Weird Tales volume 28 number 03

by Wright, Farnsworth, 1888–1940

  Arthur read on about the trial of Autiel Duryea before Veniti, the Car-cassonnean Inquisitor-General; read, with mounting horror, the evidence which had sent that far-gone Duryea to the pillar— the evidence of a bloodless corpse who had been Autiel Duryea's young brother.

  Unmindful now of the tremendous storm which had centered over Timber Lake, unheeding the clatter of windows and the swish of pines on the roof—even of his father who worked down at the lake's edge in a drenching rain—Arthur fastened his glance to the blurred print of those pages, sinking deeper and deeper into the garbled legends of a dark age. . . .

  On the last page of the chapter he again saw the name of his ancestor, Autiel Duryea. He traced a shaking finger over the narrow lines of words, and when he finished reading them he rolled sideways on the bed, and from his lips came a sobbing, mumbling prayer.

  "God, oh God in Heaven protect me. . , ."

  For he had read:

  As in the case of Autiel Duryea we observe that this specimen of vrykolsktts preys only upon

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  the blood in its own family. It possesses none of the characteristics of the undead vampire, being usually a living male person of otherwise normal appearances, unsuspecting its inherent demonism.

  But this vrykolakas cannot act according to its demoniacal possession unless it is in the presence of a second member of the same family, who acts as a medium between the man and its demon. This medium has none of the traits of the vampire, but it senses the being of this creature (when the metamorphosis is about to occur) by reason of intense pains in the head and throat. Both the vampire and the medium undergo similar reactions, involving nausea, nocturnal visions, and physical disquietude.

  When these two outcasts are within a certain distance of each other, the coalescence of inherent demonism is completed, and the vampire is subject to its attacks, demanding blood for its sustenance. No member of the family is safe at these times, for the vrykolakas, acting in its true agency on earth, will unerringly seek out the blood. In rare cases, where other victims are unavailable, the vampire will even take the blood from the very medium which made it possible.

  This vampire is born into certain aged families, and naught but death can destroy it. It is not conscious of its blood-madness, and acts only in a psychic state. The medium, also, is unaware of its terrible r61e; and when these two are together, despite any lapse of years, the fusion of inheritance is so violent that no power known on earth can turn it back.

  The lodge door slammed shut with a sudden, interrupting bang. The lode grated, and Henry Duryea's footsteps sounded on the planked floor.

  Arthur shook himself from the bed. He had only time to fling that haunting book into the Gladstone bag before he sensed his father standing in the doorway.

  "You—you're not shaving, Arthur." Duryea's words, spliced hesitantly, were toneless. He glanced from the table-top to the Gladstone, and to his son. He said nothing for a moment, his glance inscrutable. Then,

  "It's blowing up cjuite a storm outside."

  Arthur swallowed the first words which had come into his throat, nodded cjuickly, "Yes, isn't it? Quite a storm."

  He met his father's gaze, his face burning. "I—I don't think I'll shave, Dad. My head aches."

  Duryea came swiftly into the room and pinned Arthur's arms in his grasp. "What do you mean—your head aches? How? Does your throat "

  "No!" Arthur jerked himself away. He laughed. "It's that French stew of yours! It's hit me in the stomach!" He stepped past his father and started up the stairs.

  "The stew?" Duryea pivoted on his heel. "Possibly.. I think I feel it myself."

  Arthur stopped, his face suddenly white. "You—too?"

  The words were hardly audible. Their glances met—clashed like dueling-swords.

  For ten seconds neither of them said a word or moved a muscle: Arthur, from the stairs, looking down; his father below, gazing up at him. In Henry Duryea the blood drained slowly from his face and left a purple etching across the bridge of his nose and above his eyes. He looked like a death's-head.

  Arthur winced at the sight and twisted his eyes away. He turned to go up the remaining stairs,,

  "Son!"

  He stopped again; his hand tightened on the banister.

  "Yes, Dad?"

  Duryea put his foot on the first stair, "I want you to lock your door tonight. The wind would keep it banging!"

  "Yes," breathed Arthur, and pushed up the stairs to his room.

