It is enough to say this: what Raymond Winslow was being given was not a medicine that had any business in the care of a dying man.

It was not something meant to ease him, or comfort him, or treat any illness he had.

It was something whose only effect was to hold him where he was, silent and still and trapped inside a body that would not obey him, and to keep him there.

I read the description of it once, and then again, and then a third time to be certain I had not misunderstood, and each time the meaning grew colder and more terrible.

This was not a man dying naturally, as everyone in the house believed.