The young man made a mistake about the newspapers. One inch was all
he got, tucked snugly between a patent medicine advertisement and the
notice of a sheriff’s sale. It read:
“An unidentified youth attempted to take his life in a North Side
rooming-house last night by inhaling gas. The landlady smelled the
odor of gas and called the police. Miss Lily May Kettering, a nurse
at the National Emergency Hospital, who seems to know the young man,
although refusing to divulge his identity, reports that he is on the
road to recovery.”
[Illustration]
_There’s an Eerie Thrill in_
_The_ Scarlet Night
_By_ WILLIAM SANFORD
Dr. Langley was in love with my wife.
This had been very evident to me for many weeks. Also it was most
evident to me that his love was entirely reciprocated.
The doctor was a young and handsome fellow, who bore the reputation of
being more or less unscrupulous. An unpleasant story had followed him
from another city--the story of the drowning of a young girl. Although
the coroner’s verdict had been that of accidental drowning, there were
those, it was said, who thought that the doctor knew much more of the
matter than had been brought to light, and rumor had it that he had
left the place because he was no longer popular there.
The doctor had a pleasing personality, however, and a way with him
that had the effect of disarming any prejudice against him. He was,
in brief, a ladies’ man, possessing all of the little attentions and
flatteries so dear to the heart of women. And he gave them all with a
subtle manner of sincerity that made them doubly potent.
The doctor’s practice was fairly large, and he had also succeeded in
having himself appointed local medical examiner for our town. He was
deeply interested in his chosen profession, and still fascinated by the
dissecting-room. He owned a handsome touring-car with which, as I knew,
my wife was very familiar.
My wife was twenty-five--fifteen years my junior--pretty and with much
charm of manner, yet possessed of a certain hardness of nature and
lack of sympathy for the suffering of others, unusual in a young woman
of good breeding. She came of excellent family, was well educated and
always had associated with good people.
I had been somewhat addicted to strong drink before we were married,
but had managed to keep it from her to a certain extent. She knew that
I drank, but thought that it was no more than many men do at their
clubs. Of my several wild sprees out of town she had never heard.
We had been married two years when Dr. Langley took up his practice in
our town, and from the moment he made a professional call on my wife,
for some minor ailment, they had become intensely interested in each
other.
My drinking habits had increased, rather than diminished, since my
marriage, and I no longer made any effort to keep occasional lurid fits
of intoxication from her. My love for liquor became as much a part of
my life as food or sleep. My position as assistant manager in a large
wholesale house was fairly secure, however, and one not easy to fill,
which perhaps accounted for the firm still holding me.
One cold, bleak evening in November, while I was playing cards at my
club--and, thanks to the rum-runners who thrived in our town, drinking
whisky--I heard a strangely-familiar voice call my name in greeting,
and, looking up, I was overjoyed to behold an old friend of bygone
days, whom I had not seen in several years. He had dropped off on his
way to another city.
The time was ripe for a celebration in honor of our meeting. My friend
produced a quart flask of whisky from his suitcase, saying that it was
the duplicate of one he had already sampled, and spoke to me of its
age, strength, fine quality, and the high price he had been obliged to
pay for it. Thereupon he presented it to me. I thanked him heartily
and opened the flask, and we all drank a couple of rounds from it. All
of that day, and the day previous, I had been drinking more or less
heavily.
Cards were resumed and we played until after midnight, when, with many
a handshake, I bade good-by to my friend, who was obliged to catch a
train to reach his destination the following noon. The card game being
broken up, we had a farewell round of drinks, and I stumbled out into
the night.
The cool air soon revived my somewhat befuddled brain. Also, I was
soon shaking with the cold. Remembering the generous sized flask of
whisky in my pocket, the gift of my friend, I uncorked it and took a
long drink, rejoicing in the fact that the bottle was still almost
two-thirds full.
