by Cave, Hugh
"I was lying in my room," he said bitterly, pacing toward Pell's dead body, and speaking to me in jerky phrases, "when the thing came. Footsteps—in the passage outside. My door opened. No one there. A strange force, hellishly hypnotic, took hold of me. Tried to fight it. Couldn't. It led me here. God knows what would have happened."
He was on his knees beside Pell.
"Good God, Reed," he said suddenly. "Look here!"
I groped to his side and stared down. There had been enough horror already; I will not attempt to describe Pell's body. Enough to say that some sharp instrument—a hideously long knife or sword—had slashed it nearly in twain, from skull to abdomen.
"Nasty," Lamoran shuddered. "Ugh! How the devil—"
He straightened up suddenly and stepped forward to the huge idol. I saw him poke his fingers into the shattered head. He grunted with satisfaction and called to me.
My bullets had scored four irregular holes in the thing's flat forehead, about an eighth of an inch apart, on an almost perfectly straight line above the eyes. Below that, the center of the face had crumpled in, revealing the tip of an
ancient long-sword which extended, apparently, the entire length of the idol's bulk. Looking closer, I saw a narrow, significant slit running perpendicularly through the mass.
"Favorite trick of the ancients," Lamoran said raspingly. "There'll be a square flagstone in the floor under Pell's body. The victim walks toward this damned thing, steps on the stone. Pressure releases a counter-weight or spring of some sort. The sword flashes down and out through the groove, cleaving the intruder from head to foot. I'd—I'd have got it when I knelt beside Pell just now if your bullets hadn't put the thing out of order. Ugly death!"
He turned away heavily. His tired face was beginning to regain its normal color; but mine, I think, must have been as white as a death's-head.
"The thing—" I said brokenly, "the thing that led you here, that inhabits this horror house. What is it, Jim? If we don't learn—"
"I think I know. Help me get Pell to the reception hall."
We lifted Pell between us and carried him to the door. As we crossed the threshold, Lamoran glanced significantly at the shattered lock and looked at me in bewilderment.
"You had to shoot your way in here?" he demanded.
I told him of the counter-balance in the cellar, and of Rojer Macon. I knew then how this infernal door was operated. Once opened, to admit a victim, it had the hellish power of locking itself as soon as it swung shut again, and could not be released until that crude balance in the pit was reset. A simple enough mechanism in itself—worked with ordinary weights and counter-weights—but a device that had caused more than one unholy death in the darkness of the idol's chamber.
In silence we bore Pell to the reception hall. There we placed him on the long divan and decently covered his twisted body with an embroidered silk robe. Finally Lamoran turned to me.
"I've gone pretty deep into occultism, you know," he shrugged. "What I have to tell you is not mere twaddle."
"It is—truth?"
"1 will tell you what I know. In many of the secret cults of China and India, it is believed that every true idol of Kung Tsze or Confucius is inhabited by the deathless spirit of one of the Master's disciples. The man who originally constructed this house—you'll find this fact in one of those books in the library—was an English nobleman who spent most of his time in the interior of China. When he came here, he brought the Confucian image with him. He himself was a member of a cult known as the Kung Shah, now extinct. He obtained the idol in one of the most ancient temples of the Orient. He also brought with him a Chinese servant named Tai-tse-Kiang."
Lamoran glanced at me. I said nothing, waiting for him to continue.
"That is all," he shrugged.
"Do you mean," I muttered, "that Tai-tse-Kiang is an 'undead,' that he is one of the Master's disciples, inhabiting the thing we have just destroyed? Good God, man, it is imposs—"
"Nothing is impossible."
"But such a creature, with the horrible power of assuming human form, the power of life-in-death--"
"I think you will find," Lamoran said quietly, "that the power has been destroyed. The unseen specter of this House of the Undead was last known to be in my chamber, where he came to exert his influence on me. If you will go there, you may find the reason why Tai-tse-Kiang so jealously guarded the Iron Room from destruction."
