by Otto Penzler
FOG, LIKE A blind amorphous monster, imposed its tenuous bulk upon the city. A great grey-bellied beast, it brooded above the skyline, pushed down its clammy filaments into the canyon of the street, strangling the bleary street lamps, puffing convulsed wraiths into the dank, black alleys of the slums.
The man who sat in the sickly light from the globe above the flop-house door spoke in an alcoholic wheeze. Fear, like the imponderable pressure of the fog, had settled over this mean and evil district, and this man, for the moment, was its spokesman.
He said, sniffing as he knuckled his bulbous nose, “The p’lice don’t know nothin’ that goes on here, and people don’t give explanations that wouldn’t be believed. P’lice couldn’t do nothin’ anyhow; fightin’ things that ain’t really men, things that got no blood in their veins.”
“That’s a rather wild statement,” Dwight commented.
“You ain’t seen one of them things,” the man muttered. “I have—two of ’em. There’s more. Lame Lena that sells papers on the corner seen one last night. Knock sounds at her door. She opens it. This thing is standin’ there, ugly as a dead monkey. ‘What you want?’ Lena asks, bitin’ her gums. ‘Blood,’ the thing says. Lena slams the door and bolts it.”
“Lena may have gone a little too heavy on the sheep-dip,” Dwight suggested.
The man sucked at his greasy stub of a pipe; his rheum-clogged eyes rolled furtively over the gaseous billows of mist that choked the street. “But that ain’t all,” he said. “Curley Lennox seen one bite a dog’s throat in an alley one mornin’ ’bout sunup. The mutt howled and fought, but the Thing didn’t seem to mind. It run off though, when Curley come up. The dog was dead.”
“That’s news,” Dwight said, “when a man bites a dog.”
The jest went unapplauded. In spite of himself it gave Dwight a queer feeling. You couldn’t laugh about these matters, apparently.
“Another one bust into an opium dive,” the man went on. “I won’t say where. But the Chink had a corpse to get rid of later. The rest of ’em run off and left this feller—after they seen the Thing wouldn’t bleed no matter how much they cut him.”
“Good God!” Dwight exclaimed. “You mean, seriously . . . ?”
“Didn’t I tell you?” the man growled irately. “Didn’t I say there ain’t no blood in ’em?”
“A figure of speech, I supposed . . . ?”
“Figger of speech, hell! Listen, I seen that fight in Hongkong Charlie’s place my-self.”
“Let’s hear about that.”
The man rocked forward in his chair which leaned against the fog-sweaty building, and knocked the dottle from his pipe. “Three nights ago, it was,” he rumbled. “I’d dropped in fer a spread of chowmein and a little snifter. I sees this Thing with the dead-pan sittin’ there an’ it gives me the creeps to look at him. But I goes on eatin’.
“Next thing I know there’s a howl, an’ this Thing has grabbed a Chink kid an’ started to run out with him. Up jumps Emilio the Spick, who’s sittin’ by the door, and out comes Emilio’s knife. As slick a knife-fighter as ever cut a Gringo’s guts, that Mex. But does it do him any good? The Thing drops the kid, and they fight. The Thing’s got no weapon, so it fights with its hands clawed. Emilio cuts him to ribbons, so to speak. Face, arms, throat slashed.
“Then of a sudden Emilio jumps back, goes white, crosses himself and begins to gibber in Mexican. That was when he seen the Thing wouldn’t bleed. I seen it, too. There was a gash you could see the raw edges of—like a piece of bled beef.”
“And no blood?”
“No blood. And, mister, that Thing went out, and nobody follered it, neither. . . .”
His words trailed off. Light footsteps sounded on the clammy pavement.
DWIGHT TURNED IN the direction of the man’s bleary glance. The slender figure of a girl was materializing from the mist. She walked with lowered head and face half hidden by the collar of her smartly tailored coat, but Dwight caught a brief glimpse of black, mysterious eyes, that sent a curious glow tingling in his veins, and he noticed how the wan light from the smoky globe lay softly on the perfect texture of her skin. No harpy of the pavements, that girl!
