And Afterward, the Dark

by Basil Copper

  My next information came from the diary Farlow had kept over the last few months. The extract which I have summarized is from the period immediately following my last visit. Farlow was by this time having shock treatment of a particularly violent type, and his days had thus begun to assume the same detached, unworldly aspect as that of his nights. Sondquist was worried about him, beneath the urbane professional surface, and the object of the special treatment was to break up the dream patterns and so disperse them. At least, this is how the diary of Farlow read to the mind of a layman. There was much abstruse speculation of a suprametaphysical type, which was a bit too heavy going for me, and I skipped those pages in which Farlow gave himself up to such musings on the physical laws of nature and of the construction of the universe.

  But the effect of the treatment had been merely to delay the progress of the dreams; so that where Farlow had, for example, been experiencing three sequences of the dream state in a week, he now had one. So the object realized had been only that of a slowing-up process; the treatment had no power to disrupt, destroy, or dispel the pattern which had assumed a cloud of such alarming proportion on Farlow's mental horizon.

  He spent such part of his day not occupied in treatment, lying on the small iron bed, fully clothed, looking up at the ceiling and listening to the soothing noises of the birds from the garden beyond. He lay listening to the roaring of the blood in his ears; he could hear the fluids of his body bubbling beneath the surface of his skin. He was enormously conscious of being alive; he could almost feel his toenails growing underneath his socks. And with this tremendous feeling, this consciousness of the vital force within himself, Farlow, at forty-nine, realized that he had much to live for, much yet to give the world in the way of knowledge and research; with this realization came a tremendous effort to shake off the dark sense of doom which now not only filled the horizon of his dream but the entire horizon of his waking life.

  One of his last entries in the diary said with tragic foreknowledge, "Those faces, those ghastly, cruel faces! And those eyes! If Sondquist is not successful, they will reach me soon. And that will be the end...."

  The end came sooner than expected. To me it was a profound shock. I had been unable to visit Farlow for nearly a week. When I telephoned Greenmansion to inquire about my friend, the matron had been evasive and had put me on to the doctor in charge. He in turn had not been helpful and had referred me to Sondquist. But as Sondquist himself was too busy to come to the phone it did not get me much farther forward. I was not at all satisfied and decided to visit the sanatorium in person.

  It was a day of early summer in which the shimmering haze, the contented songs of birds, and the heavy warmth which rose from the ground, spoke of even greater heat to come. As I drove out to Greenmansion, the beauty of the afternoon made a vivid contrast in my mind to the dark situation in which the unfortunate Farlow found himself. As soon as I arrived I saw that there was something wrong. The main gates of the sanatorium were shut and locked and I had to ring at the porter's lodge.

  He in turn had to phone the main building to get permission for me to proceed. While he was doing this I left my car and quietly opened the small gate at the side of the lodge, which was unlocked. As I slipped past I heard the porter's cry of protest, but he was too late. I was in the grounds and rapidly walking towards the house. As soon as I came up to the front steps I could see by the unusual activity that I was too late to help my friend. An ambulance from the State Department concerned was parked against the side of the lawn and next to it two big blue police cars with State license plates. I was met by a white-faced matron who tried to dissuade me from seeing Dr. Sondquist.

  "Ring the Superintendent tonight, please," she said. "It will be best."

  I shook my head. "I wish to see Dr. Sondquist at once," I said firmly. She hesitated and then reluctantly went into her office. I had waited in the hall for nearly ten minutes before the measured tread of the doctor sounded along the corridor. He looked harassed and worn.

  "I wish to see Farlow," I said without further preamble. Sondquist shook his head and a curious look came and went in his eyes.

  "I have bad news for you, I am afraid," he said. ''Farlow died last night."

  The information took some moments to sink in and I then became aware that Sondquist had led me to a chair; the matron hovered in the background. The Superintendent handed me a glass of brandy and I mechanically swallowed it.

  "What happened?" I stammered, as soon as I had recovered my senses somewhat.

  Again the curious look passed over Sondquist's face. "He had a heart attack in the night," he said. "There was nothing we could do."

