Red Star Tales

by Yvonne Howell

  II. The Secret of the Forbidden Tap

  Miss Adams’s life had not been easy. Her father died when she was seventeen, and she had to shoulder all the responsibility for caring for her sick mother and younger sister. The small resources remaining after their father’s death did not even suffice for her to finish college. She had to study and support her family. For several years she worked as a proofreader for a newspaper. Once she qualified as a doctor, she tried in vain to find a position. She had offers to travel to South America, to those Godforsaken places where yellow fever raged. Miss Adams was reluctant to bring her family there, but she didn’t want to leave them either. Professor Kern’s proposal offered a way out of her situation. In spite of all the strangeness of the job, she accepted without hesitation.

  Miss Adams was unaware that before Professor Kern had offered her the job, he had exhaustive enquiries made about her.

  She had now been working for Kern for two weeks. Her duties were not difficult. During the course of the day, she had to monitor all the machines that kept the head alive. At night, John took her place.

  Professor Kern had shown her how to handle the taps for the containers. Indicating the big cylinder from which a thick tube ran to the head’s throat, Kern forbade her in the sternest terms from opening its tap.

  “If you were to turn that tap, the head would instantly perish! At some point I will explain to you my system of nourishing the head and the function of this cylinder. For now, all you need to know is how to handle the machines.”

  However, Professor Kern was in no hurry to provide the promised explanation.

  A small thermometer was inserted deeply into one of the nostrils of the head. This had to be extracted at fixed times in order to record its temperature. Even the containers were provided with thermometers and manometers. The temperature and pressure of the fluids had to be monitored. But the well-regulated apparatus never caused any trouble, operating with the accuracy of clockwork. Last of all, a particularly sensitive piece of equipment attached to the head’s temple registered its pulse, automatically plotting it on a chart. The typewriting ribbon had to be changed at fixed intervals. The contents of the tanks were refilled before Miss Adams’ arrival.

  Miss Adams was now somewhat accustomed to the head, and had even become friendly with it.

  When she entered the laboratory in the mornings, with cheeks rosy from walking in the fresh air, the head smiled weakly at her, and its lids trembled in a sign of welcome.

  The head was unable to speak. But a form of sign language was soon established between them, although it was limited strictly to words that could be expressed as gestures. The head blinked once to say “yes” and raised its lids high for “no.” The silent movement of its lips helped a little.

  With the help of the head’s language of gestures and Miss Adams’ ordinary speech, they even managed to have conversations based on questions and answers: Miss Adams would ask questions, and the head would signal “yes” or “no.”

  “Well, how are you feeling today?” Miss Adams asked.

  The head smiled and lowered its lids to say, “Quite well, thank you.”

  “How did you pass the night?”

  The same gesture.

  Miss Adams would fire questions at the head while efficiently performing her morning duties. She checked the apparatus, the temperature, the pulse. She made notes in a journal. Then, with the greatest care, she washed the face of the head with water and alcohol using a soft sponge, then wiped it down with super-absorbent cotton wool. She washed the eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. Special tubes were inserted into the nose and mouth for this. She tidied the hair.

  Her hands touched the head swiftly and skilfully. Its face wore a contented expression.

  “Today is a wonderful day,” Miss Adams was saying excitedly. “The breeze is light and chilly; the sort that makes you want to fill your chest with air. Look how brightly the sun is shining. It’s just like spring!”

  The corners of Professor Dowell’s mouth curved down sorrowfully. His eyes turned regretfully to the window and then paused upon Miss Adams.

  She blushed, mildly annoyed at herself. With a woman’s instinctive sensitivity, she had tried to avoid mentioning anything unattainable for the head, which could unnecessarily remind it of its pitiful physical state.

  She felt a certain maternal pity for the head, as she might for a helpless, malformed infant.

  “Well, let’s do some work!” Miss Adams said hurriedly to rectify her mistake.

  In the mornings, before Professor Kern arrived, the head was occupied with reading. Miss Adams would carry over a heap of the latest medical journals and books and show them to the head. It looked through them; when it came to an article it needed, it wriggled its brows. Miss Adams would place the journal on a stand, and the head would plunge into reading. Miss Adams learned to tell, by following the movements of its eyes, which line the head was reading in order to turn the pages at the right moment.

  When it wanted to make a note in the margins, the head made a sign, and Miss Adams would run her finger down the lines, following the head’s eyes, and make a pencil mark in the margin.

  Miss Adams did not understand why the head made these marginal notes; but she did not expect to get an explanation with their simple language of gestures, so she did not ask.

  Once, however, when she was passing through Professor Kern’s office during his absence, she saw a pile of journals on his writing table with the marks she had made at the head’s indication. And on a sheet of paper, in Professor Kern’s hand, several of these marked passages had been copied out. This gave her food for thought.

  Suddenly remembering this, Miss Adams could not restrain herself from asking:

  “Tell me, why do we mark these sections in scientific articles?”

