Weird Tales volume 30 number 04

by Wright, Farnsworth, 1888-€“1940

  493

  between his teeth. If he had an ounce of pep about him, he'd get out and work the flowers. Sleeps too much anyway. Not good for him."

  She stamped out of the room and down the hall, and Letty heard her open the door of the study and scream at her husband.

  "Hector DeBrugh! Wake up!"

  There was a silence, during which Letty wondered what was going on. Then she heard the noisy clop-clop of Mrs. De-Brugh's slippers on the hardwood floor of the study, and she knew the woman was going to shake the daylights out of Mr. DeBrugh and frighten him into wakefulness. She could even imagine she heard Mrs. DeBrugh grasp the lapels of her husband's coat and shake him back and forth against the chair.

  Then she heard the scream. It came quite abruptly from Mrs. DeBrugh in the study, and it frightened Letty out of her wits momentarily. After that there was the thud of a falling body and the clatter of an upset piece of furniture.

  Letty hurried out of the room into the hall and through the open door of the study. She saw Mrs. DeBrugh slumped on the floor in a faint, and beside her an upset ash-tray. But her eyes did not linger on the woman, nor the tray. Instead, they focussed on the still form of Mr. DeBrugh in the sofa.

  He was slumped down, his head twisted to one side and his mouth hanging open from the shaking Mrs. DeBrugh had given him. The meerschaum had slipped from between his teeth, and the cold ashes were scattered on his trousers.

  Even then, before the sea of tears began to flow from her eyes, Letty knew the old man was dead. She knew what he had meant by the speech he had said to her only a few minutes before.

  "TTis heart," was the comment of the

  -i- J- doctor who arrived a.' short time

  later and pronounced the old man dead.

  "He had to go. Today, tomorrow. Soon."

  After that, he put Mrs. DeBrugh to bed and turned to Letty.

  "Mrs. DeBrugh is merely suffering from a slight shock. There is nothing more that I can do. When she awakens, see that she stays in bed. For the rest of the day."

  He left then, and Letty felt a strange coldness about the place, something that had not been there while Mr. DeBrugh was alive.

  She went downstairs and made several telephone calls which she knew would be necessary. Later, when Mrs. DeBrugh was feeling better, other arrangements could be made.

  She straightened the furniture in the study, pushing the familiar sofa back in place, from where Mr. DeBrugh invariably moved it. Then she knocked the ashes from the meerschaum, wiped it off, and placed it carefully in the little glass cabinet on the wall where he always kept it.

  Times would be different now, she knew. She remembered what he had said. "You will be well taken care of." But there had been something else. "After Mrs. DeBrugh and I are gone."

  Letty could no longer hold back the tears. She fell into a chair and they poured forth.

  But time always passes, and with it goes a healing balm for most all sorrows. First there was the funeral. Then came other arrangements. And there was the will, which Mrs. DeBrugh never mentioned.

  His things would have fallen into decay but for the hands of Letty. Always her dust-cloth made his study immaculate. Always the sofa was in place and

  WEIRD TALES

  the pipe, cleaa and shining, in the cabinet.

  There was a different hardness about Mrs. DeBrugh. No longer was she content with driving Lett)' like a slave day in and day out. She became even more unbearable.

  There were little things, like taking away her privilege of having Saturday afternoons off. And the occasional "forgetting" of Letty's weekly pay.

  Once Letry thought of leaving during the night, of packing her few clothes and going for ever from the house. But that was foolish. There was no place to go, and she was getting too old for maid service.

  Besides, hadn't Mr. DeBrugh said she would be taken care of. "After Mrs. DeBrugh and I are gone." Perhaps she would not live much longer.

  And then one morning Mrs. DeBrugh called Letty in to talk with her. It was the hour Letty had been awaiting—and dreading.

  There was a harsh, gloating tone in Mrs. DeBrugh's voice as she spoke. She was the master now. There was no Hector to think of.

