Gilmour was bending over the desk, his body hunched and stiff as though it laboured under a mighty load. The skin was drawn tight upon his face; it seemed as though his skull was showing through, and his eyes burned and held in them all the hate in hell.
The Professor breathed deeply.
“Why did you do it, you swine?” asked Gilmour in a very low voice.
The scientist’s mouth twitched, the aid of wisdom left him, his eyes turned slightly, and he suddenly became a mad old man. There was a pause. They looked at each other Then Neville laughed, a long thin laugh of triumph.
“Why did I do it?” he repeated, and cackled. “Why ask me that?” he screamed, his insane mirth turning to fury. “Did you think I was going to sit back and let you rob me of her? You fool! Don’t you know that I’ve watched over her and loved her all these years, and dreamt and worked for the Seventh Serum and a son? Pah! You idiot! Do you think any fool could come and claim her? Dictate to me, threaten me just because he thought he loved her? So do I. And she’s my child. Had she been a boy, I would never have been troubled by stupid oafs and idiotic love! A son I wanted to carry on my work, pile fame upon fame and put our name amongst the mighty!”
Neville’s face was white with passion. “But nature cheated me,” he shouted, “and gave me a useless daughter, to be robbed away by fools like you, had I not spent half my life prying into her secrets. I vowed I would have a son, and now I’ve got one. See, with my brain I cheated Nature and robbed you, the robber. Now go, young man. You have never been in my scheme of things, and there are many more women to share your foolish love!”
The old man stopped, breathless and exhausted with his emotion. Gilmour maddened him; he thought the younger man was making an unreasonable fuss over nothing. To Neville the matter was not anything out of the ordinary. He had spent too long dreaming of it. It was only the achievement of his work. He wished to sit back and enjoy watching the results. Arnold Gilmour was done with, an irritation ended. He had explained to him. The fellow could not love a man; he must understand and clear out decently.
But in the gaining of his desire, Neville had sacrificed more than half his lifetime; he had lost his sanity!
Gilmour had listened to the professor in silence, seeming to be unaware of the old man’s rantings. But at the last few words, he grinned mirthlessly and moved around the desk.
“No,” he said, very softly, two inches from the scientist’s face. “You’re wrong; there’s only one girl for my ‘foolish’ love.”
Then the storm burst; Gilmour’s body trembled with fury and Neville quailed before him, for Arnold’s wrath seemed of the gods and outraged Nature. Like the elements unleashed, it swept around the room. It battered Neville down into his chair and lashed into the very windows of his soul, plumbing his innermost depths. It uprooted all his senses, stripped him of all reason—overwhelming him with a blind panic and fearful terror.
“You madman,” Gilmore cried, his voice almost a scream of contempt. “Look at me; see, I’m almost as mad as you are, driven mad with what you’ve done. You swine, to think that you could take a soul, banish it from heaven and earth! It wasn’t yours to tamper with; Jeanette had given herself to me, to me only, and now you’ve murdered her and left that creature whom you call your son, Oh, you may have got away with it all right, but you forgot something, you mad old fool,” he snarled. “You forgot me, and my love for her!” Gilmour’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Listen, Nature is going to trick you like she did before, because you are going to bring Jean back to me.”
“That I’ll never do,” muttered the old man viciously.
“Yes you will, Neville,” hissed Gilmour. “If you don’t, I’m so mad now that I’m going to kill you. See, just like this; oh, it’s so easy.”
With the grin of an imbecile, Gilmour brought his hand up and his fingers encircled the Professor’s throat. Neville’s eyes bulged with terror, but he could offer no resistance, for he was hypnotized by a madness greater than his own.
Gilmour leered as he tightened his grip; then the scientist screamed chokingly. With his senses failing, he suddenly realized that here was no bluff; he was looking into the face of death itself.
“Don’t,” he sobbed. “I will; I swear I will.”
