Weird Tales volume 30 number 04

by Wright, Farnsworth, 1888-€“1940

  After the rising sun had filled the apartment with its honest light and cheer I felt considerably calmer. I slept all morning, and in the afternoon was disposed to agree with Miss Dolby that the whole business had been a bad dream, nothing more. Dressing, I went down the hall, knocked on her door and invited her to dinner with me.

  It was a good dinner. Afterward we went to an amusing motion picture, with Charles Buttenvorth in it as I remember. After bidding her good-night, I went to my own place. Undressed and in bed, I lay awake. My late morning slumber made my eyes slow to close. Thus it was that I heard the faint shuffle of feet and, sitting up against my pillows, saw the glowing silhouettes of the Golgotha dancers. Alive and magnified, they were creeping into my bedroom.

  I did not hesitate or shrink this time. I sprang up, tense and defiant.

  "No, you don't!" I yelled at them. As they seemed to hesitate before the impact of my wild voice, I charged frantically. For a moment I scattered them and got through the bedroom door, as on the previous night. There was another shindy in the entry; this time they all got hold of me, like a pack of hounds, and wrestled me back against the wall. I writhe even now when I think of the unearthly

  hardness of their little gripping paws. Two on each arm were spread-eagling me upon the plaster. The cruciform position again!

  I swore, yelled and kicked. One of them was in the way of my foot. He floated back, unhurt. That was their strength and horror—their ability to go flabby and non-resistant under smashing, flattening blows. Something tickled my palm, pricked it. The point of a spike. . . .

  "Miss Dolby!" I shrieked, as a child might call for its mother. "Help! Miss D "

  The door flew open; I must not have locked it. "Here I am," came her unafraid reply.

  She was outlined against the rectangle of light from the hall. My assailants let go of me to dance toward her. She gasped but did not scream. I staggered along the wall, touched a light-switch, and the parlor just beyond us flared into visibility. Miss Dolby and I ran in to the lamp, rallying there as stone-age folk must have rallied at their fire to face the monsters of the night. I looked at her; she was still fully dressed, as I had left her, apparently had been sitting up. Her rouge made flat patches on her pale cheeks, but her eyes were level.

  This time the dancers did not retreat or vanish; they lurked in the comparative gloom of the entry, jigging and trembling as if mustering their powers and resolutions for another rush at us.

  "You see," I chattered out to her, "it wasn't a nightmare."

  She spoke, not in reply, but as if to herself. "They have no faces," she whispered. "No faces!" In the half-light that was diffused upon them from our lamp they presented the featurelessness of so many huge gingerbread boys, covered with pink icing. One of them, some kind

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  of leader, pressed forward within the circle of the light. It daunted him a bit. He hesitated, but did not retreat.

  From my center table Miss Dolby had picked up a bright paper-cutter. She poised it with the assurance of one who knows how to handle cutting instruments.

  "When they come," she said steadily, "let's stand close together. We'll be harder to drag down that way."

  I wanted to shout my admiration of her fearless front toward the dreadful beings, my thankfulness for her quick run to my rescue. All I could mumble was, "You're mighty brave."

  She turned for a moment to look at the picture above my dying fire. My eyes followed hers. I think I expected to see a blank canvas — find that the painted dancers had vanished from it and had grown into the living ones. But they were still in the picture, and the cross and the victim were there, too. Miss Dolby read aloud the inscription:

  "A thing picture . . . The artist knew what he was talking about, after all."

  "Couldn't a living picture be killed?" I wondered.

  It sounded uncertain, and a childish quibble to boot, but Miss Dolby exclaimed triumphantly, as at an inspiration.

  "Killed? Yes!" she shouted. She sprang at the picture, darting out with the paper-cutter. The point ripped into one of the central figures in the dancing semicircle.

  All the crowd in the entry seemed to give a concerted throb, as of startled protest. I swung, heart racing, to front them again. What had happened? Something had changed, I saw. The intrepid leader had vanished. No, he had not drawn back into the group. He had vanished.

  Miss Dolby, too, had seen. She struck again, gashed the painted representation of another dancer. And this time the

  vanishing happened before my eyes, a creature at the rear of the group went out of existence as suddenly and completely as though a light had blinked out.

