Then, in late spring, came the news Fiske had waited for. Dr. Dexter was back; he had returned to his house on Benefit Street. The boards had been removed, furniture vans arrived to discharge their contents, and a manservant appeared to answer the door and to take telephone messages.
Dr. Dexter was not at home to the investigator, or to anyone. He was, it appeared, recuperating from a severe illness contracted while in government service. He took a card from Purvis and promised to deliver a message, but repeated calls brought no indication of a reply.
Nor did Purvis, who conscientiously “cased” the house and neighborhood, ever succeed in laying eyes upon the doctor himself or in finding anyone who claimed to have seen the convalescent physician on the street.
Groceries were delivered regularly; mail appeared in the box; lights glowed in the Benefit Street house nightly until all hours.
As a matter of fact, this was the only concrete statement Purvis could make regarding any possible irregularity in Dr. Dexter’s mode of life—he seemed to keep electricity burning twenty-four hours a day.
Fiske promptly dispatched another letter to Dr. Dexter, and then another. Still no acknowledgment or reply was forthcoming. And after several more unenlightening reports from Purvis, Fiske made up his mind. He would go to Providence and see Dexter, somehow, come what may.
He might be completely wrong in his suspicions; he might be completely wrong in his assumption that Dr. Dexter could clear the name of his dead friend; he might be completely wrong in even surmising any connection between the two—but for fifteen years he had brooded and wondered, and it was time to put an end to his own inner conflict.
Accordingly, late that summer, Fiske wired Purvis of his intentions and instructed him to meet him at the hotel upon his arrival.
Thus it was that Edmund Fiske came to Providence for the last time; on the day that the Giants lost, on the day that the Langer Brothers lost their two black panthers, on the day that cabdriver William Hurley was in a garrulous mood.
Purvis was not at the hotel to meet him, but such was Fiske’s own frenzy of impatience that he decided to act without him and drove, as we have seen, to Benefit Street in the early evening.
As the cab departed, Fiske stared up at the paneled doorway; stared at the lights blazing from the upper windows of the Georgian structure. A brass nameplate gleamed on the door itself, and the light from the windows played upon the legend AMBROSE DEXTER, M.D.
Slight as it was, this seemed a reassuring touch to Edmund Fiske. The doctor was not concealing his presence in the house from the world, however much he might conceal his actual person. Surely the blazing lights and the appearance of the nameplate augured well.
Fiske shrugged, rang the bell.
The door opened quickly. A small, dark-skinned man with a slight stoop appeared and made a question of the word, “Yes?”
“Dr. Dexter, please.”
“The doctor is not in to callers. He is ill.”
“Would you take a message, please?”
“Certainly.” The dark-skinned servant smiled.
“Tell him that Edmund Fiske of Chicago wishes to see him at his convenience for a few moments. I have come all the way from the Middle West for this purpose, and what I have to speak to him about would take only a moment or two of his time.”
“Wait, please.”
The door closed. Fiske stood in the gathering darkness and transferred his briefcase from one hand to the other.
Abruptly, the door opened again. The servant peered out at him.
“Mr. Fiske—are you the gentleman who wrote the letters?”
“Letters—oh, yes, I am. I did not know the doctor ever received them.”
The servant nodded. “I could not say. But Dr. Dexter said that if you were the man who had written him, you were to come right in.”
Fiske permitted himself an audible sigh of relief as he stepped over the threshold. It had taken fifteen years to come this far, and now—
“Just go upstairs, if you please. You will find Dr. Dexter waiting in the study, right at the head of the hall.”
Edmund Fiske climbed the stairs, turned at the top to a doorway, and entered a room in which the light was an almost palpable presence, so intense was its glare.
And there, rising from a chair beside the fireplace, was Dr. Ambrose Dexter.
Fiske found himself facing a tall, thin, immaculately dressed man who may have been fifty but who scarcely looked thirty-five; a man whose wholly natural grace and elegance of movement concealed the sole incongruity of his aspect—a very deep suntan.
