by Otto Penzler
Somebody chuckled. I listened, and knew with horror that it was myself. Again a loud, mad laugh. And now I was talking. I was a hundred people, talking, laughing, cursing, while always those motionless eyes pulled at my heart strings. Suddenly something inside me snapped. I heard a sickening rattle in my own throat. And then came darkness …
“Signore!” Far away, a girl’s voice called to me. I opened my eyes. The window shades were drawn and it was dark in the room, but I could see that the dawn had come again.
“Signore! Signore!” the girl called again, her voice quivering with fear. I sat up and was overjoyed to find I was untied. I listened for the sweet voice, which I knew was the voice of that charming Austrian girl, calling to me in Italian. I rose to my feet.
Free! I was free, I thought. Not only free, but I felt a strange power course through my body that had always been only too delicate. I strode out of the room and ran quickly down the stairs. In the hall I stopped only to pick up my flashlight, which was lying where I had dropped it the night before.
I heard the girl calling again. She was coming toward me, along a pitch-dark corridor at the rear. I ran to meet her, flashing my light upon her. God, how beautiful she was, though her face was white as marble, and her violet-blue eyes wide with fear. She raised her hand to protect her eyes from the glaring light and then took it away, trying to penetrate the darkness where I stood.
“It—it is the young man who came before?” she whispered hesitantly. “The American or Englishman who save me?”
“It is,” I replied. “And for two years he has dreamed of seeing you again.”
A relieved smile lit her face. “I knew it was you,” she whispered. “When my old grandfather told me of the foreigner who passed him on the path, I—I somehow was sure it was you. And when——” and now her smile died away—“when he told me of the queer feeling that rushed over him afterwards, as if a devil had entered his body, and how he had a vague memory of entering the chateau, but could really remember nothing clearly till he stood before his own door in the village, then I knew he—” she shuddered as she formed the word with her lips, “—had done his work; and I was afraid. I slipped away from the house before dawn, and I have been searching, searching——” Her voice died away, and she dropped her eyes.
I took a step toward her. “You braved everything to come to my aid?”
She nodded.
“You see,” she whispered, “I felt partly to blame. The night before last I dreamed of you. I dreamed I was calling to you. And yet, I was afraid to have you come. It was as if somebody stood over my bed and forced me.”
I remembered the mind-reader in the theatre. Taking her hand in mine, I gently pressed her fingers. I felt her shudder. “Come,” she whispered, “we must get away from this place, from him!”
“There’s nothing to fear,” I replied softly. I drew her close and we walked together into the entrance hall, toward the outer door of the chateau, toward happiness and freedom. “He has lost his power. I know it, because I feel free.”
But now her whole body was trembling. “No, no!” she gasped. “He is here! He is near us! I …”
We were passing near one of the long narrow windows that lighted the gloomy hall and she was walking close by my side. Suddenly she turned to look at me, and her words ended in a shriek as she tore herself free from my hold. Astounded, I saw her stare at my face. In her eyes I could read a terror even greater than on that night when I first saw her. Her fingers rose as if to make the sign of the cross; and then, before it was completed, she swayed and sank at my feet in a faint.
I stared down at her, stunned. Slowly I lifted my eyes to a tall mirror before me, while a tremendous fear crept over my body, leaving me cold. Then I saw the image reflected there, and recoiled as if from a snake.
Staring out of that long glass at me was the hideous face of the dead Count!
Having overpowered me, as I lay bound on the floor, he had transferred my mind, my soul, to his own dead body. That was his ghastly revenge.
What can I say of my feelings as I gazed at the loathsome thing that was now myself? What words can express the horror as, tottering up to the room beyond the portières, I turned the light upon the bound body that was mine, and yet no longer mine, lying limp and lifeless, the eyes closed in a soulless slumber. In a daze I staggered down to the hall, and stared at the beautiful girl who moaned as she lay there, still unconscious. Then, as I watched her, a new sensation crept over me—an evil desire, a burning love for the girl that was worse than hate. Then I experienced the final culminating horror. I knew that the very evil that was his was creeping over my soul, trying to conquer the last vestige of the pitiful thing that was me.
