’um, ain’t I?
“Yeh, dey–or it–I don’t know which. De udder night I nearly saw ’um.” His voice sank broodingly. “I come in an’ shut de door an’ stand dere in de dark a minute, den I KNOW dat somethin’ is beside me. I let go wid me left but all I do is skin me hand an’ knock a panel outta de door. W’en I toin on de light, de room is empty. I tell yuh”–the voice sank yet lower and the wicked eyes avoided mine sullenly–“I tell yuh, either I’m bugs or Bat Roike is hauntin’ me!”
“Nonsense.” I spoke abruptly but I was conscious of a queer sensation as if a cold wind had blown upon me from a suddenly opened door. “It’s neither. You changed your habits too much; from a gregarious, restless adventurer, you’ve become almost a recluse. The change from the white lights and the clamor of the throng to a second rate boarding house and a job in a poolhall is too great. You brood too much and think too much about the past. That’s the way with you professional athletes; when you quit active competition, you forget the present entirely. Get out and tramp some more; forget Battling Rourke; change boarding places. It isn’t good for a man of your nature to think too much. You’re too much of an extrovert–if you know what that means. You need lights and crowds and fellowship, too.”
“Mebby you’re right,” he muttered. “Dis is gettin’ on me noives, sure. I been talkin’ to uh bootlegger wot wants me tuh go in wid him, woikin’ outa Mexico; mebbe I’ll take him up.” Suddenly he rose abruptly.
“Gettin’ late,” he said shortly. A moment he turned at the door and I could have sworn I saw a gleam in his cold grey eyes–was it fear? A moment later his huge hand shut the door behind him and his footsteps died away in the distance.
The next morning my breakfast room was invaded by my closest friend, Hallworthy, and his young wife.
This young lady, a slim little twenty year old beauty, perched herself on my knee and held up a pair of rosy lips to be kissed. Her husband did not object in the least, however, because his wife happens to be my sister.
“This is a truly remarkable hour for a visit,” I remarked. “How did you ever get this Young American up this early, Malcolm?”
“The most terrible thing!” the girl interrupted. “I can’t imagine–”
“Let me tell it, Joan,” said Hallworthy mildly. “Steve, you knew Clement Van Dorn, didn’t you, and Professor Falrath?”
“I know Clement Van Dorn very intimately and have heard him speak of Falrath.”
“Look here.” Hallworthy laid a Los Angeles paper before me. I read the item he pointed out, attentively.
“Falrath murdered by Van Dorn, his best friend? I am surprized.”
“Surprized!” exclaimed Hallworthy. “I am astounded! Nonplussed! Dumfounded! Why, outside the fact that they were the best of friends, Clement Van Dorn had the greatest abhorrence of violence that I ever saw in a man! It was almost an obsession with him! He kill a man? I don’t believe it!”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“There is but a thin veneer over the savagery of all of us,” I said calmly. “I, who have seen life, both at its highest and its lowest, assure you of this. Trivial things can assume monstrous proportions and loose, for an instant, the primal savage, roaring and red handed. I have seen a man kill his best friend over a checker game. Men are only men and the primitive, monstrous instincts still hold sway in the dim corners of the mind.”
“Not among men like Van Dorn,” Hallworthy dissented. “Why, Steve, Clement is positively bloodless in his erudition. He was out of his element anywhere but in Greenwich Village, where he was an authority on the most pallid form of vers libre and cubist art.”
“I agree with Malcolm,” said Joan, taking his arm, her protective feminism uppermost. “I don’t believe Clement killed him.”
“We shall soon know,” I answered. “We’re going to see Clement.”
This necessitated a trip to the prison, for Van Dorn’s bail had been remanded and he was being held for trial. Van Dorn, a slim, pallid youth with delicate and refined features, paced his cell and gesticulated jerkily with his slender, artistic hands as he talked. His hair was tousled, his eyes bloodshot; he was unshaven. His universe had crashed about him; his standards were upset. He had lost his mental equilibrium. Looking at him, I felt that if he were not already insane, that he was hovering on the verge of insanity.
