The Book of the Living Dead

by John Richard Stephens

  “Start with Grenfel’s death, you mean?”

  “With the things that led up to it,” Tom said. “First, the argument with Major Dennis Macklin. You’ve probably heard of their argument, of how Grenfel boasted that science would soon know how to bring the dead back to life, and of how Macklin, in his role of cynical, wealthy explorer, sneered, said the secret would never come from a test tube and that if he wanted to know it he would go to the savages who had guarded the forbidden secret for ages.

  “Well, the argument got hot and resulted in a wager that sent Macklin chasing off to Africa, to the regions west of the Ruwenzori, where a tribe called ‘The People-Who-Dance-with-the-Dead’ are said to live. And Grenfel set up a secret laboratory and set feverishly to work.”

  He paused and drew a breath.

  “It created a lot of excitement and talk. All day and night in the upper halls of the science building you could hear the hissing of those glass retorts of Grenfel’s, in which hearts and other organs throbbed with an eerie, unnatural life. And Grenfel got leaner and wilder, until a day came when a crowd gathered under his third-story window to hear some promised, startling announcement.

  “But what they saw was a white-haired, emaciated madman appear suddenly against the darkness of the room, wave his arms wildly and then plunge down with a scream to smash his brains out on the pavement below. And when they rushed to his laboratory they found his terrified assistant reading a brief document which Grenfel had left and which read:

  “‘I have found it. A mere detail added to the usual artificial respiration and arterial injections of defibrinated blood, physiological salts and epinephrine, will do the trick. The horrible truth is that not half of our dead are really dead, until we kill them in graves, in ovens, or under the embalmers’ knives. But to bring back the thing that comes back from death is a crime against God. No man who knows what I know can let death take him unawares.’”

  I shuddered. “And that started the panic? Yet Porter Bruton insisted on going on with the experiments?”

  Tom nodded. “He was like a madman himself, wild to get at what Grenfel had discovered. And he made no secret of his reason.” He paused to look at me uncertainly. “He wanted Lilly, believed that the fame and fortune that discovery would bring would enable him to take her away from you.”

  I swallowed uncomfortably and wished that Tom hadn’t brought that up.

  “But the madness got him, just as it did Grenfel?” I asked.

  “I wonder,” Tom mused. “I think what got him was Dennis Macklin.”

  “Macklin?”

  “Yes. He came rushing back from Africa by plane, bringing those witch-men with him. That was when the ugly rumors started about Faustine Grenfel and those crazy college kids who call themselves ‘Thrill-hunters.’ It was said that Macklin and his voodoo men were teaching them some devilish things that can be done with dead bodies. And bodies were stolen, Grenfel’s among them.”

  “Grenfel’s! And his own daughter—”

  “I couldn’t swear to anything except that I found his coffin in the mausoleum empty,” Tom said. “Also another body is missing from a pauper’s grave. I got suspicious of it and had it dug into before dawn this morning. The body had been taken out and the coffin re-buried. But what’s worrying me now, since you told me what you thought you heard there by the oven, is a scene I saw in the graveyard last night. I’m almost afraid to tell you.”

  “Go on,” I urged.

  Tom poured himself another drink and swallowed it neat; there was a bead of fine sweat on his forehead.

  “I’d been prowling about to see if I could catch any body-snatchers,” he said, “when I heard voices and stole up behind a cypress to watch a strange scene. What I saw was Porter Bruton seated on a low tombstone with Macklin standing in front of him and two African witch-men behind. And Bruton was pleading.

  “‘For God’s sake, Dennis,’ I heard him say, ‘don’t do that to me. Have mercy.’

  “‘You have your choice,’ Macklin replied coldly.

  “Then Bruton got up and went stumbling off, and presently Macklin and his witch-men marched off, too.”

  “Good God!” I gulped. It sounded exactly like descriptions I had read of death-curses in the jungle. “And right after that Porter Bruton went home and killed himself with poison—or did he?”

  Tom grimaced.

  “His father says he did,” he said.

