The Haunts & Horrors Megapack: 31 Modern & Classic Stories

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  In intervals between duty I saw the town, visited the Porta Nigra, the great fortified gate past which the life of Treves had flowed since Roman days, the brick basilica and the vast amphitheatre where Constantine had butchered captives or turned them loose to be torn by wild beasts for the amusement of the populace. In the evening there was always plenty of amusement, dances, dinners, or the opera where fat German tenors serenaded equally fat German sopranos with a zest that defied years and embonpoint.

  Felicia Watrous was a favorite everywhere, pouring tea at the officers’ club, dining at headquarters, or serving buns and coffee to the men. Half the younger officers were wild about her, but it took apKern to put their disappointment into words.

  “Hang it, Carmichael,” he complained, “the gal ain’t human! She has you stopped before you get a chance to get cranked up. She’s—she’s like a nun. You know—just a mere spiritual entity, with her body already in the grave and only her soul remaining, and that swathed in a religious habit. You don’t fall in love with a nun any more than you do with a ghost, but—” he made a gesture of futility as he reached for the brandy to replenish his drink—“there it is! I’d go for her in a big way if she’d give me a break, or even act as if she knew that I’m around.”

  I knew just what he meant. She had an odd trick—or an unconsciously conditioned reflex—of fading out of the real world at times and becoming entirely oblivious of her surroundings. Her power to dismiss the world from her consciousness, apparently to notice nothing about her, or even completely to forget the existence of the person talking to her, was extremely disconcerting to young men with matrimonial designs, and utterly absorbing to a doctor with a leaning toward psychiatry.

  Then came the influenza epidemic of ’19. Ambulances strained and stalled with their loads of the stricken, hospitals were bulging with fresh cases till we set beds in the corridors and cellars and still required room for more cots. The only reason that we worked no longer was that no day could be stretched to yield a twenty-fifth hour. Our patients died like flies; at first that hurt us, for it’s no easier for a doctor than a layman to stand by and watch men die, but presently we grew used to it.

  I had a patient in 18-B, an infantry lieutenant named Ten Eyck, and from the first I knew his case was hopeless. Yet he fought for life with a tenacity that almost startled me. “I have to get well, Doctor—” civilian titles were the rule among civilian soldiers—he told me. “There’s a girl back home I’ve got to see—”

  “Of course, you will, son,” I soothed him. “You’re getting stronger all the time. Like me to write a letter to her for you?” I hadn’t time to act as secretary to a dying man, but somehow I determined to snatch it.

  “I’d be obliged if you would sir. I’ve loved her since I was that high—” He tried to raise one hand to indicate a Liilliputian stature, found he lacked the strength for it, and lay back, panting, on his pillow. “Her father was a Presbyterian minister and her mother died when she was born.”

  “Take it easy, Lieutenant,” I counseled. “Just tell me what you’d like to say to her; don’t waste strength on biographies.”

  “But you ought to know this, sir. It explains why I love her so. You see, ’way back in 1894 her folks went out to Africa as missionaries, and she was born there. Their station was in western equitorial Africa, the gorilla country. One day, while her mother was walking in the garden, a great big buck gorilla came charging from the jungle. Hunters had killed his mate, and he was wild with grief and rage. He snatched her up and made off to the forest, but he didn’t hurt her. They found her next day in the hammock he’d made for his dead mate, quite mad from fright, but physically unharmed. Her baby was born the next week, and she died in childbed.”

  As far as I could see there wasn’t any connection between the tragedy of the missionary’s wife and this young man’s love for his daughter, but he seemed to think there was.

  “He quit the mission field and came back to Philadelphia,” he continued in a whisper. “They lived next door to us, and Mother sort o’ raised her. She was in our house as much as in her own, I guess, and we grew up together. Funny thing about her, though, she’d never go in wadin’ with me. When we’d be out in the country, she’d go walkin’ in the woods or fields, but never took her shoes an’ stockings off. Seemed to be sort o’ touchy about her feet, though they were small and pretty, and—”

  “Better tell me what you’d like to say, son,” I advised. It didn’t need a doctor’s training to see that his sands were running low. “If you’ll tell me—”

  “Last thing she said when I went off to camp was, ‘I’ll be waitin’, Tommy,’” he continued in a husky whisper. “Can’t let her down when she said that, can I, Doc? Got to get well and go back to her. You see that, don’t you?”

