by John Farris
Lord Luxton nearly fell off the setee when a lamp flashed on a few feet away. Without his being aware of the passage of time it had grown rather dark in the doctor's parlor. Outside there remained a few tinder glints beneath the heavy part-raised lid of eternity; the moon, having risen through blood, was a pearly crescent twice-squared by windowpanes. The old housekeeper whickered at his show of nerves and shuffled dimly away to lower the blackout shades.
Opposite his lordship, Mary Burgess sat as if she'd hypnotized herself, eyes dormant, the composed body yielding a tremor or two.
"Dr. Burgess?"
"That's all."
"I beg your—"
"Nothing more the boy could tell, except: a scuttling presence behind him, a quick shadow, a severe blow to the head as he turned. But he's never been certain. He doesn't know what he dreamed in coma, and what he truly experienced."
"He's alive today. Then some sort of rescue was affected by—"
"The young chef du poste from Zenkitu arrived late the following day with troops; they found Jackson in hospital, barely breathing. His trephined skull was wrapped in bandages that could have been cleaner. His father they observed limping about the settlement, scarcely clothed and in very poor condition. One foot was rotting from sores. He offered no resistance, and said not a single meaningful word."
"What do you mean, the boy's skull was trephined?"
"Surgically opened; two round pieces of skull, each about the size of a shilling, had been taken out."
"Why?"
"To make a fetish."
A bell tinkled glassily in the dark hail outside the parlor. Mary Burgess looked up.
"There's someone at the surgery," she said, distinctly uneasy. She got up and went to the front windows to look out.
She was there for a long minute. Lord Luxton waited, impatient, wondering what he was to make of the unfinished story that had so powerfully affected his imagination—of a living mythology in the primeval forest. "Womanly, yet it was a serpent." And what had Eustace Holley scrawled, possibly in an abject state of fear, on the wall of his chamber? Luxton wished he had copied down the words, which had a vaguely familiar ring. LADY/IN THY SERPENT/PRISON-HOUSE/SOME PITY SHOW. That sounded right. So the good doctor had died, done in by an unknown force, obsessed by—what? His belief in a spectrum of monsters, a full bestiary that ranged from androgynes to bloodsucking Truds and the Corpse-Eaters in the Book of the Dead? His lordship wanted to ask—
The bell was repeated.
Mary Burgess's head jerked toward him. "I have to go. Please excuse me."
"Of course. Will you be all right?"
"Why wouldn't I be?" she said crossly. "It's only a patient. Have more tea if you like, I shan't be long."
But it seemed a lengthy wait to Luxton. He amused himself by leafing through a few of the volumes on her leather-topped writing desk: Lucian's The True History, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Charles Gould's Mythical Monsters, Keats and Coleridge. She had recently translated an epistle from the eleventh-century Christian reformer Bernard of Clairvaux to the Abbé Guillaume de St. Thiery, which criticized the excessive ornamentation of medieval churches, especially representations of synthetic creatures. Considering the fate of Dr. Holley, a portion of the letter was germane.
What is the meaning of these obscene monkeys and raging lions? And of the horrid centaurs, the wild men, the blaring huntsmen? Here you see many bodies joined to one head and there many heads on one body. There a beast drags a horse dragging half a goat after it, here a horned animal is the forepart with a horse forming the hindquarters. Everywhere there is a profusion of the most varied forms, as motley as they are astonishing, so that people prefer to read in stones rather than in books and spend the whole day gaping at every detail of these oddities instead of meditating on their prayers.
Interesting, thought Luxton, as he paced the creaking floor of the parlor. Dr. Holley had survived his ordeal, real or imagined, but obviously he'd never been restored to the twentieth century, to his trust in God and the holy order of the cosmos. Or was it presumptuous to conclude that belief in fantastic organic entities was particular to the primitive state of mind? The creative imagination was timelessly replete with monsters, some evil, some benign, but always linked to reality, the world of natural forms. The human-headed snakes, for instance, Indian demigods called Naga. And what of the part-crocodile griffins of the Nile, plentifully depicted in ancient papyri? Were they more fantastic than those primordial creatures of wing and claw which are, by their extant bones, verifiable? The cultured and sophisticated Egyptians worshiped the fabulous, the half-human—but they also were aware and made use of such creatures as the electric fish, living batteries that could generate enough power to knock down a horse. . . .
