PseudoPod

• Author : Amanda C. Davis
• Narrator : Pamila Payne
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
• Discuss on Forums

“The House, The Garden And The Occupants” first appeared in the anthology TRIANGULATION:MORNING AFTER, from Parsec Ink, in July 2012.

“I like the concept of ghosts as personalities locked in a never-ending ‘now’. Also, when it comes to haunted houses, one ghost is never enough.”

Links for Jason Arnopp and Mr. B, The Gentleman Rhymer can be found… well, at the links right under their names!

This is Anne, with shreds of her gown wisping away like the edges of clouds, at the elbow of the grand staircase where the iron-framed window overlooks a patch of garden entombed in briars. She casts a glow onto the wall that reflects faintly but bestows her no shadow. She is riveted to the window; her face is watery, difficult to make out, but her posture reveals her inner workings. A clock chimes midnight. Slowly, she lowers her head. Slowly, she turns from the window. She takes a single step upstairs before she dissipates like fog under the sun.

The first time she took this path she followed it to her bedroom, to a letter-opener strewn on her writing desk, to her bath, to her grave. Now she exists only in a narrow series of moments. She only completed this path once.

Anne comes with the first stroke of midnight and leaves with the last; she knows nothing but midnight, and the word that falls from her ghostly lips, unheard, and those things have composed the full of her existence for over one hundred years.

This is the column of light that flares in the garden, as tall as a tree and bright as an angel, just after the last chime of midnight. It burns bright for a single blink of an eye before it collapses to the earth, leaving the night empty and dead. A pool of light lingers at its base. The garden shifts. Its shadows follow no rules.

The column of light, in its youngest years, answered to Boy, and then to Groom, and a host of careless and vicious names in between, but the only name it will answer to now is the last one it knew, the one that Anne called it. If the light speaks, it has never been heard; if it knows anything at all, it is the single moment of flaring and falling, too quick to grasp. Its existence is an eternal cycle of light and dark. It moves so fast that life from its perspective might be a single blur of light. But it will never tell.

This is the roil of malice that dwells in the crack above the lintel of the front door, a seething coil tight as a Gordian knot, black as blindness, in a place no light can reach.

This is Jacob Winterbeam, twenty-five, who has sunk the savings of his brief life into an estate that has by disrepair or disrepute been spared the indignity of subdivisions and commercial zoning.

The post PseudoPod 389: The House, the Garden, and the Occupants appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Simon Kurt Unsworth
• Narrator : David Rees-Thomas
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
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“The Cotswold Olimpicks” was first published in TERROR TALES OF THE COTSWOLDS, published by Gray Friar Press in 2012, and it was reprinted in 2013 in Stephen Jones’ THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST NEW HORROR 24. “I’d like the audience to remember that the Cotswold Olimpicks are a real event, and that the poem at the end of the story was genuinely written by Robert Dover!”

Some more information on the actual Cotswold Olimpicks can be found here and here

‘What do you want?’ asked Fillingham.

‘You to celebrate with us,’ she replied, holding out the cup again. The liquid inside slithering up and then down again and even in the poor light, Fillingham saw the residue it left on the clear plastic sides glistening and clinging like oil. ‘Devotions must be paid.’

‘What?’ said Fillingham. ‘Look, I appreciate you’ve got this weird acting gig at the games and you’re only doing your job, but please, it’s late and I’m tired and I don’t want to drink whatever that is.’

‘A last enquiry: you refuse?’

‘Yes! I refuse! Now, just leave me alone.’ To emphasize what he was saying, Fillingham lifted his camera and took a photograph, the light of the flash filling the corridor with a leaching whiteness that painted the woman into a colourless mass for a moment. As the dancing ghostlights cleared from his eyes, the woman nodded and then lifted the cup to her lips and drank the liquid it contained. Keeping the cup at her lips, she thrust her tongue out into it and Fillingham saw it writhe within, licking at the remaining drips of drink. It should have been erotic, he thought; he was sure it was meant as erotic, but somehow it wasn’t, it was crude and unpleasant. Her tongue was dark and looked slimy, glittering inside the clear plastic walls of the cup. Finally, she dropped the cup to the floor, lowered her head and muttered something that sounded Latin or Greek. Before she could look up at him again, Fillingham shut his door.

