by Cave, Hugh
Was it possible that those walls failed to make contact, that a tiny air-space existed up there beyond the reach of his hands?
There could be no other explanation. Through some such aperture his own exhalations had escaped; otherwise death would long ago have stalked this grim enclosure. And through some such opening was this new warmth creeping in upon him.
For the room was warm! So warm, now, that it brought discomfort. Breath wheezed in Mario's parched throat as he returned the candle to its niche. Stripping himself of shirt and undershirt, he used the discarded garments to wipe rivulets of perspiration from his body.
Terror assailed him and he stared with gaunt, red-rimmed eyes at his silent companion, said hoarsely:
"This is what he meant when he declared the end was near, my beloved! But he will not dare! Surely he will not dare!"
But he wondered, and was not sure.
Hours passed and he paced the floor of the cell, pausing at intervals to wipe moisture from his drooling face. Mumbled words spilled from his lips, at times incoherently, at times with forced indifference. For long intervals he sat cross-legged on the floor, where the heat was less intense, and gazed up at the naked body of his loved one.
"It is a good thing I have you to comfort me, my dear," he whispered. "Otherwise I should go quite mad. Luigi did not think of that when he brought you . . .
But as the heat grew more unbearable, the calm went out of his voice and he stormed from wall to wall, screaming denunciations on the head of his tormentor. His voice became a cracked, sobbing thing which hurt his throat. With increasing horror he stared at the aperture beneath the ceiling, reviled the genius who had built such a chamber of torment.
And terror came into his eyes when he gazed at the niched candle and saw that the heat had wilted that waxen cylinder.
"Luigi!" he shrieked. "Luigi. Have mercy!" His clenched fists pounded the unyielding door until they were bruised and swollen and purple. But no answer came to his cries.
Madness came to mock him as he lurched wildly about the narrow cell, clawing the walls with his hooked fingers and wailing words of torment. Madness blazed in his bulging eyes and his eyeballs were gleaming glass marbles, hot in his head. Distorted visions grew out of his crazed brain.
He saw the leeringly triumphant face of Luigi staring at him from shadows where no face existed. Rushing forward, he beat at the face with his fists, only to shudder with a knowledge of his own madness, and lurch backward, retching in his throat as the heat grew more intense.
Stumbling then to that strange waxen figure near the door, he sagged to his knees and put his trembling arms about the woman's thighs, stared fearfully up into her face.
"It is the end," he moaned. "The end, my beloved—for us both."
Then a strange light gleamed in his eyes and he swayed erect, to stand before her. "No, it is not the end for you! I am not that mad! For days I have made myself believe you were a creature of flesh and blood, alive and real. But I know better. I am not so mad that I cannot change lies back to truths! The real Angelina will not die, even though I do!"
He stared past the waxen image, through the frowning walls of his prison, and saw in his mind the real Angelina, alive and lovely, in the magnificent home above him. Sad-eyed she was for love of him, and bewildered for not knowing what had become of him. But she was alive, and love for him was still in her soul. And he muttered insanely: "Just once more I will take your loveliness in my arms, beloved. Just once more I will make believe. And then I can forget this lifeless image and recall the truth, for the truth now is more comforting."
Slowly he turned, and walked again to the waxen figure of the woman he desired. His steps were uncertain and his heart pounding because of the torment within it. And his arms, outstretched to caress that nude figure, dripped sweat, trembled.
But he did not touch her. Instead, he stood suddenly rigid, staring with blood-rimmed eyes that opened in sheer horror.
Before him, as melted wax yielded to the force of its own weight and crawled like living flesh, the image of Angelina had stirred with life. As the candle in the niche was drooping, so, too, was the image of Mario's beloved. And as the flickering yellow glow of the candle-flame illumined her features, those features lost shape and form and slowly became a hideous distortion of reality.
Mario stared and cried out in horror, but the transformation continued before his eyes and he was powerless to prevent it. Slowly the woman's cheeks melted and ran away; slowly her lips curled downward in leering mockery; slowly her molded breasts drooped and became shapeless mounds of ugliness. Slowly the smooth curves of her thigh crawled floor-ward.
