Murgunstrumm and Others

by Cave, Hugh

  George Latham and I stared at each other, and neither spoke. I don't know what he was thinking, but my thoughts were back in the shadowed living-room of that big house on the edge of the swamp. I was standing there with Yago's glittering eyes on me, and I was watching Elaine—because the words that came roaring through the phones were almost the same words I had heard Elaine whispering, on that other occasion.

  Something about the black lakes of Hali... about Nyarlathotep and Hastur and the Prince of Evil . . . and Mark, Elaine's brother, who was dead and who had promised to come back.

  It went on and on, on and on, and we listened to it. An S.O.S. couldn't have silenced the air-lanes any more completely. Both George and I knew that every operator within listening distance was doing exactly what we were—forgetting his job and concentrating on that weird, crazy babble of words from Peter Ingram.

  Finally George said explosively: "I've been telling you for weeks that guy is goofy! Listen to him!"

  I was listening. "Harken to me, O Mighty Nyarlathotep! You who rule the midnight forests by the shores of Hall, hear me. . . ."

  "I'm going over there," I said.

  For Peter's sake, I had to. For our own, too. The crazy fool was interfering with all kinds of important business. If he kept it up, he'd have the law down on his neck, and then maybe it would get back to us—we'd be criticized for having let him monkey around the station.

  I didn't want to lose my job. I didn't want Peter to get into any trouble either, because, in spite of what I'd seen and heard, I still thought the world of Elaine.

  So George Latham took over, and I backed my car out of the station garage and drove over to that house on the edge of the swamp. It was raining a little, and the road was black and dangerous, and there was a light in Peter's workroom, but the rest of the house was in darkness.

  I stepped into a pool of water at the foot of the steps and began cursing. The door was locked; I had to knock, and then had to stand there for what seemed like an hour, waiting for someone to answer my pounding.

  Old Yago opened up. I said, "I want to see Peter; it's important," and I pushed past him. He turned to stare at me as I strode to the stairs. I could feel his eyes eating into my back. Not until I was halfway up the staircase did he close the door; and while I was hiking along the hail to Peter's workroom I heard the Indian climbing after me.

  Peter's door was shut. I banged on it. A chair scraped inside, and there was a queer, heavy silence for about ten seconds—which seemed a long time—and Peter said: "I'm not ready for you yet. Go back to bed."

  "It's Harry Crandall," I said.

  "Who?"

  "Harry Crandall. And I've got to talk to you!"

  The chair scraped again, and I heard footsteps. I should have been prepared, I suppose. I should have remembered how thin and emaciated he'd been on my last visit. But the door opened, and I took one look at the man and stepped back, cold all over. He was like a ghost.

  "Come in," he said. "I thought you were my wife."

  I kept staring at him. His face was dead-white, and his eyes were like holes burned in a sheet. He hadn't slept, hadn't eaten, for days; I was sure of it. His hands shook, and a bulging little muscle at the side of his mouth kept twitching, and his breathing was hoarse and fast, as if the effort hurt him.

  He closed the door, put a claw-like hand on my arm and pulled me toward the desk on the other side of the room. The desk was a radio table now—of a sort. It was cluttered with wires and paraphernalia, and in the midst of the chaos hung a microphone.

  "I'm working on ultra high-frequency waves," Ingram said. "This outfit here"—and he pointed to the transmitter—"is a special apparatus for throwing the signals outside the known spectrum."

  I put my legs wide apart and jammed my hands against my hips and glared at him. "You weren't working the high-frequency waves a while ago," I growled. "You raised hell with everything on the Atlantic coast!"

  "I was experimenting then. Probably had some parasites. That's ironed out. Now I'm ready to begin."

  I glanced over his apparatus. I'm no Marconi, but I know enough about radio to know that ultra high-frequency stuff is all in the experimental stage, and damned deep. Evidently he'd been doing a lot of reading.

  But the book that lay open beside the microphone was not a radio book. It was one of those tomes from the desk drawer and was full of stuff I wouldn't want to read unless I were good and drunk in broad daylight. Queer formulae, queer names, rituals . . . all that stuff. Necromancy, I guess you'd call it. And some of those formulae, if I know my languages, were in Arabic.

