SHOCK MASTERPIECES
Macabre! That is the word for the tales told in this book. The Dance of Death, that fearsome carnival of the skeletons, weaving their gruesome evils in and out of the lives of the living, summarizes the essence of each of these shock masterpieces.
Here are stories of terror from all climes and times: from the lingering horrors of ancient Egypt to the unnamed monsters of the frigid cold and the tropic jungle. Here are the amorphous haunts of modern cities and the reptilian shadows of the forgotten past.
THE MACABRE READER
features the most unforgettable weird stories of H. P. Lovecraft, Zealia Brown Bishop, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and many others.
Donald A. Wollhelm
Is well known to readers for his many anthologies of fantastic stories. In the field of the weird-horror story he was the originator and editor of the longest continued series of weird anthologies, the eighteen volumes of the Fantasy Reader. His most recent work in this field, prior to the present collection, was the hard-bound volume Terror in the Modern Vein (Hanover House), whose concentration on the especially 20th Century terror tale elicited the praise of reviewers.
A resident of New York, Mr. Wollheim has an extensive collection of science-fiction and weird literature, is himself an author, and is an editor professionally. On behalf of Ace Books, he has produced a number of fast-selling anthologies. Still available are The End of the World (S-183), The Earth in Peril (D-205), Men on the Moon (D-277), and The Hidden Planet (D-354).
THE
MACABRE
READER
Edited by
DONALD A. WOLLHEIM
ACE BOOKS. INC.
23West 47th Street, New York 36. N.Y.
THE MACABRE READER
Copyright ©, 1959, by Ace Books, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Crawling Horror, The Thing on the Doorstep, The Opener of the Way, copyright, 1936, by the Popular Fiction Publishing Co.
It Will Grow on You, copyright, 1942, by Esquire, Inc.
The Hollow Man, from “Night Pieces” by Thomas Burke, copyright, 1936, by D. Appleton-Century Co., Inc.; reprinted by permission of D. Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc.
The Trap, The Hunters from Beyond, The Cairn on the Headland, copyright, 1932, by Clayton Magazines, Inc.
In Amundsens Tent, The Curse of Yig, copyright, 1927, 1929, 1935, by the Popular Fiction Publishing Co., Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 59-8649
Printed in U.S.A.
THE PHANTOM-WOOWER - Thomas Lovell Beddoes
THE CRAWLING HORROR - Thorp McClusky
THE OPENER OF THE WAY - Robert Bloch
Night Gaunts - H. P. Lovecraft
IN AMUNDSEN’S TENT - John Martin Leahy
THE THING ON THE DOORSTEP - H. P. Lovecraft
THE HOLLOW MAN - Thomas Burke
IT WILL GROW ON YOU - Donald Wandrei
THE HUNTERS FROM BEYOND - Clark Ashton Smith
THE CURSE OF YIG - Zealia Brown Bishop
GREEGHEE - Ray H. Zorn
THE CAIRN ON THE HEADLAND - Robert E. Howard
THE TRAP - Henry S. Whitehead
The Dweller - H. P. Lovecraft
THE PHANTOM-WOOWER
A ghost, that loved a lady fair,
Ever in the starry air
Of midnight at her pillow stood;
And, with a sweetness skies above
The luring words of human love,
Her soul the phantom wooed.
Sweet and sweet is their poisoned note,
The little snakes of silver throat,
In mossy skulls that nest and lie,
Ever singing “die, oh! die.”
Young soul put off your flesh, and come
With me into the quiet tomb,
Our bed is lovely, dark, and sweet;
The earth will swing us, as she goes,
Beneath our coverlid of snows,
And the warm leaden sheet.
Dear and dear is their poisoned note,
The little snakes of silver throat,
In mossy skulls that nest and lie,
Ever singing “die, oh! die.”
Thomas Lovell Beddoes
THE CRAWLING HORROR
Thorp McClusky
I
I am about to set down on paper a sequence of indisputable happenings. At some of the incidents I was personally present, and the story of the others has come to me through the testimony of unimpeachable and trustworthy witnesses.
I am a country physician, having practiced in this single village all my life, as, indeed, my father did before me. The people here are farmers, mostly of Dutch or German descent, with a few Poles and Lithuanians.
About two miles beyond the village Hans Ludwig Brubaker had his farm. The farm is still there, and it is worked by relatives, but Hans has gone. No one definitely knows where, or what, he is. We can only guess.
Hans lived there alone. His mother, who outlived Brubaker, senior, died in 1929 or 1930, and Hans was left by himself. The village naturally assumed that he would presently marry. But, for some obscure reason, he did not, although he showed a decided preference for one young woman.
Now there is no way of definitely knowing just when the strange progression of events, at first of seeming unimportance, began. But, with the whole story complete, although I cannot say when it began, I can tell how it began. I know that, during the first months, Hans did not suspect anything
out of the ordinary. Obviously he misunderstood, and so ignored, the small beginnings which led slowly, step by step, toward horror. He told me, possibly three months ago, how it had begun.
