by Brian Lumley
And on that obscure subject he would say no more…
Two years later, as a prodigy not yet ten years old, Hemmings had been enrolled into Mensa International as one of that intellectual organization’s youngest members. His IQ was much higher than most, even his father’s, but his interests in what he termed “common-or-garden sciences” had soon waned while his passion for numbers had grown exponentially. All the while, by contrast, his father had been growing ever more distant.
From then on the years had passed with seeming rapidity; a fat boy became a fat youth, a teacher, a university professor. Into his early middle years he maintained something of contact with his father, though not without good reason: while the old man—now in truth an “old” man—had money and a not inconsiderate estate, his son had very little. For all his skill with numbers, fat Professor Hemmings had been less than financially prudent. Ever hungry but for some reason rarely entirely satisfied, he would usually take his meals—expensive but otherwise “ordinary” fare—in the best restaurants he could find in the vicinity of the University.
During his leave of alleged compassionate absence, however, at the estate on the outskirts of Dalkeith where his father lay on his deathbed, Hemmings had found himself hungrier than ever; more especially so, though at the time he had not known what it was or why. Perhaps he had some kind of worm…in any case he had been about to find out the truth.
And now as he walked the dreary promenade in Kirkaldy, memories of that time—the first time—came flooding back yet more vividly into his mind…
His father had not wanted him there. The nurse, an experienced woman in her mid-forties, previously employed as a Matron in a local hospital, had taken Hemmings aside to tell him that in his father’s less painful and therefore more lucid moments, he had asked on two or three occasions that she keep his son away from him. Trying to explain, he had rambled on a little, telling her there was an unnatural something about “that boy” that didn’t agree with him. Having found nothing peculiar or unnatural about Hemmings herself, she could only put it down to the regular doses of powerful pain-killers which she was administering to the dying man. Since the younger Hemmings would need to attend to that himself on the few occasions when she would be absent, she had thought an early warning was in order. Her patient was on his deathbed; if in his deteriorating condition, perhaps in a moment of drug-induced delirium, he should mutter anything seemingly hurtful, his son should not take it too seriously.
Hemmings had replied that he understood—while to himself he had thought: Well, and so the old man no longer considers it necessary to hide his aversion—in fact it appears that in the end his loathing may even have turned to fear! As for “unnatural”: if anything it had been his father’s attitude, the unwarranted blame he had placed on his only son’s shoulders, that had been strange and unnatural; and for an entire lifetime at that!
A few days into his visit, the Matron, as she preferred to be called, had other duties and would be away overnight and all the next day. Hemmings would be required to see to his father’s drugs once during the night and twice the next day. The old man could eat nothing but weak soup, which Hemmings would also prepare…little difficulty in that. But since his father’s resentment was now made manifest, if only to some other or others, so Hemmings no longer felt constrained regarding his own indifferent emotions. Why should he pretend otherwise when even as a boy in his formative years his father had had no scruples about referring to him as “strange” and “cold?” Why, it could even be that from his early childhood he’d developed that way by reason of the other’s bitter, distant attitude!
Well it could be, but in truth he hardly thought so. He was what he was…
Hemmings slept in a room central between his father’s study and the room occupied by the terminally sick man. This arrangement would allow him to hear the old man if he stirred or cried out in his sleep. A fourth room, directly opposite his father’s across a narrow corridor, was in use by the Matron when she was there; which wouldn’t be until she returned late the next evening. On the night in question, however, Hemmings had his father all to himself…
In the dead of night, about two o’clock, Hemmings was disturbed in his reading of a well-thumbed book on metaphysics from the old man’s library by sounds from the room next door. He had read the same volume in his teens and even then found its contents risable, so that he wasn’t at all annoyed at having to lay it aside; he had always had his own beliefs with regard to ontology and such. Also, since it was almost time for his father’s sedative, he was hardly surprised to have heard these stumbling movements from the next room; but it did seem a little odd that the old man hadn’t called out, and there was something suspiciously furtive about the muffled sounds.
