Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  Gerard took smaller and smaller amounts, and increased the length of time between doses. The dreams began to recur, but he tried to forget them. There was one vision in which he seemed to be wandering through the streets of Bushire, and another in which he walked on and on through a wilderness of mountainous barrenness. And then there was a dream of Persian nomads who stared at the scarlet symbol on his breast, and placed him carefully in a litter and carried him north.

  What was the real significance of the visions? If, as Gerard suspected, he temporarily returned to his former body, the mystery was only half solved. How could a dying old man survive a shipwreck and a mad journey into the arid Persian desert-lands?

  There was one possible explanation; the youthful mind of Steven might have infused, through some strange psychic bond, additional vigor to the ravaged, diseased body. Dagh Ziaret had said that Steven would be insane. And, truly, only a madman would have set out from Bushire into the heart of Persia.

  As Gerard forced himself to take less and less of the drug, his dreams came with increasing frequency and vividness. The nomads were gone now, and he was in a hut in a little village that lay between tall mountains. An old man attended his wants, daily anointing the red brand of Ahriman with an oily, stinging substance. Once, when the Persian’s robe gaped, Gerard saw a similar design on the bronzed flesh.

  At first, in the dreams, Gerard seemed paralyzed. Later he gained some control of his body, and at this the Persian was pleased. Yet worn-out muscles often failed to respond, and the slightest movement brought on exhaustion.

  Once Gerard tried to talk to his attendant, but only succeeded in making a hoarse croaking sound. Then he remembered how he had made certain Steven would never speak again . . .

  FOR several days now Gerard had not seen Jean. She rang the doorbell one night and brushed past him, her chin raised and determined. Gerard followed her to the library, where she sat down and looked at him intently.

  “Steve,” she began, “you’re sick. I can tell that. If you won’t call a doctor, I will.”

  Gerard was indeed ill. His eyes burned with fever brightness; his face was drawn and gray with exhaustion. For two days now the last of the powder had been gone, and he had been dosing himself with caffein and benzedrin in a frantic effort to keep awake.

  He sat down, lighting a cigarette and taking short, nervous puffs. “Jean,” he said slowly, “I can’t explain. I don’t want a doctor, though . . .”

  He had intended to say more, but despite himself Gerard’s eyelids sank. The warmth of the room, the soft cushions of the chair, were deadly soporifics.

  Suddenly conscious of his danger, he tried to rouse himself. But already it was a tremendous effort to open his eyes. His head lolled forward . . .

  Deep in his mind a frantic voice shrilled, “Wake up!” But it was too late.

  Simeon Gerard slept.

  Jean eyed the man for a moment. Then she stood up and gently eased Gerard back to a more comfortable position.

  At the touch of her hands he moaned and stirred sleepily. His eyes opened. For a moment they stared, blank and blind; and then there was a soul behind them once more.

  “Jean!” the man whispered. “I—what’s happened? How did I get here?”

  She drew back. “Steve—don’t you know me?”

  “Of course. But the last I remember Uncle Simeon took me down to a temple or something under the house, and—where is he?”

  “Your uncle? He’s been gone for months, Steve!”

  Steven remembered nothing since he had entered the temple of Ahriman. Of his long weeks in the Orient, those torturing days of insanity, he knew nothing. During that period his mind had been gone. But now it had returned . . .

  “Amnesia,” he said at last. “It must have been that.”

  6

  SIMEON GERARD awoke. He lay looking up at an illimitable blue expanse, dazed and frightened. Once more the frightful dream had him in its toils. But it was different now. He was no longer within the squalid little hut . . .

  No, he had not been there during the last dream, either. There had been a long chanting procession through the night, while torches flamed in the cold wind that blew down from the snow-topped mountains . . . a procession in which he had been borne in an open litter. The Persians had taken him toward the high tower beyond the village, had begun to climb a ramp of steps that wound about it . . . and had left him there, staring up at the stars. Then he had awakened.

