The Citadel of Fear

by Gertrude Barrows Bennett

  "Queerer yet--if you knew Rosalis--he deliberately took the ingot I'd given him and dropped it over the side; just after we came to anchor. Those pirates looked on, wooden-faced--and it was their gold as well as his, mind you!

  "I came back on board that night, after the stuff was landed, and I'll be darned if they hadn't dug out a relico of Santa Maria from somewhere about the ship, and set it up near the bow, and the whole gang of 'em on their knees to it! To 'purify the ship of its passenger', Rosalis said. I might have felt personally insulted, if there hadn't been three of us, and one such a queer-looking beggar as Marco. Maybe those red eyes of his got their goat --"

  "Four of you," corrected Colin O'Hara softly.

  "No, three. The girl and Marco and I. But I didn't bother much to find out what particular superstition was troubling Rosalis. The old contrabandista had landed my stuff so that the customs authorities never got a look in, and that was enough for me. Done up in straw and gunny-sacking it was. Never even had wooden cases till I had it in a warehouse, and from there I took it to another, as 'mineral specimens'. And, by George, I shipped it north as freight--plain, common-as-dirt freight, and never lost a piece!

  "Chances? Of course I took chances. But the difference between a fool and a wise man lies in the kind of chances he takes, and I rather fancy that success is the last criterion of that. Even if Rosalis had suffered a change heart and told tales of me on the other side of the Gulf there was little connection between Archer Kennedy, one-time of Campeche, and Mr. Chester T. Reed, who signed bills of lading, at last, for several cases of worthless bits of stone."

  * * * * *

  Kennedy paused. After a moment he kicked reflectively at one of the golden urns.

  "Lord!" he said. "There was a time when just owning so much yellow glory would have turned my head. And look how I use it now! To me it is merely a non-corroding elemental metal, necessary to a certain process, and which it amuses me to utilize in the traditional forms it was carved into in Tlapallan. But if I should ever need money you would find how sacred the temple vessels are to me! Not that I expect that need to come. By the time I've run through what raw gold we brought away I'll have a stronger ruling power than gold in my hands!

  "Supernaturalism is only dangerous," continued Kennedy, "if you believe in it. The priests made that mistake. I didn't. With the one little 'mystery' that I managed to bring out of Tlapallan, I shall establish such a dominion as the world never saw before. Men bow to two powers--gold and fear! In the day when I am ready they will bow to one only, and that will be in my control. Gold! What's gold beside fear?"

  Again he kicked contemptuously at the urn. Then he stopped speaking abruptly, and a queer, dazed look came into his face. He passed a hand over his forehead.

  "Strange, too," he muttered, more to himself than Colin. "I could do a lot with all this wealth here. Mastery of the world! What will I get out of it more than the gold would buy me?"

  "A very sensible question!" approved Colin. "But what have the bogies yonder that you're so set on claiming as your own to do with world-mastery?"

  "They? Why--they are only a beginning." The tone was almost querulous--he was like a man half-asleep and beginning to doubt his, dream. But in continuing the dazed look passed and his old grandiloquent manner returned. "Only a beginning. I had to learn the method. Marco taught me much, but the priests had never half realized what could be done. They were afraid of their own power, the fools!

  "My fearless intelligence has wonderfully improved results; the brutes grow now with the most amazing rapidity--and multiply! And how they eat! You would hardly believe that those starved-looking beasts get away with living meat enough to keep a whole jungleful of tigers fat and happy. It's growing so fast, I suppose.

  "But in the first month, after getting all this in order, I achieved only two successes--the beauty that strayed to Carpentier in June, and Genghis Khan, who, by the way, remains strong enough for all your attempt to injure him. He dragged your weight from the gates down here with one arm.

  "As for the other, my first-born, as you might say, your sister killed it before it was half-grown. It strayed away one night, and I fancy you can guess the answer now to your famous 'bungalow mystery'. The poor brute crawled home up the creek and died before morning! Lord, but I was angry! Then in a few short weeks came all these!"

