The 11th Golden Age of Weird Fiction

by E. Hoffmann Price

  “Oh…please don’t… Stop!” she protested.

  “Okay, darling; if you say so, I won’t stop!” he assured her.

  Madeline tried to evade him as his hands again closed about her; but the ensuing flurry accomplished no more than to give him a devastating glimpse of alluring white curves that blossomed luxuriously from her hosiery. She was warm and solid and the touch of her smooth flesh made him wonder at his earlier qualms. For a moment she resisted.

  Then her supple body yielded, and he felt the throbbing of her firm breasts as she clung to him. Yet it seemed that she was moved by more than responsive desire; it was rather as if she were hanging on to her one hold on reality.

  Then Farley’s embrace became closer and he smothered her halfhearted protests with savage kisses until the ecstatic quiver that rippled along her body told him that anything could happen in a city half as old as Time.

  “Don’t Glenn…not now…”

  “Anyway,” he whispered in her ear as he carried her bodily from the shadowy arcade and down a dimly illuminated hallway, “you can’t claim that I’m a total stranger.”

  “No…” Madeline murmured. “But somehow, I can’t remember where I met you. Everything still seems to be a haze—”

  “Sweetheart, you haven’t been anywhere yet!”

  Another stride and they were in a spacious, high-celled room. She slipped from his arms and for a moment surveyed the curious blend of European furniture and Arabic architecture. Farley thus finally found an instant for a glimpse of her tiny feet.

  Her shoes were unmarred by dust. She couldn’t have walked from the Metropole to Salahiyeh—but before he could speculate on any conveyance quiet enough to be unnoticed from the courtyard, she was slipping the ensemble over her head. Farley’s eager glance swept upward to follow the progress of the yellow dress, and he ceased wondering how Madeline had arrived.

  And if she forgot to leave, all the better—the more he saw of her, the less dismaying amnesia seemed.

  For a moment she stood there, radiant in the dim glow of a floor lamp. Turquoise scanties…the gracious, ivory curve of her waist…firm breasts that scorned the transparent embrace of a needless brassiere…and then he noticed that her eyes were no longer bewildered, but darkly glowing.

  Her arms seconded the curved, scarlet invitation of her lips as she sank back among the pillows, shuddered luxuriously, and reached for the wall switch.

  However much Madeline had forgotten, she remembered enough to be a perfumed witchery and an amorous, clinging fascination. Neither noted that the moonlight sifting through the barred window was slowly marching across the broad tiles; and neither was aware of the shapeless blot that lurked in the darkness just beyond the arched doorway.

  Amorous ardor, and the heavy sweetness of Syrian wine drunk between kisses, and the night breeze laden with the breath of Damask roses lulled them to a love-drugged stupor…

  But what finally aroused Farley was the sonorous voice of a muezzin intoning from some distant mosque an unheeded call to midnight prayer. But before he could marvel at such criminal drowsiness, he missed Madeline’s possessive arms and the clinging warmth of her body.

  Something was wrong—perilously, terrifying wrong. She still was there. He could see her, a shapely whiteness in the gloom; but he did not her hear somnolent breathing. A horrible premonition warned him against touching her, but he did. She was cold.

  And then he realized that the hand he had jerked away from her breast was moist and sticky! He gained his feet at a bound, but even before he could reach the wall switch, he knew that it was blood that stained his fingers.

  A click. But there was no light. He fumbled for a match. A yellowish flickering flare. Only an instant, and a vagrant gust of wind whisked it out, but he had seen enough. It was burned into his brain beyond all erasure. The silver haft of a dagger projected from her left breast. A red froth was darkening about her mouth. Her eyes stared horribly, and her face was frozen in agony of death.

  But worst of all was that the weapon was his own, an antique khanjar he had purchased in the swordsmith’s bazaar. There was no mistaking the chasing of the pommel, or the uncut sapphires that studded it.

  He was glad that the lights were out of order. A second glimpse of that frozen, once lovely face would have upset his tottering reason.

