The Satyr's Head: Tales of Terror

by Campbell, Ramsey

  I shuddered and turned away from the window. A minute later I was back at the bar and Casserman came over.

  ‘You see him?’ he asked.

  I took a long drink and grinned at him rather foolishly. I suppose it was some kind of reaction from the experience I’d just had. ‘How could I see him?’ I replied. ‘He went into the men’s room and disappeared!’

  Casserman scowled at me. ‘I was up near the front; I didn’t see him go out.’

  I drained my glass and shoved it across the bar. ‘Hell, one of us needs glasses then!’

  I left late, a bit the worse for wear and went home. I didn’t sleep well.

  The next night when I stopped in at Casserman’s, Fred wasn’t there. His place at the end of the bar was empty.

  When he got a free minute, Casserman came over. ‘I’m worried about that little runt. Probably lyin’ sick in some flea-bag flophouse.’

  I sipped my beer. ‘Can you get his address?’

  Casserman scratched his head. ‘Maybe. Rick Platz used to know all that race-track bunch. Maybe I’ll call him tomorrow. No use tonight.’

  ‘By the way,’ I said, ‘do you know the runt’s name—I mean, besides ‘Fred?’

  Casserman shook his head. ‘Cripes. I don’t. He just never told me. But Rick probably knows.’

  A late assignment kept me from Casserman’s the next night. The following evening I stopped in as usual.

  Casserman sliced the foam off a beer and set it before me. ‘I got the runt’s address,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Rick didn’t know at first but he found out and called me back. Just as I figured, it’s a kind of flophouse. Eleven Buren Street, around the corner from Water Street. The runt has a room there. His last name, Rick says, is Amodius.’

  ‘I’ll look him up tomorrow,’ I promised.

  Since I didn’t have to report to the city room until four in the afternoon, I had plenty of time the next day. I drove down Water Street, turned at Buren and parked just around the corner in front of a four-storey brick tenement-type building. It was the kind of place which had seen better days fifty years ago. The bricks were black with soot and grime, the window panes cracked and pasted together with tape, the front sidewalk a litter of blown papers and broken bottles.

  It was situated in a seedy, waterfront neighborhood and I didn’t like leaving my car, but I had little choice.

  The doorbell obviously didn’t work so I just clumped down a dimly lighted entrance hall until I ran into someone—a wild-looking teenager carrying two gallon jugs.

  He shrugged impatiently when I asked for Fred Amodius. ‘I dunno no names here. See Mr. Catallo.’ He nodded toward a nearby door. I knocked on it.

  There was a stir inside and an enormous fat man wearing a satiny pink bathrobe opened the door. He took a swipe at his scattered hair and scowled... ‘Yeah?’

  When I mentioned Fred Amodius, I saw the blood rising up through his bristly jowls. ‘That lousy punk! You’re too late, mister! They dragged him out of here yesterday. The lousy punk!’

  ‘He was sick?’ I asked.

  He grinned evilly. ‘Yeah, he was sick all right! So sick he stunk up the place! He musta croaked up there in that closet a coupla weeks ago. The lousy punk! I let him have the place for nothing—over a year now. Said he’d take out the garbage and stuff. Clean up a little. The lousy punk! A month now and he ain’t done nothing! Good riddance!’

  ‘Can I see his room?’ I asked.

  His scowl deepened and he hesitated. Finally he shrugged. ‘Sure, if you can stand the stink. Top floor, last room at the back, left. Leave the window open.’ He peered at me with suspicion, ‘Whatta you lookin’ for? You a relative? There’s nothin’ in the room. That dope didn’t leave a dime.’

  I told him a distant relative of Amodius had sent me to check the room. He didn’t believe me but he let me go up anyway.

  I was starting up the stairs when he called out, ‘Lousy punk!’ I had the feeling, this time, that he meant me instead of Amodius, but I didn’t make an issue of it. I supposed he was miffed because I hadn’t slipped him a bill.