  "This," I said, "is what you were sending out over the air?"

  He nodded. His hand was pawing my arm again, pulling me aside, and there was an odd expression on his face—a queer twist of unholy anticipation—as he lowered himself into the chair. The hand that closed over that microphone was as thin and bony as the fist of a corpse.

  "Listen," he muttered. "I'll show you!"

  "But—"

  "Don't worry. I'll not interfere with the station. What I have to say will go out where no human words have ever gone before. I've worked for weeks to reach out into the void. Tonight, just before you came, I had an answer."

  "An answer from what?" I said, frowning.

  "I don't know yet. But now—"

  Well, I stood there and listened to him, and before many minutes passed I was cold as ice, and afraid. I'm a sober man; I've stood many a mid-watch alone, with wind rattling the windows and rain hammering a dirge on the station-house roof but the words that whispered from Peter Ingram's quivering lips scared me. It was the same old stuff at first, but the ghastly eagerness in Ingram's half-mad face made it different. The guy actually believed he was talking to someone. You could tell by his eyes, by the way he glued his mouth to the mike.

  He mumbled Arabic, then went back to English. "Listen to me, O Nyarlathotep, O ruler of the darkest dwelling-places of the far departed. Hear me, in the name of the twisted ones who crawl through the halls of Hell! Hear me, in the name of her who suckles the legless children of the vast Lake of Hali. The Mass is midnight black, and crimson blood flows from the wounds of the gods I have denounced. Take me to thine own scaly bosom and hear my prayer.

  "I was an unbeliever, O Mighty One. I sought thee first with ridicule for my wife who believes in thee. I would have proved to her that there was no life after death, no hope, no return for the departed. Now I would bring the dead back to her, and this is the night. This is the night I have awaited, O Prince of Darkest Dark! He died when the wind wailed as it does tonight, and when the storm gathered. Tonight the way is open…

  Peter Ingram wasn't talking for my benefit. He didn't even know I was standing there watching him, listening to him. When his voice trailed off he still sat there, gripping the mike, and his hands were shaking, and beads of sweat dripped from his wasted face and splashed on the open book in front of him.

  The room was still as a tomb. The rain whipping against the windows seemed to make no sound, and wind whining around the house had no voice. Not for me. My heart was sledging, and I was cold, and scared.

  Something here was all wrong. In a kind of daze, I realized that. Weeks ago, Peter Ingram had dug his teeth into a study of this stuff in order to prove to Elaine that she was wrong in her beliefs. He'd been determined then to convince her that her dead brother never would or could come back. And now he believed all that she believed, and more!

  The man was mad!

  "Listen," I mumbled. "For God's sake, stop this business. Forget it."

  But he was whispering into the microphone again, paying no attention to me.

  "Send him back to her, O Mighty One," he pleaded. "It was on a night like this that he died, and on his lips was a promise to return. Grant him that dying wish this night! Let him return!"

  Suddenly he stiffened, sat there with his eyes closed and began to tremble from head to foot. I took a step backward, staring at him.

  "Listen!" he shouted
. "Listen, Elaine! An answer! I swore to you I'd get an answer, and I have! I am!"

  Well, I didn't hear anything. I told them later, at the police station, that I did not hear anything, and I repeat it here, so help me God, I didn't hear anything! Peter Ingram sat there, sucking breath and gasping it out again, and I stared at him, and that was all.

  For about one minute—one endless, horrible minute—that was all. Then I did hear something downstairs.

  A door opened. The wind hurled it shut again, and glass broke—so I knew it was the front door. Then I heard footsteps.

  They weren't the kind of footsteps you'd have made or I'd have made. They were heavy, house-jarring thuds that rattled the walls and shook the floor on which I was standing. They were slow, plodding steps.

  Someone down there had come in by the front door—which was locked—and was walking along the hall. Someone huge, heavy. My mind flashed to a picture of Frankenstein's monster, striding in out of the storm....

