it.
'Why me?' I asked. 'Why not try it on your disciples in London University under proper conditions?'
'Because it would be premature,' he said, 'and because I'm not prepared to risk telling anyone, not even my disciples, as you choose to call them. You are the only one to know that I'm even thinking along these particular lines, which is way outside the stuff I usually do. I stumbled on this thing by chance, and I've got to find out more about it before I'm even remotely satisfied that it has possibilities. I intend to work on it when I come down to Kilmarth in September. Meanwhile, you're going to be alone in the house. You could at least try it once, and report back. I may be entirely wrong about it. It may have no effect upon you except to turn your hands and feet temporarily numb and make your brain, such as you possess, dear boy, rather more alert than it is at present.'
Of course in the end, after another glass of brandy, he had talked me into it. He gave me detailed instructions about the lab, he gave me the keys to the lab itself and to the cupboard where he kept the drug, and described the sudden effect it might have — no intervening stage, but direct transition from one state to another — and he said something about the after-effects, the possibility of nausea. It was only when I asked him directly what I was likely to see that he became evasive. 'No,' he said, 'it might predispose you, unconsciously, to see what I saw. You've got to make this experiment with an open mind, unprejudiced.'
A few days later I left London and drove to Cornwall. The house was aired and ready — Magnus had briefed Mrs. Collins from Polkerris, the small village below Kilmarth — and I found vases filled with flowers, food in the fridge, and fires in the music-room and the library, although it was mid-July; Vita could not have done better herself. I spent the first couple of days enjoying the peace of the place, and the comfort, too, which, if I remembered rightly, had been lacking in former times when Magnus's delightful and somewhat eccentric parents were in command. The father, Commander Lane, had been a retired naval man with a passion for sailing a ten-ton yacht in which we were invariably sea-sick, the mother a vague, haphazard creature of great charm who pottered about in an enormous broad-brimmed hat whatever the weather, indoors and out, and spent her time snipping the dead heads off roses, which she grew with passion but with singular lack of real success. I laughed at them and loved them, and when they died within twelve months of one another I was almost more distressed than Magnus was himself. It all seemed a long time ago now. The house was a good deal changed and modernised, yet somehow their engaging presence lingered still, or so I had thought, those first few days. Now, after the experiment, I was not so sure. Unless, having seldom penetrated the basement in those early holidays, I had been unaware that it held other memories.
I got out of the bath and dried myself, put on a change of clothes, lit a cigarette, and went downstairs to the music-room, so called in lieu of the more conventional drawing-room because Magnus's parents excelled at playing and singing duets. I wondered if it was still too soon to pour myself the drink I badly needed. Better be safe than sorry — I would wait another hour.
I switched on the radiogram and picked a record at random from the top of the stack. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 might restore my poise and equanimity. Magnus must have mixed up his records the last time he was down, however, for it was not the measured strains of Bach that fell upon my ears, as I lay stretched on the sofa before the log fire, but the insidious, disquieting murmur of Debussy's La Mer. Odd choice for Magnus when he had been down at Easter. I thought he eschewed the romantic composers. I must have been mistaken, unless his taste had changed through the years. Or had his dabbling in the unknown awakened a liking for more mystical sounds, the magical conjuring of sea upon the shore? Had Magnus seen the estuary sweeping deep into the land, as I had done this afternoon? Had he seen the green fields sharp and clear, the blue water prodding the valley, the stone walls of the Priory graven against the hill? I did not know: he had not told me. So much unasked on that abortive telephone conversation. So much unsaid. I let the record play to the end, but far from calming me it had the opposite effect. The house was strangely silent now the music had stopped, and with the rise and fall of La Mer still lingering in my head I walked through the hall to the library and looked out of the wide window to the sea. It was slatey grey, whipped darker in places by a westerly wind, yet calm, with little swell. Different from the more turbulent blue sea of afternoon glimpsed in that other world. There are two staircases descending to the basement at Kilmarth. The first, leading from the hall, goes direct to the cellars and the boiler-room, and thence to the door into the patio. The second is reached by passing through the kitchen, and so down to the back entrance, the old kitchen, scullery, larder and laundry. It was the laundry, reached by the second staircase, that Magnus had converted to a laboratory. I went down these stairs, turned the key of the door, and entered the laboratory once again. There was nothing clinical about it. The old sink still stood upon the stone flagged floor beneath a small barred window. Beside it was an open fireplace, with a cloam oven, used in old days for baking bread, cut into the thickness of the wall. In the cobwebbed ceiling were rusty hooks, from which in former times salted meat and hams must have hung.