He was wondering what could bring her into this evil district, when, to his surprise, the girl with a sort of furtive duck turned in at the flophouse doorway and mounted the stairs. He saw her trim ankles vanish in the sickly light, heard the click of her heels in the hallway above and turned back bewildered.
The man grinned. His puffy, stubble-rough jowls spread in fat folds over the frayed collar of his coat. “Surprises you, eh—to see a doll like that in here?”
“Rather,” Dwight said. “Who is she?”
The sagging shoulders shrugged.
“You’re askin’ me. Took me by surprise, too, when she come in this evening and paid fer a room. But should I ask questions? She paid; I reckon she knows her business.”
“Yes,” Dwight said abstractedly. “Still, with all due respect for your establishment . . . But look here, what’s your opinion about these monsters?”
The man screwed his flabby face into a grimace and spat. “Ugh! I don’t know. Only they ain’t human.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Somethin’—a look about ’em. Faces with a greenish gleam on the skin, like you might see on a Chinese vase, eyes so cold and empty it makes you shiver, like when you look over a high cliff . . .” He paused, his brow creased intently. “I tell you they look like them figures of dead murderers from Paley’s Waxworks come to life!”
Dwight looked sharply at him, but did not pursue his inquiries in that direction. “I’d give something to see one of your monsters,” he said.
The man looked at him narrowly; sudden suspicion gleamed in his rheumy eyes. “You ain’t a reporter?”
“No,” Dwight said, “I’m a capitalist.”
The man laughed. Dwight, too, smiled. Queerly, it happened to be the truth. He didn’t add that conducting a private detective agency was his way of escaping the boredom of an idle existence.
“You’d really like to see one of them buzzards?”
“Five dollars’ worth,” Dwight said.
Greed gleamed rawly in the man’s face. “All right,” he agreed. “But just a peek. I don’t want no disturbance—from him.”
“You’ve got one—in here?”
The man nodded, dragged his shapeless bulk upright. “Came in this afternoon. Face all muffled. But I seen the eyes—the skin. I reckon he’s sleepin’ now, if they sleep. You can take a peek at him.”
Dwight slapped a bill into the grimy palm and followed the scrape of the ragged shoes up the stairway. A dim, fly-specked bulb lighted the upper hall. It was bare of carpet and oily grime stained the floor and cracked plaster walls. The smell was the immemorial reek of such a place. Dwight stared about warily. It might be a trap; you never knew in a dive like this.
The slithering shoes paused. The landlord gripped his arm, shoved his head so close that the smell of sour alcohol was sickening. “He’s in Twenty-two,” he hissed. “We’ll go easy, mister.”
He slunk softly to the door and Dwight crept behind him. The transom was dark; there was no sound from within. The man’s warty hand was on the knob; he gave the door a little push.
“H’mm!” This time aloud. He shoved the door wide. “Empty!”
“What’s this,” Dwight growled, “a game?”
The squat man’s face was puckered with real surprise.
“So help me . . .” he began, “he ain’t come down the stairs.”
“Since he’s not human,” Dwight muttered sourly, “I suppose—”
“Don’t laugh!” the man said grimly. “He’s here—somewhere.”
Then it dawned on Dwight what was in the man’s mind.
“Damn!” he swore. “That girl! Where’s her room?”
“Twenty-six,” the man sputtered, and started forward.
Dwight followed, taking long strides on tiptoe. But t
hey didn’t reach the door. It was Dwight who grabbed the other’s arm and drew him suddenly back. He had stopped at the closed door of Twenty-five. Feeling the iron grip on his arm, the landlord sputtered, rolled his eyes.
“Jeez! What is it?”
Dwight’s features had clouded: the grip of his lean fingers tightened on the pudgy arm, “Look!” he said between gritted teeth.
“What . . . where?” The man raised his frightened eyes, stared.
The transom hung ajar, forming a dark and hazy mirror, and in the moist, distorted depths something was swimming, something like a human body which seemed to move gently with a curious volition not its own.
