The vampire nemesis and other weird stories of the China coast (13 page)

" Is that where the paradise comes in ? " I queried, laughing, " being sottishly drunk and knowing clearly that you are drunk ?"

Wilson shrugged his shoulders.

" What do they call it ? " I asked, after a pause.

" Kandasie. It is made, I believe, from the roots of a tree, solely by an old chief at Levuka, who, since the British Government has peremptorily stifled his appetite for eating his fellow-natives, consoles himself with paralysing them."

I looked at the drug again and sniffed it.

" How do they take it ? "

" I believe the conventional method is to crumble a few grains and allow it to dissolve on the tongue, swallowing a few mouthfuls of water after it."

" Poison ?" I asked again.

" No," he replied, " that is the curious thing about it. The natives swear that no quantity of it will kill; and I, personally, have been making experiments with very large doses on rabbits and dogs. An unusually large dose appears to prolong the period of catalepsy, but the subject wakes up apparently more refreshed than before he went under its influence.

"
It is a deeply-interesting drug, and I should

like " he was continuing, when a deep growl

from Cerberus under the table caused him hastily to drop the pilula into an empty ash-tray that stood near him on the mantelpiece and swing round in consternation, exclaiming—

" By Jove! I forgot all about your beauty of a cat, and brought my Gyp in with me!"

In the ensuing distraction of our frantic efforts to prevent Cerberus attacking and demolishing the little terrier the baleful drug was forgotten.

"I don't believe that brute is a cat at all!" exclaimed the doctor, when after infinite trouble he had succeeded in capturing the sorely-threatened Gyp and imprisoning him in his arms, while I thrust Cerberus unceremoniously out at the door.

" What is it, then ? " I inquired with a smile.

" Goodness knows! But I should think, judging by its size and ferocity, that there is more of the panther than the cat about it."

Wishing me a hasty " good night," he went out with his dog, leaving the pilula where in his agitation he had let it fall, and it was not until I was about to retire that I bethought me of it.

I had no mind to allow it to remain where it was, and run the possible risk of its falling into the hands of little May. Despite the doctor's assurances that it was in nowise a poison, it was an experiment I felt disinclined to see tried upon
my child; so I took the drug up to my bedroom with me.

I was taking a last cursory survey of it, before depositing it in safety in a drawer for the night, when a horrible, seemingly irresistible curiosity, demon-inspired, prompted me to court the experience of a new sensation.

I glanced through the open door into my wife's room; she was sleeping soundly, and with a fascination I did not attempt to combat, I examined the drug anew.

This was the turning-point in my life. Had I but thrust the vile temptation aside at that fateful moment, I should yet have been a prosperous man, happy in the love of my children, instead of the physical wreck, under the fiendish dominion of madmen, that I now am.

Deaf to the warning voice within, that cried out to me not to trifle with so potent a bondage, I crushed a few grains of powder into my palm and placed it, not without some trepidation, on my tongue. It dissolved with a sharp, acrid taste, and as I inhaled the pungent fumes generated in my mouth a violent fit of hiccoughs convulsed my frame, until I had hurriedly to seize the waterbottle from my wash-stand and swallow with avidity the major portion of the cooling liquid.

Then I lay down and waited calmly, yet curiously, for the drug to act.

Suddenly a fearful throbbing commenced in my
brain, growing louder and more distressing each moment, until it resembled the whirr of the wheels in a child's clockwork toy. I felt frightened and repentant, and strove to call for assistance, but my tongue clave to the roof of my mouth, and no sound but a horrible rattling issued from my throat. Frightful, racking pains shot through my body and limbs, traversing it in every direction, as though it would tear me asunder, and I groaned in anguish.

After a while the whirring of wheels in my giddy brain seemed to be growing fainter and more distant, as a cold, clammy sweat broke out over me and stood in beads upon my brow. " Could these be the pangs of approaching death ?" I asked myself in vague terror. The maddening whirr became slower and slower, then gradually subsided to a pulsating tic-tack, tic-tack, not unlike the same clockwork toy that has nearly run its course. I struggled to raise my hand to my face, but the frantic struggle I dreamed I was making existed but in my mind, for the muscles were rigid as iron bands, and not the fraction of an inch could I stir. The pulsing ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and I felt myself sinking down—down— down!

