The price was cheap enough when distributed. Everybody hilariously agreed. But if the pair got “scared out”, the reverse was to be true. Peter’s penniless condition was no bar to his affirmation, for he knew he could not lose with Betty at his side.
The opposition at this point had a super-brilliant thought. If the two failed to maintain their vigil, Peter and Betty must agree to announce their engagement by the close of the school term.
Peter turned red and stammered. Betty pinked prettily, stuck out that positive Bates chin of hers, and said flatly, “All right, we will!”
And that brought down the house, as the saying goes.
* * * *
I heard all about this in a round-about way, and the news nearly shocked me into a trance. Not that I cared anything either for the Bates or the Gilmans, or that I had any concern for the safety or morals of the two children. What shocked me was the knowledge that now I would have to act, and I must not fail!
The Captain’s revenant had to date claimed five victims with its astral noose. Unless I acted, the noose would claim two more. I knew this. Worse, my chance to lay the Captain’s ghost might not reappear for Heaven knew how long. The outraged citizens of Acton might even tear the haunted Castle down, and what they might set loose upon the town by doing so, only the rascally Captain knew.
In the process of foiling the wicked spirit, I would be faced with extreme peril. This I also knew. I knew, moreover, that I had to succeed, not only for my own sake, but also for that of the two innocent youngsters involved, I was not entirely selfish in my feelings.
It was just after sunset that I approached Acton Castle from the side toward the burying ground. There was a hint of storm in the air, as upon another such evening long ago, and the great, piled masses of black cumuli shut out every bit of light from the darkling sky.
The wind moaned and rattled among the scabby limbs of an ancient apple tree, rippled the deep grasses, and rustled the mass of vines and creepers that covered this wall of the loathsome structure.
I had often approached the house in just this manner, but I had not summoned the courage to enter. Always I had fallen back, biting my lip and wondering was there not another way.
Lightning flared and revealed the old house in all its hideous dilapidation. It crouched like a malignant monster, stark bones thrust through rents in its scabbed epidermis, withered in vein and ligament, fat-pouched with the pregnancy of terror.
I half turned then, and made as if to scuttle away in fright, and lightning flared again in company with a vibrating roll of thunder.
The blue-purple of that sizzling flare limned the rotting crypt atop the graveyard hill, ringed it with skeletal silhouettes of decadent trees.
Horror mounted upon my terror and rode it like a beast of burden. In that momentary, fitful glow I had seen that the serpentine grill of the Acton crypt hung open!
I crouched and listened to the low moan that rose upon the wind and died before it became a shriek…and I did not know until it had been uttered that the cry was my own.
The pitiful ululation of fright merged with the roll of thunder; lightning flared feebly a time or two more. The haunted Castle rocked and rattled with the concussion of thunder.
I crept on, trembling and afraid. In the blackness, a greater, more noisome dark yawned horridly. I listened at the door of Acton Castle. The lightning had momentarily ceased. The thunder had quieted its rumble, night poised on hot, threatening wings. In the silence, I heard a rat scurry over a rotting beam somewhere inside the Castle. The air smelled of age and decay. Inside, dust lay deep upon the warped, brittle flooring.
I glided quickly through the door. The darkness of the grave engulfed me. The stillness was of the crypt as well, and the oppressive fetor that oozed from the riven walls.
I hated the house, I detested it and loathed it utterly. It was a thing of sentience, alive, mocking, threatening. IT was the Thing—the Captain’s grisly revenant was only its tool, IT had dominated the man alive—IT dominated his spirit dead!
A warning voice seemed to whisper to me to go back whence I had come, to leave this abode of abomination before it would suck me into its greedy trap and I should indeed be lost.
I took a firmer grip on my purpose—squared myself away with my own soul, so to speak. Upon my courage, or the lack of it, depended the fate of a boy and a girl. I carried the future happiness and well being of the entire town upon my shoulders. I could not fail in my duty.
Afar off, a dog howled dolorously. Others took up the mournful refrain. I knew why they howled. I forged on until I reached the room that had claimed five victims from the world of the living.
Here indeed was the evil heart of this ancient pile. The very air pulsed with wickedness and the lust for cruelty. I was afraid.
Lightning sheeted from the leaden sky, purpling the room with a harshly vivid light. What I saw in that fractional, timeless instant made me reel.
Death was prepared! Instead of a single hook, upon which, long ago, Joshua Benton had been suspended, now there were two—ugly and grim. The trap was set.
I heard them come in, and I hid in a closet filled with cobwebs.
They stumbled over the rotten flooring, lighting their hesitant way with a pocket flashlight. They were quiet, and they breathed quickly. In the reflected shine of the light, their young faces looked pale, and their eyes were big and dark.
Lightning split the gloom to the accompaniment of a roar of thunder, and the rain came battering down, drumming a diapason of unleashed fury on the roof, hissing in the grasses and brambles that choked the yard. A fine spray blew in through the gaping windows. The air cooled as a draft swept through the place, bringing with it the raw, bitter smell of wet growing things.
