“What is it, sir?”
“I don’t know what it is, but—it’s something.”
Atkins followed me into the room. Edwin Lawrence lay face foremost on the floor. All about him the carpet was stained with blood. His clothes were soaked. Had it not been for his clothes I should not have certainly known that it was Lawrence, because, when we turned him over, we found that his face and head had been cut and hacked to pieces. In my time I have seen men who have come to their death by violence, but never had I seen such an extraordinary sight as he presented. It was as if some savage thing, fastening upon him, had torn him to pieces with tooth and nail. His flesh had been ripped and rent so that not one recognisable feature was left. Indeed, it might not have been a man we were looking upon, but some thing of horror.
I spoke to Atkins. “Run and fetch Dr. Hume. I am afraid he will be of little use, but he must come. And the police!”
Off he sped to tell the ghastly tidings. So soon as he was gone I looked about me. On a chair close by was a pair of white kid gloves—a woman’s. I picked them up and put them in my pocket. Among the portraits on the mantelshelf was the face of one I knew. I put that in my pocket also with the gloves.
The room was in some disarray, but not in such disorder as to suggest that a desperate struggle had taken place. A chair or two and a table were not in the places in which I knew they generally stood; the table on which we had played that game of cards last night was pushed up against another, on which were some copper vases. A revolving bookcase had been driven up against the fireplace. On the woodwork were gouts of blood. There was a blotch on the back of one of the books—a volume of Rudyard Kipling’s “Many Inventions.” On the edge of the white stone mantelpiece was the mark of where a hand had rested—a blood-stained hand. Something lay on the carpet, perhaps two yards away from the dead man’s feet. I took it up. It was a collar—a man’s collar—shapeless and twisted and stiff with coagulated blood. As I stared at it a wild wonder began to take shape and to grow in my brain.
“Ferguson, what’s the matter? What’s this Atkins tells me about? Good God! is that Lawrence?”
It was Dr. Hume who spoke. He had come into the room while I was staring at the collar.
Graham Hume is a man who has taken high medical honours; but, having ample private means, he does not pretend to have anything in the shape of a regular practice. He has a hobby—madness. He is a student of what he calls obscure diseases of the brain; insisting that we have all of us a screw loose somewhere, and that out of every countenance insanity peeps—even though, as a rule, thank goodness, it is only the shadow of a shade.
Some strange stories are told of experiments which he has made. His chambers are on the ground floor; and, though he has a plate on his door, his patients are few and far between—nor are they by any means always welcome even when they do appear. Probably the larger number of them are residents in the Mansions, and because that was so, any one living in the buildings being in sudden need of medical help used to rush at once to him. Lawrence used to chaffingly speak of him as “the Imperial Doctor.”