Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural

by Marvin Kaye (ed. )

  “They don’t read the service until the grave is filled in,” said Lean, pressing his lips to an academic expression.

  “Don’t they?” said the adjutant, shocked that he had made the mistake.

  “Oh, well,” he cried, suddenly, “let us—let us say something—while he can hear us.”

  “All right,” said Lean. “Do you know the service?”

  “I can’t remember a line of it,” said the adjutant.

  Lean was extremely dubious. “I can repeat two lines, but—”

  “Well, do it,” said the adjutant. “Go as far as you can. That’s better than nothing. And the beasts have got our range exactly.”

  Lean looked at his two men. “Attention,” he barked. The privates came to attention with a click, looking much aggrieved. The adjutant lowered his helmet to his knee. Lean, bareheaded, he stood over the grave. The Rostina sharpshooters fired briskly.

  “Oh, Father, our friend has sunk in the deep waters of death, but his spirit has leaped toward Thee as the bubble arises from the lips of the drowning. Perceive, we beseech, O Father, the little flying bubble, and—”

  Lean, although husky and ashamed, had suffered no hesitation up to this point, but he stopped with a hopeless feeling and looked at the corpse.

  The adjutant moved uneasily. “And from Thy superb heights—” he began, and then he too came to an end.

  “And from Thy superb heights,” said Lean.

  The adjutant suddenly remembered a phrase in the back part of the Spitzbergen burial service, and he exploited it with the triumphant manner of a man who has recalled everything, and can go on.

  “Oh, God, have mercy—”

  “Oh, God, have mercy—” said Lean.

  “Mercy,” repeated the adjutant, in quick failure.

  “Mercy,” said Lean. And then he was moved by some violence of feeling, for he turned suddenly upon his two men and tigerishly said, “Throw the dirt in.”

  The fire of the Rostina sharpshooters was accurate and continuous.

  One of the aggrieved privates came forward with his shovel. He lifted his first shovel-load of earth, and for a moment of inexplicable hesitation it was held poised above this corpse, which from its chalk-blue face looked keenly out from the grave. Then the soldier emptied his shovel on—on the feet.

  Timothy Lean felt as if tons had been swiftly lifted from off his forehead. He had felt that perhaps the private might empty the shovel on—on the face. It had been emptied on the feet. There was a great point gained there—ha, hal—the first shovelful had been emptied on the feet. How satisfactory!

  The adjutant began to babble. “Well, of course—a man we’ve messed with all these years—impossible—you can’t, you know, leave your intimate friends rotting on the field. Go on, for God’s sake, and shovel, you!”

  The man with the shovel suddenly ducked, grabbed his left arm with his right hand, and looked at his officer for orders. Lean picked the shovel from the ground. “Go to the rear,” he said to the wounded man. He also addressed the other private. “You get under cover, too; I’ll finish this business.”

  The wounded man scrambled hard still for the top of the ridge without devoting any glances to the direction whence the bullets came, and the other man followed at an equal pace; but he was different, in that he looked back anxiously three times.

  This is merely the way—often—of the hit and unhit.

  Timothy Lean filled the shovel, hesitated, and then in a movement which was like a gesture of abhorrence he flung the dirt into the grave, and as it landed it made a sound—plop! Lean suddenly stopped and mopped his brow—a tired laborer.

  “Perhaps we have been wrong,” said the adjutant. His glance wavered stupidly. “It might have been better if we hadn’t buried him just at this time. Of course, if we advance to-morrow the body would have been—”

  “Damn you,” said Lean, “shut your mouth!” He was not the senior officer.

  He again filled the shovel and flung the earth. Always the earth made that sound—plop! For a space Lean worked frantically, like a man digging himself out of danger.

  Soon there was nothing to be seen but the chalk-blue face. Lean filled the shovel. “Good God,” he cried to the adjutant “Why didn’t you turn him somehow when you put him in? This—” Then Lean began to stutter.

