“Strange Tales, Dark Thoughts”
Volume II
by Adrian Scott
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2011 by Ian T. Foster, M.A.
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Ian T Foster, M.A;
Unit 73/130-132 King Street
Caboolture Queensland 4510
Phone: 0438 559 513
Email: ian64832@dodo.com.au
© Cover Design: Laura Shinn
Table of Contents
“ELECTRIC MAN”
by Adrian Scott
I watched as he sat on the steel table several feet from me, and fastened the thick leather straps around both his ankles. Awkwardly, he lay back, reached across his own body, and clamped a third, longer, strap around his breast, then a shorter around his left wrist. With the exception of his right hand, he was now immobile.
The authorities had warned him against further experimentation; they had also warned me, in no uncertain manner, against assisting him. But he would have none of it. His experiments must proceed, and he would break any law in order to see that task accomplished.
He laid his head back on the padded headrest at such an angle that he could see the large brass lever just above him, and reached his right arm back and upwards, groping with difficulty for a few moments until his palm came in contact with the cold metal touch of it.
“Ready, Charles?” he glanced across at me, standing just to his right. I was removed from him by several feet for the sake of safety, but in a position to reach the panel on the face of the huge generator should it become necessary.
I nodded. Ah, how I wished, at that moment, that I could have stayed his hand, caused him to reconsider his actions. But I knew I could not. He had made up his mind, and nothing – no power on this earth – would stop him.
His knuckles whitened as his grip on the large lever tightened. He closed his eyes, breathed deeply for a moment or two, then his lips drew into a thin, determined line, and he threw the lever.
A loud, sputtering roar filled the huge room as the generator sent its charge down the thick cable and into his body. His entire form began to buck and strain at the leather straps; his right arm, still free, leapt and kicked until, with a loud crack, the radius and ulna snapped, and the arm dropped uselessly at his side. But the shoulder muscle still reacted to the violence assaulting his body.
With a supreme effort, he managed to turn his head. His eyes, wide and staring, met mine, and he tried to speak. But his mouth was drawn taut in a rictus resembling death.
I hesitated but a moment, then rushed to the huge bank of dials and switches, and threw the lever into the ‘Off’ position. Immediately, his body relaxed, and he lay there, gasping, groaning, quite unable to help himself.
As I began to unfasten the leather straps that still held him, he managed to warn me not to touch his body: the electric charge it had absorbed was enough to kill an ordinary man, and it was only the months of exposing himself to ever-increasing electrical charges that had enabled him to live through the past few seconds. Touching him would have meant my death.
Slowly, as a man in a trance, he sat up. He stared down at the right arm, the broken ends of bone just visible through the pale skin, while I fetched a pail of water, bandages, and plaster.
But I could not help him. He had to set the arm without assistance, a task I could not have believed possible.
He took hold of the arm at the wrist, and proceeded to pull the bones back into position. He twisted first one way, then the other, and finally we heard a slight ‘snap’, and a grinding sound as the broken ends met.
Picking up the bandage, he dropped it into the pail, allowed it to soak, and began to wrap one end about the forearm. Then, suddenly, he stopped.
“What is wrong?” said I; “are the bones not met?”
“No,” he replied hesitantly, a tone of wonder in his voice; “look!”
And he held out the arm before him, turned it one way, then the other; he moved each finger separately, then bunched them into a fist, and released them again.
“The bones! The bones! They…they have fused together!”
He again turned the right arm, again made a fist, then reached down and lifted the pail with ease.
“The electric charge to which I subjected myself…” he pondered; “…it must have…fused the broken ends. Dear God! I have become my own Maker!”
At his words, a vague sense of disquiet settled upon my heart. This was not right, ethically or morally. A man should not have the power to repair his own damaged body – that power should lie in the hands of the Almighty.
In subjecting himself to a charge of electricity far greater than any other man could have endured, he had, in effect, crossed the boundary that separated Man from God.
From that moment on, I feared for him.
He lowered his feet to the rubber mat beneath the table and stood upright. At first, his body trembled, as if in the grip of ague; then he found his balance, and slowly stepped forward, careful to keep his feet upon the thick matting he had laid.
