The Friendship of Mortals

by Audrey Driscoll

Early in 1920, Arkham experienced an exceedingly cold and snowy period that lasted for several weeks. One night there was a loud knock at my door. Before I could respond, it opened and West came in. He was pale and agitated.

  “Herbert, what is it?” I asked. “Are you sick?”

  “Yes. No. No, I’m not,” he said. “It’s just that…” He took off his hat and ran a hand through his hair. He threw the hat onto a chair and began pacing nervously. Suddenly he stopped and looked at me. “I’ve been to Sefton Asylum,” he said.

  “What were you doing there?” I asked. “Checking on John Hocks? Don’t tell me he’s started to talk!”

  “Stop babbling, Charles. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Hocks is still there and unchanged, as far as I know. I’ve kept a watch on him for years, without setting foot in the place. I hate going there. It’s like a prison whose inmates are doubly confined, first in their madness, then physically. But… With luck, she didn’t know me. That wouldn’t be surprising after all… Damn it, now what should I do?”

  I had never seen him so bothered. “Herbert, I don’t know what you’re talking about. You have to explain it to me from the beginning if you want my advice. And for God’s sake stop that pacing. It’s making me nervous. Take off your coat and sit down, and tell me what happened.”

  He did as I suggested but seemed about to jump to his feet again. “So if you weren’t at Sefton to see Hocks, what were you doing there?” I asked.

  “Even lunatics need surgery on occasion, Charles. The asylum has an arrangement with St. Mary’s, to the effect that any of us doctors contribute our services as needed. They had an accident there this morning. One of the inmates was burned while working in the kitchen. It was nothing much; I expect the fellow will be perfectly well inside of a week. But when I was leaving, I saw… someone. And it’s possible she knew me. Recognized me.”

  “Who was this person?” God help me, I was intrigued. ‘Every man has a few secrets,’ West had said to me once, and I knew he was no exception. “A… resident?” Given the possibilities, I could not bring myself to say ‘inmate.’

  “I don’t know,” he said, standing up and raking his fingers through his hair again. “That’s the damnable thing – I don’t know! But if I can guess, so can others. Your friend Nurse Enright, for example. She was there. No doubt it’ll be all over Arkham by tomorrow.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Miss Enright is discreet and sensible. She wouldn’t talk irresponsibly.”

  “That doesn’t make any difference. Things like this always get out. There’s only one thing to do – see Holberg and find out more about her.” He picked up his coat and began to put it on.

  “You’re going?” I asked stupidly. It appeared that he had found an answer to his dilemma, whatever it was, but not from me. “Who’s Holberg?”

  “The director of the asylum. I’ll see him when I go back tomorrow to check on my patient. Perhaps he’ll tell me something about… her.”

  Suddenly he stopped in front of me, one arm in a coat sleeve. “This is the sort of thing that cracks a man’s foundations.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. You haven’t really told me anything.”

  He ignored this. “I have to go now. Thank you for your.. attention.”

  When he was gone I sat for a long while, thinking and staring at the dying embers in the fireplace.

  The following day Sarah Enright and I met for lunch at a cafeteria patronized by students and others who perforce valued cheapness over culinary excellence. From the first I could see that Sarah had something to tell me. Her face was animated and her eyes sparkled. “I have a piece of news I think you’ll find interesting. First hand too, not gossip.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Is it about Dr. West?”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “He told me about it himself. I think it was something of a shock for him.”

  “I could see that. It was quite amazing. One second he was his usual self, you know, cool as anything, walking along next to mousy little Dr. Spencer. Then he saw her and changed completely, just like that. He got white as a sheet. And those eyes of his – for a second or two he looked… well, crazy.”

  “Sarah, I hope you haven’t, that you won’t say anything about this to anyone else. But can you tell me a little more about this person? Is she a young woman?”

  “No! At least sixty, maybe even seventy. She’s the lady I look after sometimes. Miss Anna Derby. I told you about her, remember? Yesterday I was taking her back to her room when we met Dr. West. You know, I never realized it before, but they look sort of alike. Are they related?”

  This detail was new to me, and possibly crucial, but I tried not to show it. “I don’t know. Why is she there, at Sefton?”

  “Well, I suppose because she isn’t fit to live alone. She’s not sane.”

  “But does she have a family here in Arkham?”

  “Not here. Boston. At any rate, Mr. Robert Derby hired me to visit with her three times a week. They have the same name, so they must be related, but I’m not sure just how.”

  “Who’s Mr. Derby?”

  “He’s a judge. He lives in Boston now, but the family used to have a house on High Street. I don’t know whether it’s been sold or only rented.”

  “I see. Sarah, do you think this lady recognized Dr. West?”

  “I don’t know. She was sort of… upset the rest of the day. I asked her what was troubling her, but she wouldn’t say. I was afraid she’d get one of her bad spells again.”

  Sarah had been looking after Anna Derby for six or seven years. During that time her condition had remained much the same. Sarah was not certain what her trouble was, but the symptoms included long periods of silence and short ones of intense agitation, during which she had to be confined or restrained because of an urge to wander. Once or twice she had slipped away but was found before she left the asylum grounds. In between, she had periods of near normalcy, although there was always a certain vagueness in her manner. “There’s something sad about her, Charles,” Sarah said. “It’s as though she lost herself somewhere.”

  “Perhaps she did,” I said without thinking. “And now, it seems, she’s been found.”

  A few evenings after this, history seemed to repeat itself in the form of another loud knock at my door just as I was beginning to think about going to bed. This time it wasn’t West but his servant, Andre Boudreau.

  Without waiting for a greeting, he burst into excited speech. “Monsieur Milburn, you must come now! The Doctor, he needs your help.” As if he thought I would follow him into the winter night just as I was, without a coat and in my slippers, he began to turn away, but I laid a hand on his sleeve.

  “Wait, Andre, please – Has something happened to Dr. West? An accident?” I thought of John Hocks. Could he have escaped from Sefton?

  “No, not an accident. He needs for you to help him, in the laboratory.”

  We stood and looked at each other, Andre Boudreau and I, in my doorway, with cold air invading my sitting room through the open door. The laboratory! I was surprised that West would have admitted anyone else into this secret. I thought I was the only other person in Arkham who knew about the place.

  “Come in, please, Andre,” I said. “Of course I’ll help Dr. West, but I can’t go out like this. Sit down and wait while I get ready.”

  He complied, but lapsed into silence while I got into coat, boots and hat. Further details were not forthcoming. Considering the urgency of the summons and not keen on running the several blocks to West’s house, I asked Andre to crank up the Ford. As I expected, his cranking was far more efficient than mine, and we were on Boundary Street in a few minutes.

