The Complete Stories, Vol. 1: Final Reckonings

by Robert Bloch

  Krantz bared his teeth.

  Let them laugh! He was Otto Krantz, Headsman of the Reich. Krantz, the executioner, whom all men feared.

  He had outsmarted them after all. Now they would be buried away in a grave and no one would ever know that Krantz had murdered them.

  Krantz told them this in whispers, and they nodded to each other, sharing secrets. But Krantz did not mind. He was no longer afraid.

  He almost welcomed the coming of dawn in this changed mood. He donned his immaculate evening dress carefully. He brushed his stiff collar into place before the bureau. The heads laughed at him over his shoulder in the mirror, but he didn't care about that now.

  He swaggered through the street on his way to Headquarters, cradling the axe in its case against his brawny chest. A passing guard drew stiffly to attention as Krantz marched by.

  Krantz laughed. There — wasn't that proof of his importance, his cleverness? Let the heads understand that he was a man of position, of power.

  Otto Krantz knew he had nothing to fear. He would go about his duties today without question. He squared his shoulders and marched up the steps, into the outer office. He wasn't worried. He knew no one else could see the heads but himself.

  He smiled at the man behind the desk. That was the way — brazen it out! "I'd like to see Inspector Grunert, please. About today's orders. Is he here yet?"

  "The Inspector left word for you to go right in."

  There. The Inspector was waiting for him! That's the kind of a man Otto Krantz was. Inspectors waited for his arrival. He smiled derisively at the heads. Then he strutted into Inspector Grunert's office. The Inspector was waiting.

  Krantz realized that just as soon as the two Gestapo men stepped from behind the door and pinned his arms close to his sides. They took the axe, they held him tightly, he could not struggle, he could only gape, he could only pant, he could only listen to what Grunert was saying.

  "Otto Krantz, I arrest you in the name of the Third Reich, for the murder of Joachim and Eva Fulger."

  But what was he talking about? The Fulgers were in their graves by now, buried.

  No — they weren't.

  The Inspector was pulling the sheet from the table over in the corner.

  And Otto Krantz stared. He saw the heads again, and this time everyone could see them. They were grinning up at him now from over the tops of the sheets.

  Somehow he dragged his captors forward with him. He bent over the bodies. He wanted to know how, know why they had been discovered.

  They looked all right. The heads had been sewed on tightly. Perfectly. The high collars were still in place. Nothing was wrong with his work, nothing looked suspicious. Why, the collars hadn't even been pulled back to disclose any of the sewing!

  Then what was wrong?

  Krantz gazed at the still bodies, trying to read the secret. He didn't hear any of Inspector Grunert's mumblings about madmen, about murder. He was trying to remember what had happened.

  "As ye sow," the old man had warned. "As ye sow — "

  Then Otto Krantz's gaze traveled up again to the heads of the dead wizard and his daughter. He screamed, once.

  "Too bad you didn't have any light to work with in that shed," Inspector Grunert purred.

  Otto Krantz didn't hear him.

  He was staring madly at the grinning heads of the old man and the girl — the heads he had sewed back on in the darkness and inadvertently switched.

  The Shadow From the Steeple

  WILLIAM HURLEY WAS BORN an Irishman and grew up to be a taxicab driver—therefore it would be redundant, in the face of both of these facts, to say that he was garrulous.

  The minute he picked up his passenger in downtown Providence that warm summer evening, he began talking. The passenger, a tall thin man in his early thirties, entered the cab and sat back, clutching a briefcase. He gave an address on Benefit Street and Hurley started out, shifting both taxi and tongue into high gear.

  Hurley began what was to be a one-sided conversation by commenting on the afternoon performance of the New York Giants. Unperturbed by his passenger’s silence, he made a few remarks about the weather—recent, current, and expected. Since he received no reply, the driver then proceeded to discuss a local phenomenon, namely the reported escape, that morning, of two black panthers or leopards from the traveling menagerie of Langer Brothers Circus, currently appearing in the city. In response to a direct inquiry as to whether he had seen the beasts roaming at large, Hurley’s customer shook his head.

