Circumstances the nature of which I am not at liberty to disclose have recently released me from a promise to keep the following curious documents secret until the death of certain individuals named therein.
I nevertheless give them to the world with a great deal of hesitance, since their publication will be certain to cast upon their authors doubt of their veracity, or their sanity. With this in mind, I have endeavored to substantiate the narratives, in so far as possible, by affidavits of disinterested witnesses, which I transmit herewith.
Unfortunately the greater part of the report of Hugh Lambert cannot ipso facto be thus supported, and I can only rest his case for credence on his reputation as a paleontologist and archaeologist of eminence, and on my own simple statement that I believe utterly and absolutely in the truth of his statements.
A. L. Z.
Extract from the diary of Ann Doring, screen actress.
August 15, 1934
It is really the morning of the sixteenth, but this is the first chance I have had to get my diary up to date. Though it’s going to take simply hours to write down everything, I’m going to do it, because I don’t want to forget the least little bit of what has happened.
Was yesterday a day!
It began, calmly enough, with my driving alone from New York to visit Dick at Camp Wanooka, high in the Helderbergs. It ended with me in a doctor’s waiting room, somewhere in the outskirts of Albany, biting my nails and wondering whether the man I love would live through the night.
The man I love. It still seems queer to write that. Yesterday afternoon Hugh Lambert was only a name to me, and not an important one at that. By midnight I knew that if he died life would have no meaning for me any more.
It was Dick’s fault in the first place. That kid brother of mine wasn’t satisfied with my paying a thousand dollars for his summer at the ritziest boys’ camp in the East; he insisted on my coming up here for him to show me off. The brat knew how to wangle me into it, too. About his second or third letter he started raving about the camp director. This Hugh Lambert had everything. Looks. Strength. Personality. Not only had he been All-American halfback in ’26, but he’d explored half the blank spaces on the map since graduating from Dartmouth. He was managing the camp this summer only to get funds for another expedition to Cambodia or Patagonia or some place like that.
The camp, Dick wrote, was overrun every week-end with the year’s most glamorous debs, but Lambert didn’t give any sign he knew they existed, though he was the cause of their sudden access of sisterly and cousinly affection.
Leave it to those sophisticated youngsters to get on to that. And they did more than gossip about it. When Dick learned I was making a flying trip to New York between pictures, he wired me that he was on the long end of a bet Lambert would break down before the end of the summer, and that he had as good as lost. He begged me as a pal to rush up and save him from going about in rags and tatters all winter.
Now I ask you.
Well, I got to camp just about suppertime. I found Dick brown as a berry, and grown till he was half a head taller than I. I don’t think I would have known him if he hadn’t pounced on me, yelling like a Comanche.
After the family greeting was over, the young nut didn’t even give me a chance to fix up my face but dragged me into the mess hall and right up to the head table where that paragon of his was waiting for the kids to settle down.
I’ll swear Hugh Lambert never knew whether the boys ever did get to their places. He took one look at me and he was sunk. Maybe I didn’t think that was a compliment, too. Not because of the brother’s build-up, either.
That chap knows his women, or I don’t know my men. He hasn’t got that cleft in his chin, and that slow, crinkly smile around his gray quiet eyes for nothing. I knew, right away, that the reason he hadn’t fallen for the society girls was because they just didn’t stack up against the other women in his life, the exotic ones on the other side of nowhere.
I was rather in a daze myself, which was something new for me. The tops among the Hollywood glamour boys have made a play for me without raising my blood pressure two points. But Hugh Lambert is different.
He’s big. I don’t mean physically, though he’s that, too—wide-shouldered and narrow-waisted, his skin a slinky bronze sheath for flat, slithery muscles. But there’s the bigness of all outdoors in him, and a deep, deep, strength that comes from matching oneself against savage nature and overcoming it.
Against savage men, too. His blunt chin chin and one bony cheek are creased by a white scar Dick tells me was made by a Galla assegai.
Well, it was Ann and Hugh right away, as if we’d known each other forever, but what we said didn’t mean anything, because there were others at the table. The head councillor, Ed Hard; a couple of other men whose names I didn’t catch; and the freckle-faced, pug-nosed camp nurse, Edith Horne.
After supper Hugh excused himself. Dick begged me to go to some kind of entertainment in the recreation hall, but I made him carry my bags to my room in the guest house, where he chattered till I chased him out so I could wash up and change to that blue knitted sport suit I had Schiaparelli send over on the Normandie. I had a date, you see, to meet Hugh down by the lake after the kids were tucked away for the night.
