by Jerry eBooks
“I had an interesting conversation with Dr. Coriat. Oh, just a professional chat. I don’t think he likes your husband.”
“But—about those delusions—?”
“I think,” said Gabriel, “that you are aware what those delusions are? You failed to mention them when you came to my office?”
“But they are too fantastic. I was afraid you would think Roger just a madman. Yes, I know what they are. He thinks he sees into the future, and—and—”
“And—?”
“And that I’m going to fall in love with Dr. Coriat some day, and then Roger is going to kill me. How can Dr. Coriat be influencing Roger in that way? Or what is there in that house? An empty house, Dr. Gabriel, that nobody has lived in!”
She went on, chattering almost incoherently: “A horrid idol, a stone image, that had all the village scared at first. If Dr. Coriat hadn’t saved Mr. Judge’s little girl—he’s one of the selectmen—when all the other doctors said it was hopeless—Raoul would never have got any practice at all. How can that horrid image influence Roger? It’s crazy, I tell you. What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to see your husband, sit with him awhile, and try to calm him. By the way, what do you think of the new house? Coriat must plan to reside in Wortley indefinitely.”
“I—I’ve only seen it at a distance. I wouldn’t go near the place. Doctor, I don’t want to talk about this any more. If you can’t save Roger’s sanity, I shall have to take him away.”
“I don’t think Raoul Coriat is going to be nearly so formidable as you imagine,” answered Gabriel. He rose and went toward the door. “I want you to go to bed and have a good night’s sleep,” he said. “By the way, your husband doesn’t take any sleeping drugs, does he?”
“He—he—yes, he does take something. A harmless, non-habit-forming prescription that helps him get a night’s rest.”
“He gets it in Wortley?”
“Yes, from Mr. Polson. It’s not supposed to be sold without a medical prescription, but Mr. Polson knows us, and, anyway, it’s perfectly harmless.”
Upstairs, Roger Hartley was stretched out on the studio couch. It had been made up as a bed since Gabriel’s former visit, from which the doctor concluded that relations between the Hartleys were more strained than had been apparent. The little doctor tiptoed to the side of the sleeping man. On a table beside him was a half-empty bottle containing some white tablets.
Dr. Gabriel held up the bottle to the small bulb beside the bed, and read the prescription. The substance was harmless, taken in moderation, but Dr. Coriat’s name was written in a fine, almost illegible scrawl under the statement of the contents. Gabriel knew enough of small town procedure to have been sure that the druggist would not sell a forbidden product without covering himself by a doctor’s prescription. No doubt there was an arrangement between Mr. Polson and Coriat—a harmless arrangement, to enable the druggist to get around the State law.
That was what Gabriel had expected. To compound a small quantity of hashish with the phenobarbital would be a simple matter. Hashish possessed that peculiar property of changing one’s concepts of space and time. Gabriel had suspected that this drug had been employed by Coriat, the moment Roger told him his story.
But how real was this alteration in the time concept?
Did hashish enable one to penetrate the future, or was it purely illusory? Gabriel, watching the sleeping man, racked his brains for case-histories, without much success.
The moon was shining into the room. There was no sound in the house. Dr. Gabriel snapped off the light, sat down in the overstuffed armchair, and waited. For an hour no sound was audible, except the heavy breathing of the sleeper.
Then Roger began to moan. He tossed himself about, and the moans grew stronger. He sat up suddenly, and then got slowly off the couch. Almost invisible in his corner, Gabriel watched him. He saw that Roger’s gait was that of an automaton. There was a peculiar rigidity to his body suggestive of catalepsy.
Roger stooped over a desk and pulled out a drawer very softly. It was the caution of a man obsessed by a single purpose. As Roger straightened himself, the doctor saw the glint of the metal barrel of the revolver.
If the sleep-walker was going to Marian’s room to murder her, instant intervention would become necessary. But that would postpone the solution, and Gabriel prayed that Roger was going to the house instead—going there to try to shoot the phantom of his wife as she would appear in eight years’ time! Gabriel kept close upon Roger’s heels, moving softly, so as not to awaken him. Roger passed the door of Marian’s room, and continued downstairs, and out into the night.
