The Macabre Reader

by Donald A. Wollheim

  It must be the curse of Yig. He had sent his monstrous children on All-Hallows’ Night, and they had taken Walker first. Why was that—wasn’t he innocent enough? Why not come straight for her—hadn’t she killed those little rattlers alone? Then she thought of the curse’s form as told by the Indians. She wouldn’t be killed—just turned to a spotted snake. Ugh! So she would be like those things she had glimpsed on the floor—those things which Yig had sent to get her and enroll her among their number! She tried to mumble a charm that Walker had taught her, but found she could not utter a single sound.

  The noisy ticking of the alarm-clock sounded above the maddening beat of the distant tom-toms. The snakes were taking a long time—did they mean to delay on purpose to play on her nerves? Every now and then she thought she felt a steady, insidious pressure on the bedclothes, but each time it turned out to be only the automatic twitchings of her over-wrought nerves. The clock ticked in the dark, and a change came slowly over her thoughts.

  Those snakes couldn’t have taken so long! They couldn’t be Yig’s messengers after all, but just natural rattlers that were nested below the rock and had been drawn there by the fire. They weren’t coming for her, perhaps—perhaps they had sated themselves on poor Walker. Where were they now?

  Gone? Coiled by the fire? Still crawling over the prone corpse of their victim? The clock ticked, and the distant drums throbbed on.

  At the thought of her husband’s body lying there in the pitch blackness a thrill of purely physical horror passed over Audrey. That story of Sally Compton’s about the man back in Scott County! He, too, bad been bitten by a whole bunch of rattlesnakes, and what had happened to him? The poison had rotted the flesh and swelled the whole corpse, and in the end the bloated thing had burst horribly—burst horribly with a detestable popping noise. Was that what was happening to Walker down there on the rock floor? Instinctively she felt that she had begun to listen for something too terrible even to name to herself.

  The clock ticked on, keeping a kind of mocking, sardonic time with the far-off drumming that the night wind brought. She wished it were a striking clock, so that she could know how long this eldritch vigil must last. She cursed the toughness of fiber that kept her from fainting, and wondered what sort of relief the dawn would bring, after all. Probably neighbors would pass—no doubt somebody would call—would they find her still sane? Was she still sane now?

  Morbidly listening, Audrey all at once became aware of something which she had to verify with every effort of her will before she could believe it; and which, once verified, she did not know whether to welcome or dread. The distant beating of the Indian tom-toms had ceased.

  She did not relish this new and sudden silence, after all! There was something sinister about it. The loud-ticking clock seemed abnormal in its new loneliness. Capable at last of conscious motion, she shook her covers from her face and looked into the darkness toward the window. It must have cleared after the moon set, for the saw the square aperture distinctly against the background of stars.

  Then without warning came that shocking, unutterable sound—ugh!—that dull pop of cleft skin and escaping poison in the dark. God!— The bonds of muteness snapped, and the black night waxed reverberant with Audrey’s screams of Stark, unbridled frenzy.

  Consciousness did not pass away with the shock. How merciful if only it had! Amidst the echoes of her shrieking Audrey still saw the star-sprinkled square of window ahead, and heard the doom-boding ticking of that frightful clock. Did she hear another sound? Was that square window still a perfect square? She was in no condition to weigh the evidence of her senses or distinguish between fact and hallucination.

  No—that window was not a perfect square. Something had encroached on the lower edge. Nor was the ticking of the clock the only sound in the room. There was, beyond dispute, a heavy breathing neither her own nor poor Wolfs. Wolf slept very silently, and his wakeful wheezing was unmistakable. Then Audrey saw against the stars the black, demoniac silhouette of something anthropoid—the undulant bulk of a gigantic head and shoulders fumbling slowly toward her.

  “Y’aaaah! Y’aaaah! Go away! Go away! Go away, snake devil! Go ’way, Yig! I didn’t mean to kill ’em—I was feared he’d be scairt of ’em. Don’t, Yig, don’t! I didn’t go for to hurt yore chillen—don’t come nigh me—don’t change me into no spotted snake!”

