The affair was beyond any human and rational experience. I tried to say “Hydrophobia,” but the word wouldn’t come, because I knew that I was lying.
We bound this beast with leather thongs of the punkah-rope, and tied its thumbs and big toes together, and gagged it with a shoe-horn, which makes a very efficient gag if you know how to arrange it. Then we carried it into the dining-room, and sent a man to Dumoise, the doctor, telling him to come over at once. After we had despatched the messenger and were drawing breath, Strickland said, “It’s no good. This isn’t any doctor’s work.” I, also, knew that he spoke the truth.
The beast’s head was free, and it threw it about from side to side. Any one entering the room would have believed that we were curing a wolf’s pelt. That was the most loathsome accessory of all.
Strickland sat with his chin in the heel of his fist, watching the beast as it wriggled on the ground, but saying nothing. The shirt had been torn open in the scuffle and showed the black rosette mark on the left breast. It stood out like a blister.
In the silence of the watching we heard something without mewing like a she-otter. We both rose to our feet, and, I answer for myself, not Strickland, felt sick—actually and physically sick. We told each other, as did the men in Pinafore, that it was the cat.
Dumoise arrived, and I never saw a little man so unprofessionally shocked. He said that it was a heart-rending case of hydrophobia, and that nothing could be done. At least any palliative measures would only prolong the agony. The beast was foaming at the mouth. Fleete, as we told Dumoise, had been bitten by dogs once or twice. Any man who keeps half a dozen terriers must expect a nip now and again. Dumoise could offer no help. He could only certify that Fleete was dying of hydrophobia. The beast was then howling, for it had managed to spit out the shoe-horn. Dumoise said that he would be ready to certify to the cause of death, and that the end was certain. He was a good little man, and he offered to remain with us; but Strickland refused the kindness. He did not wish to poison Dumoise’s New Year. He would only ask him not to give the real cause of Fleete’s death to the public.
So Dumoise left, deeply agitated; and as soon as the noise of the cart-wheels had died away, Strickland told me, in a whisper, his suspicions. They were so wildly improbable that he dared not say them out aloud; and I, who entertained all Strickland’s beliefs, was so ashamed of owning to them that I pretended to disbelieve.
“Even if the Silver Man had bewtiched Fleete for polluting the image of Hanuman, the punishment could not have fallen so quickly.”
As I was whispering this the cry outside the house rose again, and the beast fell into a fresh paroxysm of struggling till we were afraid that the thongs that held it would give way.
“Watch!” said Strickland. “If this happens six times I shall take the law into my own hands. I order you to help me.”
He went into his room and came out in a few minutes with the barrels of an old shot-gun, a piece of fishing-line, some thick cord, and his heavy wooden bedstead. I reported that the convulsions had followed the cry by two seconds in each case, and the beast seemed perceptibly weaker.
Strickland muttered, “But he can’t take away the life! He can’t take away the life!”
I said, though I knew that I was arguing against myself, “It may be a cat. It must be a cat. If the Silver Man is responsible, why does he dare to come here?”
Strickland arranged the wood on the hearth, put the gun-barrels into the glow of the fire, spread the twine on the table and broke a walking stick in two. There was one yard of fishing line, gut, lapped with wire, such as is used for mahseer-fishing, and he tied the two ends together in a loop.
Then he said, “How can we catch him? He must be taken alive and unhurt.”
I said that we must trust in Providence, and go out softly with polo-sticks into the shrubbery at the front of the house. The man or animal that made the cry was evidently moving round the house as regularly as a night-watchman. We could wait in the bushes till he came by and knock him over.
Strickland accepted this suggestion, and we slipped out from a bath-room window into the front verandah and then across the carriage drive into the bushes.
In the moonlight we could see the leper coming round the corner of the house. He was perfectly naked, and from time to time he mewed and stopped to dance with his shadow. It was an unattractive sight, and thinking of poor Fleete, brought to such degradation by so foul a creature, I put away all my doubts and resolved to help Strickland from the heated gun-barrels to the loop of twine-from the loins to the head and back again—with all tortures that might be needful.
