ADW Part 6

That night I had the most disturbing dream. In it I was hosting a dinner party for the most distinguished doctors and physiologists in the country. Everybody was absolutely spellbound by my conversation, and not a small amount of wine was flowing. At the height of the evening, just as I was entering a pleasant conversation with one of the doctors’ enchanting daughters, a bleached assemblage of bones descended the staircase and made its way to the punchbowl. “How do you do?,” spoke the skeleton with an airy wave to the entire room. “I am ze famous Ludwig Glauben.” It held up a glass of punch and made a toast “to science.” 

As it raised the glass to its teeth the liquid spilled through the jaw and splashed against the ribs and onto the floor. Women fainted, men rushed to the doors, and plates and glasses broke upon the floor. My dinner party was a complete failure.

In a fit of pique, I grabbed the intruder by the bony neck with both my hands and insulted it with numerous epithets. When I awoke, however, I had succeeded only in strangling my bedpost.

The next morning I dressed hurriedly and rushed into the study. There, amid open books and strewn papers, were Prof. Glauben’s mortal remains. The head looked up at me as I entered the room. “Guten Morgen. You slept vell, I hope?” It was then that I realized fully that this really was Prof. Glauben. His form was admittedly altered, but his personality was the same. He was still a man of science. He still cared for me; we were still friends. The potion had indeed preserved his soul, and is it not the soul only that is the object of our mutual affections? “Yes,” I lied with an embarrassed smile, “I slept well.

“Gut! Ve have much work ahead of us!”

For several months we continued the experiments within the privacy of my apartments. Prof. Glauben’s laboratory and equipment had been seized by the government upon his arrest, though I had been able to spirit most of his papers out of the university before his possessions were auctioned to pay his legal fees.

One of our greatest difficulties was keeping Prof. Glauben from being observed. My valet was given strict instructions not to enter my laboratory or my study, and visitors were barred from those rooms as well. We kept the shades tightly drawn and were careful to cover Prof. Glauben with heavy clothes whenever it was necessary for him to leave my home. We experienced a number of close calls, but no one, to my knowledge, discovered our secret.

One day in the early spring Prof. Glauben called me to the table where he had been treating some muscle tissue with a greenish liquid. “Venwick, vhat does you think vould happen if somebody observed my appearance?” I was surprised at this sudden and unanticipated question, but told him, quite unabashedly, about the dream I’d had on the first night he came to stay with me. “Ja, das it vhat I thought,” he murmured dolefully. “Das is vhat I thought….”

PART 7 WILL APPEAR ON MONDAY