The
pretense of eating, always curiously like a formality with him, he
virtually abandoned; and mental power alone appeared to keep him from
total collapse. He acquired a habit of writing long documents of some sort, which he
carefully sealed and filed with injunctions that I transmit them after
his death to certain persons whom he named--for the most part lettered
East Indians, but including also a once celebrated French physician
now generally thought dead, and about whom the most inconceivable
things had been whispered. As it happened, I burned all these papers
undelivered and unopened. His aspect and voice became utterly
frightful, and his presence almost unbearable. One September day an
unexpected glimpse of him induced an epileptic fit in a man who had
come to repair his electric desk lamp; a fit for which he prescribed
effectively while keeping himself well out of sight. That man, oddly
enough, had been through the terrors of the great war without having
incurred any fright so thorough. *       *       *       *       *

Then, in the middle of October, the horror of horrors came with
stupefying suddenness. One night about eleven the pump of the
refrigerating machine broke down, so that within three hours the
process of ammonia cooling became impossible. Doctor Muñoz summoned me
by thumping on the floor, and I worked desperately to repair the injury
while my host cursed in a tone whose lifeless, rattling hollowness
surpassed description. My amateur efforts, however, proved of no use;
and when I had brought in a mechanic from a neighboring all-night
garage we learned that nothing could be done until morning, when a
new piston would have to be obtained. The moribund hermit's rage and
fear, swelling to grotesque proportions, seemed likely to shatter what
remained of his failing physique; and once a spasm caused him to clap
his hands to his eyes and rush into the bathroom. He groped his way
out with face tightly bandaged, and I never saw his eyes again. [Illustration: "He groped his way out with face tightly bandaged, and I
never saw his eyes again."] The frigidity of the apartment was now sensibly diminishing, and
at about five in the morning, the doctor retired to the bathroom,
commanding me to keep him supplied with all the ice I could obtain
at all-night drugstores and cafeterias. As I would return from my
sometimes discouraging trips and lay my spoils before the closed
bathroom door, I could hear a restless splashing within, and a thick
voice croaking out the order for "More--more!" At length a warm day
broke, and the shops opened one by one. I asked Esteban either to help
with the ice-fetching while I obtained the pump piston, or to order the
piston while I continued with the ice; but, instructed by his mother,
he absolutely refused. Finally I hired a seedy-looking loafer whom I encountered on the corner
of Eighth Avenue to keep the patient supplied with ice from a little
shop where I introduced him, and applied myself diligently to the task
of finding a pump piston and engaging workmen competent to install it. The task seemed interminable, and I raged almost as violently as the
hermit when I saw the hours slipping by in a breathless, foodless round
of vain telephoning, and a hectic quest from place to place, hither and
thither by subway and surface car. About noon I encountered a suitable supply house far downtown, and at
approximately one-thirty that afternoon arrived at my boarding-place
with the necessary paraphernalia and two sturdy and intelligent
mechanics. I had done all I could, and hoped I was in time. Black terror, however, had preceded me. The house was in utter turmoil,
and above the chatter of awed voices I heard a man praying in a deep
basso. Fiendish things were in the air, and lodgers told over the
beads of their rosaries as they caught the odor from beneath the
doctor's closed door. The lounger I had hired, it seems, had fled
screaming and mad-eyed not long after his second delivery of ice:
perhaps as a result of excessive curiosity. He could not, of course,
have locked the door behind him; yet it was now fastened, presumably
from the inside. There was no sound within save a nameless sort of
slow, thick dripping. Briefly consulting with Mrs. Herrero and the workmen despite a fear
that gnawed my inmost soul, I advised the breaking down of the door;
but the landlady found a way to turn the key from the outside with some
wire device. We had previously opened the doors of all the other rooms
on that hall, and flung all the windows to the very top. Now, noses
protected by handkerchiefs, we tremblingly invaded the accursed south
room, which blazed with the warm sun of early afternoon. A kind of dark, slimy trail led from the open bathroom door to the
hall door, and thence to the desk, where a terrible little pool had
accumulated. Something was scrawled there in a pencil in an awful,
blind hand on a piece of paper hideously smeared as though by the very
claws that traced the hurried last words. Then the trail led to the
couch and ended unutterably. What was, or had been, on the couch I cannot and dare not say here. But
this is what I shiveringly puzzled out on the stickily smeared paper
before I drew a match and burned it to a crisp; what I puzzled out
in terror as the landlady and two mechanics rushed frantically from
that hellish place to babble their incoherent stories at the nearest
police station. The nauseous words seemed well-nigh incredible in that
yellow sunlight, with the clatter of cars and motor trucks ascending
clamorously from crowded Fourteenth Street, yet I confess that I
believed them then. Whether I believe them now I honestly do not know. There are things about which it is better not to speculate, and all
that I can say is that I hate the smell of ammonia, and grow faint at a
draft of unusually cool air. "The end," ran that noisome scrawl, "is here. No more ice--the man
looked and ran away. Warmer every minute, and the tissues can't last. I fancy you know--what I said about the will and the nerves and the
preserved body after the organs ceased to work. It was good theory, but
couldn't keep up indefinitely. There was a gradual deterioration I had
not foreseen. Doctor Torres knew, but the shock killed him. He couldn't
stand what he had to do; he had to get me in a strange, dark place,
when he minded my letter and nursed me back. And the organs never would
work again. It had to be done my way--artificial preservation--_for you