The Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK™, Vol. 1: Henry S. Whitehead

by Henry S. Whitehead

  The three holes through the man’s cheek were of equal size and similar appearance, obviously inflicted by some stabbing implement of about the diameter of a quarter-inch. The first stab, Brutus thought, had been the one highest up, and this one had not only penetrated into the mouth like the others, but had severely scratched the gum of the upper jaw just above his eye-tooth. I talked to him as I dressed these three wounds. “So the Thing must have been concealed inside your room, you think, Brutus?”

  “Undoubtedly, sar,” returned Brutus. “There was no possible way for it to crawl in ‘pon me—de door shut tight, de window-screen undisturb’, sar.”

  The poor fellow was trembling from head to foot with shock and fear, and I accompanied him back to his cabin. He had not lighted his lamp. It was only by the light of the moon that he had seen his assailant disappear over the foot of the bed. He had seized the handkerchief and run out into the yard in his pajamas.

  I lit the lamp, determining to have electricity put into the cabin the next day, and, with Brutus’ assistance, looked carefully over the room. Nothing, apparently, was hidden anywhere; there was only a little space to search through; Brutus had few belongings; the cabin furniture was adequate but scanty. There were no superfluities, no place, in other words, in which the Thing could hide itself.

  Whatever had attacked Brutus was indeed going about its work with vicious cunning and determination.

  Brutus turned in, and after sitting beside him for a while, I left the lamp turned down, closed the door, and took my departure.

  Brutus did not turn up in the morning, and Stephen Penn, returning from an investigatory visit to the cabin came to me on the gallery about nine o’clock with a face as gray as ashes. He had found Brutus unconscious, the bed soaked in blood, and, along the great pectoral muscle where the right arm joins the body, a long and deep gash from which the unfortunate fellow had, apparently, lost literally quarts of blood. I telephoned for a doctor and hurried to the cabin.

  Brutus was conscious upon my arrival, but so weakened from loss of blood as to be quite unable to speak. On the floor, beside the bed, apparently where it had fallen, lay a medium-sized pocket knife, its largest blade open, soaked in blood. Apparently this had been the instrument with which he had been wounded.

  The doctor, soon after his arrival; declared a blood-transfusion to be necessary, and this operation was performed at eleven o’clock in the cabin, Stephen contributing a portion of the blood, a young Negro from the town, paid for his service, the rest. After that, and the administration of a nourishing hot drink, Brutus was able to tell us what had happened.

  Against his own expectations, he had fallen asleep immediately after my departure, and curiously, had been awakened not by any attack upon him, but by the booming of a rata drum from somewhere up in the hills back of the town where some of the Negroes were, doubtless, “making magic,” a common enough occurrence in any of the vodu-ridden West India islands. But this, according to Brutus, was no ordinary awakening.

  No—for, on the floor, beside his bed, dancing to the distant drumbeats, he had seen—It!

  That Brutus had possessed some idea of the identity or character of his assailant, I had, previous to this occurrence of his most serious wound, strongly suspected. I had gathered this impression from half a dozen little things, such as his fervid denial that the creature which had bitten him was either a rat or a mongoose; his “Gawd know” when I had asked him what the Thing was like.

  Now I understood, clearly of course, that Brutus knew what kind of creature had concealed itself in his room. I even elicited the fact, discovered by him, just how I am quite unaware, that the Thing had hidden under a loose floor board beneath his bed and so escaped detection on the several previous searches.