  The others, driven by their danger, rushed.

  I met them, feet planted. I tried to embrace them all at once, went over backward under them. I struck, wrenched, tore. I think I even bit something grisly and bloodless, like fungoid tissue, but I refuse to remember for certain. One or two of the forms struggled past me and grappled Miss Dolby. I struggled to my feet and pulled them back from her. There were not so many swarming after me now. I fought hard before they got me down again. And Miss Dolby kept tearing and stabbing at the canvas— again, again. Clutches melted from my throat, my arms. There were only two dancers left. I flung them back and rose. Only one left. Then none.

  They were gone, gone into nowhere.

  "That did it," said Miss Dolby breathlessly.

  She had pulled the picture down. It was only a frame now, -with ragged ribbons of canvas dangling from it.

  I snatched it out of her hands and threw it upon the coals of the fire.

  "Look," I urged her joyfully. "It's burning! That's the end. Do you see?"

  "Yes, I see," she answered slowly. "Some fiend-ridden artist—his evil genius brought it to life."

  "The inscription is the literal truth, then?" I supplied.

  "Truth no more." She bent to watch the burning. "As the painted figures were destroyed, their incarnations faded."

  We said nothing further, but sat down together and gazed as the flames ate the last thread of fabric, the last splinter of wood. Finally we looked up again and smiled at each other.

  All at once I knew that I loved her.

  ^/Tere Lies

  By H. W. GUERNSEY

  An ironic little story about a practical communist who taught his friend when to take him seriously

  CHAUNCEY knocked the dottle out of his corncob and briefly startled Old Shep by inquiring unemotionally, "Will you never finish that blasted stick?"

  Which in Old Chauncey was tantamount to fury. Words being precious things, both old boys hoarded every syllable; Shep tightened his leathery lips and with the scalpel-point of the knife flicked away a mote of pine. Each link of the chain he was whittling from that interminable stick of soft pine resembled ivory in its satin finish. He might produce one link in a day or let it require a full week. No hurry. The current chain numbered four hundred and seventy-two links. A masterpiece.

  Under Shep's surreptitious scrutiny, Old Chauncey stood erect purposefully and stalked to the woodpile. There a fat log stood on end. With one swift, seemingly effortless stroke of the ax he cleft the log in two, spat explosively and hiked into the house wagging his jaw.

  The log-built house, a jewel of conscientious carpentry, stood on the wooded elevation called St. Paul's Hill, near town. On the side hill one hundred and twenty feet below stood another log-built affair, formerly the ice-house. Since Old Shep had become Chauncey's permanent guest, this structure had been equipped with furnishings as complete and comfortable as the house, including plumbing. So there was no reason for Shep to hang around Old Chauncey's kitchen.

  The housekeeper, Celia Lilleoden, per-

  formed the chores incidental to both houses with such easy efficiency that old Chauncey was repeatedly reminded of his bachelorhood. From continually sunning themselves behind the kitchen like two old snakes the men had acquired a wrinkled black-walnut finish, but Celia still retained the firm, buxom ripene
ss of an apple.

  As a practical communist Old Chauncey kept his latch-key out by inclination. His generosity was limitless.

  Thus, Old Shep did not have to ask for anything he wanted. It was share and share alike.

  For example, he charged tobacco to Old Chauncey's account at the store in town. He always had. If he preferred a grade of tobacco superior to what Old Chauncey himself used, such was his privilege. A plug is a plug.

  Shep and Chauncey once had occupied the same double desk of raw cherrywood in the schoolhouse which was now a weedy hill of rubble and rotten wood a half-mile out on the backroad.

  Besides words, Old Shep hoarded tobacco plugs in case the cause of communism ever collapsed.

  In accordance with this scheme of living, Old Chauncey gradually became accustomed to being spared the nuisance of opening the occasional letter he received from another old soldier fh Sackett's Harbor, New York. At first Shep had gone to the trouble of sneaking the mail down to the ice-house and steaming it open. But currently the mail arrived slit

  '490

  WEIRD TALES

  open without any subterfuge. The knife, incidentally, was the better of Old Chauncey's two. Shep had borrowed it, knowing that in communism there can be no Indian giving.

