Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural

by Marvin Kaye (ed. )

  My husband is a man of means, though some call him a miserly wretch. But no matter, I am totally devoted to his needs. Daily, I move dutifully from the kitchen to the laundry readying lunch or dinner at the hours he expects his meals. I spare nothing to keep his linen clean, but still I will not speak to him.

  Mr. Mezange is six years older than I. Stoop-shouldered, shrunken, crippled with gout, he leans on his cane and takes small steps as we stroll. How harmless he seems now, this quiet old man, but still I will not say a word to him, not when we walk, not at home, not through the long silent evenings of the past two years. There is nothing left to say. Habit sustains me in my automatic and punctual routines, and whether it is a nice day and we go outside or it rains and we stay within, taking our meals together, he is alone whether I am with him or not.

  Our lips are sealed to one another. The only communication that ever passes between us comes from the happenstance of our eyes meeting, and this we both avoid. I have studied my own ash-gray eyes in the glass and see the resignation and melancholy and fear within their depths. They are the eyes of a sick woman, and they are ringed by the dark shadows that come from many sleepless nights.

  But my husband’s eyes are different. Two sharp creases between his brows pinch his face with cruelty. Underneath the reddish lids, small circles gleam in the center of his pupils, almost as if his eyes were cut from metal. They, too, are round from sleeplessness, and they seem both frightening and frightened. Except by accident, it has been two years since I have looked him in the eye. At table, I avoid sitting opposite him, and when we are walking or now while we rest upon this bench, I never turn my head toward him.

  Why do we never speak? Because if I opened my mouth, his eyes would watch me, and I would remember. And so my lips are sealed, and so are his. It is a pact of silence, and though we never agreed to it aloud, it is a vow we will not dishonor.

  Two years ago, we took a trip to the South. Mr. Mezange was in one of his rare generous moods. I never objected to a change of scene, so we agreed to spend two weeks on the shores of the Mediterranean.

  My husband, normally penurious, was in a decidedly frivolous mood. He actually wanted to visit a gambling casino. I went along, of course, but soon saw it was a disastrous mistake. He lost a great deal of money and his temper grew ugly. I stood behind him at the table and tried what I could do in timid whispers to calm him, but to no avail. He was furious, the more so because one of his neighbors at the table was a well-to-do woman in stylish clothes and expensive jewelry who played with a vengeance and was greatly favored by luck.

  My husband’s steely eyes stayed fixed upon her.

  When we left the casino just before daybreak, it was at the same time as the wealthy woman. Our path led us down a deserted road cloaked in wavering pale shadows. The woman walked several paces ahead of us. Suddenly, without warning or a hint to me of what was in his heart, Mr. Mezange dashed forwards and threw himself upon her. I uttered one cry of dismay and horror, but already he had his scarf in her mouth, gagging her, and his hands clutched her neck, squeezing it with all his strength.

  For a second, I thought of running, but then my husband grasped me by the arm and whispered, “Quick! Help me! Her money!” I stood there, rooted to the spot, till he saw I was incapable of motion, and then, releasing me, he stooped down and with great difficulty wrenched her bag from hands clutched tight in the agony of death.

  While I watched, frozen in a state of wordless, mindless complicity, he dragged his victim across the road and tumbled her body into a muddy ditch. Clasping his fingers so tight about my arm I felt his nails digging into my flesh, he tugged me away, half-pushing, half-pulling me into our hotel and up to our room, where we stayed just long enough to pack and pay our bill. We caught the first train home . . . and ever since silence weighs on us like a tombstone. Time and again, I have yearned to lift its crushing weight from my conscience, but out of fear and out of that duty which habit accustomed me to, I have never betrayed my husband.

  Neither of us learned the aftermath of his dreadful crime, yet none of its details grow dim—I still see her bulging eyes, the blood spurting from her nose, crimson in the pale shadows of dawn. My nightmares never go away, and yet my lips are sealed to the world and especially to him.

  The autumn air is chilly. Mr. Mezange hunches over and pulls his collar high. I spy this from the corner of my eye, for I do not turn my head toward him. I face the road, and so I see the car that slows and stops in front of our bench. The driver emerges and goes to the fountain for some water.