He was there before me. A bugle sobbed taps, behind us, and then the quiet settled around us. Not silence. There was the lapping of the water at our feet, the trees whispering to a gentle breeze, the almost rhythmic shrill of a million crickets, but it was all hushed and dreamy, and somehow melancholy.
Lake Wanooka lies deep in a cup of high, wooded hills whose dark bulk shut it in last night so that although Albany is only an hour away civilization seemed as distant as the stars that dusted the soft glow of the sky.
The moon was a great golden half-globe hammocked in a black fold on the mountains’ crest. The shimmering silver film spread over the quiet waters was like limpid music magically visible, and all that nostalgic beauty was just for the two of us. There was no one else in the world.
Hugh’s voice, when at last he spoke, was a deep, throaty murmur. “They’ve waited for us since the beginning of Time, the Old Mountains and the ancient lake.”
“The Old Mountains. The Helderbergs.” Some imp of the perverse made me matter of fact. “Why did the Dutch call them that?”
“Because they are old, the oldest mountains in America next to the Laurentides.”
“And the lake?”
“The lake is almost as ancient. It has neither inlet nor outlet, and its bottom has never been plumbed. The geologists say that as the Great Glacier melted, its waters filled an immensely deep valley here. Fifty thousand year’s ago, that was.”
“Fifty thousand years,” I repeated, feeling creepy and insignificant as I matched that against the sixty or seventy years I might expect to exist.
“It’s a long time Lake Wanooka has been waiting for us to come together on her shore.” Hugh’s arm crept around my waist. “Five hundred centuries, Ann dear.”
He was a fast worker, I thought. Too fast. I’d better put the brakes on. “Who lived here before the ice melted,” I said, laughing. “The Eskimos?”
“No one,” he answered. “No human existed in this region until long after the Ice Age.”[1]
Just then the echo of my laugh came back from across the glimmering lake. It must have been an echo, but I had an eerie feeling that it was the mountain itself that laughed.
Hugh must have noticed the little shudder that ran through me, because he shrugged me closer to him and asked, very tenderly, “Cold, Ann?”
“Not any more,” I managed, my heart beating against my ribs wildly. “Not....”
His body was suddenly rigid against mine, and I knew he wasn’t listening to me. He was staring at the lake, his brow furrowing.
“What—” I gasped. “What’s the matter?”
“It’s there again.” Hugh wasn’t answering me; he was thinking aloud. “Queer. Damn queer.”
I followed the direction of his eyes. About a hundred feet from the lake’s far end there was a disk of greater luminosity on the water, for all the world as if a searchlight were shining up through it from far below. Within the circumference of that pale glow, the surface was strangely smooth, glistening like silk stretched tight over an embroidery hoop.
“It is queer,” I whispered, not knowing why I whispered. “I never saw anything like it before.”
Just then a tiny black spot marred the silver shimmer, not in but right next to the strange radiance. From where it had been (it was gone at once) something darted toward the shore, an invisible something one was aware of only by the long narrow triangle of its wake creasing the water.
Hugh gulped, swallowed.
I whispered. “What makes that light?”
“I don’t know,” he said slowly. He shook himself, and then he was looking down at me, and his tender smile was crinkling the corners of his eyes, making me warm again, warm all over. “What does it matter what it is? We’re together, and—”
A twig snapped, in the woods behind us! Hugh whirled around to stare into the shadows where the moonlight was shut out by the thick foliage. I was terribly frightened. Then I wasn’t frightened any more but mad. I’d heard a boyish giggle in there, and the hiss of a whisper, quickly hushed.
“Some of those darn kids, prowling around,” Hugh growled. “If I get hold of them....”
“Oh, what’s the difference?” My hand on his arm kept him from diving into the brush, as he was about to do. “Let them have their fun. Come on, we’ll go for a ride in my car.” I had to stop him. I didn’t want him to catch Dickie, though my brother’d hear plenty from me tomorrow.
Of course it was Dick—I’d know that giggle anywhere—and probably the kid with whom he had bet. The merry brats had been spying on us to see who’d win.
“Fine.” Hugh responded to my suggestion. “Come on.” Then he had my arm and we were running up the long campus hill to the little plateau where the camp buildings clustered.
|
[1]
|
Editor’s note: Mr. Lambert’s statement agrees with the findings published in Bulletin 33, Smithsonian Institute, bureau of Ethnology, q.v. But cf. Races of Man, J. Deniker, pp. 510, 511, where are mentioned certain eoliths and early paleoliths as dating back before the end of the Pleistocene. |
As we were getting near the gate where I had parked my roadster, I asked him a question the reply to which still has me wondering. “Why should a fish breaking water and swimming towards shore startle you, Hugh?”
