The Pulp Fiction Megapack

by Robert Leslie Bellem

  Yet they were only dogs after all, he reasoned, and this girl constituted his one hope of finding his way out of the wilderness before night came.

  He took another step toward her. The dogs, as though obeying a quick, unspoken command, broke their strange formation and suddenly ringed him, the giant leaders slinking around to his back, the others stationing themselves one on each side and two in front. They stood stiff-legged, fangs bared, the fur on their necks lifting up in savage hackles.

  Demerest felt a moment of instinctive, cringing dread. He wasn’t a coward. But his good sense told him that he stood in the presence of violent death. In a concerted attack these dogs would rip out his throat, literally tear him to pieces.

  The girl stopped, too. Tall, imperious, and lovely in spite of her grotesque garb, she regarded him searchingly for many seconds, her great, dark eyes lingering on his face. Then her lips moved. She made a clucking sound to the dogs.

  They fell out of their ring formation as quickly as they had assumed it, and slunk behind her again, following with silent obedience as she moved away.

  Demerest stood weak and trembling, a light sweat beading his forehead, as the weird cavalcade passed on. The dogs appeared to vanish almost at once, their great shapes blending with the darkness of the ground.

  For a full minute he watched the girl move off, and got a suggestion of the lithe loveliness of her figure beneath her cloak, the exquisite grace of her carriage. He stared until her imperious shoulders blurred and disappeared in the gathering dusk.

  Then, resolutely, he turned and followed. She had refused to speak to him. Her dogs had menaced his life. She’d treated him as something to be ignored or scorned. But there must, he reasoned, be some human habitation in the direction she had taken.

  * * * *

  Darkness came. The sulphurous glow faded from the west, extinguished by the dying day, and blotted out by the low-seeping rain clouds that were gathering again. A wind whimpered across the soggy fields like a tortured spirit. Demerest strayed from the path several times.

  He bumped into jagged rocks, scratched himself on ground-clinging bushes. At the end of half an hour it was pitch-black. His small flashlight, with its battery nearly exhausted and its bulb already weakly red, shed hardly enough illumination for him to see a yard ahead. Finally he caught sight of a wan glimmer in the darkness.

  He moved toward it, seeing in imagination the shapes of the great black dogs creeping close. The glimmer became an old-fashioned porch lantern swinging above the door of a massive stone house.

  Demerest stooped and groped for a stick. If the black beasts served as watch dogs for this mansion, they might attack him.

  He got closer, stared at the imposing front of the building, and realized that this must be the Halliday place. A sudden sense of the strangeness of his mission came to him. It was deeper, more eerie than when he’d received the letter in his pocket, every word of which he remembered clearly. It read:

  Dear Stephen:

  You probably have forgotten me, but your dear father and I were very close friends. And now, because I’m in desperate trouble, I’m turning to you, his son.

  I’ve heard that you’re engaged in radio work. Please come to my country home at once. Pretend you’re nothing more than a radio repair man whom I’ve summoned. Don’t admit that you know me. Be formal when we meet, unless we get a chance to talk alone. Guard every action, every word. Be ready to help me when the signal is given. There’s no one else on the outside I’d dare turn to.

  I’ve made many mistakes. I’ve been a wicked, selfish old fool. But, for the sake of one I love more than life itself, I ask you to help me. The enclosed check for five hundred dollars will defray expenses.

  Thinking back, Stephen Demerest shook his head. He had no inkling of the letter’s meaning. He remembered Benjamin Halliday only dimly, recalling, however, that he had once been his father’s friend. Only a few meager bits of information had come to him about Halliday. The man had grown wealthy in Europe. He had married brilliantly but unhappily. His wife had run off with another man, leaving him with an infant daughter. Then no further reports of Halliday had reached Demerest until, two years ago, he’d seen a brief notice in the paper of Halliday’s arrival in America.

  What the man’s trouble now was, why he had buried himself in the wildest part of New England, Demerest could not imagine.

  But the size of the house before him indicated wealth. He believed it was Halliday’s place. He approached the door, lifted the old-fashioned knocker and heard the hollow thud of it echo far inside the house.

