by Fritz Leiber
They guyed him unmercifully for this weakness, and kept it up until Betty jumped up in a swirl of rose-colored lawn and declared she was not afraid if Peter wasn’t, and she would share the vigil with him.
The idea made Peter pleasantly uncomfortable. Peter was not the kind who could have entertained a dishonorable concept for an instant. But if there was a person with whom he would rather pass a night in a haunted house, that person was Betty Bates.
“If we stick it out,” he told the crowd, and added parenthetically “—which we will—the cokes, ice cream, and juke-box platters are on the gang for the next month!”
The price was cheap enough when distributed. Everybody hilariously agreed. But if the pair got “scared out”, the reverse was to be true. Peter’s penniless condition was no bar to his affirmation, for he knew he could not lose with Betty at his side.
The opposition at this point had a super-brilliant thought. If the two failed to maintain their vigil, Peter and Betty must agree to announce their engagement by the close of the school term.
Peter turned red and stammered. Betty pinked prettily, stuck out that positive Bates chin of hers, and said flatly, “All right, we will!”
And that brought down the house, as the saying goes.
* * * *
I heard all about this in a round-about way, and the news nearly shocked me into a trance. Not that I cared anything either for the Bates or the Gilmans, or that I had any concern for the safety or morals of the two children. What shocked me was the knowledge that now I would have to act, and I must not fail!
The Captain’s revenant had to date claimed five victims with its astral noose. Unless I acted, the noose would claim two more. I knew this. Worse, my chance to lay the Captain’s ghost might not reappear for Heaven knew how long. The outraged citizens of Acton might even tear the haunted Castle down, and what they might set loose upon the town by doing so, only the rascally Captain knew.
In the process of foiling the wicked spirit, I would be faced with extreme peril. This I also knew. I knew, moreover, that I had to succeed, not only for my own sake, but also for that of the two innocent youngsters involved, I was not entirely selfish in my feelings.
It was just after sunset that I approached Acton Castle from the side toward the burying ground. There was a hint of storm in the air, as upon another such evening long ago, and the great, piled masses of black cumuli shut out every bit of light from the darkling sky.
The wind moaned and rattled among the scabby limbs of an ancient apple tree, rippled the deep grasses, and rustled the mass of vines and creepers that covered this wall of the loathsome structure.
I had often approached the house in just this manner, but I had not summoned the courage to enter. Always I had fallen back, biting my lip and wondering was there not another way.
Lightning flared and revealed the old house in all its hideous dilapidation. It crouched like a malignant monster, stark bones thrust through rents in its scabbed epidermis, withered in vein and ligament, fat-pouched with the pregnancy of terror.
I half turned then, and made as if to scuttle away in fright, and lightning flared again in company with a vibrating roll of thunder.
The blue-purple of that sizzling flare limned the rotting crypt atop the graveyard hill, ringed it with skeletal silhouettes of decadent trees.
Horror mounted upon my terror and rode it like a beast of burden. In that momentary, fitful glow I had seen that the serpentine grill of the Acton crypt hung open!
I crouched and listened to the low moan that rose upon the wind and died before it became a shriek…and I did not know until it had been uttered that the cry was my own.
The pitiful ululation of fright merged with the roll of thunder; lightning flared feebly a time or two more. The haunted Castle rocked and rattled with the concussion of thunder.
I crept on, trembling and afraid. In the blackness, a greater, more noisome dark yawned horridly. I listened at the door of Acton Castle. The lightning had momentarily ceased. The thunder had quieted its rumble, night poised on hot, threatening wings. In the silence, I heard a rat scurry over a rotting beam somewhere inside the Castle. The air smelled of age and decay. Inside, dust lay deep upon the warped, brittle flooring.
I glided quickly through the door. The darkness of the grave engulfed me. The stillness was of the crypt as well, and the oppressive fetor that oozed from the riven walls.
I hated the house, I detested it and loathed it utterly. It was a thing of sentience, alive, mocking, threatening. IT was the Thing—the Captain’s grisly revenant was only its tool, IT had dominated the man alive—IT dominated his spirit dead!
