The Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK™ Vol 2: George T. Wetzel

by George T. Wetzel

  Why should such a tragedy concern the wanderer? As I stood thus musing, a preternatural hush fell upon everything. The only silence comparable to it is that total dead quiet at dawn when, night having ended nocturnal creatures cease their activity to fall asleep, and diurnal animals still slumber, not yet having drained the glass of repose—a time truly when all the world is closest to absolute stillness.

  The sudden silence was exactly like that, except the time was near 9 P.M. and downtown traffic noise had been increasing, though far away, in a muffled crescendo.

  Now that traffic roar had been effaced and a hush hung over the air.

  The uncanny quiet induced the relaxation I had hoped for the night long, so, giving up my shadowing of the wanderer, I returned home while in this somniferous state and sank into an oblivious sleep.

  The next day the normal cycle of living regulated me and I was in cheerful spirits until I read that harrowing datum in the paper. Then the enigma of the wanderer rushed back and I began collating my experiences and an appalling truth dawned on me.

  Something frightened that man, pursued him, drove him into vagrancy. Probably he had a sense of localization as to benches, going to the same one each morning in Mt. Morris Park. But on the morning of June 14 because of intuitive fear or suspicion, he stayed away—that someone else sat on his particular bench there and something happened to this unwary person and to another man sitting on a nearby bench—that two days later the trail of the intended victim was picked up.

  Bronx Home News, June 17, 1931—in Morningside Park, a cop noticed a man seemingly asleep on a bench. And when he tried to shake the vagrant awake, he found the man dead, heart failure. The description of him was—the wanderer, the man of the crowd whom I had trailed trying to unravel his mystery; and the morning I left him was when he died. I know now what he fled and fear lest I too must be pursued unto death.

  EATER OF THE DEAD

  Originally published in HPL, (1972).

  …The face of the Great Sphinx at Gizeh is both a riddle and the soul of eon-burdened Egypt. Were its features as we see them now, mutilated so by superstitious Arabs and gnawed at by Time or had it been deliberately carved that way by the ancients and why?

  Only after I had looked at it often enough did I penetrate to the hideous truth; for the gruesomely broken nose was the clue. It was the face of a mummified corpse.

  —Journal of Stephen Vierne

  * * * *

  I was never a superstitious man. Death to me was but another biological aspect of the human body—that of chemical decomposition.

  Ghosts of the dead were, to my mind, the hallucination of a guilt-ridden conscience. So in my cynical but unsuspecting materialism, I robbed modern graves of the fresh dead for rings and jewelry, and sold their bodies—if very fresh—or their acid-reduced skeletons to more callous, unquestioning anatomical schools and medical equipment supply houses.

  When punitive laws were passed—forced by public outrage over a series of blatantly bungled but unprosecuted body-snatching—I began to look for safer but equally lucrative fields. It was during the furor over the discovered body-snatching that an anonymous letter (written, I suspected, by such a “resurrectionist”) wryly asked the editor of one crusading newspaper if all archaeologists were not equally criminal, for did they not rob the ancient tombs and graves of Mesoamerica, Persia, Crete, Egypt, etc. of their interred dead!

  There was my new enterprise—suggested unintentionally in that letter. The robbing of ancient tombs—whether under the excuse of science or not—was not imperiled by legal action of the deceased’s survivors, for such survivors were many centuries dead themselves at the closest.

  But I still found an obstacle, even though small. No matter what the modern nation with aged burials, the authorities wanted the archeologists to cut them in on most, if not all, of the loot and finally passed restrictive laws that all such discovered plunder was governmental antiquities and could not be removed from their country. But this was not publicly “offensive” (as modern grave-robbing was) as I could, if caught, claim it had been committed in the name of “science.” It was easy in those distant days, then, to laugh at my cleverness.

  I decided to form a “business company” to seek ancient artifacts; and since Egyptian items always fetched the best price, her hoary-aged tombs would be my objective.

