The Dirigibles of Death
by A. Hyatt Verrill
Copyright © 1930 by A. Hyatt Verrill
This edition published in 2012 by eStar Books, LLC.
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ISBN 9781612105871
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The Dirigibles of Death
by A. Hyatt Verrill
I was living in England, at Ripley, when the first of the mysterious things arrived. I am an early riser and fond of taking a stroll along the lanes and across the fields at dawn, and on that particular morning—an epochal and terrible date in the world's history—I rose and with stick in hand prepared to start on my usual morning walk. As I opened my front door and glanced down the village street I actually gasped with astonishment. In the dim gray light an immense, dark-colored mass loomed through the soft morning mist above the roof of the Antelope public house on the opposite side of the road a few rods down the street. I was still gazing at the thing, wondering what on earth it could be, when old Tim Newbald appeared on the porch of his little cottage. Evidently he, too, saw the thing, for he uttered a surprised ejaculation, and adjusting his glasses, stared towards the Antelope.
"What be the drasted thing?" he demanded, without taking his eyes from the strange object.
Sudden realization came to me. "An airship!" I shouted to him. "A dirigible of some sort. Must have been forced down. Maybe persons injured or killed."
As I spoke I dashed to the street and ran towards the Antelope, my mind filled with visions of dead and injured persons in the gondola of the strange airship.
Old Tim came clumping at my heels, and as I passed Gilmore's house he too popped from the door and, instantly catching sight of the stranded balloon, came racing along with me. Whether it was the sounds of our running feet, whether we unconsciously shouted as we ran, or whether it was some inexplicable form of telepathy or intuition, I cannot say, but regardless of the early hour and the fact that ordinarily few persons are astir in the village before seven, everyone seemed to be up, everyone appeared to have seen the stranded dirigible. By the time I reached the Antelope I was leading a group of a dozen excited and curious people. The contraption was resting in an open pasture back of the inn, its rounded, slightly-swaying black mass rising perhaps twenty feet above the ridge of the inn. Apparently no one in the Antelope had noticed the strange arrival in the inn's backyard. Evidently old man Thorpe and the staff were still sleeping, for the windows were tightly shuttered, the doors closed and no sign of life showed about the premises. The gate in the inn wall was also closed and latched and some delay was caused by trying to open it. By this time a considerable crowd had gathered, and I was conscious of wondering how the inmates of the Antelope could sleep through the hubbub we were making. Then Bob Moore, the village constable, arrived on his bike and took official charge. I noticed, as I finally forced the gate and hurried to the rear of the inn, that someone was pounding lustily at the front door of the Antelope. Reaching the inn-yard, I had a clear view of the airship.
Although I am not at all familiar with the niceties of details of such contrivances, I realized at once that it was very different from anything of the sort I had ever before seen. The balloon or bag was perhaps 800 feet in length by forty feet in diameter, and appeared to be made of some metal. Below it, and forming an integral part of it, was a boat-shaped body or car that rested, slightly canted by the remains of a hay-rick under one side, at a sharp angle on the ground. Close at my elbow was the bobby, while the rest of the crowd swarmed into the inn-yard from all sides.
"Rum lookin' Zep Hi s'y," commented the representative of the law as we hurried forward towards the airship now but a few yards distant. "Queer, too ‘ow the blinkin’ thing got here. Wasn't 'ere when Hi parsed at three, Hi'll swear. Think'e, Doc, there'll be bodies 'urt into it?"
"Like as not," I replied. "Don't see anyone about. If they're not injured or dead they'd have let us know they were here long ago."
We had now reached the airship, and to my amazement I saw that the door of the body or car was wide open. Moore and I stepped close and peered inside, expecting to see dead or injured men, although looking back upon it I cannot understand why we should have thought the crew of the ship should be harmed when there was no sign of injury or even of an abrupt descent about the car. But we were so confident that we would find wounded occupants or bodies, that when we found it absolutely empty, we were completely flabbergasted.
I say the car was empty, but I must qualify that statement slightly. It was empty of human beings, of furnishings, but the floor was covered with a thick layer of filthy straw or hay.
"Lor' love me, hif it aint a blinkin' fly in' cow-shed!" exclaimed the constable.
Then, removing his helmet and scratching his red head reflectively: "No sign hof them as came hin hit," he observed. "Gone off, they 'ave, an' left the bloomin' thing 'ere. Now what the blinkin' blazes ham Hi to do with hit, sir?