  Andre hustled me down to the laboratory without ceremony. I was surprised to see both doors to it standing open, the concealing one that doubled as shelves of wine bottles and the iron door itself. Inside, the place looked both familiar and unfamiliar. I had a fleeting impression that it was
more crowded than before, with pieces of equipment unknown to me. But the sight of West bending over a table took me instantly to the past.

  “Here he is, Doctor,” said Andre. “Voici Monsieur Milburn.”

  “Thank you, Andre,” said West, turning toward us. “Please leave us now.”

  “Are you sure, Doctor?” said Andre. “I thought we would be – ”

  “Not tonight,” West said shortly. “I’ll call you if I need you. Charles, come here.”

  Andre left, but slowly and with a long look back at us as he closed the door. I turned to West.

  His face was pale and somehow ravaged, with a kind of flickering nervousness about the eyes. As I approached him, I saw a sheet-covered body on the table and the familiar revivifying apparatus standing ready nearby, complete with a flask of the violet-coloured liquid.

  “What is it you want me to do, Herbert?” I asked. “And are you sure you’re all right?”

  “No, I’m not,” he said, impatiently. “As for what I want you to do, the answer is ‘Everything.’ I only hope you remember how.” He turned away from me, clutching at his head with both hands. “My God, this is horrible!” he muttered, as though to some third person, but Andre, obeying his orders, was no longer in the room.

  “What do you mean, everything? How can you – ? It’s been years since I’ve had anything to do with this, you know that, and why can’t you do it?”

  He swung around. “Too many questions!” His voice was harsh but the distress on his face frightened me more than his anger. After a brief struggle with himself, he assumed a semblance of calm but I could see that it was a forced calm.

  “Charles.” He came close to me and made as if to put his hands on my shoulders, then dropped them to his sides. “Listen carefully. I cannot do this revivification, but… it must be done. I have to do it, or rather, you have to do it, for my sake. Please, Charles.”

  He was pleading with me, something I had never imagined. “All right, Herbert, I’ll try, but I don’t know if I can.”

  “You can. You will. I’ll be right there to tell you exactly what to do. Everything’s ready. Go wash your hands. Go on, quickly!”

  I could not argue with his desperate urgency. I washed as directed and struggled into one of West’s lab coats. Mustering all my determination, I approached the body on the table.

  Even through the sheet, I discerned several things about the corpse: it was small and thin, surely no more than five feet tall. At first I thought it was a child, but certain anatomical details told me otherwise. The body was that of a woman.

  This wasn’t the first time that we had worked with a female corpse. Several of our subjects in years past had been women, but that could not be the reason for West’s apparent distress. The sex of a corpse had never deterred him; I had been the one to be intimidated. West had laughed at my modesty and insisted that the female subjects be stripped naked and treated like all the rest. “She’s dead, Charles. She’s not going to blush because you see her hidden assets.”

  I took a deep breath and prepared to remove the sheet, but before I could do so, West was plucking at my hands, nearly dancing in his agitation. “No, no, no! Leave that one alone!” he cried, and I saw then that the head of the corpse was shrouded with a separate cloth from that which covered the body.

  “Why, Herbert?” I asked. “Is there a reason you don’t want me to see her face?”

  “Because I say so,” he replied. “She’s my – my subject, and it has to be done this way. Here, I’ll show you. Like this.”

  Carefully, he folded down the sheet, exposing the neck and shoulders but stopping short of revealing the breasts. “There, now get on with it, for God’s sake!” He thrust a scalpel toward me, and it was all I could do to make myself take it.

  “Who is she?” I made no move to begin, thinking he was more likely to be informative now than after the job was done.

  He drew in a breath sharply for an angry reply, but clamped down on it with a twist of his lips. “That’s irrelevant. She’s a subject. I can’t tell you any more. Physician-patient confidentiality, you know.” Another grimace, intended to be taken for a smile. “Now come here and… do it. Please, Charles.”

  Begging didn’t become him, and I was short on cruelty. I bent over the corpse. The dead woman had not been young, judging by the loose and wrinkled skin of her neck, which made West’s fit of apparent prudishness even more peculiar.

  He positioned the head and showed me exactly where to make the incision to expose the jugular vein. “Right there, that’s right,” he said. “Come on, you need to exert more pressure. Steady and even.” But when the blade began to part the flaccid flesh, he abruptly turned his face away, clutching at the edge of the table. For a second I thought he was going to faint, but I had to concentrate on the job in hand. When I had finally inserted the first needle, I felt a rush of relief, but this was only the first of many steps. West looked, if possible, even paler but there was a steely determination in his eyes.

  He insisted on being the one to uncover the corpse’s lower extremities, and again he exposed only enough of the body for me to locate the femoral artery, folding and tucking the sheet carefully to ensure that the pubic area remained covered. This time he looked away before I began cutting the skin. It was bluish-white and the texture of crepe, with small broken veins like purple hieroglyphs on parchment among sparse grey hairs.

  West had told me long ago that there was no point in revivifying old people because they were too weak to sustain the forced return to life. Invariably, they retreated swiftly into death. Why, then, was he so insistent on performing the procedure on this elderly woman?

  I nearly asked him this question, but one look at his eyes, which darted from me to the corpse and back in a feverish way, made me keep silent.

  Once the needles were in place, West grew calmer and regained something of his old manner. All at once, he was in charge of the proceedings and I only an onlooker. He activated the apparatus to administer the revivifying fluid, adjusting the taps and watching the meters.

  Once the flask was empty, West covered the body again, adding a light coverlet over the sheets and adjusting the cloth that covered the face as though to make sure that it would not impede respiration, once it began. I was about to ask him the reason for these departures from his normal practice, when he forestalled me.

  “Thank you, Charles, for coming so promptly and being so helpful,” he said, with a facsimile of his charming smile. “I cannot tell you how crucial your assistance was tonight.”

  You could tell me if you chose to, I thought, but knew that it would be useless to say so.

  “I’m sure you’re tired now, and want to go home,” he continued, steering me toward the laboratory door. “I’ll have to ask you to show yourself out, since I can’t leave my… patient alone.”

  At the door of the laboratory I stopped and looked at him closely. His outward manner was calm, but underneath the surface I sensed nervousness and confusion. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, and there was a distinct tremor in his fingers. No wonder he had felt unequal to the surgical parts of the procedure. I had a dozen questions I could not ask, but took a chance on a suggestion. “Herbert, I can stay if you want me to. You don’t look well.”

