The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard (14 page)

“To my friend Stephen Gordon, to be listened to alone in his study.”

“That’s all,” I said, after reading this curious request aloud.

“Sure, and ’tis more than enough. Is it not black magic he’s trying to make on you? Else why should he wish you to listen to his caterwauling alone?”

“I don’t know. But I think I’ll do it.”

“You’re a fool,” said Costigan frankly. “If ye will not be taking my advice and throwing the thing into the sea, it’s myself will be with you when you put it on your talking machine. And that’s final!”

I did not try to argue. Truly, I was somewhat apprehensive of Casonetto’s promised vengeance, though I could not see how this was to be accomplished by the mere rendition of a song heard on a phonograph.

Costigan and I repaired to my study and there placed on the machine the last record of Giovanni Casonetto’s golden voice. I saw Costigan’s jaw muscles bulge belligerently as the disc began to whirl and the diamond point to spin down the circling grooves. I involuntarily tensed myself as if for a coming struggle. Clear and loud a voice spoke.

“Stephen Gordon!”

I started in spite of myself and almost answered! How strange and fearful it is to hear your name spoken in the voice of a man you know to be dead!

“Stephen Gordon,” the clear, golden and hated voice went on, if you hear this I shall be dead, for if I live I shall dispose of you in another manner. The police will soon be here, and they have cut off every avenue of escape. There is nothing for me to do but stand my trial, and your words will put a noose about my neck. But there is time for one last song!

“This song I shall imprison in the disc which now rests upon my recording machine, and before the police arrive I shall send it to you by one who will not fail me. You will receive it through the mails the day after I am hanged.

“My friend, this is a suitable setting for the last song of the high priest of Satan! I am standing in the black chapel where you first surprised me when you came blundering into my secret cavern, and my clumsy neophytes let you escape.

“Before me stands the shrine of the Unnamable and before it the red-stained altar where many a virgin soul has gone winging up to the dark stars. On all sides hover dark mysterious things, and I hear the swish of mighty wings in the gloom.

“Satan, lover of darkness, gird my soul with evil and strike chords of horror in my golden song.

“Stephen Gordon, harken ye!”

Full, deep and triumphant, the golden voice surged up, lifted in a strange rhythmic chant, indescribably haunting and weird.

“Great God!” whispered Costigan. “He’s singing the invocation from the Black Mass!”

I did not reply. The uncanny notes of that song seemed to stir my very heart within me. In the darksome caverns of my soul, something blind and monstrous moved and stirred like a dragon waking from slumber. The room faded and grew indistinct as I fell under the mesmeric power of the chant. About me inhuman forces seemed to glide and I could almost sense the touch of bat-like wings brushing my face in their flight–as though by virtue of his singing, the dead man had summoned up ancient and horrible demons to haunt me.

I saw again the sombre chapel, lit by a single small fire that flickered and leaped on the altar, behind and above which brooded the Horror, the Unnamable horned and winged thing to which the devil worshippers bowed. I saw again the red-dyed altar, the long sacrificial dagger raised in the hand of the black acolyte, the swaying robed forms of the worshippers.

The voice rose and rose, swinging into a triumphant booming. It filled the room–the world, the sky, the universe! It blotted out the stars with a tangible veil of darkness! I staggered from it as from a physical force.

If ever hate and evil were incarnated in
sound
I heard and felt it then. That voice bore me down to the deeps of Hell undreamed. Abysses loathsome and endless yawned before me. I had hints and glimpses of inhuman voids and unholy dimensions outside of all human experience. All the concentrated essence of Purgatory flowed out at me from that whirling disc, on the wings of that wonderful and terrible voice.

Cold sweat stood out on my body as I realized the feelings of a victim bound for the sacrifice. I was the victim, I lay on the altar and the hand of the slayer hovered above me, gripping the dagger.

From the whirling disc the voice surged on, sweeping me irresistably to my doom, swinging higher and higher, deeper and deeper, tinged with insanity as it approached the climax.

I realized my danger. I felt my brain crumbling before the onslaught of those spears of sound. I sought to speak, to scream! But my mouth gaped without sound. I tried to step forward, to shut off the machine, to break the record. But I could not move.

