Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural

by Marvin Kaye (ed. )

  Lazarus was not moved by the magnificence of the imperial palace. It was as if he saw no difference between the crumbling house, closely pressed by the desert, and the stone palace, solid and fair, and indifferently he passed into it. The hard marble of the floors under his feet grew similar to the quicksand of the desert, and the multitude of richly dressed and haughty men became like void air under his glance. No one looked into his face, as Lazarus passed by, fearing to fall under the appalling influence of his eyes; but when the sound of his heavy footsteps had sufficiently died down, the courtiers raised their heads and with fearful curiosity examined the figure of a stout, tall, slightly bent old man, who was slowly penetrating into the very heart of the imperial palace. Were Death itself passing, it would be faced with no greater fear: for until then the dead alone knew Death, and those alive knew Life only—and there was no bridge between them. But this extraordinary man, although alive, knew Death, and enigmatical, appalling, was his cursed knowledge. “Woe!” people thought; “he will take the life of our great, deified Augustus;” and then sent curses after Lazarus, who meanwhile kept on advancing into the interior of the palace.

  Already did the emperor know who Lazarus was, and prepared to meet him. But the monarch was a brave man, and felt his own tremendous, unconquerable power, and in his fatal duel with him who had miraculously risen from the dead he wanted not to invoke human help. And so he met Lazarus face to face.

  “Lift not your eyes upon me, Lazarus,” he ordered. “I heard your face is like that of Medusa and turns into stone whomsoever you look at. Now, I wish to see you and talk with you, before I turn into stone,” he added in a tone of kingly jesting, not devoid of fear.

  Coming, close to him, he carefully examined Lazarus’ face and his strange festal garments. And although he had a keen eye, he was deceived by his appearance.

  “So. You do not appear terrible, my venerable old man. But the worse for us, if horror assumes such a respectable and pleasant air. Now let us have a talk.”

  Augustus sat, and questioning Lazarus with his eye as much as with words, started the conversation: “Why did you not greet me as you entered?”

  Lazarus answered indifferently: “I knew not it was necessary.”

  “Are you a Christian?”

  “No.”

  Augustus approvingly shook his head.

  “That is good. I do not like Christians. They shake the tree of life before it is covered with fruit, and disperse its odorous bloom to the winds. But who are you?”

  With a visible effort Lazarus answered: “I was dead.”

  “I had heard that. But who are you now?”

  Lazarus was silent, but at last repeated in a tone of weary apathy: “I was dead.”

  “Listen to me, stranger,” said the emperor, distinctly and severely giving utterance to the thought that had come to him at the beginning, “my realm is the realm of Life, my people are of the living, not of the dead. You are here one too many. I know not who you are and what you saw there; but, if you lie, I hate lies, and if you tell the truth, I hate your truth. In my bosom I feel the throb of life; I feel strength in my arm, and my proud thoughts, like eagles, pierce the space. And yonder in the shelter of my rule, under the protection of laws created by me, people live and toil and rejoice. Do you hear the battle cry, the challenge men throw into the face of the future?”

  Augustus, as if in prayer, stretched forth his arms and exclaimed solemnly: “Be blessed, O great and divine Life!”

  Lazarus was silent, and with growing sternness the emperor went on: “You are not wanted here, miserable remnant, snatched from under Death’s teeth, you inspire weariness and disgust with life; like a caterpillar in the fields, you gloat on the rich ear of joy and belch out the drivel of despair and sorrow. Your truth is like a rusty sword in the hands of a nightly murderer, and as a murderer you shall be executed. But before that, let me look into your eyes. Perchance only cowards are afraid of them, but in the brave they awake the thirst for strife and victory; then you shall be rewarded, not executed . . . Now, look at me, Lazarus.”

  At first it appeared to the deified Augustus that a friend was looking at him, so soft, so tenderly fascinating was Lazarus’ glance. It promised not horror, but sweet rest, and the Infinite seemed to him a tender mistress, a compassionate sister, a mother. But stronger and stronger grew its embraces, and already the mouth, greedy of hissing kisses, interfered with the monarch’s breathing, and already to the surface of the soft tissues of the body came the iron of the bones and tightened its merciless circle, and unknown fangs, blunt, and cold, touched his heart and sank into it with slow indolence.

