Atlantic Street in unlighted for the three deserted blocks between the lunch wagon and the two big globes over the hospital gates. Consequently, as I swung along the sandy side path, I was able to see two figures standing in the middle of the gateway. I approached noiselessly, all the more interested when I recognized one of them as Nurse Finch. The other, I soon gathered, was the farmer named Tompkins; he was objecting, “But I can’t afford to pay no more to thet place, miss, ’spite of what ye say.”
“You leave her for the night,” Muriel insisted. “She’s just completely tuckered out, and there’s no sense bumping her back to the farm tonight. I’ll see to it that you don’t have to pay anything. And about the other bill, for the oxygen and all, just you forget it. None of the other doctors but him would have billed you with that.”
The old fellow growled that he would be glade to hand the money over to Wyck in person for the chance to do something or other; but just what the threat was I could not hear. Muriel extended her hand. He wiped his apologetically on his thigh before shaking hands with a vigorous, awkward jerk. Then he turned and went back through the gates to get his flivver. Muriel, to my surprise, turned north on the lonely road to Alton Center. There was no house in that direction for miles except old Gideon’s. I was about to join her when the question of her reason for walking in that direction, at such an hour, made me pause. I decided to intercept her in front of the Wyck residence if she did seem to actually to contemplate turning in there.
Then, just as I was about to call her name softly, I saw that she had passed the entrance. I quickened my pace, only to draw back against the barberry hedge, breathless, as the dapper little figure of Gideon himself stepped out and walked slowly after her. With heart pumping, I cautiously followed. I remember my amazement at thinking what an incorrigible old ankle-snatcher the man must be, to go strolling in the darkness with a pretty nurse, at the end of a day when he had seemed pale and shaky with illness; but it was no less puzzling that Muriel, after her hysterical denunciations, should have made this prearranged date with someone she hated so fiercely. The only explanation seemed to be, either that he was able to exercise some tyrannical power over her or that she was deliberately leading him toward some kind of revenge. The fact that both might be true made me all the more wary, as I crept along behind them.
They continued to walk slowly for nearly an hour, stopping only when they reached the second of two little bridges. There, as I crept within a few yards on hands and knees, in the moist dust of the roadside, I could see them standing still. The doctor was clinging to the railing of the bridge, as if the walk had exhausted him; it well might have, in the circumstances. My own heart was banging with the excitement of sheer uncertainty, as I crouched near them, half expecting to see Muriel produce a weapon, and wondering what I would do if she did.
“This is the end of it,” she said suddenly, in a husky voice that sounded very loud against the utter stillness. “I don’t care what becomes of me now. I said to myself today that this would be the last time, but there isn’t going to be another. I can’t keep this up any longer, no matter what you do to me. It’s all over, do you understand?”
“It was going to end tonight anyway,” he said curtly.
“Oh yeah?” she snapped. “Well, anyway, God’s a witness that I said it first. I didn’t go on and let it end some other way, because I was too scared. But if you want me to, I’ll go away and keep my own mouth shut, like I promised, when you made me.”
“You can go or stay as you please, Muriel. It makes no difference, so far as I’m concerned, after tonight.”
“No difference! Nothing ever made any difference to you. You never cared what happened to other people, so long as you got what you wanted. But do you think I could go on living here, after—”
The rest of it was lost in the noise made by a car. I expected the two talkers to scramble, as I did, for shelter; but they merely drew back against the railing. The car turned noisily on the Bottom Road, reversed, and went back to stop on the bridge again, pointing uphill. Dr. Wyck climbed painfully into the back seat, followed by Muriel. The driver used his clutch badly in starting, and stalled. As he got out to crank the engine of the battered Ford, I think I gasped audibly; for the face that showed in the headlights was that of a boy named Ted, who had come dashing into the hospital to learn the fate of Wyck’s maid.
The car again started with a jerk, and this time did not stall, but went scuttling up the hill in low, making a terrific racket.
