The Taint and Other Novellas (3 page)

Of the great manuscript in Larner’s hand the student could make very little; there were too many inconsistencies in its strange contents—odd juxtapositions in sentence-structure and so on—that seemed to point to its being a translation from some other language, possibly German, and done by a man none too well versed in the tongue, perhaps Larner himself. On the other hand, Larner could have copied his work from some other translated version; and then again, it was just possible that the entire work was his own, but that seemed hardly likely. There were lurid descriptions of rites—hideous magical ceremonies involving human and animal sacrifices—which, even suffering as they did through poor translation, were more than sufficient to convince the student nurse that the study of this work had indeed gone far to helping Larner on his way to the institute’s basement ward. Having a very well balanced mind himself, and therefore seeing no point in wading through three or four hundred pages of such material, Spellman passed quickly on to the cuttings-file.

Now this was something one could get one’s teeth into and what a bonus for Spellman’s book! Why, the cuttings-file was crammed full of stuff he was sure he could use. There were cuttings from sources scattered throughout the globe, from London, Edinburgh, and Dublin; from the Americas, Haiti, and Africa; from France, India, and Malta; from the Troodos Mountains of Cyprus, the Australian Outback, and the Teutoburger Wald in West Germany; and the great majority of them involved the actions of persons—both singularly and in groups or “cults”—allegedly influenced by alien or “outside” forces!

They covered a period from early February 1925 to mid-1926—detailing cases of panic, mania, and weird eccentricity—and as Spellman read he quickly spotted connecting links in what at first had seemed dissociated stories. Two columns of the
News of the World
had been given over to coverage of the case of the man who uttered a hideous cry before leaping from a fourth-storey window to his death. His room showed proof on investigation that the suicide had been involved with some sort of magical rite; a pentacle had been chalked on the floor and the walls were painted with a crude representation of the blasphemous
Nyhargo Code.
In Africa missionary outposts had reported ominous mutterings from little-known desert and jungle tribes, and it was shown in one cutting how human sacrifices had been made to an earth-elemental called Shudmell. Spellman was quick to tie this report in with the fantastic and still unexplained disappearance of Sir Amery Wendy-Smith and his nephew in Yorkshire in 1933; they, too, had seemed obsessed by the conviction that they were doomed to death at the devices of a similar “deity,” one Shudde-M’ell, “of gigantic, rubbery, snakelike, and tentacled appearance.” In California an entire theosophist colony donned white robes for a “glorious fulfillment” that never arrived, and in Northern Ireland white-robed youths sacked and burned three churches in outlying districts to make way for “the Temples of a greater Lord.” In the Philippines American officers had found certain tribes extremely bothersome throughout the entire period, and in Australia sixty percent of Aboriginal settlements had shut themselves off completely from contact with whites. Secret cults and societies all over the world had brought themselves into the open for the first time, admitting allegiance to various gods and forces and declaring that the vision of their faiths, an “ultimate resurrection,” was about to take place. Troubles in insane asylums were legion, and Spellman wondered at the stoicism of medical fraternities that they had not noted the parallelisms or drawn anything other than the most mundane conclusions.

On the first night of his serious study of the file, Spellman did not get to his bed until very late, leaving it at a correspondingly late hour in the morning. This was a rare indulgence for him; indeed, feeling somehow lethargic the whole day, he did not bother to study or even to work on his book. That evening, when the time came around for his late shift, he still felt sleepy and dull, and it was only then that he discovered he had been detailed once more for the abhorrent lower wards and Hell. Again Barstowe shared the night shift with the student nurse, and Spellman guessed that before midnight the froggish man would come down to make his usual offer.

At eleven he was in the basement ward, beginning his first hurried tour of the morbid place, when he was startled to hear his name called from the small barred spy-hole in the door of the second cell on the left. This was Larner’s cell, and apparently the man was in one of his more lucid states. This suited the student very well, for he had intended to talk to Larner at the first opportunity. Now he saw he had his chance.

“How are you, Larner?” he carefully enquired, moving over to peer at the white face framed in the tiny square spy-hole. “You certainly seem in good spirits.”

