The Book of the Living Dead

by John Richard Stephens

  “Burned alive,” I muttered hoarsely. “Burned alive, like Porter Bruton, but not by any earthly fire.”

  There was no one else in the room, but the air reeked with an acrid smell like brimstone.

  Turning, I ran toward my car. Whatever that revenant shape had been, I knew now that the African’s entrance was all that had saved me from Macklin’s fate, knew what grisly doom awaited me when next I faced that apparition out of hell. Yet my mind did not dwell on that. The need to find Lilly swallowed up all other considerations.

  But where to go, where to look for her? Instinctively I piloted my car back toward Faustine Grenfel’s house, and this time, a block away, I saw a light. Pulling into the curb, I parked and sneaked up the rest of the way on foot. There was a light in the front and one in the back, and I stole up behind a trellis and peered into the living room.

  A swift wave of relief swept over me, for Lilly was there, unharmed, seated on a divan under a bridge lamp. But the next instant a chill of apprehension crept into my blood. It was the queer look on her face, as leaning forward, with the light falling softly on her brown hair and creamy skin, she was staring at something in her lap, staring with a weird absorption at what I now saw was a photograph of Porter Bruton!

  I turned and made for the front door, rushing straight in without knocking. Lilly sprang to her feet with a gasp, and I saw her drop the photograph with a furtive movement at the end of the divan. Then with a quick and patently false smile, she came toward me.

  “Why, Willis, you startled me—”

  I reached out, gripped her shoulders, and I didn’t smile back.

  “What are you doing here?” I demanded.

  “Why,” she stammered, “just waiting for Faustine to come in.”

  Why this fear of me, this evasiveness? Suddenly I noticed that one of her small hands was crushing tightly something which she seemed to be trying to conceal.

  “What’s that?” I rasped, and grabbing her hand, I loosened the tight-clenched fingers and pulled out a ball of wadded paper.

  “Willis, please!” She tried to snatch it back.

  But I swung toward the light, smoothed it out and felt the scalp crawl on my neck as I read:

  Faustine:

  If I appear to die, know that I will not be dead. But do not let them cremate me. If they attempt that, you must come to the service, and if by the time it is over I have not revived, prevent their burning me at all cost. Keep my secret and do not fail me.

  Porter

  I whirled back on Lilly, who had sunk down weakly on the divan.

  “Where did you get this?”

  Terror was in her eyes and her voice came faint and hoarse from her throat.

  “He mailed it to Faustine—last night before he took the poison. And oh, Willis, he did come back! I saw him. I’ve been looking at his picture and I know it was he—his face, there at the window at the Clover Club. And Willy Richmond went out to see, and he didn’t come back—” Her voice broke on a sob and her brown eyes were pleading. “But, Willis, you didn’t have anything to do with it, did you? Faustine said—”

  “That lying hell-cat!” I burst out. “What’s she told you? Where is she now?”

  I paused. A sound had reached my ears. It came from the dark hall, a low monotonous murmur, a woman’s voice muttering weirdly in coaxing, reiterated commands, and a man’s voice replying in a throaty halfwhimper—an eerie mumbling like something forced by necromancy from dead lips.

  Instantly I turned, but Lilly clung to me.

  “Willis, Willis, you mustn’t—”

  “Mustn’t I?” I grated, rudely shoving her back. “You stay here and keep quiet or I’ll tear the roof off this damned place!”

  Then I strode softly into the hall and crept toward the door of Faustine’s bedroom, from which the queer sounds were coming. Stooping, I applied my eye to the keyhole, and though my range of vision was limited, what I saw was enough to curdle my blood and conjure visions of the witches who dragged the dying from battlefields to use them as horrible mediums of communication with the dead.

  For on Faustine’s bed, stretched out as if for burial, lay the bulky form of Sam Fleagle, utterly still. His flabby face, the color of a spoiled oyster, was beaded with death sweat, his glassy eyes staring unseeingly at the she-monster poised above him.

  Crouched there in loose negligee, Faustine was like a feeding cat. Her vampire-face was thrust forward and down, small teeth gleaming as she articulated words in a husky, commanding whisper.

