by Cave, Hugh
It was a long time since he had been as close to her as this. Those damned clay figures had claimed all his attention, but tonight, at this moment, he could think of nothing but Ellen, his own little wife.
His mouth found hers and he kissed her until she was gasping for breath. She liked it. Her soft young breasts swelled against him and her heart throbbed out a wild song of delight. The warm pressure of her, the intoxicating fragrance of her hair and skin and breath, drove from Oden's mind all the vague fears that had gathered there . . . .
It was after two o'clock when Philip Oden awoke. A hand was on his stomach, pulling at him, and his wife's voice was hoarsely whispering his name.
He opened his eyes. The room was pitch dark, and rain was still murmuring against the windows. "What is it?" he mumbled. "What's the matter?"
His wife was sitting up in bed, her slender body a pale, stiff figure in the dark. "Listen, Phil!" she whispered. "Listen! I—I heard footsteps!"
Oden listened. Not fully awake, he found it hard to keep his eyes open, and suspected that his wife had been dreaming. Then he heard what she had heard. Someone, or something, was slowly ascending the stairs from the living-room. Footsteps were distinctly audible.
Oden's mouth curled in a snarl. He had slept soundly for the first time in almost a week, and his mind was still sluggish with sleep. He did not immediately associate the footsteps with anything that had gone before. They were merely footsteps.
"Some thief, looking for trouble," he muttered, and swung his feet to the floor, intending to get the gun that was in the top drawer of the bureau.
But there was something wrong with those footsteps, and he realized it while pushing himself off the bed. They were unmistakably being made by naked feet.
He swayed on wide-spread legs and stared at the door. He was not frightened —not yet—but maggots of uneasiness crawled in his brain, and his heart began to swell against his chest. Naked feet! And the sound they made was a weirdly terrible shf… shf… shf… that was like nothing else he had ever heard.
A sob of abject terror welled from Ellen's lips as the footsteps came nearer. They were in the hall now, advancing toward the bedroom door. Never once taking his gaze from that yawning black aperture, Oden sidled toward the bureau.
"Oh God, it's coming!" his wife moaned. "Do something, Phil!"
There was another sound then—a sound that chilled the blood in Oden's veins and caused beads of cold sweat to stand out on his ridged forehead. It seemed to have no beginning but was suddenly loud enough to sweep like a living thing along the hail, through darkness, and smother even the suck of his own labored breathing. It was an uncouth slobbering, a ghastly, half human outpouring of grisly mirth.
A madman with impaired vocal cords might have uttered such a sound. A madman or a hungry animal. And the footsteps whispered through it, shf… shf… shf … continuing their awful advance.
Suddenly the doorway was no longer empty.
Oden uttered a hoarse cry of horror. His wife screamed. The thing in the doorway leered at both of them, and made slobbering sounds with its drooling lips, and took a lumbering step forward.
Numb with fear, Oden staggered back until the wall slammed into him, stopping him. Then, with both arms outthrust and low whispering sounds sobbing from his gaping mouth, he stared.
The thing was one of his own clay figures, come to life. It was the Beast out of Gromleigh's horror-book. Huge and hairless and hideous, it loomed like a great white giant in the room's darkness, and the room was full of the squalid, sluttish jargon that spewed from its flabby mouth.
He had brought the thing to life! He had done what Ingershaw and Yago must have done! And it was hungrily advancing upon his wife, just as in Gromleigh's book it had seized every defenseless woman that aroused it!
Oden lurched away from the wall and flung himself forward. He forgot about the gun in the top drawer of the bureau. He saw only the hideous monster lumbering toward the bed, and heard only the terror-screams of the helpless girl who cringed there. The girl was his wife. He loved her. It was his job to protect her.
He charged blindly, and the beast whirled to meet him. Hairless, slippery flesh slid under Oden's clawing hands. Shrilling incoherent words, he struggled to hurl the monster back. No one had ever called him a coward or a weakling, and he was not weak now. Fear had given him superhuman strength.
