Weird Tales/Volume 4/Issue 3/The Green and Gold Bug

by J. M. Alvey

An Odd Little Story
of Weird Chinese Revenge

The Green and Gold Bug

By J. M. ALVEY

Author of "Spirits" and "Tragedy Island"

THE inquest was over. The coroner had gone, and so had the twelve men who formed his jury. The police officials and reporters for the press had ceased to ring our doorbell. The undertaker, polite and low-spoken, had got his work well in hand and the two coffins lay side by side in the dimly-lighted parlor. An awed silence was in the house where but a few hours ago grim tragedy stalked its hideous way.

But I am starting my story at the wrong end. Let us turn back forty-eight hours to the beginning.

It was early on Wednesday night, and my uncle and I, dressed for dinner, sat, each at a window in the living-room watching every passing taxi in the street. At last one stopped outside; two figures stepped out into the cold night; and while one paid the taxi driver, the other rushed up the front steps and came into the front hall and flung her arms round my uncle's neck. It was my kid sister Joe, back from a five months honeymoon in the far-distant and mysterious countries of the orient.

"Well, well," said my uncle, "is the little rosebud glad to be home again and rest once more in her uncle's arms?"

And Joe said: "Yes—oh, yes!" and burst out crying and hid her face on my uncle's oversize vest and held his coat lapels each with a tiny, girlish hand.

I went out to greet her husband but fell back before him as he advanced, so shocked was I at the change in his appearance. From a handsome youth, well-built and smiling, he had become a pale, shriveled figure which staggered under the weight of the light hand baggage he was dragging into the house.

My uncle and I had planned to give the travelers a royal welcome. Our plans, however, were rudely swept aside, and the bridegroom was rushed upstairs to bed and the doctor summoned.

Just what the sick man's ailment was the physician was unable to determine. There were times when his heart raced like fury and his breath came in gasps and his neck swelled and his eyes bulged. At such times he clutched the bed clothes with an iron claw and tried to raise himself. Then, the spell would pass like a snap of the fingers, and the patient would relax and fall back as if exhausted from a violent struggle.

About midnight he rested easier, and Joe, my uncle and I sat down to the untasted dinner.

"A month ago, in China," said Joe, "we went up into the mountains one day, to a temple where a horrible old creature sat on the floor with incense burning all around him. He was a magician, or priest, or soothsayer or something, and had power with the Chinese gods. But Dick laughed at him and said the poor Chinamen were suckers to fall for his line.

And the magician was angry and rose up in all his ugliness and put a curse on Dick and on his family. Dick was going to fight him right there, and we would have been murdered, I'm sure, only I pulled him away and made him take me quickly back into the city.

"And that night," said Joe, "Dick had the first attack."

"Josephine!" cried my uncle. "Do you know what you are saying? I'm—Confound it, my dear, what nonsense! 'Put a curse on him?' You know better than to believe such trash, 'Curse,' the devil, my dear! Dick has got some low-down foreign plague. It don't matter whether the Democrats or the Republicans are in power, there's no place like the U. S. A. Confound these outlandish, God-forsaken, evil-smelling places, where all the pests and misery of the world are bred. Dick's got bubonic plague, or the beri-beri or some such fool thing."

Joe told us that Dick got over the first attack in a few hours, but two weeks later on the first night out at sea on the way home he had the second, and it was worse than the first. After that they became more frequent and more violent, and Dick was wasting away and poor Joe's heart was breaking.

"Fiddlesticks!" said my uncle. "Bosh and tommyrot! 'Curse,' my eye! I'm no doctor, but the lad's got some heathen disorder. But cheer up, little woman. We'll have your lover overhauled and in A 1 shape in a jiffy. It may take a month to get real sick in China, but that's China. You're home now, my dear, and it don't take all day to get a pain in the tummy here, nor all night to get over it. Just smile, little girl, and get ready to go to housekeeping. That's what."

It was two o'clock before the house settled down. It was three when I heard a noise outside my door. I went out to see what it was.

The light at the top of the stairs had been left burning, and as I opened my door there was enough light to show me the deformed creature that was creeping along the wall of the hallway, a hideous man, a weird beast, some terrible imp from hell, what I could not say, so awful was it, so unlike anything I have ever seen, or heard of, or fancied.

And this thing opened the door of the honeymooners' room and passed in.

I had no revolver, so I took up a dumb-bell that I used of a morning for exercise and went to the door of the room where the thing had entered. I opened it, and reached in and snapped on the lights. In the bed lay the travelers sound asleep. I went over and touched them go make sure they were only sleeping. I looked under the bed, in the closet and out on the porch roof under the windows. There was nothing there.

Joe, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, caused me to pull my head in from the window.

"What's the matter? What's the matter?"

"Nothing," said I. "Don't be frightened. I thought I heard the fire engines going down town and came over to look."

I went downstairs to look around a bit. The hall, the parlors, the dining-room were all empty, but in the little passage that runs from the dining-room to the kitchen I thought I heard a footstep. I was sure I did. I stood and listened. And then somebody sneezed. I pulled the swinging door open. There stood my uncle in his nightshirt.

"God bless my soul!" he said. "I was about to shoot you."

"You're catching cold," I told him. "Go to bed. What are you tramping around here for this hour of the night?"

"And why are you, sir?"

"I heard a noise," I explained,

"So did I."

"And I thought I saw something."

"'Thought!'" he cried. "'Thought,' hell. I did."

"You did. Where?"

"You saw it, too?"

"Yes, in the corridor outside my room."

"You're lucky," said my uncle. "I saw it in my room."

He smiled a grim smile.

"I was so shocked that I could not move. After it left I got up and came down here. I thought it might have come this way."

"No," I said. "It came past my room and went into their room."

The next day the sick man was much improved. Joe was brighter. My uncle smiled in spite of his troubled mind. I said nothing.

That night we went to bed early. I was tired out and soon fell asleep. It was three o'clock again when I heard a noise. This time I rushed out and came face to face with the unearthly visitor. It gave me one mighty crack on the chin that sent me back into my room. I lay on the floor in a semi-dazed condition for full five minutes as well as I can estimate, Then I grabbed my dumbbell and went out again.

As on the previous night, I went to the door of Joe's room and opened it and switched on the lights.

On the floor lay Joe, blood at her mouth and nose. Across the foot of the bed lay her husband, looking more like his old self than I had seen him since the day of his wedding.

I told my story at the inquest. The police officials laughed at it. The reporters seized upon it as great stuff for the papers. The coroner's jury considered it gravely, and then gave it as their verdict, "that Josephine Blackton was murdered by her husband Richard Blackton, who afterward died by his own hand."

They are right and yet they are wrong. I have found new evidence. I shall make it known.

In the trunks of the honeymooners, which arrived tonight, was a collection of curios. Among them was a small bottle containing a strange insect, a green-and-gold-colored bug, and the bottle was labeled: "Shang-tang Jan. 15. The strange bug that stung Dick last night. We believe that someone threw it in the window."

I don't like the idea of a murder and a suicide in our family. I don't want that coroner's verdict to stand. I'm going to prove that an enraged old magician in the mountains near Shang-tang caused the green and gold bug to be thrown in the window where the Americans were staying and it poisoned Dick and slowly drove him mad; destroyed his human qualities, mind and body; and that the two who lay side by side in their coffins were both murdered and that the murderer sits among his incense burners seven thousand miles away. I'm going to prove it if I have to go to China!