  “But if Macklin put a witch-spell on him—” I choked it off.

  “In that case,” Tom said hollowly, “we’d better get drunk, because we’ve just burned a man alive.”

  I got up and took another drink, but it didn’t seem to do me any good. Half of me was cold and the other half was hot and my palms were oozing a clammy sweat.

  “I’m glad I didn’t hear him scream,” Tom said, “especially that about coming back.”

  “Oh, shut up!” I growled. But instinctively I glanced at the window. The sun was down and the blue dusk had flattened itself against the pane like some blind amorphous monster pressing for entry.“I can’t stand any more of this. I’m going to find Macklin and have it out with him!”

  “Better go easy,” Tom cautioned. “He might put a spell on you. I’d hate to have to burn you, too. Anyhow, I believe I’d be thinking of Lilly. If Bruton did come back he’d come back for her.”

  “Go to hell!” I said. But I turned and stalked to the phone.

  I called Lilly’s house to see if she was there and also to ask about Macklin, who was a guest of her father’s. It was Macklin himself who answered the phone, and he said that Lilly had gone out.

  “Where is she?” I blurted.

  “She left about an hour ago,” his suave voice answered, “with Willy Richmond and Faustine Grenfel. I think they were headed for the Clover Club.”

  “Willy Richmond and Faustine Grenfel!” I exclaimed, and hung up.

  Tom stared at me. “She went out with those two? Good God, Willis, they’re the ring leaders of those corpse-snatchers!”

  I started toward him, fists doubled. “Don’t you intimate anything about Lilly,” I growled, “or I’ll—”

  The change that had come over his face caused me to pause. I couldn’t believe I had scared him that badly, but his jaw had dropped down and his eyes were suddenly bulging from his head. Then I realized that he was not looking at me but at the window behind me. I whirled.

  But the window was a murky square of blackness.

  I turned back. “What the hell did you see?”

  He had tottered upright and his blood-drained face still wore its look of imbecile terror as he passed a shaking hand across his eyes.

  “So help me God, Willis, it was him—Porter Bruton. It was his burned corpse standing there and—and”—his agonized eyes sought my face—“he had something flung over one shoulder—something that looked like a body!”

  I spun about and raced for the door. Outside it was almost dark except for a sickly yellowish glow still lingering in the sky. I rounded the corner and sprinted for the window. I almost stumbled on the thing before I saw it.

  Shakily I went down on hands and knees and struck a match. It lay sprawled, face up, the body of a thin, sallow-faced youth. The bugged-out eyeballs, suffused with blood, the purple, swollen tongue protruding between the teeth, the livid marks on the throat all pointed to strangulation.

  I bent nearer, staring at those marks. My nostrils caught an odor, and I turned sick. It was a smell of fire and death, of burned flesh, and over those discolorations left by clawed, strangling fingers there was a smear of slime, pustular and clouded with a char of black ashes.

  The corpse was that of Willy Richmond, the youth with whom Lilly and Faustine had gone out only an hour or two ago!

  Weakly I staggered upright, staring idiotically about into the silent dark which was vibrant with the muted voices of insects, pulsing, it seemed, in dirges for their own small dead. Tom’s voice called from the front.

  “Willis, what is
it?”

  That jarred me back to my senses. I turned and started running for my car.

  Passing Tom, I panted, “Go and see for yourself,” and ran on.

  He could call the police or do what he pleased; the only thought in my mind was to find Lilly. I sprang into my car and stomped the engine into life.

  The Clover Club was a small night spot not far from the campus. There had never been anything sinister about the place. At least I had never noticed it until tonight when I staggered in, waved a waiter aside and stood blinking while my eyes probed the dimness for a loved and familiar face. But now it was plain some sort of soul-rot had crept in here where once innocent gaiety had prevailed.

  It was in the air, in the hectic faces that shone corpselike under the blue lights; something that glowed lewd and secretive in fevered eyes, that breathed obscenely in hot whispers from drunken lips. It was in the music, in the weird, mysterious, jerky notes that crept in above the muted crooning of the brasses. It was in the movements of the dancers who hugged close and slithered like zombies, smoothly, subtly, but with a slight roll, like the unsteady gait of things that slouch blindly through darkness.

