Murgunstrumm and Others

by Cave, Hugh

  A crash of underbrush sounded behind him. Hurley's voice came again, roaring triumphantly, close at hand. Wrenching his mangled wrist loose, Simms lunged forward with blind fury to bring the conflict to an end.

  A shriek jangled from Sanderson's bloody lips, as the big man sprawled backward. Stumbling half erect, Simms leaped headlong. Hurley's triumphant bellow, behind him, changed suddenly to a hoarse yell of warning.

  It came too late. Sanderson's hands clawed out, caught Simms' legs. For a sickening instant the big man's writhing body toppled on the brink of the cliff. Simms, off balance and carried forward by the fury of his charge, realized his peril but could not avoid it.

  Flailing arms found his thighs, locked there in a last embrace. Desperately, hopelessly he strove to regain his equilibrium, to hurl himself clear. His wide eyes stared down into emptiness. Far below, white water churned hungrily over protruding black rocks.

  With Sanderson's contorted hulk clinging to him in a mad grip of death, Simms hurtled over the brink.

  10. Reveille

  There was nothing to see when Hurley stumbled to the cliff's edge and stared down. The foam-flecked water, far below, was all that met Hurley's horrified gaze. Black rocks reared their jagged crowns above hissing surf. Farther out, the white water merged with the deep, rolling green of the sea.

  For a long moment Hurley stood there, motionless. Then, shuddering violently, he turned away. Ten paces distant a white-faced girl stood utterly rigid, staring at him; and behind her, other intruders were crowding forward.

  Hurley paced toward them with sluggish steps. He did not look into the girl's face. Could not. Mechanically he put an arm around her shoulders. To the troopers who were gazing at him questioningly, he said in a lifeless voice:

  "One of you go down there and look around."

  Later, long later, Hurley sat at his desk in the headquarters room of State Police Barracks, and peered into the fixed faces of Max Ferris and Claire Evans. Except for the slow breathing of three people, the room was strangely still, as if death itself were a grim spectre among those present.

  The girl sat in a straight-backed chair near the wall, staring straight ahead of her with unseeing eyes. She did not look up when Ferris leaned forward, drew a folded newspaper clipping from his coat pocket, and slid it across the desk. She displayed no interest whatever when Ferris said quietly:

  "There's all the proof you need. I wasn't lying. Wasn't exaggerating, either."

  Hurley unfolded the paper, scowled down at it. A creased photograph of Henry Sanderson stared back at him from the printed page. Beneath the photograph was a name which was not Henry Sanderson. The name was Henry Marsden. Half-inch headlines said luridly:

  HOPE VALE INMATE ESCAPES

  Henry Marsden, Four-Year Inmate of

  Private Institution for Insane,

  Makes Getaway During Night.

  Is Still at Large

  Hurley narrowed his eyes and read further, skipping the introductory sentences which merely repeated the headlined information.

  . . . Marsden, confined to the Hopevale Sanatorium four years ago this month, was believed by many to have been a victim of unusual circumstance, and himself made many insistent claims that he was not mentally ill. It is remembered that at the time of his confinement, the name of Franklin J. Reese, brother-in-law of the escaped inmate, played a prominent part in proceedings . . . .

  Max Ferris, following the movements of Hurley's forefinger on the paper, said quietly, as if reading Hurley's thoughts:

  "Whether you know it or not, the guy we found chained in Marsden's prison-room, dead from torture, was the same Franklin Reese. I guess it's easy to figure out why Marsden tortured him to death. I did some close figuring myself, and got plenty of facts to back it up. And I'm telling you Marsden wasn't mad when he was first put away. He may have been insane when he got out, but not when he went in. He was framed, for money—money reasons. And this Reese guy framed him beautifully."

  Ferris leaned back, sucked on an unlighted cigarette.

  "As for the rest of it, I've told you all I know," he shrugged.

  "You better tell me again. This time I'll listen."

  "Well," and Ferris hunched his shoulders in a slight shrug, "Marsden escaped from the Hopevale madhouse in July. He must have bought this house and fixed it up during the next couple of months, in preparation for the plans he had for revenge. Three weeks ago, four other inmates escaped. Four of the worst cases in Hopevale—and if they're considered bad in that hell-dive, they're bad. Everything pointed to an outside job.

