There is a reaper. But Charles V. De Vett doctors had given him
just one month to live, a month to wonder what comes afterward. There
was one way to find out, ask a dead man. The amber brown
of the liquor disguised the poison it held, and I watched with a smile
on my lips as he drank it. There was no pity in my heart
for him. He was a jackal in the jungle of life, and I,
I was one of the carnivores. It is the lot of the jackals
of life to be devoured by the carnivore. Suddenly, the contented look on
his face froze into a startled stillness. I knew he was feeling the first
savage twinge of the agony that was to come. He turned his head and
looked at me, and I saw suddenly that he knew what I had done,
you murderer. He cursed me, and then his body arched in the
middle, and his voice choked off deep in his throat. For a short
minute, he sat tense, his body stiffened by the agony that rode it,
unable to move a muscle. I watched the torment in his eyes build
up to a crescendo of pain, until the suffering became so great that it
filmed his eyes, and I knew that though he still stared directly at me,
he no longer saw me. Then, as suddenly as the spasm had
come, the starch went out of his body, and his back slid slowly
down the chair edge. He landed heavily, with his head resting limply against
the seat of the chair. His right leg doubled up in a kind of
jerk before he was still. I knew the time had come. Where are
you? I asked? This moment had cost me sixty thousand dollars three weeks
ago. The best doctors in this state had given me a month to live,
and with seven million dollars in the bank, I couldn't buy a minute
more. I accepted the doctor's decision philosophically, like the gambler that I am.
But I had a plan, one which necessity had never forced me to
use until now. Several years before, I had read an article about the
medicine men of a certain tribe of Aborigines living in the jungles at the source
of the Amazon River. They had discovered a process in which the juice of
a certain bush known only to them, could be used to poison a man.
Any One subjected to this poison died, but for a few minutes after
the life left his body, the medicine men could still converse with him.
The subject, though ostensibly and actually dead, answered the medicine men's every question.
This was their primitive, though reportedly effective method of catch and glimpses of
what lay in the world of death. I had conceived my idea at the
time I read the article, but I had never had the need to use
it until the doctors gave me a month to live. Then I spent my
sixty thousand dollars, and three weeks later I held in my hands a small
bottle of the which doctor's fluid. The next step was to secure my victim,
my collaborator, I preferred to call him. The man I chose was
a nobody, a homeless, friendless nonentity, picked up off the street.
He had once been an educated man, but now he was only a bum,
and when he died, he'd never be missed. A perfect man for
my experiment. I am a rich man because I have a system. The
system is simple. I never make a move until I know exactly where that
move will lead me. My field of operations is the stock market. I
spend money unstintingly to secure the information I need Before I take each step.
I hire the best investigators, bribe employees and persons in position to give me
the information I want. And only when I am as certain as humanly possible
that I cannot be wrong, do I move. And the system never fails.
Seven million dollars in the bank is proof of that. Now, knowing
that I could not live, I intended to make the system work for me
one last time before I died. I'm a firm believer in the adage that
any situation can be whipped, given prior knowledge of its coming and of course,
its attendant circumstances. For a moment, he did not answer, and
I began to fear that my experiment had failed. Where are you? I
repeated, louder and sharper. This time, the small muscles about his eyes
puckered with an unnormal tension, while the rest of his face held its death
frost. Slowly, slowly, unnaturally, as though energized by some hyperrational power,
his lips and tongue moved. The words he spoke were clear. I
am in a a tunnel, he said. It is lighted dimly, but
there is nothing for me to see. Blue veins showed through the flesh of
his cheeks, like water marks on translucent paper. He paused, and I
urged go on. I am alone, he said. The realities I knew
no longer exist, and I am damp and cold. All about me is
a sense of gloom and dejection. It is an apprehension, an emanation so
deep and real as to be almost a tangible thing. The walls to either
side of me seem to be formed not of substance, but rather of the
soundless cries of melancholy, of spirits. I cannot see. I am waiting,
waiting in the gloom for something which will come to me. That need
to wait is an innate part of my being, and I have no thought
of questioning it. His voice died again. What are you waiting for?
I asked. I do not know, he said, his voice dreary with
the despair of centuries of hopelessness. I know only that I must wait.
That compulsion is greater than my strength to combat. The tone of his voice
changed slightly. The tunnel about me is widening now, and the walls have
receded into invisibility. The tunnel has become a plain. But the plain is
as desolate as forlorn and dreary as was the tunnel. And still I stand
and wait. How long must this go on? He fell silent again,
and I was about to prompt him with another question. I could not afford
to let the time run out in long silences. But abruptly the muscles about
his eyes tightened, and suddenly a new aspect replace their hopeless dejection. Now
they express the black, bottomless terror. For a moment I marveled that so
small a portion of a facial anatomy could express such horror. There is something
coming toward me, he said, a beast of brutish foulness. Beast is
too inadequate a term to describe it, but I know no words to tell
its form. It is an intangible and evasive thing, but very real,
and it is coming closer. It has no organs of sight as I know
them, but I feel that it can see me, or rather that it
is aware of me, with a sense sharper than vision itself. It is
very near now, Oh God, the malevolence, the hate, the potentiality,
of awful, fearsome destructiveness, that is its very essence. And still
I cannot move. The expression of terrified anticipation centered in his eyes lessened slightly
and was replaced instantly by its former, deep, deep despair. I am
no longer afraid, he said, why, I interjected, why I was
impatient to learn all I could before the end came, Because he paused,
Because it holds no threat for me. Somehow, some day I understand.
I know that it too is seeking that for which I wait. What is
it doing now? I asked. It has stopped beside me, and we
stand together gazing across the stark, empty plain. Now a second awful entity,
with the same leashed virulence about it, moves up and stands at my
other side. We all three wait, myself with the dark fear of this
dismal universe, my unnatural companions, with patient, malicious menace. Bits of
he faltered of I can only name it Aura, go out from the beasts
like an acid stream and touch me, and the hate and the venom chill
my body like a wave of intense cold. Now there are others of the
awful breed behind me. We stand waiting, waiting for that which will come.
What it is, I do not know. I could see the pallor
of death creeping steadily into the last corners of his lips, and I knew
that the end was not far away. Suddenly, a black frustration built up
within me. What are you waiting for? I screamed, the tenseness and
the importance of this moment forcing me to lose the iron self control upon which
I have always prided myself. I knew that the answer held the secret of
what I must know. If I could learn that my experiment would not be
in vain and I could make whatever preparations were necessary for my own death,
I had to know that answer. Think, think, I pleaded, what
are you waiting for? I do not know? The dreary despair in his
eyes, sightless as they met mine, chilled me with a coldness that I
felt in the marrow of my being. I do not know, he repeated,
I, yes, I do know. Abruptly, the plasmatic film cleared
from his eyes, and I knew that, for the first time since the
poison struck, he was seeing me clearly. I sensed that this was the
last moment before he left for good. It had to be now tell me,
I command you, I cried, What are you waiting for? His
voice was quiet as he murmured, softly, implacably before he was gone.
We are waiting, he said, for you. End of There Is a
Reaper by Charles V. De Vett