KEEPER OF THE GATEWAY
Originally published in Spicy Mystery Stories, September 1936.
At the outskirts of Atherton, Don Garrett swung from the old Spanish highway into the drive of a vacant estate. Parking a car in front of Denby Hollis’ house would be entirely too conspicuous.
As Garrett re-crossed the highway, he noted a poster made conspicuous by the glare of the street light at the intersection. It portrayed the dark, handsome face of the psychic who was the current sensation of San Francisco. A blurb announced: “Ankh Hotep. He knows all!”
Garrett grinned wisely, and cocked a derisive eye at the psychic.
“If Ankh Hotep knew where I’m going, he’d shed his shirt and collar in a hurry!”
And ten minutes later, he was stealthily picking his way through the shadows of Denby Hollis’ estate. He approached a window in the left wing. It was open. With scarcely a betraying sound, he pulled himself up to the sill.
One eyeful of the girl whose shapely body glowed under the soft light of the reading lamp would have made Ankh Hotep get entirely out of touch with the infinite. Over her chiffon nightgown she wore a coral velvet lounging robe, but neither concealed the sleek perfection of her delicately rounded body. Her legs were ivory fascinations whose long, graceful sweep extended beyond the partial protection of the robe; and the curves that blossomed upward from her knees had a heart-stirring roundness that finally dipped into a waistline designed for an embracing arm.
If all that had been visible in Ankh Hotep’s crystal globe—!
For a moment, Garrett’s eager glance lingered on the pert roundness of breasts that flirted with the low yoke of her gown. A small, star-shaped mole was just visible in the inner shadows. Then his glance shifted upward, caressing the loveliness of a face framed by soft, warm black hair.
She started as Garret cleared the sill, but she did not cry out. Her smile was a crimson promise, and her dark eyes welcomed the intruder.
“I thought you’d never get here,” she murmured, as he knelt beside the chaise longue. “I tried to phone and let you know that dad has gone to Los Angeles, and that we’d have the house to ourselves. I’ve been alone ever since Mamie served dinner. Oh, I wish you could have joined me. The kind of steak you dream about—”
“Idiot,” chuckled Garrett, “I’ve got too much on my mind to be dreaming about steaks—”
“And,” Lorraine Hollis resumed, “there were just oodles of mushrooms, and was I tickled silly when Mamie said she wanted to spend the night in Frisco!”
Garrett had no time to regret the several hours needlessly wasted. His arms slipped under the heavy robe, and drew the chiffon-clad length of loveliness toward him. She pretended to repulse him. He made playful gestures at subduing her, kissing the hollow of her throat, caressing her vibrant curves, enveloping her in an embrace from which she could not escape. Not even if she had wanted to.
“Darling,” she sighed, “wouldn’t it be splendid not to have to wonder if you could reach the window in time to outrun a charge of buckshot?”
“Gorgeous,” he answered, “if your old man didn’t have such a complex against fortune-hunters, we’d be in our own house.”
But as Lorraine clung more closely, and her breath came in short, quick gasps, neither had any thoughts left for future possibilities… One slender arm at last drew clear of his embrace and reached the switch cord…
If Ankh Hotep knew everything, he would have vanished in a puff of flame.
Finally, as the first fierce ardor of a meeting expended itself, Garrett seated himself at her feet and reveled in the fascination of her white loveliness, once more aglow beneath the single lamp.
“Hafiz,” he remarked, “once offered to trade two big cities for a mole just like the one you’re wearing—”
She laughed softly and pretended to hide the star-shaped beauty mark, and Garrett said, “Hafiz was a damn piker.
“But speaking of Turks and the like,” continued Garrett, “wouldn’t it be hell if your father consulted this guy Ankh Hotep? He knows everything!”
Lorraine grimaced wryly and shuddered.
“We saw Ankh Hotep in the city, last week at a private séance. He’s uncanny. His eyes are like daggers. Or like a black, poisonous tule pond.”
And from brandy and soda, they turned again to kisses, with no more thought for the omniscient Egyptian… But the drowsy sweetness of the room tricked them both…
* * * *
When Garrett awoke, a vague fear oppressed him, and his brain was strangely numb. He seemed still in the grip of a horrible dream which he could not remember.
