‘They would become you very well,’ came the even and studied response, ‘as indeed they seem to have done.’

As Willett said this, it almost seemed as though a cloud passed over the sun, though there was no change in the shadows on the floor. Then Ward ventured: ‘And is this what asks so hotly for a reckoning? Suppose a man does find it now and then useful to be twofold?’

‘No’, said Willett gravely, ‘again you are wrong. It is no business of mine if any man seeks duality, provided he has any right to exist at all, and provided he does not destroy what called him out of space.’

Ward now started violently. ‘Well, Sir, what have ye found, and what d’ye want of me?’

The doctor let a little time elapse before replying, as if choosing his words for an effective answer.

‘I have found’, he finally intoned, ‘something in a cupboard behind an ancient overmantel where a picture once was, and I have burned it and buried the ashes where the grave of Charles Dexter Ward ought to be.’

The madman choked and sprang from the chair in which he had been sitting.

‘Damn ye, who did ye tell – and who’ll believe it was he after these two full months, with me alive? What d’ye mean to do?’

Willett, though a small man, actually took on a kind of judicial majesty as he calmed the patient with a gesture.

‘I have told no-one. This is no common case – it is a madness out of time and a horror from beyond the spheres, which no police or lawyers or courts or alienists could ever fathom or grapple with. Thank God some chance has left inside me the spark of imagination, that I might not go astray in thinking out this thing. You cannot deceive me, Joseph Curwen, for I know that your accursed magic is true!

‘I know how you wove the spell that brooded outside the years and fastened on your double and descendant; I know how you drew him into the past and got him to raise you up from your detestable grave; I know how he kept you hidden in his laboratory while you studied modern things and roved abroad as a vampire by night, and how you later shewed yourself in beard and glasses that no-one might wonder at your godless likeness to him; I know what you resolved to do when he balked at your monstrous rifling of the world’s tombs, and at what you planned afterward , and I know how you did it.’