"The Three Drugs" by E. (Edith) Nesbit (originally published as "the Third Drug" by Edith Bland, The Strand Magazine, February 1908, and in The Strand Magazine (US), March 1908, as b y E. Bland; reprinted as "The Three Drugs" as by E. Nesbit in her collection Fear, 1910; the story has also been reprinted under one title mor the other in Before Armageddon, edited by Michael Moorcock, 1975; in Stories of the Occult, edited by Denys Val Baker, 1978; in E. Nesbit's Tales of Terror, 1983; in her collection In the Dark, 1988, and in an expanded edition, 2000; in Great Tales of Terror, edited by S. T. Joshi, 2002; in Edith Nesbit: The Power of Darkness -- Tales of Terror, 2006; and in her collection Horror Stories, 2016; in From the Dead: The Complete Weird Stories of E. Nesbit, 2018; in The Darker Sex: Tales of the Supernatural and Macabre by Victorian Woman Writers, edited by Mike Ashley, 2009; in The Feminine Future: Early Science Fiction by Women Writers [as by Edith Nesbit], edited by Mike Ashley, 2015; in Man-Size in Marble and Other Horrors: The Best Horror & Ghost Stories of Edith Nesbit, 2015; in Weird Women: Classic Supernatural Fiction by Groundbreaking Women Writers, 1852-1923, edited by Leslie S. Klinger and Lisa Moton, 2020; in More Voices from the Radium Age, edited by Joshua Glenn, 2023; and in Trapped!, edited by Charles G. Waugh, Ph.D. & M. Grant Kellermeyer, M.A., 2023)
Edith Nesbit Bland (1858-1924) was, among other things, a prolific writer of children's books and has been described as the first modern writer for children and credited with inventing the children's adventure story. Many of her works remain in print, including volumes of her popular children's series about the Bastable children (The Story of the Treasure Seekers, et al.), and the Five Children (The Five Children and It, et al.); among her standalones were The Railway Children and Wet Magic. During her lifetime she published 109 books, plus 6 plays, and edited a further 10 volumes. An active Socialist, she was a political activist and a co-founder of the Fabian Society. (Interestingly, she opposed women's suffrage because she feared that, had women gotten the vote, they more likely support the Tories rather than the Socialists. She dies at age 65, most like from lung cancer because she "smoked excessively."
To many modern readers, she also known for her more than twenty stories of the weird, many of which have gone on to become classics of the genre, including "Man-Size in Marble," "John Charrington's Wedding," "Uncle Abraham's Romance," "The Ebony Frame," "The Haunted House," "The Head," "In9 the Dark," "The Mystery of the Semi-Detached," and "The Three Drugs."
Roger Wroxham was despondent -- the reason or reasons do not matter, but he could not find a way out. One evening he started walking through the deserted Paris streets, where he found himself headed toward the Seine with a vague idea of throwing himself in. Suddenly he was accosted by three thugs -- Apaches armed with knives. They fell on him and, when they wounded him severely on the arm, he decided that what he most wanted to do was live. He managed to get away but they chased him through the dark, lonely streets until he found a large old house with an unlocked door. He rushed into the house and closed and bolted the door; eventually he heard the Apaches move away. His wound left him weak. The large house was silent and seemed empty until he heard footsteps coming from a distance. The sole occupant of the house turned out to be a doctor who took him into another room, but before the doctor was ab le to begin to treat the wound, Roger passed out.
When he awoke with his arm bandaged, Roger felt remarkably well and invigorated. The doctor insisted that Roger needed to rest and could spend the night in the house. Placing Roger on a bed, he left wile keeping the door to the room open. But Roger felt too alert to rest. And there was this odd odor permeating the room, something of flowers and camphor. A second door in the room was locked and the odor seemed to come from there -- an odor that reminded him of death. Suddenly roger's vigor faded and he felt very weak. The doctor brought him to his laboratory and mixed a strange concoction and told him to drink it, otherwise he would soon be dead. Roger drank it and again passed out. When he woke, the doctor told him a strange story.
The doctor had been experimenting with creating a sort of super life, taking one beyond the normal limits of humanity. His experiments seemed to work well with lower life forms -- animals -- but not with humans, probably because the humans he could find were degenerates, criminals, and Apaches. All had dies and were stored in the locked room. Roger, however, was a superb specimen, far superior to his previous experiments. For his part, Roger seemed complacent and willing to follow whatever the doctor said. Then he suddenly became weaker, which indicate that it was time to go to the third part of the experiment...to issue the third drug. The doctor bound Roger hand and foot, then carved a wound on his temple, which he then sealed with a bandage covered with some sort of unguent. Again Roger passed out.
When Roger awoken, he found he had strange powers and a memory of all that happened in the world in the past. He could evince a memory of an ancient pharaoh, for example, and he knew that the doctor's one true love was a woman named Constansia, whom the doctor had buried under the lilacs in the back yard. The doctor refused to unbind Roger because Roger in his present condition was far more powerful than he. It was now time for the doctor to experiment on himself: "You know -- all things. It was not a dream, this, the dream of my life. It is true. It is a fact accomplished. Now I, too, will know all things. I will be as the gods." with that he wounded himself and applied the first drug, an unguent like the one he had smeared over the bandages when he first treated Roger.
The euphoria hit the doctor, then slowly died off, bringing the doctor almost to the point of death, when it time to drink the elixir he had prepared -- the second drug. The doctor collapsed after taking the second drug and appeared to be dead. Roger feared the doctor would not wake up. Eventually he did but after a while he became weak and appeared to be approaching actual death, which meant it was time to administer the third drug -- but to do that, Roger had to help him and Roger was still bound and the doctor was too weak to unloose Roger. Slowly, the doctor faded into death while Roger remained in that silent house, completely unable to move. In the meantime the amazing effects of the third drug began to abate...
How was Roger able to escape from his solitary prison? Or was he?
A strange, fantastical tale of the quest for knowledge gone horribly wrong, a tale as old as Frankenstein, as old as Faust...
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