The 11th Golden Age of Weird Fiction

by E. Hoffmann Price

  That wasn’t all. There was that man chasing that blonde girl. Out of the chatter, I got it: a golden-haired witch luring young men to the monoceros. Some of these folks had a funny way of saying witch, I guess it was the Cornwall accent or something. It would be bad if they got hold of Diane.

  We went to the market. On the way back, I asked Emily, “What’s this golden-haired…uh, witch business? The earl held out on me, and so did you.”

  “That would have distracted you from the monoceros. These young men are mortally afraid, but each one brags about a blonde girl from London or somewhere, spending a week end at the sea, and being impressed by him, and coming back to meet him. Women—young and attractive women—are scarce—”

  She sighed. “As scarce as young and attractive men—oh, what a God forsaken edge of nowhere this is!”

  “So they sneak out to meet the blonde baby, making a careful sneak so none of the other boys cut in, and—one more lad fades?”

  Emily nodded. “The fourth. Or fifth. A witch tempting them into the den of the monoceros. You know how such a story spreads.”

  When we got back to the castle, Treganneth called me into his study. It was an old, dark room, all lined with old, leather bound books in oak cases. He had some of them spread out on the big table; and there was a square of parchment written in jet black ink.

  His hand shook when he pointed, and so did his voice: “Dale, I’ve been finding old records. The way to get to the foundations of this place. There is a crypt. There was a monster, centuries ago, and it did live on human sacrifices the heathen Treganneths offered, long before King Arthur’s time. It’s utter rubbish, but there is something strange—there was a golden-haired witch who lured victims to the monoceros, once the Treganneths turned against the Druids and became Christians.”

  “You believe that?”

  “I don’t know what I believe.”

  “Another man vanished, last night.”

  Treganneth groaned, passed one hand before his eyes. “Again!”

  I prodded him. He straightened up.

  “You’re holding out. I want the straight of it, or you can chase yourself.”

  He got haughty and tough. “What do you mean?”

  “Emily Polgate has a hold on you.”

  He wouldn’t say yes, and he wouldn’t say no; he just glared. I took another crack at him: “When we stopped on the ridge, and I took out my binoculars, I got a good look at the girl in the turret. Who is the girl, and why?”

  Treganneth jumped up, sweating. “Why—you insolent puppy!”

  “Take it easy. The first thing you know, the yokels are going to take this place to pieces by hand and then take blondie to pieces and Emily, and you too. What kind of a game is this, you having a dame trapping yokels? Monster, my eye, the chumps fall over the cliff, the waves pound them to pulp.”

  Treganneth was white now, and his heavy jaw twitched. “The girl in the tower—she’s there for her own good. She’s quite mad.”

  “How about you and Emily Polgate?”

  “I prefer not to discuss that.”

  “Emily has loyally held down the fort, then hell pops, all the servants check out, men disappear. All of them young men.”

  “For God’s sake, shut up! Let’s look into this crypt. Show it is empty. Throw the place open to the villagers.”

  Treganneth took the chart and a flashlight. In a few minutes, we were in that dark tangle of vaults and passages. He hunted a few minutes in the blind alley, and then he saw the trap with the ring.

  The smell of iodine, of sea-decay came swooping up. We went down the narrow stairs. Treganneth was a lord, all right. He led the way. That made me feel better. I didn’t want him in back of me.

  At the bottom of the stairs, he saw the lantern, and pulled up sharp. “By Jove! Someone’s been here before us.” He turned around, flashed his light into my face. “You?”

  “How would I know about this when you just found out?”

  He swung the flash back toward the pit. I struck a match to light a smoke. He jumped like he’d been stung. His flashlight went about. Then he made a choking sound and pointed.

  I looked. A pink rosette was lying at the foot of the steps. It was one of the frills from Emily’s flossy nightgown. It had torn off while we were pawing each other in panic. I cracked off, “All right, your girlfriend is running this show.”

  “You—damn it—how do you know—?”