  But the half-formless head and shoulders only lurched onward toward the bed, very silently.

  Everything snapped at once inside Audrey’s head, and in a second she had turned from a cowering child to a raging madwoman. She knew where the ax was—hung against the wall on those pegs near the lantern. It was within easy reach, and she could find it in the dark. Before she was conscious of anything further it was in her hands, and she was creeping toward the foot of the bed—toward the monstrous head and shoulders that every moment groped their way nearer. Had there been any light, the look on her face would not have been pleasant to see.

  “Take that, you! And that, and that, and that!”

  She was laughing shrilly now, and her cackles mounted higher as she saw that the starlight beyond the window was yielding to the dim prophetic pallor of coming dawn.

  Doctor McNeill wiped the perspiration from his forehead and put on his glasses again. I waited for him to resume, and as he kept silent, I spoke softly.

  “She lived? She was found? Was it ever explained?”

  The doctor cleared his throat.

  “Yes—she lived, in a way. And it was explained. I told you there was no bewitchment—only cruel, pitiful, material horror.”

  It was Sally Compton who had made the discovery. She had ridden over to the Davis cabin the next afternoon to talk over the party with Audrey, and had seen no smoke from the chimney. That was queer. It had turned very warm again, yet Audrey was usually cooking something at that hour. The mules were making hungry-sounding noises in the bam, and there was no sign of old Wolf sunning himself in the accustomed spot by the door.

  Altogether, Sally did not like the look of the place, so was very timid and hesitant as she dismounted and knocked. She got no answer, but waited some time before trying the crude door of split logs. The lock, it appeared, was unfastened; and she slowly pushed her way in. Then, perceiving what was there, she reeled back, gasped, and clung to the jamb to preserve her balance.

  A terrible odor had welled out as she opened the door, but that was not what had stunned her. It was what she had seen. For within that shadowy cabin monstrous things had happened and three shocking objects remained on the floor to awe and baffle the beholder.

  Near the burned-out fireplace was the great dog—purple decay on the skin left bare by mange and old age, and the whole carcass burst by the puffing effect of rattlesnake poison. It must have been bitten by a veritable legion of the reptiles.

  To the right of the door was the ax-hacked remnant of what had been a man—clad in a nightshirt, and with the shattered bulk of a lantern clenched in one hand. He was totally free from any sign of snake-bite. Near him lay the ensanguined ax, carelessly discarded.

  And wriggling flat on the floor was a loathsome, vacant-’ eyed thing that had been a woman, but was now only a mute mad caricature. All that this thing could do was to hiss, and hiss.

  Both the doctor and I were brushing cold drops from our foreheads by this time. He poured something from a flask on his desk, took a nip, and handed another glass to me. I could only suggest tremulously and stupidly:

  “So Walker had only fainted that first time—the screams roused him, and the ax did the rest?”

  “Yes.” Doctor McNeill’s voice was low. “But he met his death from snakes just the same. It was his fear working in two ways—it made him faint, and it made him fill his wife with the wild stories that caused her to strike out when she thought she saw th? snake devil.”

  I thought for a moment.

  “And Audrey—wasn’t it queer how the curse of Yig seemed to work itself out on her? I suppose the impression of his
sing snakes had been fairly ground into her.”

  “Yes. There were lucid spells at first, but they got to be fewer and fewer. Her hair came white at the roots as it grew, and later began to fall out. The skin grew blotchy, and when she died—”

  I interrupted with a start.

  “Died? Then what was that—that thing downstairs?” Doctor McNeill spoke gravely.

  “That is what was bom to her three-quarters of a year afterwards. There were three more of them—two were even worse—but this is the only one that lived.”

  GREEGHEE

  Greegree, I have brought the hair.

  Take the long, black shining strand,

  Bed it in the sodden clay,

  Mold the doll with skillful hand.

