The Haunts & Horrors MEGAPACK®. Lawrence Watt-Evans
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“Strychnine in a hypo, hurry!” I commanded when the girl came stumbling in her haste. “If you’d pay more attention to your duties—” It wasn’t fair. She’d been on duty since the night before and there were heavy, violet circles underneath her eyes, but raw nerves make raw words, and heaven knew our nerves were all rasped raw. “Never mind,” I added as she turned reproachful eyes on me. “Never mind the hypo, Nurse. Call the head orderly and tell him to bring the wheel-cot and change the linen on this bed. We’ve got another vacancy.”
“Oh!” her sob was hard and ugly, like a smothered cry. “Another?”
“Another,” I repeated as I drew the sheet across the dead boy’s face. I’d nailed another lie. Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt. Not for death, anyway.
I was in that state of bodily exhaustion that gives a curiously deceptive sense of brightness of mind as I walked down the corridor from B-18. Nine years could make a lot of changes, but at the end I’d recognized Lieutenant Thomas Ten Eyck as surely as if I’d known him always. As I glanced through the grimy window to the cheerless courtyard where the February wind was busy chasing little whirls of snow across the red-brick tiles it seemed to me that I could look clear down the vista of the years and straight across the ocean to a sun-washed summer afternoon in Fairmount Park where a boy and girl were idling by the monkey cage and he was telling her, “I bet you couldn’t do it,” as a little monkey fed itself from its hind foot.
She’d almost fainted at his none too witty sally. Why? Did it bring up tragic thoughts of her mother? Hardly. She’d not been fearful of the monkey’s. Seeing them had raised no phobia. Not until he called attention to the monkey’s feeding, and expressed doubt she could duplicate it, did she wilt. Why? The question rose again, insistently, but found no answer.
Funny thing about life, I reflected. I had seen them for a possible three minutes on that day nine years ago. Then our lives had crossed again in Germany. She was somewhere in the city now, unmindful of his presence; he was lying in his bed back there with a sheet across his face, past all hopes and all defeats, quits with destiny before his manhood fairly started.
* * * *
“Carmichael, for Gawd’s sake, give me a snort!” Weinberg came stamping into my quarters, flakes of February snow adhering to the collar of his sheepskin, a drawn and almost haunted look on his face.
“Surest thing in Germany,” I returned as I broke out brandy, soda water, and glasses. “Been wishin’ I had someone here to drink with me.”
He splashed about three ounces of raw cognac in the tumbler and drained it almost at a gulp. His hand had trembled when it put the drink to his lips, but in a moment it grew steady, which to anyone who knows drinking and drinking men, is a bad sign.
“Easy on, old top,” I cautioned as he poured a second, even larger, drink. “You know you’re welcome to it, but—”
I stopped my protest as I looked into his eyes.
There was no trace of the brilliant, carefree, wise-cracking young medico whose steadiness of hand and eye and uncanny ability as an orthopedist were the talk of all who knew him. Instead, his countenance was serious with what Carlyle once called “the awful, deadly earnestness of the Hebrew.”
“I saw it again tonight,” he told me, and despite the warming glow of the brandy he shivered.
“Saw what?”
“Remember the lividities on that bloke’s neck—the one we found dead on the train from Paris?”
“The one you said looked as if he’d been throttled by an ape?”
He nodded, taking a long sip of brandy. “Check.”
“Where?”
“Over at the mortuary. I’d come off duty and was washing up in the basement when young Himiston—you know him, Cornell ’16; came over with the last replacement from the draft—called me over to a wheel-cot standing by the entrance to the autopsy room. ‘Ever see anything like this. Captain?’ he asked, drawing back the sheet from a body. ‘Nobody can figure it; they found him in the hall outside N-l8, the women’s ward, dead as a herring with his head turned almost all the way around—just as if something had wrung his neck like a chicken’s.’
“There it was, so help me, Carmichael, point for point and line for line, the same bruise-pattern as the one you saw on the train from Paris and I’d seen once before at Bellevue Mortuary.”
“What’s the history?” I demanded as I helped myself to cognac. Somehow I, too, was beginning to feel chilly, despite the fierce heat from the porcelain stove.
“Here it is—” He spread his fingers fanwise and checked the items off. “There’s a crowd of nurses—five or six of ’em—laid up with the flu in N-18. Next door, in a semi-private which happens to be private now because the other inmate died this afternoon, is Miss Watrous. Just down the corridor, in M-40, is Amberson, in drydock with a smashed collar-bone, and next to him, in 41, is apKern with the flu. Notice anything?”
“Three of the five people who were in the compartment when the German spy was throttled were within a hundred feet or so of the spot where, presumably, this man was killed—again presumably—in the same way.”
“Right. Right as a rabbit. This fellow was a Polack from Pennsylvania, miner or something; big as a horse and strong as a bull. Influenza convalescent who’d gone raving-wild on some whiskey someone smuggled into the first floor wards. Crazy as a chinch-bug, and with a killing streak on him. He’d knocked an orderly out cold and gone wandering through the hospital. While they were looking for him on the ground floor, he was running up and down the second-story corridors, peeking into rooms and wards and scaring all he patients senseless. Finally he reached the nurses’ ward.”
“And—” I prompted as he fell silent.
“‘And’ is right,” he answered finally. “He came barging into the ward, snatched the blankets off the first bed, and lay down in it. When the patient in it tried to get out, he grabbed her.”
Then he answered the unspoken question in my eyes: “No, he might have thought about that later; right then he was intent on murder and destruction. He took her by the hair with one hand and clutched her throat in the other and was about to break her neck when something—get this, they’re all agreed on it—something rushed in from the corridor, snatched him by the neck, and dragged him out.”
“Something? What was it?” I asked fatuously.
“That’s just what nobody knows. The only light in N-18 was a candle, no electric bulbs in there, for it used to be a storeroom and was never wired. When the big Bohunk fanned the bedclothes back, he blew the candle out, so all the light they had was what came through the window from the courtyard. The girls were all too weak to fight him, but not too weak to yell, and they were setting up an awful clamor when It rushed in.”
I leaned forward, about to ask another question.
“Keep your blouse on, can’t you?” he demanded irritably, befoere I could frame my thought. “I’m telling you everything I know. When I say ‘It,’ I’m as near to being specific as anybody. Something—and no two of ’em are agreed on what it was—came crashing in from the hallway and grabbed the murdering drunkard by the neck, hustled him out, and killed him, just as something we don’t know about did in that Jerry secret agent on the train from Paris.”
“Some of the girls declare it looked like a great white ape, one thinks it was a spider bigger than a man, but all agree it handled that six-footer as if he’d been a baby. Now,” he tapped me on the knee in sober emphasis, “I’m not saying there’s any connection between the fact that some of those who were with us on the Paris train were within striking distance of N-18 tonight, but I do say it gives us something to think about.”
“I’m afraid you’re goin’ off the deep end,” I told him. “Amberson’s laid up with a smashed clavicle.