Page 10 of If Looks Could Kill

The fever is hot upon his brow. The hallucinations have only increased.

He must get back to the States and take the sulfur cure at Hot Springs as soon as he can arrange it.

That’s what he needs after all this agitation and commotion.

Rest, quiet. There’s no quiet in a London boiling over with “Red Fiend” murder mania.

He has a mania of his own.

That girl. He seems to see her everywhere. Passing through a narrow street, he looks up and sees her watching him through a second-floor window. In a crowded tea shop, she serves his sandwiches. At railroad stations, she stands behind him in the ticket line.

It can’t be real. He never was one for women’s faces. They all look more or less the same to him. It’s the stress of his fruitless search pressing down upon him.

And the elixir, which eludes him. The philosopher’s stone is no stone, but a metaphor for a recipe, a concoction science is bound to discover, but not fast enough for him, so he must leap where other men fear to step. He must soar where other men crawl.

And yet, the girl. When he turned and saw her in the queue at the train station, he could swear that a thin forked tongue darted out at him between her smiling lips. Her curls began moving of their own accord.

It’s the fever. Fevered body, fevered mind. The present phase of the illness.

To be rid of the girl is to be rid of the pain. Soon, soon, he must strike again.