Page:Weird Tales volume 02 number 03.djvu/43

 Stark Terror is the Keynote of This Strange Tale

AM not a scientific or learned man. If I were, perhaps I might be able to set down the events which I am about to chronicle in such a manner as would be of enormous value to the scientific world.

Had the events which I am about to relate been witnessed by a man possessed of a knowledge of science, the world would undoubtedly have been made richer by the passing of Doctor Carrol. For then we would have a true explanation of all that took place within the mysterious laboratory which he had fitted up for himself. We would then have a solution of the most mystifying series of circumstances which I have ever heard of.

Alas, that I alone know all the absolute facts surrounding the affair! And I alone, of all the world, am perhaps the man least fitted for the task of setting them down.

For, as I have stated, I know nothing of science or of the principles involved in the doctor's experiments. The best I can do is to write down the actual occurrences in the best way I know, and permit my reader to draw his own conclusions. Were I a writer of fiction, the reading of what is to follow might have been made much more pleasurable—but then, perhaps, I might have yielded to the temptation, which I have found to be very common to writers, to polish up and gloss over certain occurrences which took place, with a view of making them more thrilling and interesting. The events themselves are thrilling enough, and if you do not find them interesting the fault lies only in my meager ability to relate what I know to be the absolute facts.

Why Doctor Carrol, with his host of scientific friends, should ever have taken a fancy to me, is more than I have ever been able to figure out. Certainly I am not one who would attract attention from such a learned man as he. In fact, I was but a servant of the doctor's—yet at times he treated me with more courtesy than he did his colleagues in science.

I was his gardener, with a little cottage of my own on the edge of his estate; and