“We’re in for it now,” Peter mumbled, squeezing the girl’s arm with reassurance. “At least, it’s dry in here.” He essayed a brittle laugh that lacked every aspect of being genuine.
Outside, the flare and flicker of lightning made hard, glistening pencils of the rain. The old house banged and rocked to the concussion of thunder and wind.
Betty Bates whimpered with honest fright.
Peter said, “Let’s sit down and take it easy.”
They sat down, and after a moment he switched off the light.
Betty said nothing, but I could hear the breath sucking softly into her lungs.
The storm calmed, finally. Then in the midst of deathly stillness, the old house rocked and a thunderous noise rent the air. The sound came from inside the house!
Fear wormed at me. I knew what the sound portended. A grisly fiend stalked the halls upstairs. The house echoed hollowly to the sound of boots, rough seaman’s boots, clumping upon the crumbled floor. The evil old house rattled and swayed.
The children slept. I had not observed when first they dropped off. Surely they must awaken now, I thought. That noise would wake the dead! But no, the innocents slumbered on, hand loosely clasping hand, the girl’s golden head relaxed upon the boy’s sturdy shoulder.
I awaited the ordeal.
Would I succeed? Would the fires of Hell once and for all claim the revenant of the fiendish Captain? Or would mine be the fate, and his the victory?
A chill seeped through the ancient Castle. A reeking odor of the grave eddied on the gusty draft. Measured, rhythmic, step by step upon the rotting stairs, the Captain’s footsteps approached the sleeping pair. Awake! Awake! Oh, God! Awake and fly this place!
And they did awake, just as the Captain’s boots clattered upon the landing outside the door.
“Some of the guys,” whispered Peter nervously, “trying to trick us after they promised they wouldn’t!”
I admired him for that. You see, in that moment, I knew that he knew, and I no longer had any thought of vacillating.
“I—I
—don’t care!” the frightened girl wailed softly, “I don’t c-care about that bet, anyway. I’d rather lose it, Peter. Peter—I love you! T-take me away from here!”
Peter’s reply was a firm pressure upon her hand.
“When it—they reach the doorway,” he whispered, “I’ll turn on the light.”
The thundering footsteps halted. The house creaked ominously. A malignant rattling rippled through every rotted board and timber. Something dark, bloated, fantastically repulsive hovered in the door.
“It’s c-cold,” chattered the girl, “and—and it smells, and—” she shrieked. “There’s something there!”
Peter panted heavily, “The light won’t work! I—”
Unspeakably loathsome, radiant with black evil, the spectre hovered at the door, I could see it. They with their weak organs of sight, thank God, could not. But they knew it was there.
The fiend advanced, clutching a noose of hemp in each hand…and at that moment I stepped from hiding. My crucial moment had come.
The fiend made foul, slopping noises as it advanced upon the stricken pair, nooses blindly outstretched, and I shrieked!
The frightful sound of my voice rang through the house.
The phantom moaned with despair. The boy and the girl looked at me, and there were hate, horror and loathing in their eyes.
I wanted to tell them to run, to save themselves while they yet might, but I could only groan and shriek in agony.
Peter galvanized into action, seized the fainting girl in his arms, and with her sprang through the gutted window, into the fresh, clean air of the outdoors.
Quickly then I mumbled the curse, the hideous awful curse I had tried once before to inflict upon the hateful Captain, but fear had frozen my tongue and I had been defeated. Fearlessly now I droned through the ritual with that Thing gibbering, cowering and wailing before me. And then, the final words, “Avaunt thee, fiend!”
And the revenant of Captain Acton laughed with howling glee.
“A worse condemned fiend than I are you. I was unwillingly bound with the shackles of Hell, but now I am free because of you! You have burst my astral gyves—for even in Hell is greater freedom than this torment I have suffered. You have failed again, for, by freeing me, you have bound yourself! Take this—my parting gift!” Straight toward me he hurled those two damnable nooses of hemp! “To you, my successor,” slobbered the Thing, “condemned to haunt forever more this crumbling Castle!”
The Captain disappeared in a fierce puff of heat, a clap of thunder, and a billowing cloud of smoke.
In the following silence a chuckling grew and bounded from wall to wall, a hideous, mad cachinnation of hellish mirth that bubbled from my lips and sprayed into froth the ever-flowing rivulet of blood that gushes from the shotgun wound in my head.
I am sane now. I, Joshua Benton, have twice condemned myself with vain meddling, but now I am sane, I too can be free—some day. I know what I must do, I must hang the right man, woman or child—one who knows the secret ritual that I know. That one, alive or dead, will pronounce the holy words that will burst my shackles asunder. Who? When? How many will I hang before…do you know the words that will set me free…?
HYMENEAL (poem)
Published under the pseudonym “Val Seanne”
Originally published in The Nekromantikon #3, 1950.
Gray is the dusk of my wedding day…
And the keen wind whistles
Shrill, sharp, and cold
Upon the plains of Yar.
