He walked with cat-like sureness, covered the entire length of the hall, then motioned her back against the wall. Peering across his shoulder, she could see the native padding about the dining room clearing away the remnants of breakfast.
Waiting until he had left the room, they followed the wall to a half hidden opening behind some drapery. Beyond was a flight of well worn steps that led down into the musty rooms below. The stairs were well worn and slimy, and Miriam had to stuff her fist into her mouth to keep from exclamation when she stepped on a scurrying rat or some other subterranean animal that had scurried under her feet.
At the foot of the stairway was a passageway that led to a worn old door that was fastened by a stout padlock. The darkness of the corridor was suddenly split by a pocket flashlight that Phil pulled from under his skirt.
“Just our luck,” he muttered. “Doesn’t look as though we could break it open, either.” He bit his lower lip savagely in vexation. “I’ve got to get in there, Miriam, I’ve just got to.”
Her voice almost stuck into her throat. “The native. Maybe he knows where the key is. Maybe you could make him tell?”
The flashlight went out, leaving the passage again in dank darkness. “You’ve got an idea there,” he said. “I’ll go get him. He’ll talk, if he knows anything,” he promised.
She felt him press the flashlight into her hand, then another cold metallic object. It was a gun!
“Just in case I don’t come back,” he said. “Don’t be afraid to use it. There are six shots in it. Be sure you only use five.” He squeezed her shoulder reassuringly, then she heard him feeling his way back toward the stairs.
It seemed like ages that she stood there alone in the damp, cold darkness. It seemed like an obscene wet black blanket had been dropped over her head, and she gasped for breath. Fingers seemed to be groping from the walls, and in her mind’s eye she could see the blistering, cooking flesh of the blonde girl as cry after cry was wrenched from the pain wracked body that had once been a poem in curves, soft breasts and white skin.
Then she heard a sound. At first it seemed like the scurrying of a rat, then it had more substance, like some large creature crawling along the walls, bat-like. She fought down panic, but loneliness and the darkness had left its mark, and she could not long resist. She pressed the lever on the flashlight and a thin beam of yellow light cut through the darkness. A glad cry escaped from her throat.
Phil stood there, blinking in the light, holding by the throat the little native. He lifted him from the floor and shook him like a terrier with a rat.
“Where is it?” he snarled, exposing his even white teeth. “I’ll get it if I have to tear your arms out of their sockets and bash your head in with them.”
* * * *
The dark face of the native became a dull maroon, and his eyes threatened to pop from his head, but he stubbornly shook his head. Suddenly, he lashed out with his feet and caught Phil in the pit of the stomach. The aerialist gasped and relaxed his hold. In a moment, the brown man was on him, his fingers searching out the larger man’s windpipe, while his other hand whipped out a large knife. He bared, his sharp teeth in a snarl.
Terror transfixed the girl. She felt unseen horror strangling her. Subconsciously she knew she must do something, but she lacked the power to command her muscles. Suddenly, almost as though impelled by some outside force, she felt herself lashing out with the gun. The first blow caught the little man across the side of the head, laying the bone bare, while blood gushed out and ran down the side of his face. He had barely time to turn his face when her hand descended again, this time crushing in the top of his head like an eggshell. His hand fell from Phil’s throat and he collapsed into a heap at the girl’s feet.
Nausea gripped her, and her senses started to reel. She leaned against the wall for support; it gave way under her and she fell into what felt like a bottomless abyss. Some large black hand blotted out consciousness, and when she awoke, once again Phil was at her side, bathing her face with water. She sat up with a shuddering sigh.
“Guess I’m not much help always passing out like I do,” she said. “I’m sorry I’m such a sissy.”
“Not much help indeed,” he smiled. “You only saved my life, that’s all.” He brushed her hair out of her face. “Feel better?”
She nodded. “Guess it’s because he’s the first man I ever killed,” she said. “He is dead, isn’t he?”
“Couldn’t be deader,” the man agreed. “For a minute there looked like it was going to be me, and it would have been if it weren’t for you.”
