Horror Stories

  The sense of smell was tested, and its laboratory, with its mingled odours, became abominable to him. Hardly could he stay himself from rushing forth into the outer air, to wash his nostrils in the clear coolness of Hampstead Heath. The sense of taste gave him, magnified a thousand times, the flavour of his after-dinner coffee, and other tastes, distasteful almost beyond the bearing point.

  But ‘Success,’ he said, rinsing his mouth at the laboratory sink after the drinking of the antidote, ‘all along the line, success.’

  Then he tested the action of his discovery on the sense of hearing. And the sound of London came like the roar of a giant, yet when he fixed his attention on the movements of a fly, all other sounds ceased, and he heard the sound of the fly’s feet on the shelf when it walked. Thus, in turn, he heard the creak of boards expanding in the heat, the movement of the glass stoppers that kept imprisoned in their proper bottles the giants of acid and alkali.

  ‘Success!’ he cried aloud, and his voice sounded in his ears like the shout of a monster overcoming primeval forces. ‘Success! success!’

  Remained only the eyes, and here, strangely enough, the Professor hesitated, faint with a sudden heartsickness. Following all intensification there must be reaction. What if the reaction exceeded that from which it reacted, what if the wave of tremendous sight, stemmed by the antidote ebbing, left him blind? But the spirit of the explorer in science is the spirit that explores African rivers, and sails amid white bergs to seek the undiscovered Pole.

  He held the syringe with a firm hand, made the required puncture, and braced himself for the result. His eyes seemed to swell to great globes, to dwindle to microscopic globules, to swim in a flood of fire, to shrivel high and dry on a beach of hot sand. Then he saw, and the glass fell from his hand. For the whole of the stable earth seemed to be suddenly set in movement, even the air grew thick with vast overlapping shapeless shapes. He opined later that these were the microbes and bacilli that cover and fill all things, in this world that looks so clean and bright.

  Concentrating his vision, he saw in the one day’s little dust on the bottles myriads of creatures, crawling and writhing, alive. The proportions of the laboratory seemed but little altered. Its large lines and forms remained practically unchanged. It was the little things that were no longer little, the invisible things that were now invisible no longer. And he felt grateful for the first time in his life, for the limits set by Nature to the powers of the human body. He had increased those powers. If he let his eyes stray idly about, as one does in the waltz for example, all was much as it used to be. But the moment he looked steadily at any one thing, it became enormous.

  He closed his eyes. Success here had gone beyond his wildest dreams. Indeed he could not but feel that success, taking the bit between its teeth, had perhaps gone just the least little bit too far.

  And on the next day he decided to examine the drug in all its aspects, to court the intensification of all his senses which should set him in the position of supreme power over men and things, transform him from a Professor into a demigod.

  The great question was, of course, how the five preparations of his drug would act on or against each other. Would it be intensification, or would they neutralise each other? Like all imaginative scientists, he was working with stuff perilously like the spells of magic, and certain things were not possible to be foretold. Besides, this drug came from a land of mystery and the knowledge of secrets which we call magic. He did not anticipate any increase in the danger of the experiment. Nevertheless he spent some hours in arranging and destroying papers, among others certain pages of the yellow note-book. After dinner he detained his man as, laden with the last tray, he was leaving the room.

  ‘I may as well tell you, Parker,’ the Professor said, moved by some impulse he had not expected, ‘that you will benefit to some extent by my will. On conditions. If any accident should cut short my life, you will at once communicate with my solicitor, whose name you will now write down.’

  The model man, trained by fifteen years of close personal service, drew forth a notebook neat as the Professor’s own, wrote in it neatly the address the Professor gave.

  ‘Anything more, sir?’ he asked, looking up, pencil in hand.

  ‘No,’ said the Professor, ‘nothing more. Good-night, Parker.’

  ‘Good-night, sir,’ said the model man.

  The next words the model man opened his lips to speak were breathed into the night tube of the nearest doctor.

  ‘My master, Professor Boyd Thompson; could you come round at once, sir. I’m afraid it’s very serious.’