  The man went wild. He swung at me with the flash, and howled, “Damn you, you’re part of a conspiracy to keep me from Diane! You and that—”

  He had missed braining me, but the flash smashed on my shoulder. Then he piled in with fists, there in the stinking dark. The smell was awful now; not sea stench, but corpse odor. The dead were crying in the only way they could.

  He slugged me a honey. Lucky he couldn’t see what he was doing. I popped him one, heard him grunt.

  “You damn fool, I’m not in cahoots with Emily, she’s tricking them down into this den!”

  But he wouldn’t listen. He was off his chump. He growled, and came back at me. I smashed against the wall. I’m not sure I could have swapped punches with him by daylight, but here it was impossible.

  He was yelling like crazy now, and the echoes made it worse. Every lunge, he promised to kill me. I was sure now that Emily had tried to make him get rid of Diane; he figured that if I knew so much about the dame’s nightgown, we had teamed up against him.

  Every so often he connected and slugged me dizzy. Then I ducked him, and began bicycling, but there was nowhere to go. I saw a small flash of daylight, overhead. There was an opening I’d naturally not seen when Emily took me down to the pit by night. I began to get the picture now. Some girl was leading the yokels along the cliff, and they’d stumble through and down into this stinking cave.

  I yelled at him, and pointed, but he wouldn’t listen. He bored in toward the sound. There was a spattering of glass. He tripped on the lantern. Just then I got in a good wallop.

  That, and the damp paving did it. There was a thump, and he stopped yelling. Then I heard the soggy splash.

  I struck a match. I was shaking all over, I was ready to park my fritters. Then a woman screeched, “So you did tell him, so you did drive him mad, ohhh—”

  By the light of the match I saw it was Emily. She had a pistol in one hand, and my flashlight in the other.

  “Go down after him! Go down and tell him the villagers are going to finish the blonde witch—he was mine, he would have been—I belonged here, she didn’t—go—go or I’ll shoot you—”

  Emily must have heard me yelling at Treganneth. She knew I had spilled the beans; that if I got loose, she was on the spot.

  The light blazed full in my eyes. I backed up a step. She laughed. The back of my legs was against the coping. I couldn’t see the gun, I couldn’t see a thing. I went wild like everyone else, and made a dive to catch her around the knees.

  She cut loose with the pistol, and she missed. Another shot, just as I stumbled and did get her about the knees. Before I could grab the gun, we toppled in a heap.

  Behind me, a woman screamed; a woman with a lamp. The lamp spattered on the stones, and the flashlight rolled clear. There was a tangle of legs and feet, and I couldn’t get up. Two dames were mixing it.

  One had bare legs. I tangled with a blanket shed in the show. The bare legs and the silk legs stumbled clear of me, and the flashlight, though I could see a white shape in the indirect glow. Diane and Emily toppled to the coping.

  “Hold it!” I yelled, and kicked clear of the blanket.

  I lunged, but I didn’t grab Diane in time. Emily went over the side. There wasn’t a thump this time; just a scream, the most horrible thing I’d ever heard. I pulled Diane away from the coping.

  She was hysterical, and couldn’t say anything. I threw the blanket aro
und her, and reached for the flashlight lying on the floor. The switch lock disengaged, and I was shaking too much to make it stick again. Diane was saying, “Something happened to the lock, the door opened by itself. I slipped out to steal some of her clothes, and I saw her sneaking down, with a gun. So I followed her.”

  Then she hung on tight, and asked me what had happened. We were too shaky to crawl up the stairs. No sound came up from the pit.

  I said we were too weak to move.

  That’s what I thought until a gleaming gray haze came up out of the dark: that dragon head with the long spike in the forehead, those terrific coils. Treganneth was kicking and threshing in one loop of the monster; there were other men, in other coils. But that was pretty compared to what was on the unicorn spike.

  Emily was speared clean through. The gleaming horn came out just below her breast. She was clawing, but there was no sound; just that apparition rising, with her draped over its forehead. Only the spike kept her from slipping off. But where the point touched the ceiling of the vault, the living smoke began to fade.

