"Oh, please!" the antique dealer cried out in despair. "You must believe that I had no part in ... I tried to phone you, to warn you! Tried to figure out the manner cti death, so you could avoid . . . But they all died so differently! Mrs. Haver-sham, asphyxiated. Your friend, drowned. And your lovely fiancee . . ." The old man's eyes widened suddenly. "Ah! Now I understand! It's true! It all ties together . . . Listen to me!"
Bob Milam had turned unsteadily toward the door, but Mr. Sproull sidled after him like a small persistent crab and seized him by the arm.
"No, no! Wait! You must listen!" he gasped. "The diary mentioned that Schuyler Van Grooten was subject to 'sleeping fits'—a cataleptic. His intimate friends and relatives must have known that, but . . . but they . . . wait!" he begged. "Your monkey spoon, where is it? You must give it away! At ttnce!" the old dealer insisted excitedly. "To ... to some impersonal agency. The Scrap-metal Drive—yes, that's it! Get it out of your possession, or you, too, will . . . ! So much hate, such hunger for revenge hovers about them! Like a piece of metal that has been magnetized, they can actually draw disaster to anyone who ..."
But at that moment the blond young man jerked his arm loose and plui into the street, wanting only to get away from this crazy old man who had caused him so much grief in the space of a few short days. Mr. Sproull pattered after him, calling excitedly for him to wait. But by the time he reached the curb, Bob Milam
had whistled down a passing cab and was climbing into it. The old hunchback hurried to the curb and strained to catch the address. But the young man was only telling the driver, wearily:
"Drive around. Just drive. Anywhere ... I don't care."
The antique dealer's arms dropped to his sides limply in defeat. He watched the tixi speed out of sight, then turned slowly and walked slowly, thoughtfully, back into his shop.
THE evening paper, left under his door as usual, carried the story. A taxi was ambling along 187th Street, where wreckers were busy razing an old warehouse. Somehow the dynamite charge went off sooner than was intended . . . and a crumbling wall of bricks and mortar fell on the cab as it passed. The cabby managed to dig his way out. But the single passenger, an intoxicated young man identified as one Robert Milam of New Jersey, could not be pulled out of the wreckage for almost an hour. He was dead when frantic workmen did finally reach him—not crushed, but trapped without air in the rear seat of the taxi cab . . .
And in his pocket the police found a peculiar-looking spoon, inscribed with his name, the date of his birth—and the very date of his death!
Mr. Sproull finished reading, then took off his square-Icnsed glasses and polished them with a hand that trembled. There was nothing, he mused philosophically, really nothing at all that he could have done to save those three nice young people, who had all three died the same way—fighting for breath; smothered to death by one agency or another. Just exactly as Mrs. Haversham had died, in her exhaust-filled garage.
And just as, centuries ago, an old Dutch patroon, one Schuyler Van Grooten, had died — clawing and screaming and gasping for breath in his coffin, awakened from one of his cataleptic trances to find that his greedy heirs had deliberately buried him alive . . .
/k the End of the Corridor
^^* i _
Heading by John Giunta
BY
EVANGELINE WALTON
WHENEVER Philip Martin felt like being funny he would say that he was & professional grave-tet^t. If people looked properly shocked
"Some day you may rob one grave too many."
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75
he would add, "I began with a king's grave," and then grin. A mild joke, not in the best of taste perhaps, but then everything about Philip was mild; his nearsighted brown eyes, his tall, shambling frame, his face that never had been quite young. Even his shy way of showing off, of hoping, a little wistfully, that he could shock people or make them laugh.
As a matter of fact, His Majesty the King had been dead about 3,000 years when Philip and his father, the late and distinguished James K. Martin, Ph.D., had dug him up. It is generally considered respectable to rob a man's grave if he has been dead long enough. The Martins, father and son, had always made a most correct and respectable thing of grave-robbing, just as they had of everything else they turned their well-kept, somewhat dry Bostonian hands to. That anything could ever change this (or indeed his own prim, proper personal life) Philip never dreamed when he set out for Greece to carry on the work of the late Dr. Kimon Dragoumis. He was contemptuously amused when, at a farewell dinner, a slightly tipsy Parisian savant said to him:
"Some day you may rob one grave too many, my friend."
