Lovecraft Ezine Mega-Issue 4 Rev1 Read online

  “Tells me if I kill myself they'll have my brothers. Slow and alive, he said. Says I can't hurt the babies. I – Lord help me, I want to die, I don't want to hurt 'em, I just, I want to . . . ”

  “I see,” said Dr. Hamilton. Later, the stupidity of this remark would gnaw at him, but at the moment there was simply nothing else to be said.

  Merciful to bleed him out – but what was that for him to judge? Here was the matter. There was this Mialai-thy'temai offshore, and whatever she was – he was – he expected that Morton would bear living children. What if he did not – if the doctor was called out to help, and he did not? Well. This, then, was the business at hand.

  Dr. Hamilton raised himself from the floor, paced once or twice, and thought very carefully – first about doors; and then about the caesarean procedure as it might be applied to a multiple birth.

  That night, a heavily draped and very slowly moving Ben Morton was led slowly down the icy steps, with Dr. Hamilton's arm supporting him, and through the streets to the doctor's study. It took an hour, with two stops for Morton to rest.

  “We can't say when you . . . when the time for this is coming,” Dr. Hamilton had said. “It's a good deal of trouble, but it's best for you to stop along of me.”

  “He has to know where I am,” was all Morton had said. “We got to send word. Else he should think . . . He has to come and see.”

  “Let him,” said Dr. Hamilton. “Send word. Do what you wish. You'll lie downstairs. People come and go out the side door there. I'll have the girl make you up a pallet. The floor will be good for your back.”

  They did not speak again until they had reached Dr. Hamilton's house. Dr. Hamilton guided Morton through the basement door directly into his study, where he received such patients as did not have the money to summon him to their homes. There, the doctor ordered Belinda to spread spare blankets over the bare floor, and then again over the bulk of Morton.

  As Morton's pulse was very high, Dr. Hamilton bled him somewhat to relieve the pressure of his apoplexy, and this helped Morton to rest. He slept a choking, noisy sleep while Dr. Hamilton sat at his writing-desk, head in his hands, craned over his account-book and log of supplies.

  Some nine days passed in this fashion. Belinda kept Morton cleaned and fed, while Dr. Hamilton saw to other patients, and did his best to see them at home or keep them out of the study in any case. When time permitted, Dr. Hamilton read extensively in his library. This gave him no further help, nor did he honestly expect it to. He prepared for a birth in the study, and he prepared for a death.

  To prepare for a birth required no new goods – he had forceps, oil, cloth, dressings and water to boil – but, as it appeared to him that the infants would not have a living mother, someone would have to nurse them. To that end, he consulted his own records, and sent Belinda to fetch Miss Ida Landry out of number ten, Shurtleff Street.

  “There is a certain lady,” said Dr. Hamilton to Miss Landry, “who has good reason to keep her name quiet, and to be frank I do not believe she will live through her birth, let alone have the health to nurse. I need your help, if you can give it. For this, I can pay you in board, and in trade on a bill of mine in some time to come. Will you help me?”

  Miss Landry chewed a stray strand of her hair; she did not appear to notice she was doing so. At last she said, “What kind of . . . is the baby a . . . ”

  Dr. Hamilton answered her with a chill stare, and repeated, “Will you help us or will you not?”

  Miss Landry's shoulders sagged.

  “I suppose so.”

  “Very good, my dear,” said Dr. Hamilton, gently clasping her hand. “Thank you very much indeed.”

  Miss Landry was seventeen, and bereaved a month before, shortly after giving birth to her first and only child. Dr. Hamilton had been kind enough to leave no bill when he departed her family's ragged rooms on Shurtleff Street. There had been nothing he could do for Miss Landry's infant girl, and in any case, he doubted he would have seen any money or trade from the likes of the Landrys. The child's father, Miss Landry said (quite unasked) had gone whaling, and would marry her when he returned; but her eyes were dropped when she said it, and her mother looked aside with a scowl.

  Dr. Hamilton did not know that he would need a wet-nurse; he did not know what would be born, or if they would be born alive, but he determined to prepare. For five or six of them, he feared he would need three wet-nurses, but he only knew of the one girl just now who would serve. Rice-gruel would have to do otherwise.