  On one occasion Chauncey accosted Old Shep behind the kitchen with a crumpled letter in his fingers.

  "Shep," he suggested casually, "I wish you'd slit my letters open at the top instead of an end. It wouldn't bunch the writing up so much when you shove it back inside."

  "Chauncey," Old Shep replied tremblingly, "you're not serious with me, are you? If you want to keep secrets from your old crony, why, you just tell me seriously not to open those letters any more and I won't."

  It used to give Chauncey a funny feeling when Old Shep talked like that.

  Of a somnolent summer morning while Chauncey was scrubbing his long yellow teeth he glimpsed blurred movement through the starched white bathroom curtain. Tweaking the curtain somewhat aside he witnessed Old Shep scampering down the side hill to the icehouse with a load of kindling in his arms.

  "I'll be dog-goned," swore Old Chauncey with toothpaste foam dribbling down his chin. "He complains he can't do his chopping on account of his rheumatism, and look at the old turkey gp I see where I chop kindling for both of us from now on."

  When Old Shep showed up to get in a few licks of whittling before breakfast, Chauncey inquired, "How's that rheumatism?"

  "Fierce, Chauncey. I'm getting mighty creaky."

  "Well, help yourself to my kindling,

  Shep. Long as I know where it's disappearing to, I don't give a durn."

  "Thanks, Chauncey; thanks! I knew you'd feel that way."

  The bacon, eggs, and delicately crusty fried potatoes hit the palate so ambrosial-ly that, after breakfast, Chauncey was seduced into the disastrous error of mentioning to Shep the chances of marrying Miss Lilleoden: error, for it was only human nature to covet the goods which another man prized most.

  Thenceforward Old Shep neglected his whittling or idled awkwardly with it in the kitchen, where a housekeeper spends most of her time. Chauncey observed blackly that Old Shep had a cunning way with him, too.

  "Durn it," Chauncey ruminated dismally, "everything I want, he gets. If I tell him to stay away from her he won't take me seriously. The old hoodoo always h as h is way. Anyhow, his durned whittling is out of my sight."

  Befell a morning when Old Shep didn't appear, and Chauncey found him stretched out stiff half-way down the side hill. In Shep's vulturine right fist was clenched a small crumple of bills. This pilfering had occurred with such regularity that the companion of Chauncey's childhood had accumulated just about enough to get started with Celia Lilleoden.

  Chauncey asked the coroner, a glistening little round man like a wet dumpling, "Is he dead?"

  "Of course he's dead," said the coroner. "Obviously."

  "He has no kin," Celia reminded Old Chauncey in her slow, soft contralto.

  "I'll do him one more favor," Chauncey offered unblinkingly. "He can have my lot in the cemet'ry."

  HERE LIES

  491

  The lot in Dream Hill Cemetery measured eight feet long, five feet wide and ten feet deep, meaning that it had been excavated and ready for occupancy these past five years. The walls were common brick. On the floor was a stone bed to lie on. Whimsically Chauncey had also installed a small table furnished with a tobacco bag and pipe, matches, an alarm clock with an illuminated dial, and an ashtray. And a thick, plumber's candle. The old pagan!

  Anchored in the foot-wall of this cell, ladder-like, were iron rungs which had enabled him on past occasions to descend and inspect his subterranean property; as, on this occasion, he made the trip to deposit Shep's unfinished wooden chain.

  The stone slab sealing the cell had long been cut with the dangerous advertisement: HERE LIES CHAUNCEY D'AUTREVILLE WHOSE WORLDLY GOODS WERE ANY MAN'S FOR THE ASKING.

  Naturally, a new inscription had to be chiseled.

  "But there ain't any more room in that piece, Chauncey," the stone-cutter objected. "You want 'nother stone."

  "Turn it upside down and cut it in the bottom," Old Chauncey directed. "With that topside staring him in the face, he'll have something to read in the hereafter."

  The underside, becoming the face, carried the inscription: HERE LIES SHEP-ARD FRANKENFIELD WHO FEELS NO ANXIETY FOR THE FUTURE NOR REGRET FOR THE PAST.

