Thomas Slauenwite, M.D., is a fictional character from the horror short story "Winged Death", by H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald. A vengeful and callous physician who sees his murderous actions as justified, he is an example of an amoral narrator-protagonist, similar to Lt. Cmdr. Karl Heinrich from "The Temple" and the necrophiliac mortician from "The Loved Dead".
Biography[]
Thomas Slauenwite was born on April 12, 1885, in Trenton, New Jersey. His father, Dr. Paul Slauenwite, was a South African physician from Pretoria, Transvaal, who died in 1916. At the time, Thomas was fighting in World War One in France as part of a South African regiment. Following his father's footsteps, he studied medicine at Columbia University and became an expert in African fevers. One of his classmates was the future biologist Henry Sargent Moore, who befriended Slauenwite and studied with him in both America and Africa, eventually becoming one of the world's most respected authorities on African flies and other dipterans. Meanwhile, Slauenwite's own research took him from Durban, Natal, to Mombasa, where he lived in the same house that had been formerly occupied by the late physician Sir Norman Sloane.
Slauenwite found Sir Norman's papers in the house and, after reading them, published a revolutionary theory about the transmission and development of remittent fever, which made him famous among his peers. He was promised a high position in the South African health service and a probable knighthood if he were to resign his American citizenship, which he agreed to. Unfortunately for him, it was at this point that his promising career was ruined by Moore, who had corresponded with Sir Norman. Moore accused Slauenwite of plagiarism and produced letters that proved that Slauenwite's theory was actually Sir Norman's.
Slauenwite was furious at what he perceived as a betrayal, claiming that he helped to propel Moore's career, and referring to Moore's accusations as "absurd". With the "half-promised appointment and knighthood" withheld and his reputation tainted (especially among those colleagues who had known Sir Norman in person), Slauenwite left Mombasa and found work as a general clinician at the small trading post of M'gonga, close to the Ugandan border. He resolved that someday he would find a way to kill Moore.
In January 1929, Slauenwite treated a hunter named Mevana, who had been bitten by a devil-fly in the Ugandan jungle. Slauenwite learned about the legend that if a man dies after being bitten by a devil-fly, his mind and memories will move into the body of the insect. While he dismissed this as superstition, he was interested in the flies' infectiousness and started to plan out how he could murder Moore. After successfully treating Mevana with tryparsamide at the suggestion of his colleague, Dr. Lincoln, Slauenwite asked the hunter to show him the place where the devil-flies lived, in the vicinity of a lake past the megalithic ruins of the Fishers from Outside and their gods Tsadogwa and Clulu.
Slauenwite spent months breeding the devil-flies in his lab and cultivating samples of the germ Trypanosoma gambiense, so the insects would feed solely on infected meat and become vectors of the disease. To prevent Dr. Moore from recognising the flies for what they were, Slauenwite crossbred them with South African tsetse flies and managed to obtain a fertile hybrid strain that was no less lethal than the parent lineages. In August, after building up a good stock fed on infected meat, he secretly arranged for the flies to escape from their cages and bite two of the trading post's employees, Batta and Gamba. While he pretended to treat both of them, he coldly let Batta die so he could study how the disease would develop. The remedy he gave Gamba was genuine, to act as scientific control and to avoid raising suspicions. As a final touch, he developed a dye to stain the flies' wings blue, so that Moore would have no chance of recognising them, even as hybrids, and would not be able to seek out treatment.
On December 15, Slauenwite took a long vacation, grew a beard to disguise his appearance, and travelled southwards using a fake identity. He arrived at Ukala on March 9, 1930 and sent a package containing the infected blue-winged hybridised flies to New York, where Moore was presently teaching. Along with the package he sent a typewritten letter identifying himself as a Londoner entomologist named Nevil Wayland-Hall and asking Moore's help in identifying the species, taking care to casually mention their "complete harmlessness". Being familiar with Moore's habits, he felt confident that Moore would "throw overboard all caution when it comes to studying an unknown species".
Back at M'gonga, Slauenwite explained his prolonged absence by claiming that he'd been sick and got lost on his way. Through his correspondence with New York colleagues, he got news that Moore did in fact receive the blue-winged flies and, a few weeks after being bitten by one, started to get ill. Since no one could identify the flies' species, Moore wasn't able to seek treatment. His condition gradually got worse, although it took over a year for him to die, on September 20, 1931. In the meantime, the hybrid flies had laid eggs and the ruse was revealed once the next generation developed without the blue wings, proving that whoever sent the flies to Moore was acting in bad faith. The police started looking for "Wayland-Hall", and Slauenwite knew that some colleagues suspected him, so he moved to Johannesburg and got himself a new identity as "Frederick Nasmyth Mason of Toronto, Canada, broker in mining properties".
Slauenwite lived under his new name for a few months and felt safe. On January 15, 1932, a blue-winged fly entered his room and started to torment him, demonstrating seemingly impossible intelligence, and evading all his efforts to kill or capture it. Over the next few days, the scene repeated itself, causing Slauenwite to question his own sanity. The fly hovered around Slauenwite's copy of Moore's book, as if to mock him, and even dipped its legs into his inkwell and crawled over the ceiling, where it wrote an unmistakable question mark. On January 18, it wrote the number five, and from that day on started to fly in circles in a way to signal a countdown: five, four, three, two, one.
Terrified, Slauenwite took a train to Bloemfontein and rented a room in the Orange Hotel, where he locked himself and tried in various ways to seal every entrance, but the persistent insect followed him and continued to terrorise him. On January 23, the fly bit Slauenwite on the back of the neck, causing him to die instantly from a heart attack. His mind, as predicted by the devil-fly legend, was transplanted into the body of the insect, which purposely crawled into a bottle of ammonia and drowned itself. (HPL: "Winged Death")