Except for a faint glow from the embers of the bearers’ fire we were in complete darkness, little starlight struggled through the trees, the river made but a faint murmur. We could hear the two voices together and then suddenly the creaking voice changed into a razor-edged, slicing whistle, indescribably cutting, continuing right through Stone’s grumbling torrent of croaking words.
‘Good God!’ exclaimed Van Rieten.
Abruptly he turned on the light.
We found Etcham utterly asleep, exhausted by his long anxiety and the exertions of his phenomenal march and relaxed completely now that the load was in a sense shifted from his shoulders to Van Rieten’s. Even the light on his face did not wake him.
The whistle had ceased and the two voices now sounded together. Both came from Stone’s cot, where the concentrated white ray showed him lying just as we had left him, except that he had tossed his arms above his head and had torn the coverings and bandages from his chest.
The swelling on his right breast had broken. Van Rieten aimed the center line of the light at it and we saw it plainly. From his flesh, grown out of it, there protruded a head, such a head as the dried specimens Etcham had shown us, as if it were a miniature of the head of a Balunda fetishman. It was black, shining black as the blackest African skin; it rolled the whites of its wicked, wee eyes and showed its microscopic teeth between lips repulsively negroid in their red fullness, even in so diminutive a face. It had crisp, fuzzy wool on its minikin skull, it turned malignantly from side to side and chittered incessantly in that inconceivable falsetto. Stone babbled brokenly against its patter.
Van Rieten turned from Stone and waked Etcham, with some difficulty. When he was awake and saw it all Etcham stared and said not one word.
‘You saw him slice off two swellings?’ Van Rieten asked.
Etcham nodded, chokingly.
‘Did he bleed much?’ Van Rieten demanded.
‘Ve’y little,’ Etcham replied.
‘You hold his arms,’ said Van Rieten to Etcham.
He took up Stone’s razor and handed me the light. Stone showed no sign of seeing the light or of knowing we were there. But the little head mewled and screeched at us.
Van Rieten’s hand was steady, and the sweep of the razor even and true. Stone bled amazingly little and Van Rieten dressed the wound as if it had been a bruise or scrape.
Stone had stopped talking the instant the excrescent head was severed. Van Rieten did all that could be done for Stone and then fairly grabbed the light from me. Snatching up a gun he scanned the ground by the cot and brought the butt down once and twice, viciously.
We went back to our hut, but I doubt if I slept.
VI
Next day, near noon, in broad daylight, we heard the two voices from Stone’s hut. We found Etcham dropped asleep by his charge. The swelling on the left had broken, and just such another head was there miauling and spluttering. Etcham woke up and the three of us stood there and glared. Stone interjected hoarse vocables into the tinkling gurgle of the portent’s utterance.
Van Rieten stepped forward, took up Stone’s razor and knelt down by the cot. The atomy of a head squealed a wheezy snarl at him.
Then suddenly Stone spoke English.
‘Who are you with my razor?’
Van Rieten started back and stood up.
Stone’s eyes were clear now and bright, they roved about the hut.
‘The end,’ he said; ‘I recognize the end. I seem to see Etcham, as if in life. But Singleton! Ah, Singleton! Ghosts of my boyhood come to watch me pass.’ And you, strange specter with the black beard, and my razor! Aroint ye all!’
‘I’m no ghost, Stone,’ I managed to say. ‘I’m alive. So are Etcham and Van Rieten. We are here to help you.’
‘Van Rieten!’ he exclaimed. ‘My work passes on to a better man. Luck go with you, Van Rieten.’
Van Rieten went nearer to him.
‘Just hold still a moment, old man,’ he said soothingly. ‘It will be only one twinge.’
‘I’ve held still for many such twinges,’ Stone answered quite distinctly. ‘Let me be. Let me die my own way. The hydra was nothing to this. You can cut off ten, a hundred, a thousand heads, but the curse you can not cut off, or take off. What’s soaked into the bone won’t come out of the flesh, any more than what’s bred there. Don’t hack me any more. Promise!’
His voice had all the old commanding tone of his boyhood and it swayed Van Rieten as it always had swayed everybody.
