The Haunts & Horrors Megapack: 31 Modern & Classic Stories

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  Stories of the front and service, of communications lines, of base hospitals, Paris, Brest, and Saint-Nazarire sped the time till we passed Epernay. The air grew cold with a hard bitterness while the fog congealed to sleety rain that spattered like thrown sand against the window and gushed down the glass like the backwash of a sullen tide. The window casing somehow rattled loose from its sides, and a current of chilled air, with now and then a spit of sleet, came straight against me. After several ineffectual efforts to right matters, I turned the collar of my trench coat up about my ears, slid down until I rested on the extreme end of my spine, and sought forgetfulness of my discomfort in sleep.

  Conversation had died down to monosyllables. Even apKern seemed drained dry of wisecracks, and Amberson rose lurching from his seat.

  “See you in the morning—I hope,” he rumbled, jerking at the leather cord that worked the single light in the compartment. For a moment the globe glowed with fading incandescence, then we were smothered in Cimmerian darkness.

  Was it a trick of tired nerves, the retention of the light-image upon my retina in the dark? I wondered. Somehow, it seemed to me that as night flattened on the window and the blackness closed about us the orange eyes of the girl sitting opposite me glowed with a sort of smoky, sulphurus luminance like those of a cat in the gloom. The impression lasted but a moment. Either she had lowered her lids or my eyes had grown accustomed to the lack of light, and I was staring sightlessly into a shadow as impenetrable as a velvet curtain.

  Memory was scratching at my brain, softly but insistently as a cat demanding admission to a room. Miss Waltrous’ face was poignantly familiar to me and, dimly, I connected it with something vaguely unpleasant.

  I tried to fit the pieces of the mental picture-puzzle together, assembling keywords, fumbling with my thoughts. The riddle of her strange familiarity—that persistent thought, “I’ve seen her somewhere”—was within reach of my brain if only I could get the facts in proper perspective, I was sure. Her name: Felicia Watrous. Did its syllables strike some note of memory? No. Try again: That face, that sweet, pale oval face, almost too perfect in its symmetry; the long red lips of that red, sensitive mouth; those glowing orange eyes and hair as russet as the leaves of a copper-beech in autumn; she came from Philadelphia—

  I had it!

  The triumph of remembering brought me up right in my seat, I almost snapped my fingers in delight. Not faintly, but clear-cut as a motion picture flashed upon a screen, I saw that scene in Fairmount Park. I was in my final year of internship and, as always, short of money, had gone to the zoo for the afternoon. Beside the monkey cage a boy and girl stood idly. Through closed lids I could see them perfectly with my mind’s eye, the lad in baggy trousers rolled high above his ankles to display bright socks, a V-necked sweater with the “F” that showed he was an athlete at Friends’ School; the girl in Peter Thompson suit, hatless, her small proud head aflame with copper hair as sweetly poised as a chrysanthemum upon its stalk. They had a bag of sugar cookies and had tossed one to the ravenous little rhesus monkeys swarming up the bars. One of the greedy little simians fastened on a cake fragment with its hand, then, not content, seized another with its hand-like foot, leaped to an overhanging perch and proceeded to feed itself, nibbling first from the bit clutched in its hand, then from the fragment grasped in its prehensile foot.

  “Look there!” the lad exclaimed as he nudged his companion. “Lookit that glutton feedin’ his face with hands and feet. Bet you couldn’t do that!”

  The innocent remark was devastating in effect. The girl seemed suddenly to lose all strength and wilted brokenly against the railing set before the cages. Her face was twisted in mute agony, her brow was glistening with sweat, her cheeks had gone pale with a pallor that passed white and seemed gray verging on green. And from the tortured mask of stricken features, her eyes seemed to beg for pity.

  I ran to offer her my help, but she smiled away my kindly meant assistance. “A—little—faint,” she murmured in a voice that shook as if it took her last remaining ounce of strength to speak. “I’ll—be—all—right.” Then, with the frightened boy assisting me, we got her to the red-wheeled dog-cart waiting by the fountain, and he had driven her away.

