HORRORS!: Rarely-Reprinted Classic Terror Tales

by Unknown

  "And every morning I would enter the room, and examine the different hairs and seals. You see, after the first week I had stretched parallel hairs all along the walls of the room, and along the ceiling; but over the floor, which was of polished stone, I had set out little colourless wafers, tacky-side uppermost. Each wafer was numbered, and they were arranged after a definite plan, so that I should be able to trace the exact movements of any living thing that went across.

  "You will see that no material being or creature could possibly have entered that room, without leaving many signs to tell me about it. But nothing was ever disturbed, and I began to think that I should have to risk an attempt to stay a night in the room, in the Electric Pentacle. Mind you, I knew that it would be a crazy thing to do; but I was getting stumped, and ready to try anything.

  "Once, about midnight, I did break the seal on the door and have a quick look in; but, I tell you, the whole room gave one mad yell, and seemed to come towards me in a great belly of shadows, as if the walls had bellied in towards me. Of course, that must have been fancy. Anyway, the yell was sufficient, and I slammed the door, and locked it, feeling a bit weak down my spine. I wonder whether you know the feeling.

  "And then, when I had got to that state of readiness for anything, I made what, at first, I thought was something of a discovery.

  "It was about one in the morning, and I was walking slowly round the castle, keeping in the soft grass. I had come under the shadow of the east front, and far above me, I could hear the vile hooning whistling of the room, up in the darkness of the unlit wing. Then, suddenly, a little in front of me, I heard a man's voice, speaking low, but evidently in glee:

  "'By George! You chaps; but I wouldn't care to bring a wife home to that!' it said, in the tone of the cultured Irish.

  "Someone started to reply; but there came a sharp exclamation, and then a rush, and I heard footsteps running in all directions. Evidently, the men had spotted me.

  "For a few seconds I stood there, feeling an awful ass. After all, they were at the bottom of the haunting! Do you see what a big fool it made me seem? I had no doubt but that they were some of Tassoc's rivals; and here I had been feeling in every bone that I had hit a genuine Case! And then, you know, there came the memory of hundreds of details, that made me just as much in doubt, again. Anyway, whether it was natural, or abnatural, there was a great deal yet to be cleared up.

  "I told Tassoc, next morning, what I had discovered, and through the whole of every night, for five nights, we kept a close watch round the east wing; but there was never a sign of anyone prowling about; and all the time, almost from evening to dawn, that grotesque whistling would hoon incredibly, far above us in the darkness.

  "On the morning after the fifth night, I received a wire from here, which brought me home by the next boat. I explained to Tassoc that I was simply bound to come away for a few days; but I told him to keep up the watch round the castle. One thing I was very careful to do, and that was to make him absolutely promise never to go into the room between sunset and sunrise. I made it clear to him that we knew nothing definite yet, one way or the other; and if the room were what I had first thought it to be, it might be a lot better for him to die first, then enter it after dark.

  "When I got here, and had finished my business, I thought you chaps would be interested; and also I wanted to get it all spread out clear in my mind; so I rang you up. I am going over again tomorrow, and when I get back I ought to have something pretty extraordinary to ten you. By the way, there is a curious thing I forgot to tell you. I tried to get a phonographic record of the whistling; but it simply produced no impression on the wax at all. That is one of the things that has made me feel queer.

  "Another extraordinary thing is that the microphone will not magnify the sound – will not even transmit it; seems to take no account of it, and acts as if it were non-existent. I am absolutely and utterly stumped, up to the present. I am a wee bit curious to see whether any of your dear clever heads can make daylight of it. I cannot – not yet."

  He rose to his feet.

  "Goodnight, all," he said, and began to usher us out abruptly, but without offense, into the night.

