The vampire nemesis and other weird stories of the China coast (12 page)

others' cries, and the odds reduced; and then

But it is not to tell of this, and so perhaps show them our hand, that I have purloined sheet after sheet of note-paper; for they allow me to write letters, though I am fully aware that the accurst hounds read them through and tear them up as they fall into their hands.

But a while ago I wrote a letter to the Prince of Wales, congratulating him on his recovery from a severe illness, and they told me they would post it.

Oh, they were cunning, those madmen, as madmen ever are! But I was more cunning than they, and outwitted them at their own game; for I watched and saw them read the letter to the end, then with a smile of devilish triumph tear it to bits and throw it away.

And when they told me they had posted it and I should have a reply in a few weeks, they thought that I believed them. But I was laughing slyly to myself, for /
knew.

And this is the way they treat private correspondence with one's personal friends! Is this not proof enough, if proof were needed, that they are insane ?

Even now, as I pen these lines, I can see them watching me with a fiendish leer, thinking I see them not; for when I look up they hastily turn their eyes away, trying to look unconcerned. And I know what they are waiting for; they are waiting
greedily for me to finish my letter, that they may find a moment's hellish amusement in its perusal ere they burn it.

But they will be disappointed, and I gloat ove their disappointment. Cunning as they are, they will be outwitted once again ; for while they wait, with their smirking offers to post my letter, I quietly conceal the old sheet and commence a new, until I can see them wonder impatiently when it will be concluded.

Oh, the cunning of the maniacs is deep, but they are no match for
me !

So they leer and watch and wait, while I go on calmly writing; for it is no mere letter I am indicting, but the relation of the events of a night so wildly horrible that I doubt the power of mortal language to express its profundity of horror.

Were I mad, as these raving lunatics grinning so derisively around me pretend, would I not have ample excuse for any mental aberration I might show ?

But you shall hear my story and decide for yourself.

Some day, when we have succeeded in overpowering these maniacs and putting them under the restraint that should be their portion, and which with a fiendish refinement of cruelty they now inflict upon us, I may have the opportunity of placing these frightful facts before the world. Till then they must remain the gruesome possession of
him into whose hands these sheets may chance to fall.

It is many months or years ago—how many I cannot now say—that I was living contentedly with my wife and little baby-girl at Suva, the chief town of Viti-Levou, in the Fiji Islands. I had business in the law courts there; I was—I was— I cannot now remember what position I held. It is strange how unretentive my memory has become on some points, how clear, terribly, agonisingly clear on others.

I can remember that our beautiful house stood far out on the road that, passing through the town, skirts the shores of the bay and runs round the point, still beside the seashore, until it ends abruptly opposite to the two outlying islands that are used as a quarantine station for the Indian coolie immigrants. There were no other houses near us but one; that one belonged to a Doctor Wilson, a medical missionary connected with the London Mission. The next building was the little church, newly erected, which stood at the top of a steep hill leading up from the road beside the beach inland.

The first event connected with that epoch of horror, that will close only when the last fluttering breath has fled from my tortured body, was the finding of a little kitten.

The proprietor of the Pier Hotel and myself were strolling in the cool of the evening on the
jetty which stands almost opposite his establishment, and at which the steamers used to load fruit for the Australian mainland, when we heard a pitiful mewing coming from the vicinity of a crate of bananas that had arrived too late for shipment by the outgoing steamer, and had been left on the wharf for the night.

We both crossed to the spot, and shouldering aside the crate, disclosed a little kitten—if it was a kitten, and not a fiend in feline form—crouching in terror at our feet. It had evidently strayed ashore from the Union Company's steamer that had been lying there that day, and had been forgotten in the hurry of departure.

The loneliness and helplessness of the poor little thing appealed to me, so I told my companion of my intention of taking it home and caring for it. Picking it up in my arms, we turned and walked home, soothing the fears of the terrified little thing as we went.

And here, while cursing the devil-inspired impulse that prompted me to take the brute beneath our roof, let me pause to note a peculiarity in its appearance that at the time struck in my mind a note of ominous warning—a warning that, disregarded, has haunted my waking moments and been with me in my dreams ever since.