  The driver then made several uncomplimentary remarks about the local police force and their inability to capture the beasts. It was his considered opinion that a given platoon of law enforcement officers would be unable to catch a cold if immured in an ice-box for a year. This witticism failed to amuse his passenger, and before Hurley could continue his monologue they had arrived at the Benefit Street address. Eighty-five cents changed hands, passenger and briefcase left the cab, and Hurley drove away.

  He could not know it at the time, but he thus became the last man who could or would testify to seeing his passenger alive.

  The rest is conjecture, and perhaps that is for the best. Certainly it is easy enough to draw certain conclusions as to what happened that night in the old house on Benefit Street, but the weight of those conclusions is hard to bear.

  One minor mystery is easy enough to clear up—the peculiar silence and aloofness of Hurley’s passenger. That passenger, Edmund Fiske, of Chicago, Illinois, was meditating upon the fulfillment of fifteen years of questing; the cab-trip represented the last stage of this long journey, and he was reviewing the circumstances as he rode.

  Edmund Fiske’s quest had begun, on August 8, 1935, with the death of his close friend, Robert Harrison Blake, of Milwaukee.

  Like Fiske himself at the time, Blake had been a precocious adolescent interested in fantasy-writing, and as such became a member of the “Lovecraft circle”—a group of writers maintaining correspondence with one another and with the late Howard Phillips Lovecraft, of Providence.

  It was through correspondence that Fiske and Blake had become acquainted; they visited back and forth between Milwaukee and Chicago, and their mutual preoccupation with the weird and the fantastic in literature and art served to form the foundation for the close friendship which existed at the time of Blake’s unexpected and inexplicable demise.

  Most of the facts—and certain of the conjectures—in connection with Blake’s death have been embodied in Lovecraft’s story, “ The Haunter of the Dark,” which was published more than a year after the younger writer’s passing.

  Lovecraft had an excellent opportunity to observe matters, for it was on his suggestion that young Blake had journeyed to Providence early in 1935, and had been provided with living-quarters on College Street by Lovecraft himself. So it was both as friend and neighbor that the elder fantasy writer had acted in narrating the singular story of Robert Harrison Blake’s last months.

  In his story, he tells of Blake’s efforts to begin a novel dealing with a survival of New England witch-cults, but modestly omits his own part in assisting his friend to secure material. Apparently Blake began work on his project and then became enmeshed in a horror greater than any envisioned by his imagination.

  For Blake was drawn to investigate the crumbling black pile on Federal Hill—the deserted ruin of a church that had once housed the worshippers of an esoteric cult. Early in spring he paid a visit to the shunned structure and there made certain discoveries which (in Lovecraft’s opinion) made his death inevitable.

  Briefly, Blake entered the boarded-up Free-Will Church and stumbled across the skeleton of a reporter from the Providence Telegram, one Edwin M. Lillibridge, who had apparently attempted a similar investigation in 1893. The fact that his death was not explained seemed alarming enough, but more disturbing still was the realization that no one had been bold enough to enter the church since that date and discover the body.

  Blake found the reporter’
s notebook in his clothing, and its contents afforded a partial revelation.

  A certain Professor Bowen, of Providence, had traveled widely in Egypt, and in 1843, in the course of archaeological investigations of the crypt of Nephren-Ka, had made an unusual find.

  Nephren-Ka is the “forgotten pharaoh,” whose name has been cursed by the priests and obliterated from official dynastic records. The name was familiar to the young writer at the time, due largely to the work of another Milwaukee author who had dealt with the semi-legendary ruler in his tale, “ Fane of the Black Pharaoh.” But the discovery Bowen made in the crypt was totally unexpected.

  The reporter’s notebook said little of the actual nature of that discovery, but it recorded subsequent events in a precise, chronological fashion. Immediately upon unearthing his mysterious find in Egypt, Professor Bowen abandoned his research and returned to Providence, where he purchased the Free-Will Church in 1844 and made it the headquarters of what was called the “Starry Wisdom” sect.

