AVON FANTASY READER
No. 8
Edited
by DONALD A. WOLLHEIM
ROBERT E. HOWARD
• FRANK
BELKNAP LONG, JR.
MARY ELIZABETH
COUNSELMAN • FRANCIS
FLAGG
RAY BRADBURY • ALGERNON BLACKWOOD
H. P. LOVECRAFT • JOHN MICHEL
EVERIL WORRELL • AMBROSE BIERCE
*|t AVON PUBLISHING CO., INC. ygt
^ 119
WEST 57TH STREET, NEW YORK 19, N.Y. ^
QUEEN OF THE BLACK COAST by Robert E. Howard.
Copyright, 1934, by Popular
Fiction Publishing Company for Weird Tales Magazine.
THE MACHINE MAN OF ARDATHIA by Francis Flagg.
Copyright, 1927, by Experimenter Publishing
Co.; rights now held by Ziff-Davis Publishing Co.; reprinted by permission of
heir through Ackerman Authors Agency.
THE CAT-WOMAN by Mary Elizabeth Counselman.
Copyright, 1933, by Popular Fiction
Publishing Co. for Weird Tales.
THE
MAN WITH A THOUSAND LEGS by Frank Belknap Long, Jr. Copyright, 1927, by the
Popular Fiction Publishing Co. for Weird Tales. By permission
of Frank Belknap Long, Jr.
ZERO HOUR by Ray Bradbury. Appeared in Planet Stories.
Copyrighted May, 1947, by Love Romances
Publishing Company, Inc.
THE OTHER WING from "Day and Night
Stories," by Algeron Blackwood.
Published and copyright,
1917, by E. P. Dutton and Co. Inc., New York, Renewed 1945.
THE TEMPLE by H. P. Lovecraft.
Copyright, 1925, by the Popular Fiction
Publishing Company; 1939, by August Derleth and
Donald Wandrei. By permission of Arkham House.
THE GOBLINS WILL GET YOU by John Michel.
Copyright, 1942, by Manhattan Fiction
Publications. Reprinted by permission of the author.
THE CANAL by Everil Worrell.
Copyright, 1927, by the Popular Fiction
Publishing Co., for Weird Tales.
AN INHABITANT OF CARCOSA by
Ambrose Bierce. Copyright, 1909, by Albert & Charles Boni,
Inc.
Queen of the Black Coast
Robert E. Howard
1. Come Joins the Pirates
Probably the most popular series of stories that ever appeared in Weird Tales magazine were the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard. Taking place in a period of time lying just before the last ice age—roughly about 25,000 years ago—Mr. Howard had worked out for his own guidance a history and chronology of these barbarous and mystery-darkened realms he fancied may have existed in that "Hyborian" age. Among those time-lost scenes there roves the figure of his hero, a savage from the North, who fights and romances his restless way among the witchcraft and magic-makers of the shadowy kingdoms that antedated Egypt. "Queen of the Black Coast" is a Conan story of high adventure among pirates in an Africa darker by far than any known to our explorers.
Believe
green buds awaken in the spring,
That
autumn paints the leaves with somber fire;
Believe
I held my heart inviolate
To lavish on one man my hot desire.
—The
Song of Belit.
OOFS
drummed down the street that sloped to the wharfs. The folk that yelled and
scattered had only a fleeting glimpse of a mailed figure on a black stallion,
a wide scarlet cloak flowing out on the wind. Far up the street came the shout
and clatter of pursuit, but the horseman did not look back. He swept out onto
the wharfs and jerked the plunging stallion back on its haunches at the very
lip of the pier. Seamen gaped up at him, as they stood to the sweep and striped
sail of a high-prowed, broad-waisted
galley. The master, sturdy and black-bearded, stood in the bows, easing her
away from the piles with a boat-hook. He yelled angrily as the horseman sprang
from the saddle and with a long
leap landed squarely on the mid-deck.
"Who invited you
aboard?"
"Get
under way!" roared the intruder with a fierce gesture that spattered red drops from his broadsword.
"But we're bound for the coasts of
Gush!" expostulated the master.
"Then
I'm for Cush! Push off, I tell you!" The other cast a quick glance up the
street, along which a squad of horsemen were galloping; far behind them toiled
a group of archers, crossbows on their shoulders.
"Can you pay for your passage?"
demanded the master.
"I
pay my way with steel!" roared the man in armor, brandishing the great
sword that glittered bluely in the sun. "By Crom,
man, if you don't get under way, I'll drench this galley in the blood of its
crew!"
The
shipmaster was a good judge of men. One glance at the dark scarred face of the
swordsman, hardened with passion, and he shouted a quick order, thrusting
strongly against the piles. The galley wallowed out into clear water, the oars
began to clack rhythmically; then a puff of wind filled the shimmering sail,
the light ship heeled to the gust, then took her course like a swan, gathering
headway as she skimmed along.
On
the wharfs the riders were shaking their swords and shouting threats and
commands that the ship put about, and yelling for the bowmen to hasten before
the craft was out of arbalest range.
"Let
them rave," grinned the swordsman hardly. "Do you keep her on her
course, master steersman."
The master descended from the small deck
between the bows, made his way between the rows of oarsmen, and mounted the
mid-deck. The stranger stood there with his back to the mast, eyes narrowed
alertly, sword ready. The shipman eyed him steadily, careful not to make any
move toward the long knife in his belt. He saw a tall powerfully built figure
in a black scale-mail hauberk, burnished greaves and a blue-steel helmet from
which jutted bull's horns highly polished. From the mailed shoulders fell the
scarlet cloak, blowing in the sea-wind. A broad shagreen belt with a golden buckle held the scabbard of the
broadsword he bore. Under the horned helmet a square-cut black mane contrasted
with smoldering blue eyes.
"If
we must travel together," said the master, "we may as well be at
peace with each other. My name is Tito, licensed master-shipman of the ports of
Argos. I am bound for Cush, to trade beads and silks and sugar and brass-hiked
swords to the black kings for ivory, copra, copper ore, slaves and
pearls."
The
swordsman glanced back at the rapidly receding docks, where the figures still
gesticulated helplessly, evidently having trouble in finding a boat swift enough
to overhaul the fast-sailing galley.
"I
am Conan, a Cimmerian," he answered. "I came into Argos seeking
employment, but with no wars forward, there was nothing to which I might turn
my hand."
"Why do the guardsmen
pursue you?" asked Tito. "Not that it's any of my
business, but I thought perhaps----- "
"I've nothing to
conceal," replied the Cimmerian. "By Crom,
though I've spent considerable time among you civilized peoples,
your ways are still beyond my comprehension.
"Well,
last night in a tavern, a captain in the king's guard offered violence to the
sweetheart of a young soldier, who naturally ran him through. But it seems
there is some cursed law against killing guardsmen, and the boy and his girl
fled away. It was bruited about that I was seen with them, and so today I was haled into court, and a judge asked me where the lad had
gone. I replied that since he was a friend of mine, I could not betray him.
Then the court waxed wroth, and the judge talked a great deal about my duty to
the state, and society, and other things I did not understand, and bade me tell
where my friend had flown. By this time I was
becoming wrathful myself, for I had explained my position.
"But
I choked my ire and held my peace, and the judge squalled that I had shown contempt for the court, and that I should be hurled into a dungeon to rot until I betrayed my friend. So
then, seeing they were all mad, I drew my sword and cleft the judge's skull;
then I cut my way out of the court, and seeing the high constable's stallion
tied near by, I rode
for the wharfs, where I thought to find a ship bound for foreign parts."
"Well,"
said Tito hardily, "the courts have fleeced me too often in suits with
rich merchants for me to owe them any love. I'll have questions to answer if I
ever anchor in that port again, but I can prove I acted under compulsion. You
may as well put up your sword. We're peaceable sailors, and have nothing
against you. Besides, it's as well to have a fighting-man like yourself on board. Come up to the poop-deck and we'll have a
tankard of ale."
"Good enough," readily responded
the Cimmerian, sheathing his sword.
The
Argus was a small sturdy ship, typical of those trading-craft which ply
between the ports of Zingara and Argos and the
southern coasts, hugging the shoreline and seldom venturing far into the open
ocean. It was high of stern, with a tall curving prow; broad in the waist,
sloping beautifully to stem and stern. It was guided by the long sweep from the
poop, and propulsion was furnished mainly by the broad striped silk sail,
aided by a jibsail. The oars were for use in tacking
out of creeks and bays, and during calms. There were ten to the side, five fore and five aft of the small mid-deck. The most precious
part of the cargo was lashed under this deck, and under the fore-deck. The men
slept on deck or between the rowers' benches, protected, in bad weather, by
canopies. With twenty men at the oars, three at the sweep, and the shipmaster,
the crew was complete.
So
the Argus pushed steadily southward, with consistently fair weather. The sun beat
down from day to day with fiercer heat, and the canopies were run up—striped
silken cloths that matched the shimmering sail and the shining goidwork on the prow and along the gunwales.
They sighted the coast of Shem—long rolling
meadowlands with the white crowns of the towers of cities in the distance, and
horsemen with blue-black beards and hooked noses, who
sat their steeds along the shore and eyed the galley with suspicion. She did
not put in; there was scant profit in trade with the sons of Shem.
Nor did master Tito pull into the broad bay
where the Styx river emptied its gigantic flood into
the ocean, and the massive black castles of Khemi
loomed over the blue waters. Ships did not put unasked into this port, where
dusky sorcerers wove awful spells in the murk of sacrificial smoke mounting
eternally from blood-stained altars where naked women screamed, and where Set,
the Old Serpent, arch-demon of the Hyborians but god
of the Stygians, was said to writhe his shining coils
among his worshippers.
Master
Tito gave that dreamy glass-floored bay a wide berth,
even when a serpent-prowed gondola shot from behind a
castellated point of land, and naked dusky women, with great red blossoms in
their hair, stood and called to his sailors, and posed and postured brazenly.
Now
no more shining towers rose inland. They had passed the southern borders of Stygia and were cruising along the coasts of Cush. The sea
and the ways of the sea were never-ending mysteries to Conan, whose homeland
was among the high hills of the northern uplands. The wanderer was no less of
interest to the.sturdy seamen, few of whom had even
seen one of his race.
They were characteristic Argosean
sailors, short and stockily built. Conan towered
above them, and no two of them could match his strength. They were hardy and
robust, but his was the endurance and vitality of a wolf, his thews steeled and his nerves whetted by the hardness of his
life in the world's wastelands. He was quick to laugh, quick and terrible in
his wrath. He was a valiant trencherman, and strong drink was a passion and a
weakness with him. Naive as a child in many ways, unfamiliar with the sophistry
of civilization, he was naturally intelligent, jealous of his rights, and
dangerous as a hungry tiger. Young in years, he was hardened in warfare and
wandering, and his sojourns in many lands were evident in his apparel. His
horned helmet was such as was worn by the golden-haired -/Esir
of Nordheim; his hauberk and greaves were of the
finest workmanship of Koth; the fine ring-mail which
sheathed his arms and legs was of Nemedia; the blade
at his girdle was a great Aquilonian broadsword; and
his gorgeous scarlet cloak could have been spun nowhere but in Ophir.
So
they beat southward, and master Tito began to look for
the high-walled villages of the black people. But they found only smoking ruins
on the shore of a bay, littered with naked black bodies. Tito swore.
"I had good trade here, aforetime. This is the
work of pirates."
"And if we meet them?"
Conan loosened his great blade in its scabbard.
"Mine is no warship. We run, not fight.
Yet if it came to a pinch, we have beaten off reavers
before, and might do it again; unless it were Belit's Tigress."
"Who is Belit?"
"The
wildest she-devil unhanged. Unless I read the signs
a-wrong, it was her butchers who destroyed that village on the bay. May I some day see her dangling from the yard-arm! She is called
the queen of the black coast. She is a Shemite
woman, who leads black raiders. They harry the shipping and have sent many a
good tradesman to the bottom."
From
under the poop-deck Tito brought out quilted jerkins, steel caps, bows and
arrows.
"Little
use to resist if we're run down," he grunted. "But it rasps the soul
to give up life without a struggle."
It was just at sunrise when the lookout
shouted a warning. Around the long point of an island off the starboard bow
glided a long lethal shape, a slender
serpentine galley, with a raised
deck that ran from stem to stern. Forty oars on each side drove her swiftly
through the water, and the low rail swarmed with naked blacks that chanted and
clashed spears on oval shields. From the masthead floated a long crimson
pennon.
"Belit!" yelled Tito, paling. "Yare! Put her
about! Into that creek-mouth! If we can beach her before they run us down, we
have a chance to escape with our lives!"
So,
veering sharply, the Argus ran for the line of surf that boomed along
the palm-fringed shore, Tito striding back and forth, exhorting the panting
rowers to greater efforts. The master's black beard bristled, his eyes glared.
"Give
me a bow," requested Conan. "It's not my idea of a manly weapon, but
I learned archery among the Hyrkanians, and it will
go hard if I can't feather a man or so on yonder deck."
Standing
on the poop, he watched the serpent-like ship skimming lightly over the waters,
and landsman though he was, it was evident to him that
the Argus would never win that race. Already arrows, arching from the pirate's deck, were falling with a hiss into the sea,
not twenty paces astern.
"We'd
best stand to it," growled the Cimmerian; "else we'll all die with
shafts in our backs, and not a blow dealt."
"Bend
to it, dogs!" roared Tito with a passionate gesture of his brawny fist.
The bearded rowers grunted, heaved at the oars, while their muscles coiled and
knotted, and sweat started out on their hides. The timbers of the stout little
galley creaked and groaned as the men fairly ripped her through the water. The
wind had fallen; the sail hung limp. Nearer crept the inexorable raiders, and they were still a good mile from the surf when
one of the steersmen fell gagging across the sweep, a long arrow through his
neck. Tito sprang to take his place, and Conan, bracing his feet wide on the
heaving poop-deck, lifted his bow. He could see the details of the pirate
plainly now.
The
rowers wer£ protected by a line of raised mantelets along the sides, but the warriors dancing on the
narrow deck were in full view. These were painted and plumed, and mostly naked,
brandishing spears and spotted shields.
On the raised platform in the bows stood a
slim figure whose white skin glistened in dazzling contrast to the glossy ebon
hides about it. Belit, without a doubt. Conan drew the shaft to his ear—then some
whim or qualm stayed his hand and sent the arrow through the body of a tall
plumed spearman beside her.
Hand over hand the pirate galley was
overhauling the lighter ship. Arrows fell in a rain about the Argus, and men cried out. All the steersmen were down, pin-cushioned, and Tito
was handling the massive sweep alone, gasping black curses, his braced legs
knots of straining thews. Then with a sob he sank
down, a long shaft quivering in his sturdy heart. The Argus lost headway and rolled in the swell. The men shouted in confusion, and
Conan took command in characteristic fashion.
"Up,
lads!" he roared, loosing with a vicious twang of cord. "Grab your
steel and give these dogs a few knocks before they cut our throats! Useless to
bend your backs any more: they'll board us ere we can row another fifty
paces!"
In desperation the sailors abandoned their
oars and snatched up their weapons. It was valiant, but useless. They had time
for one flight of arrows before the pirate was upon them. With no one at the
sweep, the Argus rolled broadside, and the steel-beaked prow
of the raider crashed into her amidships. Grappling-irons crunched into the
side. From the lofty gunwales, the black pirates drove down a volley of shafts
that tore through the quilted jackets of the doomed sailormen, then sprang down spear in hand to complete the slaughter.
On the deck of the pirate lay half a dozen bodies, an earnest of Conan's
archery.
The
fight on the Argus was short and bloody. The stocky sailors, no
match for the tall barbarians, were cut down to a man. Elsewhere the battle had
taken a peculiar turn. Conan, on the high-pitched poop, was on a level with the
pirate's deck. As the steel prow slashed into the Argus, he braced himself and kept his feet under the shock, casting away his
bow. A tall corsair, bounding over the rail, was met in midair by the
Cimmerian's great sword, which sheared him cleanly through the torso, so that
his body fell one way and his legs another. Then, with a burst of fury that
left a heap of mangled corpses along the gunwales, Conan was over the rail and
on the deck of the Tigress.
In
an instant he was the center of a hurricane of stabbing spears and lashing
clubs. But he moved in a blinding blur of steel. Spears bent on his armor or
swished empty air, and his sword sang its death-song. The fighting-madness of
his race was upon him, and with a red mist of unreasoning fury wavering before
his blazing eyes, he cleft skulls, smashed breasts, severed limbs, ripped out
entrails, and littered the deck like a shambles with a ghastly harvest of
brains and blood.
Invulnerable
in his armor, his back against the mast, he heaped mangled corpses at his feet
until his enemies gave back panting in rage and fear. Then as they lifted their
spears to cast them, and he tensed himself to leap and die in the midst of
them, a shrill cry froze the lifted arms. They stood like statues, the black
giants poised for the spear-casts, the mailed swordsman with his dripping
blade.
Belit sprang before the blacks, beating down their
spears. She turned toward Conan, her bosom heaving, her eyes flashing. Fierce
fingers of wonder caught at his heart. She was slender, yet formed like a
goddess; at once lithe and voluptuous. Her only garment was a broad silken
girdle. Her white ivory limbs and the ivory globes of her breasts drove a beat
of fierce passion through the Cimmerian's pulse, even in the panting fury of
battle. Her rich, black hair, black as a Stygian night, fell in rippling
burnished clusters down her supple back. Her dark eyes burned on the Cimmerian.
She was untamed as a desert wind, supple and
dangerous as a she-panther. She came close to him, heedless of his great blade,
dripping with the blood of her warriors. Her supple thigh brushed against it,
so close she came to the tall warrior. Her red lips parted as she stared up
into his somber menacing eyes.
"Who are you?" she demanded.
"By Ishtar, I have never seen your like, though
I have ranged the sea from the coasts of Zingara to
the fires of the ultimate south. Whence come
you?"
"From
Argos," he answered shortly, alert for treachery. Let her slim hand move
toward the jeweled dagger in her girdle, and a buffet of his open hand would
stretch her senseless on the deck. Yet in his heart he did not fear; he had
held too many women, civilized or barbaric, in his iron-thewed
arms, npt to recognize the light that burned in the
eyes of this one.
"You
are no soft Hyborian!" she exclaimed. "You
are fierce and hard as a gray wolf. Those eyes were never dimmed by city
lights; those thews were never softened by life amid
marble walls."
"I am Conan, a
Cimmerian," he answered.
To the people of the exotic climes, the north
was a mazy half-mythical realm, peopled with ferocious blue-eyed giants who
occasionally descended from their icy fastnesses with torch and sword. Their
raids had never taken them as far south as Shem, and this daughter of Shem made
no distinction between ^Esir, Vanir
or Cimmerian. With the unerring instinct of the elemental feminine, she knew
she had found her lover, and his race meant naught, save as it invested him
with the glamor of far
lands.
"And I am Belit,"
she cried, as one might say, "I am queen!"
"Look
at me, Conan!" She threw wide her arms. "I am Belit,
queen of the black coast. Oh, tiger of the North, you are cold as the snowy
mountains which bred you. Take me and crush me with your fierce love! Go with
me to the ends of the earth and the ends of the sea! I am queen by fire* and
steel and slaughter—be thou my king!"
His eyes swept the blood-stained ranks,
seeking expressions of wrath or
jealousy. He saw none. The fury was gone from the ebon faces. He realized
that to these men Belit was more than a woman: a
goddess whose will was
unquestioned. He glanced at the Argus, wallowing
in the crimson sea-wash,
heeling far over, her decks awash, held up by the grappling-irons. He glanced
at the blue-fringed shore, at the far green hazes of the ocean, at the vibrant
figure which stood before him; and his barbaric soul stirred within him. To
quest these shining blue realms with that white-skinned young tiger-cat—
to love, laugh, wander and pillage-----
"I'll sail with
you," he grunted, shaking the red drops from his blade.
"Ho,
N'Yaga!" her voice twanged like a bowstring.
"Fetch herbs and dress your master's wounds! The rest of you bring aboard
the plunder and cast off."
As
Conan sat with his back against the poop-rail, while the old shaman attended to
the cuts on his hands and limbs, the cargo of the ill-fated Argus was quickly shifted aboard the Tigress and stored in small cabins below deck. Bodies of the crew and fallen
pirates were cast overboard to the swarming sharks, while wounded blacks were
laid in the waist to be bandaged. Then the grappling-irons were cast off, and
as the Argus sank silently into the blood-flecked waters, the Tigress moved off southward to the rhythmic clack of the oars.
As
they moved out over the glassy blue deep, Belit came
to the poop. Her eyes were burning like those of a she-panther in the dark as
she tore off her ornaments, her sandals and her silken girdle and cast them at
his feet. Rising on tiptoe, arms stretched upward, a quivering line of naked
white, she cried to the desperate horde: "Wolves of the blue sea, behold
ye now the dance— the mating-dance of Belit, whose
fathers were kings of Askalon!"
And
she danced, like the spin of a desert whirlwind, like the leaping of a
quenchless flame, like the urge of creation and the urge of death. Her white
feet spurned the blood-stained deck and dying men forgot death as they gazed
frozen at her. Then, as the white stars glimmered through the blue velvet dusk,
making her whirling body a blur of ivory fire, with a wild cry she threw
herself at Conan's feet, and the blind flood of the Cimmerian's desire swept
all else away as he crushed her panting form against the black plates of his corseleted breast.
2. The Blac\ Lotus
In
that dead citadel of crumbling stone
Her eyes" were snared by that unholy
sheen, And curious madness took me by the throat, As
of a rival lover thrust between.
—The
Song of Beht.
The Tigress ranged
the sea, and the black villages shuddered. Tom-toms beat in the night, with a
tale that the she-devil of the sea had found a mate, an iron man whose wrath
was as that of a wounded lion. And survivors of butchered Stygian ships named Belit with curse, and a white warrior with fierce blue
eyes; so the Stygian princes remembered this man long and long, and their
memory was a bitter tree which bore crimson fruit in the years to come.
But heedless as a vagrant wind, the Tigress cruised the southern coasts, until she anchored at
the mouth of a broad sullen, river, whose banks were jungle-clouded walls of
mystery.
"This
is the river Zarkheba, which is Death," said Belit. "Its waters are poisonous. See how dark and
murky they run? Only venomous reptiles live in that river. The black people
shun it. Once a Stygian galley, fleeing from me, fled up the river and
vanished. I anchored in this very spot, and days later, the galley came
floating down the dark waters, its decks blood-stained and deserted. Only one man
was on board, and he was mad and died gibbering. The cargo was intact, but the
crew had vanished into silence and mystery.
"My
lover, I believe there is a city somewhere on that river. I have heard tales of
giant towers and walls glimpsed afar off by sailors who dared go part-way up
the river. We fear nothing: Conan, let us go and sack that city!"
Conan
agreed. He generally agreed to her plans. Hers was the mind that directed their
raids, his the arm that carried out her ideas. It
mattered little to him where they sailed or whom they fought, so long as they
sailed and fought. He found the life good.
Battle
and raid had thinned their crew; only some eighty spearmen remained, scarcely
enough to work the long galley. But Belit would not
take the time to make the long cruise southward to the island kingdoms where
she recruited her buccaneers. She was afire with eagerness for her latest
venture; so the Tigress swung into the river-mouth, the oarsmen
pulling strongly as she breasted the broad current.
They
rounded the mysterious bend that shut out the sight of the sea, and sunset
found them forging steadily against the sluggish flow, avoiding sandbars where
strange reptiles coiled. Not even a crocodile did they see, nor any four-legged
beast or winged bird coming down to the water's edge to drink. On through the
blackness that preceded moonrise they drove, between banks that were solid
palisades of darkness, whence came mysterious rustlings and stealthy footfalls,
and the gleam of grim eyes. And once an inhuman voice was lifted in awful
mockery—the cry of an ape, Bêlit said, adding that
the souls of evil men were imprisoned in these man-like animals as punishment
for past crimes. But Conan doubted, for once, in a gold-barred cage in an Hyrkanian city, he had seen an
abysmal sad-eyed beast which men told him was an ape, and there had been about
it naught of the demoniac malevolence which vibrated in the shrieking laughter
that echoed from the black jungle.
Then
the moon rose, a splash of blood, ebony-barred, and- the jungle awoke in
horrific bedlam to greet it. Roars and howls and yells set the black warriors
to trembling, but all this noise, Conan noted, came from farther back in the
jungle, as if the beasts no less than men shunned the black waters of Zarkheba.
Rising
above the black denseness of the trees and above the waving fronds, the moon
silvered the river, and their wake became a rippling scintillation of
phosphorescent bubbles that widened like a shining road of bursting jewels. The
oars dipped into the shining water and came up sheathed in frosty silver. The
plumes on the warrior's head-pieces nodded in the wind, and the gems on swordhilts and harness sparkled frostily.
The
cold light struck icy fire from the jewels in Bêlit's
clustered black locks as she stretched her lithe figure on a leopardskin thrown on the deck. Supported on her elbows,
her chin resting on her slim hands, she gazed up into the face of Conan, who
lounged beside hér, his black mane stirring in the
faint breeze. Bêlit's eyes were dark jewels burning
in the moonlight.
"Mystery
and terror are about us, Conan, and we glide into the realm of horror and
death," she said. "Are you afraid?"
A shrug of his mailed
shoulders was his only answer.
"I
am not afraid either," she said meditatively. "I was never afraid. I
have looked into the naked fangs of Death too often. Conan, do you fear the
gods?"
"I
would not tread on their shadow," answered the barbarian conservatively.
"Some gods are strong to harm, others, to aid; at least so say their
priests. Mitra of the Hyborians
must be a strong god, because his people have builded
their cities over the world. But even the Hyborians
fear Set. And Bel, god of thieves, is a good god.
When I was a thief in Zamora I learned of him."
"What of your own gods? I have never
heard you call on them."
"Their
chief is Crom. He dwells on a great mountain. What
use to call on him? Little he cares if men live or die. Better to be silent
than to call his attention to you; he will send you dooms, not fortune! He is
grim and loveless, but at birth he breathes power to strive and slay into a
man's soul. What else shall men ask of the gods?"
"But what of the
worlds beyond the river of death?" she persisted.
"There
is no hope here or hereafter in the cult of my people," answered Conan.
"In this world men struggle and suffer vainly, finding pleasure only in
the bright madness of battle; dying, their souls enter a gray misty realm of
clouds and icy winds, to wander cheerlessly throughout eternity."
Belit shuddered. "Life, bad as it is, is
better than such a destiny. What do you believe, Conan?"
He
shrugged his shoulders. "I have known many gods. He who denies them is
as blind as he who trusts them too deeply. I seek not beyond death. It may be
the blackness averred by the Nemedian skeptics, or Crom's realm of ice and cloud, or the snowy plains and
vaulted halls of the Nordheimer's Valhalla. I know not, nor do I care. Let me live deep
while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my
palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the
blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers
and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion.
I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion,
and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay,-and am content."
"But
the gods are real," she said, pursuing her own line of thought. "And
above all are the gods of the Shemites—Ishtar and
Ashtoreth and Derketo and Adonis. Bel,
too, is Shemitish, for he was born in ancient Shumir, long, long ago, and went forth laughing, with
curled beard and impish wise eyes, to steal the gems of the kings of old times.
"There
is life beyond death, I know, and I know this, too, Conan of Cim-meria"—she rose lithely to her knees and caught
him in a pantherish embrace —"my love is
stronger than any death! I have lain in your arms, panting with the violence of
our love; you have held and crushed and conquered me, drawing niy soul to your lips with the fierceness of your bruising
kisses. My heart is welded to your heart, my soul is
part of your soul! Were I still in death and you fighting for life, I would
come back from the abyss to aid you—aye, whether my spirit floated with the
purple sails on the crystal sea of paradise, or writhed in the molten flames of
hell! I am yours, and all the gods and all their eternities shall not sever
us!"
A scream rang from the lookout in the bows.
Thrusting Belit aside, Conan bounded up, his sword a
long silver glitter in the moonlight, his hair bristling at what he saw. The
black warrior dangled above the deck, supported by what seemed a dark pliant
tree trunk arching over the rail. Then he realized that it was a gigantic
serpent which had writhed its glistening length up the
side of the bow and gripped the luckless warrior in its jaws. Its dripping scales shone leprously in the moonlight as it
reared its form high above the deck, while the stricken man screamed and
writhed like a mouse in the fangs of a python. Conan rushed into the bows, and
swinging his great sword, hewed nearly through the giant trunk, which was
thicker than a man's body. Blood drenched the rails as the dying monster swayed
far out, Still gripping its vietim, and sank into
the river, coil by coil, lashing the water to bloody foam, in which man and
reptile vanished together.
Thereafter
Conan kept the lookout watch himself, but no other horror came crawling up from
the murky depths, and as dawn whitened over the jungle, he sighted the black
fangs of towers jutting up among the trees. He called Belit,
who slept on the deck, wrapped in his scarlet cloak; and she sprang to his
side, eyes blazing. Her lips were parted to call orders to her warriors to take
up bow and spears; then her lovely eyes widened.
It
was but the ghost of a city on which they looked when they cleared a jutting
jungle-clad point and swung in toward the in-curving shore. Weeds and rank
river grass grew between the stones of broken piers and shattered paves that
had once been streets and spacious plazas and broad courts. From alt sides except that toward the river, the jungle crept
in, masking fallen columns and crumbling mounds with poisonous green. Here and
there buckling towers reeled drunkenly against the morning sky, and broken
pillars jutted up among the decaying walls. In the center space a marble
pyramid was spired by a slim column, and on its
pinnacle sat or squatted something that Conan supposed to be an image until his
keen eyes detected life in it.
"It is a great bird," said one of
the warriors, standing in the bows.
"It is a monster bat," insisted
another.
"It is an ape," said Belit.
Just then the creature spread broad wings and
flapped off into the jungle.
"A
winged ape," said old N'Yaga uneasily.
"Better we had cut our throats than come to this place. It is
haunted."
Belit mocked at his superstitions and ordered the
galley run inshore and tied to the crumbling wharfs. She was the first to
spring ashore, closely followed by Conan, and after them trooped the
ebon-skinned pirates, white plumes waving in the morning wind, spears ready, eyes rolling dubiously at the surrounding jungle.
Over
all brooded a silence as sinister as that of a sleeping serpent.
Belit posed picturesquely among the ruins, the
vibrant life in her lithe figure contrasting strangely with the desolation and
decay about her. The sun flamed up slowly, sullenly, above the jungle, flooding
the towers with a dull gold that left shadows lurking beneath the tottering
walls. Belit pointed to a slim round tower that
reeled on its rotting base. A broad expanse of cracked, grass-grown slabs led
up to it, flanked by fallen columns, and before it stood a massive altar. Belit went swiftly along the ancient floor and stood before
it.
"This
was the temple of the old ones," she said. "Look—you can see the
channels for the blood along the sides of the altar, and the rains of ten thousand
years have not washed the dark stains from them. The walls have all fallen
away, but this stone block defies time and the elements."
"But who were these
old ones?" demanded Conan.
She spread her slim hands
helplessly. "Not even in legendry is this city mentioned. But look at the
handholes at either end of the altar! Priests often
conceal their treasures beneath their altars. Four of you lay hold and see if
you can lift it."
She
stepped back to make room for them, glancing up at the tower which loomed
drunkenly above them. Three of the strongest blacks had gripped the handholds
cut into the stone—curiously unsuited to human hands—when Belit
sprang back with a sharp cry. They froze in their places, and Conan, bending to
aid them, wheeled with a startled curse.
"A
snake in the grass," she said, backing away. "Come and slay it; the
rest of you bend your backs to the stone."
Conan
came quickly toward her, another taking his place. As he impatiently scanned
the grass for the reptile, the giant blacks braced their feet, grunted and
heaved with their huge muscles coiling and straining under their ebon skin. The
altar did not come off the ground, but it revolved suddenly on its side. And
simultaneously there was a grinding rumble above and the tower came crashing
down, covering the four black men with broken masonry.
A
cry of horror rose from their comrades. Belit's slim
fingers dug into Conan's arm-muscles. "There was no serpent," she
whispered. "It was but a ruse to call you away. I feared; the old ones'guarded their treasure well. Let us clear away the
stones."
With
herculean labor they did so, and lifted out the mangled bodies of the four men.
And under them, stained with their blood, the pirates found a crypt carved in
the solid stone. The altar, hinged curiously with stone rods and sockets on one
side, had served as its lid. And at first glance the crypt seemed brimming with
liquid fire, catching the early light with a million blazing facets. Undreamable wealth lay before the eyes of the gaping
pirates: diamonds, rubies, bloodstones, sapphires, turquoises, moonstones,
opals, emeralds, amethysts, unknown gems that shone like the eyes of evil
women. The crypt was filled to the brim with bright stones that the morning sun
struck into lambent flame.
With a cry Belit
dropped to her knees among the blood-stained rubble on the brink and thrust her
white arms shoulder-deep into that pool of splendor. She withdrew them,
clutching something that brought another cry to her lips —a long string of
crimson stones that were like clots of frozen blood strung on a thick gold
wire. In their glow the golden sunlight changed to bloody haze.
Belit's eyes were like a woman's in a trance. The Shemite soul finds a bright drunkenness in riches and
material splendor, and the sight of this treasure might have shaken the soul of
a sated emperor of Shushan.
"Take up the jewels,
dogs!" her voice was shrill with her emotions.
"Look!" A muscular black arm
stabbed toward the Tigress, and Belit wheeled,
her crimson lips a-snarl, as if she expected to see a rival corsair
sweeping in
to despoil her of her plunder. But from the gunwales of the ship a dark shape
rose, soaring away over the jungle.
"The
devil-ape has been investigating the ship," muttered the blacks uneasily.
"What
matter?" cried Belit with a curse, raking back a
rebellious lock with an impatient hand. "Make a litter of spears and
mantles to bear these jewels— where the devil are you going?"
"To
look to the galley," grunted Conan. "That bat-thing might have knocked
a hole in the bottom, for all we know."
He
ran swiftly down the cracked wharf and sprang aboard. A moment's swift
examination below decks, and he swore heartily, casting a clouded glance in the
direction the bat-being had vanished. He returned hastily to Belit, superintending the plundering of the crypt. She had
looped the necklace about her neck, and on her naked white bosom the red clots
glimmered darkly. A huge naked black stood crotch-deep in the jewel-brimming
crypt, scooping up great handfuls of splendor to pass them to the eager hands
above. Strings of frozen iridescence hung between his dusky fingers; drops of
red fire dripped from his hands, piled high with starlight and rainbow. It was
as if a black titan stood straddle-legged in the bright pits of hell, his
lifted hands full of stars.