The leper halted in the front porch for a moment and we jumped out on him with the sticks. He was wonderfully strong, and we were afraid that he might escape or be fatally injured before we caught him. We had an idea that lepers were frail creatures, but this proved to be incorrect. Strickland knocked his legs from under him and I put my foot on his neck. He mewed hideously, and even through my riding-boots I could feel that his flesh was not the flesh of a clean man.
He struck at us with his hand and feet-stumps. We looped the lash of a dog-whip round him, under the armpits, and dragged him backwards into the hall and so into the dining-room where the beast lay. There we tied him with trunk-straps. He made no attempt to escape, but mewed.
When we confronted him with the beast the scene was beyond description. The beast doubled backwards into a bow as though he had been poisoned with strychnine, and moaned in the most pitiable fashion. Several other things happened also, but they cannot be put down here.
“I think I was right,” said Strickland. “Now we will ask him to cure this case.”
But the leper only mewed. Strickland wrapped a towel round his hand and took the gun-barrels out of the fire. I put the half of the broken walking stick through the loop of fishing-line and buckled the leper comfortably to Strickland’s bedstead. I understood then how men and women and little children can endure to see a witch burnt alive; for the beast was moaning on the floor, and though the Silver Man had no face, you could see horrible feelings passing through the slab that took its place, exactly as waves of heat play across red-hot iron—gun-barrels for instance.
Strickland shaded his eyes with his hands for a moment and we got to work. This part is not to be printed.
The dawn was beginning to break when the leper spoke. His mewings had not been satisfactory up to that point. The beast had fainted from exhaustion and the house was very still. We unstrapped the leper and told him to take away the evil spirit. He crawled to the beast and laid his hand upon the left breast. That was all. Then he fell face down and whined, drawing in his breath as he did so.
We watched the face of the beast, and saw the soul of Fleete coming back into the eyes. Then a sweat broke out on the forehead and the eyes-they were human eyes—closed. We waited for an hour but Fleete still slept. We carried him to his room and bade the leper go, giving him the bedstead, and the sheet on the bedstead to cover his nakedness, the gloves and the towels with which we had touched him, and the whip that had been hooked round his body. He put the sheet about him and went out into the early morning without speaking or mewing.
Strickland wiped his face and sat down. A night-gong, far away in the city, made seven o’clock.
“Exactly four-and-twenty hours!” said Strickland. “And I’ve done enough to ensure my dismissal from the service, besides permanent quarters in a lunatic asylum. Do you believe that we are awake?”
The red-hot gun-barrel had fallen on the floor and was singeing the carpet. The smell was entirely real.
That morning at eleven we two together went to wake up Fleete. We looked and saw that the black leopard-rosette on his chest had disappeared. He was very drowsy and tired, but as soon as he saw us, he said, “Oh! Confound you fellows. Happy New Year to you. Never mix your liquors. I’m nearly dead.”
“Thanks for your kindness, but you’re over time,” said Strickland. “To-day is the morning of the seco
nd. You’ve slept the clock round with a vengeance.”
The door opened, and little Dumoise put his head in. He had come on foot, and fancied that we were laving out Fleete.
“I’ve brought a nurse,” said Dumoise. “I suppose that she can come in for…what is necessary.”
“By all means,” said Fleete cheerily, sitting up in bed. “Bring on your nurses.”
Dumoise was dumb. Strickland led him out and explained that there must have been a mistake in the diagnosis. Dumoise remained dumb and left the house hastily. He considered that his professional reputation had been injured, and was inclined to make a personal matter of the recovery. Strickland went out too. When he came back, he said that he had been to call on the Temple of Hanuman to offer redress for the pollution of the god, and had been solemnly assured that no white man had ever touched the idol and that he was an incarnation of all the virtues labouring under a delusion.