  My God, there is a woman sitting in the car . . . she is alone . . . she reads . . . her head is down, but through the open window, light strikes her face in high relief. I know her face. A haunting resemblance? The ghostly image of remembrance?

  No.

  The chill I feel is more than the breath of October. This is no phantom likeness; it is she. I am not mistaken, for look! my husband glances up, and he, too, is startled. His hand tightens on the handle of his cane.

  She stops reading as her chauffeur returns to the car, and now she sits up straight and leans towards the open window of her door. Her head is at the window. She knows! She has recognized her assailant, a man who thought he murdered her . . . and his silent accomplice.

  All my strength is gone. My heart races, but I cannot bear to hear her incriminating voice; I must be the first to speak, but how? There are no words, there have been no words for two long years. And now for the first time in all that silent interval, I turn my head and look into my husband’s eyes; and he knows, yes, I will speak, I will tell his victim, “Yes, an accomplice, but an unwilling one, robbed of volition by the horror of what my husband did.” No more will I keep his secret, no more will I be the dutifully obedient wife, I am without pity—and now, see! His eyes, oh! the fear in them, the pleading! They are not my husband’s eyes, I do not recognize them, they are the pain-filled eyes of some wounded animal.

  But I have waited too long. The woman speaks first, before I have a chance to unburden my soul.

  “Pardon, sir, madame . . . is it far before we reach the chateau at Civray? My chauffeur must have taken the wrong road.”

  Two years of silence, and all for what? At last I am able to speak, because words are not within my husband’s power, and I tell her, “We don’t know. We don’t live around here.” And that is all. The car starts up again and quickly chugs off into the distance.

  My husband and I get up and retrace our way homeward, taking slow steps, in no hurry to return to the solitude of our home, where we will not look into one another’s eyes nor will we talk about that ultimate betrayal, that moment of triumph and capitulation that leads us back forever and forever to our house of silence.

  Translated by Faith Lancereau and adapted by Marvin Kaye

  JACK LONDON, born in San Francisco in 1876, had a life that must have been an inspiration to any member of the “beat” generation who read works other than those by Kerouac and Ferlinghetti. Rancher, pirate, vagrant, seaman, London also wrote many eminently enjoyable tales and novels of high adventure before his death in 1916. The Sea Wolf, The Call of the Wild, “To Build a Fire” and many, many other fine tales distinguish his fabulous career. “Moon-Face,” which appeared in volume form in 1906, is a kind of rural “Cask of Amontillado.” Its idea reportedly was inspired by a tale in Black Cat magazine one year earlier.

  Moon-Face

  By Jack London

  John Claverhouse was a moon-faced man. You know the kind, cheekbones wide apart, chin and forehead melting into the cheeks to complete the perfect round, and the nose, broad and pudgy, equidistant from the circumference, flattened against the very center of the face like a dough ball upon the ceiling. Perhaps that is why I hated him, for truly he had become an offense to my eyes, and I believed the earth to be cumbered with his presence. Perhaps my mother may have been superstitious of the moon and looked upon it over the wrong shoulder at the wrong time.

  Be that as it may, I ha
ted John Claverhouse. Not that he had done me what society would consider a wrong or an ill turn. Far from it. The evil was of deeper, subtler sort, so elusive, so intangible, as to defy clear, definite analysis in words. We all experience such things at some period in our lives. For the first time we see a certain individual, one who the very instant before we did not dream existed; and yet, at the first moment of meeting, we say, “I do not like that man.” Why do we not like him? Ah, we do not know why; we know only that we do not. We have taken a dislike, that is all. And so I with John Claverhouse.

  What right had such a man to be happy? Yet he was an optimist. He was always gleeful and laughing. All things were always all right, curse him! Ah! How it grated on my soul that he should be so happy! Other men could laugh, and it did not bother me. I even used to laugh myself, before I met John Claverhouse.