  He gestured with that left hand of his in its bulky white glove.

  "Came from where?" asked Colin. "I heard tell of a man once who went down into hell and bargained with the old boy himself for a billy-goat, but I never did give what you might call credence to the story. If you've been doing the like o' that, though, Mr. Kennedy, I'd advise --"

  "Oh--silence! Do you hear me? Sikence! Your superstitious chatter is enough to drive a man mad! I tell you, these beasts are of my own making-mine! Or rather, they are my recreations from the common, silly, useless forms they first grew in. How can I make a dolt like you understand?"

  "I don't know, unless you should tell it all in plain English."

  "It is rather difficult," sneered the Lord of Fear, "for me to make clear to a man like you the technical details of a process more than sufficiently recondite for the comprehension of a --"

  "I understand all those words," said Colin meekly.

  "Of a trained thinker," finished the other. "Will you kindly cease interrupting me? As I was saying, to make the details clear to you is not only impossible but needless. I should not go into the matter in any degree were it not that I wish to dismiss from your so-called intelligence the idea that you are about to become the victim of a supernatural phenomenon. Do you know what occurs when an organic substance undergoes what is known as decay?"

  "It rots," came the rather weary reply.

  "The answer I would have expected. But, to delve a little deeper into the veridical nature of this 'rotting' --"

  "The cell-structure," broke in his audience, "deteriorates under the caducous influence of the oxygenation of the atmosphere and other similar atrocities. Mr. Kennedy, as you say I'm a man of the simplest attainments and not only that, but between being hit on the neck and loss of blood and the elegant ventilation of this strike-off between a voodo temple and a section of purgatory, 'tis only by sheer will power that I do not faint from moment to moment. If you've information to impart, put it in words of one syllable, and as few of them as possible, or I'll not take the trouble to stay in my senses to hear it!"

  There may have been that in his face which confirmed the statement and urged haste. At any rate, the would-be lecturer conceded glumly: "I can't explain it so that most of it won't go over your head, but the A B C of it is this:

  "In an animate creature the life of the microscopic individual cells which form its tissues and the life of the organization of all those cells, in other words, of the creature in toto, are entirely separate and distinct. An animal may die, in the common sense of the word, and if its body is kept in a place sterile of germs and of moderately cool temperature the cell-life will not perish for a considerable period. In fact, the body of that 'dead' animal is so very much alive that a portion of it may be grafted upon the body of another 'living' animal, and that portion will take up its normal functions as if there had been no interim of 'death.'

  * * * * *

  "In other words, flesh, tissue, blood, sinew, and the organic matter, of bone never die until decay sets in. But (paradoxically in sound, not fact), decay is always preceded by death--not the death of the animal but the death of the cell. And decay means dissolution--the breaking down of the cell-structure--the resolving of firm flesh into a semiliquid and putrescent mass. That is the natural course.

  "There is, however, a certain substance of obscure mineral derivatives which was known to Nacoc-Yaotl's priests, and whose secret I brought away with me, as well as a considerable supply of the substance itself. The application of a thin film of this substance in solution to living tissue dissolves the cell-organization, which it immediately permeates, without destroyin
g either the cell-structure, the life of the cell, or the life of the organisation.

  "One might call this portion of the process pseudo-putrescence--false decay. As it goes on the entire being of an organism melts, as it were, into a homogeneous, jelly-like mass and yet remains in every sense alive."

  Kennedy paused impressively. Colin saw that for once comment was really desired.

  "'Twould be more exciting," he ventured; "did you give a name to your organism. So be it was a cabbage now or a turnip, one's sympathies would scarce go out to the poor thing as they might to --"

  "Stop it!" shouted Kennedy. "Is there no power on earth which will divert your idiotic flippancy into serious attention? I clearly indicated that I was speaking of animal life, not vegetable. Can't you understand that it is the blood, the sinews, the bones, the living, conscious, feeling flesh that is resolved into this --"

  "That's enough!" flashed Colin. "You make me sick, you do! The man that would do the thing like that to so much as a rat is not fit to be living in the world at all, and much less listened to!"

