The man of mystery showed weird burns that came and went on his body. In dreadful fashion, the doctor learned the why of it.
THE strangest thing in my long and varied career as a general practitioner happened in prosaic New York, not twelve blocks from where I still have my office.
At the time, I was just starting out in general practice, with a glittering new shingle and little else except a professional beard. Patients were few and far between in those days, and yet I was full of enthusiasm and confidence in the all-powerfulness of science. I had a great deal of spare time, and I used to amuse myself by analyzing my patients and the few other people I met, and by guessing at their life stories from their appearance. But never in all my idle wondering did I dream of as grotesque a series of happenings as the weird incidents that involved Andrew Clyde.
I looked up, one morning early, to see him sitting in my outer office, twitching so nervously that I thought him a drug addict, or "snowbird," as they call themselves. His face was drawn and haggard, though he must have been in his early thirties, and I noticed that his hair was slightly gray.
When I called him into my office, I discovered that his scalp and left foot were covered with the ugliest burns I had ever seen. Great blisters had formed, and then broken. While the wounds were fairly superficial, and not exactly dangerous to life, yet they must have been causing him excruciating pain. He sat sullenly in a chair and submitted to the examination without saying a word.
I saw that the burns must have been made within a few hours, since their edges had not yet begun to cicatrize, a stage which precedes healing. He refused to tell me any reason why he had not sooner sought medical treatment, or to explain how he had been burned. He seemed in a highly nervous state rather than in physical agony, though the burn on the side of his skull should have been enough to render him unconscious.
AFTER treating him with the usual oils and unguents, I bandaged him as carefully as I knew how. He did not wince, and, in fact, it seemed to me as if there were no sensitiveness at all in the affected regions. At first, I had imagined that the wounds might have been caused by the sulphuric acid used in etching counterfeit money plates, but the burns were of a non-acid type.
As he stood up to go, I began to warn him about the consequences of failing to take care of the wounds. He looked up at me despairingly—he was a short, rather slender man.
"Doctor, are these real burns? I'm too near crazy to know."
I told him that the burns were real enough to make it advisable for him to go to a hospital, or at least to remain in bed for a few days. His question mystified me.
"But Doctor," he said, with his high voice breaking, "you don't understand. They come every night—when I'm asleep!"
He started for the door, with his flabby face contorted with either fear or hatred. I called him to stop, and gave him a sedative.
"Your nerves are in terrible shape," I told him. "Whatever it was that burned you, has left you all wrought up. Now, you know that you were not burned in your sleep. Sit here and tell me the whole story."
"Doctor, I tell you that this happens every night, about midnight. It's not so much the pain of the burns... they don't hurt very badly. But no matter how I chain and lock my door, I wake up about midnight with a horrible ringing in my ears and choking in my throat. And, every time, my head and foot are burned this way."
I decided that this man was in the throes of some remarkable form of hysteria, and wishing to observe him more closely, offered to let him sleep on the cot in my consulting room. "I will be here late tonight anyway," I told him,"and whatever it is that's bothering you, will have both of us to contend with."
He agreed eagerly. The man seemed torn between the necessity of keeping a terrible secret and the desire to confide it to some other living person.
"But it's not you They're after, Doc." He leaned forward as if to tell me something of the greatest importance. "It's not you—it's me. And it'll happen here just the same. I know it will."
I MADE him promise to return that evening so that I could re-dress his wounds and see that he spent a calm night. I secretly intended to give him a powerful opiate that would keep him comfortably sleeping until the next morning.
By the time he returned in the evening, I had come to the conclusion that my patient was the victim of hallucinations and self-inflicted tortures. But as soon as I started to take off the bandages in order to care for the burns, I found to my horror that there was no sign of wound or scar on either head or foot!
At my cry of amazement, he looked full in my eyes and laughed—a fearful, despairing laugh that made my blood run cold.
"Now, do you believe me? Doctor, it's this way every time. I wake with the burns-they sting for a while and then disappear. Every night for five nights it's happened. I'm not crazy, but it's a wonder I'm not. Every night since——" He stopped, as if sorry he had said so much.
