I meant her no harm.
“There’s no sense to this!” I said, pleading with Jerry Olander. “There’s no sense to any of this. Please let me alone, let me kill myself if that’ll give you some satisfaction! But don’t try to make me do this!”
“It all makes sense,” he said, getting nastily quiet. “Everything you do is colored by those memories. How many nights have you lain awake in pain from a toothache, rather than going to a dentist because the family sent you to Cousin Franklyn to save a few dollars on dental bills? How many of your teeth that might have been saved did he pull because he was no damned good, should have been a butcher instead of a dentist? You’re afraid of dentists to this day because of Cousin Franklyn. And how many women who might have loved you have you walked away from, picked fights with, ignored, considered better or worse than you, not your ‘type,’ because of Peggy Mantle and the way she laughed at you when you were fifteen? How many times have you walked past a store where you needed to buy something, because you remembered the way old man Clareborne threw you out of his department store when you were a little boy? How much of what you think is free will is just a programmed reaction to things you’ve buried, memories you don’t want to remember, pains and slights and affronts you suffered as a child? How many, chum? How goddam many? Oh, there’s sense here!”
Jerry Olander had me walk across the room. To the telephone. “But I’m all alone now. I have no one. No wife, no children, no mother, no father, not even too many people I can call friends. I’m all alone; won’t you leave me Nancy!”
I began to dial a number.
The phone began to ring.
“You’re not alone, chum,” Jerry Olander said softly. “I’m right here with you. And I’ve got a long, long memory.”
The receiver was picked up at the other end and a voice said, “Hello.”
Zombie things from the quicklime pit began emerging, one after another of them; dozens of them, summoned by Jerry Olander’s long, long memory. I wanted to shout, to make a terrible dying sound, to clarion a warning, and found I could not even do that. In the fourth year of our war, Jerry Olander had even gained control of my words, and I had lost, I had lost, I had lost!
“Hi, Nancy,” I heard myself saying, “what are you doing for dinner tonight?”
Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once.
—THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY, CIRCA 1861
INVASION FROM INFERNO
HUGH B. CAVE
Time for some pulp thrills. Hugh Barnett Cave (1910–2014) had the distinction of having been one of the original authors published in Christine Campbell Thompson’s Not at Night series, with stories in Keep on the Light, Terror By Night, and The “Not at Night” Omnibus.
Born in Chester, England, he emigrated with his family to America when he was five. From the late 1920s onward Cave’s stories began appearing in such legendary pulp magazines as Weird Tales, Strange Tales, Ghost Stories, Black Book Detective Magazine, Spicy Mystery Stories, and the infamous “weird menace” or “shudder pulps,” Horror Stories and Terror Tales.
After leaving the horror field in the early 1940s for almost three decades, a volume of the author’s best horror tales, Murgunstrumm and Others, was published by Karl Edward Wagner in 1977. Cave subsequently returned to the genre with new stories and a string of modern horror novels: Legion of the Dead, The Nebulon Horror, The Evil, Shades of Evil, Disciples of Dread, The Lower Deep, Lucifer’s Eye, Isle of the Whisperers, The Dawning, The Evil Returns, and The Restless Dead. His short stories were also collected in a number of volumes, including The Corpse Maker, Death Stalks the Night, The Dagger of Tsiang, Long Live the Dead: Tales from Black Mask, Come Into My Parlor, The Door Below, and Bottled in Blonde. Milt Thomas’s biography, Cave of a Thousand Tales: The Life & Times of Hugh B. Cave, was published by Arkham House a week after the author’s death.
During his lifetime, Cave received Life Achievement Awards from the Horror Writers Association, the International Horror Guild, and the World Fantasy Convention. He was also presented with the Special Convention Award at the 1997 World Fantasy gathering in London, where he was a Special Guest of Honor.
“I long ago lost most of my pulp stories in a fire,” he lamented. “A few years back, a friend urged me to try finding copies of them, and helped me in many ways to do so.
