by Mike Ashley
The doctor suddenly gripped his friend’s arm. A creak had sounded on the stairs. In the tense silence both men fancied they could detect a soft, sliding scuffle in that direction. With uncontrollable horror Terry’s heart came up to his throat. In one panther bound the doctor reached the door and tore it open. Then he swore in baffled irritation.
Through the open door Terry could hear distinctly scurrying steps on the first landing. In sudden surge of horror at being left alone he leaped from his chair to follow his friend, and bumped into him at the door.
Dr. Muncing, cursing his luck in a most plebian manner, noted his expression and became immediately the scientist again.
“What’s this, what’s this? This won’t do. Scare leaves you vulnerable. Now let me psychoanalyze you and eliminate that. Sit down and get this; it’s quite simple and quite necessary before we start out chasing this thing. You feel afraid for two reasons. The first is psychological. Our forebears knew that certain aspects of the supernatural were genuinely fearsome. Unable to differentiate the superstition grew amongst the laity that all aspects were to be feared, just as most people fear all snakes, though only six per cent of them are poisonous. You have inherited both fear and superstition. Secondly, in this particular case, you sense the hostility of this thing and its potential power for destruction. Therefore, you are afraid.”
Under the doctor’s cold logic, his friend was able to regain at least a grip on his emotions. With a smile he said, “That’s pretty thin comfort when even you admit its power for destruction.”
“Potential, I said. Don’t forget, potential,” urged the doctor. “Its power is capable of becoming enormous. Up to the present it has not been able to absorb very much energy. It evaded us just now instead of attacking us, and we have shut off its source of supply. Remember, too, its manifestation of itself must be physical. It may claw your hair in the dark; perhaps push you over the banisters if it gets a chance; but it can’t sear your brain and blast your soul. It has drawn to itself sufficient physical energy to make itself heard; that means to be felt, and possibly to be seen. It has materialized; it cannot suddenly fade through walls and doors.”
“To be seen?” said Terry in awe-struck tones. “Good gosh, what does a tangible hate look like?”
The doctor nodded. “Well put, Jimmy; very well expressed. A tangible hate is just what this thing is. And since it is inherently a formless entity, a shape in the dark, manifesting itself by drawing upon human energy, it will probably look like some gross distortion of human form. Just malignant eyes, maybe, or clutching hands; or perhaps something more complete. Its object will be to skulk about the house seeking for an opening to absorb more energy to itself. Ours must be to rout it out.”
Mentally Terry was convinced. He could not fail to be, after that lucid exposition of exactly what they were up against. But physically the fine hair still rose on his spine. Shapeless things that could hate and could lurk in dark corners to trip one up on the stairs were sufficient reason for the very acme of human fear. However, he stood up. “I’m with you,” he said shortly. “Go ahead.”
The doctor held out his hand. “Stout fellow. I knew you would, of course; and I brought this along for you as being quite the best weapon for this sort of a job. A blackjack in hand is a strong psychological bracer, and it has the virtue of being iron.”
Terry took the weighty little thing with a feeling of vast security, which was instantly dispelled by the doctor’s next words.
“I suppose,” said Terry. “That on account of the iron the thing can’t approach one.”
“Don’t fool yourself,” said the other. “Iron is a deterrent. Not an absolute talisman in every case. We are going after this thing; we are inviting contact. Just as a savage dog may attack a man who is going after it with a club, so our desperate elemental, if it sees a chance, may—well, I don’t know what it can do yet. Stick close, that’s all.”
Together the two men went up the stairs and stood in the upper hall. Four bedrooms and a bathroom opened off this. Two of the rooms they knew to be occupied. The other doors stood similarly closed.
“We’ve got to try the rooms,” the doctor whispered. “It probably can, if necessary, open an unlocked door, though I doubt whether it would turn an iron key.”
Firmly, without hesitation, he opened one of the doors and stepped into the room. The doctor switched on the light. Nothing was to be seen, nothing heard, nothing felt.