“I am, I am—and I trust you’ll help me stay that way….”

“Oh? And how might I be of service?”

“Tell me,” Larner secretively asked, “who is on duty with you tonight?”

“Nurse Barstowe,” Spellman answered. “Why do you ask?”

But Larner had scurried back away from the door on hearing Barstowe’s name spoken, so that Spellman had to peer in through the spy-hole to see him.

“What’s wrong, Larner? Don’t you get on with Barstowe, then?”

“Larner is a trouble-maker, Spellman—didn’t you know?” Barstowe’s guttural, strangely menacing voice came suddenly from close behind. Spellman jumped, startled by the unexpected sound, turning to face the squat nurse who must have crept up on him quiet as a mouse. “And anyway—” the ugly man continued, “since when is it your practice to discuss senior personnel with the inmates? Very odd behavior, that, Spellman.”

But the student was not a man to be easily intimidated, and the instinctive fear Barstowe’s appearance had aroused in him quickly turned to anger when he heard the veiled threat in the older man’s question. “You’re out of bounds, Barstowe—” he harshly answered, “—and what do you mean by sneaking about down here? If you’re thinking of changing duties with me you can forget it—I don’t like the way these people behave when you’re on duty!” Spellman made his oblique accusation and watched Barstowe’s reaction.

The fully-trained nurse had gone gray on hearing Spellman “tick him off,” and he was plainly at a loss as to how to answer. When he did speak he had dropped his “Spellman” attitude: “I—I—what are you getting at, Martin? Why! I only came down here to do you a service. I’m not blind, you know. It’s plain you don’t
like
it down here. But you’ve done yourself now, Martin. I won’t be offering to help you out again—you can bet your life on that.”

“That suits me fine, Barstowe—but hadn’t you better be getting back upstairs? By now half the inmates could be out running about the grounds—or are they too afraid of that stick of yours to try it?” Barstowe’s gray color took on an even lighter shade, and beneath the folds of his smock his right hand jerked involuntarily at mention of his stick. “Got it with you, have you?” Spellman pointedly stared at the tell-tale bulge in the froggish man’s clinical attire. “I shouldn’t have bothered if I were you. You won’t be needing it tonight—not down here at any rate.”

At that Barstowe seemed to shrink into himself, the color leaving his face completely, and he turned without another word and almost ran along the corridor and up the stone steps. For the first time, as the squat nurse hurriedly climbed those steps, Spellman noticed that all the spy-holes in the doors lining the corridor were occupied. Faces—in various stages of agitation or animation—with eyes all fixed on the retreating figure of the ugly man, were framed in those tiny barred openings. And Spellman shuddered at the positive
hatred
those mad faces and eyes reflected.

On his next visit to Hell one hour later, Martin Spellman tried to talk to the basement ward’s three or four occasionally articulate inmates; to no avail. Even Larner would have nothing to do with him. And yet the student nurse seemed somehow to detect an air of satisfaction; a peculiar feeling of
security
flowed out quite tangibly from behind those locked doors and padded walls….

• • •

For at least a week after the incident with Barstowe, Spellman felt tempted to mention the man’s odd ways to Dr. Welford; and yet he did not wish to cause Barstowe any real harm. After all, he had no genuine proof that the man was not carrying out his duties in anything other than a proper manner, and the fact that he carried a stick with him whenever he visited the basement ward could hardly be called conclusive evidence of any unprofessional intent; there was no way at all in which Barstowe could put his weapon to any use. It seemed purely and simply that the man was a rather nasty coward and nothing more—someone to be avoided and ignored, certainly, but not really worth bothering oneself about.

Beside, things were bad at that time; Spellman did not want a jobless Barstowe on his conscience. He did ask one or two discreet questions of the other nurses, however, and while it appeared that none of them particularly cared much for Barstowe, it was likewise evident that no one considered him especially evil or even a bad nurse. And so Spellman dismissed the matter….

• • •

Towards the end of November Spellman first heard the news of Barstowe’s projected move into “living-in” quarters; apparently the landlady with whom the squat man lodged was expecting her son home from abroad and needed Barstowe’s room. Only a few days later the unpleasant possibility became reality when the oddly offensive nurse did indeed move into one of the four ground-floor flatlets; and he had hardly settled in when, at the very end of a month, the first hint of the horror came to Oakdeene.