  But to find out from Brutus—the only person who knew—that, indeed, was quite another affair. There can be, I surmise, no human being as consistently and completely shut-mouthed as a West Indian Negro, once such a person has definitely made up his mind to silence on a given subject! And on this subject, Brutus had, it appeared, quite definitely made up his mind. No questions, no cajolery, no urging—even with tears, on the part of his lifelong friend Stephen Penn—could elicit from him the slightest remark bearing on the description or identity of the Thing. I myself used every argument which logic and common-sense presented to my Caucasian mind. I urged his subsequent safety upon Brutus, my earnest desire to protect him, the logical necessity of co-operating, in the stubborn fellow’s own obvious interest, with us who had his welfare at heart. Stephen, as I have said, even wept! But all these efforts on our parts, were of no avail. Brutus Hellman resolutely refused to add a single word to what he had already said. He had awakened to the muted booming of the distant drum. He had seen the Thing dancing beside his bed. He had, it appeared, fainted from this shock, whatever the precise nature of that shock may have been, and knew nothing more until he came slowly to a vastly weakened consciousness between Stephen Penn’s visit to him late in the morning, and mine which followed it almost at once.

  There was one fortunate circumstance. The deep and wide cut which had, apparently, been inflicted upon him with his own pocket-knife—and had been lying, open, by mere chance, on a small tabouret beside his bed—had been delivered lengthwise of the pectoral muscle, not across the muscle. Otherwise the fellow’s right arm would have been seriously crippled for life. The major damage he had suffered in this last and most serious attack had been the loss of blood, and this, through my employment of one donor of blood and Stephen Penn’s devotion in giving him the remainder, had been virtually repaired.

  However, whether he spoke or kept silent, it was plain to me that I had a very definite duty towards Brutus Hellman. I could not, if anything were to be done to prevent it, have him attacked in this way while in my service and living on my premises.

  The electricity went in that afternoon, with a pull-switch placed near the hand of whoever slept in the bed, and, later in the day, Stephen Penn brought up on a donkey cart from his town lodging-place, his own bedstead, which he set up in Brutus’ room, and his bureau containing the major portion of his belongings, which he placed in the newly-swept and garnished cabin next door. If the Thing repeated its attack that night, it would have Stephen, as well as Brutus, to deal with.

  One contribution to our knowledge Stephen made, even before he had actually moved into my yard. This was the instrument with which Brutus had been stabbed through the cheek. He found it cached in the floor-space underneath that loose board where the Thing had hidden itself. He brought it to me, covered with dried blood. It was a rough, small-scale reproduction of an African “assegai,” or stabbing-spear. It was made out of an ordinary butcher’s hardwood meat-skewer, its head a splinter of pointed glass such as might be picked up anywhere about the town. The head—and this was what caused the resemblance to an “assegai”—was very exactly and neatly bound on to the cleft end of the skewer, with fishline. On the whole, and considered as a piece of work, the “assegai” was a highly creditable job.

  It was on the morning of this last-recorded attack on Brutus Hellman during the period between my visit to him and the arrival of the doctor with the man for the blood-transfusion, that I sat down, at my desk, in an attempt to figure out some conclusion from the facts already known. I had progressed somewhat with my theoretical investigation at that time. When later, after Brutus could talk, he mentioned the circumstance of the Thing’s dancing there on his cabin floor, to the notes of a drum, in the pouring moonlight which came through his screened window and gave its illumination to the little room, I came to some sort of indeterminate decision. I will recount the steps—they are very brief—which led up to this.

  The facts, as I noted them down on paper that day, pointed to a pair of alternatives. Either Brutus Hellman was demented, and had invented his “attacks,” having inflicted them upon himself for some inscrutable reason; or—the Thing was possessed of qualities not common among the lower animals! I set the two groups
of facts side by side, and compared them.

  Carswell and I had actually seen the Thing as It ran out of the cabin that first night. Something, presumably the same Thing, had torn a large rat to pieces. The same Thing had bitten savagely Brutus’ lower leg. Brutus’ description of it was that it looked “like a frog.” Those four facts seemed to indicate one of the lower animals, though its genus and the motive for its attacks were unknown!

  On the other hand, there was a divergent set of facts. The Thing had used mechanical means, a liana stem with a looped knot in it, to get into Brutus’ cabin through the window. It had used some stabbing instrument, later found, and proving to be a manufactured affair. Again, later, it had used Brutus’ knife in its final attack. All these facts pointed to some such animal as a small monkey. This theory was strengthened by the shape of the bites on Brutus’ leg and on the rat’s throat.

