Dr. Acker's Account

I am Paul Acker. I have been a physician in this city for thirty-one years. I live on Brattle Street, in my father's house, with a laboratory behind it that was his before it was mine, and I am writing this down because I can no longer carry it in one body. I am not out of my mind. I have examined myself the way I would examine a patient, and I find a mind that is intact and a body that is not. This is the second copy. I burned the first.

I am giving it to Warren Pike, of Pike and Ordway in Boston, with one condition: it is not to be opened while Adrian Hale is alive. That is not delicacy. If he is alive there is still a chance that what I saw was the last of it, and what I know can do no good and a great deal of harm. If he is dead, you have a right to it, and you may think of me what you like.

It was the second week of October, and it was raining. I had sent Hector home at six. I had one of my headaches, the kind that sits behind the left eye, and I had eaten nothing since morning, and I was thinking about the fact that my hands had begun to shake in the mornings when I lifted a cup. At half past eleven there was a knock.

I keep a revolver in the drawer of the table by the window. My father kept it there and I had never taken it out in my life. I took it out that night, I do not know why, and stood at the door with my fingers around it.

He was small, and wet through, and the rain had only been falling twenty minutes, so he had not come far, and yet he stood on my step like a man pulled out of a river. His clothes were good cloth and they did not fit him, and not the way clothes fail a man who has been ill: they were too large everywhere at once, the coat hanging off his shoulders, the cuffs turned back twice, the trousers rolled thick at the ankle. He held his hat in his hand. He looked up at me and I felt the thing you feel when your foot comes down in the dark on a stair that is not there.

He said, "Dr. Acker." Not a question. As if we had an appointment. Then he put a letter in my hand, and stepped back under the dripping portico, and watched the street over his shoulder.

The letter was in Adrian Hale's hand. I had not spoken to him in eleven years and I knew it at once. It ran like this, as near as I can give it:

"Acker. We have not behaved like friends for some years and I am not going to spend this letter on that. I am asking you for something that will look like madness. Go to your laboratory. In the floor safe under the second bench you will find a sealed tin and a small vial in a wooden rack. Wrap them and carry them to your house and give them, unopened, to the man who brought you this. Do not open the tin. Do not tell anyone, not your assistant, not the police, not a living soul. If you fail me tonight I am finished and it will be on you. You will have the explanation before midnight."

I read it twice on the step. I asked him who he was. He said, "Cal Voss," and said he was a friend of Hale's, and that there was no time for the rest. He touched my sleeve to hurry me, and the cold came through the cloth into the bone, and I pulled my arm away without meaning to.

I did not believe the letter. I went because of the hand: a forger copies letters, but not the way a man loops the tail of his A or lets his capital H lean into the word, because he does not know those things are there. And I was curious. Hale and I had quarrelled about his work, and I had been sure I was right, and when a letter comes at midnight from a man you are sure you were right about, you go.

I went out the side door and across the yard without the light on. The laboratory was colder than the house. I turned on the bench lamp and stood a moment because I had to make myself do the next part. The safe was in the floor under the second bench, a squat thing my father had put in. The combination was the year of his graduation and my mother's birthday. It came open on the third try, and inside was the tin, flat, about the size of a thick book, sealed around the lid with waxed paper and a wax seal, and beside it, in a wooden rack, a vial half full of a red liquor that moved when I tilted it the way oil moves and did not run like water.

The seal was my own. I had pressed it there myself, eleven years ago, when Hale came to me in the evening with a tin and a vial and a face I did not like and said, "Keep these for me, Paul. I do not trust myself with them and I do not trust my house." I asked what they were. He said, "The end of an argument." He said, "You will know when I ask for them." I took them, because it was Hale and because I owed him a kindness, and I put them in the floor and asked no more, and that is how the tin came to be under my bench, and it is the beginning of the reason I have said nothing. I wrapped them in a clean towel and carried them back across the yard under my coat.

He was not sitting when I came in. He was standing in the middle of the room, and the moment the door opened he crossed the floor and took the bundle out of my arms before I could set it down. He put it on the table and stood over it, and then he put his hand flat on the tin and held it there, and his whole body went loose, the way a man goes loose when a pain stops. He had been more frightened than I was. He had been more frightened than I will ever be.

