RGL e-Book Cover©
RGL e-Book Cover©
The Spider, April 1939, with "Doc Turner and the Banshee"
Chill, eerie, the wailing horror filled the little room where old Doc Turner fought to save a man from death. But Doc knew that he had more to defeat than a murderous banshee—and that if he failed he also must die!
SIFTING through the black-barred ties of the 'El' trestle, a chill rain glistened on gutter-cobbles and debris-strewn sidewalks. Tonight Morris Street was empty of the pushcart hucksters and chattering, swarthy aliens for whom it is market, promenade, club and playground. The rain became emerald and ruby dust on the windows of Doc Turner's drugstore, faceting the green and scarlet light from bulbous, tall bottles—antique symbols of a trade that here, at least, remained a profession.
Within the store, shelves once painted white but now age-yellowed, sagged with the weight of the tonics and cough-mixtures and laxatives crowding them. Two rows of showcases, lengthwise of the shop, were heavy-framed, their glass tops so scratched as to conceal rather than display dusty piles of medical equipment. The air was heavy with the nostalgic 'drugstore-smell' that is compounded of anise and colocynth, licorice and verbena, valerian, aloes, and the tangy oils drying out of great bars of castile soap stacked crisscross on the wooden sales counter that right-angled the rows of showcases at the rear.
A fly-specked, translucent bowl hanging from the wallpapered ceiling shed a grudging illumination over all this. The grimy light was caught and made silken by the white hair of an old man who stood behind the sales counter, tugging pensively at the silver bush of his mustache.
The blue eyes that peered out of Andrew Turner's wrinkled, craggy face were faded. His bold promontory of a nose was marked with the tiny red wriggles of aged capillaries. His long-fingered, acid-stained hands were fleshless under their sere skin and his store coat of shabby grey alpaca hung loosely from stooped shoulders. Frail and feeble-seeming, Doc Turner was wrapped in the thoughts of old age, that are more meaningful than the poet-sung thoughts of youth.
They were broken in upon by the rattle of the front door's opening. Rain gusted in, and out of the wet-lashed emptiness of Morris Street a slim girl of about eighteen entered and came toward the old pharmacist.
She moved lithely, but her sodden shoes squelched on the bare floor. The rain dripped from the muddy hem of her brown skirt and the fringes of the threadbare plaid shawl wrapped over her head and shoulders. The drenched folds of the shawl were held together under a blunt, determined little chin by a slender hand. Within them was framed a wan, small-featured face, the sweet lips quivering a bit. The thin walls of a pert, tip-tilted nose flared. The long-lashed, amber eyes that should have been dancing and merry were dark with deep trouble.
"Kitty Mackey," Doc exclaimed. "You're soaked through, child! What are you doing out in this weather, so late?"
She reached the counter and her hand let go of the shawl to grip its edge. "'Tis himself again, Doc Turner," she sighed, in her intonations a soft brogue that told she was not long from the Old Sod. "My father." The shawl slid off her head and was caught on her shoulders. Strands of her hair were wet-plastered against her wide and thoughtful brow, but where it had been protected from the rain it was soft, wavy and lustrous. "Father will not take the medicine you made at noon, and he will take nothing save for a little water." Her hair was not black, but the deep, deep red of the flower they call the 'black rose.' "He lays in his bed waiting for death, and I'm at my wit's end to know what to do."
"Waiting for death!" Doc snorted. "That's nonsense. The settlement doctor was in after you left, and he told me all that's wrong with your father is that he's had the flu for a week, and it's drained his strength."
"So Doctor Bayne told him, and so do I, but he will have none of it," she answered. "He believes he will not live out this night. He hears the banshee, he says, and—"
"The banshee! What kind of foolishness is that?" Doc asked. "The man must be delirious with fever—"
"He has no fever, Doc." Kitty's fingertips flattened on the counter edge. "His skin is ice to my touch and grows colder by the minute. Besides—" The girl hesitated, her pupils widening till they were black windows for the fear that was in her soul. "Besides," she whispered, "I've heard it myself."
"You've heard it!"
