A young soldier’s elderly cousin disappears after not having aged for more than two decades. But now, after the way, a spectre of the cousin reappears, needing to talk about where he’s been outside the plane of our existence and the great debt he owes.
pending
The alternative was staggaring more than my facilities could hold or deal with—that my cousin, sleeping calmly in that bed, had left our spance and time for a period of four years, and that before this complete disappearance, as a preliminary to it, by way of training possibly, he had escaped our time, while still occupying our space, for a far longer period, for some twenty-five years. 

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(6)

Variants

(1)
  1. “Elsewhere and Otherwise” by Algernon Blackwood, in Shocks (Grayson and Grayson, 1935).
  2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by Algernon Blackwood

Indexer Notes

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  1. The story refers to An Adventure (1911): Was this depression, this lowering of vitality, I remember asking myself, similar to what the two ladies experienced just as they passed the threshold into their unique otherworldly Adventure in Versailles?