Collected Short Fiction, page 131
Their letters, a year later, abruptly ceased. I was unable to get in touch with them, or to learn anything of them save that they had gone from New Orleans.
Upon my return I found the old house deserted. In a year of search, I learned, die police had discovered only that the brothers had vanished into the desolate bayou swamps coastward from the city.
The Telfairs had been among my dearest friends, and since I had some spare weeks at my disposal, I set out to solve the mystery of their disappearance—little suspecting the sinister and amazing chain of horror I was to unearth.
2. The Man Whose Eyes Were Haunted
IT WAS through a New Orleans dealer in electrical equipment that I got the name of the Cajun, Henri Dubois.
The Telfair brothers, shortly before they vanished, had purchased a large amount of heavy machinery, which had been taken—for what purpose the dealer did not know—into the unreclaimed swamps. The Cajun, as Doctor Telfair’s agent, had received part of the goods.
I knew little of the man. His Cajun ancestry was evident from his name and situation. His illiteracy was evinced by the signature on the receipts, a rude cross with the words, “Henri Dubois, his mark.”
In the week just spent in his search I had learned that he was unmarried, that he lived alone in the most solitary part of the bayou country, emerging only rarely with furs or fish to exchange for his staple necessities of tobacco, grits, ammunition and com whisky.
More than one person had warned me that he was “queer”—a shy, shiftless recluse, whom no one actually knew.
I found his lonely shanty-boat at sunset on an oppressive summer day. The gray-green walls of swampy forest above the black, stagnant bayou had become unpleasantly depressing. And the dwelling that I found beyond the ancient, moss-bearded cypress and red gum upon the last bend, did not relieve my depression.
It was a heavy, square-ended barge, aground in the mud, supporting an ugly shack, tar-paper roofed. Silence of desolation clung about it, only intensified by the melancholy chorus of distant frogs, welling from the dark and implacable swamps.
I climbed to its narrow strip of deck to wait return of the absent owner. As I stood there, fighting insistent mosquitoes, the swart inscrutability of the swamps darkened to a brooding and sinister gloom. I could readily imagine ghostly life animating the white, miasmic mists writhing up through bearded skeletons of trees.
When I first saw the Cajun he was watching me suspiciously from his battered skiff, in the shadows of the dense, overhanging vegetation, a dozen yards away, fingering a rusty shotgun on his ragged knee.
Henri Dubois—I knew him at once for the man I sought—looked prematurely aged. While still abundant, his hair was iron-gray, white at the temples. Though he appeared fairly robust, his weak, querulous face was incredibly seamed and drawn.
His eyes were his strangest features. Watching me with unmistakable hostility, they roused my pity. In their depths was the ineffaceable print of some experience that had seared the man’s very soul, left him a mere shaken wreck, faith and courage broken.
His was the expression of a weak man who has encountered some overwhelming emotional experience that has twisted him, burned him out, if I may put it so, leaving him dazed, uncertain of life and without much interest in living. I have seen neurotic patients in psychiatric wards with that same look.
Studying the lurking dread in his eyes, I knew that the emotion photographed there was not grief or despair—it was sheer horror.
He was not the kind, I saw at once, to give me willingly any information about his dealings with my lost friends, or even to grant me ordinary civility.
“Good evening, Mr. Dubois,” I called, as cordially as I could.
He stared at me silently, hands still on the gun in his lap.
“You are Henri Dubois, aren’t you?”
He expectorated into the green, stagnant water, nodded voiceless assent.
“My name is Walters.” I managed a smile. “Edwin Walters. I’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.
And I’m afraid I must impose upon your hospitality for the night—if I may.”
He grunted something that I did not understand. I decided to explain myself more fully.
“I’m trying to find what became of the Telfair brothers.”
The effect of my words was startling. Terror burst into his haunted eyes. He jerked back as if I had struck him, and flung up the ancient gun with shaking hands.
