perhaps even five billion years ago.
“I do not claim that life
“How do we know that stones can not think; that the earth beneath our feet may not once have been endowed with a hideous intelligence? Entire cycles of animate evolution may have occurred on this planet before the most primitive of ‘living’ cells were evolved from the slime of warm seas.
“There may have been eons of — experiments! Three billion years ago in the fiery radiance of the rapidly condensing earth who knows what monstrous shapes crawled — or shambled?
“And how do we know that there are not survivals? Or that somewhere beneath the stars of heaven complex and hideous processes are not still at work, shaping the inorganic into forms of primal malevolence?
“And what more inevitable than that some such primiparous spawn should have become in my eyes the apotheosis of all that was fiendish and accursed and unclean, and that I should have ascribed to it the attributes of divinity, and imagined in a moment of madness that it was immune to destruction? I should have hurled it into the depths of the seas and risked boldly the fulfillment of Chung Ga’s prophecy. For even had it proved itself omnipotent and omniscient by rising in fury from the waves or summoning its Brothers to destroy me I should have suffered indescribably for no more than a moment.”
Ulman’s voice had risen to a shrill scream. “I should have passed quickly enough into the darkness had I encountered merely the wrath of Chaugnar Faugn. It was not the fury but the forbearance of Chaugnar that has wrought an uncleanliness in my body’s flesh, and blackened and shriveled my soul, till a furious hate has grown up in me for all that the world holds of serenity and joy.”
Ulman’s voice broke and for a moment there was silence in the room. Then, with a sudden, convulsive movement of his right arm he uncloaked the whole of his face.
He was standing very nearly in the center of the office and the light from its eastern window illumed with a hideous clarity all that remained of his features. But Algernon didn’t utter a sound, for all that the sight was appalling enough to revolt a corpse. He simply clung shakingly to the desk and waited with ashen lips for Ulman to continue.
“It came to me again as I slept, drinking its fill, and in the morning I woke to find that the flesh of my body had grown fetid and loathsome, and that my face — my face…”
“Yes, Clark, I understand.” Algernon’s voice was vibrant with compassion. “I’ll get you some brandy.”
Ulman’s eyes shone with an awful light.
“Do you believe me?” he cried. “Do you believe that Chaugnar Faugn has wrought this uncleanliness?”
Slowly Algernon shook his head. “No, Clark. Chaugnar Faugn is nothing but a stone idol, sculptured by some Asian artist with quite exceptional talent, however primitive he may have been in other respects. I believe Chung Ga kept you under the influence of some potent drug until he had— had cut your face, and that he also hypnotized you and suggested every detail of the story you have just told me. I believe you are still actually under the spell of that hypnosis.”
“When I boarded the ship at Calcutta there was nothing wrong with my face!” shrilled Ulman.
“Conceivably not. But some minion of the priest may have administered the drug and performed the operation on shipboard. I can only guess at what happened, of course, but it is obvious that you are the victim of some hideous charlatanry. I’ve visited India, Clark, and I have a very keen respect for the hypnotic endowments of the Oriental. It’s ghastly and unbelievable how much a Hindoo or a Tibetan can accomplish by simple suggestion.”
“I feared — I feared that you would doubt!” Ulman’s voice had risen to a shriek. “But I swear to you…
The sentence was never finished. A hideous pallor overspread the archeologist’s face, his jaw sagged and into his eyes there crept a look of panic fight. For a second he stood clawing at his throat, like a man in the throes of an epileptic fit.
Then something, some invisible force, seemed to propel him backward. Choking and gasping he staggered against the wall and threw out his arms in a gesture of frantic appeal. “Keep it off!” he sobbed. “I can’t breathe. I can’t. ”
With a cry Algernon leapt forward, but before he reached the other’s side the unfortunate man had sunk to the floor and was moaning and gibbering and rolling about in a most sickening way.
Algernon Harris emerged from the B.M.T. subway at the Fifty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue entrance and began nervously to pace the sidewalk in front of a large yellow sign, which bore the discouraging caption: “Buses do not stop here.” Harris was most eager to secure a bus and it was obvious from the expectant manner in which he hailed the first one to pass that he hadn’t the faintest notion he had taken up his post on the wrong side of the street. Indeed, it was not until four buses had passed him by that he awoke to the gravity of his predicament and began to propel his person in the direction of the legitimate stop-zone.
Algernon Harris was abnormally and tragically upset. But even a man trembling on the verge of a neuropathic collapse can remain superficially politic, and it isn’t surprising that when he ascended into his bus and encountered on a conspicuous seat his official superior. Doctor George Francis Scollard, he should have nodded, smiled and responded with an unwavering amiability to the questions that were shot at him.
“I got your telegram yesterday,” murmured the president of the Manhattan Museum of Fine Arts, “and I caught the first train down. Am I too late for the inquest?”
Algernon nodded. “The coroner — a chap named Henry Weigal — took my evidence and rendered a decision on the spot. The condition of Ulman’s body would not have permitted of delay. I never before imagined that — that putrefaction could proceed with such incredible rapidity.” Scollard frowned. “And the verdict?”
“Heart failure. The coroner was very positive that anxiety and shock were the sole causes of Ulman’s total collapse.”
“But you said something about his face being horribly disfigured.”
“Yes. It had been rendered loathsome by — by plastic surgery. Weigal was hideously agitated until I explained that Ulman had merely fallen into the hands of a skillful Oriental surgeon with sadistic inclination in the course of his archaeological explorations. I explained to him that many of our field workers returned slightly disfigured and that Ulman had merely endured an exaggeration of the customary martyrdom.”
“And you believe that plastic surgery could account for the repellent and gruesome changes you mentioned in your night-letter — the shocking prolongation of the poor devil’s nose, the flattening and broadening of his ears…”
Algernon winced. “I must believe it, sir. It is impossible sanely to entertain any other explanation. The coroner’s assistant was a little incredulous at first, until Weigal pointed out to him what an unwholesome precedent they would set by even so much as hinting that the phenomenon wasn’t pathologically explicable. ‘We would play right into the hands of the spiritualists,’ Weigal explained. ‘An officer of the police isn’t at liberty to adduce an hypothesis that the district attorney’s office wouldn’t approve of. The newspapers would pounce on a thing like that and play it up disgustingly. Mr. Harris has supplied us with an explanation which seems adequately to cover the facts, and with your permission I shall file a verdict of natural death.’”
The president coughed and shifted uneasily in his seat. “I am glad that the coroner took such a sensible view of the matter. Had he been a recalcitrant individual and raised objections we should have come in for considerable unpleasant publicity. I shudder whenever I see a reference to the Museum in the popular press. It is always the morbid and sensational aspects of our work that they stress and there is never the slightest attention paid to accuracy.”
For the moment Doctor Scollard was silent. Then he cleared his throat, and recapitulated, in a slightly more emphatic form, the question that he had put to Algernon originally. “But you said in your letter that Ulman’s nose revolted and sickened you — that it had become a loathsome greenish trunk almost a foot in length which continued to move about for hours after Ulman’s heart stopped beating. Could — could your operation hypothesis account for such an appalling anomaly?”
