Page:Weird Tales Volume 4 Number 2 (1924-05-07).djvu/54

 Dr. Menostique. As yet I have not even missed it."

I shrank back in my chair. My reason rebelled against the things my eyes and my hearing were telling me. What mysterious power was this in which the terrible doctor held this beautiful girl? With my own sight I had beheld her piteous fumblings with the wrist as she had moved closer to the table. What prompted her colossal untruth? I forced myself to speak, but the same horrible clutching fingers seemed to forbid my rising.

"This is a hoax," I croaked, my voice strange and unrecognizable in my own ears, "What are you trying to do? What monstrous trick are you playing with me?"

Again the big man seemed not to hear me. His eyes were upon the girl, and the two at the end of the table leaned forward interestedly as he slowly withdrew a platinum-like stopper from the end of his peculiarly shaped retort. From a case which I had failed to notice, but which must have been on the table during all the time I had been in this awful room, he took several shining instruments which I recognized as surgical scalpels and knives. They fascinated me with their bright, sinister immaculateness.

Dr. Menostique turned again to the girl.

"It will be necessary to turn your chair, Freda, so your head will lie on its back, directly under this light. You are not afraid? The removal of an eye will take but half the time involved in the amputation of the hand. I have the artificial eye in readiness."

Her eye! They were going to remove her eye!

Again the rlgirl [sic] smiled without a trace of fear.

"I am glad to submit to these operations in the cause of science," she said. The two men at the end of the table nodded owlishly in agreement. They arose, as if actuated by a single brain, and walked to the other end of the table, passing me noiselessly, intent on assisting in the proper placement of the chair.

The girl, Freda, likewise arose, and the two turned her chair so that its back was against the end of the table, directly under the cluster of lights that illumined the room. The doctor casually arranged his instruments and the tube.

My soul struggled for the release of my body, but I was powerless to move. The huge man placed his instruments more carefully. The fearsome hand, still rosy in the white light, he shoved carelessly to one side, much as one might brush aside an unwanted pencil in absent-minded indifference. My mind revolted at this sickening display of casual indecency. The hand trembled on the edge of the table, and while I eyed it in horrible fascination, dropped upon the floor at my feet. The doctor looked up and evinced neither surprise nor regret at the gruesome incident. He stretched forth his hand, making the request with nonchalant politeness.

"The specimen," he said smilingly, "there by your foot. Please hand it to me."

Some power beyond my own bent me to his request. For a moment I could not, and then, because it seemed I must, I picked the thing up. With a groan I dropped it instantly. Like some horrid revelation it came to me that I must be insane. The elevator clanged in its shaft and the street cars roared far below, while the constant screech of automobile sirens came plainly and clearly to my ears, but I was mad. I must be mad! Somewhere, somehow, my reason must have left me to become a whimpering scrapegoat for ghoulish fancies.

For the hand was warm to my touch! Was I not mad? Was my mind not a shattered remnant of normality to imagine that this hand, this poor dead witness to an infamous quackery, carried within it for these many minutes since it had left the body of its mistreated owner the pulsating warmth of life? I shrank in utter terror.

But the quiet, commanding voice of the doctor reached me.

"Quick, please! We are ready for the second operation."

The awfulness of that command! My God! the compelling awfulness of it. I had no choice. With racing heart and whirling brain I forced myself to hand the sickening object to him. He received it carelessly, and placed it with scarcely a look on the table before him. My soul shuddered with the consciousness of a profanation. I longed to flee from the room and all its horrid occupants, but the power of motion seemed to have left me. My eyes again followed the purposeful movements of the doctor. He was adjusting the table and carefully measuring the distance from it to the chair. The girl, Freda, stood waiting.

Finally everything seemed to be to the big man's liking. With never a glance at me or his colleagues, he motioned smilingly to Freda, who immediately took her place in the chair. Her uncanny willingness to submit to so unheard of an operation smacked in itself of insanity, yet her bearing and calm, untroubled eyes—those beautiful eyes, one of which was to be an offering to this inhuman god of chicanery—told all too clearly of her perfect awareness of what she was about to do. I strove to cry out, to call to the world some warning of what was about to happen—what had already happened in that seemingly innocent hotel room, but though I tried mightily, no sound escaped my lips, nor did my manifest endeavors register upon any of the four who occupied it with me. Even now, on the morning following, I can recall with fearful vividness how frantic was my vain effort to shout.

And then, while horror held me paralyzed, the doctor, with shining scalpel in hand, nodded to one of the men to apply the greenish transparent liquid that moved curiously in the queer S-shaped tube.

The strange leaden motion that seemed to originate in the liquid was a terrifying manifestation of unreality. It did not boil; it did not bubble. Rather it seemed to oscillate within itself in a heavy oily manner, a satanic disturbance which affected me strangely. A vision of the infernal one seemed to come between me and the tube as I watched, and the idea struck me as singularly appropriate, since only the devil himself could conjure in so mind-twisting a fashion.

A strange fancy took hold of me. I was no more a mortal. In some mysterious manner I seemed to have passed on, and was now in the inferno. These things I was witnessing must be a part of the everlasting tortures I was to suffer in these lower regions. I writhed, but could not escape.

The S-shaped tube disappeared. For a moment I thought it had vanished into thin air, and then I saw the man to whom the doctor had nodded lift it from the table. With a tiny cotton-tipped rod he was about to apply it to the eye of the girl, who, with head thrown back over the chair, where the strong lights revealed her pure startling beauty, waited with patient unconcern.

Then for an instant my sight seemed to fail me. When I saw again, the man was setting the S-shaped tube back upon the table. The liquid was dull and strangely still. Only a small portion of it remained. The doctor spoke.

"Quiet, please."

Before my unbelieving eyes (I had not really felt within my soul that such a thing could happen) the big man calmly ran the scalpel under the eye of the girl, who neither winced nor gave any other manifestation of concern. No drop of blood flowed! ''Great God! Not one drop of blood!''

Some untapped power within me gave me strength to spring from my chair. Powerless was I to speak, but I found myself on my feet, and in a frenzy of