I groped to the door, confounded by his words. His own voice was almost hypnotic at that moment; it was the voice of a man who had delved deeper—far deeper—into such matters of eternal mystery than most mortals dared even to think. Mechanically I climbed the great ramp to the upper floor and paced along the passage to Lamoran's chamber.
There I stopped, and an involuntary cry came from my lips. Tai-tse-Kiang, the Oriental servant, lay full length across the threshold, with his face staring upward in death.
The lower part of that face had crumpled in decay. The forehead, smooth and flat, was punctured with four bloodless bullet holes.
The Death Watch
In a way it was my fault. But I had known Elaine Ingram for years, and when she asked me for the details of her brother's passing I could not force myself to tell her the truth.
When she said to me that night, right after the funeral, "Did he ask for me before he went, Harry? "—I lied to her. I had to.
"Yes," I said, "he kept asking for you. He kept saying how much he loved you."
"Did he say he would come back?" Elaine whispered.
"Yes," I told her; "he said he'd come back."
She and her husband, Peter Ingram, took over the old house out there at the edge of the swamp. Peter was a writer; he could make a living anywhere. And Elaine insisted on moving in because, she said, Mark would be coming back sometime and he would surely return to the house in which he had died.
For six months they lived in that house, and I got to be pretty good friends with Peter. He'd come over to the radio station every now and then and sit with me while I was on watch. Sometimes on the mid-watch, which is usually dull around four in the morning, he'd poke about, asking questions, and I'd tell him what I knew about being a radio man.
He had a natural aptitude for that sort of thing and before long he could have sat there at the bug and worked a shift without much trouble, if I'd dared to let him.
One night he was sitting there, watching me, and when a lull came and I leaned back to light a cigarette, he said suddenly: "Harry, I'm worried about Elaine."
I knew what the trouble was. Elaine was convinced, you see, that her dead brother would come back to her.
"She just sits there in the living-room," Peter said, "and never says a word. Old Yago sits there with her. Harry, I've got to do something about it. It's driving me insane."
I said: "Why don't you get rid of Yago?"
"Elaine likes him."
This Yago had lived in various shacks around town for as long as I could remember.
He claimed to be a Seminole Indian. He drank a lot, and folks said he was queer. Whatever he was, Elaine had taken a fancy to him and hired him to work around the place; and now he was living there.
"Harry," Peter said, "I've got to convince her that she's wrong, that the dead don't come back. But she won't talk to me any more, If I sent Yago away, she'd just go deeper into those damned books of hers."
I thought it over for a few days, and one day I said to him: "Why don't you read up on spiritualism? You can't expect to argue with Elaine unless you can talk her language. Study the stuff for a while and you'll be able to pick the holes in it."
He was fooling with an old amplifier which had been lying on my desk. He looked up at me, stared a moment, then nodded. I didn't see him again for two weeks.
Bill Macy said to me one day: "What the devil is Ingram up to? I was in the post office this morning and there were half a dozen boxes of equipment from the Beacon Radio Company, addressed to him. I thought he was a writer."
"The poor guy's
got to have a hobby of some kind," I said. "He's lonely." But that night, to satisfy my curiosity, I figured out an excuse for calling on him, and drove over there about nine o'clock.
It was a black night, and when the nights get black in Florida they're like ink. I drove slowly because the road was bad, and I could hear the frogs grunting in the swamp all around me, and after a while I saw the lighted windows of the house.
You can't imagine a house in a place like that unless you've lived in Florida and seen some of the left-overs from the boom. This place was enormous. It had about twelve rooms and looked like a small hotel, very ornate and elaborate, and yet it was the only house for miles around.
As I remember, some wealthy chap from New York figured the town would grow out that far, and sank a small fortune in the house and then realized his mistake. He put it in the hands of an agent, who couldn't sell it—because who would want to live miles from civilization on the edge of a swamp filled with snakes and 'gators and bugs?
So the agent rented the place to Elaine and Mark and their mother—this was before Elaine married Peter Ingram—and I think they paid twenty a month for it. Then the mother died and Elaine was married, and Mark stayed on alone.