  Doctor Duryea's hollow footsteps sounded in steady, unhesitant beats across the floor of Timber Lake Lodge. Sometimes they stopped, and the crackling hiss of a sulfur match took their

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  313

  place, then perhaps a distended sigh, and, again, footsteps. . . .

  Arthur crouched at the open door of his room. His head was cocked for those noises from below. In his hands was a double-barrel shotgun of violent gage.

  . . . thud . . . thud . . . thud . . .

  Then a pause, the clinking of a glass and the gurgling of liquid. The sigh, the tread of his feet over the floor. , . .

  "He's thirsty," Arthur thought— Thirsty!

  Outside, the storm had grown into fury. Lightning zigzagged between the mountains, 611ing the valley with weird phosphorescence. Thunder, like drums, rolled incessantly.

  Within the lodge the heat of the fireplace piled the atmosphere thick with stagnation. All the doors and windows were locked shut, the oil-lamps glowed weakly—a pale, anemic light.

  Henry Duryea walked to the foot of the stairs and stood looking up.

  Arthur sensed his movements and ducked back into his room, the gun gripped in his shaking fingers.

  Then Henry Duryea's footstep sounded on the first stair.

  Arthur slumped to one knee. He buckled a fist against his teeth as a prayer tumbled through them.

  Duryea climbed a second step . , , and another . . . and still one more. On the fourth stair he stopped.

  "Arthur!" His voice cut into the silence like the crack of a whip. "Arthur! Will you come down here?"

  "Yes, Dad." Bedraggled, his body hanging like cloth, young Duryea took five steps to the landing.

  "We can't be zanies!" cried Henry Duryea. "My sou! is sick with dread. Tomorrow we're going back to New York. I'm going to get the first boat to

  open sea. . . . Please come down here." He turned about and descended the stairs to his room.

  Arthur choked back the words which had lumped in his mouth. Half dazed, he followed. . . .

  In the bedroom he saw his father stretched face-up along the bed. He saw a pile of rope at his father's feet.

  "Tie me to the bedposts, Arthur," came the command. "Tie both my hands and both my feet.

  Arthur stood gaping.

  "Do as I tell you!"

  "Dad, what hor "

  "Don't be a fool! You read that book! You know what relation you are to me! I'd always hoped it was Cecilia, but now I know it's you. I should have known it on that night twenty years ago when you complained of a headache and nightmares. . . . Quickly, my head rocks with pain. Tie me!"

  Speechless, his own pain piercing him with agony, Arthur fell to that grisly task. Both hands he tied—and both feet . . . tied them so firmly to the iron posts that his father could not lift himself an inch off the bed.

  Then he blew out the lamps, and without a further glance at that Prometheus, he reascended the stairs to his room, and slammed and locked his door behind him.

  He looked once at the breech of his gun, and set it against a chair by his bed. He flung off his robe and slippers, and within five minutes he was senseless in slumber.

  He slept late, and when he awakened his muscles were as stiff as boards, and the lingering visions of a nightmare clung before his eyes. He pushed his way out of bed, stood dazedly on the floor.

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  A dull, numbing cruciation circulated through his head. He felt bloated . . , coarse and runnin
g with internal mucus. His mouth was dry, his gums sore and stinging.

  He tightened his hands as he lunged for the door. "Dad," he cried, and he heard his voice breaking in his throat.

  Sunlight filtered through the window at the top of the stairs. The air was hot and dry, and carried in it a mild odor of decay.

  Arthur suddenly drew back at that odor—drew back with a gasp of awful fear. For he recognized it—that stench, the heaviness of his blood, the rawness of his tongue and gums. . .. Age-long it seemed, yet rising like a spirit in his memory. All of these things he had known and feit before.

  He leaned against the banister, and half slid, half stumbled down the stairs. , , «

  His father had died during the night. He lay like a waxen figure tied to his bed, his face done up in knots.

  Arthur stood dumbly at the foot of the bed for only a few seconds; then he went back upstairs to his room.

  Almost immediately he emptied both barrels of the shotgun into his head.

