The sun shone and a crisp wind blew bracingly over a new-washed world the next morning when Gordon Whitney’s housekeeper found the professor’s bedroom door locked and the inmate unresponsive to her knocks. In her growing concern she called certain faculty members who were crossing the campus, and together they finally broke down the bedroom door.
Whitney was quite dead, although an autopsy failed to establish any cause. He would have seemed asleep had it not been for that shocking expression of horrified despair—which, as Professor Turkoff privately observed afterwards, harmonized so strangely with the realization of a life’s dream.
The Scourge of B’Moth
Bertram Russell
1
The first inkling that I had of the gigantic abomination that was soon to smother the world with its saprophytic obscenity in 192-, was obtained almost by accident.
My friend Dr. Prendergast, a gentleman eminent in his own particular branch of medicine, which included all sorts of brain specializations, operations, trephining, and so on, called me personally by telephone from his own residence late one night.
It struck me as surprising that he should not have had his secretary or nurse call me during office hours. I was not in error when I thought his mission an urgent one.
“Randall,” he said to me, “I’ve never seen the like of this in all my years of experience, and I am pretty sure you never did in yours either.”
“A mental case?” I asked with quickening interest.
“Yes. And more. It’s got me almost beaten to a standstill. I confess I’m pretty nearly stumped. I’ve gone over him thoroughly—X-rayed him and so on—but still I can’t find any evidence whatsoever of organic disturbance.”
“Well—can’t it be a functional neurosis?” I asked in some surprise.
“If it is, I never saw another like it. The fellow seems to be actually possessed. He acts without knowing why he does so. I’ve given him a rough psychoanalysis, but it reveals nothing more than the repressions and inhibitions that every average person has. His unconscious contents show absolute ignorance of the awful obsession by which his waking hours are beset.”
“There must be a reason for it,” I said. “If a man has an obsession, there are unconscious associations to exorcise it with. It can only be the symbol for something else....”
“The symbol for something else. You’re right there. But if I can’t find out what this something else really is, and pretty soon at that, this patient is going to join his Master before long.”
“His Master?” I queried, surprised at what I thought to be a Biblical allusion by Prendergast.
“Yes. Whoever that is. He talks about nothing else. This Master represents the thing that is dominating him, stretching out its tentacles from the darkest depths of unfathomable abysses to strangle the desire to live within him. He says now that he is eager to die, and you don’t need me to tell you what that means in the neurotic.”
“I’ll come over immediately,” I said.
“German-American Hospital, ward 3, psychiatric,” he said giving me the final instructions.
I hurriedly donned my clothes—I had been reading Goethe in a dressing-gown before retiring—and unlocking the garage I started the coupe. Soon I was on my way to the hospital where my friend had arranged to meet me.
The night was exceptionally dark, and a thin, clammy drizzle had commenced to fall—not a cold rain, but a viscid, penetrating darkness like the breath of some Stygian fury. The car was quite closed, yet I felt the clammy thrill of it inside. I even noticed that the instrument board was covered with drops of fluid and the wheel became wet and unruly under my touch. I almost allowed it to slip out of my hands as the car rounded a sharp curve. I jammed the brakes on. The wheels skidded on the slithery ground. I had been just in time to prevent the coupe from careening over the edge, where a dark abyss fell away from the road as if a giant had scooped a track through the heart of the hills.
A cold perspiration broke out all over me. I could hardly drive. My hair tingled at the roots. For it had seemed to me at that moment that hands other than my own had wrenched that wheel from mine in a demonic lust of murderous intent. Try as I would, I could not throw off the thought that a nameless fetidity had me in its control at that moment, and was even now within the car bent upon my destruction.
Was I, a psychiatrist of years’ standing, versed in all the processes that produce disturbance in the human brain, skilled in treatment— was I falling headlong, powerless to help myself, into the depths? I fought the very suggestion, but to little avail. The dark night, the wild and mountainous nature of the country (where the hospital had been erected for the sake of quietness and seclusion) combined to produce a feeling of unknown forces, malignant in their fury toward man and the sons of man, that I could not dismiss.
But more than all was the nauseating, overpowering effect of that clammy fog, like a breath of evil that rode with me, enveloping me in its chill blast. I laughed aloud at the notion of a presence other than my own in the car, and the laugh, muffled by the turgid breath that surrounded me, echoed in weird accents from the rear of the car. My voice had sounded strange like the laugh of an actor who is not interested in his role. I even turned to the rear of the coupe, as if expecting to see the presence there, but my darting eyes revealed nothing.
“This must cease,” I told myself, as I turned on the heater. It may have been the comforting warmth produced, or it may have been an unconscious assurance that the laws of nature still continued to function—my turning the switch had proved this. I did not know what was the true cause, but as the heat within the car increased, my spirits warmed, too, and I found myself driving with my accustomed care, and utterly without the meaningless fears that had overwhelmed me so few minutes ago but so many ages since, as it seemed to me.
