The Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK ™, Vol. 3: Emil Petaja

by Emil Petaja

  “You must do as she says, Doctor,” I told him. “Keep her alive until dark—somehow.”

  He gave her a hypo. Her taut body went limp as death. Her mouth twitched and she was still. So still I thought she must be dead. A wave of indignation swept me. She must not be dead! Lord knows Auntie had lived long enough, but all she asked was to live until dark. I had personal reasons for wanting this, too. I wanted to share her incredible secret—to know. I was like Auntie. I hadn’t had time to be as wicked as she had been, but give me time and I probably would outdistance her. Whatever the result I must know! I must!”

  Dr. Hubbard was testing her heart.

  “She’s dead!”

  “No. I gave her a strong sedative. If she sleeps she might live until tonight.” He straightened, his lips curving a tight little smile. “I have known Miss Galder for a long time now. She always had a way of getting what she wants. She might get this too.”

  “But—”

  “I have to leave now,” he told me. “There’s really nothing I can do. If she has absolute quiet she may survive even until tomorrow morning. Call me the instant she stirs.”

  “Will that do any good?”’

  He shook his head and left.

  I prowled the ancient house with its high ceilings and intricately carved woodwork. I suppose in my heathen way I was praying all the time. Praying that Auntie would live. Selfishly, of course. I must learn her secret. Share it. We were of one blood, she and I.

  Matilda told me some interesting things while I nibbled at the food she fixed for me. Matilda had been with Auntie since the house was built. She was old, like Auntie, a little deaf, and abysmally stupid and unimaginative. She did just what she was told to do, and kept to her corner room off the kitchen with a lack of interest in Auntie’s affairs which approached fanaticism.

  There were no other servants. A char-woman came in to do the heavier cleaning once a week, and her husband washed windows and moved furniture for her. A Japanese gardener tended to the miniature front garden, but the back garden was sealed up. Despite the incipient danger to the house due to the fact that the cliff wall was slowly crumbling away under the impact of seasonal rains, the high-walled rear garden was kept sealed and all were forbidden entrance thereto. The kitchen door opened just to the front of the wall, and there were no rear windows on the first floor. All this was so curious that I left off pretending to eat and went upstairs to look down at this deserted spot.

  What I saw through an upstairs window was disappointing. There was no garden at all. It was a lifeless place, with the crumbling cliff-wall as an end to it. The earth was hard and grey; even weeds didn’t like this place. There was nothing strange about all this, actually. Maybe the weed pollen couldn’t jump the wall. Calder House was on the very top of the hill, and the house was so constructed that the rear of it was quite safe from prying eyes.

  I looked upward at the bottom of Auntie’s precious gazebo. Auntie wasn’t up in her own bedroom. There was a more interesting reason for that than merely because tending her on the ground floor was easier. Auntie wanted no one on her gazebo. Or anywhere near it.

  I went up.

  Auntie’s sitting room door was locked but I had provided myself with a set of house keys. As the door creaked open I was nine years old again, whiffing the redolence of Auntie’s heliotrope perfume. My heart pounded as I stepped in the room.

  It had an olden flavor, Auntie’s sitting room did, but with a risqué dash.

  I had a sharp cognizance, almost like a memory, of Auntie waiting here for her lover—for her lover…

  In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

  A stately pleasure dome decree,

  Where Alph the sacred river ran

  Through caverns measureless to man

  Down to a sunless sea…

  Now what on earth put that in my mind? Schoolboy rhymes memorized long ago. Rhymes. Nasty rhymes about Auntie. What was I thinking? What was it? It was right on the tip of my mind, but now it was gone.

  Ah!

  There was something in Auntie’s fireplace that caught my eye. Papers had been burned in it, probably the last time Auntie was here, and one corner scrap had evaded the flames. I nipped it out of the black ashes. It was the rough-cut end of what had apparently been a large piece of butcher’s paper. Piggoti’s package flashed to mind. Where had I left it? Oh, yes. In the front hall with my hat and topcoat. So Piggoti wasn’t crazy. How many pieces of butcher’s paper had been burned in this fireplace just as this had been? How many? A hundred? A thousand?

  I went out on the gazebo.

