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

by Emil Petaja

  At a single glance Isma appeared to be merely one small mass of filthy black rags. A more penetrating look revealed that she did have eyes, odd green-yellow eyes, and a mottled brown face fraught with wrinkles, somewhere under that tattered black shawl of hers.

  Oddly enough, there was something proud and regal about the way she stood there, surrounded by cats of every kind and color, soothing her hurt Tom with a grotesque black claw.

  “Hey, down there!” Hilda cried, forgetting she was a lady. “You keep your blasted cats out of my yard!”

  No answer.

  “I’ve stood about all I’m going to!” Hilda went on with mounting fury. “It’s bad enough to have a—a creature like you cluttering up a respectable neighborhood! W-Why this house and yard of yours is indecent! What’s more—she went on determinedly, “I’m not going to stand for it any longer! Gilpepper House used to be one of the show-places of the county, and I’m not going to have you and your cats next to it any longer! I’m going to have the Law on you!”

  No reply from the bundle of rags. Only a low caressing mumbling directed at the feline in her arms.

  “Don’t you hear me!” Hilda shrieked, brandishing her broom. “I’ve got connections on the police force, and I’ll have you out of here in a week!”

  No response. But now that incalculably old face turned up at her. Those lambent eyes spilled forth a malevolence so powerful that Hilda almost tumbled down off her perch.

  Perhaps the revolting old hag did understand her, after all. Well, she told herself self-righteously as she stalked back through her own well-kept yard, she would understand the Law all right…

  * * * *

  Lieutenant Jack Trask of the southern city’s police force was Hilda’s “connection.” His grandfather and great-grandfather had been butlers for the Gilpeppers in the old days. That was when Hilda’s grandmother was the brightest socialite in this part of the state.

  In those days Gilpepper Street was the residential street—not just a hodge-podge of apartment buildings, funeral parlors, immigrant families, and that awful gypsy. Hilda was the last of the Gilpeppers, and she was fiercely determined to carry on their proud tradition, mortgage or no mortgage, servants or no servants.

  Blood was thicker than water, she told herself. Since Jack Trask’s forbears had bowed their heads to the Gilpeppers, that ought to mean something. Jack Trask ought to be glad to do her this one small favor.

  Lieutenant Trask was an affable youngish man, and he knew all about the Gilpeppers and their proud tradition. He knew all about Hilda’s skimpings and scrapings to carry it forward, too; her determination to cling to something that had long since faded into oblivion.

  So he listened very patiently to her long tirade.

  “Isma Karek, eh?” he remarked, when she’d finished her denunciation; “Oh, yes. I know her. She’s the old woman who goes through the trash bins up and down the alleys, at night, collecting all sorts of scraps. Egyptian, I think. She’s an odd character, surely. But there’s never been a whisper of complaint about her before. No thieving or anything like that. We’ve always considered her harmless.”

  Hilda sat up stiffly.

  “Harmless! With all her cats clawing up my garden and—and driving the whole neighborhood crazy with their noise! And—you just should have seen the way she looked at me!”

  A cat can look at a queen, flitted over the lieutenant’s mind, but he just smiled placatingly.

  “It’s been my experience that cats aren’t nearly as destructive as some other pets,” he temporized. “Take puppies, for instance. We have a tabby-cat at home. Kids love her, and she keeps the yard free of mice, I must say.”

  Hilda’s lips quivered. A sharp impatient hiss escaped.

  “Then—you won’t do anything about it?”

  “Of course I will, Miss Gilpepper,” he twinkled. “I’ll investigate personally. And if I find conditions there as bad as you say, I’ll—”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll see that the place is cleaned up,” he told her gravely.

  With that Hilda had to be satisfied.

  * * * *

  She waited eagerly for Lieutenant Trask to pay her a call after he’d investigated, as he promised he would. There was no doubt in her mind what his verdict would be. Jack Trask was a civic-minded family man. He couldn’t help but be severely shocked by the nauseous condition prevailing in that woman’s house and yard.

  She saw him coming up the walk, from behind the crisp frayed curtains. She didn’t stand on ceremony. She opened the door at once. He was hardly seated on the edge of one of her plush chairs when the exclaimed impatiently, “Well?”