Philip grinned. "You mean curses? That old tripe about ancient tombs having invisible guardians?"
M. de Lesseps smiled. "You think me a foolish old man, hem? Not all ancient things are toothless. Yet you may be wise, my young friend. Perhaps it-is safer to rob the tombs of the ancient dead, of those who have had time to forget their wrongs. When I was young I too went to Greece, to Maina where the old blood is purest, to write a book. But I saw what I dared not write. There are dead there who need no curses—they can act" He shuddered and crossed himself.
Philip said indulgently, "If dead men could walk because they had reason for revenge, a lot of them would have done it these last few years. The men who died in concentration camps, for instance."
The savant said seriously, "That depends on the man, my friend. On what he studied
while he was alive, what he knew and believed. On what his background was. Among simple yet ancient peoples, who are still near the source of things, there are survivals—" He rambled on, learnedly yet drunkenly, about primeval man, about vision and gifts that his modern descendants had lost. Until Philip got very bored, and took too many drinks.
He had a headache next morning, when he boarded the plane for Athens. But it was only the beginning of his headaches. For when he reached the little seaside village that had been the site of Dragoumis' work he found—nothing. Only the few tholoi that the great Greek had first found and explored were still visible. The bulk of that underground collection of mysterious My-cenean tomb-chambers had vanished as if the hills out of whose sides they had been carved had swallowed them up again.
It seemed strange, in spite of the disaster that had come upon Dr. Dragoumis and his co-workers; the guerrilla warfare that had raged for years afterward through this grim land, of sea and mountains, and was still uncomfortably near. So near, in fact, that it had taken Philip years to get his own permit to dig.
A landslide had covered the excavations; that was all he could learn. Though some of the villagers must have known the approximate location of the buried sites they would tell him nothing. They acted either sullen or blandly ignorant—too ignorant. He had a queer and unreasonable feeling that they were afraid.
Sophoulis, the local school-teacher, advised him to go to Mme. Dragoumis, "She may still have some of her husband's papers, kyrie."
"You mean she still lives here?" Philip asked in surprise. He had heard of Mme. Dragoumis as one of the famous beauties of the Balkans, a very gay and fashionable woman, much younger than her husband. "In that island villa of theirs?"
"She will not leave it, kyrie. Not for an hour. Not once since that night the doctor died has she set foot on the mainland. She says that her husband is still alive—that she must be there to greet him if he returns,"
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"She dares not leave it," Mrs. Sophoulis said with a hard little smile. "Her family has been worried about her, and once they even sent doctors to take her away, but she locked herself in her room and said she would kill herself if they broke the doors down—that it would be better to die that way than to go ashore."
Philip felt a little apprehensive. The lady might not be sane enough to be of any help to him.
"I thought the Nazis shot Dr. Dragoumis," he said.
"So it is said. None knows," Sophoulis said heavily. "
They suspected him of hiding arms, arms smuggled in from British submarines; and perhaps he was. Or perhaps he had found tombs in which there were precious tilings—treasures that he feared the Nazis might carry off to Germany. Certainly he was doing something that he wished to keep secret. He was a giant who could outdig any of his men, and toward the last he dug oftenest by moonlight—and alone."
"It must have been the tombs themselves that he wished to protect," Philip said stiffly. "No true scientist would risk such monuments of tiie past by storing arms in them."
"Who knows, kyrie? A true patriot will risk anything. At least there was talk. Too much talk. Perhaps even someone who wished to talk too much. So the Nazis waited for him, that night at the villa. Kyria Dragoumis says that they shot him as he was escaping through the French windows, but that so great was his strength that he ran on, with their bullets in him. And later, when they searched the tholo't where they thought he might be hiding, the mountain itself slid forward and covered them—yes, the very mountains seemed angry that the invaders should dare go poking about among their bowels. It took them two days to dig out the bodies of their Gestapo men, kyrie."