  He hesitated and I thought I saw a flicker of relief in his eyes, quickly suppressed. He glanced back at the silent form on the table behind us and sighed. “Thank you, no, Charles. I must… I can do the rest myself. Good night.”

  He swung the heavy door to close it, but I before it could clang shut we heard a faint, whispery voice, rising to a thin wail. The ensuing look of sick distress on West’s face convinced me. I pushed the door open.

  “I’m staying,” I said. “You need help here. Both of you.”

  West’s face was almost as white as his lab coat. “All right, Charles,” he whispered.

  Together, we returned to the table, where by now our patient was jerking feebly and uttering incohere
nt sounds. Before either of us could do anything, she started to scream and thrash.

  “Not there, not now, never, don’t do it, I won’t go, leave me alone, I have to go back, I hate him, hate him, hate…”

  I stepped forward, realizing that West had not used restraints on this subject. Here was another difference, but this was no time to comment on it. The woman’s movements had dislodged the cloth that covered her face. It slipped to the floor as I bent over her. Her eyes were unfocussed and her breath came in gasps. I smelled antiseptic and something foul beneath it.

  Suddenly she seemed to see me and went limp. “Who are you?” she asked, sounding almost calm, but then she quickly turned her head toward West. His face wore a look of uncertainty and questioning I had never seen before. His lips moved as though he was about to speak.

  To say that the woman’s face changed would be a gross understatement. It was transfigured. Years seemed to fall away as delight dawned in her eyes and a smile like sunrise rearranged the pallid flesh. West’s smile. For the moment it lasted, the resemblance between them was unmistakable. “Lawrence,” she whispered, then cried the name aloud while struggling to lift her arms from under the blanket that covered her.

  West backed away. “Charles, she’s raving! You talk to her. I can’t.” He turned around, raising his hands to his face. “Oh God, why did I start this?” he muttered.

  The woman had almost succeeded in sitting up. “Lawrence, come back!” she screamed. “I saw you… yesterday? You were there! They tried to fool me; someone told me you were Hiram, but I knew you. I’d know you anywhere! I tried to find you, but… something happened and I couldn’t. Come back, come back!”

  Exhausted, she collapsed into the mess of blankets. Her eyes were closed, her mouth open, showing yellowed teeth and shrunken gums.

  I had to reassure her. “He’ll come back soon, I promise you. My name is Charles Milburn, I’m a friend of his, but I don’t believe we’ve met. ”

  “Friend of Hiram’s?” Her face became grotesquely contorted, full of hate. “Get away from me! Where’s Lawrence?”

  She whipped her head around toward West, but he backed away as though from a viper about to strike and stood several yards away, apparently paralyzed.

  “I don’t know anyone called Hiram,” I said, bending closer. “What is your name, can you tell me?”

  “Annie, Anna, Annalinda, anatomic, annihilated Anna. You’ll be a dead woman Anna, unless – Unless. It was less than that, ha-ha!” She laughed, a loud, ringing laugh that sounded completely wrong in that underground laboratory.

  Her laughter stopped as suddenly as it had started. “Who are you?” she asked again.

  “Charles Milburn. May I call you Anna?”

  “If you like.” Her eyes, swimming like bluish agates in wet, red-rimmed sockets, grew vague. “Who did you say you are? Another doctor? Enemies, doctors, nice ones… You look like a doctor.”

  “Not really a doctor.” I was floundering. What was I supposed to say to this woman, and what the Hell was the matter with West? He had revivified her with some intention in mind, but he had not bothered to tell me what that intention was and now he was apparently terrified to go near her. I wished Sarah was there.

  Trying to forget that she had been a corpse not so long before, I made myself take Anna’s hand in mine. It was cold and bony, a bag of loose sticks and marbles. Her nails were long enough to be slightly curved and pressed into my skin. “I’m not a doctor,” I repeated, “but I want to help you. Suppose you tell me about Lawrence. Maybe we can find him together.”

  “Yess,” she breathed. “Find him.” She pressed her lips together, emphasizing deep, vertical lines that showed her determination. The rekindled life within her was focused entirely on one idea. Behind the grotesque and pathetic mask of age, with its wrinkles and sparse grey eyelashes, was a hot desire that frightened me.

  I reached out and pulled a nearby stool toward me. It wasn’t comfortable, but it would have to do; I was afraid that if I let go of Anna’s hand, the tenuous rapport I had established with her would vanish. I spared a glance for West. He stood with his back against a laboratory bench, his hands clenched at his sides, watching us. I wondered what he would do if Anna survived this ordeal – take her back to the asylum or give her a room in his house? In any case, he would have to face her. An uncharitable part of me was maliciously amused.

  Anna looked at me, her eyes narrow with suspicion. “Why should I believe you?” she asked.

  “Lawrence,” I prompted gently. “Who is he?”

  “Oh, wouldn’t you want to know?” A smile, ghastly and inappropriate in its teasing roguishness, disfigured her patrician features, and the question came out in a teasing sing-song, as did what followed. “Lawrence Dexter… Lorenzo, amato.” The smile lingered on her lips, transformed somehow to sweetness.

  I thought hard, staring at a row of glass vessels gleaming on a distant shelf. (Alembics, I thought, but of course they weren’t). I had to question her carefully, because this was something precious to her. “How did you meet him?”

  “At the Convivium. He knew the secrets. About the enemies. But they got him, then they got me.”

  She was wandering. I tried to steer her back to reality. “When did he tell you these things?”

  “How? When? Where? Why? You sound like the doctors that tied me up and asked me things again and again and again. How do I know you aren’t one of them?” Her voice had grown shrill. I glanced toward West again. He was sitting on a wooden box, elbows on knees with his forehead on his hands.

  “I promise you, I’m not an enemy,” I said. Gently, I let go of her hand and held both of mine out, palms turned toward her. “See, I have no weapons. And I won’t take you anywhere unless you want me to. You were telling me about when you met Lawrence.”

  “Jeremy was four years old and little Hiram was seven. And big Hiram, my husband – ” She laughed, a cracked, crazy laugh, and when she spoke again it was in the sing-song voice. “He had other fish to fry. Little fish, little fish. Lots of little fish in Hiram’s net.” She sang the sentence again, her voice quavering in a way that stirred the hairs on the back of my neck and made West press his knuckles to his lips.

  “I was lonely.” Anna’s voice was calm again, and now plaintive as well. “All those women with their sorry-faces – I could tell they whispered about me behind my back. But they didn’t know about Lawrence Dexter and the Convivium of the Secret Wisdom. I had my own secret.” She smiled, a little cat smile.

  I took a chance with another question. “What was he like, Miss Derby? Lawrence Dexter.”

  “Like me,” she said, still smiling. “Like he was my brother. Except his eyes were grey.”