‘I promise,’ said Van Rieten.
Almost as he said the word Stone’s eyes filmed again.
Then we three sat about Stone and watched that hideous, gibbering prodigy grow up out of Stone’s flesh, till two horrid, spindling little black arms disengaged themselves. The infinitesimal nails were perfect to the barely perceptible moon at the quick, the pink spot on the palm was horridly natural. These arms gesticulated and the right plucked toward Stone’s blond beard.
‘I can’t stand this,’ Van Rieten exclaimed and took up the razor again.
Instantly Stone’s eyes opened, hard and glittering.
‘Van Rieten break his word?’ he enunciated slowly. ‘Never!’
‘But we must help you,’ Van Rieten gasped.
‘I am past all help and all hurting,’ said Stone. ‘This is my hour. This curse is not put on me; it grew out of me, like this horror here. Even now I go.’
His eyes closed and we stood helpless, the adherent figure spouting shrill sentences.
In a moment Stone spoke again.
‘You speak all tongues?’ he asked thickly.
And the emergent minikin replied in sudden English:
‘Yea, verily, all that you speak,’ putting out its microscopic tongue, writhing its lips and wagging its head from side to side. We could see the thready ribs, on its exiguous flanks heave as if the thing breathed.
‘Has she forgiven me?,’ Stone asked in a muffled strangle.
‘Not while the moss hangs from the cypresses,’ the head squeaked. ‘Not while the stars shine on Lake Pontchartrain will she forgive.’
And then Stone, all with one motion, wrenched himself over on his side. The next instant he was dead.
When Singleton’s voice ceased the room was hushed for a space. We could hear each other breathing. Twombly, the tactless, broke the silence.
‘I presume,’ he said, ‘you cut off the little minikin and brought it home in alcohol.’
Singleton turned on him a stern countenance.
‘We buried Stone,’ he said, ‘unmutilated as he died.’
‘But,’ said the unconscionable Twombly, ‘the whole thing is incredible.’
Singleton stiffened.
‘I did not expect you to believe it,’ he said; ‘I began by saying that although I heard and saw it, when I look back on it I cannot credit it myself.’
The Pig-skin Belt
I
BE IT NOTED that I, John Radford, always of sound mind and matter-of-fact disposition, being entirely in my senses, here set down what I saw, heard and knew. As to my inferences from what occurred I say nothing, my theory might be regarded as more improbable than the facts themselves. From the facts anyone can draw conclusions as well as I.
The first letter read:
‘San Antonio, Texas,
January 1st, 1892.
MY DEAR RADFORD:
You have forgotten me, likely enough, but I have not forgotten you nor anyone (nor anything) in Brexington. I saw your advertisement in the New York Herald and am glad to learn from it that you are alive and to infer that you are well and prosperous.
I need a lawyer’s help. I want to buy real estate and I mean to return home, so you are exactly the man I am looking for. I am writing this to ask that you take charge of any and all of my affairs falling within your province, and to learn whether you are willing to do so.
I am a rich man now, and without any near ties of kin or kind. I want to come home to Brexington, to live there if I
can, to die there if I must. Along with other matters which I will explain if you accept I want to buy a house in the town and a farm near-by, if not the Shelby house and estate then some others like them.
If willing to act for me please reply at once care of the Hotel Menger. Remember me to any cousins of mine you may see.
Faithfully yours,
CASSIUS M. CASE.’
The name I knew well enough, of course, but my efforts to recall the individual resulted only in a somewhat hazy recollection of a tall, thin, red-cheeked lad of seventeen or so. It was almost exactly twenty-eight years since Colonel Shelby Case had left Brexington taking with him his son. Colonel Shelby had died some six years later. I remembered hearing of his death, in Egypt, I thought. Since his departure from Brexington I had never heard of or from Cassius.
My reply I wrote at once, professing my readiness to do anything in my power to serve him.
As soon as the mails made it possible, I had a second letter from him.
