Tales of the Grotesque: A Collection of Uneasy Tales

by L. A. Lewis

  The speed-boat pilot gently but very firmly held him prostrate. ‘That cabin’s no place for you in your present shape’, he said in an awed voice, ‘at all events, read the letter first. It looks as if he’d expected something to go wrong.’

  Cary took it with shaking fingers and slit the envelope.

  ‘My dear old man,’ (he read).

  ‘In case you find me either knocked out or even possibly dead at the end of our experiment, read this first and act as I direct. In fuller explanation of the haunting that has troubled your sleep I will tell you that, by what some people are fond of calling a ‘kink in space’, the girl on the skiff was not drowned but transferred in her sleep to some phase of dimensions parallel to our own but imperceptible to us under normal conditions. It must have occurred through the pure accident of mooring her end of the skiff at the precise point where such a transference was possible. How the thing actually takes place I know no better than you. As you are aware, though, you very nearly shared the same fate, and one can only hope that no one else will be unlucky enough to sleep in future at that exact spot. Because the body no longer occupied its natural sphere the soul could not leave it, and you, after your own narrow escape, can well imagine the never-ending procession of horror to which that soul has been subjected. Last night I projected myself into that other world where the body was suspended and saw all that you described. I placed, however, upon a finger of the living corpse a portion of a ring originally found in an Egyptian sarcophagus and believed, according to hieroglyphs engraved upon it, to possess what I had best call inter-dimensional properties.

  ‘The factor of speed in moving the sections which I am wearing away from the location of the ‘kink’ I feel to be essential, though dangerous to the wearer of the ring.

  ‘I earnestly hope, and am persuaded to believe, that the result will be the dragging back of that other section into our own world, and, with it, the missing body. If this proves to be the case, and I am not in a fit state to deal with the situation, place the remains in the dragnet in order to simplify the explanation of their recovery.

  ‘If this ends fatally for me, old fellow, try to console yourself with the knowledge that Fate assigned me inevitably to a very stern duty.

  ‘Yours ever,

  ‘B. Eyston’

  Cary dropped the letter and lay gazing blankly upward for several minutes.

  ‘Mr. Desmond,’ he asked in a stronger voice, 'just what is in that cabin?' The landlord swallowed and looked away evasively.

  ‘Mr. Eyston, dead, as I told you,’ he replied at last, ‘and lying across him an almost fleshless body - pretty near a skeleton!’ He shuddered and fell silent, while Cary slowly struggled into a sitting posture.

  ‘You must have noticed that odd ring my friend was wearing,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Did you happen to see if there was one like it on a finger of the - skeleton?’ The landlord shook his head.

  ‘There was no ring at all,’ he affirmed huskily, ‘but I must also tell you that the right forefinger of both Mr. Eyston and - the other thing are missing.’

  He hesitated once more, then added hurriedly, ‘I’ve only once seen a man with a hand mauled like Mr. Eyston’s. His finger had been torn out by a giant pike!’

  The Author’s Tale

  Well, the one I think I’ll tell you didn’t start off as a ghost story at all,’ said the well-known Author, putting down his glass. ’A "thriller”, yes - a torture tale, in fact, after the best tradition of Poe - but something went wrong with the plot, and it finished up in the regions of the uncanny.’

  'We agreed to stick to facts,’ the Big Game Hunter reminded him, 'not the plots of dramatists.’ The B.G.H. had been telling a few himself, mostly about African witch-doctors and Indian fakirs.

  'Sure,’ replied the Author, with one of his rare smiles. 'This is fact -only, as I meant to convey, it began as a human drama of revenge, and then the punishment was taken out of the avenger’s hands by - something else.*

  The rest of us drew our chairs nearer the fire. It was raining too hard to permit our customary Saturday 'foursome’, but we were not inclined to start for our homes and get a soaking that way.

  'Go ahead,’ said the Barrister, producing cigars.

