Liquid Death And Other Stories

by John Russell Fearn

  Her hand closed around me. She drank my contents and relaxed in the armchair. The man started talking again.

  "There's only one thing to do with people like you, Mary, and I've done it! Since you won't give me grounds for divorce, I've made my own grounds. I'll marry Claire Blake in spite of you!"

  The woman's voice was low and bitter. "You know, Barry, you are a rotten beast! The rottenest I've ever known! What's more, I'm going to put Claire Blake wise to the fact before you start in to two-time her, as you have me… You're only after her seven million dollars, so you may as well admit it. 'That's why you want to be rid of me!"

  She stopped talking and put me back on the tray. Picking me up, Barry started to polish my outside with a handkerchief. When he was through he polished my companion both inside and out and left it as clean as a new window.

  "Turning waiter?" questioned the woman, laconically.

  "No, my dear. Just a little preparation, that's all… I'm meeting Claire tonight at the West Fork Road-house at ten o'clock. That gives me very little time to finish things off here first…"

  He put his handkerchief in his pocket and studied the cloying dregs in my base.

  Suddenly the woman tried to get to her feet, but she fell back. Holding her white throat, she shouted, hoarsely:

  "Barry! Barry, what have you done to me? I'm—I'm choking—"

  "That poison's pretty fast," he answered, and his voice, reminded me of steel blades rubbing together. "I've polished my own glass inside and out and your glass on the outside only. That leaves it clear for this…" Taking her quivering hand he clamped her fingers around me, then let her go. Grinning viciously, he said: "Evidence for suicide, my dear…"

  The woman just couldn't do anything but gasp and gulp hoarsely. Barry went out and locked the door from the outside… For a moment nothing happened, then driven by the frantic urge for air, for relief, the woman suddenly writhed out of the chair and dropped to her knees.

  She tried to reach the window, but just couldn't make it. Instead she clutched hold of me and hurled me base-foremost at the window, breaking the glass. Her weak, strangled cry of "Help! Air!" followed me—then I thudded down on leather.

  I didn't break. I'm pretty tough. I was in the car park back of the hotel. The car park attendant was bawling a little distance off.

  Then his voice came close to the open two-seater in which I'd landed. Silks started rustling and suddenly a smartly dressed young woman clambered into the driving-seat beside me. Since it was pretty dark she didn't see me, of course. Pursing up her painted lips she started to whistle.

  Something bounded out of the gloom and plumped almost on top of me. A dog of sorts: Great Dane, I think it was. A real hefty brute, anyway… The girl made him lie down, then had her bags fixed in the rumble seat. She looked at her watch, then started up the engine. The car went smoothly into the High Street and headed out of town at a spanking pace.

  Now and again she looked at the dog and said: "Take it easy, Kong; don't be so darned affectionate! I've got a wheel to look after."

  We were on the main country road, heading west when something sharp started pulling at me. It was Kong's hefty paw. He raked me over then thrust his huge, wet tongue in my insides, started licking and licking until he'd taken up all that sediment. Then I rolled into the corner and stopped there. The dame was doing sixty-five and kept looking at the dashboard clock.

  "I'll only just make it for ten if I step on it," she muttered, then she pressed her foot harder on the accelerator and sent the ear screaming through the dark down that ribbon of country road.

  All of a sudden Kong started to move uneasily. His paws kneaded up and down like engine pistons. He let out the most horrible wail, as though he'd heard music being played somewhere.

  The girl looked at him momentarily, startled. Then she snapped out: "Kong! Sit down! Sit down—!"

  Half her sentence was drowned out by the roar and hoot of a car trying to overtake not half a mile behind. It couldn't have been doing less than seventy.

  Kong howled again and leapt up entreatingly. In trying to draw the girl's attention to himself he struck her in the face with his paw… She screamed wildly, jammed her feet down helplessly on clutch and brake pedals, then let go of the steering-wheel with the sudden shock.