  The tragedy at Timber lake was discovered accidentally three days later, A party of fishermen, upon finding the two bodies, notified state authorities, and an investigation was directly under way. Arthur Duryea had undoubtedly met death at his own hands. The condition of his wounds, and the manner with which he held the lethal weapon, at once foreclosed the suspicion of any foul play.

  But the death of Doctor Henry Duryea confronted the police with an inexplicable mystery; for his trussed-up body, unscathed except for two jagged holes over the jugular vein, had been drained of all its blood.

  The autopsy protocol of Henry Duryea laid death to "undetermined causes," and it was not until the yellow tabloids commenced an investigation into the Duryea family history that the incredible and fantastic explanations were offered to the public.

  Obviously such talk was held in popular contempt; yet in view of the controversial war which followed, the authorities considered it expedient to consign both Duryeas to the crematory,,,,

  '"The priestess led the rigid little creature forward under the fabulous tree.**

  ^/ree of Life

  By C. L. MOORE

  *A gripping tale of the planet Mars and the terrible monstrosity that called its victims to it from ajar — a tale of Northwest Smith

  OVER time-ruined Illar the searching planes swooped and circled. Northwest Smith, peering up at them with a steel-pale state from the shelter of a half-collapsed temple, thought of vultures wheeling above car-

  rion. All day long now they had been raking these ruins for him. Presently, he knew, thirst would begin to parch his throat and hunger to gnaw at him. There was neither food nor water in these ancient Martian ruins, and he knew 315

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  that it could be only a matter of time before the urgencies of his own body would drive him out to signal those wheeling Patrol ships and trade his hard-won liberty for food and drink. He crouched lower under the shadow of the temple arch and cursed the accuracy of the Patrol gunner whose flame-blast had caught his dodging ship just at the edge of Illar's ruins.

  Presently it occurred to him that in most Martian temples of the ancient days an ornamental well had stood in the outer court for the benefit of wayfarers. Of course all water in it would be a million years dry now, but for lack of anything better to do he rose from his seat at the edge of the collapsed central dome and made his cautious way by still intact corridors toward the front of the temple. He paused in a tangle of wreckage at the courtyard's edge and looked out across the sun-drenched expanse of pavement toward that ornate well that once had served travelers who passed by here in the days when Mars was a green planet.

  It was an unusually elaborate well, and amazingly well preserved. Its rim had been inlaid with a mosaic pattern whose symbolism must once have borne deep meaning, and above it in a great fan of time-defying bronze an elaborate grille-work portrayed the inevitable tree-of-life pattern which so often appears in the symbolism of the three worlds. Smith looked at it a bit incredulously from his shelter, it was so miraculously preserved amidst all this chaos of broken stone, casting a delicate tracery of shadow on the sunny pavement as perfectly as it must have done a million years ago when dusty travelers paused here to drink. He could picture them filing in at noontime through the great gates that

  The vision vanished abruptly as his questing eyes made the circle of the

  ruined walls. There had been no gate. He could not find a trace of it anywhere around the outer wall of the court. The only entrance here, as nearly as he could tell from the foundations that remained, had been the door in whose ruins he now stood. Queer. This must have been a private court, then, its great grille-crowned well reserved for the use of the priests. Or wait—had there not been a priest-king Illar after whom the city was named? A wizard-king, so legend said, who ruled temple as well as palace with an iron hand. This elaborately patterned well, of material royal enough to withstand the weight of ages, might well have been sacrosanct for the use of that long-dead monarch. It might

  Across the sun-bright pavement swept the shadow of a plant. Smith dodged back into deeper hiding while the ship circled low over the courtyard. And it was then, as he crouched against a crumbled wall and waited, motionless, for the danger to pass, that he became aware for the first time of a sound that startled him so he could scarcely credit his ears—a recurrent sound, choked and sorrowful—the sound of a woman sobbing.

  The incongruity of it made him forgetful for a moment of the peril hovering overhead in the sun-hot outdoors. The dimness of the temple ruins became a living and vital place for that moment, throbbing with the sound of tears. He looked about half in incredulity, wondering if hunger and thirst were playing tricks on him already, or if these broken halls might be haunted by a million-years-old sorrow that wept along die corridors to drive its hearers mad. There were tales of such haunters in some of Mars' older ruins. The hair prickled faintly at the back of his neck as he laid a hand on the butt of his force-gun and commenced

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  317

  a cautious prowl toward the source of the muffled noise.

