The Horror Megapack

by H. P. Lovecraft

  “They don’t, eh?” Foster murmured.

  The girl eyed him intently. “Suppose you run through it, and I’ll mark down a rough scoring.”

  Foster hit a few chords. “Phooey!” he said at last, and picked up the lyrics. Those were readable, anyway. He began to hum.

  “Swell,” Lois said. “Just sing it. I’ll catch the melody.”

  Foster’s voice was true, and he found it surprisingly easy to remember the love song the juke-box had played. He sang it, and Lois presently played it on the piano, while Foster corrected and revised. At least he could tell what was wrong and what was right. And, since Lois had studied music since her childhood, she had little difficulty in recording the song on paper.

  Afterwards she was enthusiastic. “It’s swell,” she said. “Something really new! Mr. Foster, you’re good. And you’re not lifting from Mozart, either. I’ll shoot this right over to the big boy. Usually it’s smart not to be in too much of a hurry, but since this is your first job here, we’ll chance it.”

  * * * *

  Taliaferro liked the song. He made a few useless suggestions, which Foster, with Lois’s aid, incorporated, and sent down a list of what else was needed for the super-musical. He also called a conclave of the song-writers to listen to Foster’s opus.

  “I want you to hear what’s good,” Taliaferro told them. “This new find of mine is showing you up. I think we need new blood,” he finished darkly, eying the wretched song-writers with ominous intensity.

  But Foster quaked in his boots. For all he knew, his song might have been plagiarized. He expected someone in the audience to spring up and shout: “That new find of yours swiped his song from Berlin!” Or Gershwin or Porter or Hammerstein, as the case might be.

  Nobody exposed him. The song was new. It established Foster as a double-threat man, since he had done both melody and lyrics himself.

  He was a success.

  Every night he had his ritual. Alone, he visited a certain downtown bar. When necessary, the juke-box helped him with his songs. It seemed to know exactly what was needed. It asked little in return. It served him with the unquestioning fidelity of ‘Cigarette’ in “Under Two Flags.” And sometimes it played love songs aimed at Foster’s ears and heart. It serenaded him. Sometimes, too, Foster thought he was going crazy.

  Weeks passed. Foster got all his assignments done at the little downtown bar, and later whipped them into suitable shape with his secretary’s assistance. He had begun to notice that she was a strikingly pretty girl, with attractive eyes and lips. Lois seemed amenable, but so far Foster had held back from any definite commitment. He felt unsure of his new triumphs.

  But he blossomed like the rose. His bank account grew fat, he looked sleeker and drank much less, and he visited the downtown bar every night. Once he asked Austin about it.

  “That juke-box. Where’d it come from?”

  “I don’t know,” Austin said. “It was here before I came.”

  “Well, who puts new records in it?”

  “The company, I suppose.”

  “Ever see ’em do it?”

  Austin thought. “Can’t say I have. I guess the man comes around when the other bartender’s on duty. It’s got a new set of records on every day, though. That’s good service.”

  Foster made a note to ask the other bartender about it. But there was no time. For, the next day, he kissed Lois Kennedy.

  That was a mistake. It was the booster charge. The next thing Jerry Foster knew, he was making the rounds with Lois, and it was after dark, and they were driving unsteadily along the Sunset Strip, discussing life and music.

  “I’m going places,” Foster said, dodging an oddly ambulatory telephone pole. “We’re going places together.”

  “Oh, honey!” Lois said.

  Foster stopped the car and kissed her.

  “That calls for another drink,” he remarked. “Is that a bar over there?”

  * * * *

  The night wore on. Foster hadn’t realized he had been under a considerable strain. Now the lid was off. It was wonderful to have Lois in his arms, to kiss her, to feel her hair brushing his cheek. Everything became rosy.

  Through the rosy mist, he suddenly saw the face of Austin.

  “The same?” Austin inquired.

  Foster blinked. He was sitting in a booth, with Lois beside him. He had his arm around the girl, and he had an idea he had just kissed her.

  “Austin,” he said, “how long have we been here?”

  “About an hour. Don’t you remember, Mr. Foster?”

  “Darling,” Lois murmured, leaning heavily against her escort.