  I went over every inch of the long balcony overlooking the Bay and that blasted spot of earth below. At the far end I found odd stains in the flooring. Here Auntie’s heliotrope perfume was very strong. As if she had poured it on those stains to hide—Yes! Another odor. An odor that was both offensive and fascinating. There was a hint of forbidden rapture in it, like the reek of opium poppies being prepared for the creation of satanic-paradise dreams. It made me giddy.

  I blinked there, on my knees, through the railing that protected me from oblivion. I noticed that the railing was ornately carved in a repetitious pattern of wooden snakes and flowers. Good and evil. Beauty and terror. Snakes and flowers. Beyond the railing the sun was a blurred smear of yellow and bloody red. I thought it would sizzle when it dropped into the inky sea. The desire to see—to know—made me shiver. I wanted to leap over that railing to stifle it because I couldn’t bear the idea that perhaps I would never know.

  “Arthur! Mister Arthur!”

  It was Matilda, calling me from the stairs.

  * * * *

  “Arthur and I want to be alone,” Aunt Ermintrude told Matilda and the disproving nurse.

  The nurse frowned deeper. “But—”

  “Get out; both of you! Get out!” Matilda sniffled and waddled away. The nurse hesitated, but the look in Auntie’s yellow eyes put her out in the hall as well, with mutterings about calling the doctor.

  “Arthur, shut the door.”

  “Yes, Auntie.”

  “Lock it.”

  “Yes, Auntie.”

  “Now come here close to me. I haven’t much time. It will be dark soon, won’t it, Arthur?”

  “Within an hour.”

  She tried to sit up. “Arthur, I will be able to make it upstairs, won’t I?”

  “No, Auntie.”

  “But you could carry me, Arthur?”

  “Sure, Auntie, but—”

  “You don’t think I’d make it alive, is that it?”

  My head dropped. What could I say? Of course she wouldn’t make it. She looked dead and in her grave already. Some fierce inner flame of evil alone was burning.

  She snorted convulsively. “All right, then. I’ll have to tell you, Arthur. And you’ll have to break it to Daniel.”

  She spoke the name with wistful tenderness.

  “Daniel?” I licked my lips. My throat was suddenly like paper. The word popped out like a wrinkled pea out of a pea-shooter. Auntie ignored it.

  “Arthur, you and I are different. Don’t say anything. I know you are. You’re like me. That’s why we always got along so well. Neither of us are at all like them!” Her contempt included the entire human race besides us. “We aren’t afraid to look the devil in the face and laugh at him. Are we, Arthur? Laugh! Yes, Arthur, I’m a wicked woman and I’ll roast in hell forever. But nobody can say I haven’t lived life to the hilt. God, how I’ve lived! People have gibbered and gossiped about me and my sins for the last sixty years. But they don’t know the half of it, Arthur!

  “When I was through all they could show me I wanted more. There was more and I knew I would be the one to find it. I met a man. Or maybe he wasn’t a man. I don’t know. But he taught me secrets they don’t even dream about. They have no idea what goes on in the dark of the night—in the very air they breathe. Nor do they realize that the visions they see when they sin with gin and opium and hashish are as real as—

  �
��Never mind, Arthur. Call them demons, dracs. Call them holy visions. Call them anything you like. But call them strong enough; Arthur, and they’ll make themselves known!”

  I shivered.

  “The gazebo?”

  “Yes! The gazebo! You see, these others can’t come through to us just anywhere. No, only in a few secret places in the world. And my gazebo is one-of these places. No, it didn’t happen that way just by accident. I had this house built just here so they could come through and find me! I learned from this man that here on this hill was one of the secret thin spots, up here in the middle of the air. By careful planning my architects struck it. What a time the builders had! Three of them tumbled down the cliff and were smashed. The cacodemons get so playful sometimes. I intended the entrance to be right in my living room, but it just missed.

  “And of course they couldn’t all come through. That would be disastrous for the world. Only one came, Arthur. But what a one! Oh—you’ve brought the sweets for little Daniel!”

  I blinked down at the parcel under my arm, the parcel Mr. Pigotti had given me.

  “Little Daniel?” I mumbled.