  A chanting procession . . . and a tower in Persia . . . and a man who lay motionless upon its summit. These meant something vitally important, Gerard felt. The old Persian had led the villagers, and his deep voice had rolled out in sonorous syllables. He had intoned—

  The Call of Ahriman! The Prayer for the Dead!

  But that was madness. He wasn’t dead. He could still think and feel . . .

  But could he?

  Now Gerard realized that he seemed to have no feeling whatever in his body. Nor could he move or even close his eyes. He lay outstretched, stiff and immobile, staring up. Suppose Steven had died here in Persia. Could the soul of Simeon Gerard be drawn back to a corpse?

  No, he wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be. Yet, straining and trying frantically to move even a muscle, Gerard realized that he was completely paralyzed. His body seemed to be without feeling.

  A shadow moved against the blue. A bird was circling, far above. It dropped lower.

  And other shadows came, till there were dozens of the things circling, circling . . . and Gerard remembered the hovering, indistinct outline he had seen on the roof of the temple of Ahriman, as well as the vision Dagh Ziaret had seen in his crystal. What had the Persian said?

  I see birds circling . . . great birds that swoop against the sky . . .

  The shadows dropped toward the tower.

  There are vultures in the crystal, effendi!

  A frightful shock of cold horror flamed through Gerard. With a grinding, fearful effort he succeeded in turning his head very slightly; the strain left him drained of all vitality and utterly helpless.

  And now he saw the summit of the tower around him.

  Four skeletons lay near-by, fleshless, white, grinning up in grim mockery. Quite suddenly Gerard realized the truth.

  This was the Tower of Silence . . . one of the towers on which the Persians, according to their religion, exposed their dead. Since fire and earth were too sacred to be contaminated with human flesh, corpses were left upon the Towers of Death, to the sun and the wind and—the vultures!

  The birds came down swiftly, sensing helpless prey. There was a flapping of great wings; a vulture swept above Gerard, and the man, half insane with horror, thought: Thank God, I can feel nothing now! Where before he had shrunk from the thought that his soul might be inhabiting a corpse, he now welcomed the idea gladly.

  Silence, and a cold wind blowing from the snow-topped mountains of Persia.

  Silence, save for the beat of great wings. The birds were all around him now. A naked, scabrous neck and a vicious beak came into Gerard’s range of vision . . .

  Quite suddenly the vultures dropped, their outspread wings almost hiding the man’s body. Gerard saw a swift beak striking down . . .

  He had been wrong. He could still feel pain.

  THE GRIP OF DEATH

  Two Hands—and a Throat; Ten White Links in a Grim Necklace of Death!

  LUKE HOLLAND’S narrow, sallow face twitched as he slowly mounted the stairs. He carried a tray on which rested a napkin, a decanter of port, and a wineglass filled with poisoned wine.

  Luke had acquired the poison by soaking sheets of flypaper in water; he’d read of the trick in a book. The police would have no way of tracing it now. Some people—his uncle, for instance—might think of him as stupid. But no, he was wise and cunning. Yes, Luke Holland was very cunning, with the warped brain generations of decadent Puritan stock had given him.

  Luke’s cunning was not unmixed with superstitious fear. That was why he meant to ki
ll his Uncle Lionel. He thought he knew of the old man’s trafficking in witchcraft; the Bible forbade that, and said a sorcerer deserved to die.

  Besides, Luke could use the money he would inherit with his uncle’s death, as sole living relative. Then he could get away from this strange, evil house and cease being dependent on the whims and vagaries of an eccentric old man.

  How he hated Uncle Lionel!—hated his white, wrinkled face, his sunken, watery eyes, his thin blue lips. He hated, too, the disturbing smile on that withered countenance when old Lionel talked about the money Luke would get when he died. It was almost as though the wretch knew what was in his nephew’s mind and was mocking him.

  So Luke had thought it all over very carefully for many days, and decided to act. The poisoned wine old Lionel would drink as his regular midday tonic, and the police would say that his death was due to heart failure.

  What a joke! All deaths, thought Luke, are due to heart-failure, in the final analysis. Quite a whimsical notion. He laughed now, as he mounted the stairs.

