The Thrill Book Sampler

by Seabury Quinn

  “Ol’ stone image doesn’t like it out there in the cold. Ol’ image jealous ‘cause I wouldn’t let Betty worship it—wants to come back to house and get revenge on me,” I mumbled, half maudlin, as I dropped my pipe and book and thrust my head deep into a sofa pillow.

  How long I slept I do not know. Certainly it must have been several hours, for when I opened my eyes and sat up with a start the fire had burned itself to a bed of dull ashes on the hearth, and a chill had crept through the living room. My reading lamp, too, had burned itself out, and save for the fitful gleam of a nearby streetlight, shining through the window, the room was in darkness.

  Lying there in that no man’s land between sleep and waking, I heard the grandfather’s clock in the hall strike off the half-hour, and put my feet to the floor sleepily. “Half past something or other,” I yawned; “must be getting late. Wonder how soon Betty will be getting home?”

  The crazy little French gilt clock that Betty keeps on the parlor mantel, and which is always half an hour slow, chimed twelve times nervously. That meant we were in the middle of that eerie hour which belongs neither to the day which is gone nor the day which is to come, and which, for want of a better term, we call midnight.

  The fumes of the rock and rye I had taken earlier in the evening still hung in my brain, dulling my perceptions and clouding my vision a little. In the uncertain light from the streetlamp it seemed to me I detected a movement among the inanimate objects in the room.

  I opened my mouth in another prodigious yawn, and flung my arms wide in a mighty stretch, striving to shake off the remnants of my sleep. Before either yawn or stretch were finished, however, I was sitting bolt upright on the couch, listening to the sound which came to me from the veranda. It was a slow, heavy, scraping, thumping sort of noise; the kind that would be produced by the dragging of a heavy weight across the floor, or the rolling of a ponderous chest, or the walking of some great-footed animal.

  Thump, thump, thump, the footsteps—if they were footsteps—sounded on the planks of the porch, around the corner of the house, across the width of the piazza, up to the very door of the vestibule. Then a silence, ten times more ominous than the noise itself.

  The breath in my lungs and throat seemed suddenly impregnated with nitrous fumes, strangling and burning me at once, and tiny globules of cold perspiration seeped out upon my scalp and the palms of my hands as I sat there in the dark, resolutely closing my mind against the thought of what waited outside the door.

  “B-r-r- ring!” the shrill clamor of the doorbell cut in on my terrified vigil. I jumped up with a relieved grin. Doorbells are comforting things to have about at such times; there is something reassuringly modern and human about them.

  I got to my feet almost cheerfully and reached for the electric switch. My groping fingers found it readily enough but no flood of warm, yellow light followed their pressure. As frequently happens, the current was off.

  In darkness, then, I shuffled along the hall to the front door.

  That vague, nameless horror we all feel at times when entering a dark room alone was on me as I fumbled with the knob. Very cautiously I put back the curtain from the glass panel in the door and peeped into the shadowy vestibule. There was nothing to be seen.

  “Humph!” I grunted. “Nobody there. Ears must have been playing a trick on me; bell didn’t ring at all.” Emboldened by the emptiness of the vestibule, I swung the door wide.

  “Who’s there?” I called, feeling quite sure that my challenge would go unanswered.

  A moment later I regretted my rashness. Just within the door, dimly outlined against the gray darkness of the outer night, crouched an ungainly, squat figure. Its staring eyes glared with a hellish phosphorescence; its ivory tusks gleamed from writhing, blood-red lips; its hideous painted face twisted in a grimace of deadly hatred.

  “Why, it—it—it’s the image!” I gibbered fatuously.

  It was the image. The same image that had slain poor little Chang; the same stone monster that had forced Betty to worship it; yet it was not the same. Its loathsome, bloated face changed expression; it moved; it was alive!

  Shaken in a very palsy of fear, I shrank back into the hall.

  Swift as my retreat was, it was not quick enough. With a swaying, ungainly bound, the thing was upon me. Great hands, cruel and relentless as the coils of a serpent, closed round my neck, choking the breath from me; huge, fiery eyes glared vengefully into mine; long, gleaming tusks were gnashing at my throat, seeking the living blood in my veins.