"That
flying devil has staved in the water-casks,"
said Conan. "If we hadn't been so dazed by these stones we'd have heard
the noise. We were fools not to have left a man on guard. We can't drink this
river water. I'll take twenty men and search for fresh water in the
jungle."
She
looked at him vaguely, in her eyes the blank blaze of her strange passion, her
fingers working at the gems on her breast.
"Very
well," she said absently, hardly heeding him. "I'll get the loot
aboard."
The
jungle closed quickly about them, changing the light from gold to gray. From
the arching green branches creepers dangled like pythons. The warriors fell
into single file, creeping through the primordial twilights like black phantoms
following a white ghost.
Underbrush
was not so thick as Conan had anticipated. The ground
was spongy but not slushy. Away from the river, it sloped gradually upward.
Deeper and deeper they plunged into the green waving depths, and still there
was no sign of water, either running stream or stagnant pool. Conan halted
suddenly, his warriors freezing int6 basaltic statues. In the tense silence
that followed, the Cimmerian shook his head irritably.
"Go
ahead," he grunted to a sub-chief, N'Gora.
"March straight on until you can no longer see me; then stop and wait for
me. I believe we're being followed. I heard something."
The
blacks shuffled their feet uneasily, but did as they were told. As they swung
onward, Conan stepped quickly behind a great tree, glaring back along the way
they had come. From that leafy fastness anything might emerge. Nothing
occurred; the faint sounds of the marching spearmen faded in the distance.
Conan suddenly realized that the air was impregnated with an alien and exotic
scent. Something gently brushed his temple. He turned quickly. From a cluster
of green, curiously leafed stalks, great black blossoms nodded at him. One of
these had touched him. They seemed to beckon him, to arch their pliant stems
toward him. They spread and rusded, though no wind
blew.
He
recoiled, recognizing the black lotus, whose juice was death, and whose scent
brought dream-haunted slumber. But already he felt a subtle lethargy stealing
over him. He sought to lift his sword, to hew down the serpentine stalks, but
his arm hung lifeless at his side. He opened his mouth to shout to his
warriors, but only a faint rattle issued. The next instant, with appalling
suddenness, the jungle waved and dimmed out before his eyes; he did not hear
the screams that burst out awfully not far away, as his knees collapsed,
letting him pitch limply to the earth. Above his prostrate form the great black
blossoms nodded in the windless air.
3. The Horror in the Jungle
Was
it a dream the nighted lotus brought?
Then
curst the dream that bought my sluggish life; And
curst each laggard hour that does not see
Hot blood drip blackly from the crimsoned knife.
—The
Song of Belit.
First there was the blackness of an utter
void, with the cold winds of cosmic space blowing through it. Then shapes,
vague, monstrous and evanescent, rolled in dim panorama through the expanse of
nothingness, as if the darkness were taking material form. The winds blew and
a vortex formed, a whirling pyramid of roaring
blackness. From it grew Shape and Dimension; then suddenly, like clouds
dispersing, the darkness rolled away on either hand and a huge city of dark
green stone rose on the bank of a wide river, flowing through an illimitable
plain. Through this city moved beings of alien configuration.
Cast
in the mold of humanity, they were distinctly not men. They were winged and of
heroic proportions; not a branch on the mysterious stalk of evolution that
culminated in man, but the ripe blossom on an alien tree, separate and apart
from that stalk. Aside from their wings, in physical appearance they resembled
man only as man in his highest form resembles the great apes. In spiritual,
esthetic and intellectual development they were superior to man as man is
superior to the gorilla. But when they reared their colossal city, man's primal
ancestors had not yet risen from the slime of the
primordial seas.
These beings were mortal, as are all things
built of flesh and blood. They lived, loved, and died, though the individual
span of life was enormous. Then, after uncounted millions of years, the Change
began. The vista shimmered and wavered, like a picture thrown on a wind-blown
curtain. Over the city and the land the ages flowed as waves flow over a beach,
and each wave brought alterations. Somewhere on the planet the magnetic centers
were shifting; the great glaciers and ice-fields were withdrawing toward the
new poles.
The littoral of the great river altered.
Plains turned into swamps that stank with reptilian life. Where fertile meadows
had rolled, forests reared up, growing into dank jungles. The changing ages
wrought on the inhabitants of the city as well. They did not migrate to fresher
lands. Reasons inexplicable to humanity held them to the ancient city and their
doom. And as that once rich and mighty land sank deeper and deeper into the
black mire of the sunless jungle, so into the chaos of squalling jungle life
sank the people of the city. Terrific convulsions shook the earth; the nights
were lurid with spouting volcanoes that fringed the dark horizons with red
pillars.
After
an earthquake that shook down the outer walls and highest towers of the city,
and caused the river to run black for days with some lethal substance spewed up
from the subterranean depths, a frightful chemical change became apparent in
the waters the folk had drunk for millenniums uncountable.
Many
died who drank of it; and in those who lived, the drinking wrought change,
subtle, gradual and grisly. In adapting themselves to the changing conditions,
they had sunk far below their original level. But the lethal waters altered
them even more horribly, from generation to more bestial generation. They who
had been winged gods became pinioned demons, with all that remained of their
ancestors' vast knowledge distorted and perverted and twisted into ghastly
paths. As they had risen higher than mankind might dream, so they sank lower
than man's maddest nightmares reach. They died fast, by cannibalism, and
horrible feuds fought out in the murk of the midnight jungle. And at last among
the lichen-grown ruins of their city only a single shape lurked, a stunted
abhorrent perversion of nature.
Then
for the first time humans appeared: dark-skinned, hawk-faced men in copper and
leather harness, bearing bows—the warriors of pre-historic Stygia.
There were only fifty of them, and they were haggard and gaunt with starvation
and prolonged effort, stained and scratched with jungle-wandering, with
blood-crusted bandages that told of fierce fighting. In their minds was a tale
of warfare and defeat, and flight before a stronger tribe which drove them ever
southward, until they lost themselves in the green ocean of jungle and ri\er.
Exhausted
they lay down among the ruins where red blossoms that bloom but once in a
century waved in the full moon, and sleep fell upon them. And as they slept, a
hideous shape crept red-eyed from the shadows and performed weird and awful
rites about and above each sleeper. The moon hung in the shadowy sky, painting
the jungle red and black; above the sleepers glimmered
the crimson blossoms, like splashes of blood. Then the moon went down and the
eyes of the necromancer were red jewels set in the ebony of night.
When
dawn spread its white veil over the river, there were no men to be see.n: only a hairy winged horror that squatted in the
center of a ring of fifty great spotted hyenas that pointed quivering muzzles
to the ghastly sky and howled like souls in hell.
Then scene followed scene so swiftly that each tripped over the heels of
its predecessor.
There was a confusion of movement, a writhing and melting of lights and
shadows, against a background of black jungle, green stone ruins, and murky
river. Black men came up the river in long boats with skulls grinning on the
prows, or stole stooping through the trees, spear in hand. They fled screaming
through the dark from red eyes and slavering fangs. Howls of dying men shook
the shadows; stealthy-feet padded through the gloom, vampire eyes blazed redly. There were grisly feasts beneath the moon, across
whose red disk a bat-like shadow incessantly swept.
Then
abruptly, etched clearly in contrast to these impressionistic glimpses,, around
the jungle point in the whitening dawn swept a long galley, thronged with shining
ebon figures, and in the bows stood a white-skinned giant in blue steel.
It
was at this point that Conan first realized that he was dreaming. Until that
instant he had had no consciousness of individual existence. But as he saw
himself treading the boards of the Tigress, he
recognized both the existence and the dream, although he did not awaken.
Even
as he wondered, the scene shifted abruptly to a jungle glade where N'Gora and nineteen black spearmen stood, as if awaiting some one. Even as he realized that it was he for whom they
waited, a horror swooped down from the skies and their stolidity was broken by
yells of fear. Like men maddened by terror, they threw away their weapons and
raced wildly through the jungle, pressed close by the slavering monstrosity
that flapped its wings above them.
Chaos
and confusion followed this vision, during which Conan feebly struggled to
awake. Dimly he seemed to see himself lying under a nodding cluster of black
blossoms, while from the bushes a hideous shape crept toward him. With a savage
effort he broke the unseen bonds which held him to his dreams, and started
upright.
Bewilderment
was in the glare he cast about him. Near him swayed the dusky lotus, and he hastened to draw away from it.
In
the spongy soil near by there was a track as if an
animal had put out a foot, preparatory to emerging from the bushes, then had
withdrawn it. It looked like the spoor of an unbelievably large hyena.
He yelled for N'Gora.
Primordial silence brooded over the jungle, in which
his
yells sounded britde and hollow as mockery. He could
not see the sun, but his wilderness-trained instinct told him the day was near
its end. A panic rose in him at the thought that he had lain senseless for
hours. He hastily followed the tracks of the spearmen, which lay plain in the
damp loam before him. They ran in single file, and he soon emerged into a
glade—to stop short, the skin crawling between his shoulders as he recognized
it as the glade he had seen in his lotus-drugged dream. Shields and spears lay
scattered about as if dropped in headlong flight.
And
from the tracks which led out of the glade and deeper into the fastnesses,
Conan knew that the spearmen had fled, wildly. The footprints overlay one
another; they weaved blindly among the trees. And with startling suddenness
the hastening Cimmerian came out of the jungle onto a hill-like rock which
sloped steeply, to break off abruptly in a sheer precipice forty feet high. And
something crouched on the brink.
At
first Conan thought it to be a great black gorilla. Then he saw that it was a
giant black man that crouched ape-like, long arms
dangling, froth dripping from the loose lips. It was not until, with a sobbing
cry, the creature lifted huge hands and rushed toward him, that Conan
recognized N'Gora. The black man gave no heed to
Conan's shout as he charged, eyes rolled up to display the whites, teeth
gleaming, face an inhuman mask.
With
his skin crawling with the horror that madness always instils
in the sane, Conan passed his sword through the black man's body; then,
avoiding the hooked hands that clawed at him as N'Gora
sank down, he strode to the edge of the cliff.
For
an instant he stood looking down into the jagged rocks below, where lay N'Gora's spearmen, in limp, distorted attitudes that told
of crushed limbs and splintered bones. Not one moved. A cloud of huge black
flies buzzed loudly above the blood-splashed stones; the ants had already begun
to gnaw at the corpses. On the trees about sat birds of prey,
and a jackal, looking up and seeing the man on the cliff, slunk furtively away.
For
a little space Conan stood motionless. Then he wheeled and ran back the way he
had come, flinging himself with reckless haste through the tall grass and
bushes, hurdling creepers that sprawled snake-like across his path. His sword
swung low in his right hand, and an unaccustomed pallor tinged his dark face.
The
silence that reigned in the jungle was not broken. The sun had set and great
shadows rushed upward from the slime of the black earth. Through the gigantic
shades of lurking death and grim desolation Conan was a speeding glimmer of
scarlet and blue steel. No sound in all the solitude was heard except his own
quick panting as he burst from the shadows into the dim twilight of the
river-shore.
He
saw the galley shouldering the rotten wharf, the ruins reeling drunken-ly in the gray half-light.
And here and there among the stones were
spots of raw bright color, as if a careless hand had splashed with a crimson
brush.
Again
Conan looked on death and destruction. Before him lay his spearmen, nor did
they rise to salute him. From the jungle-edge to the river-bank, among the
rotting pillars and along the broken piers they lay, torn and mangled and
half-devoured, chewed travesties of men.
All
about the bodies and pieces of bodies were swarms of huge footprints, like
those of hyenas.
Conan
came silently upon the pier, approaching the galley above whose deck was
suspended something that glimmered ivory-white in the faint twilight. Speechless
the Cimmerian looked on the Queen of the Black Coast as she hung from the
yard-arm of her own galley. Between the yard and her white throat stretched a
line of crimson clots that shone like blood in the gray light.
4. The Attach from the Air
The
shadows were black around him,
The dripping jaws gaped wide, Thicker than rain the red drops fell; But my love was
fiercer than Death's black spell, Nor all the iron walls of hell
Could keep me from his side.
—The
Song of Belit.
■*
The
jungle was a black colossus that locked the ruin-littered glade in ebon arms.
The moon had not risen; the stars were flecks of hot amber in a breathless sky
that reeked of death. On the pyramid among the fallen towers sat Conan the
Cimmerian like an iron statue, chin propped on massive fists. Out in the
black shadows stealthy feet padded and red eyes glimmered. The dead lay as they
had fallen. But on the deck of the Tigress, on
a pyre of broken benches, spear-shafts and leopardskins,
lay the Queen of the Black Coast in her last sleep, wrapped in Conan's scarlet
cloak. Like a true queen she lay, with her plunder heaped high about her:
silks, cloth-of-gold, silver braid, casks of gems and golden coins, silver
ingots, jeweled daggers, and teocallis of gold
wedges.
But
of the plunder of the accursed city, only the sullen waters of Zarkheba could tell, where Conan
had thrown it with a heathen curse. Now he sat grimly on the pyramid, waiting
for his unseen foes. The black fury in his soul drove out all fear. What shapes
would emerge from the blackness he knew not, nor did he care.
He
no longer doubted the visions of the black lotus. He understood that while
waiting for him in the glade, N'Gora and his comrades
had been terror-stricken by the winged monster swooping upon them from the sky,
and
fleeing in
blind panic, had fallen over the cliff; all except their chief, who had somehow
escaped their fate, though not madness. Meanwhile, or
immediately after, or perhaps before, the destruction of those on the
river-bank had been accomplished. Conan did not doubt that the slaughter
along the river had been massacre rather than batde.
Already unmanned by their superstitious fears, the blacks might well have died
without striking a blow in their own defense when attacked by their inhuman
foes.
Why
he had been spared so long, he did not understand, unless the malign entity
which ruled the river meant to keep him alive to torture him with grief and
fear. All pointed to a human or superhuman intelligence—the breaking
of the water-casks to divide the forces, the driving of the blacks over the
cliff, and last and greatest, the grim jest of the crimson necklace knotted
like a hangman's noose about Belit's white neck.
Having
apparently saved the Cimmerian for the choicest victim, and extracted the last
ounce of exquisite mental torture, it was likely that the unknown enemy would
conclude the drama by sending him after the other victims. No smile bent
Conan's grim lips at the thought, but his eyes were lit with iron ktughter.
The
moon rose, striking fire from the Cimmerian's horned helmet. No call awoke the
echoes; yet suddenly the night grew tense and the jungle held its breath.
Instinctively Conan loosened the great sword in its sheath. The pyramid on which
he rested was four-sided, one—the side toward the jungle —carved in broad
steps. In his hand was a Shemite bow, such as Belit had taught her pirates to use. A heap of arrows lay
at his feet^ feathered ends toward him, as he rested on one knee.
Something moved in the blackness under the
trees. Etched abruptly in the rising moon, Conan saw a darkly blocked-out head
and shoulders, brutish in outline. And now from the shadows dark shapes came
silently, swiftly, running low—twenty great spotted hyenas. Their slavering
fangs flashed in the moonlight, their eyes blazed as no true beast's eyes ever
blazed.
Twenty:
then the spears of the pirates had taken toll of the pack, after all. Even as
he thought this, Conan drew nock to ear, and at the twang of the string a
flame-eyed shadow bounded high and fell writhing. The rest did not falter; on
they came, and like a rain of death among them fell the arrows of the
Cimmerian, driven with all the force and accuracy of steely thews
backed by a hate hot as the slag-heaps of hell.
In
his berserk fury he did not miss; the air was filled with feathered destruction.
The havoc wrought among the onrushing pack was breath-taking. Less than half of
them reached the foot of the pyramid. Others dropped upon the broad steps.
Glaring down into the blazing eyes, Conan knew these creatures were not beasts;
it was not merely in their unnatural size that he sensed a blasphemous difference. They exuded an aura tangible as the black mist
rising from a corpse-littered swamp. By what godless
alchemy these beings had been brought into existence, he could not guess; but
he knew he faced diabolism blacker than the Well of Skelos.
Springing
to his feet, he bent his bow powerfully and drove his last shaft point-blank at
a great hairy shape that soared up at his throat. The arrow was a flying beam
of moonlight that flashed onward with but a blur in its course, but the
were-beast plunged convulsively in midair and crashed headlong, shot through
and through.
Then
the rest were on him, in a nightmare rush of blazing eyes and dripping fangs.
His fiercely driven sword shore the first asunder;
then the desperate impact of the others bore him down. He crushed a narrow
skull with the pommel of his hilt, feeling the bone splinter and blood and
brains gush over his hand; then, dropping the sword, useless at such
deadly-close quarters, he caught at the throats of the two horrors which were
ripping and tearing at him in silent fury. A foul acrid scent almost stifled
him, his own sweat blinded him. Only his mail saved him from being ripped to
ribbons in an instant. The next, his naked right hand locked on a hairy throat
and tore it open. His left hand, missing the throat of the other beast, caught
and broke its foreleg. A short yelp, the only cry in that
grim battle, and hideously human-like, burst from the maimed beast. At
the sick horror of that cry from a bestial throat, Conan involuntarily relaxed
his grip.
One,
blood gushing from its torn jugular, lunged at him in a last spasm of ferocity,
and fastened its fangs on his throat—to fall back dead, even as Conan felt the
tearing agony of its grip.
The
other, springing forward on three legs, was slashing at his belly as a wolf
slashes, actually rending the links of his mail. Flinging aside the dying
beast, Conan grappled the crippled horror and with a muscular effort that
brought a groan from his blood-flecked lips, he heaved upright, gripping the
struggling, tearing fiend in his arms. An instant he reeled off balance, its
fetid breath hot on his nostrils, its jaws snapping at his neck; then he hurled
it from him, to crash with bone-splintering force down the marble steps.
As
he reeled on wide-braced legs, sobbing for breath, the jungle and the moon
swimming bloodily to his sight, the thrash of bat-wings was loud in his ears.
Stooping, he groped for his swbrd, and swaying
upright, braced his feet drunkenly and heaved the great blade above his head
with both hands, shaking the blood from his eyes as he sought the air above
him for his foe.
Instead
of attack from the air, the pyramid staggered suddenly and awfully beneath his
feet. He heard a rumbling crackle and saw the tall column above him wave like a
wand. Stung to galvanized life, he bounded far out; his feet hit a step,
half-way down, which rocked beneath him, and his next desperate leap carried
him clear. But even as his heels hit the earth, with a shattering crash like a
breaking mountain the pyramid crumpled, the column came thundering down in
bursting fragments. For a blind cataclysmic instant the sky seemed to rain
shards of marble. Then a rubble of shattered stone lay whitely under the moon.
Conan stirred, throwing off the splinters
that half covered him. A glancing blow had knocked off his helmet and
momentarily stunned him. Across his legs lay a great piece of the column,
pinning him down. He was not sure that his legs were unbroken. His black locks
were plastered with sweat; blood trickled from the wounds in his throat and
hands. He hitched up on one arm, struggling with the debris that prisoned him.
Then
something swept down across the stars and struck the sward near him. Twisting
about, he saw it—the winged one!
With
fearful speed it was rushing upon him, and in that instant Conan had only a
confused impression of a gigantic man-like shape hurtling along on bowed and
stunted legs; of huge hairy arms outstretching misshapen black-nailed paws; of
a malformed head, in whose broad face the only features recognizable as such
were a pair of blood-red eyes. It was a thing neither man, beast, nor devij, imbued with characteristics subhuman as well as
characteristics superhuman.
But Conan had no time for conscious consecutive
thought. He threw himself toward his fallen sword, and his clawing fingers
missed it by inches. Desperately he grasped the shard which pinned his legs,
and the veins swelled in his temples as he strove to thrust it off him. It gave
slowly, but he knew that before he could free himself the monster would be upon
him, and he knew that those black-taloned hands were
death.
The
headlong rush of the winged one had not wavered. It towered over the prostrate
Cimmerian like a black shadow, arms thrown wide—a glimmer of white flashed
between it and its victim.
In
one mad instant she was there—a tense white shape, vibrant with love fierce as
a she-panther's. The dazed Cimmerian saw between him and the onrushing death,
her lithe figure, shimmering like ivory beneath the moon; he saw the blaze of
her dark eyes, the thick cluster of her burnished hair; her bosom heaved, her
red lips were parted, she cried out sharp and ringing as the ring of steel as
she thrust at the winged monster's breast.
"Belitl" screamed Conan. She flashed a quick glance toward him, and in her dark
eyes he saw her love flaming, a naked elemental thing of raw fire and molten
lava. Then she was gone, and the Cimmerian saw only the winged fiend which had
staggered back in unwonted fear, arms lifted as if to fend off attack. And he
knew that Belit in truth lay on her pyre on the Tigress' deck. In his ears rang her passionate cry: "Were I still in death
and you fighting for
life I would come back from the abyss--- "
With
a terrible cry he heaved upward, hurling the sto^e aside. The winged one came on again, and Conan sprang to meet it, his veins on fire with madness. The thews started out
like cords on his forearms as he swung his great sword, pivoting on his heel
with the force of the sweeping arc. Just above the hips it caught the hurtling
shape, and the knotted legs fell one way, the torso another as the blade
sheared clear through its hairy body.
Conan
stood in the moonlit silence, the dripping sword sagging in his hand, staring
down at the remnants of his enemy. The red eyes glared up at him with awful
life, then glazed and set; the great hands knotted spasmodically and stiffened.
And the oldest race in the world was extinct.
Conan
lifted his head, mechanically searching for the beast-things that had been its
slaves and executioners. None met his gaze. The bodies he saw littering the
moon-splashed grass were of men, not beasts: hawk-faced, dark-skinned men,
naked, transfixed by arrows or mangled by sword-strokes. And they were
crumbling into dust before his eyes.
Why
had not the winged master come to the aid of its slaves when he struggled with
them? Had it feared to come within reach of fangs that might turn and rend it?
Craft and caution had lurked in that misshapen skull, but had not availed in
the end.
Turning on his heel, the Cimmerian strode
down the rotting wharfs and stepped aboard the galley. A few strokes of his
sword cut her adrift, and he went to the sweep-head. The Tigress rocked slowly in the sullen water, sliding out sluggishly toward the
middle of the river, until the broad current caught her. Conan leaned on the
sweep, his somber gaze fixed on the cloak-wrapped shape that lay in state on
the pyre the richness of which was equal to the ransom of an empress.
5. The Funeral Pyre
Now we are done with roaming, evermore;
No more the oars, the windy harp's refrain; Nor crimson pennon frights the dusky shore;
Blue girdle of the world, receive again Her whom thou gavest me.
—The
Song of Belit.
Again dawn tinged the ocean. A redder glow
lit the river-mouth. Conan of Cimmeria leaned on his
great sword upon the white beach, watching the Tigress swinging out on her last voyage. There was no light in his eyes that
contemplated the glassy swells. Out of the rolling blue wastes air glory and
wonder had gone. A fierce revulsion shook him as he gazed at the green surges
that deepened into purple hazes of mystery.
Belit had been of the sea; she had lent it
splendor and allure. Without her it rolled a barren, dreary and desolate waste
from pole to pole. She belonged to the sea; to its everlasting mystery he
returned her. He could do no more. For himself, its
glittering blue splendor was more repellent than the leafy
fronds
which rustled and whispered behind him of vast mysterious wilds beyond them,
and into which he must plunge.
No
hand was at the sweep of the Tigress, no
oars drove her through the green water. But a clean tanging
wind bellied her silken sail, and as a wild swan cleaves the sky to her"
nest, she sped seaward, flames mounting higher and higher from her deck to lick
at the mast and envelop the figure that lay lapped in scarlet on the shining
pyre.
So
passed the Queen of the Black Coast, and leaning on his red-stained' sword,
Conan stood silently until the red glow had faded far out in the blue hazes and
dawn splashed its rose and gold over the ocean.
^Jlie *ffl1acliine fïï]<nn of ^4-rdatlii
The late Francis Flagg acquired fame in the field of writing under two names. Under his birth name of Henry George Weiss he was appreciated in poetry circles as a writer of topical verse—usually brimming over with protest against social iniquities. Under his prose name of Francis Flagg, he gathered ■a reputation as a writer of dependable science-fiction and weird stories. A writer combining such talents was bound to ta\e H. G. Wells as his guide for entry into literature. And the following story, which gained Flagg his initial triumph, betrays the Wells inspiration quite credibly.
<3„
DO
NOT know what to believe. Sometimes I am positive I dreamed it all. But then
there is the matter of the heavy rocker. That undeniably did disappear. Perhaps
someone played a trick on me. But who would stoop to a deception so bizarre,
merely for the purpose of befuddling the wits of an old man ?
Perhaps someone stole the rocker. But why should anyone steal the rocker? It
was, it is true, a sturdy piece of furniture, but hardly valuable enough to
excite the cupidity of a thief. Besides the rocker was in-its place when 1 sat
down in the easy-chair. Of course, I may be lying.
Peters,
to whom I was misguided enough to tell everything on the night of its
occurrence, wrote the story for his paper, and the editor of The Chieftain says as much in his editorial of the 15th, when he remarks that
"Mr. Matthews seems to be the possessor of an imagination equal that of an
H. G. Wells." And, considering the nature of my story, I am quite ready to
forgive him for doubting my veracity.
However,
the few friends who know me better think that I had dined a little too wisely
or too well, and had been visited with a nightmare.
Hodge
suggested that the Jap who cleans my rooms had, for some reason, removed the
rocker from its place, and that I merely took its presence for granted when I
sat down. The Jap strenuously denies having done so.
I
must pause a minute here to explain that I have two rooms and a bath on the
third floor of a modern apartment house fronting the Lake. Since my wife's
death three years ago I have lived thus, taking my breakfast and lunch
27
at a
restaurant, generally taking my dinners at the club. I may as well confess that
I have a room rented in a down-town office building where I spend a few hours
every day to work on my book, which is designed to be a critical analysis of
the fallacies inherent in the Marxian theory of economics embracing at the same
time a thorough refutation of Lewis Morgan's Ancient Society. A
rather ambitious undertaking, you will admit, and one not apt to engage the
interest of a person given to inventing wild yarns for the purpose of amazing
his friends. No; I emphatically deny having invented the story. However, the
future will talk for itself. I will merely proceed to put the details of my
strange experience on paper (justice to myself demands that I should do so, so
many garbled accounts have appeared in the press), and leave the reader to draw
his own conclusions.
Contrary to my usual custom I had dined that
evening with Hodge at the Hotel Oaks. Let me emphatically state that while it
is well known among his intimates that Hodge carries a flask on his hip, I had
absolutely nothing of an intoxicating nature to, drink. Hodge will verify this.
About eight-thirty I refused an invitation to attend
the theatre with him and went to my rooms. There I changed into smoking-jacket
and slippers and lit a mild Havana. The rocking-chair was occupying its
accustomed place near the center of the sitting-room floor. I remember that
clearly because, as usual, I had either to push it aside or step around it,
wondering for the thousandth time as I did so why that idiotic Jap persisted in
placing it in such an inconvenient spot; and resolving, also for the
thousandth time, to speak to him about it. With a note-book and pencil placed
on the stand beside me, also a copy of Friedrich Engels' Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, I turned on the light in my green-shaded
reading lamp, switched off all others, and sank with 3 sigh
of relief into the easy-chair. It was my intention to make a few notes from
Engels' work relative to plural marriages, showing that he contradicted certain
conclusions of Morgan's when he said . . . But there; it is sufficient to state
that after a few minutes' work I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. I
did not doze; I am positive of that. My mind was actively engaged in trying to
piece together a sentence that would clearly express my thought.
I
can best describe what happened then by saying there was an explosion. It
wasn't that exactly; but at the time it seemed to me there must have been an
explosion. A blinding flash of light registered with appalling vividness
through the closed lids on the retina of my eyes. My first thought was that
someone had dynamited the building; my second, that
the electric fuses had blown out. It was some time before I could see clearly.
When I could . . .
"Good Lord," I
whispered weakly, "what's that!"
Occupying
the space where the rocking-chair had stood (though I did not notice its
absence at the time) was a cylinder of what appeared to be glass standing, I
should judge, about five feet high. Encased in this cylinder seemed to be a
caricature of a man—or a child. I say caricature because, while the cylinder
was all of five feet in height, the being inside of it was hardly three. You
can imagine my amazement while I stared at this apparition. After awhile I got
up and switched on all the lights to better observe it.
You
may be wondering why I did not try to call someone in. I can only say that
thought never occurred to me. In spite of my age (I am sixty) my nerves are
steady and I am not easily frightened. I walked very carefully around the
cylinder and viewed the creature inside from all angles. It was sustained in
the center of the cylinder, midway between top and bottom, by what appeared to
be an intricate arrangement of glass and metal tubes. These tubes seemed to run
at places into the body, and 1 noticed
some sort of dark fluid circulating through the glass tubes. The head was very
large and hairless; it had bulging brows, and no ears. The eyes were large, winkless; the nose well defined; but the lower part of the
face and mouth ran into the small round body with no sign of a chin, fts legs hung down, skinny, flabby; and the arms were more
like short tentacles reaching down from where the head and body came together.
The thing was, of course, naked. I drew the easy-chair up to the cylinder and
sat down facing it. Several times I stretched out my hand in an effort to touch
its surface, but some force prevented my fingers from making the contact; which
was very curious. Also, I could detect no movement of the body or limbs of the
weird thing inside the glass.
"What
I'd like to know," I muttered, "is what you are, where you came from,
are you alive, and am I dreaming or am I awake?"
For
the first time the creature came to life. One of its tentacle-like hands,
holding a metal tube, darted to its mouth. From the tube shot a white streak, which fastened itself to the cylinder.
"Ah,"
came a clear, metallic voice, "English, Primitive, f perceive; probably of the twentieth century."
The
words were uttered with an indescribable intonation; much as if a foreigner were speaking our language. Yet more than
that ... as if he were speaking a
language long dead. 1 don't
know why that thought should have occurred to me then. Perhaps
. . .
"So you can talk," I exclaimed.
The creature gave a metallic chuckle.
"As you say, I can talk."
"Then tell me what you are."
"I am an Ardathian.
A Machine Man of Ardathia.
And you . . . Tell me, is that really hair on your head?" "Yes,"
I replied.
"And those coverings you wear on your
body, are they clothes?" f answered
in the affirmative.
"How odd. Then you really are a Primitive; a
Prehistoric Man." The eyes behind the glass shield regarded me intently.
"A pre-historic man!" I exclaimed. "What do you mean?"
"I
mean that you are one of that race of early men whose
skeletons we have dug up here and there and reconstructed for our schools of
biology. Marvelous how our scientists have copied you from some fragments of
bone! The small head covered with hair; the beast-like jaw; the abnormally
large body and legs; the artificial coverings made of cloth . . . even your
language!"
For the first time I began to suspect that I
was the victim of a hoax. I got up and walked carefully around the cylinder but
could detect no outside agency controlling the contraption. Besides, it was
absurd to think that anyone would go to all the trouble of constructing such a
complicated apparatus as this appeared to be, merely for the sake of a
practical joke. Nevertheless, I looked out on the landing. I came back and
resumed my seat in front of the cylinder.
"Pardon
me," I said, "but you referred to me as belonging to a period much
more remote than yours."
"That
is correct. If I am not mistaken in my calculations, you are thirty thousand
years in the past. What date is this?"
"June 5th, 1926,"
I replied feebly.
The
creature went through some contortions, sorted a few metal tubes with its
hands, and then announced in its metallic voice:
"Computed
in terms of your method of reckoning, I have travelled back through time
exactly twenty-eight thousand years, nine months, three weeks, two days, seven
hours, and a certain number of minutes and seconds which it is useless for me
to enumerate exactly."
It
was at this point that I endeavored to make sure I was wide awake and in full
possession of my faculties. I got up, selected a fresh cigar from the humidor,
struck a light and began puffing away. After a few puffs I laid it beside the
one I had been smoking earlier in the evening. I found it there later.
Incontestable proof . . .
I
said that I am a man of steady nerves. I am. I sat down in front of the
cylinder again determined this time, to find out what I could about the incredible
creature within.
"You
say you have traveled back through time thousands of years. How is that
possible?"
"By verifying time as a fourth dimension
and perfecting devices for traveling in it."
"In
what manner?"
"I
do not know whether I can explain it exactly, in your language, and you are too
primitive and unevolved to understand mine. However I
shall try.* Know then that space is as much a relative thing as time. In
itself, aside from its relation to matter, it has no existence. You can neither
see nor touch it, yet you move freely in space. Is
that clear?"
"It sounds like
Einstein's theory."
"Einstein?"
"One of our great scientists and
mathematicians," I explained.
"So
you have scientists and mathematicians? Wonderful! That bears out what Hoomi says'. I must remember to tell . . . However, to
resume my explanation. Time is apprehended in the same manner as is space—that
is in its relation to matter. When you measure space, you do so by letting your
measuring rod leap from point to point of matter. Or, in the case of spanning
the void, let us say, from the earth to Venus, you start and end with matter,
remarking that between lies so many miles of space. But it is clear that you
see and touch no space, merely spanning the distance between
two points of matter with the vision or the measuring rod. You do the same when
you compute time with the sun or by means of the clock, which f see hanging on the wall there. Time, then, is no more of an abstraction
than is space. If it is possible for man to move freely in space, it is
possible for him to move freely in time. We Ardathians
are beginning to do so."
"But
how?"
"I
am afraid your limited intelligence could not grasp what I could tell. You must
realize that compared to us you are hardly as much as human. When I look at
you, I perceive your body is enormously larger than your head. This means that
you are dominated by animal passions and that your mental capacity is not very
high."
That
this weirdly humorous thing inside a glass cylinder should come to such a
conclusion regarding me, made me smile.
"If
any of my fellow citizens should see you," f replied, "they would consider you—well, absurd."
"That
is because they would judge by the only standard they know—themselves. In Ardathia you would be regarded as bestial. In fact, that is
exactly how your reconstructed skeletons are regarded. Tell me,
is it true that you nourish your bodies by taking food through your mouths into your Stomachs?"
"Yes."
"And are at that stage of bodily
evolution when you will eliminate the waste products through the alimentary
canal?" 1 lowered my head. "How
disgusting."
The
unwinking eyes regarded me intently. Then something
happened which startled me very much. The creature raised a glass tube to its
face. From the end of the tube leaped a purple ray which came through the glass
casing and played over the room.
