“Thanks,” said the doctor. For a moment he hesitated, his eyes questioningly on the elongated face of his host. Then with a shrug of his shoulders the pathologist walked away in the direction of the Grand Central station.
De Medici returned to his room—the room of shadows and pointed candle flames where a few hours before the intolerable vision had sent him sprawling in horror at the curtain edge. Sighing, he seated himself in the chair. Thank God, the prying, restless eyes of his friend were gone. He was alone. He could breathe, think, allow telltale expressions to play over his face. All without fear ... of what? De Medici shook his head. His finger nails scratched at the side of his chair. In response to this curious summons, the curtains over the door stirred. A new shadow swayed across the floor.
The lithe, black body of a cat approached the scratching with stiff-legged caution. De Medici watched the animal pause in the center of the room, its back languidly arched under the yellow candle rays. Its eyes burned in the half dark—two tiny crosses green and phosphorescent.
“Ah,” murmured De Medici, staring at his pet, “I must be wary.” He laughed. “Fool! And what do you think, Francesca?”
His hand stretched toward the waiting cat. It approached and stood nearer his feet. Its burning eyes seemed fastened on his. He sat silent, watching the animal.
“Yes, it begins again,” he whispered. “Her back arches. Her hair bristles. Fright, wavering terrors, move through her subtle veins. Look at her. She sees something. What? God ... me. Her eyes become a burning mirror for the unknown....”
He paused as the cat, obeying mysterious impulses, grew tense, its back bristling with inexplicable fears, its little, pointed teeth gleaming behind drawn lips. Standing thus for a moment, it recoiled suddenly from the figure of De Medici and spat.
“Ah, Francesca,” he murmured aloud, “my little mirror in which unseen ones spit back at me. He said there was nothing ... nothing. Minor hallucinations. Yes, a reassuring diagnosis. Yet, who knows me? When I know nothing myself, who can see?”
He hesitated again and then smiled tiredly at the retreating animal.
“Not I, Francesca. No, it was another. I’ve committed no murder. The ghosts that wander inside ... did they escape that night? No, I remember nothing ... nothing like that. It is all dream ... dark dream that embroiders my soul with grewsome and ghostly patterns. Guilty! Yes, I felt guilty. The detective’s eyes. And then Hugo.... The dark dream cringes under memories. But there was no duality. No, it was not I. Yet to others and to myself I act the part of a murderer. I grow furtive. My words became cautious. As if ... yes, as if I were feeling my way through guilty memories. The logic of illusion, nothing else. No demon haunts me. No masked stranger rises evilly and exultantly in my body. No, Francesca, they sleep too deep. They stir too feebly. They throw only shadows ... shadows that mock and frighten my eyes. Hm, shadows whose dim fingers wrestle with my throat. But these shadows are not I.... He was right ... ideas with which I hypnotize myself. An obsession that the past lurks unburied in me.... A curious curse of imagination that sent my father bellowing to his grave. But I have a brain! Do you hear, Francesca? I have a brain. It flashes out like a rapier and decapitates these demons at which you, in your enigmatic ignorance, spit, little cat. Do you see something moving behind the eyes of your master? Illusion, Francesca, it exists not.