I said, I want to know what this is. Before you touch it.

He said, "He taught me the formula. I know it by heart. I can make the color come and the bubbles come, the whole of it, exactly as he showed me, and then I drink it and nothing happens. Nothing at all." He tapped the tin once. "It is the material. It is not the same. There is something in his first salt, something wrong with it, and whatever was wrong with that salt is the only thing that ever worked. This is the last of it. He has tried every supplier in the city, and the new salt is clean, and clean salt does nothing but make a man sick." He looked up, and his eyes did not agree with each other, the way two clocks in a room do not agree. He said, "So I came to you. He said you were the only man alive he ever trusted, and he said you would have it, and he was right."

I did not correct him. I stood in my own house and listened to a stranger in a wet coat explain a compound I had never seen, and the terrible part was that he was telling the truth. I have been a doctor thirty-one years and I can hear a man who is lying and a man who is not.

He said, "Have you a graduated glass." I brought one from the cabinet in my consulting room, the good one, and a stirrer, and set them on the table and stepped back without deciding to. He opened the tin with a penknife, going around the lid under the paper, and the smell that came up I will not describe. The tin was not full. Inside was a white salt, coarse and grey and not clean, and it gritted when he took a pinch on the blade and tipped it in. Then the liquor. He uncorked the vial and smelled it and made a face, and then measured, one drop, two, and then, after thinking with his head on one side, a third. He counted them out loud.

At first it was only reddish; the salt went down in a slow white spiral. Then the whole thing began to brighten, red to an orange that had a struck coal in it, and it began to work, a fine steady fizz, the sound of a match struck a long way off, and a thread of vapor came off it and broke and smelled of nothing. Then, all at once, the fizz stopped. The liquid stood, and changed, and went the color of a bruised plum, and then the plum thinned and went a pale green, the green of the underside of a leaf. And then it was still. I have watched ten thousand solutions do ten thousand things and I have never seen one do that.

He watched it with his hand on the table and then looked at me and smiled. It was the smile of a man who has waited a long time and does not much care what it costs the room. He said, "You can go now. I could drink this and walk out of your house and you could spend the rest of your life telling yourself you had a bad dream, and never quite managing it." He said, "Or you can stay and be sure and never sleep properly again. Which do you want, Doctor?"

I heard myself say I had come this far. He said something about the oath, the seal of the profession, and I agreed, and I want it in the record that he asked me and that I said yes.

He put the glass to his lips and drank it down in one movement, the way a man drinks medicine he does not expect to enjoy. Then he set the glass down very carefully, and it is the care he took with the glass that I remember, because of what his hands did next.

He was a head and more shorter than I am. He stood by the table with his hands at his sides and his chin up. For two or three seconds nothing happened, and I thought, with a relief that went through me like a wave, that it was a fraud, and I was opening my mouth to say so when the relief left me like water out of a bath.

Then he changed.

There was no smoke and no sound but the rain, and no light but the lamp. I am going to be exact, because exactness is all I have left. His face began to work. Not the expression: the parts. The jaw went long and the bones went out and back under the skin like a hand moving under a coverlet, and the skull seemed to be decided a second time from inside. The color came up from his throat in a flush and went down and away and left him a grey I have seen only in the first minute after a death, and then the flush came back and brought the shape with it. He made one low sound, the sound of a man taking up a beam. He did not scream, and I think that was the worst of it, that he did not scream, that he stood there with his hands open and let it happen. His shoulders came up and out; the coat, a tent on him before, went tight and pulled at the seams across the back; his wrists came out of the cuffs and his hands grew. He was being pushed out from the inside. He did not grow the way a boy grows. He was crowded out of himself by something that had more room in it than he had.

Then he caught the table with both hands and held on and breathed, and it was finished, and it was Adrian Hale.

