Eldritch Tales (47 page)

It was the gate bell, which rang simultaneously in house and clinic, that broke the tension at last. She heard the cat-like tread of Surama on the walk as he left the clinic to answer it; and then, with an almost hysterical sigh of relief, she caught the firm, familiar accents of Dalton in conversation with the sinister attendant. Rising, she almost tottered to meet him as he loomed up in the library doorway; and for a moment no word was spoken while he kissed her hand in his courtly, old-school fashion. Then Georgina burst forth into a torrent of hurried explanation, telling all that had happened, all she had glimpsed and overheard, and all she feared and suspected.

Dalton listened gravely and comprehendingly, his first bewilderment gradually giving place to astonishment, sympathy, and resolution. The message, held by a careless clerk, had been slightly delayed, and had found him appropriately enough in the midst of a warm lounging-room discussion about Clarendon. A fellow-member, Dr MacNeil, had brought in a medical journal with an article well calculated to disturb the devoted scientist, and Dalton had just asked to keep the paper for future reference when the message was handed him at last. Abandoning his half-formed plan to take Dr MacNeil into his confidence regarding Alfred, he called at once for his hat and stick, and lost not a moment in getting a cab for the Clarendon home.

Surama, he thought, appeared alarmed at recognising him; though he had chuckled as usual when striding off again toward the clinic. Dalton always recalled Surama’s stride and chuckle on this ominous night, for he was never to see the unearthly creature again. As the chuckler entered the clinic vestibule his deep, guttural gurgles seemed to blend with some low mutterings of thunder which troubled the far horizon.

When Dalton had heard all Georgina had to say, and learned that Alfred was expected back at any moment with a hypodermic dose of morphine, he decided he had better talk with the doctor alone. Advising Georgina to retire to her room and await developments, he walked about the gloomy library, scanning the shelves and listening for Clarendon’s nervous footstep on the clinic path outside. The vast room’s corners were dismal despite the chandelier, and the closer Dalton looked at his friend’s choice of books the less he liked them. It was not the balanced collection of a normal physician, biologist, or man of general culture. There were too many volumes on doubtful borderland themes; dark speculations and forbidden rituals of the Middle Ages, and strange exotic mysteries in alien alphabets both known and unknown.

The great notebook of observations on the table was unwholesome, too. The handwriting had a neurotic cast, and the spirit of the entries was far from reassuring. Long passages were inscribed in crabbed Greek characters, and as Dalton marshalled his linguistic memory for their translation he gave a sudden start, and wished his college struggles with Xenophon and Homer had been more conscientious. There was something wrong – something hideously wrong – here, and the governor sank limply into the chair by the table as he pored more and more closely over the doctor’s barbarous Greek. Then a sound came, startlingly near, and he jumped nervously at a hand laid sharply on his shoulder.

‘What, may I ask, is the cause of this intrusion? You might have stated your business to Surama.’

Clarendon was standing icily by the chair, the little gold syringe in one hand. He seemed very calm and rational, and Dalton fancied for a moment that Georgina must have exaggerated his condition. How, too, could a rusty scholar be absolutely sure about these Greek entries? The governor decided to be very cautious in his interview, and thanked the lucky chance which had placed a specious pretext in his coat pocket. He was very cool and assured as he rose to reply.

‘I didn’t think you’d care to have things dragged before a subordinate, but I thought you ought to see this article at once.’

He drew forth the magazine given him by Dr MacNeil and handed it to Clarendon.

‘On page 542 – you see the heading, “Black Fever Conquered by New Serum”. It’s by Dr Miller of Philadelphia – and he thinks he’s got ahead of you with your cure. They were discussing it at the club, and MacNeil thought the exposition very convincing. I, as a layman, couldn’t pretend to judge; but at all events I thought you oughtn’t to miss a chance to digest the thing while it’s fresh. If you’re busy, of course, I won’t disturb you—’

Clarendon cut in sharply.