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• Author : Terry Dowling
• Narrator : Graeme Dunlop
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
• Discuss on Forums

“Nightside Eye” was a cover item for Cemetery Dance #66 along with a major interview, “Making Strange: A Gothic Conversation with Terry Dowling”, conducted by acclaimed US editor and academic Danel Olson. It was reprinted in three Year’s Bests – Stephen Jones’s Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24, Paula Guran’s Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2013, and Talie Helene and Liz Gryzb’s The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy & Horror 2012. “This hotel really actually exists in the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney and still has the eerie qualities described in this story.”

THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT Live 2005 Remake Part 1 can be found at DailyMotion

Nightside Eye

by Terry Dowling

‘My camera and sound people will be here soon, Sophie and Craig, my volunteer assistants and official witnesses. It’s six o’clock now. Once we’re set up, we’ll begin at 7pm, the same time Dr Rathcar did fifteen months ago. We’ll do the whole thing twice if we can, put several objects here on the mantel – a plastic bottle, a child’s wooden block, a toy train – and simply record what happens. Second time through, if we are lucky tonight and the phenomenon occurs, the moment they’re moved, disturbed in any way at all, I shift the patch from one eye to the other and see what I get. It shouldn’t take long.’

‘You do that once it happens.’

‘As soon as it happens. As close to. The first time is a control to establish parameters: event frequency and duration, lighting levels, things like that. But the second time round I stand over here by the fireplace and shift the patch, just as Rathcar did.’

‘But the camcorders will only catch your reactions. Not what you see.’

‘Right. But whatever we get may match reactions in the CCTV footage from the Rathcar attempt. Rathcar’s own footage hasn’t been made available yet, but may be released once we do this. Rathcar called out a single word – “Kathy!” – his assistant’s name. We don’t know why now, and of course he can’t tell us.’

‘Or won’t.’

‘Or won’t. But there may be some key detail or other that emerges. Later spectrographic analysis may show even more, who knows?’

‘It’s all very uncertain,’ Susan said, looking at him intently, or possibly at the eye-patch that was to play such a key role in what was about to happen.

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• Author : Conda V. Douglas
• Narrator : David Cummings 
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
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“The Dogs Of Ubud” Originally published in the anthology DREAMSPELL NIGHTMARES in 2010. This story comes from Conda’s travels in Bali, where she recognized how wonderfully and spiritually the Balinese treat their families, children and world.

Ubud, artists’ capital of Bali, teemed with tourists. Down the dirt path to the dance arena a tourist herd thundered, headed for tonight’s performance. Alongside the road, Balinese merchants sat, their wares arrayed on blankets.

Peter dodged through the crowd, through a cacophony of languages. If the Balinese could tolerate, even thrive, on this invasion, so could he. Now he hid, one among many. What he did, how he lived, was always hidden.

Not so the Balinese. Lulled by their jungle paradise, they never lost their innocence. Even the main living room in their family compounds possessed no walls, open-sided. Vulnerable.

When Peter saw the knife, the star-shaped wound etched upon his belly burned, the blood beneath his skin pulsing. The knife, a wavy-bladed kris, lay on a piece of tattered batik cloth, a store of a rag. Among the clutter of tattered straw fans and plastic “ivory,” the kris glittered, a diamond in a pot metal setting.

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• Authors : Mohammad Naim Kabir, Stephen Willcott and Liz Colter
• Narrators : John Bell, Ant Bacon and John Trevillian
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 385: FLASH ON THE BORDERLANDS XX: Community is a PseudoPod original.

Hell is other people…

“Penance” is a PseudoPod original. “This story began, as some of my stories do, with a quick, visual flash of something odd and unexpected just before sleep. I began the story as a humorous tale, but it quickly let me know that it wanted to be a horror tale instead.”

“Mallecho” was previously published in the print and e-book anthology, ARCANE, by Cold Fusion Media, edited by Nathan Shumate.

“Jack” appears here as an original, says Jack’s editorial fore-brain.

Larime Taylor’s “A Voice In The Dark” can be purchased here!

Hell is other people…

‘Wake,’ my ghosts said. ‘Come.’

