The 11th Golden Age of Weird Fiction

by E. Hoffmann Price

  What if he did work it open? I didn’t want any of it. He was just too big to seem real. Everything was crazy. Selene jumped up. She “talked” to them, but Captain snarled. She caught me by both arms. “You’d better go. Don’t you see, I’m a cat and I have to stick to my house.”

  “I’ll buy the damn’ place! Listen, is it that Garner guy? Where does he come in? Does he own you or the house, or what? Look here—”

  But she edged me to the door. She had a silky way of using all her weight, without trying to. I couldn’t have gotten rough with her if I’d wanted. I couldn’t have gotten a hold of her against her will. Supple, wriggling out of any grasp.

  “You idiot!” I flared up. “He’s making a sap of you, I saw you waiting the other night, I—”

  “Shhh… Wait…everything will be all right… This is his house, but it can be yours…come back tomorrow. Tomorrow afternoon.”

  I was over the threshold before I knew it. Selene stood there, smiling through the panes. I took a step and then looked back. She’d turned away, but I could see enough of that smooth face to know that hell must be in her eyes.

  Tomorrow! The boss had told me if I didn’t snap out of it, I was through. I didn’t blame him. But I couldn’t explain. Imagine, saying I was off my feed account of wondering how a cat could become a woman? That I was saying her name to myself, over and over, till the words became a part of me? Selene Felice—Selene Felice—

  Selene was some kind of myth, a moon goddess. Felice, that’s the female for Felix, which means fortunate.

  * * * *

  That night there was a full moon. Selene coming over the hill. Selene looking into my window. A lunatic is a fellow who’s moonstruck. That antique idea isn’t silly. Ever try sleeping with moonlight in your face? Sometimes you succeed, and sometimes you wish you hadn’t. I finally got up and drove down the Peninsula.

  To the hills behind San Mateo. To find out what Selene was doing about Garner. She was going to do something; but when, and what? I couldn’t wait any longer.

  So I parked and walked. A car the age of mine is as conspicuous as a bombing squadron in that hill quiet. The moon was high. The early red had looked like a prediction of war. Now she was high and white and the shadows were black, with all the slopes dancing in glimmer. I felt more a fool, the closer I got to Selene’s bungalow. Each time I reached the last curve, I back tracked.

  Something told me to check out while the checking was good. Who could put up with a dame whose cats began to lift the roof when someone took an armful or two? Garner—he got away with it—and that kept me wondering why. Wondering how much longer the cats would keep on sleeping. The way those beasts guarded Selene got under my skin as bad as the thought of Garner pawing her.

  No job, no Selene. A grain of sense. I was back at the wheel of my car when I saw Garner’s long coupe coming toward me. A twelve cylinder job with red enameled centers on the hub caps. They make not many limousines of that kind, and the coupes are scarcer yet.

  There were two people in that bus. I had snapped on my headlights, so I saw plainly enough that the girl was not Selene.

  The tail lights winked around a curve just opposite to the direction to Selene’s house. There is a network of dead end drives, and private roads, but only two main lines went from the wide spot where I was parked.

  Sunrise services at Christmas and Easter are a hobby out on the Pacific Coast; a chamber of commerce gag to make blizzard-bound middle westerners wish they were dead. Either Garner’s new girl lived along the road, or she was heading for the wooded spot near the bowl. There weren’t any religious doings scheduled for months to come, but that didn’t mean the place went to waste.

  It was not far. I followed without even a parking light. My hunch was right. He swung off toward the bowl. I was grinning all over. I’d give Selene something to think of. I’d pick her up, and we’d use my flashlight, over the edge of the amphitheater. A heel’s trick, but I wanted Selene cured of her crazy idea of belonging to Garner’s house.

  They wouldn’t hear my gears when I made a U-turn, for I had not tailed them closely. It was tricky work, on that narrow winding road, so I lost time. I was shaking and sweating, though I might know that Garner would spend more than five or ten minutes with his new dame, out under that moon.

