Of the great manuscript in Larner’s hand the student could make very little; there were too many inconsistencies in its strange contents—odd juxtapositions in sentence-structure and so on—that seemed to point to its being a translation from some other language, possibly German, and done by a man none too well versed in the tongue, perhaps Larner himself. On the other hand, Larner could have copied his work from some other translated version; and then again, it was just possible that the entire work was his own, but that seemed hardly likely. There were lurid descriptions of rites—hideous magical ceremonies involving human and animal sacrifices—which, even suffering as they did through poor translation, were more than sufficient to convince the student nurse that the study of this work had indeed gone far to helping Larner on his way to the institute’s basement ward. Having a very well balanced mind himself, and therefore seeing no point in wading through three or four hundred pages of such material, Spellman passed quickly on to the cuttings-file.
Now this was something one could get one’s teeth into and what a bonus for Spellman’s book! Why, the cuttings-file was crammed full of stuff he was sure he could use. There were cuttings from sources scattered throughout the globe, from London, Edinburgh, and Dublin; from the Americas, Haiti, and Africa; from France, India, and Malta; from the Troodos Mountains of Cyprus, the Australian Outback, and the Teutoburger Wald in West Germany; and the great majority of them involved the actions of persons—both singularly and in groups or “cults”—allegedly influenced by alien or “outside” forces!
They covered a period from early February 1925 to mid-1926—detailing cases of panic, mania, and weird eccentricity—and as Spellman read he quickly spotted connecting links in what at first had seemed dissociated stories. Two columns of the News of the World had been given over to coverage of the case of the man who uttered a hideous cry before leaping from a fourth-storey window to his death. His room showed proof on investigation that the suicide had been involved with some sort of magical rite; a pentacle had been chalked on the floor and the walls were painted with a crude representation of the blasphemous Nyhargo Code. In Africa missionary outposts had reported ominous mutterings from little-known desert and jungle tribes, and it was shown in one cutting how human sacrifices had been made to an earth-elemental called Shudmell. Spellman was quick to tie this report in with the fantastic and still unexplained disappearance of Sir Amery Wendy-Smith and his nephew in Yorkshire in 1933; they, too, had seemed obsessed by the conviction that they were doomed to death at the devices of a similar “deity,” one Shudde-M’ell, “of gigantic, rubbery, snakelike, and tentacled appearance.” In California an entire theosophist colony donned white robes for a “glorious fulfillment” that never arrived, and in Northern Ireland white-robed youths sacked and burned three churches in outlying districts to make way for “the Temples of a greater Lord.” In the Philippines American officers had found certain tribes extremely bothersome throughout the entire period, and in Australia sixty percent of Aboriginal settlements had shut themselves off completely from contact with whites. Secret cults and societies all over the world had brought themselves into the open for the first time, admitting allegiance to various gods and forces and declaring that the vision of their faiths, an “ultimate resurrection,” was about to take place. Troubles in insane asylums were legion, and Spellman wondered at the stoicism of medical fraternities that they had not noted the parallelisms or drawn anything other than the most mundane conclusions.
On the first night of his serious study of the file, Spellman did not get to his bed until very late, leaving it at a correspondingly late hour in the morning. This was a rare indulgence for him; indeed, feeling somehow lethargic the whole day, he did not bother to study or even to work on his book. That evening, when the time came around for his late shift, he still felt sleepy and dull, and it was only then that he discovered he had been detailed once more for the abhorrent lower wards and Hell. Again Barstowe shared the night shift with the student nurse, and Spellman guessed that before midnight the froggish man would come down to make his usual offer.
At eleven he was in the basement ward, beginning his first hurried tour of the morbid place, when he was startled to hear his name called from the small barred spy-hole in the door of the second cell on the left. This was Larner’s cell, and apparently the man was in one of his more lucid states. This suited the student very well, for he had intended to talk to Larner at the first opportunity. Now he saw he had his chance.
“How are you, Larner?” he carefully enquired, moving over to peer at the white face framed in the tiny square spy-hole. “You certainly seem in good spirits.”
“I am, I am—and I trust you’ll help me stay that way….”
“Oh? And how might I be of service?”
“Tell me,” Larner secretively asked, “who is on duty with you tonight?”
“Nurse Barstowe,” Spellman answered. “Why do you ask?”
But Larner had scurried back away from the door on hearing Barstowe’s name spoken, so that Spellman had to peer in through the spy-hole to see him.
“What’s wrong, Larner? Don’t you get on with Barstowe, then?”
“Larner is a trouble-maker, Spellman—didn’t you know?” Barstowe’s guttural, strangely menacing voice came suddenly from close behind. Spellman jumped, startled by the unexpected sound, turning to face the squat nurse who must have crept up on him quiet as a mouse. “And anyway—” the ugly man continued, “since when is it your practice to discuss senior personnel with the inmates? Very odd behavior, that, Spellman.”
But the student was not a man to be easily intimidated, and the instinctive fear Barstowe’s appearance had aroused in him quickly turned to anger when he heard the veiled threat in the older man’s question. “You’re out of bounds, Barstowe—” he harshly answered, “—and what do you mean by sneaking about down here? If you’re thinking of changing duties with me you can forget it—I don’t like the way these people behave when you’re on duty!” Spellman made his oblique accusation and watched Barstowe’s reaction.
The fully-trained nurse had gone gray on hearing Spellman “tick him off,” and he was plainly at a loss as to how to answer. When he did speak he had dropped his “Spellman” attitude: “I—I—what are you getting at, Martin? Why! I only came down here to do you a service. I’m not blind, you know. It’s plain you don’t like it down here. But you’ve done yourself now, Martin. I won’t be offering to help you out again—you can bet your life on that.”
“That suits me fine, Barstowe—but hadn’t you better be getting back upstairs? By now half the inmates could be out running about the grounds—or are they too afraid of that stick of yours to try it?” Barstowe’s gray color took on an even lighter shade, and beneath the folds of his smock his right hand jerked involuntarily at mention of his stick. “Got it with you, have you?” Spellman pointedly stared at the tell-tale bulge in the froggish man’s clinical attire. “I shouldn’t have bothered if I were you. You won’t be needing it tonight—not down here at any rate.”
At that Barstowe seemed to shrink into himself, the color leaving his face completely, and he turned without another word and almost ran along the corridor and up the stone steps. For the first time, as the squat nurse hurriedly climbed those steps, Spellman noticed that all the spy-holes in the doors lining the corridor were occupied. Faces—in various stages of agitation or animation—with eyes all fixed on the retreating figure of the ugly man, were framed in those tiny barred openings. And Spellman shuddered at the positive hatred those mad faces and eyes reflected.