I visited a friend whose hobby (besides reading fantasy) was the occult, who volunteered to entertain me with automatic writing and the ouija-board.  Now, I share Lovecraft’s scepticism towards the supernatural, regarding it as at best a means of amusement.  When the question arose of what spirits we should try to lure to our planchette, the names of Lovecraft, Merritt, Hall, and Flint popped into my pixilated mind.  So I set my fingers on the wooden heart and, since my host was also a Flint admirer, we asked about Flint’s fatal accident.  The ouija spelled out: 

N-O A-C-C-I-D-E-N-T—­R-O-B-B-E-R-Y

There followed something about being held up by a hitch-hiker.  Then Hall (or at least some energy-source other than my own conscious mind) came through too, and when I asked if he had left any work behind he replied: 

Y-E-S—­T-H-E L-A-S-T G-O-D-L-I-N-G

Later I asked his son about this (without revealing the title) and Javen Hall told me of the story his father had been plotting when he died:  The hidden Empire, or the child of the Southwind.  Whatever was pushing the planchette failed to inform me that when I found Austin Hall’s son and widow, they would put into my hands an unknown, unpublished fantasy novel by Hall:  The house of Dawn!  Some day it may appear in print.

Meanwhile you are getting understandably impatient to explore that unknown realm of the Blind Spot.  Be on your way, and bon voyage!

Forrest J Ackerman, Beverley Hills, Calif.

PROLOGUE

Perhaps it were just as well to start at the beginning.  A mere matter of news.

All the world at the time knew the story; but for the benefit of those who have forgotten I shall repeat it.  I am merely giving it as I have taken it from the papers with no elaboration and no opinion—­a mere statement of facts.  It was a celebrated case at the time and stirred the world to wonder.  Indeed, it still is celebrated, though to the layman it is forgotten.

It has been labelled and indexed and filed away in the archives of the profession.  To those who wish to look it up it will be spoken of as one of the great unsolved mysteries of the century.  A crime that leads two ways, one into murder—­sordid, cold and calculating; and the other into the nebulous screen that thwarts us from the occult.

Perhaps it is the character of Dr. Holcomb that gives the latter.  He was a great man and a splendid thinker.  That he should have been led into a maze of cheap necromancy is, on the face, improbable.  He had a wonderful mind.  For years he had been battering down the scepticism that had bulwarked itself in the material.