The 11th Golden Age of Weird Fiction

by E. Hoffmann Price

  A low rumbling mutter drowned his amen; then with an inverse gesture of his left hand, the priest blessed the gathering and in mocking accents completed the blasphemy: “Hoc est enim corpus meum!”

  He spat upon the consecrated bread, stolen from some consecrated altar; he scattered the fragments among the frothing, slavering devotees. They closed in, maddened with blasphemy and Asiatic drugs. They groveled, clawing and growling as they fought for the fragments.

  Crane joined them. It was too early for a break. He had to outwit the un-drugged acolytes.

  First voices, then the tearing of the scarlet robes told him that women were among those who writhed and panted and grappled on the floor. Hoods and masks yielded to clawing fingers. Soon they forgot blasphemy. The Asiatic drugs were biting deep.

  In a moment the vault had become an animation of the bestial carvings of a Tantric temple, Women in jewels and costly gowns, and men in formal evening dress were clawing each other with a fury that stripped clothing to shreds.

  A golden-haired fiend with crazed eyes and hungry red mouth emerged unpaired from the tangle and twined eager arms about Crane. A few scraps that glittered with green sequins trailed from her hips and what remained of a brassiere clung to breasts that throbbed from her fierce, drugged passion. Her legs were white serpents and her quivering body was a multitude of consuming flames, and her loose hair blinded and choked Crane as he swallowed his horror of that uncontrollable madness.

  Yet he had to play his part. That black-robed demon’s eyes glittered fiercely from behind his mask as he circled the arena, watching their ever fouler fancies cropping out…

  That golden-haired woman’s madness was cleaner than what was on every side. And despite his qualms, Crane’s blood surged in irrepressible response to her savage frenzy…

  Yet even as he yielded to that vortex of passion, a remote corner of his brain remained untainted. He plied her with answering kisses, felt the shudder of her hot flesh, but that one sane morsel was wondering. And at times he saw what was about him.

  He recognized a black-bearded man whose face had appeared in every major newspaper of the world…another, who had led a victorious army…and one who from the sidelines told premiers what to say…

  The Master gestured, and an acolyte dashed to the passageway at the left.

  Crane’s fist smashed home, driving away a black-haired woman who sought to displace his companion. Her body was raked and bitten and slashed, but she was seeking more savage company…Crane saw how Diane had been mangled. Her terror hinted that she had not been drugged…

  Then Crane saw what had been released when those unseen iron bars clanged open. A tall, gray-haired man whose deeply lined face had once been handsome and commanding. He wore what remained of full evening dress. The ribbon that had crossed his shirtfront trailed like a streamer as he approached; and on it Crane saw the ribbons of civil and military decorations.

  He recognized the man. He knew now from whose formal garb that purple rosette had been torn. His mouth frothed, and his eyes burned insanely. He snarled bestially and plunged into the surging orgy.

  This was a man whose whispers shook Europe. Now he rolled vilely in that tangle of writhing flesh.

  But why—Great God, why?

  The Master laughed and gestured. The sullen ruddy glow of the tapers was drowned in a blue white, dazzling radiance, pitilessly revealing what shadows had shrouded.

  Then Crane saw and understood.

  A motion picture camera was covering the hideous show. That damnable film would place those drugged dignitaries forever in the power of that master of blasphemy. He had tricked them from Biarritz with hints of sensational ritual, drugged them, and the record of their unspeakable wallowings would doom them. Satanism had a logical purpose: political blackmail.

  Time to move. The Master was distracted by his own show. Crane kicked clear of his companion, reached for his pistol.

  It was gone! Lost in that writhing vortex.

  He bounded to the altar, snatched that mockery of a crucifix, and whirled toward the Master. A pistol crackled. Crane felt the stab of hot lead, hurled himself aside as bullets spattered the masonry. The acolytes closed in. The brazen crucifix crunched home. But the survivors overwhelmed him, hammering and kicking and grinding him into the flagstones.

  The Master joined them. Crane, battered and stunned, heaved up out of the gory tangle, clawed the mask aside. He slashed at that swarthy, aquiline face. He missed, ducked a knife thrust, and closed in. This was the émir, the Asiatic enemy whose grip on the drugged dignitaries would buy state and army secrets, upset an African colonial empire.