  To steal Egyptian artifacts, I naively began with a survey of the most obvious spot: the known necropolis of thousands of years, the Valley of the Kings; the very plethora of interments there made my fingers itch. But in the course of seeking information on that area, I was completely discouraged to learn that between the tomb-robbing scandals of antiquity and the digging by modern day archaeologists, the site had been pretty well picked clean. The few discovered and unopened tombs of recent times were protected by armed guards of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities.

  My researches next brought me details of frustrated efforts of scientists to find the unexcavated mortuary temple below the pyramid at Dashur, and a second account of the mute and mysterious pyramid of El Kuleh at Luxor which likewise had defied all attempts to locate its entrance. Both structures were certain to contain untouched treasure. But their proximity to urban centers ruled against rifling them—even if I could find ingress where others using the most technical sophistications (including even a magnetron) had miserably failed.

  While in the Cairo Museum, I stumbled by accident across a very old and very evil book an Arab wrote of his travels in the Egyptian and Arabian deserts in the Dark Ages. And I read that which proposed a third, though very speculative, possibility, even though that Arab was considered (by occultists only, I should admit) as an accepted though infamous authority on certain other eldritch matters.

  This authority had heard around desert campfires a weird belief, and had verified it himself, he claimed. The desert people had since time immemorial observed that tracks of carrion-eating jackals would be found circling, as if inquisitively following a scent, some spot in the Libyan desert beneath which ancient, rock-hewn sepulchers were hidden.

  Having decided not only “where” but “how” I would seek ancient burials, I turned to the problems of obtaining at least two co-partners possessing specialized talents the project called for. Because of his knowledge of ancient art objects as well as of more modern ones of Medieval and Reformation periods, I recruited Karpis, a dishonest dealer in art frauds and copies, living on the Bosporus. He would examine whatever we dug up, advising what was worth the most for our limited means of return transport across the desert to the Mediterranean Sea.

  His nationality had long been a mystery to me despite his habitual fez, implying Turkish or Lebanese ancestry; once I had heard him referred to as “Karpoulis,” a Greek sounding name. He accepted my offer on one odd condition: that he be allowed to carry away, besides his own share of the plunder, 15 or 20 pounds of earth from whatever ancient burial we discovered.

  The other partner was a professional killer with a thirst for anonymity to the extent of requesting we call him by the racial designation of “Dago.” Because of his obvious Mafia connections, he was able to interest a certain international “business” organization in buying whatever we came away with.

  My two “business partners” met me in Abu Roash in the north where the pyramids start; from there we traveled southward by bus, following the continuous line of pyramids—which the Arabs, with keen perception, call the “mountains of pharaoh”—till we reached Lisht where the artificial mountain range ends and the real mountains of Libya begin. In Lisht the four Bedouins I had hired through a Cairo agency were waiting, and I told them they were to dig for an archaeological expedition in the Libyan desert.We left that day and soon were passing the Valley of the Kings, that grim mortuary of the pharaohs, remote in its awesome desolation and maggoty with archaeologists’ exploratory burrows, and then we entered the Libyan wastes.

 
* * * *

  After a few days of aimless wandering and growing restiveness of the others, I came across the tracks of a jackal and, after directing that we trail after them, saw my partners glance at each other. The tracks proceeded for a whole day in random fashion. The next morning we resumed tracking, I alone surveying the signs of the animal’s frequent pausing to sniff at sun-scorched sands and halting once where it uncovered a desiccated bone fragment.

  Near sunset, when I could sense a mutiny building up, the tracks veered towards a sunken depression in the hot sands where the animal had walked the vast circumference first, then criss-crossed and retrod it in apparently erratic fashion, but which I knew was due to frustration.

  “Here we dig,” I informed my two partners, and turning to the four Bedouins, repeated the statement, adding orders to pitch our camp about fifty feet away.

  Dago, having watched overcuriously for several days my minute study of the jackal spoor, could contain his perplexity no longer and insisted on an explanation.

  “Because,” I said, “those desert scavengers always know where there’s been an ancient burial.”

