The Ultimate Weird Tales Collection - 133 stories - Clark Ashton Smith (Trilogus Classics)

by Smith, Clark Ashton

  Truly, it was a morning made for the trysts of lovers. Wild bees were humming busily in the patches of clover and in the ceanothus bushes with their great masses of white flowers, whose strange and heavy perfume intoxicated the air. Most of the spring blossoms were abroad: cyclamen, yellow violet, poppy, wild hyacinth, and woodland star; and the green of the fields was opalescent with their colouring. Between the emerald of the buck- eyes, the grey-green of the pines, the golden and dark and bluish greens of the oaks, I caught glimpses of the snow-white Sierras to the east, and the faint blue of the Coast Range to the west, beyond the pale and lilac levels of the Sacramento valley. Following a vague trail, I went onwards across open fields where I had to thread my way among clustering boulders.

  My thoughts were all of Guenevere, and I looked only with a casual and desultory eye at the picturesqueness and vernal beauty that environed my path. I was half-way between my cabin and the meeting-place, when I became suddenly aware that the sunlight had darkened, and glanced up, thinking, of course, that an April cloud, appearing unobserved from beyond the horizon, had passed across the sun. Imagine, then, my surprise when I saw that the azure of the entire sky had turned to a dun and sinister brown, in the midst of which the sun was clearly visible, burning like an enormous round red ember. Then, something strange and unfamiliar in the nature of my surroundings, which I was momentarily at a loss to define, forced itself upon my attention, and my surprise became a growing consternation. I stopped and looked about me, and realized, incredible as it seemed, that I had lost my way; for the pines on either hand were not those that I had expected to see. They were more gigantic, more gnarled, than the ones I remembered; and their roots writhed in wilder end more serpentine contortions from a soil that was strangely lowerless, and where even the grass grew only in scanty tufts. There were boulders large as druidic monoliths, and the forms of some of them were such as one might see in a nightmare, Thinking, of course, that it must all be a dream, but with a sense of utter bewilderment which seldom if ever attends the absurdities and monstrosities of nightmare, I sought in vain to orient myself and to find some familiar landmark in the bizarre scene that lay before me.

  A path, broader than the one I had been following, but running in what I judged to be the same direction, wound on among the trees. It was covered with a grey dust, which, as I went forward, became deeper and displayed footprints of a singular form — footprints that were surely too attenuate, too fantastically slender, to be human, despite their five toe-marks. Something about them, I know not what, something in the nature of their very thinness and elongation, made me shiver. Afterwards, I wondered why I had not recognized them for what they were; but at the time, no suspicion entered my mind — only a vague sense of disquietude, au indefinable trepidation.

  As I proceeded, the pines amid which I passed became momentarily more fantastic and more sinister in the contortions of their boughs and boles and roots. Some were like leering hags; others were obscenely crouching gargoyles; some appeared to writhe in an eternity of hellish torture; others were convulsed as with a satanic merrirnent. All the while, the sky continued to darken slowly, the dun and dismal brown that I had first perceived turning through almost imperceptible changes of tone to a dead funereal purple, wherein the sun smouldered like a moon that had risen from a bath of blood. The trees and the whole landscape were saturated with this macabre purple, were immersed and steeped in its unnatural gloom. Only the rocks, as I went on, grew strangely paler; and their forms were somehow suggestive of headstones, of tombs and monuments. Beside the trail, there was no longer the green of vernal grass — only an earth mottled by drying algae and tiny lichens the colour of verdigris. Also there were patches of evil-looking fungi with stems of a leprous pallor and blackish heads that drooped and nodded loathsomely.

  The sky had now grown so dark that the whole scene took on a semi-nocturnal aspect, and made me think of a doomed world in the twilight of a dying sun. All was airless and silent; there were no birds, no insects, no sighing of the pines, no lisping of leaves: a baleful and preternatural silence, like the silence of the infinite void.