“It shouldn’t,” he replied. “Except that there are no fish in Lake Wanooka.”
Hugh insisted on driving. I got in alongside him and we started off. The little clearing around the camp entrance was bright under the moon, but when we had crossed that the road dived into the woods, and we were in darkness.
I heard Hugh’s hand fumble at the dashboard, and a click. The headlights didn’t come on. “Oh,” I exclaimed. “The bulbs both went last night. I meant to buy new ones on the way up here, but I forgot. Now we won’t be able to have our ride.” I was almost crying with disappointment.
He must have noticed that, for he said, “Yes, we will. I know this trail so well I can drive it blindfolded, and when we get to the main highway we’ll get some bulbs.”
The road was so narrow the tree boughs met overhead and the underbrush scraped along both sides of the car. After it got around the spur of the hill it pitched steeply downward. I realized how confidently Hugh drove, and then I was rather glad it was so dark. It brought back that feeling of there being just the two of us, and no one and nothing else in all the world.
After a while the road was smoother; Hugh started going faster. I saw, just ahead, the paleness of the concrete highway. It came swiftly toward us—and was blotched out by the black shape of a man who lurched out of the brush right in front of the roadster.
There was a deep ditch on our left, a telegraph pole on our right. Hugh shouted. His right arm shoved me down in the seat as his left twisted the wheel. There was an awful crash, the smash of splintering glass, a scream. I just had time to think, “We’ve hit the pole, but we’ve hit the man too,” when the roadster careened over, flinging me out of it.
Half stunned, I shoved my hands against dirt, pushing myself up. I saw Hugh lying terribly still in the road. I saw his leg plainly in the moonlight. A dark pool was spreading around it, and a stream was feeding that pool, a stream of blood that spurted from his leg, where glass from the windshield gashed it!
Editor’s note: In dealing with this material I shall take no liberties with the actual text but will cut and arrange it so as to present its narrative in a coherent, chronological order. In pursuance of this policy I here omit the balance of Miss Doring’s entry and present the following letter.
A. L. Z.
Letter from Jethro Parker, farmer:
Dear Mr. Zagat:
I have just come home from the Grange meeting and Martha had told me you been here and she promised you I would write down what happened the night of August 15th two years ago. I would rather plow fifty acres than do this chore, but Martha will not leave me, send back the ten ($10) you left to pay me for my trouble, so I guess I will have to.
Nurse Horne from Camp Wanooka was here that night to massage Martha’s leg for the rheumatics and we were in the kitchen having a snack when all of a sudden there was a thundering big crash from way up the road. Miss Horne and I jumped up and ran across my corn lot to where the noise came from.
We got near where the camp road comes out on the highway and I saw a car on its side, crumpled up against the telegraph pole that’s there. I heard a kind of moan and then I saw a girl in the dirt.
She was on her knees and she was holding on to a man’s leg with both hands. Blood was spraying up between her fingers like it was a busted water pipe she was holding on to. I could not figure out to this day how she had the gumption to do that, specially shaken up as she was and maybe bad hurt for all she knew.
Well, Miss Horne got right down on her knees alongside the girl and first thing I knew she was tearing a piece from her dress and tied it around the man’s leg.
I helped the girl stand up and I see that she is not hurt bad. Her dress is all torn and bloody, but she was the prettiest female I ever saw.
“Get a car,” she said. “Quick. We’ve got to get them to a hospital.”
I had not seen no one else. “Them?” I asks, puzzled like.
She pointed into the dark further back. I made out what I thought was a big bundle of rags. It heaved a little and I saw it was a tramp lying there. Except for his arm moving just a little bit I would have thought he was dead, the rest of him was so still.
“Hurry, Jethro,” Nurse Horne said.
I ran back through the corn lot to my barn, cranked up my flivver and drove back to the crossroads. When I got there the girl was helping the man with the hurt leg to sit up, and I saw it was Mr. Lambert from Camp Wanooka. Miss Horne was busy over the tramp. I could not see what she was doing because the thick trees made it so dark back there.
Well, sir, between the three of us we made out to get both the hurt men in the back of the flivver. The nurse got in back with them and the other girl got in alongside of me and I started off down the mountain.
I heard Mr. Lambert say, “Where are we going?”, and I heard Miss Horne answer him, “To the Albany Hospital.”
Mr. Lambert said, “If you take me there they will keep me for weeks and I must get back to camp. How about Doc Stone? You used to work for him. Don’t you think he can take care of us at his house?”