  A fortnight later, he dropped us each a card, and you can imagine that I was not late this time. When we arrived, Carnacki took us straight into dinner, and when we had finished, and all made ourselves comfortable, he began again, where he had left off:

  "Now just listen quietly; for I have got something very queer to tell you. I got back late at night, and I had to walk up to the castle, as I had not warned them that I was coming. It was bright moonlight; so that the walk was rather a pleasure than otherwise. When I got there, the whole place was in darkness, and I thought I would go round outside, to see whether Tassoc or his brother was keeping watch. But I could not find them anywhere, and concluded that they had got tired of it, and gone off to bed.

  "As I returned across the lawn that lies below the front of the east wing, I caught the hooning whistling of the room, coming down strangely clear through the stillness of the night. It had a peculiar note in it, I remember – low and constant, queerly meditative. I looked up at the window, bright in the moonlight, and got a sudden thought to bring a ladder from the stable-yard, and try to get a look into the room, from the outside.

  "With this notion, I hunted round at the back of the castle, among the straggle of offices, and presently found a long, fairly light ladder; though it was heavy enough for one, goodness knows! I thought at first that I should never get it reared. I managed at last, and let the ends rest very quietly against the wall, a little below the sill of the larger window. Then, going silently, I went up the ladder. Presently, I had my face above the sill, and was looking in, alone with the moonlight.

  "Of course, the queer whistling sounded louder up there; but it still conveyed that peculiar sense of something whistling quietly to itself – can you understand? Though, for all the meditative lowness of the note, the horrible, gargantuan quality was distinct – a mighty parody of the human; as if I stood there and listened to the whistling from the lips of a monster with a man's soul.

  "And then, you know, I saw something. The floor in the middle of the huge, empty room was puckered upwards in the centre into a strange, soft-looking mound, parted at the top into an ever-changing hole, that pulsated to that great, gentle hooning. At times, as I watched, I saw the heaving of the indented mound gap across with a queer inward suction, as with the drawing of an enormous breath; then the thing would dilate and pout once more to the incredible melody. And suddenly, as I stared, dumb, it came to me that the thing was living. I was looking at two enormous, blackened lips, blistered and brutal, there in the pale moonlight...

  "Abruptly, they bulged out to a vast, pouting mound of force and sound, stiffened and swollen, and hugely massive and clean-cut in the moonbeams. And a great sweat lay heavy on the vast upper lip. In the same moment of time, the whistling had burst into a mad screaming note, that seemed to stun me, even where I stood, outside of the window. And then, the following moment, I was staring blankly at the solid, undisturbed floor of the room – smooth, polished stone flooring, from wall to wall. And there was an absolute silence.

  "You can picture me staring into the quiet room, and knowing what I knew. I felt like a sick, frightened child, and I wanted to slide quietly down the ladder, and run away. But in that very instant, I heard Tassoc's voice calling to me from within the room, for help, help. My God! but I got such an awful dazed feeling; and I had vague bewildered notion that, after all, it was the Irishmen who had got him in there, and were taking it out of him. And then the call came again, and I burst the window, and jumped in to help him. I had a confused idea that the call had come from within the shadow of the great fireplace and I raced across to it; but there was no one there–

  "'Tassoc!' I shouted, and my voice went empty-sounding round the great apartment; and then, in a flash, I knew that Tassoc had never called. I whirled round, sick with fear, towards the window
, and as I did so a frightful exultant whistling scream burst through the room. On my left, the end wall had bellied in towards me, in a pair of gargantuan lips, black and utterly monstrous, to within a yard of my face. I fumbled for a mad instant at my revolver; not for it, but myself; for the danger was a thousand times worse than death. And then, suddenly, the Unknown Last Line of the Saaamaaa Ritual was whispered quite audibly in the room. Instantly, the thing happened that have known once before. There came a sense as of dust falling continually and monotonously, and I knew that my life hung uncertain and suspended for a flash, in a brief reeling vertigo of unseeable things. Then that ended, and I knew that I might live. My soul and body blended again and life and power came to me. I dashed furiously at the window, and hurled myself out head foremost; for I can tell you that I had stopped being afraid of death. I crashed down on to the ladder, and slithered, grabbing and grabbing; and so came some way or other alive to the bottom. And there I sat in the soft, wet grass, with the moonlight all about me; and far above, through the broken window of the room, there was a low whistling.

