At first he was under the impression that he was still standing in the class-room.  He perceived quite distinctly the surprise of the boys and the entry of Mr. Lidgett.  He is quite positive upon that score.  He did not hear their remarks; but that he ascribed to the deafening effect of the experiment.  Things about him seemed curiously dark and faint, but his mind explained that on the obvious but mistaken idea that the explosion had engendered a huge volume of dark smoke.  Through the dimness the figures of Lidgett and the boys moved, as faint and silent as ghosts.  Plattner’s face still tingled with the stinging heat of the flash.  He, was, he says, “all muddled.”  His first definite thoughts seem to have been of his personal safety.  He thought he was perhaps blinded and deafened.  He felt his limbs and face in a gingerly manner.  Then his perceptions grew clearer, and he was astonished to miss the old familiar desks and other schoolroom furniture about him.  Only dim, uncertain, grey shapes stood in the place of these.  Then came a thing that made him shout aloud, and awoke his stunned faculties to instant activity. Two of the boys, gesticulating, walked one after the other clean through him!  Neither manifested the slightest consciousness of his presence.  It is difficult to imagine the sensation he felt.  They came against him, he says, with no more force than a wisp of mist.

Plattner’s first thought after that was that he was dead.  Having been brought up with thoroughly sound views in these matters, however, he was a little surprised to find his body still about him.  His second conclusion was that he was not dead, but that the others were:  that the explosion had destroyed the Sussexville Proprietary School and every soul in it except himself.  But that, too, was scarcely satisfactory.  He was thrown back upon astonished observation.

Everything about him was profoundly dark:  at first it seemed to have an altogether ebony blackness.  Overhead was a black firmament.  The only touch of light in the scene was a faint greenish glow at the edge of the sky in one direction, which threw into prominence a horizon of undulating black hills.  This, I say, was his impression at first.  As his eye grew accustomed to the darkness, he began to distinguish a faint quality of differentiating greenish colour in the circumambient night.  Against this background the furniture and occupants of the class-room, it seems, stood out like phosphorescent spectres, faint and impalpable.  He extended his hand, and thrust it without an effort through the wall of the room by the fireplace.

He describes himself as making a strenuous effort to attract attention.  He shouted to Lidgett, and tried to seize the boys as they went to and fro.  He only desisted from these attempts when Mrs. Lidgett, whom he (as an Assistant Master) naturally disliked, entered the room.  He says the sensation of being in the world, and yet not a part of it, was an extraordinarily disagreeable one.  He compared his feelings, not inaptly, to those of a cat watching a mouse through a window.  Whenever he made a motion to communicate with the dim, familiar world about him, he found an invisible, incomprehensible barrier preventing intercourse.