They spoke asynchronously, like a flock of noisy birds. Their voices pulled me from sleep and I opened my eyes to the throng of them at my bedside.

‘Why?’ I asked. The long, morose faces stared back at me, gray and insubstantial, and mute once again.”

‘Mallecho wood? Is that safe?’ My wife asks. She reminds me of my mother.

‘I told them to stay clear,’ I say. ‘They’re just going for a bit, Jan.’ She worries like that. But then her family is not from here. I smile at her and go into the garden. The sun is strong and overhead. The children have left their ball games and toys on the lawn. I go to the rose tree and watch the insects: the flies, the bees, and the ants. Behind the tree is a brown fence and behind that is the embankment. Thick bramble covers its side. It is tall, almost as high as the house. At the top is an abandoned railway line. This was my father’s house, but he never saw the line in use. This house will pass to my children one day, I hope.

The land around here is old. Old in human terms. Some of the boundaries and copses are mentioned in the doomsday book, but there are sites of pre-history too. Standing stones, earth works, barrows and the like. Sacred groves, probably. You can feel it at night. If you walk on the embankment and look at the stars, at the landscape. The weight of generations, the renewal of the seasons. Forgotten things were done here.

I am Jack’s inferior parietal cortex, and I know what you’re thinking. Probably that this is some lame rip-off of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.

I loved that story! It sometimes had soliloquies from the point of view of _organs_! Genius. I am Jack’s makeshift temporal lobe, and I know what it is to read a good book. Now it’s mostly just road signs and maps, but you take what you can get. There’s some smooth poetry in 3 Miles to Berkley or Welcome to Alameda, you know.

The post PseudoPod 385: FLASH ON THE BORDERLANDS XX: Community appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Paul Finch
• Narrator : Ant Bacon
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
• Discuss on Forums

“The Old Traditions Are Best” was first published in Shades Of Darkness, 2008, and republished in The Mammoth Book Of Best New Horror #20, 2009.

I think it’s important to remember that Cornwall is one of the prettiest and warmest corners of England, an idyllic rural peninsula surrounded by blue seas, with miles of white sand beaches, soaring cliffs, and inland green hills and rolling moors. It is a hugely popular holiday resort, famous for its traditional fishing ports and harbour towns, without a hint of cheapness or vulgarity – Padstow is a classic example of this.

The Nerdapalooza Tapes can be found HERE.

‘Check this out.’ Russ read a selected passage. “In 1346, during the Hundred Years War, England’s king, Edward III, commenced a lengthy siege of the port of Calais. The French fleet was unable to break it, and thus launched a series of tit-for-tat raids on English coastal towns. One such was Padstow in north Cornwall, which was assaulted in the April of 1347. The town, denuded of defenders as the bulk of its male population was involved at Calais, could only offer resistance by carrying the town’s traditional spring-time symbol, the Hobby-Horse – or Obby Oss – down to the harbour, and threatening to invoke demonic forces with it. The French scoffed at this, but legend holds that, when they landed, the Obby Oss did indeed come to life and attack them. Several Frenchmen were borne away into the sea by it, before their comrades fled.”

Scott still wasn’t listening. He was too preoccupied with the incident earlier, and what, if anything, it might signify. As far as he understood, the ‘Safari Programme’, as the popular press scornfully termed it, was designed to provide short holidays for young offenders as an aid to their rehabilitation. It was supposed to be good for everyone: ease up pressure on the prison system, and show the offender that a different and more rewarding lifestyle was possible. But surely the people who actually lived in the place the offender was being taken to weren’t supposed to know about it? Surely the whole thing would be carried out as secretly as possible? This had worried Scott from the outset. Thoughts of mob vengeance were never far from a young criminal’s mind. Back in Manchester, he knew of one lad who’d been tied to a lamp-post and had paint poured over him. Another had been locked in a shed with a savage dog, and had almost died from his injuries.

Russ read on. “Owing to the infernal forces that allegedly worked through it on that long-ago spring day, the Padstow Oss has developed a reputation for defending the town aggressively, even cruelly. This is not entirely out of keeping with other hobby-horse legends. Scholars have suggested that the name itself, ‘hobby-horse’, derives from the old English word ‘Hobb’, which means ‘Devil’, though in the case of Padstow events have clearly gone a little farther than most. Even now, in modern times, the Padstow Oss has a disquieting appearance, and in a grim reversal of the role commonly played by fertility gods, is said to draw its power from violence rather than love.”

