Though the other bed stood in shadow I could still see dimly, but
sufficiently, what was there. The shape of a head lay on the pillow, the
shape of an arm lifted its hand to the electric bell that was close by
on the wall, and I fancied I could hear it distantly ringing. Then a
moment later came hurrying feet up the stairs and along the passage
outside, and a quick rapping at my door. “Monsieur’s whisky, monsieur’s whisky,” said a voice just outside. “Pardon, monsieur, I brought it as quickly as I could.”

The impotent paralysis of cold terror was still on me. Once I tried to
speak and failed, and still the gentle tapping went on at the door, and
the voice telling some one that his whisky was there. Then at a second
attempt, I heard a voice which was mine saying hoarsely:

“For God’s sake come in; I am alone with it.”

       *       *       *       *       *

There was the click of a turned door-handle, and as suddenly as it had
gone out a few seconds before, the electric light came back again, and
the room was in full illumination. I saw a face peer round the corner of
the door, but it was at another face I looked, the face of a man sallow
and shrunken, who lay in the other bed, staring at me with glazed eyes. He lay high in bed, and his throat was cut from ear to ear; and the
lower part of the pillow was soaked in blood, and the sheet streamed
with it. *       *       *       *       *

Then suddenly that hideous vision vanished, and there was only a
sleepy-eyed waiter looking into the room. But below the sleepiness
terror was awake, and his voice shook when he spoke. “Monsieur rang?” he asked. No, monsieur had not rung. But monsieur made himself a couch in the
billiard-room. THE THING IN THE HALL


The following pages are the account given me by Dr Assheton of the Thing
in the Hall. I took notes, as copious as my quickness of hand allowed
me, from his dictation, and subsequently read to him this narrative in
its transcribed and connected form. This was on the day before his
death, which indeed probably occurred within an hour after I had left
him, and, as readers of inquests and such atrocious literature may
remember, I had to give evidence before the coroner’s jury. Only a week
before Dr Assheton had to give similar evidence, but as a medical
expert, with regard to the death of his friend, Louis Fielder, which
occurred in a manner identical with his own. As a specialist, he said he
believed that his friend had committed suicide while of unsound mind,
and the verdict was brought in accordingly. But in the inquest held over
Dr Assheton’s body, though the verdict eventually returned was the same,
there was more room for doubt. For I was bound to state that only shortly before his death, I read what
follows to him; that he corrected me with extreme precision on a few
points of detail, that he seemed perfectly himself, and that at the end
he used these words:

“I am quite certain as a brain specialist that I am completely sane, and
that these things happened not merely in my imagination, but in the
external world. If I had to give evidence again about poor Louis, I
should be compelled to take a different line. Please put that down at
the end of your account, or at the beginning, if it arranges itself
better so.”

There will be a few words I must add at the end of this story, and a few
words of explanation must precede it. Briefly, they are these. Francis Assheton and Louis Fielder were up at Cambridge together, and
there formed the friendship that lasted nearly till their death. In
general attributes no two men could have been less alike, for while Dr
Assheton had become at the age of thirty-five the first and final
authority on his subject, which was the functions and diseases of the
brain, Louis Fielder at the same age was still on the threshold of
achievement. Assheton, apparently without any brilliance at all, had by
careful and incessant work arrived at the top of his profession, while
Fielder, brilliant at school, brilliant at college and brilliant ever
afterwards, had never done anything. He was too eager, so it seemed to
his friends, to set about the dreary work of patient investigation and
logical deductions; he was for ever guessing and prying, and striking
out luminous ideas, which he left burning, so to speak, to illumine the
work of others. But at bottom, the two men had this compelling interest
in common, namely, an insatiable curiosity after the unknown, perhaps
the most potent bond yet devised between the solitary units that make up
the race of man. Both--till the end--were absolutely fearless, and Dr
Assheton would sit by the bedside of the man stricken with bubonic
plague to note the gradual surge of the tide of disease to the reasoning
faculty with the same absorption as Fielder would study X-rays one week,
flying machines the next, and spiritualism the third. The rest of the
story, I think, explains itself--or does not quite do so. This, anyhow,
is what I read to Dr Assheton, being the connected narrative of what he
had himself told me. It is he, of course, who speaks. *       *       *       *       *

“After I returned from Paris, where I had studied under Charcot, I set
up practice at home. The general doctrine of hypnotism, suggestion, and
cure by such means had been accepted even in London by this time, and,
owing to a few papers I had written on the subject, together with my
foreign diplomas, I found that I was a busy man almost as soon as I had
arrived in town. Louis Fielder had his ideas about how I should make my
début (for he had ideas on every subject, and all of them original), and
entreated me to come and live not in the stronghold of doctors,
‘Chloroform Square,’ as he called it, but down in Chelsea, where there
was a house vacant next his own. ‘Who cares where a doctor lives,’ he said, ‘so long as he cures people? Besides you don’t believe in old methods; why believe in old localities? Oh, there is an atmosphere of painless death in Chloroform Square! Come
and make people live instead! And on most evenings I shall have so much
to tell you; I can’t “drop in” across half London.’

Now if you have been abroad for five years, it is a great deal to know
that you have any intimate friend at all still left in the metropolis,
and, as Louis said, to have that intimate friend next door, is an
excellent reason for going next door. Above all, I remembered from
Cambridge days, what Louis’ ‘dropping in’ meant. Towards bed-time, when
work was over, there would come a rapid step on the landing, and for an
hour, or two hours, he would gush with ideas. He simply diffused life,
which is ideas, wherever he went. He fed one’s brain, which is the one
thing which matters. Most people who are ill, are ill because their
brain is starving, and the body rebels, and gets lumbago or cancer. That
is the chief doctrine of my work such as it has been. All bodily disease
springs from the brain.