  "So that is how you feel about it, eh?"

  "That's how I feel about it!"

  Kennedy seemed rather pleased than angered. This was the first symptom of any emotion other than indifferent contempt which he had managed to elicit from his captive.

  "Then you don't wish to hear," he continued, "how in this vital jelly there rises a new impulse, a reorganization of the cells, a reconstruction to new form, molded, strangely enough, by neither chance nor heredity, but solely by the will of the --"

  "Of the empty-head who is at work! No, I care to hear no more at all about it."

  "Empty-head!" ejaculated Kennedy indignantly.

  "I said it! Any man who is fool enough to play with the devil's own process you've been describing, to try to explain it by a rigmarole of 'science', not to perceive the black power behind his own power--such a man is no more nor less than an empty-head, and I say it again! What do I care for your methods! Look at your results! Look your results in the eye, Mr. Kennedy, and then tell it to me that the worser beast on the dais there had no finger in their making!"

  "Fool--fool--fool!" The Lord of Fear fairly raged up and down the floor. "I'll show you! You shall see with your own eyes! Before you pass beyond comprehension you shall see the living creature--rabbit--cat--bird--it makes no difference what creature, or how silly and innocuous--you shall see it lie in the elemental vessel of gold!

  "You shall see me anoint it with my own hand, see me lave it then in the second solution, and"--his voice calmed, lowered and grew almost reverent--"you shall see that creature dissolve to a quivering, living mass, almost transparent, palpitant with strange, fugacious hues, with one steady crimson fleck at the center that is the nucleus.

  "And from that nucleus--you shall watch how the new structure spreads and forms. To you it may be dreadful because it is so strange. To the trained mind it is a beautiful and a very curious sight. It is like watching a wonderful egg, of which the shell is transparent, and seeing the live creature within grow visibly. It is more than that. It is like being God--a real God--and beholding the formless protoplasm take structural shape under mere power of will.

  "Oh, there is a science of will as well as of matter. One has to get the trick of it, and it doesn't come too easily, I assure you. There is a point in the process where one's bare hands must be laid very cautiously on the work. If you miss that point of time it all melts away to an evil-smelling mess that has to be burned; the very odor is poisonous. If you act too soon there is a greater danger. I had one accident that taught me--but never mind that now.

  "Then, at that moment of crisis, the whole force of one's being must be concentrated in a thought--and one can almost feel it flow through one's finger-tips. Then watch. First come the little scarlet veins, an orderly tangle of filaments, shooting out from that red speck at the jelly's heart. They grow and the arteries form; the bones begin to be fragile, translucent as clouded glass.

  "Presently a dim throbbing comes--all the center is clouded now--and under the shapeless, glistening surface a shape is beginning to show. The shape I had thought of.

  "Two dim, flame-colored disks peer out at me, and I know that they are eyes--the feral, yet obedient eyes of my newly created one. The outer jelly is almost absorbed now--it solidifies--toughens into membrane--into skin --

  "But why should I tell you more? You shall see--and after that doubt if you can that I am a creator in my own unguided right!

  "But never think me a conceited egotist! No! I don't pretend to know all that goes on in my laboratory. What true scientific man does? There are even yet phases--difficult riddles--for instance, the amazingly rapid after-growth. I have the wet marsh there for them, because in that environment they grow faster, larger, stronger.

  "I take the little new beast, all naked and shivering and snarling with feeble resentment--I take it and feed it well--it eats from the first moment--and lay it in that cool mire among the white rushes and the fungi whose spawn I brought from Tlapallan.

  "It creeps away and is gone--and when, an hour or so later, I call my beasts to the edge and bid them seize their living food, the little new beast comes with them, and already it is larger!