  Greegree, drive the little pins

  Deep—but strike no vital spot!

  Make her writhe with sudden pain,

  But remember—kill her not!

  Listen while the Haitian hills

  Scream in answer to her screams!

  —From the other forearm now

  Start the blood in sudden streams.

  Greegree, take this purse I bring!

  Give the little doll to me …

  Watch my hands twist and complete

  What has been begun by thee!

  —Ray H. Zorn

  THE CAIRN ON THE HEADLAND

  Robert E. Howard

  “And the next instant this great red loon was shaking me like a dog shaking a rat. ‘Where is Meve MacDonnal? he was screaming. By the saints, it’s a grisly thing to hear a madman in a lonely place at midnight screaming the name of a woman dead three hundred years.”

  —The Longshoreman’s Tale.

  “This is the cairn you seek,” I said, laying my hand gingerly on one of the rough stones which composed the strangely symmetrical heap.

  An avid interest burned in Ortali’s dark eyes. His gaze swept the landscape and came back to rest on the great pile of massive weather-worn boulders.

  “What a wild, weird, desolate place!” he said. “Who would have thought to find such a spot in this vicinity? Except for the smoke rising yonder, one would scarcely dream that beyond that headland lies a great city! Here there is scarcely even a fisherman’s hut within sight.”

  “The people shun the cairn as they have shunned it for centuries,” I replied.

  “Why?”

  “You’ve asked me that before,” I replied impatiently. “I can only answer that they now avoid by habit what their ancestors avoided through knowledge.”

  “Knowledge!” he laughed derisively. “Superstition!”

  I looked at him somberly with unveiled hate. Two men could scarcely have been of more opposite types. He was slender, self-possessed, unmistakably Latin with his dark eyes and sophisticated air. I am massive, clumsy and bearlike, with cold blue eyes and tousled red hair. We were countrymen in that we were bom in the same land; but the homelands of our ancestors were as far apart as South from North.

  “Nordic superstition,” he repeated. “I cannot imagine a Latin people allowing such a mystery as this to go unexplored all these years. The Latins are too practical—too prosaic, if you will. Are you sure of the date of this pile?”

  “I find no mention of it in any manuscript prior to 1014 A. D.,” I growled, “and I’ve read all such manuscripts extant, in the original. MacLiag, King Brian Boru’s poet, speaks of the rearing of the cairn immediately after the battle, and there can be little doubt that this is the pile referred to. It is mentioned briefly in the later chronicles of the Four Masters, also in the Book of Leinster, compiled in the late 1150’s, and again in the Book of Lecan, compiled by the MacFirbis about 1416. All connect it with the battle of Clontarf, without mentioning why it was built.”

  “Well, what is the mystery about it?” he queried. “What more natural than that the defeated Norsemen should rear a cairn above the body of some great chief who had fallen in the battle?”

  “In the first place,” I answered, “there is a mystery concerning the existence of it. The building of cairns above the dead was a Norse, not an Irish, custom. Yet according to the chroniclers, it was not Norsemen who reared this heap. How could they have built it immediately after the battle, in which they had been cut to pieces and driven in headlong flight through the gates of Dublin? Their chieftains lay where they had fallen and the ravens picked their bones. It was Irish hands that heaped these stones.”

  “Well, was that so strange?” persisted Ortali. “In old times the Irish heaped up stones before they went into battle, each man putting a stone in place; after the battle the living removed their stones, leaving in that manner a simple tally of the slain for any who wished to count the remaining stones,”

  I shook my head.

  “That was in more ancient times; not in the battle of Clontarf. In the first place, there were more than twenty thousand warriors, and four thousand fell here; this cairn is not large enough to have served as a tally of the men killed in battle. And it is too symmetrically built. Hardly a stone has fallen away in all these centuries. No, it was reared to cover something.”

  “Nordic superstitions!” the man sneered again.

