Murgunstrumm and Others

by Cave, Hugh

  Darkness had fallen when we began that journey to Peter Mace's house. We were alone. Captain Bruk had departed more than an hour ago, vowing that he wanted no more of her, and that so far as he was concerned he didn't care if he "never set foot on Faikana's blasted beach again." The natives, tired of hanging about the house in hopes of satisfying their childish curiosities, had returned to the village. No one saw us begin that journey which was to have such a terrible end.

  But I had no premonition of the end, then. I thought of Peter Mace, living alone in his isolated abode in the jungle, and I thanked God for sending the woman to aid him. Mysterious she was, to be sure—and not once had she given herself a name—but my hopes were high, and a queer confidence possessed me as I led her along the jungle trail. Even the jungle itself, black as death and full of sinister shapes and sounds, could not kill the song in my heart. I refused to consider the possible peril on all sides of us. I refused to be afraid. A merciful God had sent this woman to Faikana, and the same merciful God would conduct her safely to the end of her quest.

  She, too, was unafraid. She followed boldly, deliberately, in my steps. She did not speak. Several times, when I turned to assist her through stretches of black morass, or over huge fallen stumps of aoa trees, she merely smiled and accepted my hand without comment.

  So, finally, we reached the end of the trail and entered the clearing where Peter Mace's house loomed high before us. And for the first time, doubt assailed me.

  Only one light burned in that grim structure—one light, pale and yellow behind the masked window of the upstairs room. Slowly we walked toward it, and even more slowly we ascended the veranda steps. I knocked hesitantly, and there was no answer. My hand trembled on the latch. The door swung open, and silently we entered.

  There in the dark we stood side by side, the woman and I, and neither of us spoke. In the far corner of the room a feeble shaft of light descended from the ceiling, revealing the top rungs of the ladder and the uneven surface of the wall beside it. The aperture was closed. From the chamber above us came the deep, singsong voice of Peter Mace, uttering words which brought sudden terror to my heart.

  There is no need to repeat those words here. Already I have described in detail the ritual for which that room of horror was designed. Enough to say that the horror, this time, was nearing its climax—that other voices, born of lips which had no human form, were slowly and terribly rising in a shrill crescendo, smothering the blasphemies which poured from the boy's throat. Even while the veiled woman and I stood motionless, those sounds rose to a mighty roar, screaming their triumph. And with them came the shrill, awful outcry of a woman in mortal anguish.

  I wish now that I had yielded to the fear in my soul and fled from that evil place. I wish I had seized my companion's arm and dragged her back across the threshold. Instead, I remained rooted to the floor. I stood rigid, listening to the medley of mad voices that bellowed above me.

  The whole house echoed those wild vibrations. Words of terrible significance, of frightful suggestiveness, were flung out of monstrous throats, to wail and scream into the deepest depths of my consciousness. Again and again I heard names hurled out which bore sufficient significance to spike my soul with nameless and uncontrollable dread. And above them all, within them all, shrilled that wild screech of physical agony which tocsined from a woman's lips!

  The awful din reached its climax while I stood there. For a long moment the walls around me, the ceiling above, the floor below, trembled as if in the grip of a great wind. Then, slowly, the sounds subsided. Slowly they died to a sinister whispering and muttering in which I could distinguish no individual words. And finally only one audible sound remained—the low, passionate voice of Peter Mace, speaking in triumphant tones which were, in themselves, all too significant.

  Then I moved. Mechanically I turned from the woman beside me and paced toward the ladder in the corner. Fearfully I ascended the wooden rungs, holding myself erect with hands that shook violently as they groped upward at a snail's pace. From the chamber above me, the boy's voice came in fitful exclamations, uttering words of triumph, of endearment. Wildly he was saying:

  "It is finished! Beloved, it is finished! The agony has destroyed the death; the life is complete! They promised me it would be so, and they have fulfilled their promise. Oh, my beloved, come to me!"