  Foster tried to think. If was difficult. “Lois,” he finally said, “haven’t I got another song to write?”

  “It’ll keep.”

  “No. That torch song. Taliaferro wants it Friday.”

  “That’s four days away.”

  “Now I’m here, I might as well get the song,” Foster said, with alcoholic insistence and stood up.

  “Kiss me,” Lois murmured, leaning toward him.

  He obeyed, though he had a feeling that there was more important business to be attended to. Then he stared around, located the juke-box, and went toward it.

  “Hello, there,” he said, patting the sleek, glowing sides. “I’m back. Drunk, too. But that’s all right. Let’s have that song.”

  The juke-box was silent. Foster felt Lois touch his arm.

  “Come on back. We don’t want music.”

  “Wait a minute, hon.”

  Foster stared at the juke-box. Then he laughed.

  “I know,” he said, and pulled out a handful of change. He slid a nickel into the coin-lever and pushed the lever hard.

  Nothing happened.

  “Wonder what’s wrong with it?” Foster muttered. “I’ll need that song by Friday.”

  He decided that there were a lot of things he didn’t know about and ought to. The muteness of the juke-box puzzled him.

  All of a sudden, he remembered something that had happened weeks ago, the blond man who had attacked the juke-box with a hatchet and had only got shocked for his pains. The blond man he vaguely recalled, used to spend hours en tête-à-tête with the juke-box.

  “What a dope!” Foster said thickly.

  Lois asked a question.

  “I should have checked up before,” he answered her. “Maybe I can find—oh, nothing, Lois. Nothing at all.”

  Then he went after Austin. Austin gave him the blond man’s name and, an hour later, Foster found himself sitting by a white hospital bed, looking down at a man’s ravaged face under faded blond hair. Brashness, judicious tipping, and a statement that he was a relative had got him this far. Now he sat there and watched and felt questions die as they formed on his lips.

  When he finally mentioned the juke-box, it was easier. He simply sat and listened.

  “They carried me out of the bar on a stretcher,” the blond man said. “Then a car skidded and came right at me. I didn’t feel any pain. I still don’t feel anything. The driver—she said she’d heard somebody shouting her name. Chloe. That startled her so much she lost control and hit me. You know who yelled ‘Chloe,’ don’t you?”

  Foster thought back. There was a memory somewhere.

  The juke-box had begun to play “Chloe,” and the amplification had gone haywire, so the song had bellowed out thunderously for a short time.

  “I’m paralyzed,” the blond man said. “I’m dying, too. I might as well. I think I’ll be safer. She’s vindictive and plenty smart.”

  “She?”

  “A spy. Maybe there’s all sorts of gadgets masquerading as—as things we take for granted. I don’t know. They substituted that juke-box for the original one. It’s alive. No, not it! She! It’s a she, all right!”

  And—“Who put her there?” the blond man said, in answer to Foster’s question. “Who are—they? People from another world or another time? Martians? They want information about us, I’ll bet, but th
ey don’t dare appear personally. They plant gadgets that we’ll take for granted, like that juke-box, to act as spies. Only this one got out of control a little. She’s smarter than the others.”

  He pushed himself up on the pillow, his eyes glaring at the little radio beside him.

  “Even that!” he whispered. “Is that an ordinary, regular radio? Or is it one of their masquerading gadgets, spying on us?”

  He fell back.

  “I began to understand quite a while ago,” the man continued weakly. “She put the ideas in my head. More than once, she pulled me out of a jam. Not now, though. She won’t forgive me. Oh, she’s feminine, all right. When I got on her bad side, I was sunk. She’s smart, for a juke-box. A mechanical brain? Or—I don’t know. I’ll never know, now. I’ll be dead pretty soon. And that’ll be all right with me.”

  The nurse came in then, and the blond man refused to speak any more.

  * * * *

  Jerry Foster was coldly frightened. And he was drunk. Main Street was bright and roaring as he walked back, but by the time he had made up his mind, it was after closing hour and a chill silence went hand in hand with the darkness. The street lights didn’t help much.

  “If I were sober, I wouldn’t believe this,” he mused, listening to his hollow footfalls on the pavement. “But I do believe it. I’ve got to fix things up with that—juke-box!”