"There is no need to be alarmed,"
said the metallic voice. "I was merely viewing your habitat and making
some deductions. Correct me if f am
wrong, please. You are an English-speaking man of the twentieth century. You
and your kind live in cities and houses. You eat, digest, and reproduce your
young, much as do the animals from which you have sprung. You use crude machines
and have an elementary understanding of physics and chemistry. Correct me if I
am wrong, please."
"You
are right to a certain extent," I replied. "But I am not interested
in having you tell me what I am. I know that. I wish to know what you are. You
claim to have come from some thirty thousand years in the future, but you
advance no evidence to support the claim. How do I know you are not a trick, a
fake, an' hallucination of mine. You say you can move
freely in time. How is it you have never come this way before? Tell me
something about yourself; I am curious."
"Your questions are well put,"
replied the voice, "and I shall seek to answer them. Know then, that I am
a Machine Man of Ardathia. It is true we are
beginning to move in time as well as in space; but note that I say 'beginning.'
Our Time Machines are very crude as yet, and I am the first Ardathian-
to penetrate the past beyond a period of six thousand years. You must realize
that a time traveler runs certain hazards. At any place on the road, he may
materialize inside of a solid of some sort. In that case, he is almost certain
to be blown up or otherwise destroyed. Such was the constant danger until I
perfected my enveloping fay
of------ 1 cannot name or describe it in your
tongue,
but if you approach me too closely you will feel its resistance. This ray has
the effect of disintegrating and dispersing any body
of matter inside of which a time traveler may materialize. Perhaps you were
aware of a great light when I appeared in your room? I probably took shape
within a body of matter and the ray destroyed it."
"The rocking-chair!" I exclaimed. "It was standing on the
-spot you now occupy."
"Then it has been reduced to its
original atoms. This is a wonderful moment for me. My ray has proved an
unqualified success for the second time. It not only removes any hindering
matter from about the time-traveler but also creates a void within which he is
perfectly safe from harm. But to resume.
"It
is hard to believe that we Ardathians evolved from
such creatures as you. Our written history does not go back to a time when men
nourished themselves by taking food into their stomachs through their mouths,
digested it, or reproduced their young in the animal-like fashion in which you
do. The earliest men of whom we have any written records were the Bi-Chanics. They lived about fifteen thousand years before our
era and were already well along the road of mechanical evolution when their
civilization fell. The Bi-Chanics vaporized their
food substances and breathed them through the nostril, excreting the waste
products of the body through the pores of the skin. Their children were
brought to the point of birth in ecto-genetic
incubators. There is enough authentic evidence existing to prove that the Bi-Chanics had perfected the use of mechanical hearts and were
crudely able to make ... I cannot
find the words to explain just what they made, but it doesn't matter. The point
is, that while they had only partly subordinated machinery to their use, they
are the earliest race of human beings of whom we possess any real knowledge,
and it was their period of time that f was seeking, when I inadvertently came
too far and landed in yours."
The
metallic voice ceased for a moment and f took advantage of the pause to speak,
"f do not know a thing about the Bi-Chanics, or
whatever it is you call them," f remarked, "but they were certainly
not the first to make mechanical hearts. I remember reading in the paper only
several months ago about a Russian scientist who kept a dog alive four hours by
means of a gasoline motor which pumped the blood through the dog's body."
"You mean the motor was used as a
heart?"
"Exactly."
The
Ardathian (for so 1 will call the creature in the cylinder henceforth) made a quick motion
with one of its hands.
"I have made a note of your information;
it is very interesting."
"Furthermore,"
T pursued, "a year or two ago f read an article in one of our current
magazines telling how a Vienna surgeon was hatching out rabbits and guinea pigs
in ecto-genetic incubators."
The
Ardathian made another quick gesture with its hand. I
could see that my news excited it.
"Perhaps,"
I said, not without a feeling of satisfaction (for the casual allusion to
myself as hardly human had irked my pride) "perhaps you will find it as interesting
to visit the people of five hundred years from now, let us say, as you would to
visit the Bi-Chanics."
"I
can assure you," replied the metallic voice of the Ardathian,
"that if I succeed in returning successfully to Ardathia,
those periods will be thoroughly explored. I can only express surprise at your
having advanced as far as you have, and wonder why it is you have made no
practical use of your knowl-edge.
"Sometimes
T wonder myself," I returned. "But I am very
much interested in learning more about yourself and your times. If you would
resume your story. . . ."
"With
pleasure," replied the Ardathian. "In Ardathia, we do not live in houses or in citiis. Neither do we nourish ourselves as do you, or as
did the Bi-Chanics. The chemical fluid you see
circulating through these tubes which run into and through my body has taken
the place of blood. The fluid is produced by the action of a light ray on
certain life-giving elements in the air. It is constantly being produced in
those tubes under my feet and driven through my body by a mechanism too
intricate for me to describe. The same fluid circulates through my body only
once, nourishing it and gathering all impurities as it goes. Having completed
its revolution, it is dissipated and cast forth by means of another ray which
carries it back into the surrounding air. Have you noticed the transparent
substance enclosing me?"
"The cylinder of glass, you mean?"
"Glass! What do you mean by glass?"
"Why,
that there," I said, pointing at one of the panes of glass in the window.
The Ardathian
directed a metal tube at the spot indicated. A purple streak flashed out,
hovered a moment on the pane, and then withdrew.
"No,"
came the metallic voice, "not that. The cylinder, as you call it, is made
of a transparent substance, very strong and practically unbreakable. Nothing
can penetrate it but the rays which you see, and the
two whose action I have described above, which are invisible. Know then that we
Ar-dathians are not delivered of the flesh; nor are
we introduced into incubators as ova taken from female bodies, as were the Bi-Chanics. Among the Ar-dathians
there are no males or females. The cell from which we are to develop is
created synthetically.. It is fertilized by means of a
ray and then put into a cylinder such as you observe surrounding me: As the
embryo develops, the various tubes and mechanical devices are introduced into
the body by our mechanics and become an integral part of it. When the young Ardathiari is born, he does not leave the case in which he has
developed. That case—or cylinder, as you call it,—protects him from the action
of a hostile environment. If it were to break and expose him to the elements,
he would perish miserably. Do you follow me?"
"Not
quite," I confessed. "You say that you have evolved from men like us,
and then go on to state that you are synthetically conceived and machine made.
I do not see how this evolution was possible."
"And
you may never understand! Nevertheless, I shall try to explain. Did you not
tell me you had wise ones among you who are experimenting with mechanical
hearts and ecto-genetic incubators? Tell me, have you
not others engaged in tests tending to show that it is the action of
environment, and not the passing of time, which accounts for the aging of
organisms?"
"Well,"
I. said hesitatingly, "I have heard tell of chicken hearts being kept
alive in special containers which protect them- from their normal environment."
"Ah," exclaimed the metallic voice,
"but Hoomi will be ^stounded
when he learns that such experiments were carried on by pre-historic men
fifteen thousand years before the Bi-Chanics! Listen
closely, for what you have stated about chicken hearts provides a starting
point from which you may be able to follow my explanation of man's evolution
from your time to mine. Of the thousands of years separating your day from that
of the Bi-Chanics I have no authentic knowledge. My
exact- knowledge begins with the Bi-Chanics. They
were the first among men to realize that man's bodily advancement lay on and through
the machine. They perceived that man only became human when he fashioned tools;
that the tools increased the length of his arms, the grip of his hands, the strength of his muscles. They observed that with the aid
of the machine, man could circle the earth, speak to the planets, gaze intimately at the stars. We will increase our span of
life on earth, said the Bi-Chanics, by throwing the
protection of the machine, the things that the machine produces, around and
into our bodies. This they did, to the best of their ability, and increased
their longevity to an average of about two hundred years. Then came the Tri-Namics. More advanced
than the Bi-Chanics, they reasoned that old age was
caused, not by the passage of time, but by the action of environment on the
matter of which men were composed. It is this reasoning which causes the men of
your time to experiment with chicken hearts. The Tri-Namics
sought to perfect devices for safe-guarding the flesh against the wear and tear
of its environment. They made envelopes—cylinders —in which they attempted to
bring embryos to birth and to rear children, but they met with only partial
success."
"You
speak of the Bi-Chanics and of the Tri-Namics," f said,
"as if they were two distinct races of people. Yet you imply that the
latter evolved from the former. If the Bi-Chanics
civilization fell, did any period of time elapse between that fall and the rise
of the Tri-Namics,? And how did the latter inherit
from their predecessors?"
"It
is because of your language, which I find very crude and inadequate, that f have not already made that clear," answered the Ardathian.
"The Tri-Namics were really a more progressive
part of the Bi-Chanics. When I said the civilization
of the latter fell, I did not mean what that implies in your language. You must
realize that fifteen thousand years in your future, the race of man was,
scientifically speaking, making rapid strides. It was not always possible for
backward or conservative minds to adjust themselves to new discoveries.
Minority groups, composed mostly of the young, forged ahead, made new
deductions- from old facts, proposed radical changes, entertained new ideas,
and finally culminated in what 1 have
alluded to as the Tri-Namics. Inevitably, in the
course of time, the Bi-Chanics died off, and
conservative methods with them. That is what I meant when I said their
civilization fell. In the same fashion did we follow the Tri-Namics.. When the latter succeeded
in raising children inside the cylinder, they destroyed themselves. Soon all
children were born in this manner. In time the fate of the Tri-Namics became that of the Bi-Chamics,
leaving behind them the Machine Men of Ardathia, who
differed radically from them in bodily structure—so many human nucleii inside of machines—yet none the less their direct
descendants."
For
the first time, f began to get an inkling of what the Ardathian meant when it alluded to itself as a Machine Man.
The appalling story of man's final evolution into a controlling center that
directed a mechanical body, awoke something akin to
fear in my heart. If it were true, what of the soul, spirit, God. . . .
The metallic voice went on.
"You must not imagine that the early Ardathians possessed a cylinder as invulnerable as the one
which protects me. The first envelopes of this nature were made of a pliable
substance, which the wear and tear of environment wore out within three
centuries. The substance composing the envelope has gradually been improved,
perfected, until now it is immune for fifteen hundred years to anything save a
powerful explosion or some other major catastrophe."
"Fifteen hundred years!" I
exclaimed.
"Barring
accidents, that is the length of time an Ardathian
lives. But to us fifteen hundred years is no longer than a hundred would be to
you. Remember, please, that time is relative. Twelve hours of your time is a
second of ours, and a year. . . . But suffice it to say that very few Ardathians live out their allotted span. Since we are
constantly engaged in hazardous experiments and dangerous expeditions,
accidents are many. Thousands of our brave explorers have plunged into the past
and never returned. They probably materialized inside solids and were
annihilated. But I believe I have finally overcome this danger with my
disintegrating ray."
"And how old are
you?"
"As
you count time, five* hundred and seventy years. You must understand that there
has been no change in my body since birth. If the cylinder were* everlasting,
or proof against accident, I should live forever. It is the wearing out, or
breaking up of the envelope, which exposes us to the dangerous forces of nature
and causes death. Some of our scientists are engaged in trying to perfect means
for building up the cylinder as fast as the wear and tear of environment breaks
it down; others are seeking to rear embryos to birth with nothing but rays for
covering—-rays incapable of harming the organism, yet immune to dissipation by
environment and incapable of destruction by explosion. So far they have been
unsuccessful; but I have every*confidence in their ultimate triumph. Then we
shall be as immortal as the planet on which we live."
I stared at the cylinder, at the creature
inside the cylinder, at the ceiling, the four walls of the room, and then back
again at the cylinder. I pinched the soft flesh of my thigh with my fingers. I
was awake all right; there could be no doubt about that.
"Are there any questions you would like
to ask?" came the metallic voice.
"Yes,"
I said at last, half fearfully. "What joy can there be in existence for
you? You have no sex; you cannot mate. It seems to me," I hesitated,
"it seems to me that no hell could be greater than centuries of living
caged alive inside that thing you call an envelope. Now I have full command of
my limbs and can go where I please. I can love . . ."
I came to a breathless stop, awed by the
lurid light which suddenly gleamed in, the winkless
eyes. .
"Poor
pre-historic mammal," came the answer, "how could you, groping in the
dawn of human existence, comprehend what is beyond
your lowly environment! Compared to you, we are as gods. No longer are our
loves and hates the reaction of viscera. Our thoughts, our thinking, our
emotions are conditioned, molded to the-extent we control the immediate
environment. There is no such thing as mind—of the . . . But it is impossible
to continue. Your vocabulary is too limited. Your mentality—it is not the word 1 like to use, but as 1 have
repeatedly said, your language is woefully inadequate—has a restricted range of
but a few thousand words. Therefore f cannot
explain further. Only the same lack—in a different fashion, of course, and with
objects instead of words—hinders the free movements of your limbs. You have
command of them, you say. Poor primitive, do you realize how shackled you are
with nothing but your hands and feet! You augment them, of course, with a few
machines; but they are crude and cumbersome. It is you who are caged alive and
not I. I have broken through the walls of your cage; have shaken off its
shackles; have gone free. Behold the command I have of my limbs!"
From
an extended tube shot a streak of white—like a funnel—whose radius was great
enough to encircle my seated body. 1 was
conscious of being scooped up and drawn forward with inconceivable speed. For
one breathless moment f hung suspended against the cylinder itself, the winkless eyes not an inch from my own. In that moment I had
the sensation of being probed, handled. Several times I was revolved, as a man
might twirl a stick. Then I was back in the easy-chair again, white, shaken.
"It
is true that I never leave the envelope in which I am encased," continued
the metallic voice. "But I have
at my command rays which can bring me anything I desire. In Ardathia
are machines—machines it would be useless for me to describe to you—with which
I can walk, fly, move mountains, delve in the earth, investigate the stars, and
loose forces of which you have no conception. Those machines are mechanical
parts of my body, extensions of my limbs. 1 take them off and put them on at will. With their
help I can view one continent while busily employed in another. With their help
I can make time machines, harness rays, and plunge for thirty thousand years
into the past. Let me again illustrate."
The tentacle-like hand of the Ardathian waveda tube. The five foot cylinder glowed with an intense light, spun like a top,
and so spinning, dissolved into space. Even as 1 gaped like one petrified—perhaps twenty seconds elapsed— the cylinder
reappeared with the same rapidity. The metallic voice announced: "I have
just been five years into your future."
"My
future!" f exclaimed. "How can that be when I have not lived it yet?" "But of course you have lived
it." I stared, bewildered.
"Could I visit my past
if you had not lived your future?"
"I
do not understand," I said feebly. "It doesn't seem possible that
while I am here, actually, in this room, you should be able to travel ahead in
time and find out what I shall be doing in a future I haven't reached
yet."
"That
is because you are unable to grasp intelligently what time is. Think of it as a
dimension—a fourth dimension—which stretches like a foad
ahead and behind you."
"But
even then," I protested, "I could only be at one place at a given
time on that road, and not where I am and somewhere else at the same
second."
"You
are never anywhere at any time," replied the metallic voice, "save
always in the past or the future. But I see it is useless to try to acquaint
you with a simple truth, thirty thousand years ahead of your ability to understand
it. As I said, I traveled five years into your future. Men were wrecking this
building."
"Tearing down this place? Nonsense, it
was only erected two.years ago."
"Nevertheless, they were tearing it down. I sent forth my visual ray to
locate you. You were . . ." "Yes, yes," I queried eagerly.
"In a great room with numerous other
men.
They were all doing a variety of odd things. There was . . ."
At that moment, a heavy
knock was heard on the door of.my room.
"What's
the matter, Matthews?" called a loud voice. "What are yqu talking about all this time? Are you sick?"
I
uttered an exclamation of annoyance because I"
recognized the voice of John Peters, a newspaper man who occupied the apartment
next to mine. My first intention was to tell him I was busy, but the next
moment I had a better idea. Here was someone to whom I could show the cylinder,
and the creature inside of it! someone to bear witness
to having seen it besides myself. I hurried to the door and threw it open.
"Quick,"
I said, grasping him by the arm and hauling him into the room. "What do
you think of that?"
"Think of what?" he demanded.
"Why
of that there," I began, pointing with a finger, and then stopping short,
with my mouth wide open; for on the spot where a few seconds before the
cylinder had stood, there was nothing. The envelope and the Ardathian
had disappeared.
Author's Note: The material for this manuscript came into
my hands in an odd fashion. About a year after the press had ceased printing
garbled versions of Matthews' experience, I made the acquaintance of Hodge. I
asked him about Matthews: He said:
"Did
you know they've put him in an asylum? You didn't? Well they have. He's batty
enough now, poor devil. He was always a little queer, I thought.
I
went to see him the other day, and it gave me quite a shock, you know, to see
him in a ward with a lot of other men, all doing something queer. By the way,
Peters told me the other day that the apartment house was to be torn down. The
City is going to remove several houses along the Lake Shore to widen the
boulevard. He says they won't wreck them for three or four years yet. Funny eh? Would you like to see what Matthews wrote about
the affair himself?"
I
would; and did. And like Matthews, I submit the story to the reading public herewith,
and leave it to them to draw their own conclusions.
^7fie C^at- WJoman
by ^VYiurij. ^Kizabetli Counielman
Mary Elizabeth Counselman achieved an unexpected fame when a storm of reader applause greeted the publishing of a short "filler" story about three marked pennies and'the fates that befell their owners. She has a \nac\ for touching the emotional springs that lie deep in men and women. The tale we now publish is such in question, a tender little account of a curious encounter.
HE first I heard of the strange Mademoiselle
Chatte-Blanche (f shall call her this as 1 can not remember her real name) was that incoherent,
absurd tale told me by the landlady.
"She
ain't like us," the old ladiy
insisted, glancing fearfully over her shoulder and speaking in a low tone.
"A furriner, she is, and a quare
one! I don't like the looks of 'er. Them eyes of hers are full of
evil!"
f
suppressed a smile. "Oh now, Mrs. Bates—not that bad, is she?" I said
soothingly. "And you say she lives right across the hall from me, huh?
I'm, looking forward to meeting the lady."
"You'll
come to no good, Mr. Harper, if you have any truck with the likes o' her!"
the old lady warned, and waddled off, shaking her -head slowly.
ft was not until the second night after moving
into Bates Boarding House that I really saw the lady. I had come in rather late
from a show and was fumbling with my door-key, when a slight noise behind me
caused me to turn quickly and straighten up.
A
woman, a tall and beautifully formed woman, stood in the half-open doorway
across from mine. She was very fair, with a straight ash-blond bob that fitted
close to her head. There was something about her—f could not place it, unless
it was her perfectly round green eyes—that reminded me immediately of a cat.
1 swept off my hat with an unwonted
nervousness, and murmured some sort of apology <£or disturbing her. She did
not answer me at all, but merely stood there staring at me in the dimly lighted
hall with those large cat-like eyes. I opened my mouth to speak again, closed
it foolishly, and turned, red with discomfiture, to fumble again with my lock.
Suddenly behind me I heard a gentle but quite
audible "pr-rrr" like the
40
whir of an electric fan, though not as loud.
Glancing over my shoulder I noticed that the strange woman had gone back into
her room, although she must have moved very quietly for me not to have heard
her.
In
her half-open door stood a large white cat, and it was its purring which I had
noticed.
"Hello, kitty!" I murmured, holding out a hand.
The
animal seemed very friendly, for it came to me at onie
and rubbed against my legs, still purring loudly. I petted it a moment, then unlocking my door at last, I stepped inside, closed the
door, and switched on my light. Glancing down I found that the cat had slipped
in while I was not looking.
Scratching
its head in a way cats love, I carried it across the
hall, and knocked timidly. There was no answer. I knocked again, then twice
more, loudly. Still there was no answer. The lady must be out, or perhaps
asleep, I told myself; and opening the door slightly I put the cat inside and
shut it within. Then I returned to my room and went to bed.
I
was wakened some hours later by something heavy on my feet. Sitting up and
feeling about the covers, I touched something warm and furry. I switched on the
bed lamp quickly, to find the white cat curled up contentedly on my feet. It
must have come in through the window. Smiling slightly I went back to sleep,
promising myself to return it to my queer neighbor in the morning.
Early the next day I knocked at the door, and
receiving no answer put the cat inside as on the previous night. It was not
until I was leaving for the office that I noticed with a start that all my
windows were closed, as they must have been all night. I was sure, too, that my
door had been locked against a chance thief. How, then, had the white cat
gained admittance?
I
was still wondering about this when I came home from the office. Mrs. Bates was
dusting the stairs, and I paused a moment to speak to her. She mentioned again
my queer neighbor, warning me to "keep shy" of her.
I
smiled. "I saw her last night coming out of her door. Good-looking, isn't
she?" The landlady shook her head ominously and cast her eyes toward
heaven. "And she has a beautiful white cat," I added.
Mrs.
Bates stiffened. "Cat?" she snapped. "I don't allow no pets kept in the boarders' rooms! I'll have to speak to
her about that."
The
front door opened just at this point and my strange neighbor came in. I was
impressed once more with her odd beauty, the feline grace in her every motion. The word came inevitably to my mind—she
reminded me so much of-a sleek, well-fed cat.
"I'm told you keep a cat in your room,
miss," began the landlady un-
pleasantly. "I thought you knew the rule---------- "
Mademoiselle
Chatte-Blanche turned her round green eyes upon Mrs.
Bates in that disturbing unwinking stare of hers.
"I haf no cat," she said.
Her voice was a purring, throaty contralto,
very pleasant, with a slight accent—not French, not anything I had ever heard.
The landlady
scowled. "But Mr. Harper here just tells me----- "
"I'm
sorry," I broke in hastily. "It must have been a stray cat. I saw it
in
your doorway, and naturally I thought----- " I floundered helplessly.
That
fixed
green stare made me forget what I was trying to say.
"It
iss all r-right," she murmured, and went
upstairs to her room without another word. I followed suit in a moment; and
there in the open door she stood as if waiting for me, motionless, silent,
fixing me with her unwinking eyes.
"I'm terribly sorry," I began
again, trying not to meet that disconcerting
cat-like gaze. "You see, I put the cat----- "
Suddenly
she moved toward me, closing her eyes slightly like a pleased cat—and to my
utter consternation, rubbed her head gently against my shoulder!
My
first thought was that this was merely an amusing trick of a clever
street-woman, the advances of a fille de joie a little less blatant than those of her
boldly dressed, loud-voiced sisters.
Then
suddenly the feeling swept over me like a cold draft that she was not a woman
at all, that she was not even a mortal^-Z^fl/ she was a cat!
Moreover,
as f drew myself away from her and entered my room queerly shaken, I could
have sworn I heard, from the depths of that pale throat, the purring of a cat!
f strode
across the room and stood a moment staring out the window, trying to collect my
scattered wits, when I felt something rubbing against my ankle. It was the
white cat, arching its furry back and purring loudly.
I
was in no mood just then for anything resembling a cat, but its gentle wiles
won me in spite of myself and f began
playing with it. I rolled a ball of cord across the room and the animal bounded
after it, tapping it playfully. Soon I had forgotten my upsetting encounter
with Mademoiselle Chatte-. Blanche and was having
quite a time with my furry visitor, when our romp was interrupted by a rap on my
door and a familiar call, announcing Mrs. Bates.
As she came in, her smile vanished. "Oh,
this is your white cat, eh? I never liked the critters. . . . Scat!"
As the animal crouched motionless with fear,
the old lady seized it quickly by the scruff of its neck and dropped it from my
window into the muddy alley below. "There! Maybe it'll go away now."
She
talked for a moment, collected her rent, and was standing in my open door for a
parting word, when beyond her in the hall 1 saw Mademoiselle Chatte-Blanche.
She was strangely
disheveled and spattered with mud; and she was directing upon the landlady's
back such a look of concentrated hate that I shivered. Only a moment she stood
thus; then she had disappeared into her room.
Next
morning at breakfast (I ate alone, as I had to leave earlier than the other
boarders) I noticed that Mrs. Bates' face was all but hidden behind a network
of adhesive plaster, and bright red spots of mercurochrome.
"Why
. . . why, what's the matter with your face?" I asked with concern as she
served my breakfast.
"A
cat got in my room last night," she wailed. "That big white one, it
was! It jumped on me in bed and scratched me up terrible afore I could chase it
out. I tried to kill it with the broom, but it got away. I never did like a cat
. . . mean critters, they are! . . ." She prattled on until I left for the . olfice.
•
It was two days later that I saw Mademoiselle
Chatte-Blanche again. I confess I had avoided her in
the hall; and as our meal hours were different, we had no occasion to meet. But
on this afternoon she was standing in her door as usual, watching me as I came
down the hall. Sensing that she was likely to repeat her disconcerting
cat-caress, I nodded curtly and went straight into my room, stumbling over
something soft as I did so.
There
was the white cat again, purring and rubbing against my legs affectionately.
Something impelled me to glance back where the woman across the hall had been
standing, with an uncanny knowledge that she was there no longer.
She was gone.
I shut my door with a creepy feeling, which
the pranks of the white cat
soon dispelled, however. We played together for a while, when our romp was
again interrupted by the voice and knock of Mrs. Bates. g
The
cat seemed to know it was she, for it fluffed up its long fur and hissed
angrily. Then it turned as if frightened and leaped out of the open window. It
was a second-story window—not a pleasant jump, even for a cat. I glanced down
to see if the animal had landed safely—just in time to see a huge mongrel dash
down the alley and pounce upon my unfortunate pet.
The
cat fought furiously, but it had not a chance against the big dog. I saw the
mongrel snap twice at my little friend, heard the kitten give an odd cry of
anguish—a cry that sounded far more human than feline. A moment later, Mrs.
Bates and I saw the limp, blood-spattered form of the white cat lying very
still in the muddy alley.
And
somehow, it has always seemed to me something more than a mere coincidence that
on that very day Mademoiselle Chatte-Blanche disappeared
mysteriously as smoke, without a word of farewell—and, as Mrs. Bates reiterated
plaintively, without even paying her rent. And strangely, she left behind all
her personal belongings (from which Mrs. Bates managed to collect slightly more
than her rent, though she would never have admitted
MARY ELIZABETH COUNSELMAN
it).
All her clothes, hats, shoes, toilet articles, every little personal belonging,
our lady left behind her . . . and an absurd thing the landlady remarked upon
at length curiously; a foolish plaything fond old maids fashion for their
cats—a small worsted mouse stuffed with catnip.
^Jlie *¥FJun with a ^Jlioudund dle^A by Jranh d^efhnap oCong, ^r.
Although more than twenty years have passed since The Man with a Thousand Legs appeared, wc would venture to doubt that the plot has ever been repeated, or that anything quite li\e it for eeriness of conception will be found often today. In those early days, no formulae for fantasy had been beaten out, and a young writer such as Long could stri\e out in channels such as simply would not occur to today's authors who generally find U easier to travel the well-worn plot ruts rather than stride out into imagination's more uncharted regions.
i
1. Statement of Horace Randall, Psychoanalyst
CamHv' OMEONE
rapped loudly on the door of my bedroom. It was past midnight but I had been
unable to sleep and I welcomed the disturbance. "Who's there?" I
asked.
"A
young man what insists on being admitted, sir," replied the raucous voice
of my housekeeper. "A young man—and very thin and pale he is, sir— what
says he's business what won't wait. 'He's in bed,' I says, but then he says as how you're the only doctor what
can help him now- He says as how he hasn't slept or ate for a week, and he ain't nothing but a boy, sir!"
"Tell
him he can come in," I replied as I slid into my dressing gown and reached
for a cigar.
The
door opened to admit a thin shaft of light and a young man so incredibly
emaciated that I stared at him in horror. He was six feet tall and extremely
broad-shouldered, but I don't think he weighed one hundred pounds. As he
approached me he staggered and leaned against the wall for support. His eyes
fairly blazed. It was obvious that some tremendous idea swayed him. I gently
indicated a chair and he collapsed into it.
For
a moment he sat and surveyed me. When I offered him a cigar he brushed it aside
with a gesture of contempt.
"Why
should I poison my body with such things?" he snapped. "Tobacco is
for weaklings and children." "
I studied him curiously. He was apparently an
extraordinary young man. His forehead was hfgh and
broad, his nose was curved like a scimitar, and his lips were so tightly
compressed that only a thin line indicated his mouth.
I
waited for him to speak, but silence enveloped him like a rubber jacket.
"I shall have to break the ice somehow,". I
reflected; and then suddenly I heard myself asking: "You have something to
tell me—some confession, perhaps, that you wish to make to me?"
My
question aroused him. His shoulders jerked, and he leaned forward, gripping
both arms of his chair. "I have been robbed of my birthright," he
said, "I am a man of genius, and once, for a brief moment, I had power—■
tremendous power. Once I projected my personality before vast multitudes of
people, and every word that I uttered increased my fame and flattered my
vanity."
He
was trembling and shaking so violently that I was obliged to rise and lay a
restraining hand upon his shoulder. "Delusions of magnificence," I
murmured, "undoubtedly induced by a malignant inferiority-complex."
"ft is not that," he snapped.
"I am a poet, an artist, and I have within me a tremendous force that must
be expanded. The world has denied me self-expression through legitimate
channels and now 1 am justified in hating the world. Let society
beware!"
He
threw back his head and laughed. His hilarity seemed to increase the tension
that had somehow crept into the room.
"Call
me a madman if you will," he exclaimed, "but I crave power. I can not
rest until my name is on a million lips."
"A conservative course of treatment--- "
f began.
"I want no treatment," he shouted,
and then, in a less agitated voice, "You would be surprised, perhaps, if f
told you my name!" "What is your
name?" I asked. "Arthur St. Amand," he
replied, and stood up.
1 was so astonished that f dropped my cigar, f may even add that I was momentarily awed. Arthur St. Amand!
"Arthur St. Amand,"
he repeated. "You are naturally amazed to discover that the pale, harassed
and half-insane youth that you see before you was once called the peer of
Newton and Leonardo Da Vinci. You are amazed to
discover that the starving lad with an inferiority-complex was once feted x by
kings and praised by men whose lightest words will go thundering down 'Time. It
is all so amazing and so uproariously funny, but the tragedy remains. Like Dr.
Faustus f once looked upon the face of God, and now f'm less than any schoolboy."
"You
are still very young," f gasped. "You can't be more than
twenty-four." "I am twenty-three," he said. "It was
precisely three years ago that I published my brochure on etheric
vibrations. For six months I lived in a blaze
of glory. I was the marvelous boy of the
scientific world, and then that
Frenchman advanced his theory----- "
"1
suppose you mean Monsieur Paul Rondoli,"
T interrupted. "I recall the sensation his startling refutation made at
the time. He Completely eclipsed you in the popular
mind, and later the scientific world declared you a fraud. Your star set very
suddenly."
"But
it will rise again," exclaimed my young visitor. "The world will
discuss me again, and this time I shall not he
forgotten. I shall prove my theory. I shall demonstrate that the effect of etheric vibration on single cells
is to~ change—to change —." He hesitated and then suddenly shouted, "But
no, I
shall not tell you. I shall tell no one. I came here tonight to unburden my
mind to you. At first I thought of going to a priest. It is necessary that I
should confess to someone.
"When
my thoughts are driven in upon themselves they become monstrous. I have an
active and terrible brain^ and I must speak out occasionally. I chose you
because you are a man of intelligence and discrimination and you have heard
many confessions. But T shall not discuss etheric
vibrations with you. When you see It you will understand."
He
turned abruptly and walked out of the room and out of my house without once
looking back. I never saw him again.
2. Diary of Thomas Shiel, Novelist and Short-Story Writer
July 21. This
is my fourth day at the beach. I've already gained three pounds, and I'm so sunbaked that I frightened a little girl when I went
swimming this morning. She was building sand castles and when she saw me she
dropped her shovel and ran shrieking to her mother. "Horrible black
man!" she shouted. I "suppose she thought I was a genie out of the Arabian Nights. It's pleasant here—I've almost got the evil taste of New York out of my
mouth. Elsie's coming down for the week-end.
July 22. The little girl I frightened yesterday has disappeared. The police are
searching for her and it is generally believed that she has been kidnaped. The unfortunate occurrence has depressed everyone
at the beach. All bathing parties have been abandoned, and even the children sit
about sad-eyed and dejected. No footprints were found on the sands near the
spot where the child was last seen. . . .
July 23. Another child has disappeared, and this time the abductor left a clue. A
young man's walking stick and hat were found near the scene of a violent
struggle. The sand for -yards around was stained with blood. Several mothers
left the New Beach Hotel this morning with their children.
July 24. Elsie came this morning. A new crime occurred
at the very moment of her arrival, and 1 scarcely
had the heart to explain the situation to her. My paleness evidently frightened her.
"What is the matter?" she asked; "you look ill." "I am
ill," I replied. "I saw something dreadful on the beach this
morning." "Good heavens!" she exclaimed; "have they found
one of the children?" It was a great relief to me that she had read about
the children in the New York papers. "No," I said. "They didn't
find the children, but they found the body of a man and he- didn't have a drop
of blood in him. He had been drained dry. And all about his body the
investigators found curious little mounds of yellowish slime—of ooze. When the
sunlight struck this substance it glittered." "Has it been examined
under a microscope?" asked Elsie. "They are examining it now,"
I explained. "We shall know the results by this evening." "God
pity lis all," said Elsie, and she staggered and
nearly fell. I was obliged to support her as we entered the hotel.
July 25. Two curious developments. The chemist who examined the jellyish
substance found near the body on the beach declares that it is living protoplasm,
and he has sent it to the Department of Health for classification by one of
their expert- biologists. And a deep pool some eight yards in diameter has been
discovered in a rock fissure about a mile from the New Beach Hotel, which
evidently harbors some queer denizens. The water in this pool is as black as
ink and strongly saline. The pool is eight or ten feet from the ocean, but it
is affected by the tides and descends a foot every night and morning. This
morning one of the guests of the hotel, a young lady named Clara Phillips, had
come upon the pool quite by accident, and being fascinated by its sinister
appearance had decided to sketch it. She had seated herself on the rim of the rock
fissure and was in the act of sketching in several large boulders and a strip
of beach when something made a curious noise beneath her. "Gulp," it
said. "Gulp!" She gave a little cry and
jumped up just in time to escape a long golden tentacle which slithered toward
her over the rocks. The tentacle protruded from the very center of the pool,
out of the black water, and it filled her with unutterable loathing. She
stepped quickly forward and stamped upon it, and her attack was so sudden that
the thing was unable to flip away from her and escape back into the water. And
Miss Phillips was an amazingly strong young woman. She ground the end of the
tentacle into a bloody pulp with her heel. Then she turned and ran. She ran as
she had not run since her "prep" school days. But as she raced across
the soft beach she fancied she could hear a monstrous, lumbering something
pursuing her. It is to her credit that she did not look back.
