Tales of Terror and Mystery Story 2 - The Leather Funnel

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Tales of Terror and Mystery by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit librivox.org.
Tales of Terror and Mystery by Arthur Conan Doyle. The Leather Funnel.
My friend, Lionel Dacre, lived in the Avenue du Wagram, Paris. His house was that small one with the iron railings and grass plots in front of it, on the left hand side as you pass down from the Arc de Triomphe. I fancy that it had been there long before the avenue was constructed, for the gray tiles were stained with lichen, and the walls were mildewed and discolored with age. It looked a small house from the street, five windows in front if I remember right, but it deepened into a single long chamber at the back. It was here that Dacre had that singular library of occult literature, and the fantastic curiosities which served as a hobby for himself and an amusement for his friends. A wealthy man of refined and eccentric tastes, he'd spent much of his life and fortune in gathering together what was said to be a unique private collection of Talmudic, Kabbalistic and magical works, many of them of great rarity and value. His tastes leaned toward the marvelous and the monstrous, and I have heard that his experiments in that direction of the unknown have passed all the bounds of civilization and of decorum. To his English friends, he never alluded to such matters and took the tone of a student and a virtuoso, but a Frenchman whose tastes were of the same nature has assured me that the worst excesses of the black mass have been perpetrated in that large and lofty hall, which is lined with the shelves of his books, in the cases of his museum.
Dacre's appearance was enough to show that his deep interest in these psychic matters was intellectual rather than spiritual. There was no trace of asceticism upon his heavy face, but there was much mental force in his huge domed-like skull, which curved upward from amongst his thinning locks like a snow peak above its fringe of fir trees. His knowledge was greater than his wisdom, and his powers were far superior to his character. The small bright eyes buried deeply in his fleshy face twinkled with intelligence and an unabated curiosity for life, but they were the eyes of a sensualist and an egoist. Enough of the man, for he's dead now, poor devil, dead at the very time that he had made sure that he had at last discovered the elixir of life.
It is not with his complex character that I have to deal, but with a very strange and inexplicable incident which had its rise in my visit to him in the early spring of the year 82
I'd known Dacre in England, for my researches in the Assyrian Room at the British Museum had been conducted at the time when he was endeavoring to establish a mystic and esoteric meaning in the Babylonian tablets, and this community of interests had brought us together. Chance remarks had led to a daily conversation, and that to something verging upon friendship. I had promised him that my next visit to Paris I would call upon him. At that time, when I was able to fill my compact, I was living in a cottage at Fontainebleau, and as the evening trains were inconvenient, he asked me to spend the night in his house.
I've only that one spare couch, said he, pointing to a broad sofa in his large salon. I hopefully will manage to be comfortable there. It was a singular bedroom, with its high walls of brown volumes, but there could be no more agreeable furniture to a bookworm like myself, and there is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book. I assured him that I could desire no more charming chamber and no more congenial surroundings.
If the fittings are neither convenient nor conventional, they are at least costly, said he, looking round at his shelves. I've expended nearly a quarter of a million of money upon these objects which surround you, books, weapons, gems, carvings, tapestries, images. There's hardly a thing here which is not its history, and it's generally one worth telling. He was seated as he spoke at one side of the open fireplace and eye at the other. His reading table was on his right and a strong lamp above it ringed it with a very vivid circle of golden light. A half-rolled polypsist lay in the center, and around it were many quaint articles of bric-a-brac. One of these was a large funnel, such as used for filling wine casks. It appeared to be made of black wood and to be rimmed with a discoloured brass. That's a curious thing, I remarked. What's the history of that? Ah, ah, said he. It is the very question which I've had occasion to ask myself. I would give a good deal to know. Take it in your hands and examine it. I did so, and found that what I had imagined to be wood was in reality leather, though age had dried it into an extreme hardness. It was a large funnel, and might hold a quart when full. The brass rim encircled the wide end, but the narrow was also tipped with metal.