“Old Avilton is certainly a case of the living contradiction, if there ever was one,” remarked Schuler. “Of course, no one quite believes in the occult or the necromantic nowadays; but anyone who can cook up such infernally realistic horrors, such thoroughgoing hair-frizzlers as he does, simply hasn’t the right to be so cold-blooded about it. I claim that it’s really indecent.”
“I agree,” rejoined his companion. “He’s so damnably matter-of-fact that he arouses in me a sort of Hallowe’en impulse: I want to dress up in an old sheet and play ghost or something, just to jar him out of that skeptical complacency of his.”
“Ye gods and little ghosties!” cried Schuler. “I’ve got an inspiration. Remember what Avilton told us about the new story he’s writing—about the serpent that comes to life ?” He unfolded the prankish idea he had conceived, and the two laughed like mischievous schoolboys plotting some novel deviltry.
“Why not? It should give the old lad a real thrill,” chuckled Godfrey. “And he’ll think that his fictions are more scientific than he ever dreamed before.”
“I know where I can get one,” said Schuler. “I’ll put it in a fishing-creel, and hide the creel in my valise next Saturday when we go to Avilton’s. Then we can watch our chance to make the substitution.”
On Saturday evening the two friends arrived together at Avilton’s house, and were admitted by a Japanese who combined in himself the roles of cook, butler, housekeeper and valet. The other guests, two young musicians, had
already come, and Avilton, who was evidently in a mood for relaxation, was telling them a story, which, to judge from the continual interruptions of laughter, was not at all in the vein for which he had grown so famous. It seemed almost impossible to believe that he could be the author of the gruesome and brain-freezing horrors that bore his name.
The evening went successfully, with a good dinner, cards, and some pre-war Bourbon, and it was after midnight when Avilton saw his guests to their chambers, and sought his own.
Godfrey and Schuler did not retire, but sat up talking in the room they occupied together, till the house had grown silent and it was probable that everyone had fallen asleep. Avilton, they knew, was a sound sleeper, who boasted that even a rivet-factory or a brass orchestra could not keep him awake for five minutes after his head had touched the pillow.
“Now’s our chance,” whispered Schuler, at last. He had taken from his valise a fishing-creel, in which was a large and somewhat restless gopher-snake, and softly opening the door, which they had left ajar, the conspirators tip-toed down the hall toward Avilton’s library, which lay at the farther end. It was their plan to leave the live gopher-snake in the library in lieu of the stuffed rattler, which they would remove. A gopher-snake is somewhat similar to a rattler in its markings; and, in order to complete the verisimilitude, Schuler had even provided himself with a set of rattles, which he meant to attach with thread to the serpent’s tail before freeing it. The substitution, they felt, would undoubtedly prove a trifle startling, even to a person of such boiler-plate nerves and unrelenting skepticism as Avilton.
As if to facilitate their scheme, the door of the library stood half-open. Godfrey produced a flashlight, and they entered. Somehow, in spite of their merry mood, in spite of the schoolboy hoax they had planned and the Bourbon they had drunk, the shadow of something dim and sinister and disquieting fell on the two men as they crossed the threshold. It was like a premonition of some unknown and unexpected menace, lurking in the darkness of the book-peopled room where Avilton had woven so many of his weird and spectral webs. They both began to remember incidents of nocturnal horror from his stories—happenings that were ghoulishly hideous or necromantically strange and terrible. Now, such things seemed even more plausible than the author’s diabolic art had made them heretofore. But neither of the men could have quite defined the feeling that came over them or could have assigned a reason for it.
“I feel a little creepy,” confided Schuler, as they stood in the dark library. “Turn on that flashlight, won’t you?”
The light fell directly on the low bookcase where the stuffed rattler had been coiled, but to their surprise, they found the serpent missing from its customary place.
