The Haunts & Horrors Megapack: 31 Modern & Classic Stories

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  “Is he hurt?” demanded the mother, wildly.

  The visitor bowed in assent. “Badly hurt,” he said, quietly, “but he is not in any pain.”

  “Oh, thank God!” said the old woman, clasping her hands. “Thank God for that! Thank—”

  She broke off suddenly as the sinister meaning of the assurance dawned upon her and she saw the awful confirmation of her fears in the other’s averted face. She caught her breath, and turning to her slower-witted husband, laid her trembling old hand upon his. There was a long silence.

  “He was caught in the machinery,” said the visitor at length in a low voice.

  “Caught in the machinery,” repeated Mr. White, in a dazed fashion, “yes.”

  He sat staring blankly out at the window, and taking his wife’s hand between his own, pressed it as he had been wont to do in their old courting-days nearly forty years before.

  “He was the only one left to us,” he said, turning gently to the visitor. “It is hard.”

  The other coughed, and rising, walked slowly to the window. “The firm wished me to convey their sincere sympathy with you in your great loss,” he said, without looking round. “I beg that you will understand I am only their servant and merely obeying orders.”

  There was no reply; the old woman’s face was white, her eyes staring, and her breath inaudible; on the husband’s face was a look such as his friend the sergeant might have carried into his first action.

  “I was to say that ‘Maw and Meggins’ disclaim all responsibility,” continued the other. “They admit no liability at all, but in consideration of your son’s services, they wish to present you with a certain sum as compensation.”

  Mr. White dropped his wife’s hand, and rising to his feet, gazed with a look of horror at his visitor. His dry lips shaped the words, “How much?”

  “Two hundred pounds,” was the answer.

  Unconscious of his wife’s shriek, the old man smiled faintly, put out his hands like a sightless man, and dropped, a senseless heap, to the floor.

  III

  In the huge new cemetery, some two miles distant, the old people buried their dead, and came back to a house steeped in shadow and silence. It was all over so quickly that at first they could hardly realize it, and remained in a state of expectation as though of something else to happen—something else which was to lighten this load, too heavy for old hearts to bear.

  But the days passed, and expectation gave place to resignation—the hopeless resignation of the old, sometimes miscalled, apathy. Sometimes they hardly exchanged a word, for now they had nothing to talk about, and their days were long to weariness.

  It was about a week after that the old man, waking suddenly in the night, stretched out his hand and found himself alone. The room was in darkness, and the sound of subdued weeping came from the window. He raised himself in bed and listened.

  “Come back,” he said, tenderly. “You will be cold.”

  “It is colder for my son,” said the old woman, and wept afresh.

  The sound of her sobs died away on his ears. The bed was warm, and his eyes heavy with sleep. He dozed fitfully, and then slept until a sudden wild cry from his wife awoke him with a start.

  “The paw!” she cried wildly. “The monkey’s paw!”

  He started up in alarm. “Where? Where is it? What’s the matter?”

  She came stumbling across the room toward him. “I want it,” she said, quietly. “You’ve not destroyed it?”

  “It’s in the parlour, on the bracket,” he replied, marvelling. “Why?”

  She cried and laughed together, and bending over, kissed his cheek.

  “I only just thought of it,” she said, hysterically. “Why didn’t I think of it before? Why didn’t you think of it?”

  “Think of what?” he questioned.

  “The other two wishes,” she replied, rapidly. “We’ve only had one.”

  “Was not that enough?” he demanded, fiercely.

  “No,” she cried, triumphantly; “we’ll have one more. Go down and get it quickly, and wish our boy alive again.”

  The man sat up in bed and flung the bedclothes from his quaking limbs. “Good God, you are mad!” he cried, aghast.

  “Get it,” she panted; “get it quickly, and wish—Oh, my boy, my boy!”

  Her husband struck a match and lit the candle. “Get back to bed,” he said, unsteadily. “You don’t know what you are saying.”

  “We had the first wish granted,” said the old woman, feverishly; “why not the second?”