  With arms and legs and stiffened back I strained against the monster, striving to unclasp the cruel hands throttling me, pushing vainly against the terrible embrace which drew me nearer, ever nearer, the champing white teeth which flashed from the misshapen face so near mine.

  As I fought against the accursed thing crushing me in its relentless grip, I thought wildly, “This is how poor Chang died,” and I braced my knee against its swollen belly.

  Cold, acid sweat stood out upon my forehead and rolled down into my eyes; my lungs were bursting with the air imprisoned within them; great, sonorous gongs seemed booming in my ears; lights flashed before my eyes, and the walls of the vestibule seemed toppling in upon me.

  The image and I swayed back and forth in a death grapple, went down; there was a crash, a blinding flash of light, my hands relaxed their grip on the stone shoulders, I was deathly sick at my stomach— “Bring me another cold rag; he’ll be all right in a minute,” Doctor Towbridge’s voice sounded close beside me, and his firm, capable hands replaced a cold-water pack on my forehead.

  I sat up and stared about me. I was lying on the couch in the living room. Doctor Towbridge was bending over me, and a very frightened Betty stood behind him, a cloth saturated with cold water in her hand.

  “Young man,” Doctor Towbridge bent his sternest professional look upon me, “next time you feel inclined to cheat an honest physician out of his honest fee don’t risk a case of alcoholic poisoning trying to drink up all the rock and rye in town.”

  “But I wasn’t drunk,” I expostulated; “that cursed image—”

  “Yes, yes, we know all about that, too. We found it broken to pieces in the vestibule, and you’ve done nothing but rave about it for the past half-hour. The neighbors’ boys evidently carried out their design of putting the thing against your front door, and when you went to the vestibule it fell through the door and was broken. Too bad, too; it was a valuable piece of bric-a-brac, wasn’t it?”

  I looked at them out of the corner of my eye. “Yes,” I answered meekly. If they already thought me drunk, what would they think if I were to tell them how the image really came to be broken? “Yes,” I agreed, “it cost us a lot of money; but I think we can worry along without it.”

  Doctor Towbridge may have been right. Perhaps I did take too much rock and rye that night; maybe the neighbors’ boys did put the stone image in the doorway. Possibly my fight with the grisly thing was all the figment of an alcohol- inspired dream. But there is one thing I’d like the doctor to explain—if he can. For a week after that horrible night there were great purple bruises on my throat, where I had believed the monster’s terrible hands had been.

  IT was a quiet night in the police station.Lieutenant Craig, behind the desk, yawned at the empty blotter and wished the clock didn’t tick so loudly. Terry Maginnis, of the reserves, in the back room, dropped his briar pipe, and it sounded almost like a pistol shot. Then, when Terry had sworn devoutly for a second or two over losing a pipeful of tobacco, the deadly silence gathered again and the lieutenant shook himself to keep awake.

  He was in the middle of a long-drawn out yawn when the telephone clanged with its usual startling suddenness, and Craig reached eagerly for the instrument, hoping for something to break the monotony.

  “This is the police station. What do you want?” he demanded sharply.

  The voice that came jerkily over the wire had a curious, hollow sound and waxed fainter toward the end. “Send an
officer to Overview Lodge and notify the morgue. I shall be dead when your man gets here.” There was a pause. Then: “Listen!”

  Lieutenant Craig, experienced in the sound of gunshots, heard a roar on the wire that could have been caused only by one thing, and called out excitedly to Maginnis: “Terry, you and Jim Callery beat it to that Overview joint, overlooking the river. You know where it is. That old guy down there has just plugged himself. I heard the shot on the phone. Get a move on. I’ll call up the hospital to send an ambulance. He may not be dead, though he said he would be. Telephone me from the house.”

  Maginnis and Callery were out of the front door by this time, but the former called back: “All right, ‘loot.’ I got ye. What’ll we do wid th’ corpse if there is wan?”

  “We’ll send the wagon later and bring it here,” snapped Craig, who already was ringing up the hospital. “On your way!”

  Overview Lodge was a rambling two-story stone house, whose damp walls suggested that the river must often creep up there while its small-paned windows, the old- fashioned weather vane on the Moorish cupola, and the filagree ornamentation of the rotting wooden veranda, were all in the style of architecture a hundred years old at least. Standing back from the narrow, unfrequented road, amid a funereal thicket of birches, elms, and hemlocks, it looked like an ideal home for a student, to whom the street noises of a great city would be a real distress.

