by Whit Burnett
excitedly talking over the telephone. He was there for more
than twenty minutes, they could hear little of what he said,
though once he screamed rather angrily, "Never said I did say
I did say I did," and at least twice he cried petulantly, "Aow,
pooh!" When he returned he put his hand on Isobel's shoulder.
"It's all right, ducks," he said. "I've fixed it. Now we can all be
cosy and that's nice, isn't it?" Sitting tailor-wise on the Boor, he
produced his solution with reasonable pride. "You see," he
said, "it only says in the will 'set in that room in which they entertain their friends.' But it doesn't say you need entertain with those great horrors in the room more than once, and after a
great deal of tiresome talk those lawyers have agreed that I'm
right. For that one entertainment we'll build our setting round
the horrors, Isobel dear, everything morbid and ghostly. Your
first big reception, duckie, shall be a Totentanz. It's just the
sort of special send-off you need. After that, pack the beastly
things off, and presto, dear, back to normal."
The Totentanz was Isobel's greatest, alas! her last, triumph.
The vast room was swathed in black and purple, against
which the huge white monuments and other smaller tombstones
specially designed for the occasion stood out in bold relief. The
Totentanz • 145
waiters and barmen were dressed as white skeletons or elaborate Victorian mutes with black ostrich plumes. The open fireplace was arranged as a crematorium fire, and the chairs
and tables were coffins made in various woods. Musical archives had been ransacked for funeral music of every age and clime. A famous Jewish contralto wailed like the ghetto, an
Mrican beat the tomtom as it is played at human sacrifices, an
Irish tenor made everyone weep with his wake songs. Supper
was announced by "The Last Post" on a bugle and hearses were
provided to carry the guests home.
Some of the costumes were most original. Mrs. Mule came
tritely but aptly enough as a Vampire. Lady Maude with her
hair screwed up in a handkerchief and dressed in a shapeless
gown was strikingly successful as Marie Antoinette shaved for
the guillotine. Professor Cadaver dressed up as a Corpse Eater
was as good as Boris Karloff; he clearly enjoyed every minute
of the party, indeed his snake-like slit eyes darted in every direction at the many beautiful young women dressed as corpses and his manner became so incoherent and excited before he left
that Isobel felt quite afraid to let him go home alone. Guy bad
thought at first of coming as Millais's Ophelia, but he remembered the harm done to the original model's health and decided against it. With flowing hair and marbled features, however,
he made a very handsome "Suicide of Chatterton." Isobel
thought he seemed a little melancholy during the evening, but
when she asked him if anything was wrong he replied quite absently, "No, dear, nothing really. Half in love with easeful death, I s'pose. I mean all this fun is rather hell when it comes
to the point, isn't it?" But when he saw her face cloud, he said,
"Don't you worry, ducks, you've arrived," and, in fact, Isobel
was too happy to think of anyone but herself. For many hours
after the last guests had departed, she sat happily chipping
away at the monuments with a hammer. She sang a little to
herself: "I've beaten you, Uncle and Auntie dear, I hope it's the
last time you'll bother us here."
Guy felt very old and weary as he let himself into his oneroomed luxury flat. He realized that Isobel would not be needing him much longer, soon she would be on the way to spheres beyond his ken. There were so many really young men who
could do his stuff now and they didn't get bored or tired in the
middle like he did. Suddenly he saw a letter in the familiar, uneducated handwriting lying on the mat. He turned giddy for a moment and leaned against the wall. It would be impossible
to go on finding money like this for ever. Perhaps this time he
could get it from Isobel, after all she owed most of her success
to him, but it would hasten the inevitable break with her. And
even if he had the courage to settle this, there were so many
J46
Nineteen Tales of Terror
•
more demands in different uneducated hands, so much more
past sentimentalism turned to fear. He lay for a long time in
the deep green bath, then sat in front of his double mirror to
perform a complicated routine with creams and powders. At
last he put on a crimson and white silk dressing gown and hung
his Chatterton wig and costume in the wardrobe. He wished so
much that Chatterton were there to talk to. Then going to the
white painted medicine cupboard, he took out his bottle of
luminal. "In times like these," he said aloud, "there's nothing
like a good old overdose to pull one through."
Lady Maude enjoyed the party immensely. The funeral
baked meats were delicious and Isabel had seen that the old
lady had all she wanted. She sat on the edge of her great double
bed, with her grey hair straggling about her shoulders, and
swung her thick white feet with their knobbly blue veins. The
caviare and chicken mayonnaise and Omelette Surprise lay
heavy upon her, but she found, as usual, that indigestion only
made her the more hungry. Suddenly she remembered the
game pie in the larder. She put on her ancient padded pink dressing gown and tiptoed downstairs-it would not do for the Danbys to hear her, servants could make one look so foolish.
