Recalled to Life | Page 8

Thornton's report, that we might at last count with some certainty upon
arriving at fresh results as to the actual murder. I can see from what you
tell me you're a young lady of intelligence--much above the
average--and great strength of mind. It's curious your memory should
fail you so pointedly just where we stand most in need of its aid.
Recollect, nobody else but you ever saw the murderer's face. Now, I'm
going to presume you're answering me honestly, and try a bold means
to arouse your dormant memory. Look hard, and hark back.--Is that the
room you recollect? Is that the picture that still haunts and pursues
you?"
He handed me the photograph he held in his fingers. I took it, all on fire.
The sight almost made me turn sick with horror. To my awe and
amazement, it was indeed the very scene I remembered so well. Only,
of course, it was taken from another point of view, and represented
things in rather different relative positions to those I figured them in.
But it showed my father's body lying dead upon the floor; it showed his
poor corpse weltering helpless in its blood; it showed myself, as a girl
of eighteen, standing awestruck, gazing on in blank horror at the sight;
and in the background, half blurred by the summer evening light, it
showed the vague outline of a man's back, getting out of the window.
On one side was the door: that formed no part of my mental picture,
because it was at my back; but in the photograph it too was indistinct,
as if in the very act of being burst open. The details were vague, in
part--probably the picture had never been properly focussed;--but the
main figures stood out with perfect clearness, and everything in the
room was, allowing for the changed point of view, exactly as I
remembered it in my persistent mental photograph.
I drew a deep breath.
"That's my Picture," I said, slowly. "But it recalls to me nothing new.
I--I don't understand it."
The Inspector stared at me hard once more.
"Do you know," he asked, "how that photograph was produced, and
how it came into our possession?"

I trembled violently.
"No, I don't," I answered, reddening. "But--I think it had something to
do with the flash like lightning."
The Inspector jumped at those words like a cat upon a mouse.
"Quite right," he cried briskly, as one who at last, after long search,
finds a hopeful clue where all seemed hopeless. "It had to do with the
flash. The flash produced it. This is a photograph taken by your father's
process.... Of course you recollect your father's process?"
He eyed me close. The words, as he spoke them, seemed to call up
dimly some faint memory of my pre-natal days--of my First State, as I
had learned from the doctors to call it. But his scrutiny made me shrink.
I shut my eyes and looked back.
"I think," I said slowly, rummaging my memory half in vain, "I
remember something about it. It had something to do with photography,
hadn't it?...No, no, with the electric light....I can't exactly remember
which. Will you tell me all about it?"
He leaned back in his chair, and, eyeing me all the time with that same
watchful glance, began to describe to me in some detail an apparatus
which he said my father had devised, for taking instantaneous
photographs by the electric light, with a clockwork mechanism. It was
an apparatus that let sensitive-plates revolve one after another opposite
the lens of a camera; and as each was exposed, the clockwork that
moved it produced an electric spark, so as to represent such a series of
effects as the successive positions of a horse in trotting. My father, it
seemed, was of a scientific turn, and had just perfected this new
automatic machine before his sudden death. I listened with breathless
interest; for up to that time I had never been allowed to hear anything
about my father--anything about the great tragedy with which my
second life began. It was wonderful to me even now to be allowed to
speak and ask questions on it with anybody. So hedged about had I
been all my days with mystery.
As I listened, I saw the Inspector could tell by the answering flash in
my eye that his words recalled SOMETHING to me, however vaguely.
As he finished, I leant forward, and with a very flushed face, that I
could feel myself, I cried, in a burst of recollection:
"Yes, yes. I remember. And the box on the table--the box that's in my
mental picture, and is not in the photograph--THAT was the apparatus

you've just been describing."
The Inspector turned upon me with a rapidity that