Murgunstrumm and Others

by Cave, Hugh

  "The head," I concluded, "is alive. The rest of the body is positively dead. I am willing to wager that the head will never die—that nothing could kill it, unless it be crushed and demolished—disintegrated as an entity."

  Margot had been following my reasoning intently. When I had finished, she stepped closer to me and touched my hand. Her words were hardly more than a whisper.

  "You have not told me yet, who killed my father—"

  I had no answer. I could not tell her what I believed, because the things I believed were not logical—not possible. I had just finished telling her that the dog had died immediately. How, then, could I explain to her my fantastic theory that the creature had remained alive and had taken vengeance on the man who had tortured him?

  "It would be merciful," she said softly, "to close the lower windows in his room. The storm is fearful."

  I nodded. When I thought of the tempest screaming through the open windows in that upstairs room, and the rush of rain that would sweep through that gruesome enclosure, I could not repress a shudder. I stepped toward her, with the intention of drawing her back to the safety of our retreat.

  "It is no place for a girl—up there, in this night of madness." I said softly.

  "There is still the Burman," she murmured. "And he is still a trusted servant, even in this time of horror."

  I saw her step quickly to the wall of the study. Her finger pressed a half-concealed button, and from somewhere beyond, over the wail of the storm, came the almost inaudible sound of a bell.

  From the shadow of the doorway, a monotonous voice asked, "You call me, missy?"

  Margot spoke without leaving my side, "You will close the windows upstairs in all the rooms," she said. "Especially in Sir Gordon's room. Be careful. Do not touch anything."

  No sign of fear crossed the Burman's expressionless face. He nodded silently and stepped back. The gloom of the open doorway swallowed him.

  Margot turned again to face me. Her first words revealed the trend of her thoughts and startled me with their suddenness.

  "You say the dog is dead." It was not a question; she was thinking aloud.

  "The dog is dead," I replied. "The dog's head—is alive."

  "It is hard to understand," she said. "I am not much of a scientist, Dr. Hale. Tell me—has the nature of this serum any effect on the thing treated? I mean by that, has the dog's head, which you say is alive, because of the serum injected into it, any of the frightful savageness of the serpent and the mad gorilla from which this serum was obtained?"

  I must have started with the sudden memory that her words thrust upon me—the memory of that snarling thing in the cellars below us.

  She smiled heavily and took my hand. "I am sorry," she said softly. "I see I have shocked you."

  "Shocked me! You have stumbled on the most important phase of this horrible thing," I told her. "Tell me, was this dog, as you knew it, a beast—a fiend?"

  She shook her head. "He was my companion, my pet," she said. "I have never heard him growl."

  "And now—" I spoke slowly, so that the portent of my words might carry full weight—"he is the fiend incarnate. His living head is a thing gone mad. You understand: it does not move—it is not alive—until some disturbing element touches it. Then it becomes a snarling, ferocious thing. To say that it is endowed with the treachery and strength of a snake and a gorilla would be too much, too fantastic, but the symptoms are there. What I say is God's truth!"

  "And father knew this?"

  "Your father probably did not realize what the effect of the serum would be," I explained. "I am sure he would not have used it on the hound, if he had known. And I am sure of something else, Margot."

  "Yes?"

  I had to say it, then. I had blurted so much of it out that I could not refrain from telling the rest: "I am convinced that the dog killed your father—and the housekeeper. Don't ask me how! I do not know. But, good God in heaven, what other explanation is there to offer? Those ghastly marks—those expressions of terror on both of their faces—"

  My voice died into silence. From the darkness above us the scream of the storm took it up in a thousand echoes, hurling them down to us with fury. This fearful house, ancient and dead—could it be possible that these buried vaults were inhabited by creatures of another world? For centuries, strange men and women had paced through these musty rooms and passages. The burial vaults were somewhere in the underground corridors, I knew. Could it be possible that Sir Gordon's irreverent play of life and death had angered the very dead themselves? The sound of that wailing wind in the upper towers—the uncanny creaking of the very room in which we stood—these things were surely not natural occurrences! My God, could the dead be walking with us?

  Then I saw Margot standing rigid before me, one hand upraised.

  "Listen!" she gasped.

  And then I heard it—faintly at first, then bursting shrilly through the sound of the storm, to echo again and again through the corridors of the house—a human voice, it was, lifted in a scream of utter terror, shrill and piercing—then silence.

  With a hoarse cry, I burst from the room; I was vaguely conscious that Margot followed me; then I was in the outer corridor, stumbling through the dark along that dimly remembered passage and up the stairs to the open door of Gordon Null's room. There, with both hands clutching the door frame, I stopped abruptly, for the thing before me froze every muscle in my body:

  The scream had come from the Burman's twisted lips; he was leaning over the bed now, bent grotesquely over the rigid body that lay there, and both his hands were clawing weakly at the terrible fingers, which, like merciless talons of steel, had fastened themselves in the Burman's throat and were deliberately strangling him to death.

