“You don’t quite understand, do you, my dear brother? You’re wondering how Gratia could be my sole hope of survival. No matter. It’s better that you never know. We don’t want to trouble your sensitive mind on your last night in this life. Indeed, no! We want you to be at peace. We want you to be ready—for death!”
What happened then I cannot clearly remember; the murderous violence of those few minutes returns only in disparate snatches. I recall the maniacal force of Claude’s lunge, the cold, bony vise of his fingers closing on my windpipe. I think I heard Gratia scream. That pale, hateful face was horribly close to mine; his putrid breath hissed, hot against my skin. I remember crashing backward under the impact of his charge.
Darkness and moonlight spun in my head. I thought my lungs would burst. Then, by some desperate, instinctive twist of the body, I was free. Wind rasped in my chest. I had Claude crushed between me and the damp stone wall. My fingers clamped in his hair, jolting his head forward and back viciously. When his skull pounded against the stone for the third time, his frenzied grasp relaxed. He slid to the floor at my feet, twitched once, and was still.
He wasn’t dead. With the brilliant eyes shuttered by blank, purplish lids, the pale waste of his face had every aspect of death, but, under my searching hand, his evil heart still pounded feebly. Mechanically, possessed of a strange, decisive calm, I bound him hand and foot with the heavy sash-cords of the window-drapes. I carried him to his room and laid him on the huge antique bedstead. I locked him in.
Gratia had stopped crying, but her hand was cold and trembling in mine as we descended through the chill darkness to the library. I talked, then; I told her gently that there was nothing more to be afraid of; I said it was all over now. I built a fire and poured drinks for both of us. And, the whole time, a single, inescapable thought coursed with harrowing persistence beneath my outward calm. I knew that, for the safety of everyone concerned, there was only one place for Claude Ashur: the State Asylum for the Criminally Insane. When I had finished my drink, I made two telephone calls. I asked Dr. Ellerby and the police to come to Inneswich Priory as quickly as possible.
VII
IT WAS ALL HANDLED VERY QUIETLY. NONE OF THE FACTS GOT into the papers. The few reporters whose editors sent them to cover the trial were refused admission. They returned, disgruntled, to their respective phone booths and dictated brief, barren items that only hinted at the abominable truth; these articles, if printed at all, were mercifully swallowed by some obscure corner of an inner page. For a while, the newspaper men tried another angle. They spent a good deal of time in the Tavern at Inneswich; they asked questions. They learned nothing. The people of the village, perhaps out of respect for the memory of my father, met all inquiries with a cold stare and locked lips. So, the loathsome secret of Inneswich Priory, the shame that had scummed the name of Ashur, remained hidden beyond a barrier of clement silence.
The only formal charge against Claude Ashur was one of assault with intent to kill. I stood in the witness box and muttered the details of his attempt on my life. That was all I had to do. The alienists did the rest. It wasn’t difficult. It was simply a matter of subjecting Claude to countless cross-examinations; of recording the awed, reluctant testimony of various villagers who knew of my brother’s “oddity”; of questioning the timid, uneasy man who was Dean of Men at Miskatonic University, and reading a letter from one Henry Boniface, who had taught Claude Ashur to paint.
The strange, exalted manner in which Claude accepted Father’s death was brought to light, and, in the end, I admitted the story of that odious portrait in Pickham Square, and the murder-incantation of Albertus Magnus. In mid-September, 1925, the alienists reached a decision. They declared my brother incurably insane.
On that last day of his examination, I went alone to the State Asylum; alone, I felt the final, brutal impact of his hate-filled unblinking stare, and glimpsed again the cold anger of the calculating mind that lay hidden behind that emaciated mask. He showed no signs of hysteria or violence. Between white-coated attendants, he walked quietly to the doorway of the consultation room. Then he turned, and, for an instant, his face gray in the gloom of a rainy afternoon, the features somehow broadened and blurred, he was again the old, cynically smiling, indestructible Claude.
“You mustn’t suppose that you’ve won, Richard,” he said softly. “You mustn’t delude yourself. They can lock me up. They can bolt doors and bar windows. But they can never imprison the real Claude Ashur. I’ll be free again. Some day, some how, I’ll reach out to you—to you and my devoted wife. Sooner or later, I’ll have my revenge.” His muted laughter whispered through tight lips. “You don’t believe that, now. But you will. Wait, Richard… Just wait, and see…”
I tried to listen to the quiet reassurances of the doctors; I saw my brother disappear around a bend in the corridor; I heard a door open and close. The metallic grind of bolts drifted back to me through the dimness. I told myself that Claude had gone out of my life forever. But I didn’t believe it. That last, soft-spoken warning echoed ceaselessly in my head; I had the terrible conviction that this was not the end of Claude Ashur.
The semblance of contentment which settled over Inneswich Priory was a thing born of our desperate need for peace of mind. The happiness wasn’t real. It was as though our determination to shut out the hideous past had pushed back a musty drapery of gloom, letting in the feeble, timorous sunlight of normalcy. In the next months, I saw Gratia slowly reclaim the young, fresh vitality I’d first known to be a part of her during the week of Claude’s illness. She laughed again; she walked with me along the winter-bleak strand of the beach; she planned little surprises in the way of food delicacies; and it was she who finally convinced me that I should go back to my writing.
Had anyone asked us, I know we should have said we were quite happy. It would have been a lie. I wrote; but the several literary articles I managed were somehow weak; they lacked spontaneity. The prose was stunted and overcast with a strange uneasiness. Gratia and I made plans. We talked of travel and marriage, but there was always a ghost of unrest that hovered between us—the knowledge that our plans could come to nothing. The realization that while that twisted, hateful creature in the asylum went on drawing the breath of life, Gratia would never be free. We were like lonely children, playing desperately at some pitiful game, trying to ignore the horror-infested night that closed slowly in on every side.
It is difficult to trace the stages by which the change overtook me. I think it began with an unwonted restlessness, that laid siege to my mind scant days after Claude had been committed to the asylum. I took to wandering, alone, along the most desolate, brine-eaten stretches of the coast; a seething uneasiness pounded mercilessly in my brain. There were horrible moments of blank detachment—moments when a wild exhilaration crawled along my spine, and I would prowl the nigh-dark labyrinths of the Priory, full of a sense of illimitable power. More than once I came to myself, damp with sweat, chilled, standing before that carven door in the East Wing; the door leading to the hellish tomb that housed everything that stood for the blasphemous evil of Claude Ashur.
Then, as suddenly as it had come, the moment would pass, and, shaken, bewildered, I would fall across my bed, sinking into a deep, restless sleep. I never mentioned those horrible nocturnal seizures to Gratia, and yet, there were times when her eyes met mine, and I saw the half-fearful question that lurked behind her gentle gaze. She sensed that something was wrong. Her unspoken suspicions became a hideous reality the night I played the piano.