It happened in the small hours of the morning following one of those rare evenings when, unable to endure his surroundings for another night without a break of some sort, Martin Spellman had allowed himself to be persuaded by Harold Moody to go down into Oakdeene village for a drink. Martin was not a drinking man and his limit was usually only three or four beers, but that night he felt “in the mood,” and the result was that when he and Moody got back to the sanatorium just before midnight he was more than amply prepared for his bed.

It was, too, the beer that saved Martin Spellman from possible involvement when the horror came, for at any other time the hideous screams and demented shrieks from the basement ward would most certainly have shocked him from sleep. As it was, he missed all the “excitement,” as Harold Moody had it the next morning when he went into the student’s room to shake him awake.

The “excitement” was that four hours earlier, at about three in the morning, one of Hell’s worst inhabitants had died after throwing a particularly horrible fit. During his attack the man, one Gordon Merritt, a hopeless lunatic for twenty years, had somehow contrived to gouge out one of his own eyes!

It was only later that Spellman thought to enquire which of the nurses had been unfortunate enough to be on duty when Merritt took his last, fatal fit; and an almost subconscious tremor of strange apprehension went through him when he was told that it had been Barstowe!

• • •

For the two weeks following Merritt’s death Barstowe kept very much to himself; much more than ever before, and he had never been much of a mixer. In fact, had he not known better, Spellman might never have suspected that Barstowe was “living-in” at all. The truth was that the directors of Oakdeene had been far from happy at the enquiry, and it was thought that the squat nurse had been given a sound dressing down—something about his responses to the situation on the night of the incident being inefficient and altogether too slow. The general belief seemed to be that Merritt’s seizure might well have been avoided if Barstowe had been a bit “quicker off the mark”….

On the 13th December Spellman again found himself on nightduty, and once more it was his hourly lot to have to patrol the ward called Hell. Until that time he had never realized that there existed in his subconscious the slightest intention of trying to discover more details of the facts surrounding Merritt’s death—he only knew that something had been bothering him for far too long and that there were certain things he would like to know—and yet, on his first visit to the basement ward, he went straight to Larner’s cell and called the man to the spy-hole.

The cells were constructed in such a way as to make every interior corner visible from those small, barred windows; that is to say that each cell was wedge-shaped, with the “sharp” end of the wedge formed by the door itself. Larner had been lying on his bed at the far end of the cell staring silently at the ceiling when Spellman called out to him, but he quickly got up and went to the door on identifying his caller.

“Larner,” Spellman quietly questioned as soon as the other had greeted him, “—what happened to Merritt? Was it—was it the way they say, or—? Tell me what happened, will you?”

“Nurse Spellman, would you do me a great favor?” Larner apparently had not heard the student’s question—or perhaps, Spellman thought, he had simply chosen to ignore it!

“A favor? If I can, Larner—what is it you want me to do?”

“There is a matter of
justice
to be attended to!” the lunatic suddenly blurted out, so suddenly, with such urgency—with something so very akin to fervor in his voice—that the young nurse took a quick step back from the cell door.

“Justice, Larner ? Whatever do you mean?”

“Justice, yes!” The man peered out at Spellman through the bars, blinking rapidly, nervously as he spoke. And then, in the manner of certain lunatics, he abruptly changed the subject. “Dr. Welford has mentioned how you find the
Cthaat Aquadingen
of interest. I, too, once found it a very interesting work—but for a long time now the book has not been available to me. I suppose they believe its contents to be…well, ‘not in my best interests.’ Perhaps they’re right, I’m not sure. It’s true that the
Cthaat Aquadingen
put me in here. Oh, that’s true—quite definitely—yes, that’s why I’m here. I read the Sixth Sathlatta far too often, you see? I almost broke down the barrier completely. I mean, it’s all very well to see Yibb-Tstll in dreams—you can stand that much at least—
but to have him breaking through the barrier!
…Ah! There’s a monstrous thought. To have him breaking through—
uncontrolled!”