  As he strode out into the arcade, he pictured Madeline’s arrival. It had then seemed odd; in retrospect it was sinister. She had come to him, directed by some alien and evil will; and cold thrills raced down Farley’s spine as he wondered whether some monstrous force had reached out of the darkness and directed him to stab his strange guest.

  Madeline was to meet her sister when she arrived from Beirut. She would be missed from her room at the Metropole. An American girl as strikingly dressed as Madeline could not have come from the heart of the city to Salahiyeh unnoted. Then he remembered how his courtyard door had closed of itself soon after she had entered.

  “A-l-l-l-l-lahu akbar…allahu a-k-k-k-bar…” the muezzin was intoning. “God is most Great…come to prayer…”

  And that reminded Farley that his Moslem friends might extricate him from the inevitable wrath of the French administration. They would help him escape the judgment of their enemy, the hated Feringhi invaders. Farley, exiled to Syria by the outrageous provisions of his Uncle Simeon’s will, had many Moslem friends.

  By the terms imposed by the eccentric old millionaire, Farley was to receive twenty thousand dollars a year as long as he went to school; and to keep from forfeiting his share of the estate, he had worked his way alphabetically through the curriculum until he arrived at Semitics, and a year in Damascus to prepare for another of the Ph.D’s that trailed after his name like cuds of tobacco behind an army transport.

  Twenty thousand a year, and nothing to do but loaf around the bazaars learning Arabic had given Farley valuable native contacts; and since Syrian women from the waist down are distressingly like something a piano maker despairingly discards as too bulky, he had made no enemies. Shaykh Saoud would know what to do—and he lived not far from Farley’s villa.

  But as he stepped from the arcade his reassurance faded. Fear walked with him as he recollected having sensed for a moment that some alien, all powerful force was guiding Madeline’s steps across the moon drenched tiles, making her move like an automaton devoid of will. Some diabolical power of the night had sent her to her death and Farley’s doom.

  And before he reached the entrance, there was a tapping at the massive door. Not loud, but insistent. For a moment he stood frozen; then he realized that flight would be vain; that it would be impossible to elude whoever was seeking Madeline.

  “Min?” he challenged. His voice sounded hollowly in his ears. He sighed from his lips when he heard the answer; familiar, guttural Arabic: “Saoud, ya sahib!”

  Shaykh Saoud, dropping in for his midnight pipe and coffee.

  He slipped the bolt and admitted a lean, hawk nosed Arab wearing a white turban and white djellab. He wondered how long he could endure the scrutiny of those dark, deep set eyes, and the interminable exchange of courtesies prescribed by custom. Finally he interrupted the ritual and told of Madeline’s uncanny actions and utter absence of memory.

  The Arab’s face lengthened, and as he heard the end of the recital, he quoted from the Koran, “I betake me unto the Lord of the Daybreak for refuge from the evils that He hath created; and from the evils of the night when it darkeneth; and from the spells of women when they mutter, and from the envy of the envier when he envieth!”

  Saoud’s pronouncing that Moslem charm against supernatural menace in no way served to reassure Farley; but he countered, “For God’s sake, what can—we do about it? I can’t leave her here. I can’t bury her in the grounds—”

  “The peace upon you, brother,” said Shaykh Saoud. “Thou art my father and my grandfather! By Allah, I know of one
who can set this aright.”

  The old man’s assurance gave Farley fresh courage.

  “How?”

  “Get the body. I will show you.” Then, seeing Farley shudder at the thought, he added, “Run out your car. I myself will carry the Feringhi girl. But you will be glad enough to bring her back in your own arms.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. We will call on a holy man who will revive her.”

  Farley swore in English.

  “For God’s sake, Saoud—this is no joke! Man, she’s dead—cold—stabbed with a blade half as long as your forearm—”

  “Nevertheless, she will live again. Do as I say,” commanded the imperturbable Arab. “All things are possible to Allah.”

  Saoud’s words only increased Farley’s conviction that the world and the night were hideously bedeviled—that some archaic evil stalked abroad. The madness had finally overwhelmed that grave, level-headed old shaykh. If Saoud were only mocking him, it would be bad enough; but the Arab was solemnly serious.