  “Aye, superstitions if you will!” Fired by his scorn, I exclaimed so savagely that he involuntarily stepped back, his hand slipping inside his coat. “We of North Europe had gods and demons before which the pallid mythologies of the South fade to childishness. At a time when your ancestors were lolling on silken cushions among the crumbling marble pillars of a decaying civilization, my ancestors were building their own civilization in hardships and gigantic battles against foes human and inhuman.

  “Here on this very plain the Dark Ages came to an end and the light of a new era dawned on the world of hate and anarchy. Here, as even you know, in the year 1014, Brian Born and his Dalcassian ax wielders broke the power of the heathen Norsemen forever—those grim anarchistic plunderers who had held back the progress of civilization for centuries.

  “It was more than a struggle between Gael and Dane for the crown of Ireland. It was a war between the White Christ and Odin, between Christian and pagan. It was the last stand of the heathen—of the people of the old, grim ways. For three hundred years the world had writhed beneath the heel of the Viking, and here on Clontarf that scourge was lifted forever.

  “Then, as now, the importance of that battle was underestimated by polite Latin and Latinized writers and historians. The polished sophisticates of the civilized cities of the South were not interested in the battles of barbarians in the remote northwestern comer of the world—a place and peoples of whose very names they were only vaguely aware. They only knew that suddenly the terrible raids of the sea kings ceased to sweep along their coasts, and in another century the wild age of plunder and slaughter had almost been forgotten—all because a rude, half-civilized people who scantily covered their nakedness with wolf hides rose up against the conquerors.

  “Here was Ragnarok, the fall of the Gods! Here in very truth Odin fell, for his religion was given its death blow. He was last of all the heathen gods to stand before Christianity, and it looked for a time as if his children might prevail and plunge the world back into darkness and savagery. Before Clontarf, legends say, he often appeared on earth to his worshipers, dimly seen in the smoke of the sacrifices where naked human victims died screaming, or riding the wind-tom clouds, his wild locks flying in the gale, or, appareled like a Norse warrior, dealing thunderous blows in the forefront of nameless battles. But after Clontarf he was seen no more; his worshipers called on him in vain with wild chants and grim sacrifices. They lost faith in him, who had failed them in their wildest hour; his altars crumbled, his priests turned gray and died, and men turned to his conqueror, the White Christ. The reign of blood and iron was forgotten; the age of the red-handed sea kings passed. The rising sun slowly, dimly, lighted the night of the Dark Ages, and men forgot Odin, who came no more on earth.

  “Aye, laugh if you will! But who knows what shapes of horror have
had birth in the darkness, the cold gloom, and the whistling black gulfs of the North? In the southern lands the sun shines and flowers bloom; under the soft skies men laugh at demons. But in the North, who can say what elemental spirits of evil dwell in the fierce storms and the darkness? Well may it be that from such fiends of the night men evolved the worship of the grim ones, Odin and Thor, and their terrible kin.”

  Ortali was silent for an instant, as if taken aback by my vehemence; then he laughed. “Well said, my northern philosopher! We will argue these questions another time. I could hardly expect a descendant of Nordic barbarians to escape some trace of the dreams and mysticism of his race. But you cannot expect me to be moved by your imaginings, either. I still believe that this cairn covers no grimmer secret than a Norse chief who fell in the battle—and really your ravings concerning Nordic devils have no bearing on the matter. Will you help me tear into this cairn?”

  “No,” I answered shortly.

  “A few hours’ work will suffice to lay bare whatever it may hide,” he continued as if he had not heard. “By the way, speaking of superstitions, is there not some wild tale concerning holly connected with this heap?”

  “An old legend says that all trees bearing holly were cut down for a league in all directions, for some mysterious reason,” I answered sullenly. “That’s another mystery. Holly was an important part of Norse magic-making. The Four Masters tell of a Norseman—a white-bearded ancient of wild aspect, and apparently a priest of Odin—who was slain by the natives while attempting to lay a branch of holly on the cairn, a year after the battle.”