“I guess so,” Nurse Horne answered. “He has all the equipment and it is lots nearer too. Jethro, it is the big white house on New Scotland Road just before you get to the city line.”
“I know,” I said. “I used to take my neighbor Elijah Fenton there to have his neck dressed before he got drowned in Lake Wanooka last winter.”
“Please go faster,” the girl beside me said. “Oh please. He must not die.”
I was already going like a drunken bat so I looked around at her and I saw her mouth was blue and trembling. I was scared she was going to have hysterics so I started to talk to her to get her mind off her excitement.
“Elijah was drowned,” I said, “the time the ice broke on Lake Wanooka and two score of the Four Corners Church moonlight skating party went through it. It is so deep there we did not get back any of the bodies, but every time I see Jeremiah Fenton I get cold all over. Jeremiah is Elijah’s twin and like as two peas from the same pod. When he came walking in to memorial services there was three women fainted. I—”
“Stop!” she screamed. “Oh, stop it!” Now ain’t females funny? I never could make them out.
Well, Mr. Zagat, Martha’s been reading this over my shoulder and she says that this is all you want me to tell about, so I will stop. Hoping this is satisfactory, I am,
Yours truly,
Jethro Parker.
P. S. There is something been bothering me ever since that night, but I don’t know just how to write it down. Next time you are up this way will you please drop in to visit me and I will tell you about it? Come to noon dinner and sample Martha’s chicken dumplings.
Parker.
Account of Courtney Stone, M.D., Surg. D., F.A.C.S.: Chief Surgeon Albany Post-Graduate Hospital, etc., etc.:
At about eleven p.m. on August 15, 1934, I was in my study, too tired to retire. I had that afternoon performed nine operations at the hospital; including the excision of a cerebral carcinoma of which I was a little proud; and had attended a joint consultation by the medical and surgical staffs that had gone on and on, endlessly.
Two days before, a patient in coma had been brought in from the Helderberg region. The routine tests had revealed no pathologic malfunction, no trauma sufficient to explain his condition; nor did his symptoms correspond to any known disease. In a manner of speaking there were no symptoms except the stupor and, so gradual that it was almost imperceptible, a fading away of vitality that unless checked must inevitably result fatally.
Although surgical intervention was by no means indicated I had been intrigued by the puzzle this case presented and was pondering it when my meditations were interrupted by the furious tingling of my doorbell. I waited an instant for Mrs. Small, my housekeeper, to answer it, recalled that I had given her the night off and shoved myself unwillingly out of my chair.
A nervous, hysterical quality in the bell’s pealing told me that the late caller was in search of my professional services. My practice has long ago reached the point where night calls are merely a matter for resentment, and I was prepared to send the fellow to young Adams, down the road, with a flea in his ear.
I changed my mind however when, opening the door with one hand as I clicked on the hall light with the other, I looked straight into, Hugh Lambert’s face, pallid and dirt-streaked. He was palpably in a state of collapse and would have fallen if he had not been supported on one side by Edith Horne, the nurse I had recommended for his camp, and on the other by a second girl whom I perceived only vaguely.
It was she who had been ringing. “We’ve had an awful accident,” she blurted. “Hugh’s terribly hurt.”
“Slashed artery, Doctor Stone,” Edith interposed, “in the left leg. He’s lost a lot of blood.”
“Get him into surgery and I’ll get right to work. I’m glad you brought him to me instead of the hospital.” That was quite true. Anthony Wagner, Wanooka’s millionaire owner, is also a financial mainstay of the hospital and so the medical supervision of the camp has devolved upon me. I visit it frequently. Despite the disparity of our ages I have grown extremely fond of Hugh and I should not have wanted some half-baked intern messing around with him. “Here, let me help you.”
“I can ... hop ... along,” Hugh muttered between set teeth. “Help other—”
“That’s all right,” a nasal twang came from the porch. “I carried him this far an’ I can manage to get him the rest of the way.” As the others shuffled past me, a gangling gaunt-visaged man in overalls shoved in through the door, his arms cradling a dark form whose limbs dangled flaccidly. I realized that I had another patient.
“Come on in. You know the way.”
I had recognized Jethro Parker, a farmer who the winter before had once or twice accompanied a friend here. He grunted acquiescence and I turned to go through the entrance hall to the rear of the house.
“Get Hugh on the examining table, Edith,” I called. The nurse elbowed a tumbler switch beside the surgery door and the white blaze of the white-tiled room silhouetted the slowly moving trio. Hugh’s legs caved in. I saw that at the last minute he’d lost consciousness and I sprang to aid the girls.
