The Shadow Girl

The Shadow Girl by Ray Cummings (Ace Books, 1962)

Science fiction novella. Engineers Ed Williams and Alan Tremont construct an experimental television set that malfunctions, displaying bizarre transmissions rather than standard broadcasts. The device shows a mysterious white skeletal tower in an alien landscape under starlight, inhabited by a beautiful golden-haired girl. Through subsequent visions, they witness the tower materializing across different historical eras—manifesting to indigenous peoples in a primeval forest, then reappearing in a familiar park setting near New York City. The tower appears to exist outside normal space-time, phasing between temporal locations. The narrative follows the engineers' growing fascination and alarm as they recognize the tower's proximity to their own world. A biographical note identifies Cummings (1887–1957) as a science fiction pioneer influenced by Edison, known for stories bridging nineteenth-century proto-SF and mid-twentieth-century science fiction conventions, exploring themes of time travel, dimensional space, and cosmic scales.