No matter how closely I examined the patient, there was no sign of any burn or scar on him. Yet this was unmistakably the same man I had treated early in the morning! I would have recognized his haggard face anywhere.
I threw myself in a chair opposite him and lit a pipe with trembling fingers. I was young then. But I have never been timid. Doctors learn to face this world and the next, without losing their equanimity. But this man and his wild story seemed to belong to neither.
He tossed off the sleeping potion that I had made ready for him, and lay down fully dressed on the cot, covering himself with his overcoat. He was not the sort with whom many men would sympathize. There was something of the cornered rat in his furtive, sneaky gestures. Yet stark, naked terror looked out of his pig-like eyes.
NONE of my books on hysteria, hypnosis, or dreams seemed to shed any light on the case of the man who called himself Andrew Clyde, and who was sleeping so noisily in the room next to me. Through the open door I could hear his regular breathing, and I wondered how he could sleep at all, even under the influence of the morphine I had given him.
The lights were low in both rooms, and I must have dozed in my chair, although I had determined to keep awake. I was suddenly brought to myself with a start. The lights flickered and went low for a moment, as if the current were cut off. Then the strong odor of burning flesh filled the room. I rushed to my patient. He was sleeping, but with his mouth open and groaning. Pulse and respiration were unbelievably high, and at the rear of his skull the skin and hair had been burned away as I had seen it that morning.
I feverishly unlaced his shoe, and examined his foot. As I had feared and half expected, the great broken blister was there, just the same. If anything, it was just a little more severe than before.
In such moments, when the mind wavers between the real and the impossible, between the sane and the insane, we cling to whatever firm, sure foundations are near us. I had my medical knowledge, and my instruments and medicines. Not daring yet to think, or to wonder what had happened, I mechanically treated and bandaged his burns, and gave him another quieting hypodermic injection.
Then I staggered to the cabinet where I kept my dispensary and hesitated between the bottle labeled "spir. frum." and the round can of cocaine. There are times when a doctor can almost be forgiven for taking to drugs, horrible as their effect is sure to be. But I drank copiously of the raw whisky, and went back to my patient. I was determined, now that I was sure he would not wake for some hours, to find out something about him in the hope of solving the mystery that surrounded him.
It was with difficulty that I went through his pockets, for he was a heavy man, and I was weak with a strange fear. But his steady breathing reassured me, and I found upon examination that his pulse and breathing were slowing down to normal. My search of his pockets, unprofessional as it was, did not add to my knowledge or to my peace of mind.
None of his clothes were marked in any way, and there were no letters or any sort of memoranda to be found. In one of his hip pockets was a roll of fairly large bills. They gleamed green and yellow by my study light. There was more money than a young doctor had ever seen before in his life. It was very evident that this Andrew Clyde did not lack for funds. And it was equally certain that he either had no use for banks or that he definitely belonged in that half-world of criminals who dare not use them.
THERE was also a pocket knife with a blade nearly four inches longer than that allowed by police edict, and a harmless-looking gun of the forbidden type capable of discharging a twenty-two cartridge with deadly short-range effect.
These things, together with some change and other odds and ends, made up the contents of his pockets. I replaced everything as it had been, and walked into the other room.
I had come to the conclusion that this Clyde must be a member of the criminal profession, and I wondered whether or not to turn him over to the police. But the police certainly could not understand his strange malady if I could not. There was the mystery of his terrible burns, which lasted a few hours, vanished and reappeared on schedule. I could not let him slip out into the whirlpool of New York's streets without learning the reason for what was happening to him. My own sanity depended upon finding a rational explanation for this thing. Apparently it was beyond science, God, or man. Yet I was consumed with the fierce need of knowing.
If I could explain this thing to my own satisfaction, I felt that I could go on with my work and with my life. But if it turned out to be a vagary of fate, there seemed no sense, no meaning in life.
