by S. T. Joshi
Rachel settled for ignoring him and concentrating all her attention on me when I came down again. She didn’t tell me that I hadn’t aged a bit since the last time she had seen me, because it would have been too evidently untrue. I might have paid her the equivalent compliment, but it didn’t seem necessary. She had not put on much weight—remarkable in a woman who had been a trifle stout even in her twenties—and her angular face was still relatively wrinkle-free, but her hair had begun to go gray and she had not condescended to begin dyeing it. Her best feature was still her frank blue-green eyes.
She thanked me profusely for coming and insisted a trifle too lavishly on her regret at not having seen me for so long and her gratitude to me for keeping my friendship with her husband so firm. “When the police told me that you had been arrested, I was outraged,” she said. “If you had fired a gun, I told them, it was certainly not at my husband. That was unthinkable. You might very well, I said, have been defending him—but attacking him, never.”
“The error was of short duration,” I assured her. “The lack of a bullet-hole in the body told that story for me—although it took a little longer for the medical examiner to determine the true cause of death.”
“Crawford was always a victim of his unreliable capacity for passion,” she said. “His explosive excitability was bound to expose any flaw in his make-up eventually—and the brain is such a delicate organ, so prone to sudden hemorrhages.”
“He had been working too hard, I fear,” I told her. “Science benefits from commitment—one might almost say obsession—in a purely methodological sense, but there is often a human cost to be paid for such long hours and deep commitment. I urged him to take more rest and more exercise, but he felt that he was reaching a climax in his achievement and could not be persuaded.” I had to be a trifle diplomatic; I did not know whether she had seen his body before its cremation, and whether she knew the extent to which he had changed.
“I’m glad that you were with him at the end,” she said.
I had no reply to that—certainly not “So am I”—and Dove, who was not even bothering to pretend that he was not eavesdropping on the conversation, could contain himself no longer.
“It’s a great shame that your defense proved unavailing,” he remarked, belying his claim to natural charm, “and an even greater shame, from the viewpoint of science, that your bullet hit the machine.” He did not ask what I had been firing at, perhaps slyly hoping to prompt Rachel into asking the question—but she did not rise to his bait either.
“I believe we have an appointment for eight, Mr. Dove,” she said, coldly. “In the meantime, David and I have private matters to discuss. I don’t mean to be rude, but I must ask you to leave now, and come back at eight.”
He had grace enough not to scowl at the summary dismissal, and merely said “Of course. Until eight, Mrs. Tillinghast, Mr. Dearden,” before putting his hat back on and closing the door behind him.
“It could have been worse,” I said. “You might have found all three camped on the doorstep.” She was already moving away, though, in the direction of Tillinghast’s attic laboratory.
I took my courage in both hands and followed her.
ALTHOUGH THEY HAD FIGURED OUT SOON ENOUGH that the laboratory was not, in fact, a “crime scene,” the police had nevertheless made a start at gathering “evidence,” and had also sent in a cleaning crew to sanitize the carpet where Tillinghast had fallen and died. The fragments of the machine had been packed away in a tea-chest, although the batteries that the scientist had employed to supply it with current were still lined up in the customary stern array. None of the fragments was glowing; there was not the slightest trace of any uncanny radiance in the room, although the light of the electric bulb in the ceiling, drawing power from the batteries, did seem a trifle unsteady.
Rachel looked around carefully. She inspected the wreckage of the machine with a keen gaze, although she did not remove the debris from the tea-chest, but she also examined the rest of the room carefully, opening the drawers in the table and examining the various items of apparatus on the shelves at close range.
“I suppose he kept his papers in the study,” she said, eventually.
I did not want to ask whether she was actually contemplating selling anything she could find to Crisson. “I fear that his record-keeping became somewhat lax in the last few months of his endeavor,” I told her, truthfully. “Doubtless he would have written it all up eventually, but he was too caught up in the fervor of creativity. It might well be the case that you’ll find nothing in his desk and filing-cabinet that he hasn’t already communicated to his correspondents while consulting their expertise.”
“But he talked to you about what he was doing—even in those last weeks?”
“He talked,” I agreed, “but I fear that my understanding of what he said was rather limited. Patterway would have understood what he was saying and would have known what questions to ask in order to obtain more precision, but I didn’t. I fear that Crisson’s private detective was probably wasting his time—I doubt that there’s any document here or elsewhere that would provide a vital clue to anyone seeking to replicate Crawford’s work.”
She did not seem surprised at my mention of the detective and did not query the assumption that Crisson must have been the one who had hired him. Her eyes went back to the tea-chest, but her gaze did not seem avid; it was not the commercial value of the fragments that was on her mind. I watched her silently, preoccupied myself with a feeling of oddity in my head, which was not exactly a pain, as yet, but did not seem to bode well. I was not yet suffering the visual distortions that were the invariable prelude to my migraines, however, and that reassured me that no peril was imminent.
“What’s that noise?” Rachel asked, suddenly, with a hint of alarm in her voice. She, too, appeared to have become gradually uneasy—unsurprisingly, given the circumstances.
