The Best of Weird Tales 1923

by Marvin Kaye

  He was so thin that the skin of his face seemed drawn over the raw bones without any intervening layer of flesh. His face was absolutely colorless, even his lips were blue-white. He had a straggly beard, yellow and vile-looking. Even without the enormous shapeless mouth and toothless gums, the beard was sufficient to make the face repulsive.

  But it was the unnatural, fanatical light in his eyes which impressed itself most clearly on the screen of my memory. It was not human, but a glow such as might appear in the eyes of a maniac or a wild

  animal. His costume seemed made up of stray bits from the clothes of all the tramps of earth. And yet he carried a cane and kept swinging it about jauntily as though it were a thing of vast importance.

  “You call those jewels!” he cried harshly in a voice made of falsetto notes. “Why, those are not even fit to be thrown to the swine which grovel in a thousand pens more than a mile from my castle. Come with me and I will show you gems more wondrous than the Crown Jewels of Old Russia, more gorgeous

  than the collection of Cleopatra and more luxurious than the famed necklace of Helen of Troy. After you see my jewels, you will laugh at what is obviously but a collection of baubles.”

  On the impulse of the moment, I said, “I will go with you, but before we go, I suggest that we have a bite to eat. You look hungry.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “This day,” he cried, “have I drunk three pearls melted in golden goblets of rarest wine. But if you wish to eat, I will go with you. All the restaurants near here are mine.”

  So we went to Messimo’s Chop House and ate, but what we ate I cannot recall. As we passed out, John Rust grew quite angry because I paid the check.

  “That was foolish,” he stormed, “for did I not tell you I owned the restaurant? Tonight I want you to be my guest.”

  He led the way through a labyrinth of alleys and narrow streets.

  “I live apart from the howling mobs,” he told me, “so that my sleep will not be disturbed. Each morn I am awakened by a lad as lovely as Narcissus who plays an anthem of the Sun on a harp wrought of gold and platinum and set with a hundred and thirty-three pink diamonds. At the top of the harp is a single square blue diamond of forty carats, the finest in the world. It represents the Morning Star. The strings of the harp are the rays of the sun. The pink diamonds represent the individual kingdoms over which I reign.”

  As he spoke, we came to a hole in the ground, a filthy, ancient cellar. I must confess that I had a twinge of terror as I followed John Rust down a flight of slippery stone steps, more treacherous and steep than the facade of Gibraltar.

  Something, I know not what, scampered across my feet and went screeching off into the blackness which engulfed us like the shadows in a tomb of recent death. I could hear John Rust fumbling about, and after an eternity of waiting, he struck a match and lighted a candle. As he did so, he cried:

  “Behold, my treasure-chamber!”

  By the dim light of the candle which made the silhouette of John Rust dance on the wall like the capering of a fiend, I glanced about me. The cellar was absolutely unfurnished, unless the cobwebs of a century can be classed as drapery. Down the stone steps the night rain dripped monotonously.

  “Look!” fairly shrieked John Rust, “look at these diamonds, sapphires, carved jades, rare corals, tourmalines, emeralds and gorgeous lapis lazuli! Has ever mortal man gazed on a finer collection than this? Here is more wealth than even Midas dreamed of. The Gaekwar of Baroda by comparison to me is without jewels; the Dalai Llama of Tibet is a pauper when the light of my wealth shines upon him.

  All the treasures of Rome are insignificant when held parallel to mine. The Incas of Peru owned less than I divide in a single year among the poor!”

  He clutched at the bits of ashes, coal and pebbles which were falling through his fingers, the wealth which the Gods had lavished on him so prodigiously.

  “Tell me,” he cried hoarsely, “are your eyes not blinded by the brilliance of my stones?”

  “My surprise at what you tell me is acute,” I declared truthfully. “I can scarcely find words to express my thoughts.”