Parker choked out an exclamation behind me, but I paid no attention other than to throw over my shoulder a direction for him to lay his charge on a leather-covered couch nearby. Lambert’s left trouser leg was a gory sponge. The cloth was slashed and the flesh beneath it deeply gashed, so that the anterior tibial artery was laid open for two inches as neatly as though it had been done with a scalpel.
The lacerated vessel should have been literally fountaining blood, but there was only a slight seepage. I looked for the explanation, disentangled from the sopping jumble of cloth above it a tight bandage of once white fabric, that had been knotted over the gastrocnemius to make a crude tourniquet, so expertly applied I knew it was Edith’s work.
“Will he be all right, doctor?” the other girl asked, behind me. “Will he live?”
“Of course,” I answered with the gruff curtness I have found to be more reassuring to jittery relatives and friends than a gentler manner. “You can’t kill a bull like this with a scratch.” But I wasn’t as confident as I made myself sound. His exsanguinated pallor told me that Hugh had spilled a devil of a lot of blood. “Just go out in the waiting room, please, and make yourself comfortable while we take care of him.” I felt Hugh’s pulse. It was damned feeble and twice too rapid.
“Mr. Parker,” I continued, “you’ve been here before. Please show the lady.” Sotto voce to Edith I murmured, “First thing is to sterilize and suture that artery. Prepare what I’ll need while I take a look at the other one. You know where everything is, don’t you?”
“Yes, doctor,” she answered crisply, though she was whiter around the gills than a nurse of her experience should be even with her patient as bad a mess as Lambert. “I haven’t forgotten.”
She moved away and I straightened to examine the other case. Parker was between us. He had slumped into a chair, his head buried in his knotted hands. “Now, now, man,” I rebuked him. “You ought to be able to stand the sight of a little blood.”
He looked at me, his weather-beaten face greenish under its stubble. “It ain’t that.” His pupils were dilated, his tone a half-whisper of almost religious awe. “It’s not the blood.” He swallowed with perceptible effort. “It— Doc! do you— Could a man come to life after being drowned six months? Changed, maybe?”
“Nonsense,” I snorted. “What on earth gave you such an idea as that?”
His head turned, slowly, reluctantly, to the figure on the couch. “When I came into the light I saw his face and—” A sigh as if of relief, cut his sentence short. “No,” he resumed. “I guess I was wrong. He’s just a tramp. I guess I was just kind of kerflumoxed with all the excitement.”
“I guess you were,” I said dryly. “Look. The third bottle on the bottom shelf over there is whisky. Pour yourself a jolt. That’s the best medicine for what ails you.” I had no time for the vagaries of superstitious rustics.
“May I have some too?” a clear bell-like voice asked wistfully. “I rather imagine I could use it.”
“Of course.” I really saw the other girl then for the first time. Disheveled and disarrayed as she was, she was something worth seeing.
She was tall, but she carried that tallness with a singularly graceful poise, and there was singing rhythm to every line of her body. Ordinarily the harsh glare of my floodlight is cruel to feminine charm, but it merely emphasized the pearly sheen of her skin, the delicate modeling of her features. I found myself pensively wishing that I was not short and rotund, that there were no gray hairs in my Vandyke.
“You were in that accident, too. Are you hurt?”
“Just shaken up a little.” She smiled briefly. “And bruised. Nothing to take you away from poor Hugh.”
“Don’t be too sure, Ann Doring.” I knew her at once. “I’ll look you over later. Meantime, if you’d like to clean up you’ll find everything you need at the head of the stairs.”
“Thank you. I’ll take advantage of your kindness. But first, my drink.”
“It’s all poured out, miss,” Parker said from across the room. “I’ve had mine an’ I’ll be runnin’ along. Marthy will be worrying about what become of me.”
Miss Doring downed her drink and followed him out of the room. I turned to look at the tramp.
“I’ve cut his shirt and coat away,” Edith Horne said as I came around. “So you won’t have to bother with that.” Competent as all get-out, that young lady. I don’t know a better nurse. I had hated to send her up to the lake, but she’d earned a vacation through a busy winter, and besides she was just right for the job. Strictly business and no feminine nonsense. “His clothes are so old they’re moldy and rotted.”
“Third and fourth ventral ribs caved in,” I diagnosed aloud as I stepped toward the couch. “Look like they’re driven into the lungs.” But they couldn’t be— I frowned. The fellow would be dead or writhing in agony if they were. He wouldn’t be watching me with a curious detachment out of eyes as expressionless and blackly glinting as camera lenses.