It was not enough. Huge hands took hold of him and lifted him off the floor. The sledge-hammer blows of his fists had no effect. Held at arm's length, he snarled and writhed to free himself, and drove his feet savagely into the monster's flabby body—but the awful leer did not fade from that hideous face, and the beast was impervious to pain.
Turning, the beast flung Oden aside—flung him easily and without apparent effort, yet with such force that the room itself shuddered to the impact as Oden's contorted body crashed to the floor.
Blood trickled from the corners of his mouth as he struggled to hands and knees. Agony streaked through him, and his left leg was a crushed, throbbing weight that held him down. He tried to rise, but crumpled and lay groaning. As if from a great distance he heard his wife screaming for help, and saw the monster leaning over her.
Horribly conscious of what was happening, but helpless to prevent it, Oden lay in a twisted heap on the floor, his own blood forming a wet, sticky pool under his hands. The room was still dark, but not dark enough to blind him. He saw every ghastly detail.
The same huge hands which had hurled him aside were now dragging Ellen from the bed. They were clutching the soft white flesh of her body, tearing the filmy nightgown which was her only protection. She struggled the way he had struggled, and with the same lack of success. It was foolish to fight....
Through Oden's frenzied mind flashed passages from the horror-book which in some hellish manner had brought this uncouth monster into being. God, how vividly real were those passages now! Time and again this beast had attacked women. Some he had dragged -to his lair and devoured. Others he had mauled and mutilated and cast aside.
And now Ellen was to be one of his victims! His mouth was glued to hers, and her half-nude body was a fragile toy in his powerful paws. Her beauty had aroused in him a strange sort of madness. He was not hurting her—much. Not intentionally. Animal sounds of delight gibbered from his lips as he caressed his new plaything.
And Ellen had stopped screaming. Her hands were no longer tearing frantically at the monster's face. She lay limp in his arms, unaware of his clumsy caresses.
Phil Oden tried again to stagger erect, and again fell back, groaning, when his crushed leg refused to support him. The monster turned to peer at him, and voiced a vicious snarl of hate.
Then, while Oden stared with horrified eyes, the beast gathered Ellen's limp body in its huge arms and lumbered to the door. Unable to follow, Oden swayed on hands and knees and moaned in torment.
He knew what would happen now. It was all in the book. The monster would go lurching out into the night, back to its foul den. There, for hours on end, it would gloat over its newly acquired plaything, gurgling and laughing and chuckling
Finally it would tire of the game and then….
The hollow thump of the beast's receding footsteps died to silence. Downstairs, the front door closed with a resounding crash, and then there was only the muted whisper of the rain and the rasp of Oden's own harsh breathing. The beast had gone, taking Ellen with him.
"Oh, my God," Oden groaned.
He began crawling. Agony raged within him, and hot sweat dripped from his contorted face, but he crawled over the threshold and along the corridor to the head of the stairs.
The stairs were steep and sloped down, down, into a darkness that had no bottom. Swaying there, he fought for strength.
Like a crippled dog he descended, bracing himself with his hands and dragging his crushed leg behind him. Unending waves of pain shot through him. The agony in his head was a raging fire, destroying his mind. But he kept going.
That monstrous thing was not real. It couldn't be real. It was an invention of Ivan Gromleigh, who believed that every human being possessed a dual personality; and he, Philip Oden, had brought the thing to life by modeling it in clay. That was the answer. He was responsible.
His warped brain fastened on that thought to the exclusion of all else. Groaning through clenched teeth, he crawled across the living-room floor, dragged himself into the dining-room. The clay figures were still there on the table.
He pulled himself erect by clutching the legs of the tripod, lurching to his knees and grabbing the table-edge. The table tipped and he hung his weight on it, pulling it over.
The clay figures thudded to the carpet.
Sobbing wildly, he flung himself upon them, seized them. They had brought the monster to life. They must be destroyed!