"You might put it in the village pound," I suggested with a grin. "But, seriously, I imagine whoever arrived with it are within the Antelope. Having landed in an inn's yard the most natural thing would be for them to patronize the said inn. I suppose—"
My words were interrupted by a shout and someone yelling for the constable, and I turned to see a man standing in the rear entrance to the inn, his face pale, his eyes wide and evidently greatly frightened.
"Hi, constable!" he yelled again. "Ye're wanted. The's been murder done!"
Murder! At the dread word we dashed to the inn. "What, who's murdered?" demanded Moore as we sprang up the steps.
"Everyone!" gasped the wild-eyed fellow at the door, who, I now saw, was Chris Stevens from over Clacton way. "Jim Thorne, Jerry, Ellen the bar-maid, and, and—"
We waited to hear no more. Into the hallway we rushed and came to an abrupt and sudden halt as we almost tripped over the body of Jerry the porter and man-of-all-work lying on the floor. I stopped and felt his pulse. He was dead, cold, and the pool of blood that surrounded his head had coagulated and hardened. Evidently he had been dead for several hours. Proceeding more cautiously, we passed through the bar-parlor to the room where old Jim Thorne had always slept. One glance was enough. Thorne's body lay sprawled on the floor, the face blood-covered, mutilated beyond recognition. The room was a mess. The bed-clothes were scattered about, chairs were upset, and it was obvious that a severe struggle had taken place. We hurried upstairs to find the body of Ellen, the bar-maid, a middle-aged woman, lying dead in the upper hallway, and gray-haired old Martha, the cook, stretched lifeless just within the door to her room.
"Hell's bells!" ejaculated Moore in a half-whisper. "Hit's like a blinkin' slaughter 'ouse so 'tis. Four o' 'em dead an' a bloomin' noise they must 'a made an' not a body hin the village havin' 'eard 'em. What make 'e on it. Doc?"
I shook my head. "Wholesale murder," I replied as I examined Martha's body. "And no sign of robbery or any motive. And the wounds! I've never seen any just like them. Look at poor old Martha's face, and at
her chest—covered with cuts and slashes—cut to ribbons— as if she'd been hacked with a buzz-saw. And old Jim's face, did you notice it?"
"Did Hi!” exclaimed the constable. "Well, Hi should s'y! Looked 'e'd been chawed, 'e did; garstly, Hi call hit."
"Ellen, too," I remarked. "Her right hand and arm were torn to shreds. And that awful hole in Jerry's head! Whoever committed these crimes was a fiend— a giant in strength and used some strange weapon— perhaps a rake or a pitchfork. I should say, offhand, it was the work of a maniac—"
Moore seized my arm and I could feel him trembling. "Lor' love me. Doc, think' 'e hit might 'a been the bodies out of yon Zep?"
"Scarcely," I replied. "But it's damnably mysterious. And it surely is a remarkable coincidence that the airship should have descended in the inn-yard at or about the same time the murders were committed. And I'd like to know what became of the occupants of the dirigible. Anyhow, Moore, you'd best send to London for a good detective—this is a Scotland Yard job—and telephone to Guildford for the coroner. In the meantime—"
A shout from downstairs cut my sentence in two and, not knowing what next to expect, we dashed down. Jared Dunne, the postman, was standing at the doorway surrounded by an eager, questioning, excited throng.
"T-t-there's a m-m-murder d-daown tha r-r-road," stuttered Jared. "I w-was a-c-comin’ up through C-C-Cobham an' I s-seen a G-Gypsy c-c-caravan b-beside the road. An' t-the G-Gypsies all l-lyin' raon'd d-d-deader'n N-N-Nelson."
"My God!" gasped poor Moore. "Haint four bodies murdered 'ere to the blinkin' Antelope henough? An’ you to come with this 'ere story o' a crew o’ bloomin’ Gypsy-folk murdered hover to Cobham side!"
By this time word of the four murders in the inn and the murdered Gypsies had spread through the village and the place was in an uproar. Closing the inn door and cautioning the people to keep clear, Moore shooed them from the premises, deputized four men to keep guard over the airship, the inn-yard and the pasture, and having telephoned to Guildford for the coroner and to Scotland Yard for an inspector, he locked his cubbyhole of a police station, climbed into my car and we raced off towards Cobham.