“We’d sense it if it were here,” said the doctor as coolly as though hunting for nothing more tangible than an odour of escaping gas. “It must be in the other empty room. Come on.”
He threw the door of that room wide open and stood, shoulder-to-shoulder with Terry, on the threshold. But there was nothing; no sound; no sensation.
“Queer,” muttered the doctor. “It came up the stairs. It would hardly go into the bathroom, with an iron tub in it—though God knows, maybe cast iron molecules don’t repel like hand-wrought metal.”
The bathroom drew blank. The two men looked at each other, and now Terry was able to grin. This matter of hunting for a presence that evaded them was not nearly so fearsome as his imagination had conjured up. The doctor’s eyes narrowed to slits as he stood in thought.
“Another example,” he murmured, “of the many truths in the Bible about the occult. Face the devil and he will fly from you, eh? I wonder where the devil this devil can be?”
As though in immediate answer came the rasping sounds of a dry grating cough.
Instinctively both men’s heads flew round to face the sick man’s door. But that remained undisturbed; the patient seemed to be sleeping soundly. Suddenly the doctor gripped his friend’s arm and pointed—up to the ceiling.
“From the attic. See that trapdoor. It has taken on the cough with the vital energy it has been drawing from the sick man. I guess there’ll be no lights up there. I’ll go and get my flashlight. You stay here and guard the stairs. Then you can give me a boost up.”
The doctor was becoming more incredible every minute.
“You mean to say you propose to stick your head up through there?”
The doctor nodded soberly; his eyes were now black beads.
“It’s quite necessary. You see, we’ve got to chase this thing out of the house while it is still weak, and then protect all entrances. Then, if it cannot quickly establish a contact with some other sick and non-resistant source of energy, it must go back to where it came from. Without a constant replenishment of human energy it can’t keep up the human vibrations. That’s the importance of shutting it out while it is still too weak to break through anybody else’s resistance somewhere else. It’s quite simple, isn’t it? You sit tight and play cat over the mouse hole. I’ll be right up again.”
Cat-like himself, the doctor ran down the steps. Terry felt chilled despite the fact that the hall was well lighted and he was armed. But that black square up there—if any cover belonged over it, it had been removed. The hole gaped dark, forbidding; and somewhere beyond it in the misty gloom a formless thing coughed consumptively. Terry, gazing at the hole in fascinated terror, imagined for himself a sudden framing of baleful eyes, a reaching down of a long taloned claw.
It grew to a horror, staring at that black opening, as into an evil world beyond. The effort of concentration became intolerable. Terry felt that he could not for the life of him hold his stare; he had to relieve himself of that tension or he would scream. He felt that cry welling up in his throat and the chill rising of hair on his scalp. He let his eyes drop and took a long breath to recover the control that was slipping from him.
There came a sharp click from the direction of the electric switch, and the hall was in sudden blackness.
Terry stood frozen, the cry choked in his throat. He could not tell how long he remained transfixed. An age passed in motionless fear of he did not know what. What had turned off the lights?
In the blackness a board creaked with awful deliberation. Terry could not tell where
. His faculties refused to register. Only his wretched imagination—or was it his imagination?—conjured up a shadow, darker than the dark, poised on one grotesque foot like some monstrous misshapen carrion bird, watching him with a fell intentness. His pulse hammered at his temples for what seemed an eternity of horror. He computed time later by the fact that his eyes were becoming accustomed to the dim glow that came from the light downstairs.
Another board creaked, and now Terry felt his knees growing limp. But that was the doctor’s firm step on the lower stairs. Terry’s knees stiffened and he began to be able to breathe once more.
The shadow seemed to know that Dr. Muncing was returning, too. Terry was aware of a rush, of a dimly monstrous density of blackness that launched itself at him. He was hurled numbingly against the wall by a muffling air-cushion sort of impact. Helplessly dazed, smothered, he did not know how to resist, to defend himself. He was lost. And then the glutinous pressure recoiled, foiled. He could almost hear the baffled hate that withdrew from him and hurtled down the stairs.
