* * * *
Garrett’s next perception was an intolerable aching and throbbing of his head. His leg was a flaming agony. His shirt was sticky with blood, and he felt the warm trickle that oozed down his ribs. The nightmare became a painful reality. He was in moon-thinned darkness. A cold, wind-driven fog chilled him, despite the fever of his wounds. He heard a scraping and a chunking, and felt something strike his ankle.
Someone was digging. Earth catapulted up from beyond the mound along which Garrett lay. He heard the impact of a pick against rock. The supposed wandering hobo was to be buried.
Bit by bit Garrett understood. In the darkness, one of Mikhail’s bullets had glanced across his skull, and knocked him senseless. They had assumed him to be dead. Dripping as he was with blood, their error was not surprising.
His leg was stiff, and he was weak from loss of blood. He tried to move, and dislodged a small stone from the excavated earth. He froze, but after an endless instant, he relaxed. Mikhail had not heard the betraying sound.
The shoveling finally ceased. A spade came swooping up out of the grave.
Garrett was too weak to run or fight. He had but one chance. And despite his peril, he forced himself to deliberation, slowly rising to a crouch, crawling toward the spade—Garrett, overconfident of his returning strength, stumbled.
Mikhail exclaimed in amazement, cursed and cleared the edge of the grave; but lurching forward kept his hands from his pistol. The delay was short, but spurred by desperation; Garrett recovered and seized the spade. As Mikhail rolled to the surface, he reached for his gun.
One shot and the whole pack would be drawn to the scene!
Garrett desperately slashed out with the spade. It caught Mikhail across the head. The spasmodic contraction of his muscles jerked a shot. He recovered. Another shot—a wild one—but Garrett’s second blow was deadly.
He dropped the brain-splashed spade, lunged for the weapon, and ducked to the corner of the garage. But there was no sound from the cabin.
The black sedan was no longer in the drive. Trembling and nauseated by the crunch of bone, he entered the garage. It housed a roadster. He was glad the keys were in the ignition. He would not have to go back and probe Mikhail’s pockets.
In the glove compartment was a flashlight. Garrett took it and went through the cabin.
The welding equipment was still there. And here and there on the floor were little drops of molten bronze. They were still warm. The coffin had been resealed.
In one corner was a cabinet he had not previously noted. Its shelves contained glass-stoppered bottles. Most of the labels were marked with chemical symbols and pharmaceutical terms he could not translate; nor had he any time for speculation.
Garrett’s watch, broken in action, gave him no idea of the elapsed time. However, it would have taken a skilled welder at least forty minutes to seal that copper casket.
As he backed the roadster up the steep incline, Garrett had part of the answer: Mikhail, hiding out with the substitute Lorraine, would need a car to get supplies.
Presently Garrett was sending the speedy little car through the shifting mists that blocked the lower levels.
He stopped at a filling station and removed the most conspicuous signs of the struggle.
* * * *
When he reached Denby Hollis’ estate, Ankh Hotep’s black car was still parked in the porte cochere.
Garrett rang for admission. Denby Hollis, eyes strangely glittering, came to the door.
“For God’s sake, Garrett, why can’t you leave us alone?”
“I’ve changed my mind. I’m sorry about the way I spoke. I just couldn’t believe. But after thinking it over—”
“I understand.” The old man relented. “Come in. Ankh Hotep is about to start.”
Garrett followed Hollis into the library.
Ankh Hotep ironically regarded the newcomer.
“Ah, Mr. Garrett,” he observed, “you have thought better of your skepticism?”
“Er…yes. I sort of figured that in case the shock upset Mr. Hollis, I’d—”
“Better than that,” interrupted Ankh Hotep, “you can be a witness. In case anyone should claim she is an imposter. Raising the dead is easier than convincing the world that it has been done.
“I am ready. There must be no interruption. It will be dangerous.”
He approached the copper casket that lay on the hearth.
Then, as he cut the seals, and set aside the cover of the casket, he challenged, “Do you wish to look? To be convinced?”