“Only the weathervane,” I told her. “It’s quite close at hand here, on top of that chimney-stack.” I pointed to the bare bricks of the flue that rose up in the middle of the attic floor, rudely cutting through the improvised boards, and disappeared into the slanting joists to protrude through the tiles. The roof was designed in the French mansard style, with two distinct pitches, in order to offer more space within for storage or living; but Tillinghast, ever the utilitarian, had never seen fit to tack lath and plaster over the brickwork or the joists and paper over the surface, in order to make the space look more like a conventional room.
“I thought it might be rats,” she said, defensively.
“There’s not so much as a mouse up here,” I assured her. “No birds’ nests or roosting bats.” All that was true; I did not care to think about what it might leave unmentioned.
She had had enough procrastination. She looked me squarely in the eye and said: “What happened, David?”
She meant, of course: “What were you shooting at?”
I had told the police that I had made a mistake—that the strange electric lighting associated with Tillinghast’s experiment had generated peculiar shadows, and that I had mistakenly believed that there was an intruder in the room with us, whose manner had seemed threatening. The medical examiner—a man possessed of pet theories—had told me, with an odd combination of sympathy and imperiousness, that I must have been hypnotized, but I did not want to repeat that to Rachel. The doctor had met Tillinghast more than once while he was still alive and had obviously formed the impression that he had mesmeric powers, but Rachel and I both knew that any such supposition was nonsense. The medical examiner had not found any evidence of any modification to Tillinghast’s pineal body apart from the hemorrhage, of course; he had not looked for it, and probably would not have been able to detect anything untoward if he had.
“I thought the machine was doing us harm,” I told her, after a slight pause, opting for the truth, if not quite the whole truth. “Its effect was causing us to see things that were not there. The sensation was deeply dist
urbing—even more so in Crawford’s case, I think, than in mine, because he had exposed himself to it before. Perhaps it was foolish of me to take out the gun, but I hit what I aimed at—although that might, in all honesty, have been an unlikelier event than my hitting the machine by accident, having fired at something else entirely.”
“Is that what killed him?” she asked, bluntly. “Something he saw, or thought he saw?”
“How can I tell?” I countered, accurately enough. “Does it matter?”
She was still looking into my eyes, as if trying to read my mind. What she saw, I cannot tell, beyond the obvious—but I felt, as I looked into her blue-green eyes, that I could see grief therein, and an irreducible residue of love and regret.
It occurred to me, suddenly, that she blamed herself. She was thinking that if she had not left her husband—if she had stuck to her vows and stayed with him no matter what—perhaps he would never have built the machine… or even if he had, perhaps she would have been able to save him, somehow, from its dire effects.
Perhaps, I thought, she was right.
“It was my fault,” I told her, feeling that I ought at least to share her burden. “I saw what was happening to him in the weeks before he gave me that final demonstration. I should have known that it was leading to disaster. I should have stopped him. I had the opportunity.”
“But you didn’t have the motive or the means,” she said, her voice hardly more than a whisper. “No, David, it wasn’t your fault. He was a grown man—in his forties, for God’s sake—fully responsible for himself.”
“The machine is dangerous,” I told her. “I can’t be sure exactly how, but it is. That’s not going to stop Crisson wanting to buy the pieces, though, or Patterway wanting to get them into the laboratories at Miskatonic for painstaking investigation, or Dove wanting to charm himself into some kind of collaboration with either or both of them. Nor will it stop them if the pieces prove unhelpful and there are no specific plans—they’ll just take the view that it will take them a little longer to duplicate the work, starting from an earlier stage.”
“They’re grown men too,” she said. “Patterway’s older than Crawford, Dove must be almost the same age, and Crisson only four or five years younger. They’re entitled to be architects of their own fate—and they’ve already had a demonstrative warning, even if they didn’t have the front-row seat that you did.”
She was right. I went with the flow. “Perhaps you should hand everything over to one or all of them and wish them luck,” I said, judging that to be what she wanted me to say, by way of endorsement. “But the one thing you shouldn’t do is involve yourself.”
She nodded slowly—but only to indicate that she understood, not that she had come to a decision. She relaxed her stare, though.
“Thank you for being here, David,” she said. “Alone, I’m not sure that I’d have had the strength… Let’s go back down. I’m hungry, aren’t you? Craven should be back with the supplies by now, and Janine’s a tolerable cook… tolerable in every capacity, in fact.” She didn’t have to explain why the servants’ presence didn’t count, in terms of her being—or feeling—alone.
“Yes,” I said, “best get something to eat, ready for the vultures’ landing.”
“Vultures?” she queried.
“Jackals?” I suggested, as a potential alternative.
“Let’s hope so,” she said. “I wouldn’t want them turning into Hydes.”
I laughed, although, as macabre wordplay went, it really didn’t seem to be very funny.
HAVING SURVIVED THE ATTIC LABORATORY UNSCATHED, I FELT that I was holding up well, fully capable of playing the knight all night, if necessary—but I was overconfident. Absurd as it may seem, it was the dinner that seemed to do the damage. Not that there was anything wrong with the preparation, which was pedestrian but competent, or even the choice of menu, which was predictable enough and quite familiar… but there was something about it that had a triggering effect.