  The adjutant understood. He was pale to the lips. “Go on, man,” he cried, beseechingly, almost in a shout. Lean swung back the shovel. It went forward in a pendulum curve. When the earth landed it made a sound—plop!

  Here is one of the characteristically ferocious tales of AMBROSE BIERCE, America’s great cynic who disappeared in Mexico in 1914 and was never heard from since. Born in 1842 to an impoverished Connecticut family, Bierce spent most of his career in San Francisco, first as a political writer, later as a columnist for the Hearst paper The San Francisco Examiner. His fiction is distinguished by mordant satire and often ghoulish comedy. There is perhaps a trace of the latter in “One Summer Night,” which, nevertheless, is a brutal little miniature.

  One Summer Night

  By Ambrose Bierce

  The fact that Henry Armstrong was buried did not seem to prove that he was dead; he had always been a hard man to convince. That he was really buried, the testimony of his senses compelled him to admit. His posture—flat upon his back, with his hands crossed on his stomach and tied with something that he easily broke without profitably altering the situation the strict confinement of his entire person, the black darkness and profound silence, made a body of evidence impossible to controvert and he accepted it without cavil.

  But dead—no; he was only very, very ill. He had, withal, the invalid’s apathy and did not greatly concern himself about the uncommon fate that had been alloted to him. No philosopher was he—just a plain, commonplace person gifted, for the time being, with a pathological indifference: the organ that he feared consequences with was torpid, So, with no particular apprehension for his immediate future, he fell asleep and all was peace with Henry Armstrong.

  But something was going on overhead. It was a dark summer night, shot through with infrequent shimmers of lightning silently firing a cloud lying low in the west and portending a storm. There brief, stammering illuminations brought out with ghastly distinctness the monuments and headstones of the cemetery and seemed to set them dancing. It was not a night in which any credible witness was likely to be straying about a cemetery, so the three men who were there, digging into the grave of Henry Armstrong, felt reasonably secure.

  Two of them were young students from a medical college a few miles away; the third was a gigantic man known as Jess. For many years Jess had been employed about the cemetery as a man-of-all-work and it was his favorite pleasantry that he knew “every soul in the place.” From the nature of what he was now doing it was inferable that the place was not so populous as its register may have shown it to be.

  Outside the wall, at the part of the grounds farthest from the public road, were a horse and a light wagon, waiting.

  The work of excavation was not difficult: the earth with which the grave had been loosely filled a few hours before offered little resistance and was soon thrown out. Removal of the casket from its box was less easy, but it was taken out, for it was a perquisite of Jess, who carefully unscrewed the cover and laid it aside, exposing the body in black trousers and white shirt. At that instant the air sprang to flame, a crackling shock of thunder stunned the world and Henry Armstrong tranquilly sat up. With inarticulate cries, the men fled in terror, each in a different direction. For nothing on earth could two of them have been persuaded to return. But Jess was of another breed.

  In the gray of the morning the two students, pallid and haggard from anxiety and with the terror of their adventure still beating tumultuously in their blood, met at the medical college.

  “You saw it?” cried one.

  “God! yes—what are we to do?”

  They went around to the rear of the building, where they saw a horse,
attached to a light wagon, hitched to a gatepost near the door of the dissecting room. Mechanically they entered the room. On a bench in the obscurity sat Jess. He rose, grinning, all eyes and teeth.

  “I’m waiting for my pay,” he said.

  Stretched naked on a long table lay the body of Henry Armstrong, the head defiled with blood and clay from a blow with a spade.

  “SAKI” was the pen-name of HECTOR HUGH MUNRO, who took the name from one of Omar’s Persian quatrains. Born in Burma in 1870, Munro spent his earlier years traveling and in 1893 joined the Burmese military police, but his ill health (malaria) forced him to resign and settle in England. There he began his career as a journalist and author of such deliciously satirical novels as The Unbearable Bassington and tales like “The She-Wolf” and other sometimes humorous, sometimes horrifying works of fiction. “The Easter Egg” is an understated example of the latter. “Saki” died in 1915 during World War I.

