by Sax Rohmer
The chin and lower lip seemed to be drawn up to meet the nose, entirely covering the upper lip. The nostrils were distended to an incredible and wholly unnatural degree. The skin had a kind of purple iridescent sheen unlike anything I have ever seen. The effect was grotesque in the truest sense of the word, for the thing was clearly grinning at me, though God knows there was nothing in the situation to provoke that grin.
Nearer it came, and nearer. I could hear the heavy body being drawn across the floor. I could hear the beating of my own heart. At the moment when the awful thing seemed to coil for a spring, there suddenly intruded on the ghastly silence the sound of whispered conversation rising from the garden below.
In the same instant, the sound seemed to impinge on the monster’s hearing likewise. The hideous mask became bloated with a grimace that was legibly rage. The protruding eyes twisted in the head. Even in this dreadful moment, a monitor section of my brain registered an outside impression. I identified the source of the whispered conversation in the garden and the whispers—Aubrey and Margery. In that moment I believe I guessed the truth. The thought was but a flash, and then it was gone, dispelled by the necessity for action. By a backward slithering movement the thing which had been in my room was gone and swallowed up in the darkness of the hall. I turned and sprang. I had my nerves fairly in hand again and a fear for those two below galvanised me.
On the landing I paused and listened intently. No sound came up from the darkened stair and when, stepping quietly forward and leaning over the rail, I peered into the hall below, nothing stirred.
Again I heard the whispers in the garden. I crept back to my window and leaned out. Over to my left and on a level with me, a shaft of light shone out from our host’s bedroom. Otherwise there was no light except the ghostly faint one falling from a moon veiled by racing clouds.
Between my window and the. new wing and on a level with my eyes, was the window of Mrs Drurock’s room; and in the bright moonlight I could see her leaning out, her elbows on the ledge. Her bare arms gleamed like marble in the cold light, and she looked statuesquely beautiful. Wales I could not see, for a thick, square-clipped hedge obstructed my view…but I saw something else.
* * *
Lizard fashion, a hideous unclad shape crawled past beneath me amongst the tangle of ivy and low plants. The moonlight touched it for a moment, and then it was gone into denser shadows.
A consciousness of impending disaster came to me, but, because of its very vagueness, found me unprepared. Then suddenly I saw young Wales. He sprang into view above the hedge, against which, I presume, he had been crouching; he leapt high in the air as though from some menace on the ground beneath him. I have never heard a more horrifying scream than that which he uttered.
“My God!” he cried. “Margery! Margery!” and yet again: “Margery! Help!”
Then he was down, still screaming horribly, and calling for aid. The crawling thing made no sound, but the dreadful screams of Wales sank slowly into a sort of sobbing, and then into a significant panting which told of his agony.
I snatched up my kit, raced out of the room and down the stairs. I was held a moment at the door by the heavy and numerous bolts, but fumbled my way to the open at last. I almost fell over Aubrey where he lay inert upon the ground. I wasted no time in futilities, but busied myself with my restoratives at once. I found the wound quickly, having an inkling of where it would be—upon the neck. I got a terrific dose of ammonia down his throat and went about the cauterising. Margery came rushing out of the house over to us.
“Be quiet!” I commanded her. She had started to sob. “What did you see?”
“I don’t know,” she quavered. “What was it?”
I was instantly put at rest on one subject. She had not had time to glimpse the horrible thing which had attacked her lover. “It’s a snake-bite,” I said at random. “He’ll be all right. He’s coming to now,” I told her and gave her no time to collapse. “You must get back to your room at once. People will come. Your husband will have heard. Do you understand?”
For answer, she turned and fled. I breathed relief. I had spoken true. Aubrey was stirring. I would have him out of this, with another stiff dose of the ammonia and a poultice. His life was safe, though he might carry a scar on his neck for the rest of his days. It was Drurock, turning up fully dressed, but dishevelled and red-eyed from sleep, who helped me carry Aubrey to his room. We deposited our six-foot burden on the bed. I faced our host across the unconscious form of my friend.
