Horrors Unknown

by Sam Moskowitz (ed)

  Several times Costello and I addressed him, but each time he cut us short with a sharp, irritable “Sssh!” continuing his crouching watch beside the window, staring intently into the shaded garden beyond.

  It must have been some three-quarters of an hour later that we sensed, rather than heard, the scuffling of light footfalls on the grass outside, heard the door-knob cautiously tested, then the scuttering of more steps, scarcely louder than the sound of windblown leaves, as the visitant rounded the cottage wall and made for the window beside which de Grandin mounted guard.

  A puff of autumn wind, scented with the last blooms of summer’s rose beds, sent the light clouds drifting from before the moor’s pale lantern, and, illuminated in the pallid light of the night’s goddess, we saw framed at the window-square the terrifying vision which had followed young Ratliffs story of his escape two nights before.

  “My Gawd!” Costello’s bass voice was shrill and treble with sudden terror as the thing gazed malevolently in at us. Next instant his heavy service revolver was out, and shot after shot poured straight into the hideous, grinning face at the window.

  He might as well have fired boiled beans from a pea-shooter for all the effect his bullets had. Distinctly I saw a portion of the mummy’s ear clipped off by a flying slug of lead, saw an indentation sink in the thing’s head half an inch above the right eye as a soft-nosed bullet tore through skin and withered flesh and frontal bone; but the emaciated body never paused in its progress. One withered leg was lifted across the window-sill; two long, unfleshed arms, terminating in hands of enormous length, were thrust out toward the Irishman; a grin of such hellish hatred and triumph as I had never conceived possible disfigured the object’s visage as it pressed onward, its long, bony fingers opening and closing convulsively, as though they already felt their victim’s neck within their grasp.

  “Monsieur, you do play truant from hell!” De Grandin’s announcement was made in the most casual manner as he rose from his half-kneeling posture beside the window and placed himself directly in the mummy’s path, but there was a quaver in his voice which betrayed the intensity of his emotion.

  A noise—you could hardly call it a snarl nor yet a scream, but a sound midway between the two—emanated from the thing’s desiccated throat as it turned on him, threw out one hand and snatched at his throat.

  There was a tiny spark of light, as though a match had been struck, then a mighty, bursting blaze, as if time had turned backward in its flight for a second and the midday sun had thrown its beams through the midnight blackness of the room, a swishing whistling sound, as of air suddenly released from tremendous pressure, and a shriek of mad, unsupportable anguish. Then the fierce blazing of some inflammable substance suddenly set alight. My eyes started from my face as I seemed to see the mummy’s scraggy limbs and emaciated torso writhe within a very inferno of fire. Then:

  “Cher Sergent, it might be well to call the fire department; this place will surely burn about our ears unless les pompiers hurry with their hose, I fear,” remarked Jules de Grandin as calmly as though advising us the night was fine.

  “But—but—howly Mither o’ Moses!” Sergeant Costello demanded as we turned from watching the firemen salvaging the remnants of Kolisko’s cottage; “how did ye manage it, Doctor de Grandin, sor? May I never eat another mess o’ corned beef an’ cabbage if I didn’t shoot th’ thing clean through th’ head wid me gun, an’ it never so much as batted an eye, yet ye burned it up as clean as—”

  “Precisely, mon vieux the Frenchman admitted with a chuckle. “Have you never heard the adage that one must fight the Devil with fire? It was something like that which I did.

  “No later than night before last a young man came crying and whimpering at Friend Trowbridge’s door, begging for shelter from some ghastly thing which pursued him through the streets. Both Trowbridge and I thought he suffered from an overdose of the execrable liquor with which Monsieur Volstead has flooded this unhappy land, but before we could boot him from the door, behold, the same thing which you so unsuccessfully shot tonight did stick its unlovely countenance against our window and I who always go armed lest some miscreant do me a mischief, did fire eight shots directly into his face. Believe me, my friend, when Jules de Grandin shoots, he does not miss, and that night I shot exceptionally well. Yet when Friend Trowbridge and I searched the garden, neither hide nor hair of the one who should have been eight times dead did we find. ‘There is something here which will take much explaining,’ I say to me after we could not find him.