  “It pains,” said the deified Augustus, growing pale. “But look at me, Lazarus, look.”

  It was as if some heavy gates, ever closed, were slowly moving apart, and through the growing interstice the appalling horror of the Infinite poured in slowly and steadily. Like two shadows entered the shoreless void and the unfathomable darkness; they extinguished the sun, ravished the earth from under the feet, and the roof from over the head. No more did the frozen heart ache.

  Time stood still and the beginning of each thing grew frightfully near to its end. Augustus’ throne, just erected, crumbled down, and the void was already in the place of the throne and of Augustus. Noiselessly did Rome crumble down, and a new city stood on its site and it too was swallowed by the void. Like fantastic giants, cities, states and countries fell down and vanished in the void darkness, and with uttermost indifference did the insatiable black womb of the Infinite swallow them.

  “Halt!” ordered the emperor.

  In his voice sounded already a note of indifference, his hands dropped in languor, and in the vain struggle with the onrushing darkness his fiery eyes now blazed up, and now went out.

  “My life you have taken from me, Lazarus,” said he in a spiritless, feeble voice.

  And these words of hopelessness saved him. He remembered his people, whose shield he was destined to be, and keen salutary pain pierced his deadened heart. “They are doomed to death,” he thought wearily. “Serene shadows in the darkness of the Infinite,” thought he and horror grew upon him. “Frail vessels with living, seething blood, with a heart that knows sorrow and also great joy,” said he in his heart, and tenderness pervaded it.

  Thus pondering and oscillating between the poles of Life and Death, he slowly came back to life, to find in its suffering and in its joys a shield against the darkness of the void and the horror of the Infinite.

  “No, you have not murdered me, Lazarus,” said he firmly, “but I will take your life. Begone.”

  That evening the deified Augustus partook of his meats and drinks with particular joy. Now and then his lifted hand remained suspended in the air, and a dull glimmer replaced the bright sheen of his fiery eye. It was the cold wave of Horror that surged at his feet. Defeated, but not undone, ever awaiting its hour, that Horror stood at the emperor’s bedside, like a black shadow all through his life, it swayed his nights but yielded the days to the sorrows and joys of life.

  The following day, the hangman with a hot iron burned out Lazarus’ eyes. Then he was sent home. The deified Augustus dared not kill him.

  Lazarus returned to the desert, and the wilderness met him with hissing gusts of wind and the heat of the blazing sun. Again he was sitting on a stone, his rough, bushy beard lifted up; and the two black holes in place of his eyes looked at the sky with an expression of dull terror. Afar off the holy city stirred noisily and restlessly, but around him everything was deserted and dumb. No one approached the place where lived he who had miraculously risen from the dead, and long since his neighbors had forsaken their houses. Driven by the hot iron into the depth of his skull, his cursed knowledge hid there in an ambush. As if leaping out from an ambush it plunged its thousand invisible eyes into the man, and no one dared look at Lazarus.

  And in the evening, when the sun, reddening and growing wider, would come nearer and nearer the western horizon, the blind Lazarus w
ould slowly follow it. He would stumble against stones and fall, stout and weak as he was; would rise heavily to his feet and walk on again; and on the red screen of the sunset his black body and outspread hands would form a monstrous likeness of a cross.

  And it came to pass that once he went out and did not come back. Thus seemingly ended the second life of him who for three days had been under the enigmatical sway of death, and rose miraculously from the dead.

  The Beast Within

  Several years ago, I was having drinks at the Museum Cafe in New York with D. F. “Davy” Jones, author of the popular Colossus trilogy of science-fiction thrillers. The subject turned to terror and the things that “really” frighten. “Davy” stared broodingly into his glass and said, “Corpses don’t bother me at all. But people scare the bejesus out of me!” The stories in this section support his thesis—that the greatest enemy we have to fear is the beast within, the savage lurking in every human breast.