  That had been in 1910—nine years ago. I had been a barely-noticed bystander—a member of the audience of her brief drama—she had been the star of the short tragedy. No wonder she had failed to recognize in the uniformed medical officer the callow intern who had helped her.

  Was there, I asked myself as I leaned back against the hard, uncomfortable cushions of the German railway coach, some connection between the lad’s reference to her inability to feed herself with her foot and her collapse, or had she been seized with a fainting spell? If she had, it sounded like a cardiac affection; yet the girl who slept so peacefully across from me was certainly in the prime of health. More, she must have passed a rigid physical examination before they let her come overseas. Puzzling over it I saw the lights of Chálons station flash past, watched the darkness deepen on the window pane once more, and fell into a chilled, uncomfortable sleep.

  * * * *

  Consciousness came to me slowly. The window had worked farther down in its casings, and sleet-armed rain was stabbing at my face. My feet and legs felt stiff with a rheumatic stiffness, and my head was aching abominably.

  “Damn these Jerry coaches,” I swore spitefully as I rose to force the window back in place. “If I ever see a Pullman car again I’ll—”

  My anger protests slipped away from my lips. The blackness of the night had given way to a diluted gray, and by this dim uncertain light I made the forms of my companions out—and there was something horribly wrong with them. ApKern was slumped down in his seat as if he had been a straw man from which the stuffing had been jerked, Amberson lay with feet splayed out across the aisle; Weinberg’s shoulders drooped, and his hands hung down beside his knees and swung as flaccidly as strings with each movement of the train. The girl across from me lay back against her cushions, head bent at an unnatural angle. Thus I called the roll with a quick frightened glance and noted that the stranger was not present.

  Yes, he was! He was lying on the floor at apKern’s feet, one arm bent under him, his legs spread out as though he’d tried to rise, felt too tired for it, and decided to drop back. But in the angles of his flaccid legs, their limpness at the hips and knees and ankles, I read the signs no doctor has to see twice. He was dead.

  The others? I jerked the leather light-cord, and as the weak bulb blossomed into pale illumination took stock. Dead? No, their color was too bright. Their cheeks were positively flushed—too flushed! I could read it at a glance. Incredibly, I was the only person in that cramped compartment not suffering carbon monoxide poisoning.

  I drove my fist through the window, jerked the door open and as the raw air whistled through the compartment, I bent to examine Miss Watrous. Her pulse was very weak but still perceptible. So were Weinberg’s, Amberson’s, and apKern’s. The stranger was past helping, and the air would help revive the others.

  My first job was to find the chef de train—the conductor—and report the casualty.

  “Find whoever is in charge of this confounded pile o’ junk,” I told an enlisted man I met in the corridor of the next coach. “There’s been an accident back there—four officers and a Red Cross woman gassed—”

  “Gassed?” he echoed unbelievingly. “Does the captain mean—”

  “The captain means just what he says,” I snapped. “Go get me the conductor toot sweet. Shake it up!”

  “Yes, sir.” He saluted and was off like the proverbial shot, returning in a few moments with a young man whose double bars proclaimed him a captain, with the red R denoting he was in the Railroad Section on his shoulder.

  It was no time to stand on ceremony. Technically, I suppose, the Medical Corps outranked the Railroad Section, but I tendered him a salute. “Gas?” he echoed as the corporal had when I completed my recital.

  “If we
haven’t five cases of carbon monoxide poisoning—one of ’em fatal—back there, I never rode an ambulance,” I answered shortly. “How it happened, I don’t know—”

  “How’d you happen not to get it?” he broke in suspiciously.

  “I was sitting by the window, and it worked loose in the night. Air blew directly in my face. That accounts for the girl’s not being more affected, too. She was facing backward, so didn’t get the full effect of ventilation, but her case seems the mildest. Major Amberson, who was farthest from the window, seems most seriously affected, but all of them were unconscious.”

  We had reached the compartment as I concluded. “Help me with this poor chap,” I directed, bending to take up the dead man’s shoulders. “If they have a spare compartment, we can put him in that.”

  “There’s one right down the corridor,” he told me. “Party debarked at Chálons when we took the train over from the Frogs.”

  “Thank the Lord for that,” I answered. “If the French were still in charge, we’d have the devil of a time explaining—ah!” Amazement fairly squeezed the exclamation from me.

