"I'm going to show you," he announced, "that a man can turn into a beast, and back again."
9. "To a Terrified Victim He Is Doom Itself."
He leaned toward the bookshelf beside him, pawed for a moment, then laid two sizable volumes on the desk between us.
"If this were a fantasy tale, Mr. Wills," he said with a hint of one of his smiles, "I would place before you an unthinkably rare book—one that offered, in terms too brilliant and compelling for argument, the awful secrets of the universe, past, present and to come."
He paused to polish a pair of pince-nez and to clamp them upon the bridge of his broad nose.
"However," he resumed, "this is reality, sober if uneasy. And I give you, not some forgotten grimoire out of the mystic past, but two works by two recognized and familiar authorities."
I eyed the books. "May I see?"
For answer he thrust one of them, some six hundred pages in dark blue cloth, across the desk and into my hands. "Thirty Years of Psychical Research, by the late Charles Richet, French master in the spirit-investigation field," he informed me. "Faithfully and interestingly translated by Stanley De Brath. Published here in America, in 1923."
I took the book and opened it. "I knew Professor Richet, slightly. Years ago, when I was just beginning this sort of thing, I was entertained by him in London. He introduced me to Conan Doyle."