Philips Rog - Vial of Immortality

Copyright 1950 by Rog Phillips

This edition published in 2010 by eStar Books, LLC.

www.estarbooks.com

ISBN 9781612101538

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental .

Vial of Immortality

By Craig Browning

If a vampire really exists, it has to be something scientifically explainable . It was!...and Dr. Schwick fou nd the ans w er!

In the furry bodies of those two half-transparent rats lay the secret of an evil immortality

Dr. Schwick sat in his favorite barrel chair pouring apple cider from a gallon glass jug into a large drinking glass. His overdeveloped paunch, short fat legs, and stubby fingers were belied by his high, intellectual forehead and keen grey eyes.

Hi s wife sat over in one corner of the room sewing on a dress she was making. She ignored her husband and his present favorite disciple.

The disciple was a young man about twenty-five years old, five feet seven, with blond hair parted in the middle and neatly laid on his scalp.

His name was Orville Chadwick, and he had been developing a talent for automatic writing on the typewriter. He was rather thin, due to the diet of potato water and carrot juice he had been living on under Dr. Schwick's tutelage.

The two were in marked contrast to each other; the one thin, with long sensitive fingers ; the other stout and bloated looking; with fingers that at first glance seemed to all have been amputated at the first joint. It was only by looking at the eyes of the two that one could tell that the gross man was the master and the sensitive, younger man the lesser intellect.

Dr. Sc hwick screwed the cap back on the jug and set it on the thick green rug beside his chair. He took several deep swallows of the sparkling apple cider and smacked his lips loudly. Then he continued what he had been saying.

"All my life, Orville, I'v e been hoping someone with your talents would come along. The big trouble with having a talent like yours is that it doesn ' t carry with it the judgment to put it to the best usage. You think that it is something wonderful to just be able to sit down at a typewriter and throw yourself into a trance and wake up to find your fingers have written out some intellectual nonsense that a conceited spirit thinks to be a world shaking revelation from the astral.

"Pah! You don't have to contact the astral to get intellectual nonsense. Millions of words of that sort of thing are being written every day by perfectly natural agencies. And just because a man has been dead for a century or so doesn't make him a know-it-all. If it did all our greatest

scientific achievements would be written and published by mediums rather than by materialistic scientists."

"But what other use CAN I put it to, doctor?" Orville asked. "When I go into a trance I don't know what entity is going to take over. I never know unless he writes out his name. I don't have any control over the matter."

"You can have control to a certain extent," Dr. Sehwick replied. "Go

places. I knew a writer once who made quite a success of his profession by just going various places and opening his mind to the astral entities around him. Very remarkable things resulted. He wrote one story while in a small midwestern town that illustrates very remarkably what I am driving at. He had never been in this town before, knew none of the people, and even less about the topography of the place.

"He had only been there a few hours when inspiration struck him. He sat down at his typewriter and in three days turned out forty thousand words. It was a complete story, and written without a flaw.

"So far as he knew it was pure fiction. He 'inv ented' the names of the characters and even the names of the streets and geographical centers such as mountains and hills and gulches and creeks. The same with the plot.

"Like all writers he let it be known that he was a famous author and had just written a story. He sent it to a magazine publisher who happened to need that type of story right at that very moment, and consequently it appeared on the stands in less than a month. Naturally the natives of the town all bought it and read it.

"The story hit the townsmen right between the eyes! It proved with chapter and verse, so to speak, that the drunkard who had been sent to prison for committing a murder that had taken place near that town was innocent, and pointed the finger of guilt directly at a very upright citizen of that town, even giving his correct name!"

"So he was an automatic writer just like I am !" Orville exclaimed.

"No, Dr. Schwick said gently. "He was a successful author. He wouldn't have been if he dabbled in great revelations from seedy ghost writers. He pu t his talent to practical use, enter taining the public."

"Oh," Orville said, somewhat abashed.

At that moment the front doorbell rang. Dr. Schwick placed his hands on the arms of his chair and lifted his mighty frame to an upright position, unconsciously protesting against this invasion of his comfort.

Mrs. Schwick glanced up from her sewing and followed her husband with her eyes as he went to the front door.

His booming voice told her who the visitor was.

"Well! Dr. Schwick exclaimed heartily. "Dr. Bowden ! Come in, come in. What brings you over on a night like this? I thought, what with spring weather giving everybody colds and the flu, that if I wanted to see you again before the summer doldrums set in I would have to look you up my self."

Dr. Bowden looked very much like he might have been Dr. Schwick' s brother. Except for his huge paunch Dr. Schwick could have worn Dr.Bowden 's clothes and looked well in them.

The visitor shuffled off his topcoat and took a chair without invitation. He looked at the apple cider jug on the rug, and at the glass in Dr. Schwick's hand, and calmly asked if another glass could be obtained.

There was a twinkle of excitement in Dr. Schwick's eyes. He sensed that something was on his old friend's mind, and it must be up his alley or this visit would not have been made. Nor was he wrong. Dr. Bowden came straight to the point after quenching his thirst with one glass of cider and settling back contentedly with a second held in his hand.

"I have a case that has me puzzled, " he began. "It ' s a case more than a

patient. There are two patients and one corpse, to be exact. The dead person met with accidental death while alone. One of the patients has a broken leg. The other is suffering from acute anemia."

"Anemia!" Dr. Schwick said in a hushed, meaningful tone. "Tell me about it."

"That's what I came here to do, Dr. Bowden said irritably. "I was first called onto the case by a real estate friend of mine who has sent me patients before. It seems he had just sold a house to some people. They had moved in and he decided to drop around and see if everything was satisfactory. The people were man and wife with no children. Their names were Crane- Fred and Edith

Crane.

"He knocked at the back door. At first he heard no sign of life inside.

After the second knock he heard a woman screaming for help. He tried the door. It was unlocked, so he went in and followed the direction of the screams to the basement.

"Edith Crane was lying at the bottom of the steps with a compound leg fracture. He had quite a time convincing her she should remain quiet

until he could get a doctor. He called me and I came right away.