  “A coincidence,” stammered the old man.

  “Go and get it and wish,” cried his wife, quivering with excitement.

  The old man turned and regarded her, and his voice shook. “He has been dead ten days, and besides he—I would not tell you else, but—I could only recognize him by his clothing. If he was too terrible for you to see then, how now?”

  “Bring him back,” cried the old woman, and dragged him toward the door. “Do you think I fear the child I have nursed?”

  He went down in the darkness, and felt his way to the parlour, and then to the mantelpiece. The talisman was in its place, and a horrible fear that the unspoken wish might bring his mutilated son before him ere he could escape from the room seized upon him, and he caught his breath as he found that he had lost the direction of the door. His brow cold with sweat, he felt his way round the table, and groped along the wall until he found himself in the small passage with the unwholesome thing in his hand.

  Even his wife’s face seemed changed as he entered the room. It was white and expectant, and to his fears seemed to have an unnatural look upon it. He was afraid of her.

  “Wish!” she cried, in a strong voice.

  “It is foolish and wicked,” he faltered.

  “Wish!” repeated his wife.

  He raised his hand. “I wish my son alive again.”

  The talisman fell to the floor, and he regarded it fearfully. Then he sank trembling into a chair as the old woman, with burning eyes, walked to the window and raised the blind.

  He sat until he was chilled with the cold, glancing occasionally at the figure of the old woman peering through the window. The candle-end, which had burned below the rim of the china candlestick, was throwing pulsating shadows on the ceiling and walls, until, with a flicker larger than the rest, it expired. The old man, with an unspeakable sense of relief at the failure of the talisman, crept back to his bed, and a minute or two afterward the old woman came silently and apathetically beside him.

  Neither spoke, but lay silently listening to the ticking of the clock. A stair creaked, and a squeaky mouse scurried noisily through the wall. The darkness was oppressive, and after lying for some time screwing up his courage, he took the box of matches, and striking one, went downstairs for a candle.

  At the foot of the stairs the match went out, and he paused to strike another; and at the same moment a knock, so quiet and stealthy as to be scarcely audible, sounded on the front door.

  The matches fell from his hand and spilled in the passage. He stood motionless, his breath suspended until the knock was repeated. Then he turned and fled swiftly back to his room, and closed the door behind him. A third knock sounded through the house.

  “What’s that?” cried the old woman, starting up.

  “A rat,” said the old man in shaking tones—“a rat. It passed me on the stairs.”

  His wife sat up in bed listening. A loud knock resounded through the house.

  “It’s Herbert!” she screamed. “It’s Herbert!”

  She ran to the door, but her husband was before her, and catching her by the arm, held her tightly.

  “What are you going to do?” he whispered hoarsely.

  “It’s my boy; it’s Herbert!” she cried, struggling mechanically. “I forgot it was two miles away. What are you holding me for? Let go. I must open the door.”

  “For God’s sake don’t let it in,” cried the old man, trembling.

 
“You’re afraid of your own son,” she cried, struggling. “Let me go. I’m coming, Herbert; I’m coming.”

  There was another knock, and another. The old woman with a sudden wrench broke free and ran from the room. Her husband followed to the landing, and called after her appealingly as she hurried downstairs. He heard the chain rattle back and the bottom bolt drawn slowly and stiffly from the socket. Then the old woman’s voice, strained and panting.

  “The bolt,” she cried, loudly. “Come down. I can’t reach it.”

  But her husband was on his hands and knees groping wildly on the floor in search of the paw. If he could only find it before the thing outside got in. A perfect fusillade of knocks reverberated through the house, and he heard the scraping of a chair as his wife put it down in the passage against the door. He heard the creaking of the bolt as it came slowly back, and at the same moment he found the monkey’s paw, and frantically breathed his third and last wish.

  The knocking ceased suddenly, although the echoes of it were still in the house. He heard the chair drawn back, and the door opened. A cold wind rushed up the staircase, and a long loud wail of disappointment and misery from his wife gave him courage to run down to her side, and then to the gate beyond. The street lamp flickering opposite shone on a quiet and deserted road.