Where was it going? At this moment of crisis I experienced a sensation of desperate responsibility—of a need to act quickly, with no knowledge of what to do at all. I was gripped with an absolute conviction that something intolerably evil had been occurring in a hidden place—that Mike’s choking terror of “the black one wit’ the white eyes” had something real to justify it—that he secret which Muriel dared not confess was far more sinister than any of the acts which long ago had made Gideon Wyck the most detested man within many miles.
I stood frozen by the bridge, watching the Ford’s lights make a weird moving pattern as it climbed higher and higher between the still leafless trees. The whole phrase of Mike’s rushed through my mind: “a black one it was, wit’ white eyes, like in the whole in the hill.”
Whatever the hole in the hill might be, I knew that that was where the car was going. What might turn out to be the last clue was disappearing up the hill. With cold fear gripping at my viscera, I started to follow.
Presently I realized, half-inspirationally, that I was at a fork. Deep ruts could be felt, leading both ways. I tried first the right-hand road; but it led promptly into holes which no car could have passed in that muddy season; so I turned back. The other way led before long into an open field, with more woods beyond, but with no spark of light to show where the car might have gone. Although I could still feel ruts underfoot plainly enough to follow them, in a short while I realized that they were lost.
The field was far larger than it had appeared, in the starlight, which of course gave no perspective. The usual wire fence was missing from the other edge of it, and there was no stone wall, or other means of tracing the opening for the old road. After blundering into and out of a score of black holes I realized the ridiculousness of my quest.
I started back. But more troubles were awaiting me. The road up which I had come seemed to have vanished entirely. Finally, in desperation, I started down anywhere through the dark woods. I am going to leave to your imagination the events of the next hour or two, at the end of which time I suddenly fond myself on a trail, and sank down in the middle of it, shaking with nervous exhaustion. When at last able to proceed, I found myself only a few yards above a little bridge which proved to be the first of the two leading up from the Bottom Road. This circumstance saved a mile of the walk back to town; but all the way the muscles of my legs were twitching and shivering.
The Wyck’s house, when I passed it, was as dark as pitch. The first chance to consult my watch came under the twin globes of the hospital gates. It proved to be 1:20 A.M. I had been gone nearly four hours.
The first thought that occurred to me was that the others might have returned to town before me. I decided to call the hospital from the Connells’, to find out about Muriel. As I approached the house, the sight of the lighted bedroom window, downstairs, made me fear that Mike had suffered another of his strange attacks. I was all the more alarmed when a closer view revealed Prexy’s Marmon parked in front of the house. I rushed in, but everything was quiet. Through the open door of Mike’s bedroom I could see that he was asleep, and that Dr. Alling was seated by the bedside holding a watch in his hand.
“Why, what’s happened?” I cried. “Where’s Mrs. Connell?”
“What’s happened to you?” Prexy asked sharply, staring at me in amazement.
Only then did I realize the full effect of my encounters with branches, stones and barbed-wire fences. My trousers were ripped. The bureau mirror showed trickles of blood on my hands and face, and a great blue bruise on my forehead. My coat was smeared with pitch from pine trees and I was covered with burrs. I was about to explain something of my adventures, if not their cause, when Mike groaned. I stepped back in horror from the wholly maniacal expression of fear that contorted his features. He rose to a sitting posture, while a shriek, which I shall never be able to forget, tore at my very heart. As once before, but now far louder, it panted in and out of his throat continuously, as if some fearful power were pumping at his lungs, crushing them mercilessly, only to draw them more forcibly open again.
I sprang to the bed. Poor Dr. Alling seemed even more affected, for he suddenly lifted the hand that contained his watch and banged it noisily on the bedside table. Mike’s right hand seized my let arm in a grip that numbed the muscles—and I realized that he was striving to smash my face with the other, the amputated, fist. Just as Prexy scuttled around the room, making for a hypodermic needle on the bureau, Mike began to slam me against the wall. He was still screaming frightfully. My efforts to get him back on the bed might as well have been addressed to a carthorse. I, for the moment at least, felt a dreadful suspicion that it was no Mike Connell gripping me but an iron-thewed fiend who had got possession of Mike’s body. In the grip of one hand only, he was actually lifting me from the floor to smash me harder against the door jamb. In that suspended instant, I saw the slight, childish figure of Dr. Alling, maneuvering bravely for a chance to use the hypodermic needle without breaking it. My glance shifted to Mike’s eyes, and I went sick with horror upon seeing that the irises had disappeared out of them, leaving nothing but inhuman black pupils, expanded as if by the action of belladonna. Then my skull crashed back pitilessly against the wall, and I can tell you of what happened next by hearsay only.