  The trees became denser, then dwindled, and I came to a circular field, Here, there was no mistaking the nature of the monolithal boulders — they were headstones and funeral monuments, but so enormously ancient that the letterings or figures upon them were well-nigh effaced; and the few characters that I could distinguish were not of any known language. About them there the hoariness and mystery and terror of incomputable Eld. It was hard to believe that life and death could be as old as they. The trees around them were inconceivably gnarled and bowed as with an almost equal burden of years. The sense of awful antiquity that these stones and pines all served to convey increased the oppression of my bewilderment, confirmed my disquietude. Nor was I reassured when I noticed on the soft earth about the headstones a number of those attenuate footprints of which I have already spoken. They were disposed in a fashion that was truly singular seeming to depart from and return to the vicinity of each stone.

  Now, for the first time, I heard a sound other than the sound of my own footfalls in the silence of this macabre scene. Behind me, among the trees, there was a faint and evil rattling. I turned and listened; there was something in these sounds that served to complete the demoralization of my unstrung nerves; and monstrous fears, abominable fancies, trooped like the horde of a witches' sabbat through my brain.

  The reality that I was now to confront was no less monstrous! There was a whitish glimmering in the shadow of the trees, and a human skeleton, bearing in its arms the skeleton of an infant, emerged and came towards me! Intent as on some ulterior cryptic purpose, some charnel errand not to be surmised by the living, it went by with a tranquil pace, an effortless and gliding tread in which, despite my terror and stupefaction, I perceived a certain horrible and feminine grace. I followed the apparition with my eyes as it passed among the monuments without pausing and vanished in the darkness of the pines on the opposite side of the field. No sooner had it gone, than a second, also bearing in its arms an infant skeleton, appeared, and passed before me in the same direction and with the same abominable and loathsome grace of movement.

  A horror that was more than horror, a fear that was beyond fear, petrified all my faculties, and I felt as if I were weighted down by some ineluctable and insupportable burden of nightmare, Before me, skeleton after skeleton, each precisely like the last, with the same macabre lightness and ease of motion, each carrying its pitiful infant, emerged from the shadow of the ancient pines and followed where the first had disappeared, intent as on the same cryptic errand. One by one they came, till I had counted eight! Now I knew the origin of the bizarre footprints whose attenuation had disturbed and troubled me.

  When the eighth skeleton had passed from sight, my eyes were drawn as by scene irresistible impulsion to one of the nearer headstones, beside which I was amazed to perceive what I had not noticed before: a freshly opened grave, gaping darkly in the soft soil. Then, at my elbow, I heard a low rattling, and the fingers of a fleshless hand plucked lightly at my sleeve. A skeleton was beside me, differing only from the others through the fact that it bore no infant in its arms. With a lipless and iagratiating leer, it plucked again at my sleeve, as if to draw me towards the open grave, and its teeth clicked as if it were trying to speak. My senses and my brain, aswirl with vertiginous terror, could endure no more: I seemed to fall and fall through deeps of infinite eddying blackness with the clutching terror of those fingers upon my arm, till consciousness was left behind in my descent.

  When I came to, Guenevere was holding me by the arm, concern and puzzlement upon her sweet oval face, and I was standing among the boulders of the field appointed for our rendezvous.

  'What on earth is the matter with you, Herbert?' she queried anxiously. 'Are you ill? You were standing here in a daze when I came, and didn't seem to hear or see me when I spoke to you. And I really thought you were going to faint when I touched your arm.'


  THE PARROT

  The pawnshop was so crowded with unredeemed articles, that neither electricity nor sunlight could dissipate fully the murk of its doubtful corners. The windows were always unwashed and the cobwebs were unswept. It was even darker and grimier than usual, on this late afternoon of April; and the sea-fog that had inundated San Francisco was visibly mingled with the dust that hovered always in its air. No one who was unfamiliar with the place would have noticed the parrot, which occupied a perch in the corner farthest from the door. The bird was in one of its taciturn moods, and had apparently forgotten its extensive repertoire of thieves' argot, water-front oaths, and Jewish idioms, for it had not spoken a word since morning.