‘MY DEAR RADFORD:
‘Your kind letter has taken a load off my mind. I am particular about any sort of arrangements I make, exacting as to the accurate carrying out of small details and I feared I might have difficulty in finding a painstaking man in a community so easy-going as Brexington. I remember your precise ways as a boy and am basking in a sense of total relief and complete reliance on you.
‘I should buy the Shelby house and estate on your representations, but I must see for myself first. If they are the best I can get I shall take them anyhow. But please be ready to show me over every estate of five hundred acres or more, lying within ten miles of the Court House. I wish to examine every one which is now for sale or which you can induce the owners to consider selling. I want the best which is to be had. Also I want a small place of fifty acres or so, two miles or more from the larger place I buy. Money is no object to me and the condition of the buildings on the places will not weigh with me at all.
‘So with the town house: I may tear it down entirely and rebuild from the cellar up. What I want in the town is a place of half an acre to two acres carrying fine, tall trees, with well-developed trunks. I want shade and plenty of it, but no limbs or branches growing or hanging within eight feet of the ground. I do not desire shrubbery, but if there is any I can have it removed, while I cannot create stout trees. Those I must have on the place when I buy it, for I will have the shade and I will have a clear sweep for air and an unobstructed view all round.
‘I am not at the Menger as you naturally suppose. I merely have my mail sent there. I am living in a tent half a mile or more from the town. At Los Angeles I had the luck to fall in with a Brexington nigger, Jeff Twibill. He knew of another, Cato Johnson, who was in Frisco. I have the two of them with me now, Jeff takes care of the horses and Cato of me and I am very comfortable.
‘That brings me to the arrangements I want you to make for me. Buy or lease or rent or borrow a piece of a field, say four acres, free of trees or bushes and sloping enough to shed the rain. Be sure there is good water handy. Have four tents; one for me, one for the two niggers (and make it big enough for three or four); one to cook in and one for my four horses, they are luxurious beasts and live as well as I do. Have the tents pitched in the middle of the field so I shall have a clear view all around. The field must be clear of bushes or trees, must be at least four acres and may be any size larger than that: forty would be none too big for me. I want no houses too close to me.
‘You see I am at present averse to houses, hotels and public conveyances. I mean to ride across the continent camping as I go. And in Brexington I mean to tent it until I have my own house ready to live in. I am resolute to be no man’s guest nor any man’s lodger, nor any company’s passenger.
‘I am coming home, Radford, coming home to be a Colonel with the rest of them. And I shall be no mere colonel-by-courtesy: I have won my right to the title, I won it twice over, years ago in Egypt and later in Asia.
‘Thank you for all the news of the many cousins, I did not realize they were so very numerous. I am sorry that Mary Mattingly is dead, of all the many dear people in Brexington I loved her best. ‘I shall keep you advised of my progress across the continent. And as questions come up about the details of the tent-equipment you can confer with me by letter.
‘Gratefully yours,
‘CASSIUS M. CASE.’
I showed the letters to one and another of my elder acquaintances, who remembered Cassius.
Dr Boone said:
‘I presume it is a case of advanced tuberculosis. He should have remained in that climate. Of course, he may live a long time here, tenting in the open or living with the completest fresh air treatment. His punctiliousness in respect to self isolation does him credit, though he carries it further than is necessary. We must do all we can for him.’
Beverly said:
‘Poor devil. ‘Live if he can, die if he must.’ He’ll die all right. They’d call him a ‘lunger’ out there and he had better stay there.’
The minister said:
‘The lode-star of old sweet memories draws him homeward. ‘Mary Mattingly,’ yes we all remember how wildly he loved Mary Mattingly. While full of youth he could find forgetfulness fighting in strange lands. Now he must be near her although she lies in her grave. The proximity even of her tomb will be a solace to his last days.’
We were prepared to do all that sympathy could suggest. Mr Hall and Dr Boone gravely discussed together the prolongation of Case’s life and the affording of spiritual support. Beverly I found helpful on my line of finances and creature comforts. As Case’s leisurely progress brought him nearer and nearer our interest deepened. When the day came on which he was to arrive Beverly and I rode out to meet him.