The air inside the car was clear now; the drops of moisture had disappeared from the instrument board, and my hand grasped the steering wheel with its accustomed firmness. It was becoming uncomfortably hot, and at last I switched off the heater. As the air cooled, my spirits cooled, too. I felt the same senseless dread stealing over me again, and I watched with intense anxiety for the reappearance of those drops of moisture on the dashboard. Seeming to materialize from nothingness, they came.
The air within the car thickened, and again caressed me with its voluptuous and sickly folds. As the lights of the hospital appeared upon the crest of a ridge ahead of me, I began to tell myself that I had to turn on the heater once more. But my will was not equal to the act. I drove on in a kind of dream, blithely careless of anything in the world. The steering wheel responded easily to my touch; it even seemed to spring from under my hand as I swerved around treacherous corners where chasms thousands of feet deep yawned below, missing the edge by a scant few inches.
I drove on, heedless, in the dense opacity. I could see nothing now. But the wheel seemed to have a magic of its own. I felt the car bumping and undulating like a roller coaster. My head crashed against the roof. The springs bent with an ominous crack. I felt the wheels slithering sideways as though someone were pulling them from their course, and finally, with a terrific crash, the coupe turned over and would have capsized completely if the pillars that marked the entrance to the hospital had not partly prevented it from falling.
Dr. Prendergast and two of his associates opened the door and dragged me out half-dazed into the night.
“What’s wrong, Randall?” said Prendergast anxiously.
I stood there, stupidly, hardly knowing what answer to make.
“We’ve been watching you for some time. We saw your lights five miles away. You’ve been driving like a man in a dream. Look!”
I turned, and saw the tracks of the car in the lawns before me. I had left the driveway and traveled across the hills and valleys of the landscape garden. A chill dread came over me. I could see the tracks of the car clear out into the road beyond. I could even see the headlights of another car traveling along the same road tha
t I had come— miles away. In the soft air there was no moisture; above, the stars twinkled along their age-old courses. The fog had lifted!
With a new fear clutching at my heart’s vitals, I spoke to them.
“The fog—the rain—it made it impossible for me to see. I couldn’t find the road half of the time. I never saw such a night!”
“Fog? Rain? There’s been no fog and no rain. Why, we could see your headlights for miles. The night is as clear as a crystal!”
“But there was fog, right up to a minute ago. The car was wet with it, I tell you.”
As I spoke, I reached my hand to the windshield, intending to prove my assertion. In amazement, I looked at it. There was no trace of moisture—none at all! I stooped to the grass, and buried my hand in it. There was no rain upon it. It was even a little dried up, and I could see it had not been watered for some time. Again I pierced the night. There was not a cloud in the air anywhere, not a bank of fog between the hospital and the city.
“What you need is a stimulant. Come inside, and I’ll give you one,” said Dr. Prendergast, taking me cautiously by the arm.
Fearful for my own sanity, I stumblingly entered the hospital. As I took one last look around, I thought I saw a thin wisp of sickly vapor curling around the green lawn before me, like a wraith of yellow venom, and while my distraught nerves tingled in every fiber, there came to me the muffled echo of a mocking laugh.
Half walking, half sliding, I was taken into the hospital.
2
“Feel better?” asked Dr. Prendergast, when I had gulped the stimulant that he had handed to me.
In the cheerful air of the doctor’s private office I felt my fears to be of the flimsiest. I even felt constrained to laugh aloud at them. But the memory of that ride was not so easily effaced. However, I made light of my experience, saying that I had had but little sleep, and night-driving did not agree with me. Dr. Prendergast gave me a curious look from his slanted eyes but said nothing.
We left the office, and taking the elevator, were soon in ward 3— the ward where the mental cases were confined. A nurse met us with a chart in her hands.
“How is the patient?” asked my colleague, with more than usual interest.
“Still delirious, Doctor,” answered the trim little nurse.
“We shall take a look at him,” he remarked, walking toward a cot in a far corner of the room. “There he is,” he added, to me.
Before us lay a pallid-looking figure. His black hair was tousled, as though he had been tearing at it with his fingers. His eyes were surrounded by deep, hollow circles that made him look like a grim precursor of death itself. He was talking inarticulately, and holding a disjointed conversation with some imaginary creature that he alone saw.
As I sat beside him, he burst into a frenzied laugh. Lifting his emaciated hand toward me, he pointed a skinny finger into my face.
“Ha! ha! Here’s another one to rob the Master. You came too late—the Master saw to that. Ha! ha!”
“Quiet yourself,” said Dr. Prendergast in a soothing voice. “You are going to get well, but you must not excite yourself in this fashion.”
“Going to get well? Oh no, I’m not—The Master saw to that. I’m going soon, very soon. I’m going to join the Master. Deep down— where he waits for the faithful. That’s where I’m going. Why should I want to live? Why should I wait around when there is work to be done?”
“What sort of work?” I inquired, hoping to relieve the compression within him by allowing him to talk.
“The work of the jungle. The work of the deep. That’s what must be done. The time approaches. Millions and millions will help. And I shall soon be there. Ha! ha! You came too late. The Master saw to that. On the storm he rides. His breath is the breath of the fog. In the rain, he comes to the earth. He stayed you tonight. Eh? Didn’t he?”