She managed a pathetic smile. "I've heard it, Doc, and I'm afraid. For Father, and for—" She broke off. "But that is no matter. It's him—"
"Finish what you were saying," Doc said. "You're afraid for—"
"Myself," the girl admitted. "Oh, I've been to the Sisters' School, and I know that such things cannot be, but..." The smile was on her lips again, deprecating the dread that crawled under her clear skin. "But since I was little I have heard tell of the Mackey's banshee. None but a Mackey can hear it. No Mackey dies unless he has heard it. No Mackey lives for more than a week after he has heard it the first time. And I've heard it, Doc, this very night. I cannot help but be afraid."
Andrew Turner's gray hand closed on Kitty's white one. "You don't believe that, Kitty."
His eyes took hold of hers. "You don't really believe it."
There was trouble in her winsome face, and fear, but there was courage too. "No," she answered. "I do not really believe it." By saying that she was trying to make it so.
"But your father does," Doc sighed, "and that's where the danger lies."
"Yes," the girl agreed. "That's where the danger lies. For one who thinks himself doomed to death is as good as dead, and all the medicines you have in this store cannot save him. But I believe that you can, Doc Turner. Father has talked a lot with you, and knows how wise you are. He trusts you. Will you come with me and tell him that he won't die? Will you, Doc?"
"Of course I will, child." The old man's smile was heartening, but there was no smile in his eyes. "It's almost midnight and I was about to close. Wait a minute and I'll go with you."
CLIMBING the creaking, uncarpeted stairs of the tenement on
Hogbund Lane, Doc Turner sighed to think that human beings should
be compelled to live in such a place. Yellow carbon filaments on
each alternate floor gave an illumination of sorts, enough to
show the dirt-grey treads, the gaps in the battered railings, the
plaster walls pitted and scarred and scrawled with
pencilings.
The damp chill in this stairwell penetrated to Doc's very bones, for the owner of this warren furnished neither heat nor hot water to his tenants. There was a reek in the air from stale cooking, moldering clothing.
"It's a shame to make you climb so high," Kitty murmured as they stopped ascending at last and her key rattled into a lock in a paint-peeled door. "But the top floor is the cheapest and we scarcely can afford even that."
The door opened. Doc followed the girl into welcome warmth from a coal range that stood against the wall of a kitchen that was all immaculate and sparkling.
Kitty went across the linoleum whose pattern was rubbed away save in spots, but was scrubbed clean. "Father," she called, gliding toward another door that stood open to let in the heat from the coal stove. "Are you all right, Father?"
"I still live, if that's what you mean," a feeble voice replied as she went through that door. "But my time grows short. I've heard it again, colleen. I shall not hear it many times more."
Andrew Turner glanced around the kitchen. Sink, cupboards, unpainted wooden table, were spic and span. A couch beneath the window was neatly made up. The girl must sleep there, he thought, for they had only the two rooms.
"I've brought you a friend, Father," he heard Kitty say, and then she called him to come in.
It was a bedroom he entered, a small room, the shade of its single window drawn. A dresser, chair and brass bed were its only furnishings, but there were curtains at the window and on the floor a gay-colored rug patiently fashioned out of rags. The sheets on the bed were white and crisp-looking though much mended.
These sheets lay over a giant frame, and on the pillow rested a head stubbled with a rusty beard, its cheek sunken, its lusterless eyes deep in shadow-filled sockets.
"What's all this, Shean Mackey?" Doc said cheerily, though his heart sank as the gaunt face turned toward him and he saw the waxen pallor with which approaching dissolution had painted its skin. "Kitty tells me you've got some nonsense about a banshee's howl in your head." The girl was on her knees beside the bed, her arms around her father and her glorious hair pillowed on his breast. "I couldn't believe it of you, so I've come to see for myself."
"'Tis no nonsense, friend Andrew." Mackey's lead-colored lips scarcely moved to give passage to his shadow of a voice. "Wise in philosophy and science though you are, there are matters beyond your understanding—and the death-warnin' of the Mackeys is one of these. The banshee has followed me across the great sea, and I've heard its howling. I know that my time is come—"
He broke off. His bony jaw was ridged with knotting small muscles and a soundless scream was in his eyes. Kitty clutched him to her, her soft breasts furrowed by the bed's edge. Her head was turned, so that he could not see the terror that masked it too, and now made it hideous.
