As the weeks passed, I observed with regret that my new friend was
indeed slowly but unmistakably losing ground physically, as Mrs.
Herrero had suggested. The livid aspect of his countenance was
intensified, his voice became more hollow and indistinct, his muscular
motions were less perfectly coordinated, and his mind and will
displayed less resilience and initiative. Of this sad change he seemed
by no means unaware, and little by little his expression and
conversation both took on a gruesome irony which restored in me
something of the subtle repulsion I had originally felt.
He developed strange caprices, acquiring a fondness for exotic spices
and Egyptian incense till his room smelled like a vault of a
sepulchred Pharaoh in the Valley of Kings. At the same time his
demands for cold air increased, and with my aid he amplified the
ammonia piping of his room and modified the pumps and feed of his
refrigerating machine till he could keep the temperature as low as 34
degrees or 40 degrees, and finally even 28 degrees; the bathroom and
laboratory, of course, being less chilled, in order that water might
not freeze, and that chemical processes might not be impeded. The
tenant adjoining him complained of the icy air from around the
connecting door, so I helped him fit heavy hangings to obviate the
difficulty. A kind of growing horror, of outre and morbid cast, seemed
to possess him. He talked of death incessantly, but laughed hollowly
when such things as burial or funeral arrangements were gently
suggested.
All in all, he became a disconcerting and even gruesome companion; yet
in my gratitude for his healing I could not well abandon him to the
strangers around him, and was careful to dust his room and attend to
his needs each day, muffled in a heavy ulster which I bought
especially for the purpose. I likewise did much of his shopping, and
gasped in bafflement at some of the chemicals he ordered from
druggists and laboratory supply houses.
An increasing and unexplained atmosphere of panic seemed to rise
around his apartment. The whole house, as I have said, had a musty
odour; but the smell in his room was worse--and in spite of all the
spices and incense, and the pungent chemicals of the now incessant
baths which he insisted on taking unaided. I perceived that it must be
connected with his ailment, and shuddered when I reflected on what
that ailment might be. Mrs. Herrero crossed herself when she looked at
him, and gave him up unreservedly to me; not even letting her son
Esteban continue to run errands for him. When I suggested other
physicians, the sufferer would fly into as much of a rage as he seemed
to dare to entertain. He evidently feared the physical effect of
violent emotion, yet his will and driving force waxed rather than
waned, and he refused to be confined to his bed. The lassitude of his
earlier ill days gave place to a return of his fiery purpose, so that
he seemed about to hurl defiance at the death-daemon even as that
ancient enemy seized him. The pretence of eating, always curiously
like a formality with him, he virtually abandoned; and mental power
alone appeared to keep him from total collapse.
He acquired a habit of writing long documents of some sort, which he
carefully sealed and filled with injunctions that I transmit them
after his death to certain persons whom he named -for the most part
lettered East Indians, but including a once celebrated French
physician now generally thought dead, and about whom the most
inconceivable things had been whispered. As it happened, I burned all
these papers undelivered and unopened. His aspect and voice became
utterly frightful, and his presence almost unbearable. One September
day an unexpected glimpse of him induced an epileptic fit in a man who
had come to repair his electric desk lamp; a fit for which he
prescribed effectively whilst keeping himself well out of sight. That
man, oddly enough, had been through the terrors of the Great War
without having incurred any fright so thorough.
Then, in the middle of October, the horror of horrors came with
stupefying suddenness. One night about eleven the pump of the
refrigerating machine broke down, so that within three hours the
process of ammonia cooling became impossible. Dr. Muņoz summoned me
by thumping on the floor, and I worked desperately to repair the
injury while my host cursed in a tone whose lifeless, rattling
hollowness surpassed description. My amateur efforts, however, proved
of no use; and when I had brought in a mechanic from a neighbouring
all-night garage, we learned that nothing could be done till morning,
when a new piston would have to be obtained. The moribund hermit's
rage and fear, swelling to grotesque proportions, seemed likely to
shatter what remained of his failing physique, and once a spasm caused
him to clap his hands to his eyes and rush into the bathroom. He
groped his way out with face tightly bandaged, and I never saw his
eyes again.