“What do you think?” said Strickland.
I said, “‘There are more things…’”
But Strickland hates that quotation. He says that I have worn it threadbare.
One other curious thing happened which frightened me as much as anything in all the night’s work. When Fleete was dressed he came into the dining-room and sniffed. He had a quaint trick of moving his nose when he sniffed. “Horrid doggy smell, here,” said he. “You should really keep those terriers of yours in better order. Try sulphur, Strick.”
But Strickland did not answer. He caught hold of the back of a chair, and, without warning, went into an amazing fit of hysterics. It is terrible to see a strong man overtaken with hysteria. Then it struck me that we had fought for Fleete’s soul with the Silver Man in that room, and had disgraced ourselves as Englishmen for ever, and I laughed and gasped and gurgled just as shamefully as Strickland, while Fleete thought that we had both gone mad. We never told him what we had done.
Some years later, when Strickland had married and was a church-going member of society for his wife’s sake, we reviewed the incident dispassionately, and Strickland suggested that I should put it before the public.
I cannot myself see that this step is likely to clear up the mystery; because, in the first place, no one will believe a rather unpleasant story, and, in the second, it is well known to every right-minded man that the gods of the heathen are stone and brass, and any attempt to deal with them otherwise is justly condemned.
DUMPSTER DIVING, by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Claire wished she liked puppies. When she found the little creature clawing blindly in the dumpster out back of her building, she felt sorry for it, abandoned there so young, before its eyes were even open, and without a winter coat. Its whines were so feeble she was afraid it was on the verge of freezing to death. The air was so cold it hurt Claire’s nose to breathe. Bent porchlight and moonlight caught fuzzily in the frost on the street. Claire stood with her wastebasket resting on the dumpster’s edge, wanting most of all to fling the shredded paper that had been part of her husband’s diaries into the dumpster and then to flee the freezing night for cocoa in her warm apartment.
If only it were dead. She could have given it a burial under a snow of paper, a spadeful of murdered memories, and that would be the end of it, as far as she was concerned. Tomorrow was trash pickup day.
It cried. It snuffled. It thrust its little nose up at her, making a hopeless bleating sound.
It was alive, and there was a “no pets” rule in her building.
It was alive. She had hated dogs all her life.
It was alive, alone, and helpless, about to die. She remembered that feeling.
It laid its nose down on the crumpled newspapers and sighed, just the faintest whisper of sound-colored air.
“Oh, hell,” she said, tossing her paper to the side. She reached out with mittened hands, plucked the little thing from its newspaper nest, and slipped it into her coat pocket. Maybe tomorrow she could take it somewhere—the Humane Society, or something—get rid of it.
Maybe it was crawling with parasites and they had just infested her coat. She remembered seeing a dead bird once, looking at it closely and seeing the mites crawling over its feathers. Maybe she’d have to fumigate her whole apartment if she took it up there. Whereas now, only her coat and mittens were at risk. She could toss them, puppy and all, into the dumpster and go upstairs, unpolluted.
It squirmed in her pocket, a tiny live weight against her hip.
“Oh, hell.”
She went back inside and took the elevator up to her floor.
Warm, not hot, the water she ran into the blue sink in her cluttered bathroom. She bathed the tiny thing with antibacterial soap, and realized that it wasn’t so very dirty. It smelled mostly of coffee grounds from the dumpster.
Warm, not hot, the milk she put into one of her pink rubber dishwashing gloves. The puppy suckled from a pin-pricked index finger, tugging with more strength than she had thought possible. Its tiny belly tightened and tautened like a tambourine.
She pulled the smallest drawer from her dresser and dumped her underwear in with her slacks. She lined the bottom of the drawer with torn brown towels, then snuggled the puppy in next to a hot water bottle, warm, almost hot. The puppy gave a satisfied groan and fell asleep.
In the morning, the puppy was gone. In its place lay a tiny curled human baby, its forehead and hands and knees pressed up against the now cool hot water bottle.