  Professor Dowell’s head displayed annoyance and impatience. The head stared meaningfully at Miss Adams, then at the tap from which the tube ran to its throat; it raised its brows twice. This indicated a request. Miss Adams understood that the head wanted her to open the forbidden tap. This was not the first time that the head had made this request to her. But Miss Adams explained the head’s desire in her own terms: clearly, it wanted to end its joyless existence. Miss Adams could not make up her mind to open the forbidden tap. She feared the responsibility; she feared losing her job.

  “No, no!” Miss Adams answered the head’s request with terror. “If I open that tap, you’ll die! I don’t want to kill you, I can’t do it, I’m not brave enough!” A spasm ran across the head’s face from impatience and consciousness of its own helplessness. The head ground its teeth.

  Three times the head energetically looked upwards, opening its eyes wide…

  “No, no, no… I won’t die,” Miss Adams understood the head to say. She hesitated.

  The head began to move its lips soundlessly, and it seemed to Miss Adams that the lips were trying to say:

  “Open it, open it, I beg of you…”

  Miss Adams’ curiosity was piqued to the highest degree.

  She could sense that there was some mystery here. Even before this, she had not quite believed Professor Kern’s words about the fatal nature of the forbidden tap.

  Meanwhile, an immeasurable sorrow shone in the eyes of the head. The eyes asked, begged, demanded; it was as though all its human power of thought, all its stored-up willpower was concentrated in that gaze.

  And Miss Adams made up her mind.

  With her heart beating fast and a trembling hand, she carefully opened the tap part of the way.

  Immediately a hiss sounded in the head’s throat. Miss Adams heard the head’s voice: weak, uninflected, crackly, like a broken gramophone.

  “I… th..thank…k.… you!”

  The forbidden tap released air compressed in the cylinder. Passing through the head’s throat, the air stimulated the vocal cords to move, allowing the head to speak. The muscles of the throat and vocal cords could no longer function normally, and ther
efore air passed through the throat with a hissing sound even when the head was not speaking. And the damaged vocal cords lent its voice that uninflected, rattly timbre.

  The face of the head expressed satisfaction.

  But at that very moment they heard footsteps in the office and the noise of a lock opening – the laboratory door was always locked with a key from the office side.

  Miss Adams narrowly succeeded in turning the tap off. The hissing in the head’s throat stopped.

  Professor Kern entered.

  III. The Head Spoke

  About a week had gone by since Miss Adams discovered the secret of the forbidden tap.

  During this time, relations between Miss Adams and the head had grown even friendlier. In the hours Professor Kern spent at university, Miss Adams opened the tap, sending a moderate stream of air into the head’s throat, so that the head could speak in an audible whisper. Miss Adams spoke softly too. They were afraid that the Negro might overhear their conversation.

  Their chats worked a visible improvement on Professor Dowell’s head. His eyes became livelier, and even the sorrowful wrinkle between his brows smoothed out.

  The head spoke eagerly and at length, as if rewarding itself for the period of enforced silence.

  The night before Miss Adams had dreamed about Professor Dowell’s head, and she had wondered afterwards: did the head dream?

  “Dreams…” the head whispered softly. “Yes, I dream. And I cannot tell whether this brings me greater sorrow or joy. I dream that I’m healthy, full of strength, and I wake up doubly bereft. I am reduced both physically and morally… After all, I am deprived of everything that living people enjoy! Only consciousness, like a curse, is left to me…”

  “What do you dream about?”

  “I have not yet dreamed about myself in my current situation. I see myself as I was once… I see my family, my friends… Not long ago, I dreamed about my late wife and lived the springtime of our romance over again. Long ago she came to see me as a patient; she had hurt her leg getting out of a motor-car. We first met in my reception room. We somehow felt a bond straightaway. After her fourth visit, I invited her to look at a portrait of my fiancée which was lying on my writing desk.

  “‘I will marry her if she accepts my proposal,’ I said.

  “She walked over to my desk and saw the little mirror lying there: she glanced into it, laughed and said:

  “‘I don’t think she’ll say no!’

  “Within a week, she was my wife. I dreamed that scene not long ago…” The head’s expression lit up with the memory, but grew sombre again at once. It was as if a ray of autumn sunlight had momentarily pierced a shroud of grey autumn clouds, before being quenched.

  “How infinitely long ago that time was!”

  The head grew thoughtful. Air hissed quietly through its throat.

  “Last night I dreamed about my son… How I would love to see him once again!... But I wouldn’t dare to put him through this ordeal… He thinks I am dead…”

  “Is he grown up? Where is he now?”

  “Yes, he’s grown up… He’s almost the same age as you or a little older. He has finished university…At the moment he should be in Italy, with his mother’s sister… No, it would be better not to dream! Now I lead the life of an almost bodiless spirit. How laughable and foolish the dream of non-corporeal existence seems to me! We are sons of the earth, creatures of flesh and blood. And we can only be happy with and on our native clay. Do you know what it means to live without a body, to exist as consciousness alone? I am tormented not only by my teasingly real dreams. When I am wide awake, my sensations torture me. Strange as it might seem, sometimes I imagine that I can feel my body. I suddenly want to breathe in with my whole chest, or spread my arms wide, as one does after sitting too long. And sometimes I experience a paralysing pain in my left leg. Laughable, isn’t it? As a doctor, however, you should understand. The pain is so real that I involuntarily look down and, of course, I see through the glass below me only empty space and the flagstones of the floor… From time to time I imagine that I am about to suffer an attack of breathlessness, which makes me almost glad of my ‘post-mortem’ state, which at least frees me from asthma. It is all simply the reflex action of brain cells, somehow linked to the life of the body…”

  “How dreadful all this is!” Miss Adams burst out.