The frigidity of the apartment was now sensibly diminishing, and at
about 5 a.m. the doctor retired to the bathroom, commanding me to keep
him supplied with all the ice I could obtain at all-night drug stores
and cafeterias. As I would return from my sometimes discouraging trips
and lay my spoils before the closed bathroom door, I could hear a
restless splashing within, and a thick voice croaking out the order
for "More--more!" At length a warm day broke, and the shops opened one
by one. I asked Esteban either to help with the ice-fetching whilst I
obtained the pump piston, or to order the piston while I continued
with the ice; but instructed by his mother, he absolutely refused.
Finally I hired a seedy-looking loafer whom I encountered on the
corner of Eighth Avenue to keep the patient supplied with ice from a
little shop where I introduced him, and applied myself diligently to
the task of finding a pump piston and engaging workmen competent to
install it. The task seemed interminable, and I raged almost as
violently as the hermit when I saw the hours slipping by in a
breathless, foodless round of vain telephoning, and a hectic quest
from place to place, hither and thither by subway and surface car.
About noon I encountered a suitable supply house far downtown, and at
approximately 1:30 p.m. arrived at my boarding-place with the
necessary paraphernalia and two sturdy and intelligent mechanics. I
had done all I could, and hoped I was in time.
Black terror, however, had preceded me. The house was in utter
turmoil, and above the chatter of awed voices I heard a man praying in
a deep basso. Fiendish things were in the air, and lodgers told over
the beads of their rosaries as they caught the odour from beneath the
doctor's closed door. The lounger I had hired, it seems, had fled
screaming and mad-eyed not long after his second delivery of ice;
perhaps as a result of excessive curiosity. He could not, of course,
have locked the door behind him; yet it was now fastened, presumably
from the inside. There was no sound within save a nameless sort of
slow, thick dripping.
Briefly consulting with Mrs. Herrero and the workmen despite a fear
that gnawed my inmost soul, I advised the breaking down of the door;
but the landlady found a way to turn the key from the outside with
some wire device. We had previously opened the doors of all the other
rooms on that hall, and flung all the windows to the very top. Now,
noses protected by handkerchiefs, we tremblingly invaded the accursed
south room which blazed with the warm sun of early afternoon.
A kind of dark, slimy trail led from the open bathroom door to the
hall door, and thence to the desk, where a terrible little pool had
accumulated. Something was scrawled there in pencil in an awful, blind
hand on a piece of paper hideously smeared as though by the very claws
that traced the hurried last words. Then the trail led to the couch
and ended unutterably.
What was, or had been, on the couch I cannot and dare not say here.
But this is what I shiveringly puzzled out on the stickily smeared
paper before I drew a match and burned it to a crisp; what I puzzled
out in terror as the landlady and two mechanics rushed frantically
from that hellish place to babble their incoherent stories at the
nearest police station. The nauseous words seemed well-nigh incredible
in that yellow sunlight, with the clatter of cars and motor trucks
ascending clamorously from crowded Fourteenth Street, yet I confess
that I believed them then. Whether I believe them now I honestly do
not know. There are things about which it is better not to speculate,
and all that I can say is that I hate the smell of ammonia, and grow
faint at a draught of unusually cool air.
"The end," ran that noisome scrawl, "is here. No more ice -the man
looked and ran away. Warmer every minute, and the tissues can't last.
I fancy you know -what I said about the will and the nerves and the
preserved body after the organs ceased to work. It was good theory,
but couldn't keep up indefinitely. There was a gradual deterioration I
had not foreseen. Dr. Torres knew, but the shock killed him. He
couldn't stand what he had to do -he had to get me in a strange, dark
place when he minded my letter and nursed me back. And the organs
never would work again. It had to be done my way -preservation -for
you see I died that time eighteen years ago."
http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0600031.txt