And
this is the story of little Harry Doty. I offered him a beautiful new dime, but
he told it to me gratis. I give it in
his own words.
"Yes
sir, I've always knowed about that pool. I used to
fish for crabs and sea-cucumbers and big, purple anemones in it, sir. But up
until last week I alius knowed
what I'd bring up. Onct or twice I used to get scSmethin' a bit out o' the ordinary, such as a bleedin'-tooth shell or a headless worm with green suckers in its tail and lookin' like the devil on a Sunday outin'
or a knowin'-lookin' skate what ud
glare and glare at me, sir. But never nothin' like this thing, sir. I caught it on the top o' its head and
it had the most human-lookin' eyes I ever saw. They
were blue and soulless, sir. It spat at me, and I throws
down my line and beats it. I beats it, sir. Then I hears it come lumbering after me over the beach. It made a
funny gulpin' noise as if it was a-lickin' its chops."
July 26. Elsie and I are leaving tomorrow. I'm on the verge of a lethal collapse.
Elsie stutters whenever she tries to talk, f don't blame her for stuttering but f can't understand why she wants to talk at all after what we've seen. . .
There are some things that can only be expressed by silence.
The
local chemist got a report -this morning from the Board of Health. The stuff
found on the beach consisted of hundreds of cells very much like the cells that
compose the human body. And yet they weren't human cells. The biologists were
completely mystified by ' them, and a small culture is now on its way to
Washington, and another is being sent to the American Museum of Natural
History.
This
morning the local authorities investigated the curious black pool in the rocks.
Elsie and T and most of the other vacationists were
on hand to watch operations. Thomas Wilshire, a member of the New Jersey
constabulary, threw a plummet line into the pool and we all watched it eagerly
as it paid out. "A hundred feet," murmured Elsie as the police looked
at one another in amazement, "ft probably went into the sea," someone
exclaimed. "1
don't think the pool itself is that deep."
Thomas Wilshire shook his head. "There's queer things
in that pool," he said. "1 don't
like the looks of it."
The
diver was a bristling, brave little man with some obscure nervous affliction
that made him tremble violently. "You'll have to go down at once,"
said Wilshire. The diver shook his head and shuffled his feet.
"Get
him into his suit, boys!" ordered Wilshire, and the poor wretch was lifted
bodily upon strong shoulders and transformed into a loathsome, goggle-eyed
monster.
fn a
moment he had advanced to the pool and vanished into its sinister black depths.
Two men worked valiantly at the pumps, while Wilshire nodded sleepily and
scratched his chin. "I wonder what he'll find," he mused.
"Personally, I don't think he's got much chance of ever coming up. f wouldn't be in his shoes for all the money in the United States
mint."
After
several minutes the rubber tubing began to jerk violently. "The.poor lad!" muttered Wilshire. "I knew he
didn't have a chance. Pull, boys, pull!"
The
tubing was rapidly pulled in. There was nothing attached to it, but the lower
portion was covered with glittering golden slime. Wilshire picked up the
severed end and examined it casually. "Neatly clipped," he said. "The poor devil!"
The rest of us looked at one another in
horror. Elsie grew so pale that I thought she was about to faint. Wilshire was
speaking again: "We've made one momentous discovery," he said. We
crammed eagerly forward. Wilshire paused for the fraction of a second, and a faint smile of triumph curled his lips.
"There's something in that pool," he finished. "Our friend's
life has not been given in vain."
I had an absurd desire to punch his fat,
triumphant face, and might have done so, but a scream from the others quelled
the impulse.
"Look,"
cried Elsie. She was pointing at the black surface of the pool. It was changing
color. Slowly it was assuming a reddish hue; and then a hellish something shot
up and bobbed for a moment on its surface. "A human arm!" groaned
Elsie and hid her face in her hands. Wilshire whistled softly. Two more objects
joined the first and then something round which made Elsie stare and stare
through the spaces between her fingers.
"Come
away!" I commanded. "Come away at once." I seized her by the arm
and was in the act of forcefully leading her from the edge of that dreadful
charnel, for charnel it had become, when I was arrested by a shout from
Wilshire.
"Look at it! Look at it!" he
yelled. "That's the horrid thing. God, it isn't human!"
We both turned back and stared. There are
blasphemies of creation that can not be' described,
and the thing which rose up to claim the escaping fragments of its dismantled
prey was of that order. I remember vaguely, as in a nightmare of Tartarus, that it had long golden arms which.shone
and sparkled in the sunlight, and a monstrous curved beak below two piercing
black eyes in which I saw nothing but unutterable malice.
The
idea of standing there and watching it munch the fragmentary remains of the
poor little diver was intolerable to me, and in spite of the loud protests of
Wilshire, who wanted us, I suppose, to try and do something about it, I turned
and ran, literally dragging Elsie with me. This was, as it turned out, the
wisest thing that I could have done, because the thing later emerged from the
pool and nearly got several of the vacationists. Wilshire
fired at it twice with a pistol, but the thing flopped back into the water
apparently unharmed and submerged triumphantly.
3. Statement of Henry Greb, Prescription Druggist
I usually shut up shop at 10 o'clock, but at
closing time, that evening I was leaning over the counter reading a ghost
story, and it was so extremely interesting that I couldn't walk out on it. My
nose was very close to the page and I didn't notice anything that was going on
about me when suddenly I happened to look up and there he was standing and
watching me.
I've seen some pale people in my time (most
people that come with prescriptions are pale) and I've seen some skinny
people, but I never have -seen anyone as thin and pale as the young man that
stood before me. "Good heavens!" f said, and shut the book.
The
young man's lips were twisted into a sickly smile. "Sorry to bother
you," he says. "But f'm
in a bad way. f'm in
desperate need of medical attention!"
"What can I do to.
help you?" I says.
He
looks at me very solemnly, as if he were making up his mind whether he could
trust me. "This is really a case for a physician," he says.
"It's against the law
for us to handle such cases," f told him.
Suddenly
he held out his hand, f gasped. The fingers were smashed into a bloody pulp,
and blood was running down his wris.t. "Do
something to stop the bleeding," he says. "I'll see a physician
later."
Well,
I got out some gauze and bound the hand up as best I could. "See a doctor
at once," I told him. "Blood-poisoning will set in if you're not careful.
Luckily, none of the-bones are fractured."
He
nodded, and for a moment his eyes flashed. "Damn that woman!" he
muttered. "Damn her!"
"What's
that?" f asked, but he had got himself together again and merely smiled.
"I'm all upset," he said. "Didn't know just what I was
saying—you must pardon me. By the way, I've got a little gash on my scalp which
you might look at."
He
removed his cap and I noticed that his hair was dripping wet. He parted it with
his hand and revealed a nasty abrasion about an inch wide. I examined it
carefully.
"Your
friend wasn't very careful when he cast that plug," I says
at length. "I never believe in fly-fishing when there's
two in the boat. A friend of mine lost an eye that way."
"ft was made by a fish-hook," he confessed. "You're something of a
Sherlock Holmes, aren't you?"
f
brushed aside his compliment with a careless gesture and turned for the bottle
of carbolic acid which rested on the shelf behind me. ft was then that I heard something between a growl
and a gulp from the young man.
f
wheeled abruptly, and caught him in the act of springing upon me. He was
foaming at the mouth and his eyes bulged. I reached forward and seized him by
the shoulders and in a moment we were engaged in a desperate struggle upon the
floor. He bit and scratched and kicked at me; and I was obliged to silence him
by pummeling his face. It was at that moment that I noticed a peculiar fishy
odor in the room, as if a breeze from the sea had entered through the open
door.
For
several moments 1 struggled and fought and strained and then something seemed
to give suddenly beneath me. The young man slipped from my grasp and made for
the door. I endeavored to follow, but I stumbled over something slippery and
fell flat upon my face.
When
I got up, the young man was gone, and in my hand I held something so weird
that I could scarcely believe that it was real, and later I flung it from me
with a cry of disgust. It was a reddish, rubbery substance about five inches
long, and its under edge was lined with' little golden
suckers that opened and closed while I stared at them.
I was still laboring under a fearful strain
when Harry Morton entered the shop. He was trembling violently, and I noticed
that he gazed fearfully behind him as he approached the counter.
"What's the best thing you have for
highfalutin-acting nerves?" he asks.
"Bromides,"
I says. "I can mix you some. But what's the
trouble with your nerves, Harry?"
"Hallucinations," he groans. "Them, and other things."
"Tell me about
it," I says.
"I
was leanin' 'gainst a
lamppost," he says, "and-1 sees
a big lumbering yellowish thing walkin' along the
street like a man. It wasn't natural, Henry. I'm not superstitious, but that
there thing wasn't natural. And then it flops into the gutter and runs like a
streak of lightnin'. It made a funny noise, too. It
said 'Gulp.' "
I
mixed the bromides and handed him the glass over the counter. "I understand,
Harry," I says. "But don't go about blowing
your head off. No one would believ* you."
4. Statement oj Helen Bowan
I was sitting on the porch knitting when a
young man with a bag stops in front of the house and looks up at me. "Good
morning, madam," he says, "have you a room with
bath?"
"Look
at the sign, young man," I says to him. "I've a nice light room on
the second floor that should just suit you."
Up
he comes and smiles at me. But as soon as I saw him close I didn't like him. He
was so terribly thin, and his hand was bandaged, and he looked as if he had
been in a fight.
"How much do you want
for the room?" he asks.
"Twelve
dollars," I told him. I wanted to get rid of him and I thought the high
rate would scare him off, but his hand goes suddenly into his pocket and he
brings out a roll of bills, and begins counting them. I gets
up very quickly and bows politely to him and takes his grip away from him, and
rushes into the hall with it. I didn't want to lose a prospect like that.
Cousin Hiram has a game which he plays with shells, and I knew that the young
man would be Cousin Hiram's oyster.
I takes him upstairs
and shows him the room and he seems quite pleased with it. But when he sees the
bathtub he begins jumping up and down like a schoolboy, and clapping his hands
and acting so odd that I begins to suspect that he is
going out of his mind. "It's just the right size!" he shouts. "I
hope you won't mind my keeping it filled all day. I bathe quite often. But I
must have some salt to put into it. I can't bathe in fresh water!"
"He's
certainly a queer one," I thought, "but I ain't
complaining. It isn't often, Hiram and I land a fish as rich as this one."
Finally
he calms down and pushes me out of the room. "Everything's all
right," he says. "But I don't want to be disturbed. When you get the
salt, put it down in the hall and knock on the door. Under no circumstances
must anyone enter this room."
He
closed the door in my face and I heard the key grate in the lock. I didn't like
it, and I didn't like the sounds that began to come from behind that door.
First I heard a great sigh as if somehow he had got something disagreeable off
his chest, and then I heard a funny gulping sound that I didn't like. He didn't
waste any time in turning on the water either. I heard a great splashing and
wallowing, and then, after about fifteen minutes, everything became as quiet
as death.
We
didn't hear anything more from him until that evening, when I sent Lizzie up
with the salt. At first she tried the door, but it was locked, and she was
obliged to put the bag down in the hall. But she didn't go away. She squeezed
up close against thé wall and waited. After about ten
minutes the door opened slowly and a long, thin arm shot out and took in the
bag. Lizzie said that the arm was yellow and dripping wet,
and the thinnest arm she had ever seen. "But he's a thin young man,
Lizzie," I explains to her. "That may be," she says, "but I
never saw a human being with an arm like that before!"
Later, along about 10 o'clock I should say, I
was sitting in the parlor sewing when I felt something wet land on my hand. I
looked up and the ceiling was dripping red. I mean just what I say. The ceiling
was all moist and dripping red.
I jumped up and.ran out into the hall. I
wanted to scream, but I bit my lips until the blood begins running down my chin
and that makes me sober and determined. "That young man must go," I says to myself. "I can't have anything that isn't
proper going on in this house."
I climbs the stairs looking as grim as death and
pounds on the young man's door. "I won't stand for whatever's going on in
there!" I shouted. "Open that door."
I heard something flopping about inside, and
then the young man speaking to himself in a very low
voice. "Its demands are insatiable. The vile, hungry beast! Why doesn't it
think of something besides its stomach? I didn't want it to come then. But it
doesn't need the ray now. When its appetite is aroused it changes without trie ray. God, but I had a hard time getting back! Longer and longer between!"
Suddenly he seemed to hear the pounding. His
queer chattering stops and I hear the key turn in the lock. The door opens ever
so slightly and his face looks out at me. He is horrible to look at. His cheeks
are sunken and there are big horrid rings under his eyes. There is a bandage
tied about his head.
"I
want you to leave at once," I tells him.
"There's queer things going on here and I can't stand for queer things.
You've got to leave."
He
sighed and nodded. "It's just as well perhaps," he says. "I was
thinking of going anyway. There are rats here."
.
"Rats!" f gasped. But I wasn't really surprised. 1 knew there were rats in the house. They made life miserable for me. I
was never able to get rid of them. Even the cats feared them.
"I can't stand rats," he continues,
"f'm packing up—clearing out now." He shuts
the door in my face and I hears him throwing his
things into a bag. Then the door opens again and he cbmes
out on the landing. He is terribly pale, and he leans against the wall to
catch himself, and then he starts descending the stairs.
I watches him as he goes down, and when he reaches the first
landing he staggers and leans against the wall. Then he seems to grow shorter
and he goes down the last flight three steps at a time.-Then he makes a running
leap toward the door. I never saw anyone get through a door so quick, and I begins to suspect that he's done something that he's ashamed
of.
So
I turns about and goes into the room. When f looks at
the floor I nearly faints. It's all slippery and wet,
and seven dead rats are lying on their backs in the center of the room. And
they are the palest-looking rats I've ever seen. Their noses and tails are pure
white and they looks as if they didn't have a drop of blood in them. And then 1 goes into the alcove and looks at the bathtub. I won't tell you what I
see there. But you remember what I says about the
ceiling downstairs? I says it was dripping red, and
the alcove wasn't so very different.
I gets out of that room as quick as I can, and f shuts and
locks the door; and then I goes downstairs and telephones to Cousin Hiram.
"Come right over, Hiram," I says.
"Something^ terrible has been here!"
5. Statement of Walter Noyes, Lighthouse Keeper
I was pretty well done up. I'd been polishing
the lamps all afternoon, and there were calluses on my hands as big as hen's
eggs. I went up into the tower and shut myself in and got out a book that I'd
been reading off and on for a week, ft was a translation of the Arabian Nights- by
a fellow named Lang. Imaginative stuff like that is a great comfort to a chap
when he's shut up by himself away off on the rim of the world, and I always
enjoyed reading about Schemselnihar and Deryabar and the young King of the Black fsles.
f
was reading the first part of The King cff the Blacky Isles and
had reached the sentence: "And then the youth drew away his robe and the
Sultan perceived with horror that he was a man only to his waist, and from
thence to his feet he had been changed into marble," when 1 happened to look toward the window.
An icy south wind was driving the rain
furiously against the panes, and at first I saw nothing but a translucent
glitter on the wet glass and vaguely beyond that the gleaming turmoil of dark,
enormous waves. Then a dazzling and indescribable shape flattened itself
against the window and blotted out the black sea and sky. I gasped and jumped
up.
"A monstrous squid!" I muttered. "The storm must have blown
it ashore. That tentacle will smash the glass if I don't do something."
I
reached for my slicker and hat and in a moment I was descending the spiral
stairway three steps at a time. Before emerging into the storm I armed myself
with a revolver and the contents of a tumbler of strong Jamaica rum.
f paused for a moment in the doorway and
stared about me. But from
where I stood I could see nothing but the tall gray boulders fringing the
southern extremity of the island and a stretch of heaving and rolling water.
The rain beat against my face and nearly blinded me, and a deep murmur
arose from the intolerable wash of the waves. Before me lay only a furious
and tortured immensity; behind my back was the warmth and security of my
miniature castle, a mellow pipe and a book of valiant stories—but 1 couldn't
ignore the menace of the loathsome shape that had pressed itself against the
glass. ,
f
descended three short steps to the rocks and made my way rapidly toward the
rear of the lighthouse. Drops of rain more acrid than tears ran down my cheeks
and into my mouth and dripped from the corners of my mustache. The overpowering
darkness clung like a leech to my clothes. I hadn't gone twenty paces before I
came upon a motionless figure.
'At first f saw. nothing but the head and shoulders of a
well-shaped man; but as I drew cautiously nearer I collided with something that
made me cry out in terror. A hideous tentacle shot out and wound itself about
my leg.
With
a startled cry f turned and attempted to run. But out of the macro-carpus darkness leaped another slimy arm, and another. My
fingers tightened on the revolver in my pocket, f whipped it out and opened
fire on the writhing brutes.
The
report of my gun echoed from the surrounding boulders. A sudden, shrill scream
of agony broke the comparative quiet that followed. Then there came a voluble,
passionate pleading. "Don't shoot again! Please don't! I'm done up. I was
done up when I came here, and I wanted help! I didn't intend to harm you.
Before God, I didn't intend that they should
attack you. But I can't control 'em now. They're too
much for me. It's too much for me. Pity me'!"
For a moment I was too dazed to think. I
stared stupidly at the smoking revolver in my hand and then my eyes sought the
cataclysmic ocean. The enormous waves calmed me. Slowly I brought my eyes to
bear on the thing before me.
But even as I stared at it my brain reeled
again, and a deadly nausea came upon me.
"And then the youth drew away his robe
and the Sultan perceived that he was a man only to h'is
waist ..."
Several feet from where I stood, a monstrous
jelly spread itself loathsomely over the dripping rocks, and from its veined
central mass a thousand tentacles depended and writhed like the serpents on the
head of Medusa. And growing from the middle of this obscenity was the torso and
head of a naked young man. His hair was matted and covered with sea-weed; and
there were bloodstains upon his high, white forehead. His nose was so sharp
that it reminded me of a sword and I momentarily expected to see it glitter in
the dim, mysterious light. His teeth chattered so loudly that I could hear
them from where I stood; and as I stared and stared at him he coughed violently
and foamed at the lips.
"Whisky!" he
muttered. "I'm all done up! I ran into a ship!"
I
was unable to speak, but I believe I made some strange noises in my throat. The
young man nodded hysterically.
"I knew you'd understand," he
muttered. "I'm up against it, but I knew
you'd help me pull through. A glass of whisky----- "
"How
did that thing get you?" I shrieked. I had found my voice at last, and was
determined to fight my way back to sanity. "How did that thing get its
loathsome coils on you?"
"It didn't get
me," groaned the young man. "I'm It!"
"You're what?"
"A part of //,"
replied the young man.
"Isn't
that thing swallowing you?" I screamed at him. "Aren't you going down
into its belly at this moment?"
The
young man sadly shook his head. "It's part of
me," he said again, and then, more wildly, "I must have something to
brace me up! I'm all in. I was swimming on the surface, and a ship came and cut
off six of my legs. I'm weak from loss of blood, and I can't stand."
A
lean hand went up and brushed the water from battered eyes. "A few of 'em are still lively," he said, "and I can't
control 'em. They nearly got you ■—but the
others are all in. I can't walk on 'em."
With as much boldness as I could muster I
raised my revolver and advanced upon the thing. "I don't know what you're
talking about," I cried. "But I'm going to blow this monster to
atoms."
"For
heaven's sake don't!" he shrieked. "That would be murder. We're a
human being."
A
flash of scarlet fire answered him. Almost unconsciously f had pressed upon the
trigger, and now my weapon was speaking again. "I'll blow it to
tatters!" I muttered between my teeth. "The vile,
crawling devil!"
"Don't!
don't!" shrieked the young man, and then an
unearthly yell made the night obscene. I saw the thing before me quiver in all
its folds, and then it suddenly rose up and towered above me. Blood spurted
from its huge, bloated body, and a crimson shower descended upon me. High above
me, a hundred feet in the air", f saw the pale, agonized face of the young
man. Ffe was screaming blasphemies. He appeared to be
walking on stilts. "You can't kill me," he yelled. "I'm stronger
than I thought. I'll win out yet."
I
raised my revolver to fire again, but before f could take aim the thing swept
by me and plunged into the sea. ft was perhaps fortunate for me that f did not attempt to
follow it. My knees gave beneath me
and f fell flat upon my face. When I came to so far as to be able to speak 1 found myself between clean white sheets and staring into the puzzled
blue eyes of a government inspector.
"You've
had a nasty time of it, lad," he said. "We had to give you stimulants.
Didja have a shock of a sort?"
"Of a sort,-yes," I replied.
"But it came out of the Arabian Nights."
6. The Marvelous Boy
[Curious Manuscript Found in a Bottle]
f was the marvelous boy. My genius amazed the world. A magnificent
mind, a sublime destiny! My enemies . . . combined to ruin me. A punctured
balloon . . .
A
little box, and f put a dog under it. He changed . . .
Jelly! Etheric vibrations generate curious changes in
living cells . . . Process starts and nothing can stop it. Growth! Enormous growth!
Keeps sending out shoots— legs! arms! Marvelous
growth! Human being next. Put a little girl under it.
She changed. Beautiful jellyfish! It kept getting larger. Fed
it mice. Then I destroyed it.
So interesting. Must try it on myself, f know how to get back. Will-power.
A child's will is too weak, but a man can get back. No actual change in
cell-content.
A tremendous experience! I picked out a deep
pool where I could hide. Hunger. Saw man on beach.
The police suspect. I must be more careful.
Why didn't I take the body out to sea?
Horrible incident. Young lady artist.
I almost caught her, but she stamped on a leg. Smashed it.
Horrible pain. I certainly must be more careful.
Great humiliation. Little boy hooked me. But I gave him a scare. The varmint! I glared and
glared at him. I tried to catch him, but he ran too fast. I wanted to eat him.
He had very red cheeks. I hate women and children.
Of
course they suspect. Little boys always babble. I wanted to eat him. But I gave
them all a good scare, and I got a man. He came down
after me in a diver's suit, but I got him. I took him-to pieces. I mean
that—literally to pieces. Then I let the fragments float up. I wanted to scare
them. I think I did. They ran for their lives. The authorities are fools.
I
got back. But it wasn't easy. The thing fought and fought. "I'm
master!" I said, and it gulped. It gulped and gulped and gulped; and then
I got back. But my hand was smashed and bleeding!
That
fool clerk! Why did he take so long? But he didn't know how hungry his red face
made me. The thing came back without the ray. I was standing before the counter
and it came back. I sprang at him. I was lucky to get away.
Terrible trouble. I can't keep it from coming back. I wake up
in the night, and find it spread out on the bed and all over the floor. Its
arms writhe and writhe. And its demands are insatiable. Every waking moment it
demands food. Sometimes it completely absorbs me. But now as I write the upper
portion of my body is human.
This
afternoon I moved to furnished room near beach. Salt water has become a
necessity. Change comes on more rapidly now. I can't keep it off. My will is
powerless. I filled the tub with water and put in some salt. Then I wallowed in
it. Great comfort. Great relief.
Hunger. Dreadful, insatiable hunger.
I
am all beast, all animal. Rats. I have caught six
rats. Delicious. Great comfort.
But I've messed up the room. What if the old idiot downstairs should suspect?
She
does suspect. Wants me to get out. I shall get out.
There is only one refuge for me now. The sea! I shall go to the sea. I can't
pretend I'm human any longer. I'm all animal, all beast.
What a shock I must have given the old hag! I could hear her teeth chattering
as she came up the stairs. All I could do to keep from springing at her. '
Into
the sea at last. Great relief, great joy. Freedom at last!
A ship. I
ran head on into it. Six arms gone. Terrible
agony. Flopped about for hours.
Land. I climbed over the rocks and collapsed. Then
I managed to get back.
Part of me got back. I called for help. A crazy fool came out of the light-
house and stared at me. Five of my tentacles sprang at him. I couldn't control
them. They, got him about the leg. He lost his head.
Got out a revolver and
shot at them. ,
I
got them under control. Tremendous effort. Pleaded with him, tried to explain. He would not listen. Shots—many shots. White-hot fire in my
body—• in my arms and legs. Strength returned to me. 1 rose up, and went back into the sea. 1 hate human beings, f am growing larger, and I
shall make myself felt in the world.
Arthur
St. Amand.
7. The Salmon Fishermen [Statement of William Gam well]
There were five of us in the boat: Jimmy
Simms, Tom Snodgrass, Harry O'Brien, Bill Samson and myself. "Jimmy,"
I said, "we may as well open the lunch. I'm not particularly hungry, but
the salmon all have their noses stuck in the mud!"
"They
sure ain^t biting," said Jimmy. "I never
seen such a bum run of the lazy critters."
"Don't
go complaining," Harry piped up. "We've only been here five
hours."
We
were drifting toward the east shore and I yelled to Bill to pull on the oars,
but he ignored me.
"We'll
drift in with the shipping," I warned. "By the way, what's that
queer-looking tug with a broken smoke-stack?"
"It came in this
morning," said Jim. "It looks like a rum-runner to me."
"They're
taking an awful risk," Harry put in. "The revenue cutter's
due by here any minute."
"There she is
now," said Bill and pointed toward the flats.
Sure
enough, there was the government boat, skirting the shore and looking like a
lean wasp on the warpath. "She's heading the tug off as sure as you're
born," said Bill. "I'll say we're in for a hot time!"
"Back water!" f
shouted. "Do you want to get between 'em?"
Tom
and Bill pulled sturdily on the oars- and our boat swung out in the direction
of the west shore; and then the current took us and carried us downstream.
A
signal flag flashed for a moment on the deck of the cutter. Jimmy translated
it to us. " 'Stand to, or we'll fire'," he
exclaimed. "Now let's see what the tug's got to. say
to that!"
The tug apparently decided to ignore the
command, ft rose on a tremorless
swell,
and plunged doggedly forward. A vast black column ascended from its broken
smoke-stack. "They're putting on steam!" cried Bill. "But they
haven't a chance in the world."
"Not a chance," confirmed Tom.
"One broadside will blow 'em to atoms."
Bill
stood up and clapped his hands to his ears. The rest of us were nearly deafened
by the thunderous report. "What did 1 tell you?" shouted Tom.
We
looked at the tug. The smoke-stack was gone and she was wallowing in a heavy
swell. "That was only a single shot across her bows," said Bill.
"But it did a lot of damage. Wait until they open fire with the big
guns!"
We
waited, expecting to see something interesting. But we saw something that
nearly frightened us out of our shoes. Between the cutter and the tug a
gigantic, yellowish obscenity shot up from the water and towered thirty feet in
the air. ft thrashed wildly about and made a horrible
gulping noise. We could hear the frenzied shrieks of the men on the tug, and
from the deck of the cutter someone yelled. "Look at it! Look at it! Oh, my God!"
"Mercy in
heaven!" groaned Bill.
"We're in for
it!" sobbed Tom.
For
a moment the thing simply towered and vibrate between
the two boats and then it made for the cutter, ft had at least a thousand legs
and they waved loathsomely in the sunlight. It had a hooked beak and a great
mouth that opened and closed and gulped, and it was larger than a whale. It was
horribly, hideously large. It towered to the mounting zenith, and in its
mephitic, blasphemous immensity it dwarfed the two boats and all the tangled
shipping in the harbor.
"Are
we alive?" shrieked Bill. "And is that there shore really Long
Island? I don't believe it. We're in the Indian Ocean, or the Persian Gulf or
the middle of the Hyperborean sea . . That there thing
is a Jormungandar!"
"What's
a Jormungandar?" yelled Tom. He was at the end
of his rope and clutching valiantly at straws.
"Them
things what live on the bottom of the arctic seas," groaned Bill.
"They comes up for air once in a hundred years.
I'll take my oath that there thing's a Jormungandar."
Jormungandar or not, it was apparent to all of us that
the monster meant business, ft was bearing down upon the cutter with incredible
ferocity. The water boiled and bubbled in its wake. On the other boats men
rushed hysterically to the rails and stared with wide eyes.
The
officers of the cutter had recovered from their momentary astonishment and were
gesticulating furiously and running back and forth on the decks. Three guns
were lowered into position and directed at the onrushing horror. A little man
with gilt braid on his sleeves danced about absurdly on his toes and shouted
out commands at the top of his voice.
"Don't
fire until you can look into his eyes," he yelled. "We can't afford
to miss him. We'll give him a broadside he won't forget."
"It isn't human,' sir!" someone
yelled. "There never was nothing like it before in this world."
The
men aboard the tug were obviously rejoicing. Caps and pipes asce.nded
into the air and loud shouts of triumph issued from a hundred drunken throats.
"Fire!" shouted
the blue-coated midget on the cutter. .
"It
won't do 'em no good!"
shouted Bill, as the thunder of the guns smote our ears. "It won't do 'em a bit o' good."
As
it turned out, Bill was right. The tremendous discharge failed to arrest the
progress of the obscene monster.
It
rose like a cloud from the water and flew at the cutter like a flying-fish.
Furiously it stretched forth its enormous arms, and embraced the cutter. It
wrenched the little vessel from the trough of the wave in which it wallowed
and lifted it violently into the air.
Its
great golden sides shone like the morning star, but red blood trickled from a
gaping hole in its throat. Yet it ignored its wounds. It lifted the small steel
ship into the air in its gigantic, weaving arms.
I
shall never forget that moment. I have but to shut my eyes and it is before me
now. I see again that Brobdingnagian horror from
measureless abysses, that twisting, fantastic monstrosity from sinister depths
of blackest midnight. And in its colossal arms and legs I see a tiny ship from
whose deck a hundred little men fall shrieking and screaming into the black
maelstrom beneath its churning maws.
Yards
and yards it towered, and its glittering bulk hid the sun. It towered to the
zenith and its weaving arms twisted the cutter into a shapeless mass of
glistening steel.
"We're
next!" muttered Bill. "There ain't nothing
can save us now. A man ain't got a chance when he
runs head-on against a Jormungandar!"
"That
ain't no Jormungandar,"
piped Tom. "It's a human being what's been out all night. But I ain't saying we're not in for it."
My
other companions fell upon their knees and little Harry O'Brien turned yellow
under the gills. But the thing did not attack us. Instead with a heartbreaking
scream that seemed outrageously human it sank beneath the waves, carrying with
it the flattened, absurd remains of the valiant little cutter and the crushed
and battered bodies of innumerable men. And as it sank loathsomely from sight
the water about it flattened out into a tremorless
plateau and turned the color of blood.
Bill
was at the oars now, shouting and cursing to encourage the rest of us.
"Pull, boys," he commanded. "Let's try to make the south .shore
before that there fish comes up for breath. There ain't
one of us here what wants to live for the rest of his life on the bottom of the
sea. There ain't one of us here what ud care to have it out with a Jormungandar."
In a moment we had swung the boat about and
were making for the shore.
Men
on the other ships were crying and waving to us, but we didn't stop to hand in
any reports. We weren't thinking of anything but a huge monstrosity that we
would see towering and towering into the sky as long as our brains hung
together in our foolish little heads.
8. News Item in the Long Island' Gazette
The body of a young man, about 25 years old, was found this morning on a deserted beach near Northport.
The body was horribly emaciated and the coroner, Mr. E. Thomas Bogart,
discovered three small wounds on the young man's thigh. The edges of the wounds
were stained as though from gunpowder. The body scarcely weighed one hundred
pounds, ft is thought that the youth was the victim of foul play and inquiries
are being made in the vicinity.
9. The Box of Horror [Statement
of Harry Olson]
I hadn't had a thing to eat for three days,
and I was driven to the cans. Sometimes you find something valuable in the cans
and sometimes you don't; but anyhow, I was working 'em
systematically. I had gone up the street and down the street, and hadn't found
a thing for my pains except an old pair of suspenders and a tin of salmon. But
when T came to the last house I' stopped and stared. Then I stretched out a
lean arm and picked up the box. It was a funny-looking box, with queer glass
sides and little peek-holes in the side of it, and a metal compartment about
three inches square in back of it, and a slide underneath large enough to hold
a man's hand.
I
looked up at the windows of the house, but there wasn't anyone watching me,
and so f slipped the box under my coat and made off
down the street, "ft's something expensive, you can bet your life on
that," I thought. "Probably some old doctor's croaked and his widow
threw the thing away without consulting anyone.. This
is a real scientific affair, this is, and f ought to get a week's board out of it."
I
wanted to examine the thing better and so I made for a vacant lot where I
wouldn't be interrupted. Once there I sat myself down
behind a signboard and took the contraption from under my coat and looked at
it.
Well,
sir, it interested me. There was a little lever on top of it you pressed and
the slide fell down and something clicked in the metal box in back of it, and
the thing lighted up.
I realized at once that something was meant
to go on the slide. I didn't know just whit,, but my
curiosity was aroused. "That light isn't there for nothing," I
thought. "This box means business."
I
began to wonder what .would happen if something alive were put on the slide.
There was a clump of bushes near where I was sitting and I got up and made for
it. It took me some time to get what I was after; but when I caught it I held
it firmly between my thumb and forefinger so it couldn't escape, and then I talked to it. "Grasshopper," I
said. "I haven't any grudge against you personally, but the scientific
mind is no respecter of persons."
The
infernal varmint wriggled and wriggled and covered my thumb with molasses, but
I didn't let up on him. I held him firmly and pushed him onto the slide. Then I
turned on the lever and peeped through the holes.
The
poor devil squirmed and fluttered for several minutes and then he began to
dissolve. He got flabbier and flabbier and soon I could see right through him.. When he was nothing but ooze he began to wriggle. I
dumped him on the ground and he scurried away faster than a centipede.
"I'm
deluding myself," I thought. "I'm seeing things that never
happened." Then I did a very foolish thing. I thrust my hand into the box
and turned on the lever. For several moments nothing happened and then my hand
began to get cold- I peeped through the holes and what I saw made me scream and
scream and draw my hand out and go running about the lot like a madman. My hand
was a mass of writhing, twisting snakes! Leastwise, they looked like snakes at
first, but later I saw that they were soft and _yellow and rubbery and much
worse than snakes.
But even then I didn't altogether lose my
head. Leastwise, I didn't lose it for long. "This is a sheer
hallucination," I said to myself, "and I'm going to argue myself out
of it."
I
sat down on a big boulder and held my hand up and looked at it. It had ■
a thousand fingers and they dripped, but I made myself look at 'em- I did some tall arguing. "Snap out of it," I said.
"You're imagining things!" I thought the fingers began to shorten and
stiffen a little. "You're imagining all this," I continued.
"It's the sheerest bunk. That box isn't anything out of the
ordinary!"