"Good God," his lordship said aloud, visualizing a brilliant flash, a chemical-electrical pulse of, perhaps, a million-million watts occurring in a millionth of a second, creating an intense but focused shock wave, strong enough to fling a denuded old man through the narrow crotch of a tree. Luxton knew of no manufactured device that could create such power without general and widespread destruction. Then conceivably a natural source, some kind of sentient generator, could be the culprit. We are, he thought, all creatures of electrical impulse—yet how might this crude, awesome power operate within the laws of nature? Indeed. And how many human deaths were contained within a single drop of cobra venom, or an invisible colony of pneumonia bacilli?
Down below in the surgery Mary Burgess shrieked in terror.
Lord Luxton was bounced from his entertaining speculations as if from the tailgate of a wagon. Nerves afray, disoriented, nonetheless he was on the move without conscious thought. The Scots housemaid he discovered crouched at the top of the steep stairs, one hand on the railing, her small old eyes quibbling from nervousness. There was cloudy glass in the door at the foot of the stairs, behind the glass a pale inner light. He heard nothing.
"Dr. Burgess?" he called.
"Go doon," said the housemaid. She would not budge.
His lordship descended, opened the door. At the end of the ground-floor hall was an empty vestibule not much larger than a telephone call box. On his left were two doors, the first locked, the second standing open.
As he hurried down the hall to the dark waiting room of the surgery, Medwick, his chauffeur, came banging in through the vestibule door.
"Everything all right here, m'lord? I was on my way back from supper when I heard—"
"I don't know; come with me."
A thin strand of light was showing beneath the examining room door. They heard the brittle clashing of swept glass. Luxton turned on a standing lamp.
"Dr. Burgess?"
The sweeping stopped.
"Come in," she said.
Lord Luxton glanced at Medwick, who nodded and dropped into a chair to wait. His lordship let himself into the examining room, and was assaulted by the heat. For some reason Mary Burgess had started a fire of cannel coal in the old-fashioned stove. She had no other company. As she stooped to brush glass from the linoleum into a dustpan, Luxton observed that there was another way out of the examining room.
She was wearing, unbuttoned, a knee-length white coat, stethoscope in one pocket.
"What happened to your patient?" he inquired.
"My patient? Oh—" She carried the pan to a dustbin and disposed of the pieces, what was left of a medium-size glass bottle. She walked obtusely, like a convalescent, between the bulky cabinets and quaint machines of her practice, her studded face a purse of closely held afflictions. "It was Simon Temple. Bloody bump on his forehead. Too much gin, all the lads, and careless at horseshoes. Didn't amount to much. He went the back way home."
The telephone rang; Mary Burgess flinched but took the receiver from the wall.
"Oh, yes. Quite all right. . . . No, nothing. Gave myself a nasty shock, is all. Thank you for calling, constable." She rang off, her eyes closing in exasperation as she leaned against the wall. "Roused the entire villag
e, did I? Stupid old woman."
"What caused you to scream, Mary?"
"I suppose—if one has suffered enough anxiety, one is capable of projecting with the mind's eye all manner of insults to reason. Even an image of the living dead. I merely thought I saw"—she paused for air—"something out there in the dark of the waiting room."
"Eustace Holley?"
She blinked agreement. "But I do not fantasize. Nor do I believe in ghosts. I've never screamed before. Wouldn't have thought I knew how."
"I'm sure you'll be all right now. I've put you under considerable strain, and for that I—What have we here?"