The tundra rustles slyly
To the tread of wedding guests…
Rustle, rustle, teem and bustle…
By the light of a pale north star—
Aye, the guests are all a-gathered;
The wedding feast awaits…
The groom alone still lacketh;
We have left the door a-jar.
“Whispering, stirring, stridulating guests—
O, Were-folk here assembled—
Tell me true, his journey endeth
In some gloomy land afar!”
“Nay, fair bride; the bridegroom cometh.
Hear his step outside the door!”
He comes, He comes!… O God, He comes!
My lord, my groom…is Death’s grim avatar!
FEAR (short story)
Originally published in The Nekromantikon, 1950.
Any analysis of fear is bound to wind up on the same scrap heap with similar analyses of love, humor and the divorce rate.
I shall not so much analyze fear as an emotion, but discuss certain aspects of fear that gave rise in the older generation to the myths, superstitions and beliefs of supernatural device and existence. In this modern generation, this amounts to a “thrill desire” for the weird, the macabre, the instinctively terrifying.
The weird had its naissance in fear, in a primordial fear of the unknown, the gibbering, nameless revulsion for the dark and the terrors it seemed to hold.
It was in the earliest experience of Man that storms arose, thunder rolled, lightning hurled jagged tongues of fire upon the earth, and the woods and fields burst into flames thereat. Whence came the storms and the devouring flames? Puny man, who could not withstand flame, conceived that animate, invisible beings caused the storms. They were beings who commanded the terrible flames, who reveled in them moreover, and by means of them fed upon the earth.
Postulate, then, that in the darkling consciousness of early man was conceived the importance of flame to his gods and demons, and the thought of appeasing them through the use of fire in ritual and sacrifice.
Generations later, the vague, formless fears of Man, the invisible gods, goddesses and demons, became animated in forms that religious logic deemed most probable. At first, beneficent gods seemed no less terrible than their demon co-habitors of the supernatural realm. A god who performed good works was as much to be feared as one who performed evil. For the principle attribute of a god seems to have been a transcendent humanity, a surpassing of the human faculties of jealousy, hatred and revenge. One chose among the gods, and those chosen were appeased and ingratiated until they could be depended upon to protect the devotee from the other maleficent gods.
The weird literature of the past century (I say century advisedly, for prior to that weird literature was not a literature at all but a fabric of simple beliefs) has done more perhaps to create a tangible form of the supernatural than the previous thousand generations of terror-stricken gibbering and calculated inculcation of fear.
Modern literature has given the supernatural a definite anatomy—even a personality—which was lacking before. It has defined and formulated the vampire into a gestalt (a word beloved of the psychologists!) which occurs almost identically in every mind upon encounter with the concept. There is no longer any doubt as to the form and substance of a were-wolf; the undead are as common as your neighbors; the least demon of Gehenna has been yanked shrieking into print and there interrogated, browbeaten, put upon, ridiculed, subjected to monstrous indignities, until not even Hell has a secret worth keeping.
With all of this light cast upon a subject, wherein lies fear as a fundament for the popularity of weird literature? The pundits and nigromancers of the critical world long ago classified man’s reading habits under a single disdainful and categorical head: “escape.”
Who in the world chooses to escape into a realm of fear? Can any manner of living be so bad as that?
The truth is that you and I do not read to escape our world. The man who first said we do uttered the remark with all the banal jesting of a facetious aphorism. The catchword, “escape literature,” hounds every member of the human species from the time he or she learns his ABC’s. It is high time we got out from under, don’t you think?
People do not read to escape th
eir world. Far from it. They read to add to it. Life is rich with experience, but no life is long enough or diverse enough to cram into it all the experience there is. Experience is the instinctive desire of every human being, and if he cannot contact it personally, then he desires it vicariously. It is, simply, the urge for “what next?”—the desire to be up and doing.
Love, hate, gladness, sorrow, fear…these are our richest emotions. We have all experienced them individually. How do others experience them? Curiosity compels us to find the answer.
Through reading, we experience other situations that fall quite without our own experience, and by seeing the situation through the eyes of another, we experience his reactions, our own being thereby stimulated, and the two are superimposed with a heterodyning effect that unifies the whole experience into a strong emotional impression.
Let us away, therefore, with this folderol of “escape literature” and “adult fairy tales” and other such stigma gratuitously bestowed by the adherents of “realism” as depicted in the love story, the adventure story, the war story, et al, and sundry. In telling us that good fiction is a mirror held up to life, these abhorrents of what they call our “distorted view” fail to take into cognizance that indeed fiction is a mirror held up to life, and like any good mirror, shows the subject backwards!
The appeal of the weird, if anything, owes itself to the fact that it reaches more deeply into the dim corridors of the mind, strikes root in the fertile soil of the thalamus, the seat of emotions and that hall of the brain whence come our dreams and nightmares. There it flourishes in the satisfaction of a natural appetite for wonder.
Any discussion of fear would not be complete without a treatment of its practical facets. Fear is as basic an aspect of the human organism as hunger. Consciously or subconsciously, each of us feeds his own fears. If we did not, fear would die out, and as a consequence, so would the race.
The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister Page 25
