Page:Weird Tales v01n03 (1923-05).djvu/30

Rh. Its bouquet filled the room with a faint, far-off odor of lotus flowers.

"Shall we drink now, Robert, or shall we wait until dinner is served?"

"Let us drink now," I said, curious to taste this Eastern wine, with which I was not familiar.

"Amen!" said my wife, softly.

Then she spoke, rapidly and softly under her breath, a few Chinese words, or so I judged them to be, and we drank the wine. There was not a great deal in the flagon, and we drank it all before dinner was served.

As I sat at dinner a strange comfortable feeling gradually came over me. Distrust, fear, and apprehension died out of my mind, and my heart was light. My wife and I laughed and talked together as we had done in the days of our courtship. I was a different man.

After dinner we went into the music-room and she sang for me. Sang in a sweet low voice strange weird old songs of ancient China. Of the dragon banner floating in the sun, and the watch fires on the hills. Of old Tartar loves and hates. Of wrongs that never die, but pass on from age to age, from life to life, from death to death-unhasting, unending until the debt be paid.

I sat listening, dozing in a hazy mental languor, with the feeling foreign to me of late, that all was well with the world. I was peacefully happy, and my wife's sweet voice crooned on. Bedtime, the going up to our bedroom, and what followed after is only a blurred memory.

I awoke, or seemed to awake (now that I am in this madhouse I do not really know) far into the night.

I awoke with a feeling of suffocation, a sensation of impending dissolution. I could not move, I could not speak. I had a sense of something indescribably evil, loathsome, blood-curdling, that was hanging over me, threatening my very life.

I tried to open my eyes. The lids seemed to be weighted down. All the force of my will could only slightly open them. Through this slight opening, I saw my wife bending over me, and the eyes that looked at me were the inscrutable eyes of Toi Wah!

she bent down—I could sense the delicate fragrance of her hair—and applied her sweet, soft lips to mine. Again I felt that I was suffocating, that the very breath of my life was being drawn from me.

I concentrated all my will in the effort to struggle, and with tremendous effort I was able feebly to move an arm. My wife hastily took her lips from mine and looked at me closely, with the cruel amber eyes of the great Tartar cat, whose bones lay in my garret.

Once more she leaned over and applied her lips to mine. I lay there in helpless lethargy, unable to move, but with an active mind that leaped back into the past, bringing to my memory all the old nursery tales of childhood of cats sucking the breath of sleeping children, of the folklore tales that I had heard of helpless invalids done to death by cruel cats who stole their breath from them.

I began to be aroused at last. Was my breath to be sucked from me by this half-human, half-cat that was bending over me? With a final despairing effort of my wine-sodden will, I raised my arms and pushed this soft sweet vampire from my breast and from the bed.

And then, as the cold sweat of fear poured from my trembling body, I shouted for help. At last my servant came running up the stairs and pounded on the door.

"What is it?" he called. "What is wrong, sir? Shall I go for the police?"

"Nothing is wrong," answered my wife calmly. She had risen from where I had thrown her and was arranging her disheveled hair. "Your master has had a terrible dream, that is all."

"It is a lie!" I shouted. "Do not leave me alone with this vampire!"

I sprang from bed, and, heedless of my wife's semi-nude condition, I flung open the door. She shrank back, but I seized her by the wrist, beside myself with nervous terror.

And then there on her wrist—I saw! I looked closely to be sure. Then instantly all was clear to me. I was in doubt no longer. I knew!

"Look!" I shrieked. "Here on her wrist! Toi Wah's collar!" I do not know why I said it, or scarcely what I did say, but I knew it to be true!

"Toi Wah's collar!" I repeated. "She can't take it off! She is changing into a cat! Look at her eyes! Look at her hair! Soon she will be Toi Wah again with the collar about her next, and then—"

And then I saw my wife disconcerted for the first time. I felt the arm I had seized, tremble in my frenzied grip.

"Why, Robert!" she stammered. "I—I found this on the attic floor yesterday. And—and—thinking it a curious old Chinese relic, I put it on my wrist. It's a bracelet, not a collar!"

"Take it off then!" I shouted. "Take it off! You can't! You can't, until you become Toi Wah again, and then it will be about your neck. Read what it says! It is in your accursed tongue!

"But you shall never live to madden me again with fear, to make my life a hell of peering eyes and padding feet, and then to suck my breath at last! I killed you once, I can do it again! And again and yet again in any shape the devils in hell may send you to prey upon honest men!"

And I seized her by her beautiful throat. I meant to choke her until those cruel yellow eyes started from their sockets, and then laugh as I saw her gasping in the last agony of death.

But I was cheated. The servants over-powered me, and I was brought here to this mad-house.

I said I was perfectly sane then. I say it now. And learned alienists, sitting in council, have agreed with me. Tomorrow I am to be discharged into the custody of my sweet cooing-voiced wife, who comes daily to see me. She kisses me with soft lying lips that long to suck my breath, or perhaps even rend the flesh of my throat with the little white teeth back of the cruel lips.

So tomorrow I will go forth—to die. To be murdered! I go to death just as surely as if the hangman waited to haul me to the gallows, or if the warden stood outside to escort me to the electric chair.

I know it! I have told the learned psychologists and doctors that I know it. But they laugh.

"All a delusion!" they exclaim. "Why, your little wife loves you with all her loyal heart. Even with your finger-prints a bluish bruise about her tender throat, she loved you. That night when you awoke, frightened, to find her bending over you, she was only kissing you, in an effort to soothe your troubled sleep."

But I know! Therefore, I am setting all this down so that when I am found dead the learned doctors may know that I was right and they were wrong. And so that Justice may be done.

And yet—perhaps nothing can be done. I have ceased to struggle. I have given up. Like the Oriental, I say, "Who can escape his fate?"

For I shall die by Chinese justice, a Buddhist revenge for killing the Tartar cat, Toi Wah. Toi Wah that I hated and feared, and have hated and feared through all the lives that the two of us have lived, far, far back to that time when the yellow sabre-toothed tiger seized my first-born and fled with him among the reeds and ferns of the Pale-