  She closed her eyes and I saw a glitter of tears on her wrinkled cheeks. “He loved me, but Hiram would never let me go. But I had my son.”

  “So you had three sons?” I held my breath.

  “Two and one, that’s three. Only I had to pretend to… make up to Hiram. To fool him.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” I said.

  Another flirtatious smile. “Come now, I don’t have to spell it out for you, do I Doctor? You should know about these things.”

  “And when was he born, your son?”

  “He was my November boy, my little Francesco… ”

  A violent movement from West caught my eye. He had jumped up and was staring at the woman on the table.

  “Did you say – Francesco?” It came out in a whisper.

  “My son?” she murmured. “That was his name. Not Herbert. Not West. That was Hiram’s name but my son wasn’t Hiram’s.”

  “Herbert! What’s wrong with you?” I ran around the table and grabbed his arm, resisting his attempt to shake my hand off. “I don’t know why you made me revivify this woman – your mother, don’t try to tell me otherwise – but now that she’s alive you have to talk to her. You have to!”

  He looked at me, on his face an expression I had never seen bef
ore, as though something had broken in him. And – could it be? – I thought there were tears in his eyes. “Come on,” I said, gently shaking his sleeve, “there’s nothing to be afraid of. I’ll be right here.”

  “No, I can’t. She’s too… it’s horrible. But Charles, ask her… ask her for me – why did she leave?”

  I was about to argue with him, but I could see that a change was coming over our patient. Her breath came in gasps again and she was staring fixedly at the ceiling. I hurried over to her

  “Anna, can you hear me?”

  A long interval of silence while her mouth moved as though she was chewing the words. “Yes…” She swallowed, the movement of her throat pulling at the fresh sutures in the loose skin of her neck.

  “Anna, tell me – why did you leave your children?”

  This time her voice seemed to reach me from a distance, as though she had retreated down a long hallway.” “Lawrence… dying… in New York City.”

  She took a long, shuddering breath. “I wanted to… come back, but Hiram – ”

  I waited, but she did not speak again. “Hiram. What did Hiram do?” I prompted.

  This time there was no recognition, no conversation. She stared at the ceiling and raved. The words she intoned were beyond comprehension, as though she spoke in an unknown tongue.

  “Gyazgin komgolz bagha dord, kagha weerpa dagha merdolon saava.” There was more, and it all sounded like this.

  West recoiled violently, clapped his hands over his ears and almost ran to the far side of the room. For a moment I thought he was going to leave altogether, but he stopped near the door.

  Anna’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she gasped “Francesco…” The name struck more forcibly for being suddenly understandable, like a familiar face emerging from darkness. Then she slumped back onto the blankets, apparently lifeless once more.

  “Herbert! Come here, I think she’s fainted!”

  “No! I can’t listen to that gibberish she’s spouting. You don’t know – ”

  I went over to him and grabbed his arm. “She’s not saying anything now, she’s unconscious. Maybe dead. Come on, you’re the doctor – do your job!” I frog-marched him back to the table.

  Perhaps the lifeless appearance of our victim reassured him. It was, after all, the normal outcome of these experiments. After a moment he went through the motions of checking for vital signs. There were none.

  He drew up the coverlet over her face and stood in silence for a long moment. Then he bent over the still form, murmuring something I could not hear, nor did I want to. I went over to the door and waited for him there.

  I did not intend to visit West the following day, thinking it best to leave him to his own devices. The more I thought about what we had done in the cellar laboratory, the more it seemed like a grotesque dream. I remembered the steel blade laying open the bloodless flesh, West’s uncharacteristic agitation and the irrationality of the entire proceeding. I wondered how he had managed to acquire the corpse and move it into his laboratory.

  After a night of restless sleep I cancelled all my obligations for the day and drove to Boston. I visited a number of libraries, paging through bound copies of newspapers a quarter century old and making notes. As I drove back to Arkham, I was certain that West would be interested in the information I had compiled, but was at the same time reluctant to deliver it.

  The next day a discreet notice appeared in the obituary section of the Advertiser, of a funeral service to be held that evening for Anna Derby West “of Arkham, suddenly deceased at the age of 70 years.”

  Anna Derby West. So he had publicly acknowledged their relationship.

  I remembered that Sarah was working an early shift at the hospital and made my way there instead of to my office at the Library. With luck I managed to catch her on a break. The ordinary human noise of the hospital’s cafeteria insulated us like the tumult of a storm and we were able to talk in its privacy.

  “Sarah,” I began, “that woman you told me about, Miss Derby – ”

  “Oh, Charles, she’s dead! She got sort of upset last week. I told you about that. Well, next time I was there – that would have been two days after – she was having one of her bad spells. I couldn’t get her to settle down. A couple of days after that she ran away. She was gone by the time I got there for my shift with her, but she didn’t get very far, poor lady. One of the orderlies found her just a few hundred yards from the gates.”

  “Are you sure she was dead?”

  “She wasn’t, then. They took her to St. Mary’s, here in Arkham. They can’t really cope with medical emergencies at the asylum. But she died about half an hour later. Hypothermia.”

  “I’m sorry, Sarah.” Then I thought of something. “When did that happen, exactly? Her death, I mean.”

  “Let me see…” She thought for a moment. “Late Saturday afternoon, about five or six o’clock.”

  Saturday afternoon. Andre had summoned me to West’s on Saturday night.

  “I don’t suppose anyone has told Herbert about this – Dr. West, I mean. Perhaps I should – ”

  “Oh, but he was there!” Sarah looked up at me, the tears on her cheeks incongruous with her sudden vehemence. “He was just leaving when they brought her in, but he stayed with her until.. until the end.” She found a handkerchief, wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

  “Sarah,” I said, “did you go into the emergency ward with her, or did you wait outside?”

  “I went in. If I’d been just anybody, they wouldn’t have let me in, but since I work here, no one stopped me. And I felt it was my fault, somehow. The last time I saw her she told me she had to find an old friend whom she’d seen a few days ago. The way she said ‘friend’ I figured it must have been an old flame. I tried to humor her, thinking she would forget the notion when she calmed down, but I guess it didn’t work.”

  “And Dr. West – what was he doing there? He doesn’t work in Emergency, surely?”

  “No, of course not! I don’t know why he was there. But after Miss Derby died, he signed her body into the morgue and did the paperwork, listing her possessions and so on. She didn’t have much, of course, poor thing. Just her nightgown and robe and a handkerchief. She’d lost her slippers, I guess.” Sarah let out a choked laugh. “But she still had that blessed walnut.”