  Morton prepared himself for death, so far as Dr. Hamilton could see. His brother came to see him, and they had low, choked words between them. Whether the boys learned anything of the nature of Morton's ailment, Dr. Hamilton could not say. He had told Morton that he'd better not speak of it; to that Morton did not respond, but only made a sort of hissing noise, burbling with spit, that answered for a laugh.

  Neither brother spoke to Dr. Hamilton of the matter of the bill, which robbed him of the opportunity to wave his hand and say, “We must not speak of such things just now”. Quietly, he resented this. Dr. Hamilton had not reckoned the expense of this treatment, in the sense that he had said to himself, I do not reckon the expense of this, and said it several times quite firmly. But, then, he was recompensed; he was paid in the opportunity to observe this thing. It was nothing anyone else had ever had. Whether he would live to speak of it was another matter.

  The labor came in the middle of the afternoon, when Dr. Hamilton was at his desk and otherwise occupied. He had come to ignore Morton's moans, whines and unpleasant noises, and did not at first take great notice.

  “Doc,” Morton cried at last, “it's my back. It's breaking my back.”

  “Is it,” he said, rubbing his aching forehead; then Morton gave a strangled, piercing cry. Dr. Hamilton's eyes flew open.

  On examination of Morton's abdomen, he saw that a silverish liquid had leaked from the pores that were in the middle of the stretch marks. These pores gaped so much now that they were red as little lips. It seemed as if a fresh mucus membrane were appearing behind them.

  “Has to be now,” moaned Morton. “Has to be now, oh, God, I can't – ”

  It was a small mercy that the sound of a grown man's screams had never attracted much attention from Dr. Hamilton's neighbors. In the past, there had never been much that Dr. Hamilton could do for the pain of operations, except to make them as quick as he might. Now, at least, he had ether. He soaked a sponge at the bottle's mouth, stuffed it into the vaporizer, and dosed Morton as best he could.

  Belinda was scraping a pot in the kitchen when Dr. Hamilton threw the door open behind her and slammed it to the wall. She barely startled; this was not the first or last time that he came looking for her bloodstained and in haste.

  “What's the moon, Belinda?”

  “Waning quarter,” she answered instantly. It had become a common question in town.

  “Ah. Right,” he said, and chewed his lip. “Well. Look, go down to Shurtleff Street and get that Ida Landry out of number ten. Take her around the parlor, don't bring her downstairs. No one's to come in, not even if he's got a piece of bone sticking out of him, you hear?”

  Belinda had learned that it was best to begin moving as soon as the doctor gave her orders. She had her cloak around her shoulders by the time he had finished speaking.

  Within the hour, Belinda returned with Miss Landry, and set her awkwardly in the parlor, on the worn red sofa.

  “Stay there,” was all she said; and from there she went to the kitchen, and down the basement stairs, where she knocked softly on the study door. She had just pressed her right ear to the door panel when Dr. Hamilton yanked it open, and seized her arm as she stumbled.

  “Belinda,” he said. “Meat.”

  “What?”

  Behind him, there were thin and choking newborn cries.

  “Get me flesh. What is there? Is there mutton? Ham? Go get fish if you have to – get a chicken, get a cat, go get it – ”
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  With this, he was shaking her shoulders. Belinda shrieked and pulled away.

  “There's ham – just enough for – ”

  “Get it, I don't care! Bring it here!”

  When she returned with an armful of cheesecloth wrapped around such ham as they had in the icebox, she heard the cries of an infant from behind the study door. At her knock, Dr. Hamilton opened the door and said gently, “Please, stand here – hold him for me, just a few moments. Don't go anywhere. Don't take him to Miss Landry. Not just yet.”

  Into her waiting arms, he pressed a red-faced, bundled newborn, and slammed the door.

  For the next ten minutes, Belinda had nothing to do but stand in the poor half-light and examine this hiccuping, whining child. It was certainly not the first newborn she had held. He was, she could only say later, the most ordinary baby – a bulldog face, a mouth smeared with mucus, a chunk of cord and damp matter at his belly.