“No,” quavered Denby Hollis, shuddering; and Garrett held back.
Ankh Hotep stepped behind the casket. His dark face became majestic as he declaimed, “Hearken, Osiris, and all the wise ones who sit with him in judgment of the dead! I, Ankh Hotep, know the word of power. By that old wisdom I command you to release her!
“If you refuse, I will pronounce aloud your sacred name, and it will become a mockery for men to hear!”
Then that man who threatened the gods began to chant in a guttural, unintelligible language not even remotely resembling any that Garrett had ever heard. Yet the very sound sent thrills and shudders rippling down his spine. Despite the hideous fraud he had seen in preparation, the surge and thunder of that great voice and the very will of Ankh Hotep made the mummery seem real.
“Come forth again by daylight,” he resumed in English. “Smile again at the dawn, and forget that death ever kissed your lips… Ankh Hotep, Keeper of the Gateway, commands, and you will obey…”
Over and over he intoned it, weaving a spell of hypnotic enchantment that Garrett could not resist. Fierce waves of power smote him like surges of flame, like mighty gusts of wind and overwhelming tides—irresistible, conquering, until even the fraud and desecration Garrett had witnessed became an unreality. Nothing was real except this glaringly illuminated room.
It had become a little world stolen from the universe.
“I, Ankh Hotep, command time, and the gods, and those who guard the Gateway…”
Garrett’s tense nerves were tingling and vibrating like tightly stretched wires. The Egyptian bent over the casket for a moment, straightened, and without breaking the rhythm of his chant, commanded, “Come forth! The Gate is open!”
Then silence—brooding, awful silence in which Garrett could hear only his own hoarse breathing and the pounding of his heart.
Finally there was a sighing and a stirring. It came from the open casket. It seemed that there was a fourth presence now in the room.
Garrett, his perceptions keener than normal, could even hear the slow, regular pulse that was beating in the casket, momentarily becoming faster.
The stirring became more audible. A hand crept over the edge. Slender white fingers…ever so slowly, but certainly, they were closing on the metal…
White arms. Garrett watched the ripple of muscles. It was as though life’s tempo had taken the pace of a slow motion picture… Bit by bit they flexed. Then she appeared—Lorraine, sitting upright in that casket!
Her dark eyes were wide with wonder, as though she had been startled out of a sound sleep. Freshness and beauty had arisen from the dregs of death.
The flare of lights made the white shroud a misty blur through which her radiant body smiled clear and shapely. She was standing now, poised uncertainly, as though learning anew to walk—“Oh, dad!” she gasped. “Where have I been—?”
It was Lorraine’s voice, to the last inflection. As she lifted dainty feet clear of the casket, her glance shifted to Garrett. She seemed utterly unaware that she wore a stained and rumpled shroud that was tainted by death—
“Don—whatever—?” She was perplexed, wondering at their awe-stricken stare. She seemed unaware of Ankh Hotep behind the casket.
Garrett’s brain was a blazing confusion. How could a ringer recognize him?
Feign that sudden, happy recognition, that moment of confusion at seeing her father and her forbidden sweetheart side by side? Denby Hollis, incoherently groping for words, caught her in his arms. Garrett, recollecting what had happened in the cabin, was more stunned than Hollis. Could those strange drugs, administered to a corpse, have paved the way for Ankh Hotep’s uncanny powers? Could one of those thugs, during Garrett’s blank moments, have applied some long forgotten Egyptian drug? Had they tried to kill him to preserve a guarded, archaic secret?
Lorraine was warm, living flesh. And as she broke from her father’s embrace, she seemed to sense that she wore strange apparel.
“Don, do tell me what it’s all about.”
Her kiss sent shudders racing through Garrett. His brain was a whirling madness. Then a semblance of sanity cropped up. He thrust Lorraine from him, snatched the yoke of her shroud, tore it half to the waist. She was too amazed to protest. Before she could instinctively shield her shapely breasts with crossed hands, Garrett saw the star-shaped birthmark.