Well sir, you may not believe it, but I
argued myself back into sanity. I argued my hand back to normal. The Wriggling, twisting things got shorter and fatter and joined together and before very long I had a hand with
fingers.
.Then
I stood up and shouted. Luckily no one heard me, and there wasn't anyone to
watch me dancing about on my toes either. When I got out of breath I picked the
infernal box up and walked away with it. I made directly for the river.
"You've had your day," I said. "You won't turn any more poor
critters into jelly-fish!"-
Well sir, I threw the vile thing into the
river, but first I smashed it against the planks on the wharf
until it looked like nothing on earth under the stars. "And that's the end
of you!" I shouted as it sank. I ought to have got a medal for that, but I
ain't complaining. It isn't every man has the
pleasure of calling himself a disinterested benefactor of humanity.
ero ^rtour
Unquestionably Ray Bradbury is on his way to becoming on,e of this nation's leading short story writers. His continuing success in winning recognition among collections of the best stories bears^ out the promise his initial pulp magazine triumphs held forth. Bradbury has stated that he never writes down for one market or up for another, but always turns out the best he can and things of a mar\et afterwards. This is borne out by "Zero Hour" which, though straight science-fiction, compares very favorably with his best "slicl^"
appearances.
H, IT was to be so jolly! What a game! Such excitement they hadn't known in years. The children
catapulted this way and that across the green lawns, shouting at each other,
holding hands, flying in circles, climbing trees, laughing . . . Overhead, the
rockets flew and beetle-cars whispered by on the streets, but the children
played on. Such fun, such tremulous joy, such tumbling and
hearty screaming.
Mink ran into the house, all dirt and sweat.
For her seven years she was loud and strong and definite. Her mother, Mrs.
Morris, hardly saw her as she yanked out drawers and rattled pans and tools
into a large sack. "Heavens, Mink, what's going on?"
"The most exciting game ever!"
gasped Mink, pink-faced. "Stop and get your breath," said the mother.
"No, I'm all right," gasped Mink.
"Okay I take these things, Mom?" "But don't dent them,"
said Mrs. Morris.
"Thank
you, thank you!" cried Mink and boom! she was gone,
like a rocket.
Mrs.
Morris surveyed the fleeing tot. "What's the name of the game?"
"Invasion!" said Mink. The door slammed.
In
every yard on the street children brought out knives and forks and pokers and
old stove pipes and can-openers.
It
was an interesting fact that this fury and bustle occurred only among the
younger children. The older ones, those ten years and more disdained the affair
and marched scornfully off on hikes or played a more dignified version of hide-and-seek on their own.
65
Meanwhile, parents came and went in chromium beetles. Repair men came to repair the. vacuum
elevators in houses, to fix fluttering
television sets or hammer upon Stubborn food-delivery
tubes. The adult civilization passed and repassed the
busy youngsters, jealous of the fierce energy of the wild tots, tolerantly amused at their flourishings,
longing to join in themselves.
"This
and this and this," said Mink, instructing the others with their
assorted spoons and wrenches. "Do that, and bring that over here. No! Here, ninnie! Right. Now, get back while 1 fix this—" Tongue in teeth, face wrinkled in thought. "Like
that. See?"
"Yayyyy!"
shouted the kids.
Twelve-year-old Joseph
Connors ran up.
"Go away," said
Mink straight at him.
"I wanna
play," said Joseph.
"Can't!" said Mink.
"Why
not?"
"You'd just make fun of us."
"Honest, I wouldn't."
"No. We know you. Go away or we'll kick you."
Another
twelve-year-old boy whirred by on little motor-skates. "Aye, Joe! Come on!
Let them sissies play!"
Joseph
showed reluctance and a certain wistfulness. "I want to play," he said.
"You're
old," said Mink,' firmly. "Not that old,"
said Joe sensibly. "You'd only laugh and spoil the Invasion."
The
boy on the motor-skates made a rude lip noise. "Come on, Joe! Them and
their fairies! Nuts!".
Joseph walked off slowly.
He kept looking back, all down the block.
Mink
was already busy again. She made a kind of apparatus with her gathered
equipment. She had appointed another little girl with a pad and pencil to take
down notes in painful slow scribbles. Their voices rose and tell in the warm
sunlight.
All
around them the city hummed. The streets were lined with good green and
peaceful trees. Only the wind made a conflict across the city, across the
country, across the continent, fn a
thousand other cities there were trees and children and avenues, business men
in their quiet offices taping their voices, - or watching televisors.
Rockets hovered like darning needles in the blue sky. There was the universal,
quiet conceit and easiness of men accustomed to peace, quite certain there
would never be trouble again. Arm in arm, men all over earth were a united
front. The perfect weapons were held in equal trust
by all nations. A situation of incredibly beautiful balance had been brought
about. There were no traitors among men, no unhappy
ones, no disgruntled ones; therefore the world was based upon a stable ground.
Sunlight illumined half the world and the trees drowsed in a tide of warm air.
Mink's mother, from her upstairs window,
gazed down.
The children.
She looked upon them and shook her head.
Well, they'd eat well, sleep well, and be in school on Monday. Bless their
vigorous little bodies. She listened.
Mink
talked earnestly to someone near the rose-bush—though there was no one there.
These odd children. And the little girl, what was her name? Anna? Anna took notes on a pad.
First, Mink asked the rose-bush a question, then called the answer to Anna.
"Triangle," said Mink.
"What's a tri," said Anna with
difficulty, "angle?"
"Never mind," said Mink.
"How you spell it?" asked Anna.
"T-R-I—"
spelled Mink, slowly, then snapped, "Oh, spell it yourself!" She went
on to other words. "Beam," she said.
"I haven't got tri," said Anna,
"angle down yet!" "Well, hurry, hurry!" cried Mink.
Mink's
mother leaned out the upstairs window. "A-N-G-L-E," she spelled down
at Anna.
"Oh, thanks, Mrs. Morris," said
Anna.
"Certainly,"
saicl Mink's mother and withdrew, laughing, to dust
the hall with an electro-duster-magnet.
The voices wavered on the shimmcry
air. "Beam," said Anna. Fading.
"Four-nine-seven-A-and-B-and-X,"
said Mink, far away, seriously. "And a fork and a string and a—hex-hex-agony . . . hexagona//"
At lunch, Mink gulped milk at one toss and
was at the door. Her mother slapped the table.
"You
sit right back down," commanded Mrs. Morris. "Hot
soup in a minute." She poked a red button on the kitchen butler and
ten seconds later something landed with a bump in the rubber receiver. Mrs.
Morris opened it, took out a can with a pair of aluminum holders, unsealed it
with a flick and poured hot soup into a bowl.
During
all this, Mink fidgeted. "Hurry, Mom! This is a matter of life and death!
Aw—!"
"I was the same way at your age. Always life and death. I know."
Mink banged away at the soup.
"Slow down," said Mom.
"Can't," said Mink. "Drill's
waiting for me."
"Who's Drill? What a peculiar
name," said Mom.
"You don't know him," said Mink.
"A new boy in the neighborhood?"
asked Mom.
"He's new all right," said Mink.
She started on her second bowl.
"Which one is Drill?" asked Mom.
"He's around," said Mink,
evasively. "You'll make fun. Everybody pokes fun. Gee, darn." "fs Drill shy?"
"Yes. No. In a way.
Gosh, Mom, I got to run if we want to have the fn-vasion!"
"Who's invading what?"
"Martians invading Earth—well, not exactly Martians. They're—I don't know. From
up." She pointed with her spoon.
"And inside," said Mom, touching Mink's feverish brow.
Mink rebelled. "You're laughing! You'll
kill Drill and everybody."
"1 didn't mean to," said Mom. "Drill's a Martian?" >
"No.
He's—-well—maybe from Jupiter or Saturn or Venus. Anyway, he's had a hard
time."
"I imagine." Mrs. Morris hid her
mouth behind her hand.
"They couldn't figure
a way to attack Earth."
"We're impregnable," said Mom, in mock-seriousness.
"That's the word Drill used! fmpreg—That
was the word, Mom."
"My, my. Drill's a brilliant little boy. Two-bit words."
"They
couldn't figure a way to attack, Mom. Drill says—he says in order to make a
good fight you got to have a new way of surprising people. That way you win.
And he says also you got to have help from your enemy."
"A fifth column," said Mom.
"Yeah. That's what Drill said. And they couldn't figure a way to surprise
Earth or get help."
"No
wonder. We're pretty darn strong," laughed Mom, cleaning up. Mink sat
there, staring at the table, seeing what she was talking about.
"Until,
one day," whispered Mink, melodramatically, "they thought of
children!"
"Well!" said Mrs. Morris, brightly.
"And
they thought of how grown-ups are so busy they never look under rose-bushes or
on lawns!"
"Only for snails and
fungus."
"And then there's something about
dim-dims."
"Dim-dims?"
"Dimens-shuns."
"Dimensions?"
"Four of 'em! And there's something about kids under-nine
and imagination. It's real funny to hear Drill talk."
Mrs. Morris was tired.
"Well, it must be funny. You're keeping Drill waiting now. It's getting
late in the day and, if you want to have your Invasion before your supper bath,
you'd better jump." "Do I haye to take a bath?" growled Mink.
"You do. Why is it children hate water?
No matter what age yo» live in children hate water
behind the ears!"
"Drill says I won't have to take
baths," said Mink. "Oh, he does, does he?"
"He
told all the kids that. No more baths. And we can stay up till ten o'clock and
go to two televisor shows on Saturday 'stead of
one!"
"Well, Mr. Drill better mind his p's and q's. I'll call up his
mother and—"
Mink
went to the door. "We're having trouble with guys like Pete Britz and Dale Jerrick. They're
growing up. They make fun. They're worse than parents. They just won't believe
in Drill. They're so snooty, cause they're growing up.
You'd think they'd know better. They were little only a coupla years ago. I hate them worst. We'll kill them
first.."
"Your father and I, last?"
"Drill
says you're dangerous. Know why? 'Cause you don't believe in Martians! They're
going to let us run the world. Well, not just us, but the
kids over in the next block, too. I might be queen." She opened the door. "Mom?"
"Yes?"
"What's—lodge . . . ick?"
"Logic? Why, dear, logic is
knowing what things are true and not true."
"He
mentioned that," said Mink. "And what's im—pres—sion—able?"
It took her a minute to say it.
"Why,
it means—" Her mother looked at the floor, laughing gently. "It
means—to be a child, dear."
"Thanks
for lunch!" Mink ran out, then-stuck her head back in. "Mom, I'll be
sure you won't be hurt, much, really!"
"Well, thanks," said Mom.
Slnm went the door.
At four o'clock the audio-visor buzzed. Mrs.
Morris flipped the tab. "Hello, Helen!" she said, in welcome.
"Hello, Mary. How are things in New
York?"
"Fine, how are things in Scranton? You
look tired."
"So do you. The
children. Underfoot," said Helen.
Mrs. Morris sighed, "My Mink, too. The super Invasion."
Helen laughed. "Are your kids playing
that game, too?"
"Lord,
yes. Tomorrow it'll be geometrical jacks and motorized hopscotch. Were we this
bad when we were kids in '48?"
"Worse. Japs and Nazis. Don't know
how my parents put up with me.
Tomboy." —
"Parents learn to shut their ears."
A silence.
"What's wrong, Mary?" asked Helen.
Mrs.
Morris' eyes were half-closed; her tongue slid slowly, thoughtfully over her
lower lip. "Eh," she jerked. "Oh, nothing.
Just thought about that. Shutting ears and such. Never mind. Where were we?"
"My boy Tim's got a crush on some guy
named—Drill, I think it was."
"Must be a new
password.
Mink likes him, too."
"Didn't know it got as far as New York. Word of mouth, f imagine.
Looks like a scrap drive. I talked to Josephine and she said her kids—that's in Boston —are wild on this new game. It's sweeping
the country."
At
this moment, Mink trotted info the kitchen to gulp a glass of water. Mrs.
Morris turned. "How're things going?"
"Almost finished," said Mink.
"Swell," said Mrs. Morris.
"What's that?"
"A yo-yo," said
Mink. "Watch."
She
flung the yo-yo down its string. Reaching the end it— It
vanished.
"See?"
said Mink. "Ope!".Dibbling
her finger she made the yo-yo reappear and zip up the string.
"Do
that again," said her mother. "Can't. Zero
hour's five o'clock! 'Bye." Mink exited, zipping her yo-yo.
On
the audio-visor, Helen laughed. "Tim brought one of those yo-yo's in this
morning, but when f got curious he said he wouldn't show it to me, and when f
tried to work it, finally, it wouldn't work."
"You're not impressionable," said Mrs. Morris.
"What?"
"Never mind. Something I thought of. Can I help you, Helen?" "1 wanted to get that black-and-white cake recipe—"
The hour drowsed by. The day waned. The sun
lowered in the peaceful blue sky. Shadows lengthened on the green laWns. The laughter and excitement continued. One little
girl ran away, crying.
Mrs. Morris came out the
front door.
"Mink, was that Peggy
Ann crying?"
Mink
was bent over in the yard, near the rose-bush. "Yeah.
She's a scare-baby. We won't let her play, now. She's getting too old to play.
I guess she grew up all of a sudden."
"fs that why she cried? Nonsense. Give me a civil answer, young lady, or inside you
come!"
Mink whirled in consternation, mixed with
irritation. "I can't quit now. It's almost time.
I'll be good. I'm sorry." "Did you hit Peggy Ann?"
"No, honest. You ask her. It was something—well, she's just a scaredy-pants."
The ring of children drew in around Mink
where she scowled at her work
with spoons and a kind of square shaped arrangement of hammers and pipes.
"There and there," murmured Mink. '
"What's wrong?"
said Mrs. Morris.
"Drill's stuck. Half
way. If we could only get him all the way through, it'll be easier. Then
all the others could come through after him." "Can I help?"
"No'm, thanks. I'll fix it."
"All right. I'll call you for your bath in half an hour.
I'm tired of watching you."
She
went in and sat in the electric-relaxing chair, sipping a little beer from a
half-empty glass. The chair massaged her back. Children,
children. Children and love and hate, side by side. Sometimes children
loved you, hated you, all in half a second. Strange children, did they ever
forget or forgive the whippings and the harsh, strict words of command? She
wondered. How can you , ever forget or forgive those
over and above you, those tall and silly dictators?
Time passed. A curious,
waiting silence came upon the street, deepening.
Five
o'clock. A clock sang softly somewhere in the house, in a quiet, musical voice,
"Five o'clock . . . five o'clock. Time's a-wasting. Five o'clock,"
and purred away into silence.
Zero
hour.
Mrs. Morris chuckled in her
throat. Zero hour.
A
beetle-car hummed into the driveway. 'Mr. Morris. Mrs. Morris smiled. Mr.
Morris got out of the'beetle, locked it and called hello to Mink at her work. Mink
ignored him. He laughed and stood for a moment watching the children in their business.
Then he walked up the front steps.
"Hello,
darling."
"Hello, Henry."
She
strained forward on the edge of the chair, listening. The children were silent.
Too silent..
He emptied his pipe, refilled it. "Swell
day. Makes you glad to be alive." Buzz.
"What's
that?" asked Henry. • "I
don't know." She got up, suddenly, her eyes widening. She was going to say
something. She stopped it. Ridiculous. Her nerves
jumped. "Those children haven't anything dangerous out there, have
they?" she said.
"Nothing
but pipes and hammers. Why?"
"Nothing
electrical?"
"Heck, no," said
Henry. "I looked."
She
walked to the kitchen. The buzzing continued. "Just the same you'd better
go tell them to quit. It's after five. Tell them—" Her eyes widened and
narrowed. "Tell them to put off their Invasion until tomorrow." She
laughed, nervously.
The buzzing grew louder.
"What are they up to? I'd better go
look, all right." The explosion!
The house shook with dull sound. There were
other explosions in other yards on other streets.
Involuntarily,
Mrs. Morris screamed. "Up this way!" she cried, senselessly, knowing
no sense, no reason. Perhaps she saw something from the corners of her eyes, perhaps she smelled a new odor or heard a new noise.
There was no time to argue with Henry to convince him. Let him think her
insane. Yes, insane! Shrieking, she ran upstairs. He ran after her to see what
she was up to. "In the attic!" she screamed. "That's where it
is!" It was only a poor excuse to get him in the attic in time—oh God, in
time!
Another explosion outside. The children screamed with delight, as if at a great fireworks display.
"ft's
not in the attic!" cried Henry. "It's outside!"
"No,
no!" Wheezing, gasping, she fumbled at the attic door. "I'll show
you. Hurry! I'll show you!"
They
tumbled into the attic. She slammed the door, locked it, took the key, threw it into a far, cluttered corner.
She
was babbling wild stuff now. ft came out of her. All the subconscious suspicion and fear that had gathered secretly
all afternoon and fermented like a wine in her. All
the little revelations and knowledges and sense that
had bothered her all day and which she had logically and carefully and sensibly
rejected and censored. Now it exploded in her and shook her to bits.
"There,
there," she said, sobbing against the door. "We're safe until tonight.
Maybe we can sneak out, maybe we can escape!"
Henry
blew Up, too, but for another reason. "Are you
crazy? Why'd you throw that key away! Damn it, honey!"
"Yes, yes, I'm crazy, if it helps, but
stay here with me!"
"I don't know how in hell f can get out!"
"Quiet.
They'll hear us. Oh, God, they'll find us soon enough—" Below them, Mink's
voice. The husband stopped. There was a great universal humming and sizzling,
a screaming and giggling. Downstairs, the audio-televisor
buzzed and buzzed insistently, alarmingly, violently. Is that Helen calling? thought Mrs. Morris. And is she calling about what I think she's calling about?
. Footsteps came into the house. Heavy footsteps.
"Who's coming in my house?" demanded Henry,-
angrily. "Who's tramping
around down there?" /
Heavy feet. Twenty, thirty, forty,
fifty of them. Fifty persons crowding into the house.
The humming. The giggling of the
children. "This way!" cried Mink, below.
"Who's
downstairs?" roared Henry. "Who's there!"
"Hush,
oh, nonononono!" said his wife, weakly, holding
him. "Please, be quiet. They might go away."
"Mom?" called
Mink, "Dad?" A pause. "Where are
you?"
Heavy
footsteps, heavy, heavy, very HEAVY
footsteps came up the stairs. Mink leading them.
"Mom?" A hesitation. "Dad?" A waiting, a silence.
Humming. Footsteps toward the
attic. Mink's first:
They
trembled together in silence in the attic, Mr. and Mrs. Morris. For some reason
the electric humming, the queer cold light suddenly visible under the door
crack, the strange odor and the alien sound of eagerness in Mink's voice,
finally got through to Henry Morris, too. He stood, shivering, in the dark
silence, his wife beside him.
"Mom! Dad!"
Footsteps. A little humming sound.
The attic lock melted. The door opened. Mink peered inside, tall blue shadows
behind her. "Peek-a-boo," said Mink.
by -s$(cf.ernon d3iachwoocl
One of the almost legendary figures among ghost story writers, Algernon Blackwood is justly famous for his oft-reprinted classics, "The Willows," and "The Wendigo." He ma\es his first appearance in the Avon Fantasy Reader series with a story not otherwise to be found in available collections. "The Other Wing" is a strange, haunting tale of an imaginative child in a lone-somely huge mansion. We selected it not only because it is not well \nown, but also as an interesting and welcome contrast to what we will describe as the comparatively more blatant fantasy of our American writers.
1
■mi T USED to puzzle him that, after dark, some one would look
in around the edge of the bedroom door, and withdraw again too rapidly for him
to see the face. When the nurse ha? gone away with the
candle this happened: "Good night, Master Tim," she said usually,
shading the light with one hand to protect his eyes; "dream of me and I'll
dream of you." She went out slowly. The sharp-edged shadow of the door ran
across the ceiling like a train. There came a whispered colloquy in the
corridor outside, about himself, of course, and—he was
alone. He heard her steps going deeper and deeper into the bosom of the old
country house; they were audible for a moment on the stone flooring of the
hall; and sometimes the dull thump of the baize door into the servants'
quarters just reached him, too—then silence. But it was only when the last
sound, as well as the last sign of her had vanished, that the face emerged from
its hiding-place and flashed in upon him round the corner. As a rule, too, it
came just as he was saying, "Now I'll go to sleep, f won't think any
longer. Good night, Master Tim, and happy dreams." He loved to say this to
himself; it brought a sense of companionship, as though there were two persons
speaking.
The
room was on the top of the old house, a big, high-ceilinged room, and his bed
against the wall had an iron railing round it; he felt very safe and protected
in it. The curtains at the other end of the room were drawn. He lay watching
the firelight dancing on the heavy folds, and their pattern, showing a spaniel
chasing a long-tailed bird towards a bushy tree, interested and amused him. ft was repeated over and over again. He counted the num-
74
ber of dogs, and 'the number of birds, and the
number of trees, but could never make them agree. There was a plan somewhere in
that pattern; if only he could discover, it, the dogs and birds and trees would
"come out right." Hundreds and hundreds of times he had played this
game, for the plan in the pattern made it possible to take sides, and the bird
and dog were against him. They always won, however; Tim usually fell asleep
just when the advantage was on his own side. The curtains hung steadily enough
most of the time, but it seemed to him once or twice that they stirred—hiding a
dog or bird on purpose to prevent his winning. For instance, he had eleven
birds and eleven trees, and, fixing them in his mind by saying, "that's
eleven birds and eleven trees, but only ten dogs," his eyes darted back to
find the eleventh dog, when—the curtain moved and threw all his calculations
into -confusion . again. The eleventh dog was hidden.
He did not quite like the movement; it gave him questionable feelings, rather,
for the curtain did not move of itself. Yet, usually, he was too intent upon
counting the dogs to feel positive alarm.
Opposite to him was the fireplace, full of
red and yellow coals; and, lying with his head sideways on the pillow, he could
see directly in between the bars. When the coals settled with a soft and
powdery crash, he turned his eyes from the curtains to the grate, trying to
discover exactly which bits had fallen. So long as the glow was there the sound
seemed pleasant enough, but sometimes he awoke later in the night, the room
huge with darkness, the fire almost out—and the sound was not so pleasant then.
It startled him. The coals did not fall of themselves. It seemed that some one poked them cautiously. The shadows were very
thick before the bars. As with the curtains, moreover, the morning aspect of
the extinguished fire, the ice-cold cinders that made a clinking sound like
tin, caused no emotion whatever in his soul.
And
it was usually while he lay waiting for sleep, tired both of the curtain and
the coal games, on the point, indeed, of saying, "I'll go to sleep
now," that the puzzling thing took place. He would be staring drowsily at
the dying fire, perhaps counting the stockings and flannel garments that hung
along the high fender-rail when, suddenly, a person looked in with lightning
swiftness through the door and vanished again before he could possibly turn his
head to see. The appearance and disappearance were accomplished with amazing
rapidity always.
It
was a head and shoulders that looked in, and the movement combined the speed,
the lightness and the silence of a shadow. Only it was not a shadow. A hand
held the edge of the door. The face shot round, saw him, and withdrew like
lightning. It was utterly beyond him to imagine anything more quick and clever.
It darted. He heard no sound. It went. But—it had seen him, looked him all
over, examined him, noted what he was doing with that
lightning glance. It wanted to know if he were awake still, or asleep. And
though it went off, it still watched him from a distance; it waited somewhere;
it knew all about him. Where it waited no one could ever guess. It came
probably, he felt, from beyond the house, possibly from the roof, but most
likely from the garden or the sky. Yet, though strange, it was not terrible. It
was a kindly and protective figure, he felt. And when it happened he never
called for help, because the occurrence simply took his voice away.
"ft comes from the Nightmare Passage," he decided;
"but it's not a nightmare." It puzzled him.
Sometimes,
moreover, it came more than once in a single night. He was pretty sure—not quite positive—that it occupied his room as soon as he was properly asleep. It
took possession, sitting perhaps before the dying fire, standing upright
behind the heavy curtains, or even lying down in the empty bed his brother Used
when he was home from school. Perhaps it played the curtain game, perhaps it
poked the coals; it knew, at any rate, where the eleventh dog had lain
concealed. It certainly came in and out; certainly, too, it did not wish to be
seen. For, more than once, on waking suddenly in the midnight blackness, Tim
knew it was standing close beside his bed and bending over him. He felt, rather
than heard, its presence, ft glided quietly away, ft moved with marvellous softness, yet he was positive it moved. He felt
the difference, so to speak, ft had been near him, now it was gone, ft came back, too—just as he was falling into sleep again.
Its midnight coming and going, however, stood out sharply different from its
first shy, tentative approach. For in the firelight it came
alone; whereas in the black and silent hours, it had with it—others.
And
it was then he made up his mind that its swift and quiet movements were due to
the fact that it had wings, ft flew. And the others that came with it in the
darkness were "its little ones." He also made up his mind that all
were friendly, comforting, protective, and that while positively not a Nightmare, it yet came somehow along the Nightmare Passage before it
reached him. "You see, it's like this," he explained to the nurse:
"The big one comes to visit me alone, but it only brings its little ones
when I'm quite asleep."
"Then the quicker you
get to sleep the better, isn't it, Master Tim?"
He
replied: "Rather! f ^always do. Only 1 wonder where they come jroml" He spoke, however, as though he had an
inkling.
But
the nurse was so dull about it that he gave her up and tried his father.
"Of course," replied this busy but affectionate parent, "it's
either nobody at all, or else it's Sleep coming to carry you away to the land
of dream's." He made the statement kindly but
somewhat briskly, for he was worried just then about the extra taxes on his
land, and the effort to fix his mind on Tim's fanciful world was beyond him at
the moment. He lifted the boy on to his knee, kissed and patted him as though
he were a favourite dog, and planted him on the rug
again with a flying sweep. "Run and ask your mother,"
he added; "she knows all that kind of thing. Then come back and tell me
all about it—another time."
Tim found his mother in an arm-chair before
the fire of another room; she was knitting and reading at the same time—a
wonderful thing the boy could never understand. She raised her head as he came
in, pushed her glasses on to her forehead, and held her arms out. He told her
everything, ending up with what his father said.
"You see, it's not Jackman, or Thompson, or any one like that," he
exclaimed. "It's some one real."
"But nice,"' she assured him,
"sbme one who comes to take care of you and see
that you're all safe and cozy."
"Oh, yes, I know that. But------ "
"I think your father's right," she
added quickly, "it's Sleep, I'm sure, who peps in
round the door like that. Sleep has got
wings, I've always heard."
"Then the other thing—the little
ones?" he asked. "Are they just sorts of dozes, you think?"
Mother did not answer for a moment. She
turned down the page of her book, closed it slowly, put it on the table beside
her. More slowly still she put her knitting away, arranging the wool and
needles with some deliberation.
"Perhaps,"
she said, drawing the boy closer to her and looking into his big eyes of
wonder, "they're dreams!"
Tim
felt a thrill run through him as she said it. He stepped back a foot or so and
clapped his hands softly. "Dreams!" he whispered with enthusiasm and
belief; "of course! I never thought of that."
His
mother, having proved her sagacity, then made a mistake. She noted her success,
but instead of leaving it there, she elaborated and explained. As Tim expressed
it she "went on about it." Therefore he did not listen. He followed
his train of thought alone. And presently, he interrupted her long sentences
with a conclusion of his own:
"Then
I know where She hides," he announced with a touch of awe. 'Where She lives, I mean." And without waiting to be asked, he
imparted the information: "It's in the Other Wing."
"Ah!"
said his mother, taken by surprise. "How clever of you,
Tim!"—and hus
confirmed it.
Thenceforward
this was established in his life,—that Sleep and her attendant Dreams hid
during the daytime in that unused portion of the great Elizabethan mansion
called the Other Wing. This other wing was unoccupied, its corridors untrodden, its windows shuttered and its rooms all closed.
At various places green baize doors led into it, but no one ever opened them.
For many years this part had been shut up; and for the children, properly
speaking, it ' was out of bounds. They never mentioned it as a possible place,
at any rate; in hide-and-seek it was not considered, even; there was a hint of
the inaccessible about the Other Wing. Shadows, dust, and silence had it to themselves.
But
Tim, having ideas of his own about everything, possessed special information
about the Other Wing. He believed it was inhabited.
Who occupied the immense series of empty rooms, who
trod the spacious corridors, who passed to and fro behind the shuttered
windows, he had not known exactly. He had called these occupants
"they," and the most important among them was "The Ruler."
The Ruler of the Other Wing was a kind of deity, powerful, far away, ever present yet never seen.
And
about this Ruler he had a wonderful conception for a little boy; he connected
her, somehow, with deep thoughts of his own, the deepest of all.. When he made up adventures to the moon, to the stars, or
to the bottom of the sea, adventures that he lived inside himself, as it
were—to reach them he must invariably pass through the chambers of the Other
Wing. Those corridors and halls, the Nightmare Passage among them, lay along
the route; they were the first stage of the journey. Once the green baize doors
swung to behind him and the long dim passage stretched ahead, he was well on
his way into the adventure of the moment; the Nightmare Passage once passed, he
was safe from capture; but once the shutters of a window had been flung open,
he was free of the gigantic world that lay beyond. For then light poured in and
he could see his way.
The
conception, for a child, was curious, ft established a correspondence between
the mysterious chambers of the Other Wing and the occupied, but •unguessed chambers of his Tnner
Being. Through these chambers, through these darkened corridors, along a
passage, sometimes dangerous, or at least of questionable repute, he must pass
to find all adventures that were real. The light—when he pierced far enough to take the shutters down—was
discovery.
Tim did not actually think, much less say, all this. He was aware of it, however.
He felt it. The Other Wing was inside himself as well as through the green
baize doors. His inner map of wonder included both of them.
But
now, for the first time in his life, he knew who lived there and who the Ruler
was. A shutter had fallen of its own accord; light poured in; he made a guess,
and Mother had confirmed it. Sleep and her Little Ones, the host of dreams,
were the daylight occupants. They stole out when the darkness fell. All
adventures in life began and ended by a dream—discoverable by first passing
through the Other Wing.
2
And, having settled this, his one desire now
was to travel over the map upon journeys of exploration and discovery. The map
inside himself he knew already, but the map of the Other Wing he had not seen.
His mind knew it, he had a clear mental picture of rooms and halls and
passages, but his feet had never trod the silent floors where dust and shadows
hid the flock of dreams by day. The mighty chambers where Sleep ruled he longed
to stand in, to see the Ruler face to face. He made up his mind to get into the
Other Wing.
To accomplish this was difficult; but Tim was
a determined youngster, and he meant to try; he meant, also, to succeed. He
deliberated. At night he could not possibly manage it; in any case, the Ruler
and her host all left it after dark, to fly about the world; the Wing would be
empty, and the emptiness would frighten him. Therefore he must make a daylight
visit; and it was a daylight visit he decided on. He deliberated more. There
were rules and risks involved: it meant going out of bounds, the danger of
being seen, the certainty of being questioned by some
idle and inquisitive grown-up: "Where in the world have you been all this
time"—and so forth. These things he thought out carefully, and though he
arrived at no solution, he felt satisfied that it would be all right. That is,
he recognized the risks. To be prepared was half the battle, for nothing then
could take him by surprise.
The
notion that he might slip in from the garden was soon abandoned; the red bricks
showed no openings; there was no door; from the courtyard, also, entrance was
impracticable; even on tiptoe he could barely reach the'broad
window-sills of stone. When playing alone, or walking with the French governess,
he examined every outside possibility. None offered. The shutters, supposing
he could reach them, were thick and solid.
Meanwhile, when opportunity offered, he stood
against the outside walls and listened, his ear pressed against the tight red
bricks; the towers and gables ot the Wing rose
overhead; he heard the wind go whispering along the eaves; he imagined tiptoe
movements and a sound of wings inside. Sleep and her Little Ones were busily
preparing for their journeys after dark; they hid, but they did not sleep; in
this unused Wing, vaster alone than any other country house he had ever seen,
Sleep taught and trained her flock of feathered Dreams. It was very wonderful.
They probably supplied the entire county. But more wonderful still was the
thought that the Ruler herself should take the trouble to come to his particular
room and personally watch over him all night long. That was amazing. And it
flashed across his imaginative, inquiring mind: "Perhaps they take me
with them! The moment I'm asleep! That's why she comes to see me!" ,
Yet his chief preoccupation was, how Sleep got out. Through the green baize doors, of
course! By a process of elimination he arrived at a conclusion: he, too,-must
enter through a green baize door arid risk detection.
Of
late, the lightning visits had ceased. The silent, darting figure had not
peeped in and vanished as it used to do. He fell asleep too quickly now, almost
before Jackman reached the hall, and long before the
fire began to die. Also, the dogs and birds upon the curtains always matched
the trees exactly, and he won the curtain game quite easily; there was never a
dog or bird too many; the curtain never stirred. It had been thus ever since
his talk with Mother and Father. And so he came to make a second discovery: His
parents did not really believe in his Figure. She kept away on that account.
They doubted her; she hid. Here was still another incentive to go and find her
out. He ached for her, she was so kind, she gave herself so
much trouble—just for his little self in the big and lonely bedroom. Yet
his parents spoke of her as though she were of no account. He longed to see
her, face to face, and tell her that he believed in her and loved her. For he was positive she would like to
hear it. She cared. Though he had fallen asleep of late too quickly for him to
see her flash in at the door, he had known nicer dreams than ever in his life
before—-travelling dreams. And it was she who sent them. More—he was sure she
took him out with her.
One evening, in the dusk of a March day, his
opportunity came; and only just in time, for his brother Jack was expected home
from school on the morrow, and with Jack in the other bed, no Figure would
ever care to show itself. Also it was Easter, and after Easter, though Tim was
not aware of it at the time, he was to say good-bye finally to governesses and
become a day-boarder at a preparatory school for Wellington. The opportunity
offered itself so naturally, moreover, that Tim took it without hesitation. It
never occurred to him to question, much less to refuse it. The thing was
obviously meant to be. For he found himself unexpectedly in front of a green
baize door; and the green baize door was—swinging! Somebody, therefore, had
just passed through it.
ft
had come about in this wise. Father, away in Scotland, at fnglemuir,
the shooting place, was expected back next morning; Mother had driven over to
the church upon some Easter business or other; and the governess had been
allowed her holiday at home in France. Tim, therefore, had the run of the
house, and in the hour between tea and bed-time he made good use of it. Fully
able to defy such second-rate obstacles as nurses and butlers, he explored all
manner of forbidden places with ardent thoroughness, arriving finally in the
sacred precincts of his father's study. This wonderful room was the very heart
and centre of the whole big house; he had been birched here long ago; here,
too, his father had told him with a grave yet smiling face: "You've got a
new companion, Tim, a little sister; you must be very kind to her." Also,
it was the place where all the money was kept. What he called "father's
jolly smell" was strong in it—papers, tobacco, books, flavoured
by hunting crops and gunpowder.