All that night I sat in my armchair, puzzling over the grotesqueness of this case. Could it have been possible for the man to have inflicted the wounds on himself, for some unknown reason? But I had seen him in a drugged sleep. And one burn had appeared underneath his shoe!
I WONDERED for a moment if some unknown assailant had entered through the door of the office, or could have passed me while I lay asleep. My window opened out over a great building excavation, and it was four stories above the ground. There was no ledge above or below it, and not even an ape could have found a foothold on the outer wall. And the door to my office had been locked and bolted! If anyone had succeeded in getting past the night watchman at the outer door downstairs, he could not have found any way to enter my rooms.
But, for the moment admitting that natural means could have inflicted the wounds in some strange revenge or punishment, I was immediately confronted with, the incredible fact that they seemed to have little or no effect on the burned man, and that within a few hours they had completely disappeared. If they had healed naturally, it would have taken three or four weeks for the cicatrix, or scar tissue, to form, and the mark would have remained until death.
Through this vicious circle my thought moved all night long. There seemed no scientific method in which to attack the problem. If the wounds were natural, why did they heal so magically and return so regularly? If they were not natural . . .but I had seen them, and smelled the odor of flesh. I could not believe my eyes, and I could not doubt them. I was young then, and I believed more firmly in the omnipotence of man's knowledge than I do now.
My patient awakened late in the fore-noon, dizzy and weak. I gave him coffee, which is more of a stimulant than most people think, and he sat on the edge of the cot with his head in his hands. I waited, hoping he would tell me more about himself and what had happened.
"Again, Doc! It always happens. . .every night.And it will. . .until Saturday——" He stopped, his teeth chattering with fear.
"Until Saturday?" I grasped him by the hand, "Come to, man, and tell me what this is all about. I can't do anything for you unless I know the whole story."
I thought for a moment that he was going to confide in me. But his weak mouth tightened and he set his jaw. "It's—it's my own business. They'll get me, or else I'll go crazy. Either way——" He shrugged his shoulders with a curious fatalism and rose to his feet.
"But you can't go out that way—something beastly vile is going on, and I've got to know what it is." At the time I didn't care particularly for the safety of my patient, but I had to know the reason for what had happened to him. Everything I had ever believed in was tottering. I stood in front of the door.
"Promise that you'll come back here this evening and stay," I said. "I've got to find out what it is." I had lost all my professional calm.
My patient looked at me strangely, with a twisted smile on his face. He shook his head, slowly. "You'll never find out—no one will ever find out. They'll get me—Saturday. There's nothing to do."
"But the police—"
"Police! What can the 'bulls' do against—the dead?" He whispered the last word, rolling his small, frightened eyes hideously. "Can they catch Nothing and put handcuffs on it? Who'll shoot at a spook? Nobody ever sees Them but me!" The man's superhuman nerve seemed to have been strained to its breaking point. I half expected to see him fall writhing on the floor, a subject for a strait-jacket. But he recovered himself, and sat shuddering on the cot.
I tried to reassure him, though I felt far from certain of anything myself. "Believe me," I said, "it is something quite natural that is after you. Maybe you have some strange enemy—or perhaps some malignant hypnotism is being practiced on you. Keep your head, man, and we'll try to find out what it is—and fight it." My words sounded hollow and meaningless as I said them, even to myself.
He shook his head, with a bitter twist of his mouth which might have been a smile.
"You don't understand, Doc. It's nothing you or any other man can fight. Maybe God can—if there is a God who cares what happens to me. I don't know. But I know well enough what's coming—Saturday night. I've only got these three days to live—three days——"
He pushed past me and dashed out of the office. I could hear him running down the stairs. Then there was silence.
THE rest of that week was a nightmare. I don't know how I went through my routine work. It's a wonder that I did not make some terrible mistake in treating my few patients. I walked around in a sort of daze. Every time the door of my office opened, I leaped to my feet, expecting and fearing to see the man with the burns. But he did not come, and I did not hear from him.