We had no difficulty in finding the Gypsy caravan. It stood a few yards from the road at the edge of a spinney of birch and larch trees; a gaudy, high-wheeled red and gilt affair and even from the road we could see the huddled bundles of clothes that marked the dead owners of the van.
But as we drew closer and had a nearer view of the bodies, even Moore—who was the most unemotional of men—drew back with an exclamation of horror. And though, in my profession, I am constantly facing grew-some sights, and in the World War became callous of death in its most horrible forms, I could not repress a shudder and a sensation of nausea as I looked at the dead Gypsies sprawled upon the dew-sprinkled grass. There were five of them—two men, a woman and two children, and with the exception of one of the men, all had been mutilated in the most horrible and revolting manner. The woman's head had been torn—actually torn, not cut—from her body, and one of her arms had been stripped of flesh, leaving only shreds adhering to the bloody bones.
The man beside her was almost as awful. His eyes had been gouged from their sockets, his lips and nose torn off, and in his bared chest was a ragged opening through which his heart had been removed. The bodies of the two children were scarcely recognizable. They appeared as if gnawed and devoured by famished wolves. But terrible as were these revolting sights, I scarcely noticed them at the time, for my eyes were staring incredulously at another body, the body of a creature—no, I cannot call it a man—that lay with a long bladed Gypsy knife sticking in its breast. Never would I have believed it possible that anything in human form could have been so repulsively loathsome, so gruesomely horrible. Instantly I realized that this dead thing was the murderer, that by a lucky stroke the last Gypsy to die had plunged his knife in the fiend's heart before he, too, expired. Words cannot adequately describe the horrible creature lying there with ghastly face upturned to the sky. He, it, the thing, was of gigantic size; he must have stood well over six feet and weighed fully eighteen stone or two hundred and fifty two pounds; with enormously long gorilla-like arms ending in knotted claw-like fingers whose nails—reeking with blood and human flesh, were veritable talons. His face was that of a Caliban, a distorted, flat, blob of pasty white where not smeared with blood, with loose, flabby, pendulous lips that exposed protruding yellow teeth. He had no nose; the forehead was almost nonexistent, and the tousled, straw-colored hair grew from the eyebrows ever the misshapen skull that was that of an idiot. But even these repulsive physical characters paled beside the inexpressibly loathsome and revolting appearance of his body, that was almost nude. Everywhere it was covered with festering open ulcers, that I instantly recognized as those of the terrible tropical disease known as the Yaws.
Even in my horror, my amazement at the thing, I felt positive that it must have arrived in the mysterious airship, that it or its fellows, for I had a premonition that there was more than one of the murderers, had rushed upon the inmates of the Antelope and had ruthlessly murdered them, and that with the others still at large no one was safe. Yet somehow it seemed so unreal, so incredible that such things could be taking place in this quiet, peaceful bit of suburban England, that I could not avoid feeling that I was passing through some horrible nightmare. I turned to Moore. "Nothing we can do here," I said. "We'll have to leave the bodies as they are until the coroner arrives. Too bad you didn't bring someone along to keep watch here until then. As it is, you'll have to remain yourself, I suppose."
"Hi will, will Hi!" cried the constable. "Not by the blinkin' hell Hi will. Lor' love me, Doc, hit's too awrful. An' that blond gorilla! Gord, did never a body see such a 'orrible-lookin' beast? 'E's the blinkin' murderer Hi'll s'y. An' now 'e's gone west there'll be no more bloomin’ murders. Let's clear hout o' 'ere, Doc. No use stayin’, Nobody's goin' to meddle with these corpuses."
"Very well," I assented. "But don't flatter yourself Moore, that there won't be any further murders. In my opinion that homicidal maniac—for that's what he unquestionably was—is only one of the crew that arrived on the airship. Of course he may have been the only murderer, but unless there's something most mysterious and horrible afoot, why didn't the others make themselves known? Why didn't they notify the authorities that this beastly creature was at large? No, Moore, there's something back of this—something uncanny, weird, terrible, deep; something of which we have no conception, at which I cannot even guess."
Little did I dream how far short of the reality were my fears, my suspicions, my words.