“So you are Edmund Fiske.”
The voice was soft, well-modulated, and unmistakably New England—and the accompanying handclasp warm and firm. Dr. Dexter’s smile was natural and friendly. White teeth gleamed against the brown background of his features.
“Won’t you sit down?” invited the doctor. He indicated a chair and bowed slightly. Fiske couldn’t help but stare; there was certainly no indication of any present or recent illness in his host’s demeanor or behavior. As Dr. Dexter resumed his own seat near the fire and Fiske moved around the chair to join him, he noted the bookshelves on either side of the room. The size and shape of several volumes immediately engaged his rapt attention—so much that he hesitated before taking a seat, and instead inspected the titles of the tomes.
For the first time in his life, Edmund Fiske found himself confronting the half-legendary De Vermis Mysteriis, the Liber Ivonis, and the almost mythical Latin version of the Necronomicon. Without seeking his host’s permission, he lifted the bulk of the latter volume from the shelf and riffled through the yellowed pages of the Spanish translation of 1622.
Then he turned to Dr. Dexter, and all traces of his carefully contrived composure dropped away. “Then it must have been you who found these books in the church,” he said. “In the rear vestry room beside the apse. Lovecraft mentioned them in his story, and I’ve always wondered what became of them.”
Dr. Dexter nodded gravely. “Yes, I took them. I did not think it wise for such books to fall into the hands of the authorities. You know what they contain, and what might happen if such knowledge were wrongfully employed.”
Fiske reluctantly replaced the great book on the shelf and took a chair facing the doctor before the fire. He held his briefcase on his lap and fumbled uneasily with the clasp.
“Don’t be uneasy,” said Dr. Dexter, with a kindly smile. “Let us proceed without fencing. You are here to discover what part I played in the affair of your friend’s death.”
“Yes, there are some questions I wanted to ask.”
“Please.” The doctor raised a slim brown hand. “I am not in the best of health and can give you only a few minutes. Allow me to anticipate your queries and tell you what little I know.”
“As you wish.” Fiske stared at the bronzed man, wondering what lay behind the perfection of his poise.
“I met your friend Robert Harrison Blake only once,” said Dr. Dexter. “It was on an evening during the latter part of July, 1935. He called upon me here, as a patient.”
Fiske leaned forward eagerly. “I never knew that!” he exclaimed.
“There was no reason for anyone to know it,” the doctor answered. “He was merely a patient. He claimed to be suffering from insomnia. I examined him, prescribed a sedative, and acting on the merest surmise, asked if he had recently been subjected to any unusual strain or trauma. It was then that he told me the story of his visit to the church on Federal Hill and of what he had found there. I must say that I had the acumen not to dismiss his tale as the product of a hysterical imagination. As a member of one of the older families here, I was already acquainted with the legends surrounding the Starry Wisdom sect and the so-called Haunter of the Dark.
“Young Blake confessed to me certain of his fears concerning the Shining Trapezohedron—intimating that it was a focal point of primal evil. He further admitted his own dread of being somehow linked to the monstrosity in th
e church.
“Naturally, I was not prepared to accept this last premise as a rational one. I attempted to reassure the young man, advised him to leave Providence and forget it. And at the time I acted in all good faith. And then, in August, came news of Blake’s death.”
“So you went to the church,” Fiske said.
“Wouldn’t you have done the same thing?” parried Dr. Dexter. “If Blake had come to you with this story, told you of what he feared, wouldn’t his death have moved you to action? I assure you, I did what I thought best. Rather than provoke a scandal, rather than expose the general public to needless fears, rather than permit the possibility of danger to exist, I went to the church. I took the books. I took the Shining Trapezohedron from under the noses of the authorities. And I chartered a boat and dumped the accursed thing in Narragansett Bay, where it could no longer possibly harm mankind. The lid was up when I dropped it—for as you know, only darkness can summon the Haunter, and now the stone is eternally exposed to light.