Try as I might, I could not conceive of a natural explanation for the wounds, and the strange way in which they came and disappeared. But his own idea of a supernatural cause, I refused to accept. At that time, as I have said, I firmly believed that man's knowledge was strong enough to solve man's mental and physical problems. Now—I am not so sure. There are strange happenings in this world of ours, and lives interlap with fierce loves and ambitions and hates that sometimes go beyond the grave itself.
It was evident that my strange client had a guilty conscience of some kind, and that he believed his wounds to be an unearthly punishment visited upon him. But what could a man have ever done to deserve the fearful doom of being burned to death by inches? What sin was foul enough to sear itself deep into a man's body and brain, bringing him a living Hell?
Two days passed, and I was unable to rest or sleep. Most of the time I spent walking the streets, trying to forget the experiences of the past few days, and yet hoping against hope that I might meet the man who called himself Andrew Clyde. Part of the hours I spent in medical libraries, hoping to find something which would answer the questions that tormented my brain. But there was nothing there.
On Saturday night something of the certainty with which Clyde had spoken of the doom that would fall on him Saturday at midnight must have imparted itself to me. I had a weird foreboding that there were fearful things about to happen, and that I was fated to be involved, in some manner.
My offices oppressed me, and early in the evening I set out for a walk to clear my brain. It was a hot, muggy night. No breath of wind moved through the city streets, and everything seemed held in a sweating tension, awaiting the rain. There was not a star in the sky, and low clouds were scudding, borne from the southwest.
IN the distance there was the low rumbling of thunder, growling like a great beast stalking the city. I walked for several hours, and then, fearing the coming rain, I hastened back toward my office. Just as the frst drops splashed on the dusty sidewalks, I came in sight of the building. I noticed that there were lights in my windows, although I was sure that I had turned them out when I left.
Hurrying up the stairs, I opened the door of my outer office. There, in a chair, sat Andrew Clyde, his eyes staring and his face drawn with fright.
He leaped to his feet as I stood there. It was evident that he was in an unusually severe state of nervous excitement.
"Doctor, I picked the lock of your door. I had to come here. You must help me——"
His little eyes were shining behind tangled hair which, I noticed with a start, had turned snow-white since I had seen him last. There was no scar on the side of his skull.
"Tonight—tonight it'll happen. They'll get me tonight! Can't you stop them? Can't you do something? What are doctors for? Hide me somewhere——"
His pleading grew incoherent. I helped him to my armchair—he would not go near the cot where he had lain the other night—and offered him a hypodermic.
He waved it away. "Give me a drink, Doc. I want to die game."
I poured him a stiff drink of Scotch, which he swallowed at a gulp without blinking. The raw spirits seemed to make a new man of him, and he showed a marked, if artificial, improvement in voice and bearing. He pushed his hair out of his eyes, and sat up straighter in the chair.
"There's nothing I can do for you, Clyde—unless you'll tell me all you know about this thing. You're forcing me to work blindly. You know, or think you know, what it is that's troubling you." I was impatient with the man, for he had thrown his problem on me without giving me anything to go by.
He shrugged his shoulders. "My secrets are my own, and I've done too much talking already. I'll die without telling anything more."
I was intentionally cruel. "Then get up and go. You can't die here." I pointed to the door. "Either get out or explain what it is all about. I'd like to help you, but I can do nothing for you as things are now. Unless you take me into your confidence——"
He looked at me like a kicked dog, and terror shone in his eyes. "I have to stay, Doctor! I can't be alone—when—when it happens. Maybe I'll die. I might escape it. But that's not what I'm afraid of. I don't fear dying, for I've faced it every night for the last week. But I can't be alone. I don't dare to be alone."
"Then—sit down and tell me the story. It will never go any farther."
"I—I can't. And I don't dare to be alone tonight. If I'm alone, I'll kill myself to end the awful suspense, and then They'll be waiting, worse than ever, on the other side. They'll be waiting there for me, and laughing——"
"Who are 'They'?"