They were hearing something, the two of them, that made their blood run cold. But for Doc there was only the hoarse gasp of the dying man's breath to break the silence. For an infinitely long minute there was that fear-filled hush in the room, and the terror on the faces of the Mackeys.
"You see," Shean Mackey whispered. "You two did not hear it, but I did, and I'm not mad."
Doc burst into a hearty laugh. "You fool!" he chuckled. "You blithering idiot. Of course I heard it, and Kitty heard it too, though you've got her so confused she'd probably tell you she did not. Banshee, my eye! It was the howl of a cat we heard, prowling the rooftops out there and moaning his frustrated love. That's all it is, and that's what has terrified you."
"A... cat..." Mackey repeated. "Never have I heard a cat howl like that. But, but if you heard it, it cannot be the banshee of the Mackeys. None but one with the blood of Ballylee in his veins can hear that—"
"You're sure, Doc?" Kitty broke in.
"I tell you I heard it," the old druggist repeated his lie, looking her straight in the face. "I heard the same thing you did. And so you both can stop being superstitious ninnies. Where's that medicine Doctor Bayne prescribed? I'm going to give your father a dose of it while you go and make something for him to eat. Some broth, or—"
"I've got a pot of chicken soup simmering on the back of the stove," she exclaimed, lifting to her feet, her eyes shining with joy and relief. "And here's the medicine."
"All right, my friend," Doc said. "Let me help you sit up so this stuff won't spill all over your chin." He set the bottle and spoon on the seat of the chair, slid his arm under Shean Mackey's shoulders.
Mackey was heavy and very weak. It took all Doc's strength to budge him. He got his other arm around the sick man—and felt Shean stiffen!
ICE SHEATHED Doc Turner's body. Clear and distinct, he heard a deep-throated wail that rose in volume till it was the keening of a soul condemned to eternal perdition. No cat's cry was this, but such a voice as comes howling down the wind at Walpurgis midnight when all God-fearing souls are asleep and Satan calls his coven to him for the Black Sabbath.
Abruptly as it had come, the sound ended. "That tomcat's squall is certainly grisly enough," Doc remarked, his voice calm and unruffled. "I can hardly blame you for letting it frighten you." He reached across Mackey to straighten the pillow, and his nose flared as if it had suddenly sensed some odd odor.
Doc turned to pick up the medicine bottle. He uncorked it, poured a dose into the bowl of the teaspoon, his hand rock-steady. Through the open door he could see Kitty bustling about the kitchen. She was humming, and her eyes were no longer troubled. She could not have heard the yowling that had come to his ears and her father's, though it had certainly been loud enough!
"All right, young fellow," Doc turned to his patient. "Open wide."
"Does it taste bad?"
"Bad or not, you're taking it."
He did, and Kitty came in with a steaming bowl on a tray, some crackers and a spotless napkin. Doc made room for her on the chair. She sat there and fed her father as if he were a child. The shadow of fear had lifted from them both, but it lay now on Doc Turner...
"Kitty," he said, when she'd finished, "I want you to do something, exactly as I tell you and without asking why."
"Anything, Doc."
"I want you to move your father into the kitchen," Doc said, "and I want you to stay in there with him—keeping the door of this room tightly shut. Do you understand?"
"Yes." She looked up at him.
"You promised not to ask why," Doc checked her. "Will you do it?"
It took the two of them to get Shean Mackey into the kitchen.
"Kitty," he asked, as she took the pillow from him. "Who lives in the flat next to this one?"
She stared at him, wide-eyed. "I—I don't know."
"Oh—" Doc shrugged—"I merely wondered if there was a woman near at hand with whom you were friendly enough to call upon her for help... if you needed it." He shut the bedroom door, turned back to the girl. "I don't think that cat will disturb you again tonight." He smiled. "Ah, I see Shean has dropped off to sleep already, which is a good sign. And so, my child, I will be leaving you. Good-night."