  ‘Well, to begin with,’ said the Author, 'the story concerns a bloke whom I used to know very well at one time, and whom, for want of a better name, we will call Lester.

  'He was, I suppose, an ultra-rabid sentimentalist from the general standpoint. His profession doesn’t matter, but his matrimonial ventures do. The fellow made a perfect habit of getting married - like a damn’ film-star. In fact, he was eventually nicknamed "Hollywood” by his closer associates. He was under twenty on the first occasion, and he got himself a wife who nagged. He found this out in a week or so, but as they lived in one small bed-sitting-room he couldn’t get away from it. She started mostly in the evening when he was tired after a day’s work and wanted a spot of peace. After a bit he began to go pub-crawling to escape from the home atmosphere, and then she nagged at him for wasting his money. She used to have a go at him most mornings too, because he didn’t have much appetite for the breakfast she had prepared. He stuck it for some years, being very young and rather of the Sir Galahad type. It just didn’t occur to him that, having made marriage vows, he could possibly break them. Eventually, however, when the sex-appeal side of things had died a natural death, he realized that his initial idolization of this woman - whose condescension in marrying him at all he had once considered goddess-like - had been converted into frank loathing. They had a culminating scene lasting the whole of one weekend, and she finally went back to her family. They were, fortunately for him, people of substance, and when she later on divorced him she didn’t apply for alimony.

  'Now, one might think that after an experience like that he would have devoted a few years to meditation before rushing into marriage again -but not a bit of it! Within a week of the decree absolute he was hitched up to a very snappy bit of work culled from a theatrical touring company, whom he had already been introducing to his friends as his "second wife” for some months. You’ll notice that his Sir Galahad ideals were by now wearing a bit thin.

  'Well, that show lasted for about a year - during which his finances failed to multiply - and then the lady poled off with another bloke possessing lots of "dough” and a yacht. Lester was very cut up about it because of the sensitiveness of his affections. He didn’t mind about the other bloke - jealousy being absent in his make-up - and he quite saw the point about the yacht. But what he couldn’t fathom was why she couldn’t still go on loving him.

  'Well, of course, everybody said this second fiasco would turn him into a misogynist - but did it hell! Inside of a year he appeared before the registrar with a third acquisition, and this time it really looked as if he had backed a winner. The girl was quiet and unassuming, appeared completely devoted - even to the extent of taking off Lester’s shoes and fetching his slippers when he came in - and was, above all, a damn’ good cook. Things went along splendidly for quite a while. She never nagged at him, was seen everywhere in his company, and couldn’t do too much in the way of vetting his wardrobe. If you ever did meet him walking out solo he bored you with her praises and declared he wouldn’t part with her for all the money in Europe. This, mark you, after as long as three years! I should mention here that he had ultimate expectations from his family which she knew about, and, in the light of later events, this was probably what made her play up to him so cleverly.

  'When he had saved a thousand quid by denying himself many of the pleasant things of life, he invested the lot in the purchase of a small business which he considered his wife - an erstwhile commercial secretary, by the by - quite capable of managing. His own work, by now, was taking him around the country a lot, and he left her in sole charge, going down to the place for weekends, but never bothering to audit the books.

  'Now, beneath his wife’s pose of affection, so long and carefully maintained, lay a merce
nary and spiteful nature. The supposed paragon of virtue, who had carte blanche with the net profits, began to manipulate the turnover, feeling, doubtless, that Lester’s "expectations” were overlong in materializing. In three months she ran up bills with suppliers to more than half the value of the stock-in-trade, and decamped with the whole of the liquid assets. He went home one Saturday to find the premises locked and deserted and, to be brief, had to sell out for a mere song, all of which went into squaring his creditors.

  'Not content with this, she got a separation order on some trivial pretext of "unfaithfulness” - he had condoned several infidelities on her part - and tried to sting him for maintenance. The publicity of the proceedings lost him his job - so she was unlucky about that - but the treachery and ingratitude of the whole affair brought a hidden vein of violence through the crust of good nature which had previously enveloped him. He determined that she should pay. Not through any legal action for embezzlement. Oh, dear, no! He could not afford the costs and, in any case, her sentence was likely to be inadequate by reason of her sex. She might, in fact, get away with it altogether. Lester was through with sentiment this time.

