Eldritch Tales (48 page)

‘You see, don’t you? The fever cases
from the Pacific Coast
didn’t respond to his serum. They puzzled him. They didn’t even seem like any true fever he knew. Well, those were
my
cases! Those were the
real
black fever cases! And there can’t ever be an antitoxin on earth that’ll cure black fever!

‘How do I know?
Because black fever isn’t of this earth!
It’s from
somewhere else
, James – and Surama alone knows where, because he brought it here. He
brought it and I spread it!
That’s the secret, James! That’s all I wanted the appointment for – that’s all I ever did –
just spread the fever that I carried in this gold syringe and in the deadlier finger-ring-pump-syringe you see on my index finger!
Science? A blind! I wanted to kill, and kill, and kill! A single pressure on my finger, and the black fever was inoculated. I wanted to see living things writhe and squirm, scream and froth at the mouth. A single pressure of the pump-syringe and I could watch them as they died, and I couldn’t live or think unless I had plenty to watch. That’s why I jabbed everything in sight with the accursed hollow needle. Animals, criminals, children, servants – and the next would have been—’

Clarendon’s voice broke, and he crumpled up perceptibly in his chair.

‘That – that, James – was – my life. Surama made it so – he taught me, and kept me at it till I couldn’t stop. Then – then it got too much
even for him
. He tried to check me. Fancy –
he
trying to check anybody in that line! But now I’ve got my last specimen. That is my last test. Good subject, James – I’m healthy – devilish healthy. Deuced ironic, though – the madness has gone now, so there won’t be any fun watching the agony! Can’t be – can’t—’

A violent shiver of fever racked the doctor, and Dalton mourned amidst his horror-stupefaction that he could give no grief. How much of Alfred’s story was sheer nonsense, and how much nightmare truth he could not say; but in any case he felt that the man was a victim rather than a criminal, and above all, he was a boyhood comrade and Georgina’s brother. Thoughts of the old days came back kaleidoscopically. ‘Little Alf’ – the yard at Phillips Exeter – the quadrangle at Columbia – the fight with Tom Cortland when he saved Alf from a pommelling . . .

He helped Clarendon to the lounge and asked gently what he could do. There was nothing. Alfred could only whisper now, but he asked forgiveness for all his offences, and commended his sister to the care of his friend.

‘You – you’ll – make her happy,’ he gasped. ‘She deserves it. Martyr – to – a myth! Make it up to her, James. Don’t – let – her – know – more – than she has to!’

His voice trailed off in a mumble, and he fell into a stupor. Dalton rang the bell, but Margarita had gone to bed, so he called up the stairs for Georgina. She was firm of step, but very pale. Alfred’s scream had tried her sorely, but she had trusted James. She trusted him still as he shewed her the unconscious form on the lounge and asked her to go back to her room and rest, no matter what sounds she might hear. He did not wish her to witness the awful spectacle of delirium certain to come, but bade her kiss her brother a final farewell as he lay there calm and still, very like the delicate boy he had once been. So she left him – the strange, moonstruck, star-reading genius she had mothered so long – and the picture she carried away was a very merciful one.

Dalton must bear to his grave a sterner picture. His fears of delirium were not vain, and all through the black midnight hours his giant strength restrained the frenzied contortions of the mad sufferer. What he heard from those swollen, blackening lips he will never repeat. He has never been quite the same man since, and he knows that no one who hears such things can ever be wholly as he was before. So, for the world’s good, he dares not speak, and he thanks God that his layman’s ignorance of certain subjects makes many of the revelations cryptic and meaningless to him.

Toward morning Clarendon suddenly woke to a sane consciousness and began to speak in a firm voice.

‘James, I didn’t tell you what must be done – about everything. Blot out these entries in Greek and send my notebook to Dr Miller. All my other notes, too, that you’ll find in the files. He’s the big authority today – his article proves it. Your friend at the club was right.

‘But everything in the clinic must go.
Everything without exception
,
dead or alive or
–
otherwise
. All the plagues of hell are in those bottles on the shelves. Burn them – burn it all – if one thing escapes, Surama will spread black death throughout the world.
And above all burn Surama!
That – that
thing
– must not breathe the wholesome air of heaven. You know now – what I told you – you know why such an entity can’t be allowed on earth. It won’t be murder – Surama isn’t human – if you’re as pious as you used to be, James, I shan’t have to urge you. Remember the old text – “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” – or something of the sort.

‘
Burn him
,
James!
Don’t let him chuckle again over the torture of mortal flesh! I say,
burn him
– the Nemesis of Flame – that’s all that can reach him, James, unless you can catch him asleep and drive a stake through his heart . . .
Kill him
–
extirpate him
–
cleanse the decent universe of its primal taint
–
the taint I recalled from its age-long sleep
. . .’

The doctor had risen on his elbow, and his voice was a piercing shriek toward the last. The effort was too much, however, and he lapsed very suddenly into a deep, tranquil coma. Dalton, himself fearless of fever, since he knew the dread germ to be noncontagious, composed Alfred’s arms and legs on the lounge and threw a light afghan over the fragile form. After all, mightn’t much of this horror be exaggeration and delirium? Mightn’t old Doc MacNeil pull him through on a long chance? The governor strove to keep awake, and walked briskly up and down the room, but his energies had been taxed too deeply for such measures. A second’s rest in the chair by the table took matters out of his hands, and he was presently sleeping soundly despite his best intentions.