The girl sat up and looked around. “Where are we, and how did we get here? Did you find the key on him?”
“No,” Phil told her. “I don’t exactly know what this room is. After you conked him, you got a little dizzy and leaned against the wall for support and evidently touched some kind of a hidden switch. That door over there opened and here we are. This isn’t the room I saw last night, though, because this has no windows in it and that one had.”
“Maybe there’s another secret door?” the girl suggested.
“That’s what I’m hoping,” the man admitted, his eyes running over the rough-hewn wall of the room. “I figure it must be over on that side, and lead into that chamber that’s padlocked.” He got up and ran his finger over the rough rock. He put his shoulder against the wall and pushed, but nothing happened. At each interval of two feet he continued to push against the wall, and as he came to the corner of the room, he felt the wall give.
His voice was strange when he turned to the girl. “I’ve found it,” he said. “I’m going in. I think you’d better stay here.” He pushed the door open and stared into the black void beyond.
The girl was at his side in an instant. “You’re not going in alone. We’re in this together. Even if I did turn into a Fainting Fanny, I think I’ve been a little help.”
Phil patted her hand. “You’ve been more than a little help,” he said. “That’s not the reason I don’t want you to go in there. I just want to spare you the sight of what I think we’re going to find.”
“I want to go,” the girl said simply.
“All right,” he agreed, “but I hope I’m wrong about what I expect to find—” He took the flashlight and pressed the button. The long finger of light split the black of the chamber beyond, revealing a long, rough-hewn table bearing a lamp. Keeping the lamp focused on that lamp, Phil led the way into the chamber.
He paused a moment before lighting the lamp, then with a deep breath he bathed the chamber in light. Miriam let out a squeal of fright, then buried her head in his shoulder.
Along the wall, mounted like the heads of wild animals in some sportsman’s study were the heads of over a score of women, staring glassy eyed into the room below. Two new plaques had recently been added. From one glared the head of the stout woman lecturer, from the other a head, with the drugstore reddened hair of the magician’s assistant, grinned inanely.
Miriam felt insanity closing in on her in a black cloud and fought it off. She straightened up and kept her eyes from the ghastly display on the wall.
“That’s what they brought back last night,” she said in a low voice. “The beasts, the insane beasts! They murdered those women in cold blood, then mutilated their bodies for this mad display of cruel degeneracy.”
Phil stopped before the head of a once-beautiful brunette. Her long hair hung limply from her bodiless head and fine dark eyes stared sightlessly down at the man staring at her.
“That was my sister,” Phil said quietly. “She was lovely. I’ve come all the way to this fever infested hell-hole to avenge her, and now that I’m certain what her fate was, I’m going to carry out that promise.”
The tears stood in Miriam’s eyes at the vision of a brother standing before the desecrated body of his sister swearing vengeance. The horror of the situation was never more apparent than at that moment.
“Avenge her or join her?” a voice from the doorway asked. Both s
wung around to see the hated face of their host in the doorway. “So she was your sister, eh? She was a fine specimen. Gave me quite a chase. Through treetops and all. When I finally sent an arrow right through her, she fell to earth like a mortally wounded bird—”
With a roar Phil sprang at his tormentor. The narrow room rang with the sound of a shot as he charged. Miraculously, it only creased his shoulders. He was on the bearded man before he could squeeze the trigger again. A big hand closed over the gun hand and crushed the gun to the floor. Then with a mighty swing he hit the big game hunter flush on the fat lips with his fist. Blood spouted in all directions and he hit the wall with a dull thud and slid to the floor. Phil pulled him to his feet again, and there was the dull crunch of shattered bone as he hit him again.
As Martinez sank to the floor, from another pocket he pulled a second gun. “You shall yet die to join her on my wall,” he said with difficulty, the blood cascading from his badly mutilated mouth. “Or maybe I turn you over to my faithful Wasiri, and we watch while they eat your quivering flesh?” He started to pull himself to his feet. When finally he had gained his feet, he fell heavily back against the wall in exhaustion—and then the miracle happened!
