The Pulp Fiction Megapack

by Robert Leslie Bellem

  The eerie dimness of the night’s light, the ceaseless mysterious murmur of the sea, the strangeness of the endeavor—all these were very real and accepted. It was the most natural thing in the world, this adventure.

  “And now the catch must be cleaned and hung up,” Wilson murmured, his dark eyes glittering. “I think I shall stuff this specimen and keep her as an object of art, for she is a thing of beauty.”

  He jabbed his long needle into the upper part of one of her full white breasts. The mermaid writhed with tremendous vigor, moaned, flung her arms about my neck and clasped me to her soft body as protection against the onslaught of the needle.

  I reveled in the shuddering thrill of her body for a moment, felt jealous possessiveness surging up within me like coals of fire. Her blue eyes opened wide with fear and pain, looked pleadingly into mine.

  “This catch is my own!” I snarled at Wilson, turning my head toward him.

  “And the idea, the discovery and the preparations are mine!” he said hotly. “I shall have my choice!”

  He grabbed my head, jerked me away. I sprawled on the rock panting angrily.

  Forsythe strode toward Wilson, as the latter threaded the wire through the mermaid’s breast. Forsythe glanced at the halfwit, who had just hooked a brunette mermaid. “The supply is running low, Master,” Forsythe said to Wilson. “Shall I attempt to drive a further supply within reach of your lines?”

  “Yes!” Wilson snapped. “As many as you can!” Forsythe came back to me. “Do not be angry.

  Perhaps I may send you some even more beautiful.”

  I arose, and Forsythe walked off the rock and around the rim of the cove to where it turned southward out of my sight perhaps a hundred yards away.

  I returned to Wilson and the mermaid. I felt strangely subdued, and my head spun with an odd dizziness. I seemed half in one world, half in another, somehow.

  “Hold her!” Wilson snapped.

  Obeying automatically, I watched as he pierced the top of the mermaid’s other breast and threaded the wire through. He put half a dozen wires through the holes, to give strength, enough to support her weight.

  “And now—” Wilson produced a sharp knife, poised the point of it between the mermaid’s bleeding breasts and with sadistic fiendishness he raked the point of the knife slowly downward, cutting through the skin and into the pulsing flesh of her. A rivulet of blood appeared, and she squirmed tortuously, moaned deep in her throat. “The heart of a fish is wonderful when fried,” Wilson murmured.

  I stared. Everything was hazy for a moment. And then I observed the halfwit dragging his brunette mermaid up onto the rock at his feet. He reached down for her gleefully. I sprang up, leaped toward him, to grab her away from him.

  For suddenly I seemed to have re-achieved some degree of sanity. I stared about me dazedly. The same sea, the same erotic moon above, the same fleecy clouds, the same mermaids and the same men. And yet—my brain. My brain was different! My thoughts were their normal selves again!

  The full horror of the scene struck me with a force that sent chills coursing over me, made everything go black before my eyes for an instant. When I regained my vision and started for the halfwit again, I was amazed to see the brunette mermaid bounding up onto the rock, grasping him in her arms, biting him savagely on the throat. The halfwit keeled over backwards, yelling in surprise, his protruding teeth and upstanding straw hair making him look a thing of grotesque terror.

  My shocked eyes turned back to Wilson. He was slitting the blonde mermaid’s stomach clear down to her thighs, through the scales.

  And—before my astonished eyes the outer scaled skin of the fish half-parted to reveal the soft white skin and stomach of a human female!

  The sight seemed only to whet the morbid passions of Wilson. He jerked the knife downward avidly, savagely. The fish skin split to her knees, revealing graceful young thighs…

  “Wilson, you swine! What are you doing!” I cried, striding toward him.

  He looked up at me, snarled: “She’s mine! Keep away!”

  I sprang at him, swung a fist hard. It grazed his jaw and he swung his knife, which barely missed my throat. The effort threw him momentarily off balance and I swung my fist hard again. This time it landed on his jaw, knocked him backwards gasping.

  He struck his head on the great brown rock, moaned, rolled his eyes, and stretched out limp. I looked around wildly.