Clouds had darkened the moon, a storm was beating up; there was a continuous rustling in the trees along the road. An eerie night, with no sound save of the trees.
Roger walked stiffly along the road, and Gabriel followed, until they reached the new structure. Then Roger turned up a side street, unpaved and ungraded, and made toward the rear.
Here a trail ran between overhanging branches that whipped back in Gabriel’s face. The sense of eerieness was succeeded by one of evil. It struck the doctor like a cloud of blackness, and for the moment he lost sight of Roger altogether.
The blackness lifted slowly, but the sense of evil remained, grew stronger. Dr. Gabriel found himself in a doorway that had certainly not been visible from the street earlier that evening. He pushed the door open. And suddenly the interior of the house grew bright.
He found himself in a hallway, with a large, sumptuously furnished room beyond, and, leading off that, a conservatory. The scent of the flowers came to him strongly. There was still no sign of Roger. But, as Gabriel stood there, he heard a sound on the road behind him, like the pit-a-pat of a child’s feet.
He turned back. Those sounds were coming toward the house, but the darkness and the overhanging branches made direct vision impossible. And, as he waited, suddenly the branches parted, and there appeared—not the blind child, but Marian Hartley!
She was wearing a dressing-robe, there were slippers upon her feet, drenched with the dew, and her hair was hanging in disorder about her neck. At the sight of Dr. Gabriel she recoiled for an instant, then seized him by the arm.
“Listen!” she hissed. “Listen!” She held up her finger. And, as the pit-a-pat grew louder, “It’s she! It’s little Dorothy, my daughter, who’s not yet born!”
The sounds of the footsteps ceased, but now, through the encompassing silence, Dr. Gabriel could distinctly hear the sound of the overhanging branches being pushed apart. For an instant he even thought that he could see the elfin face of a young child among them—a blind child, peering out with that uncertain look of the blind.
“You’re talking nonsense,” answered Gabriel harshly. “What are you doing here?”
“I knew he had come here. I was lying awake, listening to every sound in the house. I heard him pass my door, and you following him.”
“Mrs. Hartley, you should have been frank with me. I knew you had been here before, and that you knew all about your husband’s delusions—”
“Delusions? Who’s not being frank now?” she sneered. “You know they’re no delusions, Yes, I knew everything, and I have come here to try to save him, or to die, because I have no faith in you. You can go! Leave me, I say!”
“I tell you to go home,” said Gabriel. “You’re running into grave danger, both for yourself and your husband. If you don’t care about yourself consider him. Leave this to me to manage.”
“And I say I’m going to help him, to stand by him,” she retorted bitterly, and pressed closer to the door.
Gabriel made no reply, but accompanied her, so that they two were wedged in the narrow entrance. And, looking in, suddenly he saw that the empty room had come to life.
There were curious, half-shadowy figures, first of young people, then of older ones, as if a film was being run off with great speed, as if the passing years were being condensed into minutes. It was like Nature’s recapitul
ation of the lower forms of life in the human embryo, when it passes through a million years of evolution in a few weeks. Gabriel saw an elderly, dark-featured woman, in a prim black dress, who seemed to be a housekeeper, cross the room and vanish through a doorway.
And then Raoul Coriat stepped out of the conservatory into the empty room.
Yes, he was older, stouter, and there were threads of gray in his hair, seen in the light of the central bulbs.
He was in evening clothes, and he stood leaning against the mantel of the empty fireplace, with a smirk on his face, as if he were waiting for somebody.
Outside, the rain had begun to fall in heavy drops; there sounded the distant mutter of thunder. Outside Gabriel and Marian Hartley, peering in through a slight wall of opacity that seemed to have grown between them. It was like a light mist, and it distorted the figure of Coriat, so that to some degree it lost its three dimensional perspective, and became flat, like a figure on a screen.