The plaque bearing the head of Phil’s sister fell, and the base of the plaque sheared the hunter’s skull neatly in two.
Phil and Miriam ran to the man’s side, but he had been killed instantly, and the head on the plaque, the lip torn away from the teeth by the jar, seemed to grin at them.
“We’ve got to find where he keeps his ammunition or dynamite to blow this Satan’s headquarters back to the Hell that spawned it,” he said. “You find your way to the pier, and I’ll join you in a little while.”
The sunlight seemed like a clean breath of heaven and Miriam sat limply down to await Phil’s coming.
Suddenly a black spiral of smoke came from the old house, and from deep in the forest came the beat of drums in ever growing volume. Over the deep throated rumble of the drums she heard a new sound, a motorboat. She said a silent prayer, and then she saw it feeling its way around a bend in the stream.
“Hop in,” Phil shouted. “The Indians have seen the smoke and they’ll be here in a little while.”
“How’d you do it?” she panted. “The fire, I mean.”
“Looking for some dynamite, I came upon a hidden dock for the boat and there was plenty of spare gasoline—”
* * * *
Not another word was spoken until we had left the House of Horror far behind. “I thought you were never coming,” Miriam admitted. “I thought we had jumped out of the frying pan into the Indians’ fire.”
“One thing I had to do was to see to it that my sister got a decent burial. I know she’ll rest better now—”
Far behind the sky was black with the smoke of the fast burning house, but ahead, the sun shone and the sky was blue.
THE DOGS OF PURGATORY, by Hugh Pendexter
Dix stared gloomily across the flat, monotonous country and its illimitable expanse of swamp and dreary areas of moss-bearded evergreens. The gray autumnal sky minimized the charm of the riotous coloring of the hard growth on the low hills behind him and prevented his appreciating the beauty of the frost-burned ferns and grasses in the lowlands ahead. He was not circumstanced to enjoy the dying glory of Indian Summer and moodily likened the painted landscape to a gaily bedecked wanton bedraggled by the storm. In fact, it was a most inhospitable country, and he cursed the chance which had led him there. It had seemed a simple matter to make the camp on Caribou Lake, but what with the loss of his compass and the clouds masking the heavens he had gone hopelessly astray three days back. For twelve hours he had been without food.
He recalled odds and ends of campfire gossip about the dismal Purgatory country and fished out his woods map. Sure enough; there were the two lakes, Big and Little Purgatory, connected by a sluggish, winding stream. He had wandered some fifty miles from the Caribou Lake trail.
The discovery was startling. Once the clouds let loose the “line” storm this whole region would be inundated. To retrace his way before securing food was impossible. To advance was a waste of his remaining energy. A drop of rain splashed ominously on the map.
He must build a lean-to to shut out the storm. First, he would light a fire before the rain soaked the dead wood; and he searched his pockets for matches. Ordinarily, for the sake of a climax, one match is found and a tragedy lived while it is being nursed into feeble flame. Dix was denied this conventional thrill. He had no matches.
The thatch of spruce boughs remained to be constructed, and unslinging his small axe he assailed a clump of evergreens and labored fiercely for several minutes. Then the absurdity of it all struck him and he threw down the axe. If a man must die of starvation what odds whether he die wet or merely moist? Without fire or food, with his strength lessening, he had been dreading the rain as a major evil. It suggested a drowning man’s fears lest he wet his feet.
As he crouched on a blanket of moss and stared helplessly on the flat waste his range of vision gradually shortened, for lowering clouds and gathering dusk shut down about him like a collapsing canopy. Queer stories of the Purgatory country drifted through his mind and as they were accentuated by despair he found it easy to imagine strange shapes in the swamp growth. The funereal cedars in the foreground became filled with supernormalities.