MRS. SOPHOULIS cut in excitedly, her dark eyes bright, "But they never found the doctor, kyrie! And some of our people say that they have seen him since,
by moonlight, pacing the cliffs above the sea, and looking out toward his home across the waters."
Her husband laughed a littie uneasily. "Our peasants hereabouts are still very superstitious, kyrie. They can see anything."
"So it seems," said Philip dryly. "You think that Mine. Dragoumis might be able to help me then?"
"Shewouldnot!"Mrs. Sophoulis snorted. "She never knew anything about it; she took no interest in it. Or in anything but parties and young men. She stays on the island now only because she is afraid—not for love of her dear dead husband, poofl Keep away from her, kyrie; she is bad luck, that one."
Sophoulis' fist pounded the table. "Be still, woman! None has any right to speak against Kyria Dragoumis; I have told you that I will have no idiotic women's gossip in my house."
There was evidently some local feeling against Mme. Dragoumis, Philip thought as he left. Possibly only among the women; Sophoulis was clearly either too fair-minded or too cautious to lend himself to it. Yet what fear could they possible think kept Mme. Dragoumis on the island—surely government guards could have kept her safe from any guerrilla ambush? The whole business was a puzzle. Why should Dragoumis have been fool enough, that night, to attempt escape? He could not have hidden anything incriminating in the tombs. "Attempted escape" was an age-old, trite pretext to cover murder; but why should anybody have wanted to murder Dragoumis, a scientist who had surely had too much sense to take any interest in anything but his work?
Well, it was none of his business. What concerned him was to find a way into those lost Mycenean vaults without blasting holes in their sides while he was at it. He took a boat and had himself rowed out to the island. To the little landing-stage from which broad steps led up to a white villa above the sea; a villa set like a pearl upon a terrace made green and silver by the foliage of orange and olive trees.
Or so he thought until he saw Anthi
AT THE END OF THE CORRIDOR
Dragoumis and knew the difference between pearl and setting. Between life and mere existence.
She was a beauty. She was delight, and wonder, and youth—the youth that Philip had never had. She set fire to the dry man as flame fires tinder.
And she was gracious to him, she was kind. Yes, she still had some of her husband's papers, she would show them to him, and search for more. He could help her search if he liked. He did. He went again and again to that villa on the island. He rilled his eyes and ears with her; with the soft music of her voice, with the curves of her body, that made softer music whenever she moved. With the warm red of her lips, and the depths of her shining eyes.
And then one day she let him fill his arms . . .
He tried, after that, to get her to marry him and go away with him. "Your husband is dead, Anthi. He has been dead these five years. It cannot hurt you to accept that now. You do not love him any more."
But she shook her head. "He was not too badly hurt that night; he rowed himself back to the mainland. He was a peasant, born in a hut in Maina—not civilized, like you and me, for all his learning. He was very strong, Philip; strong like the men of an earlier world. It would be hard for him to die"
JEALOUSY leapt in him. So that was it—Dragoumis' brute strength had dazzled her, his hard peasant heritage! That was what she liked in a man. He said roughly, "If he's alive, why hasn't he come back to you? What could he have been afraid of, after the Nazis left? Afraid enough to make him stay away from a wife like you?" He kissed her, hard and savagely. He strained her close, trying to hurt her, to prove that he too was strong.
She laughed up into his face and stroked his cheek. "You would not stay away from me, would you, my Philip? Don't worry; I love you more than I ever loved him. You are much younger than he was. Though he loved me very much; as much as you could ever do."
"Then why would he stay away from you?" Philip muttered.
She looked up at him very seriously then, her eyes gone grave. "Because, that last night, he accused me of betraying him to the Nazis. Because the officer who came to arrest him was young and very handsome— a man I had danced with several times in Athens." She shivered. "But he was not handsome when they dug him out from under the mountain, after he had tried to follow my husband into the ancient tombs."