But when she opened the larder, she was horrified to find that
someone had forestalled her, the delicious, rich game pie had
been removed. The poor, cheated lady was not long in finding
the thief. She padded into the kitchen and there, seated at the
table, noisily guzzling the pie, was a very young man with long
fair hair, a red and blue checked shirt and white silk tie with
girls in scarlet bathing costumes on it; he looked as though he
suffered from adenoids. Lady Maude had read a good deal in
her favourite newspapers about spivs and burglars so that she
was not greatly surprised Had he been in the act of removing
the silver, she would have fled in alarm, but as it was she felt
nothing but anger. Her whole social foundation seemed to
shake beneath the wanton looting of her favourite food. She
immediately rushed towards him, shouting for help. The manhe was little more than a youth and very frightened-struck at her wildly with a heavy iron bar. Lady Maude fell backwards
upon the table, almost unconscious and bleeding profusely.
Then the boy completely lost his head and, seizing up the
kitchen meat axe, with a few wild strokes he severed her head
from her body. She died like a queen.
Only the moon lit the vast spaces of Brompton Cemetery,
showing up here a tomb and there a yew tree. Professor Cadaver's eyes were wild and his hands shook as he glided down the central pathway. His head still whirled with the fumes of
the party and a thousand beautiful corpses danced before his
eyes. An early underground train rattled in the distance and he
Totentanz
1 41
•
hurried his steps. At last he reached his objective-a freshly
du
g grave on which wooden planks and dying wreaths were
piled. The Professor began feverishly to tear these away, but
he was getting old and neither his sight nor his step was as sure
as it had been, he caught his foot in a rope and fell nine or ten
feet into the tomb. When they found him in the morning his
neck was broken. The papers hushed up the affair, and a Sunday newspaper in an article entitled "Has Science the Right?"
only confused the matter by describing him as a professor of
anatomy and talking obscurely of Burke and Hare.
It was the end of Isobel's hopes. True, Mrs. Mule still remained to play the vampire, but without the others she was as nothing. Indeed, the position for Isobel was worse than when
she arrived in London, for it would take a long time to live
down her close association with the Professor and Guy. Brian
was a little nonplussed at first, but there was so much to do at
the University that he had little time to think of what might
have been. He was now the centre of a circle of students and
lecturers who listened to his every word. As Isobel's social
schemes faded, he began to fill the house with his friends.
Sometimes she would find him standing full square before the
Zurbaran pointing the end of his pipe at a party of earnest
young men sitting bolt upright on the tapestried chairs. "Ah,"
he would be saying jocosely, "but you haven't yet proved to
me that your famous average man or woman is anything but a
fiction," or, "But look here, Wotherspoon, you can't just throw
words like 'beauty' or 'formal design' about like that. We must
define our terms." Once she discovered a tobacco pouch and a
Dorothy Sayers's detective novel on a tubular chair in the "dear
old lav." But if Brian had turned the house into a W.E.A. lecture centre, Isobel would not have protested now. Her thoughts were too much with the dead. She sat all day in the vast empty
drawing-room, where the two great monuments threw their
giant shadows over her. Here she would smoke an endless chain
of cigarettes and drink tea off unopened packing cases. Occasionally she would glance up at the inscriptions with a look of mute appeal, but she never seemed to find an answer. She made
less and less pretence of reading and listening to good music,
and yet for months on end would hardly stir from the house.
A faint April sun shone down upon the wet pavements of
the High Street, casting a faint and melancholy light upon the
pools of rain that had gathered here and there among the cobblestones. It was a deceptive gleam, however, for the wind was piercingly cold. Miss Thurkill drew her B.A. gown tightly
around her thin frame as she emerged from the lecture hall
and hurried off to the Heather Cafe. Turning the corner by
tea
Nineteen Tales of Terror
•
Strachan's bookshop, she saw the Master's wife advancing
upon her. Despite the freezing weather, the old lady moved
slowly, for the bitter winter's crop of influenza and bronchitis
had weakened her heart; she seemed now as fat and waddling as
her bulldogs.
"Did you get the London appointment?" she shouted; it was
a cruel question, for she knew already the negative reply.
"Back to the tomb, eh?" she went on. "Ah welll at least we
know we're dead here."
Miss Thurkill giggled nervously. "London didn't seem very
alive," she said. "I went to see the Cappers, but I couldn't get
any reply. The whole house seemed to be shut up."
"Got the plague, I expect," said the Master's wife; "took it
from here," and as she laughed to herself, she crouched forward like some huge, squat toad.