“Rot!” he angrily exclaimed, shaking his head to dislodge the unwholesome fancies. “When a chap gets to seeing things—” He chopped the sentence abruptly and leaned forward with mouth agape. His ears had joined in the conspiracy of nerves against reason; he had caught the deep baying of a dog.
Now the Purgatory region was an abomination and no man lived there, consequently there could be no dogs. Thus spoke Reason, and again the long, deep-mouthed cry sounded, this time more distinct and much nearer. He frowned and remembered his guide’s garrulous recital of a spookish experience in this same region.
The guide had sworn by all the woods gods that he had wandered to the edge of the swamp country and at twilight had glimpsed the gorgon shapes of fearful creatures, which moved with the lithe stealth of tigers and cried out like dogs after game. However, there could be no dogs in this deserted place, Reason persisted. Nor could they be wolves, for wolves do not bark. His ears had picked up some woods sound and had distorted it into an illusion.
Even as he clung to this explanation, the hoarse clamor of the canine voices swept nearer and nearer, dinning on his ears like the climax of a nightmare. He was halfway down the side of a low ridge and from this coign of vantage he now saw them just below him, and counted them, seven huge, tawny forms. They were running one behind another and not in a pack, as the wolf runs. Dix rubbed his eyes but the spectacle would not vanish. Next he discovered he was alive with fear and yet had no impulse to fly. Once he thought he heard an alien sound behind him, but the sinister figures circling up the slope held his gaze. The leader spied him; instantly the chorus was changed to a sharp, triumphant key, and they were streaking up the ridge in a long, undulating line which vaguely reminded him of sea serpents.
There were trees nearby and yet he remained motionless, the thought of avoiding their onrush never finding room in his dazed mind. Then the leader was upon him, snarling and mouthing horribly, nuzzling at his throat. There was no hallucinations in the fierce impact of the heavy body, nor in the hurt of the pounding attack of the others. He struck and kicked and cried out wildly. Above the clamor he finally caught a shrill voice and heard the swishing blows of a whip. The brutes minded this none. A man’s voice, shouting commands accompanied by resounding whacks of a club, by degrees quieted the confusion until the furious animals were beaten off and Dix to his surprise found himself alive and suffering only from bruises and scratches.
“If they hadn’t had their muzzles on!” panted the shrill voice.
“They’d have killed him in no time,” proudly completed the man.
Pulling himself to a sitting posture Dix stared i
n amazement at the couple. The man was almost a dwarf in stature, with a broad face that was nearly covered by a beard. He was eyeing Dix with open disfavor as he waved his stout cudgel to keep the dogs at a distance. The woman—Dix gaped incredulously—was exquisitely out of place in the rough scene. He noted the texture of her brown skin, the sheen of her hair, the noble poise of her small figure and her dainty grace as she kneeled beside him. But as he met her anxious gaze he read sadness and trouble in the small, oval face, a sadness which was deep seated and in nowise hinging on the danger just averted.
“The dogs?” he managed to exclaim as he rubbed his aching chest.
“Keep them back, Cumber,” she cried. “Beat them back. On your life don’t slip their muzzles!”
The last struck him as being rather a ridiculous speech, for who but a murderer would think of freeing those slavering jaws? The man grunted something unintelligible and astounded Dix by displaying a surly unwillingness in herding the brutes before him down the slope.
“Lock them in the hovel till I get to the house,” she called after him. Grumbling and mumbling the man drove the dogs into the underbrush, but it was not till he had vanished that the girl turned to Dix.
“Are you badly hurt?”
“Only bruised and shaken—thanks to the muzzles. But my mind riots most confoundedly. They’re real, eh?”
“Fearfully so,” she shuddered. “They’re a cross between the giant Danes and the bloodhound—ferocious as tigers.”
“But why are they? And why do you have them?” he puzzled.
The transient horror of her gaze was succeeded by somber earnestness as she ignored his query and said, “Turn back to the hills from where you came. Once you’ve covered a few miles you’ll be safe, as the dogs never wander far from the swamps.”
The Pulp Fiction Megapack Page 11
