The life-eater

Death stalked through the little village of La Foubelle at the edge of the great swamp. Again and again it struck, fattening the tiny, cypress-draped graveyard until there was scarcely a house that was not in mourning. No ordinary calamity this, but a horror. Men talked of it in awed, hushed whispers. Women, hollow-eyed and gaunt from worry, pressed their little ones to their flaccid breasts as they busied themselves with their household tasks. The coming of night found the streets deserted, the townspeople huddled, white-faced and frightened, behind closed doors. " La maladie sans maladie ," they called it, this dark, formless, unspeakable terror that always came at night, striking down young and old alike—leaving in its wake a body shriveled and deflated, the skin puckered into a thousand wrinkles. They had seen their loved ones die, had these simple folk of La Foubelle—seen them twist and writhe in excruciating agony at the very last. Sometimes, when the victim was very strong, the thing took toll of him for days. Jules Delatour, it was, who whimpered of having seen the horror hovering over the body of his dying mother—a black, transparent thing, he babbled, smoke-like and shapeless, its bestial face filled with malignant ferocity. But Jules was the village drunkard and had been in his cups the night his mother passed away, so no one believed his tale. Doctor Lamontaine, sipping rum from a battered tin cup and poring over a volume of Cagliostro, noted the shadow that fell across the book as a man entered the cubbyhole of an office. "Drink?" he growled without looking up, and shoved a second cup across the desk. "Rum. Good Jamaica rum. Help yourself." The green-and-yellow parrot, swinging on its perch at his elbow, opened its filmy eyes and echoed its master's invitation. " Rum! " it shrieked drowsily. " Good Jamaica rum! Hotter'n hell! Hotter'n hell! " Lamontaine looked up when his visitor made no response to the double overture. Then he leaped to his feet, his hand outstretched, his eyes smiling a welcome under their bushy red brows. "The dominie, by all that's holy!" he roared. He dumped a pile of magazines from a chair, kicked them into the corner, and shoved it to his guest. "No wonder you refused my invitation to guzzle," he chuckled. "You, the only teetotaler in the village. Sit down, my friend, and take a…