  “Yes, dreadful… Strange, when I was alive I imagined that I lived a life purely of the mind. Truly, I somehow managed not to notice my body, utterly buried in my academic studies as I was. And only when I lost my body did I realize what I was missing… The world of bodily sensations! How many pleasures it offers! Now, like never before in my whole life, I think about the scents of flowers or fragrant hay at the edge of a wood, of long walks, of the noise of surf… In losing my body, I lost a world – the whole beautiful, ungraspable world of objects which I had never noticed, objects which can be touched and handled, feeling at the same time one’s own body – oneself! Oh, how eagerly I would give up all of this chimerical existence just for the joy of weighing in my hand a single cobblestone! I envy the porter laboring under the weight of the load on his back… I have only now understood that even physical pain carries a dose of pleasure. Pain is the cry of a living body!...yes… I suffer most of all from lack of tangible sensations. If only you knew how much pleasure I derive from the touch of the sponge, when you wash my face in the mornings! And the touch of your hands… If you want to make me happy, stroke my face with your hand.”

  Miss Adams touched the head’s dry and chilly forehead with her hand.

  “My thanks!... And here is yet another request… which may strike you as peculiar. The touch of your hair! Could you somehow bend over and touch your hair to my cheek? If only you knew what a pleasure that is!”

  The head looked at her pleadingly.

  Miss Adams felt embarrassed. She was embarrassed not only by the request, but by the particular expression in the head’s eyes. This was not the first time she had noticed that expression…

  “Well, not too much at once! Let’s leave this for another time!” she said, and a faint blush spread over her cheeks.

  She felt that more than the simple act of touching was involved. She would have done it out of pity, but something close to disgust stopped her, and she sat without moving….

  An expression of deep disappointment and sorrow appeared on the head’s face.

  “The poor thing!” thought Miss Adams and, by an effort of will, she quickly stood up, laughed casually and brushed the head’s cheek with her hair.

  “Now, there you go!” she said in the same tone she would use with a spoiled child, after fulfilling its whim.

  That evening, assessing her impressions, Miss Adams could not sleep for a long time. And when she slept she dreamed of the head once again… of Professor Dowell’s sorrowful eyes… Miss Adams was running through corridors, pursued by the head. Her path was blocked by closed doors, they opened with an effort, the head began overtaking her… She could already hear the hissing whistle of air behind her…

  Miss Adams woke up with a rapidly beating heart.

  “It seems my nerves are not what they should be…”

  IV. Death or Murder?

  One day, looking through medical journals before going to sleep, Miss Adams read an article by Professor Kern about his scientific work. What caught her attention in this article were Kern’s references to certain studies by other scholars. These were all the extracts from scientific books and journals which Miss Adams had noted, instructed by the head, during their morning sessions.

  The next day, as soon as she had an opportunity to speak with the head, Miss Adams asked:

  “What does Professor Kern work on in the laboratory when I’m not here?”

  The head replied after a hesitation:

  “We continue our scientific work.”

  “That includes all the notes you take for him? But do you know he is publishing your work under his own name?”r />
  “I imagined as much.”

  “But that’s scandalous!”

  “Perhaps so… But what can I do about it?”

  “If you can’t, I certainly can!” Miss Adams exclaimed furiously.

  “Hush… It would do no good. It would be laughable for someone in my situation to claim copyright. Money? What can I do with it? Fame? What could fame do for me? And then… If all this were exposed, the experiment would not be finished. And I myself have a vested interest in it. I confess that I would like to see the results of my research.”

  Miss Adams thought about it.

  “Yes, a man like Kern is capable of anything,” she continued quietly. “Professor Kern told me, when I applied to him for work, that you died from an incurable illness and that you yourself willed your body for scientific research. Is that true?”

  “It’s a difficult subject for me… I could be mistaken… It is the truth, but possibly… not the whole truth. Kern and I were working together on the revivification of human organs, extracted from a fresh corpse. Kern was my assistant. The crowning moment of my research was to be the solution of the question of whether a human head could be restored to life. I had finished all the preparatory work; we had already revivified the heads of animals, but we were not going to publish our successes until we succeeded in demonstrating the revivification of a human head. Before this final experiment, the success of which I never doubted, I gave Kern a manuscript about my scientific work to be prepared for publication. At the same time, we were working on another scientific project, which was also close to its solution. At this time I suffered one of my terrible attacks of asthma – the very same disease I was trying to overcome. I had long struggled with asthma: who would win? And it is certainly true that I had willed my body for anatomical research – although I never expected, that my own head would be revivified. Thus it was… during this final attack of asthma, Kern was beside me and gave me medical assistance. He injected me with morphine. Perhaps the dose was too great, or perhaps my asthma won the fight…”