Donovan’s Brain

by Curt Siodmak

  When Chloe was fourteen, her mother died. To the girl’s surprise, her father took the loss hard. Death had intruded into Donovan’s kingdom and taken away one of his possessions without leave. In Donovan’s opinion a great injustice had been done him.

  For this selfishness Chloe hated him still more. In her eyes he had killed her mother. Chloe wanted revenge for the slow murder and she found a sure way of getting it—by shaming her father’s name.

  At fourteen she was having affairs with his servants, and cunningly she always saw to it that Donovan found out. Infuriated and hurt, he sent her to girls’ schools that were practically prisons, but she always found some way to escape.

  When she was sixteen, she married a wrestler, at eighteen a boxer, at nineteen her father’s chauffeur.

  By then she had conceived the fiendish idea of making herself look more like her mother. She dieted away twenty pounds, had her nose reshaped, and began to be the image of Katherine. She wanted to shock her father with this resemblance. She did not succeed.

  Donovan saw through his children’s schemes and, once having fathomed their intent, he thought of a counterstroke. The decision was accelerated by the doctor’s diagnosis of his incurable illness.

  He would disarm his children. He had done only one small thing in his life he regretted, betraying Roger Hinds. If he squared this, what cause could anyone have to hate him? His mind was so primitive that he never was aware of his everyday cruelties.

  Donovan considered himself one just man in a treacherous world.

  Covering a possible retreat, Donovan had been salting money away for years. He used Hinds’s name on this secret account, unconsciously troubled by his feeling of guilt. He liquidated his possessions and gave over his authority to his son. Nobody took it away from him!

  The next step would have been to make amends to Roger Hinds, who had been buried forty years.

  He was searching for Hinds’s relatives; he had found only a few. He had it in mind to present them with fortunes, since to him happiness and money were synonymous.

  When he found a Hinds in prison, accused of murder, he saw a big chance. Here was a life to be traded back for the one he had snuffed out.

  While he was on his way to Geraldine Hinds in Reno, the plane had crashed, and with it he was through playing at fate, for the time being.

  While Chloe and I talked, I fitted the pieces of the story together in my mind, made the connections, added missing parts and reasons for the indicated happenings. Obscurities which had baffled me before were cleared. I suddenly knew Horace Donovan better than if I had lived his life, and I was frightened.

  He had destroyed everything which opposed his will. Now that death had set up a barrier, his will surmounted it. He was stronger than death!

  I saw it all clearly—everything I needed to know for my experiment. The rest asked for only cold analysis, not empiric research.

  I must bury this brain ten feet underground and end its monstrous existence!

  “I want Cyril Hinds to die,” Chloe blurted out in a hoarse, furious whisper. “He must not go free! Oh no, my father must not have that triumph!”

  I smiled at her, put both my hands on hers, and prayed for freedom of thought and will for just this moment.

  “Only the things we desire happen to us,” I said. “And as we grow wiser, we can escape some of our instinctive destinies if we will. Don’t give that man the homage of your hatred! You have been sensitive to every temper of his. Be sensitive once to your own!”

  Chloe turned and looked at me as if she saw me for the first time. Her eyes mirrored a forgotten wish that had been lost in that long struggle. She had found a morbid delight in suffering; her forgotten wish was to find delight in joy.

  She stood at the crossroad where the right word would send her in the right direction and the wrong one into mental chaos.

  Bending forward to hold her gaze with all my will-power, I said: “Promise me to get away from here. To Rio, to Buenos Aires. Anywhere where people speak another language and do not talk about your father, only about you, yourself! You are important! Only you! Nobody but you!”

  My words seemed to clear away the hate and revengefulness. The expression on her pale face, which had been a mask of despair, grew softer. Her lips lost the hard, hurt look.

  “Let the pain of life teach you understanding,” I said. “And you will not hate life, but, in the joy of understanding, love it.”

  Chloe smiled, closed her eyes. Her body relaxed.