“As these stories arrived in the mail, my wife Peggy and I read them aloud to each other at bedtime and rated them from 1 to 10. I have her comment attached to my file-copy of the story: ‘Invasion from Inferno’ is one of the best shudder stories you’ve written. It’s exciting, different, and full of surprises. Definitely a 10!”
I: THE SPIDER WOMAN
THE LITTLE GIRL’S mouth opened and her brown eyes filled with terror. On her knees beside the berry bush, she leaned backward with a convulsive jerk and upset her pail of picked berries.
“Spiders!” she screamed. “Spiders! Oh-h-h-h, help, help!”
She was alone in the forest clearing, and the shadows of gathering dusk had crept in upon her without her knowing it. Screaming wildly, she staggered to her feet and looked frantically for the road. Weak from fright, she ran toward it.
“HERS WAS A HORRIBLE SORT OF BEAUTY.”
She had been told not to go into the woods. She had been told about the spiders, and how they might devour her. And now …
Now the clearing seemed to be wriggling after her like some huge, hungry monster. The woods were alive with crawling things. The child’s shrieks had no effect whatever on the living wave of red horror that pursued her. She tripped, fell flat on her face. The undulating wave caught up to her and slithered over her. Her last scream was like a siren wail wandering out over the purple countryside.
Andy Gale heard the screams and slammed his foot down on the brake-pedal. The car stopped with a spine-jarring jerk and he flung himself out of it, stood staring, doubting his senses. Then he rushed forward.
A wall of trees and heavy underbrush blinded him to the horror until he was in the midst of it. He could have whirled then and raced back to the road, could have fled before the things attacked him. But he saw the child lying there and heard her ghastly sobs.
A sea of red death rolled over her. Hundreds of tiny red horrors were fighting among themselves for possession of her body.
Gale stumbled forward and ground the hideous creatures under his feet, staining the earth red with their mangled bodies. He beat at them with his hands, then tore off his coat and swung it as he advanced. Horror iced his blood and swelled in his brain, but he fought his way to the girl’s side and pulled her to her feet.
“God!” he groaned.
The spiders were like a thick red blanket enveloping her. They were in her hair. They covered her little arms and legs and were under her dress, swarming over her flesh. They were feeding!
He wiped them off with frantic sweeps of his hands, as the little girl clung to him and cried her heart out. He kicked them aside as they rushed forward to climb her trembling body. Lifting her in his arms, he staggered back toward the road.
Twice he had to stop, because the awful things leaped upon him from every scraping bush. They attacked his eyes, and he fell to his knees, clawing at his face with his free hand. It was impossible to fight so many of them. For everyone he killed, there were hundreds more rushing to attack!
On fire with pain, he reached the car and dropped his limp burden on the seat, flung himself behind the wheel. The machine roared ahead. The little girl had stopped moaning.
Half a mile down the road, Gale braked the car and bent over the child. Some of the things were still crawling on her dress and in her hair. He plucked them off and killed them, and killed others that were wriggling over the upholstery.
They were tiny, eight-legged creatures with crab-like legs. Prickly, spine-like clusters of hair grew out of their potato-bug bodies. “Red spider” was the common name for them. Hideous little things, non-poisonous, but capable of breeding w
ith frightful rapidity, they were notorious in the farm-belt for the depredations they committed.
The little girl had regained consciousness and dazedly watched him as he worked over her. Suffering from shock, she moaned timidly:
“Who—who are you? Do—do you live—near here?”
“I’m Andy Gale,” he said. “I’m on my way to visit Nicklus Brukner.”
The little girl nodded weakly. Like a person coming out of ether, she seemed to be struggling to orient herself, and the pain of her wounds would not let her. She badly needed medical attention, but first Gale had to make sure no more of those voracious little red devils were feeding on her.
“Nicklus Brukner,” she whispered, “lives in the next house. At the foot of the hill. Why—why are you going there?”
“I’m going there,” Gale said, “to marry Miss Reid, the schoolteacher. She’s my sweetheart.”
His casual words, instead of soothing her, produced an effect startlingly opposite! The child cringed as if he had struck her. Her small body trembling violently, she gazed at him with terrified eyes.
