The first thing I saw was a small round table on which stood a bottle bearing a red-and-blue label, and a single glass. Then, beyond it, a long table with a padded chair. Then a reddish smoking-cap stuck up at an angle; then eyeballs glazed with death, and a face distorted with strychnine. And, just before the match burnt my fingers and went out, I saw Paul Hogenauer sitting in the chair grinning at me.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Guillotine-Window
There are sights which do not penetrate deeply into the mind because the mind refuses to credit them. The mind says: You didn't see this. You couldn't have seen it. The thing remains stuck there as flat and shallow as a picture post-card, but as vivid. Then common sense begins to assert itself, and your five wits to tick again, and you realize that you did see it.
Paul Hogenauer, in his red fez and with his twisted grin, could not be sitting in that chair. But he was.
Even the brief light of that match, when it went out, had made images expand and contract before my eyes in the dark. I stood looking at the dark, seeing Hogenauer as plainly as I had seen him a moment ago. He had slipped down in the chair from the position he had assumed in Moreton Abbot some seventy-odd miles away. His chin was thrust up a little more, and his head turned a little more to one side, as though he were contemplating an artistic effect.
The first thing that occurred to me was the sentence H.M. had spoken that night, his first mention of Hogenauer's new theory: "There's something about being able to transfer himself through the air, unseen, like Albertus Magnus." Well, he appeared to have done it. A dead man had done it.
I backed away two steps, and bumped into a chair, and mechanically sat down. In one hand I still had the envelope, which seemed to be rather a weighty envelope; in the other I had a sliver of a burnt match. The match I dropped on the floor. The envelope, with an equally mechanical motion, I put into my pocket. Striking more matches would be no good. There had come over me a craving for light, a frightened craving which brought me up out of the chair: and I had to tell myself to go steady, or the hag and the hungry goblin would have easy prey. On the top of the rosewood desk there had been a little lamp with a dull-yellow shade. At least I could find the desk again in the dark, for it was between the two windows. I groped across to it, feeling my way gently, and pulled the chain of the lamp.
It was still there, sitting in the padded chair. I remember wondering vaguely whether the room as well would be exactly like that little suburban parlour at "The Larches." It was not. It was a big, high room, more severe and with a black-and-white taste as sharply defined as the lines of the etchings on the walls. Although there were not many books, there were a great many neat stacks of papers. The fireplace was in the right-hand wall as you stood with your back to the windows. The table faced it from some distance down the room, so that the dead man siting behind it would have the western light from the far window over his right shoulder rather than his left….
Someone tapped on the window from behind. I whirled round, and saw Evelyn outside the guillotine-window. She was trying to push it up, even as she stared through at the dead man.