  There was only the one child that was born human, and needed Ida Landry. There were four that were otherwise.

  The four of them – as Dr. Hamilton began to think, all in one phrase – needed flesh, not milk. It had not taken more than a single look at the opening and shutting of their tiny mouths to tell him this. Nonetheless, it was less trouble to feed them than he supposed it would be. The flesh itself did not matter – ham, fish, rats – he ordered Belinda to find what she could, and she did. All he had to do then was throw it into the tub. They would tear it apart for themselves, living or dead. Then they slept, for four hours or five. When one began to cry, the others were soon awake, and crying themselves; and then Dr. Hamilton fed them again.

  Dr. Hamilton could not tell whether he was overfeeding them or not, but he did not wish to risk too much hunger in them. He knew well enough what a starving litter of newborn animals might do to each other, and he did not wish to explain any loss whatsoever to the gentleman who was expected. He was expected; so much Morton knew, and no more.

  “He's coming,” Morton said simply. “Said he would, when he – he said he would, to come see them, see what they were and take the ones as belonged with him. I said to Jack, they got to send word to the Order – somebody had to tell him I ha'n't made away with myself or nothing, just came over elsewhere to have 'em . . .”

  “And so he'll come here, will he?” snapped Dr. Hamilton.

  “Suppose so,” said Morton, and shut his puffed eyes. Dr. Hamilton bit the inside of his cheek until it drew blood.

  Later, he would learn that the ones from offshore were attentive fathers, when the time came. They did not trust any woman – or her family – not to kill a child of theirs a-borning. The husband would come to his wife to see that his child was whole and was healthy, and if it was not, he would know why.

  These children, at least, were quite well, insofar as Dr. Hamilton was any judge. The boy upstairs was not in any difficulty, and as for the four downstairs in his study, who could kill the likes of them? What concerned Dr. Hamilton, and what he had not prepared for, was that Morton himself was going to live. Few men had been opened as he was and lived long afterwards. Indeed, many wise men had chosen death over the prospect of such surgery, and you could not call this business surgery. Yet here Morton was, and he looked less like dying every day.

  The infants had not, in fact, eaten Morton from the inside out. Each of them slid out of Morton's abdomen in a purple sac, fitted to its body, with a cord that had apparently adhered to his peritoneum, but now snapped free easily. Inside the sacs, the infants each had a navel-cord attached to its abdomen. Four of the infants chewed their own cords away; the fifth, the one who slept upstairs, had required Dr. Hamilton's assistance for this. Morton lay there like a slashed wineskin, with great wounds where five stretchmarks had been, but his organs had not been injured.

  As soon as time permitted, Dr. Hamilton had cleaned the peritoneal injuries and sutured them. It was not that he supposed the man would live, not for a moment, but it would have taken special effort for him not to dress a wound that lay before him. It was simply a thing that his hands undertook, and in any case, it was the neatest thing to do. When the shock got on with killing Morton, the corpse, at least, could be more easily laid out.

  After that, Morton simply went on not dying. Soon enough Dr. Hamilton realized he could not fail to feed him; the man had to be anemic. He needed hot spirituous drinks, broth and egg possets, and such of these as Dr. Hamilton could obtain, he got.

  By the fifth day, Morton's continual failure to die was almost an irritant. Dr. Hamilton found himself sitting at his desk in his study across from a tub of squirming fish-infants and a man who, although much deflated, remained bedridden – floor-ridden, as it were – in his pile of stained blankets against the wall. It was a family scene that rapidly lost any charm it held.

  “I believe,” he said at last, “once you've had words with the gentleman, and all this – disposition has been made, you can be moved home. You should send for someone to aid you getting back – in a chair, I should say, because you mustn't walk. But from here I can tell you what ails you, and you can have it seen to. There is no reason you should not recuperate in your own room.”

  To this, Morton made no answer.

  Dr. Hamilton had, of course, asked Morton, “When do you suppose, – when do you look for him to come?”

