Clay Page 14

  It was not real; I lay riveted to the bed by some subconscious paralysis, and told myself it was a dream; an hallucination spawned by overwrought nerves and the macabre adventure through which I had gone in the past month. In reality, there could never exist a loathesome monster such as crowded its face close to mine in this horrible instant. Yet, even as I denied my sense of sight, a damp hand brushed my chest; fingers closed on my windpipe; the lips bared decayed teeth in a malevolent leer. The form lurched nearer and the free hand rose, very slowly. I stared, unbelieving, at the scalpel grasped in those murderous fingers. And then, I knew. This was no childhood nightmare that would wither and die in sobs of waking relief. This was inescapable truth. I knew that in the maniacal visage that bent above my bed, I was seeing myself, the pale killer, as my victim had seen me in his moment of final agony; viewing the horror of my soul through the eyes of Simon Conrad, the man I had murdered!

  I think I screamed. I tore free of the vise-like talons and crashed blindly to the floor. I stumbled to my feet, clutching the doorway for support. And then, I ran. Aimlessly, madly, I ran, winding through the labyrinthian ways of the Castle, whimpering like the fabled child, lost in the Forest. I ran until my heart pounded in my ears, my breath jolted from exhausted lungs. In the end, I cowered in some niche in the upper darkness of Zengerstein, and waited.

  It did not come. I waited like a beaten animal for death, and it did not come. The Thing of the mirror gave no pursuit. Behind me, the catacombs of corridor lay silent. Gradually, my sobbing quieted; my pulse slowed but remained erratic. Sweat bathed the seamed pallor of my face. Very slowly, I wound my way toward the flickering of the lamp that still burned in my bedchamber; carefully—with what fearful gentleness!—I opened the door... Nothing. The room was empty. Plaintively, the storm begged entrance at the casements; outside, the hounds bayed. In the chamber itself, there was no sound save the mocking hiss of the gas lamp.

  And it has been thus for the last three hours.

  But, I am not fooled. I am still as clever as that Thing that lurks in the abyss of the mirror; I know the game it plays with me—a torturing game of cat-and-mouse. It has retreated, now; it would have me hope; it would have me believe it was all a dream, a trick of the imagination. I am not so stupid. There are facts you cannot escape; there are scientific reports of the last image beheld by a dying man remaining indelible in the dead eyes; the last thing Simon Conrad saw was I, the glint of the scalpel in my hand; a murderer come to claim him. So, you see why I am not fooled; you see why I am afraid. The mirror is dark, now. But, in its inscrutable well, nameless evil stirs, and would come to life the evil of murder and insanity that claimed Simon Conrad; the pallid horror that, sooner or later, shall rise again, from the depths to claim...

  Wait... the liquescence in the mirror shifts... the evil writhes like forming ectoplasm... You see... I was not wrong... A rustling... the sounds made by the slow approach of ponderous death... a blur, now, in the glass... Yes!... That pale, fat face... nearer... Dear-God ...the eyes... the scaled blind eyes... and the scalpel... moving... upward... no...

  *

  I HAD come to the conclusion that the case of the disappearance of Simon Conrad was insoluble. I was wet and disgruntled; my men were glad the night was at an end. After hours of wandering the Schwarzwald region, fighting rain and treacherous marshes, we had unearthed nothing. Near dawn, the storm abated; the men returned, stoop-shouldered, to the Inn for dry clothes and warmed schnapps. For a long time, I stood irresolute on the Forest’s edge, staring across the lands of Zengerstein to where the ivy-slimed Castle ramparts rose like barricades guarding some ancient secret. I hated the thought of returning to Conrad’s wife and friends in Donaueschingen, unable to answer one of their anguished questions.

  I am not certain what impulse took, me across the village and round the steaming tarn to the gates of Zengerstein; perhaps; I merely wanted someone to talk to, and the solitary light - that still burned in an upper window of the Castle seemed inviting; or perhaps some inner uncertainty as to the position of Herr Doktor Markheim in this singular affair still nagged me. I do not know. But, of one thing I am certain. I did not expect the horrible discovery that awaited me.