  Part of his mind guided him into an alley. Part of his mind told him to break a window, muffling the clash with his coat, and the same urgent, sober part of his mind guided him through a dark kitchen and a swinging door.

  Then he was in the bar. The booths were vacant. A faint, filtered light crept through the Venetian blinds shielding the street windows. Against a wall stood the black, silent bulk of the juke-box.

  Silent and unresponsive. Even when Foster inserted a nickel, nothing happened. The electric cord was plugged in the socket, and he threw the activating switch, but that made no difference.

  “Look,” he said. “I was drunk. Oh, this is crazy. It can’t be happening. You’re not alive—Are you alive? Did you put the finger on that guy I just saw in the hospital? Listen!”

  It was dark and cold. Bottles glimmered against the mirror behind the bar. Foster went over and opened one. He poured the whiskey down his throat.

  After a while, it didn’t seem so fantastic for him to be standing there arguing with a juke-box.

  “So you’re feminine,” he said. “I’ll bring you flowers tomorrow. I’m really beginning to believe! Of course I believe! I can’t write songs. Not by myself. You’ve got to help me. I’ll never look at a—another girl.”

  He tilted the bottle again.

  “You’re just in the sulks,” he said. “You’ll come out of it. You love me. You know you do. This is crazy!”

  The bottle had mysteriously vanished. He went behind the bar to find another. Then, with a conviction that made him freeze motionless, he knew that there was someone else in the room.

  He was hidden in the shadows where he stood. Only his eyes moved as he looked toward the newcomers. There were two of them, and they were not human.

  They—moved—toward the juke-box, in a rather indescribable fashion. One of them pulled out a small, shining cylinder from the juke-box’s interior.

  Foster, sweat drying on his cheeks, could hear them thinking.

  “Current report for the last twenty-four hours, Earth time. Put in a fresh recording cylinder. Change the records, too.”

  Foster watched them change the records. Austin had said that the discs were replaced daily. And the blond man, dying in the hospital, had said other things. It couldn’t be real. The creatures he stared at could not exist. They blurred before his eyes.

  “A human is here,” one of them thought. “He has seen us. We had better eliminate him.”

  The blurry, inhuman figures came toward him. Foster, trying to scream, dodged around the end of the bar and ran toward the juke-box. He threw his arms around its unresponsive sides and gasped:

  “Stop them! Don’t let them kill me!”

  He couldn’t see the creatures now, but he knew that they were immediately behind him. The clarity of panic sharpened his vision. One title on the juke-box’s list of records stood out vividly. He thrust his forefinger against the black button beside the title “Love Me Forever.”

  Something touched his shoulder and tightened, drawing him back.

  Lights flickered within the juke-box. A record swung out. The needle lowered into its black groove.

  The juke-box started to play “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You.”

  THE MUMMY’S FOOT, by Théophile Gautier

  I had entered, in an idle mood, the shop of one of those curiosity venders who are called marchands de bric-à-brac in that Parisian argot which is so perfectly unintelligible elsewhere in France.

  You have doubtless glanced occasionally through the windows of some of these shops, which have become so numerous now that it is fashionable to buy antiquated furniture, and that every petty stockbroker thinks he must have his chambre au moyen âge.

  There is one thing there which clings alike to the shop of the dealer in old iron, the ware-room of the tapestry maker, the laboratory of the chemist, and the studio of the painter: in all those gloomy dens where a furtive daylight filters in through the window-shutters the most manifestly ancient thing is dust. The cobwebs are more authentic than the gimp laces, and the old pear-tree furniture on exhibition is actually younger than the mahogany which arrived but yesterday from America.

  The warehouse of my bric-à-brac dealer was a veritable Capharnaum. All ages and all nations seemed to have made their rendezvous there. An Etruscan lamp of red clay stood upon a Boule cabinet, with ebony panels, brightly striped by lines of inlaid brass; a duchess of the court of Louis XV nonchalantly extended her fawn-like feet under a massive table of the time of Louis xiii., with heavy spiral supports of oak, and carven designs of chimeras and foliage intermingled.