The man looked helplessly at Dwight; his jaw dropped, but instead of speech a flood of saliva ran out of his mouth and drooled from his pendulous under-lip. Dwight’s face was a corded brown mask; the brows dipped severely over eyes gone black and hard as lumps of basalt. A revolver had appeared in one hand; with the other he was pushing the door slowly open. Then he stopped. He felt the shaking body of the landlord, now pressed against him, stiffen with a jerk. The hair on Dwight’s neck bristled as he stared.
Between him and the open window, past which the grey and ghostly fog was boiling, the body of a man was hanging in mid-air. Headless and half naked, it dangled by its feet from a rusty iron chandelier, swaying with the gentle momentum of a dying pendulum. Directly beneath the bloody stub of a neck was a white wash-basin, and with each grotesque motion of the swinging corpse, fresh drops of the viscous, ruddy fluid were shaken down into the half-filled bowl.
There was no one else in the room.
Dwight turned. His companion, who had been gaping in speechless vertigo, now began to blubber his innocence in a terrified whimper.
“Shut up!” Dwight ordered hoarsely, and pushed past into the hall. Three long strides brought him to the door of Twenty-six. He twisted the knob. Locked. He rattled it, yelled, “Open it up!”
The hurried scrape of feet and a low muttering reached his ears. He backed away to the opposite wall, braced his thick shoulders and lunged. With a crack the flimsy lock gave, and Dwight’s body hurtled like a projectile into the room. His shins struck a chair. He sprawled, cursing his luck, snatching for the revolver which had been jarred from his hand.
Then he froze, his hand poised in mid-reach, staring. In the embrasure of the open window three heads were visible. One of them was the head of the dark-eyed girl who now held in one tense hand a black automatic. Beside, and slightly behind her, wreathed like a goblin in the swirling fog, was something which might have been a man, something which wore human garments, but whose gaping mouth was literally split from jaw to jaw, so that a purplish tongue lolled between tiers of yellow teeth dropped wide apart. And in this creature’s hand was the third head—a gory, nauseous thing, with bugging eyes and coarse red hair now twisted between the fiend’s wax-yellow fingers.
For a moment, a curious sort of horror, detached and impersonal, swallowed up all physical fear in Dwight’s mind. Then his hand moved toward the revolver a few inches away. But almost touching it, he jerked stiff again.
“Do you think I won’t shoot?” the girl asked.
Dwight thought she would. He saw the barely perceptible tightening of her finger on the trigger, and froze into immobility.
“Back to the door!” the girl ordered. “Then face about!”
Dwight obeyed. The gun crashed behind him; the light globe shattered and fell in fragments as darkness swallowed the room.
Dwight ducked, ran to the window. It opened on a fire-escape landing, and below he could make out dimly two figures descending the iron ladder into the alley. He whirled about, retrieved his revolver and climbed out. But already a car with wet top glistening through the fog was slinking out into the street.
He climbed back into the room, swung out into the hall and almost collided with the craven landlord who was creeping toward the door.
“God!” the latter swore hoarsely. “God! Wot’ll I do?”
“Call the police, you fool!” Dwight growled and shoved him aside.
A moment later he was in the mist dreary street, legging it with swift strides toward his office, a definite plan in his mind.
SELF-SCHOOLED IN A dangerous calling, Stanley Dwight had two antidotes for nerves—action and more action. He also had a system of mental discipline which served him well in circumstances like the present. And as he strode, like a tall determined phantom, through the frothing billows of fog, he brushed from his mind the morbid, disconcerting horror which clung like a foul miasma about the night’s events, and attacked the problem in a cold and analytical fashion. So by the time he had climbed the stairs, navigated the hall and swung open the door of his office he had already made up his mind as to his next move. Then he picked up the note on the desk marked “Urgent,” and frowned. It was from his office boy and sales assistant, and it read:
Old Prof. Collins has kept the phone jangling all afternoon. Is he high behind? He says are you going to let them cut his throat or aren’t you? If he’s not already croaked, you better call him.
Jimmy.
Dwight tossed the note back and swore. “Croak him!” he fumed. “What that old egotist needs is a blind bridle to keep him from breaking his neck every time a paper blows across his path!”
He turned away toward an inner door with the firm intention of going on with his other plans. “But no,” he said reflectively, and stopped. “No, he may scare himself to death. But I won’t waste much time on him!”
