Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (45 page)

‘Good God!’ exclaimed Meredith, now thoroughly aroused. Then, after a minute’s anxious reflection: ‘What were the words, Doctor? Did you make notes of them?’

‘Yes, I have them here,’ answered the psychiatrist, and brought a thin sheaf of papers out of his breast-pocket.

Meredith was out of his chair and leaning eagerly over the doctor’s shoulder long before Cowlington had his papers arranged. He gazed with a consuming intensity at the words and phrases carefully typed on several sheets of foolscap; listened, with an almost tremulous attention, while Dr Cowlington carefully reproduced the sounds of these uncouth terms. Then, taking the sheets and resuming his chair, he read through all that had been written down, pronouncing the words, though very quietly, under his breath, his lips barely moving.

He was pale, and shaking from head to foot when he rose at last and handed back, hands trembling, the thin fascicle of papers to its owner. Dr Cowlington looked at him anxiously, his professional mind alert, his fears somewhat aroused over the wisdom of this experiment of his in bringing his former case thus abruptly to his patient’s attention. Dr Cowlington felt, if he had cared to put his impression into words, somewhat baffled. He could not, despite his long and careful training in dealing with mental, nervous, and ‘borderline’ cases, quite put his acute professional finger upon just which one of the known simple and complex emotions was, for this moment, dominating this very interesting patient of his.

Dr Cowlington would have been even more completely puzzled if he had known.

For Meredith, reading through the strange babblings of the patient, Smith, had recognized all the words and terms, and had lit upon the phrase –

‘Our beloved Bothon has disappeared.’

Dr Cowlington, sensing accurately that it might be unwise to prolong this particular interview, concluded wisely that Meredith would most readily regain his normal poise and equanimity if left alone to cope with whatever, for the time being, held possession of his mind, rose quietly and walked over to the bedroom door.

He paused there, however, for an instant, before leaving the room, and looked back at the man now introspectively relaxed in a comfortable lounge-chair. Meredith had not, apparently, so much as noted the doctor’s movements towards departure. His mind, very obviously, was turned inward. He was, it appeared, entirely oblivious to his surroundings.

And Dr Cowlington, whose professional outward deportment, acquired through years of contact with abnormal people, had not wholly obliterated a kindly disposition, noted with a certain emotion of his own that there were unchecked tears plainly visible in his patient’s inward-gazing eyes.

Summoned back to Meredith’s room an hour later by one of his house nurses, Dr Cowlington found his patient restored to his accustomed urbane normality.

‘I asked you to come up for a moment, Doctor,’ began Meredith, ‘because I wanted to inquire if there is anything that you would care to give a patient to induce sleep.’ Then, with a deprecating smile: ‘The only such things I know about are morphine and laudanum! I don’t know very much about medicine and naturally you wouldn’t want to give me one of those any more than I would want to take it.’

Dr Cowlington resumed his judicial manner. He thought rapidly about this unexpected request. He took into consideration how his story about the patient, Smith, had appeared to upset Meredith. He deliberately refrained from inquiring why Meredith wanted a sleeping potion. Then he nodded his head.

‘I use constantly a very simple preparation,’ said he; ‘it is non-habit-forming; based on a rather dangerous drug, chloral; but, as I use it for my patients, compounded with an aromatic syrup and diluted with half a tumbler of water, it works very well. I will send some up to you at once, and you can take it yourself. Remember, please, four teaspoonfuls of the syrup is the outside dose. Two will probably be enough. Never more than four at any time, and not more than one dose in twenty-four hours.’

Dr Cowlington rose, came over to Meredith, and looked at the place where he had struck the side of his head against the marble wall of his shower-bath. The bruise was still swollen. The doctor passed his fingers lightly over this contusion.

‘It’s beginning to go down,’ he remarked. ‘It’s just at the posterior edge of the mastoid process of the temporal bone. You’re fortunate, I think, that we didn’t have to put you through an operation for mastoiditis. A bruise over the network of little laminated bones that are under that spot is always a risk, you know.’

