Read of the Frightful Thing
That Came from
The
Extraordinary
Experiment of
Dr. Calgroni
By Joseph Faus and James Bennett Wooding
There is much concerning the queer Dr. Calgroni that I can not give to the world.
It should be remembered that I had never been inside his house until after I beheld him frantically emerge from its big front door, that rainy night, his wizened face as white as death, and, scantily-clad, rush headlong for the depot.
That he was a surgeon of extraordinary ability I readily acknowledge. But Belleville was the last place where one would expect to find a man of such surgical skill, and, most undoubtedly, the last place one would choose for the scene of the startling events brought about as a result of the doctor's purchase of the ape "Horace" from Barber's World-famous 3-Ring Show.
Had the doctor merely put up at the hotel I might have believed him, like myself, merely summering at Belleville. For it was a restful hamlet, situated in a mountainous valley, something like a day's run from New York. But his renting of the Thornsdale place aroused latent suspicions in my mind, probably instilled there by that strange article I had read in The Surgical Monthly.
Large enough for a hotel or boarding-house, but out-of-the-way located—also because of the enormous rent demanded by its heirs—the Thornsdale place had stood vacant since the last of the Thornsdale line had died ten years before. Its doors had been closed and padlocked, and its windows barricaded.
It had been the finest residence in the old town in its day, but was now regarded as a sort of historic oddity. On the whole, it afforded a formidable appearance, crouching behind its great elms, looming huge and weather-beaten, with its board-shuttered and frowning windows. But just the sort of place the
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