A warning voice seemed to whisper to me to go back whence I had come, to leave this abode of abomination before it would suck me into its greedy trap and I should indeed be lost.
I took a firmer grip on my purpose—squared myself away with my own soul, so to speak. Upon my courage, or the lack of it, depended the fate of a boy and a girl. I carried the future happiness and well being of the entire town upon my shoulders. I could not fail in my duty.
Afar off, a dog howled dolorously. Others took up the mournful refrain. I knew why they howled. I forged on until I reached the room that had claimed five victims from the world of the living.
Here indeed was the evil heart of this ancient pile. The very air pulsed with wickedness and the lust for cruelty. I was afraid.
Lightning sheeted from the leaden sky, purpling the room with a harshly vivid light. What I saw in that fractional, timeless instant made me reel.
Death was prepared! Instead of a single hook, upon which, long ago, Joshua Benton had been suspended, now there were two—ugly and grim. The trap was set.
I heard them come in, and I hid in a closet filled with cobwebs.
They stumbled over the rotten flooring, lighting their hesitant way with a pocket flashlight. They were quiet, and they breathed quickly. In the reflected shine of the light, their young faces looked pale, and their eyes were big and dark.
Lightning split the gloom to the accompaniment of a roar of thunder, and the rain came battering down, drumming a diapason of unleashed fury on the roof, hissing in the grasses and brambles that choked the yard. A fine spray blew in through the gaping windows. The air cooled as a draft swept through the place, bringing with it the raw, bitter smell of wet growing things.
“We’re in for it now,” Peter mumbled, squeezing the girl’s arm with reassurance. “At least, it’s dry in here.” He essayed a brittle laugh that lacked every aspect of being genuine.
Outside, the flare and flicker of lightning made hard, glistening pencils of the rain. The old house banged and rocked to the concussion of thunder and wind.
Betty Bates whimpered with honest fright.
Peter said, “Let’s sit down and take it easy.”
They sat down, and after a moment he switched off the light.
Betty said nothing, but I could hear the breath sucking softly into her lungs.
The storm calmed, finally. Then in the midst of deathly stillness, the old house rocked and a thunderous noise rent the air. The sound came from inside the house!
Fear wormed at me. I knew what the sound portended. A grisly fiend stalked the halls upstairs. The house echoed hollowly to the sound of boots, rough seaman’s boots, clumping upon the crumbled floor. The evil old house rattled and swayed.
The children slept. I had not observed when first they dropped off. Surely they must awaken now, I thought. That noise would wake the dead! But no, the innocents slumbered on, hand loosely clasping hand, the girl’s golden head relaxed upon the boy’s sturdy shoulder.
I awaited the ordeal.
Would I succeed? Would the fires of Hell once and for all claim the revenant of the fiendish Captain? Or would mine be the fate, and his the victory?
/> A chill seeped through the ancient Castle. A reeking odor of the grave eddied on the gusty draft. Measured, rhythmic, step by step upon the rotting stairs, the Captain’s footsteps approached the sleeping pair. Awake! Awake! Oh, God! Awake and fly this place!
And they did awake, just as the Captain’s boots clattered upon the landing outside the door.
“Some of the guys,” whispered Peter nervously, “trying to trick us after they promised they wouldn’t!”
I admired him for that. You see, in that moment, I knew that he knew, and I no longer had any thought of vacillating.
“I—I—don’t care!” the frightened girl wailed softly, “I don’t c-care about that bet, anyway. I’d rather lose it, Peter. Peter—I love you! T-take me away from here!”
Peter’s reply was a firm pressure upon her hand.
“When it—they reach the doorway,” he whispered, “I’ll turn on the light.”
The thundering footsteps halted. The house creaked ominously. A malignant rattling rippled through every rotted board and timber. Something dark, bloated, fantastically repulsive hovered in the door.