  The Easter Egg

  By H. H. Munro

  (“Saki”)

  It was distinctly hard lines for Lady Barbara, who came of good fighting stock, and was one of the bravest women of her generation, that her son should be so undisguisedly a coward. Whatever good qualities Lester Slaggby may have possessed, and he was in some respects charming, courage could certainly never be imputed to him. As a child he had suffered from childish timidity, as a boy from unboyish funk, and as a youth he had exchanged unreasoning fears for others which were more formidable from the fact of having a carefully-thought-out basis. He was frankly afraid of animals, nervous with firearms, and never crossed the Channel without mentally comparing the numerical proportion of life belts to passengers. On horseback he seemed to require as many hands as a Hindu god, at least four for clutching the reins, and two more for patting the horse soothingly on the neck. Lady Barbara no longer pretended not to see her son’s prevailing weakness; with her usual courage she faced the knowledge of it squarely, and, mother-like, loved him none the less.

  Continental travel, anywhere away from the great tourist tracks, was a favoured hobby with Lady Barbara, and Lester joined her as often as possible. Eastertide usually found her at Knobaltheim, an upland township in one of those small princedoms that make inconspicuous freckles on the map of Central Europe.

  A long-standing acquaintanceship with the reigning family made her a personage of due importance in the eyes of her old friend the Burgomaster, and she was anxiously consulted by that worthy on the momentous occasion when the Prince made known his intention of coming in person to open a sanatorium outside the town. All the usual items in a programme of welcome, some of them fatuous and commonplace, others quaint and charming, had been arranged for, but the Burgomaster hoped that the resourceful English lady might have something new and tasteful to suggest in the way of loyal greeting. The Prince was known to the outside world, if at all, as an old-fashioned reactionary, combating modern progress, as it were, with a wooden sword; to his own people he was known as a kindly old gentleman with a certain endearing stateliness which had nothing of standoffishness about it. Knobaltheim was anxious to do its best. Lady Barbara discussed the matter with Lester and one or two acquaintances in her little hotel, but ideas were difficult to come by.

  “Might I suggest something to the gnädige Frau?” asked a sallow high-cheek-boned lady to whom the English-woman had spoken once or twice, and whom she had set down in her mind as probably a Southern Slav.

  “Might I suggest something for the Reception Fest?” she went on, with a certain shy eagerness. “Our little child here, our baby, we will dress him in little white coat, with small wings, as an Easter angel, and he will carry a large white Easter egg, and inside shall be a basket of plover eggs, of which the Prince is so fond, and he shall give it to his Highness as Easter offering. It is so pretty an idea; we have seen it done once in Syria.”

  Lady Barbara looked dubiously at the proposed Easter angel, a fair, wooden-faced child of about four years old. She had noticed it the day before in the hotel, and wondered rather how such a tow-headed child could belong to such a dark-visaged couple as the woman and her husband; probably, she thought, an adopted baby, especially as the couple were not young.

  “Of course Gnädige Frau will escort the little child up to the Prince,” pursued the woman; “but he will be quite good, and do as he is told.”

  “We haf some pluffers’ eggs shall come fresh from Wien,” said the husand.

  The small child and Lady Barbara seemed equally unenthusiastic about the pretty idea; Lester was openly discouraging, but when the Burgomaster heard of it he was enchanted. The combination of sentiment and plovers’ eggs appealed strongly to his Teutonic mind.

