by Cave, Hugh
I felt him move with a sudden twisting motion. His hand touched my shoulder, gripping me with great strength. Then, through the stillness that hung over the room, came the sound of his voice.
"Wonderful, Hale. For a moment you frightened me. I was afraid you would reach the door in your terror, and open it. Had you done so—"
He lowered himself from the table with an effort. I stared at him, and my eyes, once again accustomed to the gloom, noted a strange sight. His face was as white as the face of a corpse. His voice, too, had the peculiar quality of something deeper than life; it was the voice of a man who has seen death.
"Look queer, do I, Hale?" he laughed. "I have died, man. Don't laugh! When you bent over me in horror, a moment since, I was dead. I saw you—saw every move you went through—but I could make no protest. My eyes didn't see you; my mind did. The eyes were dead. The body was dead. My mind—that was magnificently alive!"
I heard him with a half-smile of wonder. He noticed it. For the first time in our association, I saw a savage light of anger in his narrowed eyes.
"You disbelieve?" he cried. "You think it is a hoax—the whole experiment? Get up there, man. Put yourself in position. When you leave this room—and leave it you will; I promise you—you will leave it without that veil of doubt. Come!"
There was no resisting him. To be truthful, I offered no particular resistance. The whole thing had fascinated and terrified me; but, after all, there is a certain portion of adventure in the blood of every man of science. I am no coward. I wanted to go through with his mad experiment, even though it brought me the same fate as Brand's previous experiment had brought to that shaggy monster of the jungle.
I drew myself quietly into position, lying easily on the surface of the long table. Brand said nothing. I saw him smile softly as he crossed to the second table and bent over the black switch.
"Are you ready?" he said, very casually.
"Ready," I answered.
I saw him throw the switch. Then, closing my eyes, I waited. I did not see the strange glow flood over the room, but the glare of it penetrated my closed eyelids, burning them as if I had been staring into the direct force of the sun. I felt a warm, indescribable something clutch me, forcing me into rigidity, and I saw—though my eyes were still closed—the gaunt form of Michael Brand advancing toward me. I made an effort to lift my head, to speak to him, and to my horror I was unable to move a single portion of my body. My limbs were no longer alive, no longer able to conform to my will. The will was there; I could exert it, could wish to move my body; but the body itself was dead, completely dead. My eyes, too, were sightless. The picture I saw, of the room, of my companion, of that eerie glare of light was a mental image—a small, distorted image of what was actually happening. You have looked at some familiar object through a poorly constructed reducing lens? The thing I saw was like that.
And I did see it, through the horror that surged over me. Helpless as I was, immovable as I was, I saw in startling detail every move that Brand made. I was conscious of his bending over me, conscious of the twisted smile of triumph that curled his lips, conscious of the fiendish bitterness of his eyes. He did not hate me; I could analyze his thoughts almost as easily as I could distinguish his features. He was a child—a mere child who had proved something that his playmate had obstinately refused to believe.
Proved it! As I lay there, overcome by the frightful helplessness of my condition, I would have given most of my remaining life to have been alive again. I was dead. Oh, you will not believe it. You will make no effort to understand. But the fact remains. I was dead! My body, my physical being was no longer alive. And yet I was fearfully conscious of what was transpiring about me! It was living death—a horrible, uncanny fate. I was the victim of Brand's mad mockery of life!
And then, with a frenzied effort, I struggled to move. A stifled sob broke through my lips as I struggled into a sitting position, and found myself in a room of utter darkness. Brand stood beside me, laughing softly.
"You still doubt my statements, Hale?" he questioned. "Still disbelieve?"
I felt carefully of my arms and legs, while he stood there with a grim smile on his lips. When I had lowered myself from the table, with the help of his supporting arm, he looked directly at me.