II
Language has no words to picture our dumbfounded amazement. And we were astonished in more ways than one. Chiefly, instead of the lank invalid we expected to see, we beheld a burly giant every characteristic of whom, save one, bespoke rugged health. He was all of six foot three, big boned, overlaid with a surplus of brawn, a Samsonian musculature that showed plain through his negligent, loose clothing; and withal he was plump and would have been sleek but for the roughness of his weather-beaten skin.
He wore gray; a broad-brimmed felt hat, almost a sombrero; a flannel shirt, a sort of jacket, and corduroy trousers tucked into his boots. It was before the days of khaki.
His head was large and round, but not at all a bullet head, rather handsome and well set. His face was round too, and good-natured, but not a particle as is the usual round face, vacuous and like a fullmoon. His was agreeable, but lit with character and determination. His neck was fat but showed great cords through its rotundity. He had a big barrel of a chest and his voice rumbled out of it. He dominated the landscape the moment he entered it.
Even in our astonishment three things about him struck me, and, as I afterwards found out, the same three similarly struck Beverly.
One was his complexion. He had that build which leads one to expect floridity of face, a rubicund countenance or, at least, ruddy cheeks. But he was dead pale, with a peculiar tint I never had seen before. His face showed an abundance of solid muscle and over it a skin roughened by exposure, toughened, even hardened by wind and sun. Yet its color was not in agreement with its texture. It had the hue which belongs to waxy skin over suety, tallowy flesh, an opaque whiteness, a pallidity almost corpse-like.
The second was his glance: keen, glittering, hard, blue-gray eyes he had, gallant and far younger than himself. But it was not the handsome eyes so much as their way of looking that whetted our attention. They pierced us through and through, they darted incessantly here and there, they peered to right and left, they kept us generally in view, indeed, and never let us feel that his attention wandered from us, yet they incessantly swept the world about him. You should say they saw all they looked at, looked at everything seeable.
The third was his belt, a mellowed old belt of pig-skin, with two capacious holsters, fro
m each of whlch protruded the butt of a large-calibre revolver.
He greeted us in the spirit of old comradeship renewed. Behind him Jeff and Cato grinned from their tired mounts. He sat his big horse with no sign of fatigue and surveyed the landscape from the cross-roads’ knoll where we had met him.
‘I seem to recall the landmarks here,’ he said, ‘the left hand road by which you came, would take me through to Brexington.’
Beverly confirmed his recollection.
‘The one straight ahead,’ he went on, ‘goes past the big new distillery you wrote me about.’
‘Right again,’ I said.
‘The road to the right,’ he continued, ‘will take us by the old mill, and I can swing round to my camp without nearing town.’
‘You could,’ Beverly told. ‘But it is a long way round.’
‘Not too far for me,’ he announced positively. ‘No towns or distilleries for me. I go round. Will you ride with me, gentlemen?’
We rode with him.
On the way I told him I expected him to supper that evening.
‘With all my writing, Radford,’ he said, ‘you don’t seem to get the idea. I flock by myself for the present and eat alone. If you insist I’ll explain tomorrow.’
Beverly and I left him to his camp supper.
Dr Boone and Mr Hall were a good deal taken aback upon learning that their imagined invalid had no existence and that the real Colonel Case needed neither medical assistance nor spiritual solace. We four sat for some time expressing our bewilderment.
Next morning I drove out to Case’s Camp. I found him sitting in his tent, the flaps of which were looped up all around. He was as pale as the day before. As I approached I saw him scrutinize me with a searching gaze, a gaze I found it difficult to analyze.
He wore his belt with the holsters and the revolver-butts showed from those same holsters. I was astonished at this. When I saw it on him the day before I had thought the belt a piece of bad taste. It might have been advisable in portions of his long ride, might have been imperatively necessary in some districts; but it seemed a pose or a stupidity to wear it so far east. Pistols were by no means unknown in our part of the world, but they were carried in the seclusion of the hip-pocket or inside the breast of one’s coat, not flaunted in the face of the populace in low-hung pig-skin holsters.
The Stuff of Dreams: The Weird Stories of Edward Lucas White (Dover Horror Classics) Page 11