"Good-night, Doc," Kitty murmured, "and thank you a hundred thousand times for—"
"I've done nothing to be thanked for," he cut her off. "Don't forget your promise not to enter that bedroom tonight."
Doc was out of the Mackey flat and its door was shut behind him. His smile faded, his face bleak once more as he turned around....
HE glanced down the dark stairwell and then he was at the door
next to the one he'd just come out of. It was exactly like the
other, the paint flaking from it, the porcelain knob chipped.
Doc's hand closed on that knob and turned it.
Holding the knob that way, the old druggist fished in his pocket with his free hand and brought out a bit of thin metal oddly shaped. He poked this into the keyhole, manipulated it. There was a faint rasp of metal on metal, a click.
Doc went through the doorway, closed it behind him. He was in complete darkness. Somewhere near a faucet dripped.
Doc's eyes accommodated to the murk. Vague shapes took form. This must be a table in front of him, a chair. A faint vertical glimmer beyond, was surely a wall and the darker oblong blotching it a door.
He heard fumbling movement. He heard an almost inaudible hiss, reptilian and vicious.
His head moved till his nose was at the keyhole. He sniffed, and his thin lips tightened. He knew what was wrong with Shean Mackey now!
Something caught his heel, and he stumbled. His hand touched the chair and it thumped against the table. A light-shaft threw his shadow across the floor before him, showed holes in the linoleum, one of which had caught his heel and caused him to make the sound that had betrayed him. Beside his shadow lay another.
The body of the second shadow might possibly be that of a crouching man, but no human ever had a head like the one silhouetted on the grimy oilcloth. No human ever had bulging eyes as large as clenched fists or a long, swinging snout that curved down to mid-torso. This was the shadow of some creature out of a madman's nightmare!
"Not a sound out of you," a strangely muffled voice said, behind Turner.
Doc Turner stood very still but his nostrils flared as they had when he lifted Shean Mackey to a sitting position on his bed. "Give a guy a break," he whined in tones suddenly thin and cringing.
A chuckle behind him sounded as if it came through a wad of cotton. "Nice try, Doc Turner, but it doesn't wash. I know you."
The pharmacist abandoned his pretense. "And what," he asked in his natural accents, "are you going to do about it?"
"Turn around, slowly and with your hands away from your sides, and come in."
Doc lifted his arms out slantwise and turned. The figure in the lighted doorway was hunched. It was grotesquely faceless save for huge, glinting eyes and a long, corrugated nose that descended to merge with a boxlike contrivance strapped to its chest. A hand red as flesh stripped of skin held a blued automatic.
The hissing was louder here. A narrow bed held rumpled, dirt-crusted blankets, a smudged pillow. A rickety chair was beside the bed. A valise, strapped closed, stood on the chair. Another lay open on the floor and this held some sort of machinery from which two insulated wires ran to the wall that right-angled the one against which the bed stood. Near the place where the wires entered the wall a small, round stove stood. Through the stove's mica windows came the blue-red glow of burning charcoal, and it was this that made the hissing sound.
"Sit down on the bed," his captor directed.
Doc obeyed. "Well," he sighed, "what are you going to do with me?"
"Nothing. Nothing at all if you behave yourself." The thing over the man's head was a gas mask. His hands were red because they were covered with red rubber gloves. "If you try any tricks, I will put a bullet into you. Just one will be enough, and if anyone in this house does hear a single shot he will think it simply a backfire out in the street." The man in the gas mask bent to the charcoal brazier and made some adjustment, but even as he stooped and straightened, his gun snouted pointblank at the druggist.
This was a spot....
Turner's eyes wandered to the valise and its curious contents. "The banshee would scarcely recognize its modern counterpart." He sighed. His gaze came back to the man. "Why do you want Shean Mackey to die?"
THE fellow sat down in the chair and crossed his legs. "I'm
not afraid. You won't repeat what I tell you." He chuckled once
more. "The Lord of Ballylee lies dying in Ireland, or may even
now be gone. His title is worth naught, but his estates cover
half a county. Shean Mackey is heir to title and estates. They
are entailed, and so Kitty does not inherit from her father, but
the next male, in line or collateral. The next male is myself,
Padraic Mackey, Shean's brother.
