The Compleat Crow Read Free

lotus. Man, I don’t ‘know’ what it is! But I know something of what it can do…”
    “I’m still listening,” the fugitive had pressed.
    “To one who is pure, innocent, unblemished, the Elixir is a crystal ball, a shewstone, an oracle. A single drop will make such a man—how shall we say?—AWARE!”
    “Aware?”
    “Yes, but when you say it, say and think it in capitals—AWARE!”
    “Ah! It’s a drug—it will heighten a man’s senses.”
    “Rather, his perceptions—if you will admit the difference. And it is not a drug. It is the Elixir.”
    “Would you recognize it?”
    “Instantly!”
    “And what will you pay for it?”
    “If it’s the real thing—fifty thousand of your pounds!”
    “Cash?” (Suddenly the fugitive’s throat had been very dry.)
    “Ten thousand now, the rest tomorrow morning.”
    And then the fugitive had held out his hand and opened it. There in his palm had lain the vial, a tiny stopper firmly in its neck.
    Kuphnas had taken it from him into hands that shook, held it up eagerly to the light from his window. And the vial had lit up at once in a golden glow, as if the occultist had captured a small part of the sun itself! And: “Yes!” he had hissed then. “Yes, this is the Elixir!”
    At that the fugitive had snatched it back, held out his hand again. “My ten thousand—on account,” he’d said. “Also, we’ll need an eye-dropper.”
    Kuphnas had fetched the money, asked: “And what is this about an eye-dropper?”
    “But isn’t it obvious? You have given me one fifth of my money, and I will give you one fifth of the Elixir. Three drops, as I reckon it. And the rest tomorrow, when I’m paid.”
    Kuphnas had protested, but the fugitive would not be swayed. He gave him three drops, no more. And five minutes later when he left him, already the occultist had been calculating the degree of dilution required for his first experiment. His first, and very likely only experiment. Certainly his last.
    For when with the dawn the fugitive had returned and passed into Kuphnas’ high-walled courtyard and up the fig-shaded marble steps to his apartments, he had found the exterior louvre doors open; likewise the Moorishly ornate iron lattice beyond them; and in Kuphnas’ study itself—
    There on the table, effulgent in the first bright beams of day, a bowl of what appeared to be simple water—and the empty eye-dropper beside it. But of Erik Kuphnas and the fugitive’s forty thousand pounds, no sign at all. And then, in the corner of the occultist’s study, tossed down there and crumpled in upon itself, he had spied what seemed to be a piece of old leather or perhaps a large canvas sack; except it was the general shape of the thing that attracted the fugitive’s attention. That and the question of what it was doing here in these sumptuous apartments. Only when he moved closer had he seen what it really was: that it had hair and dead, glassy, staring orb-like eyes—Kuphnas’ eyes—still glaring a strange composite glare of shock, horror, and permanently frozen malignance!
    Innocence and purity, indeed!
    That had been enough for the fugitive: he had fled at once, with nightmare gibbering on his heels, and with something else there, too. For to his knowledge that was when he had first become the fugitive, since when he had always been on the move, always running.
    Nor could he scoff any longer at the idea of an undead guardian of that Sanusi temple he’d robbed; for indeed the thing which had followed him, drawing closer every day, and certainly closer with each passing night, was not alive as men understood that word. Oh, he’d seen it often enough—its burning eyes and crumbling features—in various corners of the world, and now here in London finally it had tracked him down, forced him to earth…
    His eyes had grown accustomed to the tunnel’s darkness now, where the nitrous walls with their foxfire luminosity sufficed however faintly to light his way, so that