His senses registered the fact that without his own volition he shouted, “Look out!” and that there was a commotion somewhere below. He heard a stamping of feet and a surge of wind as though a window had been blasted open; and the next thing was the doctor’s inquiry, “Are you hurt?” and the beam of a flashlight racing up the steps.
He was not hurt; miraculously, it seemed to him, for the annihilating malevolence of that formless creature had appeared to be a vast force. But the doctor dressed him down severely.
“You lost your nerve, in spite of all that I explained to you. You let it influence your mind to fear and so played right into its hands. You laid yourself open to attack as smoothly as though you were Mrs. Jarrett herself. But out of that very evil we can draw the good of exemplary proof.
“You were helpless; paralyzed. And yet the thing drew off. Why? Because you had your iron blackjack in your hand. If it had known you had that defence it would never have attacked you, or it would have influenced you to put the iron down first. Knowing now that you have it, it will not, in its present condition of weakness, attack you again. So stick that in your hat and don’t get panicky again. But we’ve got to keep after it. If we can keep it out of the house; if we can continue so to guard the sick man that the thing cannot draw any further energy from him its power to manifest itself must dwindle. We shall starve it out. And the more we can starve it, the less power will it have to break through the resistance of a new victim.”
“Come on, then,” said Terry.
“Good man,” approved the doctor. “Come ahead. It went through the living-room window; that was the only one open. But, why, I ask myself. Why did it go out? That was just what we wanted it to do. I wonder whether it is up to some devilish trick. The thing can think with a certain animal cunning. We must shut and lock the living-room window and go out at the door. What trick has that thing in store, I wonder? What damnable trick?”
“How are we going to find an abstract hate in this maze of shadows?” Terry wanted to know.
“It is more than abstract,” said the doctor seriously. “Having broken into our plane of existence, this thing has achieved, as you have already felt, a certain state of semi-materialization. A ponderable substance has formed round the nucleus of malignant intelligence. As long as it can draw upon human energy from its victim, that material substance will remain. In moving from place to place, it must make a certain amount of noise. And, drawing its physical energy from this particular sick man, it must cough as he does. In a good light, even in this bright moonlight, it will be, to a certain extent, visible.”
But no rustlings and scurryings fled before their flashlights amongst the ornamental evergreens; no furtive shadow flitted across moonlight patches; no sense of hate hung in the darkest corners.
“I hope to God it didn’t give us the slip and sneak in again before we got the entries fixed. But no, I’m sure it wasn’t in the house. I wish I could guess what tricks it’s up to.” The doctor was more worried than he cared to let his friend see. He was convinced that leaving the house had been a deliberate move on the thing’s part and he wished that he might fathom whatever cunning purpose lay back of that move.
All of a sudden the sound of footsteps impinged upon their ears; faint shuffling. Both men tensed to listen, and they could hear the steps coming nearer. The doctor shook his head.
“It’s just some countryman trudging home along the road. If he sees us with flashlights at this hour he’ll raise a howl of burglars, no doubt.”
The footsteps approached ploddingly behind the fence, one of those nine-foot high ornamental screens made of split chestnut saplings that are so prevalent around country houses. Presently the dark figure of the man—Terry was quite relieved to see that it was a man—passed before the open gate, and the footsteps trudged on behind the tall barrier.
Fifty feet, a hundred feet; the crunch of heavy nailed boots was growing fainter. Then something rustled amongst the bushes. Terry caught at the doctor’s sleeve. “There! My God! There again!”
A crouching something ran with incredible speed along this side of the fence after the unsuspecting footsteps of the other. In the patches of moonlight between black shadows it was easily distinguishable. It came abreast with the retreating footsteps and suddenly it jumped. Without preparation or take-off, apparently without effort, the swiftly scuttling thing shot itself into the air.
Both men saw a ragged-edged form, as that of an incredibly tall and thin man with an abnormally tiny head, clear the nine-foot fence with bony knees drawn high and attenuated ape arms flung wide; an opium eater’s nightmare silhouetted against the dim sky. And then it was gone.