  Members of this religious cult, evidently recruited by Bowen, professed to worship an entity they called the “Haunter of the Dark.” By gazing into a crystal they summoned the actual presence of this entity and did homage with blood sacrifice.

  Such, at least, was the fantastic story circulated in Providence at the time—and the church became a place to be avoided. Local superstition fanned agitation, and agitation precipitated direct action. In May of 1877 the sect was forcibly broken up by the authorities, due to public pressure, and several hundred of its members abruptly left the city.

  The church itself was immediately closed, and apparently individual curiosity could not overcome the widespread fear which resulted in leaving the structure undisturbed and unexplored until the reporter, Lillibridge, made his ill-fated private investigation in 1893.

  Such was the gist of the story unfolded in the pages of his notebook. Blake read it, but was nevertheless undeterred in his further scrutiny of the environs. Eventually he came upon the mysterious object Bowen had found in the Egyptian crypt—the object upon which the Starry Wisdom worship had been founded—the asymmetrical metal box with its curiously hinged lid, a lid that had been closed for countless years. Blake thus gazed at the interior, gazed upon the four-inch red-black crystal polyhedron hanging suspended by seven supports. He not only gazed at but also into the polyhedron; just as the cult-worshippers had purportedly gazed, and with the same results. He was assailed by a curious psychic disturbance; he seemed to “see visions of other lands and the gulfs beyond the stars,” as superstitious accounts had told.

  And then Blake made his greatest mistake. He closed the box.

  Closing the box—again, according to the superstitions annotated by Lillibridge—was the act that summoned the alien entity itself, the Haunter of the Dark. It was a creature of darkness and could not survive light. And in that boarded-up blackness of the ruined church, the thing emerged by night.

  Blake fled the church in terror, but the damage was done. In mid-July, a thunderstorm put out the lights in Providence for an hour, and the Italian colony living near the deserted church heard bumping and thumping from inside the shadow-shrouded structure.

  Crowds with candles stood outside in the rain and played candles upon the building, shielding themselves against the possible emergence of the feared entity by a barrier of light.

  Apparently the story had remained alive throughout the neighborhood. Once the storm abated, local newspapers grew interested, and on the 17th of July two reporters entered the old church, together with a policeman. Nothing definite was found, although there were curious and inexplicable smears and stains on the stairs and the pews.

  Less than a month later—at 2:35 A.M. on the morning of August 8th, to be exact—Robert Harrison Blake met his death during an electrical storm while seated before the window of his room on College Street.

  During the gathering storm, before his death occurred, Blake scribbled frantically in his diary, gradually revealing his innermost obsessions and delusions concerning the Haunter of the Dark. It was Blake’s conviction that by gazing into the curious crystal in its box he had somehow established a linkage with the non-terrestrial entity. He further believed that closing the box had summoned the creature to dwell in the darkness of the church steeple, and that in some way his own fate was now irrevocably linked to that of the monstrosity.

  All this is revealed in the last messages he set down while watching the progress of the storm from his window.

  Meanwhile, at the church itself, on Federal Hill, a crowd of agitated spectators gathered to play lights upon the structure. That they heard alarming sounds from inside the boarded-up building is undeniable; at least two competent witnesses have testified to the fact. One, Father Merluzzo of the Spirito Santo Church, was on hand to quiet his congregation. The other, Patrolman (now Sergeant) William J. Monahan, of Central Station, was attempting to preserve order in the face of growing panic. Monahan himself saw the blinding “blur” that seemed to issue, smoke-like, from the steeple of the ancient edifice as the final lightning-flash came.

  Flash, meteor, fireball—call it what you will—erupted over the city in a blinding blaze; perhaps at the very moment that Robert Harrison Blake, across town, was writing, “Is it not an avatar of Nyarlathotep, who in antique and shadowy Khem even took the form of man?”

