The vampire nemesis and other weird stories of the China coast

by Dolly

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 ?

  At Shanghai we took up our residence in a small flat in Grange Road, and here for a time life ran smoothly, for I was freed somehow from my irksome duties at the Courts, and I never went to the office any more.

  Yet one haunting dread I had, that my kandasie, my precious drug, would run out, and that I would be unable to obtain more. I had brought what seemed an ample supply with me on leaving Fiji, but as my system became slowly inured to its action, I found myself with dismay compelled to consume it in ever-increasing doses before the languorous sensation of beatitude would creep over my spirit. Though physically well enough, mentally I was in a state of constant rebellion at the tawdry, cold cheerlessness of my surroundings, after the glorious brightness of my visions; finding myself eagerly looking forward to the time when I might lie down to the enjoyment of the entrancing bondage that chained me; ever less able to resist the temptation to advance the hour of my temporary release from dull earth by a few minutes at first, then by half an hour, latterly by leaps of an hour at a time.

  And now I come to the part of my history that is stamped upon my brain, every little act of it, in letters of fire, more brilliantly inexpungable than the glowing incandescence of the dream-fires themselves.

  Would to God—if God there be—that I could forget something of that awful night — that my memory could slip but one iota, but one little incident of those dread hours of horror, and so lessen, be it by ever so little, the terrible burden of white - glowing recollection that is slowly searing its way into my brain, driving me to madness as certain as the lunacy of these leering curs around me who call themselves " doctors" and " warders!"

  But I cannot forget. Not one instant of that time can I shut out from before my burning eyes; not one sound I heard in that fearful charnelhouse of death can I restrain from hammering its way anew, and ever anew, through my ears to my throbbing, bursting brain!

  Other things I can forget. Things I have desired to remember have slid from me into the Cimmerian darkness of oblivion; but the memory of this dread night stays with me, and will stay with me until the angels mercifully wash it from my mind with the lethe of eternal rest.

  A cousin of my wife's was coming out to Shanghai, and it was arranged that I should go to meet the boat at Woosung. My wife also would have come; but she did not care to leave the children alone, perhaps for the whole day.

  She was to come out by the SS. Hamburg, but when we heard of the vessel's departure from Hong-Kong we found that she was not due at Woosung until late in the evening. This would probably mean coming back by the special nighttrain. But to me it would mean infinitely more; it would mean the retardation of the only moments of happiness I now enjoyed, by several hours. The thought was unbearable—to defer the courting of the blissful colour visions by several hours! I could not do it. I shrank from the mere contemplation of such dire hardship, and, wretch that I am, I complained that our coming visitor was a nuisance, that I was not feeling particularly well, and so forth, knowing full well that if I showed any reluctance to going, my wife would be ready to offer to go herself.

  Which she did. Of course I demurred. It was my place to go to Woosung, and I could not allow her to tax herself with the journey, and so I allowed myself reluctantly to yield.

  She went down in the early forenoon, lest the boat should arrive unexpectedly; but as by four she had not yet been signalled at Gutzlaff Lighthouse my wife wired to me that she intended to stay at the Woosung Hotel, in order to be upon the spot on the vessel's arrival in the morning.

  What cared I, I thought, though she had to stay down there a week, so I were left in company of my kandasie.

  Before I went to bed that night—which, in the delights of anticipation, was much earlier than usual—I had the children's little cots moved into my room, so that I might be the better able to keep an eye up
on them.

  I keep an eye on them forsooth! Sometimes I laugh out wildly at the sheer humour of the thing. Were it not for the pitiable imbecile calling himself "warder," who seems to watch my every movement, I could lay down my pen now and laugh anew.

  But I digress. In my anxiety to lose no moment of the precious time, it must have been full three hours earlier than usual that I dismissed the amah and "boys" and lay down, after first swallowing, with placid satisfaction, my accustomed potion.

  I remember—ah, how well I remember !—as I lay there waiting for the drug to waft my spirit away, seeing Cerberus pacing with stealthy step to and fro in the room.

  Twice he stopped and raised his head with a savage snarl, so that I wondered much at his conduct, fearing he might awake the little ones who now slumbered so peacefully beside me.

  Gradually the sombre tints about the room began to brighten, and I knew that kandasie was catching my spirit up in its alluring power. The gas-jet first caught the glamour of colour as I saw a beautiful halo of deepest purple and vivid scarlet playing round the brilliant golden flame.

  I felt my limbs were growing rigid, for my hand was hanging over the side of the bed, and as Cerberus stopped his stealthy pacing and came up to lick it, I tried to remove it from the rasp of his tongue, but could not.

  Then, as my brain grew to its accustomed clearness under the stimulating influence of the narcotic, I remembered with a pang of remorse that in my eagerness to attain the summit of my gilded Parnassus I had forgotten to feed the poor brute. It was a task either my wife or myself invariably undertook, for we dared not at such times trust his savage temper with the Chinese boys. Cerberus was getting old and cantankerous, and at the best of times he was a dangerous brute when meals occupied his attention. And I had forgotten to feed him ! I felt sorry for him, for he had but the one meal a day; and now he would get nothing until the following morning, for the lightest movement was already beyond me.