  Crane bored in, but the enemy was fresh and he was dizzy and battered. They crashed to the floor, Crane underneath, vainly trying to drive home one good blow. He jerked clear of a second knife thrust; but the next raked his ribs. The vault became a roaring redness until he perceived nothing but those implacable eyes and that savage, brazen leer.

  But that last stroke did not fall. The surging tangle of madmen, sated of all but blood lust, swept Crane and his enemies against the wall. As the acolytes strove to club them into reason, Crane made the most of his respite.

  He snatched an abandoned thurible by the chains, swung it like a flail, flattening the Master’s skull. He swung again, but the chains whipped athwart a devotee who intervened, and the weapon was jerked from Crane’s grasp. He turned toward the altar, ploughing through the writhing tangle. He tripped and was dragged back into the whirlpool of madness, a yard short of his goal.

  A pistol roared as he struggled to his feet.

  Madeline had followed him.

  Crane jerked the weapon from her fingers and blasted the acolytes back as she struggled with her sister’s bonds.

  Another shot. The cameraman toppled from his perch behind the altar. The pistol was empty. Crane seized the machine and smashed it across the head of a surviving enemy. The film reservoir spewed out its reel of yellow celluloid, fogged beyond redemption in an instant.

  The knots yielded. Crane seized the half conscious girl and with Madeline at his heels, skirted the groveling tangle of drugged devil-worshipers. There were no acolytes left to pursue. And presently they reached the mist and moonlight…

  “As you learned,” explained Diane, hours later, in Crane’s rooms, “I was just frightened helpless by your dashing down to meet me. The émir didn’t intend for me to be clawed to ribbons. But Monsieur le Général Mar—”

  “Forget his name!” interrupted Crane, “Later, I’ll tell you why.”

  “Eh bien,” resumed Diane, “through error he prematurely took some of those drugs sooner than the émir intended. Before the ritual started. And you saw—”

  “Plenty.” Crane shuddered. Then he glanced at Madeline. “You little fool, you had to follow me!”

  “But yes. I suspected that through no fault of your own you had been involved and were following some insane American impulse to do what you thought the right thing. So I followed, to help if I could. I feared she was dead, so I hesitated to call the police.”

  “Damn lucky you didn’t!”

  And then Diane interposed, “Monsieur Denis, how can I ever express my gratitude—”

  “Madeline,” interrupted Crane, “has already taken care of that. And having had my fill of sunny France, I think I’ll leave for Spain in the morning.”

  SATAN’S DAUGHTER

  Originally published in Spicy Mystery Stories, January 1936.

  It was Lilith the wife of Adam…

  Not a drop of her blood was human,

  But she was made like a sweet soft woman.”

  —Dante Gabriel Rossetti

  When Morton Reed, unaided except for a leather-faced, white-bearded Arab servant, began to dig in an unpromising spot half a dozen miles from Koyunjik, his fellow archaeologists devoted their spare moments to helpful mockery;
but they remained to marvel when Reed uncovered a buried city where every tradition claimed there should be nothing of the kind.

  And inevitably the big American universities chiseled in on the discovery; which perhaps was no great imposition, as Reed’s only resources were his lean, bronzed hands and enthusiasm that gleamed from his deep-set, dark eyes to relieve the grimness of his gaunt, angular face. One man can’t excavate an entire city.

  * * * *

  Standing on the crest of a mound near the now crowded excavations, Reed watched a hundred sweating natives dragging a monstrous winged and human-headed bull from the oblivion of forty centuries. He smiled ironically, nestled in the crook of his arm a small parcel wrapped in a grimy turban cloth, spat contemptuously, and turned his back on the diggers.

  “Let them have that rubbish,” he muttered, striding toward his shabby tent at the further crest of the mound. “I’ve got mine.”

  A necromancer is one whose magic art makes the dead speak. An archaeologist is one whose spade uncovers forgotten centuries. Sometimes the distinction between the two becomes dismayingly thin.

