"and
be as brief as you possibly can."

"I came in, as I said," explained West, "about eleven o'clock and
having made some notes relating to an interview arranged for this
morning, I locked the plans in the safe and turned in."

"There was no one hidden anywhere in your chambers?" snapped Smith.

"There was not," replied West. "I looked. I invariably do. Almost
immediately, I went to sleep."

"How many chloral tabloids did you take?" I interrupted.

Norris West turned to me with a slow smile.

"You're cute, Doctor," he said. "I took two. It's a bad habit, but I
can't sleep without. They are specially made up for me by a firm in
Philadelphia."

"How long sleep lasted, when it became filled with uncanny dreams, and
when those dreams merged into reality, I do not know--shall never know,
I suppose. But out of the dreamless void a face came to
me--closer--closer--and peered into mine.

"I was in that curious condition wherein one knows that one is dreaming
and seeks to awaken--to escape. But a nightmare-like oppression held
me. So I must lie and gaze into the seared yellow face that hung over
me, for it would drop so close that I could trace the cicatrized scar
running from the left ear to the corner of the mouth, and drawing up
the lip like the lip of a snarling cur. I could look into the
malignant, jaundiced eyes; I could hear the dim whispering of the
distorted mouth--whispering that seemed to counsel something--something
evil. That whispering intimacy was indescribably repulsive. Then the
wicked yellow face would be withdrawn, and would recede until it became
as a pin's head in the darkness far above me--almost like a glutinous,
liquid thing.

"Somehow I got upon my feet, or dreamed I did--God knows where dreaming
ended and reality began. Gentlemen maybe you'll conclude I went mad
last night, but as I stood holding on to the bedrail I heard the blood
throbbing through my arteries with a noise like a screw-propeller. I
started laughing. The laughter issued from my lips with a shrill
whistling sound that pierced me with physical pain and seemed to wake
the echoes of the whole block. I thought myself I was going mad, and I
tried to command my will--to break the power of the chloral--for I
concluded that I had accidentally taken an overdose.

"Then the walls of my bedroom started to recede, till at last I stood
holding on to a bed which had shrunk to the size of a doll's cot, in
the middle of a ro