American Supernatural Tales (Penguin Horror)

by S T Joshi

  “Who’s Bayne?” Holker asked rather incuriously.

  “Myron Bayne, a chap who flourished in the early years of the nation—more than a century ago. Wrote mighty dismal stuff; I have his collected works. That poem is not among them, but it must have been omitted by mistake.”

  “It is cold,” said Holker; “let us leave here; we must have up the coroner from Napa.”

  Jaralson said nothing, but made a movement in compliance. Passing the end of the slight elevation of earth upon which the dead man’s head and shoulders lay, his foot struck some hard substance under the rotting forest leaves, and he took the trouble to kick it into view. It was a fallen headboard, and painted on it were the hardly decipherable words, “Catharine Larue.”

  “Larue, Larue!” exclaimed Holker, with sudden animation. “Why, that is the real name of Branscom—not Pardee. And—bless my soul! how it all comes to me—the murdered woman’s name had been Frayser!”

  “There is some rascally mystery here,” said Detective Jaralson. “I hate anything of that kind.”

  There came to them out of the fog—seemingly from a great distance—the sound of a laugh, a low, deliberate, soulless laugh, which had no more of joy than that of a hyena night-prowling in the desert; a laugh that rose by slow gradation, louder and louder, clearer, more distinct and terrible, until it seemed barely outside the narrow circle of their vision; a laugh so unnatural, so unhuman, so devilish, that it filled those hardy man-hunters with a sense of dread unspeakable! They did not move their weapons nor think of them; the menace of that horrible sound was not of the kind to be met with arms. As it had grown out of silence, so now it died away; from a culminating shout which had seemed almost in their ears, it drew itself away into the distance, until its failing notes, joyless and mechanical to the last, sank to silence at a measureless remove.

  ROBERT W. CHAMBERS

  Robert William Chambers was born in 1865 in Brooklyn, New York. An early interest in painting led him to study art in Paris; he skillfully made use of the atmosphere of Bohemian decadence he found there in his first novel, In the Quarter (1894). His next volume, The King in Yellow (1895), largely consisting of tales of the supernatural, has become a classic in the field. Chambers went on to write other volumes of horror and fantasy, including The Maker of Moons (1896), The Mystery of Choice (1897), and In Search of the Unknown (1904). But he gradually turned his attention to sentimental romances and popular historical tales, achieving bestseller status with an array of books including Cardigan (1901), The Younger Set (1907), Some Ladies in Haste (1908), The Common Law (1911), and The Restless Sex (1918). These books, while making him one of the wealthiest authors of his period, also spelled his aesthetic damnation. He returned to the supernatural only occasionally in his later years, with such works as The Tree of Heaven (1906), The Tracer of Lost Persons (1907), Police!!! (1915), and the mediocre “Yellow Peril” novel, The Slayer of Souls (1920). From the proceeds of his writing he purchased a lavish estate in Mamaroneck, New York, where he died in 1933. Chambers’s complete supernatural tales are now collected in The Yellow Sign and Other Stories (2000).

  “The Yellow Sign” is perhaps the most horrific story in The King in Yellow. This nightmarish tale of the reanimated dead plaguing art students in New York makes tangential use of a leitmotif that runs through many of the stories: a play entitled The King in Yellow, the reading of which induces despair or madness. Other stories in the volume include “The Repairer of Reputations,” a bizarre story of New York City in the future; “The Demoiselle d’Ys,” a delicate tale of the medieval past impinging upon the present; and “The Mask,” a story exquisitely fusing beauty and horror in its account of a chemical that freezes living entities in a state of suspended animation.

  THE YELLOW SIGN

  “Let the red dawn surmise

  What we shall do,

  When this blue starlight dies

  And all is through.”

  here are so many things which are impossible to explain! Why should certain chords in music make me think of the brown and golden tints of autumn foliage? Why should the Mass of Sainte Cécile send my thoughts wandering among caverns whose walls blaze with ragged masses of virgin silver? What was it in the roar and turmoil of Broadway at six o’clock that flashed before my eyes the picture of a still Breton forest where sunlight filtered through spring foliage and Sylvia bent, half curiously, half tenderly, over a small green lizard, murmuring: “To think that this also is a little ward of God!”