Staring down at it, Claire felt her throat constrict, her body freeze. What was it? Had she only dreamed the puppy? Why had her eyes seen it wrong last night? Was this some kind of psychological trick she was playing on herself? Like her mother had suggested, some unconscious longing for the children her husband wouldn’t give her? He had laughed when she talked to him about it. “Claire, you give new dimensions to the word ‘unfit,’” he had said.
Strangest of all, this baby didn’t look big enough to be born.
She knelt beside the drawer and watched it, saw its ribbed sides moving in and out. It was breathing. Breathing and naked, and, in some perverse way, beautiful, like a delicate mechanical nightingale.
It rolled itself over, as if sensing her, and opened pink mouth and milky blue eyes. “Uh, uh, uh,” it said, sounding like a grunting puppy again.
Maybe it had sounded like a puppy and been a baby all along. She had slipped it into her pocket so quickly…but during the bath she had taken a good look at it, enough to know that it was male. Which she could still tell; in fact, it made a little fountain that arched toward her and fell back to the rags.
Grimacing, she mopped off the little thing, moved it away from the wet rags it had just created, and lifted the water bottle away, too.
“Uh, uh,” the thing muttered, waving its arms and legs.
Most of all Claire wanted to wash her hands, literally and figuratively. If only she hadn’t taken the trash out after midnight, she would never have even seen the thing. It could have died unmourned and unnoticed, leaving her without any stain on her memory or conscience.
What she wanted was to be alone in her apartment, snuggled in a blanket, warming her hands around a cup of fragrant cocoa, the windows curtained against the cold, the TV tuned to American Movie Classics—something with Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn. Her own little vision of heaven, one she had almost managed to live out. She fantasized about it, but when she was actually on the couch, cocoa and remote in hand, there was always something missing, a restlessness stirring in her gut that told her this wasn’t right, this wasn’t enough.
Now she had to worry about Pampers and formula and God knew what else. It had been a long time since she had checked Dr. Spock out of the library, reading him on the sly, wondering if there was any way to sneak a baby out of her husband without him knowing. That was before she found out what kind of operation he’d performed on her when he had told her he was taking her appendix out.
Before she started reading his medical texts, paying particular attention to toxicology.
B
ut all that was across state lines, left behind with her previous name and everything she had owned as a child. She had taken only some money and his diaries. Nobody outside the house knew the diaries even existed, so she figured no one would know they were missing.
The baby whined, reaching toward her.
“Oh, hell,” she said. She draped a dry towel over it to keep it warm, and went to heat some milk.
* * * *
At first she thought of giving it to some agency—the police, Social Services, whatever they called it. With her sleep chopped up, diapers to import and dispose of secretly, the drain on her meager secretarial income from providing for infant needs, the smell, the mess, the fact that she never really knew what it wanted but could only hope she was giving it something that satisfied, her thoughts were dark and terrible some of the time. She considered sticking pins into it, or gumming its mouth shut with duct tape so even the small whimpering sounds it made couldn’t come out, especially when she was having trouble getting to sleep.
But time passed; the little thing integrated into her schedule. She never got around to making those calls.
* * * *
She named him Rubio, “blond” in Spanish, though he had very little hair at first, and what he had was dark. He would swallow formula with ease, but he liked the baby food with meat in it most. After she got over her first hesitation, she enjoyed keeping him warm and dry and powdered, snuggled up, well fed.
Of course, there wasn’t much she could do for him while she was at work, but she did poke some holes through the top of the dresser with an ice pick so he could get light and air even when she closed the drawer he was in, which she had to; couldn’t have anybody hearing him cry, knowing she had something she shouldn’t have in the apartment. The thousand dollars she had discovered in her husband’s sock drawer and used as getaway money was all gone. She couldn’t afford to move, and the building was for singles only. Fortunately, Rubio didn’t make a lot of noise.
The Werewolf Megapack Page 11
