by Paul Boor
“I’ve discovered all about that—the orphans, the slave trade, how you took those who were murdered. Are you in hell now, Thomas?” Nicolas asked. “With all the evil you’ve seen, that’s where you belong.”
“I’m nowhere,” Chubb replied. “They haven’t told me what it’s called. There’s nothing here but emptiness. But they’ve given me this chance to tell the truth . . . and do a last good deed. You were my only friend, Nicolas. I must tell you about the boys.”
“I know all about—”
“Your sons, Nicolas. I’ll tell you about your sons.”
“My sons?”
“First, the young one.”
“Ethan?”
“This boy, a sickly boy, would walk the lake trail. He knew me from town. I spoke with him often.”
“Ethan.”
“Such a bright boy, that boy of yours . . . and Ruth’s. But he was so frail. I didn’t mean harm. All I wanted was to show him my work, my calling . . . to be looked up to.”
“You took Ethan to your house? Your funeral parlour?”
“He wanted to come. Like any curious boy, he wanted to see what a dead body looked like. But the cellar was damp and cold and he was frightened…perhaps it was the fumes. He turned blue. He couldn’t get air. I covered him with blankets, kept him warm and talked to him. It was an attack, an attack of croup. I panicked. I knew I was in the wrong having him down there…then, it was too late.”
“All my life . . . all my life,” Nicolas said, choking on his words, “I thought he was lost in the woods.”
“I buried him in the woods.”
Nicolas jumped up, clutching the McCandlishes’ hands so tightly they winced.
“You cad! You . . . you son of a bitch!”
“I went to Ruth and tried to tell her. We had been so close, once . . . I went to her, but Schuyler was a babe in her arms and I couldn’t bear to tell her the truth. I swallowed it and she never knew. Never. In the end, she learned about me, my dealings in Buffalo . . . what an evil man I was. Those witches in Forestport told her. The Valdis crowd. Ruth knew she’d been touched by an evil man . . . in the end.”
Nicolas dropped back into his chair and slumped, dejected.
“You took my firstborn son.”
“There’s more. I mean to tell all the truth tonight.”
“What are you saying?”
“The boy I buried was your only son, Nicolas. Ethan was your only son.”
“But there’s Schuyler.”
“Schuyler is mine, Nicolas. He’s my son. Ruth and I . . . we were together so little time. But it was enough.”
“Schuyler?”
“I was foolish, Nicolas. Just out of the institute and chasing women, acting the gay blade. We were so young, so eager, Ruth and I, and you were away with your ice, you fool.”
“You cannot mean this! No!” Nicolas pitched forward and ground his forehead on the table. “No! No!”
“Schuyler was such a talented boy. Finally, someone looked up to me. When we sat at the piano, I had the love of a son. My son.”
“Lies! Lies from the grave! Get your rotted soul back to—” Nicolas jumped up, poker straight, and raised his hands, quivering, yet holding to the circle. “Get back to hell!”
“Nicolas, I came to do you a good deed.”
“You’ve shown me hell, isn’t that enough?”
“No, I brought you something you need . . . badly need . . . a gift . . . I brought you a memento of our business together, Nicolas, my friend. I brought you this . . .”
A rumbling like thunder came from overhead, the curtains parted, and Madame La Porte leaned forward, her hands like claws, her face twisted in agony. Directly over the table the ceiling shook and cracked wide open and out of the blackness tumbled a severed human hand.
With a thump! the hand fell onto the table in front of Nicolas. He stared, dumbfounded, recognizing at once the hand confiscated by the harbor inspector. The pinky was missing.
Beatrice McCandlish shrieked, raised her hands to her face in terror, and thus broke the circle. The ghastly green cloud spun down into the medium’s cabinet. One by one, the shutters banged against the outside of the house and the windows threw themselves open. Cool night air poured in, clearing the stench from the room.
The visitant was gone, the séance ended.
Nicolas removed the tweed jacket he’d borrowed from Schuyler, gathered up the severed hand, wrapped the grisly appendage in the jacket, and stalked from the room. He did this without a word, leaving Beatrice McCandlish simpering in the arms of her husband and the medium slumped in her chair, unconscious.