  “Walnut?” I asked. The word seemed absurd. And I had seen no such object in West’s laboratory.

  “Ever since I’ve known her, Miss Derby had this big walnut she kept in her pocket. If she liked you, she’d show it to you but she’d get quite fierce if anyone tried to take it from her, so I made sure no one did. It must have been a souvenir from her home, or maybe she just thought it was. Maybe it wasn’t even always the same walnut. There are walnut trees on the grounds at Sefton, you know. Sad, isn’t it?”

  I agreed. I was beginning to think the situation was much sadder than either of us had realized.

  There were few mourners at the modest funeral – West, of course, and Sarah, one or two of the staff from Sefton Asylum, and a tall, pale man who was introduced to me as Robert Derby, the dead woman’s cousin. I observed him curiously during the brief service, but could see no trace of a family resemblance between him and West. Speaking with the man later, I had an impression of a melancholy nature, and of one serious to the point of lugubriousness. What sort of family background, I wondered, had produced this morose individual? Perhaps it was not surprising that Anna Derby had wanted to distance herself from her family, even at the cost of marriage to Hiram West. At least the atmosphere around him had been one of optimism and energy, however crude.

  Afterward, I invited West to join me for an early supper at a restaurant I found congenial to both palate and wallet. He had previously professed scorn for the place, but this time accepted my suggestion of venue without comment. He seemed resigned and dispirited, a state in which I had not seen him before. This, and the formal black garb of mourning had the odd effect of making him look both older and y
ounger. Toward the end of the meal I figured it out – his face looked worn, but the grey eyes that looked out from it were the eyes of an orphan.

  I noticed something else, too. On the third finger of his right hand, West wore a ring, an emerald in a curious setting of a style I had never seen before. I was surprised because he never wore rings, as a rule. He had declared at least once that rings were a bad idea for surgeons because they retained impurities, got in the way and could potentially damage the hand on which they were worn.

  I did not like the idea of his being alone and at loose ends that evening, so after the meal I asked him back to my quarters. Again, he accepted my invitation in a way that implied that he did not really care what he did just then.

  “Would you like coffee or something stronger?” I asked as I hung up our coats.

  “Coffee would be splendid,” he said, following me into the kitchen.

  I expected that he would speak of his mother’s revivification, now that we were away from the public ear, but he talked of trifles while I busied myself with the coffee pot. A book lying on my table caught his attention. “You’re reading Paracelsus? His writings on alchemy, I see. Are you hoping to augment your fortune by making gold from lead, Charles?” He smiled at me with something of his old manner.

  “If I were, I would surely have had to ask for your help before now,” I replied. “No, it’s for the Quarrington Collection. I’m adding to the books on alchemy, so I thought I had better learn something about the subject. It’s really quite interesting.”

  He opened the book at random and read, “Nihil enim aliud mors est, nisi dissolutio quaedam, quae ubi accidit, tum demum moritur corpus… Huic corpori Deus adiunxit aliud quoddam, puta coeleste, id quod in corpore vitae exisitit. Hmm. Something about death, and the body, and.. God. That’s as close as I can get, but I’m sure you can translate it perfectly.”

  He handed me the book, and to humour him, I translated.

  “’For death is nothing but a kind of dissolution which takes place when the body dies. To this body God has added a certain other thing of a heavenly nature, that of the life which exists in the body.’”

  “Well,” said West, “I agree with him about the dissolution. But the rest is nonsense. There we part company, Doctor Paracelsus and I.”

  “But why, Herbert?” I asked. “I’m not sure that Paracelsus is referring to any kind of supernatural phenomenon here. In fact, I think a perfectly reasonable interpretation of that statement would be that he is speaking of the thing you have been looking for all these years – the key to the mechanism of life.”

  “Well, for one thing, he says that this ‘certain other thing’ is of a heavenly nature. To me that is a meaningless statement. The mechanism of life is an earthly phenomenon.”

  “Ah, but the alchemists were intensely earthy men,” I countered. “They sought the sublime in the terrestrial. At least, they began with the earthly and sought by their art to achieve the heavenly.”

  “Exactly – art, not science. Now I suppose there’s no harm in artistically inclined individuals dabbling in these pre-scientific ideas, using them as vehicles for their creative impulses, but that’s not science and never will be. So don’t expect me to have much sympathy for these notions. But you seem quite taken with them.”

  “Yes, I am. They contain so much – the beginnings of science and the medieval way of thinking about natural phenomena, but also a kind of spiritual discipline which is still valid today.”

  “Really? How can that be? But then, I know nothing about spiritual disciplines.” He was only politely interested, but at least the topic had diverted him from his earlier dejected state.

  “The practice of alchemy, in its purest form, was accomplished both in the laboratory, using matter, and spiritually within the alchemist himself. One of its tenets is that the process cannot possibly succeed if the motives of the alchemist are less than noble, a quest for material gain rather than enlightenment. The work is necessarily complex and lengthy, requiring many repetitions, failures and new beginnings. You know, Herbert, reading about it I’ve been reminded of all those revivification experiments we did together. You must remember telling me that even the smallest increment of knowledge was worth the effort, and that all the repetitions were absolutely necessary.”

  “Knowledge, yes, but… Well, I can see the parallel, even though I disagree with your implication. But I fail to see the connection between what the alchemist did to the matter in his vessel and his inner state.”

  “It’s a mystical connection,” I replied, knowing quite well that I was entering territory he unequivocally rejected. “The idea was that by struggling through all the writings, however contradictory, and following the tortuous operations in the laboratory, the alchemist brings about both an outer and an inner transformation, that at one and the same time he finds the Philosopher’s Stone in his vessel and in himself.

  “The symbols are exceedingly powerful. I suppose that’s the appeal of it for me. It’s a self-renewal through reconciliation of the opposites in one’s own nature. You destroy your old self, as it were, by subjecting it to intense scrutiny in order to find the good qualities, and seeking balance in reconciliation. Then, speaking in alchemical terms, this First Matter is allowed to rot to blackness, in a death which precedes the rebirth and transformation. It’s a sacrifice, a symbolic return to the womb. To me, that’s the point of the whole thing, the giving of oneself into the mystery to achieve rebirth, and finally the exaltation of the new self in a red dawn.” I stopped, out of breath, and feeling a bit silly.

  “I can see you’re quite taken with all this,” West said again, with an ironic smile. “In fact, I’ve never known you to get so worked up about an idea. Are you going to ask me for a little corner of my laboratory now, in which you can pursue these transformations?” His words were light, even gently mocking, but he frowned a little as he spoke.

  “I don’t think that will be necessary,” I said. “But I do find it fascinating.”