I brought the sandals he had cut from spare rubber matting, and he knelt and fastened them to his feet. They were somewhat like ancient Roman sandals, with long straps that wound round the lower legs and tied just behind the calf-muscles. But the soles kept him insulated from the earth.
“Now, what d’you say, Charles, old friend?” he grinned; “d’you believe me now, now that I have achieved what they all said could not be done?”
I stood wordlessly, as he walked to and fro, testing the strength of his muscles, bending his back and straightening, kneeling and rising. He had been right; a human life charged with electricity was possible. But to what use could such a creation be put? What purpose would it serve?
He dressed quickly and headed towards the huge door leading to the winding staircase that gave access to the outside world.
“Come, Charles,” he called; “let us test my newfound powers. Let us put the experiment to the test!”
We stepped out onto the sidewalk, avoiding the noontime crowds as best we could. He had to avoid touching any other at all costs, for to have done so would have meant death to whomsoever he touched.
I set my grey homburg on my head, and was about to cross the cobbled roadway, when a sudden gust of wind lifted the hat and carried it out into the middle of the carriageway.
Quickly, I hastened to pick it up before it was ruined by the wheels of a passing carriage, and as I bent to retrieve it, I heard the sound of a horse’s flying hooves, and the rumble of wheels.
A shout, a cry, and the carriage was gone.
I turned, and there he lay, in the middle of the cobbled road, face-down and quite still. From where I stood, I could clearly see the heavy imprint of a horse’s shoe in the back of his skull, and knew he must be dead.
I moved slowly toward him – and stopped, motionless, as he rose slowly, came to his feet, and pressed an exploratory hand to the wound in the back of his skull.
“Good Lord!” he whispered quietly; “that impact should have…been my death!”
I stepped behind him. The hoof-print had depressed the skull by a good half an inch; the brain must have suffered severe trauma; yet he lived!
As a wondering crowd began to gather, he turned to me, whispered: “Come! Let us get away from here!” and moved at a fast pace across the carriageway and on into the open country beyond the town limits.
We walked at a fast pace for what seemed like hours. Actually, it was probably no more than half an hour or so; but in that time, we covered the five miles that lay between the town and the tall granite cliffs to the west.
He led the way up the steep incline, scrambling over boulders and rocks with an ease that astonished me. He was at least ten years older than I, and had made no effort during his lifetime to keep himself fit or in condition. I also knew that he suffered from a weak heart, but this did not slow his frenetic progress over the steep incline.
Finally, as the sun lowered on the horizon, we stood at the summit of Mount Desolation – a towering bluff that shadowed the village and the forest in the valley below. He had developed a slight shaking of the head, I noticed, and a trembling of the hand, and I pondered the likelihood of some trace effect of the massive charge to which he had subjected his body.
With no hesitation, he walked to the very edge of that monstrous drop, and stood with his hand resting on a huge boulder that reached to his waist. Then, he dropped to his knees facing the boulder, reached out both arms, placed a hand on either extremity of the monolith, and with no apparent effort, raised it over his head.
I watched in awe as he came upright, holding aloft a weight of at least two or perhaps three tons – a weight that, to my knowledge, no man in history had ever lifted before. He stepped carefully to the rim of the outcropping, and hurled the boulder onto the rocks below.
What seemed like an eternity passed; then I heard the boulder shatter on the path below us, and when I looked over the edge, I could see nought of it but countless shards of shattered granite.
“You see?” he shouted exultantly; “I have the strength of twenty men! It works! It works!”
“Is this what you have risked your very life for? A child’s game?” I queried, and he turned upon me a look of such anger that I recoiled a pace or two.
“A child’s game? A child’s game? My experiment was not intended for use in a child’s game!” he proceeded to pace about the length and breadth of the ledge, gesticulating wildly with both arms.
“I have sought to create men such as the world has never seen! Think of it, Charles…an army of men, far stronger and more powerful than any on the face of this earth! Men, capable of going into battle and defeating the greatest armies in the world! Who could stand against them? Who could possibly find reason for war, when faced by such a force? A force that not only can overcome any man or machine sent against it…but a force that can actually repair its own injuries! as we have seen, twice this very day!”