He immediately put on a robe, went next door and, on entering, discovered the ailing man up from his bed, fumbling his way toward the door in the darkness of the unlit room!
“Father, what in the world…?” As Hemmings spoke, he found the light switch by the door, turned on the light, then bundled the shivering old man back into bed and straightened the covers over his oh-so-frail form.
“My study,” his father’s voice was a hoarse whisper. “I…I have to…it’s in my study…but I want it here with me.” He did not seem to be talking to Hemmings; more to himself, as people sometimes do in their sleep.
“In your study?” Frowning at the other, Hemmings tried not to scowl. “What do you mean, Father? Now listen carefully: Matron is away; but I have your pills, and in a little while I’ll prepare your soup. As for your study: your mind is perhaps wandering, for there can’t be anything of any great importance to anyone—not any longer—in your study. Is that understood?”
The old man’s dazed expression suddenly changed; he became far more aware, awake, and managed to shrink away from his son toward the centre of the bed. “I was…dreaming. It was a…a nightmare, I think. And I just…I simply wanted to be out of here, perhaps in my study…or anywhere!”
“Out of here?” Again Hemmings repeated him. “Oh, don’t you worry about that, for you’ll soon be out of here!” And feeling nothing of remorse he went on: “Perhaps it’s slipped your mind, Father, but you’re sick. You’re dying!”
There was no answer as the old man’s eyes went vacant once again, and his bald, wrinkled head fell back onto the pillows.
In no special hurry, Hemmings went to fetch the medication and on his return saw that his father was more himself. He had managed to prop himself up a little, and his sickly eyes followed his son’s every movement while he half filled a glass with water from a jug and helped the old man to get the pills down.
Then, sitting by his father’s bed, he told him: “In a minute or two, before the medication works in earnest, I’ll fetch your soup.”
“I’m not hungry,” the other told him with a weak, wobbling shake of his head. “I’m…I’m tired, not hungry. And anyway, I can no longer keep food down. You don’t need—I don’t want you—to bring me anything. I’m just tired.”
Hemmings shrugged and said, “As you wish.” And he assisted the old man as he tried to ease himself down into a prone position; but even as he did so he sensed his father cringing from his touch. At which Hemmings’ already uncaring attitude immediately stiffened.
His father, as if realizing he had made a mistake, shrank further down under the covers and muttered: “I feel…I feel something of a chill.” And: “Cold!” he continued, even shuddering a little. “I…I feel cold!” Which was also something of an error.
That word again: cold! What, and did he perhaps feel unnaturally cold? Now Hemmings scowled, but nevertheless tried not to snarl as he grunted, “So then, I’ll get you another blanket.”
“Don’t…don’t bother…” the other answered, his cracked voice descending into silence. Then, as the pills began to work on him, his eyes closed and in a little while he lay still…
Within the hour, after Hemmings had thought things through, he went quietly to th
e old man’s study, entered and put the light on. It took only a few minutes to go through the drawers in the old oak desk, and find a sealed envelope addressed to his father’s solictors in Edinburgh. Hemmings had no qualms about using a paper-knife to open the envelope, for he suspected he already knew the nature of the contents. Sure enough it was a last will and testament…which made absolutely no mention of Gordon J. Hemmings, but simply said that the value of the house, together with certain monies, were to be divided equally between several favourite charities!
Hemmings searched the drawers again—more thoroughly this time—but could discover no duplicates. This was, as far as he could tell, the only document of the sort. And now it was his, and no other eyes would ever see it. As far as anyone else was concerned, his father would seem to have died intestate…
At ten a.m. Hemmings was awake; in fact he hadn’t slept all night but had paced his room, seething inside and feeling something growing in him until it threatened to spill over. Hatred? Yes, but it was more than that. Some kind of hunger? That was a large part of it certainly: this urgent, desperate need for…something, if only he knew what!