‘Didn’t know this place was so interesting,’ Mary said, taking a sip of lemonade.

Russ looked again at Scott, who hadn’t touched his own drink. ‘Just shows though, doesn’t it, Scott. You thought that bloke was having a go at you, but all he was doing was telling you about the history of the place.’

The post PseudoPod 384: The Old Traditions Are Best appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Sara Larner
• Narrator : Marguerite Kenner
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 382: Her Face All Sharp is a PseudoPod original.

“I began writing this story with the intention of justifying vengeance. I wanted it to take the sort of clear but twisted moral stance that defines a fable as a fable (to me, anyway)…”

SLINGERS by Matt Wallace can be purchased here.

Lance Roger Axt’s UTOPIATES Audio Drama can be found at the link.

But he had read deeply about such a creature as she, in his uncle’s old library, and had been prepared for the unlikely contingency that everything went according to plan. He threw a leather hood soaked in semen, blood, and tears over her head. He could not hear her through it, which was how it must be.

He put his fingers around her neck. Onyx and sapphire, brilliant and beautiful, her neck feathers were soft and short. He ran his thumb along her inner throat, pushing gently, just to see how it felt. She twisted her head away, in the dumb manner of a hooded bird; unwilling to move but inclined away from pain. He readjusted his hand and pushed a little harder.

He couldn’t hear anything through the hood, but he knew she must have made some sound at that, some squawk or chirp. A plea.

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• Author : Damien Angelica Walters
• Narrator : Becky Stinemetze
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
• Discuss on Forums

“Scarred” originally appeared in Fireside Magazine Issue 2, released in August 2012.

Content warning:

SLINGERS by Matt Wallace can be purchased here

Violet carved her hate into her flesh one name at a time.

Her skin was riddled with scars, some barely visible, others dark and ruddy. The oldest, the first name, was on her right ankle, right above the knobby bone. It revealed a halting progress, with many gaps in between the lines and curves.

He suffered for a long time.

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• Author : Hunter Gray
• Narrator : Alethea Kontis
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
• Discuss on Forums

“Abigail” has been performed at various readings in northern New Jersey and New York but is published now here.

The sun was dipping now, and I feared for myself. My hands grew cold, like ice. And then, I felt the popcorn pop in my belly. The jelly-baby was kicking. My jelly-baby was awake and real and moving. And then I feared for her too.

The pin-prickle of fear brushed itself against the small of my back even more when I saw what lay in the street ahead of me. A perfect mountain of frosting…a cake delicately decorated in pink icing. Maraschino cherries floated around the edges and crystal sugar sprinkles peppered the top. It was beautiful, but terrifying. Why was this in the middle of the road? Who left such a thing? Instinctually, I looked around me. And behind me. For the first time, in a long time, I felt like the prey, not the predator.

But there was no one, nothing. No cars or birds or tiny children or good Samaritans trying to feed some hungry knocked-up college kid.

And then, I saw it. The most beautiful house I had ever seen.

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• Author : Gertrude Atherton
• Narrator : George Hrab
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Graeme Dunlop
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“The Greatest Good Of The Greatest Number” first appeared in her collection THE BELL IN THE FOG AND OTHER STORIES (1905).

Morton Blaine returned to New York from his brief vacation to find awaiting him a frantic note from John Schuyler, the man nearer to him than any save himself, imploring him to “come at once.” The appeal was supplemented with the usual intimation that the service was to be rendered to God rather than to man.

The note was twenty-four hours old. Blaine, without changing his travelling clothes, rang for a cab and was driven rapidly up the Avenue. He was a man of science, not of enthusiasms, cold, unerring, brilliant; a superb intellectual machine, which never showed a fleck of rust, unremittingly polished, and enlarged with every improvement. But for one man he cherished an abiding sympathy; to that man he hastened on the slightest summons, as he hastened now. They had been intimate in boyhood; then in later years through mutual respect for each other’s high abilities and ambitions.

