Beyond This

by Francis Q

  Instantly, it seemed as if a raging inferno had consumed Charles Waverly’s brain, and with the cunning born of madness, he suddenly knew just how he would blow up the labs and all their inhuman creations.

  Portrait from Life

  ARTIST TOM REDFIELD angrily hurled his canvas across the studio and clenched his hands in despair.” I’m no good… I’ll never be any good!” he shouted. “Nothing I draw seems to come to life… it’s all flat, two-dimensional, dead! I would give my soul to draw a single picture that would really seem to have life in it!”

  Knock-knock!

  Still angry, Tom stalked to the door and flung it open. “Yes?” he said to the tall, dark, saturnine man standing in the doorway. “What do you want?”

  The swarthy man smiled apologetically. “Forgive me,” he said in a strangely hollow voice, “I couldn’t help overhearing your words as I passed in the hallway… and you’re lucky that I did.

  I’m a traveling peddler, frequenting the artist’s district, selling art supplies. I’ve just gotten rid of my entire stock… with the exception of one rare, imported pencil… and when I heard your fervent wish, I immediately knew that this pencil was made for you! Allow me to present it to you… as a gift”

  Tom suspiciously took the black pencil from the man and began examining the unfamiliar, cabalistic writing on its side.

  “What’s this strange. foreign lettering on it?” he asked.

  “Where did you import it from?”

  “From the…ehm… warmer regions! May it fulfill your artistic wishes!”

  The man’s voice seemed to be oddly fading away, and by the time Tom looked up from his examination of the pencil, the peddler was gone. Tom wondered how he could have gotten down the stairs so fast, but shrugged his shoulders and turned back to his studio. He knew the peddler was either a practical joker or a quack… but he felt strangely impelled to try the new pencil out.

  Sitting down at his drawing hoard, Tom began sketching in a self-portrait, frequently looking at the mirror in front of him as a guide.

  Tom always started his portraits from the top, and by the time he completed the hair, he suddenly noticed that his hand,brushing against the paper, actually felt hair! Excited, he touched it more carefully… and there was no doubt about it… it had the texture, color and feel of actual hair… his hair!

  Wonderingly, with a growing sense of triumph, Tom quickly sketched in eyes that instantly took on the glow and color of life… nostrils that seemed to quiver with lifelike excitement… lips that were moist with constant wetting… a chin that actually felt as bristly as a two-day-old-beard!

  By this time, he was beside himself with exultation. Quickly sketching in a throat that seemed to throb with the very pulse of life, he drew the corded veins that were now tensely outlined on his own thin neck.

  “Oops… made that vein too thick… I’ll just erase it with the eraser on the other end of the pencil!”

  Tom began rubbing vigorously with the eraser against the neck he had just drawn… and suddenly stopped, look of horror on his face and a gurgling sound on his lips. The last sight his dying eyes took in was that of his reflection in the mirror… the reflection of a man with a deathly gash in his throat!

  By the time Tom’s little body slumped to the floor, and the tall, dark, saturnine man was in the room, ready to collect his pencil… and a human soul!

  Unknown Ghost

  THE GLOOMY FOG SWIRLED IN from the sea over the Danish town of Elsinore, and the tongues of mist crept eerily over the ramparts of Kronborg Castle just east of the town. But the mist and the fog didn’t seem to perturb the hundreds of illustrious people gathered in the castle’s great baronial hall… indeed, all of them welcomed having the whole scene shrouded in the fog’s white robes, as if the weather had been made to order for the great play that was about to be presented.

  It was truly a great occasion, this 350th anniversary celebration of the writing of Hamlet. In 1600, the immortal Shakespeare had penned that great tragedy: and now, in 1950, the play was to be put on at Elsinore, the actual locale of that ghost ridden drama. The greatest actors and actresses in the English speaking world were to put on the play, and the most illustrious figures in the dramatic and literary worlds were gathered there to witness it, and to pay homage to Shakespeare.

  At last the play opened on the grim, stark battlements of the castle, and when the ghost of Hamlet’s father appeared, the entire audience was suddenly stricken with a strange wonderment… and with a touch of spine-chilling fear. Never had a ghost in a play been more ghostly, never had a more fearsome apparition glided upon a stage, swathed from head to foot in loose, flowing robes of deathly white, with nothing but a pair of burning eyes glowing uncannily from the depths of the shadowed hood, the ghost seemed to be an actual wraith summoned from the unknown to act a part in the play. And even the other members of the acting company had to conceal their awe and astonishment at the wonderfully effective costume which Sir Malcolm Shawcross, the great Shakespearean actor who was portraying the part of the ghost, had managed to get up.

  And then, in hollow, sepulchral tones that seemed to emanate from some other spectral world, the ghost began to speak the lines from the play:

  “My hour is almost come, then I to sulphurous and tormenting flames must render up myself… I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres…”

  Finally, when the play was over and Hamlet’s body had been carried from the scene, thunderous applause broke out from the audience… and the wildest bravos were saved for Sir Shawcross, who took his bows as the ghost with such solemn, wraithlike motions that he provoked even more tumultuous applause.

  Then, when the curtain rang down for the last time, the players turned to Sir Shawcross to congratulate him on his out-of-this-world performance, but he had somehow managed to slip silently away… almost as if he had vanished into thin air. Smiling at the evidence of the actor’s modesty, they hurried to his dressing room in one of the wings of the castle… and there found the limp, unconscious figure of Sir Shawcross lying on the floor, still dressed in the suit in which he had arrived at the castle.

  When they finally revived him, Sir Shawcross sat dazedly up, asking, “What happened? The play… is it over? I…I was about to go on stage, it must have been hours ago, when something cold and clammy suddenly struck me from behind… I… I guess I’ve been unconscious ever since!”

