“All right, I’ll be around within an hour,” he told her. “Have you found out what’s on his mind yet?” he added.
“N-no,” Liz told him.
When he came he told her to stay downstairs while he went up to see the patient. It seemed to her that an intolerably long time passed before she heard his feet on the stairs and she went out to meet him in the hall. She looked up into his face with mute anxiety. His expression was serious, and puzzled, so that she was afraid to hear him speak.
But at last she asked: “Is – is he going to die, Doctor?”
“He’s very weak – very weak indeed,” the doctor said. After a pause, he added: “Why didn’t you tell me about those footprints he thought were following him?”
She looked up at him in alarm.
“It’s all right. He’s told me all about it now. I knew there was something on his mind. It’s not surprising, either.”
Liz stared at him. “Not –?”
“In the circumstances, no,” the doctor said. “A mind oppressed by a sense of sin can play a lot of nasty tricks. Nowadays they talk of guilt complexes and inhibitions. Names change. When I was a boy the same sort of thing was known as a bad conscience.
“When one has the main facts, these things become obvious to anyone of experience. Your husband was engaged in – well, to put it bluntly, burgling the house of a man whose interests were mystic and occult. Something that happened there gave him a shock and unbalanced his judgement.
“As a result, he has difficulty in distinguishing between the real things he sees and the imaginary ones his uneasy conscience shows him. It isn’t very complicated. He feels he is being dogged. Somewhere in his subconscious lie the lines from The Ancient Mariner:
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread
and the two come together. And, in addition to that, he appears to have developed a primitive, vampiric type of phobia.
“Now, once we are able to help him dispel this obsession, he –” he broke off, suddenly aware of the look on his listener’s face, “What is it?” he asked.
“But, Doctor,” Liz said. “Those footmarks, I –” She was cut short abruptly by a sound from above that was half groan and half scream.
The doctor was up the stairs before she could move. When she followed him, it was with a heavy certainty in her heart.
She stood in the doorway watching as he bent over the bed. In a moment he turned, grave-eyed, and gave her a slight shake of his head. He put his hand on her shoulder, then went quietly past her out of the room.
For some seconds Liz stood without moving. Then her eyes dropped from the bed to the floor. She trembled. Laughter, a high-pitched, frightening laughter shook her as she looked at the red naked footprints which led away from the bedside, across the floor and down the stairs, after the doctor ...
The End