  “I saw her,” he said succinctly.

  “Yes, of course. But what have you to say? Isn’t she a disgrace to the whole community?”’

  The lieutenant looked thoughtful and puzzled.

  “No. I can’t honestly say that. She’s strange. But then, old people are apt to get that way when they live so alone.” He paused to stare down at his cap in his hands. “She answered my knock at once. She was extremely polite, and anxious to be helpful. She said she was very sorry if her cats had disturbed you. She kept calling them her ‘children.’ I suppose she’s come to feel that way about them after all these years of living alone with them.”

  Hilda stared at him in astonishment.

  “She said—”

  “Why, yes. She speaks English remarkably well, considering.”

  “Hmph! The inside of her house was a sight, I’ll wager!”

  “No,” Lieutenant Trask said calmly. “It was neat as a pin. I was agreeably surprised. And she herself wasn’t anything as I had pictured from your description. Never paid much attention to her before, but she’s quite a sweet-faced little old lady. Rather dark, foreign obviously, but—”

  “Sweet-faced!” Hilda gasped, clutching the back of her chair, unable to sit still while she listened to this revelation.

  A long time ago she’d concluded that men were a pack of ridiculous fools, but this ingenuous statement went even beyond what her low opinion could anticipate.

  “You can’t have seen her in good light,” she said smotheredly.

  “On the contrary, there was ample light. Come to think of it, it was rather odd, though. Seemed sort of bluish, and came from another room—a big one toward the back. Now that I think about it, all the windows were shuttered tight—except that one kitchen window…”

  “Then you saw the back yard?” Hilda demanded. “Didn’t that convince you?”

  Lieutenant Trask smiled.

  “Yes. I saw it, through that window. But it seemed unusually dean. Rose trellises, neat little cabins for the cats. None of the litter and filth you spoke of!”

  “Rose trell—” Hilda muttered in awe, thinking of those hideous fungoid growths under those unpleasant, somehow suggestive arbors. “But you didn’t go out there!”

  “It didn’t seem necessary, Miss Gilpepper. I got a wide view of it through the window. However,”—he stroked his craggy jaw reflectively—“I did take a peek into that big room where the blue light sifted from. Seemed to be some sort of shrine. Egyptian, I suppose. I’m not up on those things.”

  Hilda’s amazed indignation was threaded through with feminine curiosity. “Shrine?”

  Lieutenant Trask nodded.

  “The room was half-dark, but I could make out the outline of a statue or idol of some kind on a large pedestal. Seemed to be a woman with a cat’s head, made out of green stone. There was a large bowl in the center of the room, and the light seemed to come from inside that. A most unusual effect. There were several cats in the room, as well.

  “When the old woman saw me look in there she pulled me away, smiling sort of pathetically.”

  Hilda sniffed.

  “I knew it! She’s a heathen. Practices Lord knows what manner of blasphemous rites in that room!”

  Trask grinned.

  “Well, if you think I can book her on what I saw you’re mista
ken, Miss Gilpepper. The Bill of Rights guarantees her the privilege of worshiping in any way she pleases. If she wants to pray to an old Egyptian cat-goddess, that’s her privilege!”

  Hilda was shocked speechless. Then she said harshly, “Then you aren’t going to do anything about that woman? Not anything?”

  Lieutenant Trask stood up and moved his big shoulders in what amounted to a shrug.

  “Sorry, Miss Gilpepper. As for the cats, seemed to me you exaggerated their number. Anyway, there’s no city ordinance which covers a case of this kind. Isma Karek owns that house, clear title. She pays her taxes and asks nothing from anybody. Seems to me you and her other neighbors did a pretty fair job of ostracizing her when you built that high fence around her. And as far as the police are concerned at present, what goes on behind that fence is strictly her own business!”

  * * * *

  Hilda watched him tramp off down the walk. She was frozen to the spot. Her mind seethed with humiliation and vindictive fury.

  So the world had come to this! Hideous heathen women were allowed to walk all over a Gilpepper! Even the city police was against her!