"lsobel certainly hasn't been the success she supposed,"
hissed Miss Tburkill, writhing like a malicious snake. "Well, I
shall catch my death of cold if I stay here," she added, and
hurried on.
The old lady's voice came to her in the gale that blew down
the street: "No one would notice the difference," it seemed to
cry.
WILLIAM B. SEABROOK
THE SALAMAN DER
FOR WEEKS Artur had not left his rooms.
Every day the janitor deposited outside his door the little food
he required. Sometimes he opened the door· after the janitor
had gone away. Frequently he forgot. He had explained that
he was working and did not want to be disturbed. No one else
knew where he was, so he was secure from interruption.
But he_ was not working. He had not been able to write since
he had come out of the hospital. He was waiting for the salamander. He knew that sooner or later the salamander would come to him, but he was not afraid. He knew that when it
came, it would either transform itself into a demon woman
who would glide out of the flames and consume him in her ardent embraces; or it would retain its natural shape, which is that of a small serpent-like lizard, and after communicating to
him a certain spark of fire, would disappear by crawling back
into the heart of the glowing coals.
Part of this Artur had learned from an old book of Rosicrucian mysteries, but most of it he had reasoned out for himself while he Jay in the hospital recovering from fever. He was sure
that the salamander's gift to him would be the divine spark, for
already in his brain there smoldered a little fire which awaited
only the serpent's breath to burst into pure white flame.
Sometimes his head ached and bright specks danced before
his eyes. When this occurred, his brain played strange tricks.
The interior of his skull became a vast arena, in an amphitheatre. In the center, on a tripod, flickered a tiny flame which was his soul. And locked in a death struggle before this tripod
were a Woman and a Serpent, bright lithe limbs and brighter
scaly coils interlocked and writhing . . . Woman· and Serpent
. . . Folly and Wisdom . . . Madness and Genius, contending
there for his immortal soul . • . wrestling to the death in the
amphitheatre of his brain.
149
150
Nineteen Tales of Tenor
•
Not often, however, was he obsessed by such phantasies.
Most of the time his mind was logical and clear. He had only to
wait patiently. The salamander would appear. And his high destiny would be accomplished.
So every night he piled wood in the open fireplace and kept
vigil before the flames. When the embers turned gray at dawn
he went to bed.
It was on one of these mornings, just before daybreak, when
the embers were beginning to bum low, that he first saw the
salamander. But the strange part of it was that the salamander
was not in the fire. His rooms were in one of those old mansions still unrazed in the slums of lower Manhattan; dilapidated and dirty, fallen from their high estate and cut up into tenement
apartments. Their worn doorways are sometimes of astonishing
architectural beauty, and even the interiors, despite alterations
and the wear and tear of time, often retain traces of their former dignity and gr-andeur. In the room where Artur sat the plaster was broken in places from the walls, and the ceiling was
cracked and stained; but the room was large and the ceiling
was high, higher than the ceilings are built nowadays in the
finest modem apartments, an
d around this ceiling there still ran
an elaborate old rococo cornice of white plaster-a formal design, in high relief, of swirling vines and scroll-like leaves.
Weary of staring for long hours into the fire, and convinced
that the salamander would not appear that night (the dawn was
already beginning to outline the high windows) he had thrown
himself back in his chair and was watching the flickering lights
and !Shadows as they played on the walls and ceiling, in and
out among the curves and crannies of the cornice. Suddenly
one of the curled acanthus leaves began to glow faintly and unfold. A luminous lizard wriggled from its depths and poised itself for an instant on the edge of the cornice. Artur stared-and it was gone. He had seen it. Of this he was sure. But he was not
certain whether the salamander had seen him. At any rate,
nothing more had happened.
Later, in the November dawn, as he lay sleepless on his bed,
he began to wonder if the thing had not been a hallucination,
or even something worse. Either there was a salamander hidden
in the cornice of his room, behind the acanthus leaves, or he
was going mad. One point, however, was clear; if the sala_.
mander were really up there in the cornice, it was useless to
look for it any longer in the fire. But how could he make sure?
If a salamander were an ordinary creature like a mouse or a
rat, it might be possible to entice it from its hiding place . • •
even to trap it . . . . After all, why not? Such a thing might be
possible, if one knew how to go about it
seriously
•
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•
•
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ne Salamander • 151
Presently he fell into a broken sleep, dreaming of setting
traps to catch salamanders.
The following afternoon he went out, for the first time in
nearly a month, and returned with three packages wrapped in
paper, hidden under his overcoat. The largest was a wire rat
trap, a basket-like affair with a small round opening in one
end, guarded on the inside with a circle of sharp barbed points,
arranged so as to make entrance easy and exit impossible. The