  I just did not believe him and my disbelief must have shown in my next words.

  "Then why are the police here?" I asked in stumbling tones.

  Sondquist shook his head impatiently. "That is about another matter altogether," he said hurriedly. Spots of red stood out high on his cheekbones. He put his hand on my shoulder in a kindly manner.

  "I have much to do at the moment. Why not ring me this evening and we will arrange an appointment for tomorrow, when I have more time. Then I will answer all your questions.''

  I agreed dully and a few minutes later drove back to town. But the interview with the doctor next day did not seem at all satisfactory to me and there were many of my questions left unanswered. The funeral took place quietly and the weeks passed by and poor Farlow and his problems seemed forgotten by the world at large. But I had not forgotten. I kept up my acquaintance with Sondquist and after many visits, when he had come to trust me and had seen that there was more than morbid curiosity in my questioning, he satisfied my queries. Sometimes I wish he hadn't. For then I should sleep better at nights.

  It was more than a year afterwards before he could bring himself to confide in me. It was almost September and a thin fire of twigs crackled in his study at Greenmansion, for though the days continued in blazing heat, there was an underlying chill in the evenings. He had got out some of the record books on Farlow's treatment and had allowed me to look at the patient's own diary.

  After we had been talking for some time, I asked him, "Do you think Farlow was mad?"

  Sondquist hesitated and then shook his head emphatically. "I sometimes feel that I may be," he said enigmatically and a look of strain showed in his eyes.

  "What does that mean?" I asked.

  The doctor drummed nervously with his long thin fingers on the desk, then picked up his glass of wine and drained it.

  "Would you really like to know how Farlow died?" he said. I nodded. The doctor turned and stared sombrely into the fire, as though the answer to the problem of Farlow lay somewhere amid the flickering flames.

  "I can rely on your complete discretion in this matter?" he said after a long silence.

  "Absolutely," I said.

  Sondquist turned to face me and looked me straight in the eyes as he told me the end of the story.

  "You are completely aware of all the progressive stages of Farlow's dreams or visions, I take it?" he asked.

  "He gave me his confidence," I said.

  Sondquist told me that Farlow had been quiet and cooperative, as he always was, during the last day or two of his treatment. But on the afternoon before his death he had become more than usually agitated and in a long interview with Dr. Sondquist had gone deeply into his fears. The import of his story was that the Janissaries of Emilion were so close to him in his last dream that he could almost touch them. If he slept that night he felt they would destroy him somehow, that he would die.

  Sondquist, who had, of course, a different interpretation of the dream, held that the final vision would have been the catalyst; that it held the kernel of the problem. He told Farlow that in the crisis of his last dream he would finally overcome his fear and be able to live a normal life. After that night, if it came, he said, Farlow would be cured. My friend's reaction to this was the expected. He became violent, said that Sondquist had no notion of the real proble
m, and that the Superintendent's life was not at stake. In the end he became so agitated that he had to be physically restrained by the attendants. He shrieked a good deal about the Janissaries of Emilion and begged Sondquist to have a guard placed over him that night.

  The Superintendent put him under sedatives and the night staff were instructed to look at him from time to time during the dark hours. Farlow had been taken to a padded room, though a strait-jacket had not been thought necessary, and he was sleeping normally in his bed, when one of the male nurses last looked in through the peephole at about 2:00 a.m.

  The sanatorium was roused by the most appalling screams around four in the morning. The uproar had come from Farlow's room, and it was like nothing else in the Superintendent's experience. The first male nurse to look through the peephole in Farlow's door had a violent fit of vomiting and the matron fainted. It was with some difficulty that Sondquist was able to take charge; after a careful examination of the contents of the room the police were sent for, photographs were taken, and the subsequent investigation, undertaken at County level, had lasted more than a week.

  For the sake of public opinion as well as that of Greenmansion and the reputation of Dr. Sondquist, the highest authorities, among them the County Coroner, had agreed that no public examination of the matter should take place and the affair was hushed over. The truth was so fantastic that the only written record of it remained in the private files of Dr. Sondquist and these were kept perpetually locked in a private safe-deposit, to be opened only on his death.