Like a child playing with toys, he gathered them in a heap. Out there in the night, in the rain, the monster was fleeing with Ellen. Perhaps it had already reached its lair—
The thought lashed him to an insane frenzy. Savagely he ground the clay figures into the carpet, crushing them, pulverizing them. They represented endless hours of painstaking toil, but he chuckled insanely as he smashed them.
And then suddenly he jerked back on his knees, listening.
The sound that rocked the very walls around him was no human sound. Nothing of human proportions could have uttered a scream so laden with awful agony. Like thunder it bellowed through the night, shaking everything in its giant path.
Back in the dark sloughs of a primeval world, a wounded mastodon might have screamed that way in the final agonies of dying.
The monstrous din came from somewhere nearby. Like the wail of a thousand sirens it ripped and slashed through space, and the torment of a slaughtered army was packed into that one gargantuan voice.
It lived and died, and left in its wake a silence that was earsplitting.
Moaning softly, Phil Oden crawled to a telephone.
They found his wife an hour later and brought her back to him, nearly naked and shivering but unharmed. They listened patiently to his story, those grim, hard-boiled officers of the law, and one of them said vaguely: "Well, maybe it's like you say, Oden. You're ill, of course, and I guess we won't take you too seriously. But if there was a monster such as you describe, he got away and left no trace behind him. We found your wife alongside Haley's Brook, about a mile from here, and there wasn't no one else in the vicinity."
Phil Oden did not argue. He merely thanked them. But the following day's newspapers carried more than just a garbled account of the search for Ellen. They carried a General Press dispatch of which he read every word.
New Orleans, Mar. 14 (GP)—Tbe police of this city are today investigating what appears to be one of the strangest murder cases ever encountered here. At a late hour last night, screams of agony were beard by tenants of a suburban apartment house and were traced to the apartment occupied by Ivan Gromleigh, eminent psychiatrist. Led by the manager, a group of anxious tenants entered the apartment and discovered Gromleigh in bed, dead.
The man's body was torn and mangled almost beyond recognition. Literally every inch of it was pulverized as if in the jaws of a giant press.
Because the apartment itself revealed no trace of a struggle, police are of the opinion that the psychiatrist was attacked while asleep and murdered in his bed. Yet the bedclothes surrounding the body were in no way torn or damaged by the weapon that reduced the victim to a bloody pulp.
Police are investigating all angles.
Phil Oden showed the GP dispatch to his wife and held her in his arms while she read it. When the clipping fell from her trembling fingers, he put his lips against her cheek and whispered, "Easy, darling, easy," and held her hard against him until her slim, soft body had stopped quivering.
"What—what does it mean?" she asked fearfully.
"It means Gromleigh was right. He wasn't guessing. He had first-hand knowledge of the stuff he put in that book. It means we can wash our hands of the job and forget it—and we're going to."
He put his lips against hers, and the heat from her body crept into him, warming him.
"There'll be no more footsteps," he said softly.
The Affair of the Clutching Hand
"Sir Gordon Null's Place?"
The station agent at West Sussex shuffled a step nearer to me, glancing furtively into my face. Evidently a passenger on the late train was not a common occurrence and was open to suspicion. "Null's place? You'll be meanin'—'The Turrets?'"
I nodded quietly, angered by the cautious manner in which he kept his distance.
"I'll tell you the road," he said slowly. "Mind you, I ain't takin' you, not in person I ain't. There be a fearful heavy storm comin' up, an' the moor be a lonely place with the wailin' an' screamin' o' the wind. But you'll be leavin' the main highway over there by them two trees—"
He pointed into the dark, to the left of the station. "There'll be a dirt path leadin' off the road, an' you'll be followin' it straight out across the moor. Straight out, mind you, an' no turns or you'll be findin' yourself back where you started from! You follow that path, an' if it ain't too dark you'll be seem' the place ahead, like a prison."
As I groped along the path, following it with great difficulty, for the sky overhead was jet black and heavy with storm, I became more and more conscious of the madness of my journey. Hardly more than an hour past, I had been secure in my own study, in London; then, through the fog and drizzle, had come a message from Null, handed to me by a blue-coated street runner.