“Where is the damned thing, anyway?” muttered Godfrey. He turned
his light on the neighboring bookcases, and then on the floor and chairs in front of them, but without revealing the object of his search. At last, in its circlings, the ray struck Avilton’s writing-table, and they saw the snake, which, in some mood of grotesque humor, Avilton had evidently placed on his pile of manuscript to serve in lieu of a paperweight. Behind it gleamed the two serpentine candlesticks.
“Ah! there you are,” said Schuler. He was about to open his creel when a singular and quite unforeseen thing occurred. He and Godfrey both saw a movement on the writing-table, and before their incredulous eyes the rattlesnake coiled on the pile of paper slowly raised its arrow-shaped head and darted forth its forky tongue! Its cold, unwinking eyes, with a fixation of baleful intensity well-nigh hypnotic, were upon the intruders, and as they stared in unbelieving horror, they heard the faint rattling of its tail, like withered seeds in a wind-swung pod.
“My God!” exclaimed Schuler. “The thing is alive!”
As he spoke, the flashlight fell from Godfrey’s hand and went out, leaving them in soot-black darkness. As they stood for a moment, half-petrified with astonishment and terror, they heard the rattling again, and then the sound of some object that seemed to strike the floor in falling. Once more, in a few instants, there came the faint rattle, this time almost at their very feet.
Godfrey screamed aloud, and Schuler began to curse incoherently, as they both turned and ran toward the open door. Schuler was ahead, and as he crossed the threshold into the dim-lit hall, where one electric bulb still burned, he heard the crash of his companion’s fall, mingled with a cry of such infinite terror, such atrocious agony, that his brain and his very marrow were turned to ice. In the paralyzing panic that overtook him, Schuler retained no faculty except that of locomotion, and it did not even occur to him that it would be possible to stop and ascertain what had befallen Godfrey. He had no thought, no desire, except to put the length of the hall between himself and that accursed library and its happenings.
Avilton, dressed in pajamas, stood at the door of his room. He had been aroused by Godfrey’s scream of terror.
“What’s the matter?” the story-writer queried, with a look of amiable surprise, which turned to a real gravity when he saw Schuler’s face. Schuler was as white as a marble headstone and his eyes were preternaturally dilated.
“The snake!” Schuler gasped. “The snake! The snake! Something awful has happened to Godfrey—he fell with the thing just behind him.”
“What snake? You don’t mean my stuffed rattler by any chance, do you?”
“Stuffed rattler?” yelled Schuler. “The damned thing is alive! It came crawling after us, rattling under our very feet a moment ago. Then Godfrey stumbled and fell—and he didn’t get up.”
“I don’t understand,” purred Avilton. “The thing is a manifest impossibility—really quite contrary to all natural laws, I assure you. I killed that
snake four years ago, in El Dorado County, and had it stuffed by an expert taxidermist.”
“Go and see for yourself,” challenged Schuler.
Avilton strode immediately to the library and turned on the lights. Schuler, mastering a little his panic and his dreadful forebodings, followed at a cautious distance. He found Avilton stooping over the body of Godfrey, who lay quite still in a huddled and horribly contorted position near the door. Not far away was the abandoned fishing-creel. The stuffed rattlesnake was coiled in its customary place on top of the bookshelves.
Avilton, with a grave and brooding mien, removed his hand from Godfrey’s heart, and observed:
“He’s quite dead—shock and heart-failure, I should think.”
Neither he nor Schuler could bear to loo
k very long at Godfrey’s upturned face, on which was stamped as with some awful brand or acid an expression of fear and suffering beyond all human capacity to endure. In their mutual desire to avoid the lidless horror of his dead staring, their eyes fell at the same instant on his right hand, which was clenched in a hideous rigidity and drawn close to his side.
Neither could utter a word when they saw the thing that protruded from between Godfrey’s fingers. It was a bunch of rattles, and on the endmost one, where it had evidently been torn from the viper’s tail, there clung several shreds of raw and bloody flesh.
THIRTEEN PHANTASMS
“I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion.”