In the hallway, Nicolas hesitated but didn’t trouble himself to take Schuyler’s hat from the hat tree. Instead, he tightened his clutch on the odious package under his arm and made for the door. From the second-floor landing, Basil Prangoulis called, “Good Lord! What is that smell?”
Nicolas glanced back into the séance room. Doing so, he noted that the scale on which Madame La Porte sat now registered 127 pounds, or three pounds less than at the start of their circle.
Three pounds, he reckoned, was the precise weight of a human hand with half the forearm attached.
82
In the Professor's Office
With long powerful strides Nicolas struck out to the medical college. He loped, then jog-trotted, and finally broke into a full-out run, his breath coming in a rapid staccato like a played-out steed on a steep mountain trail. Remnants of electricity pulsed down his limbs; Thomas Chubb’s hideous revelations coursed round his brain.
Chubb had to be lying. The hideous rogue, it would be just like Thomas to take one last swipe at a lifelong associate.
A reasonable man shouldn’t pay heed to lies told by a shade. Besides, the whole ridiculous circle was likely a trick of the mind played by Madame La Porte, nothing more than a ghastly green mist she’d somehow concocted from common chemicals. Life had more important worries. Better to attack what might be changed in the world than to dwell on the tricks of a medium or the lies of ghosts. It couldn’t be true about Ethan. Ruth and Chubb? Schuyler not his? Still, the severed hand he carried had real weight, was real flesh. Strangely, it even felt warm, as if it had just been lifted from the sawmill floor.
Breathless, Nicolas pounded at the medical college’s front door until a sleepy caretaker swung it open, and with the abhorrent package tucked under his arm, he bolted up the circular stairway.
Nicolas found Patrick, the student, working alone by the glow of the microscope’s limelight in Keiller’s laboratory. Bleary-eyed, pencil in hand, the youth looked up from his notebook and the sketch of the strange creature he’d been studying as Nicolas rushed by and burst into the office.
“Van Horne? At this hour?” the professor said. “What have you there?”
Wordlessly, Nicolas unwrapped Schuyler’s ruined jacket from around his prize. The severed hand tumbled into the ring of light from the lamp on the desk. Keiller stared. “I’ll not bother to ask how ye came onto this.”
“I appreciate your discretion, Professor. The details are difficult to fathom even if one has seen them with one’s own eyes.”
“Hmm. Appears recently severed. Perfect. Tomorrow our new term begins, and this’ll make a specimen for ’em, eh? If you’ll excuse me, I’ll take this to our storage facility and get it on some ice.” Keiller delicately lifted the specimen by its wrist and hobbled toward the door. “Aye, there’ll be hours of learning to be had with this one,” he said, smiling.
Once Keiller left, Nicolas sank into the chair across from the professor’s desk. He felt unnerved, yet strangely energized. Drained, yet exhilarated. His sprint to the college had released some deep-seated energy that left him confident, eager to act, even reckless.
The walls glowed an eerie red from the smoldering heap of coal in the fireplace. Nicolas stood, loosened his tie, and tossed off his jacket. He turned the lamp on Keiller’s desk to its brightest. He probably should’ve accompanied Keiller. The
old boy would be slow on those stairs.
The desk and the nearby table were heaped with academic works in progress, journals, and ponderous medical volumes. Nicolas opened a ledger filled with sketches and notes in Keiller’s meticulous hand. Couldn’t make much of that. He chose the thickest of the medical tomes, something entitled Pathologic and Morbid Anatomy, and began leafing through it. A faint buzz came from the mosquito cages piled on the far table; the lamp must’ve upset the deadly creatures.
Pathologic and Morbid Anatomy was filled with artists’ three-color renditions and silvery photographic images of the most gruesome diseases of man. They appeared countless. Plague victims covered with weeping red sores. Syphilitic chancres. Page after page of mushrooming tumors, burst hearts, two-headed infants, and nameless monsters who’d strayed far from the mark in the dark womb of their making.
How cruel, this world, Nicolas thought. So full of suffering.