  I held her hand in mine until she fell asleep and her breathing grew easy.

  Then I returned to the hotel.

  “A gentleman is waiting to see you, sir,” the desk clerk said, and he pointed to Yocum, standing in a corner of the lobby.

  With a smirk on his thin face, Yocum walked toward me. Flashily dressed in a suit with wide padded shoulders, he wore patent-leather shoes and flourished an expensive gray felt hat with an enormously wide brim.

  “Hello, doc,” he breezed, and put out his hand in a jovial gesture.

  “What do you want?” I asked curtly. The smile on his face spread into a disarming grin.

  “Just wanted to show you how I’m getting along!”

  His voice had become stronger, for he had been feeding himself better, but the deep hollows in his cheeks timed the end of his days like an hour-glass. I did not give him more than a few months.

  “You ought to be in a sanitarium,” I said,

  Yocum shrugged his padded shoulders.

  “Well—maybe I will! But first I want a little fun. You know, it’s like having starved for a long time. I want to eat before I fast again.”

  He scrutinized me with narrowed eyes, appraising me as if I were a second-hand car.

  “You’re looking prosperous,” he said, satisfied.

  The visit had too obvious a purpose.

  I took him over to a corner and we sat down. A sudden inspiration flashed through my mind. I might find some use for him!

  Yocum crossed his legs carefully, not to crease the pants.

  Then he took from his breast pocket a photograph which had been yellowed by smoke. It was the picture of Donovan in the morgue.

  “Found it in the ashes of my house,” Yocum said casually, showing it and then tucking it away in his coat again.

  “What do you want me to do? Buy it?” I asked.

  “Don’t be unfair, doc,” he said arrogantly. “You haven’t paid for my house yet!”

  I got up without replying, and being a poor crook, he paled.

  “Look here, doc,” he said threateningly, “I can still sell this picture to Howard Donovan!”

  “I wish you would,” I replied, and there was so much indifference in my voice Yocum was scared.

  “I don’t follow,” he said, at a loss. “Only a few days ago you were glad to pay for it…”

  I sat down again. “I’m tired of you,” I said. “You act like an ass that doesn’t know when it has gorged itself. Go ahead and tell Donovan! Suppose they do go to Washington Junction and find the brain. What then? You are the one that will go to prison for blackmail!”

  “Oh no. Not me!” Yocum said swaggeringly. “You gave me that money willingly.”

  “Tell it to the judge and see if he believes you. By the way”—I stared at him to frighten him, and succeeded—“it would be a good idea to have you arrested and get my money back!”

  “The money?” he stammered. His face broke into small parts, held together only by the network of deep gray lines. “You can’t prove it!”

  “I still have your negatives,” I said.

  “You burned down my house!” He tried to attack me to get me off the offensive.

  “Can you prove it? Who will they believe—you or me? You’ve got a prison record already, haven’t you?”

  I was hitting in the dark, but I seemed to have struck.

  “Photographs!” he murmured. “They won’t convict anybody on that evidence.”

  “You’ll h
ave to tell where you got that money for your new suit, and the car you bought. How will you explain? The negatives and the brain in Washington Junction are the only proof!” I said slowly and weightily to make it sink into his consciousness.

  He took out the picture again with trembling hands.

  “All right, you win,” he said tonelessly, and tore it into little pieces. “Forget it, doc.”

  “Oh no, I won’t. You’ll hear from me!”

  I turned sharply and left him staring helplessly after me. When I turned again, he was gone.

  MAY 15

  For nearly five months I have discontinued recording these observations. From the moment that Yocum ran out of the Hotel Roosevelt, all my actions have not been my own. My will power was snuffed out like a candle.

  A man apparently dead can hear and see, still receive impressions in his mind, but is paralyzed in voice and motion. I was listening and looking on.

  To be declared dead while still alive must be the most horrible of all tortures, but there is peace to be found in knowing the worst. I did not know what my body, separated from my mind, was going to do!

