"Good God!" exclaimed Van Rieten.
Abruptly he turned on the light.
We found Etcham utterly asleep, exhausted by his long anxiety and the exertions of his phenomenal march, and relaxed completely now that the load was in a sense shifted from his shoulders to Van Rieten's. Even the light on his face did not wake him.
The whistle had ceased and the two voices now sounded together. Both came from Stone's cot, where the concentrated white ray showed him lying just as we had left him, except that he had tossed his arms above his head and had torn the coverings and bandages from his chest.
The swelling on his right breast had broken. Van Rieten aimed the center line of the light at it and we saw it plainly. From his flesh, grown out of it, there protruded a head, such a head as the dried specimens Etcham had shown us, as if it were a miniature of the head of a Balunda fetish-man. It was black, shining black as the blackest African skin; it rolled the whites of its wicked, wee eyes and showed its microscopic teeth between lips repulsively negroid in their red fullness, even in so diminutive a face. It had crisp, fuzzy wool on its minikin skull, it turned malignantly from side to side and chittered incessantly in that inconceivable falsetto. Stone babbled brokenly against its patter.
Van Rieten turned from Stone and waked Etcham, with some difficulty. When he was awake and saw it all, Etcham stared and said not one word.
"You saw him slice off two swellings?" Van Rieten asked.
Etcham nodded, chokingly.
"Did he bleed much?" Van Rieten demanded.
"Ve'y little," Etcham replied.
"You hold his arms," said Van Rieten to Etcham.
He took up Stone's razor and handed me the light. Stone showed no sign of seeing the light or of knowing we were there. But the little head mewled and screeched at us.
Van Rieten's hand was steady, and the sweep of the razor even and true. Stone bled amazingly little and Van Rieten dressed the wound as if it had been a bruise or scrape.
Stone had stopped talking the instant the excrescent head was severed. Van Rieten did all that could be done for Stone and then fairly grabbed the light from me. Snatching up a gun he scanned the ground by the cot and brought the butt down once and twice, viciously.
We went back to our hut, but I doubt if I slept.
CHAPTER VI
Next day, near noon, in broad daylight, we heard the two voices from Stone's hut. We found Etcham dropped asleep by his charge. The swelling on the left had broken, and just such another head was there miauling and spluttering. Etcham woke up and the three of us stood there and glared. Stone interjected hoarse vocables into the tinkling gurgle of the portent's utterance.
Van Rieten stepped forward, took up Stone's razor and knelt down by the cot. The atomy of a head squealed a wheezy snarl at him.
Then suddenly Stone spoke English.
"Who are you with my razor?"
Van Rieten started back and stood up.
Stone's eyes were clear now and bright, they roved about the hut.
"The end," he said; "I recognize the end. I seem to see Etcham, as if in life. But Singleton! Ah, Singleton! Ghosts of my boyhood come to watch me pass! And you, strange specter with the black beard and my razor! Aroint ye all!"
"I'm no ghost, Stone," I managed to say. "I'm alive. So are Etcham and Van Rieten. We are here to help you."
"Van Rieten!" he exclaimed. "My work passes on to a better man. Luck go with you, Van Rieten."
Van Rieten went nearer to him.
"Just hold still a moment, old man," he said soothingly. "It will be only one twinge."
"I've held still for many such twinges," Stone answered quite distinctly. "Let me be. Let me die in my own way. The hydra was nothing to this. You can cut off ten, a hundred, a thousand heads, but the curse you can not cut off, or take off. What's soaked into the bone won't come out of the flesh, any more than what's bred there. Don't hack me any more. Promise!"
His voice had all the old commanding tone of his boyhood and it swayed Van Rieten as it always had swayed everybody.
"I promise," said Van Rieten.
Almost as he said the word Stone's eyes filmed again.
