The Devils & Demons MEGAPACK ®: 25 Modern and Classic Tales

by Mack Reynolds

  In the interval of silence he stole forward until the light glared full upon his eyes. At one extremity of an open space, hemmed in by the dark wall of the forest, arose a rock, bearing some rude, natural resemblance either to an altar or a pulpit, and surrounded by four blazing pines, their tops aflame, their stems untouched, like candles at an evening meeting. The mass of foliage that had overgrown the summit of the rock was all on fire, blazing high into the night and fitfully illuminating the whole field. Each pendent twig and leafy festoon was in a blaze. As the red light arose and fell, a numerous congregation alternately shone forth, then disappeared in shadow, and again grew, as it were, out of the darkness, peopling the heart of the solitary woods at once.

  “A grave and dark-clad company,” quoth Goodman Brown.

  In truth they were such. Among them, quivering to and fro between gloom and splendor, appeared faces that would be seen next day at the council board of the province, and others which, Sabbath after Sabbath, looked devoutly heavenward, and benignantly over the crowded pews, from the holiest pulpits in the land. Some affirm that the lady of the governor was there. At least there were high dames well known to her, and wives of honored husbands, and widows, a great multitude, and ancient maidens, all of excellent repute, and fair young girls, who trembled lest their mothers should espy them. Either the sudden gleams of light flashing over the obscure field bedazzled Goodman Brown, or he recognized a score of the church members of Salem village famous for their especial sanctity. Good old Deacon Gookin had arrived, and waited at the skirts of that venerable saint, his revered pastor. But, irreverently consorting with these grave, reputable, and pious people, these elders of the church, these chaste dames and dewy virgins, there were men of dissolute lives and women of spotted fame, wretches given over to all mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes. It was strange to see that the good shrank not from the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints. Scattered also among their pale-faced enemies were the Indian priests, or powwows, who had often scared their native forest with more hideous incantations than any known to English witchcraft.

  “But where is Faith?” thought Goodman Brown; and, as hope came into his heart, he trembled.

  Another verse of the hymn arose, a slow and mournful strain, such as the pious love, but joined to words which expressed all that our nature can conceive of sin, and darkly hinted at far more. Unfathomable to mere mortals is the lore of fiends. Verse after verse was sung; and still the chorus of the desert swelled between like the deepest tone of a mighty organ; and with the final peal of that dreadful anthem there came a sound, as if the roaring wind, the rushing streams, the howling beasts, and every other voice of the unconcerted wilderness were mingling and according with the voice of guilty man in homage to the prince of all. The four blazing pines threw up a loftier flame, and obscurely discovered shapes and visages of horror on the smoke wreaths above the impious assembly. At the same moment the fire on the rock shot redly forth and formed a glowing arch above its base, where now appeared a figure. With reverence be it spoken, the figure bore no slight similitude, both in garb and manner, to some grave divine of the New England churches.

  “Bring forth the converts!” cried a voice that echoed through the field and rolled into the forest.

  At the word, Goodman Brown stepped forth from the shadow of the trees and approached the congregation, with whom he felt a loathful brotherhood by the sympathy of all that was wicked in his heart. He could have well-nigh sworn that the shape of his own dead father beckoned him to advance, looking downward from a smoke wreath, while a woman, with dim features of despair, threw out her hand to warn him back. Was it his mother? But he had no power to retreat one step, nor to resist, even in thought, when the minister and good old Deacon Gookin seized his arms and led him to the blazing rock. Thither came also the slender form of a veiled female, led between Goody Cloyse, that pious teacher of the catechism, and Martha Carrier, who had received the devil’s promise to be queen of hell. A rampant hag was she. And there stood the proselytes beneath the canopy of fire.

  “Welcome, my children,” said the dark figure, “to the communion of your race. Ye have found thus young your nature and your destiny. My children, look behind you!”

  They turned; and flashing forth, as it were, in a sheet of flame, the fiend worshippers were seen; the smile of welcome gleamed darkly on every visage.

  “There,” resumed the sable form, “are all whom ye have reverenced from youth. Ye deemed them holier than yourselves, and shrank from your own sin, contrasting it with their lives of righteousness and prayerful aspirations heavenward. Yet here are they all in my worshipping assembly. This night it shall be granted you to know their secret deeds: how hoary-bearded elders of the church have whispered wanton words to the young maids of their households; how many a woman, eager for widows’ weeds, has given her husband a drink at bedtime and let him sleep his last sleep in her bosom; how beardless youths have made haste to inherit their fathers’ wealth; and how fair damsels—blush not, sweet ones—have dug little graves in the garden, and bidden me, the sole guest to an infant’s funeral. By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places—whether in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest—where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot. Far more than this. It shall be yours to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin, the fountain of all wicked arts, and which inexhaustibly supplies more evil impulses than human power—than my power at its utmost—can make manifest in deeds. And now, my children, look upon each other.”