He was a radio man and a good one, but that house did something to him. We at the station noticed the change in him and begged him to move into town, but he bought a lot of books and told us to mind our own business.
He gave up his job in August. Bill Macy relieved him one morning at eight, and he said to Bill: "Tell Crandall I'm through." Just like that. When I heard it, I went out to the house and begged him to reconsider. I told him it was unfair of him to quit like that, without giving me a chance to get a man to replace him.
He stared at me, and there was a queer, dull light in his eyes, and his eyes never blinked. "I'm sorry," he said, "but I have work to do."
For a month I didn't see him. Then the rumor spread around that he was sick, and I went there to find out.
He was sick all right. That queer, dull light in his eyes had become a wild glare that scared me. He looked half starved and had a raging fever.
I drove back to town and got Doc Wendell. And that night, while Doc and I watched over him, Mark died.
Now Elaine and Peter and old Yago had the place, and when I climbed out of my car that night, Yago opened the door to me.
"Hello," I said. "Is Mr. Ingram at home?"
Yago nodded and I followed him inside to the living-room. It was an enormous room, with a big fireplace and a lot of musty furniture, and Elaine was sitting there, reading. Yago limped over to a chair near the fireplace, and paid no more attention to me, and Elaine looked up and said:
"Hello, Harry."
"I've got a swell story for Peter," I said. "Is he around?"
"He's upstairs."
She didn't get up to go after him, but just sat there, staring at me. She was a good-looking girl, Elaine, a little bit on the short side but slim and trim, with very even features. She seemed tired, though, and I could see that she hadn't bothered much about her looks lately. Careless, I suppose, because they didn't have many visitors and she seldom went anywhere except to the village.
"I'll go talk to him," I said, but she shook her head.
"He's working. I'm afraid he won't want to be disturbed."
Well, there was something queer in the air, and I didn't exactly know what to do. I could have laughed it off and gone up to Peter's workroom anyway, but something in the way Elaine was looking at me gave me the creeps.
"It is pretty late," I mumbled. "Maybe I'd better come around some other time."
But just then I heard a door open upstairs, and Peter called down: "Is that you, Harry?"
When I went up, I saw right away that he was in bad shape. He was wearing slacks and slippers and no shirt, and needed a shave, and looked all in. He couldn't have looked any worse after a week's drunk.
"Been a long time since I've seen you, Mister," I said.
He nodded, and kept on nodding for a moment while he stared at me. He seemed to be making up his mind to do something, and then rather abruptly he gripped my arm and said: "Want to show you something."
His workroom was at the end of the hall and he didn't release my arm until we were inside with the door closed. "Even my wife hasn't been in this room for the past two weeks," he said. "Look."
I looked, and my mouth sagged open.
It was a big room and reeked of stale cigarette smoke. The shades were down. I guessed that they'd been down, and the windows, too, for a long time. And the whole back end of the room was piled with radio junk!
"What the devil," I demanded, "are you doing? Building a broadcasting station?"
"Look it over," he said quietly.
I looked it over. He had some ultra-short-wave apparatus that was unlike any "ultra-freq" stuff I had ever seen. The receiver apparently was still in the experimental stage, with loose wires and disconnected condensers sprawled in a mess, but the transmitter was what made me suck in my breath.
I knew what this "ultra" stuff was all about, but the weird-looking amplifiers Peter had hooked to his transmitter stumped me.
He saw me squinting with disbelief.
"Don't worry," he said. "It'll work, I'm throwing the ultra high-frequencies clear out of the spectrum with that amplification hook-up."
"About all you'll do," I said, "is drive the boys at the station mad, interfering with our reception. What's more, you haven't a license."
"For what I'm doing I don't need a license. Besides, it's far from finished. I'll be a month working on it yet before I'm ready."
I walked over to his desk, and he had a stack of radio books there that would have tested the learning of an advanced electrical engineer. I started to look them over but he said gently: "Never mind those, Harry."