  It was half past six when the nearest doctor – Jones was his unimportant name – stooped over the lifeless body of the Professor.

  He shook his head as he stood up and looked round the private laboratory on whose floor the body lay.

  ‘His researches are over,’ he said. ‘Yes, he’s dead. Been dead some hours. When did you find him?’

  ‘I went to call my master as usual,’ said Parker; ‘he rises at six, summer and winter, sir. He was not in his room, and the bed had not been slept in. So I came in here, sir. It is not unusual for my master to work all night when he has been very interested in his experiments, and then he likes his coffee at six.’

  ‘I see,’ said Dr Jones. ‘Well, you’d better rouse the house and fetch his own doctor. It’s heart failure, of course, but I daresay he’d like to sign the certificate himself.’

  ‘Can nothing be done?’ said Parker, much affected.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Dr Jones. ‘It’s the common lot. You’ll have to look out for another situation.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Parker; ‘he told me only last night what I was to do in case of anything happening to him. I wonder if he had any idea?’

  ‘Some premonition, perhaps,’ the doctor corrected.

  The funeral was a very quiet one. So the late Professor Boyd Thompson had decreed in his will. He had arranged all details. The body was to be clothed in flannel, placed in an open coffin covered only with a linen sheet, and laid in the family mausoleum, a moss-grown building in the midst of a little park which surrounded Boyd Grange, the birthplace of the Boyd Thompsons. A little property in Sussex it was. The Professor sometimes went there for week-ends. He had left this property to Lucilla, with a last love-letter, in which he begged her to give his body the hospitality of the death-house, now hers with the rest of the estate. To Parker he left an annuity of two hundred pounds, on the condition that he should visit and enter the mausoleum once in every twenty-four hours for fourteen days after the funeral.

  To this end the late Professor’s solicitor decided that Parker had better reside at Boyd Grange for the said fortnight, and Parker, whose nerves seemed to be shaken, petitioned for company. This made easy the arrangement which the solicitor desired to make – of a witness to the carrying out by Parker of the provisions of the dead man’s will. The solicitor’s clerk was quite good company, and arm-in-arm with him Parker paid his first visit to the mausoleum. The little building stands in a glade of evergreen oaks. The trees are old and thick, and the narrow door is deep in shadow even on the sunniest day. Parker went to the mausoleum, peered through its square grating, but he did not go in. Instead, he listened, and his ears were full of silence.

  ‘He’s dead, right enough,’ he said, with a doubtful glance at his companion.

  ‘You ought to go in, oughtn’t you?’ said the solicitor’s clerk.

  ‘Go in yourself, if you like, Mr Pollack,’ said Parker, suddenly angry; ‘anyone who likes can go in, but it won’t be me. If he was alive, it ’ud be different. I’d have done anything for him. But I ain’t going in among all them dead and mouldering Thompsons. See? If we both say I did, it’ll be just the same as me doing it.’

  ‘So it will,’ said the solicitor’s clerk; ‘but where do I come in?’

  Parker explained to him where he came in, to their mutual content.

  ‘Right you are,’ said the clerk; ‘on those terms I?
??m fly. And if we both say you did it, we needn’t come to the beastly place again,’ he added, shivering and glancing over his shoulder at the door with the grating.

  ‘No more we need,’ said Parker.