“Good,” said Gilmour. “Somehow I thought you would,” and with a chuckle that sounded like the last rattle of a corpse, he released his grip. He opened the drawer into which Neville had placed the Seventh Serum, and took out the phial with a look of deep loathing upon his face.
“Here,” he said, curtly. “Change her back, and be quick, for every time I think of it, my brain goes funny and I want to kill you!”
“That is of no use now,” answered Neville soberly. His approach to the gates of seemed to have brought his sanity back to him. “The smallest grain of that would kill him now—”
“Don’t say ‘him’!” screamed Gilmour, with a sudden burst of passion, “I tell you it’s her, Jeanette. Why won’t that do; it did well enough at first. Don’t try to fool me—or, by heaven, you’ll be sorry.”
“Try to be calm,” said Neville, his age increasing with the minutes. “I told you that this serum was for neutralizing the secretion of the female. I need a slightly different formula for the male. Try to compose yourself, and I will prepare it. Don’t worry,” he said, reading the other’s thoughts, “I will not fail you, for just now I am beginning to understand the greatness of my sin.” And with a sigh that was more a groan, he commanded Gilmour to leave him while he worked.
During the hours that followed, Gilmour prowled in and out of the Mount House, carefully avoiding the laboratories, or any place he might meet the youth. To Arnold he was a thing of horror, a living tombstone, a strange monstrosity that played upon his sanity
There were many things to remind him of Jeanette and he spent the hours torn between spasms of passionate rage and deep grief. As the sun was setting, he wandered into the rose gardens and stood, hunched and lonely, breathing in the magic air of the sweet June night. He could hear the last song of the birds, and the mysterious sounds of twilight, and he thought of Jeanette with hopeless eyes and a pale drawn face. A strange foulness and a great emptiness had come into his life. He felt barred from these simple, natural things of earth. His dreams, so fine and big at dawn, were shattered. He turned and cast a look of fear at the black pile that was Mount House. He was alone, very, very much alone. The building was a sepulchre. He sat amid the roses and sobbed out his heart in an agony of black despair.
At last he rose, shivering, and returned to the house.
Professor Neville was in the laboratory, and Arnold was relieved to find the old man alone; he would not have faced the boy without losing his self-control.
“Well?” he said to Neville.
“There it is,” answered Neville briefly, and he pointed to a hypodermic syringe upon the bench. “There is just enough of the serum in that to turn a man to a woman, but I am not quite sure of it. You must understand it is the first I have made and I have no subject to test it upon.”
“Why does it need testing?” asked Gilmour with great suspicion. “You know what the last lot did.”
“Quite so, but I would never think of injecting my daughter with this serum until I first know the consequences. You must wait until tomorrow, when I will promise a suitable subject.”
“Oh, no you won’t,” snarled Arnold, his face a mask of fury. “Hours to me are hell! How do I know what you will feel like tomorrow? If you want a subject so much, I’ll find you one now.” With a mad leer he took up the syringe and, almost before Neville was aware of his intentions, he had plunged it into the old man’s arm! “You will be the subject, you swine!” he cried, laughing like a man who is losing his reason. “Now you can study the effects very closely and at the same time see how you like your damned Seventh Serum.” He leaned against the bench laughing hysterically.
“You fool; you don’t know what you’ve done,” gasped Neville, half sobbing
, his face grey with terror. “Get out of my way!” he shouted, clutching at a bottle upon a shelf near Gilmour’s head.
But Arnold saw his intention.
“I know what I am doing,” he said viciously, “and now you’ve got it, you’re going to keep it.”
He followed up his words with his fist, and with one blow he laid Neville unconscious at his feet.
“When you wake up, old man, I don’t think you will be Professor Neville,” he muttered, and gathering the scientist’s body up in his arms, he left the laboratory and made his way to Neville’s bedroom. There he laid the old man upon the bed, and stood for a moment Looking down at him, then left, carefully locking the door after him.