  At the end of the fourth-floor hallway, I saw a tiny door on the left and swung it open. Catallo was right; it was a closet. An undersize cot, a kitchen chair and a wooden box comprised the furniture. The cot was covered with a stained mattress, which looked as if the rats had stampeded in it. The only other things in the room were some newspapers and magazines strewn on the floor and one pair of torn socks tossed in a corner.

  The room gave off a sickly-sweetish odour, but it wasn’t as bad as I feared. The single window was wide open.

  I glanced into the wooden box. It was empty. I closed the door and got out of there.

  I reported to Casserman that night. He shook his head, ‘I feel bad about it. We waited too long. Maybe we could have done something. But that slob is all wet. The runt wasn’t lyin’ dead in that room for any two weeks. We saw him here just a few nights ago.’

  I sipped my beer thoughtfully. ‘Well, Catallo lost track of time, that’s all.’

  Casserman gave me an enigmatic troubled look and then moved down the bar to wait on a new customer.

  I should have dismissed the business from my mind right then and there—I had plenty of other problems to worry about—but I kept fretting about it.

  After all, I had detected an odour in the room.

  I didn’t sleep well that night. The next day I went to see the autopsy surgeon. Not the coroner, but the doctor who had actually performed the autopsy. For the average citizen this might have proved sticky, but a newspaperman does have certain advantages.

  I met him in a little anteroom near the morgue, a Doctor Seilman. He was still wearing his white hospital coat but he had taken off his mask and gloves. He nodded.

  He remembered the cadaver of the runt, Fred Amodius, very well.

  ‘One of the worst cases of malnourishment I’ve seen,’ he told me. ‘He was a walking skeleton.’

  ‘What was the cause of death?’ I asked him.

  ‘We put down pneumonia as the immediate cause. But he also had a massive viral infection not necessarily related to the lung condition. Beyond that, he had bleeding ulcers, cirrhosis of the liver and probably a weak heart. Besides the malnutrition.’

  ‘How long had he been dead—before he was found I mean.’

  Seilman didn’t hesitate. ‘Three weeks.’

  I stared at him. ‘I don’t think that’s possible.’

  He shrugged. ‘Well, we don’t pretend to pin it right to the day. Three weeks, twenty days, eighteen days, something like that.’

  I felt perspiration rolling down my face. ‘What, Dr. Seilman, would you say was the absolute minimum?’

  He looked at me curiously and thought a minute. ‘I’d say the absolute minimum would be sixteen days. There was no evidence of foul play.’

  I thanked him and left.

  I can’t even remember what went on in the city room that night. All I could think about was Catallo’s phrase, “croaked up there in that closet a coupla weeks ago”. And then Dr. Seilman’s “I’d say the absolute minimum would be sixteen days”.

  It didn’t add up. Nothing added up. Because both Casserman and I had seen the runt that last night—and that was only three days before they carried him out of Catallo’s closet, less than three full days actually.

  I told Casserman that night. He swore. ‘Cripes! Somebody’s loco! We saw him sittin’ there. The both of us can’t be crazy!’

  ‘It looks like somebody is,’ I said.

  He leaned across the bar later in the evening. ‘Don’t laugh now,’ he said frowning, ‘but I’ve been thinkin’. I mean the way the runt didn’t drink his beer and stopped leavin’ a dime. Could both of us been seein’ a ghost?’

  I glanced toward the end of the bar. ‘Well—could be. But I believe he just kept going longer than they figured anybody could with his ailments. Will power, you know.’

  Casserman nodded. ‘Yeah, maybe.’ He wasn�
��t convinced and neither was I. I kept remembering that sickish-sweet odour up in the closet room.

  Even then, I didn’t drop the business. I tried to find out all I could about Fred Amodius. There were pitifully few facts available.

  Over a period of several weeks I picked up scattered bits of information. Amodius had been an orphan, kicked around from one foster home to another. Sometime in his early teens he had wound up in the street. His formal schooling must have been minimal.

  He had wanted to be a jockey but he had never made it—never even came close to it. One rainy day I stood at the big local race track talking to a stable “boy” (he was about sixty).

  He picked up a currycomb and shrugged. ‘Yeah, I remember the guy, a faded, funny-lookin’ little character. Wanted to ride. Everybody just laughed at him. He didn’t have nothin’.’

