by Jerry
He goes on into the night, along the arrow-straight highway, under the peering moon. The lady sways and dreams, and puckers her veil in.
A long slow rise begins, and now the car starts to buck when he gives it the accelerator. He looks at the gauge; his gas is dwindling fast. The tan washes out of his face for a moment. He’s on a main road, after all. All he has to do is pull over, wait for a tow-line, if he runs out of gas. Why that fleeting panic on his face?
He nurses the car forward on the dregs of gas remaining. Zigzags it from side to side of the highway, to lessen the incline that might defeat it. It goes by fits and starts, slower all the time, but he’s near the crest now. If he can only reach it, he can coast down the dip on the other side without an engine.
The car creeps up over the rise, hesitates, about to stall. Before him the road dips downward under the moon for miles. In the distance a white glow marks a filling station. He maneuvers the wheel desperately in and out, the momentum of the descent catches at the machine, and a moment later it’s coasting along at increasing speed.
The filling station blazes nearer, an aurora borealis in the middle of the dark countryside. He dare not go past, yet he’s very tense as the car rolls within the all-revealing light. He glances anxiously in the mirror. He wonders about the window-shades, but leaves them the way they are. There’s nothing that draws the human eye quicker than a suggestively lowered shade.
He turns aside, inches up the runway, brakes to a stop. An attendant jumps over.
“Five,” he says, and sits there watching the man hook up the pipeline. Watching him with utter absorption. The gun is in his lap again, bedded under the hem of his coat.
The grease monkey approaches the front window. “Wash your windows, chief?”
The driver stretches his lips into a grin. “Leave ’em.”
The monkey grins back, and his eyes wander on past the driver to the girl in the back of the car, rest there for a minute.
“Dead tired,” the man at the wheel says. “Here’s your money; keep the change.” The car moves out of the yellow radiance into the sheltering gloom again. Secrecy wells up into its interior once more, like India ink.
The flabbergasted attendant is shouting something after him. “Hey, mister, that’s a twenty-dollar bill you—”
The car is racing along again now. The man at the wheel tenses. What’s that peppering sound coming up behind him? A small, single beam of light is seesawing after him. If the man was frightened by the bus and by the filling station, what word can describe the look on his face now, as his mirror shows him a state policeman on his tail? Teeth bared in a skull-like flash, he fights down an impulse to open up, to try to race for it. He pulls over to the side, slows, stops. Again the gun comes out, and again it is bedded under his thigh with the butt protruding in readiness on the side away from the window. Then he sits grinding his fist into the hollow of his other hand.
The motorcycle flashes by, loops awkwardly around, comes back. The rider gets off, walks over, planks his foot down heavily on the runningboard. He ducks his head, leers in at him, beetle-browed.
“What’s your hurry, fellow? I clocked you at eighty.”
“Eighty-four,” corrects the leathery-faced man, with a dangerous quietness that cannot be mistaken for humility.
“Well, fifty’s the limit around here. Lemme see your license.”
The driver takes out his license with his left hand; the right is lying idly beside his right thigh, on cold black metal.
The state cop reads by the dashboard-light, leaning even further in to do so. His own weapon is way out behind at his hip; the window frame would block his elbow in a sudden reach. “Anton Denholt. Doctor, eh? I’m surprised at you, all the more reason you oughta have more sense! Next state, too, huh? You people are the ones give us the most trouble. Well, you’re in my state now, get that; you didn’t quite make that state-line marker down there—”
Denholt glances along the road as if he hadn’t seen the marker before. “I didn’t try to,” he says in that same toneless voice.
The cop nods thoughtfully. “I guess you could have at that,” he admits. “What were you doing eighty-four for—?”
Perhaps Denholt can’t stand waiting for the man to discover the girl sleeper in back, perhaps his nerves are so frayed by now that he’d rather call attention to her himself and get it over with. He jerks his head toward the back seat. “On her account,” he says. “Every minute counts.”
