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“Again the voice of reason pours cold water on my fanciful deductions!” said Holmes cheerfully. As he spoke, he methodically prodded the hawthorn bushes with his walking-stick, and turned over the sodden mass of fallen leaves beneath. He seemed oblivious to the chill drizzle, now made worse by a steadily rising wind from the east. A quarter of an hour went miserably past.

Then – “A long shot, Watson, a very long shot!” cried my friend, and pounced. From a pocket of his cape he had produced a pair of steel forceps, and from another a large pill-box. Now something red glistened in the forceps’ grip, and in a trice the thing was safely boxed. Traill, who had given an involuntary cry, backed away a step or two with an expression of revulsion.

“Another of the vile creatures?”

“I fancy it is the same,” Holmes murmured. And not a word more would he utter until we were installed in a convenient public house which supplied us with smoking-hot whisky toddies. “It is villainy, Mr Traill,” he said then. “One final test remains. I experimented not long ago with a certain apparatus, without fully comprehending its possibilities in scientific detection …”

It was late night in Baker Street, and the gas-mantles burnt fitfully. A smell of ozone tinged the air, mingled with a more familiar chemical reek. Holmes, as he linked up an extensive battery of wet cells, expounded with fanciful enthusiasm on the alternating-current electrical transmission proposals of one Mr Nikola Tesla in the Americas, and of how in the early years of the new century he fully expected electric lighting to be plumbed into our lodgings, like the present gas-pipes. I smiled at his eagerness.

At length the preparations were complete. “You must refrain from touching any part of the equipment,” Holmes now warned. “The electrical potential which drives this cathode-ray tube is dangerously high. Do you recognize the device, Watson? The evacuated glass, the tungsten target electrode within? It has already been employed in the United States, in connection with your own line of work.”

The tangle of glassware, the trailing wires and the eerie glow from the tube made up an effect wholly unfamiliar to me, reminiscent perhaps of some new scientific romance by Mr H.G. Wells. It was only very gingerly that young Traill placed his right hand where Holmes directed.

“I have seen something a little like this before,” he mused. “Old Wilfrid Jarman’s brother dabbles in electrical experiments. He vexed Selina once with a tedious demonstration of a model dynamo.”

“Healing rays?” I asked. “Earlier in the day we spoke of Mesmerism, which according to my recollection was a charlatan’s ploy to heal by what he called animal magnetism. Has electrical science made this real at last?”

“Not precisely, Watson. The apparatus of Herr Doktor Röntgen does not heal, but lights the way for the healer. In years to come, I fancy it will be remembered as the greatest scientific discovery of the present decade.”

“But I see nothing happening.”

“That is what you may expect when there is nothing to see. – No, Mr Traill, I must entreat you to remain quite still. The rays of Röntgen, which he has named for algebra’s unknown quantity X, do not impinge on the human eye. That faint glow which you may discern is not the true glow, but secondary fluorescence in the glass.”

I pondered this, while Holmes kept a wary eye on his pocket-watch. “Very well,” he said at last. “You may lift your hand now, but have a care …” And he took up the mysterious sealed envelope on which Traill’s hand had rested. “What the eye cannot see, a photographic plate can still record. I must retreat to the darkroom and – lift the veil of the spirits. Kindly entertain our guest, Watson.”

Traill and I stared at each other, lost in a mental darkness deeper than that of any photographic darkroom. Infuriatingly, I knew that to Holmes this night-shrouded terrain of crime was brilliantly lit by the invisible rays of his deductive power.

Nor was I much the wiser when morning came. Holmes, dancing-eyed and evasive, had