II

“Number one”

It was more than a week after the funeral of my poor friend Humphrey Challoner that I paid my first regular visit of inspection to his house.  I had been the only intimate friend of this lonely, self-contained man and he had made me not only his sole executor but his principal legatee.  With the exception of a sum of money to endow an Institute of Criminal Anthropology, he had made me the heir to his entire estate, including his museum.  The latter bequest was unencumbered by any conditions.  I could keep the collection intact, I could sell it as it stood or I could break it up and distribute the specimens as I chose; but I knew that Challoner’s unexpressed wish was that it should be kept together, ultimately to form the nucleus of a collection attached to the Institute.

It was a gray autumn afternoon when I let myself in.  A caretaker was in charge of the house, which was otherwise unoccupied, and the museum, which was in a separate wing, seemed strangely silent and remote.  As the Yale latch of the massive door clicked behind me, I seemed to be, and in fact was, cut off from all the world.  A mysterious, sepulchral stillness pervaded the place, and when I entered the long room I found myself unconsciously treading lightly so as not to disturb the silence; even as one might on entering some Egyptian tomb-chamber hidden in the heart of a pyramid.

I halted in the center of the long room and looked about me, and I don’t mind confessing that I felt distinctly creepy.  It was not the skeleton of the whale that hung overhead, with its ample but ungenial smile; it was not the bandy-legged skeleton of the rachitic camel, nor that of the aurochs, nor those of the apes and jackals and porcupines in the smaller glass case; nor the skulls that grinned from the case at the end of the room.  It was the long row of human skeletons, each erect and watchful on its little pedestal, that occupied the great wall-case:  a silent, motionless company of fleshless sentinels, standing in easy postures with unchanging, mirthless grins and seeming to wait for something.  That was what disturbed me.

I am not an impressionable man; and, as a medical practitioner, it is needless to say that mere bones have no terrors for me.  The skeleton from which I worked as a student was kept in my bedroom, and I minded it no more than I minded the plates in “Gray’s Anatomy.”  I could have slept comfortably in the Hunterian Museum—­other circumstances being favorable; and even the gigantic skeleton of Corporal O’Brian—­which graces that collection—­with that of his companion, the quaint little dwarf, thrown in, would not have disturbed my rest in the smallest degree.  But this was different.  I had the feeling, as I had had before, that there was something queer about this museum of Challoner’s.

I walked slowly along the great wall-case, looking in at the specimens; and in the dull light, each seemed to look out at me as I passed with a questioning expression in his shadowy eye-sockets, as if he would ask, “Do you know who I was?” It made me quite uncomfortable.