The Pulp Fiction Megapack

by Robert Leslie Bellem

  Betty was shrieking madly.

  “Please…oh, please!” she sobbed. “Please…for the love of God, have mercy!…Oh, Bob…come!”

  The sound came from a room a short distance down the hall. The terror-stricken voice of my wife pleading for mercy went through me like an electric shock, galvanizing me into action. I shook off the nausea and, pulling myself to my feet, charged like an angry bull.

  The door of the room was open, the light streaming out into the hallway. I halted at the threshold, my faculties paralyzed for an instant at the unholy sight which met my horrified eyes.

  It was a huge room into which I gazed, made, it appeared, by tearing the partition from between two smaller rooms. Fitted as a laboratory, painted a spotless white, the walls were lined with shelves overflowing with bottles, beakers and test tubes.

  In the center was a low divan. Upon it Betty was stretched. She had been nearly divested of her garments. Her slender white arms were drawn above her head. There was scant concealment of any secret of her slim body. Beside her, fastened by a long rope attached to a leather girdle about its middle, was the creature that had attacked us in the darkness. I saw now that it was a monster gorilla.

  The rope, attached to a ring in the wall, held it away from her. Its hair-covered, stubby fingers reached out for her—tried to caress her smooth, satiny flesh—tried to fondle her in a diabolical and unholy embrace. It whimpered appealingly, its tiny, bloodshot eyes gloating over her youthful beauty as it strove with all its gigantic strength to stretch the rope which held it from her.

  At a table close beside them stood Bixby, a long white smock clothing his emaciated form. He hovered over the delicate apparatus, his long, skinny fingers darting here and there, his cavernous eyes glancing gloatingly at the terrible scene that was being enacted before him.

  “In a moment,” he crooned soothingly to the whining monstrosity at the end of the rope. “In a moment, my pet. Then I will wield the knife. Her blood will be in your veins and your rich, red corpuscles will go charging through her slim, white body, mixing with her blood. Then…then she will be yours…”

  The accursed thing whimpered understandingly. It turned its shaggy head to him for an instant and whined like a dog.

  Bixby selected a slender knife from the glittering array on the table. For an instant he held it aloft, examining its razor-sharpness. Nodding with satisfaction, he took a step forward and bent over the nude form on the divan, his sunken eyes searching for the vein he was about to open.

  Betty screamed again. In her agony, she turned her head. Her eyes met mine. In them was a look of pathetic appeal. She sensed my weakness—knew that there was but little I could do to save her. Yet her movement broke the spell that seemed to have been cast over me and I charged forward with an angry bellow. Bixby turned as my hands reached for his scrawny throat The blade dropped from his fingers and he lunged for the revolver that lay in an open drawer beside him.

  Betty screamed.

  “Bob! Watch out!” she shrieked.

  I whirled. But too late. I caught an indistinct glimpse of the huge black as he struck. His great fist crashed against my head and I went down like an ox.

  * * * *

  I was out only for a second. Yet the single blow paralyzed my nerve centers, making it impossible for me to move. Things happened with kaleidoscopic rapidity. As in a trance, I saw the big black leap forward and claw with feverish rapidity at the bindings which held Betty to the couch. “Jarbo’s…she is Jarbo’s!” he snarled. “No give to ape-man this time.”

  Bixby’s saturnine face was flushed with anger. “Leave her alone, damn you!” he roared. “She is the first that he really seemed to care for. Do you think, you fool, that you are going to spoil my great experiment…now?”

  He leaped forward, his talon-like fingers grasped around the butt of the gun.

  The crazed black pushed him back with a sweep of his huge arm. The old man crashed against the table, upsetting it; the apparatus tumbled over the floor in wild disarray. He dropped to a crouching position, the gun raised, his thin lips drawn back over his teeth in a snarl of anger.

  “Leave her alone!” he snapped.

  The big black took a step forward, his huge fists doubled.

  “Jarbo’s!” he growled.

  Bixby fired. The black staggered back as the leaden slug sunk into his vitals. Then he gathered his huge body together and hurled himself forward. His fist crashed against the old man’s jaw, bringing the head back with a sudden jerk. Then his great fingers closed around the scrawny throat. There was a snap of breaking bones.