  "Lett)'," she said, "for some time now I have been considering closing the house. I'm lonely here. I intend to go to the city and live with my sister. So, you see, I shan't be needing you any longer. I'll be leaving within the next two days. I'm serry."

  Letty was speechless. She had expected something terrible, but not this. This wasn't so! Mrs. DeBrugh was lying! It was the will she was afraid of. Letty remembered Mr. DeBrugh's promise.

  She did not complain, however. Her only words were, "1*11 leave tomorrow."

  That night she packed her things. She had no definite plans, but she hoped something would turn up.

  Sleep would not come easy, so Letty lay in bed and thought of old Mr. DeBrugh. She imagined he was before her in the room, reclining on the sofa, puffing long on the meerschaum. She even saw in fancy the curling wisps of gray smoke drifting upward, upward. . . .

  It was sleep. Then, with a start, she was suddenly wide awake.

  She had surely heard a scream. But no.

  And then, as soft and as silent as the night wind, came the whisper: "Lett)'."

  It drifted slowly off into silence, and a cool breeze crossed her brow. She suddenly felt wet with perspiration. She listened closely, but the whisper was not repeated.

  Then, noiselessly, she got out of bed, stepped into slippers, and drew a robe about her. Just as silently she left her room and walked down the hall to Mrs. DeBrugh's bedroom.

  She rapped softly on the door, fearing the wrath of the woman within at being awakened in the middle of the night. There was no answer, no sound from inside the room.

  Letty hesitated, wondering what to do. And once more she felt that cool, deadi-llke breeze, and heard the faintest of whispers, fainter even than the sighing of the night wind: "Letty."

  She opened the door and switched on the light, Mrs. DeBrugh lay in the bed as in sleep, but Lett)- knew, as she had known about Mr. DeBrugh, that it was more than sleep.

  She quickly called the doctor, and sometime much later he arrived, his eyes heavy from lack of sleep.

  "Dead," he remarked, after looking at the body. "Probably had a shock. Fright, nightmare, or something her heart couldn't stand. I always thought. she would have died first."

  Letty walked slowly from the room,

  THE LAST OF MRS. DEBRUGH

  '495

  down the stairs, still in her robe and slippers. The doctor followed and passed her, going through the door into the outside.

  She walked, as though directed by some unseen force, into Mr. DeBrugh's study. She switched on a lamp beside the sofa on which he had always sat; and she noticed that it was moved slightly out of place.

  There was something else about the room, some memory of old days. First she saw some sort of legal document on the table and wondered at its being

  there. The title said: Last Will and Testament of Hector A. DeBrugh. It was brief. She read it through and found that Mr. DeBrugh had spoken truthfully in his promise to her.

  Beside the will on the table was another object, and she knew then what the "something else" in the room was.

  The meerschaum! It lay there beside the document, and a thin spiral of grayish smoke rose upward from it toward the ceiling.

  No longer did Letty wonder about anything.

  c/o a Skull on My Bookshelf

  By ELIZABETH VIRGINIA RAPLEE

  0 bony relic of forgotten days,

  Which, from my bookshelf, dominates the room, Your empty sockets, with sardonic gaze, Follow me weirdly in the deepening gloom!

  1 often think, if sudden speech returned, You might reveal that secret, grisly jest

  You're grinning at—or tell me what you've learned Of that dark realm to which we're all addressed.

  By what rude hands were you exhumed, and why Wrenched fro
m your body in its earthy bed? Who knows but such indignity will I Receive at other hands, when I am dead, And, strangely resurrected, may adorn The wall or desk of one as yet unborn!

  RfcPRINT

  %M>

  C/ur

  rple Cincture*

  By H. THOMPSON RICH

  IT WAS a day in midsummer, I remember. I had been tramping over the densely wooded and desolate hillside the greater part of the morning, getting with each mile farther and farther from the tawdry haunts of man and nearer and nearer the rugged heart of nature.

  Finally (it must have been after noontime) I paused and made a light lunch of the sandwiches and cold coffee I had brought with me from town, sitting on the edge of a great slab of granite rock, swept clean and smooth by ages of winds and rains and snows.