I hastened to assure him that I was not an officer, that I meant harm to no one. His face still strained and white, he lowered the gun, protesting in the French patois that he knew nobody named Telfair.
It was apparent that he was lying.
Before, it had not occurred to me to connect the Cajun with my friends’ disappearance save as a possible source of information. But the name of Telfair had brought back to his face that fear whose shadow I had already marked there.
The brothers, then, had been involved in the experience, whatever it might have been, that had left such a print of horror upon the man. I was sure, at once, that he had knowledge of their fate, but perhaps not criminal knowledge. He looked too much the cowardly weakling to be a successful murderer.
I had blundered, I saw, in revealing my purpose so soon. In any case the man’s confidence would not have been easily gained, and my incautious question had already raised a wall of mistrust before me.
Though I said no more of my quest, it took my best persuasive efforts to make him allow me to stay with him for the night. I followed him into the shanty-boat’s interior, narrow, ill-furnished, pervaded with the stale, sour odor peculiar to such craft.
A meager, unkempt figure in worn blue shirt and patched denim overalls, homy feet bare, he lit the dingy kerosene lamp and prepared a rude meal of coffee, fried pork, and rugged brown pones of cold corn-bread.
When we had eaten I brought in from my motor-boat a gallon jug of corn whisky I had purchased in anticipation of the present occasion. Thin hands shaking with eagerness, my host poured generously into two tin cups, handed one to me. I sipped cautiously at the raw, bitter moonshine, while he gulped his own as easily as if it had been water—and with the same visible effect.
The second cup, however, dulled the edge of his suspicion. With the third, he became almost genial, and I ventured to mention the Telfairs again, stressing my friendship and my worry.
He admitted in his rusty patois that they had employed him, that he had helped set up the machinery in the swamp. He agreed that he could guide me to the spot on the morrow.
But he still denied vehemently that he knew what had become of my friends. My question awakened that haunting terror in his eyes, sobered him to dogged, suspicious taciturnity. I could get no more from him that night, though he drank himself into a stupor, as if to drown in alcohol the memory I had raised.
3. The Punctured Skull
THAT night I tried in vain to sleep, beneath swarming mosquitoes, my blankets spread on the floor of the stalesmelling shanty-boat.
Next morning the Cajun was morosely sullen as ever. He appeared uncertain how much he had told me, and sorry he had told me anything. When we had breakfasted upon muddy chicory-coffee and grits and pork, I insisted that he keep his promise to take me where the Telfairs had set up the machinery.
At first he refused blankly. When I offered him ten dollars, he agreed to take me to the old landing, and point out the trail. He would not accompany me away from the boat.
We ascended the bayou until it became a narrow, stagnant channel, dull green walls of swamp vegetation almost meeting above it. The Cajun poled in to a landing of rotting logs, between jutting cypress knees.
He showed me the end of the weed-choked trail, and promised to wait for me until sunset. He was not, he insisted, going to remain in that vicinity after dark.
Though the footing proved firm enough, the roadway was grown up with weeds and briars, the green, thorny tangles reaching to my waist. Gaunt trees rose about me, bearded with gray festoons of Spanish moss, their dark trunks limiting lonely vistas. The undergrowth was a luxuriant jungle, broken only by the black, decaying logs of fallen trees.
It was startling, amid such surroundings, to find a modem dynamo.
It stood upon a concrete platform that must have been a hundred feet square. The trees, for some little distance around it, had been felled; the lush jungle of undergrowth had consequently sprung up more luxuriantly. Green tangles were encroaching upon the concrete. In several places the force of imprisoned life had cracked it, bursting through in sprays of green.
The dynamo stood near the center of it, evidently long unprotected from the elements, black with rust. Beside it was the powerful gasoline motor that had driven it, grimy and corroded. A transformer, coils, condensers, rheostats lay about, smashed, ruined by rust and weather.
