The Haunts & Horrors MEGAPACK®. Lawrence Watt-EvansЧитать онлайн книгу.
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 fascinated 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—”
I bent to help him, then, despite myself, drew back. Clothed in outing flannel pajamas, drenched with blood that spurted from at least ten wounds, and obviously dead, Felicia Watrous lay, a huddled, mangled, bullet-riddled corpse, before us on the rain-diluted snow.
* * * *
The liquor that the pharmacist broke out at Weinberg’s order was far from palatable, but it was “Whiskey, U.S.P.,” which meant it was one hundred proof—fifty percent grain alcohol—and that was what we needed right then.
“I was afraid of this,” he told me as he gulped a second potion down. “She’d been delirous all day, and I asked that they have a nurse with her every minute. I s’pose the girl had left to get her tray, or something, though, and that was when it happened. The moment she was free from surveillance, she went for the window—”
“What in heaven’s name are you driving at, Al?” I broke in. “What’s Felicia’s being in delirium got to do with—”
“Sorry,” he apologized. “I hadn’t told you what it was I suspected.
“Remember the other night at your quarters I told you I thought medical opinion and theories were due for overhauling?
“Yes, but—”
“Never mind the buts, old man. Ever since we found that Jerry secret agent throttled in our railway coach, I’d puzzled over his bruises. The evidence all pointed to a great ape having throttled him, but that was palpably absurd. I’d found Felicia’s puttee and shoe unfastened, but that could have had have no bearing on the case—I thought. Then the other night you told me what Ten Eyck had said before he died—Felicia’s mother had been frightened into madness by a gorilla just before she had her baby; Felicia never showed her feet to anyone; seemed sensitive about them; you saw her almost faint when young Ten joked about her ability to feed herself with her feet remember?
“Yes, of course; but—”
“Hold hard, feller; let me finish. Nearly everybody’s heard—and most laymen believe stories—of pre-natal influence; if a mother’s frightened by an an animal, her baby’s likely to be marked with some characteristic of the beast. A mother terrified by a vicious dog, for instance, may give birth to a dog-faced child; or one who’s been chased by a bull may bear a child with vestiges of horn upon its head—”
“What are you building up to?” I demanded. “Those old wives’ tales of prenatal influence have been discredited a century and more. Davenport in his Heredity in Relation to Eugenics states clearly that—”
“Sure,” he broke in sarcastically, “and you can find plenty o’ people who believe that Bacon wrote Shakespeare, and just as many others who’ll tell you that Bacon laid an egg, but let me tell you something, Pat Carmichael: Felicia Watrous killed that German spy and saved us all from asphyxiation. She must have wakened when he got his gas-kit out and saw that he was up to—remember you told me how her eyes seemed to glow in the dark? She was probably better able to see in dim lights than we are, just as animals can. So she whipped her shoe and puttee off and killed him with a single grasp of her foot, but the gas got her before she’d quite finished redressing, so—”
“Al, you’re drunk or crazy; maybe both!” I interrupted. “How in blazes could she have throttled him with her foot? I suppose you’ll tell me next she killed that crazy miner and saved those nurses—”
“Of course she did,” he broke in almost savagely. “Come here—”
Seizing me by the cuff he led me up the stairs and down the almost lightless corridor to the room where they had laid her.