  All about me was a veritable garden of great projecting rocks, jagged and broken, flat and polished, needle-like, giant flowers of earth in a thousand different forms.

  Here and there a short, dwarfed pine or spruce tree struggled for a footing amid its rock)' friends, and the resistless undergrowth surged up through every crack and crevice, while energetic mosses and lichens clutched at the granite walls and crept bravely up. One had a feeling of awe, as if in the presence of elemental,

  . WEIRD TALES for August, 1925.

  496

  eternal forces. Here, I thought, if anywhere, one might commune with the voiceless void.

  Suddenly my eyes chanced to fall upon a fissure in the rock to the left, and I sprang up with a low exclamation. What I had beheld was to all appearance a human skeleton!

  Advancing reluctantly, yet with that insistent inquisitiveness which surrounds the dead, I bent, and peered into tlie fissure. As I looked, a cry escaped me. The object I beheld was indeed a skeleton— but what a skeleton! The head, the left hand, and the foot were entirely missing, nor was there any sign of them at first sight.

  Thoroughly fascinated by the morbid spectacle, I began a search for the missing members, and was finally rewarded by unearthing the head some twenty feet away, where it lay half buried in the soft loam of decayed vegetation and sifted chole. But a painstaking and minute hunt failed to reveal the missing hand and foot.

  I was successful, however, in finding something immeasurably more important W. T.—7

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  497

  —a manuscript. This I found by the side of the mangled skeleton.

  It consisted of several pages of closely written material, in a small pocket notebook, which fact, in connection with the partial shelter afforded by the crevice where the body lay, doubtless accounts for its preservation through the years that have passed since its owner met his hideous fate.

  Picking up the notebook with nervous fingers, I opened it and turned the damp and musty pages through, reading it at first hastily, then slower and more carefully, then with a feverish concentration—as the awful significance of the words was riveted into my brain.

  The writing was in a man's cramped, agitated hand, and I give it to you just as I read it, with the exception of the names and places, and a few paragraphs of vital scientific data—all but a few words at the very beginning and end, where the manuscript had been molded into illegibility by the gradual action of the weather. Here follows:

  " as strange. I had a sense of apprehension from the start, a vague, indescribable feeling of doubt, of dread, as if someone, something, were urging me out, away, into these sullen hills.

  "I might have known. The law of retribution is as positive as the law of gravity. I know that now. Oh irony!

  "But I was so sure. No one knew. No one could know. She, my wife, heart of all, until the end. And the neighbors, her friends, never. She had merely pined away. No one dreamed I had poisoned her. Even when she died, there was no thought of autopsy. She had long been failing. And had I not been most concerned? None in the little town of

  , but who sympathized with me.

  And I mourned. Oh, I mourned! So it W. T.—8

  was that she paid the price of her infamy. Ah, but revenge never was sweeter!

  "And he? Oh, but I despised him— even as I had formerly admired him, even as I had once loved my wife—so I despised him. And despising him, I killed him—killed him, but with a poison far more subtle than that I had used to destroy my wife—killed him with a poison in effect so hideous, so harrowing, that I can scarcely think of it without sickening even as I write.

  "The poison I inculcated into his veins was a germ poison—a disease I, a physician of no small repute, had discovered and bred—a disease I had found existed only in a particular and very rare species of virulent purple and orange-banded

  spider—the genus [Here follow

  in the original manuscript seven paragraphs of elaborate scientific data, of no particular interest to the average reader, but of incalculable import to the scientific world. These paragraphs I have omitted from this account for very significant reasons, but I hold them open to scientific examination at any time, and as I have said before, I will welcome investigation by reputable scientists]—a disease which was responsible for the extreme rarity of this particular species.

  "By careful investigation I was able to learn the exact manifestation and workings of the disease—which by their frightful ravages upon the system of the unfortunate victim fairly appalled me.