Reaching home, I went at once to my bedroom. My wife was seated in a
chair by the window in her dressing-gown. As I entered, she rose and,
without any preliminaries of speech, she asked that I at once give her
a divorce so that she might marry Dr. Langley. She said there was no
reason why I should not do this, since I might then marry some woman
who cared for me, and that she would be happy with the man she had
learned to love.
The abruptness of her request, together with the cold, matter-of-fact
way in which she put it dumfounded me, but, hastily regaining my
composure, I flatly refused any such action, told my wife that she must
remain true to her marriage vows, and that nothing would ever induce me
to give her the divorce she wanted. Furthermore, I told her that the
doctor was a scoundrel--that many people believed he had murdered a
girl before coming to our town.
At this, my wife became livid with fury, accused me of deliberately
besmirching the doctor’s character because of jealousy, and declared
she would never live with me again.
The next day, however, she seemed much changed. She was very agreeable,
even tender, to me. We walked about the little garden of our home,
as we had often done in the early days of our marriage, and I felt
confident that she had decided to put the doctor out of her mind and
allow our married life to go on as usual.
We chatted pleasantly together at the dinner table that evening, and as
usual I drank a cup of strong coffee after the meal.
A few moments later a heavy drowsiness came over me and I knew no
more....
* * * * *
I awoke with a feeling of suffocation--as if a thousand tons of weight
were resting on my chest.
I gasped for breath. I was suffering torture. All about me was
blackness--impenetrable blackness. I moved my hands and encountered
boards, above and on every side. Gradually, to my numbed senses, the
horrible realization came to me, and the cold sweat started out on my
body--_I had been buried alive!_
The terrible realization had a tendency to clear my mind somewhat, in
spite of the difficulty I encountered in breathing. I saw it all now.
My wife had given me some powerful drug in my coffee, a drug obtained
from the doctor. They had planned and plotted the thing in case I
refused to consent to a divorce.
They probably had known I was still alive when I was buried. The
doctor, as medical examiner, had filed some fictitious report of death
from natural causes, and they had contrived to have a hasty funeral.
How I had managed to breathe for so long in the coffin, while under the
power of the drug, I did not know. Now that I was fully conscious again
I felt myself stifling.
No power of imagination can picture the horror and torture of mind that
my terrible predicament forced upon me. I must die a slow, terrible
death, while those who were responsible for the hellish crime enjoyed
themselves and went unpunished. The minutes seemed to drag into hours,
as I lay there struggling for breath.
Suddenly, out of the horrible black stillness, I heard a noise
above me. Listening, with every racked nerve on edge, I heard it
come nearer--nearer. At first I could not make it out--could not
understand--and then, suddenly, the truth dawned upon me with a
horrible intensity: _The body snatchers were after me for the
dissecting-room!_
I tried to cry out, but was unable to make a sound, because of my
stifling condition. They reached the coffin, and I heard the shovel
scraping against it. Then I felt myself being slowly lifted upward, and
the coffin was dumped on the ground.
Now I heard a voice, and my blood ran cold, _for it was the voice of
Dr. Langley_.
“The drug was an Oriental one,” he was saying. “It causes a semblance
of death that lasts a long time, but he probably died a few minutes
after he was buried. I am anxious to dissect to see what effect such a
drug has on the human body!”
And then, with a terrible shock, I heard the voice of my wife:
“I don’t care. Do as you wish. I hated him from the moment he refused
to give me a divorce. I could even watch you cut up his body!”
I struggled to rise in the coffin, gasping for the breath of life, and
then the lid was pried off, and, summoning all my dying strength, I
rose to my feet, waving my arms wildly back and forth and inhaling a
great breath of life-giving night air.
The doctor let the shovel fall to the ground without a word, and
staggered back and sank to his knees, while my wife gave a hideous
scream of terror. Then she snatched a knife from his kit of dissecting
instruments and drew the razor-sharp blade across her throat. She then
threw herself upon the prostrate doctor, her blood drenching his body.
My senses reeling, I staggered forward, tripped over my coffin and fell
swooning to the ground.
* * * * *
None believe my story. Neither will you. I have told it to them all,
but they will not believe it.