  Behind the bars of the narrow door lay deeper shadows than those of the ilexes outside. And in the blackest of the shadow lay a man whose every sense was intensified as though by a magic potion. For when the Professor swallowed the five variants of his great discovery, each acted as he had expected it to act. But the union of the five vehicles conveying the drug to the nerves, which served his five senses, had paralysed every muscle. His hearing, taste, touch, scent and sight were intensified a thousandfold – as they had been in the individual experiments – but the man who felt all this exaggerated increase of sensation was powerless as a cat under kurali. He could not raise a finger, stir an eyelash. More, he could not breathe, nor did his body advise him of any need of breathing. And he had lain thus immobile and felt his body slowly grow cold; had heard in thunder the voices of Parker and the doctor; had felt the enormous hands of those who made his death-toilet; had smelt intolerably the camphor and lavender that they laid round him in the narrow, black bed; had tasted the mingled flavours of the drug and its five mediums; and, in an ecstasy of magnified sensation, had made the lonely train journey which coffins make, and known himself carried into the mausoleum and left there alone. And every sense was intensified, even his sense of time, so that it seemed to him that he had lain there for many years. And the effect of the drugs showed no sign of any diminution or reaction. Why had he not left directions for the injection of the antidote? It was one of those slips which wreck campaigns, cause the discovery of hidden crimes. It was a slip, and he had made it. He had thought of death, but in all the results he had anticipated, death’s semblance had found no place. Well, he had made his bed, and he must lie on it. This narrow bed, whose scent of clean oak and French polish was distinct among the musty, intolerable odours of the charnel house.

  It was perhaps twenty hours that he had lain there, powerless, immobile, listening to the sounds of unexplained movements about him, when he felt with a joy, almost like delirium, a faint quivering in the eyelids.

  They had closed his eyes, and till now, they had remained closed. Now, with an effort as of one who lifts a grave-stone, he raised his eyelids. They closed again quickly, for the roof of the vault, at which he gazed earnestly, was alive with monsters; spiders, earwigs, crawling beetles and flies, far too small to have been perceived by normal eyes, spread giant forms over him. He closed his eyes and shuddered. It felt like a shudder, but no-one who had stood beside him could have noted any movement.

  It was then that Parker came – and went.

  Professor Boyd Thompson heard Parker’s words, and lay listening to the thunder of Parker’s retreating feet. He tried to move – to call out. But he could not. He lay there helpless, and somehow he thought of the dark end of the laboratory, where the assistant before leaving had turned out the electric lights.

  He had nothing but his thoughts. He thought how he would lie there, and die there. The place was sequestered; no-one passed that way. Parker had failed him, and the end was not hard to picture. He might recover all his faculties, might be able to get up, able to scream, to shout, to tear at the bars. The bars were strong, and Parker would not come again. Well, he would try to face with a decent bravery whatever had to be faced.

  Time, measureless, spread round. It seemed as though someone had stopped all the clocks in the world, as though he were not in time but in eternity. Only by the waxing and waning light he knew of the night and the day.

  His brain was weary with the effort to move, to speak, to cry out. He lay, informed with something like despair – or fortitude. And then Parker came again. And this time a key grated in the lock. The Professor noted with rapture that it sounded no louder than a key should sound, turned in a lock that was rusty. Nor was the voice other than he had been used to hear it, when he was man alive and Parker’s master. And –

  ‘You can go in, of course, if you wish it, Miss,’ said Parker disapprovingly; ‘but it’s not what I should advise myself. For me it’s different,’ he added on a sudden instinct of self-preservation; ‘I’ve got to go in. Every day for a fortnight,’ he added, pitying himself.

  ‘I will go in, thank you,’ said a voice. ‘Yes, give me the candle, please. And you need not wait. I will lock the door when I come out.’ Thus the voice spoke. And the voice was Lucilla’s.

  In all his life the Professor had never feared death or its trappings. Neither its physical repulsiveness, nor the supernatural terrors which cling about it, had he either understood or tolerated. But now, in one little instant, he did understand.

  He heard Lucilla come in. A light held near him shone warm and red through his closed eyelids. And he knew that he had only to unclose those eyelids to see her face bending over him. And he could unclose them. Yet he would not. He lay there, still and straight in his coffin, and life swept through him in waves of returning power. Yet he lay like death. For he said, or something in him said: ‘She believes me dead. If I open my eyes it will be like a dead man looking at her. If I move it will be a dead man moving under her eyes. People have gone mad for less. Lie still, lie still,’ he told himself; ‘take any risks yourself. There must be none for her.’