  Farley took him as far as the door of the room, gestured, and turned back to the hall. But Saoud had no qualm and when Farley ran his Packard out of the garage and drew up at a side door, the shaykh was waiting with a shrouded whiteness in his arms; a whiteness darkly splashed in spots. Blood that had trickled from Madeline’s breast to saturate the sheet.

  “Drive as I say, ya sahib,” said the Arab. “And fear not. For whatever evil this night has brought forth, verily it will be made aright. Yea, by my beard and by Allah I swear that this which I hold will again seek you with inviting arms!”

  And what now most perturbed Farley was that he began to believe Shaykh Saoud. It was only the whir of the starter and the purr of the powerful motor that still linked him to sanity. He skirted the el Amara quarter, crossed the Barada, and headed westward into the hills toward Rasheiya, and the snow crowned bulk of Mt. Hermon.

  A dead woman and a silent Arab and the ghost glamor of the moon flooded plain of Dimeshk ash-Sham, an endless, fiend-haunted drive to nowhere. Farley licked his dry lips, and tasted the lingering traces of rouge from the red mouth that had come devil-driven out of the night to seek him with strange questions and burn him with smoldering kisses.

  He began to wonder, and to hope that Saoud was right. But finally the increasingly perilous road forced Farley to forget the awful hope and the steel-riven beauty that rode with him.

  They halted at last at a cubical house that towered like a vast white tomb from the crest of a foot-hill northeast of Mount Hermon. The Arab smiled strangely as he emerged with his grisly burden and piously ejaculated “el hamdu lilahi”; Allah be praised for our safe arrival. Yet to Farley it was not an arrival but a beginning.

  The beginning of something incredible and awful. Necromancy, or worse. And as a door silently opened from the blankness of the wall, he wondered again at the smile that twitched at the corners of Shaykh Saoud’s grim mouth. What the Arab had suggested was outrageous enough; but there were other things, infinitely worse, that could be done with a woman’s body in this castle of desolation.

  A burly negro bawwab opened the door before either could knock. Which indicated that the approaches to the house were closely watched, or that their arrival had been anticipated. At that hour the fellow’s snores should have shaken the roof.

  Shaykh Saoud stalked down a vaulted passageway, crossed a courtyard, and into a hall illuminated by resinously flaming torches. It opened into a reception room—a majlis at the further end of which was a divan set back in an arched alcove. An aquiline-featured, leather-faced Arab with a white beard that trailed half way to his waist sat among the cushions.

  He was muttering to himself as his long talons fingered the ninety-nine beads of his Moslem rosary.

  Farley and his companion halted midway to the dais; and when the white haired master finally raised dark, piercing deep-set eyes, Saoud saluted him:

  “The peace upon you, Lord Hassan, and the mercy of Allah, and his blessing!”

  “W’alekunmu ’s-salaamu, wa rahmat’ Ullahi wa barakau!” returned Hassan. He clapped his hands. Two Arabs robed in white appeared to answer the summons. But before he issued any orders, Hassan eyed Farley for a moment and said, “Saoud, dress your friend like one of us. The Brethren would be better pleased.” The Brethren—the words implied some Moslem society or secret order. Farley noted the scarlet girdle and slippers that Hassan and his followers wore. He scarcely heard Saoud’s low-voiced explanation of their presence; and he was relieved when without a word the two servants left with Madeline’s shrouded body. He started when he heard his own name pronounced. Shaykh Hassan was addressing him:

  “We have heard of you, Glenn Farley. Your studies prove you to be the friend of the True Believers. Wallah, we will be as much to you. We will make you one of us, and you will learn that I am the keeper of the gateway, the master of life and death.”

  Nothing any longer seemed strange to Farley. He donned the white robe and turban and scarlet girdle a servant offered him, slipped on the scarlet babouches and with Saoud followed the old man toward a doorway that opened into a vaulted room that was a spectral, shimmering blur of satanic bluish light.

  Small rugs lay scattered on the mosaic floor, one for each of the robed figures who were filing in from another entrance. Farley and Saoud seated themselves and watched the Lord Hassan ascending the dais at the far end of the room. He gestured, and spoke a single order. The ritual began.

