Dr. Reyes's Narrative

On the ninth of January, now twelve days ago, I received by the evening delivery a registered envelope, addressed in the hand of my colleague and old school companion, Adrian Voss. I was a good deal surprised by this, for we were by no means in the habit of corresponding. I had seen the man, dined with him indeed, the night before, and I could imagine nothing in our intercourse that should justify the formality of registration. The contents increased my wonder, for this is how the letter ran:

"Dear Reyes, you are one of my oldest friends, and although we may have differed at times on scientific questions, I cannot remember, at least on my side, any break in our affection. There was never a day when, if you had said to me, 'Voss, my life, my honor, my reason depend upon you,' I would not have sacrificed my left hand to help you. Reyes, my life, my honor, my reason are all at your mercy. If you fail me tonight, I am lost. You might suppose, after this preface, that I am going to ask you for something dishonorable to grant. Judge for yourself.

"I want you to postpone all other engagements for tonight, ay, even if you were summoned to the bedside of a head of state. Take a car and, with this letter in your hand for consultation, drive straight to my house on Aldercote Square. Doyle, my manager, has his orders. You will find him waiting your arrival with a locksmith. The door of my cabinet is then to be forced, and you are to go in alone, to open the glass case marked E on the left hand, breaking the lock if it be shut, and to draw out, with all its contents as they stand, the fourth drawer from the top, or, which is the same thing, the third from the bottom. In my extreme distress of mind I have a morbid fear of misdirecting you, but even if I am in error, you may know the right drawer by its contents: some powders, a phial, and a paper logbook. This drawer I beg of you to carry back with you to Louisburg Square exactly as it stands."

"That is the first part of the service. Now for the second. You should be back long before midnight, but I will leave you that amount of margin, because an hour when your household is in bed is to be preferred for what will then remain to do. At midnight, then, I have to ask you to be alone in your consulting room, to admit with your own hand into the house a man who will present himself in my name, and to place in his hands the drawer that you will have brought from my cabinet. Then you will have played your part and earned my gratitude completely. Five minutes afterwards, if you insist upon an explanation, you will have understood that these arrangements are of capital importance, and that by the neglect of one of them, fantastic as they must appear, you might have charged your conscience with my death or the shipwreck of my reason."

"Confident as I am that you will not trifle with this appeal, my heart sinks at the bare thought of such a possibility. Think of me at this hour, in a strange place, laboring under a blackness of distress that no fancy can exaggerate, and yet well aware that if you will but punctually serve me, my troubles will roll away like a story that is told. Serve me, my dear Reyes, and save your friend,

Adrian Voss.

"P.S. It is possible the post may fail me and this letter not come into your hands until tomorrow morning. In that case, dear Reyes, do my errand when it shall be most convenient for you in the course of the day, and once more expect my messenger at midnight. It may then already be too late, and if that night passes without event, you will know that you have seen the last of Adrian Voss."

Upon reading this letter, I made sure my colleague was insane. But until that was proved beyond the possibility of doubt, I felt bound to do as he requested. The less I understood of this farrago, the less I was in a position to judge of its importance, and an appeal so worded could not be set aside without a grave responsibility. I rose accordingly from the table, got into my car, and drove straight to the house on Aldercote Square. The manager was awaiting my arrival. He had received by the same post a registered letter of instruction, and had sent at once for a locksmith and a carpenter. The tradesmen came while we were yet speaking, and we moved in a body to the old annex, from which Voss's private cabinet is most conveniently entered. The door was very strong and the lock excellent. But the locksmith was a handy fellow, and after two hours' work the door stood open. The case marked E was unlocked, and I took out the drawer, had it filled up with straw and tied in a sheet, and returned with it to my house on Louisburg Square.

Here I proceeded to examine its contents. The powders were neatly enough made up, but not with the nicety of a dispensing chemist, so that it was plain they were of Voss's private manufacture. When I opened one of the wrappers I found what seemed to me a simple crystalline salt of a white color. The phial was about half full of a blood-red liquor, highly pungent to the sense of smell, and seeming to me to contain phosphorus and some volatile ether. At the other ingredients I could make no guess. The book was an ordinary lab log and contained little but a series of dates. These covered a period of many years, but I observed that the entries ceased nearly a year ago and ceased quite abruptly. Here and there a brief remark was appended to a date, usually no more than a single word. "Double" occurred perhaps six times in a total of several hundred entries, and once, very early in the list and followed by several marks of exclamation, "total failure." All this, though it whetted my curiosity, told me little that was definite. How could the presence of these articles in my house affect either the honor, the sanity, or the life of my flighty colleague? If his messenger could go to one place, why could he not go to another? The more I reflected, the more convinced I grew that I was dealing with a case of cerebral disease. And though I dismissed my household to bed, I loaded my late husband's revolver, that I might be found in some posture of self-defense.

Twelve o'clock had scarce rung out over the city when the knocker sounded very gently on the door. I went myself at the summons and found a small man crouching against the pillars of the portico.

"Are you come from Dr. Voss?" I asked.

He told me yes by a constrained gesture. And when I had bidden him enter, he did not obey me without a searching backward glance into the darkness of the square. There was a patrol car not far off, its lights sweeping the brick, and at the sight of it I thought my visitor started and made greater haste.