‘I’m going to give my sister an hypodermic – she’s not quite well – but I’ll look at what that quack has to say when I get back. I know Miller – a damn sneak and incompetent – and I don’t believe he has the brains to steal my methods from the little he’s seen of them.’

Dalton suddenly felt a wave of intuition warning him that Georgina must not receive that intended dose. There was something sinister about it. From what she had said, Alfred must have been inordinately long preparing it, far longer than was needed for the dissolving of a morphine tablet. He decided to hold his host as long as possible, meanwhile testing his attitude in a more or less subtle way.

‘I’m sorry Georgina isn’t well. Are you sure that the injection will do her good? That it won’t do her any harm?’

Clarendon’s spasmodic start shewed that something had been struck home.

‘Do her harm?’ he cried. ’don’t be absurd! You know Georgina must be in the best of health – the very best, I say – in order to serve science as a Clarendon should serve it. She, at least, appreciates the fact that she is my sister. She deems no sacrifice too great in my service. She is a priestess of truth and discovery, as I am a priest.’

He paused in his shrill tirade, wild-eyed, and somewhat out of breath. Dalton could see that his attention had been momentarily shifted.

‘But let me see what this cursed quack has to say,’ he continued. ‘If he thinks his pseudo-medical rhetoric can take a real doctor in, he is even simpler than I thought!’

Clarendon nervously found the right page and began reading as he stood there clutching his syringe. Dalton wondered what the real facts were. MacNeil had assured him that the author was a pathologist of the highest standing, and that whatever errors the article might have, the mind behind it was powerful, erudite, and absolutely honourable and sincere.

Watching the doctor as he read, Dalton saw the thin, bearded face grow pale. The great eyes blazed, and the pages crackled in the tenser grip of the long, lean fingers. A perspiration broke out on the high, ivory-white forehead where the hair was already thinning, and the reader sank gaspingly into the chair his visitor had vacated as he kept on with his devouring of the text. Then came a wild scream as from a haunted beast, and Clarendon lurched forward on the table, his outflung arms sweeping books and paper before them as consciousness went dark like a wind-quenched candle-flame.

Dalton, springing to help his stricken friend, raised the slim form and tilted it back in the chair. Seeing the carafe on the floor near the lounge, he dashed some water into the twisted face, and was rewarded by seeing the large eyes slowly open. They were sane eyes now – deep and sad and unmistakably sane – and Dalton felt awed in the presence of a tragedy whose ultimate depth he could never hope or dare to plumb.

The golden hypodermic was still clutched in the lean left hand, and as Clarendon drew a deep, shuddering breath he unclosed his fingers and studied the glittering thing that rolled about on his palm. Then he spoke – slowly, and with the ineffable sadness of utter, absolute despair.

‘Thanks, Jimmy, I’m quite all right. But there’s much to be done. You asked me a while back if this shot of morphia would do Georgie any harm. I’m in a position now to tell you that it won’t.’

He turned a small screw in the syringe and laid a finger on the piston, at the same time pulling with his left hand at the skin of his own neck. Dalton cried out in alarm as a lightning motion of his right hand injected the contents of the cylinder into the ridge of distended flesh.

‘Good Lord, Al, what have you done?’

Clarendon smiled gently – a smile almost of peace and resignation, different indeed from the sardonic sneer of the past few weeks.

‘You ought to know, Jimmy, if you’ve still the judgement that made you a governor. You must have pieced together enough from my notes to realise that there’s nothing else to do. With your marks in Greek back at Columbia I guess you couldn’t have missed much. All I can say is that it’s true.

‘James, I don’t like to pass blame along, but it’s only right to tell you that Surama got me into this. I can’t tell you who or what he is, for I don’t fully know myself, and what I do know is stuff that no sane person ought to know; but I will say that I don’t consider him a human being in the fullest sense, and that I’m not sure whether or not he’s alive as we know life.

‘You think I’m talking nonsense. I wish I were, but the whole hideous mess is damnably real. I started out in life with a clean mind and purpose. I wanted to rid the world of fever. I tried and failed – and I wish to God I had been honest enough to say that I’d failed. Don’t let my old talk of science deceive you, James –
I found no antitoxin and was never even half on the track of one!