Before she could protest, Luxton reached beneath the padded table and carefully picked up a number of objects that had spilled from a small leather pouch clumsily handmade and stitched and now coming apart. There were three nineteenth-century enameled bells of the type used for Christmas decorations; some animal claws and rather long feral teeth; a few feathers; and, finally, two shilling-size pieces of what appeared to be bone. Everything was covered with a coarse red dust. The porous bone pieces were splotched with dark stains of indeterminate origin. Perhaps they were bloodstains.
"Burn it," Mary Burgess said after he had carefully gathered the lot. "Throw it all on the fire, for my sake."
"First will you tell me what I have here?"
"The components of a fetish. Supposedly the most powerful that can be made by the sorcerers of the African forest. The teeth and claws are from a black leopard. The red dirt has some sacred meaning, I don't know what."
"And the bone fragments?"
"Human. Sections of parietal bone."
"Those which Eustace Holley obtained from the skull of his own son?"
"Yes, I believe that to be so."
"And why did he do it?" Luxton said, staring at the handful of curious junk, which nevertheless had a most distressing history. "Why did he have to nearly destroy his son in order to make the fetish?"
"As I understand it, no less a sacrifice is required when one is threatened by the loss of one's immortal soul. But it was not Eustace Holley who performed that cannibalistic operation. It was a lunatic, a man physically and emotionally broken by the demands of his calling."
She walked to the stove and raised the lid. "Dump it all in here," she demanded, her voice high. "I say I want to be rid of it!"
Lord Luxton complied. As soon as he brushed the last clinging feather from his perspiring palm, Mary Burgess clapped the lid down tight. Then she pressed fingertips against her temples. Her bared teeth chattered.
"Perhaps a stimulant," his lordship suggested.
"No."
"I'm amazed that the boy survived such crude surgery in the wild."
"Savages of antiquity recovered from similar trephinings performed under worse conditions. His youth and an exceptional constitution saved him. More surgery was necessary. The dura mater had become seriously inflamed. If the infection had spread to the spinal cord—As it was, Jackson had drains in his head for weeks following his rescue."
"It's your contention, then, that Dr. Holley was the victim only of his overwrought imagination?"
"Worn to the quick, defenseless in his fatigue, he experienced waking nightmares. He perceived gross apparitions in the most innocent forms of nature. And when his Christian conviction, his knowledge of salvation through the perfect love of God, began to fail him, he adopted the magic of the Negroes, with which he was quite familiar. He'd had to be, in order to treat them successfully."
"Obviously he suffered another, similar breakdown quite recently. Why?"
Mary Burgess shook her head in despair. "I can't be sure. There were no significant changes of personality. In his dealings with the other Hawkspurn residents and staff he remained cordial but rather aloof, as customary. His routine was the same right until—I mean, he took his morning exercise, he had his music, chess and books. But he was dismayed by the war, the threat of invasion, although as you know in East Riding we've scarcely been touched by the raids. Even secondhand I suppose it was terrible enough for someone of his fragile emotions: the war news on the wireless, the effects of the blitz which he could observe in the faces of the poor children placed in our homes for safekeeping. 'A beast is loose,' he said once to me. 'Naught will do but that we shall be scourged. We have summoned the beast of the buried mind and now nothing else matters—angel, vision, light and body; nor the little children who are the sun of our Own souls."
"Certainly not the sentiments of a crazed man. But a voice of doom, regardless."
"He turned to the Romantic poets, his favorites, no doubt hoping to affirm the perdurable in a time of crisis. Instead he found a new obsession in the life and works of Keats."
"How odd. That ill-fated young genius. Let me make a guess. Dr. Holley's obsession had to do with the narrative poem 'Lamia."
"Quite perceptive."
"There've been clues. 'Lady In thy serpent prison-house . . .' Definitely Keatsian. Quoted directly from the poem itself?"
"I don't know," she said. "I'm not that familiar with it."
"He was attracted to Keats because of this one poem?"
"Because he judged the poem written from experience, not imagination."
"In other words he felt that Keats truly believed—"
"No, no, had encountered such a creature, which eventually was to be the death of him."
