We were alone in the midst of primordial nature—its swarthy and implacable solitude might have been pre-human. The heavy vapors of the swamp wrapped dank fingers about me as I stood there, and I felt chill forebodings that my reason could not shake away.
My brother, however, appeared unconscious of the hostile and resistless spirit of the swamp. Having started the motor and the dynamo, he called me to him, and gave me brief directions for tending them.
Then he turned to his more delicate apparatus, which was set up on a long bench beside the dynamo. Closing his circuits to light the banks of huge, oddly formed tubes, he fitted in place the twin black disks of the head-set, closed his eyes, and assumed an expression of intense, concentrated effort.
At the moment, I was filled with a wild, almost uncontrollable impulse to stop the motor and smash the banks of weirdly glowing tubes—and what unspeakable horror might have been averted had I done so!
7. The Shining House
I was witness, that night, to the most astounding miracle that science had ever wrought. In the passing days I had lost part of the bewildered anxiety inspired by the first exhibition of the new instrumentality. I could understand that the process of “fixation,” as Paul termed it, was a logical application of relatively simple natural laws. But, despite myself, I still regarded the “wand of science” with an awe not free from haunting dread.
My brother stood before his bank of instruments, with the black disks upon his temples, his quiet dark face rigid in concentration. The quiet humming of the dynamo changed a little, as the load came upon it, and the powerful motor labored.
Walls came into being around us, upon the floor of concrete, shutting out the dank breath of the darkening swamp—walls erected silently, as if by swift, invisible elfin hands.
They seemed to be of some polished, translucent stone, whose depths were filled with pale, roseate opalescence. They gleamed softly, like rose quartz held against the light. In a few seconds we, with the apparatus, were enclosed in a long room, walled with rose-hued stone, and roofed with the sullen sky of dusk.
In one end was a broad, arched doorway, hung with shimmering white curtains bright as woven wire of silver, adorned with a fantastically conceived design in scarlet and black. Even in my amazement, I was conscious of a sudden strong desire to part the argent hangings, to see what mysteries might lie beyond.
Then a roof sprang over the room—a lofty vault of dark green crystal, seeming luminous with an inner light deep as the shadowed green of forest gloom.
A little anxiously, Paul put the head-set from him, and shut off the power from the dynamo. I expected the amazing room about us to vanish in a blaze of released electricity, as his other “fixations” had always done. But rosy walls and emerald vault remained apparently substantial.
“You see that I was right, Verne,” he said softly. “With the additional power, the space-frames are more permanent.”
“You mean these walls will last like real matter?”
“They are real matter,” he said; “that is, arrested energy. But I haven’t been able to fixate as much energy in them as ordinary matter contains. They are unstable—the light they radiate is proof enough that they are disintegrating. They probably will be broken down completely in a few days—if we don’t turn on the power again, and build them back.”
I left the dynamo, and came to him.
“Paul,” I pleaded, “let’s give it up, and go back to New Orleans.”
He looked at me with a kindly smile. “Homesick for your wine, women, and song, eh?” he said. “Well, Verne, with the wand of science I can soon provide them all for you, right here.
“No,” I said anxiously, “it isn’t that! I simply can’t help feeling that we are usurping forbidden powers. I know, if we keep on, something terrible is going to happen!” I could not help flushing at the mild, amused sarcasm in his brown eyes. “Call it what you will,” I finished desperately, “premonition, hunch—I know that trouble will come, if we keep on!”
“Sorry you feel that way, Verne,” he said. “But we haven’t touched the possibilities of it, yet. I’d be insane to give up now. But you may go back, if you like, and I’ll stay on alone.”
“You know I couldn’t leave you here by yourself!”
Impulsively he came over to me and took my hand. But he was steadfast in his refusal to abandon the experiment.
Through all the night Paul remained at his instruments, seeming lost in a sort of artistic frenzy. Strange light of exultant power burned in his eyes; for hours on end he remained silent, rigid, engrossed in his labor of creation.
At dawn he wearily turned from the long bench, and stopped the humming generator. He lifted the curtain of shimmering white, in the end of the rose-walled room, and we went out to inspect the edifice he had created, or to use his term, “fixated.”
To understand that building, castle, palace—I hardly know what to call it—it is necessary to understand something of my brother’s gloomy and imaginative nature. For it was a work of imagination, made manifest without the limitations of ordinary art or architecture.
The same weird and melancholy fancy was evident in its crimson-windowed walls and many-towered roof that Paul had always displayed in the haunting minors of his compositions for the violin, in the macabre and startling grotesqueries of his paintings.
The building was not remarkably large. It covered merely the concrete foundation we had prepared, which was approximately one hundred feet square. Its four floors communicated through a spiral stair in the great central tower which lifted its ebon height above the crenelated parapets of the roof.
The material of all the castle had the solid appearance of stone, but with an odd effect of translucent luminescence—due, Paul said, to the disintegration of its impermanent space-frame, and the consequent radiation of its energy as light. The radiance of the walls was so strong that we needed no other source of illumination in the building.