At
first he felt awed, standing motionless just inside the door; but presently,
recovering equilibrium, he moved cautiously on tiptoe towards the gigantic desk
where important papers were piled in untidy patches. These he did not touch;
but beside them his quick eye noted the jagged piece of iron shell his father
brought home from his Crimean campaign and now used as a letter-weight, ft was
difficult to lift, however. He climbed into the comfortable chair and swung
round and round, ft was a swivel-chair, and he sank down among the cushions in
it, staring at the strange things on the great desk before him, as if fascinated.
Next he turned away_and saw the stick-rack in the
corner— this, he knew, he was allowed to touch. He had played with these sticks
before. There were twenty, perhaps, all told, with curious carved handles,
brought from every corner of the world; many of them cut by his father's own
hand in queer and distant places. And, among them, Tim fixed his eye upon a
cane with an ivory handle, a slender, polished cane that he had always coveted
tremendously. It was the kind he meant to use when he was a man. It bent, it
quivered, and when he swished it through the air it trembled like a
riding-whip, and made a whistling noise. Yet it was very strong in spite of its
elastic qualities. A family treasure, it was also an old-fashioned relic; it
had been his grandfather's walking stick. Something of another century clung
visibly about it still, ft had dignity and grace and leisure in its very
aspect. And it suddenly occurred to him: "How grandpapa must miss it!
Wouldn't he just love to have it back again!"
How
it happened exactly, Tim did not know, but a few minutes later he found himself
walking about the deserted halls and passages of the house with the air of an
elderly gentleman of a hundred years ago, proud as a courtier, flourishing the
stick like an Eighteenth Century dandy in the Mall. That the cane reached to
his shoulder made no difference; he held it accordingly, swaggering on his
way. He was off upon an adventure. He dived down through the byways of the
Other Wing, inside himself, as though the stick transported him to the days of
the old gentleman who had used it in another century.
ft may seem strange to those who dwell in
smaller houses, but in this rambling Elizabethan mansion there were whole
sections that, even to Tim, were strange and unfamiliar, fn his mind the map of
the Other Wing was clearer by far than the geography of the part he travelled
daily. He came to passages and dim-lit halls, long corridors of stone beyond
the Picture Gallery; narrow, wainscoted connecting-channels with four steps
down and a little later two steps up; deserted chambers with arches guarding
them—all hung with the soft March twilight and all bewilderingly unrecognised. With a sense of adventure born of
naughtiness h% went carelessly along, farther and farther
into the heart of this unfamiliar country, swinging the cane, one thumb stuck
into the arm-pit of his blue serge suit, whistling softly to himself, excited
yet keenly on the alert—and suddenly found himself opposite a door that checked
all further advance, ft was a green baize door. And it was swinging.
He
stopped abruptly, facing it. He stared, he gripped his cane more tightly, he held his. breath. "The
Other Wing!" he gasped in a swallowed whisper. It was an entrance, but an
entrance he had never seen before. He thought he knew every door by heart; but
this one was new. He stood motionless for several minutes, watching it; the
door had two halves, but one half only was swinging, each swing shorter than
the one before; he heard the little puffs of air it made; it settled finally,
the last movements very short and rapid; it stopped. And the boy's heart, after
similar rapid strokes, stopped also—for a moment.
"Some
one's just gone through," he gulped. And even as he said it he knew who
the some one was. The conviction just dropped into
him. "It's Grandfather; he knows I've got his stick. He wants it!"
On the heels of this flashed instantly another amazing certainty. "He
sleeps in there. He's having dreams. That's what being dead means."
His
first impulse, then, took the form of, "I must let Father know; it'll make
him burst for joy"; but his second was for himself—to finish his adventure.
And it was this, naturally enough, that gained the day. He could tell his
father later. His first duty was plainly to go through the door into the Other
Wing. He must give the stick back to its owner. He must hand it back.
The
test of will and character came now. Tim had imagination, and so knew the
meaning of fear; but there was nothing craven in him. He could howl and scream
and stamp like any other person of his age when the occasion called for such behaviour, but such occasions were due to temper roused by
a thwarted will, and the histrionics were half "pretended" to produce
a calculated effect..There was no one to thwart his will at present. He also
knew how to he afraid of
Nothing, to be afraid without ostensible cause, that is— which was merely
"nerves." He could have "the shudders" with the best of
them.
But, when a real thing faced him, Tim's character
emerged to meet it. He would clench his hands, brace his muscles, set his
teeth—and wish to heaven he was bigger. But he would not flinch. Being
imaginative, he lived the worst a dozen times before it happened, yet in the
final crash he stood up like a man. He had that highest pluck—the courage of a
sensitive temperament. And at this particular juncture, somewhat ticklish for a
boy of eight or nine, it did not fail him. He lifted the cane and pushed the
swinging door wide open. Then he walked through it—into the Other Wing.
3 *
The green baize door swung to behind him; he
was even sufficiently master of himself to turn and
close it with a steady hand, because he did not care to hear the series of
muffled thuds its lessening swings would cause. But he realised
clearly his position, knew he was doing a tremendous thing.
Holding
the cane between fingers very tightly clenched, he advanced bravely along the
corridor that stretched before him.- And all fear left
him from that moment, replaced, it seemed, by a mild and exquisite surprise.
His footsteps made no sound, he walked on air; instead of darkness, or the twilight
he expected, a diffused and gentle light that seemed like the silver on the
lawn when a half-moon sails a cloudless sky, lay everywhere. He knew his way,
moreover, knew exactly where he was and whither he was going. The corridor was
as familiar to him as the floor of his own bedroom; he recognised
the shape and length of it; it agreed exactly with the map he had
constructed" long ago. Though he had never, to the best of his knowledge,
entered it before, he knew with intimacy its every detail.
And
thus the surprise -he felt was mild and far from disconcerting. "I'm here
again!" was the kind of thought he had. It was how he got here that caused the faint surprise, apparently. He no longer
swaggered, however, but walked carefully, and half on tiptoe, holding the ivory
handle- of the cane with a kind of affectionate respect. And as he advanced,
the light closed softly up behind him, obliterating the way by which he had
come. But this he did not know, because he did not look behind him. He only
looked in front, where the corridor stretched its silvery length towards the
great chamber where he knew the cane must be surrendered. The person who had preceded
him down this ancient corridor, passing through the green baize door just
before he reached it, this person, his father's father, now stood in that great
chamber, waiting to receive his own. Tim knew it as surely as he knew he
breathed. At the far end he even made out the larger patch of silvery light
which marked its gaping doorway.
There
was another thing he knew as well—that this corridor he moved along between
rooms with fast-closed doors, was the Nightmare
Corridor; often and often he had traversed it; each room was occupied.
"This is the Nightmare Passage," he whispered to himself, "but I
know the Ruler—it doesn't matter. None of them can get out or do
anything." He heard them, none the less, inside, as he passed by; he heard
them scratching to get out. The feeling of security made him reckless; he took
unnecessary risks; he brushed the panels as he passed. And the love of keen
sensation for its own sake, the desire to feel "an awful thrill,"
tempted him once so sharply that he raised his stick and poked a fast-shut door
with it!
He
was not prepared for the result, but he gained the sensation and the thrill.
For the door opened with instant swiftness half an inch, a hand emerged, caught
the stick and tried to draw it in. Tim sprang back as if he had been struck. He
pulled at the ivory handle with all his strength, but his strength was less
than nothing. He tried to shout, but his voice was gone. A terror of the moon
came over him, for he was unable to loosen his hold of the handle; his fingers
had become a part of it. An appalling weakness turned him helpless. He was
dragged inch by inch towards the fearful door. The end of the stick was already
through the narrow crack. He could not see the hand that pulled, but he knew it
was terrific. He understood now why the world was strange, why horses galloped
furiously, and why trains whistled as they raced through stations. All the
comedy and terror of nightmare gripped his heart with pincers made of ice. The
disproportion was abominable. The final collapse rushed over him when, without
a sign of warning, the door slammed silently, and between the jamb and the wall
the cane was crushed as flat as if it were a bulrush. So irresistible was the
force behind the door that the solid stick just went flat as a stalk of a
bulrush.
He looked at it. It was a bulrush.
He did not laugh; the absurdity was so
distressingly unnatural. The horror of finding a bulrush
where he had expected a polished cane—this hideous apd
appalling detail held the nameless horror of the nightmare. It betrayed
him utterly. Why had he not always known really that the stick was not a stick,
but a thin and hollow reed . . .?
Then
the cane was safely in his hand, unbroken. He stood looking at it. The
Nightmare was in full swing. He heard another door opening behind his back, a
door he had not touched. There was just time to see a hand thrusting and
waving dreadfully, familiarly, at him through the narrow crack—just time to realise that this was another Nightmare
acting in atrocious concert with the first, when he saw closely beside him,
towering to the ceiling, the protective, kindly figure that visited his
bedroom. In the turning movement he made to meet the attack, he became aware of
her. And his terror passed. It was a nightmare terror merely. The infinite
horror vanished. Only the comedy remained. He smiled.
He saw her dimly only, she was so vast, but
he saw her, the Ruler of the Other Wing at last, and knew that he was safe
again. He gazed with a tremendous love and wonder, trying to see her clearly;
but the face was hidden far,aloft
and seemed to melt into the sky beyond the roof. He discerned that she was
larger than the Night, only far, far softer, with wings that folded above him
more tenderly even than his mother's arms; that there were points of light like
stars among the feathers, and that she was vast enough to cover millions and
millions of people all at once. Moreover, she did not fade or go, so far as he
could see, but spread herself in such a way that he lost sight of her. She
spread over the entire Wing ...
And
Tim remembered that this was all quite natural really. He had often and often
been down this corridor before; the Nightmare Corridor was no new experience;
it had to be faced as usual. Once knowing what hid inside the rooms, he was
bound to tempt them out. They drew, enticed, attracted
him; this was their power. It was their special strength that they could suck
him helplessly towards them, and that he was obliged to go. He understood
exactly why he was tempted to tap with the cane upon their awful doors, but,
having done so, he had accepted the challenge and could now continue his
journey quietly and safely. The Ruler of the Other Wing had taken him in
charge.
A
delicious sense of carelessness came on him. There was softness as of water in
the solid things about him, nothing that could hurt or bruise. Holding the
cane firmly by its ivory.handle, he went forward
along the corridor, walking as on air.
The end was quickly reached: He stood upon
the threshold of the mighty chamber where he knew the owner of the cane was
waiting; the long corridor lay behind him, in front he saw the spacious
dimensions of a lofty hall that gave him the feeling of being in the Crystal Paiace, Euston Station, or St. Paul's. High, narrow
windows, cut deeply'into the wall, stood in a row
upon the other side; an enormous open fireplace of burning logs was on his
right; thick tapestries hung from the ceiling to the floor of stone; and in the
centre of the chamber was a massive table of dark, shining wood, great chairs
with carved stif^f backs set here and there beside
it. And in the biggest of these throne-like chairs there sat a figure looking
at him gravely—the figure of an old, old man.
Yet
there was no surprise in the boy's fast-beating heart; there was a thrill of
pleasure and excitement only, a feeling of satisfaction. He had known quite
well the figure would be there, known also it would look like this exactly. He
stepped forward on to the floor of stone without a trace of fear or trembling,
holding the precious cane in two hands now before him, -as though to present it
to its owner. He felt proud and pleased. He had run risks for this.
And
the figure rose quietly to meet him, advancing in a stately manner over the
hard stone floor. The eyes looked gravely, sweetly down at him, the aquiline-
nose stood out. Tim knew him perfectly: the knee-breeches of shining satin, the
gleaming buckles on the shoes, the neat dark stockings, the lace and ruffles
about neck and wrists, the coloured waistcoat opening
so widely— all the details of the picture over father's mantelpiece, where,it hung between two Crimean bayonets, were reproduced
in life before his eyes .at last. Only the polished cane with the ivory handle
was not there.
Tim
went three steps nearer to the advancing figure and held out both his hands
with the cane laid crosswise on them,
"I've
brought it, Grandfather." he said, in a faint but clear and steady tone;
"here it is."
And
the other stooped a little, put out three fingers half concealed by falling
lace, and took it by the ivory handle. He made a courtly bow to Tim. He smiled,
but though there was pleasure, it was a grave, sad smile. He spoke then: the
voice was slow and very deep. There was a delicate softness in it, the suave
politeness of an older day.
"Thank you," he said; "I value
it. It was given to me by my grandfather.
I forgot it when I----- " His voice grew indistinct a little.
"Yes?" said Tim.
"When I—left,"
the old gentleman repeated.
"Oh," said Tim,
thinking how beautiful and kind the gracious figure was.
The
old man ran his slender fingers carefully along the cane, feeling the polished
surface with satisfaction. He lingered specially over the smoothness of the
ivory handle. He was evidently very pleased.
"f was
not quite myself—er—at the moment," he went on
gently; "my memory failed me somewhat." He sighed, as though an
immense relief was in him.
"I forget things, too—sometimes," Tim mentioned sympathetically. He
simply loved his grandfather. He hoped—for a moment—he would Be
lifted up and kissed. "I'm awfully glad
I brought it," he faltered—"that you've got it again."
The
other turned his kind grey eyes upon him; the smile on his face was full of
gratitude as he looked down.
"Thank
you, my boy. I am truly and deeply indebted to you. You courted danger for my
sake. Others have tried before, but the Nightmare Passage—
er----- "
He broke off. He tapped the stick firmly on the stone flooring, as
though to test it. Bending a trifle, he put his
weight upon it. "Ah!" he ex-
claimed with a short sigh of relief, "I can now---- "
His voice again grew
indistinct; Tim did not catch the words.
"Yes?"
he asked again, aware for the first time that a touch of awe was in his heart.
"—get about again,"
the other continued very low. "Without my cane," he added, the voice
failing with each word the old lips uttered, "I could not . . . possibly .
. . allow myself ... to be seen. It
was indeed . . . deplorable . . . unpardonable of me ... to forget in such a way. Zounds, sir . . .! I—I . . ."
His
voice sank away suddenly into a sound of wind. He straightened up, tapping the
iron ferrule of his cane on the stones in a series of loud knocks. Tim felt a
strange sensation creep into his legs. The queer words frightened him a little..
The
old man took a step towards him. He still smiled, but there was a new meaning
in the smile. A sudden earnestness had replaced thé courtly,
leisurely manner. The next words seemed to blow down upon the boy from above, as
though a cold wind brought them from the sky outside.
Yet
the words, he knew, were kindly meant, and very sensible. It was only the
abrupt change that startled him. Grandfather, after all, was but a mani The distant sound recalled
something in him to that outside world from which the cold wind blew.
"My eternal thanks to you," he
heard, while the voice and face and figure seemed to withdraw deeper and deeper
intothe heart of the mighty chamber. "I shall
not forget your kindness and your courage. It is a debt I can, fortunately,
one day repay. . . . But now you had best return and with dispatch. For your
head and arm lie heavily on the table, the documents are scattered, there is a
cushion fallen . . . and my son is in the house. . . . Farewell! You had best
leave me quickly. See! She stands behind you, waiting. Go with her! Go
now . . .! "
The
entire scene had vanished even before the final words were uttered. Tim felt
empty space, about him. A vast, shadowy Figure bore him through it as with
mighty wings. He flew, he rushed, he remembered
nothing more— until he heard another voice and felt a heavy hand upon his
shoulder.
"Tim, you rascal! What are you doing in my study? And in the dark, like this!" t
He
looked up into his father's face without a word. He felt dazed. The next minute his father had caught him up and kissed him.
"Ragamuffin! How did you guess I was coming back to-night?" He shook him
playfully and kissed his tumbling hair. "And you've been asleep, too, into
the bargain. Well—how's everything at home—eh? Jack's coming back from school
to-morrow, you know, and . . ."
4
Jack came home, indeed, the following day,
and when the Easter holidays were over, the governess stayed abroad and Tim
went off to adventures of another kind in the preparatory school for
Wellington. Life slipped rapidly along with him; he grew into a man; his mother
and his father died; Jack followed them within a little space; Tim inherited,
married, settled down into his great possessions—and opened up the Other Wing.
The dreams of imaginative boyhood all had faded; perhaps he had merely put them
away, or perhaps he had forgotten them. At any rate, he never spoke of such
things now, and when his frish wife mentioned her
belief that the old country house possessed a family ghost, even declaring that
she had met an Eighteenth Century figure of a man in the corridors, "an
old, old man who bends down upon a stick"—Tim only laughed and said:
"That's
as it ought to be! And if these awful land-taxes force us to sell some day, a
respectable ghost will increase the market value."
But
one night he woke and heard a tapping on the floor. He sat up in bed and
listened. There was á
chilly feeling down his
back. Belief had long since gone out of him; he felt uncannily afraid. The
sound came nearer and nearer; there were light footsteps with it. The door
opened—it opened a little wider, that is, for it already stood ajar—and there
upon the threshold stood a figure that it seemed he knew. He saw the face as
with all the .vivid sharpness of reality. There was a smile upon it, but a
smile of warning and alarm. The arm was raised. Tim saw the slender hand, lace
falling down upon the long, thin fingers, and in them, tightly gripped, a polished cane. Shaking the cane twice to and fro
in the air, the face thrust forward, spoke certain words, arid —vanished. But
the words were inaudible; for, though the lips distinctly moved, no sound,
apparently, came from them.
And
Tim sprang out of bed. The room was full of darkness. He turned the light on.
The door, he saw, was shut as usual. He had, of course, been dreaming. But he
noticed a curious odour in the air. He sniffed it
once or twice—then grasped the truth. It was a smell of burning!
Fortunately, he awoke just
in time; . . .
He
was acclaimed a hero for his promptitude. After many days, when the damage was
repaired, and nerves had settled down once more into the calm routine of
country life, he told the story to his wife—the entire story. He told the
adventure of his imaginative boyhood with it. She asked to see the old family
cane. And it was this request of hers that brought back to memory a detail Tim
had entirely forgotten all these years. He remembered it suddenly again—the
loss of the cane, the hubbub his father kicked up about it, the endless, futile
search. For the stick had never been found, and Tim, who was questioned very
closely concerning it, swore with all his might that he had not the smallest
notion where it was. Which was, of course, the truth.
bty JP. aCovecraft
The influence of the First World War was strong on H. P. Lovecraft, for in his youth he was an ardent Anglophile and remained almost fanatically so long after the end of that conflict. Thus the portrayal of the "Prussian beast" created by propagandists was accepted by him at face value and utilized in this story of a U-boat that ran afoul of an unearthly foe. Notwithstanding the fact of Nazi horror during the Second World War, we must perforce admit the artificial nature of Lovecraft's protagonist's boasting—yet even so thf author's mastery of suspenseful terror carries "The Temple" along to a real climax of ocean-bottom shoc\.
Manuscript found on the coast of Yucatan
N AUGUST 20, 1917, I, Karl Hein-rich, Graf
von Altberg-Ehrenstein, Lieutenant-Commander in the
Imperial German Navy and in charge of the submarine U-29, deposit this bottle
and record in the Atlantic Ocean at a point to me unknown but probably about N.
Latitude 20 degrees, W.
Longitude 35 degrees, where my ship lies disabled on the ocean floor. I do so
because of my desire to set certain unusual facts before the public; a thing I
shall not in all probability survive to accomplish in person, since the circumstances
surrounding me are as menacing as they are extraordinary, and involve not only
the hopeless crippling of the U-29, but the impairment of my iron German will
in a manner most disastrous.
On
the afternoon of June 18, as reported by wireless to the U-61, bound for Kiel,
we torpedoed the British freighter Victory, New
York to Liverpool, in N. Latitude 45 degrees 16 minutes, W. Longitude 28
degrees 34 minutes; permitting the crew to leave in boats in order to obtain a
good cinema view for the admiralty records. The ship sank quite picturesquely, bow first, the stern rising high out of the
water whilst the hull shot down perpendicularly to the bottom of the sea. Our
camera missed nothing, and I regret that so fine a reel of film should never
reach Berlin. After that we sank the lifeboats with our guns and submerged.
When
we rose to the surface about sunset a seaman's body was found on the deck,
hands gripping the railing in curious fashion. The poor fellow
89
was
young, rather dark, and very handsome; probably an Italian or Greek, and
undoubtedly of the Victory's crew. He had evidently sought refuge on the
very ship which had been forced to destroy his own—one more victim of the
unjust war of aggression which the English pig-dogs are waging upon the
Fatherland. Our men searched him for souvenirs, and found in his coat pocket a
very odd bit of ivory carved to represent a youth's head crowned with laurel.
My fellow officer, Lieutenant Klenze, believed that
the thing was of great age and artistic value, so took it from the men for himself. How it had ever come into the.
possession of a common sailor neither he nor I could
imagine.
As the dead man was thrown overboard there
occurred two incidents which created much disturbance amongst the crew. The
fellow's eyes had been closed; but in the dragging of his body to the rail they
were jarred open, and many seemed to entertain a queer delusion that they gazed
steadily and mockingly at Schmidt and Zimmer, who were bent over the corpse.
Then Boatswain Mûller, an elderly man who would have known better had he not been a
superstitious Alsatian swine, became so excited by this impression that he
watched the body in the water, and swore that after it sank a little it drew
its limbs into a swimming position and sped away to the south under the waves. Klenze and 1 did
not like these displays of peasant ignorance, and severely reprimanded the men,
particularly Miiller.
The
next day a very troublesome situation was created by the indisposition of some
of the crew. They were evidently suffering from the nervous strain of our long
voyage, and had had bad dreams. Several seemed quite dazed and stupid; and
after satisfying myself that they were not feigning their weakness, I excused
them from their duties. The sea was rather rough, so we descended to a depth
where the waves were less troublesome. Here we were comparatively calm, despite
a somewhat puzzling southward current which we could not identify from our océanographie charts. The moans of the sick men Were decidedly annoying; but since they did not appear to demoralize the rest
of the crew, we did not resort to extreme measures. It was our plan to remain
where we were and intercept the liner Dacia, mentioned
in information from agents in New York.
In
the early evening we rose to the surface, and found the sea less heavy. The
smoke of a battleship was on the northern horizon, but our distance and ability
to submerge made us safe. What worried us more was the talk of Boatswain Miiller, which grew wilder as night came on. He was in a detestably
childish state, and babbled of some illusion of dead bodies drifting past the
undersea portholes; bodies which looked at him intently, and which he
recognized in spite of bloating as having seen dying during some of our
victorious German exploits. And he said that the young man we had found and
tossed overboard was their leader. This was very gruesome and abnormal, so we
confined Miiller in irons and had him
soundly whipped. The men were not pleased at his punishment, but discipline was
necessary. We also denied the request of a delegation headed by Seaman Zimmer,
that the curious carved ivory head be cast into the sea.
On
June 20, Seamen Bohm and Schmidt, who had been ill
the day before, became violently insane. I regretted that no physician was
included in our complement of officers, since German lives are precious; but
the constant ravings of the two concerning a terrible curse were most
subversive of discipline, so drastic steps were taken. The crew accepted the
event in a sullen fashion, but it seemed to quiet Miiller,
who thereafter gave us no trouble. In the evening we released him, and he went
about his duties silently. '
In
the week that followed we were all very nervous, watching for the Dacia. The tension was aggravated by the disappearance
of Miiller and Zimmer, who undoubtedly committed
suicide as a result of the fears which had seemed to harass them, though they
were not observed in the act of jumping overboard. T was rather glad to be rid
of Miiller, for even his silence had unfavorably
affected the crew. Everyone seemed inclined to be silent now, as though holding
a secret fear. Many were illf but none made a
disturbance. Lieutenant Klenze chafed under the
strain, and was annoyed by the merest trifles—such as the school of dolphins
which gathered about the U-29 in increasing numbers, and the growing intensity
of that southward current which was not on our chart.
ft at
length became apparent that we had missed the Dacia altogether. Such failures are not uncommon, and we were more pleased
than disappointed; since our return to Wilhelmshaven was now in order. At noon
June 28 we turned northeastward, and despite some rather comical entanglements
with the unusual masses of dolphins were soon under way.
The explosion in the engine room at two p. m. was
wholly a surprise. No defect in the machinery or carelessness in the men had
been noticed, yet without warning the ship was racked from end to end with a
colossal shock. Lieutenant Klenze hurried to the
engine room, finding the fuel-tank and most of the mechanism shattered, and
Engineers Raabe and Schneider instantly killed. Our
situation had suddenly become grave indeed; for though the chemical air
regenerators were intact, and though we could use the devices for raising and
submerging the ship and opening the hatches as long as compressed air and
storage batteries might hold out, we were powerless to propel or guide the
submarine. To seek rescue in the lifeboats would be to deliver ourselves into
the hands of enemies unreasonably embittered against our great German nation,
and our wireless had failed ever since the Victory affair to put us in touch with a fellow U-boat of the fmperial Navy.
From
the hour of the accident till July 2 we drifted constantly to the south, almost
without plans and encountering no vessel. Dolphins still encircled the U-29, a
somewhat remarkable circumstance considering the distance we had covered. On
the morning of July 2 we sighted a warship flying American colors, and the man
became very restless in their desire to surrender. Finally Lieutenant Klenze had to shoot a seaman named Traube,
who urged this un-German act with especial violence. This quieted the crew for
the time, and we submerged unseen.
The next afternoon a dense flock of sea-birds
appeared from the south, and the ocean began to heave ominously. Closing our
hatches, we awaited developments until we realized that we must either
submerge or be swamped in the mounting waves. Our air pressure and electricity
were diminishing, and we wished to avoid all unnecessary use of our slender
mechanical resources; but in this case there was no choice. We did not descend
far, and when after several hours the sea was calmer, we decided to return to
the surface. Here, however, a new trouble developed; for the ship failed to
respond to our direction in spite of all that the mechanics could do. As the
men grew more frightened at this undersea imprisonment, some of them began to
mutter again about Lieutenant Klenze's ivory image,
but the sight of an automatic pistol calmed them. We kept the poor devils as
busy as we could, tinkering at the machinery even when
we knew it was useless.
Klenze and I usually slept at different times; and
it was during my sleep, about five a. m., July 4, that the general mutiny broke
loose. The six remaining pigs of seamen, suspecting that we were lost, had
suddenly burst into a mad fury at our refusal to surrender to the Yankee
battleship two days before, and were in a delirium of cursing and destruction.
They roared like the animals they were, and broke instruments and furniture
indiscriminately, screaming about such nonsense as the curse of the ivory
image and the dark dead youth who looked at them and swam away. Lieutenant Klenze seemed paralyzed and inefficient, as one might
expect of a soft, womanish Rhinelander. I shot all six men, for it was
necessary, and made sure that none remained alive.
We
expelled the bodies through the double hatches and were alone in the U-29. Klenze seemed very nervous, and drank heavily. It was
decided that we remain alive as long as possible, using the large stock of
.provisions and chemical supply of oxygen, none of which had suffered from the
crazy antics of those swinehound seamen. Our
compasses, depth gages, and other delicate instruments were ruined; so that
henceforth our only reckoning would be guesswork, based on our watches, the
calendar, and our apparent drift as judged by any objects we might spy through
the portholes or from the conning-tower. Fortunately we had storage batteries
still capable of long use, both for interior lighting and for the searchlight.
We often cast a beam around the ship, but saw only dolphins, swimming parallel
to our own drifting course. I was scientifically interested in those dolphins;
for though the ordinary Delphinus del-phis is a cetacean mammal, unable to subsist without air, I watched one oi the swimmers closely for two hours, and did not see him
alter his submerged condition.
With the passage of time Klenze
and I decided that we were still drifting south, meanwhile sinking deeper and
deeper. We noted the marine fauna and flora, and read much on the subject in
the books f had carried with me for spare moments, f could not help observing,'however, the inferior scientific knowledge of my
companion. His mind was not Prussian, but given to imaginings and speculations
which have no value. The fact of our coming death affected him curiously, and
he would frequently pray in remorse over the men, women, and children we had
sent to the bottom; forgetting that all things are noble which serve the German
state. After a time he became noticeably unbalanced, gazing for hours at his
ivory image and weaving fanciful stories of the lost and forgotten things under
the sea. Sometimes, as a psychological _ experiment, f would lead him on in
these wanderings, and listen to his endless poetical quotations and tales of
sunken ships, f was very sorry for him, for f dislike to see a German suffer;
but he was not a good man to die with. For myself I was proud, knowing how the
Fatherland would revere my memory and how my sons would be taught to be men
like me.
On
August 9, we espied the ocean floor, and sent a powerful beam from the
searchlight over it. ft was
a vast undulating plain, mostly covered with seaweed, and strown
with the shells of small mollusks. Here and there were slimy objects of
puzzling contour, draped with weeds and encrusted with barnacles, which Klenze declared must be ancient ships lying in their
graves. He was puzzled by one thing, a peak of solid matter, protruding above
the ocean bed nearly four feet at its apex; about two feet thick, with flat
sides and smooth upper surfaces which met at a very obtuse angle. 1 called the
peak a bit of outcropping rock, but Klenze thought he
saw carvings on it. After a while he began to shudder, and turned away from the
scene as if frightened; yet could give no explanation save that he was overcome
with the vastness, darkness, remoteness, antiquity, and mystery of the oceanic
abysses. His mind was tired, but f am always a German, and was quick to notice
two things; that the U-29 was standing the deep-sea pressure splendidly, and
that the peculiar dolphins were still about us, even at a depth where the existence
of high organisms is considered impossible by most naturalists. That f had
previously over-estimated our depth, f was sure; but none the less we must
still be deep enough to make these phenomena remarkable. Our southward speed,
as gaged by the ocean floor, was about as 1 had estimated from the organisms passed at higher levels.
It
was at three-fifteen p. m., August 12, that poor Klenze went wholly mad. He had been in the conning-tower
using the searchlight when I saw him bound into the library compartment where I
sat reading, and his face at once betrayed him. f will
repeat here what he said, underlining the words he emphasized: "He is calling! He is
calling! I hear him! We must go!" As he spoke he took his ivory image from
the table, pocketed it, and seized my arm in an effort to drag me up the
companionway to the deck. In a moment I understood that he meant to open the
hatch and plunge with me into the water outside, a vagary of suicidal and
homicidal mania for which I was scarcely prepared. As
I hung back and attempted to soothe him he grew more violent,
msaying: "Come now—do not wait until later; it
is better to repent and be forgiven than to defy and be condemned." Then
I tried the opposite of the soothing plan, and told him he was mad—pitifully
demented. But he was unmoved, and cried: "If I am mad, it is mercy! May
the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous
end! Come and be mad whilst he still calls with mercy!"
This outburst seemed to relieve a pressure in
his brain; for as he finished he
. grew much milder,
asking me to let him depart alone if I would not accom-.
pany him. My course at once
became clear. He was a German, but only a Rhinelander,
and he was now a potentially dangerous madman. By complying with his suicidal
request I could immediately free myself from one who was no longer a companion
but a menace. I asked him to give me the ivory image before he went, but this
request brought from him such uncanny laughter that I did not repeat it. Then I
asked him if he wished to leave any keepsake or lock of hair for his family in
Germany in case I should be rescued, but" again he gave me that strange
laugh. So as he climbed the ladder I went to the levers and allowing proper
time-intervals operated the machinery which sent him to his death. After I saw
that he was no longer in the boat I threw the searchlight around the water in
an effort to obtain a last glimpse of him; since I wished to ascertain whether
the water-pressure would flatten him as it theoretically should, or whether the
body would be unaffected, like those extraordinary dolphins. I did not,
however, succeed in finding my late companion, for the dolphins were massed
thickly and obscurely about the conning-tower.
That
evening I regretted that I had not taken the ivory image surreptitiously from
poor Klenze's pocket as he left, for the memory of it
fascinated me. I could not forget the youthful, beautiful head with its leafy
crown, though I am not by nature an artist. I was also sorry that Ihad no one with whom to converse. Klenze,
though not my mental equal, was much better than no one. I did not sleep well
that night, and wondered exactly when the end would
come. Surely, I had little enough chance of rescue.
The
next day I ascended to the conning-tower and commenced the customary
searchlight explorations. Northward the view was much the same as it had been
all the four days since we had sighted the bottom, but I perceived that the
drifting of the U-29 was less rapid. As I swung the beam around to the south, I
noticed that the ocean floor ahead fell away in a marked declivity, and bore
curiously regular blocks of stone in certain places, disposed as if in
accordance with definite patterns. The boat did not at once descend to match
the greater ocean depth, so I was soon forced to adjust the searchlight to cast
a sharply downward beam. Owing to the abruptness of the change a wire was
disconnected, which necessitated a delay of many minutes for repairs; but at
length the light streamed on again, flooding the marine valley below me.
I
am not given to emotion of any kind, but my amazement was very great when f saw what lay revealed in that electrical glow. And yet as one reared in
the best \ultur of
Prussia I should not have been amazed, for geology and tradition alike tell us
of great transpositions in oceanic and continental areas. What I saw was an
extended and elaborate array of'ruined edifices; all
of magnificent though unclassified architecture, and in various stages of
preservation. Most appeared to be of marble, gleaming whitely in the rays of
the searchlight, and the general plan was of a large city at the bottom of a
narrow valley, with numerous isolated temples and villas on the steep slopes
above. Roofs were fallen and columns were broken, but there still remained in air of immemorially ancient splendor which nothing could efface.
Confronted
at last with the Atlantis I had formerly deemed largely a myth, 1 was the most eager of explorers. At the bottom of that valley a river
once had flowed; for as I examined the scenexmore
closely I beheld the remains of stone and marble bridges and sea-walls, and
terraces and embankments once verdant and beautiful. In my enthusiasm I became
nearly as idiotic and sentimental as poor Klenze, and
was very tardy in noticing that the southward current had ceased at last,
allowing the U-29 to settle slowly down upon the sunken city as an airplane
settled upon a town of the upper earth. I was slow, too, in realizing that the
school of unusual dolphins had vanished.