"I emigrated to Canada years ago," said the man. "At first things went well with me and I saw to it that news went back to my pauper brother that I was dead by accident. I did not intend that he make demands on me. My fortune was invested in stocks, and in the crash of twenty-nine I was wiped out. There was no use my revealing myself to Shean then—he was poorer than a church mouse and could do nothing for me. But I kept in touch with him, waiting till he became Lord of Ballylee and a fair touch for a prodigal come alive, miraculously.
"That way, I learned that he was sailing to America, and I knew then that it would be not charity I would ask when the old lord passed on, but all the estate. I was at the pier when Shean and Kitty landed, and I have been close as their skin ever since. Aye, it is not charity I will take from him, but his—"
"Life." Doc's lids were drooping drowsily. "I... I understand... now," he mumbled. "And... your scheme... clever...." He fell over sidewise on the cot. His fingers clutched at its edge, as though to pull him up, but he did not move.
Padraic Mackey chuckled, and rose. He bent to the open valise, touched something. There was a whir, and then, very faintly and as though from an infinite distance, the banshee howl was in the room.
"You weren't as smart as you thought, you old fool," he muttered. "While I was talking to you, the gas got in its work. But it was even quicker than I thought. I wonder...." He stooped to his victim.
Doc's feet swept up, pounded into Mackey's midriff. Wind whooshed out of the killer's mask and the little druggist exploded from the bed, launched himself in a flying arc that crashed the fellow to the floor. The old pharmacist followed him down and as the gun was jolted from his hand snatched it up, pounded its butt down on the gas-mask, where Padraic's brow should be. A long shudder ran through the fellow's frame and then it was very still.
Doc gasped, tried to push himself off his vanquished opponent. The brief flare of energy against which he'd husbanded his breathing—pretending to be overcome as quickly as he dared—was gone. He had waited too long. The deadly fumes had got in their work and now he was too feeble to move. He sagged....
He lay like that for an instant, twitching. The ends of his fingers were turning blue and his lips were livid. There was a haze in the air.
Doc trembled and his hands fumbled to the floor, rolled him off Mackey. He was crawling, blindly, across the floor. His head butted into a wall. He pushed down again, pushed his upper body up, little by a little. His arms straightened and he hung like that for a long moment, his head hanging. He lifted one of his arms—the one whose hand still held the gun. The hand crept up along the wall, found the window's sill, kept on, up under the shade. It smashed the gun against the pane and Doc heard, dully, the sound of glass shattering. He slumped down.
Rain whipped in on him, and cold, clean air. Doc pulled the air into his lungs and it was like wine, running electric through his veins, stinging his brain back to the consciousness that almost had gone from it forever. He got to his knees, his feet—
Then, Doc wasn't very clear now, he was pounding on the door of the Mackey flat, and it was opening, and Kitty's startled face floated in front of him.
"Police," he gasped. "Call... police. Murderer... next door." He knew that Kitty's arms were keeping him from falling, and then he knew nothing at all....
"I ALMOST waited too long," Doc Turner said, the morning
sunlight streaming into the Mackey's kitchen bright on his seamed
old face, on the pallid face of Shean Mackey. "That altogether
lovely brother of yours had adjusted the drafts of the little
charcoal stove so as to fill the room with its gases and he was
talking so frankly to me to keep me engrossed while they got in
their deadly work. I knew what he was up to, took only shallow
breaths and pretended to keel over as soon as I thought it would
be at all plausible. It was touch and go."
"I did not know charcoal could be so dangerous," Mackey remarked.
"It is not if properly ventilated, but the gases from it do have a high percentage of carbon monoxide. Padraic had arranged a vent from the back of the brazier to carry them through cracks in the wall between your bedroom and his, and was slowly poisoning you. Monoxide causes a congestion of the blood and lungs, which, to the cursory examination that was all you would allow the settlement doctor to make, simulated the effects of flu. Your death would, in all likelihood, have been ascribed to natural causes. Even if monoxide poisoning were suspected, Padraic could have claimed simply that his charcoal stove was imperfect and that its fumes were carried through the wall to you. That is why he furnished the flat as though he lived there."