CHAPTER VI: TRAGEDY
Four days and nights had passed since Arnold Gilmour had locked the professor in his bedroom, and as dawn came upon the fifth day, Gilmour stood brooding through the kitchen window with deep-sunk eyes.
He seemed to have aged a score of years since the day of his arrival at the Mount House. He stood with bent body and unshaven face, a different being from the young man who had walked through the scented gardens with life and love in his heart. Those relays to him were years ago, if they ever had been at all!
Since the beginning of the nightmare, he had had but a few brief snatches of sleep in which he awake suddenly with a pounding heart and a great fear for his sanity. His brain ached with the usual never-ending monotony, and as he thought of the past few days, he knew that there was madness somewhere.
The first night he had spent huddled over a small fire in the servants’ kitchen, drinking coffee and smoking endless cigarettes. The next morning he had seen Jean; he refused or could not think of her as a boy. The youth had appeared, fresh and cheerful in the early morning, and had become surprised and pained at Gilmour’s attitude. Arnold had tried in every way to reach some last remnants of his former sweetheart, but he could not. It was impossible, ridiculous, humiliating. He was talking to a man, and while the younger Neville was quite aware and fully remembered his former love for Gilmour, he now had the mind of a man. He sympathized with Arnold, but felt no regrets for the love that was gone; indeed, he was too enraptured with the novelty and the possibilities of his new life to consider Gilmour’s torture deeply. Inwardly he regarded his female existence and his love for Gilmour as rather a foolish joke which was now over and should be forgotten.
He had inquired about his father, and was concerned about his abrupt manner the previous night, and it became obvious to Gilmour that the youth was beginning to regard him as a nuisance, and made him feel like a man who has overstayed his welcome.
It was after the youth had been to Neville’s bedroom and returned, suspiciously demanding the key from Gilmour, that the latter had overpowered him, and with a strength that Arnold never had before, he carried him to the highest room in the house and locked him in.
The days that followed he spent like a watching beast, prowling between Neville’s room and that of the boy’s. Sometimes, as on the second day, he would sit outside the Professor’s bedroom and listen to his cries from behind the door. Desperately the old man fought against the effects of the serum; piteously he groveled under the door and begged his jailer to see reason. But Gilmour would not even speak to him; the most he would do was push scraps of food and water through the slightly opened doorway.
As for the young Neville, he had wasted his energy storming around the attic and moaning, much alarmed for the fate of his father, until Gilmour had become impatient and half-strangled him. It was only by Arnold suddenly remembering that he was choking the body of his sweetheart that he stopped. But it quieted the youth and afterwards he took the food that Gilmour gave him and sometimes humbly asked for books to while the time away.
The third day there was silence in Neville’s room and when Gilmour pushed the food in, he saw only a thin hand reach out to take it.
The next day Arnold had an idea, and going through the servants’ quarters, he found a room which he knew belonged to the absent housekeeper. After a few minutes, he came out with a sardonic smile upon his face and a bundle of clothes under his arm.
These he pushed into the room with the daily supply of food. But no hand appeared to take his offerings, so he gently closed the door and sat upon the floor, listening through the keyhole, his features like that of an animal and fixed with a wolfish grin.
And now, as he stood in the grey light, brooding through the window at the dew covered rose trees, he resolved to bring this madness to an end. He felt calmer and more sober than he had ever been since the first horrible day. Shortly he would bring Neville from his room and see how the serum worked. He feared this and it made him fidget nervously. Deep in his heart he had long since regretted his rash deed, but his determination to make Neville suffer as he was obstinately overruled his reason.
As long as he lived, it would do for the scientist not to play with other people’s bodies again, thought Arnold bitterly. Then despite the weariness of his soul, he became more cheerful as he made his plans.
He had great faith in the professor’s scientific powers. It would not be long before Neville made another injection of the serum, for the youth, and then Jeanette would return to him once more. He glowed inwardly; it was as though life flowed back to his bones when he thought of this and his face became almost young again.