  Two kinds of horrors may be found here: man’s inhumanity to his own species and—perhaps even more dreadful—the power of the human mind to create a tailor-made Hell for its “owner.”

  A. M. BURRAGE, born in 1889 in Middlesex, England, is an all-but-forgotten master of fantasy fiction. “The Waxwork” is one of his finest performances, a shivery tale of ominous surroundings that prey mightily upon the nerves of the hero.

  The Waxwork

  By A. M. Burrage

  While the uniformed attendants of Marriner’s Waxworks were ushering the last stragglers through the great glass-panelled double doors, the manager sat in his office interviewing Raymond Hewson.

  The manager was a youngish man, stout, blond and of medium height. He wore his clothes well and contrived to look extremely smart without appearing over-dressed. Raymond Hewson looked neither. His clothes, which had been good when new and which were still carefully brushed and pressed, were beginning to show signs of their owner’s losing battle with the world. He was a small, spare, pale man, with lank, errant brown hair, and although he spoke plausibly and even forcibly he had the defensive and somewhat furtive air of a man who was used to rebuffs. He looked what he was, a man gifted somewhat above the ordinary, who was a failure through his lack of self-assertion.

  The manager was speaking.

  “There is nothing new in your request,” he said. “In fact we refuse it to different people mostly young bloods who have tried to make bets—about three times a week. We have nothing to gain and something to lose by letting people spend the night in our Murderers’ Den. If I allowed it, and some young idiot lost his senses, what would be my position? But your being a journalist somewhat alters the case.”

  Hewson smiled.

  “I suppose you mean that journalists have no senses to lose.”

  “No, no,” laughed the manager, “but one imagines them to be responsible people. Besides, here we have something to gain; publicity and advertisement.”

  “Exactly,” said Hewson, “and there I thought we might come to terms.”

  The manager laughed again.

  “Oh,” he exclaimed, “I know what’s coming. You want to be paid twice, do you? It used to be said years ago that Madame Tussaud’s would give a man a hundred pounds for sleeping alone in the Chamber of Horrors. I hope you don’t think that we have made any such offer. Er—what is your paper, Mr. Hewson?”

  “I am freelancing at present,” Hewson confessed, “working on space for several papers. However, I should find no difficulty in getting the story printed. The Morning Echo would use it like a shot. ‘A Night with Marriner’s Murderers.’ No live paper could turn it down.”

  The manager rubbed his chin.

  “Ah! And how do you propose to treat it?”

  “I shall make it gruesome, of course; gruesome with just a saving touch of humour.”

  The other nodded and offered Hewson his cigarette-case.

  “Very well, Mr. Hewson,” he said. “Get your story printed in the Morning Echo, and there will be a five-pound note waiting for you here when you care to come and call for it. But first of all, it’s no small ordeal that you’re proposing to undertake. I’d like to be quite sure about you, and I’d like you to be quite sure about yourself. I own I shouldn’t care to take it on. I’ve seen those figures dressed and undressed, I know all about the process of their manufacture, I can walk about in company downstairs as unmoved as if I were walking among so many skittles, but I should hate having to sleep down there alone among them.”

  “Why?” asked Hewson.

  “I don’t know. There isn’t any reason. I don’t believe in ghosts. If I did I should expect them to haunt the scene of their crimes or the spot where their bodies were laid, instead of a cellar which happens to contain their waxwork effigies. It’s just that I couldn’t sit alone among them all night, with their seeming to stare at me in the way they do. After all, they represent the lowest and most appalling types of humanity, and—although I would not own it publicly—the people who come to see them are not generally charged with the very highest motives. The whole atmosphere of the place is unpleasant, and if you are susceptible to atmosphere I warn you that you are in for a very uncomfortable night.”

  Hewson had known that from the moment when the idea had first occurred to him. His soul sickened at the prospect, even while he smiled casually upon the manager. But he had a wife and family to keep, and for the past month he had been living on paragraphs, eked out by his rapidly dwindling store of savings. Here was a chance not to be missed—the price of a special story in the Morning Echo, with a five-pound note to add to it. It meant comparative wealth and luxury for a week, and freedom from the worst anxieties for a fortnight. Besides, if he wrote the story well, it might lead to an offer of regular employment.

