Magnus had ranged his curious exhibits along the slatted shelves fixed to the walls. Some of them were skeletons, but others were still intact, preserved in a chemical solution, their flesh bleached pale. Most were hard to distinguish — for all I knew they could have been kittens in embyro form, or even rats. The two specimens I recognised were the monkey's head, the smooth skull perfectly preserved, like the bald pate of a tiny unborn child, with eyes dosed, and, next to it, a second monkey's head from which the brain had been removed, and which now lay in a jar near by, pickled and brown. There were other jars and other bottles that held fungi, plants and grasses, grotesquely shaped, with spreading tentacles and curling leaves.
I had mocked him, over the telephone, calling the laboratory Bluebeard's chamber. Now, as I looked round it again, the memory of my afternoon still vivid in my mind, the small room seemed to hold a different quality. I was reminded not so much of the bearded potentate in the Eastern fairy-tale as of an engraving, long forgotten, that had scared me as a child. It was called The Alchemist. A figure, naked save for a loin-cloth, was crouching by a walled oven like the one here in the laundry, kindling a fire with bellows, and to his left stood a hooded monk and an abbot, carrying a cross. A fourth man, in mediaeval hat and cloak, leant upon a stick conferring with them. There had been bottles, too, upon a table, and open jars containing egg-shells, hairs and threadlike worms, and in the centre of the room a tripod with a rounded flask balanced upon it, and in the flask a minute lizard with a dragon's head.
Why only now, after some five-and-thirty years, did the memory of that dread engraving return to haunt me? I turned away, locking the door of Magnus's laboratory, and went upstairs. I could not wait any longer for that much-needed drink.
CHAPTER THREE
IT RAINED THE following day, one of those steady mizzles that accompany a drifting fog from the sea, preventing any enjoyment out of doors. I awoke feeling perfectly normal, having slept surprisingly well, but when I drew back the curtains and saw the state of the weather I went back to bed again, despondent, wondering what I was going to do with myself all day.
This was the Cornish climate about which Vita had expressed her doubts, and I could imagine her reproaches if it happened when the holidays were in full swing, my young stepsons staring aimlessly out of the window, then forced into wellingtons and macs and sent, protesting, to walk along the sands at Par. Vita would wander from music-room to library altering the position of the furniture, saying how much better she could arrange the rooms if they were hers, and when this palied she would telephone one of her many friends from the American Embassy crowd in London, themselves outward bound for Sardinia or Greece. These symptoms of discontent I was spared for a while longer, and the days ahead of me, wet or fine, were at least free, my own time for my own movements. The obliging Mrs. Collins brought me up my breakfast and the morning paper, commiserated with me about the weather, saying that the Professor always found plenty to do in that funny little old room of his down under, and informed me that she would roast one of her own chickens for my lunch. I had no intention of going down under, and opened the morning paper and drank my coffee. But the doubtful interest of the sports page soon palled, and my attention wandered back to the all-absorbing question of exactly what had happened to me the previous afternoon.
Had there been some telepathic communication between Magnus and myself?
We had tried this at Cambridge, with cards and numbers, but it had never worked, except once or twice by pure coincidence. And we had been more intimate in those days than we were now. I could think of no means, telepathic or otherwise, by which Magnus and I could have undergone the same experience, separated by an interval of some three months — it was Easter, apparently, when he had tried the drug himself — unless that experience was directly connected with previous happenings at Kilmarth. Part of the brain, Magnus had suggested, was susceptible to reversal, restoring conditions, when under the influence of the drug, to an earlier period in its chemical history. Yet why that particular time? Had the horseman planted so indelible a stamp on his surroundings that any previous or later period was blotted out?
I thought back to the days when I had stayed at Kilmarth as an undergraduate. The atmosphere was casual, happy-go-lucky. I remembered asking Mrs. Lane once whether the house was haunted. My question was an idle one, for certainly it did not have a haunted atmosphere — I asked simply because it was old.
"Good heavens, no!" she exclaimed. "We're far too wrapped up in ourselves to encourage ghosts. Poor things, they'd wither away from tedium, unable to draw attention to themselves. Why do you ask?"
"No reason," I assured her, afraid I might have given offence. "Only that most old houses like to boast a spook."
"Well, if there is one at Kilmarth we've never heard it," she said. "The house has always seemed such a happy one to us. There's nothing particularly interesting about its history, you know. It belonged to a family called Baker in sixteen hundred and something, and they had it until the Rashleighs rebuilt the place in the eighteenth century. I can't tell you about its origins, but someone told us once that it has fourteenth-century foundations."
That was the end of the matter, but now her remarks about early fourteenth-century foundations returned to me. I thought about the basement rooms and the courtyard leading out of them, and Magnus's curious choice of the old laundry for his laboratory. Doubtless he had his reasons. It was well away from the lived-in part of the house, and he would not be disturbed by callers or Mrs. Collins. I got up rather late and wrote letters in the library, did justice to Mrs. Collins roast chicken, and tried to keep my thoughts on the future and what I was going to decide about that offer of a New York partnership. It was no use. The whole thing seemed remote. Time enough when Vita arrived and we could discuss it together.