Page:Weird Tales Volume 12 Issue 06 (1928-12).djvu/54

left eye and disappearing in the fringe of the gray imperial at the corner of his mouth. Then, glancing down at the card he saw engraved there:

Hearne went to the given address the next day at the stipulated hour and found himself ushered into a small sitting-room by a young woman whose pale, almost emaciated features had not entirely effaced a certain elusive, dark-eyed beauty. For a moment he paused on the threshold, startled by a vague familiarity which he imagined he saw in her face, and she, too, stared back at him, saying no word.

"Why—why," he began, "it almost seems as though I'd seen you somewhere before. You—you—where could it have been?"

Blood suddenly rushed into her wan cheeks. She closed the door behind him and bade him pass on into the corridor.

"No," she said, almost inaudibly. "It's not possible."

"But I'm almost sure," he protested.

"Quick, please," she whispered. "He's coming."

At that moment Dr. Trask appeared in the doorway. Hearne saw a heavy flood of red pour into the Mephistophelean features of the scientist. Ignoring Hearne and walking swiftly across the room the physician seized the girl by the arm, his powerful fingers sinking deep into the flesh. With that she gave a low cry of pain and went whiter still.

"What business is this?" he hissed. "Why do you delay here at the door? I told you to show him in promptly. Go back to your room. I will deal with you later."

"I say, it's really my fault," put in Hearne, dismayed. “I—I thought I'd met her somewhere before. Awfully sorry to have delayed you."

Dr. Trask turned to him, the flicker of anger which still lingered in his eyes belying the honeyed smoothness of his voice. "It is nothing," he remarked. "I'm a bit out of sorts today and any delay annoys me greatly. Kindly step into the laboratory and we'll get busy immediately."

He led the way through an intervening corridor into a spacious, high-ceiled room lit from the roof by a series of skylights. On the walls were racks of test-tubes, retorts and glass jars, while bits of intricate electrical apparatus connecting with a maze of colored wires were scattered about on tables and benches. At the farther end a man was bending over a microscope.

"This is Merwin, my assistant," said Dr. Trask, beckoning to the other. Hearne saw a tall, rawboned individual, whose low beetle-brows matching a thick, unkempt thatch of black hair and wide, thin-lipped mouth under an almost bridgeless nose indicated a surly, brutish nature.

Trask offered Hearne a chair and then sat down beside him while Merwin placed a small stand containing a goblet, a medicine dropper and a small phial of colorless liquid at his side.

"As you perhaps remember from our conversation of yesterday," he began, "I am a psychiatrist, a doctor of mental maladies. Unlike most of those in my profession I also employ medicines in the cure of my patients as well as hypnosis and other forms of mental suggestion. Being virtually new in this field I have been obliged to develop my own compounds—and in the course of my work I have come upon drugs containing properties hitherto unknown to man."

He pulled the small phial toward him and tapped it with his forefinger. "I have here an elixir of peculiar properties which if used in conjunction with hypnosis and certain elec-