Ruth’s illness replayed in his mind, its relentless downhill course, how the thing ate at her until she chose to end her own life. Dear Ruth. No one could blame her, with all she’d endured, with the awful knowledge she’d locked inside her. In his mind’s eye Nicolas conjured the young, healthy Ruth, felt her body with a husband’s knowledge and was saddened by the horror of her end, her anchor-rope tether, its rough hemp tight around her. So much suffering . . . and so little time before some unspeakable contagion takes you.
The lemony eyes of a fever victim stared back at him. Yellow Jack. Renée had said the fever killed more and more each summer, even the young and healthy. He shuddered, imagining the carts she’d described, laden with the dead rolling down the brick streets of Galveston at dawn.
Inexplicably, a choke lodged in Nicolas’s throat. He tasted a trickle of tears and then, an uncontrollable stream . . . Surely it was Thomas Chubb’s revelations doing this to him, yet even Thomas’s betrayal seemed insignificant in view of the suffering on these pages.
He wiped an eye on his shirtsleeve. No man could stop the world’s woes; no man dared even try. It was nature’s way—most men believed that. The only ones thinking otherwise were Keiller and Renée. They dreamt of altering nature, worked at it every day. Nicolas was in the office of a rare man, indeed—one who believed in his own power to change the world. Keiller . . . his niece Renée . . . science . . . hope against the suffering of the world.
Nicolas closed the medical book and traced a slow circle around the room. The air in the office was warm as blood. Damn that fireplace. Hot as Hades for Keiller’s mosquitoes. He paused by the fireplace. The cages nearby buzzed, their screening vibrating with invisible wings sensing warm blood nearby.
Nicolas thought of what Renée and Keiller had both told him about their science. They were desperate to perfect their anti-toxoid before next summer’s epidemic, and all they needed was someone never exposed to the dread disease. An untouched, virginal subject to test their theories. A Northerner.
Nicolas admired the neat order of Keiller’s insect cages in the cluttered office. He recalled how Keiller had shown off his laboratory when Nicolas first stepped onto the island, before he met Renée . . . before Nicolas’s life had been irrevocably altered.
Now, he might be killed before he left this island. Or later. His life was tenuous, but then all of life was tenuous. Nicolas pictured the families shattered when summer drove the bloodthirsty mosquitoes from their swamps. He imagined those death carts . . . and how the Keillers, with a single experiment, might stop it all.
Nicolas took stock of the pile of mosquito cages, their frenzy of activity. He edged open the lid of a red cage, the noisiest, the most lethal, and slipped his right arm in. Yes, he would do it. He would be Keiller’s guinea pig. It was the right thing to do with his own fragile life.
A sudden hush. A hundred faint pinpricks; a thousand. A wonderfully warm, burning sensation. The insects took their blood meal so easily, so quickly and, now, quietly. Oh, messengers of death, carriers of Keiller’s particle—so bloodthirsty, yet silent in your work.
From behind him came a shout.
“What? What’s this?” It was Keiller, returned. Nicolas gave a start but did not waver. “Van Horne! What’ve ya done? You’re in my insectary! What have you done?”
“An experiment, Professor. An experiment of one, let’s call it.”
“What the . . . ? You’re crazy!”
“You would do it, if you could.”
“No, no, no. You don’t understand. I’m a scientist, Nicolas.”
“And now I’m your guinea pig.”
Keiller blanched. “Damn you, Van Horne, you’re too fine a gentleman for this.” Keiller cautiously extracted Nicolas’s arm from the cage and secured the lid. “Oh, my—you are badly bitten,” he said. “Just yesterday Renée inoculated this cage with freshly prepared particles, our most virulent from last summer. You’ll be infected, no doubt about it.”
Keiller sat Nicolas down and called to the lab for Patrick. He instructed the youth to “find the quickest mount, ride at a gallop to the stables, and insist that Dr. Renée Keiller harvest as much anti-toxoid as possible.”
“And tell her,” the old man said, turned dead serious, “she must carry the anti-toxoid on ice to the laboratory and begin purifying for the purpose of injection into a human being.”
The youth’s mouth dropped open.
