Weird Tales/Volume 12/Issue 6/The Statement of Justin Parker
A Short, Tragic Tale Is
The Statement of Justin Parker
By August W. Derleth
My sole desire in writing this is to place before the public all that I know of the singular facts attending the disappearance of Michael Salisbury, retired, from his home on Salisbury Plain, on the seventeenth day of December last.
Michael Salisbury and I had always been the best of friends since childhood; we were together always, until late in 1916, when he went to the African Veldt to spend over seven years there. He had hardly returned—as a matter of fact, it was on the train that I met him—before I left for the Veldt.
The incident is rather peculiar, and it may aid in a manner to throw light on what followed. I was on board a train leaving London for Liverpool; he had just come in from Liverpool. He came rushing into my compartment, two bags in his hands, looking nervously to right and left. Suddenly he saw me. He stopped, dropped his bags, and came over to sit down beside me.
"My dear Justin, think of seeing you here!" It was obvious to me from the beginning that the man didn't have the least idea what he was saying.
"Just returning from the Veldt, Michael?" I asked. "Aren't you on the wrong train? This one isn't going anywhere near your home."
"Oh, no! Right train, all right. Connections—everything tip-top. Liverpool train, isn't it?"
"Yes," said I. "Didn't you just come from there?"
"To be sure. But I've the right train. I'll fool them."
"'Fool them?'" I repeated, astonished. "Whatever are you talking about?" I began to think that the Veldt had seriously affected Michael Salisbury.
"My valet and housekeeper. Fool them—came in on a different train."
The prevarication was too obvious. All the while he was looking from the car windows and staring up and down the aisles at the people in the car. Besides, his valet had been with him to the Veldt; of course, he might have returned before him. . . there was that possibility.
We talked for some little time; he in the same disconnected manner, with his eyes on everything at once, especially the car windows. The moment the train stopped at the first station outside London he jumped up with his bags, which some well-meaning porter had a time before removed from the aisle. On the platform he turned and shouted.
"Right after all, Justin; it is the wrong train."
I went on to Liverpool, deeply concerned over this strange and unaccountable action on the part of Michael Salisbury. At Liverpool I took a boat for Calais, and three months later I was in the Great Veldt, which my friend had just left.
I returned from the Veldt on the fifth of December; on the seventh I received a short note from Michael Salisbury. It was somewhat disconnected, but I gathered that he earnestly wished me to come down to his home some distance out on the Plain and spend a few days with him. I have given this note to the press, and I believe that it is now in the possession of Messrs. Montague and Saunders of Chancery Lane.
I arrived on the tenth of December, and I found a somewhat different Michael Salisbury from the one I had seen some years before. His rooms were hung in solid, unrelieved black; he himself wore nothing but black, stalking around most of the time in a heavy, black dressing-gown. His hair looked as if it had never been combed, and it had begun to gray at the temples. He had grown a beard which covered more than half his face. He wore a gold-rimmed pince-nez with smoked glasses. These melancholy conditions were wholly contrary to Michael Salisbury's temperament, and you can imagine that I was not slow in asking him what it all meant. But he ventured little by way of explanation.
"It's hard to cast a shadow on black, Justin," he said, an offering which whetted my curiosity still more.
"But why this aversion to shadows?" I asked at once.
"The angle at which a shadow is cast determines for the distant observer exactly the position of the object casting it."
This answer puzzled me beyond words. Surely you can not blame me when I say that I began to cast sidelong glances at Michael Salisbury, fearing at first for his sanity. I remonstrated with him.
"Never mind, Justin," he said at last. "Tomorrow I'll tell you all about it." Then he laughed and said, "And I'll explain just how it happened that I of all people got the wrong train at London a few years ago."
And with that he packed me off to bed, for it was already late at night when I arrived. It seemed to me a good sign that he remembered as a jest that adventure of four years before, and I went to bed thoroughly convinced that I was to hear something far out of the ordinary.
And I was not disappointed. A great majority of those who read this will not attach a bit of significance or truth to the strange narrative that Michael Salisbury told me on the morning of the eleventh of December. I admit that I myself doubted the tale at first.
"It's rather an incredible tale, Justin," he began; "nevertheless, I'll vouch for it. When I came from the Veldt four years ago, I had with me a diamond, which I had taken from the domain of a certain pigmy tribe in the Veldt. The diamond was part of a makeshift idol, worshiped by these people. These dark-skinned pigmies, strangely enough, were not a fraction as barbaric as their neighbors on all sides. Their priests were the educated men of the village; three of them could speak English, having learned it from an English explorer some years before I came. These three priests were the historians of the village, the chief tradesmen, and, most important, the guardians of the idol their people worshiped. They were robed in costumes decidedly similar to those of the Egyptian priests of Ra; they wore ornaments of beaten gold and silver, and used great quantities of beaten copper. Under their leadership, the pigmies had established trade with more civilized colonies along the coast.