  “The way of transgressors—and newspaper men—is hard,” he said. “I have already promised myself an uncomfortable night because your murderers’ den is obviously not fitted up as an hotel bedroom. But I don’t think your waxworks will worry me much.”

  “You’re not superstitious?”

  “Not a bit,” Hewson laughed.

  “But you’re a journalist; you must have a strong imagination.”

  “The news editors for whom I’ve worked have always complained that I haven’t any. Plain facts are not considered sufficient in our trade, and the papers don’t like offering their readers unbuttered bread.”

  The manager smiled and rose.

  “Right,” he said. “I think the last of the people have gone. Wait a moment. I’ll give orders for the figures downstairs not to be draped, and let the night people know that you’ll be here. Then I’ll take you down and show you round.”

  He picked up the receiver of a house telephone, spoke into it and presently replaced it.

  “One condition I’m afraid I must impose on you,” he remarked. “I must ask you not to smoke. We had a fire scare down in the Murderers’ Den this evening. I don’t know who gave the alarm, but whoever it was it was a false one. Fortunately there were very few people down there at the time, or there might have been a panic. And now, if you’re ready, we’ll make a move.”

  Hewson followed the manager through half a dozen rooms where attendants were busy shrouding the kings and queens of England, the generals and prominent statesmen of this and other generations, all the mixed herd of humanity whose fame or notoriety had rendered them eligible for this kind of immortality. The manager stopped once and spoke to a man in uniform, saying something about an arm-chair in the Murderers’ Den.

  “It’s the best we can do for you, I’m afraid,” he said to Hewson. “I hope you’ll be able to get some sleep.”

  He led the way through an open barrier and down ill-lit stone stairs which conveyed a sinister impression of giving access to a dungeon. In a passage at the bottom were a few preliminary horrors, such as relics of the Inquisition, a rack taken from a mediaeval castle, branding irons, thumb screws, and other mementoes of man’s one-time cruelty to man. Beyond the passage was the Mur
derers’ Den.

  It was a room of irregular shape with a vaulted roof, and dimly lit by electric lights burning behind inverted bowls of frosted glass. It was, by design, an eerie and uncomfortable chamber—a chamber whose atmosphere invited its visitors to speak in whispers. There was something of the air of a chapel about it, but a chapel no longer devoted to the practice of piety and given over now for base and impious worship.

  The waxwork murderers stood on low pedestals with numbered tickets at their feet. Seeing them elsewhere, and without knowing whom they represented, one would have thought them a dull-looking crew, chiefly remarkable for the shabbiness of their clothes, and as evidence of the changes of fashion even among the unfashionable.

  Recent notorieties rubbed dusty shoulders with the old “favourites.” Thurtell, the murderer of Weer, stood as if frozen in the act of making a shop-window gesture to young Bywaters. There was Lefroy the poor half-baked little snob who killed for gain so that he might ape the gentleman. Within five yards of him sat Mrs. Thompson, the erotic romanticist, hanged to propitiate British middle-class matronhood. Charles Peace, the only member of that vile company who looked uncompromisingly and entirely evil, sneered across a gangway at Norman Thorne. Browne and Kennedy, the two most recent additions, stood between Mrs. Dyer and Patrick Mahon.

  The manager, walking around with Hewson, pointed out several of the more interesting of these unholy notabilities.

  “That’s Crippen; I expect you recognize him. Insignificant little beast who looks as if he couldn’t tread on a worm. That’s Armstrong. Looks like a decent, harmless country gentleman, doesn’t he? There’s old Vaquier; you can’t miss him because of his beard. And of course this—”

  “Who’s that?” Hewson interrupted in a whisper, pointing.

  “Oh, I was coming to him,” said the manager in a light undertone. “Come and have a good look at him. This is our star turn. He’s the only one of the bunch that hasn’t been hanged.”