The cop peers back. “She sick, Doc?” he asks, a little more considerately. Denholt says, “It’s a matter of life and death.” And again he is speaking the absolute truth, far more than the trooper can guess.
The cop begins to look apologetic. “Why didn’t you say so? There’s a good hospital at Rawling. You must have passed by there an hour ago. Why didn’t you take her there?”
“No. I can make it where I’m going, if you’ll only let me be on my way. I want to get her home before the baby—”
The cop gives a low whistle. “No wonder you were burning up the road!”
He slaps his book closed, hands Denholt back his license. “You want an escort? You’ll make better time. My beat ends at that marker down there, but I can put in a call for you—”
“No, thanks,” says Denholt blandly. “I haven’t much further to go.”
The touring car glides off. There is a sort of fatalism in Denholt’s attitude now, as he urges the car back to high speed. What else can happen to him, after what just did? What else is there to be afraid of—now?
Less than forty miles past the state line, he leaves the great transcontinental highway and turns off into a side-road, a “feeder.” Presently it begins to take a steady upgrade, into the foothills of a chain of mountains. The countryside changes, becomes wilder, lonelier. Trees multiply to the thickness of woodlands. The handiwork of man, all but the roadway itself, slowly disappears.
He changes his course a second time, leaves the feeder for what is little better than an earth-packed trail, sharply tilted, seldom used. The climb is steady. Through occasional breaks in the trees of the thickly wooded slopes that support the trail, he can see the low country he has left below, the ribbon of the trunkroad he was on, an occasional winking light like a glowworm toiling slowly along it. There are hairpin turns; overhanging branches sway back with a hiss as he forces his way through. He has to go much slower here, but he seems to know the way.
A barbed-wire fence leaps suddenly out from nowhere, begins to parallel the miserable road. Four rungs high, each rung three strands in thickness, viciously spined, defying penetration by anything but the smallest animals. Strange, to want privacy that badly in such an out-of-the-way place. A double gate sidles along in it, double-padlocked, and stops abreast of him as his car comes to a halt. A placard beside it reads in the diamond-brightness of the headlights: “Private Property. Keep Out.” A common-enough warning, but strange to find it here in this mountain fastness. Even, somehow, sinister.
He gets out, opens both padlocks, edges the freed halves of the gate inward with his shoe. Instantly a jarring, jangling sound explodes from one of the trees nearby. An alarm bell, wired to the gate. Its clang is frightening in this dark silence. It too spells lack of normality, seems the precaution of a fanatic.
The car drives through, stops while the man closes and fastens the prickly gate behind it. The bell shuts off; the stillness is deafening by contrast. The car goes on until the outline of a house suddenly uptilts the searching head-light-beams, log-built, sprawling, resembling a hunting-lodge. But there’s no friendliness to it. There is something ominous and forbidding about its look, so dark, so forgotten, so secretive-looking. The kind of a house that has a maw to swallow with—a one-way house, that you feel will never disgorge any living thing that enters it. Leprous in the moonlight festering on its roof. And the two round sworls of light played by the heads of the car against its side, intersecting, form a pear-shaped oval that resembles a gleaming skull.
&n
bsp; The man leaves the car again, jumps up under a sort of a shed-arrangement sheltering the main entrance. Metal clashes and a black opening yawns. He vanishes through it, while pulsing bright-beamed car and sleeping lady wait obediently outside.
Light springs up within—the yellow-green wanness of coal-oil, shining out through the door to make the coal-black tree-trunks outside seem even blacker. The place looks eerier than ever now.
Homecoming?
The man’s shadow lengthens, blacks out the doorway, and he’s ready to receive the patient lady. He kills the engine, opens the rear door and reaches in for her with outstretched arms. He disengages her dangling wrist , from the intertwined support-strap, brushes off the laprobe, cradles her body in upturned arms, and waddles inside with her, like someone carrying something very precious. The door bangs shut behind him at a backward thrust of his heel, and darkness swallows up the world outside.
