Blood and Water and Other Tales Page 4

  It is a warm night in the spring of 1897, and gazing at the stars from the upper deck of a P & O liner bound for Bombay stands a young woman named Lucy Hepplewhite. Her hands rest lightly upon the rough dark wood of the rail, and her face is bathed in moonlight. A soft breeze lifts the delicate tassels of the lace mantilla she has thrown about her shoulders, and gently ruffles the curls escaping from her piled tresses. Her dark eyes are misted and shining, and from between her soft lips small pearly teeth gleam like stars. But what is it that brings now a gentle smile to those ripe lips? What is she thinking of, this flower of Victorian maidenhood, as she turns her gaze to the gleaming surface of the darkly heaving waters below? She is thinking of the altar. She is thinking of love. For she is going to India to marry a young man in the Indian Civil Service to whom she became engaged some six months previously. His name is Cecil Pym, and he occupies an important post in Poonah. It is there that the happy couple will be married, and afterwards honeymoon elsewhere in the hill country. The prospect arouses in Lucy a strange excitement, a vague and delicious warmth that she is hesitant to define; then the sea breeze freshens and she turns, with a last glance at the moonlit swells, and goes below, leaving the deck deserted.

  The voyage was uneventful for the most part, and Lucy amused herself with a little bridge, an occasional game of deck quoits, and pleasant expectations of connubial bliss with Cecil. The prospect of life in India had never unduly alarmed her; however, as the great vessel slipped down the Suez Canal, the weather grew uncomfortably warm and brought an immoderate flush to her pale cheek. She retired to her cabin and was troubled, for the first time in her life, by thoughts that were less than spotlessly pure. And in that moment the first faint whisper of a doubt as to how she would cope with the weather began to disturb her serenity.

  But she did not brood upon the matter, for it was not in her nature to do so. She banished the shadow that had fallen briefly across her mind, and carried a parasol whenever she promenaded. And in the fullness of time the ship docked at Bombay, and Lucy Hepplewhite made her way gingerly down the gangway and into the arms of a tall young Englishman in a high white pith helmet and a cream-colored suit of fine Madras cotton with a pale thin stripe of eggshell blue.

  Only one incident marred their happy reunion, and that was a one-handed leper who emerged from the milling dockside crowd and, grinning hideously, shoved his begging bowl in Lucy’s face. Cecil saw him off quickly enough, and Lucy, who was a girl of pretty stout kidney, was not unduly distraught. Still, as they trotted toward the Empress Hotel in a tonga for tea, she could detect the telltale signs of a light perspiration breaking out beneath her cotton underclothing. She was frankly relieved when they finally escaped the blazing Bombay sun and found shelter in the cool depths of the Empress.

  Lucy had heard that men changed after being in India for even a short while; and later that night, as she sat in Cecil’s compartment on the train to Poonah, she asked herself if he had. The answer was, alas, yes. The spirited and carefree young man she’d known in England had become quiet, and rather inward. He seemed depressed. He rarely laughed, and often his eyes drifted off into the middle distance, and became clouded, as if with some private anguish. Whatever that anguish was, Lucy was resolved that once in Poonah, and the wedding behind them, she would soothe it with womanly balm and restore him to a state of untroubled happiness. And then another question popped into her mind.

  “Cecil?”

  “Darling?” He turned to her from the window, whence he had been gazing with a frown of perplexity into the hot living night of India.

  “Why do you never take off your pith helmet?”

  It was true. Ever since he’d met her at the docks the pith helmet had not once been doffed. Not that it didn’t add a certain commanding elegance to his appearance—but the question seemed to disturb him. His jaw tightened and the finely chiseled nostrils quivered slightly.

  “Must I?” he murmured. “Now?”

  And then, to Lucy’s amazement, he pounded the door of the compartment with his fist and began sobbing uncontrollably!

  “Darling!” she cried, gathering him into her arms. “Cecil, what is it? Is it—too tight?” And she reached for the pith helmet.

  “No!” He leaped away from her, clutching his headgear to his skull.

  “Cecil, you must tell me,” whispered Lucy, gazing at him with distress and concern. It was a warm night, and she was beginning to feel damp again.