“No, no, no!” he kept exclaiming. “I don’t understand it! It’s monstrous, a terrible nightmare! They say I murdered him–that’s preposterous! How do they account for the fact that when we were found his body was clear across the room from his wheel chair?”
“Tell us the whole thing, old fellow,” Hallworthy’s voice came, soothing, calm. “We’re your friends, you know, and we will believe you.”
“Yes, tell us, Clement,” echoed Joan, her large eyes tender with pity for the wretched youth.
Van Dorn pressed his hands to his temples as if to still their throbbing, his face twisted in mental torment.
“This is the way of it,” he said haltingly. “I’ve told this tale over and over but no one believes me. I’ve been going up to Professor Falrath’s apartment nearly every night for the past week and he was explaining Spencer’s principles, the deeper phases of them. I never saw a man who possessed such a store of metaphysical learning, or who had gone deeper into the roots of things in general. Why, there never were two greater friends. That night we were sitting and talking as we had been and I stepped over to a table to get a book. When I turned”–he closed his eyes tightly, shook his head as if to rid himself of some inner vision, then stared fixedly at us, his hands clenched–“when I turned, Professor Falrath was rising out of his chair; that in itself was astonishing, because he hasn’t left the chair in years, but his face held me in frozen silence. My God, that face!” He shuddered violently. “There was no likeness of Professor Falrath, no HUMAN likeness in those frightful features! It was as if Falrath had vanished and in his place sat a horrid Spectre from some other sphere. The Thing leaped from the chair and hurled itself toward me, fingers stretched like claws. I screamed and fled toward the door but it was in front of me; it closed in on me and in desperation I fought back. Violence of any sort has always repelled me; I have always looked upon the exercize of physical force as a return to bestiality. As for killing, the very sight of blood from a cut finger always nauseated me. But now, I was no longer a civilized man, but a wild beast fighting frenziedly for life. Falrath tore my clothing to pieces and his nails left long tears in my skin; I struck him again and again in the face but without effect.
“At last I secured–how I know not for all is a scarlet haze of horror–a dagger which was one of his collection of arms–this I drove through his wrist and the start of the blood weakened and revolted me.
Yet, as he still pressed his attack, I steeled myself and thrust it through his bosom. He fell dead and I, too, fell in a dead faint.”
We were silent for a time following this weird narration.
“We’ve stayed our limit, Clement,” I said presently. “We will have to go, but rest assured that you will receive all the aid possible. The only solution I can see, is that Professor Falrath was the victim of a sudden homicidal insanity, which might have temporarily overcome his physical weaknesses as you say.”
Clement nodded but there was no spark of hope in his eyes, only a bleak and baffled despair. He was not suited to cope with the rough phases of life, which until now he had never encountered. A weakling, morally and physically, he was learning in a hard school that savage fact of biology–that only the strong survive.
Suddenly Joan held out her arms to him, her mothering instinct which all women have touched to the quick by his helplessness. Like a lost child he threw himself on his knees before her, laid his head in her lap, his frail body racked with great sobs as she stroked his hair, whispering gently to him–like a mother to her child. His hands sought hers and held them as if they were his hope of salvation. The poor devil; he had no place in this rough world;
he was made to be mothered and cared for by women–like so many others of his kind.
There were tears in Joan’s eyes as we came out of the cell and Hallworthy’s face showed that he too had been deeply touched.
I had learned that a detective had been put to work on the case–rather an unusual procedure since Van Dorn had confessed to the killing, but the object was to find the motive.
The detective working on the case gave his views as follows: “Van Dorn is just bugs, I figure. One of these fellows that was born half cookoo and completed the job by hanging around such crazy places as Greenwich Village where they’re all crazy and liable to kill anybody just for the sensation.” (Evidently his knowledge of artists and the New Thought was gathered from ten-cent movies.) “He and the old professor must have had a row and he killed Falrath, dragged his body across the room, tore his own clothes and then lay down and pretended to be in a faint when the people, who had heard the noise, come busting in at the door. That’s the way I think it was. Must have been a terrible thing, Falrath’s face was twisted all out of shape; didn’t scarcely look like a human.”