  Once in his tent, Reed examined his prize. It was a green basalt image of a woman standing on the back of a lion. She wore a tall tiara, and her delicately aquiline Semitic features were sweetened by the shadow of a smile that lurked at the corners of her sensuous mouth. That vague, disquieting smile made Reed feel as though he had exhumed some living thing.

  Her body was a suave succession of curves, and about her waist was a broad girdle from which trailed carved pendants reaching well past her hips.

  On the foot of the pedestal was a cuneiform inscription; but a wrathful muttering from the rear distracted Reed’s pondering on the text.

  “I betake me to Allah for refuge against Satan,” growled old Habeeb, Reed’s Arab servant. He fingered the blue amulet that he had worn suspended about his neck ever since they had begun excavating.

  Reed recognized the symptoms of superstitious terror.

  “What’s the trouble now?” he brusquely demanded.

  “Throw the accursed thing away, sahib,” muttered the Arab. “That is the image of Bint el Hareth.”

  That meant, literally, Daughter of Satan—El Hareth was the name by which the angels called their renegade brother.

  “Cousin of a jackass,” retorted Reed in Arabic, “that is only the lady they used to call Anaitis, a couple of thousand years before Mohammad made the world safe for the one true God.”

  But old Habeeb muttered and cursed as he collected dry camel dung for the evening’s fire.

  Master and servant ate in silence.

  Habeeb was thinking of Bint el Hareth, the queen of demons, who rode by moonlight attended by myriads of seductive, night-prowling lilin, whose whisperings lure solitary travelers into the trackless desert to their doom. Reed was equally perturbed, but for another reason: he would have to guard his treasure day and night, lest the otherwise faithful and devoted Arab destroy it.

  * * * *

  As soon as he had swallowed the last savory morsel of pilau, Reed stretched his weary length on the thick-napped Mosul rug spread on the dirt floor of his tent. He watched Habeeb descending the slope toward the campfires of the archaeologists’ native workmen. From afar came the mutter of a drum, and the monotonous reiteration of the old song about what happens to the wandering dervish when he met the sultan’s forty daughters…

  But that, reflected Reed as he again regarded his green basalt treasure, would be nothing to a meeting with the model who centuries ago had posed for this image of Bint el Hareth—

  Then he cursed that chanting in the distance. They had changed to a new song. One that Reed had never before heard in all his wanderings. A sensuous, seductive rhythm, for all the crudity of the hoarse voices that blended to produce it. Reed caught himself nodding to that disturbing cadence. It reminded him of silk and white flesh and all that an archaeologist abandons—

  It seemed finally as though something age-old and evil and alluring had begun to whisper to him in the undertones of that barbarous melody.

  Then, suddenly, he realized that he was listening to music that could come from no group of Arab laborers. He sensed that he was no longer alone.

  The full moon was rising over the low-lying knolls beyond the Tigris. Something was advancing through the moon glamor toward the entrance of his tent. A woman wearing a tall, glistening tiara. Her shapely body was a succession of fluent, rippling curves that smiled through a gown that left him wondering whether its fragile fabric could endure even a breath of evening breeze.

  A native girl. Her flesh was a warm, rosy amber, and he caught the glint of moonlight in her incredibly large, dark eyes. They were dark and somber, and the fascinating sweetness of her face was subdued by the wistful, almost melancholy mouth.

  Reed’s eyes strayed down the gracious lines of her throat, and the firm, full blossoming breasts and inward sweep of her waist. He caught his breath, and for an instant cold thrills overwhelmed the warmth that had surged through his veins.

  Beneath the gossamer that rippled with the sway of her hips was a broad silver girdle agleam with uncounted sapphires that glittered frostily in the moonlight. He heard the soft tinkle of the jeweled pendants that reached half way to her knees. For an instant it seemed that the basalt image had come to life!

  Then Reed assured himself that she must have been prowling in the excavations by moonlight and had discovered a tiara and a jeweled girdle worn uncounted centuries ago by some perfumed favorite of a Babylonian king. She had found the treasure, and was displaying it to the best advantage in order to strike a bargain.