Now the chant rose to heights unnamable and unbearable. A hideous triumph swept its notes; a million mocking devils screamed and bellowed at me, taunting me through that flood of demon-music, as if the chant were a gate through which the hordes of Hell came streaming, red-handed and roaring.

Now it swept with dizzy speed toward the point where, in the Black Mass, the dagger drinks the life of the sacrifice, and with one last effort that strained fading soul and dimming brain, I broke the mesmeric chains–I screamed! An inhuman, unearthly shriek, the shriek of a soul being dragged into Hell–of a mind being hurled into insanity.

And echoing my screech came the shout of Costigan as he leaned forward and crashed his sledge hammer fist down on the top of the machine, smashing it, and shattering into oblivion that terrible, golden voice forever.

The Touch of Death

As long as midnight cloaks the earth

With shadows grim and stark,

God save us from the Judas kiss

Of a dead man in the dark.

Old Adam Farrel lay dead in the house wherein he had lived alone for the last twenty years. A silent, churlish recluse, in his life he had known no friends, and only two men had watched his passing.

Dr. Stein rose and glanced out the window into the gathering dusk.

“You think you can spend the night here, then?” he asked his companion.

This man, Falred by name, assented.

“Yes, certainly. I guess it’s up to me.”

“Rather a useless and primitive custom, sitting up with the dead,” commented the doctor, preparing to depart, “but I suppose in common decency we will have to bow to precedence. Maybe I can find some one who’ll come over here and help you with your vigil.”

Falred shrugged his shoulders. “I doubt it. Farrel wasn’t liked–wasn’t known by many people. I scarcely knew him myself, but I don’t mind sitting up with the corpse.”

Dr. Stein was removing his rubber gloves and Falred watched the process with an interest that almost amounted to fascination. A slight, involuntary shudder shook him at the memory of touching these gloves–slick, cold, clammy things, like the touch of death.

“You may get lonely tonight, if I don’t find anyone,” the doctor remarked as he opened the door. “Not superstitious, are you?”

Falred laughed. “Scarcely. To tell the truth, from what I hear of Farrel’s disposition, I’d rather be watching his corpse than have been his guest in life.”

The door closed and Falred took up his vigil. He seated himself in the only chair the room boasted, glanced casually at the formless, sheeted bulk on the bed opposite him, and began to read by the light of the dim lamp which stood on the rough table.

Outside the darkness gathered swiftly, and finally Falred laid down his magazine to rest his eyes. He looked again at the shape which had, in life, been the form of Adam Farrel, wondering what quirk in the human nature made the sight of a corpse not only so unpleasant, but such an object of fear to many.

Unthinking ignorance, seeing in dead things a reminder of death to come, he decided lazily, and began idly contemplating as to what life had held for this grim and crabbed old man, who had neither relatives nor friends, and who had seldom left the house wherein he had died. The usual tales of miser-hoarded wealth had accumulated, but Falred felt so little interest in the whole matter that it was not even necessary for him to overcome any temptation to pry about the house for possible hidden treasure.

He returned to his reading with a shrug. The task was more boresome than he had thought for. After a while he was aware that every time he looked up from his magazine and his eyes fell upon the bed with its grim occupant, he started involuntarily as if he had, for an instant, forgotten the presence of the dead man and was unpleasantly reminded of the fact. The start was slight and instinctive, but he felt almost angered at himself. He realized, for the first time, the utter and deadening silence which enwrapped the house–a silence apparently shared by the night, for no sound came through the window. Adam Farrel had lived as far apart from his neighbors as possible, and there was no other house within hearing distance.

Falred shook himself as if to rid his mind of unsavory speculations, and went back to his reading. A sudden vagrant gust of wind whipped through the window, in which the light in the lamp flickered and went out suddenly. Falred, cursing softly, groped in the darkness for matches, burning his fingers on the hot lamp chimney. He struck a match, relighted the lamp, and glancing over at the bed, got a horrible mental jolt. Adam Farrel’s face stared blindly at him, the dead eyes wide and blank, framed in the gnarled gray features. Even as Falred instinctively shuddered, his reason explained the apparent phenomenon: the sheet that covered the corpse had been carelessly thrown across the face and the sudden puff of wind had disarranged and flung it aside.