  Raising the form of his victim above his head, the burly black threw the old man across the room. Then, turning, he leaped back to Betty.

  The ape-man gave vent to a wild, insane roar. He lunged forward, maddened at the sight of blood and the death of his master. Its terrific lunge broke the rope. Jarbo turned to meet the mad rush. They went down together, the ape and the black, clawing, biting, in a battle to the death. The sinewy fingers of the gorilla sought the other’s throat—found it. I saw the black’s eyes bulge from their sockets under the terrific pressure.

  All this, I say, transpired in less time than it takes for me to tell it. Dazed though I was, Betty’s frightened scream brought me to my senses. The revolver had fallen almost beside me. I seized it and, jamming it against the hairy head of the horrific monstrosity, pulled the trigger. The ape-man’s death grip on the black’s throat relaxed. He kicked spasmodically, then rolled over…dead.

  There was a crash as the front door was forced open. Then a squad of state policemen charged into the room, guns drawn. With them was the attendant at the oil station.

  “One of my men found your abandoned car an hour ago,” the sergeant in command told me as he assisted me to my feet. “When the attendant at the filling station identified it, we lost no time in getting here. There have been several women missing of late and all clews have centered on this locality. We were just outside when we heard the shots…”

  I picked up the surgeons’ knife from the floor and cut Betty’s bonds. Then, wrapping a cover about her trembling form, I assisted her to a chair. It took me but a moment to tell the officer what had happened.

  “That explains the disappearance of the women—up to a certain point,” he said thoughtfully. “On the other hand, there are a lot of things I don’t understand.”

  “The black’s still alive, sergeant,” one of the men who had been prowling through the room, interrupted.

  The sergeant bent over the wounded Algerian and called for a first aid kit. As it was brought, he poured a bit of liquor between the thick mutilated lips. Jarbo stirred…opened his eyes.

  “Master dead…ape dead,” he gasped, his eyes turning on me. “Pretty soon Jarbo die. You keep woman…”

  * * * *

  Dying, the big black wheezed out his story to the officers while Betty and I sat in the background shuddering at our narrow escape.

  Bixby, a scientist of renown, had been dismissed from his post at one of the great universities because of his fantastic theories and radical experiments.

  An anthropologist and biological chemist, Bixby had been obsessed by the idea of fusing blood of powerful lower animals with that of white women—to build up the racial stamina, weakened by the artificialities of modern life.

  If there’d been any basis of fact for this obsession, the secret had died with him. But it was known that if the transfusions had proved successful, Bixby had intended selling the discovery to one of Europe’s madmen, so that the blood of the jungle would aid the mothers of a dictator nation to produce more cannon fodder.

  Finding the old house in the foothills, he had purchased it and, by means of advertisements in metropolitan newspapers, had attracted several girls to the isolated spot under the guise of housekeepers. Once they were in his power, he had gone ahead with his diabolical schemes. All had died under his experiments save one—a half-witted creature little above the animals herself.
It was she the gorilla had killed; then escaped from the enclosure with the body, throwing it in the woods where Betty and I had found it.

  Bixby had given up all hope of recapturing the ape when our sudden arrival and its unholy desire for Betty had drawn the creature back to the house, where Bixby had trapped it Our wine had been drugged and Bixby, fired by the thought that we might be trailed, had decided to rush the experiment that very night.

  Only the sudden lust for Betty on the part of the black himself had halted the diabolical crime.

  * * * *

  Several years have passed. Betty and I are very happy. But the horror of what we went through on our wedding night is still implanted in our minds. At night, when the wind howls, I note that my wife draws a bit closer to me, although she says that she is not frightened. Her uncle writes us that people still talk in whispers of the insane scientist who lived in the old mansion in the foothills. Betty and I never discuss our adventure.

  We want to forget.

  BLOOD-BAIT FOR HUNGRY MERMAIDS, by John Wallace

  The afternoon was grey, cheerless, and suffused by a miasma of melancholy. The sea seemed to whisper mournfully of inscrutable mysteries within its depths. My big white cabin cruiser bobbed listlessly upon the Florida inlet, as if even it, an inanimate thing of wood and metal, felt the depressive influences of this day.