  If she removed that silver girdle…

  And then fresh wonder again subdued the desire that her shapely smiling curves had aroused. Her lovely face was a duplicate of the green basalt features of Bint el Hareth!

  Utterly impossible—but there she was, standing in the doorway, silhouetted against the moon.

  “I knew I could finally find you,” she was saying in Arabic, “if I waited until the moon rose.”

  * * * *

  The night had become a witch-glamor that chilled and at the same time inflamed Reed’s blood; then he told himself that it was after all not so strange that a village girl should strikingly resemble the green basalt statuette in face and figure. She was substantial, and the moonlight did not sift through her body, but only through the tenuous gauze that enveloped her.

  “I have been waiting for you, Malika,” Reed replied. “For a long time.”

  Digging for long buried ruins is lonely work, and even scholars have their human moments. This girl was one for whom any man might have waited. She was glamor that walked by night.

  Her slender fingers loosened the tent’s lashings, and as the flap slid down into place, she deftly knotted the cord again.

  Reed struck light to the gasoline lantern hanging on the tent pole. As he turned back toward his rug, the girl was at his side. He felt the warmth of her body, and the soft promising pressure of her gracious curves. The scent of her dark hair dizzied him, and the glow in her eyes told him that she had not come to trade in stolen antiques.

  “Gorgeous,” muttered Reed, seating himself on the rug and, catching her hand, he pulled her down beside him.

  She shook her head, and her smile was a sweetness in the desert as she murmured, “No…I am Bint el Hareth.”

  The Daughter of Satan—a perturbing play on words. But her presence was warm and dizzying, and by the glow of the gasoline lantern none of her loveliness was hidden except by the broad jeweled silver girdle and its tinkling pendants. Even her feet were bare—tiny feet, nails tinted with henna.

  Her arms moved like amber serpents as she set aside her tall silver tiara. Her hair cascaded in shimmering ripples down about her shoulders hiding her breasts, and reaching toward her silver girdle…

  * * * *
>
  The far-off mutter of Arab drums was now drowned by the pounding of Reed’s heart. He caught her in his arms, and as he found her lips, his fingers slipped between the scented strands of her streaming hair, and caressed the veiled amber curves of her yielding body.

  Lovely as her shapely form had been to the eye, it was incredibly more wondrous to the touch…satin smooth, firm, yet yielding…a succession of soft mysteries that sent fire rushing through his veins.

  Her arms twined about him as her lips surrendered to his caress, at first tentative and quivering, then maddeningly possessive.

  A strange, endless kiss—such is what the Arab story-tellers in the bazaars of Cairo described. More than contact. It was a mutual enlacement and union of lip and tongue.

  Her ecstatic shudder, and the sighing exhalation of breath as she finally drew away, goaded Reed to flaming frenzy. But somehow, without ever wholly breaking from his embrace, her lithe body evaded complete surrender. She was eager and glowing, yet evasive…

  “Not now,” she whispered as his hands vainly clawed the heavy silver girdle about her waist. “Later. This is only a meeting and a promise. Don’t try. That girdle is locked on. You can’t remove it. Not tonight.…”

  Reed had heard of jealous husbands and of fathers who applied such devices to keep feminine frailty from going too far in unguarded moments.

  She sensed his next thought even before he could speak it.

  “Neither a file nor a locksmith could help us,” she whispered. Then, shaking her lovely head and smiling sadly, she added, “A jealous king was once in love with me. He was old and grizzled and knew that I would outlive him—”

  “Who?” Reed wrathfully cut in.

  “Naram Sin of Agade,” she whispered, pillowing her head on his shoulder.

  Naram Sin had been dead for more centuries than Reed had years!

  Then she continued, “If you want me, we will meet in Kurdistan. I am here on stolen time. But later—when the signs of heaven permit—it will be otherwise. Study the inscription on the base of that statuette. Learn the ritual to chant when the planets rise to their appointed places. Then I will materialize from moon glamor and star dust. But think well, Morton Reed…before you summon me in Kurdistan, first look at what remains of my long forgotten lovers…see what Naram Sin, King of Agade, paid for my kisses…”