  Peter Ingram swung around in his chair and stared at the door. The door was closed. I think now that Peter expected the thing downstairs to come up and open that door—to come up in answer to the words he had mumbled over the mike. But Elaine's room was downstairs, and the thing strode along the hall down there, and I heard a door clatter open, and then—and then a woman was screaming.

  God, that scream!

  The sound came wailing up to us, shrill as the zero-shriek of a hurricane. It ripped and slashed its way through the whole house, drowning out the yammer of the rain, the voices of the storm outside. For one long, ghastly minute it continued unabated, and then it became a hideous gurgling sound, and I heard something else mixed up in it.

  I heard a guttural, snarling voice, and a sound of human bodies thrashing about in a death-struggle. The voice was a man's.

  "Damn you!" it bellowed. "You left me alone! You left me here to rot! Damn you!" And then the voice became a grisly peal of mad, maniacal laughter, and the woman's screams were silent.

  About that time, I reached the door of Peter Ingram's workroom, and got the door open, and went stumbling down the hail toward the stairs. And the voice was still hurling out bursts of triumphant mirth.

  It was dark down there. I think I yelled out: "Elaine, I'm coming!

  I'm coming!" but I'm not sure of that—or of certain other things, either. I do know that a scurrying shape sped along the lower hall while I was descending the stairs. That shape was whimpering and sobbing like a frightened animal, and it rushed to the front door, which was open, and it vanished into the night. It was Yago, the Indian.

  I do know, too, that Peter Ingram stood there at the head of the staircase and kept shouting: "They answered me, Elaine! They answered me!"

  But Ingram was crazy. The doctors said he was crazy.

  Anyway, I got to the bottom of those stairs and found a light-switch and went stumbling along the lower hail to Elaine's room. The door was open, and I would have rushed in if the light hadn't shown me what awaited me.

  The room was a shambles. Chairs were overturned, and the bedclothes were all over the floor, and the floor was red. Red with blood. Elaine lay in a crumpled, twisted heap against the legs of a dressing-table.

  I didn't have to go any closer to know that I couldn't be of any help. I could see her face, her throat. Something with unbelievably powerful hands had torn her....

  I backed out over the threshold. I turned on all the lights and staggered to the foot of the stairs and stared up at Ingram, who was still up there, waiting.

  "Come down," I mumbled. "For God's sake, Peter, come down here!" But he just stood there, gripping the wall with one hand, the bannister-post with the other, and he kept shouting: "I've had an answer! Tell Elaine to hurry! I've had an answer!"

  I left him there. I staggered out of the house and got into my car and drove to town. When the police went there, about half an hour later, they found Ingram pacing back and forth along the upstairs corridor, enraged because his wife would not go up to him. And they found Elaine in her room downstairs, as I'd left her.

  Later they listened to me, and I told them exactly what I've told you, and they stared at me and exchanged glances and said firmly: "Yago is the man we want. We'll find him."

  They didn't find Yago. They haven't yet. He was a Seminole Indian, and the Seminoles know every inch of the Everglades, every hiding-place of the great swamp.

  Yago will never be found, and perhaps that's best. Because if they caught him, he might tell them the truth—or what I think is the truth—and he might make them believe it. And then they would question me again, and I might tell the whole truth.

  I think about it when I'm alone on the mid-watch. I hear the wind wailing out of the swamp, and hear the frogs grunting . . . and I think of the night Elaine's brother died. Because in the very beginning I should have told Elaine and Peter how he died, instead of lying to them.

  I should have told them that Mark was a raving maniac when Doc Wendell and I sat beside his bed that night. I should have told them that he not only promised to come back, but swore to come back—swore in a mad outburst of rage to return and destroy his sister for having deserted him.

  The hours of the mid-watch are long and black . . . and more than once, on my knees, I've prayed for daylight...

  The Caverns of Time

  It was a strange region, this into which John Grayson had thrust himself. Dark, deserted mountain roads had led him into it, through walls of silence as menacing as man-made barriers.

  "What you want with the Jules, mister?" the woman asked.

