The Conservative (Lovecraft)/July 1919/The Field of Night
The Field of Night
By Willis Tate Crossman
(W. Paul Cook)
It is dark, dark. It seems to be always night, black, black, unrelieved night. Not a sky decked with stars, but a black, fathomless pit above me. Not a sign of a light in so far as my eyes can see or any of my other senses perceive. It is night, always night. Night in so far as my eyes can tell me, and night to my poor tired mentality. My brain is tired, tired. It has, worked too hard, poor thing. It was tired out, tired out, and must rest. My eyes, too, were tired, tired. They once never closed for how long I do not know. Now they never open.
Occasionally, though, my brain registers once again the impressions taken by it during its last days. But there is nothing new, always swift, vanishing photographic prints, one at a time, like the single pictures in a cinema reel. Never a connected impression. And never aided by my eyes, my poor, tired, tired eyes. It is difficult to build up a story from thousands of haphazard photographic negatives,—a picture puzzle is simple in comparison. Then when the pictures are arranged in sequence, it is strange, so strange, to seem to stand off and watch a completed story,—one’s own sory,—flashed before one.
Where am I? I do not know. I only know I am tired, tired. My poor body is tired. My eyes are tired. My weary brain is still, so still, yet striving to register impressions. Can I catch and put together and convey to you this story,—the story which I now view as a spectator, yet knowing the actor was indeed I?
After all, it is indeed a sordid story, hardly worth the trouble of recording. This man was wealthy, perhaps not enormously wealthy but possessed of means enough to purchase all the necessities and many of the comforts of life. He had not shown his miserliness, nor his meanness of soul, nor his wonderful intellect, when he caught and married this girl. But he soon revealed himself. She was a virtual prisoner in this once magnificent but now rotten and rambling old mansion on the outskirts of the town far from her home.
With clothes in which she dared not show herself to strangers, with an insufficient quantity of the poorest food, a slave to the whims of a man of ungovernable passions and splendid but perverted intellect, she had been but a few feet out of the decaying edifice since he brought here there, a bride.
How long ago that was, she did not know. Sometimes she thought it but yesterday. At other times it seemed aeons andaeons ago. Her arms were black where he had seized her with his hands. Her limbs were blue where he had kicked her. She walked wtih a bowed back, where he had thrown her against a corner of the kitchen chimney.
And now he was sick, sick unto death it seemed. He lay in the only room in the house protected from the elements. Here were his hooks. Here was a small printing outfit on which some of those books had been produced. Other volumes were old folios of black-letter, and rolls of vellum and parchment and papyrus. He had once compelled her to read one of these books, and sat watching her mirthfully as she shuddered at the forbidden things revealed therein. But after quieting with some medicament of his own compounding the extreme hysteria into which the reading had thrown her, he forbade her to touch any of the books again. Many of them were in strange languages, and he once mentioned that one of them, he alone of living men could read.
And now he was ill, here on this cot among these forbidden books. And she, she must watch over him and wait on him, giving him this or that in such and such a fashion, mixing according to his directions, grinding this herb to compound with that, while his burning eyes never left her. Once when she left him for a moment apparently asleep, she was recalled by an unearthly shriek commanding her to return. She must not close her eyes. She must not lie down. She must remain ever alert, hour after hour, ready to obey his slightest wish. This man, sick unto death, had resolved by his black knowledge and his powerful will to remain alive. Remain alive he did, until finally he was more alive than the ghost attending him. Once she fell asleep on her feet while standing over him, and was awakened by falling upon his body. He cursed her in known and unknown languages, commanded her to take a certain draught of a medicine prepared for him, and when it had given her an artificial strength and wakefulness, he gave her minute instructions for the next three hours. He was going to sleep or into a coma, he said. Three drops of this was to be forced between his teeth every quarter hour. A spoonful of that was to be given every half hour. He could swallow them without difficulty, he said. At the end of one hour he was to have a hypodermic injection of the greenish liquid, exactly there, where he made an ink mark. Exactly at the stroke of the third hour she was to inject the syringe full of the colourless liquid. These instructions were vital. The colourless liquor, especially, was not to be touched except as ordered. The result would be fatal if administered otherwise.
He sank into a senseless shape. She faithfully gave the first draught. But she was so sleepy. Perhaps she could snatch ten minutes’ rest. Quite useless. Though her brain was numb for lack of sleep, she could not sleep. That devil draught ne had made her take was designed only to prolong her agony and keep him, the Evil One himself, alive and in the flesh.
She picked up the hypodermic syringe with the colourless liquid. She loaned over him. He was in so deep a coma that his breathing was scarcely discernible. She bared the place on his body marked for the final injection. The needle was about to be inserted when the arms of the man came up; one hand grasped her throat, the other forced the syringe away from his body. His eyes were open,—burning, hell-fire eyes with a malignant triumph and yet an unearthly horror in their depths. Not a word was spoken. With the strength of the insane she forced his hand from her throat, and kneeling with her whole weight on his body forced the needle in and pressed the piston home.
With a convulsive and superhuman effort the man threw her off and gained his feet. She scrambled to the door on all fours, then rose to her feet and ran, ran out of the house, through the rank shrubbery of the front lawn and into the roadway, the man pursuing her with giant strides. She continued her career down the road toward the village; when the man came to the roadway he sank forward on his face, such being his inertia that he ploughed several feet of the roadbed with his face ere he came to rest.
Two men driving from the village, one of them the doctor, stopped their team as they saw running and swaying toward them a nearly naked woman. They left their buggy and seized her as she came to them. She offered no resistance, but collapsed in their arms. Conceiving it a faint, they attempted to revive her, but to no purpose. The doctor said she was sleeping, perfect sleep, but sleep from which for days she could not be awakened. At last her eyes opened, but she saw nothing. She spoke, but she said nothing.
The doctor was puzzled. Driving out to the old house he discovered nothing of the man. The body must have been removed by someone who for some reason did not declare himself. The doctor thoroughly explored the house, finally arriving at the room of books. Here he spent some hours, coming out shaking as with an ague, with white face and burning eyes. One small volume of modern print he put in his pocket. Then he carried, all alone, can after can of naphtha and more violent refinants of petroleum into that room. A train was laid to the outside of the house. The doctor cast a match into that train and took to his heels. In an incredibly short space of time the whole countryside was lighted by flames from the old mansion. The doctor did not leave the soot until late the next day, after he had thoroughly ransacked the embers above which had lain the room of books. No, nothing remained.
The woman was placed in an asylum, and the doctor locked the little book in the very innermost compartment of his safe, washing his hands after he had touched it.
It is dark, dark. Dark to my eyes, dark to my brain, dark to my senses. I am tired, tired. I would sleep. The pictures have ceased. Perhaps I can sleep. Ah, I sleep!