In
about two hours the boat rested in a paved plaza close to the rocky wall of the
valley. On one side I could view the entire city as it sloped from the plaza
down to the old river bank; on the other side, in startling proximity, I was confronted by the richly ornate and
perfectly preserved facade of a great building, evidently a temple, hollowed
from the solid rock. Of the original workmanship of this titanic thing I can
only make conjectures. The facade, of immense magnitude, apparendy
covers a continuous hollow recess, for its windows are many and widely
distributed. In the center yawns a great open door, reached by an impressive
flight of steps, and surrounded by exquisite carvings like the figures of
bacchanals in relief. Foremost of all are the great
columns and frieze, both decorated with scupltures of
inexpressible beauty; obviously portraying idealized pastoral scenes and
processions of priests and priestesses bearing strange ceremonial devices in
adoration of a radiant god. The art is of the most phenomenal perfection,
largely Hellenic in idea, yet strangely individual. It imparts an impression of
terrible antiquity, as though -it were the remotest
rather than the immediate ancestor of Greek art. Nor can f doubt that very detail of this massive product
was fashioned from the virgin hillside rock of our planet. It is palpably a
part of the valley wall, though how the vast interior was ever excavated I can not imagine. Perhaps a cavern or series of caverns
furnished the nucleus. Neither age nor submersion has corroded the pristine
grandeur of this awful fane—for fane indeed it must be—and today after
thousands of years it rests untarnished and inviolate in the endless night and
silence of an ocean chasm.
I can not reckon the number of hours I spent in gazing at the
sunken city with its buildings, arches, statues, and bridges, and the colossal
temple with its beauty and mystery. Though I knew that death was near, my curiosity
was consuming, and I threw the searchlight's beam about in eager quest. The
shaft of light permitted me to learn many details, but refused to show anything
within the gaping door of the rock-hewn temple; and after a time I turned off
the current, conscious of the need of conserving power. The rays were now
perceptibly dimmer than they had been during the weeks of drifting. And as if
sharpened by the coming of deprivation of light, my desire to explore the
watery secrets grew. I, a German, should be the first to tread those eon-forgottenjsvays!
I
produced and examined a deep-sea diving-suit of jointed metal, and experimented
with the portable light and air regenerator. Though I should have trouble in
managing the double hatches alone, I believed I could overcome all obstacles
with my scientific skill and actually walk about the dead city in person.
On
August 16 I effected an exit from the U-29, and
laboriously made my way through the ruined and mud-choked streets to the
ancient river. I found no skeletons or other human remains, but gleaned a
wealth of archeological lore from sculptures and coins. Of this I can not now speak save to utter my awe at a culture in the
full noon of glory when cave-dwellers roamed Europe and the Nile flowed
unwatched to the sea. Others, guided by this manuscript if it shall ever be
found, must unfold the mysteries at which I can only hint. I returned to' the
boat as my electric batteries grew feeble, resolved to explore the rock temple
on the following day.
On the 17th, as my impulse to search out the
mystery of the temple waxed still more insistent, a great disappointment befell
me; for I found that the materials needed to replenish the portable light had
perished in the mutiny of those pigs in July. My rage was unbounded, yet my
German sense forbade me to venture unprepared into an utterly black interior
which might prove the lair of some indescribable marine monster or a labyrinth
of passages from whose windings I could never extricate myself. All I could do
was to turn on the waning searchlight of the U-29, and with its aid walk up the
temple steps and study the exterior carvings. The shaft of light entered the
door at an upward angle, and I peered in to see if I could glimpse anything,
but all in vain. Not even the roof was visible; and though I took a step or two
inside after testing the floor with a staff, I dared not go farther. Moreover,
for the first time in my life I experienced the emotion of dread. I began to
realize how some of poor Klenze's moods had arisen, for
as the temple drew me more and more, I feared its aqueous abysses with a blind
and mounting terror. Returning to the submarine, I turned off the lights and
sat thinking in the dark. Electricity must now be saved for emergencies.
Saturday .the 18th I spent in total darkness,
tormented by thoughts and memories that threatened to overcome my German will. Klenze had gone mad and perished before reaching this
sinister remnant of a past unwhole-somely remote, and
had advised me to go with him. Was, indeed, Fate preserving my reason only to
draw me irresistibly to an end more horrible and unthinkable than any man has
dreamed of? Clearly, my nerves were sorely taxed, and I must cast off these
impressions of weaker men.
f could not sleep Saturday night, and turned on the lights regardless of
the future. It was annoying that the electricity should not last out the air
and provisions. I revived my thoughts of euthanasia, and examined my automatic
pistol. Toward morning I must have dropped asleep with the lights on, for I
awoke in darkness yesterday afternoon to find the batteries dead. I struck
several matches in succession, and desperately regretted the improvidence
which had caused us long ago to use up the few candles we carried.
After
the fading of the last match I dared to waste, I sat very quietly without a
light. As I considered the inevitable end my mind ran over preceding events,
and developed a hitherto dormant impression which would have caused a weaker
and more superstitious man to shudder. The head of the radiant god in the sculptures on the roc\ temple is the same as that carven bit of ivory which the dead sailor brought from the sea and which poor Klenze carried bac\ into the sea.
I
was a little dazed by this coincidence, but did not become terrified. It is
only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex
by the primitive short cut of supernaturalism. The coincidence was strange, but
I was too sound a reasoner to connect circumstances
which admit of no logical connection, or to associate in any uncanny fashion
the disastrous events which had led from the Victory affair to my present plight. Feeling the need of more restj f took
a sedative and secured some more sleep. My nervous condition was reflected in
my dreams, for I seemed to hear the cries of drowning persons, and to see dead
faces pressing against the portholes of the boat. And among the dead faces was
the living, mocking face of the youth with the ivory image.
f must be careful how 1 record my awakening today, for I am unstrung, and
much hallucination is necessarily mixed with fact. Psychologically my case is.most interesting, and I regret
that it can not be observed scientifically by a
competent German authority. Upon opening my eyes my first sensation was an
overmastering desire to visit the rock temple; a desire which grew every
instant, yet which f automatically sought to resist through some
emotion of fear which operated in the reverse direction. Next there came to me
the impression of light amidst the darkness of dead batteries, and I seemed to see a sort of phosphorescent glow in the water through the porthole which
opened toward the temple. This aroused my curiosity, for I knew of no deep-sea
organism capable of emitting such luminosity. But before I could investigate
there came a third impression which because of its irrationality caused me to
doubt the objectivity of anything my senses might record. It was an aural
delusion, a sensation of rhythmic, melodic sound as of some wild yet beautiful
chant or choral hymn, coming from the outside through the absolutely soundproof
hull of the U-29.
Convinced of my psychological and nervous
abnormality, I lighted some matches and poured a stiff dose of sodium bromide
solution, which seemed to calm me to the extent of dispelling the illusion of
sound. But the phosphorescence remained, and I had difficulty in repressing a
childish impulse to go to the porthole and seek its source. It was horribly
realistic, and I could soon distinguish by its aid the familiar objects around
me, as well as the empty sodium bromide glass of which I had had no former
visual impression in its present location. This last circumstance made me
ponder, and I crossed the room and touched the glass. It was indeed in the
place where I had seemed to see it. Now I knew that the light was either real
or part of an hallucination so fixed and consistent
that I could not hope to dispel it; so abandoning all resistance I ascended to
the conning-tower to look for the luminous agency. Might it not actually be
another U-boat, offering possibilities of rescue?
It is well that the reader accept nothing
which follows as objective truth; for since the events transcend natural law,
they are necessarily the subjective And unreal
creations of my overtaxed mind. When I attained the conning-tower I found the
sea in general far less luminous than I had expected. There was no animal or
vegetable phosphorescence about, and the city that sloped down to the river was
invisible in blackness. What I did see was not spectacular, not grotesque or
terrifying, yet it removed my last vestige of trust in my consciousness. For the door and windows of the undersea temple hewn from the roc\y hill were vividly aglow with a flickering radiance, as from a mighty altar-flame far within.
Later
incidents are chaotic. As I stared at the uncannily lighted door and -windows,
I became subject to the most extravagant visions—visions so extravagant that I
can not even relate them. I fancied that I discerned
objects in the temple; objects both stationary and moving; and seemed to hear
again the unreal chant that had floated to me when first I awaked. And over all
rose thoughts and fears which centered in the youth from the sea and the ivory
image whose carving was duplicated in the frieze and columns of the temple
before me. I thought of poor Klenze, and wondered
where his body rested with the image he had carried back into the sea. He had
warned me of something, and I had not heeded—but he was a soft-headed
Rhinelander who went mad at troubles which a Prussian could bear with ease.
The rest is very simple. My impulse to visit
and enter the temple has now become an inexplicable and imperious command which
ultimately can not be denied. My own German will no
longer controls my acts, and volition is henceforward possible only in minor matters.
Such madness it was which drove Klenze to his death,
bareheaded and unprotected in the ocean; but I am a Prussian and a man of
sense, and will use to the last what little will I have. When first I saw that
I must go, I prepared my diving-suit, helmet, and air regenerator for instant
donning, and immediately commenced to write this hurried chronicle in the hope
that it may some day reach the world. I shall seal
the manuscript in a bottle and entrust it to the sea as I leave the U-29
forever.
I
have no fear, not even from the prophecies of the madman Klenze.
What I have seen I can not be sure, and I know that
this madness of my own will at most lead only to suffocation when my air is
gone. The light in the temple is a sheer delusion, and I shall die calmly, like
a German, in the black and forgotten depths. This demoniac laughter which I
hear as I write comes only from my own weakening brain. So I will carefully don
my diving-suit and walk boldly up the steps into that primal shrine, that
silent secret of un-fathomed waters and uncounted years.
DL QoMint Witt
Qet IJou Lu ^olin ^^Vlicket
Here is a story that defies easy classification. A fantasy in the New Yorker manner, refreshingly different from the run of formula, and breezily modern in its approach. The author is indeed a New Yorker, a resident of Greenwich Village no less, and the non-conformity of that famed area has doubtless contributed to the off-trail spar\le that highlights many of this author's pen-name published tales.
/nr SHOULDN'T have happened to
a dog.
I woke up one night and saw them grinning
over the counterpane at me like a row of painted heads off a Coney fsland three-sheet. The time was three o'clock as I could
easily see by the luminous hands of my alarm clock. Oddly enough I remained unshocked.
They
explained later that a sort of preparatory hypnosis had been worked —involving
a lot of ground-up vegetable greens I found under my bed every night for a week
before and couldn't up to then account for.
I
lay quietly and simply stared and they stared back, f was a bit upset, of
course, but none of your "crawling feeling down the spine" stuff. The
faces were inhuman, distorted, elongated, squashed, some nauseating, others
merely enough to make one squeamish. And the glow which backgrounded
the whole scene took away a lot of the mystery. They had hands and feet—plainly
seen —and they didn't float.
Finally I opened diplomatic
negotiations.
f said, "Hello."
The
faces yawned a trifle, grew misty and jagged, then
resumed a solid appearance. This I found was due to the impact of physical
noises on their nervous systems. Being creatures of an order necessarily
"other dimensional," they found it a trifle difficult maintaining
what to them was a decent state of appearance.
As
soon as the shaking and quaking had stopped and the gargoylish
eyes had been popped back into many sockets, a large-headed one goggled
fiercely in what was probably intended to be a reassuring smile and said,
"Teach us to speak English."
This was the first indication of the peculiar
irrelevancy which governed their reactions. Later on it was enough to drive
anyone crazy. As a matter of fact it did.
"But
you are speaking English," I remarked, collecting my thoughts as rapidly as
possible and pulling my pajamas away from my legs to which they were glued with
cold perspiration.
"That's
what you think," three cavernous mouths intoned solemnly in unison and
three enormous heads bent toward me. "We want to know the rules."
"You mean the
ropes," I answered.
"We mean the
rules," snapped the first big head.
"That's
what 7 mean." I said and picked up a
flashlight. The beam didn't affect them at all. But the case flew back suddenly
and crashed through the back of the bed.
"Don't get
tough!" warned all the heads wiggling and waggling.
I nursed a wrenched wrist
and stuck my tongue out at them.
"So
help me Joe, I only wanted to see you better. Though why, I don't know. By the
standards of this world you make a hippopotamus look like a raging
beauty."
They subsided grumbling.
The flashlight was returned, badly dented.
Well, the first few nights were the hardest.
I managed to get them past the silly impression that they didn't speak English
at the end of the second. By the fourth night I was missing the lost sleep. But
I got no reprieve.
They
were queer creatures by any standards. At first they were reticent in talking
about themselves. What was wanted chiefly was knowledge about other people.
From hints they let drop I concluded, finally, that they were certainly not of
the tribe of Adam or any branch thereof or doing business at the same stand.
After
awhile I stopped feeling sleepy. This was due mainly to the fact that while
they read the books they had me bring around from the local libraries, I
snatched a couple of thousand winks, interrupted at choice intervals by a
twinge as they awakened me by the crude, though simple process of banging the
book on my forehead.
What
a sight in the odd glow which emanated from all around them! Like a scene out
of some Oz book. A row of heads gathered in a semi-circle, beyond the light,
pitch blackness and me in bed. Great eyes popping and
staring. Occasionally one or another would laugh and the whole bunch
would go reeling off into instability for a few seconds and then come to a
standstill like water in a quiet pool.
I
stood all this for two weeks. When I ran out of money paying for lending
library rentals, they materialized some and gave it to me.
Holy mother! Twenty
thousand smackers in good old one dollar bills!
And
brand new! Laying quiedy a few feet beneath their
faces I became suddenly suspicious.
"Is it queer?" I asked and crinkled
one of the notes between my fingers. The one with the biggest head looked up
from the copy of "Gone With the Wind."
"It shouldn't be," he said
nonchalantly. "We got them out of the U.S. Treasury vaults in—what did you
call it?—oh, Washington." I went through the floor.
Piles
of books accumulated. Luckily I had my own apartment, so nosy chambermaids
never interfered. The only thing that got interfered with was my private life.
They monopolized my time, got me to quit my job and alienated my girl, ft was
awful. When f came home one night with the ring she threw
in my face, I looked the mob squarely in their excuses for faces. They were a
bit ashamed.
"But why?" I cried, burying my head in my arms.
They gazed at me stonily then.
"It was necessary. It is all in the
rules."
I looked up angrily
"What rules?"
"The underlying rules."
The
heads swayed smugly. I picked up a book and threw it at them. It went past the
row harmlessly.
"Underlying what?" I asked, dropping helplessly back to the bed.
One
of them started to talk in Russian. He was quickly slapped down. The biggest of
the heads cocked one of its eyes at me.
"Everything," he said. "Everything."
From the moment they began giving me money I
never wanted for comfort. I even moved out of the apartment to a swankier
place uptown. The goblins failed to appear for several days after this and I
began to feel that the visitation was over. When I woke suddenly the fourth
night, f realized immediately that what I had done
was O.K. by them. They proved it by coming back. They looked carelessly at the
bookcases.
"You have bought us no new books,"
said one, wagging a finger at me.
I lit a cigarette and put one arm under my
neck.
"I have been moving. I apologize. What
do you want?"
"Books." A dozen mouths formed the word.
I became irritated.
"I am grateful for everything you have
done," I stated, "Yes, even the bad things, like taking my girl away
and making a damn slave out of me. I have always wanted comfort and now I've
got it. But couldn't you get your books at the public libraries? They have
three and a half million at the 42nd St. branch. Think
of it! Books on every subject, books covering all the
phases of earth life. Those," I
pointed disdainfully with my cigarette at the stocks of books in their cases
along the walls, "are a drop in a vast
bucket."
They looked down at me
disapprovingly.
"No," they said.
"It is not in the rules."
I was happy until they told me why they were
going to all the trouble of acquainting themselves with the psychology of
earth-men. I blew up.
"You
fools!" I cried, screaming with laughter.
"What could you do with the planet? Enslave it? The rich have done that
already. Dissect a billion bodies? Go to our hospitals. They do it every day.
Dig for diamonds? Shall I make you some?" I roared on: "Perhaps you
are hungry for green cheese. Go to the moon. I guarantee it to be fresh and
untouched by the hand of man."
A
dozen heedless fingers turned to page 242 of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West and twenty-four eyes began reading the top of
page 243.
"Come
with me," I urged, still rocking with mirth. "Let me take you into
the homes of the people of the earth and show you life as they live it. You
shall hear the screaming of women in labor, the ticking of the feet of roaches
on the bare plaster of walls, the scrape of worn-out shoes on patched carpet, a
thin gasp in darkness as love is fulfilled and the crest of the wave b.reaks on the rocks of poverty. Hover with me over the
squares of this teeming metropolis and observe the scurrying lines emerging
from nowhere and vanishing in obscurity. Feel with me the texture of the skins
of a hundred thousand women of the night, listen for the breath in their
whispered words which should be happiness but in reality is sandpaper on
scalded tongues. My friends, listen. It is madness to
want us, insanity to imagine that you harbor the notion. Preserve your reason.
Go home. Go home. Surely the earth is but a foot-stool to heaven, a mere step
on your ladder of success. My friends. . . ."
Calmly the busy fingers
turned page 263. They were fast readers.
I
shrugged my shoulders, winced at a sudden pain in the small of my back and put
out the cigarette by crushing it against the bedspring cross-bar.
I went to sleep.
There
was only one direction in which to move—forward. And up I went. First the
swankier apartment, then still another and still another. Finally I bought a
large residence on Riverside Drive and made it my castle. Theirs, too. The stacks of books grew to overwhelming
proportions. They flowed out of the cases onto the floors everywhere. The basement
was crammed, the attic door was locked. To have unlocked it would have started
an avalanche. The only room in the house relatively free was the bathroom.
I
advanced socially, culturally, politically. The goblins were vaguely pleased at
my rise in the world. Somewhat amusedly they watched my slow advance from
businessman to alderman to mayor to state senator. Their mouths took on
crinkles when I related my speeches and told of my great successes in beating
down the opposition. The night I was elected to Congress I gave a litde party.
They were honest and sentimental. Somehow
they understood the reason for the celebration and what lay behind the reason
and, in a sense, participated. They engaged in the little fest by keeping
decently quiet when I wanted to talk and answering when requested.
In the huge living room of my house, attired
in a rich lounging robe, smoking my pipe which I held in one hand and drinking
a Tom Collins which I held with the other, I sat in a deep, comfortable
armchair and surveyed the scene. The familiar one. A
dozen heads, the apex of a dozen spindly bodies, feet resting lightly on the
floor, arms akimbo in most cases, folded in others.
f raised my glass.
"To me," I shouted, "and why
not?"
"Why
not?" remarked the biggest-headed one tonelessly.
"It is all in the rules."
I ignored his redundancy.
"Yes,
to me, to me because of my success and to you, my dear ones because vou made it possible." I drank deeply and set the
glass down. I looked up. A grave smile was upon their countenances.
"Ummmmmmmm,"
I noised. "What's up?"
The
group grew mournful. Their glow increased and cast dancing shadows about the
room. They elongated and became taller. I felt suddenly a chill blowing
through the room.
The
tiniest-headed one moved forward and stopped a foot away from my outstretched
feet.
"We shall do it soon," he said,
working his thin jaws up and down almost comically. "It?"
"The conquest. We shall take you. All of you."
"Oh." My heart sank, "fs there nothing that can be done about it?"
"Nothing you could do about it."
I smoked my pipe silently for awhile.
"I want you to know that I have enjoyed
my association with you," I said, looking up and gazing at them sadly.
They all crowded closer.
"So have we," they said mournfully
and backed away again. "And there is nothing that can be done about
it?" I asked needlessly. I was aware of their power.
The heads swung back and forth ponderously in
the negative.
"When do you plan to begin? How will you
do it?"
"Within a week," said the
biggest-headed one, "and it will not be pleasant."
"It will be painful?"
"It will be painful, but it will be in
the rules."
I
left them for a while, went upstairs and fingered my gun. Presendy
I put it away and shook my head. Then I returned and continued the odd
merry-making and finally went to bed and dreamed peacefully.
f
had six days to work in, and in three I considered almost a thousand separate
plans for circumventing theirs. All were fantastic and impossible. I was
clinging to the final silly notion I conjured up, when all of a sudden a
practical idea hit me and knocked me utterly sane. Of course!
f
got them interested in poker. They were a funny lot as you may have guessed
and, suspecting nothing, enjoyed the game. We used real money as stakes, which
was somewhat silly because as soon as one of them was cleaned out (which was
almost always due to my own cleverness) he would merely materialize a newly
printed, freshly wrapped stack of bills and continue playing-
Simultaneously 1 fed them on Arthurian legend
and tales of chivalry until suggestion had strengthened their already strong
sense of honor. The fifth night I began the fatal game.
The
game started out very early in the evening and I lost heavily according to
plan. The progress of the game left me poorer and poorer. I watched their faces
carefully as it went on. Slowly they were becoming enthusiastic, acquiring the
instinct of the true poker player which is to continue through dawn and beyond.
Their faces became radiant, eagerly each one waited for the next hand to begin.
I played them carefully, noting the rise of excitement. When I judged them
ready, I reached for the cards.
The
fourth goblin to my left opened. He tossed a thousand dollars into the pot.
Everyone followed suit except the biggest-headed one and the smallest-headed
one who were playing together and dropped.
When
they finished drawing I gave myself the other two kings f had carefully placed
in position in the deck and settled back in my chair. The opener carefully
considered his hand and bet. The other joined and I tossed the required money
to the center of the table. Presently everyone dropped out of the game except
the opener and myself. He bet a sum equivalent to what
f had left. I let this pass and then suddenly raised.
"The earth and its
people," I said.
"What's that?" They all looked at
me with starded glances, noses wagging.
"I
said I raise you the tSfffi and its people. I can do this. I think you
will find it in the rules."
The goblins consulted together while I kept
my hand carefully. Finally they turned to me as one.
"We have decided that
you are right. It is in the rules," said the tiniestheaded
one and I heaved a concealed sigh of relief because I was almost dead sure it
wasn't.
"But how shall we cover this
raise?" continued the other and nodded to the opener.
I raised my eye cagily.
"Twenty billions in gold will do
it," I stated flatly and held on to my seat as the cellar rocked under the
sudden impact of the arrival of twenty billion dollars' worth of pure gold
right out of several national mints and treasuries. I pictured the mess of
books lying at the bottom of the terrific weight. ,
"Ummmmmm," I ummmmed,
considering my cards. "Will you see me?" "I will see you," replied the opener
and I laid down my cards. "Four kings," I said grandly. The world
looked good. "I have four aces," remarked the other nonchalantly and
laid his own hand down.
You know what that means.
^7fie dunal
by £verif WJorretl
"The Canal" is a love story of horror, a horror story of-love. It is an unforgettable account of a romance of deep midnight, of a strangely charming girl and of the man who sought her hand only to learn of the ungodly price it would cost him to win her. Mrs. Everil Worrell Murphy's story is justly famous for its unusual atmosphere and its combination of ancient evils and modern scenes.
-—'AST th
AST the sleeping city the river sweeps; along
its left bank the old canal creeps.
I
did not intend that to be poetry, although the scene is poetic—somberly,
gruesomely poetic, like the poems of Poe. Too well I know it—too often have I walked over the grass-grown path beside the
reflections of black trees and tumbledown shacks and distant factory chimneys
in the sluggish waters that moved so slowly, and ceased to move at all.
I
shall be called mad, and I shall be a suicide. I shall take no pains to cover up my trail, or to hide the thing that I
shall do. What will it matter, afterward, what they say of me? If they knew
the truth—if they could vision, even dimly, the beings with whom I have consorted—if the faintest realization might be theirs of the thing
I am becoming, and of the fate from which I am saving their city—then they
would call me a great hero. But it does not matter what they call me, as I have
said before. Let me write down the things I am about to write down, and let
them be taken, as they will be taken, for the last ravings of a madman. The
city will be in mourning for the thing I shall have done—but its mourning will
be of no consequence beside that other fate from which I shall have saved it.
I have always had a taste for nocturnal
prowling. We as a race have grown too intelligent to take seriously any of the
old, instinctive fears that preserved us through preceding generations. Our
sole remaining salvation, then, has come to be our tendency to travel in herds.
We wander at night—but our objective is somewhere on the brightly lighted
streets, or still somewhere where men do not go alone. When we travel far
afield, it is in company. Few of my acquaintance, few in the whole city here,
would care to ramble at
107
midnight
over the grass-grown path I have
spoken of; not because they would fear to do so, but because such things are
not being done.
Well,
it is dangerous to differ individually from one's fellows. It is dangerous to
wander from the beaten road. And the fears that guarded the race in the dawn of
time and through the centuries were real fears, founded on reality.
A month ago, I was a stranger here. I had
just taken my first position— I was graduated from college only three months
before, in the spring. I was lonely, and likely to remain so for some time, for
I have always been of a solitary nature, making
friends slowly.
I
had received one invitation out—to visit the camp of a fellow employee in the
firm for which f worked, a camp which was located on the farther side of the
wide river—the side across from the city and the canal, where the bank was high
and steep and heavily wooded, and little tents blossomed all along the water's
edge. At night these camps were a string of sparkling lights and tiny, leaping
campfires, and the tinkle of music carried faintly far across the calmly
flowing water. That far bank of the river was no place for an eccentric,
solitary man to rove. But the near bank, which would have been an eyesore to
the campers had not the river been so wide—the near
bank attracted me from my first glimpse of it.
We
embarked in a motor-boat at some distance downstream, and swept up along the
near bank, and then out and across the current. I turned my eyes backward. The
murk of stagnant water that was the canal, the jumble of low buildings beyond
it, the lonely, low-lying waste of the narrow strip of land between canal and
river, the dark, scattered trees growing there—I intended to see more of these
things.
That
week-end bored me, but I repaid myself no later than Monday evening, the first
evening when I was back in the city, alone and free, f ate a solitary dinner
immediately after leaving the office. I went to my room and slept from seven
until nearly midnight. I wakened naturally, then, for my whole heart was set on
exploring the alluring solitude f had discovered, f dressed, slipped out of the
house and into the street, started the motor in my roadster and drove through
the lighted streets.
I
left behind that part of town which was thick with vehicles carrying people
home from their evening engagements, and began to thread my way through darker
and narrower streets. Once I had
to back out of a cul-de-sac, and once I had to detour around a closed block.
This part of town was not alluring, even to me. ft was
dismal without being solitary.
But
when I had parked my car on a rough, cobbled street that ran directly down into
the inky waters of the canal, and crossed a narrow bridge, I was repaid. A few
minutes set my feet on the old tow-path where mules had drawn river-boats up
and down only a year or so ago. Across the canal now, as I walked upstream at a
swinging pace, the miserable shacks where miserable people lived seemed to
march with me, and then fell behind. They looked like places in which murders
might be committed, every one of them.
The
bridge I had crossed was near the end of the city going north, as the canal
marked its western extremity. Ten minutes of walking, and the dismal shacks
were quite a distance behind, the river was farther away and the strip of waste
land much wider and more wooded, and tall trees across the canal marched with
me as the evil-looking houses had done before. Far and faint, the sound of a
bell in the city reached my ears. It was midnight.
I stopped, enjoying the desolation around me.
It had the savor I had expected and hoped for. I stood for some time looking
up at the sky, watching the low drift of heavy clouds, which were visible in
the dull reflected glow from distant lights in the heart of the city, so that
they appeared to have a lurid phosphorescence of their own. The ground under my
feet, on the contrary, was utterly devoid of light. I had felt my way
carefully, knowing the edge of the canal partly by instinct, partly by the even
more perfect blackness of the water in it, and even holding fairly well to the
path, because it was perceptibly sunken below the ground beside it.
Now
as I stood motionless in this spot, my eyes upcast, my mind adrift with strange fancies, suddenly my feelings of
satisfaction and well-being gave way to something different. Fear was an
emotion unknown -to me—for those things which make men fear, I had always
loved. A graveyard at night was to me a charming place for a stroll and
meditation. But now the roots of my hair seemed to move upright on my head, and
along all the length of my spine I was conscious of a prickling, tingling
sensation—such as my forefathers may have felt in the jungle when the hair on
their backs stood up as the hair of my head was doing now. Also, I was afraid
to move; and I knew that there were eyes upon me, and that that was why I was
afraid to move. I was afraid of those eyes—afraid to see them, to look into
them.
All
this while, I stood perfectly still, my face uptilted
toward the sky. But after a terrible mental effort, I mastered myself.
Slowly,
slowly, with an attempt to propitiate the owner of the unseen eyes by my casual
manner, I lowered my own. I looked straight ahead—at the softly swaying
silhouette of the tree-tops across the canal as they moved gendy
in the cool night wind; at the mass of blackness that was those trees, and the
opposite shore; at the shiny blackness where the reflections of the clouds
glinted vaguely and disappeared, that was the canal. And again I raised my eyes
a little, for just across the canal where the shadows massed most heavily,
there was that at which I must look more closely. And now, as I grew accustomed
to the greater blackness and my pupils expanded, I dimly discerned the contours
of an old boat or barge, half sunken in the water. An old abandoned
canal-boat. But was I dreaming, or was there a white-clad figure seated' on the
roof of the low cabin aft, a pale, heart-shaped face gleaming strangely at me
from the darkness, the glow of two eyes seeming to light up the face, and to
detach it from the darkness?
Surely, there could be no doubt as to the
eyes. They shone as the eyes of animals shine in the dark, with a
phosphorescent gleam, and a glimmer of red! Well, I had heard that some human
eyes have that quality at night.
But
what a place for a human being to be—a girl, too, I was sure. That daintily
heart-shaped face was the face of a girl, surely; 1 was seeing it clearer and
clearer, either because my eyes were growing more
accustomed to peering into the deeper shadows, or because of that
phosphorescence in the eyes that stared back at me.
f raised my voice softly, not to break too much the stillness of the
night.
"Hello! who's there? Are you lost, or marooned, and can I
help?"
There
was a little pause. I was conscious of a soft lapping at my feet. A stronger
night wind had sprung up, was ruffling the dark waters. I had been over warm,
and where it struck me the perspiration turned cold on my body, so that I
shivered uncontrollably.
"You
can stay—and talk awhile, if you will. I am lonely, but not lost. I—I live
here."
I
could hardly believe my ears. The voice was little more than a whisper, but it
had carried clearly—a girl's voice, sure enough. And she lived there— in an old, abandoned canal-boat, half
submerged in the stagnant water.
"You are not alone there?"
"No, not alone. My father lives here with me, but he is deaf—and he sleeps
soundly."
Did
the night wind blow still colder, as though it came to us from some unseen,
frozen sea—or was there something in her tone that chilled me, even as a
strange attraction drew me toward her? I wanted to draw near to her, to see
closely the pale, heart-shaped face, to lose myself in
the bright eyes that f had seen shining in the darkness. I wanted—I
wanted to hold her in my arms, to find her mouth with mine, to kiss it. . . .
With
a start, I realized the nature of my thoughts, and for an instant lost all
thought in surprise. Never in my twenty-two years had I felt love before. My
fancies had been otherwise directed—a moss-grown, fallen gravestone was a
dearer thing to me to contemplate than the fairest face in all
the world. Yet, surely, what I felt now was love!
1 took a reckless step
nearer the edge of the bank.
"Could
I come over to you?" I begged. "It's warm, and I don't mind a
wetting. It's late, I know—but I would give a great deal to sit beside you and
talk, if only for a few minutes before I go back to town. It's a lonely place
here for a girl like you to live—your father should
not mind if you exchange a few words with someone occasionally."
Was it the unconventionality of my request
that made her next words sound like a long-drawn shudder of protest? There was a strangeness in the tones of her voice that held me
wondering, every time she spoke. "No, no. Oh, no! You must not swim across."
"Then—could
I come tomorrow, or some day soon, in the daytime;
and would you let me come on board then—or would you come on shore and talk to
me, perhaps?"
"Not in the daytime—never in the daytime!"
Again the intensity of her low-toned negation
held me spellbound.
It
was not her sense of the impropriety of the hour, then, that had dictated her
manner. For surely, any girl with the slightest sense of the fitness of things
would rather have a tryst by daytime than after midnight—yet there was an
inference in her last words that if I came again it should be again at night.
Still
feeling the spell that had enthralled me, as one does not forget the presence
of a drug in the air that is stealing one's senses, even when those senses
begin to wander and to busy themselves with other things, I yet spoke shortly.
"Why
do you say, 'Never in the daytime'? Do you mean that I may come more than this
once at night, though now you won't let me cross the canal to you at the
expense of my own clothes, and you won't put down your plank or draw-bridge or
whatever you come on shore with, and talk to me here for only a moment?4 I'll come again, if you'll let me talk to you
instead of calling across the water. I'll come again, any time you will let
me—day or night, I don't care. I want to come to you. But I only ask you to
explain. If I came in the daytime and met your father, wouldn't that be the
best thing to do? Then we could be really acquainted—we could be friends."
"In
the nighttime, my father sleeps. In the daytime, / sleep.
How could I talk to you, or introduce you to my father then? If you came on
board this boat in the daytime, you would find my father—and you would be
sorry. As for me, I would be sleeping. I could never introduce you to my
father, do you see?"
"You
sleep soundly, you and your father." Again there was pique in my voice.
"Yes, we sleep soundly."
"And
always at different times?"
"Always at different times. We are on guard—one of us is always on
guard. We have been hardly used, down there in your city. And we have taken
refuge here. And we are always—always—on guard."
The
resentment vanished from my breast, and I felt my heart go out to her anew. She
was so pale, so pitiful in the night. My eyes were learning better and better
how to pierce the darkness; they were giving me a more definite picture of my
companion—if I could think of her as a companion, between myself and whom stretched the black water.
The sadness of the lonely scene, the
perfection of the solitude itself, these things
contributed to her pitifulness. Then there was that
strangeness of atmosphere of which, even yet, I had only partly taken note. There
was the strange, shivering chill, which yet did not seem like the healthful
chill of a cool evening, fn fact, it did not prevent
me from feeling the oppression of the night, which was unusually sultry, ft was
like a litde breath of deadly cold that came and
went, and yet did not alter the temperature of the air itself, as the small
ripples on the surface of the water do not concern the water even a foot down.
And
even that was not all. There was an unwholesome smell about the night—a dank,
moldy smell that might have been the very breath of death and decay. Even I,
the connoisseur in all things dismal and unwholesome, tried to keep my mind
from dwelling overmuch upon that smell. What it must be to live breathing it
constantly in, I could not think. But no doubt the girl and her father were
used to it; and no doubt it came from the stagnant water of the canal and from
the rotting wood of the old, half-sunken boat that was their refuge.
My
heart throbbed with pity again. Their refuge—what a place! And my clearer
vision of the girl showed me that she was pitifully thin, even though possessed
of the strange face that drew me to her. Her clothes hung around her like old
rags, but hers was no scarecrow aspect. Although little flesh clothed her
bones, her very bones were beautiful. I was sure the little,
pale, heart-shaped face would be rqore beautiful
still, if I could only see it closely. I must see it closely—I must establish
some claim to consideration as a friend of the strange, lonely crew of the
half-sunken wreck.