  "Well, the Hopevale people were scared stiff, then. Their reputation wasn't any too good anyway, and another splurge of unfavorable publicity would have ruined them. So they kept the whole thing quiet and called in the Beacon Agency, where I work."

  Hurley scowled, said grimly: "And then?"

  "That's about all, I guess. I worked on the case a few days, and didn't get to first base even. Nothing to tie to. Then I heard some queer stories about this Sanderson place down here, and did some nosing around. It looked hot. So I dragged Miss Evans into it—she's one of the best on the Beacon payroll—and she worked herself into a job as Sanderson's secretary.

  "Claire found out the lowdown. Sanderson, Marsden rather, was more than half mad, I guess. Maybe they get that way, after being cooped up in a madhouse for four years. Anyway, he had the vicious idea of avenging himself on society for what it did to him. He engineered the escape of those four Hopevale inmates, and transported them to his house down here, and kept them in confinement, and let them loose every once in a while to commit wholesale murder. I guess he knew how to control them. He learned that in the madhouse. If he didn't, Oleg did anyway. Oleg used to work at the Hopevale. That's where Marsden got him from."

  Hurley stared with narrowed eyes. Judging from the expression on his face, he was thinking of recent horrors which bore out Ferris' statement. Thinking probably, of the half-naked, mindless monsters who, after being turned loose by Oleg, the dog-keeper, had fallen before the guns of the troopers, back there in Sanderson's dawn-lit yard. He shuddered, as if the memory of those half-human horrors would haunt him for a long time to come. Then he put his head in his hands and stared down at the desk, into the photographic features of the mad fiend who was responsible for the entire maze of terror.

  "Well, it's all over now," he mumbled. "All over, and we've lost the best man in the department. Mark Simms was ace-high. If luck hadn't turned against him at the last minute—"

  A soft sobbing sound interrupted Hurley's eulogy, stifled his dreary words. He turned slowly, peered at the girl in the corner, realized that the loss of Mark Simms meant even more to her than it did to the department. Meeting his gaze, she stood erect, trembling, and paced forward.

  She was fighting to control her emotions. Suddenly, as if she had been holding the words back for a long time, she said aloud, harshly:

  "Oh, God, why did it have to end that way? Why? He didn't deserve to die! He should be alive and strong, and—"

  A quiet voice, from the doorway behind her, said evenly:

  "Thanks, sister."

  The girl stiffened, turned slowly, trembling from head to foot. She drew a sharp, sobbing breath, and stared fixedly. Hurley peered past her with eyes as big as saucers. Max Ferris, blinking foolishly, uttered a guttural exclamation.

  In the doorway, leaning casually against the door-frame, stood a disheveled six-foot figure, hands wedged in his pockets. A grim smile twisted the man's lips; his face was blood-smeared, masked by a tangle of wet hair. A long purple welt extended from forehead to chin. Quietly he came forward, walking like an animated scarecrow, his torn clothes hanging in sodden, limp disarray.

  The girl stared at him as if seeing a ghost. She took a step forward. Hurley, groping erect, said thickly:

  "Well, for the love of God, where did you come from?"

  Mark Simms reached out a bruised hand and shook a cigarette from the pack on the desk. Deliberately
he stuck the white cylinder in his mouth, lit it, and lowered his scarecrow body into a chair. Drops of water splashed on the floor beneath him. He pushed the drenched hair out of his eyes, and made an obvious effort to stop shivering. All he said was:

  "That ocean is cold this time of year, Hurley. Damned cold."

  Then Hurley released pent-up emotions by voicing a lurid oath, and the oath brought another wry smile to those pale lips.

  "It's a funny feeling, dropping through space that way, Hurley. I figured I was done for then, but the good Lord must have figured otherwise or something. When we got all through falling into hell, Sanderson was on the bottom. He got the rocks, I got the water in between. That made all the difference in the world."

  Simms pulled deeply on his cigarette, stared thoughtfully at the glowing end of it.

  "Deep water that was, Hurley. Deep enough to drown a guy ten times over, when he's only half-conscious the way I was. But there's a big rock down there, sticking up out of the surf. Maybe you've seen it. The old-timers around here call it 'Ladyface' because it looks just like a girl's face. Maybe that's what gave me luck. I had enough sense to climb up on the thing and take it easy for a while. And I swear to God that rock looked just like the face of—"

  Simms turned slowly, staring meaningfully at Claire Evans. A dull red flush colored the girl's features as she realized what he meant. Then, groping erect, he exhaled a lungful of cigarette smoke and said with a shrug:

  "Anyway, you can take my word for it, Hurley—I had a damned good reason for wanting to live a while longer."

