The Taint and Other Novellas Read Online Free Page A

when, at the very end of a month, the first hint of the horror came to Oakdeene.
    It happened in the small hours of the morning following one of those rare evenings when, unable to endure his surroundings for another night without a break of some sort, Martin Spellman had allowed himself to be persuaded by Harold Moody to go down into Oakdeene village for a drink. Martin was not a drinking man and his limit was usually only three or four beers, but that night he felt “in the mood,” and the result was that when he and Moody got back to the sanatorium just before midnight he was more than amply prepared for his bed.
    It was, too, the beer that saved Martin Spellman from possible involvement when the horror came, for at any other time the hideous screams and demented shrieks from the basement ward would most certainly have shocked him from sleep. As it was, he missed all the “excitement,” as Harold Moody had it the next morning when he went into the student’s room to shake him awake.
    The “excitement” was that four hours earlier, at about three in the morning, one of Hell’s worst inhabitants had died after throwing a particularly horrible fit. During his attack the man, one Gordon Merritt, a hopeless lunatic for twenty years, had somehow contrived to gouge out one of his own eyes!
    It was only later that Spellman thought to enquire which of the nurses had been unfortunate enough to be on duty when Merritt took his last, fatal fit; and an almost subconscious tremor of strange apprehension went through him when he was told that it had been Barstowe!
    • • •
    For the two weeks following Merritt’s death Barstowe kept very much to himself; much more than ever before, and he had never been much of a mixer. In fact, had he not known better, Spellman might never have suspected that Barstowe was “living-in” at all. The truth was that the directors of Oakdeene had been far from happy at the enquiry, and it was thought that the squat nurse had been given a sound dressing down—something about his responses to the situation on the night of the incident being inefficient and altogether too slow. The general belief seemed to be that Merritt’s seizure might well have been avoided if Barstowe had been a bit “quicker off the mark”….
    On the 13th December Spellman again found himself on nightduty, and once more it was his hourly lot to have to patrol the ward called Hell. Until that time he had never realized that there existed in his subconscious the slightest intention of trying to discover more details of the facts surrounding Merritt’s death—he only knew that something had been bothering him for far too long and that there were certain things he would like to know—and yet, on his first visit to the basement ward, he went straight to Larner’s cell and called the man to the spy-hole.
    The cells were constructed in such a way as to make every interior corner visible from those small, barred windows; that is to say that each cell was wedge-shaped, with the “sharp” end of the wedge formed by the door itself. Larner had been lying on his bed at the far end of the cell staring silently at the ceiling when Spellman called out to him, but he quickly got up and went to the door on identifying his caller.
    “Larner,” Spellman quietly questioned as soon as the other had greeted him, “—what happened to Merritt? Was it—was it the way they say, or—? Tell me what happened, will you?”
    “Nurse Spellman, would you do me a great favor?” Larner apparently had not heard the student’s question—or perhaps, Spellman thought, he had simply chosen to ignore it!
    “A favor? If I can, Larner—what is it you want me to do?”
    “There is a matter of justice to be attended to!” the lunatic suddenly blurted out, so suddenly, with such urgency—with something so very akin to fervor in his voice—that the young nurse took a quick step back from the cell door.
    “Justice, Larner ? Whatever do you