Little remains to be told. The last hope was gone, and I knew it. I knew I must act, and act quickly, before my soul succumbed completely to this Evil Thing.
There is something ludicrous about carrying one’s own body down a long flight of wide, dark stairs; but there was something pitiful, too. The face looked so white and lifeless, so much more completely dead than any corpse I had ever seen. With the aid of my light, I finally arrived down here, in the vaults. I found two empty caskets which I laid side by side, and in one I gently deposited the pitiful thing that was me. From the pocket I took paper and pen which I always carried with me and now, seated on an old chair by an ancient table, the candle lighted beside me, I am hurrying to finish this document. Stronger and stronger grows the power of evil within me, and if it gained the upper hand, it would thwart my plans. For it wishes to live to carry out its fiendish will.
But I am still the stronger of the two; and now my tale is finished. With this long, hairy hand, which has written these words for me, I will take my old army revolver, and after I have laid myself in the empty coffin, I shall turn the muzzle against this evil hideous head, and thus thwart him in the end.
Far above me I hear hurried footsteps, running down the stairs and out of this haunt of hell. She has awakened, and is flying from me, flying from the evil Thing that she thinks I am. You need not fear me, Myra. I shall never follow you. Soon I shall be far from you, far from this world, forever and ever. Goodbye, sweet child. And may God bless you for your brave attempt to save me.
How still that body lies … It was me, once … Me? Who is “me”?
Soon there shall be nothing but two bodies, lying side by side, rotting through eternity.
THE GHOSTS OF STEAMBOAT COULEE
Arthur J. Burks
UNUSUALLY FOR A WRITER for the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, many of the stories by Arthur J. Burks (1898–1974) were less plot-driven than those of his contemporaries, using instead a sense of mood to create terror, and never more tellingly than in his supernatural tales. Born in Waterville, Washington, Burks had two primary careers, in the military, and as a prolific pulp writer. After serving in World War I, promotions made him an aide to General Smedley D. Butler in 1924; he resigned in 1928 to become a full-time writer, but rejoined the Marines when World War II broke out, supervising the basic training of nearly one-third of all Marines engaged in the war, and retiring as a lieutenant colonel. Although he had started writing at the age of twenty while a lieutenant, it is in the 1930s that he earned the title “The Speed Merchant of the Pulps,” producing between one and two million words a year for more than a decade. Unlike other hyperprolific authors like Walter B. Gibson (as Maxwell Grant) and Lester Dent (as Kenneth Robeson), who wrote novels about The Shadow and Doc Savage, respectively, Burks rarely wrote novels and had few series characters, keeping to original short stories in virtually every genre, notably horror, mystery, aviation, science fiction, adventure, fantasy, and romance (the last under the pseudonym Esther Critchfield). He wrote about what it was like to write at such a furious pace for Writers Digest, noting that he once had eleven stories in a single magazine under eleven different names. He had the reputation among other pulp writers (and editors) of being able to select any inanimate object in a room and write a thril
ling story about it.
“The Ghosts of Steamboat Coulee” was first published in the May 1926 issue of Weird Tales.
The Ghosts of Steamboat Coulee
ARTHUR J. BURKS
A HEARTLESS BRAKEMAN discovered me and kicked me off the train at Palisades. I didn’t care greatly. As well be dropped here in Moses Coulee like a bag of spoiled meal as farther up the line. When a man knows he has but a short time to live, what does it matter? Had I not been endowed with a large modicum of my beloved father’s stubbornness I believe I should long since have crawled away into some hole, like a mongrel cur, to die. There was no chance to cheat the Grim Reaper. That had been settled long ago, when, without a gas mask, I had gone through a certain little town in Flanders.