  I said we were too sick to move. But when that thing began to thin out, I let out a yell and headed up the stairs, Diane and blanket included. Lucky she was hanging on. I wasn’t going back for anything.

  I stumbled into daylight. Diane slid from my arms, and steadied herself against my shoulder. We both shook our heads. “Baby, that didn’t happen. Don’t ever tell anyone it did. Come on—”

  I picked the lock of Emily’s room, and said, “Get some clothes. I’ll hunt the car keys.”

  Diane grabbed my hand. “You stay right here. Even if you turned your back, I’d not be alone in this awful place.”

  I turned my back all right. The joke was on Diane. She was too shaken to notice the mirror angle. But that’s not the payoff; that came after I’d bundled Diane into the old car and told the cops all about everything except the phantom monster.

  The whole village was turned inside out. From that, and from searching the castle, especially Emily’s room, we got the story. Treganneth’s brother and Emily’s husband had quarreled about her, and the two had finished each other. There were letters from yokels, promising they’d kill her if she quit them to team up with the new lord. As I said, women were scarce, and she’d been a widow for seven years, and the village boys liked her.

  So she started getting rid of her lovers, powdering her hair gilt, to make Diane, the witch in the tower, take the rap, when the lid blew off. With enough disappearances, something was bound to happen.

  We had this all doped out when we went down into that vault. Then we looked over the edge. And that, I say, was the payoff.

  There was a skeleton, a monstrous thing, in the pit. Some of the bones were still joined, though most were scattered on a ledge, or sunk in the slime. When the tide was low, the dead reeked in the mud; at high tide, the water blanketed them. Now it was low tide, and awful.

  Treganneth was there, and so were the yokels. There were old skeletons, Treganneth’s brother and Polgate, the steward who had kicked about a lord playing with Emily.

  And Emily was there, speared on the horn that reached from the skull of the monoceros. There had been such a creature. That skull was what kept me from saying I must have been hypnotized.

  I had seen the ghost of a monster god that men had worshiped before King Arthur came to town; worshiped by Druids, worshiped by the ancestors of a woman who played for a lord, and lost. Now she belonged to a dead god. If it hadn’t been for that skull, I’d never have known that I had seen the ghost of a god, of his victims.

  Maybe that’s why Diane and I stuck together, when it was all over. It’s kind of fun telling each other we did see it, that we weren’t wacky.

  PRAYER TO SATAN

  Originally published in Spicy Mystery Tales, May 1942.

  Dan Mason, sitting on the scarlet Kurdish rug spread in Khosru Khan’s reception room, looked out of the gloomy fortress and across the Sinjar Hills. From this distance, he could not pick out where he had pitched Howarth’s camp, and he was glad that he could not. Finally he asked Khosru Khan. “What have my people done to offend you? For three days we have not had permission to take pictures.”

  Khosru Khan’s deep set eyes and bleak face brightened as he regarded the angular American whose friendship with the Yezidi devil-worshipers was the occasion for Howarth’s permission to bring his anthropological expedition into forbidden country. The khan answered, “So far, there has been no offense, but in the future, there may be.”

  Mason was not surprised. He said nothing, and struck light to a fresh cigarette. After a moment, the Yezidi prince went on, “Some of us can see into the future.

  “Those people—” He gestured toward the far off camp. “Measure our height, and our weight, and the slant of our brows, and the distance around our heads. But they are not our friends.”

  The khan was right. Wilson Howarth, who had financed the expedition into the Yezidis’ territory, believed that cash paid for everything; and so did his stooge, sandy-haired Brett. But Mason’s job was to assure the security of the expedition, as well as to process the films. So he said, “They do not understand, they do not know you as I do.”

  Khosru Khan’s eyes gleamed. “O Man! Neither are they your friends. Leave them, and become one of us.”

  “They are under my protection, just as I am under yours.”

