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I fell, losing my balance as awkwardly as some weak woman in a faint. At the last moment I roused enough to try to catch myself by grabbing the seat of a nearby chair, breaking my fall to some extent but seriously spraining my left thumb.

CHARCOT HELPED ME to a private room where he insisted that I lie down until I was fully recovered from my “faint.”M eanwhile, as he provided a rather awkward splint and bandage for my thumb, I had the chance for a private consultation with the famous doctor.

Charcot confessed himself intrigued by my behavior in the presence of the girl. I began to tell him something of my case, and confessed my overwhelming fear.

He nodded, and prepared to give me a quick examination. But another detail still bothered him. “What was that word—neither French nor English . . . something, she said, that her princely abductor had caused her to become.”

“It is in the old language of Ireland: dearg-due, meaning the sucker of red blood.”

“Yes . . . I see.” After a thoughtful pause, he added, “Having some connection with her behavior with regard to the rat.”

“Yes,”I agreed. “No doubtbt that was it”.

Charcot examined me briefly, I suppose as thoroughly as possible without advance preparation.He then gave me some hope, as a world expert on tabes dorsalis, by saying that while he certainly could not rule out the possibility in my case, he thought it unlikely that the dreams, or delusions, that I described were due to any organic lesion of the brain.

Instead, Charcot suggests that a kind of displacement has taken place: the girl in the hospital only resembles the one of whom I dreamed, and my unconscious mind has somehow altered my memory of the dream to fit the available reality.

Would that the matter could be so easily explained. But I fear that it cannot.

T uesday, 17 J uly, morning—

Lucy came to me again last night, here in my hotel. Before retiring, I had made doubly sure of the room’s single window being closed (it is utterly inaccessible from outside, two stories above the street) and locked the door and blocked it with a chair, which has become my nightly habit. This morning after her departure, when I examined the window in broad daylight, after my strange visitor’s departure, a thin caking of dust and an intact small spiderweb offered proof that it had not been opened.

If the girl in the asylum be real, as must be the case, can her shade or spirit in my room at night be anything but a figment of my own disordered reason?

In the course of last night’s visit, she said to me, “From the moment I first heard you speak in London, my little man, I knew great hunger for your sweet Irish blood.”

Flat on my back in bed, I still did not know if I was dreaming. But I was curious. “Where did you hear me speak?”

“It was at the back door of your Lyceum Theater.”

“And is it that you love the theater, then? You come to watch my employer, the great Henry Irving, on the stage?”

“Oh aye, he’s marvelous. And I love the darkness and the lights, the curtains that can hide so much, the painted faces and the masks . . .”

Still murmuring, she bent over me, and all was as before. It seems that when her touch is upon me, my uninjured hand is as powerless to resist as the sprained one.

T hursday, 19 J uly, late afternoon—

This will be my last entry in this journal. The business has come to a conclusion in the most startling and amazing way.

Lucy appeared in my room again last night, and events followed their usual frightening course, of grotesque horror mingled with indescribable pleasure—until, at the last moment before our intimacy reached its peak, she abruptly broke off and pulled away from me.

Raising myself dazedly on one elbow, I became aware of a new presence in the room.

Though the tall figure standing near the window was visible only in outline, I could be sure it was a man. Lucy cowered away before him.

Moving silently at first, the new apparition (very shadowy in darkness, hard to see distinctly) advanced toward the bed.

Hardly knowing what to make of this