Horrors Unknown

by Sam Moskowitz (ed)

  No thunder came; pretty soon the lake quieted. Then my woman and my brother’s woman walked straight to the priests. “The thunder-devil is dead,” they said. “We will take our babies.” So they took them, and breathed upon them, and coaxed them back to life, for they had been put asleep with medicine.

  Then the men came to me and one after another grasped my hand. “You are a great man,” they said. “The bad god lost his power to you. Stay with us and keep us from further evil.”

  “No!” said the chief priest. “The thunder-devil is not dead. He was weak. The magic bullet surprised him. He is resting at the bottom of the lake, a mile deep. He will be well in one day, and very hungry. Unless we throw this man in to him he will ride the water down upon us and destroy us all.”

  “That is a lie,” I said. “Who will wait here with me and watch?”

  “I will,” spoke my brother. And there were others. Then the people went back down to the pueblo; and my brother and I, and our women and three men waited beside the lake for three days. On the third day the carcass of the thunder-devil bird floated to the top. He was still dead, and he stunk very badly, for he was flesh and blood. We took signs from him, and we went down to the town; and from that time to this, señor, I have been well thought of by the Picuris. Yes, as you have seen, and as Antonio, here, who was a baby then and is war captain now, can tell you.

  My old senior settled into his shawl, tired out.

  “You are an American, señor,” he added. “You read in books. Now, what do you say that the thunder-devil was?”

  “I believe, but I cannot say,” I answered. “You took a sign?”

  “Maria!” he bade. “The devil sign.”

  Maria scuttled in, she scuttled out, and handed something to him. He passed it to me,

  “This is one, señor.”

  It was a fragment of parchment skin, about the size of one’s palm, set with scales like mica dollars, and with a round hole through it.

  “That,” said he, “is where the good God and Mary directed my bullet. The head I could show you at Picuris.”

  “Perhaps an extinct kind of pterodactyl, señor,” I ventured wisely. I tried to find the words. “Un dragon alado y furioso—a terrible winged dragon.”

  “Indeed, yes. So the padre said, to whom I made confession. A devil, sure enough. Now I have finished.”

  The squatting Antonio arose. He stood tall and straight, older than I had at first supposed.

  “Bueno,” he muttered. “It is all true. I was there.” He shook hands with me. “Adids. ” He drew his blanket over his shoulders and stalked out.

  * * *

  THE POOL OF THE STONE GOD by W. Fenimore

  * * *

  It is one of the great losses to lovers of the fantastic that A. Merritt, one of the finest and most popular writers to emerge out of the pulp magazines should have written so little. His novels, The Moon Pool, Seven Footprints to Satan, Dwellers in the Mirage, Ship of Ishtar, and others, have been brought back into print repeatedly for the past half-century and there is no indication that his following will diminish in the future.

  The unfortunate part for those who admire Merritt’s works is that he never was a full-time writer. Most of his working life was spent as associate editor and then as full editor of American Weekly when it was at the height of its profitability and circulation. The job was too big and time-consuming to allow him much opportunity to write what he wished, so his stories were infrequent and relatively few.

  After A. Merritt died of a heart attack August 21, 1943, a probe was begun to see if he had any unpublished works. Paul Dennis O’Connor, a New York City antiquarian bookman, made contact with the estate and secured the beginnings of two uncompleted novels. The first was The Fox Woman, which he had finished by Hannes Bok and published under his own imprint in a special edition in 1946 (New Collectors’ Group); and the second was The Black Wheel, also completed by Hannes Bok and published by the New Collectors’ Group in 1947.

  Avon Books had begun reprinting A. Merritt’s novels in paperback form in 1942 and they did so well that reprintings were frequent. In order to add another Merritt title to their line, Donald A. Wollheim, their editor, in 1949 collected all the short stories of A. Merritt into a paperback, leading off with the portion of The Fox Woman Merritt had completed, including a fragment titled “When Old Gods Wake,” initially published in Avon Fantasy Reader Number 7, 1948, which were the first few thousand words of an intended sequel to The Snake Mother.

  Another fragment, a little over 1,000 words long, titled “The White Road,” was also printed, and this was intended to be a possible follow-up for his first story, “Through the Dragon Glass.” As an aside to collectors, 100 copies of the Avon paperback were bound in hardcovers with little coverjackets printed for them by Lloyd Arthur Eshback, publisher of Fantasy Press, and sold for $1.00.

