The Taint and Other Novellas Read Free Page B

involved with some sort of magical rite; a pentacle had been chalked on the floor and the walls were painted with a crude representation of the blasphemous Nyhargo Code. In Africa missionary outposts had reported ominous mutterings from little-known desert and jungle tribes, and it was shown in one cutting how human sacrifices had been made to an earth-elemental called Shudmell. Spellman was quick to tie this report in with the fantastic and still unexplained disappearance of Sir Amery Wendy-Smith and his nephew in Yorkshire in 1933; they, too, had seemed obsessed by the conviction that they were doomed to death at the devices of a similar “deity,” one Shudde-M’ell, “of gigantic, rubbery, snakelike, and tentacled appearance.” In California an entire theosophist colony donned white robes for a “glorious fulfillment” that never arrived, and in Northern Ireland white-robed youths sacked and burned three churches in outlying districts to make way for “the Temples of a greater Lord.” In the Philippines American officers had found certain tribes extremely bothersome throughout the entire period, and in Australia sixty percent of Aboriginal settlements had shut themselves off completely from contact with whites. Secret cults and societies all over the world had brought themselves into the open for the first time, admitting allegiance to various gods and forces and declaring that the vision of their faiths, an “ultimate resurrection,” was about to take place. Troubles in insane asylums were legion, and Spellman wondered at the stoicism of medical fraternities that they had not noted the parallelisms or drawn anything other than the most mundane conclusions.
    On the first night of his serious study of the file, Spellman did not get to his bed until very late, leaving it at a correspondingly late hour in the morning. This was a rare indulgence for him; indeed, feeling somehow lethargic the whole day, he did not bother to study or even to work on his book. That evening, when the time came around for his late shift, he still felt sleepy and dull, and it was only then that he discovered he had been detailed once more for the abhorrent lower wards and Hell. Again Barstowe shared the night shift with the student nurse, and Spellman guessed that before midnight the froggish man would come down to make his usual offer.
    At eleven he was in the basement ward, beginning his first hurried tour of the morbid place, when he was startled to hear his name called from the small barred spy-hole in the door of the second cell on the left. This was Larner’s cell, and apparently the man was in one of his more lucid states. This suited the student very well, for he had intended to talk to Larner at the first opportunity. Now he saw he had his chance.
    “How are you, Larner?” he carefully enquired, moving over to peer at the white face framed in the tiny square spy-hole. “You certainly seem in good spirits.”
    “I am, I am—and I trust you’ll help me stay that way….”
    “Oh? And how might I be of service?”
    “Tell me,” Larner secretively asked, “who is on duty with you tonight?”
    “Nurse Barstowe,” Spellman answered. “Why do you ask?”
    But Larner had scurried back away from the door on hearing Barstowe’s name spoken, so that Spellman had to peer in through the spy-hole to see him.
    “What’s wrong, Larner? Don’t you get on with Barstowe, then?”
    “Larner is a trouble-maker, Spellman—didn’t you know?” Barstowe’s guttural, strangely menacing voice came suddenly from close behind. Spellman jumped, startled by the unexpected sound, turning to face the squat nurse who must have crept up on him quiet as a mouse. “And anyway—” the ugly man continued, “since when is it your practice to discuss senior personnel with the inmates? Very odd behavior, that, Spellman.”
    But the student was not a man to be easily intimidated, and the instinctive fear Barstowe’s appearance had aroused in him