  A slow, dawning look of horror grew on the faces of the other actors. “Then… then if you didn’t play the part of the ghost,” one said quiveringly, “Who did?”

  Yes… who?

  Revenge in Time

  NOT ALL GENIUSES ARE MAD, but Oswald Farnsworth was.

  He had a single, maniacal obsession… to wreak revenge on the grandfather who’d disinherited him and forced him to continue his scientific researches in abject poverty. Yes, it was old Grandfather Phineas, the oil millionaire, who had cut Oswald off without a cent when he refused to marry the scatterbrained, but socially-prominent girl his grandfather had picked out for him. But now… now Oswald was about to have his revenge! His grandfather had died of a heart attack just a day after Oswald had thwarted him, and just an hour after irately changing his will… but Oswald was not to be thwarted of his vengeance. For twenty years, from the day his grandfather had died, Oswald had spent every waking and dreaming moment in planning and perfecting the time-machine that would enable him to go back twenty years in time and kill old Phineas… before he had a chance to change his will and disinherit his grandson!

  And now the machine was ready… now, with just the flick of a switch… Grandfather Phineas’ old drawing room suddenly filled with a strange, unearthly hum, and for a fraction of a moment Oswald reeled dizzily, flung about in the magnetic temporal-displacement field. But then everything cleared… and Oswald suddenly saw a figure rise in alarm from the armchair in front of him. There was no doubt ab
out it… it was Phineas Farnsworth, with the familiar hawk-eyed, aristocratic mien… but a Phineas who was strangely young, no more than thirty.

  Oswald had intended going back just twenty years, when his grandfather was sixty…but apparently his calculations had been off somewhere, and he’d gone back some fifty years in time. But this was no time for regrets… this was a time for revenge… revenge for all the miserable hovels he’d been forced to live and experiment in…revenge for all the years of bitter hunger and poverty! Drawing a dagger, Oswald advanced menacingly on the young Phineas. “I’m your grandson, Oswald,” he grated out, “here to see that you never change your will!”

  “You…you’re mad!” quivered Phineas, drawing back. “You… you can’t be my grandson… because…”

  “Mad, am I?” shouted Oswald. “I’ll show you how mad I am… there!”

  The dagger blade sank deep into Phineas’ chest, and he fell to the carpet. “…because I… I’m not married… yet!” he managed to gasp out… before he died. Too late, Oswald realized his horrible mistake… saw in a single, searing moment that if Phineas was not yet married, then Oswald’ s father was not yet born…and Oswald himself could never have existed! Yes, it was too late… because Oswald no longer existed…except in the shadowy limbo of the great Unknown!

  The Pied Piper

  PROFESSOR FERGUS JENNINGS UNLOCKED THE DOOR to his experimental animal laboratory, flicked on the light… and stood there, open-mouthed, aghast! “It… it can’t be!”, he gasped, his eyes fixed on the small white rat that had somehow managed to get out of its cage… and was now standing in front of a couple of books propped up on the lab table. “It…it’s moving its head and turning those pages as if it’s actually reading… but it… it can’t be!”

  Weakly, the professor staggered back into a chair and sat there watching as the rat lifted up a forepaw and flicked another page, bobbing its head swiftly from left to right as if it were reading rapidly, and then flicking another page. In one blinding moment of realization, the professor knew that he wasn’t dreaming… that this was actually happening, and he knew why! “It worked!” he shouted at the top of his voice. “That’s the rat I fed new intelligence-stimulator to… and the solution increased the rat’s intelligence a millionfold… a billionfold! And if it could do that to a rat, the solution will raise man’s intelligence to godlike heights!” The professor suddenly became aware that the rat was sitting with its head cocked to one side, staring at him peculiarly, with an eerie look of uncanny intelligence. “Great Scott… did… did it understand me?” he wondered. “Just how intelligent is it?” Cautiously approaching the rat with his hand stretched out to grab it, the professor was startled as the rat darted from the table, landed on the floor, and scampered away into a rat-hole in the wall. The professor shrugged his shoulders in resignation, and turned to look at the books the rat had been reading.”Uhmm…a book of nursery tales, opened to the story about the Pied Piper… books on musical composition… and textbooks on hypnotism and mesmerism! I wonder…”

  Suddenly aware of his danger, the professor ran gasping from the room. “There… there could only be one reason why the rat picked out those particular books to read…and if I find any of my musical instruments gone, I’ll know I was right!” Bursting into his hobby room, the professor was just in time to see the end of his flute being dragged into another rat-hole, and then a bright-eyed rat face seemed to snicker but at him, before it, too, disappeared into the hole. Cold sweat broke out on the professor’s face as he ran to his bedroom and began packing hastily. “I…I’ve got to leave before… before…” A thin, eerie wailing suddenly seemed to emanate from the walls of the professor’s cliffside house… a high, plaintive melody that gripped him, held him entranced, drew him toward it… down… down the stairs, out onto the lawn where the white rat was dragging the flute along, blowing into it at the some time. Slowly, with the haunting, irresistible melody filling the air, the incredible flutist progressed along the lawn towards the edge of the cliff, with the professor walking slowly behind, his eyes wide open but sightless… like a sleepwalker caught up in a web of strange enchantment. Then, at the cliff’s edge, the flutist paused… but the professor didn’t. The white rat waited until it heard the splash of the professor’s body hitting the water a hundred feet below… and then it ran back into the laboratory to release the rest of the laboratory rats… and let them sip at the marvelous intelligence-stimulator which would soon enable the rats to rule the world!

  Greetings

  Have you enjoyed the journey? I hope so.

  Now I ask you only a small favor: just tell me what do you think of this book.

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  See you soon.

  Francis.