  Then I saw the green eyes in the gloom. At first I thought it was one of the big wild cats that still live just behind the settlement; a whopper. Next came a long row of green eyes. A column of cats marched along without a sound. When they reached a place where the moon blazed down on the road, I saw the even lashing of their tails.

  The craziest thing you can imagine: all kinds of cats, holding their heads high, as if they were sniffing the air before a fight. When they finally passed me, I was shaking my head. I had not driven over a quarter of a mile when another gang of them came down a trail that cut into the narrow road.

  “Convention, huh?”

  The past week had been screwy enough for anything as sensible as a feline congress. The hills were full of them. Some had long gone native. Anyone knows how two-three house cats sometimes disappear the same day, and stay away for a week, and come back around the same time. And not during mating season, necessarily. They know where and why they go, but they don’t tell.

  The lights were on at Selene’s house. The door was ajar. I knocked. No answer. I stepped in. I did not hear a sound. The sun parlor was empty. Captain and his gang had checked out. Selene’s car was in the garage.

  Maybe she’d strolled to see some neighbor. A lonesome person would, with so much moon flooding the canyons and the open hillsides. Selene goes for a stroll, doesn’t latch the door. Cats head for a convention.

  But I made sure. She was not in her bedroom. On the floor was a pair of moccasins, some Tru-Silks, a rumple of underthings, and a brassiere. A skirt and sweater was over the foot of the bed. She’d changed and checked out.

  I was good and sore. The prime chance to settle Garner was all shot! Could I go around punching doorbells and asking for Selene?

  Then I got it. I’d go back to the bowl, tail Garner, and find out where his new girlfriend lived. He’d just found her, I figured, hence this moonlight stuff. Later, he’d be spending time at her house, or a place he’d get for her.

  The way to play it was to hide out in the turtle back. Better than trailing in a slow, noisy bus like mine. I parked some distance from the road fork, and went on foot.

  Then I heard the cats. The most awful howling, and more of it than I’d ever imagined, much less heard. And you know what one feline courtship sounds like, or one good duel with well-matched contenders. I wondered if any bob cat had come down from the further range.

  There could have been a dozen, and you’d never have heard them in that screaming. Up—up—up—and still no ceiling. I ran, figuring at first that that riot would hide any noise I made lifting the turtle back. Ten to one it wasn’t locked, and if it was, his keys were in the ignition, where they should be, with girl on his brain.

  The nearer I got, the louder the screams. I quit running. There were noises no cat ever made. Captain, that monstrous fellow of Selene’s, did have a raucous voice, like an old time sea captain. But I quit running. Those howls, that threshing in the thicket near the bowl…

  It stopped. My knees began to shake. My mouth got dry. There were sounds like those a cat makes when he has a big mouthful and is impatient; tearing, shaking his head, sinking his fangs. The very same, only, many times more of it.

  “Hell,” I said aloud.

  I walked on. Gravel crunched under my feet. Then leaves. I stumbled in spite of myself. Ahead, two tail lights stared from the clearing.

  When I reached the big coupe, no one stirred anywhere.

  I did not get the score until I finally went toward the clearing. The smell might have warned me, but it didn’t. It was not until I looked and saw that I got sic
k and scared. The bones were new, white. The moonlight made that clear. A doctor could have told which were a man’s and which a woman’s. But I’m no doctor. I just needed one.

  I turned and ran. There was one question I had to ask, and I knew that Selene could answer it. By looking at her cats when they came home. If her menagerie was lean, I’d know it hadn’t happened.

  I stumbled half a dozen times, running up to my car. I nearly went over the bank, trying to make a U-turn. Getting to her house was a job. My feet pounding in the patio brought Selene to the door. Her eyes widened further than I’d ever seen.

  Then she smiled and sighed and reached out with both arms.

  “Darling, you did get impatient, didn’t you?” Her blue robe was not made to hide much. Now, it trailed straight down from her shoulders, and what she wore beneath it wasn’t much. “It’s so nice. I’m glad you did.”