Craven had done what everyone in the state tended to do when shopping for a meal to be eaten the same day, and had bought fresh seafood—not cod, which was still considered commonplace even though the fish themselves no longer arrived at the Grand Banks every year in vast profusion, nor lobster, which was also considered a trifle vulgar, but herring and octopus. I had eaten both hundreds of times before, sometimes even in the same meal, and had never feared either, although I had the normal anxieties regarding mussels and oysters—but not all octopodes are alike, it seems. Indeed, if I judged correctly, in spite of its careful slicing, the one of which I ate the greater share must have had more than eight limbs; I almost commented on it, wondering aloud whether a ten-tentacled octopus might have the same status as a good-luck charm as a four-leafed shamrock, but refrained. Perhaps I had a premonition that the effect might be opposite… if the octopus really was the guilty party.
At any rate, I had hardly finished drinking my coffee when I began to feel ill—not merely odd, but genuinely ill. I began to see the floaters too.
I had consulted my doctor about the migraines and their hallucinatory spinoff, of course, and he had referred me to a specialist ophthalmologist, who had taken the usual hobby-horse rider’s delight in explaining to me at great length what was going on. He assured me that visual phenomena often preceded migraines, and that recent study had begun to produce an elaborate classification of them. He waxed lyrical about floaters—that was the term he used, and seemed delighted that I had come up with it independently—and gave me an uncannily accurate description of their appearance and behavior without my giving him any substantial hints in advance. He was duly proud of the acumen of his science when I confirmed his observations.
“Is it really normal for them to appear to pass through walls and other solid objects?” I had asked him.
“But of course,” he had replied. “They’re an illusion conjured up by your brain; they have no need to obey the laws of solid-state physics, or those of optics. They’re phantoms. I have patients who suffer much worse, believe me. When people begin to lose their sight, because of the deterioration of the retina or the clouding of the cornea, the brain often substitutes for the lack of information received by producing hallucinations far more complex than yours—sinister enough, merely by virtue of their unreality, even when the imaginary objects are perfectly ordinary, but they often seem menacing, even monstrous.”
“Monstrous?” I repeated. “How monstrous?”
“I suspect that that depends on the personality of the individual. None of us has an entirely clear conscience, alas, and our poor brains are sometimes at the mercy of our fears. You have no need to worry unduly yet, though. Having passed forty, you’re beginning to suffer from the effects of a hardened lens and the fact that the muscles controlling it are getting weaker—that’s why you’re more prone to suffer disturbing effects late in the day, when the eye-muscles get tired—and the fact that you’ve always been short-sighted means that the developing long-sightedness is causing you particular confusions. But I can’t see any other signs of physical deterioration: no glaucoma, no cataracts, no retinal detachment. There’s just the migraines. When they come on, you need to lie down in a dark room and keep still. I’ll give you a prescription that will help numb the effects.”
In fact, he had given me several prescriptions, in series, for various sedatives, beginning with chloral and moving via tincture of cannabis to laudanum. None of them had helped; all of them, in fact, seemed to have made things worse. I had abandoned them all.
“I’m truly sorry,” I said to Rachel, “but I shall have to lie down for a while, in order to dispel a headache. I promise that I’ll be ready and able to lend you any support you might need by eight, when the vultures descend; but in order to be ready and able, I need to get my body and brain under control, and the only way to do that is by means of careful self-discipline.”
“Of course,” she said. “Poor David—have you been working too hard?”
In f
act, I had hardly been working at all. Although we schoolteachers always claim that the notion that the long summer break is pure holiday is a myth, we are mostly trying to conceal our indolence. I had not opened a book or picked up a pen since mid-July. Fortunately, Rachel took my denial as a further sign of heroic modesty.
The bedroom I had been assigned was next to Tillinghast’s study, and when I lay down with a blindfold over my eyes, attempting perfect stillness, I could hear her rummaging through the drawers of the desk and the filing-cabinet, each of which made an individually distinguishable creak as it opened and closed. I could tell that she was being assiduous, but I knew that she was merely being methodical. She was not searching with the avid determination that the jackals would have brought to the task, eager to fall upon some scrap of paper containing a hopefully crucial wiring-diagram or list of instrument-settings. She had always been a neat and orderly housekeeper while she was living in the house—habits carried over, I assumed, from her earlier career as a laboratory technician.
As the migraine developed, however, I soon lost interest in creaks from the study and in Rachel’s subsequent movements as she continued to take inventory of her shabby inheritance. No matter how hard I tried to instruct my brain to see only what my eyes registered was really present, the floaters continued to swim around the inner space of my mind.
Had I not been wearing the blindfold, I knew, I would have seen them moving back and forth through the walls and ceiling of my room—and also moving through the bed, my own body, and one another. When they seemed to be paradoxically present in the three-dimensional world revealed to sight, they often gave the impression of being living things, akin to sea-creatures—more often jellyfish and sea-cucumbers than cephalopods or fish, but not obedient to any very rigid system of classification. Exiled to the dark behind my eyes, however, they seemed more alien than that, as if they were no longer completely defined by their shapes, or any resemblance to earthly species.