A shriek welled from Mario's throat as he lurched forward, seeking frantically with both hands to preserve the beauty of that changing body. But still the horror continued, and his own face became racked with the futility of his efforts. Hoarse cries of anguish croaked from his parched lips. Madness tore at his heart.
And suddenly, as his fevered hands pawed the shapeless form before him, he saw something more, and fell back with a lurid shriek. For the face that leered out at him, where a waxen face of loveliness had been, was no longer white but black and hideous. The nude form that stood before him, where a waxen shape of beauty had stood, was a human corpse!
The room was a furnace, but Mario did not know. Like a man impaled, he stood on rigid legs, arms extended, his sweat-drenched face a frozen mask. Slowly, before him, that thin coating of wax continued to drool from the naked body beneath, and with each passing moment the hideous truth stood more revealed, until at last the mask was raised in its entirety and the truth stood no longer in doubt.
Once, not long ago, that naked form had been a dark-haired, beautifully shaped creature of warmth and passion. But the blood in that dead body had ceased flowing, that once lovely hair was now a crawling mass of horror, that face was a shrunken, hollow-cheeked death-mask devoid of beauty. And as the wax ceased dripping, Mario's loved one stood there in all her nakedness, gazing at him from empty eye-sockets—a cadaverous, death-eaten visitant from the grave.
For a moment Mario stared, but for a moment only. A wild shriek tore from his lips as he stumbled away from her. He did not hear the soft creaking sound which issued from the iron door behind him, nor did he turn to see the door's infant block of iron swing slowly outward, permitting a pair of glittering eyes to peer into the torment-chamber and watch him.
In Mario's brain something snapped, and his mad shrieks became madder peals of wild laughter which had no thought or reason. Into his eyes came a grey glare of permanent madness, and he slumped to the floor, to sit there in a strange dark world of his own, while he chuckled insane cackles of mad mirth.
So that, when the cell door swung wide, and Luigi paced slowly over the threshold, Mario only gaped at him and grinned, pointing a crooked forefinger at the long dead corpse of Angelina and croaking gleefully:
"Look! Look! She is not made of wax anymore!"
But when there was no answer, he peered into Luigi's face, scowled and demanded petulantly: "Who are you?"
And then Luigi said quietly: "I have come to take you out of here and turn you loose."
Prey of the Nightborn
Peter Marabeck's wife was buried on Tuesday, and he met the other woman the following Saturday night while driving home from Putney. Snow had fallen fitfully for two days. The road through the valley was a grayish white finger, pointing, and the woman stood straight and still in a desolation of white.
She was weirdly beautiful and nearly naked, and Peter stiffened at sight of her. She took a step forward, staring, and raised her arms hungrily toward him. Her full, round breasts under their diaphanous covering gleamed like cups of molten silver. The sinuous motion of her hips was a whispering tone-poem of beauty—and then suddenly she was not there at all.
"That's strange," Peter thought. "Where'd she go?"
It was more than strange, for the valley was quite flat in all directions, and no person could have vani
shed so abruptly from the face of it. Peter left the car and walked to where the woman had stood watching him, but he saw nothing except a smooth carpet of snow, empty of footprints.
He said aloud, as he returned to the car: "I'm seeing things. Yesterday I was hearing things, and now I'm seeing them. It must be that the shock of losing Jane has given me nerves."
Yesterday, all day long, he had wandered aimlessly about the house in a vain attempt to stifle his acute loneliness. His own name, Peter, whispered by a woman's voice, had haunted him. Now he was seeing things, instead.
He drove slowly and came at last to the farmhouse which, not long ago, had echoed his wife's singing. Outside, wind sighed through the trees and moaned over the roof. Inside, there was no sound of earthly things; there were only shadows and silence, as if the walls and carpets and furnishing had joined their mistress in eternal sleep.