“What do you think?” asked Hallworthy as we were on our way back.
“I think what I said to Van Dorn. That Clement is telling the truth and that Falrath was insane.”
“Yet, could even violent insanity cause a man of Falrath’s age and disability to spring on and nearly kill a younger man with his bare hands? Could insanity have put strength in those shrivelled muscles and bloodless tissues which had refused to even support his frail body for so many years?”
“That–or else Van Dorn is lying or insane himself,” I answered, and for a time the conversation was dropped. Van Dorn had plenty of money and at the time I could see no way in which we could aid him.
At the trial something might come up.
That night as I turned out the light, preparatory to retiring, I had an opportunity to observe the power of thought suggestion. Michael Costigan’s tale had been revolving in the back of my mind and as I plunged the room in darkness, I smiled to myself at the hint of movement in the shadows about me, which my vivid imagination created.
“Suicide follows sudden attack of insanity. The people of a boarding house on–Street were last night roused by a terrific commotion going on in an upstairs room, and upon investigation found Michael Costigan, ex-prizefighter, engaged in a debauchery of destruction, smashing chairs and tables and tearing the doors from their hinges, in the darkness of his room. A light being turned on, Costigan, a man of huge frame and remarkable strength, stopped short in what was apparently a battle with figments of his imagination, stared wildly at the astounded watchers, then suddenly snatched a revolver from the hand of the landlady and placing the muzzle against his breast, fired four shots into his body, dying almost instantly. The theory advanced is that Costigan was a victim of delirium tremens, but he was not known to be a drinking man. The landlady maintains that he was insane, and asserts that he had been talking strangely for some time.”
Laying down the paper in which I had read the above article, I gave myself over to musing. This indeed was unusual. Had Costigan’s obsession of Battling Rourke’s ghost driven him to suicide or was this obsession merely one of the incidents of a latent insanity which had finally destroyed him? This seemed more likely; a man like Costigan was not one to kill himself because of a fancied “ghost” even though he had confessed to a partial belief in its existence. Moreover, considering the terrible punishment he had received in his years in the ring, it was likely that his mentality had been affected.
I picked up the paper and idly scanned the columns, glancing over the usual lists of murders and assaults, which seemed extraordinarily numerous, somehow.
Later in the day I paid a visit to the Hallworthys who lived not overly far from my apartments. I could tell that their minds were still running on Van Dorn and deliberately steered all talk into other channels.
I leaned back in my easy chair regarding the two who sat on a lounge before me. Malcolm Hallworthy was such a man as I had always hoped my sister would marry; a kind man, kind almost to a fault, generous and gentle, yet not weak like Van Dorn. He was not many years older than Joan but he seemed so because of his indulgently protecting attitude, yet at times they seemed like happy children together.
This attitude was shown in his unconscious posture, an arm about the girl’s slim body as she nestled against him. My only doubt was that he was too indulgent. She was a willful, reckless sort of a girl, not old enough to have any judgment, and she needed, at times, a strong hand to guide her.
“How do you manage this little spit-fire, Malcolm?” I asked bluntly.
He smiled and gently caressed her curls.
“Love will tame the wildest, Steve.”
“I doubt if love alone will tame a woman,” I answered. “Before she married she could be a little wildcat when she wanted to. The first thing you know you’ll let her have her way so much that you’ll spoil her.”
“You talk as if I were a child,” Joan pouted.
“You are. I warn you, Malcolm, her mother gave her her last spanking when she was seventeen.”
A shadow touched Hallworthy’s fine, sensitive features.
“That’s never necessary. Punishing a child is simply brutal–that’s all. A relic of the Stone Age that should have no place in the twentieth century. Nothing revolts me quite as much as someone coercing a weaker mortal by the ancient tyranny of flogging.”