  When I first saw the watchman his back was toward me. I looked at him indifferently until he went into the church. I paid no more attention to him than I had to any other man who lounged through Washington Square that morning, and when I shut my window and turned back into my studio I had forgotten him. Late in the afternoon, the day being warm, I raised the window again and leaned out to get a sniff of air. A man was standing in the courtyard of the church, and I noticed him again with as little interest as I had that morning. I looked across the square to where the fountain was playing and then, with my mind filled with vague impressions of trees, asphalt drives, and the moving groups of nursemaids and holiday-makers, I started to walk back to my easel. As I turned, my listless glance included the man below in the churchyard. His face was toward me now, and with a perfectly involuntary movement I bent to see it. At the same moment he raised his head and looked at me. Instantly I thought of a coffin-worm. Whatever it was about the man that repelled me I did not know, but the impression of a plump white grave-worm was so intense and nauseating that I must have shown it in my expression, for he turned his puffy face away with a movement which made me think of a disturbed grub in a chestnut.

  I went back to my easel and motioned the model to resume her pose. After working awhile I was satisfied that I was spoiling what I had done as rapidly as possible, and I took up a palette knife and scraped the color out again. The flesh tones were sallow and unhealthy, and I did not understand how I could have painted such sickly color into a study which before that had glowed with healthy tones.

  I looked at Tessie. She had not changed, and the clear flush of health dyed her neck and cheeks as I frowned.

  “Is it something I’ve done?” she said.

  “No,—I’ve made a mess of this arm, and for the life of me I can’t see how I came to paint such mud as that into the canvas,” I replied.

  “Don’t I pose well?” she insisted.

  “Of course, perfectly.”

  “Then it’s not my fault?”

  “No. It’s my own.”

  “I’m very sorry,” she said.

  I told her she could rest while I applied rag and turpentine to the plague spot on my canvas, and she went off to smoke a cigarette and look over the illustrations in the Courier Français.

  I did not know whether it was something in the turpentine or a defect in the canvas, but the more I scrubbed the more that gangrene seemed to spread. I worked like a beaver to get it out, and yet the disease appeared to creep from limb to limb of the study before me. Alarmed I strove to arrest it, but now the color on the breast changed and the whole figure seemed to absorb the infection as a sponge soaks up water. Vigorously I plied palette knife, turpentine, and scraper, thinking all the time what a séance I should hold with Duval who had sold me the canvas; but soon I noticed that it was not the canvas which was defective nor yet the colors of Edward. “It must be the turpentine,” I thought angrily, “or else my eyes have become so blurred and confused by the afternoon light that I can’t see straight.” I called Tessie, the model. She came and leaned over my chair blowing rings of smoke into the air.

  “What have you been doing to it?” she exclaimed.

  “Nothing,” I growled, “it must be this turpentine!”

  “What a horrible color it is now,” she continued. “Do you think my flesh resembles green cheese?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said angrily, “did you ever know me to paint like that before?”

  “No, indeed!”
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br />   “Well, then!”

  “It must be the turpentine, or something,” she admitted.

  She slipped on a Japanese robe and walked to the window. I scraped and rubbed until I was tired and finally picked up my brushes and hurled them through the canvas with a forcible expression, the tone alone of which reached Tessie’s ears.

  Nevertheless she promptly began: “That’s it! Swear and act silly and ruin your brushes! You have been three weeks on that study, and now look! What’s the good of ripping the canvas? What creatures artists are!”

  I felt about as much ashamed as I usually did after such an outbreak, and I turned the ruined canvas to the wall. Tessie helped me clean my brushes, and then danced away to dress. From the screen she regaled me with bits of advice concerning whole or partial loss of temper, until, thinking, perhaps, I had been tormented sufficiently, she came out to implore me to button her waist where she could not reach it on the shoulder.

  “Everything went wrong from the time you came back from the window and talked about that horrid-looking man you saw in the churchyard,” she announced.