  He was incredulous.

  The Bedouins began scraping up sand with small wicker baskets; in an hour they excitedly brought to me clay chips mixed with the sand, the inevitable proof of underground quarrying and a tomb. We all pitched in then and before long uncovered the camouflaged entrance which our crowbars forced open. Within it a passage indistinctly slanted downwards; out of it there came an exhalation of a noxious odor which I found disagreeable but by which all the others hardly appeared to be affected.

  The slanting passage ended in a vast hypostyle hall of a mortuary temple whose colossal pillars, carved with evilly obscene hieroglyphs, were lit up sinisterly by our flashlights and whose remoter reaches were obscured in crazily distorted shadows. But I was not interested in exploring that, only the mummy boxes. The result—if I interpreted the signs before me and correctly correlated them with my reading—was one of several known mass re-burials of the noble dead by the Saites of the 26th Dynasty, to thwart ancient tomb robbers who had already produced a scandal in Ramses IX’s reign.

  There seemed to be no elaborate death traps set to guard this sepulcher, as I cautiously entered the hypostyle hall; instead the ancient priests had sought to discourage and frighten away would-be tomb robbers with a dreadful curse written in hieroglyphics atop one wall. Beneath it the warning was duplicated in a fresco of the Hall of Judgment where the soul of the intruder was weighed in the scales of Osiris.

  But it was the abomination, waiting to render the sentence of Osiris’ judgment, that temporarily made me ill at ease, though I am not a superstitious individual; a creature that must have been more a symbolic representation of the underworld than an actual entity, for no such biological grotesque could ever have existed: a winged, composite abnormality; a gargoyle of ancient Khen; a repellent crocodile-headed hideousness with the trunk of a lion and the talons of a bird; the ghoulish Ammit, Eater of the Dead.

  But Egyptian curses were nothing new. What afterwards befell the openers of King Tutankhamen’s tomb was hardly more than superstitious coincidence. Besides I had rifled many a modern grave without ill effect or being followed by curses or hauntings.

  As I started to collect jeweled trinkets I noticed there was a scene carved on the nearest sarcophagus which Dago studied with such an intent air of fascination that I looked too. It was a macabre scene of priestly embalmers wearing the ritualistic masks of Anubis (the jackal-headed god of their profession) while they bent over a corpse whose body organs were being removed and placed in the canopic jars behind them. In his brutish ignorance he thought it a sadistic scene of a torture-murder, saying as much to me. I shrugged; there was no point in educating a person with such atrophied humanity.

  We pried the lid off this sarcophagus, then lifted out the lacquered mummy box. As we pried it open, my nostrils were assailed by the invisible cloud of aromatic balms and spices and natron that poured forth; that, and a faint putrescent stench of dried blood from several thousand years ago. I remarked on this latter stench only to have my two companions look at me oddly.

  The mummy wrapping held a significant brownish discoloration. Unwrapping the head revealed the pharaoh had died a violent death: one side of the face had suffered a terrible wound—a dry, fibrous ruin tenuously held together by the cobweb of a tomb spider. I could recall nothing in the incomplete History of Manetho of this obscure Pharaoh Rekhmes.

  I ascended to the outside to forestall any entrance by our Bedouins who now were growing concerned because we had not returned immediately; telling them that the tomb was full of mephitic vapors which Europeans could resist better than inhabitants of desert climes like themselves appeared to satisfy them.

  Returning then to that subterranean void of old, I saw that Karpis, who had commenced digging up charnel earth as per our agreement, ceased in his labors and was spellbound like Dago but by something different. From behind I could see him gaping at a six-foot idol on whose base was the hieroglyphy for Setekh. I saw him attempt several sketches of the god, tearing up one after another as the anomalous features eluded his pencil. His predicament was understandable as Setekh, the strangest of all the ancient Egyptian gods, had the head of an animal puzzling and unidentifiable to modern zoologists.

  Concentrating only on the most priceless of the smaller items and totally eschewing anything taking up excessive knapsack space, our endeavor for this initial stage was over. We would return later. We began pulling down our tents.