  Footsteps approached. The door was opened and Demerest froze into startled wonder. It was as though the mouth of some fantastic sub-chamber of hell had opened. Never had he seen such a revoltingly ugly man as the one who stood in the threshold.

  A single, glaring eye gazed out of a scarred, pockmarked face. The man’s nose had been eaten away by accident or disease. His mouth was twisted into a misshapen hole that showed two broken teeth. The place where his other eye should have been was a gaping, horrible cavity in his cadaverous face.

  Demerest made an effort to keep his voice steady. “Is this Mr. Halliday’s house?” he asked.

  For almost a minute the single eye of the man before him searched his face, probed like a bright gimlet, trying, it seemed, to read his thoughts. Then the ugly head bobbed. The man stood waiting.

  “I’m a radio specialist,” went on Demerest. “Mr. Halliday asked me to come to do some repairing. My car, with all my tools in it, got mired in the mud. I’ll have to get it in the morning. I wonder if I can stay here for the night?”

  Again the noseless face bobbed. The man could understand, but seemed incapable of speech. It came to Demerest with another pang of horror that he was not only disfigured but also mute.

  The hideous servant stood aside and motioned for Demerest to enter. Demerest did so and found himself in a richly decorated hall. He started to look about him, then jumped as a voice suddenly spoke at his side. “This way if you please!”

  He had seen no one else come in, but when he looked around, there was another man almost as ugly as the first—a gnome-like figure with immensely broad shoulders and arms that nearly reached the floor. His simian, brutal face appeared hardly human, yet it was he who had spoken. He added gruffly: “You can’t see Mr. Halliday now. The doctor’s with him. Wait in here.”

  The gnome-man ushered Demerest into a big drawing-room, then turned and left him. Demerest nervously drew a cigarette from his coat and lit it. But he’d barely taken a puff when a shuffling step sounded.

  He whirled, went close to the door. An old man carrying a physician’s black satchel came slowly down the stairs. He, too, was hideously ugly, chinless, with a great projecting nose like the beak of some bird, and a pompadour of stiff white hair, giving him the look of an evil, crested parrot. He nodded at the servant, turned red-rimmed eyes on Demerest.

  Demerest shuddered. Every human being he had seen in this fantastic place had been ugly as Satan.

  The gnome-man saw the doctor to the door, then came back and planted himself in front of Demerest. “You may now go up and see Mr. Halliday,” he said, harshly. “I understand he’s expecting you.”

  Demerest didn’t answer. He moved up the stairs, heard the gnome-man’s step close behind him. The servant was dogging his footsteps like an evil shadow.

  “Right here!” The servant held open a door and followed Demerest into a room where there was a huge, old-fashioned canopied bed.

  Demerest’s eyes swung to the figure on it, then to the two others who stood beside it.

  The man in the bed was obviously Halliday. That wrinkled, crafty face, prematurely aged, stirred vague memories in Demerest’s mind. The other two, a youngish, fair-haired couple, were the first civilized-looking people he’d seen in the house. The woman had fair skin, a shapely body and washed-out but still attractive blue eyes. The man bore a striking resemblance to her. Both seemed well-bred, quiet.<
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  Halliday turned feverish eyes on his visitor. Demerest could sense the hideous, gnome-like servant standing close behind him; and Halliday’s expression seemed to plead craftily for Demerest to be discreet.

  “You’ve come about the radio,” said Halliday in a thin, flat voice. “I’m glad. It hasn’t been acting right. I’m an old man, bedridden, helpless. The radio, which keeps me in touch with the outside world, is one of my few pleasures.”

  “I won’t be able to fix it until tomorrow,” Demerest said. “My car, with all my tubes and testing equipment, is stuck in the road a mile from here. If you’ll let me spend the night, I’ll start on the radio tomorrow.”

  “I expected you to spend the night,” said Halliday. “We’re far from things here—isolated, as you see.” He waved his thin hand toward the man and the woman. “My good friends, Eric and Nana Larsen! They and my daughter, Gail, are taking turns nursing me.”

  Demerest looked into the faded blue eyes of the man and the woman, and knew that these two must be brother and sister.