  Upon the denticulated shelves of several sideboards glittered immense Japanese dishes with red and blue designs relieved by gilded hatching, side by side with enamelled works by Bernard Palissy, representing serpents, frogs, and lizards in relief.

  From disembowelled cabinets escaped cascades of silver-lustrous Chinese silks and waves of tinsel, which an oblique sunbeam shot through with luminous beads, while portraits of every era, in frames more or less tarnished, smiled through their yellow varnish.

  The striped breastplate of a damascened suit of Milanese armour glittered in one corner; loves and nymphs of porcelain, Chinese grotesques, vases of céladon and crackleware, Saxon and old Sèvres cups encumbered the shelves and nooks of the apartment.

  The dealer followed me closely through the tortuous way contrived between the piles of furniture, warding off with his hand the hazardous sweep of my coat-skirts, watching my elbows with the uneasy attention of an antiquarian and a usurer.

  It was a singular face, that of the merchant; an immense skull, polished like a knee, and surrounded by a thin aureole of white hair, which brought out the clear salmon tint of his complexion all the more strikingly, lent him a false aspect of patriarchal bonhomie, counteracted, however, by the scintillation of two little yellow eyes which trembled in their orbits like two louis-d’or upon quicksilver. The curve of his nose presented an aquiline silhouette, which suggested the Oriental or Jewish type. His hands—thin, slender, full of nerves which projected like strings upon the finger-board of a violin, and armed with claws like those on the terminations of bats’ wings—shook with senile trembling; but those convulsively agitated hands became firmer than steel pincers or lobsters’ claws when they lifted any precious article—an onyx cup, a Venetian glass, or a dish of Bohemian crystal. This strange old man had an aspect so thoroughly rabbinical and cabalistic that he would have been burnt on the mere testimony of his face three centuries ago.

  “Will you not buy something from me to-day, sir? Here is a Malay kreese with a blad
e undulating like flame. Look at those grooves contrived for the blood to run along, those teeth set backward so as to tear out the entrails in withdrawing the weapon. It is a fine character of ferocious arm, and will look well in your collection. This two-handed sword is very beautiful. It is the work of Josepe de la Hera; and this colichemarde with its fenestrated guard—what a superb specimen of handicraft!”

  “No; I have quite enough weapons and instruments of carnage. I want a small figure—something which will suit me as a paper-weight, for I cannot endure those trumpery bronzes which the stationers sell, and which may be found on everybody’s desk.”

  The old gnome foraged among his ancient wares, and finally arranged before me some antique bronzes, so-called at least; fragments of malachite, little Hindoo or Chinese idols, a kind of poussah-toys in jade-stone, representing the incarnations of Brahma or Vishnoo, and wonderfully appropriate to the very undivine office of holding papers and letters in place.

  I was hesitating between a porcelain dragon, all constellated with warts, its mouth formidable with bristling tusks and ranges of teeth, and an abominable little Mexican fetich, representing the god Vitziliputzili au naturel, when I caught sight of a charming foot, which I at first took for a fragment of some antique Venus.

  It had those beautiful ruddy and tawny tints that lend to Florentine bronze that warm living look so much preferable to the gray-green aspect of common bronzes, which might easily be mistaken for statues in a state of putrefaction. Satiny gleams played over its rounded forms, doubtless polished by the amorous kisses of twenty centuries, for it seemed a Corinthian bronze, a work of the best era of art, perhaps moulded by Lysippus himself.

  “That foot will be my choice,” said to the merchant, who regarded me with an ironical and saturnine air, and held out the object desired that I might examine it more fully.

  I was surprised at its lightness. It was not a foot of metal, but in sooth a foot of flesh, an embalmed foot, a mummy’s foot. On examining it still more closely the very grain of the skin, and the almost imperceptible lines impressed upon it by the texture of the bandages, became perceptible. The toes were slender and delicate, and terminated by perfectly formed nails, pure and transparent as agates. The great toe, slightly separated from the rest, afforded a happy contrast, in the antique style, to the position of the other toes, and lent it an aerial lightness—the grace of a bird’s foot. The sole, scarcely streaked by a few almost imperceptible cross lines, afforded evidence that it had never touched the bare ground, and had only come in contact with the finest matting of Nile rushes and the softest carpets of panther skin.