“I came in, as I said,” explained West, “about eleven o’clock and having made some notes relating to an interview arranged for this morning, I locked the plans in the safe and turned in.”
“There was no one hidden anywhere in your chambers?” snapped Smith.
“There was not,” replied West. “I looked. I invariably do. Almost immediately, I went to sleep.”
“How many chloral tabloids did you take?” I interrupted.
Norris West turned to me with a slow smile.
“You’re cute, Doctor,” he said. “I took two. It’s a bad habit, but I can’t sleep without. They are specially made up for me by a firm in Philadelphia.”
“How long sleep lasted, when it became filled with uncanny dreams, and when those dreams merged into reality, I do not know—shall never know, I suppose. But out of the dreamless void a face came to me—closer—closer—and peered into mine.
“I was in that curious condition wherein one knows that one is dreaming and seeks to awaken—to escape. But a nightmare-like oppression held me. So I must lie and gaze into the seared yellow face that hung over me, for it would drop so close that I could trace the cicatrized scar running from the left ear to the corner of the mouth, and drawing up the lip like the lip of a snarling cur. I could look into the malignant, jaundiced eyes; I could hear the dim whispering of the distorted mouth—whispering that seemed to counsel something—something evil. That whispering intimacy was indescribably repulsive. Then the wicked yellow face would be withdrawn, and would recede until it became as a pin’s head in the darkness far above me—almost like a glutinous, liquid thing.
“Somehow I got upon my feet, or dreamed I did—God knows where dreaming ended and reality began. Gentlemen, maybe you’ll conclude I went mad last night, but as I stood holding on to the bedrail I heard the blood throbbing through my arteries with a noise like a screw-propeller. I started laughing. The laughter issued from my lips with a shrill whistling sound that pierced me with physical pain and seemed to wake the echoes of the whole block. I thought myself I was going mad, and I tried to command my will—to break the power of the chloral—for I concluded that I had accidentally taken an overdose.
“Then the walls of my bedroom started to recede, till at last I stood holding on to a bed which had shrunk to the size of a doll’s cot, in the middle of a room like Trafalgar Square! That window yonder was such a long way off I could scarcely see it, but I could just detect a Chinaman—the owner of the evil yellow face—creeping through it. He was followed by another, who was enormously tall—so tall that, as they came towards me (and it seemed to take them something like half-an-hour to cross this incredible apartment in my dream), the second Chinaman seemed to tower over me like a cypress-tree.
“I looked up to his face—his wicked, hairless face. Mr. Smith, whatever age I live to, I’ll never forget that face I saw last night—or did I see it? God knows! The pointed chin, the great dome of a forehead, and the eyes—heavens above, the huge green eyes!”
He shook like a sick man, and I glanced at Smith significantly. Inspector Weymouth was stroking his mustache, and his mingled expression of incredulity and curiosity was singular to behold.
“The pumping of my blood,” continued West, “seemed to be bursting my body; the room kept expanding and contracting. One time the ceiling would be pressing down on my head, and the Chinamen—sometimes I thought there were two of them, sometimes twenty—became dwarfs; the next instant it shot up like the roof of a cathedral.
“ ‘Can I be awake,’ I whispered, ‘or am I dreaming?’
“My whisper went sweeping in windy echoes about the walls, and was lost in the shadowy distances up under the invisible roof.
“ ‘You are dreaming—yes.’ It was the Chinaman with the green eyes who was addressing me, and the words that he uttered appeared to occupy an immeasurable time in the utterance. ‘But at will I can render the subjective objective.’ I don’t think I can have dreamed those singular words, gentlemen.
“And then he fixed the green eyes upon me—the blazing green eyes. I made no attempt to move. They seemed to be draining me of something vital—bleeding me of every drop of mental power. The whole nightmare room grew green, and I felt that I was being absorbed into its greenness.
“I can see what you think. And even in my delirium—if it was delirium—I thought the same. Now comes the climax of my experience—my vision—I don’t know what to call it. I saw some words issuing from my own mouth!”
Inspector Weymouth coughed discreetly. Smith whisked round upon him.
“This will be outside your experience, Inspector, I know,” he said, “but Mr. Norris West’s statement does not surprise me in the least. I know to what the experience was due.”
Weymouth stared incredulously, but a dawning perception of the truth was come to me, too.
“How I saw a sound I just won’t attempt to explain; I simply tell you I saw it. Somehow I knew I had betrayed myself—given something away.”
“You gave away the secret of the lock combination!” rapped Smith.
“Eh!” grunted Weymouth.
But West went on hoarsely:
“Just before the blank came a name flashed before my eyes. It was ‘Bayard Taylor.’ ”
At that I interrupted West.
“I understand!” I cried. “I understand! Another name has just occurred to me, Mr. West—that of the Frenchman, Moreau.”
“You have solved the mystery,” said Smith. “It was natural Mr. West should have thought of the American traveler, Bayard Taylor, though. Moreau’s book is purely scientific. He has probably never read it.”
“I fought with the stupor that was overcoming me,” continued West, “striving to associate that vaguely familiar name with the fantastic things through which I moved. It seemed to me that the room was empty again. I made for the hall, for the telephone. I could scarcely drag