"1 am going to detain you a few moments longer, doctor," he said quietly. "This time, when you have thrown the switch, do not bring terror to a dead man's soul by rushing madly to the door. You would be a murderer, man, though the world would never know it. You would be sending a living man to the grave. The faintest light in that outer corridor—"
I offered no protest. In truth, since I had entered this room of artificial death, I had lost all sense of passing time. The hour was in all probability somewhere near midnight. It did not matter.
But Brand had lowered himself into position once more. As I stepped around him to reach the switch, he spoke to me.
"You may wonder why I have gone to the labor of constructing this death machine, Hale," he said without emotion. "1 will tell you. Science, of course, is the premier reason, and then— There is a fellow in a little country village up in Chester—a chap with wife and children, I believe—whom I should very much like to kill. He came to me four years ago and loved the girl I had wanted. She married him. This machine was perfected precisely for his benefit, so that he may die a living death and live forever after he has been buried, thinking of my revenge. That is why I am trying the test twice. First success may be merely luck. When a thing succeeds twice, on the same person, it is not a question of chance."
I shuddered at the diabolical hate of his words. Truly, this man was a monster; and yet, though his very name was repulsive to me, the very majesty of his super-mind dragged me to him. He fascinated me. I knew then that though he completed his fiendish plans, though I should read of their culmination in the daily news, I should never reveal his secret. I knew it; and he knew that I knew it!
"I am ready," he said. "Remember—no lapse of terror!"
I threw the switch. Once again there was that supreme moment of expectancy. Once again, when the first ten seconds had passed, that unholy glow filtered over the room, terminating in a dazzle of brilliance.
This time I felt no horror. I stood by the table without a tremor, staring at my companion. That same shudder passed over him. His eyes closed. His hands, which had been clenched, opened spasmodically.
The room was in dead silence. Not a sound came up from the street below.
Not a sound penetrated the dead stillness of the old house. And then—then God, how clearly it returns to my memory—I was drawn about by some unearthly power until my eyes were riveted upon the door of the room. Slowly, slowly, under the pressure of some invisible hand, the knob was being turned from without!
I screamed in horror. The very scream brought the door open with a sudden jerk; and there, framed in the entrance, enveloped by the faint glow of light from the blinded windows of the outer corridor, stood that snarling incarnation of hell that I had seen last night.
The thing's arms hung almost to the floor, dragging as he sidled forward. Its bestial face was a livid mask of hate—hate for the man who lay helpless before me on the table. I saw its foaming lips curl back over yellow fangs—saw its bloody eyes narrow to slits—heard the mighty scream of victory, the scream of blood lust, that rang from its throat. Then—
The scream was smothered in a blinding crash of light. A single deafening roar shook the room in which we stood, hurling the black switch out of my grasp. I saw a cone of livid flame envelop the metallic disc as it hurtled to the floor—saw a mad streak of fire burn down the tangle of wires and terminate with a bolt of distorted crimson light in the jars beneath the table. A great cloud of bluish smoke, sickly sweet and horribly sticky, drifted over the room, concealing the prostrate body of the man who lay dead on the table.
Dead? I do not know. The grip of that place tore any sense of reason from me. I hurtled forward, lunging past the gorilla with a shr
iek of fear. My last vision of that room was the sight of the thing that had brought death, stumbling into the table with a horrible cone of liquid fire burning into its face. I believe it was dead, even as it lunged to the floor, for no sound came from the black, twisted lips.
Then, without thought of direction, I rushed through the black passages of the old house, until, with staggering steps, I reached the lower hall. Here I stopped. A sudden reaction seized me; and I laughed madly. As the laugh trailed into silence, I turned to listen. Not a sound disturbed the stillness of the upper corridors.
Very quietly, then, I opened the heavy door and stepped into the outer darkness of After Street.
The Isle of Dark Magic
Captain Bruk, master of the Bella Gale, was the man who brought Peter Mace to Faikana; and since I did not meet the boy until his arrival, I must tell the first part of this tale as it was seen through Captain Bruk's eyes. So, then, I must go back a little.