  I crossed over to starboard, where Jack Wilson was helping the two girls with their fishing tackle. Wilson was an artist who spent six months of each year here in his villa on the East Coast. Moody, dark, saturnine, he had always impressed me as having strange wells of morbidity within his spirit. Today he was unusually morose, and I knew the reason why.

  “I suppose we may as well return and look at the stuffed fish in the game room,” I said. “They just aren’t hungry out here today.”

  “It is a poor day,” said Pamela. “An odd day.” She shivered slightly, looked up at me. And forced a smile with her beautiful brown eyes. Her hair was golden, her body a gorgeous tan. Men’s hearts could well be excused for pounding wildly in her proximity.

  From the corner of my eye I saw Wilson’s eye smolder, saw his hand clench involuntarily, saw him take a deep breath. He was jealous, certainly, and he didn’t want to show it because I never had shown jealousy to him. I actually liked the man in a way, for he was a first rate artist. It wasn’t altogether impersonal generosity on my part which made me invite him on fishing trips and to house parties where Pamela could divide her time between us: it was simply the knowledge that intelligent women dislike jealous men—and that the surest way for a man to lose the woman he loves is to display jealousy.

  * * * *

  I’D given Pamela every chance to choose Wilson, if she wanted him. And the result was that she gradually came to favor me. I didn’t gloat in this knowledge, nor even show it. I assumed an easy, friendly attitude about the whole thing. But Wilson, being I suspected, tempestuous as well as temperamental, had been less successful in hiding his feelings. He never yet had allowed his jealousy to explode, but he had given those slight indications of it a number of times.

  “I wanted to catch a barracuda,” Lucy complained. She was nineteen, blonde and pretty. Pamela’s sister. Unofficially, Wilson was escorting her, but it was plain enough whom his thoughts were on.

  I went for’ard and told Hawkins: “Heave to. We’re going in.”

  “Aye, sir,” Hawkins said. He was about forty, scar-faced, and surly. He could handle the boat. But sometimes, when he looked right through both girls, I wasn’t sure it was sensible to keep the man around.

  Forsythe was reeling in his tackle on the port side. A big, handsome man, greying at the temples. And my new partner in business since the death of my father three weeks past. John Forsythe had been my father’s partner in a large wholesale establishment in Philadelphia. My father had shot himself in his study, in a fit of despondency. His health and mind had been failing for several years. It had been as much a shock to John Forsythe as it had been to me. It’s hard to be business partner and friend to a man for ten years and then have it end that way. I’d invited him to come down to Florida with me for a month. A change of scene is always the best antidote for grief.

  The boat headed in for shore and as we passed Mermaid’s Rock, Lucy pointed and said: “Those mermaids are so contrary! They never appear when anybody’s looking—except for a couple of crazy natives! Folk tales are stupid, but interesting, things.”

  If I had known the portent of those words!

  Mermaid’s Rock was a flat plateau jutting out from a shallow part of the cove, on the south. There was a local superstition that every twenty years or so a group of mermaids returned to the rock to bask in the moonlight. The story was so common around there that we paid no attention to it anymore.

  The sun had set when the boat touched shore and the clouds began to split to let a few stars and a fragment of moon through.

  I went down into the big cabin, pulled the cork from a nearly full bottle of port, filled some glasses and came up on deck. “To mellow the day’s hard luck, and to better luck next time,” I said, passing the glasses around and sitting down. It was pleasant sitting there in the cool of the evening. We sipped and breathed deep in the semi-dark, relaxed and chatted.

  After awhile I arose and started for’ard to find Hawkins and give him instructions for going over the boat. And that was the last thing I remembered for some time.

  The deck arose suddenly and slapped me hard in the face.…

  When I awoke it was because somebody was pouring cold water in my face and shaking me vigorously. I opened my eyes to see the stars and the moonlight among fleecy clouds which drifted eerily overhead. My head throbbed with a great ache.

  “Come with me, Barton, now! The fish! The fish are biting. Beautiful fish! We shall catch them!”