Magnus had ranged his curious exhibits along the slatted shelves fixed to the walls. Some of them were skeletons, but others were still intact, preserved in a chemical solution, their flesh bleached pale. Most were hard to distinguish — for all I knew they could have been kittens in embyro form, or even rats. The two specimens I recognised were the monkey's head, the smooth skull perfectly preserved, like the bald pate of a tiny unborn child, with eyes dosed, and, next to it, a second monkey's head from which the brain had been removed, and which now lay in a jar near by, pickled and brown. There were other jars and other bottles that held fungi, plants and grasses, grotesquely shaped, with spreading tentacles and curling leaves.
I had mocked him, over the telephone, calling the laboratory Bluebeard's chamber. Now, as I looked round it again, the memory of my afternoon still vivid in my mind, the small room seemed to hold a different quality. I was reminded not so much of the bearded potentate in the Eastern fairy-tale as of an engraving, long forgotten, that had scared me as a child. It was called The Alchemist. A figure, naked save for a loin-cloth, was crouching by a walled oven like the one here in the laundry, kindling a fire with bellows, and to his left stood a hooded monk and an abbot, carrying a cross. A fourth man, in mediaeval hat and cloak, leant upon a stick conferring with them. There had been bottles, too, upon a table, and open jars containing egg-shells, hairs and threadlike worms, and in the centre of the room a tripod with a rounded flask balanced upon it, and in the flask a minute lizard with a dragon's head.
Why only now, after some five-and-thirty years, did the memory of that dread engraving return to haunt me? I turned away, locking the door of Magnus's laboratory, and went upstairs. I could not wait any longer for that much-needed drink.
CHAPTER THREE
IT RAINED THE following day, one of those steady mizzles that accompany a drifting fog from the sea, preventing any enjoyment out of doors. I awoke feeling perfectly normal, having slept surprisingly well, but when I drew back the curtains and saw the state of the weather I went back to bed again, despondent, wondering what I was going to do with myself all day.
This was the Cornish climate about which Vita had expressed her doubts, and I could imagine her reproaches if it happened when the holidays were in full swing, my young stepsons staring aimlessly out of the window, then forced into wellingtons and macs and sent, protesting, to walk along the sands at Par. Vita would wander from music-room to library altering the position of the furniture, saying how much better she could arrange the rooms if they were hers, and when this palied she would telephone one of her many friends from the American Embassy crowd in London, themselves outward bound for Sardinia or Greece. These symptoms of discontent I was spared for a while longer, and the days ahead of me, wet or fine, were at least free, my own time for my own movements. The obliging Mrs. Collins brought me up my breakfast and the morning paper, commiserated with me about the weather, saying that the Professor always found plenty to do in that funny little old room of his down under, and informed me that she would roast one of her own chickens for my lunch. I had no intention of going down under, and opened the morning paper and drank my coffee. But the doubtful interest of the sports page soon palled, and my attention wandered back to the all-absorbing question of exactly what had happened to me the previous afternoon.
Had there been some telepathic communication between Magnus and myself?
We had tried this at Cambridge, with cards and numbers, but it had never worked, except once or twice by pure coincidence. And we had been more intimate in those days than we were now. I could think of no means, telepathic or otherwise, by which Magnus and I could have undergone the same experience, separated by an interval of some three months — it was Easter, apparently, when he had tried the drug himself — unless that