  But his laugh! It irritated me, maddened me, as nothing else under the sun could irritate or madden me. It haunted me, gripped hold of me, and would not let me go. It was a huge, Gargantuan laugh. Waking or sleeping, it was always with me, whirring and jarring across my heartstrings like an enormous rasp. At break of day it came whooping across the fields to spoil my pleasant morning reverie. Under the aching noonday glare, when the green things drooped and the birds withdrew to the depths of the forest, and all nature drowsed, his great “Ha! Ha!” and “Ho! Ho!” rose up to the sky and challenged the sun. And at black midnight, from the lonely crossroads where he turned from town into his own place, came his plaguey cachinnations to rouse me from my sleep and make me writhe and clench my nails into my palms.

  I went forth privily in the nighttime and turned his cattle into his fields, and in the morning heard his whooping laugh as he drove them out again. “It is nothing,” he said; “the poor dumb beasties are not to be blamed for straying into fatter pastures.”

  He had a dog he called Mars, a big, splendid brute, part deerhound and part bloodhound, and resembling both. Mars was a great delight to him, and they were always together. But I bided my time and one day when opportunity was ripe lured the animal away and settled for him with strychnine and beefsteak. It made positively no impression on John Claverhouse. His laugh was as hearty and frequent as ever, and his face as much like the full moon as it always had been.

  Then I set fire to his haystacks and his barn. But the next morning, being Sunday, he went forth blithe and cheerful.

  “Where are you going?” I asked him as he went by the crossroads. “Trout,” he said, and his face beamed like a full moon. “I just dote on trout.”

  Was there ever such an impossible man! His whole harvest had gone up in his haystacks and barn. It was uninsured, I knew. And yet, in the face of famine and the rigorous winter, he went out gaily in quest of a mess of trout, forsooth, because he “doted” on them! Had gloom but rested, no matter how lightly, on his brow, or had his bovine countenance grown long and serious and less like the moon, or had he removed that smile but once from off his face, I am sure I could have forgiven him for existing. But no, he grew only more cheerful under misfortune.

  I insulted him. He looked at me in slow and smiling surprise.

  “I fight you? Why?” he asked slowly. And then he laughed. “You are so funny! Ho! Ho! You’ll be the death of me! He! He! He! Oh! Ho! Ho! Ho!” What would you? It was past endurance. By the blood of Judas, how I hated him. Then there was that name—Claverhouse! What a name! Wasn’t it absurd? Claverhouse! Merciful heaven, why Claverhouse? Again and again I asked myself that question. I should not have minded Smith, or Brown, or Jones—but Claverhouse! I leave it to you. Repeat it to yourself—Claverhouse. Just listen to the ridiculous sound of it—Claverhouse! Should a man live with such a name? I ask you. “No,” you say. And “no” said I.

  But I bethought me of his mortgage. What of his crops and barn destroyed, I knew he would be unable to meet it. So I got a shrewd, closemouthed, tightfisted money lender to get the mortgage transferred to him. I did not appear, but through this agent I forced the foreclosure, and but few days (no more, believe me, than the law allowed) were given John Claverhouse to remove his goods and chattels from the premises. Then I strolled down to see how he took it, for he had lived there upward of twenty years. But he met me with his saucer-eyes twinkling and the light glowing and spreading in his face till it was as a full-risen moon.

  “Hal Ha! Ha!” he laughed. “The funniest tyke, that youngster of mine! Did you ever hear the like? Let me tell you. He was down playing by the edge of the river when a piece of the bank caved in and splashed him. ‘Oh, papa!’ he cried, ‘a great big puddle flewed up and hit me.’ ”

  He stopped and waited for me to join him in his infernal glee.

  “I don’t see any laugh in it,” I said shortly, and I know my face went sour.

  He regarded me with wonderment, and then came the damnable light, glowing and spreading, as I have described it, till his face shone soft and warm like the summer moon, and then the laugh—“Ha! Ha! That’s funny! You don’t see it, eh? He! He! Ho! Ho! Ho! He doesn’t see it! Why, look here. You know a puddle—”

  But I turned on my heel and left him. That was the last. I could stand it no longer. The thing must end right there, I thought, curse him. The earth should be quit of him. And as I went over the hill, I could hear his monstrous laugh reverberating against the sky.

