They stared with a fixed meaningless steadiness,
and he scrutinised them closely. “But there’s worse yet,” he said. “There’s been some severe blow on the
head. Help me to carry her into the laboratory. Get round to her feet
and lift underneath the knees when I am ready. There! Now put your arm
right under her and carry her.”

Her head swung limply back as he lifted her shoulders, and he propped
it up against his knee, where it mutely nodded and bowed, as his leg
moved, as if in silent assent to what we were doing, and the mouth, at
the extremity of which there had gathered a little lather, lolled open. He still supported her shoulders as I fetched a cushion on which to
place her head, and presently she was lying close to the low table on
which stood the gramophone of the dead. Then with light deft fingers he
passed his hands over her skull, pausing as he came to the spot just
above and behind her right ear. Twice and again his fingers groped and
lightly pressed, while with shut eyes and concentrated attention he
interpreted what his trained touch revealed. “Her skull is broken to fragments just here,” he said. “In the middle
there is a piece completely severed from the rest, and the edges of the
cracked pieces must be pressing on her brain.”

Her right arm was lying palm upwards on the floor, and with one hand he
felt her wrist with finger-tips. “Not a sign of pulse,” he said. “She’s dead in the ordinary sense
of the word. But life persists in an extraordinary manner, you may
remember. She can’t be wholly dead: no one is wholly dead in a moment,
unless every organ is blown to bits. But she soon will be dead, if we
don’t relieve the pressure on the brain. That’s the first thing to
be done. While I’m busy at that, shut the window, will you, and make
up the fire. In this sort of case the vital heat, whatever that is,
leaves the body very quickly. Make the room as hot as you can--fetch an
oil-stove, and turn on the electric radiator, and stoke up a roaring
fire. The hotter the room is the more slowly will the heat of life
leave her.”

Already he had opened his cabinet of surgical instruments, and taken
out of it two drawers full of bright steel which he laid on the floor
beside her. I heard the grating chink of scissors severing her long
grey hair, and as I busied myself with laying and lighting the fire
in the hearth, and kindling the oil-stove, which I found, by Horton’s
directions, in the pantry, I saw that his lancet was busy on the
exposed skin. He had placed some vaporising spray, heated by a spirit
lamp close to her head, and as he worked its fizzing nozzle filled the
air with some clean and aromatic odour. Now and then he threw out an
order. “Bring me that electric lamp on the long cord,” he said. “I haven’t
got enough light. Don’t look at what I’m doing if you’re squeamish, for
if it makes you feel faint, I shan’t be able to attend to you.”

I suppose that violent interest in what he was doing overcame any qualm
that I might have had, for I looked quite unflinching over his shoulder
as I moved the lamp about till it was in such a place that it threw its
beam directly into a dark hole at the edge of which depended a flap
of skin. Into this he put his forceps, and as he withdrew them they
grasped a piece of blood-stained bone. “That’s better,” he said, “and the room’s warming up well. But there’s
no sign of pulse yet. Go on stoking, will you, till the thermometer on
the wall there registers a hundred degrees.”

When next, on my journey from the coal-cellar, I looked, two more
pieces of bone lay beside the one I had seen extracted, and presently
referring to the thermometer, I saw that between the oil-stove and
the roaring fire and the electric radiator, I had raised the room to
the temperature he wanted. Soon, peering fixedly at the seat of his
operation, he felt for her pulse again. “Not a sign of returning vitality,” he said, “and I’ve done all I can. There’s nothing more possible that can be devised to restore her.”

As he spoke the zeal of the unrivalled surgeon relaxed, and with a sigh
and a shrug he rose to his feet and mopped his face. Then suddenly the
fire and eagerness blazed there again. “The gramophone!” he said. “The
speech centre is close to where I’ve been working, and it is quite
uninjured. Good heavens, what a wonderful opportunity. She served me
well living, and she shall serve me dead. And I can stimulate the motor
nerve-centre, too, with the second battery. We may see a new wonder
to-night.”

Some qualm of horror shook me. “No, don’t!” I said. “It’s terrible: she’s just dead. I shall go if you
do.”

“But I’ve got exactly all the conditions I have long been wanting,”
said he. “And I simply can’t spare you. You must be witness: I must
have a witness. Why, man, there’s not a surgeon or a physiologist in
the kingdom who would not give an eye or an ear to be in your place
now. She’s dead. I pledge you my honour on that, and it’s grand to be
dead if you can help the living.”

Once again, in a far fiercer struggle, horror and the intensest
curiosity strove together in me. “Be quick, then,” said I. “Ha! That’s right,” exclaimed Horton. “Help me to lift her on to the
table by the gramophone. The cushion too; I can get at the place more
easily with her head a little raised.”

He turned on the battery and with the movable light close beside him,
brilliantly illuminating what he sought, he inserted the needle of the
gramophone into the jagged aperture in her skull. For a few minutes,
as he groped and explored there, there was silence, and then quite
suddenly Mrs. Gabriel’s voice, clear and unmistakable and of the normal
loudness of human speech, issued from the trumpet. “Yes, I always said that I’d be even with him,” came the articulated
syllables. “He used to knock me about, he did, when he came home
drunk, and often I was black and blue with bruises. But I’ll give him a
redness for the black and blue.”

The record grew blurred; instead of articulate words there came from
it a gobbling noise. By degrees that cleared, and we were listening to
some dreadful suppressed sort of laughter, hideous to hear. On and on
it went. “I’ve got into some sort of rut,” said Horton. “She must have laughed a
lot to herself.”

For a long time we got nothing more except the repetition of the words
we had already heard and the sound of that suppressed laughter. Then
Horton drew towards him the second battery. “I’ll try a stimulation of the motor nerve-centres,” he said. “Watch
her face.”

He propped the gramophone needle in position, and inserted into the
fractured skull the two poles of the second battery, moving them about
there very carefully. And as I watched her face, I saw with a freezing
horror that her lips were beginning to move. “Her mouth’s moving,” I cried. “She can’t be dead.”

He peered into her face. “Nonsense,” he said. “That’s only the stimulus from the current. She’s
been dead half an hour. Ah!