  He shook his head. ‘He gave up, I guess. Finally tried a stable job, but they kicked him out after a couple days.’ He looked up at me. ‘You know what, mister?’

  ‘No, what?’

  ‘He frightened the horses! The boss told him “Get lost!” The jerk!’

  That’s about all I could find out. I suppose there wasn’t much more to find out. Amodius drifted around the track, panhandled and once in a while picked up some kind of odd job. How he lived as long as he did is a mystery. They put his age down at thirty-four and although there was some uncertainty about it, that must have been fairly close.

  He lived in flophouses and cheap hotels, sometimes slept in doorways and wound up in Catallo’s miserable little closet room.

  So far as I could discover, he had no friends. Women must have been rare, or perhaps non-existent, in his life. One informant told me: ‘I never saw that little creep with a dame.’ He may have spent some time with a few of the lower-rung prostitutes. There’s no way of telling. God knows he didn’t have much to offer a woman.

  As the stark, pitifully dreary outline of his existence began to take form, I saw why that pale, shadowy, pathetic figure had clung so long to his usual place at the end of Casserman’s bar.

  He had been an individual with virtually no emotional life. All his years he had known a shabby, bleak and isolated existence. He must have hungered for life, without ever finding it. Hunger, that was the keynote. Hunger, remorseless and unremitting. Hunger for love, for affection, for recognition, for acceptance, for status—for anything.

  Having no inner emotional life at all, the thought of being hurled into the detached world of the mind, of spirit, must have been, to him, the ultimate horror. How could he survive in the world not of flesh, he must have subconsciously asked himself, when he had nothing of the spirit to remember?

  He must have looked on death, not as release, but as a last unending loneliness. With his inward emptiness, his non-life as it were, his terrible emotional deprivation, he must have neared death with a sense of fearful desperation.

  Death loomed before him as an indescribable abyss of enduring darkness, of ultimate isolation.

  If we survive death, we survive, probably, on our memories, on our emotional experiences and recollections, on the relationships which enriched our lives.

  Amodius had none, or almost none. The outer darkness must have filled him with inconceivable terror.

  And that, I think, is why he lingered at Casserman’s bar. That is why we saw him there nearly two and a half weeks after he was supposed to be dead. That is why we saw him there, or thought we saw him there, when his cadaver was lying in Catallo’s closet.

  Casserman’s bar was probably the nearest thing to “home” which he had known in many years. If he was not exactly cherished in the establishment, he was certainly not challenged. He was never badgered, nor annoyed, nor made conspicuous. At the worst he was ignored. Casserman himself always treated him courteously; some of the rest of us nodded to him.

  I am convinced that some element of him, some residue as it were, anchored itself desperately to Casserman’s even after the formal death of the flesh. It clung with inconceivable loneliness and longing to the one spot where it had known a degree of warmth, of toleration, of familiarity and friendliness.

  It left with enormous reluctance. It was torn away, I suppose, as the tenuous threads which held it temporarily at last yielded to the irresistible tug of the terrible outer gulfs.

  Possibly its terror generated a kind of energy which permitted it to move about in a body which no longer supported life as we normally know it.

  But as I recall the shadowy something which I glimpsed receding down the railroad tracks that last night, as I remember the sense of insupportable desolation which swept over me, I think not. I believe the thing which Casserman and I saw on those final nights was sheer spectre.

  At least, I am convinced, it was not of this earth.

  AUNT HESTER by Brian Lumley

  I SUPPOSE MY AUNT Hester Lang might best be described as the “black sheep” of the family. Certainly no one ever spoke to her, or of her—none of the elders of the family, that is—and if my own little friendship with my aunt had been known I am sure that would have been stamped on too; but of course that friendship was many years ago.

  I remember it well: how I used to sneak round to Aunt Hester’s house in hoary Castle-Ilden, not far from Harden on the coast, after school when my folks thought I was at Scouts, and Aunt Hester would make me cups of cocoa and we would talk about newts (“efts”, she called them), frogs, conkers and other things—things of interest to small boys—until the local Scouts’ meeting was due to end, and then I would hurry home.