Bruk was "on the beach," as the saying is, when the Jornsen Trading Company, in Papeete, offered him the Bella Gale. The Jornsen Company, like most of Papeete's smaller concerns, operated a fleet of second-rate tramps which were schooner-rigged and sailed under their own spread. No captain of repute would have accepted command of even the best of them. But Bruk was desperate.
His orders were to touch Faaite, sail north to Fakarava and Taou, and wind up at Rarioa, bartering for as much copra as the schooner would hold. He was to be back in Papeete inside the month, if possible. And he was to carry one passenger, a white man, as far as Rarioa.
The white man was Peter Mace, and, given his choice, Bruk would have picked more promising company or none at all. Peter Mace was a thin, worried-looking youth possessed of a pair of eyes which missed nothing. He could not have been more than twenty-five, and he had been in Papeete, so he said, only three weeks.
He came aboard an hour before the schooner sailed, and he brought with him a large wooden packing-case which he insisted on storing in his own cabin. And for two days he kept entirely to himself, offering not a word of explanation to anyone.
Later, however, he found time and the desire to ask questions. Before the Bella Gale reached Faaite, he had demanded the name of every atoll in Paumotu. He had questioned Bruk concerning the habits of the islanders, how they treated white men, what atolls were the least populated, and whether Bruk knew any small mom off the schooner routes where a man might be entirely alone. A thousand things he insisted on knowing, but not one word did he speak of himself or of his work or of his reason for going to Rarioa. And not once did he mention the meaning of the packing-case in his cabin.
Then one day, out of a clear sky, he said:
"If I give you five hundred dollars, Captain, will you go out of your way to put me ashore at Faikana?"
"Five hundred dollars!" Bruk echoed.
"Is that too little?"
"In the name of all that's holy," Bruk demanded, "what do you want with Faikana? If I put you down there, you'll wait half your life for a tub to take you off!"
"If five hundred dollars is too little," Peter Mace smiled, "we'll double it."
And that was all Bruk got out of him. Five hundred dollars, doubled, and Faikana. Faikana, the end of all creation, a forgotten island inhabited by a mere handful of Marquesan natives and a missionary with queer ideas!
So Peter Mace came to Faikana. And I, Father Jason, the "missionary with queer ideas," met him for the first time and wondered about that strange wooden packing-case which he brought with him.
Within a week, the boy had established himself. He first found an abandoned native shack and moved into it, taking his belongings with him. Then, with a methodical lack of haste which brought amazing results, he obtained native assistance and began building for himself a permanent residence, more than three miles from the little settlement of which my house was the center. Apparently he preferred to be alone with whatever business had brought him to our island. Yet he came several times to visit me, and politely invited me to spend the first evening with him in his new home, when it was completed.
This I did, and was mildly surprised. Though I had heard whispers from the natives, I had discreetly remained away from the scene of the boy's operations until implicitly invited there by him. I found the house to be practically isolated in a natural clearing in the midst of that belt of desolation which covers the northernmost tip of Faikana. Its only means of communication with the village was a narrow, perilous trail through dense jungle, which entailed more than an hour of the hardest kind of walking. Surely Peter Mace had no desire for casual visitors!
The house itself, however, was complete in every detail—an elaborate two-roomed native dwelling with an additional small chamber upstairs. We sat there that evening, he and I, sipping native brandy and playing chess. Our conversation never once touched on personalities. Neither he nor I asked questions, nor did he offer to show me what lay in the upstairs room. When the time came for me to go, he wished me a pleasant good-night and instructed his newly acquired native boy, Menegai, to accompany me back to the village. And for two weeks, that was all I saw of him!
But native curiosity, you know, is a thing easily aroused; and I heard many strange stories during those two weeks. "Peteme," the Marquesans called the boy, and Peteme, so they said, was a devil incarnate. During the daytime they heard him working in the upstairs room of his house, and when he was not working he was striding about like a caged animal, muttering and grumbling to himself. Several times, when they had crept close to the downstairs window and peered in, they had seen him sitting at the table, hunched over a pile of books, with whisky bottles stacked in front of him. He was drunk, they said. His eyes were distended and bloodshot, and his hands shook as they held the books. But what he had in that upstairs chamber they did not know, for it was impossible to peer in the window and find out.