I am in a hospital, where they tell me I have been for several days.
It is a prison hospital, where guards in uniform patrol the corridors,
lest even the sick try to escape.
They ask me if I cannot remember that I came home that night from the
club in a blind frenzy of drink and found my wife and Dr. Langley
together. They tell me that I choked him with such ferocity and
strength that my fingers broke into the flesh of his neck. They tell me
that my wife, screaming with terror, tried to escape, and that, just as
the people in the adjoining apartment burst into the room, I seized a
razor from the bureau and slashed her throat from ear to ear, and threw
her body, with the blood streaming from the wound, across that of the
doctor.
Are they going to hang me for this double crime that I did not commit?
They will not believe my story. Yet every detail of it is as clear to
me as the stars that shine in the heavens.
[Illustration]
_Read of the Frightful Thing
That Came from_
_The_
Extraordinary
Experiment _of_
Dr. Calgroni
_By_ Joseph Faus and James Bennett Wooding
There is much concerning the queer Dr. Calgroni that I can not give to
the world.
It should be remembered that I had never been inside his house until
after I beheld him frantically emerge from its big front door, that
rainy night, his wizened face as white as death, and, scantily-clad,
rush headlong for the depot.
That he was a surgeon of extraordinary ability I readily acknowledge.
But Belleville was the last place where one would expect to find a man
of such surgical skill, and, most undoubtedly, the last place one would
choose for the scene of the startling events brought about as a result
of the doctor’s purchase of the ape “Horace” from Barber’s World-famous
3-Ring Show.
Had the doctor merely put up at the hotel I might have believed him,
like myself, merely summering at Belleville. For it was a restful
hamlet, situated in a mountainous valley, something like a day’s run
from New York. But his renting of the Thornsdale place aroused latent
suspicions in my mind, probably instilled there by that strange article
I had read in _The Surgical Monthly_.
Large enough for a hotel or boarding-house, but out-of-the-way
located--also because of the enormous rent demanded by its heirs--the
Thornsdale place had stood vacant since the last of the Thornsdale line
had died ten years before. Its doors had been closed and padlocked, and
its windows barricaded.
It had been the finest residence in the old town in its day, but was
now regarded as a sort of historic oddity. On the whole, it afforded a
formidable appearance, crouching behind its great elms, looming huge
and weather-beaten, with its board-shuttered and frowning windows.
But just the sort of place the eccentric Dr. Calgroni could work in,
unmolested.
I saw the peculiar doctor one morning as I was leaving the small post
office. It was just after train time, and many of the villagers were
loitering about the place, among them a young man named Jason Murdock.
Murdock was of that type one always hears of in a small community--the
village “devil.” He came of a good family, and had plenty of money and
all that: but had succeeded, despite rich heritage-blood, in igniting
more fire and brimstone than all five of the village preachers had in
their imagination conceived. He was coarsely good-looking, and big and
husky.
Aristocratic hoodlum though he was, all rather secretly admired the
fellow, probably because he injected “pep” into the lazy old town.
I beheld Jason Murdock pointing to a shriveled-up figure of a little
man, stooped of shoulder.
“There he goes--that Dr. Can-groanee, who’s movin’ into the Thornsdale
place. I wonder if there’s any good liquor in his cellar? That old
Thornsdale dump has a good wine cellar.”
Dr. Calgroni paid not the slightest attention to Jason’s insolent
babble, but walked hurriedly along, his clean-shaven, dried-up
countenance turning neither to the right nor left.
“Who is that man?” I asked the postmaster, who had now come to the door
for air.
“I dunno, excepting his mail is addressed Dr.--I’ll have to spell
it--C-A-L-G-R-O-N-I--and it is mostly foreign, out of Vienna, forwarded
here from New York.”
“Sort of a man of mystery, eh?” I hazarded.
“I should say he’s sort of a fool for rentin’ that old Thornsdale
rat-trap, for God-knows-what, that’s stood vacant these ten years.”