The smirk upon Coriat’s face grew broader. He moved toward the door through which the housekeeper had disappeared. It was opening, and another woman came into the room. Gabriel had anticipated this, but he heard Marian Hartley at his side gasp as she saw her phantasmal reflection—the phantom of herself, as she would be in eight years’ time, projected upon the screen of the present!
She, too, was older, more matronly in appearance, but there seemed a girlish flush upon her cheeks as she glided forward. And she went straight into Raoul Coriat’s arms.
“My darling! How many years I’ve waited for you!” Dr. Gabriel seemed to hear the words distinctly.
He saw Coriat bend his head, and their lips met.
She stood in his arms, whispering to him, and now Gabriel could hear nothing but those soft sibilant sounds. But the face of the phantom woman was upturned to Coriat’s, and the little doctor watched, trying to break through the spell, and conscious all the while of the flesh-and-blood woman beside him.
Marian Hartley in the flesh, watching that play of phantoms, her fingers clinched in Gabriel’s arm!
The doctor heard her mutter, “Never! Never! I hate him! I’ll never come to that! Better let Roger kill me, as he intends to do!”
And then a low cry escaped her lips, and Gabriel caught at her as she bent forward. For the door was being pushed open again, and upon that thickening misty screen Gabriel saw the figure of the blind child, moving uncertainly, its arms stretched out before it. A thin wail broke from its lips as it moved its heed from side to side:
“Mummy, where are you? I want you, Mummy!”
Gabriel saw the phantom woman turn fiercely upon it. He heard Marian moan as the phantom made a threatening gesture.
“What are you doing here? How dared you leave the house?” it seemed to cry.
And Coriat stood with his clenched fist upraised, as if about to strike that whimpering little form.
Another cry broke from the lips of the woman at the little doctor’s side. She started forward, plunging into that barrier of mist, which coiled about her and enwrapped her. Gabriel knew that the trap was baited. He tried to hold her. He grasped her by the arm, and, with strength that seemed superhuman, she freed herself.
Again the door was opening, but very slowly. For a moment it was impossible to see the figure now entering the room. But Dr. Gabriel knew, and he saw the outstretched arm, and the gleam of the revolver, before he saw the rage-distorted face of Roger Hartley.
Marian—the flesh-and-blood Marian—was running forward into the room.
Instantly, as if the two could not exist in close proximity to one another, the form of the phantom vanished. Those of Coriat and the child were growing hazy. It was as if the whole hideous phantasmagoria was dissolving into that future from which it had been conjured up. But the figures of Roger and Marian stood out clearly, as if etched upon that misty screen.
Roger, the revolver in his hand, aiming it at his wife, and the form of the child outlined between them, and, from the child’s lips, that wail of despair that was like a knife in the little doctor’s heart.
Gabriel heard the roar of the weapon, and saw the phantom child stagger, and then fall forward in a pitiful little heap between the two. And the next moment Gabriel was between them, and had snatched the revolver out of Roger’s hand.
“You fool, it isn’t real—it isn’t real!” he shouted “Look!”
He pointed to where the child had been, huddled on the floor between them. There was nothing visible there, and now the whole outlines of the room were fading away. Nothing was real any longer, except the forms of the three:—of Marian, staring at her husband, with terror in her eyes, and the fear-twisted face of Roger, and Gabriel, standing between them, with arms flung wide.
“You fool!” cried Gabriel again. “It’s all hallucination. That child was the trap, to bring your wife into this hell and have you murder her!”
Now Roger seemed to understand. He remained motionless for a moment, but a swift change came over his face, as if he was awaking from a nightmare into reality.
Suddenly it had grown dark. They three might have been standing like lost souls in the blackness of Erebus. A mighty peal of thunder shook the heavens, followed by a surging roar of rain. Gabriel felt the heavy drops upon his face, as if the roof of the house was gone, and then the storm drenched him to the skin.
He flung the revolver against the wall—where the wall had been. It encountered no resistance; it went flying out into the night.
“Take her home, you ass!” Gabriel shouted in Roger’s ear.