As the morning came and the sun rose in the sky, stirring the gardens to life and all their scented glory, Gilmour brewed himself some coffee and after nibbling a little food, he made his way up to the attic.
At first he avoided Neville’s room, for he had an idea of making the younger Neville see, too, just what he had suffered before sending his horrible and unwanted maleness back to the place from whence it came.
Arnold knocked upon the door, then half opened it. “Come out,” he ordered harshly; he had no name for the boy. “I want you!”
A short interval elapsed before the youth emerged cautiously, and with the air of one who humours a madman, he inquired the reason for the disturbance.
Gilmour chuckled mirthlessly, “Come and see,” he answered, “come and see what the Seventh Serum does; as a student of physiology, you’ll be very interested.”
The youth made no reply but followed his one-time sweetheart to Neville’s room with a puzzled look upon his face.
In that instant Gilmour knew that he would never see his girl again. The world was mad and he was mad!
With the cry of a homicidal maniac, he seized the microscope and crashed it upon Neville’s head, and before the younger Neville was aware of what had happened, her skull was crushed to pulp. Then Gilmour turned with the sound of an animal to deal with the youth. The madman hurled the instrument at him, striking him upon the head, and as the youth fell to the floor, Gilmour dashed from the room.
Down the sweet country lanes he went with wild eyes, talking to himself, the specks of foam at the corners of his twisted mouth sticking in little bubbles on the bristles of his five-day-old beard.
It was in this state that he arrived at the village, and to the horror of the inhabitants, wandering into the best room of a little cottage that was the local police station, babbling childishly that he had killed a man.
And that, patient reader, solves the mystery of the Mount Murders and eases my soul.
Are there any more questions you wish answered? Stop, I anticipate you. Who am I? How do I know this? How are you to believe that it is the truth?
Ah well, you will dig to the roots.
I am James Hazelwood, the established—I flatter myself again—physiologist, and if it is relevant, happily married, the father of two fine children. I was once Jeanette Neville.
* * * *
The following real stories from 1934 Newspapers were added as a footnote to magazine appearance of “The Sex Serum” to convince Depression-era audiences it wasn’t wild fantasy, but based on established scientific fact:.
GIRL TURNS INTO BOY
Henriette, 16, to Become
>
Legally Henri.
Lille, Aug. 18 (U. P.). Henri Acces, 16 years aid, powdered his upper lip today to conceal a budding mustache, donned a dress and prepared to sing in the church choir at Lens.
He hopes next Tuesday, however, to obtain legal permission to become a boy, and shed forever the skirts he has worn all his life as Alice Henriette Acces. In time he hopes to marry.
A growing tendency of Henri/Henriette’s soprano voice in the Lens choir roused suspicions which led to an examination by experts. They decided Henriette had become Henri.
The decision was announced yesterday. Henri celebrated by borrowing a pair of his father’s trousers for temporary use, smoking his first cigarette and making plans to encourage, rather than to conceal, the sprouting mustache.
On Tuesday he plans to go to the town hall and have the sex space on his birth certificate changed from female to male. Until then he is legally a girl.
Dr. Henri Minne, the family physician, confirmed to the United Press today that Henriette had undergone a metamorphosis.
“Henri’s masculinity is unquestionable,” said Dr. Minne, “I shall recommend an operation to make his metamorphosis complete.”
MANHOOD FOR GIRL
Sought in Surgical Test
Dayton, Pa., Aug. 18. In one of the strangest and most daring experiments ever attempted by modern science, a surgeon’s knife this fall will seek to transform a dwarfed farm girl of 20 years, afflicted with a sex deformity since birth, into a normal young man.
The girl is Claire Schreckengost, second of ten children in the family of C. W. Schreckengost, farmer in the hill country above Dayton. When she was born, doctors examined her rare malformity and said she could never live more than three years,
She lived, but she grew into an awkward, undersized creature, who became so well known in the rural community that a humane society heard of her not long ago.
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