  “What is it, sir?”

  “This,” I answered, reaching under apKern’s feet and holding up a metal cylinder. The thing was six or eight inches long by about two inches in diameter, made of brass or copper, like those fire extinguishers carried on trucks and buses in America, and fitted with a nozzle and thumb-screw at one end.

  “What’s it smell like?” he demanded, staring at my find uncomprehendingly.

  “Like nothing. That’s just it—”

  “How d’ye mean—”

  “That cylinder was filled with CO—carbon monoxide—which is a colorless and odorless gas almost as deadly as phosgene. It was pumped in under pressure, and late last night someone turned the thumb-screw while we were asleep, let the gas escape, and—”

  “Nuts!” he interrupted with a shake of his head. “No one would be such a fool. It’d get him, too—”

  “Yes?” I broke in sarcastically. “Think so, do you?” Rolling the dead man over to get a grip beneath his arms I had discovered something he was lying on. A small, compact, but perfect gas mask.

  “Well—I’ll be a monkey’s uncle!” he declared as I held my find up. “I sure will. But how’d it happen he was the only one to get it in the neck, when he was all prepared—”

  “That’s what we’ll have to find out, or what a board of inquiry will determine,” I replied. “Help me get him into that compartment, then we’ll see about first aid for these—”

  “Here, what goes on?” Weinberg sat up suddenly and stared about him like a man emerging from a bad dream. “What’re you guys up to?”

  “How d’ye feel?” I countered.

  “Terrible, now you mention it. My head is aching like nobody’s business, but”—he bent and touched the supine dead man, then straightened with a groan as he pressed hands against his throbbing temples—“what’s all this? Did his Nibs pass out, or—”

  “Clear out,” I assured him. “He’s dead as mutton, and the rest of us came near joining him. Look after ’em a moment, will you? I’ll be right back.”

  * * * *

  Fresh air and copious draughts of cognac, followed by black coffee and more brandy, had revived the gas victims when I returned. Amberson was still too weak to stand, apKern complained of dizziness and clouded vision, but Weinberg, tough and wiry as a terrier, seemed none the worse for his close call. Due to her seat beside the window, Miss Watrous seemed less seriously affected than the rest. In half an hour she was ministering to apKern and Amberson, and they were loving it.

  “Look here, Carmichael,” Weinberg said as we bent above the dead man while Amberson went through his papers, “this is no case of CO poisoning.”

  “If it isn’t, I never used a pulmotor on a would-be suicide in South Philly,” I rejoined. “Why, there’s every indication of—”

  “Of your granddad’s Sunday-go-to-meetin’ hat!” he broke in. “Take a look, Professor.”

  Obediently, I bent and looked where he was pointing. “Well, I’ll be—” I began, and he grinned at me, wrinkling up his nose and drawing back his lips till almost all his teeth showed at the same time.

  “You sure will,” he agreed, “but not until you’ve told me what you make of it.”

  “Why, the man was throttled!” I exclaimed.

  There was no doubting it. Upon the dead man’s throat were five distinct livid patches, one, some three inches in size, roughly square, the other four extending in broken parallel lines almost completely around the neck.

  “What d’ye make of it?” he insisted.

  I shook my head. “Possibly the bruise left by some sort of garotte,” I hazarded. “The neck’s broken and the hyoid bone is fractured; dreadful pressure must have been exerted, and with great suddenness. That argues against manual assault. Besides, no human hand is big enough to reach clear round his neck—he must have worn a sixteen collar—and even if it were, there isn’t any thumb mark here.”

  He nodded gloomily, almost sullenly. “You said it. Know what it reminds me of?”

  “I’ll bite.”

  “Something I saw when I was hoppin’ ambulances at Bellevue. Circus was playin’ the Garden, and a roustabout got in a tangle with one of the big apes. It throttled him.”

  “So?” I raised my brows. “Where’s the connection?”