He saw him again for an instant in the blinding flash of lightning. Then, out of the ensuing darkness, he heard the howl of fury from the invisible Coriat.
No phantom could have emitted that very earthly howl. Dr. Gabriel swung instinctively, and by good fortune caromed against the man. He seized him, felt the slash of a knife across his shoulder, and then, as another flash of lightning came, saw Coriat, with the weapon in his hand, and caught his wrist.
By that flash Gabriel had seen that Coriat had become a madman, his face a devilish mask that mirrored the insensate rage that possessed him. The two men struggled furiously. Coriat slashed, and the knife-hand, partly freed, swung downward. Gabriel felt the edge of the weapon bite into the skin of his chest.
Then he had Coriat’s wrist firmly within his grasp.
The little doctor looked a puny man, but there was the strength of steel sinews in his wrists. With his left hand behind Coriat’s forearm as a fulcrum, he gripped the wrist, levering the hand back until the weapon dropped.
A scream of anguish burst from Coriat’s lips as the bone snapped, with a crack like that of a pistol-shot.
As Gabriel relaxed his grip, Coriat broke from him, and plunged into the darkness. Silence—another cry of terror out of the dark—then again silence.
Gabriel called: “Where are you, Hartley?”
Marian’s voice answered: “We’re here. Help us! Help us! We’re lost! I’m afraid to move.”
Gabriel groped very cautiously in the direction from which her voice came, and found her, her arms about her husband, who was sagging weakly. Gabriel held him. “It’s all right, Hartley,” he said. “It’s going to be all right now. Lay him down, Mrs. Hartley. But don’t move away. Don’t stir. There’s danger still.”
The little doctor squatted beside Roger, but Marian was on her knees beside her husband, whispering in his ear, holding him in her arms. And now, as the growl of the thunder receded, the faint light of the dawn began to steal across the land.
It seemed only a matter of minutes that they had been in Coriat’s house, but hours must have gone by.
And time seemed to have contracted, for the light grew brighter momentarily, until Marian raised her head in astonishment and whispered:
“Why—why, there’s no house at all! Just the foundations!”
“Yes, that house doesn’t exist,” answered Gabriel, “and now it never will, I think. Didn’t you know?”
“Yes, I�
��I knew. But I had seen it when I came here at night. I was—too bewildered. I’m frightened, doctor. It’s deviltry.”
“Deviltry that has passed,” said Gabriel. “Stay where you are!”
He rose and paced the flooring that had been laid across one half of the structure. The other half was merely a brick and concrete cellar. A deep cellar, deep enough to have taken the life of the wretched man whose body lay huddled, inanimate, below.
Marian, who had followed Gabriel, screamed as she saw the body of Coriat, with the broken neck and the head twisted fantastically over the shoulder.
“The idol!” she babbled. “That idol of his—!”
“Yes,” agreed Gabriel, “he does look like his idol. His totem betrayed him—but then—” He stopped there. No need to tell Marian that it was his suggestion of the broken neck that had worked on Coriat’s subconscious, and driven him to destruction.
They walked back in the dawn. No one had seen them, and there was no likelihood that they would be connected with Coriat’s death. The matter would look simple enough to the villagers. Coriat had been inspecting the house that he was building, and, in the darkness, he had fallen into the excavation and broken his neck.
“You mean that it was all unreal? All a trick of that devil’s and not prevision?” asked Roger weakly.
Gabriel nodded. “At first I had to consider the possibility that Coriat was able to foreshadow the future by means of that drug he gave you.”
“What drug?”
“Cannabis indica—hashish. You thought you felt a little drowsy after he gave you that shot in his office. Actually, you must have slept long enough for him to impress suggestions on your mind. These suggestions were given the force of illusion by those sleeping-tablets, in which the druggist—innocently enough—had mixed further quantities of the drug.
“Post-hypnotic suggestion, and multiple hallucination, the latter feat well known to students of magic lore—are the explanation, Hartley. Your wife—even myself, were victims of this trick. But as for prevision, you may dismiss that thought from your mind absolutely.”