The Wand of Doom Read online

  THE WAND

  OF DOOM

  JACK WILLIAMSON

  Start Publishing LLC

  Copyright © 2012 by Start Publishing LLC

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  First Start Publishing eBook edition October 2012

  Start Publishing is a registered trademark of Start Publishing LLC

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 978-1-62793-995-9

  1. The Atavistic Terror

  I believe that Paul Telfair’s unnatural fear of spiders was a dark heritage from the creeping, monstrous forebears of humanity, an atavistic survival from the things that wallowed and devoured one another in the ooze and slime of the primordial mud-flats where life began.

  Psychologists have agreed with me that his haunting horror can be explained only as a race-memory of some stark jungle tragedy of the dawn-ages, seared so indelibly into the germ-plasm that it was transmitted to him across the eons—a maddening terror, slumbering in the cells of life through uncounted generations, to wake in the brain of my friend, to consume him, mind and body, with the mordant corrosive of elemental terror.

  But if that hideous obsession was indeed a legacy handed down from some crawling monstrosity of the reeking jungle slime, it was certainly a regrettable incident of his own early childhood that wakened it.

  The sleeping fear might have slumbered on for untold generations longer, in the unexplored recesses of the germ-plasm, had it not been for the unfortunate happening that roused it, to form my friend’s life to its frightful mold, to make his existence unending nightmare, and to cut off his days at the very pinnacle of ever-mounting horror.

  Doctor Paul Telfair and his younger brother, Verne, were friends of mine for many years. I met them first during my student days at Tulane, where their father, the well-known naturalist, was professor of biology. Ancient French Creole blood, I knew, flowed in their veins. But the young men were both fine, modem Americans.

  Paul, the elder by a dozen years, was, like his father, reserved and scholarly. His was a rare combination of scientific and artistic genius, marred only by that haunting atavistic inheritance. His ability in electrical research was early recognized with the coveted doctorate. He was an accomplished violinist. A few of his paintings have gained some distinction—fantasies somewhat suggestive of the later Henri Rousseau, startling with their weird effects of light and color.

  As might have been expected, Paul was mild-tempered, retiring, by nature introspective and imaginative. Though his manners were immaculately polished, he was almost diffident except among his very few intimate friends.

  Paul never married. Verne told me, once, of his tragic first love. In his late teens he was engaged to a frail, lovely girl, a Miss Elaine LeMar. She became an invalid before the wedding, died within the year.

  But I must tell of that other tragedy, in his early youth, that marked the beginning of the fear that dominated his life, of the soul-searing terror that swept him, at last, to unthinkable, inevitable doom. The awakening of the obsessive atavistic phobia came about as a result of his father’s study of the arachnids.

  The biologist, it appears, specialized in that branch of his science, and had spiders, tarantulas, and scorpions shipped to him at New Orleans from all parts of the world. From earliest infancy, Paul had a strange horror of those hideous creatures. But the phobia would probably have been outgrown—at least to the extent of allowing him to lead a normal life—had not the thing happened that awakened in full the slumbering atavistic fear, burned it indelibly upon his brain.

  One night, crossing a dark room, the boy stumbled against a box containing a shipment of living tarantulas, which had just arrived from one of his father’s associates in the Southwest. The box overturned and the cover fell from it, releasing the creatures that stirred in the sensitive boy the fatal fear that was his dark heritage from the fathers of men in the dawn-era jungle-ooze.

  He stood there in the darkness, rigid in icy paralysis of fear. He could not run. His throat was dry and constricted, so that he could not even cry out for aid. He was riveted helpless, while the formless, devouring terror from the past wakened in him.

  He told me, once, about the occasion. Horror rendered his senses preternaturally acute, he said, so that he could hear distinctly the tiny, scratching, shuffling sounds of the tarantulas’ feet, as they ran about him. In the darkness they were invisible, but he could hear them, and he thought they were attacking him.

  The talons of elemental fear, reaching up through dark mists of time, held him unnerved and powerless in their scaring embrace. He had collapsed, trembling and shrieking, when his father reached him.

  Paul Telfair was able, as he grew older, to banish the atavistic terror form his waking hours. But through the rest of his life, especially when ill or fatigued, he was subject to hideous dreams of gigantic spiders. Verne always slept near him, to waken him from the nightmares, in which he battled haunting fears come down from primal life.

  Verne Telfair was nearly my own age. Stocky, powerful, lively, he was far different form the tall, scholarly Paul. Naturally hot-headed and impetuous, fond of social activity, he yet remained sincerely devoted to his brother.

  When I left New Orleans in 1923, to take a position in Buenos Aires, the brothers were living together in the old Telfair mansion, Paul absorbed in his experiments and his music, Verne dividing his time between social duties and the care of his more delicate brother.

  Their letters, a year later, abruptly ceased. I was unable to get in touch with them, or to learn anything of them save that they had gone from New Orleans.

  Upon my return I found the old house deserted. In a year of search, I learned, the police had discovered only that the brothers had vanished into the desolate bayou swamps coastward from the city.

  The Telfairs had been among my dearest friends, and since I had some spare weeks at my disposal, I set out to solve the mystery of their disappearance—little suspecting the sinister and amazing chain of horror I was to unearth.