  He knew these weird, fierce people; he knew that if he abandoned Howarth’s expedition, loot and massacre would follow. Mason, Howarth’s employee, was in command in the sense that a ship’s captain, rather than the owner, is in charge. He was responsible for the safety of his employers, and then there was Diane, Mason’s wife, who had insisted on coming with the party, instead of staying in Baghdad.

  Khosru Khan smiled. “I say again, in that camp is not one person who is your friend. Go in peace, and may your eyes be opened.”

  Mason went to the arched entrance, where a leathery old Arab waited with two horses. A blind beggar squatted near the well and cried, “Alms, my lord, alms!”

  Science could have prevented all this blindness. Mason, handing him a coin, could see better ways of spending money than to measure the cephalic index of a thousand-odd Yezidis. He turned to the horse which Saoud was holding, when the beggar said, “O Man! Your blindness is greater than mine! For your gift of silver, I give you the gift of sight.”

  In spite of the blazing afternoon heat, Mason for a moment had the sensation of intense cold. It may have been that strange speech, coming right after Khosru Khan’s words; but whatever the reason, he could not shake off the eerie conviction in the beggar’s words. Mason said, “Give me your gift, uncle.”

  The man spat on the wet clay near the mouth of the well, and dipped up a daub of earth as though it were an ointment; then he came toward Mason with the wavering certainty of the blind, and said, “Close your eyes, that you may see!” Mason obeyed, and the voice went on, “Malik Tawus—Lord Peacock—Master of Evil and Giver of Good—you who have a thousand eyes, give this man the sight of two eyes!”

  A prayer to Satan, the all-seeing lord of the Sinjar Hills, whose shrine contained the silver image of a peacock! Mason started when a greasy moistness was daubed on each eye lid. The beggar chuckled. “It is too late! It is too late! O Man, now you have eyes that see, and you will see whether you wish or not! And go in Peace.”

  Saoud muttered, “I betake me to Allah for refuge!” His hand shook so much that the curb chain rattled when he held the Turkoman horse for Mason to mount.

  * * * *

  A week later, after the anthropological work had been resumed by Khosru Khan’s permission, Mason had almost forgotten the beggar’s gift. Once more, he was back at his routine, each night going into the stifling blackness of the double-walled tent where he processed the day’s films. Saoud was helping him; and except for the faint and murky green light in the far corn
er, they worked in absolute darkness.

  Trickling sweat stung Mason’s eyes. He moved automatically, for he had spent weary days keeping Howarth and Brett from prying into the sacred shrine of the devil worshipers.

  From the sweltering darkness where Saoud worked there came a choked groan, a rattling sigh, then a thud. The old Arab had collapsed. Mason groped in the gloom, shouldered his muttering assistant, and carried him through the light trap into the glow of a rising moon. Then he started toward the headquarters tent to get a first aid kit.

  There was no light. That was odd, for Brett usually worked at night, tabulating the results of the day’s work. From within came the fumes of brandy; a man was snoring.

  “Drunk as a hoot owl,” Mason grumbled, “Swell expedition.”

  Then he saw the lights in his own tent, and saw the shadows on the wall. One was Diane’s: long, shapely legs, and firm, high bosom. The other was a man, and before Mason’s eyes, the two silhouettes merged, mouth to mouth.

  “Are you sure he’s drunk?” Diane asked, anxiously.

  Howarth answered, “I ought to know, though you needn’t worry, Brett’s all right.”

  They sat on the edge of the cot now. Diane went on, “He might suspect.”

  “Who, Dan?”

  Diane’s laugh was soft and contemptuous. “He’s too busy to know or care. I meant Brett—it’d be bad if he told Dan. He mustn’t find out before we get back to Mosul.”

  And now Mason remembered the beggar outside Khosru’s castle; through his wrath there ran a cool, bitter thought: “He did make me see!”

  He saw more than the shadow of his wife and her lover; he saw why Diane had insisted on coming into the forbidding Sinjar Hills, why she had brought frail negligee and lacy nightgowns. She had been counting on his several hours in the field dark room, whose double walls blocked sound as well as light.