His torso was of that distinctive gray-whiteness one associates with long defunct corpses, and entirely aside from the costal depression on which I based my superficial diagnosis there was something grotesque about it. The word is rather melodramatic, but it fits the gross, lumpy malformation of that body.
Perhaps I may more clearly convey his appearance by saying he looked as if some child had thumbed out of putty an inept, three-dimensional caricature of a human form.
His flesh was clammy under my probing hands, and peculiarly soggy, evoking from the mists of the long years a recollection of student days and my first formaldehyde-pickled cadaver. I had been right! The bones beneath were free-floating, torn from their anchorage. The man’s stoicism was remarkable. He should have shrieked under the pressure I applied, but he did not make a sound. I glanced at his face, wondering if he had fainted.
I knew that face. Or rather, I knew the one it had been ineptly molded to resemble.
The card file in my mind presented the appropriate memo:
NAME: Elijah Fenton. DIAGNOSIS: Fibrous tumor, right side of neck. TREATMENT: Excision of growth. RESULT: Successful. POST-OPERATIVE CARE: Weekly dressings, discontinued because patient drowned, 12/11/33.
I laughed shortly. Was I as credulous as Jethro Parker, letting a chance resemblance suggest impossible things? This could not be Fenton. Fenton had been drowned last winter in the tragedy at which all Albany shuddered.
A feathery chill brushed my spine. There, from clavicle to point of the right mandible, was the healed scar of the incision my own scalpel had made!
Dr. Courtney Stone’s account, continued:
I confess that for a brief moment I was jolted out of the scientific attitude and almost believed that lying before me was a revenant, somehow returned to life after being nine months dead. Then I saw that what I had taken for a scar was merely a groove across the tramp’s neck. To continue the simile I have used before, if the fellow had been sculptured from putty the awkward artist might have used Elijah Fenton as a model and attempted to reproduce the result of his operation along with the rest.
It was coincidence pure and simple, of course. If the investigators of so-called psychic phenomena would remember the frequency of such accidental duplications they would not make such fools of themselves.
Nevertheless I was grateful for the interruption of Miss Horne’s steady, “Mr. Lambert’s wound is still seeping and I’m ready for you. Would you want to take care of him first?”
“Perhaps I’d better. He can’t stand the loss of much more blood.” She was waiting for me with operating gown and sterile gloves as I turned. “Think you can take an X-ray of this fellow’s chest without help?” Artery clamps, sterile sponges, catgut-threaded needles, were laid out on a towel-covered instrument stand next to the examining table. “I’ll have to see what’s inside him before I can do anything.”
“Of course.” There was no hesitation in her reply. “I’ll wheel in the portable machine and have the picture ready for you by the time you’re through with Mr. Lambert.”
The artery wall was cleanly cut, the tissue firm, holding the suture without tearing.
The care with which Hugh Lambert always kept himself in condition paid him dividends now. Sewing him up, I heard the rumble of the portable X-ray machine behind me, the click-click of the exposure and, as I finished, Nurse Horne was beside me, handing me the bandage and tape I required.
“The plate’s in the developing bath, doctor,” she said. “Are you going to give Mr. Lambert a shot of tetanus antitoxin?”
I felt Hugh’s pulse again. It was dangerously feeble. “No. I don’t think he could take it without the shock putting him out. He seems pretty weak. Get me a blood-count on him. On the tramp, too, while you’re about it. I’ll get to the darkroom meanwhile and take a squint at the Roentgenograph.”
I lifted the film out of the hypo, washed it, adjusted it against the ground glass of the viewing frame and switched on the light behind.
The outline of the torso was clearly visible. I made out the bony structurem the fractured costal cage and the vertebral column, traces of musculature and circulatory system. But that was all. Where the shadowy outlines of the soft organs—the heart and lungs and the membranous sacs enveloping them—should be, there was only a dark, amorphous blur!
If that plate was to be believed, my patient was nothing but a bag of skin and flesh stiffened by an amateurishly articulated skeleton and stuffed with something like a thick jelly. But the picture lied, of course. We’d have to take another.
A second later the glare of the surgery blinded me as I stepped out into it. Then I saw Edith Horne emerging from the laboratory. Her lips were colorless. “Doctor Stone! Hugh’s—Mr. Lambert’s count is under two million.”
“Phew!” I whistled. “That’s bad. I’ll look up the list of professional donors while you type his blood.”
“I’ve already done that. And—and it doesn’t fit into any of the four groups. Its serum agglutinates the corpuscles of Type Four, and none of the standard sera agglutinates it.”