  'Now, this is where the story becomes interesting. Lester, as I hope I have made clear, was naturally a forbearing soul. His first wife’s nagging he had forgiven and forgotten almost as soon as it ceased; his second wife’s desertion he had accepted with resignation. In neither case had he attempted to hit back. Now, however, his blood fairly boiled at the ingratitude with which his deeply emotional love had been rewarded, and he set methodically about nothing less than a reversion to Feudalism. He would kidnap this venomous swine of a woman and hold her captive in a secret place that he knew, flogging her daily until brute force brought her to absolute subjection.

  ’First, however, he had to live, and he borrowed two hundred pounds from his brother to keep him going until a job turned up. Then he made rather a long night journey to a certain destination, took a room at a village pub, and started his preparations. Before leaving, he had interviewed his wife and warned her of his intentions; but she had snapped her fingers at him, saying that such things just couldn’t happen in the twentieth century. If he attempted to molest her she would obviously scream for help, etc. Lester smiled inwardly at this. It had not occurred to her that it would be necessary for her to make the journey in a drugged sleep on the floor of a closed car, nor that when she was released it would be under similar conditions and at a point far from the scene of her captivity. She might certainly relate her experiences, but that would amount only to her word against his, and he could bring crowds of witnesses to prove that he had never swatted anything bigger than flies.

  'Two miles or so outside the village where Lester took up his abode was a derelict farmhouse standing quite alone in a hollow and surrounded by dense undergrowth. So ubiquitous, in fact, had the brambles now become that it was next to impossible to reach the ruin from any direction without suffering serious laceration. This made it peculiarly safe from the visits of unwanted "hikers”, while the local rustics and their children gave it a wide berth on account of its reputation of being haunted.

  'Lester was not particularly troubled about ghosts. As a boy, in any case, he had frequently explored the deserted homestead in search of birds’ nests without encountering anything of an uncanny nature, despite the fact that his youthful imagination had made him susceptible to the possibilities latent in village gossip. It must be admitted, though, that he had never ventured near the farm after sundown.

  'At the period of which I am speaking it is doubtful whether the place’s evil reputation ever seriously crossed his mind. His chief interest lay in the fact that it was abandoned - isolated - and that in its seclusion he could work his will upon another human being with complete security from intrusion or interference.

  'His early rambles had put him in possession of a secret which, to the best of his belief, was unshared by any other living person. Deep down in the foundations of the building existed a spacious cellar whose only means of access was by a trapdoor flagstone hidden under a heap of rubble in the tumbledown kitchen-parlour. He had first discovered it during the "treasure-hunting” craze which attacks most schoolboys, but had been badly disappointed at the complete absence of "treasure”. The floor of the cellar, reached by a winding flight of stone steps, lay some thirty feet below ground level, and though the youthful Lester had not found so much as a forgotten bottle of wine to reward his search, he had, for some unexplained reason, kept his discovery to himself - a course of action which now seemed to have been providential. With the flagstone dropped, the cellar would be most effectively soundproof. The most frantic human screams imaginable would fail to reach the ear of a possible (but unlikely) passerby.

  'Lester’s principal difficulty lay in importing the timber necessary for his purpose without exciting anyone’s curiosity, but this he continued to do under cover of night by stealing baulks of ash from a local timber-yard, conveying them to the place in his car, and laboriously dragging them through the thorny wilderness that surrounded the ruin. He accomplished the task in one trip, leaving the wood stacked in a dilapidated outhouse, and carried it to the cellar on the following day.