"The weapons these pigmies used were a queer sort of blow-guns, through which they projected grayish pellets—soft things, composed of thousands of minute microbes encysted, covered by a skin of gelatin. As yet I have no knowledge of these microbes, save that they devour anything they come to, with the exception of glass and metal. When these pellets are shot from the guns, they break upon impact and the microbes emerge, multiplying so rapidly as to look like a puddle of gray water spreading out on all sides. I have seen an entire tribe of savages wiped out by this horror. Acid is the only thing that will kill it. I think that there is only one other man that I know of who has had experience with these microbes; that is Dr. Maxwell, who terms it the 'gray death'.
"You can easily see that I had plenty of reason to be frightened when I got off the train in London, only to discover that I had been trailed all the way from Africa by one of the pigmy priests, who stood not far behind me on the platform. On the verge of panic, I dashed through the crowd, hoping to elude him, and at last I boarded the first train that came to hand—the train on which you were setting out for Liverpool. When I saw you on the train—you, who knew that I was arriving from the Veldt that day—and when I saw that you had already seen me, I had only one course to take: that was to make up something to throw you off the track. I wasn't going to fill you full of silly fears until I was positively sure of my pursuit—though, God knows, I was sure, only I hated to admit it to myself. Then I told you on the spur of the moment that I was playing some silly prank upon my servants. I knew the tale was totally awry, and almost laughed at the expression on your face, but it was the best I could do at the time.
"I left the train when I was finally sure that I had not been followed, and hired a car to drive me all the way to my home here» on the Plain. I saw nothing of the pigmy priest for over four years after.
"Then one day last October, while wandering about on the moor, I noticed someone in the ruined chapel. You've seen the chapel, haven't you? I thought you had. At any rate, I thought nothing of the matter at the moment, thinking perhaps that some children had wandered out here—which is not so unusual as it sounds, but when I went closer to look into it, I found on the ground near the ruined structure an amulet of beaten gold. For a moment I was stunned. But I knew whom I had so fortunately spied, and I fled as fast as I could go to the confines of my home."
He stopped and pointed all around him with his stick to the black hangings and to his own black robe.
"I've seen those pigmies strike an object with their accursed pellets when it was securely out of sight—they judged its position exactly by the angle at which its shadow was thrown."
As I said, I didn't quite know how to take this story. At first I was all for the theory that he had made a mistake about being followed, but he would have none of it, and actually became angry when I persisted. Then he showed me the diamond that he had risked his life for, and to do it justice I must say that I thought it well worth such a risk. He had kept the jewel hidden in a secret safe behind his bookcases.
Never for once did Michael Salisbury cease his vigilance; he dressed always in black, and maintained a constant watch. On one occasion he confided to me that there was nothing he feared so much as the dreaded Lama sorcery, a form of animal magnetism practised by African tribes, and with which he was familiar. He never ventured to explain this magnetism to me; consequently I am totally in the dark concerning it.
For five days nothing happened to break the monotony of life out on the Plain; on the sixth day, December seventeenth, Michael Salisbury vanished. He must have disappeared in the early morning, for we had been having a lengthy conversation the night before, and neither of us had retired before midnight. His clothes were all in his room, with the exception of his black silk dressing-gown and his slippers.
The first thing I did, when I had ascertained that Michael Salisbury was nowhere about, was to look for the gem. It was gone. As no one but Michael and myself knew the combination and location of that safe, Michael must have taken it. But where could the man have gone in his dressing-gown? For some time I was more than confident that he would turn up sometime during the day.
I don't know what possessed me to go to the ruined chapel that afternoon. But I went, crossing the moor just as the sun began to sink below the horizon. The chapel was an ordinary affair, except that it was antique. Old stone, broken panes of painted glass—the usual thing. Its floor, however, was unusual: it was of earth, and the insidious advance of the water under the earth had made it soggy.
I saw nothing unusual about the structure when I approached it. I made a note of the fact that I would have to hurry to get back to the house before darkness settled over the moor, and began to wonder whether or not Michael would have returned. I entered the chapel, proceeding cautiously over the wet, miry soil. But abruptly I stopped. In the mud before me lay a grayish bubble that contracted and expanded in a sort of rhythmic movement about something that lay in its midst. I bent closer, the better to see what it wag. As I did so, my handkerchief fell from my coat pocket—fell directly into this gray bubble. More quickly than I can tell, the grayish mass had spread over the cloth and devoured it. Again I caught sight of the object in the midst of it.
And in that moment I recognized it. It was that recognition that made me turn and run from the chapel—run haphazardly across the moor. And it was that knowledge that sent me to Liverpool that same night to see whether or not a small brown man, answering to the description of an African pigmy from the Veldt, had taken passage on any outgoing ship. As if in confirmation to my recognition of the thing in the chapel, I found that a man such as the one I sought had taken passage bound for Calais, and I have wired there to have him seized on landing, and searched for the gem I know he has.
But I have some knowledge of these priests; the gem will not be found, yet it is the only thing I could have done. For the thing in the midst of that seething bubble was the gold-rimmed pince-nez that Michael Salisbury had worn when I last saw him.
