The terrible words stuck in his throat. His tongue could not form them, his will refused them sound. There was something so monstrously unclean about what he was asking that he felt a staggering sense of guilty terror.
He knew that he couldn’t do it. A stronger man, a man who could hurl a defiance into the seething pits of hell, might have uttered the words, but it was beyond his power.
He raised his face and scalding tears were on his cheeks.
“Forgive me,” he said brokenly. “It was not for myself I would have asked this terrible thing. It was—”
The candle at the foot of the statue flickered. A cold clammy draft touched his cheek with a feather’s touch and a long whining moan sounded in the long dark corridor.
Brother Joseph’s fingers closed slowly.
A blast of cold wind lashed into the room with an angry crescendoing roar. There was a dreadful lost wail in the moan of the wind, as if it had howled over the wastelands of the world and had roared through cold space and had touched things that were loathsome and putrid with approaching death.
Oberleutnant Reinwold backed away from the force of the blast. The torch in his hand was dimming. Shadows of darkness were closing inexorably in on the small band.
“Turn your torches on,” he shouted to his men.
Their answers were torn from their teeth by the lashing wind.
Brother Joseph felt a nameless, writhing horror, creeping over him, paralyzing his thoughts.
“My God, what have I done?”
This tortured cry, from the depths of his soul, was whipped from his mouth and hurled to oblivion by the sobbing, screaming wind.
And the lights were all out!
Darkness, final and complete, filled the room.
And then Brother Joseph heard a sound that was not made by the throat of a living thing; a slobbering, champing obscene sound that seemed to violate by its very existence everything decent and honorable that had ever been known to mankind.
An instant later he heard something slithering in the corridor that led to his room; a sound that was like a furry, unfooted body dragging itself across wet, slimy stones.
And he heard footsteps approaching, too.
Footsteps that moved slowly and heavily with solid tread, but he knew that no human foot could create that sound; for human, two-footed creatures do not have hooves.
Dimly, from afar it seemed, he heard the shrill, soul-numbing screams of the Germans, as the monstrous, unclean horde of things advanced, emerging from what noxious pit man could only imagine in his maddest dreams, hell-spawn surging forward with slavering jaws.
And the wind rose to a wild scream.
Brother Joseph clasped his hands until the knuckles whitened; his eyes rose to meet the stone countenance of the statue above him. His lips moved in prayer and gradually the sound faded away; a great vast silence surrounded him as he knelt there, eyes upraised, hands clasper.
But the Germans heard; and eventually they saw…
* * * *
Dawn broke over the monastery clear and bright. Reich Inspector von Moltke stepped from his special car as the first rosy rays of the sun were bathing the crumbling buildings in pastel brilliance.
“This is very queer,” he said to the soldiers who had accompanied him. “Intelligence ordered Oberleutnant Reinwold to apprehend a group of escaping refugees here last night. They have received no report from him as yet. We shall investigate.”
He entered the monastery and in due time discovered the hidden door at the rear of the altar and descended to the hidden room that had offered a haven to so many weary refugees.
The first thing the Reich Inspector noticed was a white-haired monk kneeling before a statue. The Reich Inspector drew his gun but it was not necessary.
The man was obviously dead; he was smiling and his hands were still clasped over his breast.
Reich Inspector von Moltke then turned to the other side of the room. There were thirteen things lying on the floor. The things had once been German soldiers.
The Reich Inspector had superintended much of the butchery in Poland; he had seen the effects of starvation and plague in Greece; he had been present at Lidice; but nothing in that extensive experience had prepared him for the sight of those thirteen things on the floor of the little room under the main chapel of an abandoned chapel.
He stumbled up the steps and hysterial, incoherent noises were sounding in his throat. There was a fleck of froth on his lips and his eyes were those of a wild man.
He couldn’t talk for hours; and by the time he finally got himself under control, there was not the faintest trace of the route that Pastor Mueller had taken with his refugees.
YOUR SOUL COMES C.O.D., by Mack Reynolds
Originally published in Fantastic Adventures, Mar. 1952.
In view of the trouble to which he had gone in order to acquire such out of the way items as a piece of unicorn horn and three drops of blood from a virgin, it was rather disconcerting to have the spirit appear even before the prescribed routine. In fact, he hadn’t even got his protective pentacle drawn when he looked up to find the entity materialized in his rickety easy chair.
The spirit said, “You don’t really need that, you know.”
Norman Wallace stared at his visitor, even after all these months of research, unbelievingly. The other was far from what the young man expected. Somehow, he was reminded of Lincoln, his face almost beautiful in its infinite sadness.
The spirit nodded at the pentacle. “Mere superstition. It couldn’t protect you if my purpose was to do you harm. But, more important still, I am quite incapable of such aggression. Man has freedom of choice, free will; we of the other worlds can only help him destroy—or elevate —himself; we cannot initiate.”
Norman was shaken, but not quite to the point of speechlessness. He pointed to his assembled drugs, charms, potions and incenses and said, almost indignantly, “But I haven’t performed the rite, as yet.”