  "That is the chief of it. I was not hurt, and I went round to the front, and knocked Tassoc up. When they let me in, we had a long yarn, over some good whisky – for I was shaken to pieces – and I explained things as much as I could. I told Tassoc that the room would have to come down, and every fragment of it be burned in a blast-furnace, erected within a pentacle. He nodded. There was nothing to say. Then I went to bed.

  "We turned a small army on to the work, and within ten days, that lovely thing had gone up in smoke, and what was left was calcined and clean.

  "It was when the workmen were stripping the panelling, that I got hold of a sound notion of the beginnings of that beastly development. Over the great fireplace, after the great oak panels had been torn down, I found that there was let into the masonry a scrollwork of stone, with on it an old inscription, in ancient Celtic, that here in this room was burned Dian Tiansay, Jester of King Alzof, who made the Song of Foolishness upon King Ernore of the Seventh Castle.

  "When I got the translation clear, I gave it to Tassoc. He was tremendously excited; for he knew the old tale, and took me down to the library to look at an old parchment that gave the story in detail. Afterwards, I found that the incident was well known about the countryside; but always regarded more as a legend than as history. And no one: seemed ever to have dreamt that the old east wing of lastrae Castle was the remains of the ancient Seventh Castle.

  "From the old parchment, I gathered that there had been a pretty dirty job done, away back in the years. It seems that King Alzof and King Ernore had been enemies by birthright, as you might say truly; but that nothing more than a little raiding had occurred on either side for years, until Dian Tiansay made the Song of Foolishness upon King Ernore, and sang it before King Alzof; and so greatly was it appreciated that King Alzof gave the jester one of his ladies to wife.

  "Presently, all the people of the land had come to know the song, and so it came at last to King Ernore, who was so angered that he made war upon his old enemy, and took and burned him and his castle; but Dian Tiansay, the jester, he brought with him to his own place, and having torn his tongue out because of the song which he had made and sung he imprisoned him in the room in the east wing (which was evidently used for unpleasant purposes), and the jester's wife he kept for himself, having a fancy for her prettiness.

  "But one night Dian Tiansay's wife was not to be found, and in the morning they discovered her lying dead in her husband's arms, and he sitting, whistling the Song of Foolishness, for he had no longer the power to sing it.

  "Then they roasted Dian Tiansay in the great fireplace – probably from that selfsame 'gallows-iron' which I have already mentioned. And until he died, Dian Tiansay 'ceased not to whistle' the Song of Foolishness, which he could no longer sing. But afterwards, 'in that room' there was often heard at night the sound of something whistling; and there 'grew a power in that room', so that none dared to sleep in it. And presently, it would seem, the King went to another castle; for the whistling troubled him.

  "There you have it all. Of course, that is only a rough rendering of the translation from the parchment. It's a bit quaint! Don't you think so?"

  "Yes," I said, answering for the lot. "But how did the thing grow to such a tremendous manifestation?"

  "One of those cases of continuity of thought producing a positive action upon the immediate surrounding material," replied Carnacki. "The development must have been going forward through centuries, to have produced such a monstrosity. It was a true instance of Saiitii manifestation, which I can best explain by likening it to a living spiritual fungus, which involves the very structure of the aether-fibre itself, and, of course, in so doing, acquires an essential control over the 'material-substance' involved in it. It is impossible to make it plainer in a few words."

  "What broke the seventh hair?" asked Taylor.

  But Carnacki did not know. He thought it was probably nothing but being too severely tensioned. He also explained that they found out that the men who had run away had not been up to mischief; but had come over secretly merely to hear the whistling, which, indeed, had suddenly become the talk of the whole countryside.

  "One other thing," said Arkright, "have you any idea what governs the use of the Unknown Last Line of the Saaamaaa Ritual? I know, of course, that it was used by the Ab-human Priests in the Incantation of Raaaee; but what used it on your behalf, and what made it?"