John Alvington tried to raise himself a little on the pillow as he murmured in his thoughts the long-familiar refrain of Dowson’s lyric. But his head and shoulders fell back in an overflooding helplessness, and there trickled through his brain, like a thread of icy water, the realization that perhaps the doctor had been right—perhaps the end was indeed imminent. He thought briefly of embalming fluids, immortelles, coffin nails and falling sods; but such ideas were quite alien to his trend of mind, and he preferred to think of Elspeth. He dismissed his mortuary musings with an appropriate shudder.
He often thought of Elspeth, these days. But of course he had never really forgotten her at any time. Many people called him a rake, but he knew, and had always known, that they were wrong. It was said that he had broken, or materially dented, the hearts of twelve women, including those of his two wives; and strangely enough, in view of the exaggerations commonly characteristic of gossip, the number was correct. Yet he, John Alvington, knew to a certainty that only one woman, whom no one reckoned among the twelve, had ever really mattered in his life.
He had loved Elspeth and no one else; he had lost her through a boyish quarrel which was never made up, and she had died a year later. The other women were all mistakes, mirages: they had attracted him only because he fancied, for varying periods, that he had found in them something of Elspeth. He had been cruel to them perhaps, and most certainly he had not been faithful. But in forsaking them, had he not been all the truer to Elspeth?
Somehow his mental image of her was more distinct today than in years. As if a gathering dust had been wiped away from a portrait, he saw with strange clearness the elfin teasing of her eyes and the light tossing of brown curls
that always accompanied her puckish laughter. She was tall—unexpectedly tall for so fairy-like a person, but all the more admirable thereby; and he had never liked any but tall women.
How often he had been startled, as if by a ghost, in meeting some women with a similar mannerism, a similar figure or expression of eyes or cadence of voice; and how complete had been his disillusionment when he came to see the unreality and fallaciousness of the resemblance. How irreparably she, the true love, had come sooner or later between him and all the others.
He began to recall things that he had almost forgotten, such as the carnelian cameo brooch she had worn on the day of their first meeting, and a tiny mole on her left shoulder, of which he had once had a glimpse when she was wearing a dress unusually low-necked for that period. He remembered too the plain gown of pale green that clung so deliciously to her slender form on that morning when he had flung away with a curt good-bye, never to see her again….
Never, he thought to himself, had his memory been so good: surely the doctor was mistaken, for there was no failing of his faculties. It was quite impossible that he should be mortally ill, when he could summon all his recollections of Elspeth with such ease and clarity.
Now he went over all the days of their seven months’ engagement, which might have ended in a felicitous marriage if it had not been for her propensity to take unreasonable offense, and for his own answering flash of temper and want of conciliatory tactics in the crucial quarrel. How near, how poignant it all seemed. He wondered what malign providence had ordered their parting and had sent him on a vain quest from face to illusory face for the remainder of his life.
He did not, could not remember the other women—only that he had somehow dreamed for a little while that they resembled Elspeth. Others might consider him a Don Juan: but he knew himself for a hopeless sentimentalist, if there ever had been one.
What was that sound? he wondered. Had someone opened the door of the room? It must be the nurse, for no one else ever came at that hour in the evening. The nurse was a nice girl, though not at all like Elspeth. He tried to turn a little so that he could see her, and somehow succeeded, by a titanic effort altogether disproportionate to the feeble movement.
It was not the nurse after all, for she was always dressed in immaculate white befitting her profession. This woman wore a dress of cool, delectable green, pale as the green of shoaling sea-water. He could not see her face, for she stood with back turned to the bed; but there was something oddly familiar in that dress, something that he could not quite remember at first. Then, with a distinct shock, he knew that it resembled the dress worn by Elspeth on the day of their quarrel, the same dress he had been picturing to himself a little while before. No one ever wore a gown of that length and style nowadays.
Who on earth could it be? There was a queer familiarity about her figure, too, for she was quite tall and slender.