  FUGUES, by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  Vanessa Hylas ran her fingers lightly over the curve of the forte-piano, enjoying its long, narrow shape—more like a boat than a harp—even as she pondered how she would contrived to keep the two hundred-year-old instrument tuned through an entire recital. “We’ll have to have two intermissions,” she told her manager as she continued to caress the glossy wood. “And retune it both times.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem,” said Howard Faster, making a note on his PalmPilot. “I think people will make allowances for the instrument. This isn’t just any antique. It is the Dziwny forte-piano—the very one he…”

  “He killed himself playing; yes, I know,” said Vanessa, more bluntly than she had intended. She coughed and spoke again, more gently. “Stasio Dziwny performed for the last time on this instrument. It was December 8th, 1803, if I recall the date, a pre-holiday private concert at his patron’s most important Schloss, Schloss Lowenhoff. There were about fifty people present, not counting servants, according to what I’ve read.” Her shiny, close-cropped, dark-blond hair was starting to pale around her face, the fluctuating shade not unlike the beautifully grained wood of the forte-piano’s case. At forty-three, she had grown into her angular features and was much more attractive than she had been in youth, something she recognized with a trace of humor. She held herself well, almost as if she were about to play for an audience rather than test an old instrument for the first time.

  “Yes,” said Faster, fussing with his expensive regimental tie. Smoothing his thinning, colorless hair with one blunt-fingered hand, he looked around for the warehouse manager among the vast collection of pianos. “It amazes me that it’s in such good condition, considering where it’s been for the last couple of centuries, or almost a couple of centuries. It’s a miracle they found it.”

  Vanessa nodded. “In an attic in an Austrian Schloss—not Lowenhoff; Schaumbach, or something like that—according to the documents; you saw them,” she said, repeating what she had been told just four days ago. “Stored away in a sealed room on the top floor. You wouldn’t think the Graf would care to keep the thing, even locked away like that, if the stories about it are true, and considering his family’s role in what happened.”

  “Perhaps he wanted to make sure it never got used again,” Faster suggested. “You know, take it out of circulation.”

  “If that was his intention, he did a great job with it,” said Vanessa. “It makes the provenance a simple matter.”

  “Well, yes; the documents look to be authentic,” said Faster in a resigned tone of voice. “They’ve been vetted legit. All the tests have come out supporting the claim. This is the Dziwny forte-piano.”

  The two were silent as Vanessa pointed to an irregular stain on the bass end of the keyboard. “Brown. It could be blood.”

  “It could,” said Faster uneasily. “Or something from being stored that way, or a natural discoloration of some sort. You can bet the Graf had it cleaned.”

  “A man blowing his brains out all over a forte-piano must have been messy, much more than this stain’s-worth—there’d be blood and skull fragments, and brain matter, according to what I’ve researched; those old pistols did a lot of damage,” said Vanessa distantly. “I would have expected… I don’t know: something a lot worse than this.” She pulled the bench out and sat down at the instrument, trying an experimental chord.

  A jangle of untuned strings shuddered out of the forte-piano.

  “Ye gods!” Faster exclaimed. “They said it would be tuned.”

  “Not yet,” said Vanessa, pulling her hands back as if scalded. “There are strings to be replaced, I’d have to say. They’ll need to give it a thorough going-over before it’ll be ready for the public.”

  “No kidding,” said Faster. “I’ll call Shotwell right away. This is not the sound we want; I don’t care how authentic it is. He’s got to improve it.” He pulled his cell phone out of his breast pocket and tapped in a ten-digit number, then turned away to create the illusion of privacy.

  Vanessa made a point of ignoring Faster’s end of the conversation, putting all her attention on the forte-piano. She played a few of the keys, her touch unusually hesitant, and winced at the sound the ancient, neglected strings made. At last she contented herself with playing one of Dziwny’s own compositions half an inch above the keys, hearing the correct notes in her mind. Only when Faster was through did she relent, swinging around on the bench and looking directly at him. “Well? What did he say?”