  I had quite forgotten about the coffee while I was speaking, and West, in his neat-handed way, had dealt with the brew and assembled cups and other necessary items. He picked up the laden tray and looked at me.

  “I suppose you’re thinking of the supposed worthlessness of the unexamined life. But what would prompt one to begin such an examination in the first place?”

  “I’m not sure, but I think it would be quite compelling, if it was necessary. You would drive yourself to it, whatever your will or thoughts about the matter.”

  He looked skeptical. “Really? And have you experienced such a compulsion yourself?”

  “No. Not yet, anyway. But I’m certain that is how it would be.”

  “Well, I hope you tell me about it when it happens. It should be an interesting phenomenon to observe.”

  We went into my sitting room, where West took his usual place in the armchair and leaned back with a sigh. “Thank you for this, Charles. These past few days have been very… difficult.” There was a small silence, broken only by the crackling of the fire in the fireplace.

  “I can imagine,” I said, “but I have to ask you – why didn’t you tell me everything right at the start?”

  He looked away, as though he had a pressing need to study the prints on the wall. When he turned back to me it was with an expression of mingled embarrassment and defiance.

  “I didn’t actually intend to involve you at all,” he said. “But when it came to the point – you know, the incisions, all that – I couldn’t do it, and you were the only person I could ask for help.”

  “She was your mother,” I said.

  It wasn’t a question, and he did not answer it. “I think it must have been seeing me again that set her off,” he said. “You see, I went back to Sefton the following day, both to see my burn patient there and to find out more about… her. Dr. Holberg tried to be informative, for one of his tribe. He spoke eloquently of hysteria, neurosis, mania, and a dozen other conditions, none o
f which he bothered to define in any understandable way. For all I know, she suffered from all of them, or none. I came away knowing little more than when I went in, except that the woman’s name was Anna Derby West and she had been a… a resident for more than twenty years. So I asked him if I could see her myself. That was perhaps a mistake.”

  “What did you say to her?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t get a chance. The fool of an attendant who took me to her introduced me. Well, to be fair, I didn’t think to ask him not to do that. So when the fellow said to her, ‘Here’s Dr. Herbert West to see you, Miss Derby,’ she nearly fainted. Then she started to scream, which was most uncomfortable, for me at least. I suppose that’s one thing about an asylum – you don’t expect anything normal. There was no possibility of a conversation, never mind a happy reunion.” He shook his head and fell silent.

  “Why did you revivify her?” I asked. “Did you really think it would be a happy reunion?”

  “No, of course not!” He sounded angry. “But just imagine – after twenty-five years your missing mother turns up in a lunatic asylum! Wouldn’t you want to find out how she got there? And since no one at the asylum could tell me, there was only one thing to do.”

  He got up from his chair and turned away from me, to the dark mirror of a nearby window. “I happened to be there when she was brought into the emergency department and stayed with her until she died. The next step was obvious. Moving her body from the morgue to my laboratory was easy; Andre and I managed that quite well. But I couldn’t bring myself to… touch her, to do the things that had to be done. It wouldn’t have been… decent.” He turned around, his face pale. “But I had to know!”

  “To know what?” I asked, gently.

  “About her madness – what it really was. Whether she remembered me, and… why she left.” He shook his head. He came back to his chair and sat down, leaning toward me. “I tried to tell myself it was only another experiment, but it wasn’t, of course. I couldn’t maintain scientific detachment.”

  “I don’t think she recognized you,” I contributed. “Not as her son, anyway. She thought you were someone else and being told your name was West confused her.”

  He stared at me. “Who did she think I was?”

  “Lawrence Dexter.”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t you remember? She called you by that name when she saw you, before you… ran away.”

  “I ‘ran away,’ as you put it, because it was obvious that she was insane. Especially that gibberish she spouted at the end. I’d heard something like it before – ” He broke off, biting his lip. “Right there, one of my questions was answered and I knew there was no point in asking her any others.”

  “On the contrary, talking with her brought up questions I thought I could find answers to, and I did. There actually was a Lawrence Dexter – ”

  “That’s absurd!” West interrupted. “She was… wandering in her wits. All that stuff she said, it was meaningless. You of all people should have known that, after all those subjects you tried to interview years ago. The whole thing was a waste of time.”

  “You won’t think that after you hear what I found out.”

  “I don’t know if I want to.” But he made no move to leave.

  I consulted the notes I had taken. “Lawrence Dexter was an Englishman. I don’t know anything else about him before he came to America, but in the Eighties he was the head of a society of occultists called the Convivium of the Secret Wisdom. He lived in New York City and gave lectures all over the continent. Spiritualism and magic were quite fashionable at the time.”

  “So he was either a fraudster or a lunatic. What of it?”

  “I found notices of his lectures in Boston newspapers in 1885. ‘Evil Entities Lurk Beyond the Curtain of Everyday Life. Mr. Lawrence Dexter of the Convivium of Secret Wisdom reveals the truth. Discover the secrets of the Ancient Gods.’”

  “What did I tell you? A lunatic,” said West. “And probably a fraudster too. I don’t imagine these revealing lectures were delivered for free.”

  “My point,” I said, “is that your mother must have attended one of these lectures and become acquainted with Dexter. Eventually they became lovers.”

  West fixed me with a steely look. “What are you suggesting, Charles?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything, only reminding you of what your mother said. They met in 1885. When she was talking about him she called him ‘Lorenzo, amato.’ That means ‘beloved.’

  “I know damned well what it means!” West growled, looking at the carpet and clawing at his hair.

  “She said she had to ‘make up’ to Hiram, her husband, so he wouldn’t guess, and that her son Francesco was born in November. November 1886, I’m guessing.”

  “Coincidence.” His face was pale, his pupils dilated. He looked dangerous but self-controlled.

  “You told me years ago that your mother was half Italian, and that you thought she had a love affair after your second brother was born. She said she and Dexter looked alike. That must mean that he was blonde with grey eyes, like you. When she saw you in Sefton she thought you were him, and the other night too. Your middle name is Francis. I’ll bet she called you Francesco. That’s too many coincidences.”

  He jumped up and took another turn around the room. I was half-afraid that he was going to take a swipe at me, but he did not.

  “So now I have a long-lost twin brother called Francesco. I suppose he’s the one I lied about to you all those years ago, and now he’s come back to haunt me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just lately I’ve found myself hypothesizing about this outcome or that outcome in a way I never have before, exactly as though there’s a little pest plucking at my sleeve, saying, ‘But have you thought about this? What if this happens? Or that?’ It’s maddening.”

  “How do you explain it?”