“I’ll have a few more minutes with him and then he can sleep it off,” I told him, levelly. “That’s fortunate, for I think I could have proved a murder charge.”
He blinked and said nothing.
“When I’m through here,” I said with authority, “I think you and I may as well talk it out. Will you wait for me in the library?”
He nodded imperceptibly and turned to go. I thought it just as well to add:
“I shall be very much on the alert—and armed.”
* * *
“To be specific, Drurock, I mean to maintain that these phenomena are conjured out of the soil beneath this house.”
“Conjured?”
“And I think we know the conjuror,” I retorted, and went on: “What stumps me is your having put so many of the clues in my hands. It’s as if you wanted me to smoke you out.”
“I have still to be convinced that you have ‘smoked me out’ as you put it,” he said, equably, and then added, on a dote of self-communion: “If the secret is out—well, maybe it was time at last.”
“Do I have to prove my reasoning?”
“Well,” he shrugged, “isn’t that the scientific method?”
“If I could stage a demonstration,” I retorted, “would that be more convincing than words?”
He nodded.
“May I have an axe?”
He was taken aback for a moment. Then a slow smile spread over his face.
“Mr McAllister,” he said, “it was due me.”
“Due?”
“That I should finally encounter another man with a brain as good as my own. I shall bring you the axe.”
* * *
Although Drurock had agreed to act exactly as I might direct, he stared in almost comic surprise when he learned the nature of the directions.
Placing two large silk handkerchiefs upon the table, I saturated them with the contents of a bottle which I had brought with me in my kit. I handed my host one of the handkerchiefs.
“Tie that over your mouth and nostrils,” I said. “Whatever happens, don’t remove it unless I tell you.” I significantly tapped the revolver which lay in my pocket. “I’m taking you at your word. It is time for the secret to be out.”
I rose, finally, perspiring from the task I set myself. The hole I had chopped down through parquetry and under-flooring was about a foot in diameter. It was really disgustingly hot. Despite the hour, which was one for dawn breezes to stir and cool the air, the wall thermometer stuck at high level. If anything, the mercury rose. Ensconced in his favourite sprawling pose on the couch against the wall Drurock made no move either to deter or assist me.
I opened windows and doors. A little ventilator near the ceiling worked by a hanging wire caught my eye and I opened, that, too.
“And now,” I explained, when I had finished my preparations, “we have opened all the avenues. The thing can come through the door. It can enter through a window or it may—as I expect it will—ooze up through that hole in the floor—ooze up from the arsenious mass, that buried store of poison beneath our feet. So far, am I right?”
“I am audience,” he purred. “I make no comment. I only applaud.”
An hour passed. I had an impression that Drurock dozed off and on. I read the thermometer. The temperature had not abated a fraction of a point since sunset and, sitting immobile as I was, I found myself bathed in sweat. Despite the open doors and windows, not a breath of air stirred in the place.
Then, of
a sudden, I thought I sensed a change in temperature. I shot a glance at the thermometer. It was falling with a rapidity that was visible. The conditions favourable to condensation were at work. My senses became more than ever alert. I glanced across at Henry Drurock. I believe that his eyes were keener organs of vision than the normal human pair. He had come half erect and was staring at the hole in the floor.
I followed his gaze. I was some minutes before I too perceived the very thin miasmic vapour which was rising—rising, ever rising from the aperture.
Now the column rising from the hole became thicker. A credulous observer of the ghostly phenomenon might well have expected it to progress on to some sort of materialisation into ectoplasmic form. Becoming more dense, it rose more rapidly, although it remained from start to finish a vapour not much lighter than air. It rose like a column of oily smoke until it touched the ceiling, where it mushroomed out among the rafters. I saw wisps of it sucked into the little ventilator and drawn away.
I looked to Drurock. He shrugged.