“But that is all I can tell you. I regret that my work in recent years has prevented me from seeing or communicating with you before this. I appreciate your interest in the affair and trust my remarks will help to clarify, in a small way, your bewilderment. As to young Blake, in my capacity as examining physician, I will gladly give you a written testimony to my belief in his sanity at the time of his death. I’ll have it drawn up tomorrow and send it to your hotel if you give me the address. Fair enough?”
The doctor rose, signifying that the interview was over. Fiske remained seated, shifting his briefcase.
“Now if you will excuse me,” the physician murmured.
“In a moment. There are still one or two brief questions I’d appreciate your answering.”
“Certainly.” If Dr. Dexter was irritated, he gave no sign.
“Did you by any chance see Lovecraft before or during his last illness?”
“No. I was not his physician. In fact, I never met the man, though of course I knew of him and his work.”
“What caused you to leave Providence so abruptly after the Blake affair?”
“My interests in physics superseded my interest in medicine. As you may or may not know, during the past decade or more, I have been working on problems relative to atomic energy and nuclear fission. In fact, starting tomorrow, I am leaving Providence once more to deliver a course of lectures before the faculties of eastern universities and certain governmental groups.”
“That is very interesting to me, Doctor,” said Fiske. “By the way, did you ever meet Einstein?”
“As a matter of fact, I did, some years ago. I worked with him on—but no matter. I must beg you to excuse me now. At another time, perhaps, we can discuss such things.”
His impatience was unmistakable now. Fiske rose, lifting his briefcase in one hand and reaching out to extinguish a table lamp with the other.
Dr. Dexter crossed swiftly and lighted the lamp again.
“Why are you afraid of the dark, Doctor?” asked Fiske, softly.
“I am not af—”
For the first time the physician seemed on the verge of losing his composure. “What makes you think that?” he whispered.
“It’s the Shining Trapezohedron, isn’t it?” Fiske continued. “When you threw it into the bay you acted too hastily. You didn’t remember at the time that even if you left the lid open, the stone would be surrounded by darkness there at the bottom of the channel. Perhaps the Haunter didn’t want you to remember. You looked into the stone just as Blake did, and established the same psychic linkage. And when you threw the thing away, you gave it into perpetual darkness, where the Haunter’s power would feed and grow.
“That’s why you left Providence—because you were afraid the Haunter would come to you, just as it came to Blake. And because you knew that now the thing would remain abroad forever.”
Dr. Dexter moved toward the door. “I must definitely ask that you leave now,” he said. “If you’re implying that I keep the lights on because I’m afraid of the Haunter coming after me, the way it did Blake, then you’re mistaken.”
Fiske smiled wryly. “That’s not it at all,” he answered. “I know you don’t fear that. Because it’s too late. The Haunter must have come to you long before this—perhaps within a day or so after you gave it power by consigning the Trapezohedron to the darkness of the Bay. It came to you, but unlike the case of Blake, it did not kill you.
“It used you. That’s why you fear the dark. You fear it as the Haunter itself fears being discovered. I believe that in the darkness you look different. More like the old shape. Because when the Haunter came to you, it did not kill but instead, merged. You are the Haunter of the Dark!”
“Mr. Fiske, really—”
“There is no Dr. Dexter. There hasn’t been any such person for many years, now. There’s only the outer shell, possessed by an entity older than the world; an entity that is moving quickly and cunningly to bring destruction to all mankind. It was you who turned ‘scientist’ and insinuated yourself into the proper circles, hinting and prompting and assisting foolish men into their sudden ‘discovery’ of nuclear fission. When the first atomic bomb fell, how you must have laughed! And now you’ve given them the secret of the hydrogen bomb, and you’re going on to teach them more, show them new ways to bring about their own destruction.
“It took me years of brooding to discover the clues, the keys to the so-called wild myths that Lovecraft wrote about. For he wrote in parable and allegory, but he wrote the truth. He has set it down in black and white time and again, the prophecy of your coming to earth—Blake knew it at the last when he identified the Haunter by its rightful name.”
“And that is?” snapped the doctor.
“Nyarlathotep!”