  As a matter of fact, it was a student, Doctor Theophilus Yeager, who lived there. He had inherited the home from his father and grandfather, and there he wrote his books about the strange peoples of little-known countries he had visited,

  and particularly about their religious beliefs and the curious manner of their devotional rites and sacrifices. Regarded as an authority on the lore of Asiatic nations, he was said to know more about Thibet and the unexplored regions north of the Himalayas than any other man in America.

  With him in Overview Lodge was only one person, his tall, bronze-visaged, black- bearded, white-turbaned attendant, whom he called Chundah. This tall, silent man bought what food was required for himself and his employer, and did all other errands necessary. He also prepared their meals. The doctor did not require any personal attendance; he made his own bed, and kept his room clean himself, Chundah having no more to do with it than to supply clean linen.

  Doctor Yeager—although mixing not at all with the outside world, except that he went to see his publishers now and then, and had some friends in a certain learned society to which he belonged— had not the traditional appearance of a recluse. He was an ordinary -looking person, who might have been a lawyer or business man. He wore up-to-date clothing, shaved regularly, and seemed to enjoy life in a healthy, wholesome way. Chundah also dressed like an average American—when out of doors. In the house, however, he wore the white trousers drawn in at the ankles, and a loose white blouse—both, like his turban, immaculately white—which had been his customary garb in India before he entered the service of Doctor Yeager and came with him to America.

  A swift ten-minute walk brought the two policemen to the lodge. They were on the veranda, with Maginnis keeping a sharp lookout for possible thugs about the grounds, and Callery trying the front door, before the ambulance left the hospital.

  “The door’s open, Maginnis,” called out Callery cautiously. “Come on!”

  “D’ye mean it was act’ally open, or jist unlocked, Cal?” asked Terry.

  “Open, I said,” rapped out Callery impatiently. “Where’s that Injun? Hey, Chundy!” he whispered, slipping along the dark hall to where he supposed the kitchen must be. “Come out, if you’re there.” He turned his flash light on the hall and into the kitchen, but both were empty.

  “Arrah! Phwat’s th’ use o’ skitterin’ aroun’ down here, Cal?” broke in Terry Maginnis impatiently. “Sure this lad, Chundy, or phwatever his name is, has beat it. Av coorse he has. An’, be th’ same token—git up the shtairs or let me go.” And he moved to push Callery aside.

  But Callery was just as eager to go up as Maginnis, and the two were side by side as they pushed open the door of the room which they knew Doctor Yeager used as a library and general living room. There was a green-shaded student lamp alight on the massive table, and some manuscript lay in front of the big swivel chair which apparently had been carelessly pushed back when its owner got up. Maginnis looked at the top sheet of paper, and he saw that the person writing on it had stopped so abruptly that he had not finished the last word, leaving it “amu,” but with an up stroke after it, like the beginning of another letter.

  “Faith, phwat d’ye make o’ this now, Cal?” asked Terry, pointing to the paper. “Do ye think he was thryin’ to write ‘a mule’ an’ got tangled up in his shpellin’? Annyhow, he shtopped writin’ mighty sudden.” Maginnis had walked to a heavy portiere of wine-colored velvet, deeply edged with massive gold fringe, and swept it aside. “Howly saints, phwat’s that beyant? Come here, Cal. Begorry it’s himself. He laid down on the bed, so that he c’u’d pass out aisy—rest his sowl!—then he put th’ gun to his ear, or somewhere that suited him, pulled th’ trigger, an’ niver moved. But”— Maginnis stopped and scratched his head, knocking his cap sideways over one ear— “how th’ divil did he lay that sheet all so smooth an’ nice over his own corpse whin he was as dead as Mike Mulligan’s p’isened cow? That’s phwat stumps me.”

  “He was a much smaller man than I thought, too,” remarked Callery, who, with Terry Maginnis, was staring at the long, grisly form stretched on the bed under its white covering. “He don’t make much of a ridge under the sheet.”