  But I could not see either Lilly or Faustine.

  I swung toward a table where a thin, horse-faced youth was leaning drunkenly toward his painted girl companion. When I asked if they had seen either of the girls the youth laughed, raised his glass and drank sloppily.

  “They were here,” he said,“but they left about an hour ago.” He rolled his drunken eyes. “I wouldn’t follow them, though. A simple undertaker might get shocked.”

  I resisted an impulse to smash his teeth back into his throat, whirled and went back out, a cackle of drunken laughter following me. I got back into my car and drove to the cottage where Faustine had lived alone since the death of her father.

  The place was dark, but I didn’t let that stop me. When I found the door locked I slammed my shoulder against it and crashed it in. Then, snapping on lights as I went, I made a tour of the whole house.

  But no one was there; the place was neat and in order. I paused in the kitchen, wondering if I was making a fool of myself. Certainly there was a killer at large, but that didn’t prove that Faustine and her silly followers had any connection with him. Faustine was a nervous wreck, and probably Lilly had taken her home to look after her. Willy Richmond might have left them long ago.

  I started to turn back, but noticed the steps leading down into the basement and thought I might as well search there before I left. I stumbled down into a furnace room and struck a match. The place was empty, but my eye was attracted to a small door on which there was a formidable-looking padlock. Why such a padlock as that? I had already smashed one door, so another wouldn’t matter. I dropped the match, picked up a lawnmower I had spotted and slammed it like a battering ram into the door.

  The thin panels crashed under the blows, and I pushed myself through the splintered aperture. Then I straightened up in the darkness and my blood began a slow process of curdling. It was nothing I saw or felt, it was a smell—the smell of formaldehyde!

  I struck another match, and as it blazed against the smothering darkness I saw the coffin, a new one, against one wall. A horrible premonition laid strangling fingers on my throat then, but I forced myself forward and flung the casket open. The full impact of the horror smote me then and my last doubts and reservations crumbled away in my instinctive revulsion.

  Stretched out in that casket lay the body of Professor Grenfel. That wasn’t all. The clothing had been cut away, the torso and abdomen laid bare, and a gaping gash yawned from his sternum down, its horrible discolored lips curling over an empty cavity from which his vital organs had been removed!

  I had to turn away then because I was physically sick. But as I staggered back through the door, the sickness in my brain made the mere physical reaction inconsequential. I had read enough of savage practices to know what sort of grisly traffic the evisceration of a dead body might mean. And this mad girl had butchered the body of her own father! And she had my fiancée with her—if Lilly had not already been delivered into the hands of a lust-mad killer.

  I staggered back to my car and stood leaning on the door. Anger had mounted to bloodlust in me and I swore a terrible vow.

  “If I find her, I’ll strangle her. She’s not human, she’s got no right to live!”

  But a second thought sobered me. Faustine must be insane. It was the fiend behind her madness, behind all the rest of this horror that I should think of. And who was that fiend but Macklin? He was the cancer, the seat of all the vile corruption that had poisoned the community and led finally to ghastly murder. He was the one I must deal with!

  Now that I had a definite purpose, it steadied me a little. I reached the tall, ivy-covered Langburn house with a somewhat better grip on my nerves. The only light I saw was downstairs in the library. I was ushered in by one of Macklin’s servants. I found the explorer seated under a reading lamp with a book on his knees.

  He was a small, compact, wiry man with a tanned, lean face, close-clipped black mustache and dark eyes that seemed to sparkle always with some sly, inner mockery. He rose and greeted me politely, then sat down again.

  “Anything I can do for you, Payne?”

  “You can tell me where Lilly is,” I growled.

  “But I told you that she left with Faustine Grenfel.”

  “But where are they now?”

  He shrugged. “How should I know?”