The brown face creased into a grimace of laughter. “I’m afraid you’re a victim of the same fantasy-projections as poor Blake and your friend Lovecraft. Everyone knows that Nyarlathotep is pure invention—part of the Lovecraft mythos.”
“I thought so, until I found the clue in his poem. That’s when it all fitted in; the Haunter of the Dark, your fleeing, and your sudden interest in scientific research. Lovecraft’s words took on a new meaning:
“And at the last from inner Egypt came
The strange dark One to whom the fellahs bowed.”
Fiske chanted the lines, staring at the dark face of the physician.
“Nonsense—if you must know, this dermatological disturbance of mine is the result of exposure to radiation at Los Alamos.”
Fiske did not heed; he was continuing Lovecraft’s poem:
“—That wild beasts followed him and licked his hands.
Soon from the sea a noxious birth began;
Forgotten lands with weedy spires of gold;
The ground was cleft, and mad auroras rolled
Down on the quaking citadels of man.
Then, crushing what he chanced to mould in play,
The idiot Chaos blew Earth’s dust away.”
Dr. Dexter shook his head. “Ridiculous on the face of it,” he asserted. “Surely, even in your—er—upset condition, you can understand that, man! The poem has no literal meaning. Do wild beasts lick my hands? Is something rising from the sea? Are there earthquakes and auroras? Nonsense! You’re suffering from a bad case of what we call ‘atomic jitters’—I can see it now. You’re preoccupied, as so many laymen are today, with the foolish obsession that somehow our work in nuclear fission will result in the destruction of the earth. All this rationalization is a product of your imaginings.”
Fiske held his briefcase tightly. “I told you it was a parable, this prophecy of Lovecraft’s. God knows what he knew or feared; whatever it was, it was enough to make him cloak his meaning. And even then, perhaps, they got to him because he knew too much.”
“They?”
“They from Outside—the ones you serve. You are their Messenger, Nyarlathotep. You came, in linkage with the Shining Trapezohedron, out of inner Egypt
, as the poem says. And the fellahs—the common workers of Providence who became converted to the Starry Wisdom sect—bowed before the ‘strange dark one’ they worshipped as the Haunter.
“The Trapezohedron was thrown into the Bay, and soon from the sea came this noxious birth—your birth, or incarnation in the body of Dr. Dexter. And you taught men new methods of destruction; destruction with atomic bombs in which the ‘ground was cleft, and mad auroras rolled down on the quaking citadels of man.’ Oh, Lovecraft knew what he was writing, and Blake recognized you, too. And they both died. I suppose you’ll try to kill me now, so you can go on. You’ll lecture, and stand at the elbows of the laboratory men urging them on and giving them new suggestions to result in greater destruction. And finally you’ll blow earth’s dust away.”
“Please.” Dr. Dexter held out both hands. “Control yourself—let me get you something! Can’t you realize this whole thing is absurd?”
Fiske moved toward him, hands fumbling at the clasp of the briefcase. The flap opened, and Fiske reached inside, then withdrew his hand. He held a revolver now, and he pointed it quite steadily at Dr. Dexter’s breast.
“Of course it’s absurd,” Fiske muttered. “No one ever believed in the Starry Wisdom sect except a few fanatics and some ignorant foreigners. No one ever took Blake’s stories or Lovecraft’s, or mine for that matter, as anything but a rather morbid form of amusement. By the same token, no one will ever believe there is anything wrong with you, and with so-called scientific investigation of atomic energy, or the other horrors you plan to loose on the world to bring about its doom. And that’s why I’m going to kill you now!”
“Put down that gun!”
Fiske began suddenly to tremble; his whole body shook in a spectacular spasm. Dexter noted it and moved forward. The younger man’s eyes were bulging, and the physician inched toward him.
“Stand back!” Fiske warned. The words were distorted by the convulsive shuddering of his jaws. “That’s all I needed to know. Since you are in a human body, you can be destroyed by ordinary weapons. As so I do destroy you—Nyarlathotep!”
Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos Page 28