I had known that face thirty years. I had eaten at his table and argued with him until two in the morning about nothing. There was nothing left of the small man, not the height, not the hands, not the cast of the jaw, nothing but the clothes, which split at the shoulder when he moved his arm. He was tall and grey and soaked with sweat and breathing as if he had come up a long flight of stairs, and he was Adrian Hale, and he had never had a brother.

I had walked backwards until the wall stopped me. My hand was on the revolver and I did not take it out, and I have wondered since what I would have done if I had, and I am glad I never found out. He looked at me for a while. The lamplight was the same and the fire was the same, and I could not fit it into my head that the room had gone on being the room.

Then he said, "You see." And after a moment, in his own voice, which is a good voice, a physician's voice, the warm one: "I am sorry you had to be the one."

I said, Adrian. What have you done.

He poured himself a glass of water and drank it, and his hand shook, and it was the water shaking in the glass that made it real, the tremor of a man who has been through something. He said, "I have done what I could and it is finished." He said the thing was over and under control and there would be no more of it, and then he said, "And you have to let me go now." I said I would not let him go until he told me. He said, "You will let me go, because if you do not you will have to explain me, and you cannot." He was right. That is the sentence that has cost me everything, and it was true when he said it.

He took my overcoat off the hook, because the clothes he stood in would not have carried him to the corner, and put it on, my coat, which fit him better than it had ever fit me, and went out into the rain. I heard the door and his feet on the steps and then nothing but the rain, and I sat down on the floor.

I sat against the wall two hours by the clock on the mantel. I could not get up. At some point I took my own pulse, out of habit, and it was fast and thin and it skipped, and I understood that I was not dying, that I was only afraid, and that a heart can go at that rate a long time and mean nothing. Hector found me at seven. I told him I had a bad turn and he believed me, because it was true. I washed the glass myself and dried it and put it back in the cabinet, where it still is. It is the second glass on the left. I look at it every day the way you look at a photograph of somebody dead.

I have spent these last weeks asking why I did not go out and knock on a door and tell somebody, and I will give the reasons in the order they come, including the ones that show me worst.

Nobody would have believed me. A physician of some standing who says he has seen a man change shape in his own front room loses the licence first and the standing after.

Under the oath is something worse. I kept my word to him, but a man does not keep a word like that out of virtue. To break it I would have had to explain the tin and the safe, and to explain the tin and the safe I would have had to say that the whole of it began with me, eleven years before, when I took a sealed tin from a friend and put it in my floor and never once asked what was inside.

I was afraid of the tall one, and I wanted it to be over. He told me it was finished, and he was calm, and I have wanted many things and none of them as much as I wanted that sentence to be true.

And there is one more, the one I have not said out loud until this page. Some part of me, standing against that wall with my hand on a revolver, was not a frightened man at all. It was a physician watching something no physician has watched, and it wanted to know how it worked. I would have given a year of my life for the tin and the vial to be mine and the room to be empty. That is the ugliest sentence in this document.

So I said nothing, and it has cost me. I stopped operating within the year, because my hands shook and because I could not stand over a table and be sure I was the only one in the room. I lost weight without meaning to and my color went, and the men who examine me say my heart is tired and that I must not excite myself, which is advice I have considered and rejected as a joke. I sleep an hour or two and wake and see it happening again across the top of a table, and there is no way to make a thing like that into a dream; it will not go where dreams go.

You will want the last of it, and I am going to put it in, because you are reading this because Adrian Hale is dead, and I am dead, and there is no one left it can hurt.

The small man who came to my door that night, the one I let into my house and gave my own glass to and lent my own coat, was wanted for the murder of Ward Ellis. Hale told me so himself before he left. He stood in the front room in my overcoat, with the coat splitting at the shoulder, and said that in a day or two I would read about a thing, and that I would know it had been the small one, and that he would not argue with me about who the small one was. I have the meaning by heart if not the sentence. He said he could not stop it and he was sorry, and then he asked me to let him go, and I let him go, and in the morning I washed the glass.

I would like to write at the bottom of this that I would do it differently now, that if it happened again tonight I would go out into the street and shout. I am past the age where a man can promise a thing like that about himself. I did what I did. I am not asking you to forgive it. I am asking you to put it down exactly as it is.

Paul Acker