Then he looked down at his body.
'And what did you see?' Dr Linwood prompted.
'I'd become like them, you see,' Leakey told him. 'Not altogether, but it was already taking effect — I think I can still die, though. In fact, immortality is the worst thing that could happen to me this way…'
'Well,' the doctor said, 'let me take a look.'
'Are you out of your mind? The only reason I didn't go mad was because my mind must have changed as well!'
'Listen,' Dr Linwood said, 'I've seen a great many horrible things in my time, things that would turn your stomach. I once saw a cyclist whose head had been run over by a lorry and burst open… I'm not easily revolted, and if you don't let me examine you I certainly won't believe your story — you'll admit it's not very credible — and I won't be able to do anything for you.'
Leakey was silent for a long time.
'All right,' he replied at last. 'But first—' And he switched the tape-recorder off.
At 3:17 on April 3, 1961, everybody in Mercy Hill Hospital was startled by a hysterical screaming from the office block. The cries were so shocking that even the patients on the other side of the building were awoken, and all those who heard it were troubled by nightmares long after. Such was the terror in those cries that practically all the nurses ran to find the cause, leaving the wards almost unattended.
When they broke into Dr Linwood's office, he was lying on the floor with his hands over his eyes. He was alone, and there were no signs that he had been attacked. Under sedation he stopped screaming, but said nothing that revealed the cause of his insanity. He seemed to be obsessed with something that had happened in his office, but what he imagined he had seen is not clear. All he could say was that something about the patient he had examined — who, from the tape of the interview, was dangerously obsessed, and has not been caught yet — was 'horribly changed,' and seemed to be connected with the 'Great God Pan,' 'a rebirth in the vagina of Shub-Niggurath,' 'a fluctuation of form,' and something which was 'half a dryad.' The popular opinion is that Dr Linwood had been unbalanced by the strain of his work, together with the stress of preparing his speech for the coming convention, and had been affected by a species of contagious hallucination.
If the testimony of Dr Whitaker, the house surgeon, is to be believed, this hallucination may have had some basis in fact. He had been on his way to consult Dr Linwood over a medical matter when the screams broke out, and thus reached the office before anyone else. As he entered the corridor he saw someone opening the exit door — someone who must have been the patient whom Dr Linwood examined. Dr Whitaker did not see the man's face, but he particularly noticed the hand as the patient opened the door.
'It was black, shiny black,' he told the others, 'covered with lines — shaped like a bird's claw made out of wood. In fact, it didn't look like a human hand at all.'