  "By segregating and breeding diseased members of this particular species of spider, I was able to produce the disease in the young in its most virulent form. You can well imagine the care I used in handling these spiders, to prevent infection. Briefly, the symptoms were as follows: The spider about to be stricken apparently first experiences a peculiar numbness of the first left foreleg, to judge from its inability to use or move

  WEIRD TALES

  the affected member. A day or so later the leg, which in a healthy condition is a dull brown, turns a pale, sickening shade of yellow, which deepens rapidly until it has taken on a flaming orange hue. Then, in a few hours, a deep, vicious-looking blue cincture, or band, appears just at the first joint of the affected member. This cincture rapidly deepens to purple, which seems somehow to sear its way into the flesh and through the bone, so that in a surprizingly short time the whole leg is severed at the joint where the cincture has been.

  "The spider then appears to regain its normal condition of health, which it maintains for about a week; then once again the hideous disease manifests itself, this time in the left feeler, or antenna, which in turn becomes yellow, then orange, whereupon the same blue cincture appears and deepens to purple; then, in about the same period of time as in the case of the leg, the antenna drops off, seared as if by some hellish flame.

  "Once again the spider appears to regain its health; then in about a week the whole head of the stricken insect turns slowly yellow, then orange; then the cincture appears—and as a last manifestation, the head is seared off in flaming agony—and the spider dies in horrible convulsions.

  "That, briefly, is the process—as I was able to note after weeks and months of tireless research and observation.

  "So what more perfect punishment for the man who stole from me my wife, while pretending to be my friend?

  "Toving her as I did, I had not the JL/ heart to kill her in this hideous way: so I put her to death with a painless and insidious poison.

  "But for I had no mercy. In

  fact I gloated as I worked over my vile and diseased spiders, breeding them to-

  gether until I was convinced that I had the germs of the disease in its most virulent form. Even then I was not sure what their effect would be on a human being—but that much at least I must hazard.

  "So having finally made all my preparations, I invited him to my house and placed one of the diseased spiders upon his forehead one night as he slept.

  "It must have bitten him, for he awoke with a cry, and I had barely time to close his door and get back to my room before I heard him rise and turn on the light.

  "Then he called me, and
I came to him, burning with a fiendish satisfaction. 'Something has bitten me, horribly,' he said. 'I feel as if I were going to be ill.'

  "I managed to reassure him by telling him that it was very likely nothing but one of our uncommonly large mosquitoes, and he returned to bed.

  "But he did not sleep. All night I heard him moaning and tossing. And in the morning he was very pale.

  " 'I do not know what is the matter with me,' he said, and I thought he looked at me queerly, 'but I feel as if a little rest would do me good. I feel choked. I think I will pack up my knapsack and go off to the hills for the weekend. Want to come?'

  "I longed to go with him, to see the dread disease work, but I feared its deadly contagion, and was anxious to get him away before I myself became contaminated. So I said no—and he went.

  "That was the last I ever saw of him —but once.

  "TT B went away, as he had prom-mTm. ised, and he seemed apparently well—all except the curious little inflamed spot on his forehead, whose significance I knew so well.

  "He went away—and he failed to

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  499

  come back. Days passed, and there came no word from him. People began inquiring. It was odd that he should have left no address. His business suffered,

  "Weeks went by—and no word. Search parties were sent out. The river was dragged. The morgues of near-by cities were searched. And all the while I laughed. For who would think of turning to those far-off hills?

  "And yet, as the days went by, I found , myself turning to them again—wondering, wondering, wondering. I grew nervous, agitated. I got so I couldn't sleep.

  "Finally, on a day in late summer (it was the 8th of August—date I shall never forget!) I packed a few things and set off. In search of him? God knows. I tried to tell myself not—but at any rate I found myself strangely, magnetically drawn to those distant somber hills—and thither I went.

  "It was one of those gorgeous mornings that only August can produce, and the exhilarating air would have lifted my spirits, but instead I walked along depressed, and the knapsack strapped to my shoulder served only to intensify the feeling.

  "In spite of all I could do, I found my mind reverting to the hideous revenge I had wreaked on my wife and her lover, and for the first time repentance stole in upon me.