The doctor smiled pleasantly, again nodded his head at Meredith, and started to leave. Meredith stopped him as he was about to go out of the room.

‘Yes?’ said the doctor inquiringly, as he turned, his hand on the bedroom door-handle.

‘I wanted to ask you,’ said Meredith – and the acute-minded Cowlington suspected a faint note of diffidence in his patient’s tone – ‘I wanted to ask you, Doctor, if you would be willing to put me in touch with the man to whom you referred as “Smith”.’

The doctor shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Smith died two years ago.’

In ten minutes the house nurse fetched in a small tray. On it was a tumbler, a mixing spoon, and a freshly put up eight-ounce bottle containing a reddish colored, pleasant-tasting syrup.

Twenty minutes later, Meredith, who had compromised on three teaspoons, was deeply asleep on his bed; and the General, Bothon, in the innermost dungeon-chamber of the great citadel of Alu, was standing poised in the center of that dungeon’s smooth stone floor, tensed to leap in any direction; while all about him the rending crashes of thousands of tons of the riven and falling masonry of the citadel itself was deafening him against all other sounds except the incessant and indescribably thunderous fury of the now utterly maddened ocean. The lurid glare of the fires from without had been markedly heightened. Detonation after rending detonation came to Bothon’s ears at frequent intervals. The Aluans were blowing up this central portion of their great city, as he was able quite easily to guess, in order to check the advance of the terrific conflagration which had raged for days and nights and was utterly beyond control. These detonations seemed actually faint to the alert man in that prison room against the hideous crashing of the sections of the citadel itself, and the well-nigh unbearable sustained roar of the ocean.

Abruptly the crisis for which he had been waiting arrived. The stone flooring beneath his feet buckled and sagged at his right. He whirled about and leaped far in the other direction, pressing himself, hands and arms stretched out above his head, against the wall of the prison-chamber, his heart pounding wildly, his breath coming in great gasps and sobs as the stifling, earthquake-deadened air about him shrank to a sudden and devastating attenuation. Then the solid wall opposite split in a tearing gap from top to bottom; and an even more stifling cloud of fine white dust sifted abruptly through the room as the ceiling was riven asunder.

Stifling, choking, fighting for breath and life, the General, Bothon, lowered his arms and whirled about again in the direction of this thunderous breakage, and groped his way across the now precarious flooring in the faint hope of discovering an avenue of escape. He struggled up a steep mound of
débris
through the grey darkness of the hanging dust where a few seconds before had been a level floor of solid masonry. He groped his way through thicker clouds of the drifting, settling stone-dust, skirted the irregular edges of yawning holes and toiled up and down mounded heaps of rubble, far past the place where the confining wall of his dungeon had stood, onward and forward resolutely towards that vague goal of freedom.

At last, the resources of his mighty body well-nigh spent, himself a solid grey from hair to sandals from the thickly clinging dust, his eyes two tortured red holes, his mouth and throat one searing pain, his heart and lungs well-nigh bursting, the General, Bothon, emerged across the last hill of rubbish which had been the citadel of Alu, and came out upon the corner edge of one of the largest of the city’s great public squares.

For the first time in the course of his progress out of that death trap, unscathed save for a long shallow gash where in the darkness he had scraped the upper portion of his right thigh sharply against the rough cutting-edge of a great chunk of granite, but now barely able either to see or breath, Bothon suddenly trod on something soft and yielding. He paused. He could hardly see, and he crouched and felt with his hands, under the thickly mounded dust. It was the body of a man, in chain mail. The General, Bothon, exhaled a painful breath of satisfaction. He rolled the body over, freeing it from the pounds of dust upon it, and slid his hand along the copper-studded leather belt to where a short, heavy, one-handed battle-axe was attached. This he drew from its sheath. Then from the dead man’s silken tunic which his hand had encountered he tore off a large section and with this cleansed his eyes and mouth and wiped the sweat-caked dust from his face and arms and hands. Finally he took from the corpse a heavy leathern purse. He sensed that this nook where he had discovered his unknown benefactor was a secluded spot where the dust had concealed the body from looters or the horrible attentions of the ghoulish Gyaa-Hua, mobs of which creatures, freed as he had been from their strict confinement, had added to the city’s horrors their bestial chitterings and unspeakable feastings on the bodies of the dead. He lay down for a few moments beside the dead soldier on the soft dust for a brief respite and to rest the tissues of his body and to permit his tear and salivary glands to readjust themselves to their normal functions and so somewhat to relieve the burning torture of his mouth and nose and eyes.

