Weird Tales volume 30 number 04
Page 17
"The same to you, chief, and it's me thinks you're going to need it," muttered Mike Shinn, as they shook hands.
"We go out the back of this dwelling," whispered Lurain, to Clark. "Follow me —and be very silent."
He emerged with her into the checkered moonlight and shadow of one of Dordona's silent streets. The girl, he saw now, carried a short, pointed metal bar. She led by deserted alleys of crumbling ruins, not toward the great temple, but toward a ruined, deserted stone building a quarter-mile from the great dome.
CLARK followed her wonderingly into the ruin. She led across a room strewn with debris of crumbling stone, and knelt on the corner of the stone floor. He knelt puzzledly beside her, turning his tiny flashlight beam on the weathered blocks of the floor.
"Dig out these blocks," whispered Lurain, pointing to the floor. "I will hold the light."
"But I don't " Clark began, then
halted and obeyed. It was evident that Lurain knew what she was about.
With the metal bar she had brought, he soon dug out four of the big blocks. There was revealed beneath them a dark, burrow-like opening in the earth, the mouth of a horizontal underground passage. Lurain dropped quickly down into this, and Clark followed. Turning his beam, he discovered the passage was W. T.—7
shoulder-high, extending away through the solid rock.
"This passage," Lurain whispered, "was dug secretly many generations ago, by plotters in the city who wished to reach the pit and go down the stairs to the Lake of Life. They were of the rebels of that time who finally left Dordona to found the city K'Larjpm. They could not enter the pit from the temple, for the stair-head there is always guarded, as you saw. So they dug this passage, opening into the pit below.
"Just as they finished their sacrilegious work," she continued, "their plot was detected. They were slain before they could make use of the passage, and it was blocked up and its existence kept secret. But the rulers of Dordona have known of it, and as daughter of the present ruler I knew of it. It is the one way we can enter the pit, for if we tried to enter it in the temple, the guards there would kill us at once."
Clark's hopes bounded. "Let's get on, then."
He led the way, flashing his beam ahead. As they advanced in the passage, they heard a dull roar that became louder and louder. Clark knew it was the sound of the cataract falling into the sacred shaft, and his excitement increased. Lurain, pressing on behind him, was shivering.
They readied the end of the passage. They crouched, petrified by the stupefying view ahead. The opening in which they crouched was twenty feet below the floor of the temple, in the rock side of the stupendous pit. Right below and outside this opening lay the narrow steps of the spiraling stone stair.
Out there in the pit, not ten yards from them, there gleamed in the faint light from above the falling waters of the thundering cataract, the river from far away that tumbled headlong down into this un-
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guessable abyss. Its roar seemed to shatter their cars, and its flying spray was cold on their white faces.
Clark gripped his nerves and crawled out onto the stone steps. The steps were not four feet wide, grown with the slimy green moss of ages, drenched and dripping with spray. Looking up, he could just glimpse the moonlit interior of the great temple, could just see the heads of the armored guards on duty at the head of the stair.
Looking down, he could see nothing— nothing but an unplumbed abyss of darkness into which the waters tumbled, and round whose side dropped the coils of the spiral stair. Clark's nerves shrank, appalled for the moment from the thought of venturing down into that enigmatic gulf, along tliat slippery, ancient way. Then his jaw set in renewed resolution. Below lay what he had come so far to seek.
"Lurain, we go downward now," he told the girl, raising his voice over the roar. "Would you rather wait here?"
"No, Stannar—I go with you," she cried. "My promise was to lead you to the lake itself."
Cautiously, every nerve strung taut, Clark stepped downward, feeling with his foot for the next step. He dared not use the flashlight here, so near the surface. The wet, mossy stone was slippery under his feet, threatening to send him slipping and sliding off the unrailed stair. Sick dizziness swept him as he visualized himself plunging downward, racing those tumbling waters in a nightmare fall.