  The hounds that guarded the estate were chained; I had no difficulty gaining the Castle doors, But; there was no answer to the doleful summons of the knocker. The door was not locked. I called out for Markheim; I called for that strange little companion of his named Victor. Nothing. Only solemn reverberations of my own voice. And then, I went upstairs.

  The light burning in that upper room sent slices of yellow through the portal crevices. I knocked. I tried to break in. In the end, I had to summon four of my men. Even then, the door gave way reluctantly. The bedchamber was in a state of chaos. The mirror by the bed had been smashed to evilly-smiling slivers, and before it, sprawled the corpse of Luther Markheim, the slit in his throat torn wide, the scalpel still in his rigid fingers. A pool of his lifeblood made a scarlet halo about the swollen white mask of his face. On the writing-table in one corner, gaslight wavered across the blood-spattered pages of the Markheim manuscript.

  Herr Roderick, the coroner from Donaueschingen, is a small man with a cadaverous face and a reputation for being hardheaded and realistic; a man whose profession hovers constantly on the brink of death can hardly be otherwise. He listened to the story of Simon Conrad; he glanced through the manuscript of Luther Markheim and made a minute examination of the body. We followed the corpse down the clammy stairway. It was extremely heavy and took four men to carry it. Gingerly, the men arranged it in the hearse alongside the liquescent, decadence that was the remains of Conrad and Victor Rupert. The horses shied in the rain, as though conscious and fearful of the burden they drew slowly down the desolate hillside.

  *

  I STAYED behind; there was still the routine investigation of the estate to be gotten through for the sake of my official report. Roderick, sucked his tobacco-stained teeth and followed me into the gloom of the library. He lit his pipe; a smoke cloud hovered between us, as if frozen in the chilled half light. I sank into a chair and sat staring into the fireless grate. After a time, I sighed, and riffled the pages of the manuscript that lay in my lap.

  “Strange Case” I murmured. “Hideously strange...”

  For a moment Roderick gazed at the tiny bonfire in his pipebowl. Then, quietly, he observed: “Even stranger than you think, my dear Koch...”

  I looked at him askance; he went on slowly.

  “Did you notice anything singular about Markheim’s body, Inspektor?”

  I shook my head.

  “The eyes,” Roderick said thoughtfully. “I examined the eyes very closely; there is scar-tissue about the sockets, as if an operation had been performed recently... But, the eyes in Markheim’s head were brown... and the eyes of a man who had been blind for years!”

  I could only stare.

  “But, Markheim could see! He said he could see...”

  Roderick moved his bony head from side to side.

  “Not with those eyes, mein herr. Nein. Luther Markheim never saw the Castle von Zengerstein; he only thought he saw it; willed himself to see it; what Markheim saw were the reflections of his own memories. The Thing that crept from the mirror, the monster that was himself seen through the eyes of Simon Conrad, existed only in Markheim’s ego-warped mind. It was an idea that pursued Markheim into the shadow-valley of madness; the guilty memory of the crime he committed. It was an idea that led him to destruction by the very hand that destroyed Conrad—the hand of Luther Markheim!”

  “Still...” I frowned. “The manuscript. You read it. Rupert...”

  “Rupert!” Roderick interrupted. “Ja. There lies the key to the puzzle, mein freund. I read the manuscript, as you say. I read of Markheim’s own fear of Rupert’s cowardice; he knew that Rupert was a weakling. But, he didn’t guess that the weakling had a secret. A secret he was too terrified to disclose after the experiment; a secret he tried to scream out in h
is dying breath. The weakling, strong, as long as the will of Markheim upheld him, lost his strength as soon as that will wavered under anaesthetic. Victor-Rupert began the transplantation of the eyes, but he never had the nerve to complete, it!”

  “Fantastic!” I rose abruptly. “My dear Roderick, you’ve read too much of this new fellow Freud. Why... it’s absurd. The will isn’t that powerful; it could never make a blind man believe he saw; not even a madman... Don’t be a fool...”

  The coroner did not argue. He only shrugged and smiled, at me through the haze of pipesmoke. His voice was quiet.

