Creeps by Night: Chills and Thrills

The rhythm of the ship’s engines was positively a persecution. It gave one no rest, it followed one like the Hound of Heaven, it drove one out into space and across the Milky Way and then back home by way of Betelgeuse. It was cold there, too. Mr. Arcularis, making the round trip by way of Betelgeuse and Polaris, sparkled with frost. He felt like a Christmas tree. Icicles on his fingers and icicles on his toes. He tinkled and spangled in the void, hallooed to the waste echoes, rounded the buoy on the verge of the Unknown, and tacked glitteringly homeward. The wind whistled. He was barefooted. Snowflakes and tinsel blew past him. Next time, by George, he would go farther still — for altogether it was rather a lark. Forward into the untrodden! as somebody said. Some intrepid explorer of his own backyard, probably, some middle-aged professor with an umbrella: those were the fellows for courage! But give us time, thought Mr. Arcularis, give us time, and we will bring back with us the night-rime of the Obsolute. Or was it Absolete? If only there weren’t this perpetual throbbing, this iteration of sound, like a pain, these circles and repetitions of light — the feeling as of everything coiling inward to a center of misery...

Suddenly it was dark, and he was lost. He was groping, he touched the cold, white, slippery woodwork with his fingernails, looking for an electric switch. The throbbing, of course, was the throbbing of the ship. But he was almost home — almost home. Another corner to round, a door to be opened, and there he would be. Safe and sound. Safe in his father’s home.

It was at this point that he woke up: in the corridor that led to the dining saloon. Such pure terror, such horror, seized him as he had never known. His heart felt as if it would stop beating. His back was towards the dining saloon; apparently he had just come from it. He was in his pajamas. The corridor was dim, all but two lights having been turned out for the night, and — thank God! — deserted. Not a soul, not a sound. He was perhaps fifty yards from his room. With luck he could get to it unseen. Holding tremulously to the rail that ran along the wall, a brown, greasy rail, he began to creep his way forward. He felt very weak, very dizzy, and his thoughts refused to concentrate. Vaguely he remembered Miss Dean — Clarice — and the freckled girl, as if they were one and the same person. But he wasn’t in the hospital, he was on the ship. Of course. How absurd. The Great Circle. Here we are, old fellow... steady round the corner... hold hard to your umbrella...

In his room, with the door safely shut behind him, Mr. Arcularis broke into a cold sweat. He had no sooner got into his bunk, shivering, than he heard the night watchman pass.

“But where—” he thought, closing his eyes in agony — “have I been?...”

A dreadful idea had occurred to him.

“It’s nothing serious — how could it be anything serious? Of course it’s nothing serious,” said Mr. Arcularis.

“No, it’s nothing serious,” said the ship’s doctor urbanely.

“I knew you’d think so. But just the same—”

“Such a condition is the result of worry,” said the doctor. “Are you worried — do you mind telling me — about something? Just try to think.”

“Worried?”

Mr. Arcularis knitted his brows. Was there something? Some little mosquito of a cloud disappearing into the southwest, the northeast? Some little gnat-song of despair? But no, that was all over. All over.

“Nothing,” he said, “nothing whatever.”

“It’s very strange,” said the doctor.

“Strange! I should say so. I’ve come to sea for a rest, not for a nightmare! What about a bromide?”

“Well, I can give you a bromide, Mr. Arcularis—”

“Then, please, if you don’t mind, give me a bromide.”

He carried the little phial hopefully to his stateroom, and took a dose at once. He could see the sun through his porthole. It looked northern and pale and small, like a little peppermint, which was only natural enough, for the latitude was changing with every hour. But why was it that doctors were all alike? and all, for that matter, like his father, or that other fellow at the hospital? Smythe, his name was. Doctor Smythe. A nice, dry little fellow, and they said he was a writer. Wrote poetry, or something like that. Poor fellow — disappointed. Like everybody else. Crouched in there, in his cabin, night after night, writing blank verse or something — all about the stars and flowers and love and death; ice and the sea and the infinite; time and tide — well, every man to his own taste.

“But it’s nothing serious,” said Mr. Arcularis, later, to the parson. “How could it be?”

“Why, of course not, my dear fellow,” said the parson, patting his back. “How could it be?”

“I know it isn’t and yet I worry about it.”

“It would be ridiculous to think it serious,” said the parson.