  As I crossed the room, the picture of Lady Margot's hound burned itself into me: I saw once again the dead hound's head, snarling with awful hate, lunging toward me after I had touched it; and in that single moment, as I fought back the fear that overwhelmed me, I knew the horrible secret of Null's death, for the savage, bestial hand that tore at the Burman's throat was the hand of the man who lay dead before me!

  Even as I reached the side of the bed, those fiendish fingers released their hold with a sudden, rending twist; I heard a crack of bone; and the Burman slumped heavily to the floor—dead.

  As he fell, and as that terrible clutching hand writhed toward me over the bed, the dead Burman's face twisted to the light and I saw an expression there that I shall never forget—the same stare of horror that disfigured the face of the old housekeeper—the same torn throat, the same—dreadful—death!

  I reeled backwards. On the bed, still groping blindly toward me with a triumphant gesture of hate, lay that fearful living arm.

  I knew now why it had changed position when I had stood here before; I knew now what had strangled the old housekeeper when she had first bent over the dead man's body—she had fallen against it, as I had fallen against the living head of that dead hound, and it had gripped her with the same malice, after her touch had excited it to savage action; the thing was terribly alive—would always be terribly alive—and would always be a thing of murder and savage fiendishness.

  And then I knew! Sir Gordon had used that mad serum on himself. It was the serum, working through his body that had contorted him into that spider-like shape; it was the terrible effect of the fluid, burning through his veins that had convulsed his face. Good—God

  I saw one thing more, as I reached the open doorway of that room of living death. The awful hand had twisted suddenly upward, following my movements. For a fleeting instant the light fell upon it, and there, just below the elbow, at the joint of the ulna, I saw that same purple mark that had discoloured the throat of Lady Margot's hound.

  This, then, was the reason for the living death. Null had thrust the needle into his arm at the elbow joint; it had killed him instantly, fighting its way through the veins directly to the heart; but before the circulation had ceased, that deadly fluid had found a
way into the tissues of the arm, leaving it horribly alive!

  I left that room with the steps of a man who has seen beyond the grave. I believe that Margot stood in the entrance as I groped past; but I am not sure. I remember her footsteps as she followed me; and above them, like a voice from hell, rose the wail of the storm.

  Together we groped through the black vaults of the old house. Together, with her hand on my arm, we wrenched open the outer door of that place of horror and death—and stumbled out into the storm.

  It lashed about us in fury. A great wall of blinding rain hurled us forward into the desolation of the moor. Behind us, swung shut by the force of the wind, the huge door of "The Turrets" clanged into place, barring its horrible secret.

  I do not know how we reached the little railroad station that cringed on the edge of the moor. I do know that my heart was still black with horror when I battered in the aged door and drew Margot into the cold, unlighted interior. And there we crouched, until the first gleam of light penetrated the chinks of the walls.

  And that, I believe, is all. Except that the authorities sat in solemn inquest on the triple death without any specific findings aside from the familiar formula —"at the hands of person or persons unknown." I have never returned to "The Turrets," nor has Margot. Nor do we want to. Indeed, the place is shunned by everybody, and Time and Decay are already busy on its proper dissolution.

  The Strange Case of No. 7

  "In the interests of science, come at once to number seven After Street. I promise you an evening of supreme entertainment. M. Brand."

  There was nothing else. The note was penned in a small, compact script, and bore at the top, engraved in black, a tiny death's head. I found it under the door of my study on the evening of October fifteenth, after returning from a most peculiar series of events at The Turrets, in West Sussex. It was small—light gray in color—and bore no stamp or postmark of any description. I shuddered at the sight of it, for that grinning skull, simple and meaningless in itself, was the most horrible character disclosure of the entire letter.

  I had known Michael Brand in the course of my studies at Cambridge. It was there, in the laboratories, that I first encountered him—a big, surly fellow. His limbs were out of proportion and gave him a gaunt, gangling appearance as he slouched from one place to another. A brute of a man with a morose face and an ugly temper.

  We had little in common—certainly none of those deeper bonds of intimacy which bring friendship. I saw him occasionally, spoke to him seldom, and watched him—from a distance—with a certain amount of interest. His lust for knowledge fascinated me; that was all. When I left the university to take professional rooms in Cheney Lane, the man's name was nothing more to me than a vague recollection.

  Now, years later, he had turned up again. But I decided not to heed his call. I threw the card on my desk. As if he knew what I had done, the door opened slowly an hour or so later to reveal the man himself!

  Michael Brand had become, to all appearances, an old man. His face, still twisted in that surly snarl, was thin and dry, with a narrow, bitter line of mouth cutting into the lower part of it.

  "Didn't expect to see me, Hale?" he laughed. "I've come to take you with me whether you want to go or not. I have something to show you—that will appeal to you as a medical man."

  He offered no further explanation of his visit. Merely stood there with his hands in his pockets, waiting for me to pull on my coat and follow him. I yielded.

  His rooms were in the most distant part of the city, fully an hour's ride from my own. We traversed the entire route in silence, though the silence did not seem in the least bit unusual. For my part, I was deep in the memory of our previous acquaintance, and of his former experiments in which I had taken part. For his part, he was probably meditating on the thing which lay before us, gloating, no doubt, on the surprise he had planned for my benefit.