  On the eventful day the Easter angel, really quite prettily and quaintly dressed, was a centre of kindly interest to the gala crowd marshalled to receive his Highness. The mother was unobtrusive and less fussy than most parents would have been under the circumstances, merely stipulating that she should place the Easter egg herself in the arms that had been carefully schooled how to hold the precious burden. Then Lady Barbara moved forward, the child marching stolidly and with grim determination at her side. It had been promised cakes and sweets galore if it gave the egg well and truly to the kind old gentleman who was waiting to receive it. Lester had tried to convey to it privately that horrible smackings would attend any failure in its share of the proceedings, but it is doubtful if his German caused more than an immediate distress. Lady Barbara had thoughtfully provided herself with an emergency supply of chocolate sweetmeats; children may sometimes be timeservers, but they do not encourage long accounts. As they approached nearer to the princely dais Lady Barbara stood discreetly aside, and the stolid-faced infant walked forward alone, with staggering but steadfast gait, encouraged by a murmur of elderly approval. Lester, standing in the front row of the onlookers, turned to scan the crowd for the beaming faces of the happy parents. In a side-road which led to the railway station he saw a cab; entering the cab with every appearance of furtive haste were the dark-visaged couple who had been so plausibly eager for the “pretty idea.” The sharpened instinct of cowardice lit up the situation to him in one swift flash. The blood roared and surged to his head as though thousands of floodgates had been opened in his veins and arteries, and his brain was the common sluice in which all the torrents met. He saw nothing but a blur around him. Then the blood ebbed away in quick waves, till his very heart seemed drained and empty, and he stood nervelessly, helplessly, dumbly watching the child, bearing its accursed burden with slow, relentless steps nearer and nearer to the group that waited sheeplike to receive him. A fascinated curiosity compelled Lester to turn his head towards the fugitives; the cab had started at hot pace in the direction of the station.

  The next moment Lester was running, running faster than any of those present had ever seen a man run, and—he was not running away. For that stray fraction of his life some unwonted impulse beset him, some hint of the stock he came from, and he ran unflinchingly towards danger. He stooped and clutched at the Easter egg as one tries to scoop up the ball in Rugby football. What he meant to do with it he had not considered, the thing was to get it. But the child had been promised cakes and sweetmeats if it safely gave the egg into the hands of the kindly old gentleman; it uttered no scream, but it held to its charge with limpet grip. Lester sank to his knees, tugging savagely at the tightly clasped burden, and angry cries rose from the scandalized onlookers. A questioning, threatening ring formed round him, then shrank back in recoil as he shrieked out one hideous word. Lady Barbara heard the word and saw the crowd race away like scattered sheep, saw the Prince forcibly hustled away by his attendants; also she saw her son lying prone in an agony of overmastering terror, his spasm of daring shattered by the child’s unexpected resistance; still clutching frantically, as though for safety, at that white-satin gew-gaw, unable to crawl even from its deadly neighbourhood, able only to scream and scream and scream. In her brain she was dimly conscious of balancing, or striving to balance,
the abject shame which had him now in thrall against the one compelling act of courage which had flung him grandly and madly on to the point of danger. It was only for the fraction of a minute that she stood watching the two entangled figures, the infant with its woodenly obstinate face and body tense with dogged resistance, and the boy limp and already nearly dead with a terror that almost stifled his screams; and over them the long gala streamers flapping gaily in the sunshine. She never forgot the scene; but then, it was the last she ever saw.

  Lady Barbara carries her scarred face with its sightless eyes as bravely as ever in the world, but at Eastertide her friends are careful to keep from her ears any mention of the children’s Easter symbol.

  One of the two or three greatest American mystery novelists in the first half of this century was JOHN DICKSON CARR, whose locked room puzzles virtually defined the genre of the impossible crime. Good as his Dr. Fell mysteries are, I have always preferred the ones he wrote under the pseudonym of Carter Dickson, which Carr mostly reserved for his fat, outrageous British detective, H.M. (Sir Henry Merrivale). Born in 1905 in Uniontown, Pa., Carr was the son of a U.S. Congressman, Wood Nicholas Carr. Much of his life was spent in England, where he wrote for the BBC. Sir Henry Merrivale appeared in approximately two dozen novels, but Carr also wrote one novella and one short story in which H.M. again played detective. “The House in Goblin Wood” is the short story, and though it has its hilarious moments, it is also heavy with menace. A second reading will show just how dark it really is.

  The House in Goblin Wood

  By John Dickson Carr

  In Pall Mall, that hot July afternoon three years before the war, an open saloon car was drawn up to the curb just opposite the Senior Conservatives’ Club.