  I shuddered, and for a long time clung motionless to my perch, fearing to ascend higher. Had I been aware of the scene which would meet my gaze when I reached up to drag the wooden covering from the aperture above me, I would have flung myself back down the ladder and left that evil chamber for ever undisturbed. But I did not know. I slid aside the barrier. I heaved myself to the floor above. And I saw.

  The room was a well of darkness, illuminated only by the sputtering candle on the table. Before me stood Peter Mace, disheveled and ragged, his head flung back and his bare feet planted on the crude atap mat which covered the floor. In his arms, pressed close against his emaciated body, clung a naked woman—a woman whose skin was as white and as smooth as fine-grained gypsum. Lovely she was. Too lovely. And then I realized the truth.

  Abruptly I turned and stared at the cloth-covered pedestal in the corner—the pedestal where the marble woman had sat. Then, in horror, I stared again at the creature in Peter Mace's embrace. And she was the same woman. God help me, she was the same! Those horrors of outer darkness had given her the power of life! The woman in Peter Mace's arms, clinging to him, was a woman of living stone!

  I stared, unable to believe what I knew to be true. The very frightfulness of it prevented me from assimilating its whole significance. I merely stared, and heard words issuing from her lips, and heard him answering them. Then, after an eternity, I stood erect and said aloud:

  "A woman is here to see you, Peter."

  Peter Mace turned, very slowly, releasing the naked thing in his arms. He looked at me steadily, as if bewildered by my presence. He peered all around him, as if puzzled even by the room in which he stood. Then he said quietly:

  "A woman? To see me?"

  "Yes," I nodded. "She's waiting."

  He came toward me. He did not understand. His forehead was creased and his lips frowning. Leaving his companion where she was, he stepped past me and slowly descended the ladder. The stone woman said nothing; she stood very still, watching him. Silently I followed him down the creaking rungs to the room below, where the other woman was waiting. And then it was my turn to be bewildered.

  Peter Mace and the woman in black stared at each other. Neither moved. For a full moment, neither spoke. The very intensity of their stares—the very completeness of their silence—indicated a climactic something which I did not fully comprehend. I felt that when the woman did speak, she would scream. But she did not. She said calmly:

  "You sent for me, Peter. I'm here."

  He moved toward her. Behind and above him a muffled creaking sound came from the wooden ladder, but none of us turned. The boy was still gazing with horribly wide eyes. He said falteringly:

  "You—you are not dead? You're here? How can that be?"

  "I was dead, Peter."

  "What do you mean?" he whispered.

  "I was dead, but you gave me life. I came to you."

  The boy seemed not to understand. Not until she raised her hands and drew the veil from her face—not until then did he realize the hideous results of the sins he had committed. And I realized them, too. The woman before me was Peter Mace's loved one. She was walking in death! She had been raised from the grave by the hellish rituals performed by him! This—this woman before me—was the flesh and blood reality from whom he and his artist companion had designed that stone creature in the room above us! The likeness was unmistakable!

  But there was a difference. The face of this corpse-woman was lovely only because she had made it lovely. Beneath the mask of powder which covered it, death had written with an indelible pencil, leaving certain signs which could never be erased. Little wonder she had worn a v
eil! Little wonder she had refused to reveal herself to me, or to Captain Bruk, or to any of the people who had come in contact with her! Yet Peter Mace, her lover, failed to see what the grave had done. He was blinded to all but her loveliness. He reached out his arms and stepped toward her, and with terrible eagerness he crushed her against him.

  I stood close to them, unable to move away. Again I heard the creaking of the ladder behind me, but still I did not turn. Nothing mattered but the pitiful thing which was occurring before me. I saw only this wild-eyed, sobbing boy, holding in his arms the woman who had been returned to him—the woman who, resurrected from her distant grave by the far-reaching powers of his unholy rites, had found her way across half the earth to reach his arms. Again and again he cried her name aloud. Over and over he sobbed words of endearment. All his loneliness and longing poured through his lips, and his soul was bare for her to look at.

  And then some sixth sense made me turn—or perhaps it was the thud of heavy feet striking the floor behind me. I swung slowly about, and stood transfixed. There, at the foot of the ladder, stood the stone woman whom Peter Mace had created.

