The Sapphire Siren
by Nictzin Dyalhis
A surprisingly large section of the populace believes in the existence of another world, invisibly about us, having its own rules and laws, populated by individuals and beings of varying degrees of monstrosity. I refer to the occultists, those who conjure up ghosts and talk learnedly of elementals. So it should require no stretch of the imagination to conceive of a world invisible to us, but all about us, in which men and women live and in which live also those other "things" occultists speak of. Nictzin Dyalhis has written an exciting and fantastic adventure story of a man who lived a dual life, one in this world and one in "that" one. Those who know this author only through his classic interplanetary novelette, When the Green Star Waned, will find him equally exciting in this different ultramundane sphere.
Suicide as a means of escaping trouble never appealed to me. I had studied the occult, and knew what consequences that course involved, afterward.
But I was fed up on life. I was destitute, and had no friends who might help, even were I to appeal to them. At forty-eight, one does not easily regain solvency. And, gradually, I'd lost all ambition. Not even hope remained.
If only there were some other road out—a door, for example, into the hypothetical region of four dimensions. . . it certainly couldn't be worse there than what I'd borne in the last three years. Well, I could try. . . .
I seated myself cross-legged on the floor. If I concentrated hard enough, perhaps the miracle might occur. . . at least I should have tried. . . a last resort. . . . Gradually a vague state ensued wherein I was not unconscious, for I still knew that I was I; yet a queer detachment was mine—there was a world, but of it I was no longer a part. . . .
Click!
Like a movable panel a section of the wall opened, revealing a most peculiar corridor—a strange Being stood smiling at me. It did not speak, yet I caught the challenge: "Dare you?"
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