Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 1 (1925-01).djvu/18



HE FACTS were carefully hushed up at the time. Strange stories, it is true, began to be whispered, in the clubs about the eccentricities of Dr. Ainsworth and his electric chair, but nothing definite ever leaked out. Now that that weird scientist is dead and buried, the true story of what happened in his laboratory can be made public for the first time.

It all began in a conversation that took place one afternoon early in 1919 in the smoking room of the Athenæum Club, of which Dr. Ainsworth was a member.

The talk had turned on the subject of death and the fear of death. Mortimer, the actor, had given it as his opinion that it is not death which men fear so much as the uncertainty of what is beyond. Almost inevitably he quoted "Hamlet" in support of his contention.

Hamilton, the Harley Street brain specialist, joined the discussion at this point.

"If that is true," he remarked thoughtfully, "it should follow that if a man were confronted with a mystery stranger even than the mystery of death, he would choose death rather than face the greater mystery. I doubt it. I doubt it very much."

"By Jove, yes!" Wordsworth, the soldier and celebrated explorer, remarked suddenly. "That reminds me of a story I read somewhere during the war. Some German captain had captured a number of British spies, and instead of shooting them outright, he gave each of them a chance. For half an hour he put them, separately, of course, into a room out of which two doors led. He told them that one door led straight to the waiting firing party, but where the other door led he refused to tell them. Each man was given his choice. This German fellow had the reputation of being a pretty cunning fiend, I remember."

"They chose the firing party, I fancy," Mortimer remarked sotto voce.

"Each man," Wordsworth continued quietly. "Each man guessed that something pretty grisly lay behind that other door—Chinese tortures, mutilation, hanging. Each man, as it came to his turn, chose the firing party. With that they knew exactly what they were in for."

Arthur Sinclair, the young author whose book, "The Slender Hope," it 17