  As long as I live, the expression of her face will haunt me. Her eyes were as dark and deep as midnight pits. Her lips were drawn back over parted teeth, in a snarl of animal hate. She had heard the boy's every word. She had witnessed his every act. And now her once-beautiful face was contorted. She was a savage beast whose mate had deserted her. She meant murder.

  Slowly, with awful deliberation, she advanced across the floor. She did not see me, did not consider my presence. She had eyes only for Peter Mace and the woman who clung to him. Straight past me she walked, so close that I might have reached out and touched her. And I—God help me!—I stood like a graven image, utterly unable to move or to shriek a warning.

  I did not see all of what happened. Her back was toward me, and she was between me and her victims. But I saw and heard enough to blast my soul.

  Peter Mace was whispering to his loved one, uttering low words of love and happiness. His voice suddenly ceased, then screamed aloud in terror. He leaped backward, then flung himself forward again. He might have escaped, had he not hurled himself upon that relentless stone figure in a futile attempt to protect his beloved. Those hideous fingers had already gripped the other woman's throat. Peter Mace tore at them madly, in an effort to dislodge them.

  He might better have thought of his own safety. Slowly and surely those stone fingers committed murder. The corpse-woman sank backward to the floor, staring with dead eyes at the ceiling. The fingers released their grip.

  Not until then did the boy realize the futility of resistance. Not until then did he seek to escape. Then it was too late. Those infernal hands buried themselves in the flesh of his neck. His lips opened to release a prolonged shriek of agony. The shriek became a bloody gurgle. He hung suspended, his feet beating a terrible tattoo on the floor. When she released him, he fell across the body of the woman beneath him; and he, like her, was dead.

  The room, then, was filled with the silence of death. The stone woman stood over her victims, gazing down at them. An eternity passed. Slowly, and still without speaking, the woman turned and paced to the door. Her groping hand raised the latch; the door creaked inward. Staring straight ahead of her, she walked across the veranda and descended the steps. Stiffly, and with that same hideous deliberation, she paced toward the jungle. The darkness of the outer night claimed her, and she was gone.

  That is all. That is why I, Father Jason, went away from Faikana the next day, taking my native people with me. Risking death in clumsy pahis, we paddled for two days and a night on the open sea, to reach the sparsely inhabited atoll of Mehu, where we might begin life over again. That is why, in the clearing on Faikana where Peter Mace's horror-house stands, you will find a crude slab of tou wood planted for men to look upon; and you will read the words: "Inei Teavi o te mata epoa o Faikana"—which mean, literally: "Here lie the bodies of the lovers of Faikana."

  But Faikana is inhabited by one living person only—a woman created for love, out of sin. And she is a stone woman who may not die, who may not find peace, until those unnamable horrors of the world of darkness take pity on her and relieve her of the life they gave her.

  The Whisperers

  It was a very old, very forlorn house. To reach it we had to climb a broken-down gate on which hung a FOR SALE sign, and then wade through a sea of grass which had grown rampant.

  "Darling," Anne said, "this is it! Let's buy it!"

  I stared at her. We had been married a week, but I still could not even glance at her without wanting to crush her in my arms, to feel the warm and wonderful response of her slim body against mine. She wanted this house. We could fix it up, she said, and come here weekends.

  An hour later we were in the village, talking to Jedney Prentiss, whose name was on the sign.

  He wanted twenty-five hundred for the place. "Been empty for six years," he declared, "but it's still a mighty fine house." I argued him down to eighteen hundred, and we drove to Harkness to arrange the transfer.

  That afternoon the honeymoon ended. We lit a fire in the big fireplace and burned the roadmaps, abandoning our plans to tour the Gaspee Peninsula. Then we picked out the room we wanted for our bedroom and went to work, determined to have at least that much done by nightfall. Anne had bought bedding and furniture in Harkness, and the store people had promised to deliver them at once.

