There is a Reaper ...

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  There Is A Reaper ...

  _By Charles V. De Vet_

  Doctors had given him just one month to live. A month to wonder, what comes afterward? There was one way to find out--ask a dead man!

  The amber brown of the liquor disguised the poison it held, and Iwatched with a smile on my lips as he drank it. There was no pity in myheart for him. He was a jackal in the jungle of life, and I ... I wasone of the carnivores. It is the lot of the jackals of life to bedevoured by the carnivore.

  Suddenly the contented look on his face froze into a startled stillness.I knew he was feeling the first savage twinge of the agony that was tocome. He turned his head and looked at me, and I saw suddenly that heknew what I had done.

  "You murderer!" he cursed me, and then his body arched in the middle andhis voice choked off deep in his throat.

  For a short minute he sat, tense, his body stiffened by the agony thatrode it--unable to move a muscle. I watched the torment in his eyesbuild up to a crescendo of pain, until the suffering became so greatthat it filmed his eyes, and I knew that, though he still stareddirectly at me, he no longer saw me.

  Then, as suddenly as the spasm had come, the starch went out of his bodyand his back slid slowly down the chair edge. He landed heavily with hishead resting limply against the seat of the chair. His right leg doubledup in a kind of jerk, before he was still.

  I knew the time had come. "Where are you?" I asked.

  This moment had cost me sixty thousand dollars.

  Three weeks ago the best doctors in the state had given me a month tolive. And with seven million dollars in the bank I couldn't buy a minutemore.

  I accepted the doctors' decision philosophically, like the gamblerthat I am. But I had a plan: One which necessity had never forced me touse until now. Several years before I had read an article about themedicine men of a certain tribe of aborigines living in the jungles atthe source of the Amazon River. They had discovered a process in whichthe juice of a certain bush--known only to them--could be used to poisona man. Anyone subjected to this poison died, but for a few minutes afterthe life left his body the medicine men could still converse with him.The subject, though ostensibly and actually dead, answered the medicinemen's every question. This was their primitive, though reportedlyeffective method of catching glimpses of what lay in the world of death.

  I had conceived my idea at the time I read the article, but I had neverhad the need to use it--until the doctors gave me a month to live. ThenI spent my sixty thousand dollars, and three weeks later I held in myhands a small bottle of the witch doctors' fluid.

  The next step was to secure my victim--my collaborator, I preferred tocall him.

  The man I chose was a nobody. A homeless, friendless non-entity, pickedup off the street. He had once been an educated man. But now he was onlya bum, and when he died he'd never be missed. A perfect man for myexperiment.

  I'm a rich man because I have a system. The system is simple: I nevermake a move until I know exactly where that move will lead me. My fieldof operations is the stock market. I spend money unstintingly to securethe information I need before I take each step. I hire the bestinvestigators, bribe employees and persons in position to give me theinformation I want, and only when I am as certain as humanly possiblethat I cannot be wrong do I move. And the system never fails. Sevenmillion dollars in the bank is proof of that.

  Now, knowing that I could not live, I intended to make the system workfor me one last time before I died. I'm a firm believer in the adagethat any situation can be whipped, given prior knowledge of itscoming--and, of course, its attendant circumstances.

  * * * * *

  For a moment he did not answer and I began to fear that my experimenthad failed. "Where are you?" I repeated, louder and sharper this time.

  The small muscles about his eyes puckered with an unnormal tensionwhile the rest of his face held its death frost. Slowly, slowly,unnaturally--as though energized by some hyper-rational power--his lipsand tongue moved. The words he spoke were clear. "I am in a ... a ...tunnel," he said. "It is lighted, dimly, but there is nothing for me tosee." Blue veins showed through the flesh of his cheeks like watermarkson translucent paper.

  He paused and I urged, "Go on."

  "I am alone," he said. "The realities I knew no longer exist, and I amdamp and cold. All about me is a sense of gloom and dejection. It is anapprehension--an emanation--so deep and real as to be almost a tangiblething. The walls to either side of me seem to be formed, not ofsubstance, but rather of the soundless cries of melancholy of spirits Icannot see.

  "I am waiting, waiting in the gloom for something which will come to me.That need to wait is an innate part of my being and I have no thought ofquestioning it." His voice died again.

  "What are you waiting for?" I asked.

  "I do not know," he said, his voice dreary with the despair of centuriesof hopelessness. "I only know that I must wait--that compulsion isgreater than my strength to combat."

  The tone of his voice changed slightly. "The tunnel about me is wideningand now the walls have receded into invisibility. The tunnel has becomea plain, but the plain is as desolate, as forlorn and dreary as was thetunnel, and still I stand and wait. How long must this go on?"

  He fell silent again, and I was about to prompt him with anotherquestion--I could not afford to let the time run out in longsilences--but abruptly the muscles about his eyes tightened and subtly anew aspect replaced their hopeless dejection. Now they expressed ablack, bottomless terror. For a moment I marveled that so small aportion of a facial anatomy could express such horror.

  "There is something coming toward me," he said. "A--beast--of brutishfoulness! Beast is too inadequate a term to describe it, but I know nowords to tell its form. It is an intangible and evasive--thing--but veryreal. And it is coming closer! It has no organs of sight as I know them,but I feel that it can see me. Or rather that it is aware of me with asense sharper than vision itself. It is very near now. Oh God, themalevolence, the hate--the potentiality of awful, fearsomedestructiveness that is its very essence! And still I cannot move!"

  The expression of terrified anticipation, centered in his eyes, lessenedslightly, and was replaced, instantly, by its former deep, deep despair."I am no longer afraid," he said.

  "Why?" I interjected. "Why?" I was impatient to learn all that I couldbefore the end came.

  "Because ..." He paused. "Because it holds no threat for me. Somehow,someday, I understand--I know--that it too is seeking that for which Iwait."

  "What is it doing now?" I asked.

  "It has stopped beside me and we stand together, gazing across thestark, empty plain. Now a second awful entity, with the same leashedvirulence about it, moves up and stands at my other side. We all threewait, myself with a dark fear of this dismal universe, my unnaturalcompanions with patient, malicious menace.

  "Bits of ..." He faltered. "Of ... I can name it only _aura_, go outfrom the beasts like an acid stream, and touch me, and the hate, and thevenom chill my body like a wave of intense cold.

  "Now there are others of the awful breed behind me. We stand, waiting,waiting for that which will come. What it is I do not know."

  I could see the pallor of death creeping steadily into the last cornersof his lips, and I knew that the end was not far away. Suddenly a blackfrustration built up within me. "What are you waiting for?" I screamed,the tenseness, and the importance of this moment forcing me to lose theiron self-control upon which I have always prided myself. I knew thatthe answer held the secret of what I must know. If I could learn that,my experiment would not be in vain, and I could m
ake whateverpreparations were necessary for my own death. I had to know that answer.

  "Think! Think!" I pleaded. "What are you waiting for?"

  "I do not know!" The dreary despair in his eyes, sightless as they metmine, chilled me with a coldness that I felt in the marrow of my being."I do not know," he repeated. "I ... Yes, I do know!"

  Abruptly the plasmatic film cleared from his eyes and I knew that forthe first time, since the poison struck, he was seeing me, clearly. Isensed that this was the last moment before he left--for good. It had tobe now!

  "Tell me. I command you," I cried. "What are you waiting for?"

  His voice was quiet as he murmured, softly, implacably, before he wasgone.

  "We are waiting," he said, "for _you_."

  THE END

  Transcriber's Note:

  This etext was produced from _Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy_ August 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.