“It’s c-cold,” chattered the girl, “and—and it smells, and—” she shrieked. “There’s something there!”
Peter panted heavily, “The light won’t work! I—”
Unspeakably loathsome, radiant with black evil, the spectre hovered at the door, I could see it. They with their weak organs of sight, thank God, could not. But they knew it was there.
The fiend advanced, clutching a noose of hemp in each hand…and at that moment I stepped from hiding. My crucial moment had come.
The fiend made foul, slopping noises as it advanced upon the stricken pair, nooses blindly outstretched, and I shrieked!
The frightful sound of my voice rang through the house.
The phantom moaned with despair. The boy and the girl looked at me, and there were hate, horror and loathing in their eyes.
I wanted to tell them to run, to save themselves while they yet might, but I could only groan and shriek in agony.
Peter galvanized into action, seized the fainting girl in his arms, and with her sprang through the gutted window, into the fresh, clean air of the outdoors.
Quickly then I mumbled the curse, the hideous awful curse I had tried once before to inflict upon the hateful Captain, but fear had frozen my tongue and I had been defeated. Fearlessly now I droned through the ritual with that Thing gibbering, cowering and wailing before me. And then, the final words, “Avaunt thee, fiend!”
And the revenant of Captain Acton laughed with howling glee.
“A worse condemned fiend than I are you. I was unwillingly bound with the shackles of Hell, but now I am free because of you! You have burst my astral gyves—for even in Hell is greater freedom than this torment I have suffered. You have failed again, for, by freeing me, you have bound yourself! Take this—my parting gift!” Straight toward me he hurled those two damnable nooses of hemp! “To you, my successor,” slobbered the Thing, “condemned to haunt forever more this crumbling Castle!”
The Captain disappeared in a fierce puff of heat, a clap of thunder, and a billowing cloud of smoke.
In the following silence a chuckling grew and bounded from wall to wall, a hideous, mad cachinnation of hellish mirth that bubbled from my lips and sprayed into froth the ever-flowing rivulet of blood that gushes from the shotgun wound in my head.
I am sane now. I, Joshua Benton, have twice condemned myself with vain meddling, but now I am sane, I too can be free—some day. I know what I must do, I must hang the right man, woman or child—one who knows the secret ritual that I know. That one, alive or dead, will pronounce the holy words that will burst my shackles asunder. Who? When? How many will I hang before…do you know the words that will set me free…?
ON THE ARRIVAL OF THE MACHINE AND ITS MODE OF OPERATION, by Roger Williamson
Originally published in 2003.
A guided meditation into the adventure zone
I
On this particular morning I felt perfect calm and cohesion with the universe. I took my walk along a tree lined path leading down to a park infrequently visited by the local population. In this solitude, the power zones within my body reached out with prehensile outgrowths to mesh with their counterpart selves in the larger universe outside of myself. At this moment, I and the universe functioned as one organism. We were linked by subtle girders of electromagnetic pulse waves that resonated the fabric of my being in a euphoric symphony performed by the harmony of nature’s philharmonic.
While in this state, I arrived at the lower end of the path where it opened out into a small tree enclosed area. There had once been a gate here, and although the gate itself had gone, the gnarled and rotted wooden posts still remained. As I put my arm out to lean on one of them, my hand brushed against something that felt like a piece of stiff cloth. Idly, I looked down to confirm my first impression that it was a piece of old fabric, but was sharply taken aback by the realization that it was an animal. Closer examination revealed that it was a dead bat nailed head down to the wooden post. Instinctively, I quickly lowered my hand and rubbed it against my trouser leg to remove any visible or invisible contamination.
My calm mood shaken, I gazed across the park. There was a mist that hovered several feet off the ground and parallel with it, giving the impression that the world was divided into that which was above and that which was below. Beneath, there was the vivid green grass, moist and over shadowed by the grayish tones of the mist. Through the haze, just above the tree line crowning the scene like a regent through the glazed luminosity of this mist frosted morning, the sun hovered like a dead orange thing. Traversing these two worlds, in the trees deep within the mist, crows called to their companions in invisible habitats.