“You must have made a mistake. If you were right about that, Lambert’s would be the only case of that kind ever found.”
“Not the only case,” she said. I was disturbed by the husky quaver that had crept into her tones. The atmosphere of the camp seemed to have badly impaired her professional impersonality. “The other sample, that from the tramp, reacts the same way. I’ve cross-typed the two bloods too, and they match.”
“There’s your answer,” I pointed out. “You must have made the same mistake with both. I’ll soon find out.”
But what I found out when I repeated the simple technique in the laboratory was that she had made no mistake. Only a scientist will understand the elation I felt as I racked the four test tubes that confirmed her report. In my mind I was already drafting the paper I would write for The Journal of the Medical Association....
Then I realized that the result of the tests I had just made was a virtual sentence of death on my friend. Being the sole possessor on earth, as far as science knew, of this unheard-of blood type doomed him assuredly as a noose around his neck. If he did not receive transfusion within a half hour at the outside there was no chance to save him, and there was no possibility of finding a donor for him.
There was one. There was, by a weird, impossible coincidence—a sheer, lunatic fluke, the tramp. How badly injured he was, I did not know, but there was no doubt in my mind that any drain on his vitality would lessen his chances of recovery to the vanishing point.
No. That was out. Every principle of medical ethics forbade my taking the chance of tapping his veins. Every principle of the law, too. If he died under the operation I would be guilty of murder.
Back in the surgery, Edith Horne lifted from Hugh’s recumbent form. “Low,” she whispered. Her face was drawn, the sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her pert nose vivid against a white pallor. The eyes she raised questioningly to mine were no longer a golden brown but dark with distress. She was far different, in that moment, from a nurse to whom the conflict against disease and death is a matter of emotionless routine.
“You were correct,” I told her. “It will be impossible to find anyone whose blood will match Hugh Lambert’s.”
Her hands closed, slowly, on the edge of the table. She said tonelessly, “The tramp.”
I shook my head. “No. I have no right to choose between them.”
“Right!” The corners of her mouth twitched in a smile more bitter than tears. “Have you a right to do otherwise? Look at them.”
My gaze went from Lambert, clean-limbed, strong-jawed, to the miserable derelict on the couch.
“Think what they mean to the world. And then tell me have you no right to make a choice.”
The one is a sodden hulk, I thought, useless to humanity and to himself. The other has already brought back from civilization’s frontiers outstanding contributions to science, will accomplish far more—if he lives.
My eyes came back to hers and read there a fierce challenge to be for once a man and not a scientific machine. “The Medical Board,” I temporized, weakly. “The law. If the tramp dies....”
“If he dies, only the two of us will know why.”
I made my decision. Not in words, but in an almost involuntary gesture of assent. Only afterward did it occur to me to wonder why the tramp had said not a word through all this, and by that time I had something far more amazing to wonder about.
Edith Horne gave me no time for a change of heart. In almost less time than it takes to write it, she had the Unger transfusion apparatus set up between the table and the couch, had laid out antiseptic and hemostats and ligatures, had handed me a scalpel and was waiting for me to begin.
I did, God help me!
I shall not go into details. Medical men know the procedure, others will not be interested. Suffice it to say that I connected the tramp’s artery to Hugh Lambert’s vein and permitted the blood of one to flow into the other.
I saw the ruddiness of health again tincture Hugh’s cheeks. Edith watched him with an intentness that excluded all else. I turned, then, to check on the tramp’s condition.
My jaw dropped. My hands shook on the stopcocks I was so carefully manipulating. Ice molded my body, tightening it.
The tramp was shrinking! Visibly and with increasing rapidity he was growing smaller! Every part of him was diminishing, at once and in proportion, as if he were a motion picture image from which the camera was being withdrawn at express speed. As if he were a pricked balloon out of which the gas was rapidly emptying.
He was the size of a child, then of a doll, and in no time at all, of one of those bangles that women wear on their wrists. ... He was gone! The tube that had ended in his arm dangled loosely in mid-air.
The table on which he had lain was empty. Absolutely, impossibly empty!
I swear by Hippocrates, of whom I am a humble follower, that I saw that man shrink and vanish, there before me, and leave no trace whatever, that he had ever existed....
| Affidavit of Edith Horne, R.N. | ||
| State of New York | : | |
| County of Albany | : | ss |
| City of Albany | : | |
Edith Horne, being duly sworn, deposes and says:
I have read the account of Dr. Courtney Stone as to the events occurring at his home at about midnight on the morning of August 16, 1934, and aver that as to such matters that I could have seen or heard the said statement is true.