  I was crying out for help, while my mouth said words I did not want to say and my hands did things I did not want done. My living brain was trapped.

  No message could be sent, no warning given; there was no drug in reach which could bring me respite, no suicide possible, no way of escape.

  Donovan’s brain dwelt, vampire-like in my body, and no one observed any change in me.

  Personality is partly the sum of recollections, and so the brain, remembering only its former existence, went on living its old life. That terse, pithy mind, its actions barbed with the iron of hate and disregard for human life, continued. I, incarcerated, looked on.

  I learned to be afraid of the light of day and of the stars of night. I felt I was going insane within the cell of my hermetically sealed existence.

  I tried to make a pact with God, if He would let me out of my prison. I had time to pray, and to ponder on my deeds. For even when I seemed asleep, terror kept me awake.

  We compute time in minutes and hours, days and years, and measure space in three dimensions, within the physical continuum.

  But Donovan’s mind existed outside our concrete boundaries. Though inseparable from space, it had a personal concept of time. It seemed to know the future in the same manner as we remember the past. It anticipated coming events, and counteracted them by methods I could not comprehend, for my thinking lacked an understanding of the fourth dimension. I was not aware of impending events.

  I am obliged now to identify the brain and my body in Donovan’s second existence, as the cerebrum is the seat of the personality and the body only its accidental form.

  From that moment on, an impotent spectator, I, Patrick Cory, can only call that freakish, monstrous entity which used my body by its real name: Warren Horace Donovan.

  So, a minute after Yocum had run away, Warren Horace Donovan walked out of the hotel, went to Ivar Street and into an office to rent a car. He hired a powerful sedan.

  The clerk asked to see his driver’s license, and for reasons not known to me until later, Donovan pretended to have left it at home, but he was willing to facilitate the transaction by depositing in cash any sum required.

  He signed the papers as Herb Yocum, Kirkwood Drive. If the clerk looked that up in the directory, he must have been satisfied.

  Donovan drove the car to a corner behind the hotel, left it there, and took a taxi to Fuller’s office. He was limping and a dull pain in his kidneys bothered him.

  He looked into the mirror in the taxi. His face was an unhealthy white with a tendency toward yellow. He showed all the indications of a nephritic degeneration of the kidneys. As a man whose leg has been amputated still is nagged by the corn on his missing toe, so Donovan transposed the same sensations he used to feel in his former body into mine.

  He went up to the lawyer’s office.

  After he had waited a few minutes, Fuller came in. His attitude toward Donovan was definitely hostile, but he tried to hide it under a business-like manner.

  Donovan followed him to the library, where they sat down.

  Fuller opened the conversation grimly. “I wish you would explain your strange behavior last night in Howard’s house. I don’t understand that kind of humor.”

  “I’m not asking for your opinion of any of my actions, Fuller,” Donovan replied acidly. “You’re paid to get Hinds out of prison, not to criticize my conduct!”

  Fuller’s face flushed, but he spoke in his pleasant conference voice: “Well, I’m not so sure if I want to take over this case at all. It’s hopeless. The man is a cold-blooded murderer. You’d better give it to somebody else.”

  Donovan grunted, got up, opened the small cupboard near the door. In it, connected to an electric circuit, was a switch. Donovan snapped it off and limped back to the table.

  Fuller watched, his features distorted. He sensed a more than natural intelligence behind Donovan’s strange behavior, but he could not define it.

  “Always careful, aren’t you?” Donovan said, and his voice was threatening. Fuller looked at him with veiled fear.

  “How did you know?” he began.

  “Never mind,” Donovan cut him short. “I don’t want my conversations recorded. You won’t walk out on me, either! Just remember the Ralston and Trueman case. We don’t need to fence with each other.” He used Fuller’s expression of the night before.

  Fuller paled as if he were going to faint. A hideous fear seemed to possess him.