The palace must have been an old dream of my brother, for it bore no evidence of hasty planning. Every detail was vital to the dominating impression of the whole. It must have been conceived and executed as the expression of a single mode, to catch and fix one moment of barbaric, melancholy fantasy.
Strange and striking were the colors of its lucent stuff. Towers of dead and ebon darkness, of sullen gold of sunset. High domes of frozen, empyreal violet. Oval windows glazed with blood-red crystal, whose ghastly radiance flowed in fatal floods across long halls jet-roofed and pillared with ebony, floored with ghostly silver.
True, there were lighter effects. Suites whose predominate tones were cool, restful greens and soothing saffrons and softly melancholy browns. But they served only to emphasize, by contrast, the grotesque strangeness of the castle as a whole.
We climbed to the summit of the central black tower, and looked away across the vast dark sea of green, wooded swamps, still dim and mysterious in the mists of dawn, exhaling an exotic atmosphere of primal power well in harmony with the eerie and fantastic wonder of this castle of dreams that Paul had made physically manifest with his “wand of science.”
Paul stood silent beside me for a time, looking away at the dark swamps, then down at the eldritch fantasies of violet domes below us, and towers of jet and sullen gold. In his dark eyes was a strange and fervid fire.
“This is just the beginning, Verne!” he cried, his voice quickened with the intoxication of limitless power. “The dwelling is done. Now we shall people it, with beings of our own creation!”
I caught up his hand, apprehensively, appealing.
“You don’t mean that!” I cried. “You mustn’t try that, Paul. You won’t try to create life—human life! Promise me!”
He gravely shook his head.
“I’m sorry you’re opposed to it, Verne. But that has been my aim, from the beginning. Think what it will mean to be able to mold human beings, perfect, flawless—”
“You won’t try that!” I pleaded. “It would be madness!”
He drew away his hot hand.
“No, Verne, I’m not mad. A little drunk, if you insist, with the idea of it. . . . And why not go on a spree—when we have the power of gods? You’ve celebrated, many a time, with less excuse!”
“Perhaps,” I said. “But there’s a lot of difference between emptying a friendly bottle, and running amuck with the power of creation!”
Laughing tolerantly at my vehemence, he turned without speaking to lead the way back down the spiral stair.
8. The Bright Butterfly
The dazed and bewildered incredulity upon the face of Henri Dubois, when he returned four days later with mail and supplies, was a sight I shall not forget. We were expecting him, and I had opened the postern gate before he appeared. I was standing in the gleaming emerald portal when he came in view along the narrow trail we had cut from the bayou.
For a moment he stood staring, half concealed in the green riot of undergrowth, his lean, unshaven face a very mask of astounded unbelief. Then, screaming something in French regarding the works of the devil, he dropped his pack and fled down the trail.
Calling to him not to be alarmed, I followed him. I found him on his knees, back on the landing, praying but ready to embark at a moment’s notice. After some explanation and persuasion, he returned to the castle with me, to carry the supplies he had brought. Upon the promise of a substantial increase in his remuneration, he agreed to continue his trips. But nothing would have tempted him to enter the building; he always regarded it as the work of an unhallowed power.
Paul and I lived, for the most part, in a long, palatially splendid room on the first floor, furnished with a richness almost barbaric. The deep-piled rugs were finer than ever came from Samarkand. The tapestries that hung on the marble-white walls were weirdly patterned as opium dreams. The elaborate furniture might have been designed for the setting of a futuristic drama.
I prepared our meals in a smaller room adjoining, from the supplies the Cajun brought—we were forced to depend upon outside sources for bodily necessities, since the stuff fixated by Paul’s apparatus, “matter” though it may have been, was too unsubstantial to serve as food.
My brother spent many hours each day with his integrator. He made small additions to the castle, in the way of furnishings and such works of art as tapestries, pictures, and statues, which he had only to image clearly in his mind to make manifest as tangible realities.
From the first, however, the chief end of his labors seems to have been the creation of life, and he was continually changing his technique and the arrangement of his equipment, with that in view.
In the course of his early efforts in that direction, he fixated or integrated a garden in the cleared space about the castle. The fruit of his efforts was weird as one of Henri Rousseau’s jungle paintings, and as motionless. Leaves and stems were rigid as if cast in green metal; huge and gorgeous blooms were hard and lifeless as if carved from mammoth gems by hand of elfin jeweler.
The Cajun experienced a second alarm when he walked from the darkness of the swamp into the strange bright splendor of that crystal garden. A second increase in his pay was required to overcome his new apprehensions.
Undaunted by his failures, Paul worked on—while I prayed silently that he might never succeed.
“I think that living things will require greater concentration of energy,” he told me one day in the laboratory. “The space-frame must be not only definitely formed, but filled in pretty fully, to keep alive the fire of life.”
Again I began my old argument against the wisdom of the experiment.
“Life is a holy thing. You have no more right to create human beings than you have to murder them—”
“Forget it, Verne,” he said. “Let’s go up and watch the sunset from the tower.”