  On the day preceding Old Shep's interment, Old Chauncey paid a visit to the nearest justice of the peace with Celia Lilleoden and no one thought it was in the least peculiar. As Chauncey balanced accounts with himself, the state would otherwise inherit his property* eventually,

  as was right, but he wished to insure Celia's staying on as his housekeeper, in which capacity she beggared superlatives.

  While four huskies furnished by the undertaker replaced the granite sheet over the brick chamber, Old Chauncey recollected the particulars of a certain fit of Shep's, dating about five years before, shortly before Celia. That catalepsy, or whatever it was, had gripped Shep as though in death for nearly three days until Old Chauncey had thought of making a brassy rumpus next to his ear with the big dinner bell. The alarm clock in the subterranean mausoleum was set for eleven o'clock, terminating a like period of time, when Old Shep might be expected to wake up and yawn in the hereafter. Just a whim of Chauncey's, since the coroner had pronounced Old Shep indisputably defunct.

  Late that night Celia surmised worriedly that her absent husband might be visiting the tomb of his lifelong crony, and there he was in the sickly forest of tombstones, hunkering down on Shep's horizontal tombstone like a boy watching a game of marbles.

  But he was listening, not watching. He knocked again on the slab with his bony knuckles, cocked his head. Listening for the response while the la2y bree2e lifted his silken gray hair in the sta.tr/ cave of night, he asked, "Cele, do you hear him down there?"

  Celia's gentle mind recoiled from the idea that the dead might rise in answer to a human summons. The stoically restrained grief for his departed friend must have touched her husband somewhat in the head.

  On the fifth night Chauncey observed, "That Old Shep's ghost must be getting tuckered out."

  Celia decided that there was a limit to indulgence.

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  "Chauncey," she ordered firmly, "you mustn't come down here any more. You'll be taking pneumonia."

  He accepted the order without protest.

  "Maybe that," he commented to the frankly puzzled Mrs. Old Chauncey, "will teach the old grasshopper when to take a man seriously."

  Wie

  ast of Mrs, Debrugh

  By H. SIVIA

  Mr. DeBrugh was dead, but he still regarded his promise as a sacred duty to be carried out

  "T ETTY," Mr. DeBrugh remarked between long puffs on his meer-schaum, "you've been a fine maid. You've served Mrs. DeBrugh and me for most of fifteen years. Now I haven't much more time in this life, and I wan
t you to know that after Mrs. DeBrugh and I are gone, you will be well taken care of."

  Letty stopped her dusting of the chairs in Mr. DeBrugh's oak-paneled study. She sighed and turned toward the man, who sat on a heavy sofa, puffing on his pipe and gazing across the room into nothingness.

  "You mustn't talk that way, Mr. DeBrugh," she said. "You know you're a long time from the dark ways yet." She paused, and then went on dusting and talking again. "And me—humph—I've only done what any ordinary human would do to such a kind employer as you, sir. Especially after all you've done for me."

  He didn't say anything, and she went on with her work. Of course she liked to work for him. She had adored the kindly old man since first she had met him in an agency fifteen years before. A person couldn't ask for a better master.

  But there was the mistress, Mrs. DeBrugh! It was she who gave Letty cause for worry. What with her nagging tongue and her sharp rebukes, it was a wonder Letty had not quit long before.

  She would have quit, too, but there had been the terrible sickness she had undergone and conquered with the aid of the ablest physicians Mr. DeBrugh could engage. She couldn't quit after that, no matter what misery Mrs. DeBrugh heaped on her. And so she went about her work at all hours, never tiring, always striving to please.

  She left the study, closing the great door silently behind her, for old Mr. DeBrugh had sunk deeper into the sofa, into the realms of peaceful sleep, and she did not wish to disturb him.

  "Letty!" came the shrill cry of Mrs. DeBrugh from down the hall. "Get these pictures and take them to the attic at once. And tell Mr. DeBrugh to come here."

  Letty went for the pictures.

  "Mr. DeBrugh is asleep," she said, explaining why she was not obeying the last command.

  "Well, I'll soon fix that! Lazy old man! Sleeps all day with that smelly pipe

  THE LAST OF MRS. DEBRUGH