Saved? - A story, Conclusion23:14 Jun 06 2022
Times Read: 226
With time, a slow but constant feeling crept into my disabled body, and when the symptoms came back, Andrews became very interested in my case. Still, he seemed more analytical than sympathetic, taking my pulse and heart rate with more enthusiasm than usual. During his fevered examinations, I sometimes saw his hands tremble a little, which was unusual for such a skilled surgeon, but he didn't seem to notice that I was watching. I never got even a quick look at my whole body, but when my sense of touch slowly came back, I could feel that I was big and heavy, which at first felt awkward and strange.
Over time, I could use my hands and arms again, and when the paralysis was over, I had a terrible new feeling of being physically out of place. My body had trouble doing what my mind told it to do, and every move was jerky and uncertain. Because my hands were so clumsy, I had to get used to them all over again. I thought this must be because of my illness and the spread of the virus in my body. Since my brother's case was more advanced, I didn't know how the early symptoms affected the person, so I couldn't judge. Since Andrews avoided the subject, I thought it best to keep quiet.
One day, even though I no longer thought of Andrews as a friend, I asked him if I could try getting up and sitting up in bed. At first, he strongly objected, but after telling me to keep the blankets up around my chin so I wouldn't get cold, he finally gave in. Given that the weather was nice, this seemed strange. Now that it was late fall and slowly becoming winter, the room was always warm. The weather was changing because it was getting colder at night and I could sometimes see a grey sky through the window. There was no calendar on the dirty walls, so I didn't know what season it was. With the gentle help of Sunter, it helped me to sit up, while Andrews stood at the door to the lab and watched me coldly. When I did well, His leering face broke into a slow smile, and he turned to leave the dark doorway. His mood didn't make me feel any better. Old Sunter used to be so regular and reliable, but now he was often late to do his work, leaving me alone for hours at a time.
My new job made my terrible feeling of being alone worse. The legs and arms inside my gown didn't seem to move much when I told them to, and it was mentally tiring to keep moving for any length of time. My fingers were so clumsy that they didn't feel familiar to my inner sense of touch, and I wondered if it would curse me for the rest of my life to be awkward because of my terrible illness.
The dreams started the night after I was almost back to normal. I had trouble not just at night but also during the day. I would wake up screaming from a terrible dream that I didn't want to think about when I wasn't asleep. Most of the things in these dreams were scary, like graveyards at night, walking corpses, and lost souls in a crazy mix of light and shadow. The most scary thing about the visions was how real they were. It seemed like something inside me was causing the visions of moonlit tombstones and endless catacombs filled with restless dead people. I couldn't figure out where they were coming from, and by the end of a week, I was very upset by the horrible thoughts that kept coming into my mind.
At that point, I was slowly putting together a plan to get out of the living hell Andrews had thrown me into. Andrews seemed to care less and less about me and more about my progress, growth, and getting back to normal muscle reactions. Every day, I was more and more sure that something bad was going on in that lab across the threshold. The animal cries were shocking and grated horribly on my frayed nerves.
I was also thinking that Andrews had not kept me from being deported just for my good, but for some evil reason of his own. Sunter's attention was slowly getting less and less, and I was sure that the old servant had something to do with the deviltry. Andrews no longer looked at me as a friend, but as something to test. I also didn't like the way he fiddled with his scalpel as he stood in the narrow doorway and stared at me.
I had never seen a man go through such a change before. His usually handsome face was now wrinkled and had grown whiskers, and his eyes were so bright it looked like an evil spirit was staring out of them. His cold, calculating look made me shiver horribly and made me more determined than ever to get away from him as soon as I could.
During my dreams, I had lost track of time and did not know how quickly the days were going by. During the day; the curtains were often closed, and the room was lit by the wax cylinders in the big candlestick. It was a nightmare full of genuine horror and things that made little sense, but I was getting stronger as time went on. I always gave Andrews careful answers when he asked about my physical control coming back, hiding the fact that a new life was vibrating through me every day. It was a strange strength, but I was counting on it to help me get through the coming crisis.
Finally, one chilly night when all the candles were out and a thin shaft of moonlight fell on my bed through the dark curtains, I got up and carry out my plan. Since neither of my captors had moved in several hours, I was sure that they were both asleep in rooms next to each other.
I eased my heavy body up to a sitting position and then crawled out of bed and down onto the floor. I felt dizzy for a moment, and a wave of weakness went through my whole body. But my strength came back, and I could stand up for the first time in many months by holding on to a bedpost. I slowly felt stronger, so I put on the dark robe I had seen hanging on a chair nearby. It was quite long, but I wore it over my nightgown as a coat. I felt like I was in a strange place again, like I did when I was in bed. It was hard to move my limbs the way they were supposed to. But I had to move quickly or my weak strength would run out. As a last-ditch effort to get dressed, I put on some old shoes. I could have sworn they were mine, but they seemed oddly loose, so I thought they must belong to the old Simes.
Since there were no other heavy things in the room, I picked up the big candlestick from the table, where the moon was shining with a dull light, and tiptoed toward the lab door.
My first steps were jerky and hard, and I couldn't move quickly because it was almost dark. When I got to the door, I looked inside and saw my old friend sitting in a big, stuffed chair. Next to him was a smoking stand with fresh bottles and a glass on it. He was half-lying down in the moonlight, coming in through the big window. It creased his dirty face into a drunken smirk. One of the hideous books from his private library was open on his lap.