  It was fun. To save her dress, Anne peeled down to shorts and a halter, and there she was, running around in the almost-nude with mops and brooms, dusters, and buckets of water. I watched her out of one eye and realized how lucky I was. Pretty? She had the sweetest, slimmest legs in the world! She had soft white shoulders and jaunty little breasts that jiggled every time her high heels tapped the floor. And she was more than willing, about every half hour, to take time out and slip into my arms for a minute or two of relaxation—if you could call it that.

  It was about six o'clock when our "company" arrived. I was neck-deep in bedroom debris. Anne had gone out into the yard for some birch twigs to make an auxiliary broom. Suddenly, from the doorway at my back, a voice said, "You ain't goin' to live here, are you, mister?"

  I swung about, startled half out of my skin. There on the threshold stood a sickly, emaciated little girl about twelve years old. Pity for the poor creature overwhelmed me, and I stood up slowly for fear of frightening her. "And who are you?" I asked. "A neighbor of ours?"

  "I used to live here. I'm Susie Callister."

  I stared. Jedney Prentiss had mentioned the Callisters. They were local people who had rented the place for a time. With the death of Jim Callister, his wife and little girl had moved out.

  "You people must be crazy, movin' into this place," the girl said. "My ma says it's haunted!"

  "Really?"

  "She'd lick the tar out of me if she knew I was here!"

  "And do you come here often?" I asked.

  "Yep. My pa died here. My pa was swell. I come here to talk to him."

  "To—what?"

  "Well," she said defiantly, "maybe I don't talk to him like me and you are talkin', but I talk and he listens. I sit on a box down in the cellar and tell him how ma won't let me come here. He whispers back, sometimes. He died in the cellar, from a heart attack."

  "Peter!" That was Anne's voice from downstairs. "I've made coffee and sandwiches. It's after six and I'm starved!"

  "Gee!" Susie Callister whispered. "Is it that late? I'll get kilt!" She turned like a frightened rabbit, then stopped. In a slow, pleading voice she added, "Can I—can I come here sometimes to talk to pa? Can I, please?"

  I told her she could come as often as she liked. Something told me I ought to know more about her. She fled downstairs and out the front door, slamming it behind her, and when I got downstairs Anne was standing in the hall shadows, a queer look on her face.

  "Who—who was that, Peter?"

  I told her and she seemed relieved. We sat down to
our supper in the kitchen. Anne was oddly quiet.

  She was tired, I supposed. Her lovely shoulders drooped, and her halter had slipped down a little to reveal the pale tired curves of her breasts. I walked around the table and took her in my arms. "You've worked too hard," I said.

  She smiled a little and relaxed against me, warm and soft. But she was trembling. I could feel little erratic movements under the deliciously smooth velvet of her skin. Suddenly she looked at me.

  "Peter—before we do anything else after supper, will you go down cellar and —and look around? I was down there a while ago and I think we have rats. I heard the strangest whispering sounds over near an old workbench."

  "I'll exterminate the vipers," I said lightly. But Anne was afraid. I knew by the way she clung to me, the way her body trembled against mine in search of protection. She was terrified.

  I didn't go down to the cellar right away. Our purchases arrived from the store and we had to arrange furniture. Night was upon us in earnest before I got around to the rats.

  Clutching an antique oil-lamp, I groped down the steep, treacherous cellar stairs, put the lamp on the workbench and looked around.

  It was a huge room with floor and walls of rough concrete, the floor unfinished, or long ago torn up for some reason, in the corner under the bench. My mind played with a distressing mental picture of Susie Callister, poor child, sitting here alone in the dark, pouring out her sorrows to her dead father. Something would have to be done about Susie Callister. And about the rats whose whisperings she believed to be her father's voice!

  The rats! Seated on an upturned box, I waited. Presently I, too, heard a furtive whispering, emanating, it seemed, from that section of the cellar where the floor had been torn up.

  Noiselessly I stalked the sounds. Rats? I was not so sure! This odd, subtle whispering was too human, too seductive! I could have sworn it was trying evilly to tell me something!

  On hands and knees I crept toward the corner where the floor was bare. The whisperings ceased. Unaccountably angry, I explored every inch of the packed brown earth and found nothing. Had the rats bored a tunnel beneath this part of the cellar?