All these stories I knew to be greatly exaggerated, because my people were superstitious children at best. But I knew, too, that there must be some truth in them, for natives are not deliberate liars unless they can, by lying, gain material things for themselves. And so, thinking to invite the boy to my home and there talk to him about himself, I went one afternoon to his house.
He was not there when I arrived. I knocked, and received no answer, and, on opening the door, found no one within. It was strange, I thought, that he should go away and leave the door open, for I saw that he had fitted it with a patent lock. I called his name aloud, and then, bewildered, looked about me.
The table was piled high with books, and with cardboard-covered manuscripts. Curiously I looked at these, and then intently I studied them. I shuddered, then, and felt suddenly as if I were in an unhallowed place. If a fire had been burning, I should have thrown those books into it, despite the boy's certain anger on discovering my act. For the books were forbidden books, each and every one of them; and I say forbidden, not because I come of a religious calling, but because such volumes have been condemned by truth and science alike. One of them was the Black Cults of Von Heller. Another, in manuscript form, inscribed in Latin, was the unexpurgated edition of what is now The Veil Unseen. A third I believed to be—and I now know that my belief was correct—the missing portion of that perilous treatise, Le Culte des Morts, of whose missing portion only four copies are reputed to exist! Merciful God, these were no books for the soul of a twenty-five-year-old boy who lived alone with his thoughts!
Utterly confounded, I turned from the table and sat for some time in a chair near the open door, waiting impatiently for Peter Mace to return. When he did not come, I rose and paced the floor, and suddenly recalled what the natives had whispered about the room above me. Was it possible, I thought, that the books on the table beside me had some connection with the contents of the chamber above? Could it be that Peter Mace had gone deeper into these matters than the mere study of them?
I hesitated. This was not my home; I had no right to climb the narrow ladder which hung so invitingly in the shadowed corner of
the room where I stood. Yet I had a right, as a religious adviser, to know what sins the boy was guilty of, so that I might instruct him accordingly. Deliberately, therefore, I strode across the floor.
The ladder was a flimsy one, solid enough, perhaps, to bear the weight of the boy's lean body, but not so solid that I felt comfortable in ascending it. I groped upward slowly and cautiously, testing each rung before trusting my weight upon it. Then I reached above me and pushed aside the atap mat which covered the aperture in the ceiling; and with a sigh of relief I thrust my arms through the hole. And then two things happened. Behind and below me, the door of the house clattered back against the wall, as Peter Mace came over the threshold. And before me, on a level with my eyes, I saw a thing sitting Buddha-fashion on the floor of that upstairs room.
I saw the thing only for an instant, before the boy's drunken hands clawed at my legs and dragged me down. I saw it, too, in semi-darkness, which accounts for the mistake of my first impression—which impression I carried with me for weeks afterward, believing it to be truth. For the thing I saw was a woman, naked and staring at me. A young and lovely girl, sitting utterly without motion on a pedestal made of boards covered with cloth. Beside her stood the packing-case in which she had been transported to Faikana. In her hands, extended toward me, was a large metal bowl in which some chemical, or combination of chemicals, burned with an odor as sweet as the smell of ether.
That was all I saw. The rung of the ladder broke under me as Peter Mace hurled himself upon me. I fell sideways against the wall. The fall stunned me. The next thing I knew, Peter Mace was standing wide-legged before me, and my back was against the table, and my hands were rigidly outflung to keep the boy's contorted face from thrusting itself into mine.
At that moment Peter Mace did not know me. He was insane with rage. His face was drained of all color, and the veins on his forehead protruded like ancient scars. Animal hate was in his eyes. Guttural words uncouth and terrible, snarled from his lips. He would have battered me to unconsciousness, perhaps to death, if I had not stumbled backward and groped my way to the door.