  It was good to laugh again. He had found little mirth here in the gloomy house where for the past year he had waited for his invalid uncle to die. For Lionel Holland was an occultist, and dabbled in certain realms of knowledge better left alone. Upon his retirement from the spice business eight years ago, the old man had taken a long sea voyage in the East. His original plan of rest had evidently given way to a less wholesome purpose, for when he returned he brought many crumbling, queerly bound books, and this new gnawing interest in black arts. Slyly, he had adopted the life of a recluse, breaking all social connections and retiring to his family house on the decaying grandeur of the waterfront. His nephew was suddenly offered a secretarial position, and that was all the world ever learned.

  Luke Holland had not learned very much more himself. It was what he suspected that now made him so afraid.

  His uncle was a very peculiar man. During his years’ stay in the dwelling, Luke had seen his elderly employer infrequently, for the old invalid stayed upstairs in carefully locked chambers. Luke’s duties consisted merely of preparing meals, administering his uncle’s medicine, and discouraging all callers. The meals were sent up on a dumbwaiter, a speaking-tube served for infrequent communication, and Luke was left with plenty of time on his hands to think—and to listen.

  WHAT was the old fool doing up there? Why was he so secretive? And what were those noises from the locked chambers? From the second floor, on recent evenings, had come the grating that accompanies the opening of long-sealed windows. After that he had heard a measured chanting, subdued, yet resonant. The low, scarcely audible litany seemed to strike Luke’s straining ears like the insistent beating of primordial jungle drums. His uncle was praying—but’ not to any gods Luke knew. These were older gods, for who but the Ancient Ones demanded sacrifice?

  One day, in response to written orders, Luke had procured three fine white roosters and sent them up, still alive, on the dumb-waiter. That night, after endless brooding and a strange ordeal of anticipation, his troubled vigil was disturbed by the shrill screech of a butchered fowl. There was the clatter of a heavy knife, the vibrant beating of blood-dabbled wings, followed by short silence and then the muttering rise of a prayer. The windows groaned open from above.

  It was then that Luke became certain his imagination was playing him sorry tricks. For he smelt the reek of heavy incense drifting down into the room, intermingled with the odor of fresh blood and something else.

  There was an alien scent his nostrils could not name, and which his brain dared not. It was the stench’ of a carrion thing, summoned to accept a blood offering—and it was not an olfactory but an atavistic sense which told him what was answering that prayer and sacrifice.

  Luke shivered in his bed, as presently the feeble yet immeasurably potent ritual was resumed. Even his shocked and half-dazed mind dared not credit that final dread suspicion—that now there were two voices chanting instead of one.

  But when Luke felt the massive timbers of the house shake beneath that lumbering tread, when he heard the whistling wind from the harbor howl through the upstairs rooms in answer to that gargantuan footfall, he knew what must be done. A black tryst, a scarlet sacrifice; those mocking sounds from the ceiling must be stopped. His uncle was practising sorcery. How much longer must he be pent up here in this rotting old house, prisoner and slave of that sorcerous monster?

  A monster may be killed. . . .

  Luke thought about it the following night before he sank into the noxious nightmares that now lurked in slumber.

  A monster should be killed. Witches and wizards must die. . . .

  The next night the scent of incense pervaded the house. Luke’s sleep was interrupted by the trickling whispers that slithered fearsomely down through the ceiling. Then again that lumbering, far-off tread of gigantic feet—or hooves. He remembered the open windows and lay awake until dawn brought the sanity of sunlight.

  I will kill him. I must. . . .

  THAT was when Luke Holland began to plan, and got the flypaper, and tampered with the dumbwaiter so that now he personally must carry the meals and medicine upstairs. He planned, and acted, and all the time he thought. He thought about how he hated his uncle, and about how he feared the legends of New England childhood that spoke of witchcraft and the nauseous beings that could be summoned from afar. He thought of how he could use his uncle’s money, and he thought of how the pious were enjoined to destroy wizards and warlocks.

