is right,” he answered finally. “He came barging into the ward, snatched the blankets off the first bed, and lay down in it. When the patient in it tried to get out, he grabbed her.”
Then he answered the unspoken question in my eyes: “No, he might have thought about that later; right then he was intent on murder and destruction. He took her by the hair with one hand and clutched her throat in the other and was about to break her neck when something—get this, they’re all agreed on it—something rushed in from the corridor, snatched him by the neck, and dragged him out.”
“Something? What was it?” I asked fatuously.
“That’s just what nobody knows. The only light in N-18 was a candle, no electric bulbs in there, for it used to be a storeroom and was never wired. When the big Bohunk fanned the bedclothes back, he blew the candle out, so all the light they had was what came through the window from the courtyard. The girls were all too weak to fight him, but not too weak to yell, and they were setting up an awful clamor when It rushed in.”
I leaned forward, about to ask another question.
“Keep your blouse on, can’t you?” he demanded irritably, befoere I could frame my thought. “I’m telling you everything I know. When I say ‘It,’ I’m as near to being specific as anybody. Something—and no two of ’em are agreed on what it was—came crashing in from the hallway and grabbed the murdering drunkard by the neck, hustled him out, and killed him, just as something we don’t know about did in that Jerry secret agent on the train from Paris.”
“Some of the girls declare it looked like a great white ape, one thinks it was a spider bigger than a man, but all agree it handled that six-footer as if he’d been a baby. Now,” he tapped me on the knee in sober emphasis, “I’m not saying there’s any connection between the fact that some of those who were with us on the Paris train were within striking distance of N-18 tonight, but I do say it gives us something to think about.”
“I’m afraid you’re goin’ off the deep end,” I told him. “Amberson’s laid up with a smashed clavicle. That lets him out. A man in that condition can’t wash his own face, let alone go tearing men to pieces. ApKern’s a fairly husky lad, but not quite up to wringing Pennsylvania miners’ necks. As for Miss Watrous—poor kid, she’s got a bad break coming when I tell her about him.”
“About him? Who?”
“Young Tom Ten Eyck. I didn’t realize they’d brought her into the hospital that day. She must have been checked in before he died.”
“Who in the name of Caesar’s nightshirt was this Tom Ten Eyck?”
I told him how the lad died, then how I’d seen him and Felicia years before in Fairmount Park. “Funny, isn’t it?” I ended.
“Not very,” he replied somberly. “Maybe medicine has been too cock-sure about what can and what can’t happen all these years.”
“How d’ye mean?”
He shrugged into his sheep-lined mackinaw and held his hand out. “Thanks for the drink, Pat. If I should tell you what I’m thinking you’d say I’m crazy as a coot. Maybe I am at that. Good-night.”
* * * *
For some inexplicable reason a wave of intestinal disorders swept across our section of the Army of Occupation, and the incidence of appendicitis mounted steadily. I’d performed three appendectomies that evening, two cases had reached para-appendicitic stages, and I was thoroughly depressed, dispirited, and exhausted by the time the cold and dismal twilight darkened into colder night. The courtyard was filled with sad muddy puddles, relics of the melting snow, and a fine mist, half sleet, blew against my cheeks. Everywhere was humid cold as I walked back and forth and drew great gulps of frosty air into my lungs. It seemed to me l’d never get the taint of ether out of my nostrils and throat.
“Bad night, sir, ain’t it?” asked the sentry chatily as I paused to do a right about at the end of the quadrangle. “’Minds me o’ th’ waterfront down by th’ Brooklyn Bridge. ’Member how th’ mists comes up from th’ Bay when th’ wind is changin’—my Gawd, sir, what’s that?”
He was looking toward the high brick wall that loomed against the drizzle-darkened night across the courtyard, dark and sinister as the wall of some old haunted castle, and his face was set in a stiff, frozen mask of terror. His eyes were fixed, intense; it seemed as if the very substance of his soul was pouring from them as he looked. “Mater purissima, renugium pecatorum—” I heard him mumble between chattering teeth, searching memory for the half-forgotten prayers learned at parochial school—“Mater salvatoris—”
My eyes caught the object of his fascinated gaze, and I felt my throat close with a quick fear-while something terrible and numbing-cold seemed clutching at my stomach.
Against the blackness of the fog-soaked wall a form—a human form—was moving, not grip by slow and painful grip as it clung to irregularities worn in the masonry by stress of years and weather, but with an almost effortless progress, head-downward, like a monstrous lizard!
“Good Lord, it can’t be—” I began, but his voice, high-pithed, honed sharp by hysteria, drowned my words out.
“I’ll get it, Captain; ghost or devil, I’ll get it—”
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” I heard Weinberg’s frantic cry as he dashed out into the courtyard. “Don’t fire, I tell you—it’s—”
The clatter of the sentry’s automatic cut across and blotted out his frenzied warning. The pistol was a captured German job, a ten-shot Luger issued to our Medical Department men as sidearms for patrol work. It operated like a miniature machine gun and with the trigger held back spewed its whole load in a stream of shots.
Whether he was naturally a marksman or whether fear lent accuracy to his hand, or if it were an accident, I don’t know. I do know that his shots all seemed to take effect; I saw the crawling lizard-thing pause in its downward course, hang clinging to the wall a moment, as if it clutched the wet, cold, slippery bricks with a spasmotic grasp, then suddenly go limp and hurtle to the half-hard slush that lay upon the courtyard tiles, quiver reflexively a moment, then lie still.
“You fool, you damned, fat-headed, superstitious fool!” Weinberg fairly shrieked at the sentry. “I’ll have you up before a general court for this—oh, hell, what’s the use?”
He was crying as he raced across the quadrangle with me at his heels. The tears were streaming down his cheeks, mingling with the drizzling rain that blew into his face. “Help me with her, Pat,” he begged as he fell to his knees beside the still body. “Help me carry her inside. Maybe it’s not to late—”
I bent to help him, then, despite myself, drew back. Clothed in outing flannel pajamas, drenched with blood that spurted from at least ten wounds, and obviously dead, Felicia Watrous lay, a huddled, mangled, bullet-riddled corpse, before us on the rain-diluted snow.
* * * *
The liquor that the pharmacist broke out at Weinberg’s order was far from palatable, but it was “Whiskey, U.S.P.,” which meant it was one hundred proof—fifty percent grain alcohol—and that was what we needed right then.
“I was afraid of this,” he told me as he gulped a second potion down. “She’d been delirous all day, and I asked that
