The Authentic William James by Gallagher Stephen

Author:Gallagher, Stephen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Brooligan Press
Published: 2017-11-19T00:00:00+00:00

The written account ended there.

Sebastian turned the papers over, looked around, even checked the floor. But the typed narrative had ended in the middle of the page. With the manuscript in hand, Sebastian went looking for Doc Sparks.

“Is this all there is?” he said.

“All there is we could read,” Doc Sparks said. “Last three pages were nothing but blood and brains.”

“So there is more.”

“There was.”

“Don’t tell me you burned them.”

“Not me. You buried them this morning.”

Sebastian was lost for a question.

Doc Sparks said, “You told Jonas that the face was too thin. He’d no more cotton wadding so he used your ruined paper instead.”

He explained further. Those last few pages had been stuck to the corpse’s face. Blood from the head wound had soaked into the cheap paper, making the ink run and rendering the words illegible. With the photographer on his way over, the undertaker had used the paper in a last-minute facial recon­figuration.

Nothing had been lost, Sparks insisted. The words were already gone. But Sebastian knew from his Pinkerton days that there were washes and processes that could be tried on ruined paper. In some cases, they could make lost writing decipherable again.

But not, alas, when the pages in question were stuffed into a corpse’s mouth and buried six feet deep in the Pennsylvania clay.

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