But let me try to tell coherently of that final horror. I will not
speak of what the police persistently ignored--the tales of that
dwarfed, grotesque, malodorous thing met by at least three wayfarers
in High Street just before two o'clock, and the nature of the single
footprints in certain places. I will say only that just about two the
door-bell and knocker waked me--door-bell and knocker both, plied
alternately and uncertainly in a kind of weak desperation, _and each
trying to keep to Edward's old signal of three-and-two strokes_. Roused from sound sleep, my mind leaped into a turmoil. Derby at the
door--and remembering the old code! That new personality had not
remembered it ... was Edward suddenly back in his rightful state? Why
was he here in such evident stress and haste? Had he been released
ahead of time, or had he escaped? Perhaps, I thought as I flung on a
robe and bounded downstairs, his return to his own self had brought
raving and violence, revoking his discharge and driving him to a
desperate dash for freedom. Whatever had happened, he was good old
Edward again, and I would help him! *       *       *       *       *

When I opened the door into the elm-arched blackness a gust of
insufferably fetid wind almost flung me prostrate. I choked in nausea,
and for a second scarcely saw the dwarfed, humped figure on the steps. The summons had been Edward's, but who was this foul, stunted parody? Where had Edward had time to go? His ring had sounded only a second
before the door opened. The caller had on one of Edward's overcoats--its bottom almost touching
the ground, and its sleeves rolled back yet still covering the hands. On the head was a slouch hat pulled low, while a black silk muffler
concealed the face. As I stepped unsteadily forward, the figure made a
semi-liquid sound like that I had heard over the telephone--"_glub ...
glub_"--and thrust at me a large, closely written paper impaled on the
end of a long pencil. Still reeling from the morbid and unaccountable
fetor, I seized the paper and tried to read it in the light from the
doorway. Beyond question, it was in Edward's script. But why had he written
when he was close enough to ring--and why was the script so awkward,
coarse and shaky? I could make out nothing in the dim half-light, so
edged back into the hall, the dwarf figure clumping mechanically after
but pausing on the inner door's threshold. The odor of this singular
messenger was really appalling, and I hoped (not in vain, thank God!) that my wife would not wake and confront it. Then, as I read the paper, I felt my knees give under me and my vision
go black. I was lying on the floor when I came to, that accursed sheet
still clutched in my fear-rigid hand. This is what it said:

    "Dan--go to the sanitarium and kill it. Exterminate it. It isn't
    Edward Derby any more. She got me--it's Asenath--_and she has been
    dead three months and a half_. I lied when I said she had gone
    away. I killed her. I had to. It was sudden, but we were alone and
    I was in my right body. I saw a candlestick and smashed her head
    in. She would have got me for good at Hallowmass. "I buried her in the farther cellar storeroom under some old
    boxes and cleaned up all the traces. The servants suspected next
    morning, but they have such secrets that they dare not tell the
    police. I sent them off, but God knows what they--and others of the
    cult--will do. "I thought for a while I was all right, and then I felt the tugging
    at my brain. I knew what it was--I ought to have remembered. A
    soul like hers--or Ephraim's--is half detached, and keeps right on
    after death as long as the body lasts. She was getting me--making
    me change bodies with her--_seizing my body and putting me in that
    corpse of hers buried in the cellar_. "I knew what was coming--that's why I snapped and had to go to
    the asylum. Then it came--I found myself choked in the dark--in
    Asenath's rotting carcass down there in the cellar under the
    boxes where I put it. And I knew she must be in my body at the
    sanitarium--permanently, for it was after Hallowmass, and the
    sacrifice would work even without her being there--sane, and ready
    for release as a menace to the world. I was desperate, _and in
    spite of everything I clawed my way out_. "I'm too far gone to talk--I couldn't manage to telephone--but I
    can still write. I'll get fixed up somehow and bring this last word
    and warning. _Kill that fiend_ if you value the peace and comfort
    of the world. _See that it is cremated._ If you don't, it will live
    on and on, body to body for ever, and I can't tell you what it will
    do. Keep clear of black magic, Dan--it's the devil's business. Good-bye--you've been a great friend. Tell the police whatever
    they'll believe--and I'm damnably sorry to drag all this on you. I'll be at peace before long--this thing won't hold together much
    more. Hope you can read this. _And kill that thing--kill it._

                                                           "Yours--ED." It was only afterward that I read the last half of this paper, for I
had fainted at the end of the third paragraph. I fainted again when I
saw and smelled what cluttered up the threshold where the warm air had
struck it. The messenger would not move or have consciousness any more. The butler, tougher-fibered than I, did not faint at what met him in
the hall in the morning. Instead, he telephoned the police. When they
came I had been taken upstairs to bed, but the--other mass--lay where
it had collapsed in the night. The men put handkerchiefs to their noses. What they finally found inside Edward's oddly-assorted clothes was
mostly liquescent horror. There were bones, too--and a crushed-in