  “I don’t. Charles, you have to understand this – I was a child of eight when my mother disappeared. After she left, it was as though I tied off all the blood vessels that connected me to her, as one does when amputating a limb. A part of me atrophied and died after that, and yet I managed to live – quite successfully, by some measures. You know that. But now – it’s as though someone has grafted onto me that stranger that was my young self, and I can’t do anything without him popping up and saying, ‘Here I am, what are you going to do about me?’

  He laughed bitterly. “Now you tell me that I’m the offspring of a madwoman and a man who believed in some sort of lunatic theory, and so was probably himself unbalanced. And I grew up in the house of a criminal. On the whole, though, I would rather that Hiram West was my father. He may have been a murderer, but at least he was sane.”

  “As sane as any murderer, I suppose.”

  He ignored this. “For years I thought he’d killed her. I don’t know where I got the idea – bits of things I overheard and saw, I suppose. They must have formed themselves into a shape of horror in my mind.”

  He stopped pacing and looked at me. “So what else did you find out about this Dexter?”

  “He died in August of 1895, in New York. Someone shot him, but it seems that no one was charged with his murder. Maybe it wasn’t murder, only an accident. He lived for several days but was never able to give a statement.”

  “August of ’95,” West said, slowly. “That’s when my mother left. I was eight.”

  “Another… coincidence?” I asked, carefully.

  “All right, Charles,” West said, “the dates are damnably suggestive, I agree. I suppose she might have gone to Dexter when she heard he was dying. Perhaps she intended to leave Hiram and send for me later. I don’t know. But something went wrong and she ended up in Sefton.”

  “She said things that suggested Hiram had something to do with that, and with Dexter’s death as well.”

  West swiped a hand over his face. “I wouldn’t put it past him. By the way, did you say you had something stronger than coffee?”r />
  I fetched some whiskey and poured two glasses. “Sarah Enright said she was paid by Judge Derby to visit with your mother at Sefton, and when he died that responsibility went to Robert Derby. He was at the funeral service, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, he’s a cousin. His father was my mother’s uncle. There has never been any warmth and friendliness between the Wests and the Derbys. I can understand why, now. Well Charles,” he continued, with a forced smile, “didn’t I say this would crack my foundations?”

  “Why? After all, you are what you are, regardless of who your parents were. And you know you can trust me to keep all this to myself.” Especially, I thought, given my role in the revivification of Anna Derby West. Now I was as culpable as her son, when it came to ‘offering an indignity to a dead body.’

  “Well, and what am I, then?” asked West. “Do you know? A man is the product of two things – the physical inheritance from his parents, and his upbringing. My upbringing was delivered by Hiram West and the tutors and others hired by him. But the other? There’s a theory, propounded by Dr. Henry Maudsley, a British psychiatrist, that mental as well as physical disease can be transmitted from parent to child. So while I may not be mad now, it’s very likely that I am infected with abnormality.”

  “But you have no reason to think so, do you?” I persisted. “Apart from these ideas about inheritance, I mean?”

  “There have been times when I have found myself considering the possibility,” he said, slowly. “In France during the War, for example. No, I can’t rule it out.”

  I remembered some of his letters and a chill settled over my heart. It was as though he had laid aside his brilliant veneer and revealed darkness beneath. “But that wasn’t exactly a normal situation, surely? For anyone that was there I mean, not only you. And don’t forget that I’m the son of a suicide, but I don’t expect that I’ll be driven to do what he did.”

  “That’s not the same. Suicide can actually be a rational choice, in some situations. And your father, from what you’ve told me, was a perfectly ordinary, competent individual until his bank failed. This is… insidious. And probably inescapable.”

  “But nothing about you has changed since you found out about all this,” I said. “You’re exactly the same person you were before.” The person who murdered Robert Leavitt, my mind supplied helpfully.

  “The person I was before was living in a state of blessed ignorance. Then I saw a clear road before me. Now it’s full of hidden pits. You’ll think me ungenerous and selfish, but it’s probably just as well she expired before she was able to say more. Other considerations aside, explaining her recovery would have been an awkward business, since several people were there when I declared her dead.”

  He was groping for his usual ironic manner, like a man trying to find a weapon in the dark, but it eluded him. It was time to change the subject.

  I saw that he was fretting with the ring I had noticed earlier, turning it around and around on his finger, as though it bothered him. “That’s a very distinctive ring,” I said. “I’ve never noticed it before.”

  “That’s because I’ve never worn it before. But it seems appropriate now. You see, it came from her. My mother.” He took it off and passed it to me.

  I looked at the ring closely, turning it around under the light. The emerald was quite large and very fine, with a spark of fire in its clear green depths. But it was the setting that I found most puzzling. I could not guess of what metal it was made – some curious alloy, very pale gold in colour, heavy and hard, yet with a sheen that was almost pearly. Even more peculiar were the designs carved into the metal. They had been executed with great skill and precision. The motifs appeared to be geometrical in nature, but I could not begin to guess from what cultural or artistic tradition they emanated. The intricacy and grace of the interweaving lines and curves spoke of a highly evolved technique, but to me, at least, they were utterly unfamiliar.

  “Do you know where this came from?” I asked, at length. “Where did your mother get it?”

  “I really don’t know,” he said. “I doubt that it’s an heirloom of the Derby family. There’s nothing of the solid Yankee about it, is there? But then, I seem to remember some of the old Derbys were seafarers of one sort or another. It may be that one of them brought it back from some distant place.”

  He did not seem particularly interested in the ring and I did not persist in questioning him about it. He stared at the floor for a moment, then looked up at me and said, “Quarrington predicted that I would go mad, you know. That’s another reason I wasn’t keen on him toward the end.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was that big prediction study of his. You know the one, I mentioned it a while ago. Mostly he didn’t tell us subjects what he had predicted, so it wouldn’t influence us and skew the results, but with me he let one detail slip. It surprised him so much that he forgot himself. I remember him poring over the notes he had made about me. He closed his eyes and looked like he was in pain or something. Then he looked at me and said ‘You will die twice, Herbert West.’ After that he clammed up. At the time I didn’t worry about it much. At twenty or nineteen, or whatever age I was then, death seemed so remote that it didn’t matter whether it would be once or twice. But I’ve thought about it since and decided he was telling me I would go insane – the death of the mind, you see, before the death of the body. He liked to speak in metaphors, Q. did.”

  I leaned closer to him. “You haven’t asked for my advice, but I’m going to give it anyway. Your mother’s life was sad, even tragic, but it was her life and now it’s over. Your father is dead too, whoever he was. Forget them. Well, not entirely, but there’s no reason to brood about them like this. As for all this stuff about madness, there’s no point in thinking about that, either. You have work to do, work that you love, so do it. These other things will look after themselves. If you’re infected with madness, as you say, worrying about it won’t make any difference. And if you’re not, then it’s madness to worry. And if you do go mad, I’ll make sure you’re treated well.”