As the cab rolled over the asphalt of the Avenue, Blaine glanced idly at the stream of carriages returning from the Park, lifting his hat to many of the languid pretty women. He owed his minor fame to his guardianship of fashionable nerves. He could calm hysteria with a pressure of his cool flexible hand or a sudden modulation of his harsh voice. And women dreaded his wrath. There were those who averred that his eyes could smoke.

He leaned forward and raised his hat with sudden interest. She who returned his bow was as cold in her coloring as a winter night, but possessed a strength of line and depth of eye which suggested to the analyst her power to give the world a shock did Circumstance cease to run abreast of her. She was leaning back indolently in the open carriage, the sun slanting into her luminous skin and eyes, her face locked for the benefit of the chance observer, although she conversed with the faded individual at her side. As her eyes met those of the doctor her mouth convulsed suddenly, and a glance of mutual understanding passed between them. Then she raised her head with a defiant, almost reckless movement.

Blaine reached his friend’s house in a moment. The man who had summoned him was walking aimlessly up and down his library. He was unshaven; his hair and his clothing were disordered. His face had the modern beauty of strength and intellect and passion and weakness. A flash of relief illuminated it as Blaine entered.

“She has been terrible!” he said. “Terrible! I have not had the courage to call in any one else, and I am worn out. She is asleep now, and I got out of the room for half an hour. The nurse is exhausted too. Do stay to-night.”

“I will stay. Let us go up-stairs.”

As they reached the second landing two handsome children romped across the hall and flung themselves upon their father.

“Where have you been?” they demanded. “Why do you shut yourself up on the third floor with mamma all the time? When will she get well?”

Schuyler kissed them and bade them return to the nursery.

“How long can I keep it from them?” he asked bitterly. “What an atmosphere for children—my children!—to grow up in!”

“If you would do as I wish, and send her where she belongs—”

“I shall not. She is my wife. Moreover, concealment would then be impossible.”

They had reached the third floor. He inserted a key in a door, hesitated a moment, then said abruptly: “I saw in a paper that she had returned. Can it be possible?”

“I saw her on the Avenue a few moments ago.”

Was it the doctor’s imagination, or did the goaded man at his side flash him a glance of appeal?

They entered a room whose doors and windows were muffled. The furniture was solid, too solid to be moved except by muscular arms. There were no mirrors nor breakable articles of any sort.

On the bed lay a woman with ragged hair and sunken yellow face, but even in her ruin indefinably elegant. Her parted lips were black and blistered within; her shapely skinny hands clutched the quilt with the tenacious suggestion of the eagle—that long-lived defiant bird. At the bedside sat a vigorous woman, the pallor of fatigue on her face.

The creature on the bed opened her eyes. They had once been what are vaguely known as fine eyes; now they looked like blots of ink on parchment.

“Give me a drink,” she said feverishly. “Water! water! water!” She panted, and her tongue protruded slightly. Her husband turned away, his shoulders twitching. The nurse held a silver goblet to the woman’s lips. She drank greedily, then scowled up at the doctor.

“You missed it,” she said. “I should be glad, for I hate you, only you give me more relief than they. They are afraid. They tried to fool me, the idiots! But they didn’t try it twice. I bit.”

She laughed and threw her arms above her head. The loose sleeves of her gown fell back and disclosed arms speckled as if from an explosion of gunpowder.

“Just an ordinary morphine fiend,” thought the doctor. “And she is the wife of John Schuyler!”

An hour after dinner he told the husband and nurse to go to bed. For a while he read, the woman sleeping profoundly. The house was absolutely still, or seemed to be. Had pandemonium reigned he could hardly have heard an echo of it from this isolated room. The window was open, but looked upon roofs and back yards; no sound of carriage wheels rose to break the quiet. Despite the stillness, the doctor had to strain his ear to catch the irregular breathing of the sick woman. He had a singular feeling, although the most unimaginative of men, that this third floor, containing only himself and the woman, had been sliced from the rest of the house and hung suspended in space, independent of natural laws. It was after the book had ceased to interest him that the idea shaped itself, born of another, as yet unacknowledged, skulking in the recesses of his brain. At length he laid aside the book, and going to the bed, looked down upon the woman, coldly, reflectively—exactly as he had often watched the quivering of an animal—dissected alive in the cause of science.

