For just a split second it seemed to Annister that something was about to happen; for a moment he saw, or fancied that he saw, a quick, silent signal flash, then, from eye to eye; Lunn, the hotel man, had half risen in his chair; out of the tail of his eye, as he was turning toward the door, Annister was aware of a quick ripple, a movement, the shadow of a sound, like the movement of a conjuror manipulating his cards, white hands flashing in a bewildering passade.
But nothing happened.
Leaving, he had walked slowly toward the hotel, turning over in his mind the story that had been told him by the lawyer. And there was one more question he wanted to ask him: a question that had to do with a square of paper that he had come upon among his father’s papers in New York, for it had been this chance discovery that had sent him, post-haste, to Dry Bone, and the lawyer’s office.
Thinking these things, he was turning the corner to the hotel when, out of nowhere as it seemed, a man had passed him, walking with a peculiar, dragging shuffle. Seen under the moon for a moment, this man’s face had impressed itself upon Annister: it was dark and foreign, with high cheek-bones, and—what seemed curiously out of place in Dry Bone—a black moustache and professional Van Dyke.
Annister, watching the man, saw him turn into the doorway he had just quitted; it was the entrance to the “club”—two rooms above a saddler’s shop at the corner of the street.
Halting a moment to look after the man, Annister was wondering idly who he might be—certainly not the man called “Bull,” if there was anything in a name. And then, abruptly, he was remembering what the lawyer had let fall about the “doctor”; perhaps that was who he was; he had had a distinctly professional air.
The man’s eyes had lingered upon Annister for a moment, and for a moment the latter had been conscious of a curious shock. For it had been as if the man had looked through rather than at him; those eyes had glowed suddenly in the darkness, gray-green like a cat’s, in an abrupt, ferocious, basilisk stare.
Annister, in his day, had seen some queer corners and some tight places; in Rangoon, for example, he had penetrated to a certain dark house in a dim backwater stinking and dark with the darkness of midnight even at high noon.
And it was there, in that dark house, with shuttered windows like blind eyes to the night, that he had seen that which it is not good for any white man to have seen: the rite of the Suttee; the blood-stone of Siva, the Destroyer, reeking with the sacrifice—ay—and more.
And something now, at that time half-perceived and dimly understood, came again with the sight of the dark face with its high cheek-bones, and black, forking beard; for he had seen a creature with a face and yet without a face, mewling and mowing like a cat, now come from horrors, and the practitioner had been—