The Mammoth Book of Body Horror

by Marie O'Regan

  “Anti-gravity,” said McReady softly.

  “Anti-gravity.” Norris nodded. “Yes, we had ’em stopped, with no planes, and no birds. The birds hadn’t come – but they had coffee-tins and radio parts, and glass and the machine shop at night. And a week – a whole week – all to itself. America in a single jump – with anti-gravity powered by the atomic energy of matter.”

  “We had ’em stopped. Another half-hour – it was just tightening these straps on the device so it could wear it – and we’d have stayed in Antarctica, and shot down any moving thing that came from the rest of the world.”

  “The albatross,” McReady said softly. “Do you suppose—”

  “With this thing almost finished? With that death weapon it held in its hand?

  “No, by the grace of God, who evidently does hear very well, even down here, and the margin of half an hour, we keep our world, and the planets of the system, too. Anti-gravity, you know, and atomic power. Because They came from another sun, a star beyond the stars. They came from a world with a bluer sun.”

  The Fly

  George Langelaan

  Telephones and telephone bells have always made me uneasy. Years ago, when they were mostly wall fixtures, I disliked them, but nowadays, when they are planted in every nook and corner, they are a downright intru sion. We have a saying in France that a coalman is master in his own house; with the telephone that is no longer true, and I suspect that even the Englishman is no longer king in his own castle.

  At the office, the sudden ringing of the telephone an noys me. It means that, no matter what I am doing, in spite of the switchboard operator, in spite of my secre tary, in spite of doors and walls, some unknown person is coming into the room and on to my desk to talk right into my very ear, confidentially – and that whether I like it or not. At home, the feeling is still more disagree able, but the worst is when the telephone rings in the dead of night. If anyone could see me turn on the light and get up blinking to answer it, I suppose I would look like any other sleepy man annoyed at being disturbed. The truth in such a case, however, is that I am strug gling against panic, fighting down a feeling that a stranger has broken into the house and is in my bed room. By the time I manage to grab the receiver and say: “Ici Monsieur Delambre. Je vous écoute,” I am out wardly calm, but I only get back to a more normal state when I recognize the voice at the other end and when I know what is wanted of me.

  This effort at dominating a purely animal reaction and fear had become so effective that when my sister-in-law called me at two in the morning, asking me to come over, but first to warn the police that she had just killed my brother, I quietly asked her how and why she had killed André.

  “But, François! . . . I can’t explain all that over the telephone. Please call the police and come quickly.”

  “Maybe I had better see you first, Hélène?”

  “No, you’d better call the police first; otherwise they will start asking you all sorts of awkward questions. They’ll have enough trouble as it is to believe that I did it alone . . . And, by the way, I suppose you ought to tell them that André . . . André’s body, is down at the factory. They may want to go there first.”

  “Did you say that André is at the factory?”

  “Yes . . . under the steam-hammer.”

  “Under the what?”

  “The steam-hammer! But don’t ask so many ques tions. Please come quickly, François! Please under stand that I’m afraid – that my nerves won’t stand it much longer!”

  Have you ever tried to explain to a sleepy police officer that your sister-in-law has just phoned to say that she has killed your brother with a steam-hammer? I repeated my explanation, but he would not let me.

  “Oui, Monsieur, oui, I hear . . . but who are you? What is your name? Where do you live? I said, where do you live?”

  It was then that Commissaire Charas took over the line and the whole business. He at least seemed to understand everything. Would I wait for him? Yes, he would pick me up and take me over to my brother’s house. When? In five or ten minutes.

  I had just managed to pull on my trousers, wriggle into a sweater and grab a hat and coat, when a black Citroën, headlights blazing, pulled up at the door.

  “I assume you have a night watchman at your fac tory, Monsieur Delambre. Has he called you?” asked Commissaire Charas, letting in the clutch as I sat down beside him and slammed the door of the car.

  “No, he hasn’t. Though, of course, my brother could have entered the factory through his laboratory where he often works late at night . . . all night sometimes.”

  “Is Professor Delambre’s work connected with your business?”

  “No, my brother is, or was, doing research work for the Ministère de l’Air. As he wanted to be away from Paris and yet within reach of where skilled workmen could fix up or make gadgets big and small for his ex periments, I offered him one of the old workshops of the factory and he came to live in the first house built by our grandfather on the top of the hill at the back of the factory.”

  “Yes, I see. Did he talk about his work? What sort of research work?”

  “He rarely talked about it, you know; I suppose the Air Ministry could tell you. I only know that he was about to carry out a number of experiments he had been preparing for some months, something to do with the disintegration of matter, he told me.”

  Barely slowing down, the Commissaire swung the car off the road, slid it through the open factory gate and pulled up sharp by a policeman apparently expecting him.

  I did not need to hear the policeman’s confirmation. I knew now that my brother was dead; it seemed that I had been told years ago. Shaking like a leaf, I scrambled out after the Commissaire.

  Another policeman stepped out of a doorway and led us towards one of the shops where all the lights had been turned on. More policemen were standing by the ham mer, watching two men setting up a camera. It was tilted downward, and I made an effort to look.