‘Don’t look so shaken up, old fellow! A veteran politician-fighter like you must have seen plenty of unmaskings before. I tell you, I never had even the start of a fever cure. But my studies had taken me into some queer places, and it was just my damned luck to listen to the stories of some still queerer people. James, if you ever wish any man well, tell him to keep clear of the ancient, hidden places of the earth. Old backwaters are dangerous – things are handed down there that don’t do healthy people any good. I talked too much with old priests and mystics, and got to hoping I might achieve things in dark ways that I couldn’t achieve in lawful ways.

‘I shan’t tell you just what I mean, for if I did I’d be as bad as the old priests that were the ruin of me. All I need say is that after what I’ve learned I shudder at the thought of the world and what it’s been through. The world is cursed old, James, and there have been whole chapters lived and closed before the dawn of our organic life and the geologic eras connected with it. It’s an awful thought – whole forgotten cycles of evolution with beings and races and wisdom and diseases – all lived through and gone before the first amoeba ever stirred in the tropic seas geology tells us about.

‘I said gone, but I didn’t quite mean that. It would have been better that way, but it wasn’t quite so. In places traditions have kept on – I can’t tell you how – and certain archaic life-forms have managed to struggle thinly down the aeons in hidden spots. There were cults, you know – bands of evil priests in lands now buried under the sea. Atlantis was the hotbed. That was a terrible place. If heaven is merciful, no one will ever drag up that horror from the deep.

‘It had a colony, though, that didn’t sink; and when you get too confidential with one of the Tuareg priests in Africa, he’s likely to tell you wild tales about it – tales that connect up with whispers you’ll hear among the mad lamas and flighty yak-drivers on the secret table-lands of Asia. I’d heard all the common tales and whispers when I came on the big one. What that was, you’ll never know – but it pertained to somebody or something that had come down from a blasphemously long time ago, and could be made to live again – or seem alive again – through certain processes that weren’t very clear to the man who told me.

‘Now, James, in spite of my confession about the fever, you know I’m not bad as a doctor. I plugged hard at medicine, and soaked up about as much as the next man – maybe a little more, because down there in the Hoggar country I did something no priest had ever been able to do. They led me blindfolded to a place that had been sealed up for generations – and I came back with Surama.

‘Easy, James! I know what you want to say. How does he know all he knows? – why does he speak English – or any other language, for that matter – without an accent? – why did he come away with me? – and all that. I can’t tell you altogether, but I can say that he takes in ideas and images and impressions with something besides his brain and senses. He had a use for me and my science. He told me things, and opened up vistas. He taught me to worship ancient, primordial, and unholy gods, and mapped out a road to a terrible goal which I can’t even hint to you. Don’t press me, James – it’s for the sake of your sanity and the world’s sanity!

‘The creature is beyond all bounds. He’s in league with the stars and all the forces of Nature. Don’t think I’m still crazy, James – I swear to you I’m not! I’ve had too many glimpses to doubt. He gave me new pleasures that were forms of his palaeogean worship, and the greatest of those was the black fever.

‘God, James! Haven’t you seen through the business by this time? Do you still believe the black fever came out of Tibet, and that I learned about it there? Use your brains, man! Look at Miller’s article here! He’s found a basic antitoxin that will end all fever within half a century, when other men learn how to modify it for the different forms. He’s cut the ground of my youth from under me – done what I’d have given my life to do – taken the wind out of all the honest sails I ever flung to the breeze of science! Do you wonder his article gave me a turn? Do you wonder it shocks me out of my madness back to the old dreams of my youth? Too late! Too late! But not too late to save others!

‘I guess I’m rambling a bit now, old man. You know – the hypodermic. I asked you why you didn’t tumble to the facts about black fever. How could you, though? Doesn’t Miller say he’s cured seven cases with his serum? A matter of diagnosis, James. He only thinks it is black fever. I can read between his lines. Here, old chap, on page 551, is the key to the whole thing. Read it again.