"You wouldn't understand, Doctor. They're not in your world of patients and hospitals and books. They're dead!" He screamed the last word at me as if he were on the point of breaking.
The distant rumble of thunder was growing louder. Suddenly it broke almost over our heads with a tremendous crash that dwarfed the noises of the city. Sheets of rain dashed against the building, and I got up to close a window that was open. The thermometer must have dropped twenty degrees, for the wind as I shut the window was icy cold.
I STOOD at the window a moment. Below me in the street not a person was to be seen. The city appeared to be illuminated, but deserted. The faint glow of the old-fashioned gas lamps on the corner only served to give a weird, greenish glow to the storm-swept streets. It was a night on which anything might be expected to happen.
Andrew Clyde spoke, wearily. "Give me another drink, and I'll tell you the whole story. I don't see how it can matter now. You might as well know—not that you can do anything about what is going to happen to me."
His head, with its matted white hair, was bowed in his hands. Slowly he rocked back and forth in his chair, as if on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I felt a surge of pity for this man who was wavering between a dumb, beaten acceptance of what he thought was coming upon him, and the normal impulse to resist and fight as long as breath was in him.
He began his story. I lit my pipe and leaned back in the chair opposite, where I could watch his face under the light of the study lamp.
"I told you my name was Andrew Clyde," he began. "That was what I was christened, anyhow. But for years I've been known as 'Scotty, the Ear.' They called me that because I can hear the tumblers of a safe combination as they drop. You've heard of Scotty the Ear?"
Even in his predicament he was capable of leering at me, proud of his fame. But I could not remember ever having heard of anyone by that name. He seemed disappointed.
"Did you read the newspapers about two years ago--when everybody was
talking about the Gresham murder? Well, I was one of the three who did it."
SUDDENLY I remembered. The four-year-old son of a Yonkers banker had been kidnapped, I initially thought that this detail might have been inspired by the infamous Lindburgh kidnapping. But that occurred in 1932, four years after the publication of this story. and when his abductors thought themselves in danger, they had thrown him from a carriage into the Bronx River.
"Yes, I was one of the men who kidnapped Bobby Gresham and hurled him to his death. But I've paid—God, how I've paid!
"If you remember, they caught the three of us a short time after the body of the boy was found. There wasn't much evidence against us. But they made it hot for us day after day. They wanted confessions. Finally, they said that if I'd turn evidence for the State, they'd free me. The district attorney kept after me. Every day they'd bring me into his office and he'd shoot questions at me, and frighten me with pictures of what would happen to me if I didn't tell.
"And I broke down and signed a confession, saying that Scar-face and Louis Moroni had killed the boy by throwing him into the river while I drove the horses. It wasn't true. I hadn't been driving—that was Scar-face.
"The case went to trial, and with me as a witness the State got a verdict of first degree murder against both Scar-face and Louis. When the verdict was brought in, I was sitting in the courtroom. And I can still see the look that those two pals of mine gave me. It burned itself into my mind like—like——" He motioned toward the place where the scars had been.
"The cops let me go then, with a warning to get out of town and stay out. I went south, and pulled a couple of safe-cracking jobs, alone. But I couldn't seem to settle anywhere. Everything seemed to keep leading me back, here to New York. I couldn't rest, or sleep. And about a month ago I came back.
"Scar-face and Louis were sent to the chair, and they both died cursing me, so I've been told. But I had to save myself. I didn't want to die. I don't want to die now. God, God, I don't want to die!"
I leaned forward. "But what's all this got to do with—with the burns you're having? I don't see——"
"Fool!" He almost screamed. "Just a year after the night Louis and Scar-face were sent to the death-house, the burns came to me! Seven nights they waited in the death-house—waited for death! And six times the burns have come to me. On the seventh night, just before midnight on Saturday a year ago today—they went to the chair! What will happen to me at midnight tonight? They're standing, just on the Other Side, waiting for me—dragging me through the veil the way they had to go!