Dalton started up as a fierce light shone in his eyes, and for a moment he thought the dawn had come. But it was not the dawn, and as he rubbed his heavy lids he saw that it was the glare of the burning clinic in the yard, whose stout planks flamed and roared and crackled heavenward in the most stupendous holocaust he had ever seen. It was indeed the ‘Nemesis of Flame’ that Clarendon had wished, and Dalton felt that some strange combustibles must be involved in a blaze so much wilder than anything normal pine or redwood could afford. He glanced alarmedly at the lounge, but Alfred was not there. Starting up, he went to call Georgina, but met her in the hall, roused as he was by the mountain of living fire.

‘The clinic’s burning down!’ she cried. ‘How is Al now?’

‘He’s disappeared – disappeared while I dropped asleep!’ replied Dalton, reaching out a steadying arm to the form which faintness had begun to sway.

Gently leading her upstairs toward her room, he promised to search at once for Alfred, but Georgina slowly shook her head as the flames from outside cast a weird glow through the window on the landing.

‘He must be dead, James – he could never live, sane and knowing what he did. I heard him quarrelling with Surama, and know that awful things were going on. He is my brother, but – it is best as it is.’

Her voice had sunk to a whisper.

Suddenly through the open window came the sound of a deep, hideous chuckle, and the flames of the burning clinic took fresh contours till they half resembled some nameless, Cyclopean creatures of nightmare. James and Georgina paused hesitant, and peered out breathlessly through the landing window. Then from the sky came a thunderous peal, as a forked bolt of lightning shot down with terrible directness into the very midst of the blazing ruin. The deep chuckle ceased, and in its place came a frantic, ululant yelp as of a thousand ghouls and werewolves in torment. It died away with long, reverberant echoes, and slowly the flames resumed their normal shape.

The watchers did not move, but waited till the pillar of fire had shrunk to a smouldering glow. They were glad of a half-rusticity which had kept the firemen from trooping out, and of the wall that excluded the curious. What had happened was not for vulgar eyes – it involved too much of the universe’s inner secrets for that.

In the pale dawn, James spoke softly to Georgina, who could do no more than put her head on his breast and sob.

‘Sweetheart, I think he has atoned. He must have set the fire, you know, while I was asleep. He told me it ought to be burned – the clinic, and everything in it, Surama, too. It was the only way to save the world from the unknown horrors he had loosed upon it. He knew, and he did what was best.

‘He was a great man, Georgie. Let’s never forget that. We must always be proud of him, for he started out to help mankind, and was titanic even in his sins. I’ll tell you more sometime. What he did, be it good or evil, was what no man ever did before. He was the first and last to break through certain veils, and even Apollonius of Tyana takes second place beside him. But we mustn’t talk about that. We must remember him only as the Little Alf we knew – as the boy who wanted to master medicine and conquer fever.’

In the afternoon the leisurely firemen overhauled the ruins and found two skeletons with bits of blackened flesh adhering – only two, thanks to the undisturbed lime-pits. One was of a man; the other is still a subject of debate among the biologists of the coast. It was not exactly an ape’s or a saurian’s skeleton, but it had disturbing suggestions of lines of evolution of which palaeontology has revealed no trace. The charred skull, oddly enough, was very human, and reminded people of Surama; but the rest of the bones were beyond conjecture. Only well-cut clothing could have made such a body look like a man.

But the human bones were Clarendon’s. No one disputed this, and the world at large still mourns the untimely death of the greatest doctor of his age; the bacteriologist whose universal fever serum would have far eclipsed Dr Miller’s kindred antitoxin had he lived to bring it to perfection. Much of Miller’s late success, indeed, is credited to the notes bequeathed him by the hapless victim of the flames. Of the old rivalry and hatred almost none survived, and even Dr Wilfred Jones has been known to boast of his association with the vanished leader.

James Dalton and his wife Georgina have always preserved a reticence which modesty and family grief might well account for. They published certain notes as a tribute to the great man’s memory, but have never confirmed or contradicted either the popular estimate or the rare hints of marvels that a very few keen thinkers have been known to whisper. It was very subtly and slowly that the facts filtered out. Dalton probably gave Dr MacNeil an inkling of the truth, and that good soul had not many secrets from his son.

The Daltons have led, on the whole, a very happy life; for their cloud of terror lies far in the background, and a strong mutual love has kept the world fresh for them. But there are things which disturb them oddly – little things, of which one would scarcely ever think of complaining. They cannot bear persons who are lean or deep-voiced beyond certain limits, and Georgina turns pale at the sound of any guttural chuckling. Senator Dalton has a mixed horror of occultism, travel, hypodermics, and strange alphabets which most find hard to unify, and there are still those who blame him for the vast proportion of the doctor’s library that he destroyed with such painstaking completeness.

MacNeil, though, seemed to realise. He was a simple man, and he said a prayer as the last of Alfred Clarendon’s strange books crumbled to ashes. Nor would anyone who had peered understandingly within those books wish a word of that prayer unsaid.

THE WOOD