  “Of course.” I nodded. “Sure son, I see perfectly. Now, if you’ll just give me her name and address—”

  The signs were bad. When I’d come in, he had been running a high temperature; now there was a wreath of sweat-drops on his brow beneath the hair-line, and his lips were almost lead-colored. I had to bend to catch his answer; even then it hardly reached me, for his voice was faint and thick as if his throat were packed with cotton-wool: “Fe—Felicia Watrous, six-sixteen Spring—” The pitifully-forced words stopped, not abruptly, but with a slowly sinking faintness, like a voice heard on the radio when the current is shut off with a slow turn.

  “Felicia Watrous!” I repeated. “Why, she’s right here in Treves. I’ll get her for you in an hour—Nurse!” There was no time for conversation now, and I pressed the buzzar frantically. “Nurse!” Where the devil was that damn girl, flirting with those convalescent aviators down the hall?

  “Strychnine in a hypo, hurry!” I commanded when the girl came stumbling in her haste. “If you’d pay more attention to your duties—” It wasn’t fair. She’d been on duty since the night before and there were heavy, violet circles underneath her eyes, but raw nerves make raw words, and heaven knew our nerves were all rasped raw. “Never mind,” I added as she turned reproachful eyes on me. “Never mind the hypo, Nurse. Call the head orderly and tell him to bring the wheel-cot and change the linen on this bed. We’ve got another vacancy.”

  “Oh!” her sob was hard and ugly, like a smothered cry. “Another?”

  “Another,” I repeated as I drew the sheet across the dead boy’s face. I’d nailed another lie. Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt. Not for death, anyway.

  I was in that state of bodily exhaustion that gives a curiously deceptive sense of brightness of mind as I walked down the corridor from B-18. Nine years could make a lot of changes, but at the end I’d recognized Lieutenant Thomas Ten Eyck as surely as if I’d known him always. As I glanced through the grimy window to the cheerless courtyard where the February wind was busy chasing little whirls of snow across the red-brick tiles it seemed to me that I could look clear down the vista of the years and straight across the ocean to a sun-washed summer afternoon in Fairmount Park where a boy and girl were idling by the monkey cage and he was telling her, “I bet you couldn’t do it,” as a little monkey fed itself from its hind foot.

  She’d almost fainted at his none too witty sally. Why? Did it bring up tragic thoughts of her mother? Hardly. She’d not been fearful of the monkey’s. Seeing them had raised no phobia. Not until he called attention to the monkey’s feeding, and expressed doubt she could duplicate it, did she wilt. Why? The question rose again, insistently, but found no answer.

  Funny thing about life, I reflected. I had seen them for a possible three minutes on that day nine years ago. Then our lives had crossed again in Germany. She was somewhere in the city now, unmindful of his presence; he was lying in his bed back there with a sheet across his face, past all hopes and all defeats, quits with destiny before his manhood fairly started.

  * * * *

  “Carmichael, for Gawd’s sake, give me a snort!” Weinberg came stamping into my quarters, flakes of February snow adhering to the col
lar of his sheepskin, a drawn and almost haunted look on his face.

  “Surest thing in Germany,” I returned as I broke out brandy, soda water, and glasses. “Been wishin’ I had someone here to drink with me.”

  He splashed about three ounces of raw cognac in the tumbler and drained it almost at a gulp. His hand had trembled when it put the drink to his lips, but in a moment it grew steady, which to anyone who knows drinking and drinking men, is a bad sign.

  “Easy on, old top,” I cautioned as he poured a second, even larger, drink. “You know you’re welcome to it, but—”

  I stopped my protest as I looked into his eyes.

  There was no trace of the brilliant, carefree, wise-cracking young medico whose steadiness of hand and eye and uncanny ability as an orthopedist were the talk of all who knew him. Instead, his countenance was serious with what Carlyle once called “the awful, deadly earnestness of the Hebrew.”