  “In that case, Charles, the kindest thing you could do would be to shoot me. The very thought of becoming one of those dribbling idiots at Sefton fills me with horror. But thank you, Dr. Milburn, for your opinion. I shall surely consider it. There’s a practicality about it that appeals to me.”

  He got up to leave and I saw him to the door. “Quarrington wrote me a letter shortly before his death, when I was in Flanders, full of dire warnings. He warned me not to lose sight of you, Charles, that bad things would happen if I did. I’ve taken that much of his advice anyway. You’re the only one I could talk with about all this.”

  I recognized in myself a desire to comfort him, but didn’t know how, so I put my arms around him in a brief, awkward embrace, which he neither resisted nor reciprocated. He felt frailer than he looked. “It’ll be all right, Herbert,” I muttered, and let him go.

  I listened to his footsteps receding down the stairs and something I had read recently came back to me, unbidden and complete. A cryptic sentence from Paracelsus: He who would enter the Kingdom of God must first enter with his body into his mother and there die.

  Later, I realized that I had forgotten to ask West when his mother had given him the emerald ring. Had it been when he was a child, before her departure from the household? Or during the brief encounter before her death? It didn’t really matter, but it bothered me, like a loose thread in a garment or a chip in the rim of a cup.

  That night, I dreamt the question and an answer. West told me that she had not given him the ring as such, but only a large walnut. “She handed it to me and said, ‘This is for you. He would have wanted you to have it.’ And I put it in my pocket and forgot it. But later, after she was gone, I cracked it open and found the ring. Like this.”

  He opened his hand, disclosing a walnut. Then he clenched his fist on it, producing a cracking sound, and opened his hand again, like a conjuror. On his palm lay the eme
rald ring. West laughed. “It was only a walnut,” he said.

  I knew, of course, that this was a dream. But it lodged in my memory like the truth, and I never asked him for another.

  Despite my sympathy for him, West’s revivification of his mother struck me as grotesque and pathetic. I have read a good deal since then about the theories regarding heredity that were being propounded at the time. West had probably been aware of them when they were newly in vogue, and for some reason they had resonated strongly in his rather arid materialistic philosophy, which allowed no room for the unexplained. When he discovered that his mother was an asylum inmate, his fear of hereditary insanity must have prompted the desperate urge to interrogate her unfortunate corpse after her sudden death.

  Moreover, by this time I had begun to suspect something else about him. There was only one explanation for certain of his idiosyncrasies. I had read my Plato. I knew what sort of love was discussed in Phaedrus. I knew also that in our time such individuals were considered by many to be hereditary degenerates. The knowledge that he himself harboured this abnormality must have been a heavy burden for him.

  The thing that made me almost certain was an incident which took place at one of West’s dinner parties. Things were at the stage where most of the guests were in a state of animated eloquence. John Billington was playing the piano and West was singing a duet of some sort with one of the others, rather badly. I had been talking with a new member of West’s circle, one who was unusual in being older than most of us, and without a medical connection. He was a professor of physics, James Williams by name. As West and his companion concluded their performance to cheers and applause, I became aware that Williams was no longer attending to what I was saying. Neither was he cheering or applauding. He was gazing with a fixed and hungry stare at West, who was laughing and clapping his singing partner on the shoulder, entirely given over to the enjoyment of the moment, eyes shining, fair hair falling over his forehead. Suddenly, West became aware of Williams’s stare and gave him such a look that I expected the man to fall over dead from the sheer icy intensity of it. He excused himself and left the room.

  An hour or two later, the party had degenerated into something of a brawl and I was feeling unwell. West was nowhere to be found, so I went to get my coat. In the relative quiet of the entrance hall, I heard voices nearby. I looked around the corner and saw West and James Williams a little distance away. West leaned a shoulder against the panelling, one arm folded against his chest, a drink in his other hand. Williams had his back to me, but I could see his hand tentatively touching the lapel of West’s jacket, plucking the cloth nervously between thumb and fingers as he spoke.

  I could not hear what they said, for it was a conversation carried on in murmurs, mainly by Williams. His voice rose a little at times, taking on an imploring note. West’s replies were brief, but I was struck by his manner – teasing, almost coquettish, with an ironic half-smile. I must have made some involuntary sound or movement, for suddenly he glanced in my direction. Unperturbed, he flicked Williams’s hand from his lapel as though it were a bit of fluff. “Not now, James,” he said, then, in a louder voice, “Charles, surely you’re not leaving already?” I turned away from Williams’s stricken face, embarrassed.

  Williams left without a word while I was making my good-byes and (I heard later) quitted Miskatonic and Arkham some months subsequently. The day following the dinner, I mentioned the incident to West. “James Williams seemed upset about something when he left the other night.”

  “He’s an importunate fellow,” said West. “Just because I invited him to dinner and a small debauch, he thought… Well, never mind what he thought, but he seriously misjudged his potential. Not very good in a physicist. Oh, you don’t understand? Well, never mind.”

  I didn’t ask him any more, but I wondered. Had there been a miscommunication between the two of them? Had Williams recognized a kindred spirit and leapt to conclusions? Or had West given him reason for hope, then changed his mind?

  None of this troubled me, particularly. What did, in fact, was this very lack of trouble, and the realization that the scene I had witnessed had intrigued me, rather than repelled.

  Now that the usage of the years had dimmed West’s glamour a little, it seemed to me that I was fated to be his confidant and, in an odd sense, his guardian. His peculiar upbringing and idiosyncratic values predisposed him to dangerous excesses, but he used me as a kind of Everyman on whom to test some of his ideas and plans. I had a twofold responsibility – to protect the world from him, and him from the world. I wondered which would prove more compelling.

  With the arrival of spring, Anna Derby’s remains were laid to rest in the Derby family plot in Christ Church Cemetery, rather than by the side of her husband in Boston. West insisted on this. “She was quite clearly dissociated from Hiram, no longer his wife in any sense that mattered.”

  “What do your brothers think?” They had attended neither the funeral service nor the burial.

  “They have no feelings about her, one way or the other. As for me, I don’t see much of them now. They had to make other arrangements when I was in Europe, and I decided not to be available to them when I returned.”

  “What do you mean, ‘other arrangements’?”

  “I used to do the odd bit of work for them. Strictly off the record, of course. But no more. They’ll have to deal with their own dirty linen. And don’t ask me to explain that, because I won’t.”