  He could not frame the question any better than that, but it did not matter. Morton was no help; he only grunted, and gave a shrug. The gentlemen from offshore only moved in town in the new moon, or in the blackest storm – that was as much as the doctor knew; and the next new moon would be tomorrow. What else could he do, but count upon that?

  Dr. Hamilton had a good deal else to do. There had been no less suffering upstairs, for all this business, and that was almost delightful to him, by now. He was called out for a dental abscess, two tooth-pullings, and a case of worms. To all these visits he went on foot, wrapped in his worn wool greatcoat, with his leaking boots filling again and again with melted snow and ice from the half-frozen earthen streets; and every step away from his house was a relief.

  The doctor sat up with Morton that night. Morton had not asked him to do it. He said nothing much to the doctor as they sat there in a pool of greasy yellow lamplight, just as they had the few nights before; just as before, the doctor read to himself and drank hot rum-and-water. He did not know what to expect that he should hear, or see. Consequently, he did his best to expect nothing.

  As it happened, the doctor stepped away from the study around nine o'clock, having gone behind the stairwell to answer a call of nature; then he returned, pulled the sticking door behind him, and turned to see Morton being held aloft by both shoulders in the grasp of a gentleman from offshore.

  The gentleman stood to his full height, some seven feet tall, with his great frog-legs extended to the full. Two soft antennae on his head, which brushed the brick ceiling, swung towards Dr. Hamilton; and then the gentleman turned.

  “Doctor,” he said.

  Dr. Hamilton's knees gave beneath him. He grasped the wall and slid his hand roughly down it, so he could give himself at least the dignity of appearing simply to sit down suddenly on the floor. He spoke at last, in gulps and whispers.

  “Sir,” he said, “I do not believe I heard you come in.”

  The gentleman shrugged. The outside door was shut; none of the windows were open. He could only have been admitted by someone who shut the door after him, and the only man there was Morton.

  “Mr. Morton,” said Dr. Hamilton, “is in a very delicate state of health and he should not be -”

  He was interrupted by a deep, hoarse growl, not directed at himself but at Morton. The gentleman had spoken directly into Morton's ear, his long-jawed, needle-toothed head leaning over his shoulder. It sounded as if two of his words were say again.

  “Doc,” said Morton. He turned his head as best he could, and then he began to smile. “Doctor, I told Mialai, here, I said to let me go. Said I'd rather die than go on like I was.”
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  Mialai-thy'temai nodded to Dr. Hamilton.

  “You now, you hear this, so,” he said. With that, he took Morton's chin firmly in his heavy, clawed hand, seized his shoulders in the grip of his jaw, and twisted. Dr. Hamilton squeezed his eyes shut.

  Morton made a kind of whine; then there was a crack, then a thump. In the silence, almost unconscious of himself, Dr. Hamilton went to his knees and bowed his head before he opened his eyes again.

  “Four are here,” said Mialai-thy'temai at last. “He said five.”

  Dr. Hamilton had to puzzle his words together for a moment; then he spoke.

  “There – yes. One more child. A boy, sir. We set him to nurse, he's with his nurse just now, but – ”

  Mialai-thy'temai took only two steps across the room to reach Dr. Hamilton; he picked the doctor up by both shoulders, just as he had Morton. Dr. Hamilton shut his eyes as soon as he heard the crackling footfall of the gentleman's fins, but once Mialai-thy'temai picked him up, Dr. Hamilton could feel the great head sliding forward across his shoulder, the ridged bone and skew-angled teeth of the jaw scratching the skin of his neck. Mialai-thy'temai spoke from his throat.

  “Bring him here.”

  Five eventful minutes later, Dr. Hamilton returned to the study. His legs were still shaking slightly, as the gentleman had dropped him directly on the ground after giving his order. Nonetheless, Dr. Hamilton had made it up the basement stairs at a great turn of speed, snatched the sleeping infant from Ida Landry's arms without a word, and returned as quickly as he might. The child squeaked and smacked his lips, but he did not yet begin to wail.

  Dr. Hamilton kept his eyes fixed on the child, and extended his arms gingerly from the shoulder, in the universal human gesture of offering an infant to be held.