  “Next morning you did come and tell us of Professor Kolisko’s murder and when we had viewed his remains, I wondered much what sort of creature could have done the thing. The pressure exerted on his neck was superhuman, but the marks of the hand were not those of an ape, for no ape possesses such a long, thin thumb.

  “Then we did find the dead professor’s diary and I have the tiny shivers playing tag with each other up and down my back as I read and translate it. It sounds like the dream of one crazed with dope, I know, but there was the possibility of truth in it. Do you know the vampire, my friends?”

  “The vampire?” I echoed.

  “Precisement; the vampire, you have said it. He is not always one who can not die because of sin or misfortune in life. No. Sometimes he is a dead body possessed by some demon—perhaps by some unhappy, earthbound spirit. Yes.

  “Now, as I read the professor’s journal, I see that everything which had transpired were most favorable for the envampirement of that body which his cousin had brought from Egypt so long ago. Yet the idea seemed—how do you say?—ah, yes—to have the smell of the fish on it.

  “But when you come and say Miss Adkinson have been erased in the same manner as Professor Kolisko, I begin to wonder if perhaps I have not less nuts in my belfry than I at first thought.

  In Professor Kolisko’s journal there was reference to his cousin, ‘How does it come that this cousin have not come forward and told us what, if anything, he knows?’ I ask me as we view the poor dead woman’s body, and the answer was, ‘He has most doubtless seen that which will not be believed, and hides because he fears arrest on a false charge of murder.’

  “Right away I rush to New York and inquire at the Musee Metropolitain for the address of Monsieur Michel Kolisko the Egyptologist. I find his living-quarters in East Eighty-sixth Street. There they tell me he have gone to the Carmelite retreat. Morbleu, had he hidden in lost Atlantis, I should have hunted him out, for I desired speech with him!

  “At first he would not talk, dreading I intended to drag him to the jail, but after I had spoken with him for a time, he opened his heart, and told me what he later told you.

  “Now, what to do? By Monsieur Kolisko’s story, it were useless to battle with this enlivened mummy, for the body of him was but the engine moved by an alien spirit—he had no need of brains, hearts and such things as we must use. Also, I knew from experience, bullets were as useless against him as puffs of wind against a fortress wall. ‘Very well,’ I tell me, ‘he may be invulnerable to bullets and blows, but living or dead, he is still a mummy—a dry, desiccated mummy—and we have had no rain lately. It are entirely unlikely that he have gotten greatly moistened in his trips through the streets, and all mummies are as tinder to fire. Mordieu, did they not once use them as fuel for locomotives in Egypt when railways were first built there? Yes.’

  “And so I prepare the warm reception for him. At one time and another I have taken photographs at night, and to do so I have used magnesium flares—what you call flashlight powder. At a place where they sell such things in New York I procure a flashlight burner—a hollow cylinder for the powder magazine with a benzine wick at its top and a tube through which air can be blown to force the powder through the burning petrol and so give a continuous blaze. I get me also a rubber bag which I can inflate and attach to the windpipe of the apparatus, thus leaving my lips free for swearing and other important things, and also giving a greater force of air.

  “I
reason: ‘Where will this living mummy go most naturally? Why not to the house where he received his new life, for the town in which he goes about committing murder is still new to him?’

  And so, when Monsieur la Momie returns to the place of his second nativity, I am all ready for him. Your shots, they are as ineffectual as were mine two nights ago, but I have my magnesium flare ready, and as he turns on me I blow the fierce flame from it all over him. He are dry like tinder, the fire seized on him like a hungry little boy on a jam-tart, and—pouf—he is burn up, incinerated; he is no more!”