  “I saw it again tonight,” he told me, and despite the warming glow of the brandy he shivered.

  “Saw what?”

  “Remember the lividities on that bloke’s neck—the one we found dead on the train from Paris?”

  “The one you said looked as if he’d been throttled by an ape?”

  He nodded, taking a long sip of brandy. “Check.”

  “Where?”

  “Over at the mortuary. I’d come off duty and was washing up in the basement when young Himiston—you know him, Cornell ’16; came over with the last replacement from the draft—called me over to a wheel-cot standing by the entrance to the autopsy room. ‘Ever see anything like this. Captain?’ he asked, drawing back the sheet from a body. ‘Nobody can figure it; they found him in the hall outside N-l8, the women’s ward, dead as a herring with his head turned almost all the way around—just as if something had wrung his neck like a chicken’s.’

  “There it was, so help me, Carmichael, point for point and line for line, the same bruise-pattern as the one you saw on the train from Paris and I’d seen once before at Bellevue Mortuary.”

  “What’s the history?” I demanded as I helped myself to cognac. Somehow I, too, was beginning to feel chilly, despite the fierce heat from the porcelain stove.

  “Here it is—” He spread his fingers fanwise and checked the items off. “There’s a crowd of nurses—five or six of ’em—laid up with the flu in N-18. Next door, in a semi-private which happens to be private now because the other inmate died this afternoon, is Miss Watrous. Just down the corridor, in M-40, is Amberson, in drydock with a smashed collar-bone, and next to him, in 41, is apKern with the flu. Notice anything?”

  “Three of the five people who were in the compartment when the German spy was throttled were within a hundred feet or so of the spot where, presumably, this man was killed—again presumably—in the same way.”

  “Right. Right as a rabbit. This fellow was a Polack from Pennsylvania, miner or something; big as a horse and strong as a bull. Influenza convalescent who’d gone raving-wild on some whiskey someone smuggled into the first floor wards. Crazy as a chinch-bug, and with a killing streak on him. He’d knocked an orderly out cold and gone wandering through the hospital. While they were looking for him on the ground floor, he was running up and down the second-story corridors, peeking into rooms and wards and scaring all he patients senseless. Finally he reached the nurses’ ward.”

  “And—” I prompted as he fell silent.

  “‘And’ is right,” he answered finally. “He came barging into the ward, snatched the blankets off the first bed, and lay down in it. When the patient in it tried to get out, he grabbed her.”

  Then he answered the unspoken question in my eyes: “No, he might have thought about that later; right then he was intent on murder and destruction. He took her by the hair with one hand and clutched her throat in the other and was about to break her neck when something—get this, they’re all agreed on it—something rushed in from the corridor, snatched him by the neck, and dragged him out.”

  “Something? What was it?” I asked fatuously.

  “That’s just what nobody knows. The only light in N-18 was a candle, no electric bulbs in there, for it used to be a storeroom and was never wired. When the big Bohunk fanned the bedclothes back, he blew the candle out, so all the light they had was what came through the window from the courtyard. The girls were all too weak to fight him, but not too weak to yell, and they were setting up an awful clamor when It rushed in.”

  I leaned forward, about to ask another question.

  “Keep your blouse on, can’t you?” he demanded irritably, befoere I could frame my thought. “I’m telling you everything I know. When I say ‘It,’ I’m as near to being specific as anybody. Something—and no two of ’em are agreed on what it was—came crashing in from the hallway and grabbed the murdering drunkard by the neck, hustled him out, and killed him, just as something we don’t know about did in that Jerry secret agent on the train from Paris.”

  “Some of the girls declare it looked like a great white ape, one thinks it was a spider bigger than a man, but all agree it handled that six-footer as if he’d been a baby. Now,” he tapped me on the knee in sober emphasis, “I’m not saying there’s any connection between the fact that some of those who were with us on the Paris train were within striking distance of N-18 tonight, but I do say it gives us something to think about.”

  “I’m afraid you’re goin’ off the deep end,” I told him. “Amberson’s laid up with a smashed clavicle. That lets him out. A man in that condition can’t wash his own face, let alone go tearing men to pieces. ApKern’s a fairly husky lad, but not quite up to wringing Pennsylvania miners’ necks. As for Miss Watrous—poor kid, she’s got a bad break coming when I tell her about him.”