I laughed. Long roaming in the by-ways of the world had calloused me to many things. I could scarcely get Hallworthy’s viewpoint on some subjects; Joan’s either, for that matter. Though we were brother and sister, yet our lives, until recent years had been as different as the poles. She had been raised in luxury, but I had wandered forth into the world at the age of eight and some of the things I had seen and the ways I had travelled had not been of the nicest.
“Many things may not be right,” I said. “But they are necessary.”
“I deny that!” exclaimed Hallworthy. “Wrong is never necessary! The rightness of a thing makes it necessary, just as wrongness makes it unnecessary.”
“Wait!” I raised a hand. “You think, then, if a thing is Right, it should be done, no matter if the consequences are bad.”
“The consequences of Right are never bad.”
“You are a hopeless idealist. According to your theory, all knowledge gained by research should be given to the people, since it is certainly Wrong to keep the race in ignorance?”
“Certainly. You seem to believe that the end makes things right or wrong. I believe that everything is fundamentally right or wrong and that nothing can make for good results but right.”
“Wait. You forget that the great host of people cannot even assimilate such knowledge as has been gained through the past centuries. Suppose hypnotism were a proven fact; would it be right to give to all people the power of controlling others?”
“Yes, if it were a proven fact. It is wrong to suppress knowledge, therefore it is right to dispense knowledge and the results would be good.”
That evening I visited Professor Falrath’s apartments. I had gotten permission to do so, with the intention of going through his papers to see if any light could be thrown on the murder, or his past relations with Van Dorn.
Among them I found the following letter which he had evidently never finished; it was addressed to Professor Hjalmar Nordon, Brooklyn, New York, and the part which caught my attention follows:
“For the last few nights I have been the victim of a peculiar hallucination. After I turn out the light, I seem to sense the presence of something in my room. There is a suggestion of movement in the darkness and straining my eyes it sometimes seems as though I can almost see vague and intangible shadows which glide about through the darkness. Yet, I know that I cannot see these things, as one sees a physical object; I feel them, somehow, and the sensation is so realistic that they seem to register themselves on my sight and hearing. I can
not understand this. Can it be that I am losing my mind? As yet I have said nothing to anyone, but tonight when Van Dorn comes here, I shall tell him of this illusion and see if he can offer any logical explanation.”
Here the letter ended abruptly. I re-read it, again conscious of that strange feeling of an unknown door opening somewhere and letting in the dank air of outer spaces.
This was monstrously strange. Michael Costigan and Hildred Falrath had been as far apart as the poles, yet here seemed a common thought between them. Costigan, too, had spoken of shadows lurking and gliding about his room, and the strange thing, each had spoken of FEELING the presence of the spectres. Each had impressed the fact that the Things were unseeable and unhearable, yet each spoke vaguely of SEEING and HEARING.
I took the letter to my rooms, and composed a letter to Professor Nordon, narrating the whole affair and telling him of the letter, explaining that I did not enclose for the reason that it might be of use in Van Dorn’s trial to prove the friendship existing between him and the late professor.
This done, I went out into the warm star-light of the late summer night for a stroll, feeling fagged somehow, though I had done nothing to justify such a feeling. As I went along the poorly lighted and almost deserted street–for it was late–I was aware of the strange actions of an individual just in front of me. His progress seemed to be measured by the areas of street lights. He would hesitate beneath the glow of a light, then suddenly dart swiftly along the street until he came to another light, where he would halt as if loath to leave its radiance.
Feeling some interest, I hastened my step and soon overtook him, for in spite of his haste between the lamp posts, his lingering beneath them made his progress very slow. He was standing directly beneath one, staring this way and that, when I came up behind him and spoke to him. He whirled, hand clenched and raised and struck wildly at me. I blocked the blow easily and caught his arm, supposing he thought I was a foot-pad. However, the evident terror on his face seemed abnormal, somehow. His eyes bulged and his mouth gaped while his complexion was as near white as the human skin can become.
The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard Page 63