  "You had better read Harzam's Monograph, and my Addenda to it, on 'Astral and Astarral Co-ordination and Interference'," said Camacki. "It is an extraordinary subject, and I can only say here that the human vibration may not be insulated from the 'astarral' (as is always believed to be the case, in interferences by the Ab-human) without immediate action being taken by those Forces which govern the spinning of the outer circle. In other words, it is being proved, time after time, that there is some inscrutable Protective Force constantly intervening between the human soul (not the body, mind you) and the Outer Monstrosities. Am I clear?"

  "Yes, I think so," I replied. "And you believe that the room had become the material expression of the ancient jester – that his soul rotted with hatred, had bred into a monster – eh?" I asked.

  "Yes," said Carnacki, nodding. "I think you've put my thought rather neatly. It is a queer coincidence that Miss Donnehue is supposed to be descended (so I have heard since) from the same King Ernore. It makes one think some rather curious thoughts, doesn't it? The marriage coming on, and the room waking to fresh life. If she had gone into that room, ever ... eh? IT had waited a long time. Sins of the fathers. Yes, I've thought of that. They're to be married next week, and I am to be best man, which is a thing I hate. And he won his bets, rather! Just think if ever she had gone into that room. Pretty horrible, eh?"

  He nodded his head grimly, and we four nodded back. Then he rose and took us collectively to the door, and presently thrust us forth in friendly fashion on to the Embankment, and into the fresh night air.

  "Goodnight," we all called back, and went to our various homes.

  If she had, eh? If she had? That is what I kept thinking.

  THE CARETAKER'S STORY

  Edith Olivier

  The caretaker did not finish his story, but his last lines were written more indelibly before my eyes than if they had been inscribed by pen and ink.

  When I advertised for a caretaker for my seaside cottage, I was delighted to get a reply from my most level headed and reliable friend, Jem West. Anyone he recommended would be satisfactory.

  Jem wrote that Horter, who applied for my post, had been for several years the skipper of his cutter, and he only got rid of him when he got rid of the boat itself.

  'Since then,' the letter went on, 'he has had two long voyages, both of which ended tragically in shipwreck. Once he was the only man saved. It hit him very hard, and he lost his nerve and wants to give up the sea. He'll suit you perfectly, for he's as honest as the day, and a ha
ndy man in every way.'

  When I saw Jem at the club a day or two later, I asked him whether he thought it wise to put a man who had lost his nerve into an absolutely empty house on a very lonely bit of coast. It would have been another thing if Horter had a wife, but, as it was, he would be day and night entirely alone in the house.

  Jem didn't agree. He said that Horter's nerves were perfectly sound except for sea-going. That shipwreck ha, knocked him out because, it seemed, one of the crew had been his greatest friend, and Horter had got it into his head that he was in some way responsible for the man's death.

  "He's got hold of some old seaman's superstition, an he's been reading The Ancient Mariner as well. He is a bit crazy on that one point, but otherwise he is a very steady old fellow, and I think a year or two on shore will put him right."

  I interviewed Horter and liked the man, though he struck me as having lost his nerve rather badly. Not that he was at all jumpy. On the contrary, his manner was quiet and calm, but throughout our conversation no shadow of a smile crossed his face. He wore an expression of unchanging melancholy, and his sad eyes seemed to look through without seeing me. He was rather a remarkable-looking man with about him something of the decayed dandy. For instance, he wore an old shirt made of very fine and expensive silk, the sleeves of which had been cut off an inch or two above the elbow, allowing the frayed ends to hang loosely upon his arm. Instead of a belt, he had knotted an old Free Forester tie around his waist, and his spotlessly clean white duck trousers must have cost a lot when he bought them. Horter had delicate, refined features, though a receding chin gave a weak look to the lower part of his face. But for that, he would have been a handsome man. The deep-set eyes were of a clear blue, and the aquiline nose was finely cut. But it had a beak-like appearance from being inadequately supported by the chin beneath it, and in fact the man looked altogether rather like a sorrowful and haunted seagull. I almost expected him to spread his wings and sail quietly away into the sky.