Chapters (28)
- Foreword
- 1.A dangerous assignment
- 2.A widow seeks revenge
- 3.A scientist becomes queer
- 4.Out of the past
- 5.The Brotherhood of the Ram
- 6.The Satanic Temple
- 7.An unfortunate—accident (?)
- 8.A prey to loneliness
- 9.A fiendish plot
- 10.Ordeal of a neophyte
- 11.Seen in a crystal
- 12.A tangled skein
- 13.Dead men's shoes
- 14.In the toils
- 15.Men without mercy
- 16.The setting of a trap
- 17.Unhappy return
- 18.'When rogues fall out...'
- 19.The night of her life
- 20.Wanted! A human victim for sacrifice
- 21.Death of a woman unknown
- 22.In the ruined abbey
- 23.The terrible deduction
- 24.In the Cave
- 25.Race against time
- 26.Deadline—twelve noon
- Footnotes
For a long time past, thoughts of him had come to me only infrequently. I was aware, although it had never been confirmed as a fact by a communication from him or any other source, that he was in the U.S.S.R., and now content to carry on his scientific work there under his Russian masters in one of their research establishments. It distressed me that he should be working for the Communists, but there was nothing I could do about it, and I had come to accept it that, as our paths in life had diverged so widely, it was unlikely that we should ever meet again.
Yet, having once more started to think about him, try as I would I could not get him out of my mind. In fact, I became the victim of a mental disturbance of the same nature as that I have suffered recently. I found that I could no longer concentrate fully on my work or take pleasure in the social life that my wife and I had been leading. Then too, as now, I gradually became convinced that Lothar was in England and wished to see me.
My visions of him increased in clarity until I became familiar with the surroundings in which he was living. He had two rooms on the ground floor of a rather shoddy apartment house. It was number 94, in a long dreary street which I knew to be in North London somewhere beyond St. Pancras Station. The next development was my becoming aware of the way to find it on starting from the Station, and that Lothar was willing me to come there to meet him.
I knew instinctively that no good could come from such a meeting; so for some days I resisted the urge to go there. But Lothar gave me no peace; and both Dinah and my fellow employees at the research station became greatly alarmed by my mental condition. They said that at times I talked as if I were a different person, and urged me to see a doctor.
To have done so would have been futile. Medical science now accepts telepathy, but I doubt if any doctor would have believed my story and, even if he had, it would have been beyond his power to help me. The probability is that he would have had me put into a mental home, if only for a period of observation, and, as that could have brought me no relief, I were not prepared to submit to it.
At length, towards the end of the month, on May 26, to be exact, I decided that, if I was not to lose my job owing to a complete breakdown, I must give way to Lothar's urging. So I took the day off and went up to London.