  We (father, mother and myself) left Harden when I was just twelve years old, moving down to London where the Old Man had got himself a good job. I was twenty years old before I got to see my aunt again. In the intervening years I had not sent her so much as a postcard (I’ve never been much of a letter-writer) and I knew that during the same period of time my parents had neither written nor heard from her; but still that did not stop my mother warning me before I set out for Harden not to “drop in” on Aunt Hester Lang.

  No doubt about it, they were frightened of her, my parents—well, if not frightened, certainly they were apprehensive.

  Now to me a warning has always been something of a challenge. I had arranged to stay with a friend for a week, a school pal from the good old days, but long before the northbound train stopped at Harden my mind was made up to spend at least a fraction of my time at my aunt’s place. Why shouldn’t I? Hadn’t we always got on famously? Whatever it was she had done to my parents in the past, I could see no good reason why I should shun her.

  She would be getting on in years a bit now. How old, I wondered? Older than my mother, her sister, by a couple of years—the same age (obviously) as her twin brother, George, in Australia—but of course I was also ignorant of his age. In the end, making what calculations I could, I worked it out that Aunt Hester and her distant brother must have been at least one hundred and eight summers between them. Yes, my aunt must be about fifty-four years old. It was about time someone took an interest in her.

  It was a bright Friday night, the first after my arrival in Harden, when the ideal opportunity presented itself for visiting Aunt Hester. My school friend, Albert, had a date—one he did not really want to put off—and though he had tried his best during the day it had early been apparent that his luck was out regards finding, on short notice, a second girl for me. It had been left too late. But in any case, I’m not much on blind dates—and most dates are “blind” unless you really know the girl—and I go even less on doubles; the truth of the matter was that I had wanted the night for my own purposes. And so, when the time came for Albert to set out to meet his girl, I walked off in the opposite direction, across the autumn fences and fields to ancient Castle-Ilden.

  I arrived at the little old village at about eight, just as dusk was making its hesitant decision whether or not to allow night’s onset, and went straight to Aunt Hester’s thatch-roofed bungalow. The place stood (just as I remembered it) at th
e Blackhill end of cobbled Main Street, in a neat garden framed by cherry trees with the fruit heavy in their branches. As I approached the gate the door opened and out of the house wandered the oddest quartet of strangers I could ever have wished to see.

  There was a humped-up, frenetically mobile and babbling old chap, ninety if he was a day; a frumpish fat woman with many quivering chins; a skeletally thin, incredibly tall, ridiculously wrapped-up man in scarf, pencil-slim overcoat, and fur gloves; and finally, a perfectly delicate old lady with a walking-stick and ear-trumpet. They were shepherded by my Aunt Hester, no different it seemed than when I had last seen her, to the gate and out into the street. There followed a piped and grunted hubbub of thanks and general genialities before the four were gone—in the direction of the leaning village pub—leaving my aunt at the gate finally to spot me where I stood in the shadow of one of her cherry trees. She knew me almost at once, despite the interval of nearly a decade.

  ‘Peter?’

  ‘Hello, Aunt Hester.’

  ‘Why, Peter Norton! My favourite young man—and tall as a tree! Come in, come in!’

  ‘It’s bad of me to drop in on you like this,’ I answered, taking the arm she offered, ‘all unannounced and after so long away, but I—’

  ‘No excuses required,’ she waved an airy hand before us and smiled up at me, laughter lines showing at the corners of her eyes and in her un-pretty face. ‘And you came at just the right time—my group has just left me all alone.’

  ‘Your “group”?’

  ‘My séance group! I’ve had it for a long time now, many a year. Didn’t you know I was a bit on the psychic side? No, I suppose not; your parents wouldn’t have told you about that, now would they? That’s what started it all originally—the trouble in the family, I mean.’ We went on into the house.

  ‘Now I had meant to ask you about that,’ I told her. ‘You mean my parents don’t like you messing about with spiritualism? I can see that they wouldn’t, of course—not at all the Old Man’s cup of tea—but still, I don’t really see what it could have to do with them.’