“We’ll begin immediately,” Keiller said. “Go.” He turned to Nicolas and reexamined his puffy, pink arm near the lamp.
“You see, Nicolas, the dose is unknown. A human will require a great deal of anti-toxoid, I’m afraid. We’ll use our strongest.”
When Keiller looked up, Patrick hadn’t budged from the doorway, his face drained of blood. “An experiment?” the young man whined. “With him?”
“Get a horse, boy! Ride!”
Patrick stumbled out the door. Keiller limped behind his desk, pulled a bottle of Scotch from a drawer, and poured himself a stiff dollop. He downed it and poured another. “None of this for you, Van Horne. The anti-toxoid will be hard enough on your liver.”
“What am I in for, Professor?”
“We’ll inject anti-toxoid direct into your vein. Let’s see—yellow fever incubates in three to six days . . . We’ll give you three treatments, one a day over the next three days to beat the particle to the punch.”
“We’ll know in three days then?”
“That we will. The anti-toxoid will have side effects. Serious side effects. If you survive—”
“Survive?”
“I confess, Van Horne, the stuff’s been killing our guinea pigs. About fifty percent mortality from the treatment alone. It’s a mite hard on the internal organs.”
“This infusion—where do you do it?”
“I’ll arrange for a hospital bed on the General Men’s Ward. I’m thinking two liters of purified anti-toxoid for a first dose. It should take only an hour to infuse, then you’ll have to rest.” Keiller’s hand trembled as he reached for his whiskey and squinted through his spectacles, searching for a pen.
“I’ll write the orders now. Renée and I will see to it.”
83
First Treatment
Beds stretched in four long rows down the ward. Wrapped in a hospital gown, Nicolas lay between stiff white sheets. Electric lights blazed overhead. Florence Nightingales dashed to and fro in black frocks with white aprons and caps. A red rubber tube ran from the steel trocar in his forearm to a glass bottle of murky grey fluid. An empty bottle stood on the bedside table; the last of the anti-toxoid flowed; his veins pulsed with it.
It was late afternoon, nearly dusk. He must’ve passed out with the first treatment. All he could remember was a young physician stabbing him with that thick steel trocar and the room growing dim. The room was still fading in and out. His legs shook convulsively, his belly ached, and his arms seemed made of wood. A sea of strained faces washed by—nurses, students, doctors. Then Renée was at his side.
“Oh, Nick,” she was saying under her br
eath. “Why in the world have you done this?”
“I . . . I . . .”
He must’ve dozed again because the next time he opened his eyes night was falling and his bed was surrounded by the solemn beards and white coats of physicians making their evening rounds. Keiller was lecturing, something about “adverse effects,” “necrosis,” and “organ damage.”
“What’s happened, Francis?”
“A wee reaction, quite bad, actually,” Keiller said. “But you’ve taken it well enough.”
The professor’s face was drawn. Nicolas read doubt in the old man’s eyes.
“Is it working, Professor?”
“As I’ve said, it’ll be a few days before we have a verdict. Your veins are not much good, sir. It appears ye’ve punished ’em somethin’ awful. Renée finally managed a passable vascular access for the second bottle.”
“Can I go?”
“Oh, yes. Renée’s preparing tomorrow’s dose of anti-toxoid as we speak. Your job as the guinea pig . . . uh, the patient, Van Horne, is to get plenty of rest. And remember, no whiskey, sir. Be here on the ward promptly at noon tomorrow.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Must rush along now. Need to finish our rounds. You remember I’ve a special anatomy class to instruct this evening. We’ll be dissectin’ all through the night.”
84
Abducted
He’d taken only the first step of the narrow, unlit stairwell to the flat when they struck. One step in the scant light from the street, and powerful arms encircled his neck and head from behind, a forearm the size of a fence post tightened against his throat. He sensed a second man, someone tall, his breath stinking of cigar and cognac wafting down as the strong one did his work.
He was so close to safety, surprised barely a dozen steps from Schuyler’s snug front room and divan. Those bolts with piano wire strung between sprang to mind, the weapon that had nearly done him in at the rail of the Jilted Lady. The Russian assassin . . . the garroter he’d been dreading.