  Presently he caught a flash of white, luminous in the gloom of these ruined walls, and went forward with soundless steps, eyes narrowed in the effort to make out what manner of creature this might be that wept alone in time-forgotten ruins. It was a woman. Or it had the dim outlines of a woman, huddled against an angle of fallen walls and veiled in a fabulous shower of long dark hair. But there was something uncannily odd about her. He could not focus his pale stare upon her outlines. She was scarcely more than a luminous blot of whiteness in the gloom, shimmering with a look of unreality which the sound of her sobs denied.

  Before he could make up his mind just what to do, something must have warned the weeping girl that she was no longer alone, for the sound of her tears checked suddenly and she lifted her head, turning to him a face no more distinguishable than her body's outlines. He made no effort to resolve the blurred features into visibility, for out of that luminous mask burned two eyes that caught his with an almost perceptible impact and gripped them in a stare from which he could not have turned if he would.

  They were the most amazing eyes he had ever met, colored like moonstone, milkily translucent, so that they looked almost blind. And that magnetic stare held him motionless. In the instant that she gripped him with that fixed, moonstone look he felt oddly as if a tangible bond were taut between them.

  Then she spoke, and he wondered if his mind, after all, had begun to give way in the haunted loneliness of dead Hlar; for though the words she spoke fell upon his ears in a gibberish of

  meaningless sounds, yet in his brain a message formed with a clarity that far transcended the halting communication of words. And her milkily colored eyes bored into his with a fierce intensity.

  "I'm lost—I'm lost " wailed the

  voice in his brain.

  A rush of sudden tears brimmed the compelling eyes, veiling their brilliance. And he was free again with that clo
uding of the moonstone surfaces. Her voice wailed, but the words were meaningless and no knowledge formed in his brain to match them. Stiffly he stepped back a pace and looked down at her, a feeling of helpless incredulity rising within him. For he still could not focus directly upon the shining whiteness of her, and nothing save those moonstone eyes were clear to him.

  The girl sprang to her feet and rose on tiptoe, gripping his shoulders with urgent hands. Again the blind intensity of her eyes took hold of his, with a force almost as tangible as the clutch of her hands; again that stream of intelligence poured into his brain, strongly, pleadingly.

  "Please, please take me back! I'm so frightened — I can't find my way — oh, please!"

  He blinked down at her, his dazed mind gradually realizing the basic facts of what was happening, Obviously her milky, unseeing eyes held a magnetic power that carried her thoughts to him without the need of a common speech. And they were the eyes of a powerful mind, the outlets from which a stream of fierce energy poured into his brain. Yet the words they conveyed were the words of a terrified and helpless girl. A strong sense of wariness was rising in him as he considered the incongruity of speech and power, both of which were beating upon him more urgently with every breath. The mind of a forceful and

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  strong-willed woman, carrying the sobs of a frightened girl. There was no sincerity in it.

  "Please, please!" cried her impatience in his brain. "Help me! Guide me back!"

  "Back where?" he heard his own voice asking.

  "The Tree!" wailed that queer speech in his brain, while gibberish was all his ears heard and the moonstone stare transfixed him strongly. "The Tree of Life! Oh, take me back to the shadow of the Tree!"

  A vision of the gritleorn amen ted well leaped into his memory. It was the only tree symbol he could think of just then. But what possible connection could there be between the well and the lost girl— if she was lost? Another wail in that unknown tongue, another anguished shake of his shoulders, brought a sudden resolution into his groping mind. There could be no harm in leading her back to the well, to whose grille she must surely be referring. And strong curiosity was growing in his mind. Much more than met the eye was concealed in this queer incident. And a wild guess had flashed through his mind that perhaps she might have come from some subterranean world into which the well descended. It would explain her luminous pallor, if not her blurriness; and, too, her eyes did not seem to function in the light. There was a much more incredible explanation of her presence, but he was not to know it for a few minutes yet.