  It was at this point that I put my final questions, Dr. Sondquist made his answers and permitted me to see some photographs which I felt would have been better destroyed. I can never forget what they depicted. Sick at heart, I at length took my leave and drove like a drunken man back to my house. When I had recovered my senses somewhat, I wrapped the piece of rock Farlow had given me in a piece of sacking, and weighted it with stones secured by wire.

  Then I drove out to the Point and hurled it into the deepest part of the sea. That done, some of the shadow seemed lifted from my mind. But the thing haunts my brain and latterly my sleep too has become more and more broken. Pray God that I do not dream the same dream as Farlow.

  What Sondquist had told me and what the photographs depicted had been like something from an obscene slaughterhouse. For in Farlow's room, which was padded and contained no sharp edges of any kind, much less a weapon, the gutted, disembowelled, and eviscerated monstrosity which had once been my friend was spread about in carmine horror; there an eyeball, here a leg or an arm like some demoniac scene in a canvas by Bosch. Save that this was gory reality. No wonder the staff had fainted or that the ambulance attendants had used masks and tongs when clearing up.

  Said Sondquist in a trembling voice as I took my leave, "Make no mistake about it, though the thing is scientifically impossible, Farlow had been hacked to pieces as surely as if a dozen men had attacked him with sharpened swords or knives!''

  Archives of the Dead

  Robert Trumble arrived at Linnet Ridge as a thin, persistent rain was beginning to fall. The house was in a remote part of Surrey and the sombre drive up through avenues of pines and fir had not prepared him for the sight of the building itself; painted white, standing foursquare to the bracing winds of the uplands, it did not seem to Trumble to typify the reputation of Dr. Ramon Fabri as one of the foremost authorities on the occult.

  And yet why should it? Trumble smiled wryly to himself. Surprising how one's mind still moved on conventional lines in some respects. He still found it difficult to conceal his bitterness at some facets of the world as he found it; a minor poet of some brilliance, he had somehow failed to live up to his early promise. As is the way with poets, the public had omitted to buy his works in any great numbers, the editions had passed out of print, and Trumble had been reduced to tutoring and hack work over the past years in order to make a living.

  This was why Dr. Fabri's Personal advertisement in The Times had seemed so attractive; a secretaryship, though not really the sort of thing to which a minor poet aspired, would at least see him financially stable until he should set forth again on some other literary adventure. From what he had gathered at a London interview with Dr. Fabri his duties would not be too onerous; furthermore, the salary was generous in proportion to Trumble's slender secretarial experience; he would live in and live well, judging by Dr. Fabri's reputation as a gourmet; and the post would leave him time for his literary endeavours. He had closed at once and, three days later, had driven down in his old, second-hand two-seater.

  As always, the hood had leaked all the way, though the rain had held off its main attack until he was past Reigate; from then on its steady encroachment had made driving a misery and Trum-ble saw with relief the lodge gates of his destination compose themselves before the thin beams of his headlights in the filmy April dusk.

  His tyres crunched over gravel as he drove up a well-kept drive between smooth lawns and on to the impressive Georgian facade of Dr. Fabri's residence. He carried up his two shabby suitcases between the gleaming white splendour of the pillared entrance porch and saw light shining through the circular windows that flanked the pale yellow front door. Before he could set down his cases to ring the bell, a tall, lean figure blocked out the light that spilled from the open entry.

  The man was some sort of general handyman, Trumble judged by his striped waistcoat and the green baize apron he wore round his waist like a domestic servant in a faded prewar comedy. The man had razor-sharp features with yellow skin stretched over a sharply etched skull; his bald head echoed his face in the lamplight as he stooped to pick up Trumble's bags.

  "Dr. Fabri's waiting in the study, sir," he said in correct, clipped tones. "He says he would like you to go straight through."

  Trumble murmured some commonplace and then turned towards his car; he found the bald man at his elbow. A hand closed over his arm and he was held softly but immovably. The pressure lasted only a moment but the fellow must have had immense strength.