"I can't live here," Peter thought. "Every separate thing reminds me of her. Oh my God, if only I could be with her!"
A voice said softly: "Peter!"
He turned, startled, and the other woman was sitting there in an overstuffed chair near the window, as if she had been sitting there a long while. Slender she was, and alluringly lovely, and so scantily clad that Peter felt the blood in his veins come to life as he stared at her.
Her eyes were crystal globules reflecting the lamplight, and from the glowing depths of them a magnetic power reached forth to enmesh Peter Marabeck's soul. A streamer of vivid scarlet, to match her lips, dangled like serpentine flame over the alabaster whiteness of one shoulder. The rest of her was pale and somehow unreal, yet real enough to draw Peter forward, wide-eyed and trembling.
And then suddenly the overstuffed chair was gray and empty, laughing at him. There was no woman; there was no scarlet mouth waiting for the hungry pressure of his lips. Mutely he stared, then muttered, "I'm goin' crazy."
He slumped into a chair and gazed about the room as if it were a strange, unholy place. "She spoke my name as I heard it yesterday," he thought. "Who is she? What does she want of me?" Then he slept, but it was not good slumber.
He dreamed that his wife came and stood beside him. "That woman is wicked, Peter," his wife whispered. "She is not for you. You must be careful."
In his dream he stood up and held his wife close to him, and spoke to her. But the words jangled noisily and became the vibrant clamor of a bell; and when he awoke, the room was full of the same sound.
He went mechanically through the kitchen to the back door. The bell jangled again, persistently, and he drew the door open. Snow was falling outside. The man on the stoop was covered from head to foot with it, and was puffing and blowing from the cold.
"Oh," Peter said. "It's you. Come in."
He had forgotten that Dr. Menner was coming, but now he was glad. It was good to stand and watch Dr. Menner pound the snow from his arms and legs. These things were real. He could understand them.
"Awful night," Menner said gruffly. "If I weren't a small-town practitioner, I'd be home in bed. Ugh! Have to warm myself over the stove a while and then—"
"There's no fire," Peter said.
"What? Night like this and no fire? You mad?"
"I—forgot."
The doctor stared queerly. "Oh, I see. Well, we'll talk. Want to talk to you anyway."
He stumped into the parlor, and Peter followed. "Been talking to a specialist," Menner declared. "He wants to see the—wants to see her."
"See her?" Peter frowned.
"Yes. Oh, I know, I know how you feel. But he insists. Soon as I told him about those marks on her throat, he snapped me up. Queer, too. Markham's the man. Usually takes a wholesale epidemic to interest him."
"He can't see her," Peter said stiffly. "Let the dead be."
"You're a fool, Marabeck."
"She wouldn't want to be dug up."
Menner leaned forward to point with an accusing finger. "Look here. Do you know what Markham thinks? The mark of the vampire, he says!"
"The mark of—? No, no! My God—!"
"It's a long time since this valley was cursed with the evil ones, Peter. You were no more than three years old; you don't remember it. But they came, hordes of them. Where from, nobody knows. We drove them out with wolfbane and fire, but not all of them."
"No, no!" Peter said thickly. "My wife died natural. She didn't—couldn't—"
"Not all of them," Menner nodded, remembering. "Some of the victims lived, with the blood-lust on them. We isolated them, like lepers."
Peter was staring. Behind the overstuffed chair a face was looking steadily, silently into his own, and below the face a flame-colored sash glowed against a woman's alabaster shoulder. Crimson lips were curled, smiling. Pale breasts rose and fell in evil rhythm. White hands were waiting to encircle the doctor's throat.
"But they didn't stay where we put them," the doctor said thoughtfully. "One was a fiend. She escaped and took the others with her. Where to, no one knows. But if Markham's right, they're back—or she's back, anyway. And—"
Smooth white hands seized the doctor's throat, and Peter's scream of horror was soundless. Menner writhed, uttered ghastly sounds of torment and terror while carmine lips lowered to his stretched neck and fastened there.