  Auntie laughed. It was like breaking dry toast. “Daniel isn’t so little any more. I keep forgetting how long it’s been since—” A spasm of pain set her shuddering. “Arthur! Listen! I’ve left you everything in my will. But there’s a condition. You must live in this house—alone. And you must be nice to Daniel. See that he gets his sweets twice every week and—” Her face blackened with agony, “It’s—it’s dark now. Isn’t it, Arthur? Daniel will be up there soon, pawing at the gazebo door and wanting in. Go up, there, Arthur! Hurry! Tell Daniel that I—that I—”

  There was a rasping sigh, then nothing.

  I left Matilda and the nurse to their duties and went up to auntie’s sitting room to wait. I had made it quite clear I was not to be disturbed, and I bolted the door inside to make sure. I put down that clammy parcel I still carried, and lit a cigarette. I couldn’t sit still. I paced the room in a frenzy.

  Auntie was right. I was like her. I was! All my life I had secretly wanted something extreme to happen to me—to see into dark, forbidden places. Soon I would. Soon I’d have the full and complete answer to everything, the culmination of twelve years of waiting—since auntie slashed my face on the gazebo when I was nine. I had sinned since then, but it was pale wan stuff. This was—was beyond—natural—human—experience—This was for aunt Ermintrude—and, for me!

  Finally…

  It came, the stealthy pad of footsteps along the gazebo. And with it a slithering sound, as if the Creature out there were possessed of a thick tail that swished from side to side as it advanced toward the sitting room door.

  I wasn’t the remotest bit afraid. If I were to die, well and good; at least I would know the answer in that split-second before oblivion. I crushed out my last cigarette carefully, then hastily snapped the string on Mr. Piggotti’s parcel and half unwrapped it temptingly.

  The creature, outside was pawing at the door and making odd half-human sounds.

  I sucked in a deep breath, then stepped quickly to the gazebo door and opened it.

  I tried not to gasp. But I think I did, just a little. It wasn’t easy not to. It wasn’t so much that he had long pointed ears and scales all over his towering body. I think more it was the vague familiarity of that snouted face and those yellow, yellow eyes.

  Coleridge.

  It hit me now.

  Like woman wailing for her demon lover.

  That was what I had sensed about Auntie’s sitting-room as if her well-guarded secret had become infused in the very walls and had been, for one brief instant, in tune with my demanding mind.

  The creature looked at me curiously and, I thought, a bit resentfully. He hadn’t expected me. Nor had I quite expected—him. Well, I had to break this awkward silence, and Aunt Ermintrude had unfortunately died before she could tell me just what I should say.

  So I simply smiled, held out the open parcel, and said: “Hello, Cousin Daniel.”

  THE HUNGRY GHOST

  Gordon whimpered when Nurse Rawlins came into his private room with his dinner. Nurse Rawlins was a brisk well-scrubbed little dynamo. That smile of hers seemed to be forever saying, We’re going to stop all this nonsense, aren’t we, Mr. Keel? We’re going to stop it today.

  “Good evening!” she chirped, setting down his tray on the bedstand. “Shall we get ready for our dinner now, Mr. Keel?”

  He managed a weak smile. She plumped up his pillows briskly and cranked up the hospital bed. He thought, she means well, damn her. She unfolded the tray legs and set it across him on the bed.

  “You’re looking ever so much better today, Mr. Keel,” she said briskly.

  “I look like hell and you know it!” Gordon cried. “I’m skin and bones. Take a good look at my face. I look like death. I’m as good as dead right now and you know it!” His effort sent him shuddering back against the pillows with a strangled sob. He shut his eyes savagely.

  Nurse Rawlins took a few seconds to look hurt, then she became brisk and efficient again. She smiled. “Nonsense!” She lifted the aluminum heat jacket off his entree dish. “Now if you will just try a bite of this veal scaloppini. Cook’s wonderful at veal scaloppini. He made it for you because it’s your favorite dish.”

  Gordon’s eyes flicked open in spite of himself. The aroma of the tender, succulent pieces of meat swimming in the rich sauce was torment. He looked at the side dish of creamed asparagus, also a favorite, at the mound of mashed potatoes into which a liberal square of yellow butter had been thrust, at the tossed salad, each green fragment of which sparkled with carefully blended French dressing. There were condiments, too, and a silver pot of coffee.