Studying this man’s face, it was impossible to imagine it agitated by any passion except thirst for knowledge. The skin was as white as marble; the profile was straight and mathematical, the mouth a straight line, the chin as square as that of a chiselled Fate. The jaw was prominent, powerful, relentless. The eyes were deeply set and gray as polished steel. The large brow was luminous, very full—an index to the terrible intellect of the man.

As he looked down on the woman his thin nostrils twitched once and his lips compressed more firmly. Then he smiled. It was an odd, almost demoniacal smile.

“A physician,” he said, half aloud, “has almost as much power as God. The idea strikes me that we are the personification of that useful symbol.”

He plunged his hands into his pockets, and walked up and down the long thickly carpeted room.

“These are the facts in the case,” he continued. “The one man I love and unequivocally respect is tied, hand and foot, to that unsexed dehumanized morphine receptacle on the bed. She is hopeless. Every known specific has failed, must fail, for she loves the vice. He has one of the best brains of this day prolific in brains; a distressing capacity for affection, human to the core. At the age of forty-two, in the maturity of his mental powers, he carries with him a constant sickening sense of humiliation; a proud man, he lives in daily fear of exposure and shame. At the age of forty-two, in the maturity of his manhood, he meets the woman who conquers his heart, his imagination, who compels his faith by making other women abhorrent to him, who allures and maddens with the certainty of her power to make good his ideal of her. He cannot marry her; that animal on the bed is capable of living for twenty years.

“So much for him. A girl of twenty-eight, whose wealth and brain and beauty, and that other something that has not yet been analyzed and labelled, have made her a social star; who has come to wonder, then to resent, then to yawn at the general vanity of life, is suddenly swept out of her calm orbit by a man’s passion; and, with the swiftness of decision natural to her, goes to Europe. She returns in less than three months. For these two people there is but one sequel. The second chapter will be written the first time they are alone. Then they will go to Europe. What will be the rest of the book?

“First, there will be an ugly and reverberating scandal. In the course of a year or two she will compel him to return in the interest of his career. She will not be able to remain; so proud a woman could not stand the position. Again he will go with her. In a word, my friend’s career will be ruined. So many novelists and reporters have written the remaining chapters of this sort of story that it is hardly worth while for me to go any further.

“So much for them. Let us consider the other victims—the children. A morphine-mother in an asylum, a father in a strange land with a woman who is not his wife, the world cognizant of all the facts of the case. They grow up at odds with society. Result, they are morbid, warped, unnormal. In trite old English, their lives are ruined, as are all lives that have not had a fair chance.”

He returned abruptly to the bedside. He laid his finger on the woman’s pulse.

“No morphine to-night and she dies. A worthless wretch is sent where she belongs. Four people are saved.”

His breast swelled. His gray eyes seemed literally to send forth smoke; they suggested some noiseless deadly weapon of war. He exclaimed aloud: “My God! what a power to lie in the hands of one man! I stand here the arbiter of five destinies. It is for me to say whether four people shall be happy or wretched, saved or ruined. I might say, with Nero, ‘I am God!'” He laughed. “I am famed for my power to save where others have failed. I am famed in the comic weeklies for having ruined the business of more undertakers than any physician of my day. That has been my rôle, my professional pride. I have never felt so proud as now.”

The woman, who had been moving restlessly for some time, twitched suddenly and uncontrollably. She opened her eyes.

“Give it to me—quick!” she demanded. Her voice, always querulous, was raucous; her eyes were wild.

“No,” he said, deliberately, “you will have no more morphine; not a drop.”

She stared at him incredulously, then laughed.

“Stop joking,” she said, roughly. “Give it to me—quick—quick! I am very weak.”

“No,” he said.

Then, as he continued to hold her eyes, her own gradually expanded with terror. She raised herself on one arm.

“You mean that?” she asked.

“Yes.”

He watched her critically. She would be interesting.

“You are going to cure me with drastic measures, since others have failed?”

“Possibly.”

Her face contracted with hatred. She had been a rather clever woman, and she believed that he was going to experiment with her. But she had also been a strong-willed woman and used to command since babyhood.

“Give me that morphine,” she said, imperiously. “If you don’t I’ll be dead before morning.”