And now a great quietness fell upon me, and I lay calm and peaceful as a sleeping babe, my eyes wide open, and everything around me distinct and clear. But a marvellous change had come over the once familiar objects that surrounded me.
Rings of beautiful light, concentric, revolving, hovered in the air, and a soft, ruby iridescence diffused itself over everything around, while flames and jets of bright parti-coloured splendour played fitfully in and out among the ornaments of my dressing-table.

I lay watching the play of gorgeous colours in a trance of beatific delight impossible to describe. This was indeed the Empyrean, the region of pure fire, of which the old Greeks dreamed, but having not the secret of kandasie, failed to realise.

I quivered with intensity of delight, as my spirit leapt forth to meet the trailing vapours of brighthued glory that hovered around me. Never before had my eyes beheld or my mind conceived as possible, such exquisite harmony of colours, such rich blending of magnificent hues. Yet every object in the room was distinct. I could see, as I lay there in ecstatic enjoyment of the miraculous display, the multi-coloured curtains wavering to and fro in the fitful breeze. More, /
could think clearly and calmly
—
could reason !
But all was transformed, glorified, with the grandeur of tint the poet's brightest dream pictures as painted by the hand of the Creator on the clouds of paradise.

How long this aesthetic feast of colour lasted I know not; but I slowly and gradually sank from the sublime heights of Elysium, to which my soul had soared, into a restful doze, and when I stirred again my limbs were free.

But how sordidly cheerless the room looked after my brief flight through the Empyrean ! I lay with half-closed eyes, shivering with disgust and loathing. My first impulse was to fly again for refuge to the drug; life seemed not worth living on this sordid earth after the brief glimpse of God's Possible, snatched through the agency of kandasie. And here it was that the terrible, malignant power of the drug made itself felt. It was not merely the attraction of a few hours of divine mental elation, but a corresponding repulsion from all that before I had been able to tolerate, if not enjoy. It was the comparison of the tawdry, sober-hued earth with the bright-tinted vapours of ineffable glory, that made me long to fly again to the embrace of kandasie.

Need I say that ere a week was out I was completely, recklessly, under the charmed spell of the fiendish thing—that I was as firmly riveted to the seductive allurements of kandasie as ever was lover attracted to his divinity's side.

Soaring on my newly-acquired vision-wings only during the stilly hours of the night, I had thought that I could evade discovery indefinitely. But one night my wife came into my room to tell me of something that had slipped her memory during the evening, and found me lying stark and stiff, pulse and respiration reduced to its minimum. I was perfectly conscious of all that went on, and longed to be able to make some sign to assure my wife
that all was well, but even a slight movement of the eyes was denied me. I heard her exclamation of horror as she bent over me and tried, with dread in her face, to shake me gently into wakefulness. I heard her hasty summoning of the servants and the hurried directions to one to fetch Dr. Wilson. At this I raved in silent fury. Dr. Wilson would see at once what was the matter—that the fit my wife thought I had fallen into was nothing but the effects of kandasie. He would probably remember, too, that he had left the little globe of powder there when he departed in such haste, and I dreaded his knowing I was a victim to the thing.

Why had I not confided in my wife ? I asked myself wildly, as I lay there awaiting his arrival. I should have told her, and she would have understood, and so saved this humiliating exposure. Yet it was nothing to be ashamed of; it was not harmful, like opium or morphine.

But fortune favoured me. Dr. Wilson had been called away to an urgent case in the neighbouring Island of Kandavu, some sixty miles from Suva, and the boy had had to ride on to the only other medical man in the place, the prison doctor, who dwelt on the gaol premises at the far extremity of the bay.

By the time he arrived the effects of the dose had passed away, and I roughly told my wife to leave the matter in my hands, and not to mention a word about my symptoms. When the doctor
came, I passed the matter off lightly, as having been a fainting fit, which my wife in her solicitude had taken much too seriously.

The poor man went off, grumbling deeply at having been brought all that distance for nothing, while I—I felt relieved that the matter had passed off so easily. But confession was necessary, if I was to avoid a similar contingency in the future, so I reluctantly took my wife into my confidence. She was inexpressibly shocked at first, until I had assured her again and again of the utter harmlessness of the drug. Then as I convinced her, dilating on the entrancing visions the drug conjured up, she evinced a desire to try some herself; but this I peremptorily declined to allow, and my determined stand against her wishes helped me to realise that perhaps the drug was not so innocuous as I had tried to make myself believe.

