“This may give you a bit of a twinge,” he warned, and lowered the needle. It never penetrated the skin. The whole figure whipped over as if snapped on the end of a lash. The
hypodermic was knocked clear out of his grasp, smashed on the floor.
“I begin to see what you mean,” said the doctor softly.
He reconsidered his method. This was, he now realized, a problem far more serious than he had expected. Not an operation but a battle loomed ahead. He faced a foe who was resourceful, determined, and of unknown abilities.
“I’m afraid it won’t be possible to use a local anesthetic,” he admitted. “And I suspect that a general anesthetic might have little effect upon the—growth.”
“Yes,” said the patient. “Kelman tried ether. It put me. asleep, but it had no effect on—that.”
The primary need, the doctor decided, would be to make the creature impotent. That was the core of the problem: to neutralize it, reduce it to an inert state or at least helplessness.
He surveyed the office equipment. There was a waste-paper basket, but of the wire mesh type, useless for his purposes. Next his eyes lighted on the glass shell that protected his microscope. This shell stood approximately two feet high and a foot in diameter at its base.
He lifted the glass cover and warily approached the waiting manikin. The patient should be able to hold the shell firmly in place over the living doll while he inserted a tube under the edge and turned on the gas.
He dropped the glass casting in position. She stood erect within, barely quivering. “Quick now—hold this,” he told the patient.
They almost succeeded. The man slid his hands around the container, and the doctor, releasing his grip, reached for the gas tubing. At that instant the imprisoned girl seemed weirdly beautiful; her features had the delicate clarity of a cameo; her hair, shimmering down her back, looked softer and finer than cobwebs, of a lustrous mahogany hue. Her eyes were hot and glittering.
The patient’s hands, dropping along the sides of the shell, had not quite come to rest with a firm hold when she doubled up with the boneless and springy ease of live rubber. She curled her fingers under the rim and jerked. The glass container rose, tilted. The doctor sprang to push it back. The patient bobbled it. The shell tilted around between all hands, then spun free and smashed into countless fragments on the floor.
There was a hint of mockery in the poise of that small, naked, and apparently defenseless being.
The doctor backed away. His feet crunched splinters of glass, and the remnants of the hypodermic. He did not stop to clean up the debris. He withdrew to his desk, opened the top right-hand drawer, and took out the automatic.
He balanced the weapon as he spoke, but his eyes never left the passive figurine. “I am a good shot,” he said quietly.
“No. Put that down.”
“I won’t miss.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” said the patient in a dull voice. He was lying motionless, staring at the ceiling. “You see, I, too, am an expert marksman. I have taken out my own .45 many times in the last two weeks. But I could not bring myself to pull the trigger.”
“I have no scruples. I will accept full responsibility.”
“Will you? Suppose you don’t miss—suppose your bullet goes right through its heart—what will you do if it does not die?”
Slowly, with a trance-like motion, the doctor replaced his automatic in the drawer.
A series of desperate expedients fleeted through his mind: of spraying the thing with liquid air till it froze solid and could be snapped off like an icicle; of heaping it with plaster of Paris till it was rigid in a solid block; of destroying it with X-ray therapy; of amputating the whole leg at the hip.
His eyes fell on the row of surgical tools laid out, the scalpels that he did not dare use so long as the figurine remained capable of violent opposition. But the sight of the scalpels gave him the clue to a new possibility.
He walked over to the table and strapped the leg down tight at ankle, knee, and waist. He padded the kneecap with cotton and taped it for maximum protection, then taped the entire upper leg as closely as he could approach to the rooted feet without interference. When he had finished, the thigh was covered except for the purplish area in which the living doll grew.
He took a square decanter of whisky from his cabinet. “Here, drink as much of this as you can stand. You’ll need it.”
“Thank you, no. I wish to see the end of this—if there is an end.”
“I’m going to operate. There won’t be any finesse about the job. It will be crude. It will be quick and direct. It will hurt. If it fails, I am afraid there will be nothing more I can do for you. Will you drink? Or take an anesthetic?”