  2. The Man Whose Eyes Were Haunted

  It was through a New Orleans dealer in electrical equipment that I got the name of the Cajun, Henri Dubois.

  The Telfair brothers, shortly before they vanished, had purchased a large amount of heavy machinery, which had been taken—for what purpose the dealer did not know—into the unreclaimed swamps. The Cajun, as Doctor Telfair’s agent, had received part of the goods.

  I knew little of the man. His Cajun ancestry was evident from his name and situation. His illiteracy was evinced by the signature on the receipts, a rude cross with the words, “Henri Dubois, his mark.”

  In the weeks just spent in his search I had learned that he was unmarried, that he lived alone in the most solitary part of the bayou country, emerging only rarely with furs or fish to exchange for his staple necessities of tobacco, grits, ammunition and com whisky.

  More than one person had warned me that he was “queer”—a shy, shiftless recluse, whom no one actually knew.

  I found his lonely shanty-boat at sunset on an oppressive summer day. The gray-green walls of swampy forest above the black, stagnant bayou had become unpleasantly depressing. And the dwelling that I found beyond the ancient, moss-bearded cypress and red gum upon the last bend, did not relive my depression.

  It was a heavy, square-ended barge, aground in the mud, supporting an ugly shack, tar-paper roofed. Silence of desolation clung about it, only intensified by the melancholy chorus of distant frogs, welling from the dark and implacable swamps.

  I climbed to its narrow strip of deck to wait return of the absent owner. As I stood there, fight
ing insistent mosquitoes, the swart inscrutability of swamps darkened to a brooding and sinister gloom. I could readily imagine ghostly life animating the white, miasmic mists writhing up through bearded skeletons of trees.

  When I first saw the Cajun he was watching me suspiciously from his battered skiff, in the shadows of the dense, overhanging vegetation, a dozen yards away, fingering a rusty shotgun on his ragged knee.

  Henri Dubois—I knew him at once for the man I sought—looked prematurely aged. While still abundant, his hair was iron-gray, white at his temples. Though he appeared fairly robust, his weak, querulous face was incredibly seamed and drawn.

  His eyes were his strangest features. Watching me with unmistakable hostility, they roused my pity. In their depths was the ineffaceable print of some experience that had seared the man’s very soul, left him a mere shaken wreck, faith and courage broken.

  His was the expression of a weak man who has encountered some overwhelming emotional experience that has twisted him, burned him out, if I may put it so, leaving him dazed, uncertain of life and without much interest in living. I have seen neurotic patients in psychiatric wards with that same look.

  Studying the lurking dread in his eyes, I knew that the emotion photographed there was not grief or despair—it was sheer horror.

  He was not the kind, I saw at once, to give me willingly any information about his dealings with my lost friends, or even to grant me ordinary civility.

  “Good evening, Mr. Dubois,” I called, as cordially as I could.

  He stared at me silently, hands still on the gun on his lap.

  “You are Henri Dubois, aren’t you?”

  He expectorated into the green, stagnant water, nodded voiceless assent.

  “My name is Walters.” I managed a smile. “Edwin Walters. I’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind. And I’m afraid I must impose upon your hospitality for the night—if I may.”

  He grunted something that I did not understand. I decided to explain myself more fully.

  “I’m trying to find what became of the Telfair brothers.”

  The effect of my words was startling. Terror burst into his haunted eyes. He jerked back as if I had struck him, and flung up the ancient gun with shaking hands.

  I hastened to assure him that I was not an officer, that I meant harm to no one. His face still strained and white, he lowered the gun, protesting in the French patois that he knew nobody named Telfair.

  It was apparent that he was lying.

  Before, it had not occurred to me to connect the Cajun with my friends’ disappearance save as a possible source of information. But the name of Telfair had brought back to his face that fear whose shadow I had already marked there.

  The brothers, then, had been involved in the experience, whatever it might have been, that had left such a print of horror upon the man. I was sure, at once, that he had knowledge of their fate, but perhaps not criminal knowledge. He looked too much the cowardly weakling to be a successful murderer.

  I had blundered, I saw, in revealing my purpose so soon. In any case the man’s confidence would not have been easily gained, and my incautious question had already raised a wall of mistrust before me.

  Though I said no more of my quest, it took my best persuasive efforts to make him allow me to stay with him for the night. I followed him into the shanty-boat’s interior, narrow, ill-furnished, pervaded with the stale, sour odor peculiar to such craft.

  A meager, unkempt figure in worn blue shirt and patched denim overalls, horny feet bare, he lit the dingy kerosene lamp and prepared a rude meal of coffee, fried pork, and rugged brown pones of cold corn-bread.

  When we had eaten I brought in from my motor-boat a gallon jug of com whiskey I had purchased in anticipation of the present occasion. Thin hands shaking with eagerness, my host poured generously into two tin cups, handed one to me. I sipped cautiously at the raw, bitter moonshine, while he gulped his own as easily as if it had been water—and with the same visible effect.

  The second cup, however, dulled the edge of his suspicion. With the third, he became almost genial, and I ventured to mention the Telfairs again, stressing my friendship and my worry.

