"It looks like the mark of a hypodermic needle," I volunteered.
Holmes raised an eyebrow. "A most peculiar place for an injection, is it not?"
"Perhaps it was intradermal," I suggested.
Dr. Stanley examined it also. "I didn't spot these yesterday." He looked faintly nonplused. "I've never seen anything like it."
Holmes reexamined the spots closely with his pocket lens. I could tell from the grim set of his features that some uncommonly unpleasant idea had occurred to him.
"I say, Watson," he said, walking over to the window and lowering his voice, by which I understood he wanted a private word with me. I joined him, gazing down into a little courtyard formed by the labyrinthine angles of
the old buildings. "I have an odd notion with regard to those spots, but I don't know if it's medically possible." He stared unseeingly down into the little gulf of air. "Suppose that for some reason, let us say to gain control of some property, someone wished to simulate an incapacitating stroke in a second party. Consider for a moment, Watson, how a frog is prepared for dissection."
"Holmes, what a horrible idea!" I cried, as I caught the drift of his thinking.
A little gesture of his hand warned me to keep my voice down. "The insertion of a needle, a little twist," his index finger twirled suggestively by way of demonstration, "and it would be done. It would leave practically no mark after the tiny spot had had a few days to heal. No trace at all once the scab dropped off and the hair grew back. But-is it possible?"
"I'm not quite sure," I spoke slowly. "It would be a horrible shot in the dark for anyone but a skilled surgeon. The least little slip and it would be murder or some equally unpredictable effect."
"Yes. The hand would have to be very skilled-or very lucky. The first hypothesis gives rather more to go on, although one can't entirely discount the second at this stage of the game. If it were so ..."
"Yes?" I could see the idea was peculiarly appalling to him, though indeed it would be dreadful enough to anyone. It clearly stirred a horror and a pity in him. He shrugged, as though to shake it off.
"I'm not sure it wouldn't be murder in either case. But we are getting rather ahead of our data. There are other possibilities. Electricity, perhaps?"
Stanley was reexamining the spots himself. "Do you suspect some kind of villainy, Mr. Holmes?" he asked anxiously. "If only the lady would speak to us!" He grasped her hands and stared into her eyes in frustration. "Why won't you tell us your name?"
"Because I can't remember it!" she shouted at him in a voice suddenly gone gravelly with anger. Dr. Stanley recoiled. As if frightened by her own outburst she folded back into herself, for all the world like some sea creature retreating into its shell. She buried her face in her hands and hunched unbeautifully.
Dr. Stanley's eyes met mine in wild surmise. "Amnesia!" he breathed. I could see that it cheered him immensely to finally have a diagnosis which he could write down. There is something about being able to put a name to a thing which makes it immeasurably more tractable to certain kinds of minds; I do not except myself.
"Her accent," I began again.
Holmes nodded. "She is either an Englishwoman who has spent a great deal of time in America, or an American who has been long in England. It will become apparent which. Wait."
Holmes pulled a straight chair up beside the bed; the lady in it regarded him with attentive solemnity and, it seemed to me, a certain hopefulness.
"Will you talk with me?" he asked quietly.
"Yes," she said, after a long pause. "You, you have your wits about you. You know things. It has been an evil dream. They," indicating Lestrade and Dr. Stanley with a nod, "kept asking me why I'd tried to kill myself. I could make no sense of them. And they kept asking me my name, and I cannot..." her voice rose, and she showed signs of retreating again.
"What can you remember?" asked Holmes, cutting across the fear expressed in her voice. "Look at me. Be calm. Don't worry for the moment about what you can't remember; concentrate on what you do recall. Begin at the beginning; speak slowly; tell me all the little details. That's better." He sat back as the lady visibly took hold of herself under his encouragement. She sat up straight as if organizing her posture would help her organize her whirling thoughts, and began an extraordinary statement, haltingly at first but becoming clearer and stronger as she went on.
"I woke up in a little room. It was.. .the day before yesterday, I think. I am not sure."
"Can you describe the room?" asked the detective.
"It was square, about ten feet on a side. There was a brick fireplace, boarded up, with black slate in front of it. The floor was light-colored boards, but it was dirty. There was no rug. The walls were painted green, but it was peeling in several places."
"What was underneath?"
"More paint. The top layer was green, then yellow, then white, then pink. The ceiling was high-three feet beyond my reach. There was a sheet tacked over the window. I was lying on a little narrow bed, made of wood. It had some carving on it of grape leaves. There was a little square table beside the bed, wood, very plain. There was no other furniture."
"How did you feel when you awoke? Did you have a headache, or were you groggy or dry-mouthed?"
"I felt nothing at first. I lay for a long time looking at the ceiling without moving. I felt numb. I felt as if I had become lost in time, as if I had been there forever and would be there forever. I don't know how long I would have lain there, but the door opened and a man came in. He had a small china bowl with food in it, a kind of sweetened gruel. He sat me up in bed and gave me the bowl and a spoon, a wooden spoon. He was strange."
"In what way?"
"Not his appearance. It was ordinary enough. He was a little shorter than I, clean-shaven, bland; maggoty. Brown eyes. I didn't much care about him, but he-he was afraid of me."
"How could you tell?"
"He kept his distance. He would not look me in the face. When I moved suddenly, he flinched. When he had to look me in the face, his eyes, they questioned me. It was then that I began to question myself. When I had eaten the gruel he took the bowl and went away, locking the door behind him. I wanted to get up and look around then, but I began to feel sleepy and dizzy. I fell asleep.
"When I woke again there were two there, the maggoty one and another: tall, older; grey, beak-nosed, with eyes like a hawk, bright and blank and unreadable. They had brought another bowl of gruel. The grey man squatted down by the bed. 'Who are you?' he asked me. I could not answer; I could not think. I lay silent and watched. 'You see,' he said, standing up and addressing the other, 'there's nothing to worry about.' "
"And what did you think of him?" inquired Holmes. "Was he also afraid of you?"
"No. He was merely-careful. He made me feel strange, angry. I wanted to memorize his face, so that if I saw him again..." she broke off abruptly.
"Go on."
She took a breath. "I felt the way one would feel about memorizing the pattern on the back of a poisonous snake. That it would be useful knowledge If you want to know," she went on with sudden decision, "he made me feel like an angry ghost.
"The bird-faced man went away. The other stayed to watch me eat, but I only pretended to eat. It wasn't hard to do. I just stared at him, like this.' She lowered her face, then raised it again abruptly to fix upon me with a stare of icy and fanatic bellicosity. Somehow the expression accentuated her peculiar facial bone structure. My consciousness of the unfeminine squareness of her jaw was intensified, and I noticed for the first time a certain skull-like quality about her features. Her eyes seemed to dilate unblinkingly. The effect was so unnerving and the fixity of her attention upon me so embarrassing that I found myself automatically dropping my eyes and wandering over to the window just to evade that basilisk glare.