"WHO knows what devilish things they have prepared for me where they are, if they can reach through to me here? When I was a boy, my mother used to tell me about the Wandering Jew, who was condemned never to rest until the end of eternity. Am I to be burned till then?"
He was sobbing, with his head buried in his hands, moaning like a wounded animal. But much of my sympathy for him was gone. His brutality about the crime he had committed, and his self-pity, left me with only a fascinated horror.
Clyde raised his head. "What time is it now? I haven't a watch. I can't bear to look at a watch or clock. But tell me quick what time it is!"
I made a sudden decision. The man, I thought, must have worried himself into the state he was in. He was hypnotizing himself, because of his guilty conscience, into a physical manifestation of what he had feared. I remembered that one of my books at college—by Jung, I think—mentioned the case of a girl who dreamed of a great dog biting her and who woke up with deep tooth marks on her wrist, though she was in a locked room.
I thought I saw a way to free him. He was looking down at the floor. I hurriedly glanced at my watch, saw that the hands pointed to ten-forty, and set them back an hour. Then I showed him the face. I knew that if I could keep his mind off himself for an hour and twenty minutes, he would be out of danger of the strange delusion which was mastering him. Even then I did not believe that the supernatural could be entering into the case in any way. I felt proud of myself for having thought of the trick with the watch!
"Well, you have nearly two hours and a half before it is midnight," I told him cheerfully. "Can't you lie down for an hour and get some sleep? There is no danger for you, man, except your own fear. Fear has made you do strange things, and made you have strange and terrible experiences. There is not a doubt in my mind but that you can be cured from all this."
MY patient smiled bitterly. "You doctors are all alike. You think you can find out about everything in books and laboratories." Then his mood changed. "I don't want to die! Do you think there's a chance—just a chance—that the burns tonight won't be any worse than those of the other six nights? That I'll keep on living? I don't dare die—They'll be there..."
I reassured him as much as I could. Finally I succeeded in quieting him, to some extent. He clung to the tiny hope that perhaps he had been insane or deluded, and that the burns had never been. But I had seen them. Anyway, he sat there in my armchair, his head in his hands.
As long as I live, I shall not forget the room as it looked that night. There was but one light, and it was near my patient. The rest of the long room was vague and shadowy. Against the walls my bookcases and medicine cabinets ranged themselves dimly and forebodingly. Outside was the storm, with the deep rumble of thunder and the splashing of rain. The wind had risen, and the building creaked and rattled with its force.
I was sitting at the other end of the room, next to the connecting door. After a little while I looked at my watch, and started to see that, allowing for the change I had made, the real time was eleven-thirty. A half hour longer....
"What time is it now?" asked Clyde, eagerly. "Is it after twelve?" I showed him the watch, getting up and taking it over to him. He sank back.
"Only ten-thirty," he said slowly. "An hour and a half, and it will all be over, one way or the other."
I returned to my seat. I noticed that my heart was beating very rapidly, and that I was short of breath. Fear is a contagious disease of the nerves, the psychologists tell us. I remembered how the two friends of the man before me must have been waiting, a year ago, for the black-robed priest and the guards who were to take them through the Little Green Door. Try as I would, I could not free my mind from the picture of that procession within the gray walls of old Sing Sing. Only a year ago—and all that was mortal of those men had been dissolved in quicklime long months before! Had everything been destroyed? I was beginning to doubt the teachings of my science. For I had seen the burns, real burns. And I had seen them disappear.
My watch showed me that the actual time was eleven forty-five. I held it in front of my eyes and watched the second hand racing as I had never seen it before. It, too, seemed in a hurry to get over the next few minutes.
A lethargy crept over me. I was neither asleep nor awake, and was perfectly able to see everything in front of me. But if I had willed to move it would have been impossible. I felt myself drifting... drifting....
The walls of my office seemed to fade out. The lights grew brighter, blindingly brighter. But I could not close my eyes. A strange, prickling sensation traveled up my spine, and my scalp muscles tightened.
Andrew Clyde half rose in his chair. He screamed at me, "You lied, you lied! You told me I had two hours and more. You lied!"
