Speaker 1: 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