  "Dr. Fabri said at once, sir," he said with slight emphasis on the last words. "I'll attend to your car if you'll give me the keys."

  Trumble looked at the man's impassive features and handed them over. The grip on his arm was instantly relaxed. The man in the striped waistcoat slid swiftly behind the wheel of Trumble's old machine.

  "Straight down the hall, sir, first door on the right," he called, his flat, clipped voice without echoes in the dusk and the thin, whispering rain. "I'll bring your baggage after."

  Trumble went through the porch and into the hall, leaving his bags where they were, as the car trundled away round the drive towards some unseen destination in the rear. Rather an odd character for chauffeur-butler, he felt, though no doubt Dr. Fabri might have use of such a person living in the lonely spot he had chosen to make his home.

  It was none of his business; and in any case the fellow had been polite enough. It was just his attitude; withdrawn strength and confidence, just this side of insolence, which rankled somewhere inside Trumble's mind. He felt he must be getting hypersensitive; rejection by the larger literary world of which he had once had such inordinate hopes might be the reason behind it. He closed the door softly behind him and blinked in the bright light of the inner hall.

  He walked in over a tiled floor of extraordinary beauty. Light reflected back the smooth greens, reds, and blues of the convoluted designs; Trumble recognized the pentacle and something which looked like the seal of Cagliostro. Dr. Fabri, as he knew, was deeply read in literature which dwelt on dark and hidden things, and Trumble himself was intensely interested in the subject; indeed, one of his earlier volumes of poetry, On Goety, had been based on the Seven Seals, which may well have originally drawn his name to Dr. Fabri's attention.

  Trumble flushed at the thought; like all failed and deeply sensitive men he was alive to every nuance and subtlety which might indicate that the wider world had not entirely overlooked his work and the notion that Dr. Fabr
i might actually have read and appreciated his poems gave his starved mind more pleasure than he cared to admit.

  He was charmed, too, to see that his future employer carried his interests to the length of including them in the decor of his house; the post promised to be one of unexpected delights. He passed several oil paintings on his way to the door of which the servant had spoken; they were undoubtedly genuine works of art, of obvious value and chosen with unfailing taste to illustrate Dr. Fabri's chosen pursuits. Trumble was astonished to notice a magnificent Bosch which he did not think had existed outside a museum in Amsterdam; though, like all of Bosch's work it had a haunting and vivid quality that one with tender nerves would find disquieting, to say the least.

  Even Trumble was not sure that he cared all that much for the subject; screaming forms which fled through what appeared to be looped sections of viscera. Really, Bosch had a stunning genius, Trumble felt; he was almost a painter of the twenty-first century and the modern world still had not caught up with his terrifying fancies and extraordinary sense of colour and design. But Trumble did not have time for more than an admiring glance at the canvas; in a moment more he was at the door and, knocking on it, heard Dr. Fabri call out for him to enter.

  Fabri was a man in his middle forties with a powerful frame and a tanned complexion; despite his comparative youth his hair was completely white but cut very short like a young man. His deep-set eyes were brilliant and penetrating and his square tortoiseshell spectacles gave his face a quizzical look and reinforced its strength. His jaw was square also and the glasses echoed the cubistic theme. He rose from a red-leather-topped desk to greet Trumble with obvious pleasure.

  "I trust you had a good journey?"

  His voice was dark-toned and deep and its timbre recalled to the new secretary that Dr. Fabri had been famous for his lecture-tours on the Continent a dozen or so years before; a celebrated series that at one time threatened to launch him into the dubious career of a television celebrity. Fortunately, Dr. Fabri had the good taste to draw back and his scholarship and erudition were henceforth confined to those comparatively small numbers of people who bought tickets of entry to the halls of learned institutions in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, and other leading capitals. Trumble had, of course, spent almost an hour in Dr. Fabri's company at his previous interview but he was now seeing the doctor in his own surroundings for the first time and he studied his employer's milieu with more than casual interest.