  “Yes, he probably bewitched the picture,” I said, yawning. I looked at my watch.

  “It’s after six, I know,” said Tessie, adjusting her hat before the mirror.

  “Yes,” I replied, “I didn’t mean to keep you so long.” I leaned out of the window but recoiled with disgust, for the young man with the pasty face stood below in the churchyard. Tessie saw my gesture of disapproval and leaned from the window.

  “Is that the man you don’t like?” she whispered.

  I nodded.

  “I can’t see his face, but he does look fat and soft. Someway or other,” she continued, turning to look at me, “he reminds me of a dream,—an awful dream I once had. Or,” she mused, looking down at her shapely shoes, “was it a dream after all?”

  “How should I know?” I smiled.

  Tessie smiled in reply.

  “You were in it,” she said, “so perhaps you might know something about it.”

  “Tessie! Tessie!” I protested, “don’t you dare flatter by saying that you dream about me!”

  “But I did,” she insisted; “shall I tell you about it?”

  “Go ahead,” I replied, lighting a cigarette.

  Tessie leaned back on the open window-sill and began very seriously.

  “One night last winter I was lying in bed thinking about nothing at all in particular. I had been posing for you and I was tired out, yet it seemed impossible for me to sleep. I heard the bells in the city ring ten, eleven, and midnight. I must have fallen asleep about midnight because I don’t remember hearing the bells after that. It seemed to me that I had scarcely closed my eyes when I dreamed that something impelled me to go to the window. I rose, and raising the sash leaned out. Twenty-fifth Street was deserted as far as I could see. I began to be afraid; everything outside seemed so—so black and uncomfortable. Then the sound of wheels in the distance came to my ears, and it seemed to me as though that was what I must wait for. Very slowly the wheels approached, and, finally, I could make out a vehicle moving along the street. It came nearer and nearer, and when it passed beneath my window I saw it was a hearse. Then, as I trembled with fear, the driver turned and looked straight at me. When I awoke I was standing by the open window shivering with cold, but the black-plumed hearse and the driver were gone. I dreamed this dream again in March last, and again awoke beside the open window. Last night the dream came again. You remember how it was raining; when I awoke, standing at the open window, my night-dress was soaked.”

  “But where did I come into the dream?” I asked.

  “You—you were in the coffin; but you were not dead.”

  “In the coffin?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you know? Could you see me?”

  “No; I only knew you were there.”

  “Had you been eating Welsh rarebits, or lobster salad?” I began laughing, but the girl interrupted me with a frightened cry.

  “Hello! What’s up?” I said, as she shrank into the embrasure by the window.

  “The—the man below in the churchyard;—he drove the hearse.”

  “Nonsense,” I said, but Tessie’s eyes were wide with terror. I went to the window and looked out. The man was gone. “Come, Tessie,” I urged, “don’t be foolish. You have posed too long; you are nervous.”

  “Do you think I could forget that face?” she murmured. “Three times I saw the hearse pass below my window, and every time the driver turned and looked up at me. Oh, his face was so white and—and soft? It looked dead—it looked as if it had been dead a long time.”

  I induced the girl to sit down and swallow a glass of Marsala. Then I sat down beside her, and tried to give her some advice.

  “Look here, Tessie,” I said, “you go to the country for a week or two, and you’ll have no more dreams about hearses. You pose all day, and when night comes your nerves are upset. You can’t keep this up. Then again, instead of going to bed when your day’s work is done, you run off to picnics at Sulzer’s Park, or go to the Eldorado or Coney Island, and when you come down here next morning you are fagged out. There was no real hearse. That was a soft-shell crab dream.”

  She smiled faintly.

  “What about the man in the churchyard?”

  “Oh, he’s only an ordinary unhealthy, everyday creature.”

  “As true as my name is Tessie Reardon, I swear to you, Mr. Scott, that the face of the man below in the churchyard is the face of the man who drove the hearse!”

  “What of it?” I said. “It’s an honest trade.”

  “Then you think I did see the hearse?”

  “Oh,” I said, diplomatically, “if you really did, it might not be unlikely that the man below drove it. There is nothing in that.”