II
He carries her through the building into an extension hidden from view from the outside. There is a distinct difference between it and the rest of the rambling structure. Its walls are not log, but brick, covered with plaster, that must have been hauled to this inaccessible place at great trouble and expense. It’s wired for electricity, current supplied by a homemade generator. Dazzling, clinical-white light beats down from above in here. And there are no chairs here, no rough-hewn tables, anything like that. Instead, retorts and bunsen-burners. A zinc operating table. Solution pans. A glass case of instruments. And across one entire side of the room, a double tier of mesh cages, each containing a rabbit.
He comes in swiftly with his burden, puts her down on the zinc table. She never stirs. He turns back and closes the door, bolts it both at top and at bottom. He strips off coat and shirt and undershirt, slips into a surgeon’s white jacket. He takes a hypodermic needle out of the instrument-case, drops it into a pan of antiseptic solution, lights a flame under it. Then he goes back to the table.
The girl’s figure has retained the doubled-up position it held all during the long ride; it lies on her side, legs tucked-up under her as they were on the car-seat, arm thrust out, wrist dangling just as the strap held it. Denholt seems to have expected this, yet he frowns just a little. He tries to straighten out the stiffened limbs; they resist him. Not all his strength can force them into a straight line with the torso. He begins to do what he has to do with frantic haste, as if every moment was both an obstacle and a challenge.
This is so. For rigor is setting in; the sleeping lady has been dead the better part of the night . . .
Denholt tears her things off arm over arm, with motions like an overhand swimmer. Hat and veil, black dress, shoes, hosiery, fall about the floor.
The girl was evidently pretty; she must have been quite young too. The rouge she put on in life still frames her parted lips. Her figure is slim and shapely, unmarred by wounds. There is no blood on her at all. That is important. Denholt races up with a jar of alcohol, douses it all over her with a great slapping splash.
He seizes the hypo from the scalding pan, hurriedly fills the barrel at a retort of colorless liquid, turns the huddled dripping figure over on its face, sweeps the nape-hair out of the way with one hand. He poises the needle at the base of the skull, looks briefly at the whitewashed ceiling as though in prayer, presses the plunger home.
He stands back, lets the hypo fall with a clash. It breaks, but that doesn’t matter; if it has failed, he never wants to use one again.
The needle’s tiny puncture doesn’t close up as it would in living tissue; it remains a visible, tiny, black pore. He takes a wad of cotton, holds it pressed there, to keep the substance just injected from trickling out again. He is trembling all over. And the seconds tick into minutes.
Outside it must be dawn, but no light penetrates the sealed-up laboratory. It must be dawn, and the last breath went out of this body on the table—how long before? Irretrievably gone from this world, as dead as though she had lived a thousand years ago. Men have cut the Isthmus of Panama and joined the two oceans; they have bored tunnels that run below rivers; built aluminum planes that fly from Frisco to Manila; sent music over the air and photographs over wires; but never, when the heart-beat of their own kind has once stopped, never when the spark of life has fled, have they been able to reanimate the mortal clay with that commonest yet most mysterious of all processes: the vital force. And this man thinks he can—this man alone, out of all the world’s teeming billions!
Five minutes that are centuries have gone by. There has been no change in her face or body. He lifts the wad of cotton now because his thumb and forefinger ache from holding it so steadily. And then—
The black puncture has vanished. The indented skin has closed up to erase it. Denholt tries to tell himself that this is due to the moisture of the serum itself or to the pressure of his fingers; but he knows that only life can do that—neither moisture nor pressure if there isn’t life. Shrinking from facing disappointment, he whispers aloud: “It’s still there; I don’t see it, that’s all. My eyes aren’t sharp enough.”
Tottering, he moves around the zinc table, picks up a small mirror, comes back with it. He turns her head slightly, holds the glass to the rigid mouth. Something wavers across it, too nebulous for the eye to discern at first. It comes again, stronger. Like a flurry. The glass mists, then clears. Then it mists once more, unmistakably now.