There was a stirring at his side, and a low, quavering groan. It was worse than any shriek of terror; it was the final despairing attempt at speech, and as he listened, it became a hideous gurgling and gasping.
Garrett’s lips were dry, and sweat suddenly cropped out as he heard it. Yet he could not be awake. Nothing in the world of reality could make Lorraine moan as she did.
He found the switch. For a long moment he stood like a wooden image. Lorraine’s face was distorted beyond recognition. Her body was rigid, and her eyes stared horribly. Her mouth frothed, and foam drooled from its corners. Her skin seemed dark and bluish, as though she had been suffocated. Her lips drew back from her teeth, and another agonizing shudder racked her body.
During that moment of paralyzing dismay, her voice was abruptly checked. Garrett knew that he was looking at the dead. He forced himself to kneel beside her. There was no sign of a pulse.
Poisonous mushrooms? There could be no other answer. There was no mark or bruise on her.
Garrett strode woodenly to the chaise longue, poured himself a drink of brandy, then forced himself to sane thought.
She was dead. To protect the memory of that lovely girl whose kisses only a few hours ago had left him breathless and aflame, he must leave no trace of his visit. He wiped his fingerprints from the bottle, dried the glass from which he had drunk, and replaced it on the buffet. In a few moments, there was no outward evidence of his presence. There were no betraying marks on the window sill. The gravel walk would not record his footprints.
Once more he crept across Denby Hollis’ estate; but this time he was not alone. Grief and sickening terror stalked at his side.
* * * *
The papers of the following evening contained the story. The autopsy confirmed Garrett’s suspicion: poisonous mushrooms sufficient to kill a dozen persons.
Garrett attended the funeral, watched the costly casket being lifted into the Hollis vault, and caught a glimpse of the pathetic, white-haired old man who had stood between him and Lorraine.
“If he hadn’t blocked us,” Garrett bitterly reflected, “she’d have been with me, and we’d have been eating beans, and they’re not poisonous.”
Several weeks later, he decided to call on the old man who had damned him. It was not to observe any formality about condolences, but to enter, even if only for a few moments, the house in which he and Lorraine had exchanged those last kisses while death had mocked them from the background. It was a morbid urge, but he did not deny it.
This time he drove into the Hollis estate. A long, black car was already parked there. A servant admitted him, saying that the master was engaged for the moment. He seated himself on the lounge where he and Lorraine had exchanged their first kisses… If he only had not seen her, a twisted, discolored thing…
The servant presently returned, and ushered Garrett into Denby Hollis’ library.
The old man was not alone. His visitor was tall and dark and impressive. Ankh Hotep, solemn and arrogant. The psychic, like all of his kind, was preying on the bereaved.
Denby Hollis would be an easy victim. He was ripe for the picking.
“Garrett,” said Hollis, after acknowledging his caller’s condolences, “let’s forget our grievances. I feel g
uilty, thinking how I kept you two apart. The way I miss her—” The old man choked. Instinctively, Garrett laid a hand on his shoulder. He scarcely knew what to say.
Hollis resumed, “Don, Ankh Hotep can let us talk to her.”
Garrett dully queried, “A séance?”
“By no means,” Ankh Hotep interposed. His smooth, precise speech was faintly tinged with a foreign accent. “No muttering shadows, such as a medium contrives to call up. I will bring her back in the flesh. I am Ankh Hotep, Keeper of the Gateway. I know the lost secrets of Egypt.”
Garrett was too stunned to object to that insane statement. The sonorous overtones of the Egyptian’s voice stirred to life the deeply seated belief in the supernatural.
“You do not yet believe,” asserted Ankh Hotep, his tone level as though no one’s belief mattered. “But I say again, I can bring her back.
“In old Egypt we embalmed the dead so that at the end of ten thousand years they could arise again. But looters have destroyed their tombs and their bodies before the destined time.”
“Ten thousand years,” muttered Garrett.