  Now, I pride myself on doing things neatly, and when I resolved to kill John Claverhouse I had it in mind to do so in such a fashion that I should not look back upon it and feel ashamed. I hate bungling, and I hate brutality. To me there is something repugnant in merely striking a man with one’s naked fist—faugh! It is sickening! So, to shoot, or stab, or club John Claverhouse (oh, that name!) did not appeal to me. And not only was I impelled to do it neatly and artistically, but also in such manner that not the slightest possible suspicion could be directed against me.

  To this end I bent my intellect, and after a week of profound incubation, I hatched the scheme. Then I set to work. I bought a water-spaniel bitch, five months old, and devoted my whole attention to her training. Had anyone spied upon me, they would have remarked that this training consisted entirely of one thing—retrieving. I taught the dog, which I called Bellona, to fetch sticks I threw into the water, and not only to fetch, but to fetch at once, without mouthing or playing with them. The point was that she was to stop for nothing, but to deliver the stick in all haste. I made a practice of running away and leaving her to chase me, with the stick in her mouth, till she caught me. She was a bright animal and took to the game with such eagerness that I was soon content.

  After that, at the first casual opportunity, I presented Bellona to John Claverhouse. I knew what I was about, for I was aware of a little weakness of his and of a little private sinning of which he was regularly and inveterately guilty.

  “No,” he said when I placed the end of the rope in his hand. “No, you don’t mean it.” And his mouth opened wide and he grinned all over his damnable moon-face.

  “I—I kind of thought, somehow, you didn’t like me,” he explained. “Wasn’t it funny for me to make such a mistake?” And at the thought he held his sides with laughter.

  “What is her name?” he managed to ask between paroxysms.

  “Bellona,” I said.

  “He! He!” he tittered. “What a funny name!”

  I gritted my teeth, for his mirth put them on edge, and snapped out between them, “She was the wife of Mars, you know.”

  Then the light of the full moon began to suffuse his face, until he exploded with, “That was my other dog. Well, I guess she’s a widow now. Oh! Ho! Ho! E! He! He! Ho!” he whooped after me, and I turned and fled swiftly over the hill.

  The week passed by, and on Saturday evening I said to him, “You go away Monday, don’t you?”

  He nodded his head and grinned.

  “Then you won’t have another chance to get a mess of those trout you just dote on.”

  But he did not notice the sneer. “Oh, I don’t know,” he chuc
kled. “I’m going up tomorrow to try pretty hard.”

  Thus was assurance made doubly sure, and I went back to my house hugging myself with rapture.

  Early next morning I saw him go by with a dipnet and gunnysack, and Bellona trotting at his heels. I knew where he was bound and cut out by the back pasture and climbed through the underbrush to the top of the mountain. Keeping carefully out of sight, I followed the crest along for a couple of miles to a natural amphitheater in the hills, where the little river raced down out of a gorge and stopped for breath in a large and placid rockbound pool. That was the spot! I sat down on the croup of the mountain, where I could see all that occurred, and lighted my pipe.

  Ere many minutes had passed John Claverhouse came plodding up the bed of the stream. Bellona was ambling about him, and they were in high feather, her short snappy barks mingling with his deeper chest notes. Arrived at the pool, he threw down the dipnet and sack and drew from his hip pocket what looked like a large fat candle. But I knew it to be a stick of “giant,” for such was his method of catching trout. He dynamited them. He attached the fuse by wrapping the “giant” tightly in a piece of cotton. Then he ignited the fuse and tossed the explosive into the pool.

  Like a flash, Bellona was into the pool after it. I could have shrieked aloud for joy. Claverhouse yelled at her, but without avail. He pelted her with clods of rocks, but she swam steadily on till she got the stick of “giant” in her mouth, when she whirled about and headed for shore. Then, for the first time, he realized his danger and started to run. As foreseen and planned by me, she made the bank and took out after him. Oh, I tell you, it was great! As I have said, the pool lay in a sort of amphitheater. Above and below, the stream could be crossed on steppingstones. And around and around, up and down and across the stones, raced Claverhouse and Bellona. I could never have believed that such an ungainly man could run so fast. But run he did, Bellona hotfooted after him, and gaining. And then, just as she caught up, he in full stride and she leaping with nose at his knee, there was a sudden flash, a burst of smoke, a terrific detonation, and where man and dog had been the instant before there was naught to be seen but a big hole in the ground.