  The woman favored him with a smile that made her look younger and glamorously appealing, in a foreign sort of way. “Please to meet you,” she said, with a slight, becoming accent. Then her eyes fell on the hideous gnome standing behind Demerest. The smile left her face and she shuddered. An air of tenseness settled over the room.

  Halliday’s features, now that the first effort of greeting was over, had become wan and corpselike, their only expression one of inscrutable, deep-seated terror. He said, listlessly: “Dinner will soon be ready. I’m sorry I can’t join you; but I shall not be alone. Either Eric or Nana will stay with me.” The invitation to dinner seemed also dismissal. The hideous servant, standing so close behind Demerest that he could feel the man’s breath on his neck, said: “Come, Mr. Demerest. I’ll find you a room.”

  Demerest had only a small grip with him. He followed the squat-bodied servant down a long hall. The man thrust open a door, lighted an oil lamp and favored Demerest with a curious leer. He said: “Here’s where you’ll sleep.”

  There was another canopied bed in the room—like the one Halliday had. The house was obviously ancient, all the furnishings dating back to Colonial times. The servant withdrew, then abruptly thrust his ugly face back around the door. “Dinner will be ready in ten minutes,” he growled.

  Demerest unpacked his things, went out into the hall, and saw Nana Larsen descending the staircase. She had changed her gown, as though for his especial benefit. Her low-cut dress revealed the shapeliness and alluring whiteness of her shoulders.

  But a moment later the pale beauty of Nana Larsen was eclipsed by the lush, dark loveliness of the girl who entered the hall below, through another door.

  Demerest started, stared, felt his heart contract. For he was again looking at the classic, inscrutable features of the mystery girl, whose great dogs had menaced his life.

  Nana Larsen smiled. “Miss Halliday, this is Mr. Demerest, your father’s radio man.”

  The mystery girl’s dark eyes searched Demerest’s face. She nodded briefly, acknowledging the introduction. There was something both haughty and tragic in her bearing. She preceded them into the dining room, and Demerest noticed that she was dressed almost as strangely as before. Her gown was individual and exquisitely becoming, but old-fashioned, Victorian in its cut, as though the girl were costumed for some part in a play.

  A third repulsive and gnome-like servant, seeming to be a brother of the one who had given Demerest his orders, was in the dining room. Gail Halliday seated herself with all the hauteur of a princess. Nana Larsen smiling slid into her chair. Demerest took a place facing the two women.

  He had a strange feeling of unreality. No one spoke. The candles on the table shed a light that barely penetrated to the corners of the big Colonial room. The presence of the monster-like servants cast a damper on the meal. Demerest could feel their eyes boring into him, watching his every move.

  Each time one of them went near Nana Larsen, to present a dish, she cringed away, as though the white, bare skin of her arms and shoulders shrank from any possible contact with their simian hands.

  * * * *

  Gail Halliday kept her eyes steadfastly on her plate. Demerest found himself watching her with ever-increasing fascination. He’d never seen a girl like her, never beheld such a mixture of strange beauty and chill aloofness. Once, when she raised her dark eyes and glanced at him, he had a sense of hidden, unaroused depths, tragic and exciting. He was attracted by her and afraid of her, at one and the same time. Nana Larsen made conversation finally by asking him about his trip from the city, slurring soft words in her peculiarly accented voice.

  The meal ended at last. Gail Halliday slipped away as mysteriously, as silently, as she had come. Nana Larsen went upstairs and Eric Larsen came down. But he did not attempt to talk to Demerest, and Demerest went to his room, after one cigarette.

  There seemed nothing else to do. Halliday hadn’t called him, and he found himself wondering if the old man’s strange letter had not been the product of delirium.

  As he went along the hall to his chamber, he caught sight of the most hideous of the servants, the one with the single burning eye and noseless face, watching him. The ugly mute stared, as though in secret, diabolical speculation.

  Demerest paced his room nervously, smoking cigarette after cigarette. The whimpering wind rose outside to a tortured moan. Spurts of rain rapped against his window with a sound like bony knuckles. Demerest drew the shade, gazed out.