The other nodded and shrugged. “What’s the difference? You wished to summon a spirit. Very well, here I am. The desire is of more importance than the act of combining those rather silly items. But, to get to the point, just what is it you desire?”
Norman Wallace took a deep breath and got down to business. He indicated his shabby quarters. “I can bear this no longer,” he said. “I want a few years of decency in living, a few years of the good things of life that others enjoy. So—”
“So in your desperation you wish to sell your soul in return for help.”
“That’s right.”
The spirit considered momentarily. “Suppose I give you my support for forty years? Suppose I guarantee you love, wealth, power, to the degree you desire them? At the end of that time your soul is mine?”
Norman Wallace’s mouth tightened, but he said, “That’s agreeable.”
The spirit came to its feet. “Very well, the pact is made.”
The other frowned. “Don’t we make out a contract or something? Don’t I have to sign in blood?”
The faintest of smiles came to the melancholy face of the spirit. “That won’t be necessary. The pact has been made; neither of us will or can break it.”
Suddenly he had disappeared.
And almost simultaneously came a knock at the door. Dazed, Norman came to his feet and opened it.
Harriet was there and immediately in his arms. “Oh, darling, darling, I was so wrong.”
He held her back, at arm’s length, in amazement. “You mean that you’ve changed your mind, you’ll marry me?
“Oh, darling, yes. I thought going away from you, spending a few months in Florida, would let me forget. I was so wrong.”
Frowning worriedly, he indicated the poverty of his room. “But, Harriet, we’d still—”
&n
bsp; She smiled now, and laughed up at him. “Remember that little farm I told you my aunt left me? The one in Louisiana?”
He nodded, uncomprehending.
“Oil, darling,” she bubbled over. “Enough to give you the start you need.”
And so it went for forty years. Wealth to the modest extent he desired it; prestige to the small degree his ambition demanded; but, most important of all, love that ripened and ever grew as the years went by. And a home rich with children, and the respect and affection of his neighbors and his associates.
Not that he had ever seen the spirit again, not in all those years. Almost, it was possible for him to look back at his life and think it was all of his own doing. Each success had seemingly been not unordinary good luck, or a result of his own efforts. Sometimes he had even tried to convince himself that the pact he’d made was a figment of his imagination, that the demon he had thought he had summoned was a result of too much worry, too much work, too little food and recreation back in those days of his poverty-stricken youth.
But subconsciously he knew. He knew!
And so it was that after his forty years he sat alone in his study and waited. Harriet had gone on to bed; the children, of course, had long since been married themselves and were living their own peaceful, happy lives.
He wondered now, as he looked back over the years, at the use to which he had put the demon’s assistance. He had been promised love, wealth, and power to the extent he desired them. But, somehow, he had wanted no more than sufficient for himself and his family. He had made no attempt to accumulate the fortune of a Midas; nor, for that matter, had he attained his possessions by recourse to the racetrack or stock market. He had worked hard during those forty years.
He had been promised power, too. Why had he taken so little? He had been content to assume a position in society that coincided with his natural abilities. He could have been president or, for that matter, dictator of the world. Why hadn’t he?
Ah, but he had taken his full measure of the other. His cup had overflowed with love. In all the years, the romance between Harriet and him had never waned. And the children? Well, for instance, the way they had returned to the old home from all over the nation this last Christmas had proven their affection.
And now suddenly he thought he knew his motivation. Somewhere, beneath it all, he had been attempting to forestall the fate awaiting him. Subconsciously he had told himself that if he were moderate, if he led the good life, he abstained from demanding the ultimate, his reckoning with the demon would be the easier.
He laughed abruptly, bitterly.
And suddenly fear washed over him. The reckoning was now.
No matter what he had done with the demonic powers awarded him. No matter how he had loved and been loved. No matter how much he repented now.
His soul was the spirit’s.
He clasped his hands tightly to the arms of his chair.
Run! Hide! ESCAPE!
But he sank back again. There was no place to run. No place to hide. No way of escape.
The spirit materialized on the couch across from him.
Norman Wallace nodded his gray head in submission. “I was expecting you.”
“Your forty years are up,” the spirit told him.
“Yes, I know.” Hopelessness had replaced fear now.
“Is there any reason why our pact should not be fulfilled? You are satisfied that I have suitably kept my part of the bargain?”
The old man hesitated, then nodded again. “I am satisfied.”
“Then you are ready to go? You have taken farewell of those you love, made what arrangements you thought necessary?”
“Yes. Yes, I am ready.” His voice was firm now. “I suppose it will be hard on Harriet for a time, but then, we must all face the end sooner or later, and only recently my doctor warned me of my heart. Harriet always said she wanted me to go first, that she would hate to think of me alone in life after we have been so close.”
The spirit came to its feet. “Very well, let us be on our way.”
Norman Wallace arose too and the shock was not so great as he might have expected when he was able to look back and see himself sitting there in the easy chair, his face pale and his eyes staring unseeingly.
“Then I am dead already?”
“Yes,” the spirit told him. “Your doctor’s diagnosis was quite accurate. Come.”
And suddenly they were in another place and Norman Wallace stared about uncomprehendingly.
He said, “It seems that in all my relations with you I have been continually surprised at the inaccuracy of the legends and myths.”