Some ten minutes later he rose to his feet, wiped his lips and the now freely flowing tears from his restored eyes, stretched himself mightily, tested the heavy axe with three or four singing strokes through the clearing air, and dusted out and readjusted his garments, finally tightening a loosened sandal thong. General Bothon, inured to mere physical hardships by the many years of rigid military activity, was his own man again. He stood now free in the center of Alu. He was adequately armed. A great gust of energy surged through him. He oriented himself; then he turned with an instinct as sure as a homing bee’s in the direction he had been seeking, and began to march at the unhurrying, space-devouring pace of a Ludektan legionary, straight for the Imperial Palace.

Bothon had thoroughly settled in his mind the answer to a question which, for the first few days of his captivity had puzzled him greatly. Why had he been left alone and undisturbed in that confinement; food and water brought him at regular intervals in accordance with the ordinary routine of the citadel? Why, to put the matter plainly, having been obviously captured by the Emperor’s retainers while lying unconscious within two squares of the Imperial Palace, had he not been summarily crucified? His keen trained mind had apprised him that the answer was to be found in the hideous turmoil of the raging sea and in the fearful sounds of a disintegrating city. The Emperor had been too greatly occupied by those cataclysms even to command the punishment of this leader of such an armed attack against the world’s metropolis as had not been known in all the long history of the mother continent.

Skirting its enormous outer walls, Bothon came at last to the massive chief entrance-way to the Imperial Palace. This enormous structure, its basic walls eight feet thick, stood massive, magnificent, intact. Without any hesitation he began mounting the many broad steps straight towards the magnificent entrance-gates of copper and gold and porphyry. Before these gates, in a rigid line and under the command of an officer beneath whose corselet appeared the pale blue tunic of the Emperor’s household-guards, stood a dozen fully armed soldiers. One of these, at a word from the officer, ran down the steps to turn back this intruder. Bothon slew him with a single crashing stroke and continued to mount the steps. At this a shouted command of the officer sent the entire troop down the steps upon him in close order. Bothon paused, and, waiting until the foremost was no more than the space of two of the broad steps above him, leaped lightly to his right. Then as the foremost four of the soldiers passed beyond him under the impetus of their downward charge, Bothon as lightly leaped back again, his heavy axe fairly singing now as he fell upon the troop’s flank with deadly, short, quick-swinging blows. Before they could collect themselves the officer and five of his men lay dead upon the steps. Leaving the demoralized remainder to gather themselves together as best they might, Bothon leaped up the intervening steps and was through the great entrance-doors, and, with a pair of lightning-like right-and-left strokes of his axe, had disposed of the two men-at-arms; stationed just inside the doorway.

His way into the Palace now entirely unobstructed, Bothon sped through well-remembered rooms and along broad corridors into the very heart of the Imperial Palace of Alu.

Traversing the very last of these, that leading to the quarter of the palace occupied by the Netvis Toldon, brother of the Emperor, with his family, it abruptly occurred to Bothon that the deafening intensity of the long-sustained roaring of the ocean and the crashing clamor from the city had lessened. His hearing, after many days of that unspeakable bedlam, had, as he realized, necessarily become adjusted to the incessant impact of the conglomerate thunderings. Might it be breaking down now under the strain of such unwonted continuity? He dismissed that solution as merely improbable. In every respect the terrific complex clamors continued, only there was that general and quite obvious softening in their general effect to be accounted for. Lowered vitality from the wound in his thigh? His long military training had brought that possible solution uppermost. His common-sense dismissed it, together with the problem itself, from his mind. He had something of greater import to tax his energies than troubling his mind over a question of acoustics.