  “Perhaps we’d better have a drink...”

  We did; neither of us broached the matter again. After a time, he left and I began my inventory of the Castle.

  I apologized to Roderick later that day. He was far from being a fool. My final investigation of the house of Zengerstein proved that. In the laboratory of Luther Markheim, on a metal stand near the operating table, I discovered a glass beaker filled with a saline solution of some sort. In the crystal-clear liquid floated two elliptical, shining orbs. The irises seemed to stare up at me, clear and keen and very blue. They were the eyes of a man who smiled in ultimate triumph.

  Clay

  I have not been there since. I am not alone in this. It has come to my knowledge that all the doctors who once held residences in the Institution on the northern lip of Dunnesmouth, have quit the place never to return. It is not strange. Men who shared such memories were bound to run from the doomed house that spawned them. Wickford could not have stayed on, any more than I; even that enthusiastic youngster of medicine. Fothering was badly shaken by the hideous outcome of the case of Jeremy Bone. These men stood in the soundless chapel, and remembered mouldering death discovered in its dim alcoves; they passed the room once occupied by Jeremy Bone, and saw again the foul liquescent thing that rose from lost hells to defy the reasoning of normal minds. Is it a wonder that they left and did not go back?

  But, others, who have never heard of the Curse of the Mark of Clay, have ventured once or twice into that ill-reputed region near Dunnesmouth. I have heard them speak of crumbling porticos and eaves sagged in, and boys from the village who come witch-hunting by night, tossing stones at the ghost of the moon in shattered windowpanes. They say the road is strangled with brambles and the wrought-iron fence leans drunkenly inward; the gate is unhinged and rust has eaten at the brass plaque on the gatepost. But, if one dares come close enough, one may still read the name, Wickford House, and below it, in barren letters, the solitary word: ASYLUM.

  In an earlier, happy time, Wickford House was quite different. There was no smell of musty documents hidden away in a teakwood case; there were no stains of clay on a swollen purple throat. The lawns were green and fresh with New England dew; the house was well-kept, with white porticos and green shutters and an air of gentle peace. Boys played at simple sports on the enclosed lawns; their faces were calm, unworried; white-coated attendants moved among them almost unnoticed. At times, even now, the memory of Dr. Gaunt’s hearty laughter overshadows the horror of those later days. Peter Gaunt understood the “boys”; he could handle them as none else could. Even Wickford admitted that, under Gaunt’s care, the boys never seemed what they were—inmates of an asylum for the insane.

  Insane. Perhaps my use of that word is ill-advised. Of late, I cannot hear it spoken without experiencing a sickly mental shudder. It holds forbidding nuances that terrify me as they never could in the old days. It is a word I once thought I understood; today, I am not so sure. It was a word Peter Gaunt hated; a strange statement to make regarding a psychiatrist, is it not? Still, every aspect of this affair has been strange—horribly strange. Insane. Yes. That was the word Gaunt and Wickford were arguing over the night of the day Jeremy Bone came to Gaunt’s ward.

  We were finishing our brandy in the leathery seclusion of the library. It was a large room, high-ceilinged, with an antiquated, smoke-grimed fireplace. Booklined walls and velvet portieres drawn across the casements to shut out the whimper of the rain gave it an air of smugness and peace. The boys were settled for the night in their dormitories; occasionally, a man in white passed along the darkened corridors. That was all. Even the shrill laughter of the boy called Trask, who had spells of hilarity in the loneliness of rainy nights, seemed distant and undisturbing. I dawdled over a volume of Stekel, not really reading; over the booktop, I studied Wickford.

  ***

  Firelight made his round face rounder and more ruddy. White hair rose from the massive forehead like a leonine mane. Wickford wiped pince-nez on an immaculate handkerchief. He was the portrait of a satisfied successful man of medicine; he had made his mark; in the realm of psychiatric research, the name Harrison Wickford was one to conjure with; his was a voice to listen to. At sixty-odd, the head of his own sanitarium, author of countless theses, calm, smiling, self-confident. His voice had adopted a sure, pedantic tone.