His pacing became faster, more agitated; his entire body began to tremble, although I do not believe he noticed it.
“No more war! No more bloodshed! Oh! What a boon we have done mankind!”
Now, at last, I knew the reason for those months of subjecting his own body to ever-increasing charges of electricity, of suffering ague and pain such as no man had ever experienced and, finally, an electrical charge that, were he not prepared for it, would have destroyed him.
He had always hated war, ever since his own father had fallen facing Napoleon in Austria, and had railed and ranted against it at every opportunity, to the point of accusations of treason from more than one source. And now I knew the extent of his hatred for such deeds.
I shook my head sadly. “This will not stop war,” I told him; “for others will learn how you have achieved this result, how you have created your…super-army, and create their own race of super men. No, my friend; you have elevated war to a height undreamed of.”
He turned upon me, and for a moment, I thought he was actually going to strike me down. Then he turned away, screaming words I did not understand, and began to scramble up the remaining two hundred feet to the very summit of the mountain-range that bordered the little valley below.
“You will not understand!” he shouted as rocks and boulders crashed about him; “none of them will understand! None of them!” And he began climbing at such a pace that within seconds, he had disappeared entirely from sight.
Forlornly, I took out my pipe, sat down upon a boulder nearby, and smoked until the sun vanished behind a low cloud-bank. The night grew chill, a light rain began to fall, but my friend did not return.
Slowly, I rose and began the long descent back down into the valley below, believing that I had seen the last of a lifelong friend who had now completely lost his reason. I knew not where he would go, or what he would do. But I believed I had seen the last of him, at least in this life.
But I was wrong.
Several months later, I closed my clinic, bid farewell to the nurse as she started on her way homeward, and was about to cross the road when I caught sight of a ragged figure rounding the next corner.
His hair was long and unwashed; a greying beard straggled down over his breast, and his clothes clung to his tall body with no more than the strength of the threads that remained.
The greatcoat that hung upon the broad shoulders was torn, rumpled, and mud-spattered, and the cuffs and collar of his once-white shirt were threadbare and blackened by the time that had passed since it had last seen the hands of a washerwoman.
But there was something about the way the figure held its head, and I paused, trying to remember where I had seen this forlorn figure before.
When almost on top of me, he raised his head, and in those eyes half-buried in wrinkles, I recognised my friend!
I called his name, and he hesitated, stared at me, then rushed toward me, both hands extended – or tried to: a heavy limp slowed him considerably, the right foot dragging uselessly in the wake of the left. I waited until he was closer.
“Where on earth have you been?” I cried; “and…and what in the name of God has happened to you?”
He stared off over my head for several seconds, then said in a voice that was harsh, almost inaudible: “where in the name of God indeed? Where in the name of God?”
He took my arm, and I noticed that three fingers on his right hand were missing, apparently hacked off at the stumps, left ragged and torn with the bone showing through.
“I have been to the ends of the earth, trying to…to solve my problem. But God! Dear God! I find no answer!”
“Your…problem?” I asked; “what is your problem? Perhaps I may be of…”
“No man on earth can help me now,” he gazed at me sadly, then looked away; “there is no one man on earth who has ever faced such a problem as I, and no man who has the answer.”
He told me that he had journeyed to Africa, and to the Americas, and even as far as the Polar regions, seeking a solution to this ‘problem’ of his to which he could find no solution.
Then he said: “You accused me once of ‘crossing the boundary between man and God’, and so I have. But not in the way you meant.”
I made to speak, but he held up a hand, and I fell silent.
“‘Crossing the boundary between man and God’ – and that is what I have done. But…but, may Heaven help me! I have crucified myself in doing so! I – I have been run down by a horse and carriage – you recall?”
I nodded ‘yes’, I remembered.
“I have been arrested, tried for murder, and hung for a crime I did not commit…that is why my voice is so…so hoarse. My vocal cords are damaged. I have been shot by a farmer when I tried to rob his coop of eggs…” he tore open the shabby greatcoat, and I saw, clear in the front of the shirt, three large bloodstains.”