“I thought the rats were fighting, at first,” he explained, with the uneasy, deprecatory laugh of the person who does not expect to be believed. “There was a powerful lot of rats about the place; the cats kept them down somewhat, but there always seemed to be more growing up, scratching and squeaking in the walls.
“But the idea of their fighting; I remember thinking that there must be one awful big fellow in there somewhere. I could hear him scuffle, and then—plop!—down he’d come off a crossbeam between the walls, soft and heavy-like.
“And the cats heard him, too. I watched them for a few weeks, snooping around, excited-like, heard that big fellow go plop every once in a while, listened to the squeaking and running in the walls that seemed, somehow, scared. The idea got into my head that the big one was a killer. He was, too, there’s not a doubt of it. Whenever he was in one place the rest were elsewhere; the mice began to desert the house for the bam. My cats got quite a number of them that way.
“Along about then a strange thing happened. One day I noticed a strange cat hanging around; white, she was, and pretty. She stayed around the porch while I was feeding my own cats, and I tried to pet her and feed her, but she wouldn’t come near me and she wouldn’t eat—seemed interested only in Peter, a big tiger-cat of mine.
“Well, that was natural, even if it did seem funny that she wouldn’t eat. Peter watched her some and that night he stayed out.
“He never came back. And I never heard the big rat, from that night on, in the walls again.
“You know how cats are around a farm—they earn their keep, and they’re good company. I always had seven or eight, sometimes as many as a dozen of them. And my cats began to disappear, one by one. In two weeks there were only a couple left.
“I couldn’t understand it; I remember that I began to think somebody was poisoning them. The two that were left looked sick and scared too, as if they knew something was wrong, and then, one day, they went away, and never came back.
“Even then I didn’t have any suspicions
that came near the truth, and for quite a while after that I didn’t notice anything.
“But it began again. This night was colder, I remember. It must have been around the first of November. I had a chunk fire going. It was evening, and I was sitting with my feet in the oven. My shoes were on the floor on the left side of the chair, a big Morris chair that’s in the kitchen— the fire was nice and warm, the doors were all shut, and I was smoking my pipe.
“The house was still as death; one of my two collie dogs was outside somewhere, and the other one, Nan, was lying close to the stove at my right, a foot or so from my chair, soaking in the warmth, sleeping. It must have been about half past nine; it certainly wasn’t later than that.
“I enjoy that last hour or so before I get into bed; everything is done for the day and I can lie back and rest and think. I had everything arranged for solid comfort, the chair-back was set just right, and my pipe was going good.
“Looking back, now, and trying to remember, I must have dozed off for a few minutes. I forget whether I put my pipe out or not—maybe it just hung loose in my left hand and went out of itself; anyway, I found it on the floor beside the stove, afterward. Yes, I was probably just sleeping, with the pipe dangling in my hand.
“My right arm was hanging from the chair arm, limp-like, and as I began to come out of that little snooze I reached down to stroke the dog. But as I came wide awake I realized that there was something queer about that thing under my hand, beside my chair.
“It didn’t feel like a dog’s back. It was the right distance from the floor, but it was slippery, and there wasn’t any hair on it. My hand kept moving, but right off I knew that, whatever I was petting, it wasn’t any dog. I had the idea that if I pressed my hand down I could push my fingers right into it.
“All this took a lot less time than in the telling—maybe three or four seconds. I began to be scared. I turned to look, and God knows what I expected to see—certainly nothing like what was there.
“It was a slimy sort of stuff, transparent-looking, without any shape to it. It looked as though if you picked it up it would drip right through your fingers. And it was alive—I don’t know how I knew that, but I was sure of it even before I looked. It was alive, and a sort of shapeless arm of it lay across the dog’s back and covered her head. She didn’t move.
“I guess I yelled then, Doctor Kurt, and I jumped out of the chair and reached for the poker. That slimy thing hadn’t moved, but I knew that if it wanted to it could move like lightning. It was heavy-looking, too; I remember thinking that it must have weighed about fifty pounds.
“I hit at the thing with a poker, and quick as thought the whole mess started sliding across the floor, stretching out as worms do, oozing under the crack beneath the door that leads onto the porch. Before I knew it the thing was gone.
“I looked at Nan. She hadn’t moved, and she seemed a-sleep. I shook her until she opened her eyes. And her eyes looked dead. …
“Well, Doctor Kurt, you’ll believe me when I tell you that I didn’t sleep that night. I caught myself listening for noises, not that I knew what to listen for, except the sound of that thing sliding back into the house again; for I remember that it could go through a crack! If I looked once around that kitchen, everywhere, I looked a hundred times.
“Peg didn’t come back all night. That was strange, because she usually stayed right around close. It was just as though she was afraid.
“As it was just getting light Peg came up on the porch.
I was glad to hear her, and I let her in quick. Then she saw Nan.
“She made a funny sort of howling noise, and her ears dropped flat against her head. Then she went for Nan. Froth was beginning to run from her mouth—it was just as though, although she was trying to kill Nan, she was deathly afraid.