“Good God!” he muttered. “It is Lorraine!”
And then there was a pounding at the door. Gruff voices demanded admittance.
“Open up! The law!”
Garrett went to the door. Two highway patrolmen looking over his shoulder, saw the group in the room beyond, and swept him along with them; but they sank back on their heels when they saw Lorraine, her torn shroud, and the open coffin.
“For hell’s sweet sake, what kind of a bughouse is this?” demanded one, eyeing Garrett.
“Ankh Hotep,” explained Hollis, “brought my dead daughter back to life. That’s why we opened the tomb.”
“The whole damn works is screwy, Harmon.”
“We’d better take them all along.”
“Just as you please,” agreed Ankh Hotep.
“But this is an outrage!” protested Denby Hollis. “My daughter—”
“Raising the dead is no crime,” interposed Garrett.
“No, but murder is!” snapped Harmon, seizing him by the arm. “How about that blood you mopped off at Bender’s filling station?”
“But it was self-defense!” protested Garrett, paling at the thought of the head he had crushed with a spade. “I tell you, they tried to kill me—bury me—I—”
“I guess that woman lying stripped on the other side of the hole in the ground was making improper advances, so you croaked her, too!” was Harmon’s ironic retort. “Come on, the gang of you!” Ankh Hotep, his dark face tightening, was edging toward a window; but Harmon caught the stealthy move and shouted, “Grab him, Sims!”
As the patrolman whirled, Ankh Hotep, swift as a cat, stooped and with both hands flung the heavy coffin lid, knocking Sims off balance.
Hannon’s hastily fired shot went wild; but Garrett, jerking free, hurled himself at Ankh Hotep. The Egyptian, drawing a knife as the flying tackle caught him about the knees, hacked down at his captor.
And then Sims, scrambling clear of the coffin lid, fired from a crouch. Ankh Hotep slumped across Garrett, and his dagger gouged into the carpet.
“Anybody else?” challenged Harmon, scarcely realizing it was over. Then he lowered his weapon, jerked Garrett to his feet.
“Two pistol shots were reported by a motorist passing by on the La Honda Road,” he continued. “And lights. An officer went out and found a man with his head crushed, and a nude woman, both dead; alongside a hole in the ground.
“About the time that was radioed to the patrol cars, you came barging into a filling station, all cut up. And the guy’s car is parked in this yard.
“Now sound off! It’d better be good, and cut out the resurrection bunk!”
Garrett accounted for his presence at the cabin, and detailed what had happened.
“It had me stopped in my tracks,” he concluded, “but now I see it all. Lorraine was never dead. Palming off a live ringer on her father would be almost impossible; but a substitute corpse would not be suspected. Not the way she looked—”
He checked himself.
“How the hell do you know?” Harmon suspiciously demanded.
“I guess I ought—” He stopped short, colored, looked foolish; but Lorraine, who had been catching up loose ends, interposed.
“Better tell them, darling,” she smiled. “Maybe dad will forgive me, now that I’ve come back to life.”
“I was here at the house the night she died,” explained Garrett. “And after a couple of drinks, we both passed out And when I awoke, she was dead, and all distorted. So I checked out, sure it was Lorraine.”
The cops nodded wisely, chuckled, and exchanged glances. Garrett’s censored version did not require amplification.
“And then,” he continued, “tonight’s jam made it clear. Since we’ve got an extra corpse, simple as two and two. Ankh Hotep picked up a pretty fair double, fed her a bunch of poison mushrooms, and then when the doped liquor laid us out, he put the dying girl in there with me. Very simple, and no one would ever catch the point, considering how her face was all distorted, and in the meanwhile, they kept Lorraine, drugged or hypnotized, a prisoner.”
“But how do you know this jane here ain’t a ringer?” Harmon was still skeptical.
“It’s a birthmark,” explained Lorraine, “but don’t think you’re going to get a look at it.”
As she spoke, she pulled her torn shroud closer together.