  The car slewed round giddily and went shooting diagonally across the road. The overtaking auto stood no chance—Steel, rubber, glass and leather compressed into a triangular hell of destruction. Bags initialed 'C. B.' vomited from the rumble seat…

  I rolled out to the side of the road. Some time after the woman dragged herself free, blood running down her face, her clothes torn and ripped. She looked for her dog and couldn't find him.

  Then she staggered across to where a figure lay in the road, the head bent at an unnatural angle. There was a pause filled with the crackling of flames, then she screamed frantically:

  "Dead! Oh, God—! Barry!"

  THE WAILING HYBRID

  I The Living Heart

  AS HE DROVE swiftly through the night Jeff Rowland's thoughts were pleasant indeed, as he dwelt with a certain schoolboyish satisfaction on the circus he had attended in Castleford village not an hour before. It represented his fourth successive visit.

  Helen Vane had been there, of course, performing her usual magic and snake-charming act. There seemed to be no snake she could not handle, from a cobra to a boa. Helen—a delightful girl, appealing strongly to him by the very reason of her fearless cleverness. He thanked the fortune that had led him to see the first performance—and her. Not yet had he spoken to her, but he meant to do so before the show moved on.

  Then Rowland cursed hotly as with blaring high-powered horn the car behind suddenly drew level with him, headlights blazing wildly. Instantly he swung his own steering wheel madly to the right, bounced crazily on uneven banking.

  With bitter eyes he stared at the sedan momentarily level with him, clearly illumined in the reflecting headlights. He caught a glimpse of a dark, swarthy face under a soft hat. The face was leaning low over the steering wheel, oblivious to everything save demoniacal speed. But that was not all! Rowland nearly overturned his car in amazement at the transient vision that followed.

  For one clear instant he caught a view of a girl beside the driver, head of golden hair dropped heavily back on the leather cushions with all the indications of unconsciousness. Across her mouth was a tight band, obviously a gag. Then the car was on its way, thundering and bumping on in clouds of dust into the dark.

  "Helen! Helen Vane!" Rowland breathed mechanically. "In that car! I'd know her face anywhere!"

  He twisted his car to the road level and for nearly two miles kept the sedan in sight. Then it suddenly veered off the lonely country road and went zigzagging away along a barely defined path across open fields. Its rear light presently vanished, perhaps because the driver realized he was being followed. Rowland promptly extinguished his own lights and watched with narrowed eyes through the windshield. The moonlight helped him considerably, enabled him finally to see the car slide into the shade of a massive dark residence, completely isolated from other evidences of habitation.

  At that he slowed down, stopped finally within a quarter of a mile of the place and climbed out on the rough road to take stock of the situation.

  The solitary residence was surrounded by tall, heavily foliaged trees and high railings. Going closer, Rowland found the massive double front gates locked; beyond them twisted an overhung drive leading into somber darkness.

  Not a light gleamed in that lonely place, not a sound came from it; yet within it was surely Helen Vane.

  Rowland's lips tightened. He walked the length of the spiked railings and stared between them in some surprise at numberless glass structures resembling conservatories, or hothouses, joining the residence. At first sight it might have belonged to a nurseryman, a raiser of trees for estates; except that nurserymen do not kidnap girls and drive like maniacs.

  Jeff Rowland didn't he
sitate any longer. Exercising care over the vicious spikes, he climbed the railings and dropped into the tree-laden grounds, picked his way between the well-tended flowerbeds. Finally he came to the largest conservatory and stood studying the open-top ventilator. If he could get through that—

  The thought was no sooner in his mind than he had gripped an outlet pipe and was shinning swiftly up it. Gaining the glass roof, he knelt carefully on the wooden framework and eased himself forward to the inviting skylight.

  To clamber through it and drop into the warmth of the conservatory was only a moment's work.

  For a long time he stood tensed and listening, surrounded by a heavy mid-tropical heat; then it gradually dawned upon him that he could hear a soft moaning, a sighing which proceeded from the stifling, vaguely moonlit greenery.

  For an unaccountable reason his scalp began to tighten.