  We reached Brand's rooms at about twelve o'clock. The street was dark and deserted. The rain, as we stepped from the cab, had settled to a steady, penetrating drizzle.

  As I closed the lower door and followed him up the gloomy stairs (he had chosen an apartment on the second floor of the house), he spoke to me.

  "Know anything of the inner side of death, Hale?" he asked.

  "Of death? I know very little," I told him, evading his question as much as possible until I had learned the cause of it.

  "Tell me," he said—at the same time opening the door of his apartment— "do you believe death, and life for that matter, to be spiritual or physical? I mean by that, does God control it—if there is a God—or does science?"

  "If I could answer that," I said simply, "I should be the mightiest physician in the world."

  "When you have left this room, Hale," he said, "you will know the answer."

  The statement was so blunt, so unexpected, that it left me silent. In the meantime, while I groped for a reply, Brand had closed the door of his room and dropped into a chair. Mechanically I took the seat facing him.

  "Hale—" Brand leaned forward in his chair and looked piercingly into my eyes. His voice was masked with triumph. "I am forty years old. For the last twenty years I've been looking for the solution of death. Not eternal life—life does not interest me, simply because I don't want to live forever. But before I die, I want to know what death is. I want to die and come back—to tell the rest of this damned ignorant world what they have never had the courage to discover."

  I laughed weakly—a half-hearted laugh that contained no semblance of humor. I realized, or was beginning to realize, that he was leading me on merely for his own amusement, and even as he replied to my laugh I sensed the termination of his jest.

  "You don't believe me, doctor?" he said quietly. "You don't believe that I can die and be fully conscious of death—that I can return to tell you about it?"

  "I should not like to see you do it!" I replied.

  "You are lying."

  "Lying?" I stared at him.

  "When you say that you would not like to see me do it—that you do not want to know the secret of death. If I were to tell you, Hale, that behind that door—" Brand pointed suddenly to the closed door at the far end of the room, half concealed by shadows—"you would find a machine which has taken me six years to perfect—you would find a half-human thing ready for the experiment—you would—" He stopped abruptly. A slow smile disfigured his mouth. "What would you do, Hale?" he finished.

  I turned impulsively to stare at the door behind me. With a shudder I fell back from my seat and faced the man before me. His face was convulsed with triumph.

  "I brought you here for a reason, Hale," he said slowly. "My experiment is ready. Before I can perfect the—the machine, we will call it—enough to place a human under its influence; I must first try its power on an animal. The patient will die, probably, since my work is not complete; but whatever the result, I must have a witness."

  I nodded slowly. Brand got to his feet and advanced toward me, towering over me in his savage eagerness.

  "In that room, Hale," he cried, "you will find a gorilla. A gorilla, you know, is the nearest thing to human life. This one is a monster, a fiend. At the risk of my life I have kept him here, starving him so that his horrible strength would not be too difficult to overcome. This morning, with my bare hands, I forced him into submission. Now—the experiment is ready."

  He pronounced the word "ready" with a maliciousness that brought cold fear to my heart. As I sat there, staring at him, his hand closed over my shoulder.

  "Open the door, Hale," he said softly. "I promise you, you will never forget what you see there!"

  With an effort I rose from the chair, one hand gripping the edge of the table to steady me. My footsteps dragged as I went across the room. My hand, resting on the knob of that fatal door, moved with the sluggishness of death.

  Then, with a great effort to overcome my fear, I flung the barrier open. For a single instant I stood framed in the entrance—long enough to see that t
he enclosure before me was a narrow, windowless room flooded with dull red light that came from an overhead lamp. There, chained to the farther wall by a heavy band of metal that encircled his chest, stood the most horrible monstrosity of man that I have ever beheld. The thing was huge—hideously huge. Its body was covered with a black, shaggy hair. Its lips were heavy, pendulous, writhing back over yellow fangs. Its eyes were pools of bloody white, with no sign of pupils. Its nostrils were thick and flat, dilating with each successive intake of breath.

  As I stood there, the creature lunged toward me with a mighty snarl. I saw its muscles—coils of living metal—strain into rigidity. I heard the protesting creak of the chain as it was wrenched forward. And then, in startling contrast, came Brand's soft voice from behind me.

  "Very much like a man, is it not, Hale? I went to some pains to get a creature which was rather far advanced, mentally and physically. Even now the thing hates me with a ferocity which is greater than any human emotion!"

  I turned slowly, still fascinated by that distorted face before me. Without a word Brand took my arm, dragging me into his room of horrors; and there, with the careless poise of a studio-artist, he pointed out the details of his "machine."

  The light was deceptive—so deceptive that for a moment I could see nothing but that snarling gorilla-thing chained to the far wall. Then, with an effort, I distinguished the apparatus which surrounded me. I have said the room was narrow. For the most part it was filled with a litter of unlabeled jars and bottles, supported by crude shelves which Brand had evidently constructed himself. A huge work-bench extended across the left wall and out into the middle of the floor like a great trestle; and there, poised on the extreme end of it, hardly more than ten feet from the victim, lay the thing toward which my companion was slowly leading me.