It seems that the needle did break, in entering Mike’s back, before any of the sedative contents of the syringe could be discharged. Conceiving that he was being attacked by Beelzebub again, Mike swung to hurl my limp body at Dr. Alling. This at least had the fortunate effect, from Prexy’s viewpoint if not from mind, of shielding him from the chair which was the next thing Mike hurled, before he rushed screaming from the house. Dr. Alling thinks that he himself was only momentarily stunned; and he must have had more strength than I ever credited him with, because when I came to I found that he had stretched me out on a pair of pillows on the floor. He was seated in a rocker, pressing his side, and groaning softly. When he saw my eyes open, however, he said, “Lie still,” and walked swaying to the phone to call for aid.
A couple of internes soon arrived with a stretcher. They wanted to put Prexy on it, but he insisted upon walking to the ambulance, to which I was carried. As they brought me up the hospital steps, I was greatly relieved to see that one of the two nurses who stepped up in attendance was Muriel Finch. Perhaps it was a result of having been knocked so vigorously on the head, but it seemed to me that her face was radiant with happiness. I quelled the temptation to speak with her, deciding that, so long as she was safe, it would be a very good notion to give my aching head a chance to digest the day’s bizarre events before saying anything that might betray my own part in them. So I let the two nurses put me to bed without saying anything at all.
While waiting for Jap to arrive, I ate breakfast in bed. He came in presently with some clothes of mine over his arm, jeering, “You’ll never get a job as keeper in any booby-hutch that I run, Dave. My booby-hutch keepers have got to be big enough to lick even the guys that think they’re Napoleon or something.”
“You mean Mike didn’t snap out of it, Jap?”
“Not him. They’ve got him in a strait-weskit, as the cockney’s call ’em, making out he’s the archangel Michael, or somebody. Claims he’s licked all the toughest devils in hell.”
“Cut out the wisecracks,” I ordered. “I liked that guy.”
“Well, you haven’t got much cause to, after the lathering he gave you last night. They say they found a piece of your pants over in the cemetery, where they got him at last, after an all-night hunt.”
“Did they have to hurt him?”
“Nah. They had the jacket on him before he came to. But he’s food for the squirrels, all right. What do you think they found he’d been doing? Digging up a grave—looking for blood, he said.”
Jap went out. A little later, when I was getting into my clothes, an interne named Jib Tucker gave me a factual account of what had happened to Mike. The poor fellow (I was about to write “the poor devil,” and perhaps I still should) had been found at daylight, lying unconscious on a new grave. The stump of his left arm was thrust into a deep hole which he evidently had clawed with his right hand.
As I was hearing the details, an awful, morbid notion took possession of my mind. I knew without needing to be told (and subsequent investigation substantiated the conviction) that the grave to which Mike had gone unerringly in his madness, through the dark night, was that of the boy Peter Thompkins, in whose dead body some of the blood of Mike’s own being had so recently incurred the mystery of death.
My head was buzzing, and I felt sick and scared.
Presently the fit of panic passed. I got a grip on myself when I remembered that Biddy would need to be consoled; but the memory of her plight only deepened the mystery. She had no been at home when I arrived, long after midnight. Where could she have been, and what had brought Dr. Alling to the bedside, while Mike was still quietly sleeping?
Daisy Towers might have an answer, I thought. It would be out of character for her not to have one, plus a complete history of what had happened, neatly arranged in her efficient pretty head. I limped downstairs, and stopped at the reception window. She twitted me genially for having been so badly mauled by a one-armed invalid.
“How’s Biddy taking it?”