THEN he was forced back into the chair. I saw gray figures hovering around him—dim and formless figures which my mind did not dare to identify. They seemed to fasten his feet and hands, and to pass something around his throat, and before his eyes. He choked, and then was silent.
Outside, the thunder crashed directly overhead. Great bursts of rain and wind pounded on the windows. The building shook in the storm, and my heart almost quit beating. I was afraid even to think.
For what seemed an interminable time the gray figures obscured my view of Andrew Clyde. I sat paralyzed in my chair. My pipe fell to the floor with a sharp sound. I had bitten the stem in two. I knew that I was dreaming and that all this would mercifully disappear as soon as I had waked.
But I could not awaken from that dream. I saw the gray figures draw back from the writhing figure of Andrew Clyde. It might have been my overwrought imagination, but when one of them turned, his face seemed to be seared across the nose and chin with a wide scar. But I could not be sure. I cannot be sure of anything that happened on that night of horrors, except that I lay helpless there.
There was a wait which seemed to me to be hours in length, although I know that it could not have been more than a few minutes. I held my breath until the blood was pounding in my ears.
Then one of the weird, gray figures raised his hand, pointing it at the man who sat twitching in my armchair. He held it there, accusingly, for a moment, and then he let it fall.
AT that move a great bolt of lightning exploded, seemingly just outside the windows. My ear-drums were almost shattered by the deafening "cr-r-rack" it made. The same instant the light, which had been so bright, so unusually bright, up to that moment, went down to a mere flickering glow, and remained there.
From the man named Andrew Clyde there came a great screaming, which reverberated through the room, and which rings in my ears sometimes today. He strained at his bonds, and then was still.
The sickish odor of burning human flesh filled the room, and made me choke. I was as incapable of motion as a chair. Try though I might, I could not even shut my eyes to what was going on before me. I was dreadfully afraid, not so much for myself as for my sanity. It was the fear of the Impossible—of the Unknown. I think would rather die than face such terror again.
There seemed to be only two of the gray figures, although it had appeared to me a moment before that there were many of them. They leaned for a moment over the body of Andrew Clyde, which was slumped down in the chair. Then, for a second, I imagined that I saw three of them, fading out into the darkness and obscurity of the opposite wall, Were two of them supporting and leading the other? Was the soul of the traitor, Scotty the Ear, dragged protestingly into unknown horrors?
IT may have been that I was dreaming, and that my imagination, poisoned by the happenings the previous week, had created all this structure of terror. But when I came to myself, it was morning, and the storm was over. Through the windows, the sunlight was pouring in—a long slant across the room to the figure in my armchair. I was stiff from sitting in a cramped position, As I rose to my feet, I found that could hardly stand erect. I was afraid to look across the room to where the crumpled body of Andrew Clyde rested in the summer sunlight.
Examination showed that Clyde met his death "by natural causes and act of God." His head, fearfully burned electrically, rested against a steam pipe which ran vertically through the building from the roof. His foot, likewise, was bent back against it, and it was likewise burned. Lightning?
But his face was set in an expression of the most abject terror, his mouth wide open, and his features contorted horribly. And I knew that Andrew Clyde had been visited with a vengeance which came from beyond the grave—a vengeance which he himself knew to be just.
There were no friends or relatives to claim the body, and as the dead man's doctor I made the funeral arrangements and saw that the remains of poor, weak Scotty the Ear were laid, I hope, to rest.
All this was twenty years ago, and I have forgotten as much of the terrible incident as I can. Strange things have happened to me since—other things that cannot be naturally explained. But in all my experience I have never spent another such night as I spent when I witnessed the ghostly execution of Andrew Clyde. And through it, I learned that man's knowledge and the little circle of natural laws which he has discovered are but the surface of an unplumbed pool, from whose vast depths strange bubbles sometimes rise.
Part of the series The Supernatural Writings of Stuart Palmer.
Annotations by Nina Zumel
Illustration from Ghost Stories Magazine, September 1928