  'He next proceeded systematically with the construction of the device that he had in mind. It was to be an oblong frame, eight feet high by five feet wide, having a ratchet pulley gear at each corner so that a woman of average build could be mounted in it like a picture, her wrists and ankles held by straps attached to the pulleys. The latter could be operated to extend the hands and feet towards the corners of the frame, stretching the whole figure into the form of a letter "X”, and restraining any attempted movement while corporal punishment was in progress. One short end of the rectangle was to be secured to the floor by substantial hinges, while the opposite end would be connected by ropes to two pulleys in the ceiling. Thus the mounted form could be raised to a vertical position for flogging, and lowered to the ground in order that it might subsequently be relaxed for periods of rest necessary to the continuance of health and ability to bear further punishment.

  'Lester took the precaution of posing as a commercial traveller to account for his prolonged and irregular absences from his pub. He had previously purchased his hinges, pulleys, and screws from ironmongers in various districts, and had brought the requisite tools with him in his car. It took him four days to construct his apparatus, and towards the evening of the fourth day he was at work on the final touch - the overhead pulleys.

  'On the previous days, so he told me, he had knocked off work no later than seven o’clock, though he could naturally have expedited the job by working well into the night. He had felt, however, a certain vague distaste for remaining on the premises at a late hour, and had even taken a small risk of discovery by leaving the flagstone raised all the time he was belowground - this in spite of the fact that no daylight could reach the cellar at any hour, and that all his labours had had to be carried out by the illumination of a petrol lamp.

  'Towards the conclusion of his task, the time being nearer eight than seven, the sensation of distaste had grown to a condition of acute uneasiness and, on descending from the shored-up frame, which he had used as a trestle for reaching the roof joists, he realized that his feelings amounted to fear. The walls seemed to be closing in against the feeble resistance of the lamp, and an inner voice kept repeating in his brain: 'Get out, you fool - out before they arrive!’

  'Lester, though, for all his sentiment and imagination, was no coward. Another detached part of his mind told him simultaneously that the disagreeable sensation was no stronger than usual; but that before he’d simply been too busy to notice it. He decided to stay and test the mechanism before returning to the outer air.

  'The ropes from the top pulleys were tied to a staple in the opposite wall. He kicked away the supporting struts, untied the ropes, and lowered the frame to the horizontal.

  'Yes, the pulleys were working freely, and would do so, he felt sure when the frame
carried its load. He stooped to inspect the adjustable corner thongs and, as he did so, saw, or imagined, in the tail of his eye the flicker of something moving. His heart jumped to his mouth at the thought of discovery, and he jerked round towards the corner where the movement had appeared to be. There was nothing there - animate or otherwise - nor was there the slightest draught to cause shadow-dancing.

  '"I’m getting nerves,” he muttered, and resumed his inspection: thongs, plaited leather, strong enough to hold a gorilla - pulleys, oiled to silence, and working like roller-bearings - ratchets dropping into place without a fault to hold the thongs at any desired tension. Yes, the job was good ... What the hell was that in the corner?

  'He swung round again, and again saw - nothing.

  ' "Too keyed up with the next move,” said Lester aloud. "I must pull myself together or I shall slip up on getting her here.” With slightly unsteady hands he lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and sat back on a comer of the frame. As he did so a slim, white arm reached out and beckoned to him from a shadowed corner; though, of course, when he turned towards it there was no arm to be seen.

  'Lester now appreciated that the place was haunted, but, curiously enough, with the realization all sense of panic left him. He described himself as imbued solely with excited curiosity. What was this thing that moved and signalled to him when he looked away, yet vanished as soon as he tried to focus it? He concentrated upon keeping very still and trying to catch it off its guard by stealing half-glances at it from an averted eye. There it was again - a tall, white figure leaning against the wall on his extreme right, one slender arm extended and slowly waving a tapering hand in his direction. By an immense effort he managed to keep his gaze straight ahead, striving to take in as much detail as he could. The figure, hanging tantalizingly on the very fringe of his vision, seemed to be that of a nude woman, dark-haired and red-lipped, but with flesh of a horrible, unnatural pallor reminding him of the flaccid whiteness of dressed tripe.