Thus a year passed away. I had to send my Samoan boy periodically to Levuka, on the Island of Ovalau, a distance of thirty-eight miles, when the necessity arose of replenishing my stock of kandasie.

Cerberus meanwhile had grown into a magnificent albeit repulsive animal, but his gentleness to ourselves was extraordinary, and was the cause of frequent comment by our friends, who shrank from him in fear and disgust. He was now twice the size of the largest cat I have ever known, and was beginning to be a little troublesome, in that he had
got into the habit of now and again making a meal off the fowls belonging to the neighbouring natives; yet they stood far too much in dread of the sombre brute with the one saturnine eye, to do more than lodge a feeble plaint with us about his depredations.

About this time my house was gladdened by the birth of a son. Everything went well until the christening ceremony, when, as the minister was about to dip his hand into the font, my wife suddenly paled, and uttering a quick, half-sobbing cry, snatched the infant back to her breast.

There was a slight stir of astonishment among the onlookers, as the minister gently disengaged the babe from the arms of its trembling mother, but without further untoward incident the ceremony came to a close.

On my angrily asking my wife at the finish of the service the reason for her singular behaviour, she told me she could not bear the thought of her baby being baptised at the same font that I had desecrated by my mockery of christening Cerberus. Something, she said, had warned her as she stood there that it was wrong, that evil would come of it, harm to the child.

I laughed derisively at her childish superstition, but I had noticed that the animal had trotted behind us to the church, and crouching beneath an unoccupied pew, had been an interested spectator of the scene. At the time it had given me no
concern, for Cerberus had often followed me out of doors; but now a vague uneasiness, a dim sense of foreboding, that I could not at the time account for, settled upon me as I pondered. I look back on that time now from the ghastly clearness of after-knowledge, and wonder that I could not have divined the cause; but I put it down to a slight morbidness of fancy, brought about probably by the reaction of my master-drug, and the incident was all but forgotten.

My wife, however, from the time of our little son's birth, took a strange dislike to the cat that had once been such a favourite. Not that she ever alluded in my presence to the change in her feelings, I doubt if she even acknowledged it to herself; but once, when together we went up to take a loving look at the little stranger, and found Cerberus sitting on a chair close by, gazing appreciatively with his solitary eye at the cradle, my wife gave a startled little scream, and utterly forgetful for the moment of everything, rushed forward, and, seizing the gigantic cat, dragged him to the door and thrust him out. For a moment she stood panting, looking in wild alarm round the room, the next she had recovered herself, and was trying in evident confusion to laugh away her peculiar fright.

Cerberus she said, with a smile that trembled about the corners of her mouth, had looked so like an evil spirit as he sat there with that horrible
blind eye and one ear gone, that, womanlike, she had not stopped to reason.

And now I was transferred by the Colonial Office at home to Hong-Kong; but as to how long we stayed there or the incidents of that period of my life I confess my mind a blank.

I know that we brought Cerberus with us, though we had to come from Suva to Melbourne, thence to Sydney, and so to Hong-Kong. I know also that my wife begged me not to bring him with us, implored me to give the brute away; but she could advance no definite motive for her wish to be rid of him, only that she was afraid of him, so I laughed away her fears and Cerberus accompanied us.

I can remember also that we lived high up from the sea, so different from our former house that stood almost level with the waters of the little bay at Suva. Here we could look down on the harbour with its shipping, and the great steamers seemed like a child's discarded toys lying here and there on the blue floor.

Then we came to Shanghai.

Here again I strive earnestly, yet vainly, to recall why we so suddenly left Hong-Kong. I have a dim, haunting notion that it was in some way connected with my infatuation for kandasie, for I was now habitually fettered in the shackles of the drug. Sometimes I find myself trembling on the verge of recollection, and I pause, laying aside my pen;
but as my mind leaps forward to grasp the elusive memory, it recedes again into the black abyss of utter forgetfulness. I recollect, or dream that I recollect, seeing my gentle wife looking at me with saddened eyes in which lurked something akin to fear; and once, coming upon her unawares, I found her sobbing bitterly—why I could not tell, nor would she enlighten me. On finding herself thus discovered, she hastily dried away the tears, and with a tremulous little smile said " God would bring it all out right in the end." God ? Were He not powerless to meddle in things mundane, would He leave me here in the absolute power of maniacs, who will not even allow me to communicate by letter with my friends outside ?