  There was a long silence. The engine chuffed on through the darkness, and the rails chattered beneath them. Far off in the hills a wild dog began howling at the moon. Cecil was hunched forward in his seat, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. And then he turned toward her, and she saw that his face was haggard with pain.

  “Very well,” he said quietly, “I’ll tell you.”

  It was not a long story, nor was it a happy one. Lucy heard it through to the bitter end, defying convention by staying in Cecil’s compartment through the hours of darkness. But they were, after all, soon to be married.

  He first described to her a little ruined summerhouse in an overgrown garden not far from his bungalow in the British cantonment in Poonah. Long since abandoned to the monkeys and the insects, and colonized by luxuriant vines whose great drooping flowers emanated odors of incense and musk, it was yet a pleasant shady spot for a smoke after dinner, and Cecil had come to think of it as his own. And then one day he’d found a little old man with a bald head and a loincloth meditating there. He’d scrounged a cigarette from Cecil and then blessed him by laying his hands on Cecil’s head. Cecil had thought nothing of it at the time, but the next day he’d felt a slight irritation where the old man had touched him, and the day after that a small brown lump had appeared on his crown. Then the lump had started to grow, and it had been growing ever since. When Cecil went to the doctor—an old boy named Cadwallader, not up to much on account of the pink gins—he’d been told to come back in a week.

  “But after a week,” said Cecil—and then broke down for the second time. Again Lucy took him in her arms, and murmured words of comfort. Finally the young Englishman sat up straight, and pluckily unbuckled the thin leather strap fastened snugly beneath his chin.

  In India, the appearance of a certain sort of plump and blustery raincloud is a sure sign that the monsoons are at hand. One such cloud drifted now across the moon and threw the swaying compartment into deep shadow. So it was that when Cecil slowly removed the pith helmet, Lucy was at first uncertain what exactly she was looking at. Her first thought was of a dark brown lily splayed limply from a short thick stem attached somehow to Cecil’s skull; but how could that be? And then the raincloud drifted on and in the sudden glow of moonlight she realized that the brown stem was in fact a wrist; that it was growing out of Cecil’s head; and that the dark limp lily atop it was a hand!

  For a dreadful moment all sympathy fled Lucy’s heart, and she knew only horror. She stared aghast at the gruesome sprout, and her own hands flew to her mouth. Cecil watched her from hooded and anguished eyes. “Now you see why I wear my pith helmet,” he said, and covered the alien extremity.

  There was little left to tell. Once the hand had come through, it proved to be rather active, constantly pulling his hair and sticking its fingers in his ears. Dr. Crumbier had refused to amputate, saying it was connected to the brainstem, and instead prescribed a heavy sedative. Twice a day Cecil would have to inject a few cc. into the thing’s wrist to keep it quiet. “In fact,” he said, glancing at his watch, “it’s about time. Darling, would you mind?”

  And so, as the first pale streaks of dawn crept over the land, Lucy Hepplewhite assisted her fiance in injecting a heavy dose of some powerful narcotic into the wrist growing out of the top of his head. It was not a pleasant task, and when it was all over she slumped into her seat, exhausted, while Cecil turned again to the window.

  Once in Poonah, Lucy was dropped off at the Florence Nightingale Residence for Young Women, and she kissed Cecil f
ondly before he went on to his own bungalow. Deep shadows had appeared around the young man’s eyes, and in the light of early morning a note of gaunt and terrible despair could be detected in his features. He seemed, again, broken and helpless before his grim fate, and Lucy’s heart went out to him. “Don’t torment yourself, darling,” she whispered, laying her small white palm on his cheek. “I’m here now.”

  “But how can you love a man with a hand growing out of his head?” he whispered furiously.

  “Trust me,” murmured Lucy; but she was never to see him alive again.

  Lucy retired to her room at the residence and fell asleep almost immediately. Her dreams were less than tranquil, however; she tossed and turned beneath her mosquito net, and through the turbulent flood of images that coursed about her fevered mind, one reared up with greater frequency and intensity than all the others—and that was the hand growing out of Cecil’s head. But in Lucy’s dream it was not sedated—very far from it: it writhed and twisted and beckoned and pointed, it throbbed and undulated like a serpent, and performed gestures of an unspeakably lewd nature. Lucy awoke with a wild cry of panic, and the hand disappeared. But the sensation persisted, and she found she was perspiring heavily.