"Consumption was the death of Keats, as I recall. Also his brother, what was the name?"
"Tom Keats. Yes, Keats the poet died of the wasting disease, in Rome, in 1821. But Eustace claimed his end was hastened by the serpent-woman whom he loved, who night after night in unholy conjugation drew the substance of life from Keats's body, resulting in a lingering death."
Lord Luxton smiled. "Analogous to Holley's own haunted life. But the life of Keats has been exhaustively researched, and he was a prodigious letter writer. He had two well-documented affairs of the heart, with Isabella Jones and then Fanny Brawne. How did Dr. Holley ex plain a third, hitherto undetected amor?"
"He wouldn't argue his case with me. But he was convinced 'Lamia' existed—that they exist, are everywhere as common as alley cats."
"Or doppelgangers?"
"Perhaps a month ago—no, even more recently, toward the end of May—something occurred that severely depressed Eustace. I don't know what it might have been, a broadcast, a news item, but his obsession took a new potentially disastrous turn. Out came the fetish, in a corked bottle which he had secreted God knows where these many years. Naturally I was curious. He owned nothing, had not a single photograph or memento to remind him of his long service in the African forest. Suddenly here was this—ghastly thing, wrought with his own bloody hands, which he clung to day and night. 'The beast is loose,' he said. 'This must keep her from my bed.' I fully believe he was personalizing the dread of the war that is everywhere around us. I was afraid then, afraid that his sinking spell would result in a permanent derangement. I was afraid of the fetish, which seemed to be the engine of his morbidity."
"So you took it from him without his knowledge."
"Yes, on impulse, night before last." She turned and jabbed a finger at the hot stove. "But if you believe that filthy token had anything to do with his death—"
"I don't believe it, no. However—"
"Eustace did. Quite right and he was terrified, having lost his—his power, his singular defense against the spawn of a destructive subconscious."
"Thus he placed those importunate words on the wall of his bedroom."
Mary Burgess made a choking sound, and turned her face away.
His lordship studied her. He noted that his pulse was fast, his face flushed, and it wasn't just the heat of the stove on a mild June night. He always felt this way moments before making the crucial move that could stop a bomb—or kill him: steady, at a miraculous peak of hazard, not afraid but in a state of almost toxic excitement or elation, as if he shared in a mysterious way the timeless secrets of the universe—ultimately what he ex
perienced was a feeling of total freedom, a willingness to confront any truth.
"What are your conclusions now as to the manner of Dr. Holley's death?" he asked her.
"It was sheer chance. An unexploded bomb. My God, can't you let him rest in peace?"
"Mary, I've seen flora proliferating in bomb craters in the heart of London which resemble nothing known on this earth. These plants are mutants, created by intense heat and some sort of short-lived radiation of which we are totally ignorant. Likewise I know that atrocious mutations of human nature are common in wartime. Is it so difficult to believe in strange animal forms, born of the enormous energy of human hatred and aggression that now threatens to destroy us all?"
"Yes. It is impossible to believe. I will not believe—"
"But you accept the longevity and reported ferocity of Gen Loussaint, who at best seems to have been half-mad, and at worst a Gorgonish mutation herself, ritually created by her cult of reptile-worshiping savages."
"She was old; on the verge of death. She could not have had anything to do with Eustace Holley's breakdown."
"Unless he was seduced by her, in the form of a ravishing serpent-woman that waxed and grew powerful as a consequence of his sexual desire."
"Sheer—bleeding—insanity!"
"What actually happened to him in the park this morning? Why were his genitals so ruthlessly ripped away? What caused those marks on his buttocks? Were sharp fingernails sunk into his flesh at a moment of ecstasy, or release—before she blew him straight to kingdom come?"
Tears flowed unnoticed down Mary Burgess's cheeks. "Why—why should she come back to him, after all this time?"
"Revenge, perhaps. Or a necessary culmination: She needed his death to be free to roam at will."