The woman turned, and John Alvington saw that it was Elspeth—the very Elspeth from whom he had parted with a bitter farewell, and who had died without ever permitting him to see her again. Yet how could it be Elspeth, when she had been dead so long? Then, by a swift transition of logic, how could she have ever died, since she was here before him now? It seemed so infinitely preferable to believe that she still lived, and he wanted so much to speak to her, but his voice failed him when he tried to utter her name.
Now he thought that he heard the door open again, and became aware that another woman stood in the shadows behind Elspeth. She came forward, and he observed that she wore a green dress identical in every detail with that worn by his beloved. She lifted her head—and the face was that of Elspeth, with the same teasing eyes and whimsical mouth! But how could there be two Elspeths?
In profound bewilderment, he tried to accustom himself to the bizarre idea; and even as he wrestled with a problem so unaccountable, a third figure in pale green, followed by a fourth and a fifth came in and stood beside the first two. Nor were these the last, for others entered one by one, till the room was filled with women, all of whom wore the raiment and the semblance of his dead sweetheart. None of them uttered a word, but all looked at Alvington with a gaze in which he now seemed to discern a deeper mockery than the elfin tantalizing he had once found in the eyes of Elspeth.
He lay very still, fighting with a dark, terrible perplexity. How could there be such a multitude of Elspeths, when he could remember knowing only one? And how many were there, anyway? Something prompted him to count them, and he found that there were thirteen of the spectres in green. And having ascertained this fact, he was struck by something familiar about the number. Didn’t people say that he had broken the hearts of thirteen women? Or was the total only twelve? Anyway, if you counted Elspeth herself, who had really broken his heart, there would be thirteen.
Now all the woman began to toss their curly heads, in a manner he recalled so well, and all of them laughed with a light and puckish laughter. Could they be laughing at him? Elspeth had often done that, but he had loved her devotedly nevertheless….
All at once, he began to feel uncertain about the precise number of figures that filled his room; it seemed to him at one moment that there were more than he had counted, and then that there were fewer. He wondered which one among them was the true Elspeth, for after all he felt sure that there had never been a second—only a series of women apparently resembling her, who were not really like her at all when you came to know them.
Finally, as he tried to count and scrutinize the thronging faces, all of them grew dim and confused and indistinct, and he half forgot what he was try
ing to d
o… Which one was Elspeth? Or had there ever been a real Elspeth? He was not sure of anything at the last, when oblivion came, and he passed to that realm in which there are neither women nor phantoms nor love nor numerical problems.
THE VENUS OF AZOMBEII
The statuette was not more than twelve inches in height, and represented a female figure that somehow reminded me of the Medicean Venus, despite many differences of feature and proportion. It was wrought of a black wood, almost as heavy as marble; and the unknown artist had certainly made the most of his material to suggest the admixture of a negroid strain with a type of beauty well-nigh classic in its perfection of line. It stood on a pedestal formed in imitation of a half-moon, with the cloven side of the hemisphere constituting the base. On studying it more closely, I found that the resemblance to the Venus de Medici was largely in the pose and in the curves of the hips and shoulders; but the right hand was more elevated than hers in its position, and seemed to caress the polished abdomen; and the face was fuller, with a smile of enigmatic voluptuousness about the heavy lips, and a sensuous droop to the deep eyelids, which were like the petals of some exotic flower when they fold beneath a sultry velvet evening. The workmanship was quite amazing, and would not have been unworthy of the more archaic and primitive periods of Roman art.
My friend Marsden had brought the figurine with him on his return from Africa; and it stood always on his library table. It had fascinated me and had stirred my curiosity from the first; but Marsden was singularly reticent concerning it; and beyond telling me that it was of negro workmanship and represented the goddess of a little-known tribe on the upper Benuwe, in Adamawa, he had so far declined to gratify my inquisitiveness. But his very reserve, and something of significant import, even of emotional perturbation in his tone whenever we spoke of the statuette, had made me believe that a story hung thereon; and, knowing Marsden as I did, remembering his habitual reticence recurrently varied by outbursts of a well-nigh garrulous confidentiality, I felt sure that he would tell me the story in due time.
The End of the Story Page 8