“Ten thousand years,” Ankh Hotep solemnly echoed; then he smiled inscrutably as the sculptured gods who still watch the Black Land, and added, “But I have regained and improved on the lost secret of the priests. Instead of having to wait a hundred centuries before commanding Osiris, the Judge of the Dead, to release his victim, I can do so at will and at once.
“Modem science has given an ancient secret a new application. Instead of waiting for the curve of time to close back on itself, I can reverse time.
“Tonight you will see. I, Ankh Hotep, can and will do this.”
* * * *
In the end, old Denby Hollis agreed to pay a hundred thousand when the resurrection was accomplished; but Garrett’s conviction had begun to waver.
Why did the possessor of the ancient wisdom have to bargain for cash?
Garrett remembered the old racetrack trick: a ringer substituted to enable a fast horse to get the odds offered on the slow nag whose place he was taking.
“Listen, Ankh Hotep!” he cut in. “You’re a damn grafter, trying to take an old man for a ride! You’ve got a double to fool him!”
The Egyptian’s smile was inscrutable. He shrugged, but Denby Hollis interposed, “How could he palm off a substitute—wouldn’t I know my own daughter—?”
Garrett had no answer. He reached for his hat. Maybe the ringer would console Hollis in his grief. If so, the fraud would be somewhat justified.
And as he stalked out of the room, he heard Ankh Hotep’s assurance: “Mr. Hollis, this very night we will open the tomb. Wait here with me—I will phone my assistant to arrange. And you will break the seals of the coffin with your own hands…you will see her emerge, alive and radiant…”
* * * *
As Garrett headed toward San Francisco, his resignation gave way to revulsion. To perform the proposed jugglery, Ankh Hotep would have to destroy the corpse.
Garrett swung back, determined to expose the revolting fraud.
He parked his car half a mile from the cemetery, then scaled the wall, and crept among the tombs that loomed up out of the darkness. He wondered how Ankh Hotep’s assistants would cope with the watchman who guarded the cemetery against vandals.
He picked his way through the eerily shifting fogs and toward the Hollis vault. There he waited.
He had brought a tire iron; but he pocketed it, deciding that interference would be futile. Better let the ghoulish Egyptian hopelessly compromise himself, then expose the fraud, showing that a live woman was being substituted for Lorraine’s body.
Unless Denby Hollis were thoroughly convinced of Ankh Hotep’s trickery, he would remain open to future attempt. Garrett could not spend his nights guarding a tomb.
Presently a black car slowly rolled down the main drive. Headlights and parking lamps were off. Four swarthy men emerged: Orientals, part of Ankh Hotep’s psychic circus.
Not a word was spoken. There was scarcely a sound of footfalls in the gravel. They reminded him of four cats walking erect.
Garrett watched them pick the lock of the tomb. And as they went about their work inside, with scarcely more than a subdued mutter of voices, and a soft clink of tools, he crept toward the big sedan.
Its interior had been stripped to make room for a coffin.
A few minutes later they emerged with a copper casket. They loaded it, locked the vault, and boarded the car.
Garrett, sensing the hazard of trailing them in his own machine, mounted the spare tire rack; but the ghouls had scarcely cleared the cemetery when he realized that their destination was not Denby Hollis’ estate. They were heading for the Skyline Boulevard and the Coast Range.
For a resurrection, they had an unusual goal…
As they entered the upper reaches of the highway, they branched off on a narrow, dirt road; but the heavy car had scarcely completed the turn and nosed into the blackness of mist shrouded trees when a voice from the side of the drive rasped, “Hold it!”
A man emerged from the gloom. A pistol enforced his challenge.
The headlights flickered on and off, thrice in succession, then the driver answered, “Always on the job, eh, Mikhail?”
“Drive on, Habeeb!” ordered Mikhail.
Garrett slipped from the rear bumper before the driver let in the clutch. The drumming of the motor masked the sound as he took cover behind a boulder.
“Yeah,” the chief was saying, “we got the cold meat. Nothing to it. Watchman’s been dead drunk for a week. We’d be broke if we had to keep him that way much longer.”