  Donovan went on the sardonic determination: “Pulse tried to blackmail me. You’d better see that he comes down in his price. Tell him I want to talk to him. At once!”

  Fuller looked dazed. He did not dare fight back, picked up the telephone, and told the switchboard girl. He took his time talking. When he hung up he seemed to have himself in control again.

  “The district attorney is keeping back a surprise witness,” he said, and gave Donovan a quick glance of inquiry. “If he calls that one we’re in bad shape.”

  “Then don’t let him call that witness,” Donovan said in quiet anger.

  Fuller bent forward over the glass table, beads of sweat standing out over his forehead.

  “You can’t pervert justice,” he said in a low, desperate voice. “There are things you can’t do. You just can’t!”

  “But you can!” Donovan said cruelly. “I want Hinds freed.”

  He was a maniac with a fixed idea. No one in the world could have deviated Donovan from his course, but Fuller was not aware of that. He went on fighting.

  “What interest have you in that man? You’re not related to him. You never saw him before!”

  “It’s no business of yours,” Donovan said aloofly. “Just get him free!”

  “But this witness can’t be bought,” Fuller said in despair.

  “I’ll pay as much as he wants,” Donovan answered.

  “It’s a girl, only thirteen years old. I can’t approach her to take money for telling a lie! She would not understand.”

  The misery in Fuller’s voice was heart-rending.

  They sat quiet until Fuller continued, exasperated:

  “She is a little girl from San Francisco, who ran away from home to break into the movies. Hitch-hiked here and had no place to sleep. She was hiding in the entrance of a building when Hinds ran over the old woman. She saw him do it. She saw him stop and drive back in reverse. The old woman recognized him and cried out his name. ‘Cyril!’ she cried, and begged him to call a doctor. But Hinds backed up farther and ran over her face.”

  Fuller spoke as if that were evidence directed against Donovan.

  “And she did not go to the police?” Donovan said.

  She was afraid of being sent home,” Fuller answered, the lawyer again, his voice soft and pleading. “She lives at the Loma Street Y. W. C. A.”

  “Then get her parents out here. You can talk to them, can’t you?�
��

  “They are here,” Fuller said.

  “All right! Pay them whatever you want to take the girl across the state border. She must not be found for the next year. Then the district attorney will have no witness, and we are in the clear,” Donovan said. “A young girl who runs away from home is not a trustworthy witness anyway. She is hysterical and likely to imagine things.”

  “But she heard the old woman call him Cyril!” Fuller was still persistent.

  Donovan got up, impatient.

  “She read that in the papers! Must I tell you how to get elements of doubt into this? Am I the lawyer in the case? I see I am obliged to take things into my own hands.”

  He limped to the door. Fuller followed him.

  “See that the girl is taken back to her parents. You’re an idiot, Fuller. You’re slipping!”

  Donovan walked out.

  Fuller did not dare reply.

  I, mute witness of the scene, wanted to cry out. Fuller might hear me…But I had no mouth to make myself heard. I was nothing but a brain in a vessel.

  Pulse, who was just entering the waiting-room, strode over to Donovan and whispered with ponderous alertness: Hello, Dr. Cory. I was coming to see you at the hotel when Fuller phoned me.”

  Looking quickly at the lawyer from under his heavy eyelids, Pulse continued in his low voice: “I just saw the girl’s family….”

  “All right, let’s get going,” Donovan interrupted gruffly, and limped out of the room. “Come with me, Pulse.”

  The big man turned quickly, shocked by Donovan’s abruptness. He always expected to be treated with the same politeness he used to lubricate his affairs, but he ran after Donovan and caught up with him in the elevator.

  “Got a car with you?” Donovan asked.

  Pulse nodded, cowed into a submission which he could not explain.

  “Drive me to where that girl’s father is staying,” Donovan ordered when they had reached the car.

  Pulse squeezed his gross body behind the steering wheel.

  “The situation is very delicate,” he said warningly. “The man is a minister.”