  Tessie rose, unrolled her scented handkerchief, and taking a bit of gum from a knot in the hem, placed it in her mouth. Then drawing on her gloves she offered me her hand, with a frank, “Good-night, Mr. Scott,” and walked out.

  II

  The next morning, Thomas, the bellboy, brought me the Herald and a bit of news. The church next door had been sold. I thanked Heaven for it, not that it being a Catholic I had any repugnance for the congregation next door, but because my nerves were shattered by a blatant exhorter, whose every word echoed through the aisle of the church as if it had been my own rooms, and who insisted on his r’s with a nasal persistence which revolted my every instinct. Then, too, there was a fiend in human shape, an organist, who reeled off some of the grand old hymns with an interpretation of his own, and I longed for the blood of a creature who could play the doxology with an amendment of minor chords which one hears only in a quartet of very young undergraduates. I believe the minister was a good man, but when he bellowed: “And the Lorrrd said unto Moses, the Lorrrd is a man of war; the Lorrrd is his name. My wrath shall wax hot and I will kill you with the sworrrd!” I wondered how many centuries of purgatory it would take to atone for such a sin.

  “Who bought the property?” I asked Thomas.

  “Nobody that I knows, sir. They do say the gent wot owns this ’ere ’Amilton flats was lookin’ at it. ’E might be a bildin’ more studios.”

  I walked to the window. The young man with the unhealthy face stood by the churchyard gate, and at the mere sight of him the same overwhelming repugnance took possession of me.

  “By the way, Thomas,” I said, “who is that fellow down there?”

  Thomas sniffed. “That there worm, sir? ’E’s night-watchman of the church, sir. ’E maikes me tired a-sittin’ out all night on them steps and lookin’ at you insultin’ like. I’d a punched ’is ’ed, sir—beg pardon, sir——”

  “Go on, Thomas.”

  “One night a comin’ ’ome with ’Arry, the other English boy, I sees ’im sittin’ there on them steps. We ’ad Molly and Jen with us, sir, the two girls on the tray service, an’ ’e looks so insultin’ at us that I up and sez: ‘Wat you looking ha
t, you fat slug?’—beg pardon, sir, but that’s ’ow I sez, sir. Then ’e don’t say nothin’ and I sez: ‘Come out and I’ll punch that puddin’ ’ed.’ Then I hopens the gate an’ goes in, but ’e don’t say nothin’, only looks insultin’ like. Then I ’its ’im one, but, ugh! ’is ’ed was that cold and mushy it ud sicken you to touch ’im.”

  “What did he do then?” I asked, curiously.

  “’Im? Nawthin’.”

  “And you, Thomas?”

  The young fellow flushed with embarrassment and smiled uneasily.

  “Mr. Scott, sir, I ain’t no coward an’ I can’t make it out at all why I run. I was in the 5th Lawncers, sir, bugler at Tel-el-Kebir, an’ was shot by the wells.”

  “You don’t mean to say you ran away?”

  “Yes, sir; I run.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s just what I want to know, sir. I grabbed Molly an’ run, an’ the rest was as frightened as I.”

  “But what were they frightened at?”

  Thomas refused to answer for a while, but now my curiosity was aroused about the repulsive young man below and I pressed him. Three years’ sojourn in America had not only modified Thomas’ cockney dialect but had given him the American’s fear of ridicule.

  “You won’t believe me, Mr. Scott, sir?”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “You will lawf at me, sir?”

  “Nonsense!”

  He hesitated. “Well, sir, it’s Gawd’s truth that when I ’it ’im ’e grabbed me wrists, sir, and when I twisted ’is soft, mushy fist one of ’is fingers come off in me ’and.”

  The utter loathing and horror of Thomas’ face must have been reflected in my own for he added:

  “It’s orful, an’ now when I see ’im I just go away. ’E maikes me hill.”

  When Thomas had gone I went to the window. The man stood beside the church-railing with both hands on the gate, but I hastily retreated to my easel again, sickened and horrified, for I saw that the middle finger of his right hand was missing.