“The nervous exudation of my own fingers, holding it,” he whispers. But he knows better. He drops the mirror as he did the needle. It clashes and shivers into pieces. But it has told him all it could.
There remains the heart to go by. If breath has done that to the glass, the heart will show it. Without the heart, no breath.
He turns her over completely now, on her back once more. His hand slowly descends to her chest, like a frightened bird spiraling to rest. It leaps up again spasmodically, as though it has received a galvanic shock at what it felt. Not alone a vibration, but warmth. Warmth slowly diffusing around the region of the heart; a lessening of the stone-coldness that grips the body elsewhere. The whole chest-cavern is slowly rising and falling. The heart is alive, has come back to life, in a dead body. And life is spreading, catching on!
Awed almost beyond endurance—even though he has given up his whole life for this, believing he could accomplish it, believing some day it would happen—he collapses to his knees, buries his head against the side of the table, sobs broken-heartedly. For extreme joy and extreme sorrow are indistinguishable beyond a certain point. Denholt is a very humble, a very terrified man, at the moment, almost regretting what he has done—he has set God’s law at bay, and he knows it. Pride, triumph, the overweening egotism that spells complete insanity will come later.
He rouses himself presently. She still needs help, attention, or he may lose her again. How often that happened with the rabbits until he learned what to do. The warm radiations from the heart have spread all over the body now, and it is a greater warmth than that of his own body. A ruddy flush, a fever-redness, has replaced the dead-white hue, especially over the heart and on the face and throat. It needs a furnace-temperature like this to cause the once-stagnant blood to circulate anew. He snatches up a thermometer, applies it. One hundred and five degrees, high enough to kill her all over again a second time. But death must be burned out and new life infused at molten heat, for this is not biological birth—but pure chemistry.
He must work fast.
He opens the door of the electric refrigerator, removes a pail of finely chopped ice he had prepared. The fearful heat of almost-boiling blood must be offset or it will destroy her before she has begun again to live. He wraps a rubber sheet around her, packs her body with the chopped ice, rolls her tightly up in it. He tests her temperature repeatedly. Within five minutes it has gone down considerably. The ice has all melted, as if placed on a hot stove. As he opens the sheet streams of water trickle out of the four corners. But the heart and the lungs are still going, the first danger has been met and overcome, t
he process of revivification has not in itself destroyed her. A delirious groan escaping her lips is the first sound she makes in this second life of hers; a feverish tossing from side to side the first movement. She is in full delirium. But delirium is the antithesis of death; it is the body’s struggle to survive.
The laboratory has done all it can for her; from now on it is a matter of routine medical care, nursing, as in an ordinary illness. He wraps her in a thick blanket, unbolts the door, removes her from the cold zinc table and carries her to a bed in a room in another part of the house.
All through the long hours of the day he sits by her, as a mother sits by her only child in mortal illness, counting each breath she takes, feeling her pulse, helping her heart-action with a little digitalis, pouring a little warm milk and brandy down her parched throat from time to time. Watching, waiting, for the second great mystery to unfold itself. A mystery as great or greater than the one he has already witnessed. Will reason return full-panoplied, or will the brain remain dead or crippled in an otherwise living body? Will she be some inarticulate, idiot thing better left unrevived? Or will she remember who she was, what went before—be the first human to bridge the gap of death, to tell the living what awaits them on the other side of the shadowy border?
All through the day the fever-reaction induced by the serum continues—and unconsciousness with it—but she lives. Undeniably she lives! At nightfall the fever increases a little, but then all fevers do; any doctor knows that. At midnight of this second night, a full twenty-four hours after she died, there is a sudden, unexpected break in her heavy breathing, and before the watcher has quite realized it, her eyes are wide open for the first time. She has regained consciousness! For the first time he sees the color of her eyes—blue—as the lids go up. Blue eyes, that have seen death, now looking into his. Calmly, undilated, unfrightened, peaceful.