“Mr Armitage departed in the early evening, leaving me and Mrs Littledale alone at Stoke Moran once more. The night, however, proved uneventful and Mrs Littledale slept in her own room, though I dreamed that the cheetah, bony and ghastly pale, circled the house all night looking for a way in.
“The following day I was sitting on my sister’s bed leafing through some of her books and feeling very dispirited by my recollection of the terror and confusion that had preceded her death when Mrs Littledale sought me out to say we had a visitor. When she gave me his name I told her to have him brought to me in one of the seldom-used sitting rooms in the central portion of the mansion. It was none other than Mr Edward Thurn, who greeted me very cordially and took a seat opposite me while Mrs Littledale went to prepare tea. I had previously formed no mental image of the man, but his appearance, except for his shortness of stature, did not surprise me. He was thin but appeared healthy, his age difficult to ascertain – I would say anywhere from late forties to perhaps sixty – his black hair less grey than my own. His face was very brown, leathery, and deeply creased by much exposure to the sun, with exceedingly keen dark eyes couched in fleshy folds. I should think at a distance he might be taken for a man of the Orient. He wore good clothes that had seen better days.
“He said to me, ‘I believe I had a presentiment that things were not well with your stepfather, and that was part of my reason for returning to England. I only just arrived several days ago and immediately wrote that letter you received, to let him know. I am terribly sorry to learn of the death of my good friend, Dr Roylott, and I am sorry for your loss as well, Miss Stoner. I know he had acted as a devoted father to you and your twin since you were very small children.’
“Unable to stopper the bitterness that rose to my lips, I replied, ‘He never told you of her passing? Small wonder. My twin, Julia, expired two years ago, Mr Thurn. She was murdered by your friend, my devoted stepfather.’
“‘What is this you say?’ my visitor cried. His expression of surprise and dismay appeared utterly genuine to me.
“‘It is a long, strange story,’ I forewarned him, and I proceeded to tell it in all its details, naturally including your own involvement, gentlemen. Mr Thurn sat riveted and was plainly disturbed by what I had to report of his long-time friend’s murder of my sister, his plot to murder me as well and his own accidental death by the very serpent my guest had shipped from India.
“Mr Thurn turned his face away and said in an odd, quiet tone, ‘But I never actually shipped him that snake. Nor the baboon or cheetah.’
“‘You did not?’ said I. ‘But if not you, then who?’
“He said, ‘I am responsible for providing those creatures to him, but not in the way you imagine. It would be very difficult to make you understand, but in all fairness it is my duty to try, after the ordeals you have suffered. Yet first I must explain to some degree about myself.’ He turned his eyes back on me, and if they had been of a piercing quality before I nearly squirmed under their gaze now. I trembled at their unnerving intensity and yet, as though hypnotised, I could not look away. There was a quality to them that suggested the man possessed an immense reservoir of internal power. I will stress, however, that this did not strike me necessarily as an evil force, but as a power such as electricity held in reserve.
“Mr Thurn began, ‘You may wonder, as I wonder now myself, how Dr Roylott and I could be such close friends, and yet even after all our years of association with him, you and I were blind to the full picture of his nature. We were similar in that we both possessed questing minds and restless spirits that led us to seek fulfilment beyond the conventional precincts of man. That is, of European man. I travelled widely in my restlessness, beginning in my youth, without even quite knowing at first if my quest was a spiritual one. I encountered your stepfather in India, yes, but it was not due to my being a patient of his, as he led you to believe. It was in prison that we met, after he had been convicted of killing his servant. My own crime was of a political nature, but I have more than once run afoul of local law in my travels, since I have often journeyed to places that were prohibited and seen things I was, as an outsider, not meant to see.
“‘I was released from prison much before Dr Roylott, and I resumed my travels, going on to the holy temple of Badrinath, taking my cue from the Portuguese Jesuits Andrade and Marques and masquerading as a Hindu on pilgrimage. After some time in that region I travelled on to Tibet, entering it through the Mana Pass in the Himalayas.’”
Here Mr Holmes cut in, “Are you sure this fellow was not deceiving you, Miss Stoner? Tibet has forbidden foreigners from crossing its borders for the past three decades. Violating that ban by entering through such a conspicuous point of ingress as the Mana Pass leaves me suspicious.”
I replied, “I can only relate what I was told, Mr Holmes, and he did say that he had been turned back in an earlier attempt. But Mr Thurn informed me, without any apparent boastfulness, that he was masterful at disguise.”
“He rather reminds me of you in that regard,” Dr Watson said to his friend.
“He also claimed rather provocatively that he had developed the means of going unseen, though he did not elaborate on what he meant by that.”
Mr Holmes said, “The thought of his actually succeeding in penetrating Tibet is intriguing. I have long desired to travel there myself, and one day may attempt it. But again I apologise. Please resume your account.”
I did so. “Mr Thurn went on with his personal history, saying, ‘Though anyone who aids a foreigner who has infiltrated Tibet runs the risk of punishment, including death, I nevertheless met people who, having lived all their lives in so isolated a region, were as fascinated by me as I was by them. I spent two years in Tibet, during which I devoted most of my time to the study of Buddhism. I was fortunate in impressing with my earnestness a gomchen, a Tibetan hermit said to be capable of working wonders, who at great risk accepted me as his secret student. It was he who taught me how to conjure seemingly living entities with my mind.’
“‘I do not understand,’ I told him.
“He said, ‘I warned you that it would be difficult for you to accept. Nevertheless, what I am telling you is the truth. It is possible for one to materialise a form the Tibetans call a tulpa, which is a manifestation of thought with the appearance of a living being, brought about through intensely focused concentration. It is an illusion, but not a delusion; a hallucination so convincing that not only does the conjurer himself witness it but, ideally, it would be visible to others as well, this phantom construction as perceptible as an authentic material entity. A tulpa might even, ultimately, take on a personality of its own and defy its master’s direction, living so to speak as an independent being.’
“‘Are you suggesting,’ I said, ‘that the snake…’
“‘Not only the snake,’ he answered. ‘I manifested the baboon and the cheetah, too, purely through the power of thought. They were not sent physically from India. It was my mind that sent them here at Dr Roylott’s behest. During our correspondence after I had left Tibet I told your stepfather of my experiences there and my own success in conjuring tulpas, and he was thoroughly intrigued. We devised an experiment: would I be able to manifest a tulpa remotely, by transmitting the power of my thoughts to his location in England, with the doctor acting as a sort of receiver to supplement my efforts? Would it be possible to create a tulpa through such a joint effort? Oh, of course the conjurations were mostly mine, but your stepfather’s belief in my efforts, and his concentration on the subjects we chose as our models, helped enable them to manifest, and after they had done so it was mostly through Dr Roylott’s own will that these forms were sustained. With these things, belief is all, a belief more complex than the blind faith of religion, because one is always aware that the object of belief is an illusion.