  “Don’t try,” said John Rust grandly. “The greatest rhetoricians the world has ever known have never invented words even to suggest their true magnificence…. Nor is this treasure all I possess. I own the world! Every castle of Rome or Venice is mine; every pasture of England, every moor of Scotland, every city in America, I own. Come,” he ended abruptly, “come with me, and I will show you my private bath, a pool such as Mark Antony or the mighty Caesar never dreamed of.”

  It must be confessed that I sighed with relief as he led the way up the worn stone steps again. It was good to be out in the open air once more, even though it was raining as heavily as when Noah set sail.

  John Rust led the way back to Washington Square, to the fountain in the center of the park.

  “This,” he explained, “is my bath, shaded by myrtle trees and palms and in the heart of a grove where ten thousand song birds sing. Among the seven wonders of the world is nothing to equal this. I am better than Monte Cristo, for whereas he only boasted when he exclaimed, ‘The world is mine!’ I can prove my claim to it.”

  During the days that followed, I met John Rust several times, and although I cannot say that he remembered me, he nevertheless talked to me, which was really all he desired. He believed that all the people in the great city were his slaves and this misconception was the direct cause of his undoing.

  While his eccentricities flowed in a harmless channel, he was unmolested, but one day he struck one of his subjects with his scepter. The scepter was a strong oak cudgel and the subject in question was a huge, stalwart ice-man who strenuously objected to being disciplined. He raised such a din that two policemen were necessary to quell his personal riot.

  After chaos had ended, the ice-man continued on his rounds, but John Rust was detained until the police-patrol arrived. He believed it was a chariot of gold, that the crowd gathered around had come to envy Caesar, and so he climbed in as majestically as though he were about to proceed to the Coliseum as the supreme guest of the populace on a fete day.

  In the course of weeks, a great brain specialist, because he was interested in the case, examined John Rust and asserted that he could be successfully normalized by a simple operation. He went on to explain about the pressure of a bone on some vital spot in the brain, the removal of which would insure the return of rationality.

  The operation was successfully performed and eventually John Rust was turned out of the hospital a withered, broken old man, entirely cured.

  He went back to his cellar. The first thing he intended doing was to sell his jewels and deposit the money in a reliable bank, for he still retained the memory of his jewels, although the hallucination that he owned the world was entirely blotted out of his memory.

  So he returned to his cellar only to find heaps of worthless stones and ashes. He shrieked in his anguish. He had been robbed of all his jewels! For a moment it seemed doubtful that his new-found sanity could stand the surging flood of his ravings. All his enormous wealth had vanished like the essence of a dream. Now life contained nothing for him. He had neither relatives nor friends. He had lived in his dungeon for more than ten years. No one knew from whence he had come. For hours he sat, perhaps even days, moaning and wailing as awfully as any woman for a lost child.

  Months later, they found him dead one morning in his cellar, lying face downward in his ashes. He had died of grief, in abject poverty, this man who once had owned the world and had ten million slaves.

  AN ADVENTURE IN THE FOURTH DIMENSION

  FARNSWORTH WRIGHT

  The thought of meteors terrifies me. They have a disagreeable habit of coming down and killing people at the most inopportune times. That is why I was so startled when I saw a large object hurtling toward me out of the sky, as I was walking along the lake front recently in my city of Chicago.

  I shivered. Was this the end? I began to say my prayers. To my
astonishment, the onrushing missile struck the grass beside me without the slightest jar.

  I gasped.

  Thousands of singular objects began to detach themselves. They bounded from the mass, and suddenly increased in size from one inch to three feet in diameter. They were entirely round, and covered with teeth. On each tooth were ten ears, constantly in motion. Each ear carried a quizzical eye.

  The dwarfish creatures rolled rapidly on the ground, the ears serving as legs, hands, tentacles and what not, propelling them with incredible speed. Sometimes they stood on only four of five of their ears, then suddenly pressed hard against the ground with half a thousand ears at once, thus bounding high into the air. They lit without jar, for the ears acted as shock absorbers and broke their fall.

  “Surely these are explorers from Mars or Venus,” I thought, as the funny bounding creatures filled the air.