In the instant that they stood rooted to the spot, a shriek of inarticulate terror rose from the road. There was a spurt of flying gravel, a mad plunging of racing footsteps, more shrieks, the last rising to the high-pitched falsetto of the acme of fear. Then a lurching fall and an awful silence.
“Good God!” The doctor was racing for the gate, Terry after him. A hundred feet down the road a dark mass huddled on the ground; there was not a sign of anything else. The misshapen shadow had vanished. The man on the ground rolled limp, giving vent to great gulping moans. The doctor lifted his shoulders against his own knee.
“Keep a look-out, Jimmy,” he warned. His deft hands were exploring for a hurt or wound, while his rapid fire of comments gave voice to his findings. “What damned luck! Still, I don’t see what it could have done to a sturdy lout like this. How could we have guarded against this sort of a mischance? Though it just couldn’t have crashed into this fellow’s vitality so suddenly; there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong, anyhow. I guess he’s more scared than hurt.”
The moaning hulk of a man squirmed and opened his eyes. Feeling himself in the grip of hands, he let out another fearful yell and struggled in a frenzy to escape.
“Easy, brother, easy,” the doctor said soothingly. “You’re all right. Get a hold of yourself.”
The man shuddered convulsively. Words babbled from his sagging lips. “It-it-its ha-hand! Oh, G—God—over my face. A h-hand like an eel—a dead ee-eel. Ee-ee!”
He went off into a high-pitched hysteria again.
There was a sound of windows opening up at the house and a confused murmur of anxious voices; then a hail.
“What is it? Who’s there? What’s the matter?”
“Lord help the fools!” The doctor dropped the man cold in the road and sprang across to the other side from where he could look over the high fence and see the square of patches of light from the windows high up on their little hill.
“Back!” he screamed. “Get back! For God’s sake, shut those windows!” He waved his hands and jumped down in an agony of apprehension. “What?” The fatuous query floated down to him. “What’s that you say?”
Another square of light suddenly sprang out of the looming mass, from the sick man’s room. Laboriously the window went up, and the sick man leane
d out.
“What?” he asked, and he coughed out into the night.
“God Almighty! Come on, Jimmy! Leave that fool; he’s only scared.” The doctor shouted and dashed off on the long sprint back to the gate and up the sloping shrubbery to the house that he had thought to leave so well guarded.
“That’s its trick,” he panted as he ran. “That’s why it came out. Please Providence we won’t come too late. But it’s got the start on us, and it can move ten times as fast.”
Together they burst through the front door, slammed it after them, and thundered up the stairs. The white, owlish faces of the Jarrett family gleamed palely at them from their door. The doctor cursed them for fools as he dashed past. He tore at the knob of the sick-room door.
The door did not budge.
Frantically he wrestled with it. It held desperately solid.
“Bolted from the inside!” The doctor screamed. “The fool must have done it himself. Open up in there. Quick! Open for your life.”
The door remained cold and dead. Only from inside the room came the familiar hacking cough. It came in a choking fit. And then Terry’s blood ebbed in a chill wave right down to his feet.
For there were two coughs. A ghastly chorus of rasping and retching in a hell’s paroxysm.
The doctor ran back the length of the hall. Pushing off from the further wall, he dashed across and crashed his big shoulders against the door. Like petty nails the bolt screws flew and he staggered in, clutching the sagging door for support.
The room was in heavy darkness. The doctor clawed wildly along the wall for the unfamiliar light switch. Terry, at his heels, felt the wave of malevolence that met them.
The sudden light revealed to their blinking eyes the sick man, limp, inert, lying where he had been hurled, half in and half out of the bed, twisted in a horrible paroxysm.
The window was open, as the wretched dupe had left it when he poked his foolish head out into the night to inquire about all the hubbub outside. Above the corner of the sill, hanging outside, was a horror that drew both men up short. An abnormally long angle of raggy elbow supported a smudgy, formless, yellow face of incredible evil that grinned malignant triumph out of an absurdly infantile head.
