiber was gone.

     “Simon made photographs of it on the hour. We’ll have proof of its gradual disappearance. If we present them as a set of six — ”

     Six hours. They’d watched the thing for six hours while I suffered on Sophia’s arm. Fernsby had known my location. He could have telephoned the hostess and had me on my way to see the wonder. And now, he only summoned me there to give an estimation of its age. He had let me sleep while he and Simon and O’Neal hovered around the scrap and made their photographs and toasted their discovery. I should have known the moment I stepped in–not from the gasp, but from his hands as they raced to cover the ghost-scrap and protect it from my eyes. How dare, you, Fernsby? You believe yourself a genius, but you’re a little man with caterpillar eyebrows and small feet. How did he see me? Not as his intellectual superior, no — as a mere technician of history who troubled himself with the details of the past while Fernsby dwelt in the world of the spirits. No, that was wrong. He didn’t think of me at all.

     “Could I have a drink?” I asked. “Something’s come over me.”

     “Yes, certainly.” Fernsby rose and went to the table where he kept his undusted bottles and decanters. The crystal clinked as loud as breaking glass. “We’ll have to defend the veracity of the photographs, but with your estimation of its age — it couldn’t be made much later, could it?”

     “I doubt it. The quality of Indian muslin declined for many reasons, one being the famine in Bengal — ”

     “Yes, if you can cite that sort of thing, we’ll be on better footing.” Fernsby continued to bang the glasses. God, the man was clumsy. Of course he tore the delicate fabric when he grasped it. This bumbling fool would have the credit for it all, and I’d be a footnote if history even remembered my name. If Fernsby did not claim my knowledge as his own.

     And so, while he was still occupied with pouring the drinks, I reached forward and I pulled away the pins and I lifted up the ghost-scrap and I ate it.