  Her voice was contented, and her eyes were sleepy. She was warm and sleek in my arms. There was not a trace of make-up on her. Her hair was damp, and mussed. She had stepped from under the shower only a minute ago. So she had neither cosmetics nor perfume.

  Then I saw the cats. Captain was washing his face. So were some of the others, though half of them were asleep. And they all bulged. Their stomachs would have dragged the carpet if they had tried to walk. Selene’s warmth seemed to distill a cat scent from her skin and hair. That, and the thought of what made her animals look overfed made me break loose. “Uh—something I ate—where’s—?”

  “Anything I can get you—?”

  Captain got up. He gave me a knowing look. He arched his back, and rubbed against me. So did the others. I stood there gulping. Selene purred in my ear, “You’ve hurried too much—”

  She sat on the lounge. There was a decanter on the end table. I took a hefty one. I told myself I had a bad case of jitters. That I was moonstruck. I pulled myself together. She curled up against me, and whispered, “The house will be yours, if you want it… I go with the house…”

  I must have looked like myself again, but I was all wrong inside. Her eyes had a contented expression. She stretched back among the cushions.

  “I’ve been terrible, but that’s all over, darling.”

  Then she looked puzzled. She knew it was long past the time for me to take an armful. Her cats were purring, sleepy. I could not explain why I wasn’t kissing her. I muttered, “It just doesn’t seem real—can’t believe it yet—dashed like crazy—an impulse like that—”

  She thought she understood. After all, it made sense, a fellow walking in circles for a week or two, then breaking in and finding there’s nothing more to argue about. “I’m dizzy.” I got up. “I’ll wash up a bit.”

  The water in the bathroom was cold. It should have done the work. In another few minutes, I’d know that it was a hallucination, out there by the bowl. But those minutes had not a chance.

  Not when I saw the bottom of Selene’s tiled shower.

  A tattered bit of satin; coral-colored where it wasn’t soaked with blood, and earth. It was clawed to streamers. I knew it must have been torn from Garner’s girl. That was bad enough, but what followed was worse: a question. Did Selene tell Captain to round up his pals, or did she lead them herself?

  That was when I made a dive from the window. My yell and the slamming sash brought Selene on the run. I landed in a heap, and did not notice the cactus. She cried out, but I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I scrambled to my feet and tore up the slope.

  Nothing was following me. It wasn’t that that I was afraid of. I was afraid of what I remembered, at the bowl. So I hit the road and somehow stuck to the curves. Black clouds gathered. A freakish rain pelted down. The windshield wiper couldn’t handle it all.

  I knew there’d be no footprints left around the bowl. But I was wrong.

  * * * *

  I sat around with a bottle all night, and didn’t feel the stuff at all. An afternoon radio newscast spilled the story. Someone had found the car and the bones, and scraps of coral underthings. Mr. Garner and girlfriend; jewelry and dental work clinched that. No one explained how skeletons could be picked clean so quickly.

  I could have explained one mystery: why, in the sheltered spot near the blood-stained blanket, there was a big paw print, “…as if a leopard weighing a hundred pounds or more had killed the couple.”

  All the others had been washed out by the rain, and the cops couldn’t follow any trail. I am still wondering if she had that bloody satin in her claws, or whether Captain brought it back to show her what a job he’d done. Her name was a give away from the start. I had spelled it Felice. It should have been felts, which sounds the same.

  Yeah, that’s Latin for cat. I don’t know who owns the house now, and I’m not going out there to ask. I got a new job. No more measuring dames for hosiery. I am twisting a gas pump. But every time a gal drives up, I hope it is, and I pray it isn’t Selene…

  THE OLD GODS EAT

  (also published as “House of Monoceros”)

  Originally published in Spicy Mystery Stories, February 1941.

  When the 5:37 stopped at Pengyl, I wasn’t surprised to see I was the only passenger who got off at that clutter of old masonry houses with thatched roofs; this was the loneliest corner of Cornwall. No one ever arrived there, and no one ever left, except those who disappeared, which was the business that brought me from London. A monster was eating the peasants. Anyway, that was what Lord Treganneth said in his letter.