  “Speak, speak, I tell you! What did he say? What did Porter Bruton say? Speak up, or I’ll beat you black and blue while you lie there helpless.”

  And feebly, the thick blubbery lips of Sam Fleagle began to move. “Don’t . . . Leave me in peace . . . I don’t know . . .”

  “You do know!” Sudden savagery blazed in her. Her clawed white hands shot forward, long pointed fingers burying themselves in the gray folds of his throat, while a look of fiendish hate transfixed her painted face.“Tell me, or I’ll—”

  She got no further because I had stood all I could stand. Kicking the door open, I lunged in.

  She whirled, agile as a startled cat, and sprang to meet my rush. White arms shot round me and all the lean, warm, supple strength of her body was exerted against me. The smile that wreathed her face was horrible in its wild, fawning appeal, as her hot breath laved my face in frantic whispers.

  “Willis, Willis, go out! You can’t interrupt—you mustn’t, not now. I’ll explain—later—but leave now. Go back to Lilly. Don’t leave her alone.” Lilly’s name coming from her lips broke my spell of madness. I pushed her off, grabbed her thin shoulders instead of her throat, and shook her.

  “You won’t trick me, you hell-cat!” I snarled.“ What have you done to Sam? Poisoned him like you and Macklin poisoned Porter Bruton?”

  “But I didn’t, I didn’t! Oh, Willis, give me time to explain. Go back to Lilly now, and—”

  “I’ll go when I’ve choked the truth out of you, when I’ve—”

  Suddenly I stiffened. From the front of the house had come a shrill scream—Lilly’s voice in a pulsing jet of terror. Releasing Faustine, I whirled, saw instantly that the front of the house was dark now, heard other sounds mingled with Lilly’s cries. Staggering toward the door, my nostrils caught a whiff of that brimstone odor, and as I lurched into the hall, a glowing blotch that seemed wreathed in greenish flame catapulted from the living room into the hall, bearing a wild, screaming bundle that I knew to be my fiancée.

  “Lilly, I’m coming!” I yelled and charged toward the monstrous thing now vanishing through the front door of the house.

  I reached it before the screen had time to slam back on his exit, but my rashness cost me dearly. As I shot through, I saw too late the dark shapes lurking at the porch edges rise and surge toward me.

  The next moment I met the impact of their giant, muscular bodies, slammed my fists madly at a swimming nightmare of gargoyle faces, and then collapsed weakly as a huge fist, like a club covered with brine-soaked leather, smashed against my temple in a blow that hammered me into oblivion.

  I woke up in darkness to find myself the core of what seemed to be a bristling, tight-wrapped cocoon, and which proved to be a stout rope wound in galling coils about my body. I rolled over and saw a penciled line of light under a closed door. I made out a whitish bundle near me.

  “Lilly?” I whispered hoarsely.

  “I don’t know where she is.” It was Faustine Grenfel’s voice that answered.

  “Where are we?” I asked, recovering from my surprise.

  “In your crematorium, in a closet off from the furnace room,” she answered. “The witch-men brought us here.”

  My brain was a whirling confusion; I couldn’t make sense out of anything, least of all why Faustine was here, tied and imprisoned too.

  “That’s odd,” I said, “because I thought they were your pals—yours and Macklin’s. How do they happen to be working with this de
vil masquerading as Porter Bruton?”

  “Masquerading?” she asked. “I wish I thought so. The witch-men don’t. That’s why they obey him in terror. They knew he was dead and burned, yet they saw him come back and kill their master. They don’t understand a magic that terrible. I no longer have any influence over them at all.”

  “Then you admit you were Macklin’s accomplice in whatever it was he did to Porter Bruton?”

  “Of course. And I’ll tell you why. Porter Bruton murdered my father!”

  “Murdered your father?”

  “Yes. Poisoned him with nitrobenzine, and when that didn’t kill quickly enough, shoved him from the window.”

  “But I thought you were in love with Porter.”

  “So did he,” she said. “And I was, until I began to suspect what he had done. You see, he wanted to steal Father’s secret because he was in love with Lilly and hoped to win her from you.”