"Come at once, Hale," it had said. "After thirty years of searching, I have found the mightiest thing in creation. I must tell someone. The others will not believe. Come by tonight's train!"
And I had come—by tonight's train. We had been together at Cambridge, Null much older than I. I remembered him as a gaunt man, tall, and wasted. His hair had always been black as pitchblende, twisting down over bitter eyes, and his face the face of a hawk.
I had reached the open moor now, where the sky was a heavy, moving void, unbroken by any sign of light. Great storm clouds, gathering intensity with every sluggish movement, formed a solid mass of darkness above me. In an hour, perhaps even less, they would come together with a sinister roar; and hell itself, in the dismal blackness of an English night, would envelope my path.
And now, ahead of me as I picked my steps cautiously through the stubble, I could make out the black outlines of my destination. Like a spider-shaped shadow it hung before me, looming fearfully close. The gravel walk crunched beneath my feet as I turned into the half-open gate. A moment later, standing in the shadow of the massive doorway, I lifted the iron knocker and let it drop with a resounding thud.
The sound was startlingly loud. I heard it echo and re-echo through the inner rooms; and as I stood there, with the thud of it dying in my ears, the great door fell away from me with a sullen rumble. I stepped over the sill, conscious that a pair of expressionless Oriental eyes were following my every movement. The door closed behind me with a heavy rasping sound. A hand fell on my arm.
"You—Doctor Hale?"
I nodded. The Oriental stood aside very quietly. His gaunt face harmonized strangely with the utter loneliness of his surroundings. He was a Burman—tall, thick-set, unemotional.
"Sir Gordon tell me he send for you," he said evenly. "You get his letter, you come, eh? Now you follow me. I take you to missy."
He led me silently down the long corridor, underneath a single sputtering gas jet that burned in the wall. A glance impressed those surroundings indelibly on my mind. The dark, repelling atmosphere of the place seemed to thrust me back with mute warning; and the faint halo of illumination, cast by that single light, seemed to beckon me forward; I was between the two forces, standing rigid in momentary hesitation, with the Burman waiting stolidly for me to follow him.
Follow him I did, through a winding series of black corridors that led me deep into the recesses of the old house. Th
ere was no light; the passages extended before me like the labyrinthine tunnels of a buried vault, until the figure ahead of me stopped suddenly and pushed open an unpretentious door that hung in the gloom of the wall.
Without waiting for me to speak, he entered. A match gleamed for an instant in his cupped hands, and as he straightened up I saw, by the increasing light of the lamp, that the room was Null's study. The light was dim, hardly reaching to the ends of the chamber, revealing a massive, wooden table in the center, with claw-legged chair beside it, and row upon row of dusty volumes against the farther wall. I sensed, from the musty odor that filled the enclosure, that the room had been dosed for some time—probably for a number of days—and had been opened solely for my accommodation.
The Burman turned silently and retraced his steps to the door. With one hand on the knob, he faced me, "You wait here. Missy come see you very soon."
I picked a cigarette from the open case on the table, and lighted it, nodding to him. When I looked up again, the doorway was empty. I was completely alone.
It was curiosity, or at least a fervent desire to be doing something, that made me glance down at the pile of scattered books and papers that lay on the table.
The books were singularly alike—all of them advanced text books on the subject of poisons and their effects on the blood.
One of them—a tiny, pocket-sized thing in red leather cover, its pages well-thumbed and marked—lay opened to a hideous picture of a mad gorilla. Another had been torn apart ruthlessly and cast aside, with the torn section carefully bound and preserved. I glanced at it in wonder, without picking it up, and found myself reading a very technical analysis of venomous snakes, with special attention to that deadly poisonous reptile known as the Bitis arien tans, or Puff Adder.
And then, as I glanced across the table in half-interest for what lay there, my eyes fell upon something else. It was my own name that caught my attention, scrawled in pencil across the front of a sealed envelope. Below it, in heavy letters, appeared the word "Personal!"