  A few moments later he was dead. The coroner’s physician rendered a verdict attributing his demise to “electrical shock,” although the window he faced was unbroken. Another physician, known to Lovecraft, quarreled privately with that verdict and subsequently entered the affair the next day. Without legal authority, he entered the church and climbed to the windowless steeple where he discovered the strange asymmetrical—was it golden?—box and the curious stone within. Apparently his first gesture was to make sure of raising the lid and bringing the stone into the light. His next recorded gesture was to charter a boat, take box and curiously angled stone aboard, and drop them into the deepest channel of Narragansett Bay.

  There ended the admittedly fictionalized account of Blake’s death as recorded by H. P. Lovecraft. And there began Edmund Fiske’s fifteen-year quest.

  Fiske, of course, had known some of the events outlined in the story. When Blake had left for Providence in the spring, Fiske had tentatively promised to join him the following autumn. At first, the two friends had exchanged letters regularly, but by early summer Blake ceased correspondence altogether.

  At the time, Fiske was unaware of Blake’s exploration of the ruined church. He could not account for Blake’s silence, and wrote Lovecraft for a possible explanation.

  Lovecraft could supply little information. Young Blake, he said, had visited with him frequently during the early weeks of his stay, had consulted him about his writing, and had accompanied him on several nocturnal strolls through the city.

  But during the summer, Blake’s neighborliness ceased. It was not in Lovecraft’s reclusive nature to impose himself upon others, and he did not seek to invade Blake’s privacy for several weeks.

  When he did so—and learned from the almost hysterical adolescent of his experiences in the forbidding, forbidden church on Federal Hill—Lovecraft offered words of warning and advice. But it was already too late. Within ten days of his visit came the shocking end.

  Fiske learned of that end from Lovecraft on the following day. It was his task to break the news to Blake’s parents. For a time he was tempted to visit Providence immediately, but lack of funds and the pressure of his own domestic affairs forestalled him. The body of his young friend duly arrived, and Fiske attended the brief ceremony of cremation.

  Then Lovecraft began his own investigation—an investigation which ultimately resulted in the publication of his story. And there the matter might have rested.

  But Fiske was not satisfied.

  His best friend had died under circumstances which even the most skeptical must admit were mysterious. The local authorities summarily wrote off the matter with a fat
uous and inadequate explanation.

  Fiske determined to ascertain the truth.

  Bear in mind one salient fact: all three of these men—Lovecraft, Blake, and Fiske—were professional writers and students of the supernatural or the supranormal. All three of them had extraordinary access to a bulk of written material dealing with ancient legend and superstition. Ironically enough, the use to which they put their knowledge was limited to excursions into so-called fantasy fiction, but none of them, in the light of their own experience, could wholly join their reading audience in scoffing at the myths of which they wrote.

  For, as Fiske wrote to Lovecraft, “the term myth, as we know, is merely a polite euphemism. Blake’s death was not a myth, but a hideous reality. I implore you to investigate fully. See this matter through to the end, for if Blake’s diary holds even a distorted truth, there is no telling what may be loosed upon the world.”

  Lovecraft pledged cooperation, discovered the fate of the metal box and its contents, and endeavored to arrange a meeting with Dr. Ambrose Dexter, of Benefit Street. Dr. Dexter, it appeared, had left town immediately following his dramatic theft and disposal of the “Shining Trapezohedron,” as Lovecraft called it.

  Lovecraft then apparently interviewed Father Merluzzo and Patrolman Monahan, plunged into the files of the Bulletin, and endeavored to reconstruct the story of the Starry Wisdom sect and the entity they worshipped.

  Of course he learned a good deal more than he dared to put into his magazine story. His letters to Edmund Fiske in the late fall and early spring of 1936 contain guarded hints and references to “menaces from Outside.” But he seemed anxious to reassure Fiske that if there had been any menace, even in the realistic rather than the supernatural sense, the danger was now averted because Dr. Dexter had disposed of the Shining Trapezohedron, which acted as a summoning talisman. Such was the gist of his report, and the matter rested there for a time.