  Something was boiling up dangerously in my throat; I held it back as best I could, but my voice quavered when I answered.

  “Because you’re the devil at the bottom of all this madness, this vile, unnatural death-obsession, this—”

  His laughter interrupted me. “My dear young man, a preoccupation with the dead is the most natural thing in human nature. In Africa, for instance, the natives bring their dead back to life and mingle with them familiarly—even dance with them.”

  “And that’s the sort of rot you’ve been poisoning these students’ minds with?” I grated.“Well, you went too far when you carried things to the point of murder!”

  “Murder?” His eyebrows lifted. “Whose murder?”

  “Porter Bruton’s, for one,” I said. “You didn’t know it, but you were seen there in the graveyard last night when you put some sort of hypnotic spell on him. And he went into the oven today—alive!”

  That jarred him for a moment. He paled slightly, but quickly recovered his composure and laughed.

  “What an idea! However, if he did go into the flames alive, he’s unquestionably dead now.”

  “He screamed,” I said, “when the flames hit him, screamed that he would come back.”

  “Really? I’m sorry I didn’t hear it.”

  His words stunned me. There was a curtained alcove behind his chair, and the light striking the plum-colored drapes, glanced off on his bony cheeks, giving them a cadaverous hue. Was this man human who had no human feelings? It seemed that God would strike a man dead for less than this, and so deep was that conviction, that when the curtains behind him stirred as to a faint breeze, I gave a violent start.

  “Why do you jump?” The mocking smile was still on his lips.

  “The curtain behind you moved,” I whispered.

  “The ghost of Porter Bruton probably,” he jeered. “But no, though the dead return, the bodies of those who burn don’t walk—”

  His words broke off. He didn’t jump or start, he simply went cautiously still. At the same instant it reached my nostrils, too—an odor in which burned cloth was mingled with scorched flesh and hair—and my eyes riveted to the gap where the curtain failed to meet.

  I didn’t believe what I saw at first. It was so strangely still, so like what a fevered brain might build out of air and terror. For the thing in the darkness there had Porter Bruton’s face, though now it was livid and blackened, with puffed greenish lips peeled back from grinning teeth and an ooze of some blood-streaked substance rolli
ng down from raw eye sockets over flame-blasted cheeks. It had a body, too, a shrunken frame from which hung the charred remnants of a black suit. The flesh that shone through was like the face, and a clawed hand was like a blackened root dragged from a fire.

  Macklin’s face was drained of blood now, and as he watched the horror mirrored in mine, he seemed too paralyzed to move. At the same instant it seemed to dawn on my dazed senses that the thing was real, but before I could move, or even scream, the blackened hand shot out to the light cord, and the smothering dark came down as the horror, shining with a greenish glow in the blackness, leaped. From Macklin burst a scream.

  What I might have done, if left to my own inclinations, I don’t know. But at that moment the door behind me opened and a witch-man—summoned by Macklin’s scream—came pounding in. I was the first object with which he collided, and taking me for the attacker, he flung his massive arms around me. I fought, pummeling his face and body as I tried to wriggle free. But in my weakened condition I was like a child in a boa’s coils, and suddenly, with Macklin’s screams still blasting in my ears, I felt myself lifted bodily and hurled.

  I struck the glass of a window, and its crash echoed about me as the ground slammed up to smash consciousness from my brain.

  I came to my senses, feeling like something that has crawled out from under a steam roller, and sat up. I was a mass of cuts and aching bruises, but my mind was beginning to clear. My first thought was to wonder if this was another stage trick of Macklin’s, a ruse to divert suspicion from himself.

  I got up, and with joints creaking, stumbled toward the shattered window through which faint light was again shining. I stared in and my senses reeled. In the circular pool of yellow light cast by the lamp, Major Dennis Macklin lay asprawl. Dead? He was worse than dead. His face, his hands, the whole upper part of his torso, from which it seemed invisible flames had eaten the clothing away, was a raw, blistered, viscous mass of cooked skin and tissue, which, while I looked seemed still to boil and crawl as with a living corruption.