yellow candles, and all the shadows were shivering,
and the little doctor nervous and putting on side, and
him -- stark and squirming in the most unnatural
ways. Well, it made me dream."

Pause.

"It's a strange state," said Warming.

"It's a sort of complete absence," said Isbister.

"Here's the body, empty. Not dead a bit, and yet
not alive. It's like a seat vacant and marked 'engaged.'
No feeling, no digestion, no beating of the
heart -- not a flutter. _That_ doesn't make me feel as
if there was a man present. In a sense it's more dead
than death, for these doctors tell me that even the hair
has stopped growing. Now with the proper dead, the
hair will go on growing --"

"I know," said Warming, with a flash of pain in
his expression.

They peered through the glass again. Graham was
indeed in a strange state, in the flaccid phase of a
trance, but a trance unprecedented in medical history.
Trances had lasted for as much as a year before
-- but at the end of that time it had ever been
waking or a death; sometimes first one and then the
other. Isbister noted the marks the physicians had