  "Veil, Micky Horgan, vot you vant?" The huge, swarthy, furtive-looking person thus hailed by Jacob Stein, the proprietor, was better known as Black Mike to the local underworld and police circles. He was peering about uncertainly for Stein, who was stooping behind the counter. The Jew was so small and dingy that he blended in with his surroundings as if he had taken on a sort of protective coloration.

  "I want one hundred dollars." Horgan's voice was a peremptory growl.

  "For vot should I gif you so much money?"

  "For this." Horgan took an amber necklace from his coat-pocket and laid it on the counter, where it gleamed like a circle of solidified sun-rays.

  Stein peered at the necklace through his heavy-rimmed goggles and shook his head with a vehement grimace.

  "I gif you fifteen," he said dubiously.

  "The hell you will. That's real amber. I didn't swipe it from any hall-bedroom, either. And I'm offering it mud-cheap because I've got to have a hundred bucks to-night."

  Stein came out from behind the counter and began to expostulate.

  "For vot you take me? No one buys amber. I'm a poor man, and I haf a family. Fifteen tollars I gif you, but no more."

  Horgan sensed finality in the tones of the Jew. Sinister, desperate thoughts arose in his brain. His need of a hundred dollars was indeed urgent, for the sum had been demanded by a sweetheart whom he loved with ferocious ardor. He knew her coldness and contempt if he should go to her without the money — knew the merciless vituperations with which she would greet him. Also, he thought of all the former occasions on which Stein had defrauded him of his rightful due for some stolen article.

  "You rotten Sheeny — I'm damned if you'll gouge me this time!" Horgan's desperation was tinged with a stealthy, rat-like anger.

  "Fifteen tollars — und I'm robbing myself, Micky." The Jew rubbed his hands together, turned his head away, and looked indifferently through the smeared windows. He did not seem to notice the ugly and precarious mood of his client.

  A murderous calculation crept into Horgan's thoughts. He peered about. The street outside was very quiet, and the fog was thickening into a drizzle. It was not likely that anyone would come in at the moment. Furtively, with careful slowness, he reached for the revolver in his hip-pocket. He pulled it out, raised it aloft with a flourish incredibly swift, and brought down the heavy butt on the pawn-broker's head. Stein fell, sprawling at full length between a crowded table and the metal base of a floor-lamp. He did not move; and stooping over him, Horgan saw that blood was beginning to ooze from the crushed crown of his skull. The horn-rimmed goggles had not fallen from the eyes, and they lent a grotesque air of life and peering animation to the corpse. It was hard to believe that Stein was dead, for even as he lay, he seemed to be inspecting some dubious article or customer.

  The burglar stood up and looked about hastily. He could not afford to delay. He went over to the counter, stuffed the necklace back into his pocket, and then took a step toward the cash-register.

  "Veil, Micky Horgan, vot you vant?" The voice came from a shadowy comer, and was an exact mimicry of Stein's. Horgan gave a violent start, and his heart missed one or two beats, while a surge of ancestral Irish superstition clamored in his brain. Then he remembered that there was a parrot which he had seen on several previous occasions.

  "I want one hundred dollars," continued the voice.

  "Damn that bird," thought Horgan. "I've got to wring its neck before I go." He seemed to hear the parrot uttering his name in Stein's voice to the San Francisco police, and repeating various bits of the late dispute. He started for the corner where the perch stood, and collided with a chair in his blind haste. He almost fell, but caught himself in time and went on, cursing aloud with the pain of a bruised knee. There was so much furniture and bric-a-brac in the place, that he could not locate the perch for a few moments.

  "For vot should I gif you so much money?" The voice was at his very elbow. He saw the bird, which seemed to be inspecting him, with its green head cocked to one side and a sardonic gleam in its eye. His hand shot out to clutch its legs, but he was not quick enough. The parrot fluttered away from the perch and settled with a leisurely flap of its wings on an empty coat-hanger among the pawned garments at one end of the shop.