  A fifteen year old Rolls Royce pulled up, and a big man got out. His face was as rugged as the Cornish coast: heavy chin, broad mouth, jutting nose; and his shaggy tweeds made him look even rougher. He said, brusquely, “I’m Treganneth. You’re Mr. Dale, I fancy?”

  His voice had a rumble like the surf that was shaking the ground under my feet, and filling the air with fine spray. What a place! Even the sea hated it, and tried to pound it to pieces.

  If he wanted to be superior, okay; his check for twenty guineas, a hundred bucks in American money, made him a nice guy.

  I heaved my bag into the car. He said, “Get in the back seat.” Then he took the wheel. That was funny. It made no sense, an earl or something of the sort, not having a chauffeur. I wondered for a second or two whether the monoceros had eaten all the servants.

  Judging from the coat of arms on Treganneth’s stationery, a monoceros is a kind of a sea monster with a horn like a unicorn; a sea-going dragon with a long spike coming out between his eyes. The motto on the engraving was funny, too: WE SERVE THE MONOCEROS.

  In the couple minutes I’d waited in Pengyl, I figured that it was a ghost town. Now I began to see the people, and I wondered where they’d been up till the time Treganneth drove up.

  A man in an oilskin coat and hat shook his fist from a doorway. Before we reached the edge of the village, another man popped out. He heaved a cobble stone and yelled, “Where’s Harry Penfield, you bloody bastard?”

  The rock smashed against the door. A bit higher, and it’d have knocked Treganneth from the wheel. This struck me as an odd way to treat the earl who owns the country for miles around. Maybe that was why he had sent for me, an American.

  I had a sort of reputation wished on me.

  I’d come to London to nail an embezzler; bonding company business, you know. The gent couldn’t run further, so he hung himself with the cord of his bath robe. The papers made a play of me hounding the man to his death. That must have pleased Treganneth, so here I was.

  A rock crashed against the rear quarter. Another knocked out the rear glass, though no pieces hit me. The people did not like Treganneth.

  Cornish miners are the best in the world, I’ve heard, and the most superstitious; too many generations underground, and the earth whispered to them. And the fishermen are as bad. Whether Treganneth did or did not have a monster around his castle, the peasants all thought he had.

  We cl
imbed a brisk grade, and got up through the mist. I was almost shocked to see how much light there was, for I’d gotten the feeling that the sun never shone here. A gray masonry fortress loomed up from a hill; it had a castellated turret, with little windows out through thick walls. For all the light, the place made me think of a second hand coffin.

  “Hold it!” I said to Treganneth. “I want to look from here. If there is funny work, whoever does it is leaving trails. The monoceros comes out of the castle and goes over the hills, or the natives go over the hills to the castle. Like in France, aviators used to spot batteries because some dumb artilleryman cut across a meadow.”

  Treganneth pulled up, but did not answer; he just sat there. I dug into my bag and got out a pair of high-power glasses. Anyone used to ordinarily fine glasses would never imagine how these binoculars gathered light. This time they surprised me; that was when I saw the girl in the turret.

  She was gripping the bars, and her face was pressed against the metal. A blanket was over her shoulders. That was all she wore, and it covered her back. She was high-breasted, and her waist was slim, and her hips had a luscious flare. The sill reached up high enough to block observations on her legs and so forth, but I was ready to okay her, from the sample displayed. Judging from the way she pressed against the bars she gripped, she was a prisoner.

  Lucky she moved away before his lordship got wise that I wasn’t studying hillsides. I said, “No, no signs of trespassers here. But who’s Harry Penfield?”

  Treganneth started. “The last man who vanished.”

  The road curved, dipped, swooped first inland, then along the sea; for a few miles, we were further from the castle than we’d been when I got that not quite-enough of a look at the blonde with the nice curves pressed against the bars. The road became tougher, the crags wilder; the full roar of the sea burst upon us, and spray drenched the car. And then we were heading for the arched gateway of the castle.