As I gazed upon the apparent chaos of nature’s flora in the surrounding trees, the leaves, branches and spaces in-between began to assume terrifying zoomorphic images in combinations that ebbed and flowed in and out of each other, from image to image. Wave upon wave of original random figures rose and washed over me to challenge my reasoning faculty’s ability to comprehend them.
How long I remained in this mood, I don’t know, but what seemed like hours was probably only seconds. I was pulled out of my other worldly mood when a movement from across the park caught my eye. As I took closer note of the distraction, I observed a young woman standing alongside a small shrub. Because of the mist, she assumed the dream like astral qualities of a pre-raphalite maiden: soft, delicate and one able to cause hallucination in her beholders. From where I stood, it was difficult to be sure of her age. Her hair was dark and full, falling in curls and tendrils like vines across her shoulders. She was very tall, I deduced, probably over six feet. After registering her height, what was most striking about her was the way she was dressed, for her apparel was far removed from the usual daytime conformity of suburbia. She wore a dress that had the appearance of being manufactured from a material of fluorescent aluminum foil. It wasn’t so much that she wore the dress as it was that it was an apparition, like a holographic image, that hovered over her. It was then that I was suddenly taken aback realizing that she was the woman I had met over lunch several weeks previously in the Bell and Cannon. I wondered if she recognized me since she appeared to be keenly staring in my direction. As we continued to observe each other, she moved a hand to the back of her neck. She must have unclasped her dress, for it fell to the ground, leaving her entirely naked. Actually, now that I think about it, it wasn’t so much that it fell, it was more like it disintegrated. Taken aback by this startling action, I at first looked away out of embarrassment. Looking into the powerful tangled undergrowth, I perceived a hare observing me with erect anticipating ears. We locked eyes as though in hypnotic trance until I made a nervous movement of my head, and so, quite suddenly, the hare turned and jumped off to become
an invisible component in the world of the unseen.
Hesitantly, I returned my attention to the young woman. Her body had taken on the qualities of her dress, like an apparition created to conceal something beneath. What was beneath I couldn’t determine, but I was inclined to believe it was not human, and possibly not even of this earth. The feral undulating movements of what was underneath her skin was akin to the ebbing and flowing of the primordial zoomorphic images I had witnessed earlier in the trees. As I continued to gaze upon her, the curves of her body, animated by the wild surging of what ever was within her, acted like the divine names on a medieval talisman charming the actions of my body like they would a spirit in magical evocation, and animated me into motion. I involuntarily ventured to walk in her direction, and as I did so, I discerned that her relationship to me maintained its initial distance. Therefore, as I approached the point where I had first cast eyes upon her, she had moved behind the bush and was hidden from my sight. I quickened my pace. When I arrived at the spot where I had last seen her before she became hidden by the bush, she was gone. I looked all around. Neither she nor the dress was anywhere to be seen, and I was left to wonder if she had ever existed.
I looked around the bush and then back across the park from where my walk had originated, but I couldn’t see her, or any evidence that she had ever been there.
It was then that something caught my eye lying on the ground.
It was a disk about ten inches in diameter. Picking it up, I found it to be very light and thought it to be constructed out of a cardboard like material. I assumed that the item was a mask because of a length of cord which was attached to either side. The construction however, denied the fact because of the omission of eye, nose and mouth apertures.
The outward image on the face of the mask was of a badly drawn, yet intriguing, goat’s head. The primitive execution of its scrawled, broken crayon lines was tantalizing and hypnotic. It subconsciously encouraged me to make a deeper examination beyond what the outward artistic workmanship warranted. With closer scrutiny, I discerned that the face was actually the geometric figure of the pentagram. The lowermost point was the goat’s beard, the two lower horizontal points its ears, the top two points its horns. As I casually fingered the mask, I felt drawn to turn it over and examine the inside. Here, upon a gray background, was an arrangement of circles and crescents in gold, red, blue, green, purple and yellow.