"But Doc," Kitty asked, from the stove where she prepared breakfast. "How did you ever guess it all?"
"I didn't guess it, child," he answered. "In the old days, before scientific firms supplied medicinal herbs and tested them chemically, I had to rely on my nose a great deal to tell me whether the drugs I bought were potent. I developed an exceptionally keen sense of smell and that has remained with me. I detected the odor of coal gas when I came into this flat last night, and meant to tell you to have your range looked after, but I smelled it much more strongly when, in helping your father to sit up, my head came near the wall behind his bed. In combination with the fact that at the same moment I was also hearing the howl of the banshee, that told me pretty nearly the whole story. What I did later was only to confirm it."
"I don't understand that banshee howl at all, at all," she admitted.
The old pharmacist smiled wearily. "That was to make sure that your father would make no effort to fight off his growing weakness. Because of it, he lay in bed when, otherwise, he would have tried to get up and go out to work, and so cleaned his lungs and blood of the deadly fumes. Because of it, he refused to let you call a doctor, and when you finally did so, he refused to tell the physician his symptoms. If he'd done that, Bayne might have suspected the truth. And because he heard the banshee and thought himself doomed to die, he refused to take the nourishment that would have helped his body fight off the effect of the noxious vapors."
"Yes." Kitty nodded. "What you say is true, but I already comprehended all that. What I meant was how was it that only Father heard the howl at all till last evening? And how was it that you did not hear it when we both did—you in the same room—and that I did not hear it when you and Father did, the time of which you have just spoken?"
Once more that tired smile hovered about Andrew Turner's mustached mouth. "If you'll recall, Kitty," he said. "You and I heard the howl only when we were in contact with the bed and with your father. I noticed this, and, as I've said, it was this fact, added to the smell of coal gas, that gave me the clue to what was happening. The way it was done is a little difficult to convey to someone who has no knowledge of science, but I'll try to make it clear."
He explained. "In the first place, you may have seen advertised a device called the Silent Radio. It consists of a diaphragm attached to a radio in place of the loudspeaker. A husband, say, may place this diaphragm under his pillow and listen to broadcasts while his wife, lying right next to him, hears nothing at all.
"Essentially that was what your precious uncle's machine amounted to," said Doc, "except that it was attached to an electric record player instead of a radio. He excavated a hole in the partition wall for it, leaving just a film of wall paper on your side. The horizontal rail of your father's brass bed was against the paper, just there, and in this way the whole structure of the bed responded to the vibrations of the diaphragm when the banshee's howl was reproduced. Lying in bed, your father thus heard that terrible wail when no one else in the room could."
"But we heard it, you and I, and we were not in the bed," she said.
"No. But when we heard the howl we were in contact with it, and with your father, our arms around him. There is another device, my dear, that is used to make people hear whose eardrums have been destroyed. The vibrations of sound are conducted to their aural nerves through the bones of their skull by a 'phone membrane in contact with their bodies. That was how we heard the banshee's howl—by conduction through our bones. Padraic Mackey did not intend that to happen, nor did he foresee it, but it was this that betrayed him. And so, you see, it was the very vagaries of the same science of sound he was using to murder his brother that defeated his attempt at fratricide."
He smiled.
The girl turned from the stove, and her eyes were shining. "No, Doc. It was the wisdom and the courage of a very dear and kindly old man that saved my father's life." She came across the floor, her cheeks flushed, her lips red and very sweet "And—and this is for thanks, though no thanks be enough for all that you have done." Her warm lips pressed Doc's cold and withered ones in a long kiss.
Doc blushed.
There were tears in the old man's faded eyes when that kiss was ended, but the light on his wrinkled countenance outshone the sun. "Enough?" he exclaimed. "It's I who am in your debt now, and if I were two or three decades younger, I shouldn't let you remain my creditor very long."