“Oh?” The spirit said.
“Yes. When you first appeared, you didn’t look like my lifelong conception of a demon. Nor in my dealings with you have you acted the way I supposed you would. Now, this place has none of the attributes I had expected of hell.”
The spirit smiled. “My dear Norman, why is it that so many suppose that souls are of less interest to us than to our adversaries? Why should not one side strive for a worthy one as well as the other? I am not a demon, nor is this hell.”
ST. JOHN’S EVE, by Nikolai Gogol
A STORY TOLD BY THE SACRISTAN OF THE DIKANKA CHURCH
Thoma Grigroovitch had one very strange eccentricity: to the day of his death he never liked to tell the same thing twice. There were times when, if you asked him to relate a thing afresh, he would interpolate new matter, or alter it so that it was impossible to recognise it. Once upon a time, one of those gentlemen who, like the usurers at our yearly fairs, clutch and beg and steal every sort of frippery, and issue mean little volumes, no thicker than an A B C book, every month, or even every week, wormed this same story out of Thoma Grigorovitch, and the latter completely forgot about it. But that same young gentleman, in the pea-green caftan, came from Poltava, bringing with him a little book, and, opening it in the middle, showed it to us. Thoma Grigorovitch was on the point of setting his spectacles astride of his nose, but recollected that he had forgotten to wind thread about them and stick them together with wax, so he passed it over to me. As I understand nothing about reading and writing, and do not wear spectacles, I undertook to read it. I had not turned two leaves when all at once he caught me by the hand and stopped me.
“Stop! Tell me first what you are reading.”
I confess that I was a trifle stunned by such a question.
“What! What am I reading, Thoma Grigorovitch? Why, your own words.”
“Who told you that they were my words?”
“Why, what more would you have? Here it is printed: ‘Related by such and such a sacristan.’”
“Spit on the head of the man who printed that! He lies, the dog of a Moscow pedlar! Did I say that? “Twas just the same as though one hadn’t his wits about him!’ Listen. I’ll tell the tale to you on the spot.”
We moved up to the table, and he began.
My grandfather (the kingdom of heaven be his!—may he eat only wheaten rolls and poppy-seed cakes with honey in the other world!) could tell a story wonderfully well. When he used to begin a tale you could not stir from the spot all day, but kept on listening. He was not like the story-teller of the present day, when he begins to lie, with a tongue as though he had had nothing to eat for three days, so that you snatch your cap and flee from the house. I remember my old mother was alive then, and in the long winter evenings when the frost was crackling out of doors, and had sealed up hermetically the narrow panes of our cottage, she used to sit at her wheel, drawing out a long thread in her hand, rocking the cradle with her foot, and humming a song, which I seem to hear even now.
The lamp, quivering and flaring up as though in fear of something, lighted up our cottage; the spindle hummed; and all of us children, collected in a cluster, listened to grandfather, who had no
t crawled off the stove for more than five years, owing to his great age. But the wondrous tales of the incursions of the Zaporozhian Cossacks and the Poles, the bold deeds of Podkova, of Poltar-Kozhukh, and Sagaidatchnii, did not interest us so much as the stories about some deed of old which always sent a shiver through our frames and made our hair rise upright on our heads. Sometimes such terror took possession of us in consequence of them, that, from that evening forward, Heaven knows how wonderful everything seemed to us. If one chanced to go out of the cottage after nightfall for anything, one fancied that a visitor from the other world had lain down to sleep in one’s bed; and I have often taken my own smock, at a distance, as it lay at the head of the bed, for the Evil One rolled up into a ball! But the chief thing about grandfather’s stories was, that he never lied in all his life; and whatever he said was so, was so.
I will now tell you one of his wonderful tales. I know that there are a great many wise people who copy in the courts, and can even read civil documents, but who, if you were to put into their hand a simple prayer-book, could not make out the first letter in it, and would show all their teeth in derision. These people laugh at everything you tell them. Along comes one of them—and doesn’t believe in witches! Yes, glory to God that I have lived so long in the world! I have seen heretics to whom it would be easier to lie in confession than it would be to our brothers and equals to take snuff, and these folk would deny the existence of witches! But let them just dream about something, and they won’t even tell what it was! There, it is no use talking about them!
No one could have recognised the village of ours a little over a hundred years ago; it was a hamlet, the poorest kind of a hamlet. Half a score of miserable farmhouses, unplastered and badly thatched, were scattered here and there about the fields. There was not a yard or a decent shed to shelter animals or waggons. That was the way the wealthy lived: and if you had looked for our brothers, the poor—why, a hole in the ground—that was a cabin for you! Only by the smoke could you tell that a God-created man lived there. You ask why they lived so? It was not entirely through poverty: almost every one led a raiding Cossack life, and gathered not a little plunder in foreign lands; it was rather because it was little use building up a good wooden house. Many folk were engaged in raids all over the country—Crimeans, Poles, Lithuanians! It was quite possible that their own countrymen might make a descent and plunder everything. Anything was possible.
The Devils & Demons MEGAPACK ®: 25 Modern and Classic Tales Page 56
