The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard

by Robert E. Howard

  Somehow, Conrad found a candle and lighted it. The faint glow showed us the room in fearful disarray–showed us each other’s ghastly faces–and showed us the black ebony table–empty! The doors and windows were locked as they had been, but the Oriental was gone–and so was the corpse of John Grimlan.

  Shrieking like damned men we broke down the door and fled frenziedly down the well-like staircase where the darkness seemed to clutch at us with clammy black fingers. As we tumbled down into the lower hallway, a lurid glow cut the darkness and the scent of burning wood filled our nostrils.

  The outer doorway held momentarily against our frantic assault, then gave way and we hurtled into the outer starlight. Behind us the flames leaped up with a crackling roar as we fled down the hill. Conrad, glancing over his shoulder, halted suddenly, wheeled and flung up his arms like a madman, and screamed,

  “Soul and body he sold to Malik Tous, who is Satan, two hundred and fifty years ago! This was the night of payment–and my God–look! Look! The Fiend has claimed his own!”

  I looked, frozen with horror. Flames had enveloped the whole house with appalling swiftness, and now the great mass was etched against the shadowed sky, a crimson inferno. And above the holocaust hovered a gigantic black shadow like a monstrous bat, and from its dark clutch dangled a small white thing, like the body of a man, dangling limply. Then, even as we cried out in horror, it was gone and our dazed gaze met only the shuddering walls and blazing roof which crumpled into the flames with an earth-shaking roar.

  The Song of a Mad Minstrel

  I am the thorn in the foot, I am the blur in the sight;

  I am the worm at the root, I am the thief in the night.

  I am the rat in the wall, the leper that leers at the gate;

  I am the ghost in the hall, herald of horror and hate.

  I am the rust on the corn, I am the smut on the wheat,

  Laughing man’s labor to scorn, weaving a web for his feet.

  I am canker and mildew and blight, danger and death and decay; The rot of the rain by night, the blast of the sun by day.

  I warp and wither with drouth, I work in the swamp’s foul yeast; I bring the black plague from the south and the leprosy in from the east.

  I rend from the hemlock boughs wine steeped in the petals of dooms; Where the fat black serpents drowse I gather the Upas blooms.

  I have plumbed the northern ice for a spell like frozen lead;

  In lost gray fields of rice, I have learned from Mongol dead.

  Where a bleak black mountain stands I have looted grisly caves; I have digged in the desert sands to plunder terrible graves.

  Never the sun goes forth, never the moon glows red,

  But out of the south or the north, I come with the slavering dead.

  I come with hideous spells, black chants and ghastly tunes;

  I have looted the hidden hells and plundered the lost black moons.

  There was never a king or priest to cheer me by word or look,

  There was never a man or beast in the blood-black ways I took.

  There were crimson gulfs unplumbed, there were black wings over a sea; There were pits where mad things drummed, and foaming blasphemy.

  There were vast ungodly tombs where slimy monsters dreamed;

  There were clouds like blood-drenched plumes where unborn demons screamed.

  There were ages dead to Time, and lands lost out of Space;

  There were adders in the slime, and a dim unholy Face.

  Oh, the heart in my breast turned stone, and the brain froze in my skull–

  But I won through, I alone, and poured my chalice full

  Of horrors and dooms and spells, black buds and bitter roots–

  From the hells beneath the hells, I bring you my deathly fruits.

  The Children of the Night

  There were, I remember, six of us in Conrad’s bizarrely fashioned study, with its queer relics from all over the world and its long rows of books which ranged from the Mandrake Press edition of Boccaccio to a Missale Romanum, bound in clasped oak boards and printed in Venice, 1740. Clemants and Professor Kirowan had just engaged in a somewhat testy anthropological argument: Clemants upholding the theory of a separate, distinct Alpine race, while the professor maintained that this so-called race was merely a deviation from an original Aryan stock–possibly the result of an admixture between the southern or Mediterranean races and the Nordic people.

  “And how,” asked Clemants, “do you account for their brachycephalicism? The Mediterraneans were as long-headed as the Aryans: would admixture between these dolichocephalic peoples produce a broad-headed intermediate type?”