  The Avon Fox Woman seemed to wind up the excavation of unpublished Merritt until a Baltimore fan and bibliographer named George Wetzel got the idea of going through the old Files of American Weekly, which sometimes published fiction, to see if there was anything in its pages which might have been written by Merritt in the thirty-one years he had been associated with it.

  George Wetzel was fascinated by bibliography, particularly in the field of the fantastic, had done some good pieces for Fantasy Commentator, had edited six brochures in The Lovecraft Collectors Library (SSR Publications, 1952), and was then working on HPL: Memoirs Critiques, & Bibliographies (SSR Publications, 1955), which, with the help of Robert Briney, would contain the most complete Lovecraft bibliography to that date.

  The results of George Wetzel’s search of the pages of American Weekly were published in the Summer, 1954 issue of Tellus, issued by a San Jose enthusiast named Page Brownton. Through wading through all the interminable pages of axe murders, pseudo-science, celebrity interviews, exotic locales, and the idle rich, he was only able to pin down one story that appeared to have been written by A. Merritt. That story was “The Pool of the Stone God,” credited to W. Fenimore. There was no further confirmation, other than subject matter and internal evidence. American Weekly never answered George Wetzel’s inquiries about the story and now since that publication has long-since been discontinued, it is unlikely that anyone ever will.

  The safest thing to do in these cases is to present the story and let the reader make up his or her own mind as to whether it is authentic Merritt. I am a bit more courageous than that, knowing something about Merritt and the publishing business.

  First, Merritt’s story appeared in the issue for September 23, 1923. He was still a working editor on the American Weekly, fourteen years away from rising to the top spot, The paper was large and with weekly deadlines there must have been a need to dive in and fill a last-minute hole many times. Merritt had been hired because of the “excellence,” of his stories of executions, murders, suicides, hangings, and lynchings. It is safe to say that from the time he went to work for the American Weekly in 1912 until he died he wrote literally thousands of stories for them, most of them “fact” features and most of them anonymous.

  “The Pool of the Stone God” is written almost with the terseness of a synopsis; it was the work of a skilled newspaper writer. The imaginative image conveyed in the story with droplets of blood on the black winged statue, in effect resembles the great golden tears flowing down the cheeks of a carven image in “The Face in the Abyss,” which appeared in Argosy-All-Story later the same year. The island locale, with its evidence of a lost and ancient civilization, corresponds closely with The Moon Pool.

  It is my opinion that Merritt dashed it off as a filler at deadline time and in the process produced a condensed horror tale of undeniable distinction. That Merritt was doing some writing for the publication right until the end of his career is confirmed by the appearance of a hardcover book written by him, titled The Story Behind the Story, published by American Weekly in 1942 to assist the sales staff in selling advertising to prospective custome
rs by telling what went into the planning of eighteen major features.

  THE POOL OF

  THE STONE GOD

  * * *

  by

  W. FENIMORE

  This is Professor James Marston’s story. A score of learned bodies have courteously heard him tell it, and then among themselves have lamented that so brilliant a man should have such an obsession. Professor Marston told it to me in San Francisco, just before he started to find the island that holds his pool of the stone god and the wings that guard it. He seemed to me very sane. It is true that the equipment of his expedition was unusual, and not the least curious part of it are the suits of fine chain mail and masks and gauntlets with which each man of the party is provided.

  The five of us, said Professor Marston, sat side by side on the beach. There was Wilkinson the first officer, Bates and Cassidy the two seamen, Waters the pearler and myself. We had all been on our way to New Guinea, I to study the fossils for the Smithsonian. The Moranus had struck the hidden reef the night before and had sunk swiftly. We were then, roughly, about five hundred miles northeast of the Guinea coast. The five of us had managed to drop a lifeboat and get away. The boat was well stocked with water and provisions. Whether the rest of the crew had escaped we did not know. We had sighted the island at dawn and had made for her. The lifeboat was drawn safely up on the sands.

  “We’d better explore a bit, anyway,” said Waters. “This may be a perfect place for us to wait rescue. At least until the typhoon season is over. We’ve our pistols. Let’s start by following this brook to its source, look over the place and then decide what we’ll do.”

  The trees began to thin out. We saw ahead an open space. We reached it and stopped in sheer amazement. The clearing was perfectly square and about five hundred feet wide. The trees stopped abruptly at its edges as though held back by something unseen.