  There was no doubt in her mind that that woman had cast some unhallowed spell over Jack Trask, made him see her and her house as she wanted him to see it, not as it actually was.

  She paced the faded carpet.

  What was to be done? If Isma Karek had played her heathen tricks on Jack Trask, obviously she would do the same with any gullible idiot of a man whom she might appeal to. And Hilda Gilpepper wasn’t the appealing type.

  As for the other neighbors, they were a wishy-washy fly-by-night lot. No use even consulting them.

  She pursed her than lips determinedly.

  There was no other way. She must take the law into her own hands. It was up to her, and her alone, to clean the community of this heathen menace…

  * * * *

  Several nights later the neighborhood was roused by the frantic,, frightening scream of: “Fire! Fire!”

  It was the old Karek shack. Went up like tinder, dry and old and brittle as it was. And along with it all the sinister ramshackle mess of outhouses behind it.

  The firemen complimented Hilda Gilpepper. For it was she who first noticed the blaze—it was doing nicely by that time—and sent in the alarm. It was clever of her, too, to have kept the garden hose playing on that high fence until it was drenched and re-drenched clear through. Otherwise the fire might have spread onto her property, it being closest.

  All that was left standing, when the ravening flames had had their way, was the brick chimney, and a large odd statue on a stone pedestal. It was blackened by soot and flame, but it still retained the semblance of a woman with the head of a cat.

  As for Isma and her numberless progeny, they were nowhere to be found. They had simply vanished. Nor did they find so much as one cat-corpse. It was very mysterious.

  * * * *

  On the night of the full moon Hilda was awakened out of sound sleep by what seemed to be the concerted wailing of many cats. But that couldn’t be! It was impossible! There weren’t any cats. They had all disappeared the night of the fire, along with that dreadful gypsy woman.

  She opened her eyes to see a vivid sidewise splash of moonlight on the floor below her open window. She waited.

  There it was again. A low agonized wailing that curved unharmoniously upwards until it became a high-pitched scream. Inhumanly human. Like a terrified child. Or like—a fragment of poetry flitted across Hilda’s mind—like a woman wailing for her demon lover.

  Her nerves snapped. She couldn’t stand it. She got up, flung on a robe and slippers, and padded to the window.

  The garden was bathed in rich shimmering moonlight. It was very beautiful, a luminiscent fairyland. Titania and Oberon appeared on such nights as this.

  But on the other side of the high board fence it was quite different. Spectral blue light played over blackened ruins and over a strange ritual…

  It was a cat-ring. Isma’s cats had come home, and they formed an immense chain, their tails fluffed, their backs arched, as they marched solemnly around and around, howling in unison.

  It was evident they were performing some ancient and unholy ceremony, here by the light of the full moon.

  There was patterned deliberateness in every motion, every sound.

  At the center of the ring was the large statue—the statue of a woman with a cat’s head—and at the foot of its pedestal crouched the biggest cat of all.

  Hilda shivered.

  She watched for sometime, her indignation waxing and growing. It seethed into anger, which burbled into cold fury, which finally boiled over into action.

  “I’ll put a stop to this—once and for all!” she declared.

  She picked up her father’s 12-gauge shotgun, loaded it grimly, shoving half a dozen extra shells loosely into her robe pocket, and marched down the winding stairs.

  She swept into the moon-drenched garden like an avenging fury. She moved the stepladder softly by the wall and stepped stealthily up to the very top of it, and drew careful bead on the monstrous black cat crouched under the statue.

  The felines were occupied with their orisons and took no notice of her. Not until the shotgun went off—with a roar that shook the house-tops for blocks.

  The caterwauling stopped abruptly.

  The crouching cat-priestess caught it right between its green-yellow eyes, and with a single scream of pain and rage it leaped into the air, then fell back at the foot of the cat-god, and lay still.

  Hilda gave a cackling cry of triumph. Fierce joy set her shivering. She’d killed one—the biggest of the lot!

  Now the cats were all looking at her silently. Just looking, with large enigmatic eyes, as she stood up there, her hair in a wild gnarl, one knee propped on the fence top to balance herself, laughing like a mad woman as she reloaded the shotgun.