  Everything was chosen to tempt the most picayunish appetite, down to the freshly baked rolls. Everything was exactly as Gordon might have ordered it at his favorite restaurant.

  Nurse Rawlins sniffed and couldn’t help mentioning the thin lamb chop she had just finished downstairs. “It was all right, but not veal scaloppini! Cook went to special pains, Mr. Keel. Dr. Green said spare no expense. The meat was hand-picked at Schwartz’s and you know how expensive they are. The chef at Tivoli’s made the salad dressing and rushed it over to the hospital by special messen—”

  “Shut up!” Gordon groaned. “Will you shut up!”

  “Certainly, Mr. Keel,” Nurse Rawlins said cheerfully. “I know you’re anxious to eat your wonderful dinner.” She hummed and stepped to the window, where she pretended to be engrossed in the summer sunset.

  “Go away!” Gordon cried weakly.

  “I was supposed to stay until you ate every—”

  “Take it away!” Gordon sobbed. “Take it out of my sight before I throw it at you!”

  Nurse Rawlins whirled anxiously.

  “What’s wrong, Mr. Keel? Don’t you like veal scaloppini any more? According to your case records you used to be very fond—”

  Gordon swallowed hard. His stomach felt as if someone with hands like steel was wringing it. “Please take it away!” he sobbed harshly.

  His tears brought all of Nurse Rawlins’ dormant pity to the fore, she had to force herself to remember that this was only a phobia Patient Keel had, a psychotic delusion regarding food of any kind. But he had to eat! Dr. Green said he’d die if he didn’t. The glucose injections didn’t seem to help. Patient Keel’s system had developed a curious immunity to artificial feeding.

  “Won’t you just eat something, Mr. Keel?”

  “No!”

  “Suppose I feed you.” She stepped around the bed.

  “No!” Gordon flung out his hands so violently that he spilled sauce across the white tray napkin. He wrenched around and buried his sobs in the pillows. “Go away! Take it away!”

  “All right, I’ll go,” Nurse Rawlins sighed. “But I’ll just leave the tray here on the stand where you can reach it.” At the door she turned. “I’ll have to tell Dr. Green you wouldn’t eat your dinner
again, Mr. Keel.”

  * * * *

  After a while Gordon opened his gaunt, hungry eyes and stared at the white ceiling. He wouldn’t look at that tray. He wouldn’t! Why in hell hadn’t she taken it away like he told her? Why did they torture him like this?

  She thought that he wasn’t hungry. My God!

  How long had it been? How long was it since he’d eaten a decent uninterrupted, meal? How long? A week, a month, a year? No. It couldn’t be a year. He’d be dead by now. A year ago he was in Denver. Cousin Grey Ellis hadn’t been dead a year. It was actually only a few weeks since Esther brought him to Dr, Green’s hospital for treatment. They’d just got back from Honolulu, from their honeymoon. Honeymoon! Esther had been so regular about everything. Not that she understood what was really wrong. How could he tell her? If he told her anything at all, then he would have to tell her everything. And then she would shrink away from him, the soft love-light in her clear blue eyes would harden into hatred. He did it for Esther, so they could be married, so Esther could have all the things she should have. But Esther was sweet and good. The fact remained that he had done it and she could no longer love him if she knew.

  Another thing was ironic. That was Gordon’s fetishistic attitude toward food. Ever since he was a child Gordon had revered food. Not that he was a glutton. It was merely a delicious over-emphasis on the pleasures of the table. He loved to eat, to talk about food, to read about it.

  His mind flitted back to his childhood in Grantyille, a little mining town in southern Colorado. His father couldn’t work, having contracted tuberculosis from long years spent underground. His mother took in washing. They were hideously poor, so poor that hamburger was a luxury. Every once in a while, between racking coughs, his father would mention Cousin Grey Ellis out in California. His voice used to be pinched and bitter.

  As a child Gordon had never had much or the best of anything. Maybe that’s what did it. He worked hard in school and after school, picking up and delivering heavy sacks of laundry. There was nothing extraordinary about Gordon. He had fair looks, a fair mind. But he wasn’t brilliant in any department. He had to work and he did work, hard, to climb up from that pit of poverty.