  He admitted in his rusty patois that they had employed him, that he had helped set up the machinery in the swamp. He agreed that he could guide me to the spot on the morrow

  But he still denied vehemently that he knew what had become of my friends. My question awakened that haunting terror in his eyes, sobered him to dogged, suspicious taciturnity. I could get no more from him that night, though he drank himself into a stupor, as if to drown in alcohol the memory I had raised.

  3. The Punctured Shell

  That night I tried in vain to sleep, beneath swarming mosquitoes, my blankets spread on the floor of the stale-smelling shanty-boat.

  Next morning the Cajun was morosely sullen as ever. He appeared uncertain how much he had told me, and sorry he had told me anything. When we had breakfasted upon muddy chicory-coffee and grits and pork, I insisted that he keep his promise to take me where the Telfairs had set up the machinery.

  At first he refused blankly. When I offered him ten dollars, he agreed to take me to the old landing, and point out the trail. He would not accompany me away from the boat.

  We ascended the bayou until it became a narrow, stagnant channel, dull green walls of swamp vegetation almost meeting above it. The Cajun poled in to a landing of rotting logs, between jutting cypress knees.

  He showed me the end of the weed-choked trail, and promised to wait for me until sunset. He was not, he insisted, going to remain in that vicinity after dark.

  Though the footing proved firm enough, the roadway was grown up with weeds and briars, the green, thorny tangles reaching to my waist. Gaunt trees rose about me, bearded with gray festoons of Spanish moss, their dark trunks limiting lonely vistas. The undergrowth was a luxuriant jungle, broken only by the black, decaying logs of fallen trees.

  It was startling, amid such surroundings, to find a modern dynamo.

  It stood upon a concrete platform that must have been a hundred feet square. The trees, for some little distance around it, had been felled; the lush jungle of undergrowth had consequently sprung up more luxuriantly. Green tangles were encroaching upon the concrete. In several places the force of imprisoned life had cracked it, bursting through in sprays of green.

  The dynamo stood near the center of it, evidently long unprotected from the elements, black and rust. Beside it was the powerful gasoline motor that had driven it, grimy and corroded. A transformer, coils, condensers, rheostats lay about, smashed, ruined by rust and weather.

  The silent and implacable spirit of the swamp already filled the place, and eager vegetation was fast obliterating this enigmatic scar in the tawny side of the wilderness. Fighting the loneliness of the place, and wondering at the meaning of it, I explored the conquering vanguard of the jungle until I found the skeleton.

  A human skeleton, the bones scattered in the fringe of crowding weeds. I started back at first, as if this had been a dark and obscene jest of the brooding swamp, and then bent to examine them.

  The skull was oddly injured. Two round holes were pierced in it, one in the frontal bone, above the left eye; the other in the occipital bone, at the back of the head, as if—and the thought came with a shudder of premonitory horror—great fangs had closed through the brain.

  Searching in the dust beneath the skeleton, I found objects to identify it. A silver signet ring, bearing the initial “T.” An old-fashioned, thick gold watch, which I well knew—crystal broken, works gone to rust, but case intact. Those articles told me, beyond question, that the grim remains were those of Doctor Paul Telfair.

  But what dread fate could have overtaken him? I could not rid myself of my first mad idea that those puzzling punctures had been made by gigantic fangs, though reason told me the agent must have been some more credible instrument—a pick, perhaps.

  I had no inkling, then, that his hauntin
g, atavistic dread of spiders had played in the tragedy the hideous part that it did.

  4. The Purple Wounds

  I was three days in winning the complete confidence of Henri Dubois. I accepted his rude hospitality, regaled him with cheap whiskey, and talked of my old friendship for the Telfairs until he felt maudlin sympathy. In the end, I won.

  When the machinery had been installed upon the concrete floor, he told me, in his rough patois, the brothers stayed there alone. Discharging the other employees, they retained him to bring the mail and the supplies they ordered, paying him ten dollars each week to make two trips.

  At first there had been no roof above the machinery. On his first trip back, Henri had been astounded to see a house over the concrete platform. A house, he said, that looked like colored glass. He was uncertain what its material actually was, or where that material had come from.

  On another trip he had found a queer sort of garden about the strange house—a garden whose leaves and blooms did not move in the wind, because they were hard, like glass.

  The brothers had been alone. But a woman, near the end, appeared mysteriously with them. Henri had seen her, one time, in the amazing garden. She was young and pretty. He had heard her sing, with a voice like little bells.

  On its face, his story, so far, was unreasonable, fantastic, incredible. Still, I was fairly sure that it represented no deliberate fabrication on his part. His manner had been that of one who tells an improbable story unwillingly, apprehensive of doubt. And I knew that he did not have the imagination to create such a narrative as he hesitantly and reluctantly unfolded.

  Almost anything can be made to seem improbable, if presented in the right way. With his narrow, warped mind, Henri Dubois would inevitably see any unusual occurrence from an illogical angle; he was sure to overlook some factors, overstress others.

  I listened without betraying incredulity, alert to some reasonable explanation of the mystery from his strange words.