  “…All they require is care, patience, occasional restraint,” he was telling Gaunt. “Keeping these in mind, it’s easy enough to handle the insane…”

  Peter Gaunt winced, turning a weary smile on me. I smiled back.

  One of Wickford’s eyebrows arched petulantly; he didn’t like the thought of being laughed at.

  “I wasn’t aware I’d said anything humorous…”

  “Insane.” Gaunt stared at his brandy. “That word is so definite—hopeless…”

  Wickford shrugged. “Insanity is a very definite thing.”

  “Is it?” The bony head moved from side to side. “I’m not at all certain. Can we say definitely that a man is insane because he is unlike us—his mind functions a shade differently? The borderline between the sane and insane, between fact and fantasy, is too shadowy for any explicit delineation. Perhaps we have no right to brand these boys with the cold, irrevocable word, insane. Perhaps they are confused, frightened, pushed too close to that shadowline between to distinguish reality from fantasy… But, then, at times, aren’t we all?”

  Wickford looked vague; his pink soft hand waved indefinitely. He laughed.

  “Bosh, my dear Gaunt! Sheer bosh! Why if that’s how you look at it, there is no way of telling just where sanity ends and insanity begins; no way of being certain of your shadowing of ‘fact and fantasy’… How could we know exactly who is sane or insane?”

  Dark eyes fastened on Wickford. Peter Gaunt gave him a sharp, quizzical grin.

  “Precisely,” he said. “How?”

  Wickford’s mouth was a surprised “O.” His eyes went bland, then he must have decided it was all a joke, for he laughed and jogged my elbow.

  “I say, sometimes I do believe this Gaunt of ours belongs among the boys rather than the doctors.”

  The laugh got loud. I smiled politely. Gaunt smiled wearily.

  Wickford changed the subject; he turned to Gaunt. “Speaking of boys, have you seen the new one I had transferred to your ward today?”

  “You mean Bone?” Gaunt nodded thoughtfully. “I’ve seen him.”

  There was a hollow tone to the words; they echoed in the silent room. A log-corpse sagged on the grate.

  “Bone,” Wickford said. “Yes, that’s it. Jeremy Bone. Odd name, eh? Seemed to be doing very poorly; no progress toward normalcy. Those delusions of persecution persist; he keeps talking of a person he calls Oliver, who tortures him… I thought you might do something with him. You’ve a way with stubborn cases.”

  My curiosity was aroused. That was the first I’d heard of Jeremy Bone. I wish now I’d never heard the damnable sound of his name. But that night I felt no presentiment of horror; I felt only curiosity.

  “Bone?” I leaned forward. “Who is he? What’s his history?”

  “That’s right,” Gaunt said. “I’d forgotten. You haven’t seen him…”

  He lit his pipe and blew out the match.

  “As Doctor Wickford said, it’s a fascinating case. This Jeremy Bone is quite young—seventeen, I believe—and, to be quite truthful, we don’t kn
ow a great deal about him. We do know he comes of very old New England stock; somewhere on the heels of the Mayflower. His mother died when he was born. According to newspaper stories, his father died just a year later, of what seemed depression over some secret tragedy no one has ever been able to fathom.”

  “And Jeremy?” I prompted.

  “Raised by a maiden great-aunt,” Wickford said. “Queer old duck, she was, by all accounts. Reared the boy in the utmost seclusion; no schools; no friends; only the musty rooms of an ancient gargoyle of a mansion.”

  Peter Gaunt stared at the glow of his pipebowl.

  “I believe loneliness is one of the things wrong with the boy. And some torturing fear. The sort of fear that may have destroyed his father; terror of some strange thing in the past of his family perhaps.”

  “Nonsense!” snapped Wickford. “Fear! Loneliness! Sounds like a melodrama. The boy is a plain and simple case of unbalance; melancholia bordering on depressive mania, due to this persecution complex.”

  “Words!” Gaunt rapped out his pipe with an impatient movement. “Words! Can they fathom the uneasy thoughts of a frightened mind like Jeremy Bone’s? Can they allay his fears—fears that may be half-real?”