He stood imperturbable. She sprang from the bed and flung herself upon him, strong with anger and apprehension.

“Give it to me!” she screamed. “Give it to me!” And she strove to bite him.

He caught her by the shoulder and held her at arm’s-length. She writhed and struggled and cursed. Her oaths might have been learned in the gutter. She kicked at him and strove to reach him with her nails, clawing the air. She looked like a witch on a broomstick.

“What an exquisite bride she was!” he thought. “And what columns of rubbish have been printed about her and her entertainments!”

The woman was shrieking and struggling.

“Give it to me! You brute! You fiend! I always hated you! Give it to me! I am dying! I am dying! Help! Help!” But the walls were padded, and she knew it.

He permitted her to fling herself upon him, easily brushing aside her jumping fingers and snapping teeth. He knew that her agony was frightful. Her body was a net-work of hungry nerves. The diseased pulp of her brain had ejected every thought but one. She squirmed like an old autumn leaf about to fall. Her ugly face became tragic. The words shot from her dry contracted throat: “Give me the morphine! Give me the morphine!”

Suddenly realizing the immutability of the man in whose power she was, she sprang from him and ran frantically about the room, uttering harsh bleatlike cries. She pulled open the drawers of a chest, rummaging among its harmless contents, gasping, quivering, bounding, as her tortured nerves commanded. When she had littered the floor with the contents of the chest she ran about screaming hopelessly. The doctor shuddered, but he thought of the four innocent people in her power and in his.

She fell in a heap on the floor, biting the carpet, striking out her arms aimlessly, tearing her night-gown into strips; then lay quivering, a hideous, speckled, uncanny thing, who should have been embalmed and placed beside the Venus of Milo.

She raised herself on her hands and crawled along the carpet, casually at first, as a man stricken in the desert may, half-consciously, continue his search for water. Then the doctor, intently watching her, saw an expression of hope leap into her bulging eyes. She scrambled past him towards the wash-stand. Before he could define her purpose, she had leaped upon a goblet inadvertently left there and had broken it on the marble. He reached her just in time to save her throat.

Then she looked up at him pitifully. “Give it to me!”

She pressed his knees to her breast. The red burned-out tear-ducts yawned. The tortured body stiffened and relaxed.

“Poor wretch!” he thought. “But what is the physical agony of a night to the mental anguish of a lifetime?”

“Once! once!” she gasped; “or kill me.” Then, as he stood implacable, “Kill me! Kill me!”

He picked her up, put a fresh night-gown on her, and laid her on the bed. She remained as he placed her, too weak to move, her eyes staring at the ceiling above the big four-posted bed.

He returned to his chair and looked at his watch. “She may live two hours,” he thought. “Possibly three. It is only twelve. There is plenty of time.”

The room grew as still as the mountain-top whence he had that day returned. He attempted to read, but could not. The sense of supreme power filled his brain. He was the gigantic factor in the fates of four.

Then Circumstance, the outwardly wayward, the ruthlessly sequential, played him an ugly trick. His eyes, glancing idly about the room, were arrested by a big old-fashioned rocking-chair. There was something familiar about it. Soon he remembered that it resembled one in which his mother used to sit. She had been an invalid, and the most sinless and unworldly woman he had ever known. He recalled, with a touch of the old impatience, how she had irritated his active, aspiring, essentially modern mind with her cast-iron precepts of right and wrong. Her conscience flagellated her, and she had striven to develop her son’s to the goodly proportion of her own. As he was naturally a truthful and upright boy, he resented her homilies mightily. “Conscience,” he once broke out impatiently, “has made more women bores, more men failures, than any ten vices in the rogues’ calendar.”

She had looked in pale horror, and taken refuge in an axiom: “Conscience makes cowards of us all.”

He moved his head with involuntary pride. The greatest achievement of civilization was the triumph of the intellect over inherited impressions. Every normal man was conscientious by instinct, however he might outrage the sturdy little judge clinging tenaciously to his bench in the victim’s brain. It was only when the brain grew big with knowledge and the will clasped it with fingers of steel that the little judge was throttled, then cast out.