  The moonlight was casting its pale glow upon sickly green and twining branches, branches of a plant resembling hypertrophied honeysuckle and occupying one large bed to itself. And it was from this that the noises were emanating. Perplexed, Rowland went closer to it, found himself stiffening in frozen amazement as the groaning suddenly changed into the voice of a woman, filled with exquisite anguish.

  "Free me! In the name of mercy—free me!"

  Rowland stared with popping eyes into the heart of that slimy, sweating hothouse and saw something unbelievably weird—the head and shoulders of a strange woman which projected above the hot, oozing soil; a woman who was, as green as the plant that coiled about her, whose thick hair hung in rippling black folds to the soil. She was buried up to her bosom; her arms moved weakly with supplicating, serpentine motions. From her lips, contorted by some unbearable agony, spewed desperate entreaties for release.

  "Who—who are you?" Jeff Rowland blurted out, bending toward her.

  "Release!" she groaned back. "Release me, I implore you!"

  For a moment the idea of quicksand occurred to him—that she was sinking into this green filth. But that didn't explain her nudity or how she had gotten into the midst of this twining mass of plant. He stepped forward determinedly onto the soil. Instantly the quicksand conception was shattered. It was quite normal.

  "Quickly!" the woman screamed, writhing in agony. "Quickly!"

  Rowland nodded promptly, wondering what particular pain was affecting her so violently. Stooping down behind her, he clamped his powerful hands under her armpits and pulled upward with all his power. Something of extraordinary strength seemed to pull him back—something that caused the woman to scream again and again. Once more he pulled and she abruptly came free, sending him stumbling backward to fall amidst the plant's coil. Like a sigh on a breeze the girl muttered two last words.

  "Thank God—" Then her face froze into its expression of unutterable anguish, her eyes glazed and became fixed.

  Jeff Rowland, sprawled, immovable, frozen with sick horror at the sight now in front of him. God—the girl had no body below her upper torso! It was completely severed just above the abdomen, leaving green, smothered entrails and complex nerve endings trailing back into the slimy green pit from which he had dragged her.

  Now he understood her agony; her mad desire for release. In some inhuman fashion her very body had been provided with roots, linked to the tree itself. She had been a quasi-plant! A deep and deadly sickness stole over Rowland at the thought, and with it the remembrance of Helen Vane. Monstrous! If such a thing were to happen to her—That thought jerked him to his feet, quivering with smoldering rage. Then he looked up sharply as the conservatory was suddenly swamped in brilliance.

  "Don't move!" a voice ordered coldly. "Stand exactly where you are—and raise your hands!"

  Slowly he obeyed, waited while footsteps came from behind him around the plant bed. Then he found himself staring into the darkly swarthy face of the man he had seen in the car, the cold black eyes fixed menacingly upon him,

  The man smiled bitterly. "I was wise in expecting you, my young friend," he remarked dryly. "I suspected you might follow me in your car. My judgment of human nature was correct, even to your using the conservatory window I opened especially for your benefit. I have been detained in my surgery, otherwise I would have come much sooner to see if you had arrived. I might even have stopped you from ruining my work—." His black eyes traveled to the dead hulk of the woman, then around the sinuous masses of the weird plant.

  "You have meddled quite a deal, haven't you?" he asked slowly. "Now I shall have to alter my plans—"

  "That girl there!" Rowland broke in passionately. "Who is she? How in hell's name did she get like that? It's—it's vivisection!"

  "No—just art," the man corrected him smoothly. "I am responsible, of course. My name is Doctor Calvin Kaylor; I am a retired botanical and anatomical surgeon experimenting with new types—types which none of my blasted contemporaries would believe in. The fusion of a human being with a plant! A fusion that you have spoiled, damn you! You tore out the living heart by the roots!"

  His cruel eyes settled on the green cavity from which the stump of a girl had been torn.

  "Living heart!" Rowland breathed in fascinated horror. "You don't mean—"

  "I mean that that girl was the heart of this plant. She would have grown into a plant woman—a flower of divine beauty. It means I shall have to start all over again."