“You—you’re the Spider Woman’s sweetheart?” she sobbed. “Then you’re as wicked as she is! Let me go! Oh, please let me go! I’m afraid!” Amazement put a scowl on Gale’s face as he leaned toward her. The Spider Woman’s sweetheart? In God’s name what was the child talking about? In her terror, she struck at him, and the exertion was too much for her. She slumped down in the seat …
With the unconscious girl in his arms, Andy Gale climbed the weather-worn steps of Nicklus Brukner’s enormous house and rang the bell. It was an old, rambling house, flanked by acres of drought-seared farmland. It looked mean and dismal. He wondered how Arachne had stood it all these months.
Even while teaching school she must have hated to board here. And since the end of the school term she had been patiently waiting here for him to get his vacation and take her away. The door opened and a thick-set, bearded man glared out at him.
“What you want?”
“I’m a friend of Miss Reid’s,” Gale said quickly. “This child is hurt.”
The man, Gale knew, was Nicklus Brukner. Arachne had described him in her letters as being an ugly, morose individual with a violent temper, and the description seemed to fit. Hunching closer, Brukner peered into the child’s face.
“Bring her in!”
Gale trailed him into a musty, shadow-ridden parlor and placed the girl on a divan. He knew how she must be suffering, for he himself was on fire from the bites of the spiders. Non-poisonous the tiny spiders might be, but their bites were like the stings of wasps, driving agony through tortured flesh.
He started to explain what had happened, but Brukner had turned and was shouting harshly: “Fada! Fada! Come here quickly!”
Over the threshold came the girl who had promised to become Andy Gale’s wife.
“Arachne!” He strode forward, took her in his arms. For a moment the child on the divan was forgotten, and he thought only of the months he had waited, of Arachne’s wonderful letter saying she would marry him.
But she was trembling now. Her lips, whispering his name, were pale, and her wide eyes refused to look into his. Something was wrong.
“What is it, Arachne? Aren’t you glad to see me?”
“Of course, Andy.” And suddenly she saw the girl on the divan. “Why, it’s little Hope Wiggin! She’s hurt!”
“She was attacked by spiders,” Gale muttered.
As if conjured up by his mention of the word, a strange, deformed creature came limping into the room. Involuntarily Gale fell back a step. This, he knew, was Fada, the crippled daughter of Nicklus Brukner.
The lame girl stopped short and rudely stared at him. He stared back. Horror and pity welled up inside him as he gazed at her thin, twisted legs, her humped body, her amazingly beautiful, sensuous face. How could any living thing be such a combination of ugliness and rare beauty?
“Spiders?” Fada said stiffly, limping to the divan. “Spiders, did you say? Let me look at her!”
Evidently she was accustomed to having her own way. Nicklus Brukner and Arachne stepped back to make room. No one spoke as the crippled girl went to her knees and pawed at the little girl’s frail body.
A scowl twisted Andy’s face. He remembered what the child had said to him in the car. You—you’re the Spider Woman’s Sweetheart! Evidently in her agony she had been confused, had really been thinking of the deformed Fada. Fada, kneeling there beside the divan, did resemble a spider. Her thin limbs and malshaped back created a frightening illusion.
Gale suddenly wanted to lurch forward and drag her away, but she was already laboriously rising to her feet. Staring straight at Arachne, the crippled girl said in a low, threatening voice: “The youngster is dead. The pain and shock have killed her. For this, my dear, the farmers will tear you into small, bloody bits, as you deserve! Spider Woman!”
Andy Gale gazed mutely at the girl he loved. For an instant he doubted that he had really heard those ghastly words hissing from Fada’s lips. But he had heard them, and so had the others.
Arachne’s face was as gray as the room’s high ceiling. She fell back, pressing a hand to her breast. The crippled girl slowly advanced, then stopped and glared at Nicklus Brukner. “Take the child home,” she snapped, “and tell the people what has happened!”
Brukner gathered the lifeless body in his arms and strode from the room. “Nothing can save you now,” the crippled girl snarled at Arachne. “Not even your handsome lover!”
“Damn you, shut up!” Gale said angrily.
