All this time the row of figures behind the table were disrobing. Adam and my two guards moved about helping them. Adam laid cardboard folders with white labels in each place. The stuffed cat was removed, and the staffs, all the paraphernalia. It was done swiftly, well rehearsed. I kept flashing looks down the line, as one person after another was revealed.
The last arrival, the goat-head, was an old man with a clipped white beard, dark gray-blue eyes; a resemblance to Smuts. Like all the others he studiously avoided looking at me, but I saw him smile at Conchis, the astrologer-magician beside him. Next to Conchis appeared, from behind the bird-head and pregnant belly, a slim middle-aged woman. She was wearing a dark-gray suit; a headmistress or a business woman. The jackal head, Joe, was dressed in a dark-blue suit. Anton came, surprisingly, from behind the Pierrot-skeleton costume. The succubus from Bosch revealed another elderly man with a mild face and pince-nez. The corn doll was Maria. The Aztec head was the German colonel, the pseudo-Wimmel of the ridge incident. The vampire was not Lily, but her sister; a scarless wrist. A white blouse, and the black skirt. The crocodile was a man in his late twenties. He had a thin artistic-looking beard; a Greek or an Italian. He too was wearing a suit. The stag-head was another man I did not know; a very tall Jewish-looking intellectual of about forty, deeply tanned and slightly balding.
That left the witch on the extreme right of the table. It was Lily, in a long-sleeved high-necked white woolen dress. I watched her pat her severely chignoned hair and then put on a pair of spectacles. She bent to hear something that the “colonel” next to her whispered in her ear. She nodded, then opened the file in front of her.
Only one person was not revealed: whoever was in the coffin-sedan.
I sat facing a long table of perfectly normal-looking people, who were all sitting and consulting their files and beginning to look at me. Their faces showed interest, but no sympathy. I stared at Rose, but she stared back without expression, as if I were a waxwork. I waited above all for Lily to look at me, but when she did there was nothing in her eyes. She behaved like, and her position at the end of the table suggested, a minor member of a team, of a selection board.
At last the old man with the clipped white beard rose to his feet and a faint murmuring that had begun among the audience stopped. The other members of the “board” looked towards him. I saw some, but not many, of the “students” with open notebooks on their laps, ready to write. The old man with the white beard gazed up at me through his gold-rimmed glasses, smiled, and bowed.
“Mr. Urfe, you must long ago have come to the conclusion that you have fallen into the hands of madmen. Worse than that, of sadistic madmen. And I think my first task is to introduce you to the sadistic madmen.” Some of the others gave little smiles. His English was excellent, though it retained clear traces of a German accent. “But first we must return you, as we have returned ourselves, to normality.” He signed quietly to my two guards, who had come back beside me. Deftly they untied the rosetted white ribbons, pulled my clothes back to their normal position, peeled off the black forehead patch, turned back my pullover, even brushed my hair back; but left the gag.
“Good. Now… if I may be allowed I shall first introduce myself. I am Dr. Friedrich Kretschmer, formerly of Stuttgart, now director of the Institute of Experimental Psychology at the University of Idaho in America. On my right you have Dr. Maurice Conchis of the Sorbonne, whom you know.” Conchis rose and bowed briefly to me. I glared at him. “On his right, Dr. Mary Marcus, now of Edinburgh University, formerly of the William Alanson White Foundation in New York.” The professional-looking woman inclined her head. “On her right, Professor Mario Ciardi of Milan.” He stood up and bowed, a mild little frog of a man. “Beyond him you have our charming and very gifted young costume designer, Miss Moira Maxwell.” “Rose” gave me a minute brittle smile. “On the right of Miss Maxwell you see Mr. Yanni Kottopoulos. He has been our stage manager.” The man with the beard bowed; and then the tall Jew stood. “And bowing to you now you see Arne Halberstedt of the Queen’s Theatre, Stockholm, our dramatizer and director, to whom, together with Miss Maxwell and Mr. Kottopoulos we mere amateurs in the new drama all owe a great deal for the successful outcome and aesthetic beauty of our… enterprise.” First Conchis, then the other members of the “board,” then the students, began to clap. Even the guards behind me joined in.
The old man turned. “Now—on my left—you see an empty box. But we like to think that there is a goddess inside. A virgin goddess whom none of us has ever seen, nor will ever see. We call her Ashtaroth the Unseen. Your training in literature will permit you, I am sure, to guess at her meaning. And through her at our, us humble scientists’, meaning.” He cleared his throat. “Beyond the box you have Dr. Joseph Harrison of my department at Idaho, and of whose brilliant study of characteristic urban Negro neuroses, Black and White Minds, you may have heard.” Joe got up and raised his hand casually. “Beyond him, Dr. Anton Mayer, at present working in Vienna. Beyond him, Madame Maurice Conchis, whom many of us know better as the gifted investigator of the effects of wartime traumata on refugee children. I speak, of course, of Dr. Annette Kazanian of the Chicago Institute.” I refused to be surprised, which was more than could be said of some of the “audience,” who murmured and leant forward to look at “Maria.” “Beyond Madame Conchis, you see Privatdocent Thorvald Jorgensen of Aalborg University.” The “colonel” stood up briskly and bowed. “Beyond him you have Dr. Vanessa Maxwell.” Lily looked briefly up at me, bespectacled, absolutely without expression. I flicked my eyes back to the old man; he looked at his colleagues. “I think that we all feel the success of the clinical side of our enterprise this summer is very largely due to Dr. Maxwell. Dr. Marcus had already told me what to expect when her most gifted pupil came to us at Idaho. But I should like to say that never have my expectations been so completely fulfilled. I am sometimes accused of putting too much stress on the role of women in our profession. Let me say that Dr. Maxwell, my charming young colleague Vanessa, confirms what I have always believed: that one day all our great practicing, as opposed to our theoretical, psychiatrists will be of the sex of Eve.” There was applause. Lily stared down at the table in front of her and then, when the clapping had died down, she glanced at the old man and murmured, “Thank you.” He turned back to me.
“The students you see are Austrian and Danish research students from Dr. Mayer’s laboratory and from Aalborg. I think we all speak English?” Some said, yes. He smiled benignly at them and sipped a glass of water.
“Well, so, Mr. Urfe, you will have guessed our secret by now. We are an international group of psychologists, which I have the honor, by reason of seniority simply”—two or three shook their heads in disagreement—”to lead. For various reasons the path of research in which we are all especially interested requires us to have subjects that are not volunteers, that are not even aware that they are subjects of an experiment. We are by no means united in our theories of behavior, in our different schools, but we are united in considering the nature of the experiment is such that it is better that the subject should not, even at its conclusion, be informed of its purpose. Though I am sure that you will—when you can recollect in tranquillity—find yourself able to deduce at least part of our cause from our effects.” There were smiles all around. “Now. We have had you, these last three days, under deep narcosis and the material we have obtained from you has proved most valuable, most valuable indeed, and we therefore wish first of all to show our appreciation of the normality you have shown in all the peculiar mazes through which we have made you run.”