  She arose, rather weakly, soon after, and bathed, unable to sleep more; and some hours later found her way across the cantonment to Cecil’s bungalow. No servant answered the door, so she quietly let herself in. It was late afternoon now, and very still. She called Cecil’s name; the sound died in the deep silence that lay upon the place like a pall, and the girl shivered. Shadows were beginning to gather in the corners of Cecil’s neat and sparsely furnished sitting room. Beside a low couch upholstered in black leather a whisky bottle, a soda siphon, and a glass of cut crystal stood upon a small table. On one wall hung a sepia-toned photograph of Cecil at Oxford, and beside it her own image. She gazed at them wistfully. Would she ever see that smile of guileless charm upon the young man’s face again? For a moment the dream returned, and a light flush crept over her cheeks.

  “Cecil!” she called. “Cecil!”

  Still nothing; so she passed through the sitting room and into the hallway beyond, at the end of which stood a closed door. That, she guessed, was his bedroom; and then a terrible feeling of nameless dread leaped up within her, and she resisted only with difficulty a fierce impulse to flee the place. Resolutely, though, she advanced, and now she thought she could hear something in the room beyond, a sort of furtive, muffled, slithering sound. A prickle of fear ran up Lucy Hepplewhite’s spine, and a gust of adrenaline welled in her belly.

  “Cecil!” she called again, walking unsteadily toward his bedroom.

  The slithering sound had stopped, and Lucy’s hand was upon the doorknob. She took a deep breath, then threw open the door—and such was the sight that met her eyes that a violent spasm seized her slight frame, and a scream died on her lips. For there on the floor by the unmade bed lay the half-naked body of Cecil Pym, his face purple, his eyes bulging, his tongue protruding grotesquely, and the heavy bruises of strangulation dark upon his sunburned neck! Beside him lay a hypodermic syringe, the plunger yet undepressed, and the third hand, still very much attached to the dead man’s crown, lying palm down on the floor, the fingers slightly curled.

  For some minutes Lucy stood there rigid with horror, and no sound escaped her. And then a choked sob finally burst free and she flung herself on him. “Oh, Cecil,” she whimpered, clinging to his still-warm body, “who has done this thing to you?” She touched him with frantic fingers, searching for life, but there was none. How long she lay there as the shadows gathered about her and the insects began their shrill and rasping chorus in the dusk, she would never know. But suddenly she became aware that her hair was being very gently stroked.

  “Cecil,” she murmured. “Cecil, are you still with me?”

  And in a way he was; for the dark hand growing out of his head had begun to softly caress Lucy’s hair. And such was the lightness, the delicacy of its touch, that the demented girl did not recoil in horror, but remained, sobbing, on the corpse, as the hand soothed her and calmed her and brought her slowly to a state of passive languor; and when it gently touched her neck she still did not resist, did not leap back in disgust, but allowed the fingers to melt her pain to pleasure and revive the longings that had first been spawned by the hot sun of Suez; and once again Lucy Hepplewhite was filmed with perspiration, and she moaned in the shadows of the body of her lover.

  When she arose from the body an hour later, her cotton underclothing was in a state of disarray and two red stains of shame burned upon her cheeks. Her hair was damply plastered to her brow, and a deep tranquility smoldered in her drowsy eyes. The hand lay still and quiet now, palm upwards, and Cecil was beginning to go bad. So without further ado Lucy adjusted her dress, tidied her hair, and washed her face in a basin of cold water. And then she went to look for Dr. Cadwallader.

  “Bad business,” muttered the portly and florid physician, standing over the body and reeking of gin. He shook his head as the servants placed Cecil’s three-handed corpse onto a stretcher and covered it with a white sheet. “Black Hand of the Raj,” he said, turning to Lucy, who was sniffling quietly into a lace handkerchief. “Always fatal. Couldn’t tell him that, of course.”