Peter stared, wide-eyed. This was not real. He was seeing things again. But the doctor's feet were beating a rapid tattoo on the carpet, and the doctor's face, turned ceilingward, writhed with pain which was slowly becoming more than pain.
A sigh of contentment escaped Menner's twisted lips. His arms curled slowly upward and held the woman to him, and with his own hands he pressed her red lips deeper into his throat.
When she straightened at last, her victim lay limp. She turned to Peter and Peter sat staring. She smiled. Peter rose mechanically, and her outstretched hands were cold to the touch of his own cold fingers. The woman said softly: "Kiss me, Peter!"
He took her in his arms, and her lips on his were so utterly without warmth that they seemed paradoxically to be on fire. Her smooth fingers caressed his face, his throat. He looked into her bottomless eyes and forgot that his wife had just died, and knew only that he was lonely for a woman's love.
Lifting her from the floor, he carried her up the dusty staircase to the room where his wife had died. But he had no thoughts now for his wife. With the door shut he lowered his willing burden to a large chair and sat beside her, and feasted his eyes on the tempting beauty of her.
The half-revealed glory of her made his senses swim and stirred strange acids in his blood. No woman could be so lovely as this one! Surely she was an unreal thing created from the pain of his own loneliness, and soon she would melt away before him, leaving him alone again.
But her skin was vibrant and alive to the touch of his eager hands. Her lips responded hungrily to the pressure of his own, and her breasts, crushed against him, throbbed to a pulsating surge. She drew him closer and held him in her arms.
"Who are you?" Peter whispered.
"Morgu."
"What kind of woman are you?"
She did not answer. Instead, she crushed her mouth against his and held it there until he was drugged by the tempest-fury of his own mad yearning. Then she said, as a clock downstairs tolled four times: "Tomorrow, Peter, I will come for you."
Peter sighed and relaxed. What she did to him then, he was not sure, but her breath was cold on his lips and he slept.
Doctor Menner lay sprawled in the overstuffed chair, with his feet stuck out before him and his head lolling; and Peter, descending the stairs the next morning, found him there.
Peter shook him, and peered at the crimson puncture in his throat, and then sat down to think. "I must go to the village and tell the police," he thought. "No. If I do that, they will say I killed him. I must find Markham, the specialist, and tell him what happened. He alone will believe me."
He walked to the village, to Markham's house, and said to Markham: "I've come because Dr. Menner is dead." Then he talked hurriedly and excitedly ab
out his wife and about the other woman; and while he talked, Markham listened and frowned. Then Markham asked many questions, and examined him, and said finally: "We're wasting time. Come."
They drove in the doctor's car to Peter's house, where Markham examined the corpse of Dr. Menner. "You can't stay in this house, Marabeck," Markham said. "You must leave."
"Tomorrow," Peter promised.
"Tonight, you fool! Today!"
"I must wait until my wife comes," Peter said. "If I go without seeing her first, how will she ever find me?"
The doctor stared at the dead man and said, scowling: "People don't believe in this anymore. If I take him back with me now, you'll be accused of murder. Fortunately, Menner has no wife or people. We'll leave him here. Tonight I'll come again and we'll drive him to his own home. Let them find him there; they'll call me in to give an opinion, and I'll call it heart disease. These marks can be washed clean. No one will notice them."
Peter said good-bye stiffly, and the doctor went away again.
The sun was setting, and the red glare on the snow was like blood, but Peter was not afraid. In a little while Jane would come. He was sure of it. Somehow Jane would find a way.
He went upstairs and lay down, waiting. The room grew darker. Then his vigil was rewarded and his wife was with him, beside him. He held her in his arms gently and kissed her the way he had always kissed her.
"I must leave here, Jane. Dr. Markham says I must go."
She nodded. "I know, Peter. A new home in some little village where you will be happy. But you must take my coffin and be sure there is grave-earth in it. You will be happy, my beloved?"
Peter thought: "Why shouldn't I be happy? This business of living is easy to adjust. Lots of other men sleep days and work nights without minding it. I'll do the same."