  “He said he’d arrange everything, since he knows you want to perform with it,” said Faster, frowning as he spoke. “You wouldn’t believe what he had the nerve to tell me.”

  “He said he couldn’t get his usual restoration crew to work on it,” she said promptly.

  “You overheard,” Faster accused.

  “No. It’s just a guess. But you’ve read the historical material about it, and you can bet Shotwell’s crew has, too, and know about the stories they’ve told about this instrument. It’s one of the most enduring fables in the classical music world, the forte-piano that compels those who play it to commit suicide.” She laughed. “Only one suicide has ever been proven in relation to this, and that was Dziwny’s own; the instrument’s been missing for close to two hundred years, so there’s no other accounts of it doing in anyone else. The Graffin died some months later in childbirth, not at the keyboard. And it turns out now that the forte-piano was put into the attic shortly afterward, so no one else had the chance to kill themselves while playing.”

  “How do you account for the stories, then?” Faster asked, interested for promotional reasons.

  “Because there was so much scandal around Dziwny’s love affair with the Graffin, assuming the rumors about the affair were true: there’s no proof that is was ever anything more than gossip. Still, it was quite a occurrence. His suicide was so dramatic. The public loved ghost stories back then, and the events were irresistible. And there was that awful book that came out in 1850, turning the whole story into a complicated Byronic romance. It’s become difficult to separate fact from fiction.” Vanessa laced her fingers together and looked directly at Faster. “How long is it going to take, getting this ready?”

  “Shotwell said probably a month,” said Faster.

  “That cuts into the Canadian tour,” Vanessa reminded him. “But that might be useful. We could use the tour to generate some interest in this instrument.”

  “Sounds good to me,” said Faster, who was in favor of anything that could end up making Vanessa, his client, more money, for he would share in her good fortune.

  “Then let’s plan on it,” she said, rising. “I want to find out everyth
ing he played that night, the night he shot himself.”

  “Good God, why?” Faster asked.

  “Because I think it would make for a very special first concert on this instrument,” she said, running her fingers lightly over the side of the forte-piano. “Think of the interest we could generate. And the myths we could put to rest.”

  The promotional possibilities began to percolate in Faster’s agile brain. “Not a bad idea, Vanessa,” he approved. “Not a bad idea at all.”

  * * * *

  Nicola van der Beck looked up from the stacks of books on her cluttered desk and managed a vulpine smile, the lines in her face punctuating her look of eager predation. She held up an old journal as if offering a jewel to Vanessa. “It took some doing,” she said proudly, “but I finally found a full account in this. The Baron Gewaltheit. A dreadful name, isn’t it? There were so many of those petty nobles back then, full of their own inconsequence. The Baron and his Baroness were at the concert, and he recorded the program in detail. At least, that is what he purports to do. I can’t find any confirmation that he actually attended the concert. He may have been in the billiard room, and filled in the story later, from what the other guests told him. Still, he was at Lowenhoff—that much is certain.” She adjusted her bifocals so that she could read the text, and began to translate. “We, along with nearly all the Graf’s guests, entered the ballroom which was set for a concert with chairs set in rows under the chandeliers, the elevated musicians’ platform occupied by the forte-piano alone. There was much excitement, for everyone had heard the rumors about Dziwny and the Graffin, which might or might not be true. Both the composer and the Graffin behaved impeccably. You could also say sinlessly here. Still, there can be no doubt that Dziwny has dedicated a number of his recent works to the Graffin, and she has been moved by them. The Graf has been losing patience with this state of affairs—the pun only works in English, of course—and he’s announced that he intends to be rid of Dziwny after the first of the year. He would dismiss him sooner but it would be difficult to find other musicians of high quality to engage so near the holidays, and there are many festivities scheduled to be held here. Also, of course, with his interesting reputation, Stasio Dziwny is still a composer who attracts a great deal of attention, all of it adding to the consequence of his patron, which the Graf von Firstengipfel would be reluctant to give up.”