  They did so; and, by the blaze of the hell-kindled torches, the wretched man beheld his Faith, and the wife her husband, trembling before that unhallowed altar.

  “Lo, there ye stand, my children,” said the figure, in a deep and solemn tone, almost sad with its despairing awfulness, as if his once angelic nature could yet mourn for our miserable race. “Depending upon one another’s hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race.”

  “Welcome,” repeated the fiend worshippers, in one cry of despair and triumph.

  And there they stood, the only pair, as it seemed, who were yet hesitating on the verge of wickedness in this dark world. A basin was hollowed, naturally, in the rock. Did it contain water, reddened by the lurid light? or was it blood? or, perchance, a liquid flame? Herein did the shape of evil dip his hand and prepare to lay the mark of baptism upon their foreheads, that they might be partakers of the mystery of sin, more conscious of the secret guilt of others, both in deed and thought, than they could now be of their own. The husband cast one look at his pale wife, and Faith at him. What polluted wretches would the next glance show them to each other, shuddering alike at what they disclosed and what they saw!

  “Faith! Faith!” cried the husband, “look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one.”

  Whether Faith obeyed he knew not. Hardly had he spoken when he found himself amid calm night and solitude, listening to a roar of the wind which died heavily away through the forest. He staggered against the rock, and felt it chill and damp; while a hanging twig, that had been all on fire, besprinkled his cheek with the coldest dew.

  The next morning young Goodman Brown came slowly into the street of Salem village, staring around him like a bewildered man. The good old minister was taking a walk along the graveyard to get an appetite for breakfast and meditate his sermon, and bestowed a blessing, as he passed, on Goodman Brown. He shrank from the venerable saint as if to avoid an anathema. Old Deacon Gookin was at domestic worship, and the holy words of his prayer were heard through the open window. “What God doth the wizard pray to?” quoth Goodman Brown. Goody Cloyse, that excellent old Christian, stood in the early sunshine at her own
lattice, catechizing a little girl who had brought her a pint of morning’s milk. Goodman Brown snatched away the child as from the grasp of the fiend himself. Turning the corner by the meeting-house, he spied the head of Faith, with the pink ribbons, gazing anxiously forth, and bursting into such joy at sight of him that she skipped along the street and almost kissed her husband before the whole village. But Goodman Brown looked sternly and sadly into her face, and passed on without a greeting.

  Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?

  Be it so if you will; but, alas! It was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown. A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man did he become from the night of that fearful dream. On the Sabbath day, when the congregation were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear and drowned all the blessed strain. When the minister spoke from the pulpit with power and fervid eloquence, and, with his hand on the open Bible, of the sacred truths of our religion, and of saint-like lives and triumphant deaths, and of future bliss or misery unutterable, then did Goodman Brown turn pale, dreading lest the roof should thunder down upon the gray blasphemer and his hearers. Often, waking suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away. And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly procession, besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.

  ROOM WITHOUT WINDOWS, by Manly Banister

  Originally published in Beyond Fantasy Fiction, September 1954.

  I had never really liked Lavorine De Valgis. I didn’t like his name or the sly, lecherous attitude he could assume when telling an off-color story. I didn’t like his insisting upon a friendship

  I didn’t want, and I didn’t like loaning him money—though he always paid back with great punctuality. I didn’t like him around the house, either, but he would drop in now and again to spend an evening with Ethel and me. He accepted our civil politeness as entertainment and never failed to return.

  I am an advertising copywriter. Lord knows what De Valgis was. He had property and access, at least, to money. He never borrowed for longer than a few days at a time. I met him, one day, in a client’s office and it was politics on my part to be friendly. I’ve always regretted it.

  De Valgis disturbed me more than he did Ethel. Maybe she got a kick out of the way he ogled her. But I didn’t like it.

  I wanted to kick him, you know where, but Ethel always pooh-poohed me about him. She pointed out that De Valgis was old and needed friends and companionship.

  He wasn’t so old—maybe sixty—but I reluctantly conceded her point.

  “Just so you don’t get too damned companionable,” I said.

  And then—just like that—Lavorine De Valgis upped and disappeared. But before he vanished, he did a peculiar thing. He deeded his house across town to me and Ethel.

  * * * *

  A glum-looking shyster by the name of Smithers dropped by one evening and delivered the deed, our first knowledge of the affair. Obviously, De Valgis had told the lawyer nothing of his business and Smithers was anxious to get the lowdown from me. Some people can’t help being curious that way.

  Smithers got no help from us.

  We were even more puzzled and flabbergasted. He went away looking disappointed, and we never saw him again.

