Free The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck by Alexander Laing

in horror from the wholly maniacal expression of fear that contorted his features. He rose to a sitting posture, while a shriek, which I shall never be able to forget, tore at my very heart. As once before, but now far louder, it panted in and out of his throat continuously, as if some fearful power were pumping at his lungs, crushing them mercilessly, only to draw them more forcibly open again.
    I sprang to the bed. Poor Dr. Alling seemed even more affected, for he suddenly lifted the hand that contained his watch and banged it noisily on the bedside table. Mike’s right hand seized my let arm in a grip that numbed the muscles—and I realized that he was striving to smash my face with the other, the amputated, fist. Just as Prexy scuttled around the room, making for a hypodermic needle on the bureau, Mike began to slam me against the wall. He was still screaming frightfully. My efforts to get him back on the bed might as well have been addressed to a carthorse. I, for the moment at least, felt a dreadful suspicion that it was no Mike Connell gripping me but an iron-thewed fiend who had got possession of Mike’s body. In the grip of one hand only, he was actually lifting me from the floor to smash me harder against the door jamb. In that suspended instant, I saw the slight, childish figure of Dr. Alling, maneuvering bravely for a chance to use the hypodermic needle without breaking it. My glance shifted to Mike’s eyes, and I went sick with horror upon seeing that the irises had disappeared out of them, leaving nothing but inhuman black pupils, expanded as if by the action of belladonna. Then my skull crashed back pitilessly against the wall, and I can tell you of what happened next by hearsay only.
    It seems that the needle did break, in entering Mike’s back, before any of the sedative contents of the syringe could be discharged. Conceiving that he was being attacked by Beelzebub again, Mike swung to hurl my limp body at Dr. Alling. This at least had the fortunate effect, from Prexy’s viewpoint if not from mind, of shielding him from the chair which was the next thing Mike hurled, before he rushed screaming from the house. Dr. Alling thinks that he himself was only momentarily stunned; and he must have had more strength than I ever credited him with, because when I came to I found that he had stretched me out on a pair of pillows on the floor. He was seated in a rocker, pressing his side, and groaning softly. When he saw my eyes open, however, he said, “Lie still,” and walked swaying to the phone to call for aid.
    A couple of internes soon arrived with a stretcher. They wanted to put Prexy on it, but he insisted upon walking to the ambulance, to which I was carried. As they brought me up the hospital steps, I was greatly relieved to see that one of the two nurses who stepped up in attendance was Muriel Finch. Perhaps it was a result of having been knocked so vigorously on the head, but it seemed to me that her face was radiant with happiness. I quelled the temptation to speak with her, deciding that, so long as she was safe, it would be a very good notion to give my aching head a chance to digest the day’s bizarre events before saying anything that might betray my own part in them. So I let the two nurses put me to bed without saying anything at all.

Nine
    While waiting for Jap to arrive, I ate breakfast in bed. He came in presently with some clothes of mine over his arm, jeering, “You’ll never get a job as keeper in any booby-hutch that I run, Dave. My booby-hutch keepers have got to be big enough to lick even the guys that think they’re Napoleon or something.”
    “You mean Mike didn’t snap out of it, Jap?”
    “Not him. They’ve got him in a strait-weskit, as the cockney’s call ’em, making out he’s the archangel Michael, or somebody. Claims he’s licked all the toughest devils in hell.”
    “Cut out the wisecracks,” I ordered. “I liked that guy.”
    “Well, you haven’t got much