  “You are wrong. They are Jupiterians,” said a voice beside me.

  I recognized the voice. It was Professor Nutt. You probably know him.

  “Ahem,” he said. “Ahem, ahem!” And once more he repeated, “Ahem!”

  “Interesting, if true,” I remarked. “And what might Jupiterians be?”

  “They might be men, but they’re not,” he snapped. “They are people from the planet Jupiter. Out of your ignorance you thought they might be Martians or Venusians, but you are wrong, for Mars and Venus have people of three dimensions, like ourselves. Jupiterians are entirely different. There are six hundred thousand of them in this Jupiterian airship.”

  I was so overjoyed at finding someone who could tell me about them, that I didn’t think to ask him how he knew all these startling facts.

  “Where is the airship you speak of?” I asked.

  “There it is,” he answered, rather grandiloquently, and pointed to an empty spot on the grass.

  I looked carefully, and made out a vast, transparent globe, apparently of glass, which was rapidly becoming visible because of the Chicago dust that was settling upon it. I approached, and touched it with my hand. It gave forth a metallic ring.

  “Aha!” laughed the professor. “You thought it was glass, but it is made of Jupiterian steel. Look out!”

  I sprang back at his warning, and the last hundred thousand leapt out of the globe, passing right through the transparent metal of which it was composed.

  “Nom de mademoiselle!” I exclaimed, in astonishment. This was a swear word I had learned in France when I was in the army.

  “Nom de mademoiselle!” I repeated, for I liked to show off my knowledge of the language. “How can they pass through the glass without breaking it?”

  “Through Jupiterian steel, you mean,” said Professor Nutt, severely. “I told you before that it is not glass. Jupiterian steel has four dimensions, and they pass through the fourth dimension. That is why you can’t see the metal, for your eyes are only three-dimensional.”

  “Are the Jupiterian people four-dimensional?” I asked, awed.

  “Certainly,” said Nutt, rather irritably.

  “Then how is it that I can see them?” I exclaimed triumphantly.

  “You see only three of their four dimensions,” he replied. “The other one is inside.”

  I turned to look again at the Jupiterians, who now covered the whole waterfront. One of them sprang lightly, fifty feet into the air, extended a hundred ears like tentacles, and seized an English sparrow. He crushed the sparrow with some score or more of his teeth, which, as I have said, covered his whole body. In less than a minute the poor bird was chewed to pieces. I looked closer, and saw that the Jupiterian had no mouth.

  “Nom de mademoiselle!” I exclaimed, for the third time. “How can it get the bird into its stomach?”

  “Through the fourth dimension,” said Professor Nutt.

  It was true. The chewed up pieces of the bird were suddenly tossed into the air, and the Jupiterian sprang lightly after them. In mid-air he turned inside out, caught the pieces of the bird in his stomach, and lit on the grass again right side up with care.

  “Did you see that?” I exclaimed, in a hushed voice. “Why can’t I turn inside out that way?”

  “Because you are not four-dimensional,” replied the professor, a trace of annoyance in his voice. “It is a beautiful thing to have four dimensions,” he rhapsodized. “Your Jupiterian is your only true intellectual, for he alone can truly reflect. He turns his gaze in upon himself.”

  “And sees what he had for breakfast?” I gasped. “And what his neighbors had, too?”

  “Your questions are childish.” said the professor, wearily. “A Jupiterian, of course, can look into the soul of things, and see what his neighbors had for breakfast, as you so vulgarly express it. But Jupiterians turn their thoughts to higher things.”

  The creatures now surrounded me, their ears turned inward, as if they were supplicating.

  “What do they want?” I asked the professor.

  “They want something to drink,” he replied. “They are pointing their ears toward their stomachs to show that they are thirsty.”

  “Oh,” I said, and pointed toward the lake. “There is the fresh, cool water of the lake, if they are thirsty.”

  “Don’t be fantastic,” said Professor Nutt. “It isn’t water they want.”