  “Yes,” I said,“ but what’s that got to do with this madness you’ve been spreading among those crazed students?”

  Faustine sighed.

  “Oh, they aren’t crazed,” she said. “They’re just a lot of silly sheep; they’ll come out of it. What I did was done to discover the witness to my father’s murder. You see, I was the first one to rush up to the laboratory after he had fallen from the window and, as I reached the upper hall, someone—I couldn’t identify him—went scuttling away from the keyhole. Later, when I suspected Porter of murdering Father and faking that note, I remembered the incident.

  “So when Dennis Macklin came back and I told him, he suggested the scheme to find out who the witness to the murder had been. With his help, I treated those kids to a lot of faked witchcraft, and I got the boys I suspected off one at a time, doped them with sodium amytal—you know it’s used sometimes as a truth serum—and while they were half-conscious, questioned them until I found the one who had seen it.

  “It turned out to be Willy Richmond. He’d seen the crime, but had been too scared of Porter to tell. We had already slipped Father’s body out of the mausoleum and had had his vital organs chemically analyzed and found the nitrobenzine. But, of course, that wasn’t proof enough.”

  “But once you had Richmond’s confession, why didn’t you go to the police?”

  “The testimony of a spy at a keyhole,” she said, “might not have sounded convincing to a jury. We were taking no chances with Porter’s paying for that hellish crime. Once we had the proof, Dennis got him into the cemetery and delivered an ultimatum. Porter, of course, didn’t know that I had helped get the proof. Dennis told him that he would give him the chance to kill himself—otherwise, he would stand trial for the crime. By killing himself he could save not only his own name, but his father would be spared the scandal. Porter agreed to take that way out.”

  “But what did he do?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “When I saw his face at that window tonight, I suspected some sort of trickery. That’s why I lured Sam Fleagle off, drugged him and questioned him. I thought maybe he, and even you and Tom Carlin, might have aided in some hoax. But I got nothing out of him. But Porter must have intended some trick, or he wouldn’t have written me that note. Thinking I was still in love with him, he counted on me to interrupt that cremation—”

  “Wait a minute!” I said. “It could have been done—granted that his father and Sam Fleagle were working with him. While Tom and I were taking you out, he could have crawled out of the coffin and substituted that body that was stolen from a pauper’s grave last night. I suppose he figured that if you failed him, his father could still cause some scene to get us away. Then later, of course, Sam Fleagle faked his voice to scare me—”

  “But old Dr. Bruton,” she interrupted, “can you believe that he would have—”

  Her voice broke off as a sound from the outer room reached our ears. It was the opening and closing of a door, and then muffled voices, one which I recognized as Sam Fleagle’s.

  “You tricked me into it, lied to me. Now there’s been murder, and by God, you’ll answer—” Fleagle was growling.

  Worming myself forward, I butted my head against the door. It must not have been closed tightly, for it swung open a few inches, and I stared out to see Sam Fleagle, wild-haired and with a dazed look from the drug Faustine had administered still in his eyes, holding old Dr. Bruton by the collar as a terrier might hold a rat.

  “But I didn’t know, Sam,” Dr. Bruton was gasping. “I didn’t know—”

  “Sam!” I called. “Come here and get these ropes off me!”

  The crematorium superintendent whirled, goggled a moment, then released old Bruton and started toward me. But he hadn’t taken three steps when the door behind him swung open. Framed in its dark rectangle stood the grisly specter of Porter Bruton. Behind him loomed the shadowy forms and wide-eyed faces of Macklin’s witch-men.

  Sam had heard it, and he heeled round again, as the fiend, followed by his fear-enslaved henchmen, stepped into the room. I saw him clearly then, and knew that there could no longer be any doubt that he was really Porter Bruton. I could see now that the burning and blackening was not real, being a skillful camouflage of colored putty, greasepaint, collodion, and phosphorescent paint to cause the glow. But there was no comfort in that. The fiend alive was more terrible and dangerous than his ghost might have been.

