by Chester S. Geier
Wraithlike, they came out of the darkness--dead
men who walked among the living. What grim secret lay
in their sightless eyes--a warning to all other men!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
October 1950
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
A chill touched Bryan as he looked down at the figure on the hospital
bed. He had seen dead men before--too many of them. He had seen them
sprawled on European battlefields, had seen them huddled in wrecked
cars or lying waxen and stiff on morgue slabs.
But he had never seen a dead man like the one who lay there on the bed.
For, paradoxically, this man was still alive. He still breathed, his
heart still pulsed. Yet it was clear that these were little more than
automatic processes. In the only respect that mattered, he was as truly
dead as though in the last stages of dissolution and decay.
He lay on the bed with an unnatural supineness, his head lolling at a
slack angle. His eyes were open in a blank stare, eyes as empty as a
waiting grave. He did not move. He made no sound. A thread of saliva
ran from a corner of his gaping mouth and made a glistening path down
the side of his jaw.
A mindless idiot would have shown more animation than this man.
Something vital and precious had gone from him, leaving him a mere
shell. His was a death-in-life, a thing somehow more terrible than a
shattered skull or a torn chest.
Bryan fought back a shudder and turned to the balding white-clad man at
his side. "What can you tell me, Dave? Just what seems to be wrong with
this fellow?"
The doctor sighed. "Wish I knew, Terry. I've never seen anything like
it in over twenty years of medical practice. Not even the specialists
seem to know. And we have several good ones here, who donate their
services to the hospital--men with experience in unusual cases."
"But don't you have any idea at all about how he got this way?" Bryan
persisted. "Isn't there any possibility that he has some sort of rare
brain disease?"
"We gave him a careful examination, Terry," the doctor returned. "We
could find no evidence of disease--no evidence of concussion or injury,
either. Except, maybe, for one thing."
"What's that?" Bryan asked quickly.
"When he was first brought in, we found a sort of reddish mark near
his left shoulder. As though something hot had touched him. The skin
wasn't broken or burned, however." The doctor shrugged. "It's gone now.
I doubt if anything so light and temporary could have been important,
anyway."
"This might be a case for the psychiatrists," Bryan suggested slowly.
"Maybe this fellow had a terrific shock of some kind--a psychic trauma,
or whatever they call it."
"That's quite possible. But we've done the best we could at this end."
The doctor's voice dropped. "I don't think there's going to be time for
anything else, Terry."
"You mean that he--"
The doctor nodded. "He's dying. I've seen the signs. It's as though
he's lost all will to live."
* * * * *
Bryan looked at the man on the bed again, grim speculation in his
eyes. His voice was solemn and soft. "Maybe I'm just a superstitious
Irishman, Dave--but I think I know what's the matter with this
fellow. I knew it the first time I looked at him. He's lost
something--something you can't see with microscopes or X-ray machines.
It's something damned important--and that's why he's dying. What he's
lost, Dave, is ... his soul."
"I'm not laughing, Terry. Oddly enough, I have the same opinion. A
doctor keeps running into situations like this, where ideas thrown into
the discard by the so-called scientific attitude have to be dusted off
and put back to work."
There was silence. An elevator made distant noises somewhere in the
building. White-clad nurses moved crisply by in the hall beyond the
open door. Late Spring sunshine was bright behind the drawn shade at
the window. Life and movement, the mundane and familiar. But in this
room thoughts probed beyond the earthly facade and found a mystery, a
wonder as old as Man.
Bryan moved his muscular shoulders as though against an invisible
resistance. Then, slowly, still fighting that resistance, he reached
into the breast pocket of his rumpled tweed jacket and produced a
pencil and a wrinkled but otherwise clean envelope. Most reporters
carried notepads about with them; some even went in for stenographers'
shorthand notebooks. But to Bryan news was something more than mere
details. It was a thing of human and emotional qualities, and these
he carried in his head like songs--some gay and humorous, many more
tragic and sad. This characteristic had given his by-line its great
popularity with _Courier_ readers. When he needed to remember details
at all--comparatively unimportant facts like dates and numbers--he
recorded them on envelopes.
"Anything else you can tell me about this man, Dave? Who he is, where
he lives?"
The doctor fingered a slip of paper from a pocket of his white smock.
"Here's his name and address. I had an interne copy them down from the
stuff we found in his clothes. Knew you'd want them, Terry." He grinned
briefly, a grin of real affection, then sobered. "The police did some
checking on him. I talked to a detective just before you showed up.
"Seems this patient lived alone at a rooming house. A widower. No
family. Worked as a dental technician for a small company in the Loop.
It appears he was in the habit of spending his evenings in Grant Park.
He was found there this morning, you know, just the way he is now."
"Grant Park," Bryan echoed. "That makes three. Three, Dave."