What Nora Aldiss Saw

I am writing this at my desk at four in the morning and I will not sleep tonight.

On the ninth of January I received, by evening courier, a registered envelope addressed in the handwriting of Adrian Kessler. I was surprised: we had dined together the night before and we had not exchanged letters in eleven years. The letter asked me to do the following.

I was to postpone everything, go straight to his house, where Manny Reyes would be waiting with a locksmith; the lock on the cabinet was to be broken; I was to open the glass cabinet marked E, take out the fourth drawer from the top with all its contents exactly as they stood, and bring it home. And then at midnight I was to be alone in my consulting room, and to admit, with my own hand, a man who would present himself in Adrian's name, and give him the drawer.

The letter said that his life, his honor and his reason were at my mercy, and that if I failed him I would carry his death on my conscience.

I believed then that he had gone insane. I went anyway, because a letter written in that tone cannot be set aside.

It took the locksmith two hours to open the door. The drawer, when I had it, contained some powders wrapped in paper — obviously not made up by any pharmacy; they were his own work — a small glass vial about half full of a red fluid that smelled sharply of phosphorus and ether, and a notebook. The notebook was a record of experiments, hundreds of dated entries going back years, most of them marked with nothing more than a word. Twice I saw the word double. And near the beginning of it, underlined three times and followed by four exclamation marks, the words total failure.

I sent my staff to bed and took an old revolver out of the drawer and put it on my desk, because by that time I was convinced I was dealing with a sick man and did not know what else I was dealing with.

At midnight, somebody knocked very softly.

I opened the door myself. A small man was pressed back against the portico, out of the light. He had the worst face I have ever looked at, and I have looked at a great many faces: the features were ordinary, and the whole of it was wrong. He was dressed in clothes that would have been funny on anybody — a jacket that hung off his shoulders, trousers rolled up four inches — and it was not funny, not for a second. There was also a physical effect I have never been able to explain and have never felt before or since. Standing within three feet of him, my pulse dropped and my jaw began to ache, the way it does before a rigor.

I asked whether he came from Adrian Kessler. He nodded. I made him sit down. He said he had been sent on an errand of some moment, and then he stopped, and put his hand to his throat, and I watched a man fight down hysteria in my consulting room.

I pointed to the drawer.

He crossed the room, and then stopped, and stood with his hand flat on his chest, and his teeth were grinding and his face had gone gray, and I was afraid for his heart. I told him to compose himself. He turned a smile on me that I would rather not describe, and pulled the sheet off the drawer.

At the sight of what was in it he gave one sob of relief so enormous that I could not move. Then, in a voice under control again: “Do you have a graduated glass?”

I got him one.

He measured a few minims of the red fluid out of the vial and added one of the powders. The mixture, which was reddish, began to brighten as the crystals dissolved, and to hiss, and to give off a small vapor. Then the hissing stopped, all at once, and the whole of it turned a dark purple, which faded slowly to a thin green. He watched it with the eye of a man watching a house he owns burn down, and then he looked up at me.

“And now,” he said, “will you be sensible? Will you let me drink this and walk out of your house and ask nothing? Or is your curiosity stronger than you are?”

I told him he was speaking in riddles, and that I had gone too far to stop before the end.

“Then remember your oaths,” he said. “What follows is under the seal of the profession.” And then he said something I have never repeated to anybody. He said: you have spent forty years telling us there is nothing under the skin. He said it in Adrian's phrasing — not his voice, his sentence; it was a sentence I had heard in Adrian's kitchen eleven years ago, used the way a man uses a tool that belongs to somebody else. Then he drank it in one swallow.

What followed took perhaps fifteen seconds.

He screamed. He reeled and caught the edge of my desk and held on to it with both hands, staring, with his mouth open, and I watched him begin to swell. His face went black, and the features of it ran and altered like wax, and I jumped up and got my back against the wall and put up my arm in front of my face.

And when I looked again, Adrian Kessler was standing in the middle of my consulting room, pale, shaking, half fainting, groping ahead of him with both hands like a man who has been dug out of a collapse.

I have been a physician for forty-four years. I have never once written down something I did not see. I saw this. I have thought about it every hour since.

He told me, for an hour, everything. I am not going to set it down; some of it I would have to put in writing, and I will not have it in my house. I will say only this, and it is enough, and if you can bring yourself to believe it you will know what you have been living next to: the thing that came into my consulting room that night and drank a glass of green liquid and became my oldest friend was the man the police are hunting for in every state in the country for the murder of Judge Merritt Ashby.

I have not slept since, and I do not expect to. I am not afraid of dying. I am afraid of having seen what I saw and being the only person alive who knows it. I will put this in an envelope tonight and leave instructions, because I do not trust my heart.

Nora Aldiss