  It was Jack Wilson, I saw, who spoke to me. His dark eyes were alight with a fierce, primitive light. He pointed out toward Mermaid’s Rock. He jerked me to my feet, quite beside himself with excitement.

  “I’ll come!” I heard myself say. “Fish? Did you say the fish are biting? I love to fish!”

  “Then come!” Wilson half dragged me ashore, dragged me a furlong around the cove to where the shoreline dipped down to Mermaid’s Rock. The man’s enthusiasm had a strange contagion. I reeled along beside him, my heart pounding, with a strange feeling that I was walking on air. We went down over the dip toward Mermaid’s Rock.

  Bizarre! The scene? Incredible! And yet—very real.

  * * * *

  Sitting on the rock with stout fishing lines in their hands were Hawkins and a silly-faced hulk of a youth who had huge protruding teeth and a mass of long unruly corn-colored hair. The latter was baiting a great hook on the end of his line with something. As we scrambled up on the rock to join them, this monstrous creature threw his hook far out into the water with a wild atavistic yell.

  Swimming around out there were three mermaids, rising and dipping gently in the surf.

  Their faces were unmistakably girls’ faces. Their full white breasts were also those of the human female. But their tails—scaly, bluish, finned—were as unmistakably piscatorial.

  “I’ve got lines!” Wilson exclaimed. “And bait. This is a chance we have but once in twenty years. They like roast pork for bait. I had a hard time getting this.”

  “It was good you could get it,” I heard myself say, and I could feel my heart thumping madly against my ribs with cruel desire. I noted that the hooks floated in the water. There was a big cork on the near side of each.

  I hurled my hook out into the water and it landed near a blonde mermaid. She saw it, turned swiftly, smelled the bait and began to nibble.

  With a cruel subtle technique I maneuvered the hook and, as the mermaid opened her mouth for a full bite of the pork, I jerked the hook into her mouth. The sharp barbs cut through each cheek. She screamed—whether in pain or masochistic ecstasy I could not determine—and threshed in the water.

 
; Ruthlessly I bore back on the line, hauled it in hand over hand, slowly but surely. She flailed, beat at the hook, cried a weird song of agony as I pulled her in toward the rock. The half-witted youth grabbed for my line to help me and I slapped him roughly, snarled at him.

  I drew the mermaid in until her arms touched the rock. I reached down and grasped her blonde wet tresses, dragged her up on the rock. I was not careful how I withdrew the bloody hook from her mouth.

  She gasped, her blue eyes filled with a strange hungry light. Suddenly she reached out with her teeth, sunk them into my wrist, while the scaly fishlike lower part of her body threshed to and fro on the rock. I yelled, tried to jerk my wrist away. Then Wilson drew a knife from his belt, stabbed the scaly lower part of her body. She opened her mouth to scream and I jerked my wrist away furiously.

  “She shall bite no more!” Wilson exclaimed and jerked a sheaf of little silver wires from his belt, gesturing to me.

  “I shall assist you—but how?” I asked.

  “You shall place your knee upon her stomach and hold her head prone upon the stone,” a somber voice behind me said. “For that is as Mr. Wilson desires it.”

  I turned about and Forsythe stood there, his eyes alight strangely; and there was a gory bruise on one side of his head.

  “That’s so,” said Wilson. “I discovered these mermaids and I brought the equipment. Hold her head down.”

  I placed my knee against her stomach, held her head down solidly against the rock.

  Wilson grasped her full sensual lips, jabbed a large needle through them cruelly, making a series of holes through each lip, about one-sixteenth of an inch apart. The mermaid writhed in pain, made guttural sounds in her throat. Wilson put the little strands of wire through the holes, twisted them tight, sealed her mouth most effectively.

  * * * *

  I gloated in the feel of her warm white body under my knee as she writhed and struggled ineffectually. Overhead the clouds floated like fantastic ghosts, and the half-moon cutting into the soft whiteness of one of those fleecy clouds was a symbol to make my pulses pound. I well knew that within every man there is a vestigial beast, a merciless lustful monster eager to prey upon the weak innocent softness of femininity. And this mermaid was at least half human; she seemed, indeed, more human than fish, for her body was warm-blooded, pulsing with life and emotion.