  “Special conditions might bring about a change in an originally long-headed race,” snapped Kirowan.

  “Boaz has demonstrated, for instance, that in the case of immigrants to America, skull formations often change in one generation. And Flinders Petrie has shown that the Lombards changed from a long-headed to a round-headed race in a few centuries.”

  “But what caused these changes?”

  “Much is yet unknown to science,” answered Kirowan, “and we need not be dogmatic. No one knows, as yet, why people of British and Irish ancestry tend to grow unusually tall in the Darling district of Australia–Cornstalks, as they are called–or why people of such descent generally have thinner jaw-structures after a few generations in New England. The universe is full of the unexplainable.”

  “And therefore the uninteresting, according to Machen,” laughed Taverel.

  Conrad shook his head. “I must disagree. To me the unknowable is most tantalizingly fascinating.”

  “Which accounts, no doubt, for all the works on witchcraft and demonology I see on your shelves,” said Ketrick, with a wave of his hand toward the rows of books.

  And let me speak of Ketrick. Each of the six of us was of the same breed–that is to say, a Briton or an American of British descent. By British, I include all natural inhabitants of the British Isles. We represented various strains of English and Celtic blood, but basically, these strains are the same after all.

  But Ketrick: to me the man always seemed strangely alien. It was in his eyes that this difference showed externally. They were a sort of amber, almost yellow, and slightly oblique. At times, when one looked at his face from certain angles, they seemed to slant like a Chinaman’s.

  Others than I had noticed this feature, so unusual in a man of pure Anglo-Saxon descent. The usual myths ascribing his slanted eyes to some pre-natal influence had been mooted about, and I remember Professor Hendrik Brooler once remarked that Ketrick was undoubtedly an atavism, representing a reversion of type to some dim and distant ancestor of Mongolian blood–a sort of freak reversion, since none of his family showed such traces.

  But Ketrick comes of the Welsh branch of the Cetrics of Sussex, and his lineage is set down in the Book of Peers. There you may read the line of his ancestry, which extends unbroken to the days of Canute.

  No slightest trace of Mongoloid intermixture appears in the genealogy, and how could there have been such intermixture in old Saxon England? For Ketrick is the modern form of Cedric, and though that branch fled into Wales before the invasion of the Danes, its male heirs consistently married with English families on the border marches, and it remains a pure line of the powerful Sussex Cetrics–almost pure Saxon. As for the man himself, this defect of his eyes, if it can be called a defect, is his only abnormality, except for a slight and occasional lisping of speech. He is highly intellectual and a good companion except for a slight aloofness and a rather callous indifference which may serve to mask an extremely sensitive nature.

  Referring to his remark, I said with a laugh: “Conrad pursues the obscure and mystic as some men pursue romance; his shelves throng with delightful nightmares of every variety.”

  Our host nodded. “You’ll find there a number of delectable dishes–Machen, Poe, Blackwood, Maturin–look, there’s a rare feast– Horrid Mysteries, by the Marquis of Grosse–the rea
l Eighteenth Century edition.”

  Taverel scanned the shelves. “Weird fiction seems to vie with works on witchcraft, voodoo and dark magic.”

  “True; historians and chroniclers are often dull; tale-weavers never–the masters, I mean. A voodoo sacrifice can be described in such a dull manner as to take all the real fantasy out of it, and leave it merely a sordid murder. I will admit that few writers of fiction touch the true heights of horror–most of their stuff is too concrete, given too much earthly shape and dimensions. But in such tales as Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher, Machen’s Black Seal and Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu–the three master horror-tales, to my mind–the reader is borne into dark and outer realms of imagination.

  “But look there,” he continued, “there, sandwiched between that nightmare of Huysmans’, and Walpole’s Castle of Otranto–Von Junzt’s Nameless Cults. There’s a book to keep you awake at night!”

  “I’ve read it,” said Taverel, “and I’m convinced the man is mad. His work is like the conversation of a maniac–it runs with startling clarity for awhile, then suddenly merges into vagueness and disconnected ramblings.”