It was time for his father’s medication, but he didn’t take anything with him when he entered his elder’s bedroom and found him awake. Before that, however, as Hemmings passed a mirror in the corridor, he was brought to a halt, shocked at the figure—his figure—which he saw in the glass! Switching on the corridor light in order to view his reflection more clearly, he saw at once that despite the mirror’s dusty surface he wasn’t mistaken.
He was pale as a ghost, even as pale as his father, and his features were gaunt, haggard, while his jacket appeared to hang loose from his slumping shoulders! But then, he had been up all night, his hunger gnawing at him, yet unable to eat anything by reason of the bile now surging in him, his full-blown loathing of the miserable, thankless man on his deathbed.
Such were Hemmings emotions, the anger—and paradoxically the emptiness—that he felt inside, that he waited at the door of his father’s room until finally, under a measure of control, he was able to enter.
The old man was awake and alert, his sunken features etched with pain, but his eyes were on his son standing on the threshold. And Hemmings was somehow aware that those rheumy eyes had been fixed on the door for as long as he had been standing just beyond it. Then, as if in confirmation:
“I knew it was you,” his father said, his voice little more than a broken whisper.
“But I’m the only one here,” Hemmings replied, going to sit by the bed. “So who else could it be?”
Without answering his question, the old man said, “When you first came…came to the house, I was sure…I knew that it was you, before ever I saw you or heard your voice. It was your magnetism, a cold suction that I felt even through these solid walls!”
Though this was far more than his father had ever ventured to tell him before, Hemmings didn’t understand; not quite, not yet. “What’s that, you say?” he replied, leaning closer to the wasted figure in the bed. “Some kind of strange, personal magnetism? My coldness and ‘unnatural’ nature? Well then, what of your nature, Father? And why do you hate me? Because my mother died giving life to me? Is that it?”
“I don’t…don’t hate you. I wish I could have loved you, but not after what…what I saw. The doctor who delivered you, here in this very room, he seemed blind, oblivious to it—too busy bringing you into the world—but I saw it as clearly as I see you now!”
Fascinated and leaning closer still, Hemmings searched the other’s eyes and said, “Explain.”
His father shook his head however weakly; not in denial, in something of a quandary, seemingly at a loss to find the words. But with his shrunken, claw hands twitching where they clutched the coverlet, finally he answered: “Well, perhaps I owe you…owe you that much, if nothing else. I couldn’t have told you as a child, for that might have…damaged you further. And as the years passed I began to think, to hope, that perhaps I was mistaken. It was simply too horrible to accept as a fact…”
Then, after a pause to order his thoughts, he went on: “You were born here, as I’ve said, in this very room. But it was not…not a normal birth.
“I loved your mother, and had determined from the first to be there when it was her time. At first all seemed to go well; she was a perfect patient—even managing to smile through the normal but painful procedures—but as you began to emerge we could see, the doctor and I, that all was not at all well, far from it. Your colour was…it was wrong! You know the phrase ‘blue baby,’ said of a newborn child with congenital cyanosis? Well, that could have been you! You were blue-grey, almost leprous, and when the doctor saw how silent you were he looked at me and shook his head.
“But for all that you didn’t appear to be moving or breathing, still your eyes were open and your heart was beating, however irregularly! The cord was cut, the child hung by his feet and slapped, but still nothing. And again the doctor shook his head; except that second time your mother saw it, and she knew what it meant!
“‘Let me hold him,’ she cried. ‘Give him to me to hold! He can’t die! I won’t let him!’
“With that motionless child hanging from his hand, the good doctor would have denied her, but she screamed at him: ‘Give me my baby!’ And he relented…would that he hadn’t!
“Your mother took you—my Annie took you—and held your still bloody body to her breast. She breathed on you; she tried to breathe you alive, to enhance what little life you were born with and keep you alive. And then, finally, you moved!