Now he and Lurain had followed the spiral stair twice around the falling cataract, were deeper below the surface. They were in almost complete darkness. Spray stung their cheeks, gusty air-currents howled up the great shaft, the thunder of the falling waters beside them was brain-numbing. Still down and down they crept, feeling for each slippery step, groping down through somber, eternal night toward the mystic Lake of Life and its legended warders.
You will not want to miss the thrilling chapters that bring this story to its close in next month's Weird Tales. Reserve your copy at your magazine dealer's
now.
Vke
Qo
olgotha Dancers
By MANLY WADE WELLMAN
A curious and terrifying story about an artist who sold his soul that he might paint a living picture
I HAD come to the Art Museum to see the special show of Goya prints, but that particular gallery was so crowded that I could hardly get in, much less see or savor anything; wherefore I walked out again. I wandered through the other wings with their rows and rows of oils, their Greek and Roman sculptures, their stern ranks of medieval armors, their Oriental porcelains, their Egyptian gods. At length, by chance and not by design, I came to the head of a certain rear stairway. Other habitues of the museum will know the one I mean when I remind them that Arnold Bocklin's The Isle of the Dead hangs on the wall of the landing.
I started down, relishing in advance the impression Bocklin's picture would make with its high brown rocks and black poplars, its midnight sky and gloomy film of sea, its single white figure erect in the bow of the beach-nosing skiff. But, as I descended, I saw that The Isle of the Dead was not mi its accustomed position on the wall. In that space, arresting even in the bad light and from the up-angle of the stairs, hung a gilt-framed painting I had never seen or heard of in all my museum-haunting years.
I gazed at it, one will imagine, all the way down to the landing. Then I had a close, searching look, and a final appraising stare from the lip of the landing above the lower half of the flight. So far as I can learn—and I have been diligent in my research—the thing is unknown
even to the best-informed of art experts. Perhaps it is as well that I describe it in detail.
It seemed to represent action upon a small plateau or table rock, drab and bare, with a twilight sky deepening into a starless evening. This setting, restrain-edly worked up in blue-grays and blue-blacks, was not the first thing to catch the eye, however. The front of the picture was filled with lively dancing creatures, as pink, plump and naked as cherubs and as patently evil as the meditations of Satan in his rare idle moments.
I counted those dancers. There were twelve of them, ranged in a half-circle, and they were cavorting in evident glee around a central object—a prone cross, which appeared to be made of two stout logs with some of the bark still upon them. To this cross a pair of the pink things—that makes fourteen—kneeling and swinging blocky-looking hammers or mauls, spiked a human figure.
I say human when I speak of that figure, and I withhold the word in describing the dancers and their hammer-wielding fellows. There is a reason. The supine victim on the cross was a beautifully represented male body, as clear and anatomically correct as an illustration in a surgical textbook. The head was writhed around, as if in pain, and I could not see the face or its expression; but in the tortured tenseness of the muscles, in the slat)' white sheen of the skin with jagged streaks of vivid gore upon it, agonized nature was plain and doubly plain. I
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could almost see the painted limbs writhe against the transfixing nails.
By the same token, the dancers and hammerers
were so dynamically done as to seem half in motion before my eyes. So much* for the sound skill of the painter. Yet, where the crucified prisoner was all clarity, these others were all fog. No lines, no angles, no muscles—their features could not be seen or sensed. I was not even sure if they had hair or not. It was as if each was picked out with a ray of light in that surrounding dusk, light that revealed and yet shimmered indistinctly; light, too, that had absolutely nothing of comfort or honesty in it.
"T Told on, there!" came a sharp chal--i- A lenge from the stairs behind and below me. "What are you doing? And what's that picture doing?"
I started so that I almost lost my footing and fell upon the speaker—one of the Museum guards. He was a slight old fellow and his thin hair was gray, but he advanced upon me with all the righteous, angry pluck of a beefy policeman. His attitude surprized and nettled me.
"I was going to ask somebody that same question," I told him as austerely as I could manage. "What about this picture? I thought there was a Bocklin hanging here."
