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Mark Twain sat in a chair beside the front door, smoking a cigar and guarding the last quiet stretch of the afternoon. The cigar burned a little to one side, but he did not hold it against the cigar. He had left a sentence unfinished at the desk in the hall, and he had decided that the best way to finish it was to stop trying for ten minutes. The path from the road ran straight to the steps. He watched it without interest, the way a man watches a stretch of water after he has already decided not to fish.

A stranger came into view at the far end of the path. He was entirely solid, respectably dressed in a dark coat, carrying a leather case under one arm and holding his hat in the other hand. He walked with the steady purpose of a man arriving on business, and Mark felt the first small sag of annoyance. The man would want money, or an endorsement, or literary advice, or payment for something Mark could not remember ordering. It did not matter which. He would want it promptly.

Mark let the cigar rest. When the stranger was perhaps a dozen steps away, Mark looked down and tapped ash onto the ground. The burn had tunneled along one side. He turned the cigar to inspect it, and for a moment his eyes closed against a thread of smoke. It was only a blink, or something near enough to a blink.

When he looked up, the path was empty.

He sat forward. From his chair he could see the road, and no one was on it. The man was not on the steps. He was not at the door. He was not beside the house, and he was not behind the low hedge, unless a grown man with a leather case had learned to pass through privet. Mark stood. He walked to the edge of the steps and looked toward the side of the house. Nothing. The path lay bare in both directions.

His first clear feeling was not fright. It was delight. For years he had wanted to see a ghost, and now a ghost had come to him in daylight, dressed like a salesman, and behaved with absolute respectability. No chains, no hollow warning, no message. He was slightly disappointed about the message, but he did not intend to complain. A man could not expect a ghost to be perfect on its first visit.

He hurried into the house. “Paper,” he said to no one. “I need paper before the facts improve themselves.” He crossed the hall toward the desk, already arranging the details in his mind.

Then he stopped.

The stranger was sitting in a chair just inside the door. The leather case rested on his knees. He looked up, gave a small civil nod, and said, “Mr. Twain. Forgive me. I rang twice. The servant admitted me at last.”

Mark stood still. “How did you get into this house?”

The stranger’s brow creased politely. “I walked up the path. I passed your chair. You appeared to be dozing, so I did not disturb you. I climbed the steps, rang the bell, waited, and rang again.” He paused. “Your man let me in and asked me to wait.”

Mark looked toward the back of the hall, where the servant had appeared with a cloth and an air of mild patience. “You admitted this gentleman?”

“After the second ring,” the servant said. “I was at the back of the house. The first ring reached me, but I waited.”

Mark almost smiled. The household had an established joke that the servant answered the bell according to a single principle: perhaps they won’t persevere.

Mark turned back to the visitor. “Did you leave the path?”

“No.”

“Did you enter by another door?”

“No.”

“Did you walk directly past me?”

“Yes. You were sitting with your eyes closed. I nodded, but you did not respond. I assumed you were asleep.”

The visitor shifted the case on his knees. “Is something the matter?”

Mark did not answer immediately. He went back out through the front door and stood beside the chair. The afternoon was exactly as he had left it. From that chair, he would have seen the man cover the remaining distance, climb the steps, ring the bell, step back, wait, ring again, wait again, and finally enter. That interval would have lasted longer than the blink Mark remembered. It would have lasted minutes. He could not remember a second of it.

He understood then. He had fallen asleep without noticing. The lapse might have been very short, but his mind had joined the moment before it to the moment after it and had simply left out the middle. The missing middle had contained a man walking past him in broad daylight. That was all.

He went back inside. The visitor had stood, hat in hand. “May I state my business now?”

“In a moment,” Mark said. He crossed to the desk and looked down at the note he had begun in the first heat of discovery. It read: “This afternoon a man vanished from the path in front of my house.”

He picked up the pen. He drew a line through “vanished.” He thought for a moment and crossed out the whole sentence. Then he wrote beneath it: “A stranger arrived on ordinary business and found me asleep in a chair outside my own front door. He did not disappear. For a small unremembered interval, I did.”

He set the pen down. The stranger had never vanished. He had simply kept walking while Mark Twain, cigar in hand, briefly disappeared from the afternoon.

This story is based on a true account included in Andrew Lang’s The Book of Dreams and Ghosts. You can read the original account in the free Project Gutenberg edition. And if you are interested in fresh and modern content about dreams that came true, you can find them in my book “Dreams That Wake You Up”, a collection of real dreams and real outcomes, directly from my clients, printed with their consent.

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