Then we three sat about Stone and watched that hideous, gibbering prodigy grow up out of Stone's flesh, till two horrid, spindling little black arms disengaged themselves. The infinitesimal nails were perfect to the barely perceptible moon at the quick, the pink spot on the palm was horridly natural. These arms gesticulated and the right plucked toward Stone's blond beard.
"I can't stand this," Van Rieten exclaimed and took up the razor again.
Instantly Stone's eyes opened, hard and glittering.
"Van Rieten break his word?" he enunciated slowly. "Never!"
"But we must help you," Van Rieten gasped.
"I am past all help and all hurting," said Stone. "This is my hour. This curse is not put on me; it grew out of me, like this horror here. Even now I go."
His eyes closed and we stood helpless, the adherent figure spouting shrill sentences.
In a moment Stone spoke again.
"You speak all tongues?" he asked quickly.
And the mergent minikin replied in sudden English:
"Yea, verily, all that you speak," putting out its microscopic tongue, writhing its lips and wagging its head from side to side. We could see the thready ribs on its exiguous flanks heave as if the thing breathed.
"Has she forgiven me?" Stone asked in a muffled strangle.
"Not while the moss hangs from the cypresses," the head squeaked. "Not while the stars shine on Lake Pontchartrain will she forgive."
And then Stone, all with one motion, wrenched himself over on his side. The next instant he was dead.
When Singleton's voice ceased the room was hushed for a space. We could hear each other breathing. Twombly, the tactless, broke the silence.
"I presume," he said, "you cut off the little minikin and brought it home in alcohol."
Singleton turned on him a stern countenance.
"We buried Stone," he said, "unmutilated as he died."
"But," said the unconscionable Twombly, "the whole thing is incredible."
Singleton stiffened.
"I did not expect you to believe it," he said; "I began by saying that although I heard and saw it, when I look back on it I cannot credit it myself."
WILLIAM SANSOM
A WOMAN SELDOM FOUND
Once a young man was on a visit to Rome.
It was his first visit; he came from the country - but he was neither on the one hand so young nor on the other so simple as to imagine that a great and beautiful capital should hold out finer promises than anywhere else. He already knew that life was largely illusion, that disappointments came in compensation: and he knew, too, that life could offer a quality even worse - the probability that nothing would happen at all. This was always more possible in a great city intent on its own business.
Thinking in this way, he stood on the Spanish steps and surveyed the momentous panorama stretched before him. He listened to the swelling hum of the evening traffic and watched, as the lights went up against Rome's golden dusk. Shining automobiles slunk past the fountains and turned urgently into the bright Via Condotti, neon-red signs stabbed the shadows with invitation; the yellow windows of buses were packed with faces intent on going somewhere - everyone in the city seemed intent on the evening's purpose. He alone had nothing to do.
He felt himself the only person alone of everyone in the city. But searching for adventure never brought it - rather kept it away. Such a mood promised nothing. So the young man turned back up the steps, passed the lovely church, and went on up the cobbled hill towards his hotel. Wine-bars and food-shops jostled with growing movement in those narrow streets. But out on the broad pavements of the Vittorio Veneto, under the trees mounting to the Borghese Gardens, the high world of Rome would be filling the most elegant cafйs in Europe to enjoy with apйritifs the twilight. That would be the loneliest of all! So the young man kept to the quieter, older streets on his solitary errand home.
In one such street, a pavementless alley between old yellow houses, a street that in Rome might suddenly blossom into a secret piazza of fountain and baroque church, a grave secluded treasure-place - he noticed that he was alone but for the single figure of a woman walking down the hill towards him.
As she drew nearer, he saw that she was dressed with taste, that in her carriage was a soft Latin fire, that she walked with respect. Her face was veiled, but it was impossible to imagine that she would not be beautiful. Isolated thus with her, passing so near to her, and she symbolising the adventure of which the evening was so empty - a greater melancholy gripped him. He felt wretched as the gutter, small, sunk, pitiful. So that he rounded his shoulders and lowered his eyes - but not before casting one furtive glance into hers.
