Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination - Edogawa Rampo [38]
He completely isolated himself in his weird laboratory, and I was the only friend who ever visited him, the others having all given him up because of his growing eccentricity. On each of my visits I began to feel more and more anxious over his strange doings, for I could see clearly that his malady was going from bad to worse.
About this time both his parents died, leaving him with a handsome inheritance. Now completely free from any supervision, and with ample funds to satisfy his every whim, he began to grow more reckless than ever. At the same time, having now reached the age of twenty, he began to show a keen interest in the opposite sex. This interest intermingled with his morbid craze for optics, and the two grew into a powerful force in which he was completely enmeshed.
Immediately after receiving his inheritance he built a small observatory and equipped it with an astronomical telescope in order to explore the mysteries of the planets. As his house stood on a high elevation, it was an ideal spot for this purpose. But he was not one to be satisfied with such an innocuous occupation. Soon he began to turn his telescope earthward and to focus the lens on the houses of the surrounding area. Fences and other barriers constituted no obstacle, because his observatory stood on very high ground.
The occupants of the neighboring houses, utterly unaware of Tanuma's prying eyes peering through his telescope, went about their daily lives without any reserve, their sliding paper windows wide open. As a result Tanuma derived hitherto unknown pleasures from his secret explorations into the private lives of his neighbors. One evening he kindly invited me to take a look, but what I saw made me blush a deep crimson, and I refused to partake any more in his observations.
Not long after he built a special type of periscope which enabled him to get a full view of the rooms of his many young maidservants while he was sitting in his lab. Unaware of this, the maids showed no restraint in whatever they did in the privacy of their own rooms.
Another episode, which I can never erase from my mind, concerned insects. Tanuma began studying them under a small microscope, deriving childish delight from watching both their fighting and their mating. One particular scene which I had the misfortune of seeing was that of a crushed flea. This was a gory sight indeed, for, magnified a thousandfold, it looked like a large wild boar struggling in a pool of blood.
Some time after this, when I called on Tanuma one afternoon and knocked on his laboratory door, there was no answer. So I casually walked in, as was my custom. Inside, it was completely dark, for all the windows were draped with black curtains. And then suddenly on the large wall ahead of me there appeared some blurred and indescribable object, so monstrous in size that it covered the entire space. I was so startled that I stood transfixed.
Gradually the "thing" on the wall began to take definite shape. The first shape that came into focus was a swamp overgrown with black weeds. Beneath it there appeared two immense eyes the size of washtubs, with brown pupils glinting horribly, while at their sides there flowed many rivers of blood on a white plateau. Next came two large caves, from which there seemed to protrude the black bushy ends of large brooms. These, of course, were the hairs growing in the cavities of a gigantic nose. Then followed two thick lips, which looked like two large, crimson cushions; and they kept moving, exposing two rows of white teeth the proportions of roof-tiles.
It was a picture of a human face. Somehow I thought I recognized the features despite their grotesque size.
Just at this point I heard someone calling: "Don't be alarmed! It's only me!" The voice gave me another shock, for the