Conscience. What was it like? The doctor had forgotten. He had never committed a murder nor a dishonorable act. Had the impulse of either been in him, his cleverness would have put it aside with a smile of scorn. He had never scrupled to thrust from his path whoever or whatever stood in his way, and had stridden on without a backward glance. His profession had involved many experiments that would have made quick havoc of even the ordinary man’s conscience.

Conscience. An awkward guest for an unsuspected murderer; for the groundling whose heredity had not been conquered by brain. Fancy being pursued by the spectre of the victim!

The woman on the bed gave a start and groan that recalled him to the case in hand. He rose and walked quickly to her side. Her eyes were closed, her face was black with congested blood. He laid his finger on her pulse. It was feeble.

“It will not be long now,” he thought.

He went toward his chair. He felt a sudden distaste for it, a desire for motion. He walked up and down the room rather more rapidly than before.

“If I were an ordinary man,” he thought, “I suppose that tortured creature on the bed would haunt me to my death. Rot! A murderer I should be called if the facts were known, I suppose. Well, she is worse. Did I permit her to live she would make the living hell of four people.”

The woman gave a sudden awful cry, the cry of a lost soul shot into the night of eternity. The stillness had been so absolute, the cry broke that stillness so abruptly and so horridly, that the doctor, strong-brained, strong-nerved as he was, gave a violent start, and the sweat started from his body.

“I am a fool,” he exclaimed angrily, welcoming the sound of his voice; “but I wish to God it were day and there were noises outside.”

He strode hurriedly up and down the room, casting furtive glances at the bed. The night was quiet again, but still that cry rang through it and lashed his brain. He recalled the theory that sound never dies. The waves of space had yielded this to him.

“Good God!” he thought. “Am I going to pieces? If I let this wretch, this criminal die, I save four people. If I let her live, I ruin their lives. The life of a man of brain and pride and heart; the life of a woman of beauty and intellect and honor; the lives of two children of unknown potentialities, for whom the world has now a warm heart. ‘The greatest good of the greatest number’—the principle that governs civil law. Has not even the worthy individual been sacrificed to it again and again? Does it not hang the criminal dangerous to the community? And is that called murder? What am I at this moment but law epitomized? Shall I hesitate? My God, am I hesitating? Conscience—is it that? A superfluous instinct transmitted by my ancestors and coddled by a woman—is it that which has sprung from its grave, rattling its bones? ‘Conscience makes‘—oh, shame that I should succumb when so much is at stake—that I should hesitate when the welfare of four human beings trembles in the balance! ‘Conscience‘—that in the moment of my supreme power I should falter!”

He returned to the woman. He reached his finger toward her pulse, then hurriedly withdrew it and resumed his restless march.

“This is only a nightmare, born of the night and the horrible stillness. To-morrow in the world of men it will be forgotten, and I shall rejoice…. But there will be recurring hours of stillness, of solitude. Will this night repeat itself? Will that thing on the bed haunt me? Will that cry shriek in my ears? Oh, shame on my selfishness! What am I thinking of? To let that base, degraded wretch exist, that I may live peaceably with my conscience? To let four others go to their ruin, that I may escape a few hours of torment? That I—I—should come to this! ‘The greatest good of the greatest number. The greatest’ … ‘Conscience makes cowards of us all!'”

To his unutterable self-contempt and terror, he found his will for once powerless to control the work of the generations that had preceded him. His iron jaw worked spasmodically, his gray eyes looked frozen. The marble pallor of his face was suffused with a tinge of green.

“I despise myself!” he exclaimed, with fierce emphasis. “I loathe myself! I will not yield! ‘Conscience‘—they shall be saved, and by me. ‘The greatest‘—I will maintain my intellectual supremacy—that, if nothing else. She shall die!”

He halted abruptly. Perhaps she was already dead. Then he could reach the door in a bound and run down-stairs and out of the house. To be followed…

He ran to the bed. The woman still breathed faintly, her mouth was twisted into a sardonic and pertinent expression. His hand sought his pocket and brought forth a case. He opened it and stared at the hypodermic syringe. His trembling fingers closed about it and moved toward the woman. Then, with an effort so violent he fancied he could hear his tense muscles creak, he straightened himself and turned his back upon the bed. At the same moment he dropped the instrument to the floor and set his heel upon it.

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