  *“Do you actually mean Heschler’s soul entered that dried-up body?” I demanded.

  The Frenchman shook his head. “I do not know,” he replied. “Perhaps it were Heschler; more likely not. The air is full of strange and terrible things, my friend. Not for nothing did the old divines call Satan the Prince of the Powers of the Air. How do we know some of those elementals who are ever on the watch to do mankind an injury did not hear the mad Koliskos’ scheme and take advantage of the opportunity to enter into the mummy’s body? Such things have been before; why may they not be again?”

  “But—” I commenced.

  “But—” expostulated Sergeant Costello.

  “But, my friends,” the little man cut in, “did you behold how dry that so abominable mummy was before I applied the fire?”

  “Yes,” I answered wonderingly.

  “Cordieu, he was wet as the broad Atlantic Ocean beside the dryness of Jules de Grandin at this moment! Friend Trowbridge, unless my memory plays me false, I beheld a bottle of cognac upon your office table. Come, I faint, I die, I perish; talk to me no more till I have consumed the remainder of that bottle, I do beseech you!”

  * * *

  UNSEEN—UNFEARED by Francis Stevens

  * * *

  Francis Stevens was probably the greatest woman writer of science fantasy in the period between Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and C.L. Moore. Twice she has achieved recognition and twice her name has faded from popularity. It may enjoy a contemporary revival with the publication in 1970 of her fine novel, The Citadel of Fear at this editor’s behest, but it is questionable that she is around to enjoy it. Born in 1884 as Gertrude Barrows, she would be eighty-seven if still alive today, but the last word ever received from her was a letter to her daughter dated September 1, 1939 from the state of California. No further information concerning her presence has come to light since that date.

  Brought up by a bookish family in Minneapolis, she never got further than a grammer school education, though both her mother and father were book lovers and had a house full of volumes. Her initial aspiration was to be an illustrator and though working, she studied art nights, but finally gave up her ambitions in that direction. It is possible that she further improved her education with evening classes, but apparently the talent for writing came naturally to her. In one of the very few letters of hers ever to have appeared in print, she said: “I wrote my first story when I was seventeen and working in the office of a department store. It had just one merit, as I remember it, and that was a rather grotesque originality. Of course, in the writer’s estimation it was a very wonderful story, but nevertheless, I was more than surprised when The Argosy, the first magazine to which it was submitted, accepted it. Within a week or so of that the Youth’s Companion accepted a couple of verses, also a first offering, and naturally, being seventeen and optimistic, I believed my literary career established. But they were both ‘beginner’s luck’—flukes—and though I persisted, for a while my success did not. So I dropped the ‘literary career,’ and several years intervened before I even attempted anything save desultory scribbling for my own amusement . . . Then I spent a year in newspaper work, which I detested; but it reawoke the ambition to write. Again I was fortunate with a first story, and since then have not deserted the field.”

  It has commonly been supposed that the first story she had published was “The Nightmare,” a long, garish but thrilling science fiction novelette which appeared in A11-Story Weekly, April 14, 1917. Reading the above letter, it was obvious that such an assumption would be an error, and a search conducted by this editor and bibliophile Lester Mayer, revealed that first story under her maiden name G.M. Barrows to be “The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar,” published in The Argosy for March, 1904. The story had never been listed in a bibliography of her works or ever directly or indirectly related to her before the writing of this preface. In keeping with her bent for the fantastic, it was science fiction, dealing with a man hit by an automobile, who is nursed back to health by a scientist who is half Japanese and half American. The room where he is kept adjoins a laboratory and factory. The contact of the patient with a newly discovered element, stellarite, converts him into an incredibly powerful physical superman. There is a good note of the mystery and the bizarre in the story, but it is not an important work.