Yet there was something grisly about the thing, something fearsomely suggestive–as if, in the cloaking dark, a dead hand had flung aside the sheet, just as if the corpse were about to rise….

Falred, an imaginative man, shrugged his shoulders at these ghastly thoughts and crossed the room to replace the sheet. The dead eyes seemed to stare at him malevolently, with an evilness that transcended the dead man’s churlishness in life. The workings of a vivid imagination, Falred knew, and he re-covered the gray face, shrinking as his hand chanced to touch the cold flesh–slick and clammy, the touch of death.

He shuddered with the natural revulsion of the living for the dead, and went back to his chair and magazine.

At last, growing sleepy, he lay down upon a couch which, by some strange whim of the original owner, formed part of the room’s scant furnishings, and composed himself for slumber. He decided to leave the light burning, telling himself that it was in accordance with the usual custom of leaving lights burning for the dead; for he was not willing to admit to himself that already he was conscious of a dislike for lying in the darkness with the corpse. He dozed, awoke with a start and looked at the sheeted form of the bed.

Silence reigned over the house, and outside it was very dark.

The hour was approaching midnight, with its accompanying eery domination over the human mind. Falred glanced again at the bed where the body lay and found the sight of the sheeted object most repellent. A fantastic idea had birth in his mind and grew, that beneath the sheet, the mere lifeless body had become a strange, monstrous thing, a hideous, conscious being, that watched him with eyes which burned through the fabric of the cloth. This thought–a mere fantasy, of course–he explained to himself by the legends of vampires, undead, ghosts and such like–the fearsome attributes with which the living have cloaked the dead for countless ages, since primitive man first recognized in death something horrid and apart from life.

Man feared death, thought Falred, and some of his fear of death took hold on the dead so that they, too, were feared. And the sight of the dead engendered grisly thoughts, gave rise to dim fears of hereditary memory, lurking back in the dark corners of the brain.

At any rate, that silent, hidden thing was getting on his nerves. He thought of uncovering the face, on the principle that familiarity breeds contempt. The sight of the features, calm and still in death, would banish, he thought, all such wild conjectures as were haunting him in spite of himself. But the thought of those dead eyes staring in the lamplight was intolerable; so at last he blew out the light and lay down. This fear had been stealing upon him so insidiously and gradually that he had not been aware of its growth.

With the extinguishing of the light, however, and the blotting out of the sight of the corpse, things assumed their true character and proportions, and Falred fell asleep almost instantly, on his lips a faint smile for his previous folly.

He awakened suddenly. How long he had been asleep he did not know. He sat up, his pulse pounding frantically, the cold sweat beading his forehead. He knew instantly where he was, remembered the other occupant of the room. But what had awakened him? A dream–yes, now he remembered–a hideous dream in which the dead man had risen from the bed and stalked stiffly across the room with eyes of fire and a horrid leer frozen on his gray lips. Falred had seemed to lie motionless, helpless; then as the corpse reached a gnarled and horrible hand, he had awakened.

He strove to pierce the gloom, but the room was all blackness and all without was so dark that no gleam of light came through the window. He reached a shaking hand toward the lamp, then recoiled as if from a hidden serpent. Sitting here in the dark with a fiendish corpse was bad enough, but he dared not light the lamp, for fear that his reason would be snuffed out like a candle at what he might see. Horror, stark and unreasoning, had full possession of his soul; he no longer questioned the instinctive fears that rose in him.

All those legends he had heard came back to him and brought a belief in them. Death was a hideous thing, a brain-shattering horror, imbuing lifeless men with a horrid malevolence. Adam Farrel in his life had been simply a churlish but harmless man; now he was a terror, a monster, a fiend lurking in the shadows of fear, ready to leap on mankind with talons dipped deep in death and insanity.

Falred sat there, his blood freezing, and fought out his silent battle. Faint glimmerings of reason had begun to touch his fright when a soft, stealthy sound again froze him. He did not recognize it as the whisper of the night wind across the window-sill. His frenzied fancy knew it only as the tread of death and horror.