The Women of Weird Tales by Melanie Anderson

Author:Melanie Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Published: 2020-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

The Rays of the Moon

Everil Worrell

For hours I had lain hidden behind the gravestone. I was a medical student—and I needed a cadaver.

My pal and I had always been different from our classmates. We would have departed from the ways of other doctors, too, had we gone on to practise our profession. In our class there were men who have given their lives in the service of humanity—but we would have made humanity serve us. We aspired to fame, to the making of spectacular discoveries, perhaps—and we would have stopped not for fear or mercy. How quickly we would have been expelled from the college in which we were enrolled, had our standards of conduct been made known to our fellow students and instructors!

Well, it would not matter now if we had been expelled. Better for us if we had been. My pal died of septicemia—the revenge, perhaps, of the corpse he was working on in the close-shuttered basement of his house when his knife slipped and infected his hand. For that corpse had been walking on two feet only a week before, the healthy body of a charwoman who worked in the medical school building, and whose naturally appointed time to die had not yet come.

Ah, well! The charwoman’s disappearance created hardly a ripple of interest, and Browne’s death not much more.

And now I lay hidden through hours of darkness in a large, well-filled cemetery not far from the outskirts of a city. The city was not the one in which I lived and pursued my studies. For caution’s sake, I had driven more than forty miles. Yet I was familiar with the countryside, for six months before I had passed this way often, on my way to the home of a girl to whom I was engaged. I had loved this girl until I became sure of her affection, and then I tired of her. Besides, I had given my allegiance to morphia, and had become unsocial. After I wearied of her it became a mono­tonous thing to know that she loved me, and so I broke my engagement. A few months later her brother called on me, begging that I go to see his sister, if only once more. She was a delicate, sensitive, high-strung girl, not very strong. My treatment of her, he said, had broken her heart, and her family actually believed her to be dying of grief. Her brother was not very courteous to me, for he had gotten the idea that a little kindness from me might save his sister’s life.

“You may not be a murderer, but you have the heart of a murderer,” he said to me.

I laughed at him, and never went near the girl again. That sort of thing is ridiculous! No girl with any sense pines away and dies of disillusionment and lost love in this day and age, as I told him. I had no time to waste in considering her feelings. And a girl who would have so little pride as to do such an unreasonable thing would be better dead, in any case.

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