  “Right here. These livid patches on this feller and the ones on that poor cuss we took down to the morgue are just alike. Charlie Norris had us all down to the mortuary when he performed the autopsy on that circus man and showed us the characteristic marks of an ape’s hand contrasted with a man’s. He was particular to point out how a man grasps something using his thumb as a fulcrum, while the great apes, with the exception of the chimpanzee, make no use of the thumb, but use the fingers only in their grasp. Look here—” he pointed to the large square livid mark—“this would be the bruise left by the heel of the hand, and these—” he indicated the long, circling lines about the dead man’s neck—“would be the finger-marks. That’s just the way the bruises showed on that man at the Bellevue Morgue.”

  “Snap out of it!” I almost shook him in my irritation. “Here’s one time when observed phenomena don’t amount to proof. It seemed fantastic enough to find a cylinder of concentrated carbon monoxide in the car, with you chaps and Miss Watrous almost dead of CO poisoning, but to lug in a gorilla or orangutan to throttle our would-be murderer before he had a chance to slip his gas mask on—Poe never thought up anything as wild as that.”

  “Okay, have it your own way,” he grumbled, “but—”

  A grunt from Amberson deflected our attention from the corpse.

  “Take a look at this, you fellers,” he commanded, holding out the sheaf of papers he had taken from the inside pocket of the dead man’s blouse. “Ever see a finer set-up?”

  The first paper was a pass from G-2 declaring the bearer might circulate where he chose inside our lines in uniform or plain clothes; he was not to be delayed; all railroad transportation officers were directed to give him every preference. Intelligence work. The next identified him as Captain Albert Parker Tuckerman, infantry unassigned, on leave with special permission to visit the Paris area. Next were travel orders to Brest, Saint-Nazaire, Treves, Coblenz—each issued in a different name. Last, but far from least, was a complete list of personnel at our provost marshal’s offices, intelligence and liaison officers, and orders for troop movements and concentrations in occupied Germany.

  Weinberg pursed his lips and gave a soundless whistle. “Looks as if you’ve caught a big fish here, sir. Who was he; any idea?”

  “Nope,” Amberson shook his head, “but I’ll bet G-2 will be glad to see his photograph. There’s a Jerry undercover man been raisin’ merry hell with our arrangments; shouldn’t wonder if he’s here—” He jerked a thumb toward the still form stretched on the railway seat. “Just for once, I’m grateful to that big-mouthed apKern. When he bega
n to sound off about carrying confidential papers, we all knew it was for Miss Watrous’ benefit, but this bird fell for it. He must have traveled with that can of carbon monoxide and gas mask ready for such emergencies. Maybe that’ll account for some of the mysterious disappearances of papers from our offices. Anyway, it’s fairly obvious that when we fell asleep he opened up his little bag o’ tricks and was about to swipe apKern’s dispatches when he got a whiff o’ his own poison and passed out.”

  “But he didn’t die that way—” Weinberg began.

  “Take it easy, buddy,” I admonished as I administered a none too gentle nudge with my field boot. “Let the board of inquiry decide how he died. Don’t go broadcastin’ that gorilla-stuff. Want to be slapped in the booby-hatch before you have a chance to sop a drink up at Treves?”

  Weinberg lit a cigarette and took a thoughtful puff. “I don’t know how the big lug died,” he finally admitted. “Maybe he woke up and apKern talked him to death. But there’s something damn funny about it, just the same.”

  “How?” Amberson demanded.

  “Oh, nothing. It couldn’t have any bearing on the case.”

  “Everything has bearing on a case like this,” the major answered with the cocksureness of the professional policeman. “What was it?”

  “Well, when I went to give first aid to Miss Watrous, I noticed that her left puttee was unfastened and her shoe untied and only partly laced.”

  “Humph. No, guess that hasn’t any bearing on our case. I know just how she must have felt,” agreed Amberson. “When I first came in the service, I almost died with my puttees. Even now I sleep better sitting up when I can loosen ’em and unknot my shoes.”

  * * * *

  Life was pleasant, even gay, at Treves. There was much influenza, but after the exertions of field and base hospitals with their never-ending lines of surgical emergencies, we found routine visitation and dedication of bed-patients almost a vacation. My quarters in the Blumenstrasse were comfortable, for a huge white porcelain stove drove back the raw damp cold, and the great bed of carved mahogany was equipped with double feather mattresses.