“But while she gave of herself, as was always your mother’s nature, you were only taking. Your little fat hands clutched at her, like greedy worms—and I saw it! The colour going out of her and into you; her cheeks, so pink and flushed, falling in a little as their rosy glow quickly transferred to you; her mouth falling open and her eyes glazing, just as you began to breathe and…and slowly smile! A newborn child, smiling like that!
“My God, you…you were healthy—but my Annie was dead!
“Finally I found my voice, and: ‘Doctor! Doctor,’ I cried. He was looking away, head bowed, cleaning his bloody hands over a bowl of water. He had done his job as best he could, but apparently he’d seen nothing.
“And there lay my Annie with a little of that awful hue on her, gone from me; and you, my son, cradled in her arms, suddenly warm and…and pink!
“So then, now I have told you…I’ve told you everything, except my thoughts on this matter. I believe it likely that you are some kind of mutant—but I do not say that disparagingly! For all God’s creatures mutate, however slowly, often over hundreds and thousands of years. In your case the metamorphosis was abrupt, a singular thing; but it was also unutterable, and morbid beyond words…”
Now Hemmings understood everything, and while listening to his father’s faltering explanation and final words he had edged ever closer, until finally he crouched spiderlike over the bed, his attention unwavering, rapt upon the old man.
And now his father’s eyes—which during the telling of his tale had been misty, unfocussed—lost their glaze and returned to something of sharpness, staring into Hemmings’ face where it loomed so close over him. For a moment transfixed, he looked—then gasped aloud, unable to speak! And:
“Oh?” said his only son, burning with such an inner hunger that it was no longer sufferable. “Is there perhaps something?” But while Hemmings burned, all the old man felt was the magnetic coldness that emanated from him.
“Your…your colour!” His father choked the words out, as the leech fell on him, gripping the bones and loose skin of his shoulders in both fat hands. “That monstrous colour! You are as grey…as grey…as death!”
“Yes, but it’s your death!” the other replied, as something of that awful hue left him and transferred to his rapidly shrivelling father; and the coverlet sank down a very little, as the old man breathed his last…
No problems ensued from Hemmings’ deeds. By the tim
e the Matron returned to the house that evening a death certificate had been signed, which showed the cause of death to have been inoperable cancer of the stomach, with the additional complications of old age. Hemmings’ father had been seventy-five years of age, after all. Moreover, the corpse had already been conveyed to a mortuary, and so the good Matron never had an opportunity to see for herself the awful settling of the body, which in any case would scarcely have appeared extraordinary; for while the old man was dead and still, his cancer had been gnawing away at him even to the last, and probably for some time after that.
Whichever, in its depleted condition the cadaver of Arthur Hamilton Hemmings was destined for burial, and just as soon as possible…
The next afternoon, summoned by Hemmings, a gentleman arrived at the house and introduced himself as Andrew Asquith, of Macdonald, Asquith and Lee, Solicitors, whose offices were on Edinburgh Castle’s prestigious Royal Mile. In his middle years, Asquith was tall, high-browed and balding, with searching hazel eyes. Hemmings ushered him into the sitting-room, where he offered him a glass of wine which Asquith politely declined. Then, without much of a preamble, the murderer “explained”:
“I would have called you earlier, but yesterday, after seeing to the most immediate, necessary requirements, I must have suffered an attack of some sort: shock, I think, which knocked the stuffing out of me. I could do nothing…I’m sure you’ll understand. My father’s death was hardly unexpected—inevitable, you might say—but still I wasn’t prepared.
“However, last night I couldn’t sleep, and as I wandered an empty house and my numbed senses recovered a little, I realized there was still much to be done, many things that had to be put in order. In an address book in my father’s study, I discovered your firm’s details, and when I called you this morning learned that I was correct in believing that Macdonald, Asquith and Lee were responsible for handling his affairs. Which is why—”