"This
is a poor place to call a refuge," I said finally. "One might have
very little money, and yet do somewhat better. Perhaps I might help you—I am
sure I could. If your ill-treatment in the city was because of poverty—I am not
rich, but I could help that. I could help you a little with money, if you would
let me; or, in any case, I could find a position for you. I'm sure I could do
that."
The eyes that shone fitfully toward me like
two small pools of water intermittently lit by a cloud-swept sky seemed to glow
more brightly. She had been half crouching, half sitting on top of the cabin;
now she leaped to her feet with one quick, sinuous, abrupt motion, and took a
few rapid, restless steps to and fro before she answered.
When
she spoke, her voice was little more than a whisper; yet surely rage was in its
shrill sibilance.
"Fool!
Do you think you would be helping me, to tie me to a desk, to shut me behind
doors, away from freedom, away from the delight of doing my own will, of
seeking my own way? Never, never would I let you do that.
Rather this old boat, rather a deserted grave under the stars, for my
home!"
A
boundless surprise swept over me, and a positive feeling of kinship with this
strange being, whose face I had hardly seen, possessed me. So I myself might
have spoken, so I had often felt, though I had never dreamed of putting my
thoughts so definitely, so forcibly. My regularized daytime life was a thing I
thought little of; I really lived-only in my nocturnal prowlings.
Why, this girl was right! All of life should be free, and spent in places that
interested and attracted.
How
little, how little I knew, that night, that dread forces were tugging at my
soul, were finding entrance to it and easy access through the morbid weakness
of my nature! How little I knew at what a .cost I deviated so radically from my
kind, who herd in cities and love well-lit ways and the sight of man, and sweet
and wholesome places to be solitary in, when the desire for solitude comes over
them!
That
night it seemed to me that there was but one important thing in life —to allay
the angry passion my unfortunate words had aroused in the breast of my beloved,
and to win from her some answering feeling.
"I
understand—much better than
you think," I whispered tremulously. "What I want is to see you
again, to come to know you, and to serve you in any way that I may. Surely,
there must be something in which I can be of use to you. All you have to do
from tonight on for ever, is to command me. I swear
it!"
"You swear that—you do swear it?"
Delighted
at the eagerness of her words, I lifted my hand toward the dark heavens.
"I swear it. From this
night on, for ever—I swear it."
"Then
listen. Tonight you may not come to me, nor I to you.
I do not want you to board this boat—not tonight, not any night. And most of all, not any day. But do not look so sad. I will
come to you. No, not tonight, perhaps not for many nights—yet
before very long. I will come to you there, on the bank of the canal,
when the water in the canal ceases to flow."
I must have made a gesture of impatience, or of
despair. It sounded like a way of saying "never"—for why should the
water in the canal cease to flow? She read my thoughts in some way, for she
answered them.
"You
do not understand. I am speaking seriously—I am promising to meet you there on
the bank, and soon. For the water within these banks is moving slower, always
slower. Higher up, I have heard that die canal has been drained. Between these
lower locks, the water still seeps in and drops slowly, slowly downstream. But
there will come a night when it will be quite, quite stagnant—and on that night
I will come to you. And when I come, I will ask of you a favor. And you will
keep your oath."
It was all the assurance I could get that
night. She had come back to the side of the cabin where she had sat crouched
before, and she resumed again that posture and sat still and silent, watching
me. Sometimes I could see her eyes upon me, and sometimes not. But I felt that
their gaze was unwavering. The little cold breeze, which I had finally
forgotten while f was talking with her, was blowing again, and
the unwholesome smell of decay grew heavier before the dawn.
She would not speak again, nor answer me when
I spoke to her, and I grew nervous, and strangely ill at ease.
At
last I went away. And in the first faint light of dawn f slipped up the stairs of my rooming-house, and into my own room.
f was deadly tired at the office next day. And day after day slipped away
and T grew more and more weary; for a man can not
wake day and night without suffering, especially in hot weather, and that was
what I was doing. I haunted the old tow-path and waited, night after night, on
the bank opposite the sunken boat. Sometimes I saw my lady of the darkness, and
sometimes not. When I saw her, she spoke little; but sometimes she sat there on
the top of the cabin and let me watch her till the dawn, or until the strange
uneasiness that was like fright drove me from her and back to my room, %where
I tossed restlessly in the heat and dreamed strange dreams, half waking, till
the sun shone in on my forehead and I tumbled into my clothes and down to the
office again.
Once I asked her why she had made the fanciful condition that she would
not come ashore to meet me until the waters of the canal had ceased to run. (How eagerly I studied those waters! How I
stole away at noontime more than once, not to approach the old boat, but to
watch the almost imperceptible downdrift of bubbles,
bits of straw, twigs, rubbish!)
My
questioning displeased her, and I asked her that no more. It was enough that
she chose to be whimsical. My part was to wait.
It
was more than a week later that I questioned her again, this time on a
different subject. And after that, I curbed my curiosity relentlessly.
"Never
speak to me of things you do not understand about me. Never again, or I will
not show myself to you again. And when I walk on the path yonder, it will hot be with you."
I
had asked her what form of persecution she and her father had suffered in the city, that had driven them out to this lonely place, and
where in the city they had lived.
Frightened
seriously lest I lose the ground I was sure I had gained with her, I was about
to speak of something else. But before I could find the words, her low voice
came to me again.
"It
was horrible, horrible! Those little houses below the bridge, those houses
along the canal—tell me, are they not worse than my boat? Life there was shut
in, and furtive. I was not free as I am now—and the freedom I will soon have
will make me forget the things I have not yet forgotten. The screaming, the
reviling and cursing! Fear and flight! As you pass back by those houses, think
how you would like to be shut in one of them, and in fear of your life. And
then think of them no more; for I would forget them, and I will never speak of
them again."
I
dared not answer her. I was surprised that she had vouchsafed me so much. But
surely her words meant this: that before she had come to live on the decaying,
water-rotted old boat, she had lived in one of those horrible houses I passed
by on my way to her. Those houses, each of which looked like the predestined
scene of a murder! As I left her that night, I felt that I was very daring.
"One or two nights more and you will walk beside me," I called to
her. "I have watched the water at noon, and it hardly moves at all. I
threw a scrap of paper into the canal, and it whirled and swung a little where
a thin skim of oil lay on the water down there—oil from the big, dirty city you
are well out of. But though I watched and watched, I could not see it move
downward at all. Perhaps tomorrow night, or the night after,
you will walk on the bank with me. I hope it will be clear and
moonlight, and I will be near enough to see you clearly—as well as you seem
always to see me in darkness or moonlight, equally ^well. And perhaps I will
kiss you—but not unless you let me."
And
yet, the next day, for the first time my thoughts were definitely troubled. I
had been living in a dream—I began to speculate concerning the end of the path
on which my feet were set.
I
had conceived, from the first, such a horror of those old houses by the canal!
They were well enough to walk past, nursing gruesome thoughts for a midnight
treat. But, much as I loved all that was weird and eery
about the girl I was wooing so strangely, it was a little too much for my fancy
that she had come from them.
By this time, I had become decidedly
unpopular in my place of business. Not that I had made enemies, but that my
peculiar ways had caused too much adverse comment. It would have taken very
little, I think, to have made the entire office force decide that I was mad.
After the events of the next twenty-four hours, and
after this letter is found and read, they will be sure that they knew it all
along! At this time, however, they were punctiliously polite to me, and merely
let me alone as much as possible—which suited me perfectly. I dragged wearily
through day after day, exhausted from lack of sleep, conscious of their
speculative glances, living only for the night to come.
But
on this day, I approached the man who had invited me to the camp across the
river, who had unknowingly shown me the way that led to my love.
"Have
you ever noticed the row of tumble-down houses along the canal on the city
side?" I asked him.
He gave me an odd look. I suppose he sensed
the significance of my breaking silence after so long to speak of them—sensed that in some way I had a deep interest
in them.
"You have odd tastes, Morton," he
said after a moment. "I suppose you
wander into strange places sometimes—I've heard you speak of an enthusiasm
for graveyards at night. But my advice to you is to keep away from those
houses. They're unsavory, and their reputation is unsavory. Positively, I think
you'd be in danger of your life, if you go poking around there. They have
been the scene of several murders, and a dope den or two has been cleaned
out of them. Why in the world you should want to investigate them--- "
"I
don't expect to investigate them," I said testily. "I was merely
interested in them—from the outside. To tell you the truth, I'd heard a story,
a rumor— never mind where. But you say there have been murders there—I suppose
this rumor I heard may have had to do with an attempted one. There was a girl
who lived there with her father once, and they were set upon there, or
something of the sort, and had to run away. Did you ever hear that story?"
Barrett
gave me an odd look such as one gives in speaking of a past horror so dreadful
that the mere speaking of it makes it live terribly again.
"What
you say reminds me of a horrible thing that was said to have happened down
there once," he said. "It was in all the papers. A little child disappeared
in one of those houses, and a couple of poor lodgers
who lived there, a girl and her father, were accused of having made away with
it. They were accused—they were accused—oh, well, I don't like to talk about
such things. It was too dreadful. The child's body was found—part of it was found. It was mutilated, and the people in the house seemed to
believe it had been mutilated in order to conceal the manner of its death;
there was an ugly wound in the throat, it finally came out, and it seemed as if
the child might have been bled to death. It was found in the girl's room,
hidden away. The old man and his daughter escaped, before the police were
called. The countryside was scoured, but they were never found. Why, you must
have read it in the papers, several years ago."
I
nodded, with a heavy heart. I had read
it in the papers, I remembered now. And again, a terrible questioning'came over me. Who was this girl, what was this girl, who seemed to have my heart in her keeping?
Why did not a merciful God
let me die then?
Befogged
with exhaustion, bemused in a dire enchantment, my mind was incapable of
thought. And yet, some soul-process akin to that which saves the sleepwalker
poised at perilous heights sounded its warning now.
My
mind was filled with doleful images. There were women—I had heard and read—who
slew to satisfy a blood-lust. There were ghosts, specters—call them what you
will, their names have been legion in the dark pages of that lore which dates
back to the infancy of the races of the earth—who
retained even in death this blood-lust. Vampires—they had been called that. I
had read of them. Corpses by day, spirits of evil by night, roaming abroad in
their own forms or in the forms of bats or unclean beasts, killing body and
soul of their victims—for whoever dies of the repeated "kiss" of the
vampire, which leaves its mark on the throat and draws the blood from the body,
becomes a vampire also—of such beings I had read.
And,
horror of horrors! In that last cursed day at the office, I remembered reading
of these vampires—these undead—that in their nocturnal flights they had one
limitation—they could not cross running water.
That night I went my usual nightly way with
tears of weakness on my face—for my weakness was supreme, and Í recognized fully at last the misery of being the victim of an
enchantment stronger than my feeble will. But I went.
1
approached the neighborhood of the canal-boat as the distant city clock chimed
the first stroke of twelve. It was the dark of the moon and the sky was
overcast. Heat-lightning flickered low in the sky, seeming to come from every
point of the compass and circumscribe the horizon, as if unseen fires burned
behind the rim of the world. By its fitful glimmer, I saw a new thing: between
the old boat and the canal bank stretched a long, slim, solid-looking shadow— a
plank had been let down! In that moment, I realized that I had been playing
with powers of evil which had no intent now to let me go, which were indeed
about to lay hold upon me with an inexorable grasp. Why had I come tonight?
Why, but that the spell of the enchantment laid upon
me was a thing more potent, and far more unbreakable, than any wholesome spell
of love? The creature I sought out—oh, I remembered now, with the cold
perspiration beading my brow, the lore hidden away between the covers of the
dark old book which I had read so many years ago and half forgotten!—until dim
memories of it stirred within me, this last day and night.
My
lady of the night! No woman of wholesome flesh and blood and odd perverted
tastes that matched my own, but one of the undead! In that moment, I knew it,
and knew that the vampires of old legends polluted still, in these latter days,
the fair surface of the earth.
And
on the instant, behind me in the darkness there was the crackle of a twig, and something brushed against my arm.
This,
then, was the fulfilment of my dream, I knew, without
turning my head, that the pale, dainty face with its glowing eyes was near my
own—that I had only to stretch out my arm to touch the slender grace of the
girl I had so longed to draw near. I knew, and should have felt the rapture I
had anticipated. Instead, the roots of my hair prickled coldly, unendurably,
as they had on the night when I had first sighted the old boat. The miasmic
odors of the night, heavy and oppressive with heat and unrelieved by a breath of air, all but overcame me, and I fought with myself to prevent
my teeth clicking in my head. The litde waves of coldness
I had felt often in this spot were chasing over my body, yet they were not from
any breeze; the leaves on the trees hung down motionless, as though they were
actually wilting on their branches. With an effort, I turned my head.
Two
hands caught me around my neck. The pale face was so near that I felt the warm
breath from its nostrils fanning my cheek.
And,
suddenly, all that was wholesome in my perverted nature rose uppermost. I
longed for the touch of the red mouth, like a dark flower opening before me in
the night. I longed for it—and yet more I dreaded it. I shrank back, catching
in a powerful grip the fragile wrists of the hands that strove to hold me. I
must not—I must not yield to the faintness that I felt stealing over me.
I was facing down the path toward the city. A
low rumble of thunder— the first—broke the torrid hush of the summer night. A
glare of lightning seemed to tear the night asunder, to light up the universe.
Overhead, the clouds were careering madly in fantastic shapes, driven by a wind
that swept the upper heavens without causing even a trembling in the air lower
down. And far down the canal, that baleful glare seemed to play around and
hover over the little row of shanties—murder-cursed, and haunted by the ghost
of a dead child.
My gaze was fixed on them, while I held away
from me the pallid face and fought off the embrace that sought to overcome my
resisting will. And so a long moment passed. The glare faded out of the sky,
and a greater darkness took the world. But there was a near, more menacing
glare fastened upon my face—the glare of two eyes that watched mine, that had
watched me as I, unthinking, stared down at the dark houses.
This
girl—this woman who had come to me at my own importunate requests, did not
love me, since I had shrunk from her. She did not love me— but it was not only
that. She had watched me as I gazed down at the houses that held her dark past,
and I was sure that she divined my thoughts. She knew my horror of those
houses—she knew my new-born horror of her. And
she hated me for it, hated me more malignantly than I had believed a human
being could hate.
And
at that point in my thoughts, I felt my skin prickle and my scalp rise again:
could a human being cherish such hatred as I read, trembling more and more, in those glowing
fires lit with what seemed to me more like the fires of hell than any light
that ought to shine in a woman's eyes?
And through all this, not a
word had passed between us!
So far I have written calmly. I wish that I
could write on so, to the end. If I could do that, there might be one or two of
those who will regard this as the document of a maniac, who would believe the
horrors of which I am about to write.
But I am only flesh and blood. At this point
in the happenings of the awful night, my calmness deserted me—at this point I
felt that I had been drawn into the midst of a horrible nightmare from which
there was no escape, no waking! As I write, this feeling again overwhelms me,
until I can hardly write at all—until, were it not for the thing which I must
do, f would rush out into the street and run, screaming, until I was caught and
dragged away, to be put behind strong iron bars. Perhaps I would feel safe
there—perhaps!
I
know that, terrified at the hate I saw confronting me in those redly gleam-, ing eyes, I would
have slunk away. The two thin hands that caught my arm again were strong enough
to prevent that, however. I had been spared her kiss, but I was not to escape
from the oath f had taken to serve her.
"You
promised, you swore," she hissed in my ear. "And tonight you are to
keep your oath."
I
felt my senses reel. My oath—yes, I had an oath to keep. I had lifted my hand
toward the dark heavens, and sworn to serve her in any way she chose. Freely,
and of my own volition, I had sworn.
I sought to evade her.
"Let
me help you back to your boat," I begged. "You have no kindly feeling
for me, and—you have seen it—I love you no longer. I will go back to the
city—you can go back to your father, and forget that I broke your peace."
The
laughter that greeted my speech I shall never forget—not in the depths under
the scummy surface of the canal—not in the empty places between the worlds,
where my tortured soul may wander.
"So
you do not love me, and f hate you! Fool! Have I
waited these weary months for the water to stop, only to go back now? After my
father and f returned here and found the old boat rotting in the drained
canal, and took refuge in it; when the water was turned into the canal while I
slept, so that I could never escape until its flow should cease, because of the thing that I am —even then I dreamed of tonight.
"When
the imprisonment we still, shared ceased to matter to my father—■ come on
board the deserted boat tomorrow, and see why, if you dare!—still f dreamed on,
of tonight!
"I
have been lonely, desolate, starving—now the whole world shall be mine! And by your
help!"
f
asked her, somehow, what she wanted of me, and a madness overcame me so that I
hardly heard her reply. Yet somehow, I knew that there was that on the opposite
shore of the great river where the pleasure camps were, that she wanted to
find. In the madness of my terror, she made me understand and obey her. I must
carry her in my arms across the long bridge over the river, deserted in the
small hours of the night.
.
The way .back to the city was long tonight—long. She walked behind me, and I
turned my eyes neither to right nor left. Only as f passed the tumbledown
houses, 1 saw their reflection in the canal and trembled so that I could have
fallen to the ground, at the thoughts of the little child this woman had been accused
of slaying there, and at the certainty I felt that she was reading my thoughts.
And now the horror that engulfed me darkened
my brain.
I
know that we set our feet upon the long, wide bridge that spanned the river. I
know the storm broke there, so that I battled for my footing, almost for my
life, it seemed, against the pelting deluge. And the horror I had invoked was
in my arms, clinging to me, burying its head upon my shoulder. So increasingly
dreadful had my pale-faced companion become to me, that I hardly thought of her
now as a woman at all—only as a demon of the night.
The
tempest raged still as she leaped down out of my arms on the other shore. And
again I walked with her against my will, while the trees lashed their branches
around me, showing the pale under-sides of their leaves in the vivid frequent
flashes that rent the heavens.
On
and on we went, branches flying through the air and missing us by a miracle of
ill fortune. Such as she and I are not slain by falling branches. The river
was a welter of whitecaps, flattened down into strange shapes by the pounding
rain. The'clouds as we glimpsed them were like devils flying through the sky.
Past dark tent after dark tent we stole, and past a few where lights burned dimly behind their
canvas walls. And at last we came to an old quarry. Into its artificial ravine
she led me, and up to a crevice in the rock wall.
"Reach
in your hand and pull out the loose stone you will feel," she whispered.
"It closes an opening that leads into deep caverns. A human hand must
remove that stone—your hand must move it!"
Why
did I struggle so to disobey her? Why did I fail? It was as though I - knew—but my failure was foreordained—I had taken oath!
If you who read have believed that I have set
down the truth thus far, the little that is left you will call the ravings of a
madman overtaken by his madness. Yet these things happened.
I
stretched out my arm, driven by a compulsion I could not resist. At arm's
length in the niche in the rock, I felt something move—the loose rock, a long,
narrow fragment, much larger than I had expected. Yet it moved easily, seeming
to swing on a natural pivot. Outward it swung, toppling toward me—a moment more
and there was a swift rush of the ponderous weight I had loosened. I leaped
aside and went down, my forehead grazed by the rock.
For
a brief moment I must have been unconscious, but only for a moment. My head a
stabbing agony of pain, unreal lights flashing before my eyes, I yet knew the
reality of the storm that beat me down as I struggled to my feet. I knew the
reality of the dark, loathsome shapes that passed me in the dark, crawling out
of the orifice in the rock and flapping through the wild night, along the way that
led to the pleasure camps.
So the caverns I had laid open to the outer
world were infested with bats. I had been inside unlit caverns, and had heard
there the squeaking of the things, felt and heard the flapping of their wings—but never in all my life before had I seen bats as large as men and women!
Sick and dizzy from the blow on my head, and
from disgust, I crept along the way they were going. If I touched one of them,
I felt that I should die of horror.
Now, at last, the storm abated, and a heavy darkness
made the whole world seem like the inside of a tomb.
Where the tents stood in a long row, the
number of the monster bats seemed to diminish. It was as though—horrible
thought!—they were creeping into the tents, with their slumbering occupants.
At
last I came to a lighted tent, and paused, crouching so that the dim radiance
which shone through the canvas did not touch me in the shadows. And there I
waited, but not for long. There was a dark form silhouetted against the tent; a
rustle and confusion, and the dark thing was again in silhouette— but with a
difference in the quality of the shadow. The dark thing was inside the tent now, its bat wings extending across
the entrance through which it had crept.
Fear
held me spellbound. And as I looked, the shadow changed again, imperceptibly,
so that I could not have told how it
changed. But now it was not the shadow of a bat, but of a woman.
"The storm, the storm! I am lost, exhausted! I crept in here, to beg for refuge until the
dawn!"
That low, thrilling, sibilant
voice—too well I knew it!
Within
the tent I heard a murmur of acquiescent voices. At last I began to understand.
I
knew the nature of the woman I had carried over the river in my arms, the woman
who would not even cross the canal until the water should have ceased utterly
to flow. I remembered books I had read—Dracula—other books, and stories. I knew they were true books and stories,
now—I knew those horrors existed for me.
I
had indeed kept my oath to the creature of darkness—I had brought her to her
kind, under her guidance. I had let them loose in hordes upon the pleasure
camps. The campers were doomed—and through them, others. . . .
I
forgot my fear. I rushed from my hiding-place up to the tent door, and there I
screamed and called aloud.
"Don't take her in—don't let her
stay—nor the others, that have crept into the other
tents! Wake all the campers—they will sleep on to their destruction! Drive out
the interlopers—drive them out quickly! They are not human—no, and they are not bats! Do you hear me?—do you understand?"
I was fairly howling, in a
voice that was strange to me.
"She is a vampire—they
are all vampires. Vampires!"
Inside the tent I heard a
new voice.
"What can be the matter with that poor
man?" the voice said. It was a woman's, and gentle.
"Crazy—somebody out of his senses,
dear," a man's voice answered. "Don't be frightened."
And then the voice I knew so well—so well:
"I saw a falling rock strike a man on the head in the storm. He staggered
away, but I suppose it crazed him."
I waited for no more. I ran away, madly,
through the night and back across the bridge to the city.
Next day—today—I boarded the sunken
canal-boat. It is the abode of death —no woman could have lived there—only such
an one as she. The
old man's corpse was there—he must have died long, long ago. The smell of death
and decay on the boat was dreadful.
Again, I felt that I understood. Back in
those awful houses, she had committed the crime when first she became the
thing she is. And he—her father— less sin-steeped, and less accursed, attempted
to destroy the evidence of her crime, and fled with her, but died without
becoming like her. She had said that one of those two was always on watch—did
he indeed divide her vigil on the boat? What more fitting—the dead standing
watch with the undead! And no wonder that she would not let me board the craft
of death, even to carry her away.
And
still I feel the old compulsion. I have been spared her kiss—but for a little
while. Yet I will not let the power of my oath draw me back, till I enter the
caverns with her and creep forth in the form of a bat to prey upon mankind.
Before that can happen, I too will die.
Today in the city I heard that a horde of
strange insects or small animals
infested the pleasure camps last night. Some said, with horror-bated breath,
that they perhaps were rats. None of them was seen; but in the morning
nearly every camper had a strange, deep wound in his throat. I almost laughed
aloud. They were so horrified at the idea of an army of rats, creeping into the
tents and biting the sleeping occupants on their throats! If they had seen what
I saw—if they knew that they are doomed to spread corruption--
So
my own death will not be enough. Today I bought supplies for blasting. Tonight
I will set my train of dynamite, from the hole I made in the cliff where the
vampires creep in and out, along the row of tents, as far as the last one—then
I shall light my fuse. It will be done before the dawn. Tomorrow, the city will
mourn its dead and execrate my name.
And
then, at last, in the slime beneath the unmoving waters of the canal, I shall
find peace! But perhaps it will not be peace—for I shall seek it midway between
the old boat with its cargo of death and the row of dismal houses where a
little child was done to death when first she became the thing she is. That is my expiation.
Ira Li la n t of Carcoia by. s$mbro3e t)3ierce
Robert Chambers, Algernon Blachjvood, and Ambrose Bierce were the three writers who planted the seeds at the turn of this century for the American weird story type that blossomed so abundantly in the last two decades. The theme which made Lovecraft and his school famous, the conception of a pantheon of "Elder Gods" and a mind-chilling cosmogony depicted in forbidden writings, can be found to have its origins in the wor\s of these three men. The grim, almost occultish, tale told here bears out Bierce's role in this eldritch gardening.
7
THERE
be divers sorts of death —some wherein the body remaineth;
and in some it vanisheth quite away with the spirit.
This commonly occurreth only in solitude (such is
God's will) and, none seeing the end, we say the man is lost, or gone on a long
journey— which indeed he hath; but sometimes it hath happened in sight of many,
as abundant testimony showeth. In one kind of death
the spirit also dieth, and this it hath been known to
do while yet the body was in vigor for many years. Sometimes, as is veritably
attested, it dieth with the body, but after a season
is raised up again in that place where the body did decay."
Pondering
these words of Hali (whom God rest) and questioning
their full meaning, as one who, having an intimation, yet doubts if there be
not something behind, other than that which he has discerned, I noted not
whither I had strayed until a sudden chill wind striking my face revived in me
a sense of my surroundings. I observed with astonishment that everything seemed
unfamiliar. On every side of me stretched a bleak and desolate expanse of
plain, covered with a tall overgrowth of sere grass, which rustled and whistled
in the autumn wind with heaven knows what mysterious and disquieting suggestion.
Protruded at long intervals above it, stood strangely shaped and somber-colored
rocks, which seemed to have an understanding with one another and to exchange
looks of uncomfortable significance, as if they had reared their heads to watch
the issue of some foreseen event. A few blasted trees here and there appeared
as leaders in this malevolent conspiracy of silent expectation.
The day, I thought, must be far advanced,
though the sun was invisible; and although sensible that the air was raw and
chill my consciousness of that fact was rather mental than physical—I had no
feeling of discomfort. Over all the dismal landscape a canopy of low,
lead-colored clouds hung like a visible curse. In all this there were a menace
and a portent—a hint of evil, an intimation of doom. Bird, beast, or insect
there was none. The wind sighed in the bare branches of the dead trees and the
gray grass bent to whisper its dread secret to the earth; but no other sound nor motion broke the awful repose of that
dismal place.
I
observed in the herbage a number of weather-worn stones, evidently shaped with
tools. They were broken, covered with moss and half sunken in the earth. Some
lay prostrate, some leaned at various angles, none was vertical. They were
obviously headstones of graves, though the graves themselves no longer existed
as either mounds or depressions; the years had leveled all. Scattered here and
there, more massive blocks showed where some pompous tomb or ambitious monument
had once flung its feeble defiance at oblivion. So old seemed these relics,
these vestiges of vanity and memorials of affection and piety, so battered and
worn and stained—so neglected, deserted, forgotten the place, that I could not
help thinking myself the discoverer of the burial-ground of a prehistoric race
of men whose very name was long extinct.
Filled
with these reflections, f was
for some time heedless of the sequence of my own experiences, but soon I
thought, "How came I hither?" A moment's reflection seemed to make
this all clear and explain at the same time, though in a disquieting way, the
singular character with which my fancy had invested all that I saw or heard. I
was ill. I remembered now that I had been prostrated by a sudden fever, and
that my family had told me that in my periods of delirium I had constandy cried out for liberty and air, and had been held
in bed to prevent my escape out-of-doors. Now f had eluded the vigilance of my attendants and had wandered hither to—to
where? I could not conjecture. Clearly I was at a considerable distance from
the city where I dwelt—the ancient and famous city of Carcosa.
No
signs of human life were anywhere visible nor audible;
no rising smoke, no watchdog's bark, no lowing of cattle, no shouts of children
at play—nothing but that dismal burial-place, with its air of mystery and
dread, due to my own disordered brain. Was I not becoming again delirious,
there beyond human aid? Was it not indeed all an illusion of my madness? I
called aloud the names of my wives and sons, reached out my hands in search of
theirs, even as I walked among the crumbling stones and in the withered grass.
A
noise behind me caused me to turn about. A wild animal—a lynx—was approaching.
The thought came to me: If I break down here in the desert— if the fever return
and I fail, this beast will be at my throat. I sprang toward it, shouting. It
trotted tranquilly by within a hand's breadth of me and disappeared behind a
rock.
A moment later a man's head appeared to rise
out of the ground a short distance away. He was ascending the farther slope of a low hill whose crest was hardly to be distinguished from the general
level. His whole figure soon came into view against the background of gray
cloud. He was half naked, half clad in skins. His hair was unkempt, his beard
long and ragged, fn one hand he carried a bow and arrow; the other held a blazing
torch with a long trail of black smoke. He walked slowly and with caution, as
if he feared falling into some open grave concealed by the tall grass. This
strange apparition surprised but did not alarm, and taking such a course as to
intercept him I met him almost face to face, accosting him with the familiar
salutation, "God keep you."
He gave no heed, nor did he
arrest his pace.
"Good
stranger," I continued, "I am ill and lost. Direct me, I beseech you,
to Carcosa."
The
man broke into a barbarous chant in an unknown tongue, passing on and away.
An
owl on the branch of a decayed tree hooted dismally and was answered by another
in the distance. Looking upward, f saw through a sudden rift in the clouds Aldebaran and the Hyades! fn all
this there was a hint of night— the lynx, the man with the torch, the owl. Yet
I saw—I saw even the stars in absence of the darkness, f saw, but was
apparently not seen nor heard. Under what awful spell
did I exist?
I
seated myself at the root of a great tree, seriously
to consider what it were best to do. That I was mad I could no longer doubt, yet recognized a ground of doubt in the conviction.
Of fever I had no trace. I had, withal, a sense of exhilaration and vigor
altogether unknown to me—a feeling of mental and physical exaltation. My senses
seemed all alert; I could feel the air as a ponderous substance; I could hear
the silence.
A
great root of the giant tree against whose trunk f leaned as I sat held inclosed in its grasp a slab of stone, a part of which
protruded into a recess formed by another root. The stone was thus partly
protected from the weather, though greatly decomposed. Its edges were worn
round, its corners eaten away, its surface deeply furrowed and scaled.
Glittering particles of mica were visible in the earth about it—vestiges of its
decomposition. This stone had apparently marked the grave out of which the tree
had sprung ages ago. The tree's exacting roots had robbed the grave and made
the stone a prisoner.
A
sudden wind pushed some dry leaves and twigs from the uppermost face of the
stone; f saw the low-relief letters on an inscription and bent to read it. God
in Heaven! my name in full!—the date of my birth!—the
date of my death!
A level shaft of light illuminated the whole
side of the tree as I sprang to my feet in terror. The sun was rising in the
rosy east, f stood between the tree and his broad red disk—no shadow darkened
the trunk!
A chorus of howling wolves saluted the dawn.
I saw them sitting on their haunches, singly and in groups, on the summits of
irregular mounds and tumuli filling a half of my desert prospect and extending
to the horizon. And then I knew that these were ruins of the ancient and famous
city of Carcosa.
Such are the facts imparted to the medium Bayrolles by the spirit Hoseib Alar Robardin.
BETTER-SELLING
AVON TITLES
67 Cardinal Francis J.
Spellman
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Aphrodite
........................................................................................ 'i"......................................................
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Atomic
Energy in the Coming Era.............................................
76...................................................... u ii„„t*„Z
Avon Book of Somerset Maugham............................................ 115................... ...W. Somerset
Maugham
Avon Complete Crosswords & Cryptograms. . 162......................................... Edited by
Cla$ic$n™™
Ra?r^ige 81'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.Vina Delmar
Baa uiri.............................................. ............... • • • ....... Raymond Chandler
Bg Sleep, The................................................................................. 3»......................... •• ' ^ornell
Woo,rich
Angel •••• R Slovl
Black Orchids . ................................................................... »5........................... ......................... M ^
&j?'.^«^i-:v.v.v::a:::::................................................................ .•••^if„^
Casey-Hard-Boned Detective....................................................... 143
........................... George ^ThTou
Catherine Herself.............................................................................
7y .................................... ....Ben Hecht
Count Bruga...................................................................................... '............................... .................. A
Merriu
aS\cZ::::::::::::::::::!:::::::....^
Forl|e?gf^^
Fourteen Great Stones................................................................... 132........................... ......Erskine Caldwell
Georgia Boy .................................................................................... ■«........................ Afa*wH Bodenheim
Ghost Patrol 4
Other Stories..................................................... 74............................... -.Mar^Uen Chile
Heav^Mya^nation:::::::::::::::::: s^.::::::::::::..™^.^
ii-ii
t> j tu„ s7 Thomas Wolfe
T11 w- j 4 James tint
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U Ca™b?*:............................. $......... *~«
Love Episode, A.............................................................................. i->u..................................... ••V >-
________ ,
Love,
Health and Marriage............................................................ 148
.................................... Cowan &
Guerard
Love's
Lovely Counterfeit........................................................... 161.............................
James M.
Cam
Man Who Had Everything, The..................................................
52..............................................
Mistress
Wilding.............................................................................
84.............................................. Rafael Sabahm
Moving
Finger, The......................................................................... 164............................................. Agatha Chnshe
Nobody's
in Town..........................................................................
51............................ ■■■■ Edna
Ferber
Now 111 Tell One............................................................................ 158........................................... Harry Hershfield
Pardners of
the Badlands............................................................... 156................................................... .Bliss Lomax
Passionate
Year, The....................................................................... 42......................................... James Hilton
Presenting Lily Mars...................................................................... 55.............. y h-Booth
j %k»]fon
Road
to Victory, The...................................................................... 48............. Cardinal Francis
J. Spellman
Rubaiyat of
Omar Khayyam........................................................ 2................................... Edward Fitzgerald
Saint in Action The ............................. 118............................................... Leslie Chart
ens
lee What
I Mean ? \ W. V. \" \\\V . 54.................................................. Lewis Brown
cu *v,
w;m Maw 47 ............................. Gene Fowler
light
Unseen & The Confession.".'.'.'.".'.'.'.'.'.'. 83'............................................................. Mary Roberts
Rinehart
Stone
of Chasity, The..................................................................... 165................................................ Margery Sharp
Taste
for Honey, A.......................................................................... 108.............................................. ...H. F.Heard
Three
Wise Guys & Other Stories.............................................. 102.............................................. Damon Runyon
Tonight
at 8:30................................................................................
28.............................................. Noel Coward
Valley
Vixen.................................................................................... 153................................... Ben Anies Williams
wlg/v^^
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