I gloated for a long time about the chance I had in front of me. Then, I took a sudden step forward and brought the heavy weapon down on his head, which wasn't protected. After the dull crunch, there was a spurt of blood, and the bad guy fell to the ground with his head half open. I didn't feel bad at all about killing the man in this way. I thought that the hideous, half-finished examples of his surgical wizardry that were scattered around the room in different stages of completion and preservation were enough to blow his soul up on their own. Andrews's experiments had gone too far for him to keep living, and as one of his monsters, I was now horribly sure that it was my job to kill him.
I realized Sunter would not be as easy. In fact, I only found Andrews unconscious because of a strange stroke of luck. When I finally collapsed at the door of the servant's room, I knew it would take all the strength I had left to finish the ordeal.
The old man's room was on the north side of the building, where it was very dark. However, he must have seen my shadow in the doorway as I walked in. He screamed so loudly that I couldn't hear him, so I pointed the candelabrum at him from the doorway. It hit something soft and made a sloughing sound in the dark, but the screaming kept going on. After that, I remember a little about what happened, but I remember fighting with the man and slowly choking him to death. Before I could grab him, he said a lot of horrible things, cried, and begged me to let him go. I didn't even know how strong I was in that crazy moment, which left Andrews' friend in the same state as him.
As I left the dark room, I stumbled toward the door to the stairs, sagged through it, and made it to the landing below. There were no lights on, and the only light I could see was the moonlight coming through the narrow windows in the hall. But I stumbled and crawled my way over the cold, damp stone slabs, dizzy from my terrible weakness. It took me ages of stumbling and crawling around in the dark to reach the front door.
In that old hallway, vague memories and haunting shadows teased me. The shadows used to be friendly and easy to understand, but now they were strange, making me stumble down the worn steps out of more than just fear. I stood for a moment in the shadow of the huge stone manor and looked down the moonlit path I had to take to get to the home of my ancestors, which was only a quarter of a mile away. But the path seemed long, and for a while I thought I could never walk it all.
I finally got a piece of dead wood to use as a cane and started walking down the winding road. In the moonlight, the old house where my ancestors had lived and died seemed to be only a few rods away. Its turrets rose ghostly in the shimmering light, and the black shadow it cast on the beetling hillside looked like it belonged to a castle made of something unreal. There stood the monument of a half-century, a safe place for all of my family, young and old, that I had left behind many years ago when I moved in with the fanatic Andrews. It was empty on that terrible night, and I hope it stays that way forever.
I got to the old place, but I don't remember the last half of the trip at all. It was enough to be close to the family cemetery, where I could find the forgetfulness I wanted among the moss-covered, crumbling stones. As I got closer to the moonlit spot, something I used to know but hadn't seen in a long time came back to bother me in a way I hadn't expected. As I got closer to my tombstone, the feeling of coming home grew stronger. Along with it came a recent wave of that terrible feeling of being alone and out of a body that I knew so well. I was happy that the end was getting closer, and I didn't stop to think about how I felt until a little while later, when the full horror of my situation hit me.
The grass hadn't grown between the pieces of sod yet, but I knew where my grave was. I started digging at the mound and scraping the wet dirt out of the hole where the grass and roots had been. I'll never know how long I worked in the nitrous soil before my fingers hit the coffin lid, but I was dripping sweat and my nails were useless hooks that were bleeding.
At last, I threw out the last bit of loose dirt and pulled on the heavy lid with shaking hands. It moved a little, and I was about to open it all the way when a smell that made me feel sick hit my nose. I stood up straight, shocked. Had some dummy put my tombstone on the wrong grave, causing me to dig up someone else? For sure, that awful smell was impossible to miss. Slowly, I felt terrible fear, so I climbed out of the hole. Just one look at the new hat was enough. This was, in fact, my grave, but what fool had put another body in it?
All at once, a bit of the truth I couldn't say hit me in the head. Even though the smell was rotten, it seemed familiar—horribly familiar.... But I couldn't believe my senses would tell me something like that. I tripped and fell back into the black hole, where I used a hastily lit match to pull the long lid all the way open. Then the light went out, as if a malicious hand had turned it off, and I screamed and clawed my way out of that cursed pit.
When I woke up, I was lying in front of the door to my own old manor. I must have crawled there after that horrible meeting in the family cemetery. I realized that dawn was coming soon, so I slowly got up, opened the old door in front of me, and walked into a place that hadn't been visited in over a decade. My body was so weak from a fever that I could barely stand, but I slowly made my way through the musty, dimly lit rooms until I reached my study, which I had left so many years before.
I decided that when the sun rose, that I'd go to the old well by the cemetery under the old willow tree and throw myself into it. This blasphemy, which has been around longer than it should have, will never be seen by another man. I don't know what people will say when they see my messy grave, but it won't bother me if I can forget what I saw among the broken, moss-covered stones of that horrible place.
I now understand why Andrews was so secretive about what he was doing and why, after it killed me, he was so damn proud of himself. He had always meant for me to be a sample—a sample of his best surgery, his masterpiece of dirty witchcraft, an example of perverted art for only him to see. Where Andrews got the other thing that made me sick while I was in his rotting mansion, I probably will never know. But I'm afraid it came from Haiti with his evil medicine. At least I'm not used to these long, hairy arms and horrible short legs. They don't follow any of the natural or sensible rules of humanity. It's another hell to think that I'll be tortured with that other person for the rest of my brief life.
Now, all I can do is wish for what was once mine, what every man who has been blessed by God should have at death, and what I saw when I opened the lid of the coffin in the ancient cemetery and saw my own shrunken, rotting, and headless body.
--End
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