He was so shocked at what he saw that he paused, he stared, shocked, into her face. He had made no mistake. She was smiling. Also - she too had hesitated. He thought instantly: "Whore?" But no- it was not that kind of smile, though as well it was not without affection. And then amazingly she spoke:
"I- I know I shouldn't ask you… but it is such a beautiful evening - and perhaps you are alone, as alone as I am…"
She was very beautiful. He could not speak. But a growing elation gave him the power to smile. So that she continued, still hesitant, in no sense soliciting:
"I thought… perhaps… we could take a walk, an apйritif…"
At last the young man achieved himself:
"Nothing,
nothing
would please me more. And the Veneto is only a minute up there."
She smiled again:
"My home is just here…"
They walked in silence a few paces down the street, to a turning that young man had already passed. This she indicated. They walked to where the first humble houses ended in a kind of recess. In the recess was set the wall of a garden, and behind it stood a large and elegant mansion. The woman, about whose face shone a curious glitter - something fused of the transparent pallor of fine skin, of grey but brilliant eyes, of dark eyebrows and hair of lucent black - inserted her key in the garden gate.
They were greeted by a servant in velvet livery. In a large and exquisite salon, under chandeliers of fine glass and before a moist green courtyard where water played, they were served with a frothy wine. They talked. The wine - iced in the warm Roman night - filled them with an inner warmth of exhilaration. But from time to time the young man looked at her curiously.
With her glances, with many subtle inflections of teeth and eyes she was inducing an intimacy that suggested much. He felt he must be careful. At length he thought the best thing might be to thank her - somehow thus to root out whatever obligation might be in store. But here she interrupted, first with a smile, then with a look of some sadness. She begged him to spare himself any perturbation: she knew it was strange, that in such a situation he might suspect some second purpose: but the simple truth remained that she was lonely and - this with a certain deference - something perhaps in him, perhaps in that moment of dusk in the street, had proved to her inescapably attractive. She had not been able to help herself.
The possibility of a perfect encounter - a dream that years of disillusion will never quite kill - decided him. His elation rose beyond control. He believed her. And thereafter the perfections compounded. At her invitation they dined. Servants brought food of great delicacy; shell-fish, fat bird-flesh, soft fruits. And afterwards they sat on a sofa near the courtyard, where it was cool. Liqueurs were brought. The servants retired. A hush fell upon the house. They embraced.
A little later, with no word, she took his arm and led him from the room. How deep a silence had fallen between them! The young man's heart beat fearfully - it might be heard, he felt, echoing in the hall whose marble they now crossed, sensed through his arm to hers. But such excitement rose now from certainty. Certainty that at such a moment, on such a charmed evening - nothing could go wrong. There was no need to speak. Together they mounted the great staircase.
In her bedroom, to the picture of her framed by the bed curtains and dimly naked in a silken shift, he poured out his love; a love that was to be eternal, to be always perfect, as fabulous as this their exquisite meeting.
Softly she spoke the return of his love. Nothing would ever go amiss, nothing would ever come between them. And very gently she drew back the bedclothes for him.
But suddenly, at the moment when at last he lay beside her, when his lips were almost upon hers - he hesitated.
Something was wrong. A flaw could be sensed. He listened, felt - and then saw that the fault was his. Shaded, soft-shaded lights by the bed - but he had been so careless as to leave on the bright electric chandelier in the centre of the ceiling. He remembered the switch was by the door. For a fraction, then, he hesitated. She raised her eyelids - saw his glance at the chandelier, understood.
Her eyes glittered. She murmured:
"My beloved, don't worry - don't move…"
And she reached out her hand. Her hand grew larger, her arm grew longer and longer, it stretched out through the bed-curtains, across the long carpet, huge and overshadowing the whole of the long room, until at last its giant fingers were at the door. With a terminal click, she switched out the light.