  She had taken the candle away, set it down somewhere at a distance, and now she was kneeling beside him and her hand was under his head. He knew he could raise his arm and clasp her – and Parker would come back perhaps, when she did not return to the house, come back to find a man in grave-clothes, clasping a mad woman. He lay still. Then her kisses and tears fell on his face, and she murmured broken words of love and longing. But he lay still. At any cost he must lie still. Even at the cost of his own sanity, his own life. And the warmth of her hand under his head, her face against his, her kisses, her tears, set his blood flowing evenly and strongly. Her other arm lay on his breast, softly pressing over his heart. He would not move. He would be strong. If he were to be saved, it must be by some other way, not this.

  Suddenly tears and kisses ceased; her every breath seemed to have stopped with these. She had drawn away from him. She spoke. Her voice came from above him. She was standing up.

  ‘Arthur!’ she said, ‘Arthur!’ Then he opened his eyes, the narrowest chink. But he could not see her. Only he knew she was moving towards the door. There had been a new quality in her tone, a thrill of fear, or hope was it? or at least of uncertainty? Should he move; should he speak? He dared not. He knew too well the fear that the normal human being has of death and the grave, the fear transcending love, transcending reason. Her voice was further away now. She was by the door. She was leaving him. If he let her go, it was an end of hope for him. If he did not let her go, an end, perhaps, of reason, for her. No.

  ‘Arthur,’ she said, ‘I don’t believe … I believe you can hear me. I’m going to get a doctor. If you can speak, speak to me.’

  Her speaking ended, cut off short as a cord is cut by a knife. He did not speak. He lay in a conscious, forced rigidity.

  ‘Speak if you can,’ she implored, ‘just one word!’

  Then he said, very faintly, very distinctly, in a voice that seemed to come from a great way off, ‘Lucilla!’

  And at the word she screamed aloud pitifully, and leapt for the entrance; and he heard the rustle of her crape in the narrow door. Then he opened his eyes wide, and raised himself on his elbow. Very weak he was, and trembling exceedingly. To his ears her scream held the note of madness. Vainly he had refrained. Selfishly he had yielded. The cold hand of a mortal faintness clutched at his heart.

  ‘I don’t want to live now,’ he told himself, and fell back in the straight bed.

  Her arms were round him.

  ‘I’m going to get help,’ she said, her lips to his ear; ‘brandy and things. Only I came back. I didn’t want you to think I was frightened. Oh, my dear! thank God, thank God!’ He felt her kisses even throug
h the swooning mist that swirled about him. Had she really fled in terror? He never knew. He knew that she had come back to him.

  That is the real, true, and authentic narrative of the events which caused Professor Boyd Thompson to abandon a brilliant career, to promise anything that Lucilla might demand, and to devote himself entirely to a gentlemanly and unprofitable farming, and to his wife. From the point of view of the scientific world it is a sad ending to much promise, but at any rate there are two happy people hand in hand at the story’s ending.

  There is no doubt that for several years Professor Boyd Thompson had had enough of science, and, by a natural revulsion, flung himself into the full tide of commonplace sentiment. But genius, like youth, cannot be denied. And I, for one, am doubtful whether the Professor’s renunciation of research will be a lasting one. Already I have heard whispers of a laboratory which is being built on to the house, beyond the billiard-room.

  But I am inclined to believe the rumours which assert that, for the future, his research will take the form of extending paths already well trodden; that he will refrain from experiments with unknown drugs, and those dreadful researches which tend to merge the chemist and biologist in the alchemist and the magician. And he certainly does not intend to experiment further on the nerves of any living thing, even his own. The Professor had already done enough work to make the reputation of half-a-dozen ordinary scientists. He may be pardoned if he rests on his laurels, entwining them, to some extent, with roses.

  The bottle containing the drug from the South Seas was knocked down on the day of his death and swept up in bits by the laboratory boy. It is a curious fact that the Professor has wholly forgotten the formulae of his great discovery, the notes of which he destroyed just before his experiment which so nearly was his last. This is a great satisfaction to his wife, and possibly to the Professor. But of this I cannot be sure; the scientific spirit survives much.