It wasn’t pretty to see.
“Nan didn’t fight back. She just lay there, as though she didn’t see what it was, as though she didn’t know enough to try to fight, or run. If I hadn’t dragged Peg off, Nan would have been dead in another minute. And even after I had put Peg outdoors Nan didn’t move much; she just shuddered a little, and she didn’t even lick at the places where the blood was running down.
“I had to shoot her, then. It made me sick to do it. Then I dragged her out off the back porch and went to the bam to do the milking. I didn’t eat any breakfast. I felt sick to the stomach.
“After I had finished die chores around the bam I got a shovel and went back to the house.
“Nans body was gone. There wasn’t a sign of her—not a bone or a patch of hair—nothing but a clean scuffed place in the grass. At first I thought I might have made a mistake; maybe I had left her around the other side of the house. But I went around to the front porch, and Nan was nowhere.
“The funny thing, Doctor Kurt, is that somehow I knew that it would happen just like it did.
“I didn’t say anything to anybody, then. I just watched, and waited. And a few weeks later I saw the dog that looked like Nan, Doctor Kurt. It was Nan, yet it wasn’t. I saw her hanging around the barnyard, and I whistled to her, L-absent-minded, and then I remembered that Nan was dead.
But it looked like Nan, and I knew that it was waiting for Peg to come out.
“I knew that it wasn’t Nan, Doctor Kurt, because it didn’t come when I whistled.
“Two or three times that week I saw that dog that looked like Nan and that wasn’t Nan hanging around, and each time she looked thinner and weaker. And then, after a few days, I didn’t see her any more. She had just gone away.
“For two weeks nothing happened. Then, one day, I spotted a strange dog, a big dog, hanging around. And that night Peg vanished. She never came back.
“You can see how it was, Doctor Kurt? I began to see a sort of pattern to it. First the mice, then the cats, then the dogs. I got to wondering if it would get the cattle next, or maybe the people.”
Abruptly, Hans paused. I think that, then, I carried it off perfectly. I did not utter a word, but merely waited impassively. Whatever I did, or omitted to do, it gave Hans confidence, for after a moment he went on.
“Doctor Kurt, as sure as I’m sitting here, it’s gone from animals to humans!”
“Humans?” I asked.
Hans nodded. “It’s happened,” he said softly. “One afternoon, three weeks ago, I was standing in the yard—you know that along about then we were having stiff frosts every morning and night? I saw this strange boy coming down the road.
“He wasn’t more than twelve or thirteen years old, and he was wearing odds and ends of clothes that looked as though he had picked them up anywhere. I looked at him, and right away I knew that he was a runaway.
“The kid as he walked along kept looking at the house as if he had half a mind to stop. But he didn’t stop, just went on past, slowly, looking back from time to time. I went down the driveway, and I almost called out to him, but I didn’t. It was as if something inside me said, ‘Don’t call— that thing you see there isn’t a boy, it’s Death in the shape of a boy.’ That’s what I seemed to think, Doctor Kurt; I was scared, and ashamed, too. I was so ashamed that I went right down to the road with the idea of yelling at the boy. Then I happened to look down at my feet.
“You know I told you that there had been a frost, Doctor Kurt? It was cold enough all night to form good solid ice. And there had been a thaw for a couple of days beforehand. Well, that slushy stuff in the road had frozen, not hard enough to hold a horse or a cow, but plenty hard enough to hold a fairly heavy man, because when I walked on it it didn’t crack or break except once in every five or six steps. But where that kid had walked, the ice was broken at every step—and he looked to weigh not more than half what I dol “I looked at those tracks in the frozen slush, Doctor Kurt, and then I turned around and walked to the house. I knew then that the thing had come back. Maybe my house is home to it; maybe, because it began in my house, it likes to come back.
“I wanted to tell, then. But I was afraid people wo
uld laugh. But I’m going to tell now, because two days ago the Peterson kid disappeared, and he hasn’t come back. And what’s more, he’ll never come back! He’s part of that thing that began in my walls, with the rats.”
Hans stopped speaking. I knew that there was nothing more for him to tell. The room was oddly silent. Presently he asked, “What can be done about it?”
I didn’t know what to say. But I felt that I should say something, should try, at least, to quiet the man’s nerves.
“Go home,” I advised at last, gently. “Get a good night’s sleep, and come back tomorrow. I’ll have thought it over by then.’’
II
That night I sat up late, pondering the story Hans had told me. Perhaps, at that time, I almost believed him. And in the morning, as I had expected, he returned.
It all looked much more impossible in the bright light of mid-morning than it had looked the evening before. I grasped at the idea that, although something extremely strange might be going on, yet the explanation might come, presently, of itself, in a purely matter-of-fact manner. In effect, that is what I told Brubaker.
Hans went away disappointed, almost angry. And not more than twenty minutes after he left my office, Hilda Lang came in. She seemed extraordinarily perturbed.
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