He pulled open a drawer. There were more books in the drawer—books of a different sort.
"Some of these were in the house when we came here," he said. "Mark must have been studying them. Others I obtained by mail, from a collector."
I skimmed through a couple of them, but it was all Greek to me. Stuff about the Black Mass and Bethmoora and the black lakes of Hali. Stuff about voodoo and the dark arts.
"Hell," I said, "only a nut would bother wading through this junk. What's eating you, anyway?"
"She reads it," he said.
"Who? Elaine?"
"Yes."
"You mean she takes this junk seriously?"
He nodded. I didn't like the way he stared at me, or the way he handled those books when he replaced them in the drawer. He seemed to resent my disbelief, and he touched the books the way some folks touch a Bible. Reverently, sort of.
Then suddenly he said: "Elaine mustn't know about this. You understand? She thinks I'm working on a novel."
"That's what I thought, too," I said.
"Well, you know better now. But you mustn't tell Elaine."
I told him I wouldn't tell Elaine. I told him he could stand some sleep, too, and if he didn't ease up a little he'd find himself in bed with a nervous breakdown.
His answer to that was a crazy kind of laugh, and the same sort of laughter kept coming in little gusts from way down inside him as he walked with me along the hail.
"I'll be over to see you soon," he promised, and held my hand for a minute; and I felt his eyes on me as I went down the stairs.
I turned, said, "So long," and walked into the living-room to say good-night to Elaine. Evidently I didn't make much noise. Elaine didn't hear me coming.
She was on her knees there in the shadows, and in front of her was a table on which stood a photograph of Mark. Her hands gripped the edge of the table and her gaze was glued to the photograph. I thought she was praying.
Naturally I took a step backward and would have faded into the hail again without disturbing her. But then I heard the words that were whispering from her lips.
"Hear me, O Mighty Nyarlathotep!" she was incanting. "You who walk in the farth
est shadows by the black lakes of Hali, listen to me, I entreat you! And you, O Hastur, O Prince of Evil! Send him back to me, for my own god has failed me. Give him to me as he promised to return. . .
I stood there, chewing my lips and gaping at her. It didn't make sense. It was a mumbo-jumbo that scared me, and I felt little shivers crawling over me.
Then, while Elaine went on repeating those same words, I saw Yago, the Seminole. He was sitting on the other side of the room, staring straight at me. It was dark over there, and his eyes were like red coals in the darkness, and I suddenly had a feeling that if I intruded, those coals would burn me.
I'd had enough. I tiptoed out of there and closed the front door behind me as softly as I could. I got into my car and turned it around and drove back out of the swamp.
That night I stood the mid-watch, and jumped at every slightest sound. My nerves were as tight as fiddle-strings. Even the shrill cackle of code couldn't make me feel at ease, and once, while I was working the S. S. Exhibitor, a big housewife spider came slowly through the open door into the operating-room, and I went over backward with a shriek.
I didn't go near Peter Ingram's house for three long weeks. I wanted to forget what I'd seen there. But then one night…
Macy was supposed to relieve me at midnight. At eleven, his wife phoned to say he was sick, so I called George Latham's home, to get George out. His wife answered. George was at the fights. When he came in, she said, she'd hustle him over to the station.
At one o'clock I'd been on duty for nine hours, and was all in, and suddenly everything went wrong. A Norwegian freighter was calling with important business, and a mad clatter of meaningless dots and dashes came out of nowhere to drown him out and tear my ears off.
For half an hour it continued unabated. When George arrived, I was a mental wreck and was cursing my head off.
"Listen to it!" I said.
And suddenly there was something else for us to listen to!
It was the voice of Peter Ingram! For a while it slurred up and down the scale, the way a phonograph sounds if you press a finger against the turntable, slowing it, then letting it speed up, then slowing it again. We couldn't distinguish words right away, because of the crazy variations in tone. But finally the tone leveled out, and Ingram's voice roared through the operating-room.