My lungs were just about done. Don’t think I am making a bid for sympathy.
I am telling this to explain my actions in those things which came later—to alibi myself of the charge of cowardice.
After leaving the train at Palisades I looked up and down the coulee. Where to go? I hadn’t the slightest idea. Wenatchee lay far behind me, at the edge of the mighty Columbia River. I had found this thriving little city unsympathetic and not particularly hospitable. I couldn’t, therefore, retrace my steps. Besides, I never have liked to go back over lost ground. I saw the train which had dropped me crawl like a snake up the steep incline which led out of the coulee. I hadn’t the strength to follow. I knew that I could never make the climb.
So, wearily, I trudged out to the road and headed farther into the coulee, to come, some hours later, to another cul-de-sac. It was another (to me impossible) incline, this time a wagon road. I have since learned that this road leads, via a series of three huge terraces bridged by steep inclines, out of Moses Coulee. It is called the Three Devils—don’t ask me why, for it was named by the Siwash Indians.
At the foot of this road, and some half-mile from where it began to climb, I saw a small farmhouse, from the chimney of which a spiral of blue smoke rose lazily. Here were folks, country folks, upon whose hospitality I had long ago learned to rely. Grimy with the dust of the trail, damp with perspiration, red spots dancing in the air before my eyes because of the unaccustomed exertion to which I had compelled myself, I turned aside and presently knocked at the door of the farmhouse.
A kindly housewife answered my knock and bade me enter. I was shortly told to seat myself at the table. When I had finished eating I arose and was about to ask her what I might do in payment for the meal, when I was seized with a fit of coughing which left me faint and trembling; and I had barely composed myself when the woman’s husband and a half-grown boy entered the house silently and looked at me.
“How come a man as sick as you is out on the road afoot like this?” demanded the man.
I studied the three carefully before replying. Nothing squeamish about them. Knew something of the rough spots of life, all of them. I knew this at once. So I told them my story, and that I had neither friends nor family, nor abode. While I talked they exchanged glances with one another, and when I had finished the husband looked at me steadily for a long moment.
“Is there a chance for you to get well?” he asked finally.
“I am afraid not.” I tried to make my voice sound cheerful.
“Would you like to find a place where nobody’d bother you? A place where you could loaf along about as you wished until your time came?”
I didn’t exactly like the way he put it; but that was just about all there was left to me, and, to date, even that had been denied me.
I nodded in answer to the question. The man strode to the door and pointed.
“See there?” he asked. “That’s the road you came here on, against that one hundred-foot cliff. Opposite that cliff, back of my house, is another cliff, three hundred feet high. Matter of fact, my place is almost surrounded by cliffs, don’t need to build fences, except where the coulee opens away toward the Columbia River, which is some lot of miles away from here. Cliffs both sides of it, all the way down. No other exit, except there!”
As he spoke he swung his extended forearm straight toward the cliff to the north.
“See what looks like a great black shadow against the face of the cliff, right where she turns to form the curve of the coulee?”
“Yes, I see it.”
“Well, that ain’t a shadow. That’s the entrance to another and smaller coulee which opens into this one. It is called Steamboat Coulee, and if you look sharp you can see why.”
I studied that black shadow as he pointed, carefully, running my eyes over the face of the cliff. Then I exclaimed suddenly, so unexpectedly did I discover the reason for the name given the coulee. Right at the base of that black shadow was a great pile of stone, its color all but blending with the mother cliff unless one looked closely; and this mass of solid rock, from where we stood in the doorway of the farmhouse, looked like a great steamboat slowly emerging from the cleft in the giant walls!
“Good Lord!” I exclaimed. “If I didn’t know better I would swear that was a boat under steam!”