“Thank you, no. Proceed, please.”
“I’ll be back in a few moments.”
He left the whisky within the patient’s reach and walked through the outer room. The Haupers July Moon had a strange, unfamiliar look, and he scanned it a second time in passing. Had the painting changed? No, it was still a perfect and tuneless abstraction, a captured moment of eternity, serene from its dark shadow masses and detached, remote, immortal to the gibbous moon beyond its mysteriously luminous sky. The painting had not altered, but he had. It mood was alien to him now. Its inward essence was one that would never again be his.
He went out into the corridor. A feeling of emptiness, of vacancy gripped him; some basic part of him had been stolen beyond recovery.
Near the stairs, built into the wall, was a fire-alarm box and a length of folded hose. Beside them hung a short-handled ax with a blade of almost surgical sharpness. He lifted the ax and returned to his office.
The patient did not turn his head. He did not seem to know or to care what the doctor was doing. He had not touched the whisky.
The doctor said, “Now, grip the sides of the table and hold on hard.” He turned the adjustment crank until the table slanted at a forty-five-degree angle.
The ax had a good balance. It was both light enough to be aimed well, and with a heavy enough head to give the bite of the blade a strong momentum.
As he tried out the ax in a tentative arc, a torrent of soft cooing and twittering issued from the tiny lips, a sound more dreadful than any cry of protest. She was looking up at her host in an ecstasy of adoration, and her voice was drooling love, the fauning, brainless love of a cretin. That love flowed over and glued the doctor in its mewing fullness. It had nothing of passion or desire; it was merely an endless well of pure, idiot love; it asked for nothing, not even a gentle caress or an affectionate return.
The doctor’s hands, which had been so uncomfortably warm, were cold and moist. A hammer began tapping at his temple.
He swung the blade.
The bright edge went through, streaked with red. There was a convulsion of movement from the severed figurine. Perhaps his foot slipped on crumbs of glass; perhaps the little creature somehow deflected the blow; perhaps the swing itself pulled him off balance, for the blade kept going, slashed through smock and trouser, lanced into the flesh alongside his own knee with a stab of fire. He stumbled, and the metal edge of the table made a thick, ugly sound against his forehead. The ax slid out of his grasp. He sat on the floor, and, when he sagged limply backward, his skull bounced with a sodden thud.
It was very dark when he groaned and struggled up.
Waves of nausea and pain made his head a bursting volcano. His leg ached with burning intensity. He looked toward the window. A faint reflection from the street lights washed the building opposite, but all its apartments were blacked out. By that evidence he knew it must be midnight or later.
He pulled himself to the wall and pushed the switch.
The patient had gone.
A row of small, round spots, like dried blood, traversed the floor from the table to the area where he had regained consciousness.
The cloth of his suit had soaked up and caked around the deep gash at his knee.
She was standing ther
e in the wound, the little doll, firmly rooted, tiny ankles blending into the form of feet that merged with his flesh. Her eyes were watching him avidly.
He stretched out his hands with a sudden terrible impulse to seize the thing and tear it out. His hands faltered, wavered, and drew back. He could not imagine what it would be like to touch the creature; he could not bring himself to find out.
He began dragging himself across the floor until he was able to reach into the top right hand drawer of his desk.
The Southern Cross had made steady way since morning; the sea had been smooth, the day warm, but the occupant of Cabin 39 had not come out for either the noon or evening meal.
He had bolted his door. He had lain in his berth all day with a fever, dozing for hours.
His left leg was swathed in the bandages that he had applied in the doctor’s office. It was badly swollen and throbbed maddeningly. But he made no effort to summon the ship’s surgeon.
After nightfall he got out the extra bandages that he had brought along. Perhaps he had drawn the first dressing too tight.
With a pocket knife he slit open the bandage along his side and gingerly lifted it away.
A tiny figurine, not yet fully formed, was growing out of the purple patch on his thigh. The figure of a woman blossomed, but with the pale hue of an unfinished fetus.