  With a curse, Sam Fleagle sprang at him. But quick as a flash, the murderer whirled, snatched from the hands of one of the witch-men a fire extinguisher, and leveled it at Sam’s rushing figure. At a pressure of the plunger a white jet leaped out, caught Sam Fleagle in mid-rush, and as the murderous spray spurted against his face and chest, he fell back with the scream of a tortured animal, flailing his thick arms, stumbling, crumpling to the floor, a writhing, burning mass of agony.

  Deliberately then the killer stepped nearer, aimed another blast at his shrieking victim, and at the same time I identified that acrid, brimstone smell and knew what had happened to Macklin, too. That fire extinguisher was loaded with sulphuric acid!

  The stark brutality of the act had apparently stunned old Bruton, but now he came out of his daze, made a stumbling step toward his son.

  “Porter, Porter,” he quavered, “are you mad? When I was forced into helping you, it was only to save your life. And even though I suspected that your story that Grenfel’s death was the accidental result of a struggle was a lie, my father’s love could not deny you.

  “I helped you fake death with that drug, and signed your death certificate. I guarded your body from observation, bribed this poor man you have just killed to help me substitute the stolen body for yours and later fake your cry from the flames. But you swore that once your life was saved, you’d leave and never come back. Is this my reward—this orgy of murder?”

  Porter stared at him coldly, his travesty of a face twisted in a sneer.

  “This orgy of murder, as you call it,” he said, “was as necessary as the other. These people knew too much, and I couldn’t leave tattling tongues behind me. But I’m nearly through now. I’ve got money and a car ready to carry me to the border, and most important of all, I’ve got locked in my head the secret that Grenfel died for. In another land, under another name, that secret will make me the greatest scientist in the world. I’m perfectly safe, because I’m officially dead. And the only ones who knew my secret are dead, too—or soon will be. All but Lilly, who shall go with me.”

  “My God! You won’t take her?”

  Porter Bruton leered. “She’s drugged and safely hidden in a coffin in a certain locked mausoleum, waiting like the sleeping princess for me to come and carry her away. And don’t think she won’t go; she won’t be able to help it. She’ll stay with me, too, if it means drugging her for the rest of her life.”

  For a moment the old man stood aghast. Then a wild look came over his quivering face.

  “You beast!” he shrilled.“I’ll strangle you with my own hands!” And he sprang.

  Agile as a bullfight
er, Porter Bruton leaped aside, and as his father lurched past him, he brutally slugged his father with the fire extinguisher, coldly watching him crumple, twitching, to the floor.

  I cursed under my breath. Through it all I had been fighting with the coils of rope that bound me. But even the burst of savage strength which the revelation of Lilly’s doom inspired was not enough to free me. And now the monster turned to lock the door and bark a command at the witch-men, one of whom started toward the closet where Faustine and I lay helpless.

  Rolling over on my back, I flung myself upright and with a desperate heave got my knees under me and straightened to my feet. But swaying there, I realized that I was still as helpless as ever. Then I thought of the switchboard on the left wall. Maybe if I could switch the lights off there would be some bare chance to escape in the confusion.

  Blindly I lunged toward the switchboard, felt my head butt a handle, felt the blue flames crackle in my hair. But it wasn’t the right switch; the lights stayed on. And now the big witch-man sprang in and dragged me back.

  I struggled, writhed, butted at him with my head, but it was no use. Flinging me over his shoulder, he carried me out and dumped me to the floor. There I lay, panting, staring up into Porter Bruton’s leering face. Death was only moments away, I knew, and a fight was not even possible. Wildly I began pleading with him for Lilly.

  It was futile. The deadly coldness of his eyes told me that, and when a sudden scraping sound on the cement floor caused me to fling my head around, I realized the doom that awaited me. One of the men was dragging a coffin from the storeroom!

  Blind panic gripped me then. As the second man darted toward me I began to squirm and heave and pitch like a caterpillar in an ant bed. Now the other man joined his mate, and the two of them laid hands on me. But my last buckling leap had thrown me across the corpse of Sam Fleagle, and my hands, behind my back, seized his coat and clung.