  That it was not a monkey, however, there was excellent evidence. The Thing looked like a frog. A frog is a very different-looking creature from any known kind of monkey. There were, so far as I knew, no monkeys at the time on the island of St. Thomas.

  I added to these sets of facts two other matters: The blood alleged to be drawn from the Thing had, on analysis, turned out to be human blood. The single circumstance pointed very strongly to the insanity theory. On the other hand, Brutus could hardly have placed the fresh blood which I had myself scraped up on my slides, on the windowsill where I found it. Still, he might have done so, if his insanity” were such as to allow for an elaborately “planted” hoax or something of the kind. He could have placed the drop of blood there, drawn from his own body by means of a pin-prick, before he fired the seven cartridges that night. It was possible. But, knowing Brutus, it was so improbable as to be quite absurd.

  The final circumstance was the little “African” hut. That, somehow, seemed to fit in with the “assegai.” The two naturally went together.

  It was a jumble, a puzzle. The more I contrasted and compared these clues, the more impossible the situation became.

  Well, there was one door open, at least. I decided to go through that door and see where it led me. I sent for Stephen. It was several hours after the blood-transfusion. I had to get some of Brutes’ blood for my experiment, but it must be blood drawn previous to the transfusion. Stephen came to see what I wanted.

  “Stephen,” said I, “I want you to secure from Hellman’s soiled things one of those very bloody sheets which you changed on his bed today, and bring it here.”

  Stephen goggled at me, but went at once on this extraordinary errand. He brought me the sheet. On one of its corners, there was an especially heavy mass of clotted blood. From the underside of this I managed to secure a fresh enough smear on a pair of glass slides, and with these I stepped into my car and ran down to the hospital and asked for Dr. Brownell.

  I gave him the slides and asked him to make for me an analysis for the purpose of comparing this blood with the specimen I had given him two days before. My only worry was whether or not they had kept a record of the former analysis, it being a private job and not part of the hospital routine. They had recorded it, however, and Dr. Brownell obligingly made the test for me then and there. Half an hour after he had stepped into the laboratory he came back to me.

  “Here are the records,” he said. “The two specimens are unquestionably from the same person, presumably a Negro. They are virtually identical.”

  The blood alleged to be the Thing’s, then, was merely Brutus’ blood. The strong presumption was, therefore, that Brutus had lost his mind.

  Into this necessary conclusion, I attempted to fit the remaining facts. Unfortunately for the sake of any solution, they did not fit! Brutus might, for some insane reason, have inflicted the three sets of wounds upon himself. But Brutus had not made the “African” hut, which had turned up before he was back from the hospital. He had not, presumably, fastened that liana stem outside his window. He had not, certainly, slain that rat, nor could he have “invented” the creature which both Carswell and I had seen, however vaguely, running out of his cabin that night of the first attack.

  At the end of all my cogitations, I knew absolutely nothing, except what my own senses had conveyed to me; and these discordant facts I have already set down in their order and sequence, precisely and accurately, as they occurred.

  To these I now add the additional fact that upon the night following the last recorded attack on Brutus Hellman nothing whatever happened. Neither he nor Stephen Penn, sleeping side by side in their two beds in the cabin room, was in any way disturbed.

  I wished, fervently, that Dr. Pelletier were at hand. I needed someone like him to talk to. Carswell would not answer, somehow. No one would answer. I needed Pelletier, with his incisive mind, his scientific training, his vast knowledge of the West Indies, his open-mindedness to facts wherever these and their contemplation might lead the investigator. I needed Pelletier very badly indeed!

  And Pelletier was still over in Porto Rico.

  Only one further circumstance, and that, apparently, an irrelevant one, can be added to the facts already narrated—those incongruous facts which did not appear to have any reasonable connection with one another and seemed to be mystifyingly contradictory. The circumstance was related to me by Stephen Penn, and it was nothing more or less than the record of a word, a proper name. This, Stephen alleged, Brutus had repeated, over and over, as, under the effects of the two degrees of temperature which he was carrying as the result of his shock and of the blood-transfusion, he had tossed about restlessly during a portion of the night. That name was, in a sense, a singularly appropriate one for Brutus to utter, even though one would hardly suspect the fellow of having any acquaintance with Roman history, or, indeed, with the works of William Shakespeare!