  “Unseen—Unfeared” has in common with that first story by Gertrude Barrows, that it has been never listed by bibliographers, and except for a previous mention by this editor is almost unknown. Unlike “The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar,” it is a product of the author’s mature writing talent and appeared in an important magazine of the period, People’s Favorite Magazine for February 10, 1919. “Unseen—Unfeared” is a science fiction horror story, and though in no ways similar in plotting, in general background and subject it appears to show the influence of Fitz-James O’Brien, particularly his two stories “The Diamond Lens” and “The Wondersmith.” It is almost redundant to state that this is the first time the story has ever been reprinted.

  UNSEEN-UNFEARED

  * * *

  by

  FRANCIS STEVENS

  I

  I had been dining with my ever-interesting friend, Mark Jenkins, at a little Italian restaurant near South Street. It was a chance meeting. Jenkins is too busy, usually, to make dinner engagements. Over our highly seasoned food and sour, thin, red wine, he spoke of little odd incidents and adventures of his profession. Nothing very vital or important, of course. Jenkins is not the sort of detective who first detects and then pours the egotistical and revealing details of achievement in the ears of every acquaintance, however appreciative.

  But when I spoke of something I had seen in the morning papers, he laughed. “Poor old ‘Doc’ Holt! Fascinating old codger, to anyone who really knows him. I’ve had his friendship for years—since I was first on the city force and saved a young assistant of his from jail on a false charge. And they had to drag him into the poisoning of this young sport, Ralph Peeler!”

  “Why are you so sure he couldn’t have been implicated?” I asked.

  But Jenkins only shook his head, with a quiet smile. “I have reasons for believing otherwise,” was all I could get out of him on that score. “But,” he added, “the only reason he was suspected at all is the superstitious dread of these ignorant people around him. Can’t see why he lives in such a place. I know for a fact he doesn’t have to. Doc’s got money of his own. He’s an amateur chemist and dabbler in different sorts of research work, and I suspect he’s been guilty of ‘showing off.’ Result, they all swear he has the evil eye and holds forbidden communion with invisible powers. Smoke?”

  Jenkins offered me one of his invariably good cigars, which I accepted, saying thoughtfully: “A man has no right to trifle with the superstitions of ignorant people. Sooner or later, it spells trouble.”

  “Did in his case. They swore up and down that he sold love charms openly and poisons secretly, and that, together with his living so near to—somebody else—got him temporarily suspected. But my tongue’s running away with me, as usual!”

  “As usual,” I retorted impatiently, “you open up with all the frankness of a Chinese diplomat.”

  He beamed upon me engagingly and rose from the table, with a glance at his watch. “Sorry to leave you, Blaisdell, but I have to meet Jimmy Brennan in ten minutes.”

  He so clearly did not invite my further company that I remain
ed seated for a little while after his departure; then took my own way homeward. Those streets always held for me a certain fascination, particularly at night. They are so unlike the rest of the city, so foreign in appearance, with their little shabby stores, always open until late evening, their unbelievably cheap goods, displayed as much outside the shops as in them, hung on the fronts and laid out on tables by the curb and in the street itself. Tonight, however, neither people nor stores in any sense appealed to me. The mixture of Italians, Jews and a few Negroes, mostly bareheaded, unkempt and generally unhygienic in appearance, struck me as merely revolting. They were all humans, and I, too, was human. Some way I did not like the idea.

  Puzzled a trifle, for I am more inclined to sympathize with poverty than accuse it, I watched the faces that I passed. Never before had I observed how bestial, how brutal were the countenances of the dwellers in this region. I actually shuddered when an old-clothes man, a gray-bearded Hebrew, brushed me as he toiled past with his barrow.

  There was a sense of evil in the air, a warning of things which it is wise for a clean man to shun and keep clear of. The impression became so strong that before I had walked two squares I began to feel physically ill. Then it occurred to me that the one glass of cheap Chianti I had drunk might have something to do with the feeling. Who knew how that stuff had been manufactured, or whether the juice of the grape entered at all into its ill-flavored composition? Yet I doubted if that were the real cause of my discomfort.