  Conrad shook his head. “Have you ever thought that perhaps it is his very sanity that causes him to write in that fashion? What if he dares not put on paper all he knows? What if his vague suppositions are dark and mysterious hints, keys to the puzzle, to those who know?”

  “Bosh!” This from Kirowan. “Are you intimating that any of the nightmare cults referred to by Von Junzt survive to this day–if they ever existed save in the hag-ridden brain of a lunatic poet and philosopher?”

  “Not he alone used hidden meanings,” answered Conrad. “If you will scan various works of certain great poets you may find double meanings. Men have stumbled on to cosmic secrets in the past and given a hint of them to the world in cryptic words. Do you remember Von Junzt’s hints of ‘a city in the waste’?

  What do you think of Flecker’s lines:

  “‘Pass not beneath! Men say there blows in stony deserts still a rose

  “‘But with no scarlet to her leaf–and from whose heart no perfume flows.’

  “Men may stumble upon secret things, but Von Junzt dipped deep into forbidden mysteries. He was one of the few men, for instance, who could read the Necronomicon in the original Greek translation.”

  Taverel shrugged his shoulders, and Professor Kirowan, though he snorted and puffed viciously at his pipe, made no direct reply; for he, as well as Conrad, had delved into the Latin version of the book, and had found there things not even a cold-blooded scientist could answer or refute.

  “Well,” he said presently, “suppose we admit the former existence of cults revolving about such nameless and ghastly gods and entities as Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth, Tsathoggua, Gol-goroth, and the like, I can not find it in my mind to believe that survivals of such cults lurk in the dark corners of the world today.”

  To our surprize Clemants answered. He was a tall, lean man, silent almost to the point of taciturnity, and his fierce struggles with poverty in his youth had lined his face beyond his years. Like many another artist, he lived a distinctly dual literary life, his swashbuckling novels furnishing him a generous income, and his editorial position on The Cloven Hoof affording him full artistic expression. The Cloven Hoof was a poetry magazine whose bizarre contents had often aroused the shocked interest of the conservative critics.

  “You remember Von Junzt makes mention of a so-called Bran cult,” said Clemants, stuffing his pipe-bowl with a peculiarly villainous brand of shag tobacco. “I think I heard you and Taverel discussing it once.”

  “As I gather from his hints,” snapped Kirowan, “Von Junzt includes this particular cult among those still in existence. Absurd.”

  Again Clemants shook his head. “When I was a boy working my way through a certain university, I had for roommate a lad as poor and ambitious as I. If I told you his name, it would startle you. Though he came of an old Scotch line of Galloway, he was obviously of a non-Aryan type.

  “This is in strictest confidence, you understand. But my roommate talked in his sleep. I began to listen and put his disjointed mumbling together. And in his mutterings I first heard of the ancient cult hinted at by Von Junzt; of the king who ruled the Dark Empire, which was a revival of an older, darker empire dating back into the Stone Age; and of the great, nameless cavern where stands the Dark Man–the image of Bran Mak Morn, carved in his likeness by a master-hand while the great king yet lived, and to which each worshipper of Bran makes a pilgrimage once in his or her lifetime. Yes, that cult lives today in the descendants of Bran’s people–a silent, unknown current it flows on in the great ocean of life, waiting for the stone image of the great Bran to breathe and move with sudden life, and come from the great cavern to rebuild their lost empire.”

  “And who were the people of that empire?” asked Ketrick.

  “Picts,” answered Taverel, “doubtless the people known later as the wild Picts of Galloway were predominantly Celtic–a mixture of Gaelic, Cymric, aboriginal and possibly Teutonic elements. Whether they took their name from the older race or lent their own name to that race, is a matter yet to be decided. But when Von Junzt speaks of Picts, he refers specifically to the small, dark, garlic-eating peoples of Mediterranean blood who brought the Neolithic culture into Britain. The first settlers of that country, in fact, who gave rise to the tales of earth spirits and goblins.”

  “I can not agree to that last statement,” said Conrad. “These legends ascribe a deformity and inhumanness of appearances to the characters. There was nothing about the Picts to excite such horror and repulsion in the Aryan peoples. I believe that the Mediterraneans were preceded by a Mongoloid type, very low in the scale of development, whence these tales–”

  “Quite true,” broke in Kirowan, “but I hardly think they preceded the Picts, as you call them, into Britain.

