The Macabre Reader by Donald A Wollheim

Author:Donald A Wollheim [Wollheim, Donald A]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror Anthology
Publisher: Ace Books (NY)
Published: 1969-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

IT WILL GROW ON YOU

Donald Wandrei

He couldn’t find the compass in the center drawer. Maybe he hadn’t left it at his office after all. Next he tried poking among the fitter of medical journals, canceled checks, and brochures about new equipment in the top right-hand drawer. Underneath lay his automatic, but no compass; he wondered briefly if it would be worthwhile to take the .38 along on the hunting trip.

He gave up searching. The time he’d wasted would have bought a dozen compasses.

The bell in the reception room rang, and he became conscious again of the cool, conditioned air inside, of the fever pulse of the city outside that he’d escape tomorrow.

He had finished with all appointments for the day; he had so arranged his patients and operating schedule as to permit him a week’s absence; the bell, he hoped, would signify no more than a minor case, or an emergency treatment.

The door opened, and he glanced past the portable examination table. For a moment the nurse, in insufferable white, was framed between many-hued bottles of medicines and rows of surgical tools in the wall cabinets. She blanked out all but small segments of the outer room: the cream leather edge and chromium arm of a chair, the robin’s egg blue of

a wall, the fat nap of a broadloom in avocado green, the comer of a Haupers original oil painting, July Moon.

She closed the door and leaned against it, and her face looked as chalky as her uniform.

“A stranger,” she said, “a man in a raincoat—” “Raincoat?” he stared toward the window, where shadows deepened in the canyon, but the great stone man-warren opposite shimmered as though melting from sunfire.

“One of those swagger coats with a belt.” She added foolishly, “It hangs all the way down to his shoes.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

“He won’t say, except that it’s urgent.”

“Who sent him here?”

“A ship’s doctor.”

“Strange. I don’t know any ship’s doctors. You’ve no idea what his trouble is?”

She hesitated, her lower lip curling inward between her teeth. “His coat flapped as he was coming in. Something is —seriously wrong. The most peculiar thing—”

“Very well. Send him in.”

She looked faint, as though she would slide down the door and dissolve into something liquid.

“I won’t need you,” he said. “You may go.”

She nodded dumbly and went out, with a kind of sidling motion around the man who entered. Her face was developing a greenish tinge. The doctor stepped toward her, but she shook her head mechanically with an expression of terror and a queer shine in her eyes. A line of sweat beads bubbled on her forehead. He eyed her closely as she pulled the door shut. Perhaps it would be well to observe her condition during the next few weeks.

For a moment his attention was distracted. He heard, or seemed to hear, a faint, muffled twittering like the cry of a bird. He looked toward the window, but there was nothing there, not even a sparrow, on the ledge outside. He cocked his head, straining, but did not hear the sound again.

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