He was beyond horror. He stared at the little living thing with a kind of deliberate finality. He turned toward the porthole and looked out across the dark waters; he seemed to see an infinite series of progressively diminishing creatures who vanished only at the point of eternity.
He measured the porthole with his eyes, but his shoulders were too broad.
He put the long swagger coat on. It rippled near his knee even after he buttoned it and drew the belt tight. A thin cry, a high but stifled wail, came from the blanketed shape, unearthly as the note of an elfin flute.
When he opened the door, a steward was hurrying past.
The steward paused. “Are you all right, sir?”
“Quite all right.”
“If there is anything I can get you—”
“No. I just thought a short walk would do me good.”
“Very good, sir. Good night.”
“Good night.”
He watched the steward vanish around a turn.
A short walk, he thought; yes a very short walk. He thrust his hands deep into his coat pockets and began climbing the companionway to the open deck.
THE HUNTERS FROM BEYOND
Clark Ashton Smith
I have seldom been able to resist the allurement of a bookstore, particularly one that is well supplied with rare and exotic items. Therefore, I turned in at Toleman’s to browse around for a few minutes. I had come to San Francisco for one of my brief, biannual visits, and had started early that idle forenoon to an appointment with Cyprian Sincaul, the sculptor, a second or third cousin of mine, whom I had not seen for several years.
The studio was only a block from Toleman’s, and there seemed to be no especial object in reaching it ahead of time. Cyprian had offered to show me his collection of recent sculptures; but, remembering the smooth mediocrity of his former work, amid which were a few banal efforts to achieve horror and grotesquerie, I did not anticipate anything more than a hour or two of dismal boredom.
The little shop was empty of customers. Knowing my proclivities, the owner and his one assistant became tacitly non-attentive after a word of recognition, and left me to rummage at will among the curiously laden shelves. Wedged in between other less-alluring titles, I found a de luxe edition of Goya’s Proverbes. I began to turn the heavy pages, and was soon
engrossed in the diabolic art of these nightmare-nurtured drawings.
It has always been incomprehensible to me that I did not shriek aloud with mindless, overmastering terror, when I happened to look up from the volume and see the thing that was crouching in a corner of the bookshelves before me. I could not have been more hideously startled if some hellish conception of Goya had suddenly come to life and emerged from one of the pictures in the folio.
What I saw was a forward-slouching, vermin-gray figure, wholly devoid of hair or down or bristles, but marked with faint, etiolated rings like those of a serpent that has lived in darkness. It possessed the head and brow of an anthropoid ape, a semicanine mouth and jaw, and arms ending in twisted hands whose black hyena talons nearly scraped the floor. The thing was infinitely bestial, and, at the same time, macabre; for its parchment skin was shriveled, corpse-like, mummified, in a manner impossible to convey; and from eye sockets well-nigh deep as those of a skull, there glimmered evil slits of yellowish phosphorescence, like burning sulphur. Fangs that were stained as if with poison or gangrene, issued from the slavering, half-open mouth; and the whole attitude of the creature was that of some maleficent monster in readiness to spring.
Though I had been for years a professional writer of stories that often dealt with occult phenomena, with the weird and the spectral, I was not at this time possessed of any clear and settled belief regarding such phenomena. I had never before seen anything that I could identify as a phantom, nor even an hallucination; and I should hardly have said offhand that a bookstore on a busy street, in full summer daylight, was the likeliest of places in which to see one. But the thing before me was assuredly nothing that could ever exist among the permissible forms of a sane world. It was too horrific, too atrocious, to be anything but a creation of unreality.
Even as I stared across the Goya, sick with a half-incredulous fear, the apparition moved toward me. I say that it moved, but its change of position was so instantaneous, so utterly without effort or visible transition, that the verb is hopelessly inadequate. The foul specter had seemed five or six feet away. But now it was stooping directly above the volume that I still held in my hands, with its loathesomely lambent eyes peering upward at my face, and a gray-green slime drooling from its mouth onto the broad pages. At the same time I breathed an insupportable fetor, like a mingling of rancid serpent-stench with the moldiness of antique charnels and the fearsome reek of newly decaying carrion.