  “You mean it’s happened before?” said Lucy, glancing up sharply.

  “’Fraid so,” said Cadwallader. “Lost a number of good men this way. Never can find the little fellow in the loincloth. Some sort of wog curse I suppose.” And he put his plump fingers to his throat as if to demonstrate. It was at that precise moment that Lucy finally succumbed to stress, and fainted, and was revived only with great difficulty, a heavy dose of smelling salts, and a small glass of brandy from a bottle which the doctor happened to be carrying in his black bag.

  India being rather a warm country, it was necessary to bury Cecil Pym the very next day. Happily, he did not take the black hand with him to the grave: Cadwallader severed it with a surgical saw and a couple of sharp knives, pickled it in vinegar, and deposited the jar in a cupboard with a number of other carefully labeled specimens. The funeral went off smoothly enough, as these things go. Lucy, veiled and lovely in black crepe de chine, hung grieving on the porky arm of the doctor throughout, and the sun beat down on the small group of late-Victorian colonials with an intense and unrelenting ferocity. It was only when the minister began to pray for the deceased that she looked up, disturbed by Cadwallader’s reaching to remove his hat. And as her damp eye blearily scanned the mourners at the graveside, it was with a ghastly tremor of foreboding that she counted no fewer than seven Englishmen conspicuous for not having removed their headgear— and the Deputy Commissioner was among them!

  After the funeral Lucy did not linger long in Poonah, nor indeed in India. Within a week she had boarded a ship for home. The Lucy who left Bombay, however, was a very different creature from the one who had arrived there mere days before. She played no bridge now, and could not be tempted to deck quoits. Instead, she leaned on the rail, still in black, gazing out to sea. And by the time she was under an English heaven once more, she had reached her decision.

  Twenty-five years ago today an old nun was buried in the graveyard of a small convent in Tunbridge Wells. Her name was Mother Constance, but we know her better as Lucy Hepplewhite. Yes, she had joined the Sisters of Perpetual Atonement and lived out her days behind the cloister walls. She took no interest in the great events that rocked the subcontinent in the half-century or so after her departure. Instead, she became a model of piety and self-sacrifice, offering prayers without stint for the soul of poor dead Cecil Pym, and wondering, in her heart of hearts, what, exactly, was the nature of the sin she had committed.

  Lush Triumphant

  Tucked into the body of an old warehouse half-way down a broken street in the meat district of Manhattan is a little restaurant called Dorian’s which in the fall and winter of 1986 enjoyed a brief vogue. On the floor above Dorian’s worked the painter Jack Fin. H
is was one of those barnlike lofts with a high tin ceiling and primitive fixtures, ranks of canvases stacked against the walls and, at the back, close by the couch he slept on, a woodburning stove with a crooked chimney that found its way out through the bricks overlooking the narrow alley where Dorian’s garbage cans were lined up along a fraying wire-mesh fence. Jack Fin would stand at his front window at night, smoking, with a Scotch in his hand, and watch the cabs discharge fashionable downtown diners who clustered chattering at the restaurant door and then vanished into the warmth within. The irritability this spectacle aroused in him increased in direct proportion to the amount of Scotch he drank; and it was exacerbated by the odors that seeped up from the kitchen and contaminated the loft’s native air, thick with turpentine and oil paint and woodsmoke.

  One night Jack Fin walked down to the Hudson. The waterfront to the west of the meat district is a desolate and sinister place; a rotting wharf juts into the river, and little stirs save a furtive rat and the ill-sprung chassis of a ’67 Plymouth the owner of which is copping a swift blowjob on the way home to Jersey. Jack Fin liked it; sinister desolation was his painterly metier, and he would tell you, if you asked him, that the waterfront was never the same any two nights. He sat down on a crag of shattered concrete and observed moonlight spilling onto the water and, some way down from him, a boy emerging from the Plymouth. The car backed up and moved off toward the Holland Tunnel; the boy smoothed the front of his pants, then picked his way through the rubble. Far off, on the Jersey shore, a hooter sounded. A siren moaned on Ninth Avenue. The boy approached Jack and asked him for a cigarette.