  He fixed his stern, pitiless gaze on my hip pocket. I turned pale, for it was my last pint. But I had to submit. If you ever have had Professor Nutt’s cold, accusing eyes on you, you will know just how I felt.

  I drew the flask from my pocket, and handed it to the chief Jupiterian, who waggled his ears in joy.

  Immediately there was pandemonium, if you know what I mean. Ten thousand times ten thousand ears seized the cork, and pulled it out with a resounding pop. One thirsty Jupiterian passed right through the glass into the bottle in his eagerness to get at the contents, and nearly drowned for his pains.

  “You see how useful it is to be four-dimensional,” remarked the professor. “You could get into any cellar in the world by merely passing through the walls. And into any beer-keg in the same way.”

  “But,” I argued, “how did this—this insect get through the glass into the whisky bottle? Glass has only three dimensions, like everything else in this world.”

  “Don’t call him an insect!” Nutt sharply reprimanded me. “He is a Jupiterian, and as such he is infinitely superior to you and me. He passed through the glass because he is four-dimensional, even though the glass isn’t. If you had four dimensions, you could untie any knot by merely passing through it yourself. You could turn inside out, or pass through yourself until your right hand became your left hand, and change into your own image as you see it in the looking-glass.”

  “Nom de mademoiselle!” I exclaimed, for the fourth time.

  A distant noise of barking was borne to my ears in the breeze. All the dogs in the city seemed to have gone wild.

  “They are disturbed by the talking of the Jupiterians,” explained the professor. “It is too high-pitched for clodhopper human ears to hear, unless they have an unusual range, but the dogs can hear it plainly.”

  I listened, and finally made out a very shrill humming, higher than any sound I had ever heard before in my life, and infinitely sweet and piercing.

  “Ah, I am hearing four-dimensional sounds,” I thought aloud.

  “Wrong, as usual,” exacerbated the professor, with much heat. “Sound has no dimensions. It proceeds in waves, and bends back upon itself until it meets itself at an infinite distance from the starting-point.

  There are three reasons why you can’t hear the music of the spheres: first because it is bent away from the earth by the force of gravity as it passes the sun; second, because your ears are not attuned to so shrill a sound; and third, because there is no music of the spheres. The first two reasons are really unnecessary, in the light of the third, but a scientific mind such as mine is not content with one reason when three can be adduced just as easily.”

  “Shades of Sir Oliver Lodge!”
I ejaculated.

  “Sir Oliver is alive,” the professor corrected me. “A man does not become a shade until after his death.

  Then he becomes a four-dimensional creature like the Jupiterians, only different.”

  “Nom de mademoiselle!” I commented.

  “Say something sensible.” he reprimanded me.

  “For the love of Einstein, how do you know all these things about the Jupiterians?” I asked, a sudden suspicion flashing across what I am pleased to call my mind.

  “Ah, Einstein, yes,” exclaimed Nutt, greatly pleased. “My mother’s father’s name was Einstein.

  “Then you are related to —”

  “No, I am not related,” he interrupted, “but my mother’s father is.”

  “A sort of fourth-dimensional relationship, I suppose,” I remarked sarcastically.

  At that moment the air became vibrant with an invisible sound. The Jupiterians came rolling from all directions, as if they had suddenly heard the dinner bell. They bounded through the Jupiterian steel of the globe, and immediately shrank in size from three feet to one inch.

  “The Jupiterian assembly call just blew.” explained the professor. “Notice how the passengers draw into themselves. Six hundred thousand are now packed into that globe. Our elevated railroads miss a great opportunity by not having four-dimensional creatures to deal with.”

  “They pack us in just as tight,” I ventured to remark.

  The globe had begun to shoot into the air, when there came from behind me a high-pitched wail of distress—a shriller and higher sound than had ever before been heard by human ears, so the professor assured me. The chief Jupiterian had been left behind. He it was who had passed into the whisky bottle.

  Not content with getting the lion’s share of the contents, he had surrounded the bottle, in his pleasant four-dimensional way, and now he could not get rid of it.