  So now Luke Holland went up the creaking staircase with his tray. There was a merry little tune humming within his head; a whimsical phrase of catchy music that tinkled gaily to the rhythm of his pounding pulse.

  “Kill him, Kill him, KILL HIM!” A surge of confident elation seethed in his veins. Never had he felt more alive, more powerful. He was the Angel of Death. His feet moved in a set cadence; his pulse beat in harmony, his very eyelids blinked to the rhythm of that tinkling tune which beat into his brain.

  “Kill, kill, kill, kill him!” For the first time in months Luke Holland’s face wore a peaceful and contented smile.

  THE big black door swung open, and he was in the room. His uncle was sitting by the table, a faint smile on his withered countenance. It was all Luke could do to prevent himself from answering that smile with a burst of triumphant laughter.

  His uncle did not know about the little tune in back of Luke Holland’s head; the little tune that was rising to a sure, swift climax.

  Luke tried to master his elation. He stared at the huge, oldfashioned chamber, with its oaken panels shooting up toward the ceiling. It was furnished in a fashion popular fifty years ago—filled with great mahogany chairs, cumbersome sofas, and massive tables. The walls were ranged with bookshelves stuffed with tomes of a size and age commensurate with the room’s general atmosphere. It looked sane enough, that room, but there were others further on behind the locked doors. Mad things lurked in the sealed chambers, just as the mad tune lurked in the sealed chambers of Luke’s brain. And mad things lurked now in the face of old Lionel Holland.

  The invalid had changed terribly in that last shadow-shrouded year. His face had become deeply reticulated, so that wrinkles shot from his eyes like the strands of spiderwebs. His mouth was-a toothless black slit in corpse-white skin, and his pallid face was framed by the dank locks of silver hair that hung below his brow. Luke, gazing upon that countenance, was reminded of the mummied visage of some long-interred Mongol conqueror.

  Old Lionel was dressed in a black robe that hung limply over his dwarfed, stooping shoulders. It was embroidered at the breast with a crescent moon design in leprous silver. That was the only note of life in the figure—that and the old man’s eyes.

  They were blue and deep like the ice of polar seas, and they seemed tinged with a peculiar and disturbing awareness. Luke, meeting them, felt some of the elation ooze from his veins; the eyes gripped his gaze and held it as if in some way they had the power to drain all secrets from his mind. Two blue m
agnets, they were. Luke shuddered as he thought of what those eyes must have looked on in past moonless nights.

  Abruptly he jerked back to consciousness. No time for fancies now, for he must act. The old man was speaking.

  “Thank you, Luke,” said Lionel Holland. His voice disconcerted the youth queerly; it seemed to come from far, far away—from some source infinitely behind the shrivelled lips purporting to utter the words.

  “No trouble at all,” Luke answered, forcing a smile.

  “You have been most kind and patient with me of late,” continued the aged recluse, quietly. His voice was a droning purr, but those searching eyes never left his nephew’s face.

  “I shall remember that kindness when I die, which will be very soon now—I am told.”

  Told by what? Luke shuddered at the thought.

  “Soon I shall finish my experiments and will be ready to go.”

  LUKE couldn’t keep his eyes from his uncle’s hands. They were fumbling with the filled glass now. The long, skinny fingers twitched like the tentacles of two tiny octopi. His uncle was “ready to go,” in just a moment, if he would only raise that glass. In just a moment Luke would be free—free of those eyes which still stared ceaselessly into his own.

  “You are so impatient, my boy,” said the old man. Still that grim mockery lingered in his tones. “Too impatient, I fear. Too hasty. You really should think matters over before taking drastic steps. If you should ever get the idea of hastening my demise, for example, before I have completed my experiments, it would be impossible for you to escape. You realize I have learned many curious things.”

  He suspected! A pang of icy fear went through Luke. But no, his uncle was raising the glass to his lips. Three inches more and . . .

  The hand holding the glass stopped in midair.

  “Are you ill?” the old man demanded, staring at Luke. “You look like a corpse. What’s the matter?”

  “It’s nothing,” Luke muttered. Would the old fool never drink?