  It was far less horrid than I had expected. Though I had never seen my brother drunk, he looked just as if he were sleeping off a terrific binge, flat on his stomach across the narrow line on which the white-hot slabs of metal were rolled up to the hammer. I saw at a glance that his head and arm could only be a flattened mess, but that seemed quite impossible; it looked as if he had somehow pushed his head and arm right into the metallic mass of the hammer.

  Having talked to his colleagues, the Commissaire turned towards me:

  “How can we raise the hammer, Monsieur Delambre?”

  “I’ll raise it for you.”

  “Would you like us to get one of your men over?”

  “No, I’ll be all right. Look, here is the switchboard. It was originally a steam-hammer, but everything is worked electrically here now. Look, Commissaire, the hammer has been set at fifty tons and its impact at zero.”

  “At zero . . .?”

  “Yes, level with the ground if you prefer. It is also set for single strokes, which means that it has to be raised after each blow. I don’t know what Hélène, my sister-in-law, will have to say about all this, but one thing I am sure of: she certainly did not know how to set and operate the hammer.”

  “Perhaps it was set that way last night when work stopped?”

  “Certainly not. The drop is never set at zero, Mon sieur le Commissaire.”

  “I see. Can it be raised gently?”

  “No. The speed of the upstroke cannot be regulated. But in any case it is not very fast when the hammer is set for single strokes.”

  “Right. Will you show me what to do? It won’t be very nice to watch, you know.”

  “No, no, Monsieur le Commissaire. I’ll be all right.”

  “All set?” asked the Commissaire of the others. “All right, then, Monsieur Delambre. Whenever you like.”

  Watching my brother’s back, I slowly but firmly pushed the upstroke button.

  The unusual silence of the factory was broken by the sigh of compressed air rushing into th
e cylinders, a sigh that always makes me think of a giant taking a deep breath before solemnly socking another giant, and the steel mass of the hammer shuddered and then rose swiftly. I also heard the sucking sound as it left the metal base and thought I was going to panic when I saw André’s body heave forward as a sickly gush of blood poured all over the ghastly mess bared by the hammer.

  “No danger of it coming down again, Monsieur Delambre?”

  “No, none whatever,” I mumbled as I threw the safety switch and, turning around, I was violently sick in front of a young green-faced policeman.

  For weeks after, Commissaire Charas worked on the case, listening, questioning, running all over the place, making out reports, telegraphing and telephoning right and left. Later, we became quite friendly and he owned that he had for a long time considered me as suspect number one, but had finally given up that idea because, not only was there no clue of any sort, but not even a motive.

  Hélène, my sister-in-law, was so calm throughout the whole business that the doctors finally confirmed what I had long considered the only possible solution: that she was mad. That being the case, there was of course no trial.

  My brother’s wife never tried to defend herself in any way and even got quite annoyed when she realized that people thought her mad, and this, of course, was considered proof that she was indeed mad. She owned up to the murder of her husband and proved easily that she knew how to handle the hammer; but she would never say why, exactly how, or under what circum stances she had killed my brother. The great mystery was how and why my brother had so obligingly stuck his head under the hammer, the only possible explana tion for his part in the drama.

  The night watchman had heard the hammer all right; he had even heard it twice, he claimed. This was very strange, and the stroke-counter, which was always set back to nought after a job, seemed to prove him right, since it marked the figure two. Also, the foreman in charge of the hammer confirmed that after clean ing up the day before the murder, he had as usual turned the stroke-counter back to nought. In spite of this, Hélène maintained that she had used the hammer only once, and this seemed just another proof of her insanity.

  Commissaire Charas, who had been put in charge of the case, at first wondered if the victim were really my brother. But of that there was no possible doubt, if only because of the great scar running from his knee to his thigh, the result of a shell that had landed within a few feet of him during the retreat in 1940; and there were also the fingerprints of his left hand, which corresponded to those found all over his laboratory and his personal belongings up at the house.

  A guard had been put on his laboratory and the next day half a dozen officials came down from the Air Ministry. They went through all his papers and took away some of his instruments, but before leaving they told the Commissaire that the most interesting docu ments and instruments had been destroyed.

  The Lyon police laboratory, one of the most famous in the world, reported that André’s head had been wrapped up in a piece of velvet when it was crushed by the hammer, and one day Commissaire Charas showed me a tattered drapery which I immediately recognized as the brown velvet cloth I had seen on a table in my brother’s laboratory, the one on which his meals were served when he could not leave his work.

  After only a very few days in prison, Hélène had been transferred to a nearby asylum, one of the three in France where insane criminals are taken care of. My nephew Henri, a boy of six, the very image of his father, was entrusted to me, and eventually all legal arrange ments were made for me to become his guardian and tutor.

  Hélène, one of the quietest patients of the asylum, was allowed visitors and I went to see her on Sundays. Once or twice the Commissaire had accompanied me and, later, I learned that he had also visited Hélène alone. But we were never able to obtain any informa tion from my sister-in-law who seemed to have become utterly indifferent. She rarely answered my questions and hardly ever those of the Commissaire. She spent a lot of her time sewing, but her favourite pastime seemed to be catching flies which she invariably released un harmed after having examined them carefully.