  "Damn you to hell!" Horgan was not aware that he had yelled the words. He lurched toward the coat-hanger, obsessed by one frantically imperative idea, that he must catch the bird and wring its infernal neck. This time, the parrot flew off before he came within reach, and established itself on the cash-register. There it continued to repeat word for word the conversation he had had with Stein. "I gif you fifteen," it screeched.

  Horgan picked up a little bronze bust of Dante from a table covered with art-objects and bric-a-brac, and hurled it at the parrot. The bust struck the cash-register with a reverberant clang, loud as that of an alarm-gong, and the bird rose again and seated itself on the parchment shade of the floor-lamp above the pawn-broker's body. It yelled raucously all the while, and sailors' oaths and Yiddish idioms were intermingled with more scraps of the dialogue that had ended in Stein's death.

  The murderer flung himself at the floor-lamp, tripped on the insulated wire, and brought the lamp down, as he fell across the corpse of his victim. The top of the lamp-stand struck a loaded table, and there was a terrific crash of Chinese pottery and cut-glass.

  "Hey, what's going on here?" The door had opened and a policeman was entering. He had heard the gong-like clang of the bust against the cash-register, and had decided to investigate. He drew a revolver very quickly and leveled it at Horgan, when he saw the body of Jacob Stein, from whose head a little pool of blood had oozed.

  Horgan picked himself up slowly and sullenly. As he rose to his feet before the leveled muzzle, he heard once more the voice of the parrot, which had now returned to its perch.

  "I gif you fifteen," it screamed, with a note that was like malicious laughter.

  THE PERFECT WOMAN

  Once there was an idealist who sought for the Perfect Woman. In the course of his search, which lasted many years, and was thorough and painstaking, he acquired the reputation of a rake, and lost his youth, his hair, his illusions, and most of his money. He made love to actresses, ingenues, milkmaids, nurses, nuns, typists, trollops and married women. He acquired an expert knowledge of hairpins and lingerie, and data on feminine cussedness. Also, he sampled every known variety of lipstick. But still he failed to find the Ideal.

  One day, to continue the weary tale, he lost whatever reason his experiences had left (or given) him; and, seized with furry of a fiercer mania, threw a Charlotte Russ at the perfectly nice deputant with whom he was drinking. Two days latter he received a membership in a home for the Mentally Exalted. Whether his insanity from disappointment, excess, prohibition, booze or a Streptococcic infection, the M. D.'s were never quite able to determine.

  On his way to the asylum, guided by two stalwart keepers, he saw a rubber doll in a shop window, and fell in love with it like a college-boy with a soubrette. He had the price of the doll in his purse, so the keepers kindly permitted him to buy it, and bring it with him to enliven his sojourn in the Refuge for the Ecstatic.

  "Gee, ain't he the nut?" they grinned.

  However, he was happy at last, and did not mind. He believed he had found
the Perfect Woman.

  He still believes it, for the doll (one of the squeekless and unmechanized kind), has never said or done anything to disillusion him. He loves it with an absolute and ideal devotion, and believes his love is returned. He is perfectly happy.

  THE PHANTOMS OF THE FIRE

  It was late summer, and the Georgetown road was deep with dust, which had settled like a dun pall on the bordering chaparral and pines. Since he had walked all the way from Auburn without securing a single lift, the man who was trudging along the road with the broiling afternoon sun on his back was hardly less dusty than the trees. He paused now and then to mop his face with a discoloured handkerchief, or to peer rather wistfully at the occasional cars which passed him without offering to stop. His clothing, though not actually ragged, was old and worn, and had the indescribable shapelessness of clothing that has been slept in. He was very thin, stoop-shouldered, and discouraged-looking; his general aspect was almost that of a professional tramp; and the people of the countryside were suspicious of tramps. 'Well, I guess I'll have t' walk all the way,' he said to himself, whining a little even in his thoughts. 'But it ain't much further now... Gosh, but things is hot an' dry.' He looked about him at the familiar landscape of parched grass, brushwood and yellow pines with an appraising eye. 'Wonder there ain't been more fires -- there alluz is at this time o' year.'