The silent and implacable spirit of the swamp already filled the place, and eager vegetation was fast obliterating this enigmatic scar in the tawny side of the wilderness. Fighting the loneliness of the place, and wondering at the meaning of it, I explored the conquering vanguard of the jungle until I found the skeleton.
A human skeleton, the bones scattered in the fringe of crowding weeds. I started back at first, as if this had been a dark and obscene jest of the brooding swamp, and then bent to examine them.
The skull was oddly injured. Two round holes were pierced in it, one in the frontal bone, above the left eye; the other in the occipital bone, at the bade of the head, as if—and the thought came with a shudder of premonitory horror—great fangs had dosed through the brain.
Searching in the dust beneath the skeleton, I found objects to identify it. A silver signet ring, bearing the initial “T”. An old-fashioned, thick gold watch, which I well knew—crystal broken, works gone to rust, but case intact. Those articles told me, beyond question, that the grim remains were those of Doctor Paul Telfair.
But what dread fate could have overtaken him? I could not rid myself of my first mad idea that those puzzling punctures had been made by gigantic fangs, though reason told me the agent must have been some more credible instrument—a pick, perhaps.
I had no inkling, then, that his haunting, atavistic dread of spiders had played in the tragedy the hideous part that it did.
4. The Purple Wounds
I WAS three days in winning the complete confidence of Henri Dubois. I accepted his rude hospitality, regaled him with cheap whisky, and talked of my old friendship for the Telfairs until he felt maudlin sympathy. In the end, I won.
When the machinery had been installed upon the concrete floor, he told me, in his rough patois, the brothers stayed there alone. Discharging the other employees, they retained him to bring the mail and the supplies they ordered, paying him ten dollars each week to make two trips.
At first there had been no roof above the machinery. On his first trip back, Henri had been astounded to see a house over the concrete platform. A house, he said, that looked like colored glass. He was uncertain what its material actually was, or where that material had come from.
On another trip he had found a queer sort of garden about the strange house—a garden whose leaves and blooms did not move in the wind, because they were hard, like glass.
The brothers had been alone. But a woman, near the end, appeared mysteriously with them. Henri had seen her, one time, in the amazing garden. She was young and pretty. He had heard her sing, with a voice like little bells.
On its face, his story, so far, was unreasonable, fantastic, incredible. Still, I was fairly sure that it represented no deliberate fabrication on his part. His manner had been that of one who tells an improbable story unwillingly, apprehensive of doubt. And I knew that he did not have the imagination to create such a narrative as he hesitantly and reluctantly unfolded.
Almost anything can be made to seem improbable, if presented in the right way. With his narrow, warped mind, Henri Dubois would inevitably see any unusual occurrence from an illogical angle; he was sure to overlook some factors, overstress others.
I listened without betraying incredulity, alert to sort some reasonable explanation of the mystery from his strange words.
On his last return, Verne Telfair had run down to meet him at the landing, he said. The young man was hurt, bleeding. One arm was torn; his side was strangely wounded. His clothing was ripped, bloody. Henri had taken him aboard the skiff, put off in the haste he demanded.
Some hideous, unnamable horror, he insisted, had followed Verne down the trail. He would not try to describe it; he had not even seen it clearly.
The Cajun had wanted to take Verne out to Doctor Pichon. His strange wounds were alarming. But Verne insisted that they were not serious; he had remained upon the shanty-boat. He dressed his injuries, with Henri’s aid, and for several days he appeared to be recovering.
On the fifth morning Verne went into delirium, the Cajun said. Screaming. Fighting things that Henri could not see. Trying to throw himself off into the bayou. Henri had tied him to the bed.
His wounds appeared to have been poisoned. They swelled, grew purple. Henri muttered, signed the cross. He had prepared, he said, to carry Verne down to see Doctor Pichon. But on the following night he died. His whole body became purple, swelled unpleasantly.
The Cajun had not dared carry the body out of the swamp, for fear of the inevitable inquiry. He had buried it. He would show me the grave.