  But it was not this singular impression that held us. At the far end of the square were a dozen stone huts clustered about one slightly larger. They reminded me powerfully of those prehistoric structures you see in parts of England and France. I approach now the most singular thing about this whole singular and sinister place. In the center of the space was a pool walled about with huge blocks of cut stone. At the side of the pool rose a great stone figure, carved in the semblance of a man with outstretched hands. It was at least twenty feet high and was extremely well executed. At the distance the statue seemed nude and yet it had a peculiar effect of drapery about it. As we drew nearer we saw that it was covered from ankles to neck with the most extraordinary carved wings. They looked exactly like bat wings when they were folded.

  There was something extremely disquieting about this figure. The face was inexpressibly ugly and malignant. The eyes, Mongol-shaped, slanted evil. It was not from the face, though, that this feeling seemed to emanate. It was from the body covered with wings—and especially from the wings. They were part of the idol and yet they gave one the idea that they were clinging to it.

  Cassidy, a big brute of a man, swaggered up to the idol and laid his hand on it. He drew it away quickly, his face white, his mouth twitching. I followed him and conquering my unscientific repugnance, examined the stone. It, like the huts and in fact the whole place, was clearly the work of that forgotten race whose monuments are scattered over the Southern Pacific. The carving of the wings was wonderful, They were batlike, as I have said, folded and each ended in a little ring of conventionalized feathers. They ranged in size from four to ten inches. I ran my fingers over one. Never have I felt the equal of the nausea that sent me to my knees before the idol. The wing had felt like smooth, cold stone, but I had the sensation of having touched back of the stone some monstrous obscene creature of a lower world. The sensation came of course, I reasoned, only from the temperature and texture of the stone—and yet this did not really satisfy me.

  Dusk was soon due. We decided to return to the beach and examine the clearing further on the morrow. I desired greatly to explore the stone huts.

  We started back through the forest. We walked some distance and then night fell. We lost the brook. After a half hour’s wandering we heard it again. We started for it. The trees began to thin out and we thought we were approaching the beach. Then Waters clutched my arm. I stopped. Directly in front of us was the open space with the stone god leering under the moon and the green water shining at his feet!

  We had made a circle. Bates and Wilkinson were exhausted. Cassidy swore that devils or no devils he was going to camp that night beside the pool!

  The moon was very bright. And it was so very quiet. My scientific curiosity got the better of me and I thought I would examine the huts. I left Bates on guard and walked over to the largest. There was only one room and the moonlight shining through the chinks in the wall illuminated it clearly. At the back were two small basins set in the stone. I looked in one and saw a faint reddish gleam reflected from a number of globular objects. I drew a half dozen of them out. They were pearls, very wonderful pearls of a peculiarly rosy hue. I ran toward the door to call Bates—and stopped!

  My eyes had been drawn to the stone idol. Was it an effect of the moonlight or did it move? No, it was the wings! They stood out from the stone and waved—they waved, I say, from the ankles to the neck of that monstrous statue.

  Bates had seen them, too. He was standing with his pistol raised. Then there was a shot. And after that the air was filled with a rushing sound like that of a thousand fans. I saw the wings loose themselves from the stone god and sweep down in a cloud upon the four men. Another cloud raced up from the pool and joined them. I could not move. The wings circled swiftly around and about the four. All were now on their feet and I never saw such horror as was in their faces.

  Then the wings closed in. They clung to my companions as they had clung to the stone.

  I fell back into the hut. I lay there through the night insane with terror. Many times I heard the fan-like rushing about the enclosure, but nothing entered my hut. Dawn came, and silence, and I dragged myself to the door. There stood the stone god with the wings carved upon him as we had seen him ten hours before!

  I ran over to the four lying on the grass. I thought that perhaps I had had a nightmare. But they were dead. That was not the worst of it. Each man was shrunken to his bones! They looked like collapsed white balloons. There was not a drop of blood in them. They were nothing but bones wrapped around in thin skin!

  Mastering myself, I went close to the idol. There was something different about it. It seemed larger—as though, the thought went through my mind, as though it had eaten. Then I saw that it was covered with tiny drops of blood that had dropped from the ends of the wings that clothed it!

  I do not remember what happened afterward. I awoke on the pearling schooner Luana which had picked me up, crazed with thirst as they supposed in the boat of the Moranus.

  * * *

  Table of Contents

  THE CHALLENGE FROM BEYOND

  THE FLYING LION

  GRETTIR AT THORHALL-STEAD

  WEREWOMAN

  FROM HAND TO MOUTH

  BODY AND SOUL

  UNSEEN-UNFEARED

  THE PENDULUM

  PENDULUM

  THE DEVIL OF THE PICURIS

  THE POOL OF THE STONE GOD