Cobb stood uncertainly for a minute and then said, "I'll leave you alone with Mr. Torey." I heard him go to the door and close it softly behind him.
I pulled a chair up close to the bed. Torey still kept his face toward the wall.
"Well, now," I started in a hearty voice I meant to be reassuring, "What's the trouble? I'd like to hear all about it." And so saying, I laid my hand on his.
He jumped as though somebody had stuck a knife in him. Then he groaned again. Still not a word.
I considered the next best approach. It was then that I noticed the window was wide open. It was getting late in the afternoon and, as much to recoup my own forces, I walked over and started to lower it.
My back was to Torey. But he must have heard the sound of the window. He let out a low groan and when I turned he was sitting straight up in bed with a look of terror on his face that even I, used as I am to the terrifying grimaces of crackpots and criminals, found disquieting.
He pointed toward the window, or so I thought, and then sank back on his pillow. When I reached him, his face and arms were covered with sweat. Either extreme weakness, I thought automatically, or—extreme terror.
"Mr. Torey, won't you try and tell me what's bothering you. I want to help you. Dr. Cobb tells me you're coming along very nicely, all except along certain nervous lines." I kept my voice low and confidential this time. "Come on now, let's hear it. You'll find me a very good listener."
George Torey turned then and for the first time I really saw him. He had the high forehead and sensitive face of a man of great intellectual capacity. That face was drawn and twisted by fear now. I was almost startled by his appearance. But he seemed to find something reassuring in my appearance for he twisted himself on his back.
I noticed he kept looking out the window of the hospital. Outside the early spring afternoon was passing into a soft dimness that preludes twilight.
"Tell me, what was it about my shutting the window that caused you to cry out just now." Perhaps there was a clue here to his strange behavior. "Is it that you are bothered by things being shut, a sort of fear of closed spaces?"
Torey smiled at that. For the first time, then, I heard him speak. His voice was cultured, controlled, though somewhat weak.
"No, Doctor, I am not troubled with claustrophobia. It's something else. Something that seems, seems quite incredible. I am intelligent enough to know that I dread the night, and when I heard you at the window, it made me realize another night was coming. It is bizarre, no, it is fantastic, absurd. I cannot expect anyone to believe." His voice shook at the end of his speech and fearful of disturbing him more, I just nodded my head slowly and once again gave him a reassuring pat on the arm. He went on: "I'm afraid to go to sleep because, because of something that happens to me when I go to sleep. I—I can't make anybody believe me—but if there is a Hell, I've been there—I've seen people there with harpoons—" He stopped abruptly. I said nothing.
We stayed like that for a moment, neither of us saying a word and yet I could feel that he wanted to tell me more about this thing that was eating away at his mind. For a minute, I felt a bit of resentment toward prosaic Dr. Cobb who had refused to tell me the details of this man's aberrations, but instead had simply said, with a rather weary, noncommittal shake of his head, "But I'd rather you'd get the whole picture from him direct."