The creature was obviously quite young, yet of a remarkable size, with a head as large as that of a full-grown cat. But it was its colour, or rather the
absolute negation of colour, that struck me with vague, superstitious uneasiness as I raised it in my arms. It had been intended by Nature to be a black cat, or whatever animal it was ; but instead of the glossy, lustrous coat one usually associates with such animals, this one's fur was a dead, dull black, without one glint of lustre. Black as soot, or the depths of the Plutonian night, with never a gleam of reflected sunlight, it absorbed the light that fell on it as in after years it absorbed the joy and sunlight from out my life. Nor was there a white hair about it to relieve the intense blackness of its body, while from out its head shone two large malignant green eyes, the iris of which, without any visible variation in the intensity of the light, expanded and contracted as it looked at you.

But it was its blackness—its horrible, sombre blackness—that in the first moment of our acquaintance almost repelled me. However, I felt compassion for its loneliness, and so in an evil moment I brought the kitten home.

My wife went into raptures of delight over the magnificent promise of the creature.

" Why," she cried, clapping her hands in childish glee, " it has a head big enough for three kittens! "

" Perhaps it is three heads rolled into one and covered with one skin," I replied with a fanciful smile.

My wife knitted her brows in thought and drummed impatiently on the table with her fingers.

"What," she asked at last, "was the name of that three-headed monster of olden times?"

" Cerberus," suggested I, " Pluto's famous hound ? " Then, " The very thing ! " I cried, well pleased with the idea, " we will call him Cerberus!"

"But Cerberus was a dog!" remonstrated my wife.

" No matter," I answered cheerfully, " he is black enough to atone for his feline descent."

So Cerberus he was called; and never surely did hell-hound more deserve to be posted for all eternity at the gates of Hades than did this monster.

I have said that our home stood just beyond the turning that led up to the church, which, together with the minister's house, were then the only buildings on that half-formed road. As was our frequent custom, my wife proposed that evening, after we had dined, that we should stroll up the hill and pay the parson a visit. His wife and she were close friends, and it was my habit to smoke a pipe with the parson, while his lady and mine discussed household matters.

Nothing would satisfy my wife this evening but that we must take Cerberus with us to be shown round, and we set out with our newly-acquired pet in my arms.

But neither the minister nor his wife were in the house; so thinking we might find them in the church next door, where a light glimmered, and
where we knew, it being a new edifice, they were wont to spend their evenings in the erection of the draperies, we crossed the little garden and went in. The tiny church, however, was as deserted as the house we had just left; as we walked through, no trace could we find of the truant pair we sought.

There had been a christening there during the day, and the font still stood with its sanctified water before me. What fiend of sacrilege urged me to it, I know not, but while my wife's back was turned I stepped to the font, and, dipping my hand in the sacred liquid, I liberally besprinkled the kitten I held, pronouncing as I did so, with hilarious profanity, the formula of baptism.

My wife, attracted by the kitten's vigorous protest, turned toward me, and with a look of consternation on her face, snatched the struggling little beast from my arms, exclaiming as she did so —

" Oh, Stanley, how can you be so wicked! "

But I laughed her fears lightly aside.

" It will give him a greater chance of growing up a good and a moral cat."

The entrance of the minister and his spouse put a stop to further discussion as to the rights of it; so leaving Cerberus to the ladies, who had already commenced a detailed survey of the trappings, we men retired to the house for a smoke and a chat.

Six months only had passed since our acquisition
of Cerberus, and he had grown into a magnificent cat. Already larger than any of the neighbouring torn cats he developed a fierceness that became known at all the feline conventions of the district, until very few gallant knights of the roof cared to court a dispute with him over a lady cat's favours. Nor was it only with antagonists of his own breed that he came to blows. He attacked dogs of any size or kind with a boldness and ferocity that in most cases caused the dog to remember that " he who fights and runs away will live to fight another day." In one or two of these encounters Cerberus got badly mauled, one in particular, in which a large bulldog was the participant, resulting in grave injury to our pet. He sent the bulldog away howling and blinded, one eye hanging by its tendons to the socket and the other terribly mutilated, but not before the dog had seized his head, and, as his teeth grazed down the skull, laid open the scalp from behind one ear to the vicinity of the opposite eye. The dog also succeeded in grasping with his teeth the cat's ear, the whole cartilage of which was torn away at the base of the skull, leaving the oral orifice gaping and unprotected. Cerberus, with his dead-black coat still without a particle of gloss, was now no handsome object, and he grew positively repulsive when one of his eyes became diseased and rotted away. The whole eye changed to nothing but a protuberant ball of white fat, in the middle of which, where the pupil might have
been, but slightly higher, was a splotch of vivid red with jagged edges, that gave the sightless orb the appearance of looking lugubriously up to heaven.