  “Poor old Mr. De Valgis,” Ethel sighed. “Where do you suppose he went, Jack? And why didn’t he tell us where he was going?”

  “Maybe he got overcome by a generous impulse,” I suggested, “but I doubt it. Mark my words, with De Valgis in it, there is also a joker.”

  Ethel clapped her hands. “Oh, Jack, don’t you realize what’s happened? We’ve got a house! Now we can quit renting this vile hut and—”

  “We’ve got a house,” I interrupted, “but not for long, honey-bun.”

  “How come—not for long?”

  “Sell it, baby—sell it! We collect the moola—buy a new car. Get it?”

  Ethel looked disappointed. Her round little face got long. Her mouth and eyes made three circles—two blue ones and one lusciously red—and her nose quivered. She looked real sad. You know—sad.

  That was just the beginning. I guess we quarreled after that. At least, if we’d heard a couple of other people saying the things we said to each other, we would have thought they were quarreling. With Ethel and me, it was merely a minor disputation of my authority, which I cleared up pretty fast.

  “At least,” she said wistfully, dabbing at her eyes, “we can go over and see the house before we sell it?”

  “Sure,” I said, feeling magnanimous. I could just feel that dough in my two mitts—enough for a new convertible and some left over. I even wasted a few precious seconds of my life in fond recollection of that confounded satyr, De Valgis.

  “I’ve seen the dump, honey. You wouldn’t like living there, anyway-even if we didn’t need a new car. I’ll stop by after work, tomorrow night, and see that everything’s shipshape. Then we can both run over any time later. It takes lots of time to sell a house.”

  * * * *

  It was one of those big, old-style places—Georgian, I think it’s called. It would have cost De Valgis a fortune to keep it up, but he hadn’t done much about it. It needed paint and new windows—a dozen other things. Ethel and I couldn’t afford to live here, if we did any fixing. But I could let the next owner worry. I was getting out from under—profitably.

  With a premature song in my heart, I fitted the key Smithers had given me into the lock and went in.

  In spite of many invitations from De Valgis, this was my first venture inside his house. I wouldn’t have taken Ethel in there on a bet—not while De Valgis was around. And I had made a point of not finding an excuse to call on the old coot myself. I’d seen the outside of the place, but it was not wholly in keeping with the inside.

  The rooms were surprisingly light and sunny. Clean—well furnished in a rather old-fashioned style. It was late when I got there, and shadows were deepening in the upper corners of the rooms. But I took my time, until finally it got so dusky I had to turn on the lights as I went from room to room.

  There was much here that indicated another, earlier life of De Valgis. Apparently, he had once been a family man. There were pictures of a pretty young woman and a couple of kids—family type stuff—but the clothing styles showed they had been taken long ago.

  The library puzzled me. De Valgis had owned a lot of books and had left them all in the house. I often wondered how he made a living and, I thought, perhaps his library would give me a clue. I had never been interested enough to wonder before.

  The first book I took off the shelf was something called Talents et etudes de la diablerie by a Vicomte de something-or-other. It was in French. After I’d spelled out a couple of words, my high school French broke down and I put the book back on the shelf. The next was a big, moldy old tome with fragmenting leather covers, titled Wissenschaft des Teufelkundes by Otto Braun.

  That’s the way the whole library went—one foreign language after another, most of which hit me right in the middle of my ignorance. Some in Spanish, some in Italian, some in Greek, Danish, Norwegian—I don’t know what all. Finally—one in English. This one dispelled any doubt I had had of my translations of occasional previous titles. It was called, Studyes in ye Carnale Knowledge of ye Devilhood eke ye Satanik Wytchcrafte wyth ye Receipts for ye Conjuring up of ye Daemons. A long title, but it was a big book.

  It had maybe a hundred thick, yellowish sheets of some kind of cured skin—and it was entirely handwritten. The writ
ing was spidery, in faded red that could have been red ink, but I suspected it wasn’t. Each page was illuminated with washed-out drawings of witches and demons.

  Since the writing was difficult to read and was phrased in jaw-breaking archaisms, I put it back on the shelf. I wish I had read it. Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t have gone into the Room Without Windows.

  I had warned Ethel that there’d be a joker in the deck. But I walked right into it. I was going through the upstairs hall, exploring each room as I came to it. The Room Without Windows was at the very end of the hall, across the back stairwell from the bath. There was a note, addressed to me and Ethel, pinned to the solid oak door.

  Dear Jack and Ethel:

  By now you know that I have gone away. I am returning to visit relatives in Europe. I may stay there the rest of my life, so do not expect me back. However, if I do come back, the house is still yours, because I have deeded it to you as a gift—for being my most beloved friends. But please take care of the books that are in the library. If I do come back, I shall want them.