The coroner had arrived when we reached Eipley and a few moments later Inspector Maidstone arrived from London. But their arrival, the excitement over the inn murders and the mysterious airship, had been almost forgotten in view of the amazing news that had come to the village. A farmer, driving in his trap from East Clacton had come to the village wild-eyed, scared almost out of his wits. His story seemed beyond credence. Three horrible-looking beings had dashed at him as he was passing a thicket—living devils as he put it, blood-stained, slobbering, inhuman-looking things. Only the fright of his skittish mare had saved him. At sight of the three she had bolted and had left the attackers far behind. Half an hour after the farmer had arrived, a telephone call from Guildford reported that a motor car with two young chaps from Farnham had been attacked while on the Hogback by two of the most repulsive and terrible of human beings. Fortunately one of the motorists had been in possession of a gun—they had been hunting—and at close range he had blown the head of one of the attackers from its shoulders. But the other had given no heed and had thrown itself at the car with maniacal fury. A terrific struggle had ensued, the motorists had been torn, scratched, bitten, their clothes ripped from them, and only when they had beaten the inhuman creature into insensibility had he ceased his frantic efforts to destroy them.
By midday the entire country had been aroused. Somewhere at least four murderous, horrible beings were at
large. No one felt safe, and the countryside was in a state of terror. Yet far worse was to come.
Major Stephen Leighton, R.A.F., Takes Up the Story
The extra editions of the press carrying the astonishing news of the appearance of a mysterious airship at Ripley, and describing the gruesome murders at the Antelope Inn and those of the Gypsies, aroused my intense interest. Although Doctor Grayson's description of the airship was most inadequate and superficial, even he had noticed that it was of a new type, and this was borne out by the little he mentioned in regard to its construction. Having specialized on dirigibles of the rigid type I was, of course, most keen on examining this strange ship and I immediately sent for my car and dashed off to Ripley.
Just beyond Cobham we passed the Gypsy caravan surrounded by quite a throng of morbidly curious persons, and we found Ripley as crowded as though a fair were being held in the village. Constable Moore, Doctor Grayson and the police sent from Guildford had the situation well in hand, however, and a cordon had been drawn about the Antelope Inn and the field where the airship rested. At my first glance at the remarkable ship I realized fully that it was of a totally new type, and I was quite naturally highly elated.
The gas-container was, as Doctor Grayson had surmised, of metal, although of what metal I could not imagine. But the doctor had erred considerably in his statements regarding the other features of the ship. The car or gondola, instead of being an integral portion of the whole, as he had described it, was attached to the balloon by means of short, rigid struts, and between the top of the gondola and the lower surface of the blunt-ended, almost elliptical balloon, a cylindrical tube of metal extended the entire length of the ship, bearing, at each end, a four-bladed propeller. Obviously, I thought, the motive power was contained within this tube, and I marveled that a motor of sufficient size to drive the ship could be contained within such a small space. The horizontal and vertical rudders were similar to those of conventional design, but were attached to a rigid framework on the gondola instead of on the balloon itself, and were in duplicate, one set on each end of the ship. I also noticed that a peculiar grid-like affair of wire-somewhat resembling the counterpoise of a radio receiver—was stretched between the cylinder I have mentioned and the top of the gondola, but I assumed that this, no doubt, was some form of radio antennae. The gondola, of some undetermined metal or metallic composition, contained nothing aside from the filthy straw mentioned by Doctor Grayson, several demijohnlike vessels and a number of beef bones. It looked far more like the den of wild beasts than the quarters of human beings, and as it smelled to high heaven I wasted no time in examining it in detail. Borrowing a ladder, I mounted to the top of the gondola for the purpose of examining the motive plant of the ship. But to my chagrin I discovered that the tube within which it evidently was contained, was tightly sealed, the plates of which it was constructed being bolted down, and that tools would be required to remove them. Securing my tool-kit from my car I again climbed to the roof of the gondola, accompanied by Doctor Grayson who had just emerged from the inn where he had been attending the inquest with the Guildford coroner. It was then that I learned, for the first time, the details of the mutilation of the Gypsies' bodies, and learned of the dead stranger and the reports of those other five maniacal fiends who had attacked the farmer from East Clacton and the motorists from Farnham. Doctor Grayson—whom I had already met at my club—confided his theories to me, and having already viewed the den-like interior of the gondola, I was inclined to agree with him that the six (or possibly more) repulsive and obviously savage strangers had arrived in the ship I was now studying. But I could not for the life of me understand whence they could have come, who they might be, or why they should have hurried from the ship and fallen like maniacs upon all they met.
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