  "But that is by no means all. These beasts have a faculty that they share with no other creatures save the simplest organisms. They do not multiply slowly, but split in twos as easily as --"

  "Mr. Kennedy! Can you not realize that 'tis a nightmare you're talking, not science?"

  "I tell you they do! They must! I admitted that I hadn't traced that phase of the experiment yet, but in no other way can their extraordinarily rapid multiplication be accounted for. And the queerest part is, they don't split into twos of the same kind.

  * * * * *

  "The gatekeeper now--the shining leech-worm. I never made him. He was draped round the neck of that statue when I came down one morning. I knew at once that he had crawled up there from the swamp, looking for food, but I71 admit that the thing gave even me rather a start. It was so different from anything I had even thought of making!

  "But obedience is the test. When I found he obeyed even better and more intelligently than the rest, I knew him for the child of my children. I named him Gatekeeper, and hid him in the lodge. The last owner hanged himself there, and there are some remarkably silly stories current about it. I generally leave the gates unlocked at night now. Anyone who comes prying through them will find a gatekeeper to tell a real story about--if he survives.

  "Isn't that an amusing idea? The first night you came here I rather expected him to get you as you went out, but I suppose, having seen you admitted, he regarded you as under protection."

  "Very like," agreed Colin dryly.

  It was characteristic of both men that neither had made reference to any reason why Kennedy, whatever horrors he kept for the rest of the world, should have refrained from loosing them on Colin. The debt of life one man owed the other had been easily canceled on Kennedy's side for the sake of a fancied grievance. For Colin, what was done was done with. If he had nearly sacrificed his own life, not once but twice to preserve a creature so contemptible, why--so much the worse for him.

  "I suppose," he continued, "that it was this gatekeeper pet of yours that wandered into my veranda a few weeks ago--and ran again, poor cowardly worm, for the silly noise of some pots and pans!"

  The Lord of Fear started and frowned.

  "No," he said shortly. "I never sent him to the bungalow."

  "Then it must have 'strayed' like the others. Wasn't it an odd coincidence, now, that Genghis Khan, who never got inside the house, was the only one of the lot that didn't manage to do a bit of damage to a certain little statue I owned? Quetzalcoatl it was--the same that yourself introduced me to when we were together at Biornson's hacienda."

  Watching closely, Colin thought that a reminiscence of that odd, dazed appearance shadowed the other's face. Then the man shook it off and scowled.

  "I kno
w nothing of it. If it happened it was a coincidence, and I can see nothing particularly strange about it. Till last night I never sent or guided any of my beasts outside these grounds. I tell you, I am not yet ready. If you hadn't come prying I would probably have never bothered with you at all.

  "Do you think that I am a man to go out of my way for the sake of anything so trivial as you--unless driven to it? As for the image. I read in one reporter's account that you had brought it from Mexico. Did you really find time and courage to go back at last? I waited for you long enough--hoping against hope that you'd cross the desert alive somehow and return with help!"

  "There," said Colin gravely, "I owe you an apology, Mr. Kennedy. If I'd guessed you were still living I'd have gone earlier--but it's done with now."

  "Along with a number of other things, including Tlapallan and--yourself!" he grinned. "You'll see the point of that shortly. To return to my gatekeeper, I don't believe he ever went near the bungalow. I told you he was more intelligent and obedient than the rest. But for that matter, save for one or two unimportant lapses, they are all obedient.

  "As they grow larger I may find a use for the fenced enclosures I supposed would be necessary, but now--well, you can see for yourself. Look into their eyes! Can you see a hunger, there? And yet not one of them will cross the deadline after that first beast's rebuff.

  "And the gatekeeper--think of it! Loose in the lodge and attending his duty more closely than any human. There's a science of will, I tell you, as well as of matter. Those I made, my will went into, and their procreations recognize me as master.

  "Think of a horde of such--when I am ready--ravaging the countryside by night, slaying whom I will to slay! And always multiplying, increasing--growing in numbers faster than men can kill them off!