He smiled, took my arm in his, and led the way toward the stair in the central tower. His obsession forgotten for the moment, he was my brother again, human and sympathetic.
From the crown of the ebon minaret, we watched the sullen sun drop into the wild, far-flung ocean of desolate green. And when we had returned to the empty, barbaric splendors of our living-room, he took his violin and played for me many of the simple old tunes that I have loved since childhood.
“Must be lonely here, eh, Verne?” he asked, smiling at me gravely, almost tenderly. “Far from the old flesh-pots! I must try to make myself a more entertaining companion.”
Then the mad, eager enthusiasm flared up again in his dark eyes, and he added, strangely, “Or make you another companion!”
The excitement attending his momentous accomplishment and the nervous strain of his long hours of concentration in the laboratory were telling heavily upon my brother. Despite all my care, he became thin and haggard; I feared collapse.
His mental state was even more alarming than his physical condition. That pathologic fear of spiders to which he had fallen the unfortunate victim in his youth was obsessing him more violently. The frightful dreams returned with increasing frequency. Almost nightly I had to wake him, trembling, strangling, from the paralysis of nightmare. And I knew that often he lay awake for hours, fighting the sleep that would mean return of the appalling visitations.
Never before, to my knowledge, had he been troubled with somnambulism. But as the strain of his efforts wore him down, I found him, several times, walking in his sleep. On each occasion he had risen from his bed in our common room and started down the hall toward the laboratory as if to continue his labors.
I made his alarming condition another argument for giving up the experiment, and urged him to come out to New Orleans with me, to consult a psychiatrist, or at least to forget his work long enough for a thorough rest.
With his usual lack of regard for my opinion, he refused; and continued his work without any consideration for his health, often remaining in the laboratory for twenty hours a day, and having me bring his meals there—frequently to be left untasted.
Nearly a month we had been alone in the amazing castle, when one day he came eagerly to me in our magnificent living-room, holding in a trembling hand a small moth or butterfly, whose fluttering wings, uniquely marked, shone with a strange violet iridescence.
“I’ve done it, Verne!” he cried, hoarse with excitement. “I’ve done it!”
“Done what?” I asked, puzzled at his extreme agitation.
He stood holding the bright little insect out toward me, trembling, licking dry lips, evidently too excited to speak again. His bright, feverish eyes were staring at me oddly.
I bent over the butterfly, studied its glistening wings.
“Found a new species?” I asked, wonderingly. “I don’t know—”
With an effort, he seemed to recover his old calm, reserved composure.
“Yes, Verne,” he said slowly, “it does belong to a new species. In fact, it is the only one of its kind that ever existed. You see, I created it, myself.”
9. Elaine
For several days following he immersed himself in his work so deeply that I feared for his health. The alarming recurrent nightmares allowed him little sleep, even when he would take time to lie down; he became distressingly haggard and nervous.
I met him one evening as he came from the laboratory, seized his thin shoulders. He was so tired he could hardly stand; his thin, pallid face was like a mask of death; his dark-rimmed eyes dull and lifeless.
“Paul, you aren’t going back in that laboratory,” I told him. “Not if I have to smash it, to keep you out. You’re killing yourself!”
He smiled at me, wanly, agreed in a weary voice, “Yes, Verne, I suppose I have been working too hard.”
“I have supper ready for you,” I told him. “You are going to eat it. And then I’m going to put you to bed and keep you there!”
To my surprise, he made no resistance.
“All right, you win, Verne. I promise to stay out of the laboratory—except just to turn on the power a few minutes a day, to keep the castle from disintegratin
g.”
Rejoicing, I gave him supper and saw him to bed, without ever suspecting what he had accomplished. To my delight, his sleep was sound and untroubled. I sat beside him all night, but my care was unnecessary, for he scarcely moved; his weary face was relaxed, almost smiling.
He was still sleeping when my vigil was terminated by a most unexpected interruption.
“Oh-h!” came a low cry of surprise from the door of the long, magnificent room. Then a clear, pleasant feminine voice said, “Good morning.”
Mute with astonishment, I sprang to my feet, to see that a young woman had come into the room, walking so silently across the deep-piled rug that I had been unaware of her entrance.
Slender, tall, with pale, lovely skin, she looked singularly attractive. Her large eyes, limpidly dark, were aglow with a frank and innocent candor. Upon her oval, fine-featured face were writ keen intelligence and penetrating, sympathetic humor. She held herself gracefully erect; her presence was somehow striking, almost commanding, even though she was attired most informally in a pale blue slip that came only to her knees. Her dark hair, long, luxuriously heavy, fell in loose, glistening wavy tresses about her shoulders. Slim, rounded arms were bare, as were her legs below the blue slip, and her small, high-arched, white-skinned feet.
Ordinarily, I think, I am not abashed in the presence of lovely women, even under such extremely informal circumstances. But on this occasion I found myself staring stupidly at the girl. Nothing could have startled me more than her sudden appearance, situated as we were in the midst of the swamps, which it was obviously impossible that she could have crossed in her present attire.
The Wand of Doom Page 3