I, as a layman,
couldn't pretend to judge; but at all events I thought you oughtn't to
miss a chance to digest the thing while it's fresh. If you're busy, of
course, I won't disturb you----"

Clarendon cut in sharply. "I'm going to give my sister an hypodermic--she's not quite well--but
I'll look at what that quack has to say when I get back. I know
Miller--a damn sneak and incompetent--and I don't believe he has the
brains to steal my methods from the little he's seen of them." Dalton suddenly felt a wave of intuition warning him that Georgina must
not receive that intended dose. There was something sinister about it. From what she had said, Alfred must have been an inordinately long
time preparing it, far longer than was needed for the dissolving of
a morphine tablet. He decided to hold his host as long as possible,
meanwhile testing his attitude in a more or less subtle way. "I'm sorry Georgina isn't well. Are you sure that the injection will do
her good? That it won't do her any harm?" Clarendon's spasmodic start showed that something had been struck home. "Do her harm?" he cried. "Don't be absurd! You know Georgina must be in
the best of health--the very best, I say--in order to serve science as
a Clarendon should serve it. She, at least, appreciates the fact that
she is my sister. She deems no sacrifice too great in my service. She
is a priestess of truth and discovery, as I am a priest." He paused in his shrill tirade, wild-eyed, and somewhat out of breath. Dalton could see that his attention had been momentarily shifted. "But let me see what this cursed quack has to say," he continued. "If
he thinks his pseudo-medical rhetoric can take a real doctor in, he is
even simpler than I thought!" Clarendon nervously found the right page and began reading as he stood
there clutching his syringe. Dalton wondered what the real facts were. MacNeil had assured him that the author was a pathologist of the
highest standing, and that whatever errors the article might have, the
mind behind it was powerful, erudite, and absolutely honorable and
sincere. *       *       *       *       *

Watching the doctor as he read, Dalton saw the thin, bearded face
suddenly grow pale. The great eyes blazed, and the pages crackled in
the tenser grip of the long, lean fingers. A perspiration broke out on
the high, ivory-white forehead where the hair was already thinning, and
the reader sank gaspingly into the chair his visitor had vacated as
he kept on with his devouring of the text. Then came a wild scream as
from a hunted beast, and Clarendon lurched forward on the table, his
outflung arms sweeping books and papers before them as consciousness
went dark like a wind-quenched candle-flame. Dalton, springing to help his stricken friend, raised the slim form and
tilted it back in the chair. Seeing the carafe on the floor near the
lounge, he dashed some water into the twisted face, and was rewarded by
seeing the large eyes slowly open. They were sane eyes now--deep and
sad and unmistakably sane--and Dalton felt awed in the presence of a
tragedy whose ultimate depth he could never hope or dare to plumb. The golden hypodermic was still clutched in the lean left hand, and as
Clarendon drew a deep, shuddering breath he unclosed his fingers and
studied the glittering thing that rolled about on his palm. Then he
spoke--slowly and with the ineffable sadness of utter, absolute despair. "Thanks, Jimmy, I'm quite all right. But there's much to be done. You
asked me a while back if this shot of morphia would do Georgie any
harm. I'm in a position now to tell you that it won't." He turned a small screw in the syringe and laid a finger on the piston,
at the same time pulling with his left hand at the skin of his own
neck. Dalton tried out in alarm as a lightning motion of his right hand
injected the contents of the cylinder into the ridge of distended flesh. "Good Lord, Al, what have you done?" Clarendon smiled gently--a smile almost of peace and resignation,
different indeed from the sardonic sneer of the past few weeks. "You ought to know, Jimmy, if you've still the judgment that made you a
governor. You must have pieced together enough from my notes to realize
that there's nothing else to do. With your marks in Greek back at
Columbia I guess you couldn't have missed much. All I can say is that
it's true. "James, I don't like to pass blame along, but it's only right to tell
you that Surama got me into this. I can't tell you who or what he is,
for I don't fully know myself, and what I do know is stuff that no sane
person ought to know; but I will say that I don't consider him a human
being in the fullest sense, and that I'm not sure whether or not he's
alive as we know life. "You think I'm talking nonsense. I wish I were, but the whole hideous
mess is damnably real. I started out in life with a clean mind and
purpose. I wanted to rid the world of fever. I tried and failed--and I
wish to God I had been honest enough to say that I'd failed. Don't let
my old talk of science deceive you, James--_I found no antitoxin and
was never even half on the track of one!_

"Don't look so shaken up, old fellow! A veteran politician-fighter like
you must have seen plenty of unmaskings before. I tell you, I never had
even the start of a fever cure. But my studies had taken me into some
quiet places, and it was just my damned luck to listen to the stories
of some still queerer people. James, if you ever wish any man well,
tell him to keep clear of the ancient, hidden places of the earth. Old backwaters are dangerous--things are handed down there that don't
do healthy people any good. I talked too much with old priests and
mystics, and got to hoping I might achieve things in dark ways that I
couldn't achieve in lawful ways. "I shan't tell you just what I mean, for if I did I'd be as bad as the
old priests that were the ruin of me. All I need say is that after what
I've learned I shudder at the thought of the world and what it's been
through. The world is cursed old, James, and there have been whole
chapters lived and closed before the dawn of our organic life and the
geologic eras connected with it. It's an awful thought--whole forgotten
cycles of evolution with beings and races and wisdom and diseases--all
lived through and gone before the first amoeba ever stirred in the
tropic seas geology tells us about. "I said gone, but I didn't quite mean that. It would have been better
that way, but it wasn't quite so. In places traditions have kept on--I
can't tell you how--and certain archaic life-forms have managed to
struggle thinly down the eons in hidden spots. There were cults, you
know--bands of evil priests in lands now buried under the sea. Atlantis
was the hotbed. That was a terrible place. If heaven is merciful, no
one will ever drag up that horror from the deep.