Into the Fourth Dimension by Ray Cummings

Are there other worlds existing side by side with ours, / yet unseen and unsuspected? Here is the incredible / tale of three who went through the wall that bars the / way to this shadowy realm and found a strange land, / a stranger people, and a fantastic enemy.

The first of the "ghosts" made its appearance in February of 1946. It was seen just after nightfall near the bank of a little stream known as Otter Creek, a few miles from Rutland, Vermont. There are willows along the creek-bank at this point. Heavy snow was on the ground. A farmer's wife saw the ghost standing beside the trunk of a tree. The evening was rather dark. Clouds obscured the stars and the moon. A shaft of yellow light from the farmhouse windows came out over the snow; but the ghost was in a patch of deep shadow. It seemed to be the figure of a man standing with folded arms, a shoulder against the tree-trunk. It was white and shimmering; it glowed; its outlines were wavy and blurred. The farmer's wife screamed and rushed back into the house.

Up to this point the incident was not unusual. It would have merited no more than the briefest and most local newspaper attention; reported perhaps to some organization interested in psychical research to be filed with countless others of its kind. But when the farmer's wife got back to the house and told her husband what she had seen, the farmer went out and saw it also; and with him, his two grown sons and his daughter. There was no doubt about it; they all saw the apparition still standing motionless exactly where the woman had said.

There was a telephone in the farmhouse. They telephoned their nearest neighbors. The telephone girl got the news. Soon it had spread to the village of Procter; and then to Rutland itself. The ghost did not move. By ten o'clock that evening the road before the farmer's house was crowded with cars; a hundred or more people were trampling the snow of his corn-field cautiously, from a safe distance regarding that white motionless figure.

It chanced that I was also an eyewitness to this, the first of the ghosts of '46. My name is Robert Manse. I was twenty-six years old that winter -- correspondent in the New York office of a Latin-American export house. With Wilton Grant and his sister Beatrice -- whom I counted the closest of my few real friends -- I was in Rutland that Saturday evening. Will was a chemist; some business which he had not detailed to me had called him to Vermont from his home near New York. In spite of the snowy roads he had wanted to drive up, and had invited me to go along. We were dining in the Rutland Hotel when people began talking of this ghost out toward Procter.

It was about ten-thirty when we arrived at the farm. Cars were lined along the road in both directions. People trampling the road, the fields, clustering about the farmhouse; talking, shouting to one another.

The field itself was jammed, but down by the willows along the creek there was a segment of snow as yet untrampled, for the crowd had dared approach so far but no farther. Even at this distance we could see the vague white blot of the apparition. Will said, "Come on, let's get down nearer. You want to go, Bee?"

"Yes," she said.

We began elbowing and shoving our way through the crowd. It was snowing again now. Dark; but some of the people had flashlights which darted about; and occasionally a smoker's match would flare. The crowd was good-natured; with courage bolstered by its numbers, the awe of the supernatural was gone. But they all kept at a safe distance.

Somebody said, "Why don't they shoot at it? It won't move -- can't they make it move?"

"It does move -- I saw it move, it turned its head. They're going up to it pretty soon -- see what it is."

I asked a man, "Has it made any sound?"

"No," he said. "They claim it moaned, but it didn't. The police are there now, I think -- and they're going to shoot at it. I don't see what they're afraid of. If they wanted me to I'd walk right up to it. " He began elbowing his way back toward the road.

We found ourselves presently at the front rank, where the people were struggling to keep themselves from being shoved forward by those behind them. Thirty feet across the empty snow was the ghost. It seemed, as they had said, the figure of a man, blurred and quivering as though moulded of a heavy white mist at every instant about to dissipate. I stared, intent upon remembering what I was seeing. Yet it was difficult. With a quick look the imagination seemed to picture the tall lean figure of a man with folded arms, meditatively leaning against the tree-trunk. But like a faint star which vanishes when one stares at it, I could not see a single detail. The clothes, the face, the very outlines of the body itself seemed to quiver and elude my sight when I concentrated my attention upon them.

Yet the figure, motionless, was there. Half a thousand people were now watching it. Bee said, "See its shoulder, Rob! It isn't touching the tree -- it's inside the tree! It's leaning against something else, inside the tree!"

The dark outline of the tree-trunk was steady reality; it did seem as though that shadowy shoulder were within the tree.

A farmer's boy beside us had a handful of horseshoes. He began throwing them. One of them visibly went through the ghost. Then a man with a star on the lapel of his overcoat fired a shot. It spat yellow flame. Where the bullet went no one could have told, save that it hit the water of the creek. The specter was unchanged.

The crowd was murmuring. A man near us said, "I'll walk up to it. Who wants to go along?"

"I'll go," said Will unexpectedly; but Bee held him back.

The volunteer demanded, "Officer, may I go?"