  Grayson fumbled the telegram from his pocket. It had been delivered yesterday at his hotel in Roanoke. "FELLOW NAMED CARLTON CLOUGH SUGGESTS YOU UPLOOK JULES FAMILY IN ENDONVILLE STOP IF ANY GOOD WE CAN USE AFTER ROANOKE BROADCAST GOOD LUCK TED."

  A great deal, Grayson sensed, hung on his answer to the woman's question. These people were not hospitable to strangers. He said warily, "A man named Carlton Clough sent me. Do you know him?"

  They exchanged glances. The old storekeeper shrank deeper into the shadows behind his counter. The woman rose. She was very old, very tiny. Her figure was that of an underfed adolescent, with a thin stem of neck, small breasts that stabbed the worn wool of her sweater. "You can ride with me," she said.

  "But my car—"

  "Can't use a car on the road we're goin'. It will be here when you come back for it." She held the door open, waiting, and Grayson felt himself drawn toward her hostile eyes.

  Was it his imagination, or did he hear the silver-bearded old storekeeper whisper, "If you come back!" It might have been the wind.

  Outside, he stood shivering. This little shack was like a candle-flame in a vast cavern. He was loath to leave it, especially with so dubious a guide. From the blackness of a nearby shed he heard the clump of a horse's hoofs, the squeal of sled-runners on hard-packed snow. A lantern winked. He saw the woman seated on what appeared to be an ancient buckboard fitted with steel slides.

  "Get up, Mister Grayson!"

  He climbed to the seat beside her. The little store vanished.

  It was hardly a road. On both sides the darkness was filled with the wind's whining. They climbed, and Grayson began to wonder if the ascent would ever end. The winding ruts reached their zenith; the horse pawed for his footing. Down they went, and ever down, the woman's withered face set in a grin that gleamed in the lantern-light.

  They stopped, to rest the animal. Grayson fumbled matches and a cigarette from his pocket, leaned forward to strike a light. The woman caught his arm. He jerked his head up to find her staring not at him but over the horse's head into the crowding dark.

  Suddenly she snatched up the lantern and blew it out. And Grayson heard the sounds which had caught her attention. Someone was approaching.

  The woman's hand touched his wrist. "Be careful!" she warned. "Say nothing!"

  Grayson thought he saw a shadow climbing. From her perch beside him the old woman bent backward, gathering something from
the belly of the wagon. It was a whip, its black coils sleek as those of a snake. With it she dropped soundlessly into the snow and glided forward.

  "Stand, Judie!" she shrilled.

  The advancing figure halted, raised its head, and Grayson saw the white mist of a frightened face in which two black eyes widened as though to burst. A girl's face, young and lovely. Back she stumbled, her arms upflung for protection.

  But the whip was swifter than her weary feet. It uncoiled about her thin cotton dress, lashed through the fabric and viciously caressed her back and shoulders. Again and again, while Grayson sat paralyzed with astonishment, the withered woman struck. She was an expert with her hellish weapon!

  The stricken girl sank to her knees, moaning, her bare shoulders glowing dimly in the dark. The whip sought out her tender skin, exploding against it with savage pistol-cracks. Her white breasts tautened with agony as her hands sought feebly to cover them.

  Finding his voice at last, Grayson shouted hoarsely, "Stop it! In God's name, stop!" And she stopped—but because she was finished, not because of his outcry—

  She flung the whip into the wagon and lifted the whimpering girl in her arms. Without compassion she threw the girl, too, into the wagon, then clambered back to her perch and snarled a command to the horse.

  Numb with amazement, Grayson looked over his shoulder at the pitiful shape. The moans and sobs had ceased. The girl lay in a huddled heap, her half-clad body cruelly exposed to the bitter cold. And she was beautiful. Not merely attractive, but beautiful! The perfection of her shoulders, the soft, pale loveliness of her young breasts, the matchless shape of her slim, bare legs. . . Grayson saw these things as in a fantastic dream, and felt them deep within him. The mere sight of her made his blood race.

  He said darkly, "Damn it, your treatment of this girl calls for an explanation!"

  The withered woman turned her head to stare at him. "You were not asked to come here, Grayson. Meddling, even in thought, is not tolerated by our people." Then she was silent.