"Margery!" he cried. "What are you doing, Margery?" And then: "My God, Margery, don't look at me!"
I sprang to the door. Major Henry Drurock, retired, tenth of the Duroque line, was close behind me.
Almost at our feet the vile thing appeared, the head first, slipping, thrusting, crawling from dark toward light. The ghastly contorted face, one cheek brushing the floor, came into the zone of illumination, the lower lip and chin drawn up as though they were of rubber, touching the tip of the nose. The visible eye glared balefully up at me and the hair hung a dishevelled mass about the face. But the horror was to be more fully revealed. After the face came the body, and what we glimpsed of that alabaster flesh was symmetrically beautiful. If anything, this apparition was more horrible than the last. The contrast of the hideous twisted demoniacal face with the fair body was intolerable.
Suddenly, springing to its feet, the apparition stood, framed in the doorway, a slim figure, seeming like a black silhouette upon a silver background, or a wondrous statue in ebony. Elfin, dishevelled locks crowned the head; the pose of the form was as that of a startled dryad or a young Bacchante poised for a Joyous leap.
For an instant, like some exquisite dream of Phidias, the figure stood… then crumpled!
I heard Aubrey's heavy invalid step upon the stair. He came into view, carrying a flimsy garment.
"I found this in the passage," he babbled. His face was as white as the bandage around his neck. "What's wrong? I thought I saw Margery and — oh, my God!"
"Go back!" I shouted at him. "You're delirious. Go back!"
"No, come on!"
Drurock's cry rose above my own, wild and imperative, more shriek than cry. "Come on down, you damned, healthy school-boy! Come down and see her. See what you wanted to steal. Do you want her now? Come and take her! All her loveliness — all that rose-white English beauty — that perfection — they're yours. Look! Look! Look!"
I could not prevent it. Aubrey found use of his legs and was with us before I could stop him. He stooped over the white form on the floor. He had not yet seen the face a second time. He lifted the demented thing tenderly and wrapped her in her discarded robe.
And then she turned her face to him. Aubrey cried out, but he did not release her from his supporting embrace. And in that moment I decided that he loved her, well and true.
"Don't you want to kiss those lips?" screamed Drurock. "By the way, where are those lips — those sweet honeysuckle lips?"
His breath rasped in his throat; his chest rose and fell visibly with the effort of his breathing. Suddenly he tore the handkerchief from his face and stumbled toward the column of vapour which still coiled upward from the hole in the floor. I may have cried out. For, before I could move to intercept him, Henry Drurock thrust his face into that noisome emanation, and inhaled!
He drew back, and slowly turned to face us. He seemed to have grown taller, and a light of mocking triumph shone in his eyes. Then, in an instant, it was supplanted by a look of surprise and horror. His mouth fell open and his hands pawed ineffectually at his throat. I saw his face begin to change.
"Wales!" I called over my shoulder. "Get Margery out of here! Now! Out of the house!"
He did not stop to protest. Drawing upon some unsuspected source of strength, he gathered Margery Drurock's slight form in his arms and staggered from the room.
I turned again to Drurock, just in time to see him fall against a small table and topple it as he crashed to the. floor.
Back and forth he writhed, clawing at the air, his hideous face upraised toward the grey cloud which seemed to stoop above him.
I could watch no longer. I turned and fled from that room above the ghastly pit, that room where now the line of the Du-roques was coming to an end…
I was with my London friend, a medical research man. He had accepted my specimens from the ditches of Low Fennel with curt thanks, and was proving more interested in my tale of the humans of the locality than my report on its other fauna.
"Moreover," I went on, "that old Norman pillager, the first mad Drurock, was your precursor in the matter of volatilised arsenic as a preventative against the fits, by a longish bit — nine generations."
"Yes," mused my medical friend, the nerve and brain research specialist. "We do have to go back to some of that old lore of the medieval healers."
"I guess the whole history of the Drurocks, victims of the inherited taint, one after the other, all along the line, proves the case of arsenic," I said.
"Provided you can get it in that particular gaseous form, and at the proper degree of temperature, I suppose," nodded my medical friend, then shook his head regretfully. "Too bad I can't dump a thousand dying men into a vat lined with the natural ore and get the Drurock prescription duplicated. What a lot of drudgery I'm going to have to go through before I duplicate it."
"Have you accounted for the failure of the Drurock prescription in the recent years?" he asked me. "It's fairly obvious that the force of the emanations was either diminished or the source polluted. Else why the emergence of Major Drurock's convulsive symptoms toward the end?"
"Pollution is the answer," I stated, sure of my ground. "You mustn't forget that the tetanic convulsions attacked three normal persons that we know of — Seager, the contractor, Ord, the handy-man, and lastly, Margery."
"How is Mrs Wales?" asked my friend. "No recurrence of the trouble?"
"Oh," I laughed, "they're honeymooning in Sweden, and Aubrey writes me she's put on five pounds and is taking a reducing diet."
"Then," my friend went back to the discussion, "you account for the outbreak of these epileptiform attacks by something known?"
"Rather by something guessed," I countered. "We didn't linger long in Low Fennel after Drurock's death, I can tell you — not long enough for research. But I assume that those corroding waters down in the mine finally ate down to a hitherto sealed stratum, probably one of barium. That busy, underground chemical plant tried an experiment in barium compounds, and you know what some of those do to the central nervous system!"
"Crawled like reptiles!" mused my friend. "Now, I should have liked to see that. Poor old Drurock. You've got to pity the tortured soul. His old reliable remedy played out on him; worse — reversed itself. He must have suffered damnably. Quite ready for you or any one to find him out. Why don't you write up a paper on all this?"
I shook my head. "I don't pretend to have worked the whole thing out and I rather think I never shall."
"Too bad," deplored my medical friend, the research specialist. "An autopsy might be rarely instructive."
"Don't be scientifically obscene," I protested.
"Don't be unscientifically romantic," he retorted.
The Leopard-Couch
My name first became associated with that of Dr Maurice Bode upon the publication of a small treatise dealing with a certain phase of the complex religion of ancient Egypt. In the preparation of The Worship of Apis at Memphis he was good enough to collaborate with me; and although this little work was designed solely for the use of students, it nevertheless had a fairly large sale, undoubtedly owing to its containing accounts of many unique investigations conducted by Bode in Egypt.
Since its appearance in 1895 we have regularly worked in concert; and it is my intention to here set forth the broad facts connected with a very remarkable experiment which took place at my own rooms during the autumn of last year, and to give some account of the circumstances that led up to it. Occult students who were in London at the time will already be familiar with the matter, which formed the subject of a paper read by Maurice Bode before one of the leading research societies. As the affair seemed to open up an entirely new field, it has been suggested to Bode that a more popular account thereof might serve to promote inquiry into a subject which has but latterly begun to arouse anything approaching general interest. It is, therefore, at his request that the following is penned.