* * * *
The cabin, like most of its kind, was perched on a steep slope, so that while the front was low, the rear was two-storied. The basement should give Garrett ready access to the main floor.
As they carried the casket up the front steps, he slipped around to the rear and located the door that opened into the basement. He entered and picked his way into the darkness. His movements were masked by the echoing footsteps above.
He wondered at the presence of a watchman. What had Mikhail been keeping under guard? Garrett found a stairway leading to the main level. To block Ankh Hotep’s plan, he had to learn more details.
A muttered consultation on the floor above was followed by a thump. They had deposited the heavy casket in a room toward the front.
As Garrett cautiously lifted the trapdoor, he heard a high-pitched whining, a strange, eerie whirring and whistling. He shuddered as he crept through the darkness, the iron ready. He halted at the jamb of a half opened door.
The room ahead of him was illuminated by a kerosene lamp. Mikhail was operating a small circular saw driven by a storage battery taken from a car. The whirring disk of steel was biting a long, straight cut down the bottom of the inverted casket. By slitting the heavy copper sheeting, they could remove the corpse without destroying the seals of the cover.
In one corner was a whitish slab, perhaps three-eights of an inch thick. Near it stood two cylinders of compressed gas and an oxy-acetylene torch. The procedure was simple: remove the corpse, put in a live ringer, her face toward the lid of the casket, and follow up with a slab of asbestos board. Then the copper bottom of the casket would be welded back into place. The asbestos would protect the supposed corpse from the hot blast of the flame; and a tiny vent hole, which the victim of the fraud would never perceive, would give her ample air.
Ankh Hotep might not know everything, but his hundred thousand dollar fraud was simple enough; although his greatest knowledge lay in his convincing manner.
Garrett wondered where they kept the living woman who was to substitute for a corpse. He shivered, trying to picture anyone cold-blooded enough to permit herself to be sealed up in a freshly emptied coffin!
The bottom of the inverted casket was removed. The pung
ent fumes of embalming fluid permeated the room. It was time for Garrett to retreat. As he moved backward, the four ghouls lifted the casket from the supporting trestles, turned it right side up. The rigid, shrouded corpse which the undertaker had skillfully doctored and tinted to disguise the agony of death, thudded to the floor. The sound was sickening.
“There’s your cold meat, Mikhail,” chuckled Habeeb. Then to the others, “Set it up and get busy!”
* * * *
Lorraine was dead; but the sight of that once lovely body exposed to those thugs, started a wave of rage and horror that burned out Garrett’s judgment. He plunged recklessly into the room, lashing out with the tire iron. For a moment, his frenzied attack swept the ghouls back; but as he tore into the pack, Mikhail tackled him about the ankles.
“For cripes sake! Where did this nut come from?” growled the chief.
They closed in, overwhelming him. Though Garrett’s strip of metal smashed into the tangle, his blows were hampered. He was cursing and raging, insanely reviling them as he slugged. Wrath and outraged sentiment scarcely let him feel the kicks and blows that hammered home. And then the five desecrators bore him to the floor, knocking him breathless.
“You’d never think a hobo would get up this far,” panted the chief. “Watch it—”
Garrett, feeling the assault relax as he slumped flat, suddenly kicked clear and jerked himself away from the tangle. He caught them off guard. His leap carried him smashing against the wall. He recovered, gathered himself to charge and beat his way to freedom.
Though he had ruined his chance of catching Ankh Hotep off-guard, he could expose the conspiracy before the ghouls had time to dispose of the corpse or remove the traces of their work from the cabin.
Garrett lunged; but this time they were ready for him. His attack was checked in mid-bound by Mikhail’s pistol. The heavy slug tore through the flash of Garrett’s thigh, breaking his stride. He pitched in a heap. Another shot, and the leader commanded, “Back, you idiots! Mike’s got him—keep out of the way—”
But Mikhail’s shot was wild. Garrett hurled his the iron—not at the enemy, but at the kerosene lamp. The yellow flame winked out. But at the same instant, a tongue of fire spurt from the darkness. Garrett’s wits were blotted out. Mikhail’s last shot had connected.
The 11th Golden Age of Weird Fiction Page 19