  Stragella

  Night, black as pitch and filled with the wailing of a dead wind, sank like a shapeless specter into the oily waters of the Indian Ocean, leaving a great gray expanse of sullen sea, empty except for a solitary speck that rose and dropped in the long swell.

  The forlorn thing was a ship's boat. For seven days and seven nights it had drifted through the waste, bearing its ghastly burden. Now, groping to his knees, one of the two survivors peered away into the East, where the first glare of a red sun filtered over the rim of the world.

  Within arm's reach, in the bottom of the boat, lay a second figure, face down. All night long he had lain there. Even the torrential shower, descending in the dark hours and flooding the dory with life-giving water, had failed to move him.

  The first man crawled forward. Scooping water out of the tarpaulin with a battered tin cup, he turned his companion over and forced the stuff through receded lips.

  "Miggs!" The voice was a cracked whisper. "Miggs! Good God, you ain't dead, Miggs? I ain't left all alone out here—"

  John Miggs opened his eyes feebly.

  "What—what's wrong?" he muttered.

  "We got water, Miggs! Water!"

  "You're dreamin' again, Yancy. It—it ain't water. It's nothin' but sea—"

  "It rained!" Yancy screeched. "Last night it rained. I stretched the tarpaulin. All night long I been lyin' face up, lettin' it rain in my mouth!"

  Miggs touched the tin cup to his tongue and lapped its contents suspiciously. With a mumbled cry he gulped the water down. Then, gibbering like a monkey, he was crawling toward the tarpaulin.

  Yancy flung him back, snarling.

  "No you won't!" Yancy rasped. "We got to save it, see? We got to get out of here."

  Miggs glowered at him from the opposite end of the dory. Yancy sprawled down beside the tarpaulin and stared once again over the abandoned sea, struggling to reason things out.

  They were somewhere in the Bay of Bengal. A week ago they had been on board the Cardigan, a tiny tramp freighter carrying its handful of passengers from Maulmain to Georgetown. The Cardigan had foundered in the typhoon off the Mergui Archipelago. For twelve hours she had heaved and groaned through an inferno of swirling seas. Then she had gone under.

  Yancy's memory of the succeeding events was a twisted, unreal parade of horrors. At first there had been five men in the little boat. Four days of terrific heat, no water, no food, had driven the little Persian priest mad; and he had jumped overboard. The other two had drunk salt water and died in agony. Now he and Miggs were alone.

  The sun was incandescent in a white hot sky. The sea was calm, greasy, unbroken except for the slow, patient black fins that had been following the boat for days. But something else, during the night, had joined the sharks in their hellish pursuit. Sea snakes, hydrophiinae, wriggling out of nowhere, had come to haunt the dory, gliding in circles round and round, venomous, vivid, vindictive. And overhead were gulls wheeling, swooping in erratic arcs, cackling fiendishly and watching the two men with relentless eyes.

  Yancy glanced up at them. Gulls and snakes could mean only one thing—land! He supposed they had come from the Andamans, the prison isles of India. It didn't much matter. They were here. Hideous, menacing harbingers of hope!

  His shirt, filthy and ragged, hung open to the belt, revealing a lean chest tattooed with grotesque figures. A long time ago—too long to remember—he had gone on a drunken binge in Goa. Jap rum had done it. In company with two others of the Cardigan's crew he had shambled into a tattooing establishment and ordered the Jap, in a bloated voice, to "paint anything you damned well like, professor. Anything at all!" And the Jap, being of a religious mind and sentimental, had decorated Yancy's chest with a most beautiful Crucifix, large, ornate, and colorful.

  It brought a grim smile to Yancy's lips as he peered down at it. But presently his attention was centered on something else—something unnatural, bewildering, on the horizon. The thing was a narrow bank of fog lying low on the water, as if a distorted cloud had sunk out of the sky and was floating heavily, half submerged in the sea. And the small boat was drifting toward it.