I did not actually see the disappearance of the man we called the tramp. My attention was wholly concentrated on watching the condition of the patient, Hugh Lambert, to whom the said tramp’s blood was being transfused, but I affirm that said tramp was on the operating table in the surgery when the transfusion started, and that when I looked up at a sort of strangled cry from Dr. Stone, he was no longer either there or anywhere else in the room. I further depose that I was in such a position that even if the tramp had been in condition to move he could not have gone out through the door into the entrance hall without pushing me aside, and that the only other exit from the room is through Dr. Stone’s office, which was locked.
There is no question in my mind that the said tramp actually vanished in the manner described by Dr. Stone.
In witness whereof I set hereunto my hand and seal this 5th day of December, 1934.
(Signed) Edith Horne, R.N.
(Editor’s Note: To save space, the jurat, or notary’s statement of the administration of this oath, has been omitted from this and succeeding affidavits. The originals, however, are on file at my office and may be examined there by any one presenting credentials from a recognized scientific society. A. L. Z.)
Dr. Courtney Stone’s account, resumed:
I must automatically have shut off the stopcocks of the transfusion apparatus, for that is how they were when I was recalled to myself by Nurse Horne’s startled demand, “Where is the tramp? What’s become of him?”
I didn’t reply. What could I have said if I had tried to? I sought sanity in ligating Hugh’s vein, in suturing the wound I had made. Edith helped me.
By the time the task was completed I had got more nearly back to normal. “He must have managed somehow to get off the table while I was watching the gauges,” I said. “He must be somewhere around. We’ll look for him.”
We did, in the laboratory, in the X-ray dark room. Even in my office, though the door to that was locked. It was impossible for the tramp to have gotten in there, but not as impossible as the other thing I thought I had seen. We didn’t find him.
Edith turned to me finally, her face inscrutable, and said, “Well, that solves our problem, doesn’t it?”
“How about Jethro Parker and Miss Doring? They will be asking for the tramp.”
“That’s easy. He wasn’t as badly hurt as he seemed, refused treatment and went away. He refused even to give his name and there is no way to trace him. And that’s what we’ll tell Hugh Lambert, too. We won’t even tell him about the transfusion. Glass cut his arm as well as his leg, and in the excitement he didn’t notice it.”
There was everything in favor of the course she proposed, nothing against it. We returned to the surgery and I examined Hugh.
“He’s coming back strong. We’ll fix up a bed for him in my study and he’ll be good as new in ten days or so, with proper nursing.”
“You can be sure I’ll give him that. I—”
“No, Edith. Your job is back at the camp. There are half a hundred kids there to be watched over and I wanted you there because I wouldn’t trust them to any of the other available nurses. I’ll have the Registry send someone over for Hugh.”
“That won’t be necessary, doctor.” The opening door admitted Miss Doring. “I was pacing the hall,” she explained, “and couldn’t help overhearing you. I’m coming to stay here, and take care of Hugh.”
“Very commendable, my dear,” I met her proposal. “I’m sure you’re anxious to do something for him. There really will not be anything to do requiring training, but helping at the dressing of wounds such as his requires courage from one who is not used to the sight of blood. I can’t have you fainting just when I need you.”
“You wouldn’t be afraid of that, doctor,” it was Edith who replied, “if you had seen Miss Doring grasping Hugh’s leg to stop that artery. She saved him, when she couldn’t have been sure that she was not herself badly hurt or so badly cut that her career was ended.”
“I wasn’t doing him much good. It was the bandage you put on that really saved him. I—”
“Wait a minute, you two,” I growled. “Stop throwing bouquets at each other, and let’s get this matter settled. I’ll take you as Hugh’s practical nurse on Miss Horne’s say-so, but aren’t you being somewhat impulsive? It seems to me I read somewhere that you were flying back to Hollywood to start a new picture at once.”
“Hang the picture!” Despite her earnestness there was a twinkle of elfin mischief in Ann Doring’s eyes. “Let Ratskoff do a little worrying about me for once.”
And that ended the discussion. I forebore to ask Mrs. Small what she thought on her return to find that she was being called upon to chaperon a glamorous motion picture actress, but I confess I found myself hurrying through my day’s work to get home a half-hour earlier. Somehow my bachelor domicile had taken on a new allure.
But it was not to last long. Hugh gained strength rapidly, and the third day after these events insisted on being taken back to camp to finish his convalescence there. Ann Doring went with him.
Sundry telegrams from the files of the New York Office of World Pictures Corporation:
HOLLYWOOD CAL 8/17/34
JENNINGS
WORLPIC NEW YORK