“It’s fooled a lot of folks,” returned the farmer dryly. “Well, that coulee entrance is on my land, so I guess I have a right to make this proposition to you. Back inside that coulee about two miles is a log cabin that could easy be made livable. Just the place for you, and I could send in what little food you would need. It’s kind of cool at night, but in the daytime the sun makes the coulee as hot as an oven, and you could loaf all day in the heat. There are plenty of big rocks there to flop on and—who knows?—maybe you’d even get well!”
“And nobody owns the house?” I inquired.
“Yes, I own it. I used to live in it myself.”
“Why did you move?” I felt as a fellow must feel when he looks a gift horse in the face, but to save me I could not forbear asking the question.
“Well,” he said finally, “all my land lies out here in Moses Coulee, and when I lived there I could not keep my eye on it. I have large melon patches down toward Steamboat, and if there isn’t someone here when the Siwashes drift though to their potlatch on Badger Mountain, outside, the damn Indians would steal all the melons. So we moved out here.”
The explanation sounded reasonable enough; but it left me unsatisfied. I had been moodily gazing at that black shadow on the cliff which was the entrance to Steamboat Coulee, and while I stared it had come to me that the huge maw looked oddly like a great open mouth that might take one in and leave no trace. There was something menacing about it, distant though it was. I felt that this unexplainable aura would become more depressing as one approached the coulee. I had begun to distrust these people, too. The woman and the son talked too little, even for people who lived much alone.
The sun was weltering, deepening the shadow at the mouth of Steamboat. At the two irregular edges of the shadow there hung a weirdly shimmering blue haze.
I blamed morbid fancies to my sickness. I began to reason with myself. Here was I, a grown man, looking a gift horse in the mouth, questioning the motives of kindly people who were only giving me a chance to die under cover like a human being—near to, if not among, friends.
I swallowed my forebodings and turned to the man. Beyond him, over his shoulder, I looked into the eyes of the woman, who, arms akimbo, was standing in the half-shadow beyond the door, gravely awaiting my answer. Confound it! Why couldn’t she say something? Beside her stood the boy, also noting me gravely. As my eyes went to the boy his tongue crept forth from his mouth slowly and described a circle, moistening his lips. My morbid fancy saw something sinister even in this, for I was minded of a cat that looks expectantly at a saucer of cream. I jerked my head around to meet the eyes of the man, and he, too, was regarding me gravely.
“I thank you, sir,” I said, as politely as I could; “you are very kind. I accept your offer with great pleasure. May I know to whom I am indebted for this unusually benevolent service?”
Again that queer hesitation before the answer. When it came the tones were s
trangely harsh, almost a rebuke.
“What difference does a name make? We don’t go much on last names here. That there is Reuben, my boy, and this is my wife, Hildreth. My own name is Plone. You can tell us what to call you, if you wish; but it don’t make much difference if you don’t care to.”
“My name is Harold Skidmore, late of the U. S. Army. Once more allow me to thank you, then I shall go into my new home before it gets so dark I can’t find it.”
“That’s all right. Reuben will go along and show you the place. Hillie, put up a sack of grub for Skidmore. Enough to last him a couple of days. He’ll probably be too sore from his walk to come out for more before that—and we may be too busy to take any in to him.”
The woman dropped her arms to her side and moved into the kitchen to do the bidding of Plone. Plone! What an odd name for a man! I studied him as, apparently having forgotten me, he stared moodily down the haze-filled coulee. I tried to see what his eyes were seeking, but all I could tell was that he watched the road by which I had come to this place—watched it carefully and in silence, as though he expected other visitors to come around the bend which leads to the Three Devils. He did not turn back to me again; and when, ten minutes or so later, Reuben touched my arm and started off in the direction of Steamboat, Plone was still staring down the road.
I looked back after we had left the house well behind, and he was watching me now, while his taciturn wife stood motionless beside him, with her arms akimbo. Looking at the two made me feel strangely uncomfortable again, so I turned back and tried to engage Reuben in conversation. As soon as I spoke he quickened his stride so that it took all my breath to keep pace.