  The name was—Cassius!

  I figured that anyone bearing the Christian name, Brutus, must, in the course of a lifetime, have got wind of the original Brutus’ side-partner. The two names naturally go together, of course, like Damon and Pythias, David and Jonathan! However, I said nothing about this to Brutus.

  I was on the concrete wharf beside the Naval Administration Building long before the Grebe arrived from San Juan on the Thursday morning a week after Brutus Hellman’s operation.

  I wanted to get Pelletier’s ear at the earliest possible moment. Nearby, in the waiting line against the wall of the Navy building, Stephen Penn at the wheel, stood my car. I had telephoned Pelletier’s man that he need not meet the doctor. I was going to do that myself, to get what facts, whatever explanation Pelletier might have to offer as I drove him through the town and up the precipitous roadways of Denmark Hill to his house at its summit.

  My bulky, hard-boiled, genial naval surgeon friend, of the keen, analytical brain and the skillful hands which so often skirted the very edges of death in his operating-room, was unable, however, to accompany me at once upon his arrival. I had to wait more than twenty minutes for him, while others, who had prior claims upon him, interviewed him. At last he broke away from the important ones and heaved his unwieldy bulk into the back seat of my car beside me. Among those who had waylaid him, I recognized Doctors Roots and Maguire, both naval surgeons.

  I had not finished my account of the persecution to which Brutus Hellman had been subjected by the time we arrived at the doctor’s hilltop abode. I told Stephen to wait for me and finished the story inside the house while Pelletier’s houseman was unpacking his traveling valises. Pelletier heard me through in virtual silence, only occasionally interrupting with a pertinent question. When I had finished he lay back in his chair, his eyes closed.

  He said nothing for several minutes. Then, his eyes still shut, he raised and slightly waved his big, awkward-looking hand, that hand of such uncanny skill when it held a knife, and began to speak, very slowly and reflectively:

  “Dr. Roots mentioned a peculiar circumstance on the wharf.”

  “Yes?” said I.

  “Yes,” said Dr. Pelletier. He shifted his
ungainly bulk in his big chair, opened his eyes and looked at me. Then, very deliberately:

  “Roots reported the disappearance of the thing—it was a parasitic growth—that I removed from your houseman’s side a week ago. When they had dressed the fellow and sent him back to the ward Roots intended to look the thing over in the laboratory. It was quite unusual. I’ll come to that in a minute. But when he turned to pick it up, it was gone; had quite disappeared. The nurse, Miss Charles, and he looked all over for it, made a very thorough search. That was one of the things he came down for this morning—to report that to me.” Once again Pelletier paused, looked at me searchingly, as though studying me carefully. Then he said:

  “I understand you to say that the Thing, as you call it, is still at large?”

  The incredible possible implication of this statement of the disappearance of the “growth” removed from Hellman’s body and the doctor’s question, stunned me for an instant. Could he possibly mean to imply—? I stared at him, blankly, for an instant.

  “Yes,” said I, “it is still at large, and poor Hellman is barricaded in his cabin. As I have told you, I have dressed those bites and gashes myself. He absolutely refuses to go to the hospital again. He lies there, muttering to himself, ash-gray with fear.”

  “Hm,” vouchsafed Dr. Pelletier. “How big would you say the Thing is, Canevin, judging from your glimpse of it and the marks it leaves?”

  “About the size, say, of a rat,” I answered, “and black. We had that one sight of it, that first night. Carswell and I both saw it scuttering out of Hellman’s cabin right under our feet when this horrible business first started.”

  Dr. Pelletier nodded, slowly. Then he made another remark, apparently irrelevant;

  “I had breakfast this morning on board the Grebe. Could you give me lunch?” He looked at his watch.