The guard relaxed his forbidding attitude at first sound of my voice. "Oh, I beg your pardon, sir. I thought you were somebody else—the man who brought that thing." He nodded at the picture, and the hostile glare came back into his eyes. "It so happened that he talked to me first, then to the curator. Said it was art—great art—and the Museum must have it." He lifted his shoulders, in a shrug or a shudder. "Personally, I think it's plain beastly."
So it was, I grew aware as I looked at
it again. "And the Museum has accepted it at last?" I prompted.
He shook his head. "Oh, no, sir. An hour ago he was at the back door, with that nasty daub there under his arm. I heard part of the argument. He got insulting, and he was told to clear out and take his picture with him. But he must have got in here somehow, and hung it himself." Walking close to the painting, as gingerly as though he expected the pink dancers to leap out at him, he pointed to the lower edge of the frame. "If it was a real Museum piece, we'd have a plate right there, with the name of the painter and the title."
I, too, came close. There was no plate, just as the guard had said. But in the lower left-hand corner of the canvas were sprawling capitals, pale paint on the dark, spelling out the word GOLGOTHA. Beneath these, in small, barely readable script:
J sold my soul that 1 might paint a living picture.
No signature or other clue to the artist's identity.
The guard had discovered a great framed rectangle against the wall to one side. "Here's the picture he took down," he informed me, highly relieved. "Help me put it back, will you, sir? And do you suppose," here he grew almost wistful, "that we could get rid of this other thing before someone finds I let the crazy fool-slip past me?"
I took one edge of The Isle of the Dead and lifted it to help him hang it once more.
"Tell you what," I offered on sudden impulse; "I'll take this Golgotha piece home with me, if you like."
"Would you do that?" he almost yelled out in his joy at the suggestion. "Would you, to oblige me?"
"To oblige myself," I returned. "I need another picture at my place."
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And the upshot of it was, he smuggled me and the unwanted painting out of the Museum. Never mind how. I have done quite enough as it is to jeopardize his job and my own welcome up there.
It was not until I had paid off my taxi and lugged the unwieldy parallelogram of canvas and wood upstairs to my bachelor apartment that I bothered to wonder if it might be valuable. I never did find out, but from the first I was deeply impressed.
Hung over my own fireplace, it looked as large and living as a scene glimpsed through a window or, perhaps, on a stage in a theater. The capering pink bodies caught new lights from my lamp, lights that glossed and intensified their shape and color but did not reveal any new details. I pored once more over the cryptic legend; / sold my soul that 1 might paint a living picture.
A living picture—was it that? I could not answer. For all my honest delight in such things, I cannot be called expert or even knowing as regards art. Did I even like the Golgotha painting? I could not be sure of that, cither. And the rest of the inscription, about selling a soul; I was considerably intrigued by that, and let my thoughts ramble on the subject of Satan ist complexes and the vagaries of half-crazy painters. As I read, that evening, I glanced up again and again at my new possession. Sometimes it seemed ridiculous, sometimes sinister. Shortly after midnight I rose, gazed once more, and then turned out the parlor lamp. For a moment, or so it seemed, I could see those dancers, so many dim-pink silhouettes in the sudden darkness. I went to the kitchen for a bit of whisky and water, and thence to my bedroom.
I had dreams. In them I was a boy again, and my mother and sister were
leaving the house to go to a theater where —think of it!—Richard Mansfield would play Bean Brummell. I, the youngest, was told to stay at home and mind the troublesome furnace. I wept copiously in my disappointed loneliness, and then Mansfield himself stalked in, in full Brummell regalia. He laughed goldenly and stretched out his hand in warm greeting. I, the lad of my dreams, put out my own hand, then was frightened when he would not loosen his grasp. I tugged, and he laughed again. The gold of his laughter turned suddenly hard, cold. I tugged with all my strength, and woke.
Something held me tight by the wrist.
In my first half-moment of wakefulness I was aware that the room was filled with the pink dancers of the picture, in nimble, fierce-happy motion. They were man-size, too, or nearly so, visible in the dark with the dim radiance of fox-fire. On the small scale of the painting they had seemed no more than babyishly plump; now they were gross, like huge erect toads. And, as I awakened fully, they were closing in, a menacing ring of them, around my bed. One stood at my right side, and its grip, clumsy and rubbery-hard like that of a monkey, was closed upon my arm.