These particulars struck me, I confess, disagreeably, and as I followed him into the bright light of the consulting room I kept my hand ready on my weapon. Here at last I had a chance of clearly seeing him. I had never set eyes on him before, so much was certain. He was small. I was struck besides with the shocking expression of his face, with his remarkable combination of great muscular activity and great apparent debility of constitution, and with the odd air of a man unfinished. I had not been three paces from him before the skin along my arms began to crawl, and my gorge rose as it does at a bad smell in a sickroom. I found myself holding my breath and edging the table between us, for which, had he asked me, I could have given no reason. At the time I set it down to some idiosyncratic personal distaste. But I have since had reason to believe the cause lies much deeper in the nature of man and turns on some nobler hinge than the principle of hatred.

This person was dressed in a fashion that would have made an ordinary person laughable. His clothes, although of rich and sober fabric, were enormously too large for him in every measurement: the trousers hanging on his legs and rolled up to keep them from the ground, the waist of the coat below his haunches, the collar sprawling wide upon his shoulders. Strange to relate, this ludicrous accoutrement was far from moving me to laughter. Rather, as there was something abnormal and misbegotten in the very essence of the creature that now faced me, this fresh disparity seemed but to fit in with and reinforce it.

"Have you got it?" he cried. "Have you got it?" And so lively was his impatience that he even laid his hand upon my arm and sought to shake me.

I put him back, conscious at his touch of a certain icy pang along my blood. "Come, sir," said I. "You forget that I have not yet the pleasure of your acquaintance. Be seated, if you please." And I showed him an example, sitting down myself in my customary seat.

"I beg your pardon, Dr. Reyes," he replied civilly enough. "My impatience has shown its heels to my politeness. I come here at the instance of your colleague, Dr. Adrian Voss, on a piece of business of some moment, and I understood..." He paused and put his hand to his throat, and I could see that in spite of his collected manner he was wrestling against the approaches of a kind of hysteria. "I understood, a drawer."

But here I took pity on my visitor's suspense, and some perhaps on my own growing curiosity.

"There it is, sir," said I, pointing to the drawer, where it lay on the floor behind the table and still covered with the sheet.

He sprang to it, and then paused, and laid his hand upon his heart. I could hear his teeth grate with the convulsive action of his jaws, and his face was so ghastly to see that I grew alarmed both for his life and for his reason.

"Compose yourself," said I.

He turned a dreadful smile on me, and as if with the decision of despair, plucked away the sheet. At sight of the contents he uttered one loud sob of such immense relief that I sat petrified. And the next moment, in a voice already fairly well under control, "Have you a graduated glass?" he asked.

I rose from my place with something of an effort and gave him what he asked.

He thanked me with a smiling nod, measured out a few drops of the red tincture, and added one of the powders. The mixture, at first of a reddish hue, began, in proportion as the crystals melted, to brighten in color, to effervesce audibly, and to throw off small fumes of vapor. Suddenly, and at the same moment, the ebullition ceased and the compound changed to a dark purple, which faded again more slowly to a watery green. My visitor, who had watched these metamorphoses with a keen eye, smiled, set down the glass upon the table, and then turned and looked upon me with an air of scrutiny.

"And now," said he, "to settle what remains. Will you be wise? Will you suffer me to take this glass in my hand and go forth from your house without further parley? Or has the greed of curiosity too much command of you? Think before you answer, for it shall be done as you decide. As you decide, you shall be left as you were before, neither richer nor wiser. Or, if you shall so prefer to choose, a new province of knowledge and new avenues to fame and power shall be laid open to you, here, in this room, upon the instant, and your sight shall be blasted by a prodigy to stagger the unbelief of Satan."

"Sir," said I, affecting a coolness that I was far from truly possessing, "you speak enigmas, and you will perhaps not wonder that I hear you with no very strong impression of belief. But I have gone too far in the way of inexplicable services to pause before I see the end."

"It is well," replied my visitor. "Reyes, you remember your vows. What follows is under the seal of our profession. And now, you who have so long been bound to the most narrow and material views, you who have denied the virtue of transcendental medicine, you who have derided your superiors, behold!"

He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry followed. He reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth. And as I looked there came, I thought, a change. He seemed to swell. His face became suddenly black, and the features seemed to melt and alter. And the next moment I had sprung to my feet and leaped back against the wall, my arms raised to shield me from that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.

"O God!" I screamed, and "O God!" again and again. For there before my eyes, pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death, there stood Adrian Voss.

The revolver lay loaded on the table at my elbow where I had put it before I went to the door, and I never once put my hand to it. What stood there was not a thing a bullet would have answered.

What he told me in the next hour I cannot bring my mind to set on paper, though I will set down the words he began with, for I have heard them in my sleep ever since. He sat on the far side of the table with his hands over his face and said through them, "Alma, I have killed a man." I said, "You are ill. Let me call somebody." He said, "His name was Alan Whitfield, and I beat him to death with a walking stick in a lane by the river, and there was no witness but a girl at a window, and I enjoyed it." He said the word as a man reports a result. Then: "Say it back to me. I want to hear how it sounds from somebody else." I would not say it. He rose twice and walked the length of the consulting room without finishing a sentence, and the third time he came back and stood over me and asked me, in the voice of a man begging a colleague for a diagnosis, whether I thought there was any cure for him. Since that hour I have not slept more than an hour at a time, and I keep a lamp burning in the hall. I will say but one thing, Kessler, and that, if you can bring your mind to credit it, will be more than enough. The creature who crept into my house that night was, on Voss's own confession, known by the name of Marsh, and hunted in every corner of the land as the murderer of Whitfield.

Alma Reyes