  I thought nothing of it when Dago asked two of the Bedouins into the tomb to help him with something; Karpis and I were too busy packing the stolen treasures. When he reappeared, alone, and requested the remaining Bedouins to come also, I decided it was unusual—as did one of them who nervously doubted the reputed mephitic vapors were gone—and I dropped my work and hurried down into the excavation. Halfway within the underground passage, I bumped into Dago and angrily demanded an explanation.

  “Dead men tell no tales.” He drew his finger across his throat, smiling.

  “It wasn’t necessary! There was another way to handle them.” I was enraged at his arrogant presumption. “Even after we replace the surface sand, this area will now become too conspicuous by a horde of jackals drawn from miles around by the scent of fresh death. The desert Arabs will notice; then no more private treasure house.”

  * * * *

  On the way to the sea Dago deliberately kept attempting to disclose the unpleasant details of the four Bedouins’ deaths. Before I finally had to threaten him to shut up, he had got as far as revealing that each man died dissimilarly, boasting as a bully does that to use the same method in each case would have been lacking in professional finesse and imagination.

  I have seen this morbid “pride” in other Mafia killers during the Roaring 1920’s, murderers who also indifferently talked of each “hit” being novel and inventive.

  An Arabian fishing boat ferried us from Egypt’s delta region northward into the Aegean Sea; and we were shortly making a landfall of the little Grecian island on which we must await the buyer of our goods. I saw as we neared what appeared to be the cindery excrescence of an ancient, drowned volcano, with gloomy cypress trees and funeral-like ruins on its hills etched against the sunset. The scene was like a melancholy evocation of a locality seen in a dream…hauntingly reminiscent of a macabre landscape painted by Arnold Becklin of the grim Ponzianne Islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea. We landed and rented rooms in the taverna.

  That evening Dago went to bed early, complaining of an obscure fever, while I shared a bottle of the queerly resin-flavored wine of Greece with the tavern keeper. Karpis went out, carrying a small canvas bag, mumbling something about rambling among the ancient burial ruins on the hillside.

  It could have been an hour later that Dago strayed down, not to partake of the wine, but to lament of dreams indu
ced by his fever. One of them was a nightmarish experience in which Anubis-masked Egyptian priests bent over him with curious surgical instruments in their hands—the same scene as carved on Rekhmes’ sarcophagus. I decided not to inform him that the priestly-embalmers de-viscerated a corpse with such instruments.

  In the morning I was awakened out of a deep sleep not by the light of day nor birdsongs but by an exotically spiced odor, unidentifiable but maddeningly familiar. As I drowsily opened my eyes, I grumbled, “Who is burning that damn incense?”

  I got up, dressed and poked around in the deserted downstairs. The smell, even though faint, not only filled the atmosphere, it literally permeated the whole house. Presently Karpis and the taverna keeper were astir in their rooms; the odor began to dissipate with the rising of a sea breeze filtering through a just-opened window or door.

  Dago had not yet come down to breakfast, so in view of his fever, we apprehensively went upstairs. In the hallway near his door lingered only a trace of that spicy, natron-like scented air. Within his tightly shut room it was overpowering; and it became increasingly perplexing to me that Karpis and the taverna keeper did not remark about it.

  Karpis was staring at our late partner whose eyes were fixed glassily on some unspeakable horror.

  “He died of the fever,” opined my partner; the taverna keeper nodded assent.

  While they dug a grave, I contrived, unsuccessfully, to get into Dago’s room—now locked—to examine the dead man’s chest and abdomen to nullify a disturbing idea I had.

  That same day a millionaire’s yacht anchored off the island. Karpis boarded her and exchanged our plunder for money, without incident. As they steamed off, I pondered on what sort of return voyage they would have with that cargo. For I was thinking of another ship and another cargo years ago, of the strange shipwreck off the Spanish coast and how everything was lost, including Pharaoh Menkure’s mummy box which they were carrying.