  We find troll and dwarf legends all over the Continent, and I am inclined to think that both the Mediterranean and Aryan peoples brought these tales with them from the Continent. They must have been of extremely inhuman aspect, those early Mongoloids.”

  “At least,” said Conrad, “here is a flint mallet a miner found in the Welsh hills and gave to me, which has never been fully explained. It is obviously of no ordinary Neolithic make. See how small it is, compared to most implements of that age; almost like a child’s toy; yet it is surprizingly heavy and no doubt a deadly blow could be dealt with it. I fitted the handle to it, myself, and you would be surprised to know how difficult it was to carve it into a shape and balance corresponding with the head.”

  We looked at the thing. It was well made, polished somewhat like the other remnants of the Neolithic I had seen, yet as Conrad said, it was strangely different. Its small size was oddly disquieting, for it had no appearance of a toy, otherwise. It was as sinister in suggestion as an Aztec sacrificial dagger. Conrad had fashioned the oaken handle with rare skill, and in carving it to fit the head, had managed to give it the same unnatural appearance as the mallet itself had. He had even copied the workmanship of primal times, fixing the head into the cleft of the haft with rawhide.

  “My word!” Taverel made a clumsy pass at an imaginary antagonist and nearly shattered a costly Shang vase. “The balance of the thing is all off center; I’d have to readjust all my mechanics of poise and equilibrium to handle it.”

  “Let me see it,” Ketrick took the thing and fumbled with it, trying to strike the secret of its proper handling. At length, somewhat irritated, he swung it up and struck a heavy blow at a shield which hung on the wall near by. I was standing near it; I saw the hellish mallet twist in his hand like a live serpent, and his arm wrenched out of line; I heard a shout of alarmed warning–then darkness came with the impact of the mallet against my head.

  Slowly I drifted back to consciousness. First there was dull sensation with blindness and total lack of knowledge as to where I was or what I was; then vague realization of life and being, and a hard someth
ing pressing into my ribs. Then the mists cleared and I came to myself completely.

  I lay on my back half beneath some underbrush and my head throbbed fiercely. Also my hair was caked and clotted with blood, for the scalp had been laid open. But my eyes traveled down my body and limbs, naked but for a deerskin loin-cloth and sandals of the same material, and found no other wound. That which pressed so uncomfortably into my ribs was my ax, on which I had fallen.

  Now an abhorrent babble reached my ears and stung me into clear consciousness. The noise was faintly like language, but not such language as men are accustomed to. It sounded much like the repeated hissing of many great snakes.

  I stared. I lay in a great, gloomy forest. The glade was overshadowed, so that even in the daytime it was very dark. Aye–that forest was dark, cold, silent, gigantic and utterly grisly. And I looked into the glade.

  I saw a shambles. Five men lay there–at least, what had been five men. Now as I marked the abhorrent mutilations my soul sickened. And about them clustered the–Things. Humans they were, of a sort, though I did not consider them so. They were short and stocky, with broad heads too large for their scrawny bodies. Their hair was snaky and stringy, their faces broad and square, with flat noses, hideously slanted eyes, a thin gash for a mouth, and pointed ears. They wore the skins of beasts, as did I, but these hides were but crudely dressed. They bore small bows and flint-tipped arrows, flint knives and cudgels. And they conversed in a speech as hideous as themselves, a hissing, reptilian speech that filled me with dread and loathing.

  Oh, I hated them as I lay there; my brain flamed with white-hot fury. And now I remembered. We had hunted, we six youths of the Sword People, and had wandered far into that grim forest which our people generally shunned. Weary of the chase, we had paused to rest; to me had been given the first watch, for in those days, no sleep was safe without a sentry. Now shame and revulsion shook my whole being. I had slept–I had betrayed my comrades. And now they lay gashed and mangled–butchered while they slept, by vermin who had never dared to stand before them on equal terms. I, Aryara, had betrayed my trust.