“Jerry—don’t you know me? I’m Humiston—Newbold....”
The voice had been the voice of Humiston, but the face—it had been the face of another, totally unlike; there had been no possible resemblance. But the man had been—sane. The investigator was persuaded of that; suffering under a peculiar delusion, indeed, but sane.
The man had rushed forward then, baring his arm; and there, on that thin, pitiful flesh that had once been healthy and hard, there ran a curious design in red; the investigator sucked in his breath as that tell-tale birth-mark sprang, livid, under his gaze. For he had seen it before.
The doctor’s eyes had narrowed to slits; somehow, the man from the capital had gained the impression that it was the first time that he had seen that mark. But the investigator could do nothing. Birth-marks can be duplicated. He had waited then, in a curious indecision as the bearded doctor had interposed a suave:
“Well, of course, Commissioner, you’re quite aware, or you should be, how it is: these paranoiacs are noted for their delusions—ah—megalocephalic tendencies, I should say.... They believe themselves to be—someone else, and always a bank president, say, a famous actor, an author, a great general.... Now—Mr. Humiston—you knew him, I believe?” Beneath the silken tone there ran suddenly a hint of iron, of menace, veiled but actual; the investigator felt it. “This patient knew your name, of course,” the suave voice had continued. “Poor fellow—we must be gentle with him.”
And there the matter had ended. Curiously enough, the man who had claimed to be Banker Humiston had, after that first burst of frenzied speech, kept silent. Perhaps that mordant gleaming in the doctor’s eyes had telegraphed a warning, a message, a command.
But the investigator went home, oddly shaken, to dream, like Pilate’s wife, of a white face with staring eyes which changed, even as he gazed, into the face of his friend, Newbold Humiston; to hear, even in his dream, a voice, and it was the voice of the living, and of the dead.
In a bare cell, six feet by six—a cubicle in which there was barely sufficient head room for a tall man to stand upright—a figure stood with its hands clenched upon the bars, staring outward at the grim wood visible to the south.
Travis Annister had abode here in this living tomb three weeks now, three centuries, in which, as in a nightmare of cold horror, he had been aware merely of a face, three-pointed, bearded, the eyes active with a malign intelligence, the lips smiling always with the cold smile of death.