He went out, closed the door, clumped back into the street and hailed a taxi. The car ploughed through the sodden murk of the streets and came to a halt before a cottage on the fringes of the university campus. Dwight told the driver to wait.
Professor Collins, wearing a dressing-gown and carrying a revolver in one slightly tremulous hand, answered the door. He was a small, dumpy man, with scraggly hair fringing a pate as white and ponderous as a roc’s egg. His pink face was clean shaven and its cherubic cast belied the erratic temper and the intellect for which the eccentric scientist was noted. Dwight saw at once that the professor was at present as swollen as a toad with indignation and uneasiness. He followed the professor into his bachelor study, prepared for the outburst.
There the dumpy scientist squared off and faced him. And the outburst came.
“Well!” he exploded. “My well-being, I suppose, is a matter of small moment to the world. Still, since I have employed you to protect—”
“So they’ve written again?” Dwight inquired laconically. “Let’s see the note.”
He watched the professor as he fumbled among his papers. Pompous and egotistical! Ignorant people often took him for an ass. Better-informed people, of course, knew that the man who had startled the scientific world with his discoveries in the fields of biology and organic chemistry could scarcely be that. Dwight had been in one of his classes and was accustomed to the professor’s tantrums.
“It’s signed this time,” Professor Collins said indignantly as he thrust the sheet toward Dwight.
Dwight took it, glanced at it abstractedly, then stiffened abruptly with interest and alarm. It wasn’t the substance of the note that excited him. The order to leave his laboratory unlocked was natural enough in view of the fact that valuable supplies had already been stolen. It was the signature that caught Dwight’s eye.
The note read:
Last warning. Vacate your house for the night and leave your laboratory unlocked. What we need we will get. Disregard this order and a fate worse than death will be yours.
The Six without Blood.
Dwight looked up sharply. It had been his intention to minimize the seriousness of the thing. His real opinion had been that mischievous students had taken advantage of the professor’s nervousness since the recent robbery to play a joke on him. Now, matters had assumed a different aspect. Was it possible—this grotesquely horrible conjecture which had dawned, nebulous and half-formed, in his mind?
�
�Look here,” he said bluntly, “you haven’t come entirely clean with me in this business. What were the chemicals which were stolen?”
The professor paled, moistened dry lips nervously. “Why do you ask that?” His manner now was considerably subdued. “Maybe you know,” Dwight countered. The professor fidgeted; then, as with an effort, he brought his eyes level with the detective’s. “I see I’ll have to tell you,” he said. “I had two reasons for holding that back. First, the habit of a lifetime of guarding my incomplete experiments from a prying world. And second—” Here he paused, and a grim look hardened his mobile features—“and second, the possible consequences to society of a discovery of the properties of that compound.”
Dwight leaned forward, the muscles of his face tensing. “Be plainer,” he said curtly. “Just what do you mean?”
“I mean,” said Collins, “that if the properties of those drugs were discovered by evil minds, the very fabric of civilization would be unsafe!”
Dwight sprang to his feet scowling. “Then your damned secrecy,” he growled, “may cost a ghastly price! I don’t know what your stuff was, but I begin to suspect a connection between it and an unspeakable horror. Did it have something to do with blood?”
Professor Collins paled; his mouth popped open in astonishment. “It does indeed,” he stammered, “but how could you have known?”
“I don’t,” Dwight said, “but I imagine there are others who do. Tell me quickly what effect the stuff has.”
Professor Collins nodded, swallowed with difficulty, got up. “Great God!” he breathed. “What have I done? I knew that there were graves that should never be opened!” His words trailed off in a sort of sob. Then he straightened, clenched his hands, blinked at Dwight. “But perhaps it isn’t too late! You shall know all, the whole incredible secret. I have it all written down—a paper I was preparing. I’ll bring it.” He trotted toward a half-open door which gave on his laboratory.
The door closed behind him. Dwight took a deep breath. His head was throbbing. Thank God he had come here after all! Now he would know. Certainly Providence must have brought him here, brought him to the only man perhaps with the power to devise an antidote for the horror he had unwittingly unleashed.