  Hawkins, the scar-faced seaman, was angling for the third mermaid, unsuccessful in hooking her as yet. Hearing the scuffle, he turned and looked at me, and when he saw the hateful gleam in my eyes, his face twisted into a lustful leer. “Fine fishin’, ain’t it?”

  “No more, it isn’t!” I snapped. “Hawkins, what do you know about this? What happened to us on the boat? How did we get into this incredible mix-up?”

  “What boat?” Hawkins asked. He looked at me suspiciously. I saw there was a big swelling on the back of his head. “Leave me alone,” he said. “I’m tryin’ to catch me a mermaid. An’ when I catch ’er I’m goin’ to see if they’re made like women. I always wondered about that—”

  “You’ll do nothing of the sort!” I grated. “My God! What is this—a mad nightmare? Have we all gone crazy?”

  “You must be, if you think you can stop me from fishin’,” Hawkins said. He pointed suddenly southward: “Look! There comes another’n—a young blonde one!”

  I turned and stared where he pointed. Certainly enough, she was young and blonde, beautiful in the moonlight. She swam from around the corner of the cove south of us. The moon was unclouded now and I stared in amazement. Almost beyond chance of mistake, that mermaid was Lucy, Pamela’s sister!

  And if Lucy were there, Pamela couldn’t be far away—and what was happening to her?

  I gazed around me, the chill within me multiplied a hundredfold. I remembered pitching forward on the boat, I vaguely remembered being awakened by Wilson and coming here and accepting this bizarre scene and the activity as a matter of course. And then my sanity had returned—suddenly, in a dizzy moment of shock. But these others were still out of their minds, plainly enough.

  What strange madness was this?

  Staring at the halfwit still struggling furiously with the berserk brunette only added to my confusion. Whence came these mermaids—these crazed girls, rather, disguised as mermaids? Had they all been doped, crazed by drugs? Then why, and by whom?

  My first thought was of Wilson, jealous, knowing that he was losing Pamela. He had said that the project was his, the equipment his, the idea his.…

  Who else?

  I strode over to him swiftly, looked at him. Unconscious, his face was still contorted evilly, lustfully. I knelt, searched him rapidly.

  In his coat pocket there was a hypodermic, with just a trace of light fluid in it. There was a small printed label on the rubber bulb. I held it close to my eyes.

  Scopolamine.

  The liquid hypnotism! That was what this strange drug was called by the medical profession, and in my work in the wholesale drug business I knew it well. Scopolamine—perhaps the most amazing drug thus far known to man. It made virtual slaves of people who are heavily injected with it. Caused them to follow commands implicitly, to follow pre-instruction and detailed plans of action and conduct over the full period of its sway—this period varying with the individual and the quantity administered. The drug had the further astounding property of killing all memory of action and thought engaged in while under its influence, if the dose was sufficiently heavy.

  Speedily I jerked some of the silver wires from Wilson’s belt, bound him securely hand and foot with it. Then I looked about me for a moment in indecision. Where was Pamela? That was the thought burning hotly through my brain. If that blonde mermaid swimming this way were Lucy, as I was certain it was, then Pamela must be around that bend to the south.

  I hesitated no longer. I ran off the big rock onto the shore rim, sprinted southward as rapidly as I might, not knowing what to expect, bu
t following my instincts blindly—to find and to protect the girl I loved, if she were in danger.…

  I must have been a weird sight; I, Bob Barton, running wildly in the moonlight along the rim of the sea, running like some mad creature of another world, with the soft pounding of the waves furnishing a musical background—the music of tragedy.

  I rounded the bend, stopped abruptly, stared down. And my blood seemed to turn to ice within me.

  For my glorious Pamela lay down there on the beach, moaning in a delirium of ecstasy as John Forsythe, an evil glitter in his eyes, stripped the last filmy silken garment from her lovely young body. She moved sensuously on the sands as Forsythe stood above her.

  “You shall be the most beautiful mermaid of them all, Pamela,” he was gloating. “I shall see that your lover is the man who catches you, who wires your lovely mouth forever shut, who cuts from you your vital organs. And then he shall die and the police shall come and they shall never understand, for I shall be in the clear. You will love that—no?”