  She started to take aim again. Then she saw something in the white moonlight that made her shriek with unbridled terror. The heavy gun tumbled from her fingers and then she tumbled after it—falling—falling—falling.

  They were, on her like unleashed demons, clawing, biting, mauling, snarling. She uttered one quavering scream of utter despair, and then it was over…

  * * * *

  Lieutenant Trask was the one who was sent to investigate. He arrived alone, ahead of the others. The killers had vanished again, but there was no doubt as to how Hilda Gilpepper had died.

  The other corpse, the stepladder, the shotgun, all told the story.

  It wasn’t at all a pretty sight, what was left of Hilda Gilpepper. Nor was the other corpse pretty, with its face blown off by 12-gauge shot.

  Gingerly Lieutenant Trask pulled aside the tattered black rags which concealed the rest of it, and he saw, as he had expected to see, the shrunken body of Isma Karek…

  THE INTRUDER

  It was in San Francisco, on the walk above the sand and surf that pounded like the heart of the Earth. There was wind, the sky and sea blended in a grey mist.

  I was sitting on a stone bench watching a faint hint of distant smoke, wondering what ship it was and from what far port.

  Mine was a pleasant wind—loneliness. So when he came, wrapped in his great overcoat and muffler, hat pulled down, and sat on my bench I was about to rise and leave him. There were other benches, and I was not in the mood for idle gossip about politics and taxes.

  “Don’t go. Please.” His plea was authentic.

  “I must get back to my shop,” I said.

  “Surely you can spare a moment.”

  I could not even to begin to place the accent in his voice. Low as a whisper, tense. His deep-set eyes held me…his face was pale and had a serenity born of suffering. A placid face, not given to emotional betrayals, yet mystical. I sat down again. Here was someone bewilderingly strange. Someone I wouldn’t soon forget. He moved a hand toward me, as tho to hold me from going, and I saw with mild curiosity that he wore heavy gloves, like mittens.


  “I am not well. I…I must not be out in the damp air,” I said. “But today I just had to go out and walk. I had to.”

  “I can understand.” I warmed to the wave of aloneness that lay in his words. “I too have been ill. I know you, Otis Marlin. I have visited your shop off Market Street. You are not rich, but the feel of the covers on a fine book between your hands suffices. Am I right?”

  I nodded, “But how…”

  “You have tried writing, but have had no success. Alone in the world, your loneliness has much a family man, harassed might envy.”

  “That’s true,” I admitted, wondering if he could be a seer, a fake mystic bent on arousing in me an interest in spiritism favorable to his pocket-book. His next words were a little amused, but he didn’t smile.

  “No, I’m not a psychic—in the ordinary sense, I’ve visited your shop. I was there only yesterday,” he said. And I remembered him. In returning from my lunch I had met him coming out of my humble place of business. One glimpse into those brooding eyes was not a thing to soon forget, and I recalled pausing to watch his stiff-legged progress down the street and around the corner.

  There was now a pause, while I watched leaves scuttling along the oiled walk in the growling wind. Then a sound like a sigh came from my companion. It seemed to me that the wind and the sea spoke loudly of a sudden, as tho approaching some dire climax. The sea wind chilled me as it had not before, I wanted to leave.

  “Dare I tell you? Dare I!” His white face turned upward. It was as though he questioned some spirit in the winds.

  I was silent; curious, yet fearful of what it might be he might not be allowed to tell me. The winds were portentously still.

  “Were you ever told, as a child, that you must not attempt to count the stars in the sky at night—that if you did you might lose your mind?”

  “Why, yes. I believe I’ve heard that old superstition. Very reasonable, I believe—based on the assumption that the task would be too great for one brain. I—”

  “I suppose it never occurred to you,” he interrupted, “that this superstition might hold even more truth than that, truth as malignant as it is vast. Perhaps the cosmos hold secrets beyond comprehension of man; and what is your assurance that these secrets are beneficent and kind? Is nature rather not terrible, than kind? In the stars are patterns—designs which if read, might lure the intrepid miserable one who reads them out of earth and beyond…beyond, to immeasurable evil.…Do you understand what I am saying?” His voice quivered metallically, was vibrant with emotion.