Philip stared at her in horror. "You don't mean that Dragoumis did have explosives in there and deliberately set them off—that he'd have destroyed tholoi just to kill a few men?"
She laughed. "Not a few men, no. One man—the man he thought had taken me from him. You would not do that, would you, my archaeologist, my ruin-lover? After all, it was Kimon, my poor, aging Kimon, who loved me best."
Suspicion stabbed him suddenly, like a knife twisting in his flesh. He shook her. "Did you love the German then, Anthi? He was younger than your husband, too—and so handsome!"
But that insulted her. She stormed at him, she raged and wept until he practically had to go down on his knees and apologize to her. Until suspicion faded, became a shameful outrage that he dared not even remember.
When she was quiet again lie tried once more to persuade her that her husband must be dead. "No living man could have stayed away from you so long. Whatever he was fool or mad enough to believe for the moment he could not—you are so beautiful, Anthi!" But she only wept again and shivered.
"You did not know Kimon, my Philip. I did." She peered nervously over her shoulder, at the shadows that seemed to have grown, blacker, over the bed. "He was so strong, Philip. He was like the giant who could not die so long as he could touch his mother, the earth. Nothing could ever kill him completely, here in his own hills. I think that he is still waiting somewhere, inside the mountain, in his tholoi —waiting.
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watching for me. That is why I never dare set foot on the mainland. Why I never can unless he is found—and laid."
Philip stared at her blankly. "But even if he were there, Anthi—a madman, in hiding, getting food somehow—he'd have stolen a boat arid come out here long ago. You must see that."
She looked very straight at him then. Her eyes were pits of blackness, blacker than the shadows. Her voice was hushed, almost a whisper: "There are those who cannot cross water."
For a minute he did not understand. Then his face went whiter, than hers. With an incredulous, yet comprehending horror. For now at last he knew. Evil things could not cross water—the unalive yet undead could not, the terrible vrykolakes of Greek belief.
All these years she had been lying, all these years she had believed her husband dead! A man no longer, but a thing of supernatural evil, an avenger who was seeking her.
Why? About what else had she lied?
But she had risen, she was coming t
oward him. Her eyes held his. Their warm brightness was all around him, and her arms were round his neck.
"You will do that for me, my Philip? You will find him and lay him, so that we can go away together and be married? So that we can forget him and love each other, always?" She pressed her cheek against his. "You will set me free from fear. You w r ill do that for your Anthi, Philip? For me?" Her lips moved along his cheek softly, touched his ear.
He stood quite still in her arms. He said hoarsely, "How could I find him, even if he were there?"
She said softly, almost crooning, "You will find him. You will lay him. For your Anthi. For me."
He did not answer. He stood there horrified, trying to think. In England and in Poland they used to bury the unquiet dead with stakes through their hearts. To keep them down, to keep them from walking. What had been done to such dead men in Greece? He could not remember. Some-
thing not so simple as a stake, he thought —something horrible—
She pressed herself closer against him. She whispered, "It will not be so hard. I can tell you where to find the last tomb he found—the greatest, the royal tholos, the one he said he kept secret for fear the Nazis would loot it."
"You think he would have gone there, knowing that you knew the place?" Philip laughed harshly.
"He would have, to save what he could. He loved it more than anything, even me. Night after night he used to tell me of it, to describe his precious day's work when I wanted to sleep. But now at last that will be useful. It will help you to find him, and then you will cut off his arms and legs— so that he will have no feet to follow us, no hands to strike us!"
Philip said bitterly, "Do you want to tie them under his armpits, as murderers used to do in Solon's time? Are you mad, Anthi? I am, to listen to you."
She flung back her head, her eyes hard with suspicion, "No, I do not want them tied under his armpits. I want them brought here to me, tonight! There arc signs by which I shall know them—do not think that you can deceive me. If I do not get them I will never marry you—you shall never touch me again!"
Weird Tales volume 42 number 04 Page 11