  “Yes, yes!” Pamela moaned.

  “Lift your gorgeous legs, Pamela,” he said.

  In his hand was the scaly mermaid skin, similar to those which clothed the lower halves of the other girls. Pamela obediently lifted her legs and Forsythe slipped the pseudo fish skin over them. There was a tight elastic to hold it above her hips.

  The sight paralyzed me for those moments as I stood above them on the rim-rock staring down. The white sands…the eerie moonlight…the amoral detachment of the pounding sea.…

  I jumped, a dozen or more feet straight down, and I landed squarely on Forsythe’s broad back We hurtled to the sand together. Flailing, lashing out with fists and feet, releasing hoarse oaths, plowing up the sand.

  My advantage lay in the surprise of my attack. Forsythe was a bigger man than I, but it was a sudden shock to him and my fury was that of a madman. Our hands found each other’s throats, we rolled over several times, then I drew back my right fist, hit him savagely on the unprotected jaw twice.

  Forsythe shuddered spasmodically, rolled his eyes, and lay still.

  I staggered to my feet, disheveled, my clothes in disarray, my hair a tangled black mass full of sand. I turned to look for Pamela, and saw her crawling toward the sea, her full young breasts making marks in the soft sand and the fish fin leaving a deeper, thinner trail.

  In a frenzy of fear, I ran after her, grasped her in my arms. “Pamela! It’s Bob! Don’t you know me?”

  Her answer to that was to throw her arms around my neck and to bite me savagely. I twisted her face away, carried her struggling and moaning. I tied her wrists behind her with a fragment of her lingerie, tied a wide strip of it tightly around her mouth. I bound Forsythe hand and foot with his shoelaces.

  I carried Pamela part way back to Mermaid’s Rock. Then, looking down at the sea, I saw Lucy below, swimming strongly, and no more than a rod away from Hawkin’s cruel hook. I didn’t hesitate. I dropped Pamela and I dived off the shallow rock shoreline, swimming as fast as possible. Lucy turned to look at me, her blue eyes glittering.

  “Lucy! come with me!” I reached out and grasped her arm. She clasped the other arm suddenly around my neck, and we both went under.

  Lucy was half-drowned when I dragged her up onto the rocks, and there was a great roaring in my ears. I lay her face down between two boulders, worked enough water out of her lungs so that she might breathe freely.

  * * * *

  My actions were a blur for the next few minutes. I recall going up to the parked automobile, driving up to my villa and phoning the police in the nearest village. I hurried back down to the rock, in time to keep the halfwit from being killed by the berserk brunette mermaid. When Hawkins came at me in a jealous rage for jerking the line from his hands, I tripped him, batted his head against the rock until he was unconscious.

  The police came presently, stared in amazement. I helped them load the crazed and the wounded into automobiles. The blonde mermaid, who had been cut by Wilson’s knife, was nearly dead. Eventually she recovered, never knowing what had happened to her.

  Nobody except myself and Forsythe remembered, the next morning. I, because I was the last to be injected with the scopolamine by Forsythe—and his supply was nearly gone from the hypo by then, so that I received a much smaller dose.

  Chemical tests proved that he alone had not been injected, which was proof enough of his guilt. And the police finally broke him down so that he confessed:

  He had murdered my father—making it look like suicide. For several years, Forsythe had been looting the business, and he feared discovery and a prison sentence. My father being in feeble health and mental condition, Forsythe had figured to kill him and falsify the books, so that he could buy my half of the firm for a pittance. But I had shown a business alertness that worried him. He maneuvered me into inviting him down to Florida with me.

  The man’s mind was crazed sadistically from fear and consciousness of guilt. Having been down to our villa before, he knew the story of the mermaids.

  He doped the port wine with laudanum to knock us all out. While we were out, he injected us with the scopolamine. Hawkins, he had hit over the head, when the seaman found me on deck and was kneeling over me trying to revive me. Only the fact that he injected me last, and lightly, saved us. He planted the hypo on Wilson to throw the guilt on him, talked Wilson, in his hypnotic state, into thinking it really was Wilson’s idea.