Visitors who saw him for the first time, positively shuddered at the repulsively demoniacal aspect of the brute with the livid, hairless scar across his head, one ear torn completely away, and that horrible, sightless eye, with its blood-red centre on the white ground, that seemed always to be glaring up into one's face. Add to this the lustreless intensity of his black coat, and one need feel no surprise that strangers avoided him. Yet to us he was gentleness itself and sagacious to an astonishing degree. He attended me wherever I went about the house, and on several occasions, when walking along the lonely road that led round the point, I was astonished to find Cerberus trotting contentedly at my heels. He had become much too well known by this time to have the slightest fear of molestation from passing dogs, while the Kanakas looked upon his hideous form with a superstitious dread that sent them scuttling across to the other side of the road when it became necessary to pass him.

Cerberus shared this affection for me with our little daughter, whom he would allow to pull his tail or box his ears with impunity, a liberty he would grant to no one else. Nor could anyone else approach him, as little May did, when he was eating. The Samoan servants could not pass within six feet of him at such times without
eliciting an ominous growl, and an erection of the hair on his neck, that boded ill to him who should dare to interfere with his repast. The child, on the other hand, he permitted to crawl up to him and actually to drag the bone that he was gnawing from between his claws without the faintest protest, while he waited, contentedly licking his lips, until such time as she should choose to restore it.

And now occurred another episode, trivial in itself, but which was destined to have a terrible influence for evil on my after life.

Doctor Wilson, of the London Mission, had just returned from his monthly medical tour of the principal islands that formed the inhabited portion of the Fijian Group, in the magnificent mission steam yacht the
John Williams
(going his morning rounds in his carriage, as he jocularly called it), and had come round to me for a smoke and to hear what had been going on in his absenee.

We were standing by the fireplace, our elbows on the mantel—for though it is never cool enough at Suva to warrant a fire, my wife had, when our house was being built, insisted on having fireplaces made in the rooms. " It makes them look so much more homelike," she had said. Even had we wanted to light a fire in the grate, it would have been an impossibility, for the chimneys were mere dummies, and did not pierce the roof. We were standing, I said, with elbows on the mantelpiece and backs to the grate, as though actually enjoying
the blaze, when the doctor drew from his waistcoat pocket something wrapped up in paper and handed it to me, asking—

" By the way, have you ever seen this stuff before ?"

I unwrapped the paper and looked at it. It was a small globule of compressed greyish-brown powder, little larger than a pea, with a peculiarly pungent odour.

"What is it?" I asked suspiciously, as I fingered and smelt it, " some of your beastly physic ? "

"No!" Wilson's style grew didactic. "That pilula is five moderately large doses of a narcotic drug which the natives claim holds the key to a temporary glimpse of paradise."

I laughed derisively.

" They all claim that charm," I sneered sceptically, "opium, bhang, haschish; they are all the same—all keys that fit the gates of paradise; and all are at best but ill-fitting skeleton keys, that draw back the bolt for an instant and irreparably injure the lock for ever after."

" Nevertheless, this drug is rather peculiar," said Doctor Wilson, with scientific enthusiasm, "in that it acts, so far as I can ascertain, directly on the cerebellum, paralysing all motion, while the cerebrum, the seat of the sensations and volition, is invigorated, and stimulated to greater activity."

" The consequence is ?" I prompted

" The consequence is, that while the thinking
and feeling part of the brain is unusually clear, the part that controls the motions of the muscles is utterly incapable of performing its functions, and the subject lies there, so to speak, dead drunk, so far as his body is concerned, but unusually sober in mind."