  “Ye’re right,” assented Maginnis in awed tones. “Be the Lord, he’s shrunk a whole lot since I last laid eyes on him. He must have been sick. Well, we’ll take a look an’ see. We don’t even know he’s dead up to now.”

  There was a lamp in a bracket against the wall, with a reflector which sent a powerful shaft of white light full upon the bed. Terry Maginnis, as an experienced policeman, had often seen dead persons, so it was with perfect coolness that he seized one side of the sheet, and, with a twitch, revealed what lay beneath. Then he jumped back, and from his mottled white lips there came forth, in a husky, awe-stricken whisper, as he touched himself piously on forehead and chest in the symbol of his religion: “D’ye see it, Callery? Or has the divil bewitched me eyesight? Phwat is it lyin’ there before ye?”

  “It’s a skeleton, Maginnis. That’s what it is,” returned Callery, as much puzzled as his companion.

  “Well, begorry, we know he’s dead annyhow,” said Terry, adding, with a sigh of relief: “Well, I’m glad I’m not crazy, Cal. If ye hadn’t said it was what ye did say it was, faith, I’d have resigned from the foorce, because I’d ha’ been no further good to it even if I shtayed.”

  It was a grotesquely horrible sight upon which the two policemen gazed, for the skeleton was attired in a comparatively new suit of bright-blue silk pajamas, with a round mandarin’s cap of the same hue stuck rakishly on one side of the smooth white skull, which, together with the grinning mouth, gave the impression of an awful bald-headed creature enjoying some ghastly joke of the other world. The blue silk blouse was open at the top, revealing the crumbling breast bone and partly sunken ribs, while at the bottoms of the blue trousers long, fleshless feet, the big toe gone from one of them, pointed straight upward side by side.

  There was no disorder about the bed: From all appearances, the skeleton might have gone calmly to bed like a living person, having prepared for rest in night clothes, and, straightening out comfortably, drawn the sheet over its face and dropped off to sleep. Or, what was the reasonable supposition, some person or persons had brought the dreadful relic of mortality from somewhere, dressed it in Doctor Yeager’s pajamas, and left it in the bed. Still another theory, which occurred simultaneously to both Maginnis and Callery, but was dismissed at once, was that the doctor might have died a long time ago and lain in bed long enough for his outer tissues to decay.

  “Ah, what are y
e talkin’ about?” grunted Terry Maginnis, when Callery ventured this suggestion. “Didn’t we both see th’ doctor on th’ street within the mont’, an’ annyhow didn’t he call up th’ station an’ say he was goin’ to die, and didn’t Craig tear th’ gun go off whin he done it?”

  “And you think Doctor Yeager could have shot himself twenty minutes ago and shed all the flesh off his bones—eyes, hair, and all—by now?” sneered Callery.

  “I didn’t say that,” was Terry’s indignant rejoinder. “It’s puttin’ foolish talk in me mout’ ye are. But here’s the skeleton, an’ the doctor’s gone, wid that heathen hired man av his also missin’, an’, be jabers, I’m goin’ to telephone th’ station like th’ loot told me, an’ let him say phwat’s to be done.

  Howld on! There’s th’ ambulance!” he exclaimed, as the clang of a bell sounded outside. “Kape yesel’ quiet, Cal. Don’t say a worrd till th’ doctor boy gives his opinion. L’ave it all t’ me. It’s young Doc Griffiths.”

  The young fellow in the white jacket and uniform cap, who breezed into the room, nodded familiarly to the policemen. “Hello, Terry! What’s broke loose in here?”

  “Faith ye c’n see fer ye’sel’, doc,” returned Maginnis, stepping aside and pointing to the bed. “This here’s what we found. Give it a name if ye wull.”

  Doctor Paul Griffiths glanced at the bed and turned wrathfully on the two officers. “Say, what kind of game is this you’re giving me? Who rung up the ambulance?”

  “Lieutenant Craig done it,” replied Maginnis with dignity. “He didn’t know phwat was down here. All he had to go by was a repoort that there was a suicide or killin’, an’ he sint Callery an’ me to look intil it. How long sh’u’d ye say that bird on th’ bed has been there?”

  Doctor Griffiths did not reply at once. His professional interest was aroused, and he was bending closely over the bed.