  In a little while the fog bank hung dense on all sides. Yancy groped to his feet, gazing about him. John Miggs muttered something beneath his breath and crossed himself.

  The thing was shapeless, grayish-white, clammy. It reeked—not with the dank smell of sea fog, but with the sickly, pungent stench of a buried jungle or a subterranean mushroom cellar. The sun seemed unable to penetrate it. Yancy could see the red ball above him, a feeble, smothered eye of crimson fire, blotted by swirling vapor.

  "The gulls," mumbled Miggs. "They're gone."

  "I know it. The sharks, too—and the snakes. We're all alone, Miggs."

  An eternity passed, while the dory drifted deeper and deeper into the cone. And then there was something else—something that came like a moaning voice out of the fog. The muted, irregular, sing-song clangor of a ship's bell!

  "Listen!" Miggs cackled. "You hear—"

  But Yancy's trembling arm had come up abruptly, pointing ahead.

  "By God, Miggs! Look!"

  Miggs scrambled up, rocking the boat beneath him. His bony fingers gripped Yancy's arm. They stood there, the two of them, staring at the massive black shape that loomed up, like an ethereal phantom of another world, a hundred feet before them.

  "We're saved," Miggs said incoherently. "Thank God, Nels—"

  Yancy called out shrilly. His voice rang through the fog with a hoarse jangle, like the scream of a caged tiger. It choked into silence. And there was no answer, no responsive outcry—nothing so much as a whisper.

  The dory drifted closer. No sound came from the lips of the two men as they drew alongside. There was nothing—nothing but the intermittent tolling of that mysterious, muted bell.

  Then they realized the truth—a truth that brought a moan from Miggs' lips. The thing was a derelict, frowning out of the water, inanimate, sullen, buried in its winding-sheet of unearthly fog. Its stern was high, exposing a propeller red with rust and matted with clinging weeds. Across the bow, nearly obliterated by age, appeared the words: Golconda—Cardiff.

  "Yancy, it ain't no real ship! It ain't of this world—"

  Yancy stooped with a snarl, and picked up the oar in the bottom of the dory. A rope dangled within reach, hanging like a black serpent over the scarred hull. With clumsy strokes he drove the small boat b
eneath it; then, reaching up, he seized the line and made the boat fast.

  "You're—goin' aboard?" Miggs said fearfully.

  Yancy hesitated, staring up with bleary eyes. He was afraid, without knowing why. The Golconda frightened him. The mist clung to her tenaciously. She rolled heavily, ponderously in the long swell; and the bell was still tolling softly somewhere within the lost vessel.

  "Well, why not?" Yancy growled. "There may be food aboard. What's there to be afraid of?"

  Miggs was silent. Grasping the ropes, Yancy clambered up them. His body swung like a gibbet-corpse against the side. Clutching the rail, he heaved himself over; then stood there, peering into the layers of thick fog, as Miggs climbed up and dropped down beside him.

  "1—don't like it," Miggs whispered. "It ain't—"

  Yancy groped forward. The deck planks creaked dismally under him. With Miggs clinging close, he led the way into the waist, then into the bow. The cold fog seemed to have accumulated here in a sluggish mass, as if some magnetic force had drawn it. Through it, with arms outheld in front of him, Yancy moved with shuffling steps, a blind man in a strange world.

  Suddenly he stopped—stopped so abruptly that Miggs lurched headlong into him. Yancy's body stiffened. His eyes were wide, glaring at the deck before him. A hollow, unintelligible sound parted his lips.

  Miggs cringed back with a livid screech, clawing at his shoulder.

  "What—what is it?" he said thickly.

  At their feet were bones. Skeletons—lying there in the swirl of vapor. Yancy shuddered as he examined them. Dead things they were, dead and harmless, yet they were given new life by the motion of the mist. They seemed to crawl, to wriggle, to slither toward him and away from him.

  He recognized some of them as portions of human frames. Others were weird, unshapely things. A tiger skull grinned up at him with jaws that seemed to widen hungrily. The vertebrae of a huge python lay in disjointed coils on the planks, twisted as if in agony. He discerned the skeletonic remains of tigers, tapirs, and jungle beasts of unknown identity. And human heads, many of them, scattered about like an assembly of mocking, dead-alive faces, leering at him, watching him with hellish anticipation. The place was a morgue—a charnel house!