  "Not with Helen Vane!" Jeff Rowland shouted frantically. "Oh, I know you've got her here—that's why I came! You can't do such things, damn your black soul!"

  Dr. Kaylor sneered coldly. "There's plenty I can do, so get that straight. I have Helen Vane here, yes. My intention was to use her for quite a different experiment, but thanks to your infernal meddling she will have to take this girl's place. The plant will die, otherwise. Later I may find a similar use for you—probably you can take the place of Helen Vane in my other experiment… Now turn around and get going, through that door! Go on!"

  Rowland's fingers twitched with the desire for action, but he was no fool. Upon him rested the life of the girl he had admired from afar. He kept his hands up and walked through a long dark passage with the doctor behind him, then under further directions he turned into an apartment that was obviously a surgery, stacked with impeccably clean but nonetheless grim-looking instruments.

  Before he could ask any further questions or make any moves, chains and manacles were clamped on his wrists and ankles, holding him tight to the wall. It was not so much himself he was thinking about now as the sight of the limp, nude girl lying on the central operating table, slender body and limbs held firmly in the grip of spotless white.

  There was no denying the fact that it was Helen Vance, her face still softly made up from her performance in the circus ring!

  II Hothouse Horror

  ROWLAND shuddered.

  "So you are wondering what it is all about?" Kaylor asked cynically, coming forward. "It isn't really so very complicated. I have already told you that I am finding a way to bridge the gap between animal and plant life. I believe that with that plant in the conservatory, a specially matured one, I can foster a new type of living being—a woman born of a plant, who will perhaps one day in the course of evolution give birth to beings like herself. I know it can be done!

  "That woman you so kindly saved was my first experiment—some village girl whom nobody traced, of course. Her heart was the life of the plant; her bloodstream was the sap; her organisms kept it going. You will remember she was already green herself—"

  "You Godless devil!" Jeff Rowland whispered. "You're nothing but a fiend!"

  "How like the words of my contemporaries before I retired here to work in secret," Kaylor sneered. "I think—"

  He broke off and moved to the operating table as Helen groaned faintly and squirmed in her bonds.

  "So you've recovered?" Kaylor asked bluntly.

  At that she jerked her head up, twisted her face around and stared at Jeff Rowland, apparently without recognition. He felt a trifle put out; he was convin
ced he had attracted her attention from the front row of the circus. Evidently the state of her mind had banished all thoughts and memories.

  "What's—what a happened?" the girl asked weakly, her eyes dilating in sudden horror as she beheld her unclothed form and buckled straps.

  "I'm Dr. Kaylor," returned the scientist coldly. 'I first saw your photograph in a paper advertising your circus when it visited Philadelphia. I kept track of you until the show came near here. I saw your show three nights ago and decided then that you were just the type I wanted for my work—blonde, healthy and young.

  "Tonight I captured you outside your van just after your act—gave you chloroform and brought you here. Unfortunately, the original purpose of my kidnapping you goes for nothing; I have other uses for you now. You can blame this man here," and he nodded his head toward Rowland.

  The girl's face fixed in an expression of deadly fear. She squirmed and twisted helplessly in the straps. Rowland tore on his chains with the ferocity of a maddened animal, aching to get his fingers on this fiend, this monster with the ridiculous excuse of a plant woman. But was it an excuse? The memory of the severed woman returned to his mind in a sudden wave of nausea.

  "Kaylor, for God's sake let her go!" he screamed hoarsely. "I beg of you to do that!"

  The surgeon-botanist was not even listening. His eyes were fixed on the helplessly writhing girl.

  "I want your body, your heart—your life," he breathed. "And I shall have them! Nobody can get into this house without my knowing it. Nobody except this man knows you are even here. I chose my time well—Yes, you will be a very beautiful experiment, my dear!"

  Kaylor stood gloating over her, watching the straining of her soft limbs, the wild terror in her staring blue eyes. Then suddenly jerking into life, he wheeled an anaesthetic machine into view, swiftly moved the switches, and clamped the cone over the girl's face.