In a frozen timelessness that was perhaps no more than a second or two, my heart appeared to suspend its beating, while I beheld the ghastly face. Gasping, I let the Goya drop with a resonant bang on the floor, and even as it fell, I saw that the vision had vanished.
Toleman, a tonsured gnome with shell-rimmed goggles, rushed forward to retrieve the fallen volume, exclaiming: “What is wrong, Mr. Hastane? Are you ill?” From the meticulousness with which he examined the binding in search of possible damage, I knew that his chief solicitude was concerning the Goya. It was plain that neither he nor his clerk had seen the phantom; nor could I detect aught in their demeanor to indicate that they had noticed the mephitic odor that still lingered in the air like an exhalation from broken graves. And, as far as I could tell, they did not even perceive the grayish slime that still polluted the open folio.
I do not remember how I managed to make my exit from the shop. My mind had become a seething blur of muddled horror, of crawling, sick revulsion from the supernatural vileness I had beheld, together with the direst apprehension for my own sanity and safety. I recall only that I found myself on the street above Toleman’s, walking with feverish rapidity toward my cousin’s studio, with a neat parcel containing the Goya volume under my arm. Evidently, in an effort to atone for my clumsiness, I must have bought and paid for the book by,a sort of automatic impulse, without any real awareness of what I was doing.
I came to the building in which was my destination, but went on around the block several times before entering. All the while I fought desperately to regain my self-control and equipoise. I remember how difficult it was even to moderate the pace at which I was walking, or refrain from breaking into a run; for it seemed to me that I was fleeing all the time from an invisible pursuer. I tried to argue with myself, to convince the rational part of my mind that the apparition had been the product of some evanescent trick
of light and shade, or a temporary dimming of eyesight. But such sophistries were useless; for I had seen the gargoylish terror all too distinctly, in an unforgettable fullness of grisly detail.
What could the thing mean? I had never used narcotic drugs or abused alcohol. My nerves, as far as I knew, were in sound condition. But either I had suffered a visual hallucination that might mark the beginning of some obscure cerebral disorder, or had been visited by a spectral phenomenon, by something from realms and dimensions that are past the normal scope of human perception. It was a problem either for the alienist or the occultist.
Though I was still damnably upset, I contrived to regain a nominal composure of my faculties. Also, it occurred to me that the unimaginative portrait busts and tamely symbolic figure-groups of Cyprian Sincaul might serve admirably to soothe my shaken nerves. Even his grotesques would seem sane and ordinary by comparison with the blasphemous gargoyle that had drooled before me in the bookshop.
I entered the studio building, and climbed a worn stairway to the second floor, where Cyprian had established himself in a somewhat capacious suite of rooms. As I went up the stairs, I had the peculiar feeling that somebody was climbing them just ahead of me; but I could neither see nor hear anyone, and the hall above was no less silent and empty than the stairs.
Cyprian was in his atelier when I knocked. After an interval which seemed unduly long, I heard him call out, telling me to enter. I found him wiping his hands on an old cloth, and surmised that he had been modeling. A sheet of light burlap had been thrown over what was plainly an ambitious but unfinished group of figures, which occupied the center of the long room. All around were other sculptures, in clay, bronze, marble, and even the terra cotta and steatite which he sometimes employed for his less conventional conceptions. At one end of the room there stood a heavy Chinese screen,
At a single glance I realized that a great change had occurred, both in Cyprian Sincaul and his work. I remembered him as an amiable, somewhat flabby-looking youth, always dapperly dressed, with no trace of the dreamer or visionary. It was hard to recognize him now, for he had become lean, harsh, vehement, with an air of pride and penetration that was almost Luciferian. His unkempt mane of hair was already shot with white, and his eyes were electrically brilliant with a strange knowledge, and yet somehow were vaguely furtive, as if there dwelt behind them a morbid and macabre fear.
The Macabre Reader Page 13