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.

I looked out of the music-room window and watched Mrs. Collins walk up the drive on her way home. It was still drizzling, and a long, uninviting afternoon lay ahead. I don't know when it was that the idea came to me. Perhaps I had been harbouring it unconsciously since I awoke. I wanted to prove that there had been no telepathic communication between Magnus and myself when I had taken the drug the day before in the laboratory. He had told me he had made his first experiment there, and so had I. Perhaps some thought process had passed between us at the moment when I actually swallowed the stuff, so influencing my train of ideas and what I saw, or imagined I saw, during the course of the afternoon. If the drug was taken elsewhere, not in that baleful laboratory with its suggestive likeness to an alchemist's cell, might not the effect be different? I should never know unless I tried it out. There was a small pocket-flask in the pantry cupboard — I had noticed it the evening before — and I got it out now, and rinsed it under the cold tap. This did not commit me to anything one way or another. Then I went downstairs to the basement, and, feeling like the shadow of my boyhood self when I had sneaked a bar of forbidden chocolate during Lent, I turned the key in the door of the laboratory.

It was a simple matter to disregard the specimens in their jars and reach for the neat little row of labelled bottles. As yesterday, I measured the drops from bottle A, but into the pocket flask this time. Then I locked the laboratory door behind me, went across the yard to the stable block, and fetched the car.

I drove slowly up the drive, turned left out of the lane to the main road, and went down Polmear hill, pausing when I reached the bottom to survey the scene. Here, where the almshouses and the inn stood now, had been yesterday's ford. The lie of the land had not altered, despite the modern road, but the valley where the tide had swept inward was now marsh. I took the lane to Tywardreath, thinking, with some misgiving, that if I had in fact taken this same route yesterday, under the influence of the drug, I could have been knocked down by a passing car without hearing it.

I drove down the steep, narrow lane to the village and parked the car a little above the church. There was still a light rain falling, and nobody was about. A van drove up the main Par road and disappeared. A woman came out of the grocer's shop and walked uphill in the same direction. No one else appeared. I got out of the car, opened the iron gates into the churchyard, and stood in the church porch to shelter from the rain. The churchyard itself sloped away in a southerly direction until it terminated at the boundary wall, and beneath it were farm-buildings. Yesterday, in that other world, there were no buildings, only the blue waters of a creek filling the valley with the incoming tide, and the Priory buildings had covered the space the churchyard held today.

I knew the lie of the land better now. If the drug took effect I could leave the car where it was and walk home. There was no one around. Then, like a diver taking a plunge into some arctic pool, I took the flask and swallowed the contents. The instant I had done so panic seized me. This second dose might have a quite different effect. Make me sleep for hours. Should I stay where I was, or should I be better off in the car? The church porch gave me claustrophobia, so I went out and sat down on one of the tombstones, not far from the pathway but out of sight of the road. If I stayed quite still, without moving, perhaps nothing would happen. I began to pray, Don't let anything happen. Don't let the drug have any effect.