  He started when he looked across to another wing of the house, where there were lighted shades, across which a figure moved—the tall, lithe, glorious figure of Gail Halliday. She was also pacing, appearing and reappearing against the shades.

  Then Demerest heard the throaty howling of dogs, a strange, clamorous, oddly menacing chorus, out in the darkness of the night. Somewhere on the other side of the court, in the girl’s wing of the house, the great black beasts were imprisoned, stirred apparently by the noise of the storm, and by a macabre, vaguely-felt restlessness that filled the air. Demerest suddenly had a sense that unknown, devilish forces were all about; that some storm other than the wind and the rain was gathering, creeping closer and closer, threatening them all.

  The girl finally stopped pacing. She disappeared from a window, then came back. For a moment he saw her figure eerily silhouetted without the strange gown on it; saw the chaste, proud lines of her body. Then her light went out.

  Demerest lay down on his bed without undressing. Steadily, above the wind and rain, he heard the mournful howling of the dogs. He dozed into fitful slumber, their animal voices ringing in his ears like some weird devil’s chorus.

  A scream awakened him, brought him bolt upright in bed, then sent him lunging off it, straight toward the door. For there was terror, anger in the shrill cry, and it was in the hall outside.

  Demerest flung the door open, leaped into the corridor. In the glow of a hanging lamp near the stairway he saw two struggling figures. One was the hideous, apelike gnome-man who had spoken to him. The other was Nana Larsen.

  She tried to break away as Demerest stood gaping. Her face was convulsed in terror and loathing. The servant clutched her with arms that writhed like constricting pythons. He lifted her bodily, tried to carry her toward the stairs.

  With a cry Demerest leaped forward. But he stopped almost at once, as though steel cables were looped about his wrists. He stooped and whirled, gasping, with the clutch of muscular fingers around his arms. He looked back, saw that the other gnome-man had sneaked up behind him.

  The inhuman-appearing monster was incredibly strong, so strong that, with the surprise hold he had taken, Demerest was helpless. He cursed, kicked back, but the gnome-man twisted his arms until they ached, blocking all movement.

  Nana Larsen shrieked, trying desperately to get free. Demerest saw her frantic movements tear her gown, saw the gleam of bare flesh, white as alabaster. The gnome-man’s fingers twined closer aroun
d her. He clutched her desperately, jaws clenched, eyes glaring, panting with his efforts.

  Then the tall form of Eric Larsen bounded into the hall. His eyes were blazing. He had a gun in his hand. With a nerve that Demerest admired, he took aim, waited a brief instant till his sister’s squirmings left a portion of the servant’s chest uncovered. Then he fired, twice.

  With a hideous howl, the ugly servant dropped the woman. He took three steps backward, clutched at his chest, toppled down the stairs, with death glazing his eyeballs. The man holding Demerest whimpered and broke away. He was quick as he darted along the hall, but Eric Larsen was quicker. He slapped a bullet after the retreating figure.

  Demerest heard the spat of it against flesh, saw the gnome-man’s arm jerk, heard his moan of pain. Then the man was gone through a door. And Demerest turned and strode toward the fallen woman.

  She was just picking herself up, her clothes half-torn from her. But in her agitation she didn’t seem to notice them. Her brother, Eric, was panting with fury, face tense and white. The sound of the shots had aroused the dogs still more. Their barking rose to a frenzied pitch, blended with the moaning of the wind. Nana shivered, pressed her arms across her body. Eric tensely said: “Stay here. Miss Halliday is in danger. I’ve got to see.”

  Demerest started to follow, but Nana clutched him. “No, stay with me! I’ve got to go back to Mr. Halliday. He is in danger, too, but—” She suddenly turned, ran down the stairs to where the fallen gnome-man lay in a tumbled heap. Demerest saw her stoop and retrieve a small automatic, which the man had evidently taken from her. She came running up the stairs, her torn clothes flapping wide.

  Eric Larsen had gone, and Nana motioned Demerest to follow her into Halliday’s room. Halliday was sitting up in bed, wild-eyed, staring. His face whitened at sight of Demerest and Nana. He said in a strangled whisper: “What—what has happened?”