The Projection of Armand Dubois — Henry S. Whitehead

This classic short story from Weird Tales Magazine originally appeared in the October, 1926 issue. It begins:



SOME time before my marriage, when I was living in Marlborough House, the old mansion on the hill back of the town of Frederiksted, on the West Indian island of St. Croix -- that is to say, before I became a landed-proprietor, as I did later, and was still making a variable living by the production and sale of my tales -- I had a next-door neighbor by the name of Mrs. Minerva Du Chaillu. I do not know whether the late Monsieur Du Chaillu, of whom this good lady was the relict, was related or not to the famous Paul of that name, that slaughterer of wild animals in the far corners of the earth, who was, and may still be, for all I know, the greatest figure of all the big game hunters, but her husband, Monsieur Placide Du Chaillu, had been for many years a clergyman of the English Church on that strange island of St. Martin, with its two flat towns, Phillipsbourg, capital of the Dutch Side, and Maragot, capital of the French Side.

The English Church was, and still is, existent only among the Dutch residents, Maragot being without an English Church. Therefore, Mrs. Du Chaillu's acquaintance, even after many years' residence on St. Martin, was almost entirely confined to the Dutch Side, where, curiously enough, English and French, rather than Dutch, are spoken; and which, although only eight miles from the French capital, has only slight communication therewith, because of the execrable quality of the connecting roads.

This old lady, well past seventy at the time, used to sit on her gallery late afternoons, when the fervor of the afternoon sun had somewhat abated, and rock herself steadily to and fro, and fan in the same indefatigable fashion as ancient Mistress Desmond, my landlady. Occasionally I would step across and exchange the time of day with her. I had known her for several years before she got her courage up to the point of asking me if some day I would not allow her to see some things I had written....