* * *
I thought I heard a door open somewhere overhead. I glanced at my companion but he, apparently, had heard nothing. He made no sign, though I thought he held his head cocked in the position of one intensely expectant of a sound or a sight. Again I thought I heard a movement, was sure some one had stirred. The sound resembled the rustling of silk and I thought it came from the stair. And then, as in a flash, I connected little bits of evidence together and knew what I had done.
“Where does that ventilator lead?” I cried, leaping to close it even as I exclaimed.
“I am under the impression it communicates with my wife’s room,” he said banteringly, through the handkerchief.
And now the sounds upon the stair became plainly audible. Some one was breathing stertorously out there and that some one was coming down on hands and knees or—or—I uttered an oath as I recalled the vision of the horrible thing which had slithered serpent-wise into my room a few hours back. That—and Margery?”
Another sound came from overhead. A second person was moving without concealment. A door slammed. I heard Aubrey’s voice lifted in shrill dismay.
“Margery!” he cried. “What are you doing, Margery?” And then: “My God, Margery, don’t look at me!”
I sprang to the door. Major Henry Drurock, retired, tenth of the Duroque line, was close behind me.
Almost at our feet the vile thing appeared, the head first, slipping, thrusting, crawling, from dark toward light. The ghastly contorted face, one cheek brushing the floor, came into the zone of illumination, the lower lip and chin drawn up as though they were of rubber, touching the tip of the nose. The visible eye glared balefully up at me and the hair hung a dishevelled mass about the face. But the horror was to be more fully revealed. After the face came the body, and what we glimpsed of that alabaster flesh was symmetrically beautiful. If anything, this apparition was more horrible than the last. The contrast of the hideous twisted demoniacal face with the fair body was intolerable.
Suddenly, springing to its feet, the apparition stood, framed in the doorway, a slim figure, seeming like a black silhouette upon a silver background, or a wondrous statue in ebony. Elfin, dishevelled locks crowned the head; the pose of the form was as that of a startled dryad or a young Bacchante poised for a joyous leap.
For an instant, like some exquisite dream of Phidias, the figure stood…then crumpled!
I heard Aubrey’s heavy invalid step upon the stair. He came into view, carrying a flimsy garment.
“I found this in the passage,” he babbled. His face was as white as the bandage around his neck. “What’s wrong? I thought I saw Margery and—oh, my God!”
“Go back!” I shouted at him. “You’re delirious. Go back!”
“No, come on!”
Drurock’s cry rose above my own, wild and imperative, more shriek than cry. “Come on down, you damned, healthy school-boy! Come down and see her. See what you wanted to steal. Do you want her now? Come and take her! All her loveliness—all that rose-white English beauty—that perfection—they’re yours. Look! Look! Look!”
I could not prevent it. Aubrey found use of his legs and was with us before I could stop him. He stooped over the white form on the floor. He had not yet seen the face a second time. He lifted the demented thing tenderly and wrapped her in her discarded robe.
And then she turned her face to him. Aubrey cried out, but he did not release her from his supporting embrace. And in that moment I decided that he loved her, well and true.
“Don’t you want to kiss those lips?” screamed Drurock. “By the way, where are those lips—those sweet honeysuckle lips?”
His breath rasped in his throat; his chest rose and fell visibly with the effort of his breathing. Suddenly he tore the handkerchief from his face and stumbled toward the column of vapour which still coiled upward from the hole in the floor. I may have cried out. For, before I could move to intercept him, Henry Drurock thrust his face into that noisome emanation, and inhaled!
He drew back, and slowly turned to face us. He seemed to have grown taller, and a light of mocking triumph shone in his eyes. Then, in an instant, it was supplanted by a look of surprise and horror. His mouth fell open and his hands pawed ineffectually at his throat. I saw his face begin to change.
“Wales!” I called over my shoulder. “Get Margery out of here! Now! Out of the house!”
He did not stop to protest. Drawing upon some unsuspected source of strength, he gathered Margery Drurock’s slight form in his arms and staggered from the room.