“All right,” agreed Harmon, nodding and chuckling. “Come on with us, buddy. If the corpse at the cabin has marks of an autopsy, we’re all through with you. And then you can come back and finish studying this young lady’s…ah…identifying marks.”
PIT OF MADNESS
Originally published in Spicy Mystery Stories, April 1936.
Bayonne seemed incredibly ancient and lovely to Denis Crane as he headed from the wine shop to the Biarritz Highway and across the sombre parkway toward the Gate of Spain. The cathedral spires were silver lance-heads reaching into the moonglow, and the city was a pearl gray enchantment afloat on a sea of writhing river mists: yet that blood soaked soil whispered to Denis Crane as he walked.
This was unholy ground, honeycombed with crypts in which Roman legionnaires had worshiped Mithra, and watched frenzied devotees slash and mutilate and emasculate themselves in honor of bloodthirsty Cybele. This corner of France was the home of witch and wizard and warlock.
A shiver rippled down Crane’s lean, broad-shouldered body as he glanced to his left and saw the ominous cluster of ancient trees that overshadowed the low gray cupola of the spring where Satan and Saint Leon once had met—
Another medieval legend. Well, and here is the causeway, and just ahead, rue d’Espagne, with the yellow glow from the windows of Basque wine shops breaking its narrow gloom.
But the scream that came from his left told him how far from warm humanity he was, however near the lights might be. It was the sobbing, desperate outcry of some woman whose last gasp could not quite voice her terror.
Crane’s suntan became a sickly yellow in that spectral, mist-filtered moonlight. He wheeled, stared into the swirling grayness of the dry moat that girdled the thirty-foot city wall. His face lengthened, tightened into grim angles, and his eyes narrowed as he listened. Silence—sinister…poisonous.… Then that dreadful wail again. It was closer now, and though it was inarticulate he knew that the woman was crying for help and despaired of getting it.
An everlasting instant, and she burst from the mist and into the foreground at the foot of the causeway that blocked the moat. Her abrupt appearance shocked Crane, though he knew that it was but the illusion of fog and moonlight.
Her hair was a streaming blackness, and her body a pearl-white glow. Her feet and legs were as bare as her torso. All she wore was a flimsy shawl caught at the shoulder, draping slantwise to veil one breast, and flaring out, to shroud the opposite hip. Crane
distinguished no feature but her mouth. It was distorted in a cry she could not utter.
He plunged down the steep slope of the causeway and into the moat. Her legs gave way, pitching her headlong to the sand. She lay there, arms sprawled out. As he reached her side, she shuddered and slumped flat, no longer making instinctive efforts to protect herself.
Crane rolled her over into the crook of his arm. He saw then what mist and motion had masked: her throat was savagely torn, her breast and stomach clawed and lacerated. Her face was a gory crisscross of bruises and slashes. The filmy fragility of the shoulder-to-hip shawl had not hampered her assailant enough for him to tear it from her body.
Neither pulse nor breath was perceptible. Though her sweetly curved body was blood-splashed, her wounds could not have killed her; but terror and despair could have.
Her face must have been as lovely as her body; but horror blinded him to the sleekness of her hips and the shapeliness of her legs and firm young breasts. His eyes narrowed as he recovered sufficiently from the shock to interpret certain significant signs.
Her hands had the incredible softness of one utterly a stranger to the lightest work; but what she still clenched in her fingers was a startling revelation.
It was similar in shape to a military campaign badge; purple, with a rosette of the same color. A decoration awarded to an elect few.
But most revealing of all was the silken shawl. It placed her beyond any question. There was only one house in Bayonne where the girls paraded in such costume; and that place was on the street that ran along the city wall.
Then he noted that she was breathing; and a slash on her inside arm was bleeding. It might not be dangerous, but it was near an artery. He drew a clean handkerchief from his breast pocket, and devised a tourniquet.
The town was asleep, and he’d have to carry her to the house on the wall; but first give that tourniquet a twist. He fumbled for a pencil—
The 11th Golden Age of Weird Fiction Page 20