table top—evidence of my mental state, and perhaps of theirs, too.
We sat, stared, concentrating for almost a full hour. And then
There it was, quivering as from an electric current but clear in every detail. I wondered if the thing was solid, a hollow shell, or whether the vague rudiments of a mechanism were hidden there inside—distorted, perhaps, by minds unfamiliar with watch-works. I wondered. . . .
Then—click! Chet had pressed the camera release, and registered on the sensitive film whatever really lay on that bare table top.
The sound was loud in the silent room, so loud that it startled me, and made the watch-image quiver and lose its shape. Slowly it dissolved as Perry leaned back, rubbing his smarting eyes and stretching tense muscles.
Chet stood up dizzily, taking up the camera with great care. I felt rather than saw him make a bee-line for the closet; heard the door shut behind him. . . .
It was then that the roaring began in my head, deafening me, blinding me. I could see that door across the room, looming large and forbidding as the door to the death-chamber of a prison. Behind it a man was moving swiftly, dipping a section of film into a pan of acid—and thereby, perhaps, solving the eternal mystery of Creation.
And men would be gods, pitting their brain-power one against another—creating images that did not exist in the normal scheme of things, creating even women that did not exist—until no one could tell the true from the false, and madness would sweep the world. . . .
Terror shook me like an ague—a blind sick terror of space and mystery and things beyond our ken. In that moment it seemed that Boyton and Tom stood beside me. I thought I could see them, waving frantic arms and screaming something at me, shoving me toward that monstrous door. . . .
I heard someone—Perry—cry out:
"Joe—what's the matter, Joe? You look so—wait, Joe! Take it easy, old boy; you're—Chet! Chet! He's gone mad! Look out!"
Vaguely I remembered picking up a chair, feather-light, and raising it above my head, and smashing with it—smashing at a monster wearing a white mask made up to resemble Perry Lester's face.
Then the huge door burst open, and I was smashing again, wielding the chair with no effort, until a second fiend, masquerading as my old friend, Ray Chetham, went down like a felled ox.
Something was in his hand—a piece of film, ready for developing, but ruined now by exposure to the light. . . .
That's about all, Sergeant. You'll find the bodies in that second-floor room, in the old vacant house on Beecher. I came straight here, the minute I realized there was nothing I could do for poor old Perry and Chet—after I came to myself, you understand, I saw what I had done.
I thought of suicide at first, longed for it, bending over them and crying like a baby. Old Chet and Perry were more like my brothers than friends. . . . I couldn't stand the thought of what I'd done. . . .
Then I knew that suicide was the easy way. What I had to do was give myself up, so that I could tell someone about our experiments before they do—whatever the state is going to do to me.
Someone else may want to try what we tried—a scientific mind, not a bunch of untrained helpless laymen like the five of us. Someone not afraid to find out what was on that undeveloped film.
I don't want to know, myself. I hope to God nobody ever finds out!