IN THE gloom of evening, Henri Dubois took me back through the brooding shadows of the swamp, to a sunken, weed-grown mound, beneath the gnarled, skeletal arms of a moss-bearded swamp oak. A rude cross, of two sticks nailed together, leaned askew at the head.
I stood watching the sinking grave for a long time, wondering if the hilarious, light-hearted Verne Telfair that I had known could indeed lie here in the dusky wilderness. It seemed incredible, blindly cruel.
Only when we had returned to the shanty-boat did Henri Dubois think to tell me that Verne had been writing in a book during the days before his sudden relapse. Henri could not read, he did not know what the writing was. He had not dared show it to any one, for fear of questions whose answers men would not believe.
Impatiently I watched him fumbling among his disorderly possessions. He pawed over piles of traps, worm-eaten peltries, balls of string, patent-medicine bottles, fish-hooks, odd rifle and shotgun cartridges.
At last he handed me a dusty laboratory notebook, rolled into a compact cylinder and tied with string. On its pages was the narrative that follows, headed like a letter, under a date four years before, and addressed to me.
I read it, there in the Cajun’s malodorous dwelling. I suppose I was anticipating dark tragedy. But I was all unprepared for the lurid wings of dread that descended upon me as I turned the dusty pages, unarmed against the rending talons of terror that seized upon my soul as I neared the final act of the grim drama, the hideous and inevitable ending.
5. A Wand of Creation
DEAR ED [it began]—If you hear nothing from me, following this, it will mean that I have not survived my injuries. I have dressed and disinfected them as well as facilities permit. I am almost free from pain, today, and have every hope of recovery. My wound, though, is unique; I don’t know what turn my condition will next take. I am penning this brief account of the affair for your eyes, in case—anyhow, I shall address it, and tell Henri Dubois to mail it.
Henri insists that let him take me out to medical aid. But I have washed the wounds, sprinkled permanganate in them. I doubt that a doctor could do anything else—my trouble, of course, is quite beyond ordinary medical experience. And my appearance could only result in unwelcome publicity, and the necessity for explanations that I am unwilling to make. In no sense am I responsible for Paul’s death, but under the circumstances, the accusation might be made, and the story of it all is so bizarre that I should be helpless to prove it in a court of law.
You are, I think, the only human being likely to be much disturbed over the accident. I can’t fancy any one else tearing his hair over it. For some time I have neglected our correspondence, for reasons that will become evident as you read. This will serve to explain our silence—and in case you hear nothing more, our disappearance. If I recover, as I have much hope of doing, I intend to join you immediately in South America, where I can add with my own lips any further details you may desire.
But preliminaries enough, except to hope that I can follow this letter very shortly, to renew old fellowship and forget what has happened here.
Paul must have been working for many years on his fatal discovery before I knew anything of it. You know how reticent he always was about any of his unproved theories.
I first learned of it one day, a few months ago, when I came home from a week’s shooting on Colonel Allen’s plantation—it was the first time I had been away from home so long, in ages. I found Paul sitting by a table covered with radio apparatus—tubes, condensers, transformers, variocouplers. There must have been two dozen tubes in the bank; I noticed they were of unusual pattern. A little motor-generator was humming in the corner. Paul wore a sort of head-band, which held against his temples two little black disks; at first glimpse it appeared to be a set of ordinary phones.
“Going in for D X?” I asked him.
He took the apparatus from his head—I saw now that it was not a set of phones at all—and smiled up at me in a queer way.
“No, Verne, I’m not trying for distance,” he said, in his tantalizingly slow voice. “But how did you find the quail?”
I was just beginning to see that his equipment was not a radio set at all, but something far different—and, his manner told me, important.
“Then what is the little toy?” I demanded.
“Think you could stand a shock?” he asked, and picked up the odd little head-piece. “Meaning something rather startling.”
“I guess so.”