Fada’s dark eyes threw hate at him as he thrust himself forward and put his hands on Arachne’s shoulders. He could feel that hate eating into him, a tangible, chilling force that was somehow foul and unclean.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said to Arachne huskily.
The crippled girl threw a harsh, bitter laugh after them but made no attempt to interfere. Slamming the door, Gale led Arachne out to the front porch where the air seemed cooler, cleaner. There he forced her gently into a chair. “Now tell me what this is all about,” he said.
She shuddered. Almost inaudibly she replied: “They’re calling me the Spider Woman, Andy. They blame me for what’s happened.”
“Well, what has happened?”
“Flood River Valley is overrun with red spiders, whole armies of them. The horrible things have destroyed the crops and attacked livestock. The damage they’ve done is frightful. Now—now they are attacking human beings.”
Gale stood still and stared at her. “And the people blame you?” he said, unbelievingly. “Why?”
“Red spiders are not native to this region, Andy. The farmers say I brought them here. My name—you know what my name means, and how I’ve always hated it.”
Yes, he knew what her name meant. To him it was the loveliest name on Earth. Greek legend told of a maiden named Arachne who, in a contest of spinning and weaving, won a victory over the goddess Athena. To punish the maiden for daring to defeat a goddess, Athena had transformed her into a spider and ordered her to spin webs throughout eternity.
The scientific name Arachnida, as applied to the spider and all its kin, owed its origin to that ancient fable. But surely that was no reason for calling Arachne Reid a spider woman!
He suddenly wanted to laugh, but the death of little Hope Wiggin had destroyed all the laughter within him. “Is it just because of your name that—” he began dully.
“No, Andy. We had a sort of insect zoo at the schoolhouse. For weeks the children brought all kinds of insects, and we kept them alive and studied them. There were fifty or more spiders, including a few red ones. When school closed, I turned them all loose, and now the people are saying that I—I—”
Gale nodded, scowling. There was something darkly sinister here, something ugly and mysterious. The significance of Arachne’s name and the fact that she had liberated a few spiders were mere scratches on the surface. Below the surface, a hateful sort of hel
l was brewing. Fada, the crippled girl, perhaps knew more about it than anyone else.
“So they claim you started the plague by turning loose a handful of spiders,” he said grimly. “Ignorant, superstitious fools, that’s what they are, and I’d like a chance to tell them so!”
Trembling with rage, Gale gripped the rotted porch railing so fiercely that his strong hands threatened to pulverize it.
“Well, we’re getting out of here,” he snorted. “They can think what they like.”
“No, Andy. I can’t go yet.”
He stared at her. Something tightened inside him.
“But you said in your letter—” he whispered.
“I’m sorry. I’m terribly sorry, Andy. Please don’t be angry.”
“You mean—you’ve changed your mind? You don’t love me?”
Her trembling lips told of the torment in her heart as she returned his stare of stunned amazement.
“I love you, Andy,” she said steadily, “but I can’t marry you. Not yet. Please don’t ask me to explain. I can’t go away with you. I’ve got to stay here.”
“But you can’t stay here!” he said hoarsely. “You mustn’t! You heard what Fada said.”
She didn’t answer immediately. Staring out into the darkness, she shuddered, then lowered her face into her hands, as if the thought of what might happen to her were more than she could bear. Gale stumbled forward and knelt beside her, put his arms around her.
“You’ve got to go away with me!” he pleaded. “Even if you no longer love me or want to marry me, you’ve got to let me take you away from here.”
He wanted her to say, “I do love you, Andy.” If only she would whisper those few simple words, the iron bands around his heart would relax and he could breathe again. Instead, she raised her head and looked at him with dead, dull eyes. “No. I can’t leave,” she said. “I’ve got to stay.”
Half an hour later, they came.
They were a rough, ugly lot, the farmers of Flood River Valley. Led by a great hulk of a man who carried a lantern in one hand and a shotgun in the other, they stormed along the road and marched into Nicklus Brukner’s yard. Gale and Arachne were on the porch when they arrived.
The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories Page 26