  Farley had gathered but vague hints of what was to be done, yet they sufficed to make him shudder as there came from behind a veiled alcove a muttering of drums and a sonorous chanting.

  Then the soul-wrenching whine of a single stringed kemenjahs began to make Farley’s taut nerves vibrate in sympathy with those diabolical, unending notes that rose and quavered and fell but ever reached out for more unendurable heights. Black slaves circulated among the witnesses who sat squatted on the floor.

  They offered each a goblet of strangely spiced and pungent wine, and three cornered wafers marked in cumin seed with Arabic script.

  “Eat,” commanded Shaykh Saoud. “And drink. Yea, food is good against grief, and this is the feast of the dead who will rise.”

  The wafers choked Farley, but the wine washed the morsels down, and warmed him against the chilling wizardry of that hidden orchestra. Wind instruments had now joined the kemenjahs. They were sobbing and moaning like homeless ghosts, and the drums muttered maddening, inarticulate words…

  Six negroes filed from an archway.

  Four carried a shrouded burden in an uncovered litter; the remaining two were bringing piers on which to set it. As they completed their task, the Lord Hassan drew the brocaded-shroud from the bier.

  Madeline, ivory white, lay gleaming in that grisly bluish light which made her hair seem molten, vibrant gold. The silver-hafted dagger still projected from her breast. The blood had been wiped from her lips and the blossoming roundness of her body.

  The exposure of her nude loveliness to the eyes of that score of white-robed, red-girdled Arabs enraged Farley. He muttered inarticulately, and half rose to his feet; but Saoud’s hand jerked him back.

  “One move and she remains everlastingly dead, and the lkhwan would tear you limb from limb!”

  Brethren—bronze-faced brothers of hell, eyes glazed, bodies swaying to the sorcery of that diabolic music; and white bearded Hassan, gesturing, bending over the body laid out as on an altar. He was whispering to her; and Farley’s senses, abnormally sharpened by tension, barely missed catching the words.

  His body now seemed somewhat apart from his brain, and he had the terrifying sensation of being everywhere at once in that blue-shimmering anteroom of hell. Yet with his terror came a sense of exultant power; he himself was part of this monstrous ritual. He no longer doubted. Anything was possible.

  Hassan now stood erect, and he was addressing t
he dead in commanding Arabic that surged and thundered and drowned the fiendish whine of the kemenjahs: “Al Asfarani! Golden One! The Master of Life and Death calls you from beyond the Border! You have perished once—arise from this death and never die again. For Death is my slave and he dare not strike a second time!”

  Horror gripped Farley’s heart. Madeline would rise and thenceforth be immune to death. There were such creatures, the undead who were immortal, living on and thriving terribly on the living… But the insidious intoxication of the ritual now dominated his will, and he could only acquiesce. His mind was enslaved by that surging sorcery.

  And Madeline was responding to Hassan’s commands! A perceptible shudder rippled along her bare, white flesh. Her breasts rose into higher relief. Hassan’s hands moved in a gesture of power: and his leathery face was deep-lined and grim and twitching. His eyes blazed with a Satanic fire as he mustered his reserves of will and repeated his command.

  A deeper breath. Farley shivered and swallowed his rebellious stomach. A dreadful nausea gripped him as he saw that white breast, transfixed with a curved blade, rise with the inflow of breath, so that the razor-sharp damascened steel must again lance her vitals.

  Madeline’s right hand slowly rose from her side. There was an inarticulate muttering from those squatting about Farley. Wonder gripped them as that pale hand crossed over, closed on the silver haft with its evilly winking sapphires. They saw her muscles flex beneath the ivory white skin, and slowly the red blade emerged…

  Hassan plucked it from her fingers, and commanded, “Rise, Al Asfarani!”

  And gracefully as a kitten leaving a cushion she obeyed. She stood before them, lithely poised, radiant and splendid, clothed only in beauty that was unmarred save by a red slot that gaped at her left breast. But no blood flowed.

  It was Madeline. Farley’s blazing brain could no longer doubt. It was beyond all conception that there could be such a close double—and utterly beyond the wildest coincidence that any trickery could have found that double at that time. Farley saw and he believed.