I saw and sensed all this, as I say, in a single moment. With the sensing came the realization of peril, so great that I did not stop to wonder at the uncanniness of my visitors. I tried frantically to jerk loose. For the moment I did not succeed and as I thrashed about, throwing my body nearly across the bed, a second dancer dashed in from the left. It seized and clamped my other arm. I felt, rather than heard, a wave of soft, wordless merriment from them all. My heart and sinews seemed to fail, and briefly I lay still in a daze of horror, pinned down crucifix-fashion between my two captors.
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Was that a hammer raised above me as I sprawled?
There rushed and swelled into me the sudden startled strength that sometimes favors the desperate. I screamed like any wild thing caught in a trap, rolled somehow out of bed and to my feet. One of the beings I shook off and the other I dashed against the bureau. Freed, I made for the bedroom door and the front of the apartment, stumbling and staggering on fear-weakened legs.
One of the dim-shining pink things barred my way at the very threshold, and the others were closing in behind, as if for a sudden rush. I flung my right fist with all my strength and weight. The being bobbed back unresistingly before my smash, like a rubber toy floating through water. I plunged past, reached the entry and fumbled for the knob of the outer door.
Thej r were all about me then, their rubbery palms fumbling at my shoulders, my elbows, my pajama jacket. They would have dragged me down before I could negotiate the lock. A racking shudder possessed me and seemed to flick them clear. Then I stumbled against a stand, and purely by good luck my hand fell upon a bamboo walking-stick. I yelled again, in truly hysterical fierceness, and laid about me as with a whip. My blows did little or no damage to those unearthly assailants, but they shrank back, teetering and dancing, to a safe distance. Again I had the sense that they were laughing, mocking. For the moment I had beaten them off, but they were sure of me in the end. Just then my groping free hand pressed a switch. The entry sprang into light.
On the iiistant they were not there.
Somebody was knocki
ng outside, and with trembling fingers I turned the knob of the door. In came a tall, slender
girl with a blue lounging-robe caught hurriedly around her. Her bright hair was disordered as though she had just sprung from her bed.
"Is someone sick?" she asked in a breathless voice. "I live down the hall— I heard cries." Her round blue eyes were studying my face, which must have been ghastly pale. "You see, I'm a trained nurse, and perhaps "
"Thank God you did come!" I broke in, unceremoniously but honestly, and went before her to turn on every lamp in the parlor.
It was she who, without guidance, searched out my whisky and siphon and mixed for me a highball of grateful strength. My teeth rang nervously on the edge of the glass as I gulped it down. After that I got my own robe—a becoming one, with satin facings—and sat with her on the divan to tell of my adventure. When I had finished, she gazed long at the painting of the dancers, then back at me. Her eyes, like two chips of the April sky, were full of concern and she held her rosy lower lip between her teeth. I thought that she was wonderfully pretty.
"What a perfectly terrible nightmare!" she said.
"It was no nightmare," I protested.
She smiled and argued the point, telling me all manner of comforting things about mental associations and their reflections in vivid dreams.
To clinch her point she turned to the painting.
"This line about a living picture' is the peg on which your slumbering mind hung the whole fabric," she suggested, her slender fingertip touching the painted scribble. "Your very literal subconscious self didn't understand that the artist meant his picture would live only figuratively."
"Are you sure that's what the artist meant?" I asked, but finally I let her con-
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vince me. One can imagine how badly I wanted to be convinced.
She mixed me another highball, and a short one for herself. Over it she told me her name— Miss Dolby—and finally she left me with a last comforting assurance. But, nightmare or no, I did not sleep again that night. I sat in the parlor among the lamps, smoking and dipping into book after book. Countless times I felt my gaze drawn back to the painting over the fireplace, with the cross and the nail-pierced wretch and the shimmering pink dancers.