  The fish costumes to create the mermaids he had bought anonymously at a costumer’s house in New York, and had brought them and the other items with him in the bottom of a trunk.

  As for the three original mermaids and the halfwit: Forsythe knew the three girls bathed nightly in the nude on a strip of beach a quarter mile north of the cove. He had made furtive trips in the night to locate them. He had also located the halfwit, peeping lasciviously at the nude girls from behind a nearby fringe of bushes. He had promised the halfwit his choice of the girls if he’d sneak up and jab each girl with a hypo. The halfwit had done this, then Forsythe took the hypo and jabbed the halfwit, forced all four to come back to the boat, where he proceeded to inject his evil commands into submissive brains.

  He intended to have his sadistic fun, watching the girls be mutilated. When sated, he would kill us all except the girls, and run for the police, screaming about a murderous orgy—with the guilt all pointing at Wilson. That done, Forsythe’s mad brain figured, he would have no further trouble.…

  I alone of the living have any memory of that ghastly night’s horrors. Thank God that Pamela will never suffer. The police and I withheld the facts from her.

  To this day Pamela looks at me oddly when I shudder at the sight of a fish, when I refuse to eat the meat of one, when I refuse to permit one in the house.

  She cannot understand the reason. Nor why I never again shall desire to go fishing…an activity which is to me the most gruesome sport in all the world.

  SHIP OF THE GOLDEN GHOUL, by Lazar Levi

  Blood-Drenched twilight crept stealthily over the wind-rippled waters. Bleak islands lifted skeleton ribs to hide the ocean from the bay. Craggy cliffs, darkling at the base and peaked with gore, hemmed in a foaming welter of surf. A narrow channel led through toothed rocks to the doubtful shelter of the cove.

  The small boat with its single mast drove furiously through the incarnadined sea. The white sail fluttered like a wounded bird.

  The helmsman swung his tiller with a practiced hand. His keen tanned face was strained and anxious; his eyes were all for the tortuous stretch of still water ahead. On either side lay death. He dared not look behind.

  But the girl, crouching aft, peered fearfully back at the islands they had just rounded. Her oval face, enshrined in windswept, blue-black hair, was drained of blood, her eyes were wide and staring, her curved red lips parted. The spray roared over the boat, drenched her slacks and close-fitting jersey. The wool clung to her young form, and lifted into prominence the tumultuous heaving of her firm breasts
.

  “There it is again,” she screamed suddenly. “What?” Bruce Howell flung into the wind.

  “The schooner!” Julia Hunt forced through clenched lips.

  “You’ve got a bad case of jitters, Julia,” Howell said with an attempt at lightness. “After all, that boat has as much right on the seas and in this bay as we have. Ten to one it’s a yachting party.”

  But his face, carefully averted from the girl, belied his words. He swung heavily on the helm to catch the last ounce of wind. The craft heeled, righted itself, and went on with a rush.

  “Hurry! Hurry!” Julia moaned. “It’s been chasing us for half an hour. If it catches us! A ghost ship with a dead man for a pilot!”

  Bruce set his teeth. He, too, had caught that dread glimpse when the strange schooner seemingly materialized out of thin air to bar their path to the outer sea.

  Only skillful handling avoided imminent collision. Howell shouted angrily as the gaunt hull slid noiselessly by, a boat’s length away. The words gurgled in his throat, died suddenly.

  For the two-master, every sail set and bellying in the wind, was deserted. Not a man leaned over the rail at his shouted objurgations. Not a man? Had the ship been entirely deserted, Julia would not have screamed and cowered; he lost momentary control of his boat.

  For, standing stiffly at the wheel, grasping the spokes with rigid fingers, staring straight ahead with hideous eyeless glare, was a corpse.

  The clothes that covered his bony frame were dripping and slimy with mold, as though they had rotted in the depths of Davy Jones’ Locker. Lank, straight hair plastered close against the shapeless face of one who had been drowned a long time. The flesh was ripped away from the gaunt stark arms.

  A dead man steering a dead ship!