“I was awoken by a tap at the door. I was instantly wide awake and I said: ‘Come in.’ I thought immediately that probably someone in the house was ill – a doctor, you know, is always ready for these emergencies. The door opened at once and a man entered holding a small ordinary storm-lantern. I noticed nothing peculiar about the man. He had a dark great-coat on, and appeared extremely anxious. ‘I am sorry to disturb you,’ he said at once, ‘but there is a young woman dangerously ill. I want you to come and see her.’ I, somehow, did not think of arguing or of suggesting that there were other medical men in the neighbourhood, or of asking how it was he knew of my presence at Verrall. I dressed myself quickly and accompanied him out of the house. He opened the front door without any trouble, and it did not occur to me to ask him how it was he had obtained either admission or egress. There was a small carriage outside the door, such a one as you may still see in isolated country places, but such a one as I was certainly surprised to see here. I could not very well make out either the horse or the driver for, though the moon was high in the heavens, it was frequently obscured by clouds. I got into the carriage and noticed, as I have often noticed before in these ancient vehicles, a most repulsive smell of decay and damp. My companion got in beside me. He did not speak a word during the whole of the journey, which was, I have the impression, extremely long, and yet I could not say how long. I had also the sense that he was in the greatest trouble, anguish, and almost despair; I do not know why I did not question him. I should tell you that he had drawn down the blinds of the carriage and we travelled in darkness, yet I was perfectly aware of his presence and seemed to see him in his heavy dark great-coat turned up round his chin, his black hair low on his forehead, and his anxious, furtive dark eyes.
“I think I may have gone to sleep in the carriage, I was tired and cold. I was aware, however, when it stopped, and of my companion opening the door and helping me out. We went through a garden, down some steps and past a fish-pond; I could see by the moonlight the silver and gold shapes of fishes slipping in and out of the black water. We entered the house by a side-door – I remember that very distinctly – and went up what seemed to be some secret or seldom-used stairs, and into a bedroom. I was by now quite alert, as one is when one gets into the presence of the patient, and I said to myself, ‘What a fool I’ve been, I’ve brought nothing with me’; and I tried to remember, but could not quite do so, whether or not I had brought anything with me – my cases and so on – to Verrall.
“The room was very badly lit, but a certain illumination, I could not say whether it came from any artificial light within the room or merely from the moonlight through the open window, draped with mauve velvet curtains, fell on the bed, and there I saw my patient. She was a young woman who, I surmised, would have been, when in health, of considerable though coarse charm. She was now in great suffering, twisted and contorted with agony, and in her struggles of anguish had pulled and torn the bedclothes into a heap. I noticed that she wore a dress of some light material spotted with small roses, and it occurred to me at once that she had been taken ill during the daytime and must have lain thus in great pain for many hours, and I turned with some reproach to the man who had fetched me and demanded why help had not been sought sooner. For answer he wrung his hands – a gesture that I do not remember having noticed in any human being before; one hears a great deal of hands being wrung but one does not so often see it. This man, I remember distinctly, wrung his hands, and muttered, ‘Do what you can for her – do what you can!’ I feared that this would be very little. I endeavoured to make an examination of the patient, but owing to her half-delirious struggles this was very difficult; she was, however, I thought, likely to die, and of what malady I could not determine.
“There was a table nearby on which lay some papers – one I took to be a will – and a glass in which there had been milk. I do not remember seeing anything else in the room – the light was so bad. I endeavoured to question the man, whom I took to be the husband, but without any success. He merely repeated his monotonous appeal for me to save her. Then I was aware of a sound outside the room – of a woman laughing, perpetually and shrilly laughing. “Pray stop that,’ I cried to the man; ‘who have you got in the house – a lunatic?’ But he took no notice of my appeal, merely repeating his own hushed lamentations. The sick woman appeared to hear that demoniacal laughter outside, and, raising herself on one elbow, said, ‘You have destroyed me and you may well laugh!’
“I sat down at the table on which were the papers and the half-full glass of milk, and wrote a prescription on a sheet torn out of my note-book. The man snatched it eagerly. ‘I don’t know when and where you can get that made up,’ I said, ‘but it’s the only hope.’ At this he seemed wishful for me to depart, as wishful as he had been for me to come. ‘That’s all I want,’ he said. He took me by the arm and led me out of the house by the same back stairs. As I descended I still heard those two dreadful sounds – the thin laughter of the woman I had not seen, and the groans, becoming every moment fainter, of the young woman whom I had seen. The carriage was waiting for me and I was driven back by the same way I had come. When I reached the house and my room I saw the dawn just breaking. I rested till I heard the breakfast gong. I suppose some time had gone by since I returned to the house, but I wasn’t quite aware of it; all through the night I had rather lost the sense of time.”
When Dr Dilke had finished his narrative, which I give here badly – but, I hope, to the point – we all glanced at each other rather uncomfortably, for who was to tell a man like Dr Dilke that he had been suffering from a severe hallucination? It was, of course, quite impossible that he could have left the house and gone through the peculiar scenes he had described, and it seemed extraordinary that he could for a moment have believed that he had done so. What was even more remarkable was that so many points of his story agreed with what the medium, Mrs Mahogany, had said in her trance. We recognized the frock with the roses, the mauve velvet curtains, the glass of milk, the man who had fetched Dr Dilke sounded like the murderer, and the unfortunate woman writhing on the bed sounded like the victim; but how had the doctor got hold of these particulars? We all knew that he had not spoken to Mrs Mahogany and each suspected the other of having told him what the medium had said, and that this having wrought on his mind he had the dream, vision, or hallucination he had just described to us. I must add that this was found afterwards to be wholly false; we were all reliable people and there was not a shadow of doubt we had all kept our counsel about Mrs Mahogany. In fact, none of us had been alone with Dr Dilke the previous day for more than a moment or so save myself, who had walked with him home from the church, when we had certainly spoken of nothing except the black stone in the church and the chill which he had said emanated from it . . . Well, to put the matter as briefly as possible, and to leave out a great deal of amazement and wonder, explanation and so on, we will come to the point when Dr Dilke was finally persuaded that he had not left Verrall all the night. When his story was taken to pieces and put before him, as it were, in the raw, he himself recognized many absurdities; how could the man have come straight to his bedroom? How could he have left the house? – the doors were locked every night, there was no doubt about that. Where did the carriage come from and where was the house to which he had been taken? And who could possibly have known of his presence in the neighbourhood? Had not, too, the scene in the house to which he was taken all the resemblance of a nightmare? Who was it laughing in the other room? What was the mysterious illness that was destroying the young woman? Who was the black-browed man who had fetched him? And, in these days of telephone and motor-cars, people didn’t go out in old-fashioned one-horse carriages to fetch doctors from miles away in the case of dangerous illness.