  “About him? Who?”

  “Young Tom Ten Eyck. I didn’t realize they’d brought her into the hospital that day. She must have been checked in before he died.”

  “Who in the name of Caesar’s nightshirt was this Tom Ten Eyck?”

  I told him how the lad died, then how I’d seen him and Felicia years before in Fairmount Park. “Funny, isn’t it?” I ended.

  “Not very,” he replied somberly. “Maybe medicine has been too cock-sure about what can and what can’t happen all these years.”

  “How d’ye mean?”

  He shrugged into his sheep-lined mackinaw and held his hand out. “Thanks for the drink, Pat. If I should tell you what I’m thinking you’d say I’m crazy as a coot. Maybe I am at that. Good-night.”

  * * * *

  For some inexplicable reason a wave of intestinal disorders swept across our section of the Army of Occupation, and the incidence of appendicitis mounted steadily. I’d performed three appendectomies that evening, two cases had reached para-appendicitic stages, and I was thoroughly depressed, dispirited, and exhausted by the time the cold and dismal twilight darkened into colder night. The courtyard was filled with sad muddy puddles, relics of the melting snow, and a fine mist, half sleet, blew against my cheeks. Everywhere was humid cold as I walked back and forth and drew great gulps of frosty air into my lungs. It seemed to me l’d never get the taint of ether out of my nostrils and throat.

  “Bad night, sir, ain’t it?” asked the sentry chatily as I paused to do a right about at the end of the quadrangle. “’Minds me o’ th’ waterfront down by th’ Brooklyn Bridge. ’Member how th’ mists comes up from th’ Bay when th’ wind is changin’—my Gawd, sir, what’s that?”

  He was looking toward the high brick wall that loomed against the drizzle-darkened night across the courtyard, dark and sinister as the wall of some old haunted castle, and his face was set in a stiff, frozen mask of terror. His eyes were fixed, intense; it seemed as if the very substance of his soul was pouring from them as he looked. “Mater purissima, renugium pecatorum—” I heard him mumble between chattering teeth, searching memory for the half-forgotten prayers learned at parochial school—“Mater salvatoris—”

  My eyes caught the object of his fasci
nated gaze, and I felt my throat close with a quick fear-while something terrible and numbing-cold seemed clutching at my stomach.

  Against the blackness of the fog-soaked wall a form—a human form—was moving, not grip by slow and painful grip as it clung to irregularities worn in the masonry by stress of years and weather, but with an almost effortless progress, head-downward, like a monstrous lizard!

  “Good Lord, it can’t be—” I began, but his voice, high-pithed, honed sharp by hysteria, drowned my words out.

  “I’ll get it, Captain; ghost or devil, I’ll get it—”

  “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” I heard Weinberg’s frantic cry as he dashed out into the courtyard. “Don’t fire, I tell you—it’s—”

  The clatter of the sentry’s automatic cut across and blotted out his frenzied warning. The pistol was a captured German job, a ten-shot Luger issued to our Medical Department men as sidearms for patrol work. It operated like a miniature machine gun and with the trigger held back spewed its whole load in a stream of shots.

  Whether he was naturally a marksman or whether fear lent accuracy to his hand, or if it were an accident, I don’t know. I do know that his shots all seemed to take effect; I saw the crawling lizard-thing pause in its downward course, hang clinging to the wall a moment, as if it clutched the wet, cold, slippery bricks with a spasmotic grasp, then suddenly go limp and hurtle to the half-hard slush that lay upon the courtyard tiles, quiver reflexively a moment, then lie still.

  “You fool, you damned, fat-headed, superstitious fool!” Weinberg fairly shrieked at the sentry. “I’ll have you up before a general court for this—oh, hell, what’s the use?”

  He was crying as he raced across the quadrangle with me at his heels. The tears were streaming down his cheeks, mingling with the drizzling rain that blew into his face. “Help me with her, Pat,” he begged as he fell to his knees beside the still body. “Help me carry her inside. Maybe it’s not to late—”