“If you were to place your fingers inside that shirt, you would still find the wounds,” he said.
“Do you not see? I have taken from God the power of life. But that was not my greatest crime, for I cannot die! Ah, God! I cannot die!”
He turned his face to me, and I saw the saddest, loneliest expression I have ever seen on the face of any man. Then he said:
“My…my greatest crime…is that I have robbed God of the power…the power of death!”
I have seen him several times since then, sometimes close to me, at others far removed. Each time, he appears more shabby, more disabled, and more pitiable a figure than before. But each time, he is alive.
Alive, enduring all that this world can inflict upon him…and totally unable to find the eternal peace of death.
THE END
“Bashri Khan”
by Adrian Scott
Bashri Khan was the most brutal and sadistic of men I have ever known. Every morning, just as the sun began its blazing trip across the steel-blue heavens, he would come into my tiny cell in that horrid prison on the distant outskirts of ____ city, India, and throw a bucket of filth from the Warders’ toilets over my quivering body as I lay, freezing and shivering, on that cold concrete floor, laugh loudly, then toss the bucket at my throbbing head.
“Get up, prisoner!” he would shout. “A new day is upon us, and I have just begun to enjoy myself!”
Then he would step aside, and two of his fellows would turn a canvas fire-hose upon me, and the icy blast, pumped directly from that sludge-ridden, disease-infested river below the east tower would send me sliding backwards, to slam bodily against the far wall of my chamber, where I would lie, whimpering and shivering like a mongrel cur until he had left my cell and the barred steel door had slammed shut behind his huge bulk.
The commencement of my days never altered, not once during my three year’s incarceration in this Godforsaken place, where I had been lodged since that never-forgotten day when I had seen Bashri Khan kicking a blind beggar in the town square, and set upon him, first with my tongue, and then with my fists. But striking him was akin to laying blows upon a solid object, for although he appeared fat and grossly overweight, there was nothing but bulging muscle beneath that filthy, short-sleeved uniform shirt.
He had stood there, laughing, that day, as I rained blow after blow upon his vast chest; then, reaching down with one immense paw, he had grasped me by the hair, lifted my long-unpolished shoes from the dust of the street, and slammed a blow into my face that had broken three teeth, torn open my lips, and created a bloody crimson flow down over my shirt
When eventually my throbbing brain returned to consciousness, I had been locked up in this very cell, every bone and fibre of my body aching and bruised from the beating he had administered even whilst I had lain at his feet, my senses already absent from the world around me.
Since that so-long-ago day, I had not seen a British face, nor heard a British accent. Whether my embassy knew of my plight, I knew not; nobody came to visit me, to aid me, to set me free.
Every face in that horrible place wore a light chocolate-brown tan, the only similarity betwixt their appearance and mine being that we were all human, and all wore the same filthy, once-grey harsh cloth uniform of shirt and trousers, accompanied by a pair of sandals that were so often repaired – at least, in my case, – I doubted another stitch in the worn and tattered leather would hold the sole and crossed thongs together.
The only pleasure that filled our miserable days lay in tobacco, which we obtained by begging, arms outstretched through the high steel bars, that allowed view of the streets outside, at odd junctures between the stone buttresses and walls of this foul den of humanity.
At this task, I fared better than most: it seemed the locals, whether peasants or wealthy businessmen, had an aversion to giving to their own kind so much as one thin cigarette. But as I was the only Englishman within this place, my grimy, bestubbled face stood out to others of my kind who happened to pass by. They would stop, stare, step a little closer, peer keenly at me as if trying to recognise someone they may have known in a past life, and when close enough I would mouth the words: “Tobacco – please, friend!” and invariably, a hand would reach inside a coat pocket, and several of those blessed white cylinders would be passed to me – providing Bashri Khan was not within eyesight. Were his huge bulk hovering nearby, a threat of a broken arm or perhaps “a few days in the company of our English friend in my little home” would send my intended benefactor scurrying back into the nearest crowd.