I turned again to Drurock, just in time to see him fall against a small table and topple it as he crashed to the floor.
Back and forth he writhed, clawing at the air, his hideous face upraised toward the grey cloud which seemed to stoop above him.
I could watch no longer. I turned and fled from that room above the ghastly pit, that room where now the line of the Duroques was coming to an end…
* * *
I was with my London friend, a medical research man. He had accepted my specimens from the ditches of Low Fennel with curt thanks, and was proving more interested in my tale of the humans of the locality than my report on its other fauna.
“Moreover,” I went on, “that old Norman pillager, the first mad Drurock, was your precursor in the matter of volatilised arsenic as a preventative against the fits, by a longish bit—nine generations.”
“Yes,” mused my medical friend, the nerve and brain research specialist. “We do have to go back to some of that old lore of the medieval healers.”
“I guess the whole history of the Drurocks, victims of the inherited taint, one after the other, all along the line, proves the case of arsenic,” I said.
“Provided you can get it in that particular gaseous form, and at the proper degree of temperature, I suppose,” nodded my medical friend, then shook his head regretfully. “Too bad I can’t dump a thousand dying men into a vat lined with the natural ore and get the Drurock prescription duplicated. What a lot of drudgery I’m going to have to go through before I duplicate it.”
“Have you accounted for the failure of the Drurock prescription in the recent years?” he asked me. “It’s fairly obvious that the force of the emanations was either diminished or the source polluted. Else why the emergence of Major Drurock’s convulsive symptoms toward the end?”
“Pollution is the answer,” I stated, sure of my ground. “You mustn’t forget that the tetanic convulsions attacked three normal persons that we know of—Seager, the contractor, Ord, the handyman, and lastly, Margery.”
“How is Mrs Wales?” asked my friend. “No recurrence of the trouble?”
“Oh,” I laughed, “they’re honeymooning in Sweden, and Aubrey writes me she’s put on five pounds and is taking a reducing diet.”
“Then,” my friend went back to the discussion, “you account for the outbreak of these epileptiform attacks by something known?”
“Rather by something guesse
d,” I countered. “We didn’t linger long in Low Fennel after Drurock’s death, I can tell you—not long enough for research. But I assume that those corroding waters down in the mine finally ate down to a hitherto sealed stratum, probably one of barium. That busy, underground chemical plant tried an experiment in barium compounds, and you know what some of those do to the central nervous system!”
“Crawled like reptiles!” mused my friend. “Now, I should have liked to see that. Poor old Drurock. You’ve got to pity the tortured soul. His old reliable remedy played out on him; worse—reversed itself. He must have suffered damnably. Quite ready for you or any one to find him out. Why don’t you write up a paper on all this?”
I shook my head. “I don’t pretend to have worked the whole thing out and I rather think I never shall.”
“Too bad,” deplored my medical friend, the research specialist. “An autopsy might be rarely instructive.”
“Don’t be scientifically obscene,” I protested.
“Don’t be unscientifically romantic,” he retorted.
THE LEOPARD-COUCH
My name first became associated with that of Dr Maurice Bode upon the publication of a small treatise dealing with a certain phase of the complex religion of ancient Egypt. In the preparation of The Worship of Apis at Memphis he was good enough to collaborate with me; and although this little work was designed solely for the use of students, it nevertheless had a fairly large sale, undoubtedly owing to its containing accounts of many unique investigations conducted by Bode in Egypt.
Since its appearance in 1895 we have regularly worked in concert; and it is my intention to here set forth the broad facts connected with a very remarkable experiment which took place at my own rooms during the autumn of last year, and to give some account of the circumstances that led up to it. Occult students who were in London at the time will already be familiar with the matter, which formed the subject of a paper read by Maurice Bode before one of the leading research societies. As the affair seemed to open up an entirely new field, it has been suggested to Bode that a more popular account thereof might serve to promote inquiry into a subject which has but latterly begun to arouse anything approaching general interest. It is, therefore, at his request that the following is penned.