  Hélène had only one fit of raving – more like a ner vous breakdown than a fit, said the doctor who had administered morphia to quieten her – the day she saw a nurse swatting flies.

  The day after Hélène’s one and only fit, Commissaire Charas came to see me.

  “I have a strange feeling that there lies the key to the whole business, Monsieur Delambre,” he said.

  I did not ask him how it was that he already knew all about Hélène’s fit.

  “I do not follow you, Commissaire. Poor Madame Delambre could have shown an exceptional interest for anything else, really. Don’t you think that flies just happen to be the bordersubject of her tendency to raving?”

  “Do you believe she is really mad?” he asked.

  “My dear Commissaire, I don’t see how there can be any doubt. Do you doubt it?”

  “I don’t know. In spite of all the doctors say, I have the impression that Madame Delambre has a very clear brain . . . even when catching flies.”

  “Supposing you were right, how would you explain her attitude with regard to her little boy? She never seems to consider him as her own child.”

  “You know, Monsieur Delambre, I have thought about that also. She may be trying to protect him. Perhaps she fears the boy or, for all we know, hates him.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand, my dear Commissaire.”

  “Have you noticed, for instance, that she never catches flies when the boy is there?”

  “No. But come to think of it, you are quite right. Yes, that is strange . . . Still, I fail to understand.”

  “So do I, Monsieur Delambre. And I’m very much afraid that we shall never understand, unless perhaps your sister-in-law should get better.”

  “The doctors seem to think that there is no hope of any sort, you know.”

  “Yes. Do you know if your brother ever experi mented with flies?”

  “I really don’t know, but I shouldn’t think so. Have you asked the Air Ministry people? They knew all about the work.”

  “Yes, and they laughed at me.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “You are very fortunate to understand anything, Monsieur Delambre. I do not . . . but I hope to some day.”

  “Tell me, Uncle, do flies live a long time?”

  We were just finishing our lunch and, following an established tradition between us, I was pouring some wine into Henri’s glass for him to dip a biscuit in.

  Had Henri not been staring at his glass gradually being filled to the brim, something in my look might have frightened him.

  This was the first time that he had ever mentioned flies, and I shuddered at the thought that Commissaire Charas might quite easily have been present. I could imagine the glint in his eye as he would have answered my nephew’s question with another question. I could almost hear him saying: “I don’t know, Henri. Why do you ask?”

  “Because I have again seen the fly that Maman was looking for.”

  And it was only after drinking off Henri’s own glass of wine that I realized that he had answered my spoken thought.

  “I did not know that your mother was looking for a fly.”

  “Yes, she was. It has grown quite a lot, but I recognized it all right.”

  “Where did you see this fly, Henri, and . . . how did you recognize it?”

  “This morning on your desk, Uncle François. Its head is white instead of black, and it has a funny sort of leg.”

  Feeling more and more like Commissaire Charas, but trying to look unconcerned, I went on: “And when did you see this fly for the first time?”

  “The day that Papa went away. I had caught it, but Maman made me let it go. And then after, she wanted me to find it again. She’d changed her mind.” And shrugging his shoulders just as my brother used to, he added, “You know what women are.”

  “I think that fly must have die
d long ago, and you must be mistaken, Henri,” I said, getting up and walk ing to the door.

  But as soon as I was out of the dining room, I ran up the stairs to my study. There was no fly anywhere to be seen.

  I was bothered, far more than I cared to even think about. Henri had just proved that Charas was really closer to a clue than it had seemed when he told me about his thoughts concerning Hélène’s pastime.

  For the first time I wondered if Charas did not really know much more than he let on. For the first time also, I wondered about Hélène. Was she really insane? A strange, horrid feeling was growing in me, and the more I thought about it, the more I felt that, somehow, Charas was right: Hélène was getting away with it!

  What could possibly have been the reason for such a monstrous crime? What had led up to it? Just what had happened?

  I thought of all the hundreds of questions that Charas had put to Hélène, sometimes gently like a nurse trying to soothe, sometimes stern and cold, sometimes barking them furiously. Hélène had answered very few, always in a calm quiet voice and never seeming to pay any attention to the way in which the question had been put. Though dazed, she had seemed perfectly sane then.

  Refined, well bred and well read, Charas was more than just an intelligent police official. He was a keen psychologist and had an amazing way of smelling out a fib or an erroneous statement even before it was uttered. I knew that he had accepted as true the few answers she had given him. But then there had been all those ques tions which she had never answered: the most direct and important ones. From the very beginning, Hélène had adopted a very simple system. “I cannot answer that question,” she would say in her low, quiet voice. And that was that! The repetition of the same question never seemed to annoy her. In all the hours of ques tioning that she underwent, Hélène did not once point out to the Commissaire that he had already asked her this or that. She would simply say, “I cannot answer that question,” as though it were the very first time that that particular question had been asked and the very first time she had made that answer.