In spite of myself, I was troubled. Who was this Master who rode on the wings of the storm, and whose breath was the fog? I asked myself how this lunatic in his ravings knew of my experience that night. He was gasping for breath. His efforts had exerted him unduly, and apparently he was about to expire.
The nurse brought a glass of water, which he gulped greedily. “Water,” he said. “Oceans of it. That’s what the Master likes. That’s the way to reach him. Into the caves where the blue light flames it goes, down, down beneath the bodies of dead men, deep—deep. The Master! Ah! B’Moth! Master—I come!”
His head fell back upon the pillow, and with a rapt expression in his eyes he died. I stood perplexed. This could be no ordinary case of hallucination. The man had seemed, as Dr. Prendergast said, bewitched, possessed. I left the cot, in company with my friend.
Suddenly he clutched my arm feverishly. “Look,” he cried. “Look!”
I turned in the direction in which he was pointing. The glass of water was still clutched in the patient’s hand. The fluid glowed with a lambent bluish radiance. It flittered across the features of the dead man, which became greenish under its influence. His lips twisted into a snarl under the light, and the sharp fangs of his long canine teeth pricked through his closed mouth.
And the water in the glass was bubbling—bubbling as though it boiled; and there before my eyes the fluid slowly fell, until the glass was empty of all save the bluish glow that surrounded it, and not only it, but the bed, the linen, the dead man, and ourselves!
3
The pressure of my professional duties served to drive the matter from my attention for several days, but it was rudely brought to my mind in a manner as strange as can well be conceived.
I had been carelessly scanning the newspaper, when my eyes were arrested and riveted by a small and apparently unimportant notice that was sandwiched in between the account of a big alimony case and the raid upon some bootleggers. Had the editor known the full import of his copy, he would have blazoned the thing in block type, and put out a special edition of his sheet. I quote the notice verbatim:
ARICA, PERU, May 8—A strange case was brought to the attention of police here today. Alonzo Sigardus, a West Indian, was haled before Justice Cordero on a charge of attempted suicide.He was seen to dive into the ocean near Point Locasta by Captain Jenks, the lookout at the Marine Exchange station there.
Jenks says he rushed to the assistance of the man, thinking he had intended to go swimming and did not know of the treacherous undertow at the point. When he arrived, however, he saw at a glance that it was a case of attempted suicide, for Sigardus could not swim, and was merely floundering around helplessly in the depths.
Captain Jenks promptly dived into the water at the place known to sightseers as Devil’s Cauldron, and after a frantic struggle with the maelstrom, during which Sigardus did his best to drown the two of them, was able to rescue the man.
Instead of thanks, however, Sigardus struck Jenks brutally upon the face, crying: “The curse of B’Moth upon you! It was the call of the Master. What right have you to interfere? I went to join B’Moth, and now you have dragged me back again. When the time comes, you shall suffer.”
The incident has aroused wide-spread local interest, because it is said that the Devil’s Cauldron upon foggy days is the meeting-place of spirits of the deep. Legend has it that upon such days, and during the rainy season, the Monster of the Pool arises from the deep water to claim his own.
Obviously, the superstitious Sigardus thought he had been called by the spirit of the Cauldron. It is interesting to note that a thick haze commenced to overcloud the pool after Sigardus had been rescued. Until this time, the sun had been shining with great brilliance.
There is much excitement among the native population here, and talk is common that the rescue bodes no good. Serious disturbances have arisen in several inland villages, and police and military have united forces to protect the white population against whom the attacks seem chiefly to have been directed.
Apparently, the incident had only obtained recognition in the press because of the legends which were connected wit
h the Devil’s Cauldron, and which were thought to be of interest to the outside world; and because of the attempted uprisings. But to me, the insertion of that single and apparently incomplete word gave a sinister and terrible inflection to the whole paragraph.
Who, or what, was B’Moth? It must be the same “Master” to whom the dying man had appealed in the German-American Hospital. And there was no shadow of doubt that it was a duplication of the same occurrence, unconnected with it except by the subtle influence of B’Moth.
I felt my hair begin to tingle when I read the news item again and came to the note about the fog that overlay the pool after Sigardus had uttered his curse. This was too close a similarity to admit of any such explanation as mere coincidence. As a psychiatrist it interested me greatly, and I even began to feel in some obscure way that it was my duty to investigate the whole business. Perhaps (and far-fetched as the idea may seem, I thought of it in all seriousness)—perhaps the very sanity of the world was at stake.
As I laid the paper aside and prepared to drive to my office, I felt again the oppressive weight of that unspeakable thing that I was slowly coming to dread, so that I could not drive alone in fog or through a rainstorm (though I dared tell no one of this phobia). I felt—Good God, how I felt!—the weight of that pollution. I seemed to be drawn unresistingly into the maw of this corruption. I stood transfixed, my teeth chattering, unable to lift a hand, watching the place where I felt absolutely certain the thing was. And then into my jangled consciousness came the imperative ringing of the telephone bell.
Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos Page 23
