19 Tales of Terror

by Whit Burnett

  other two packages were a small box of absorbent cotton and

  a bottle of wood alcohol.

  That night Artur lighted no fire in the hearth. Instead, he

  placed the wire trap on the floor in the center of the room, in

  the pitch-black darkness, baited with a tightly wadded ball of

  absorbent cotton soaked in alcohol, which he carefully lighted.

  After watching the bluish flame for a moment, he tiptoed into

  his alcove bedroom and with the curtains drawn lay down to

  wait. All day long he had been moving in a dazed fever of suppressed excitement, and it had not occurred to him to take any food. He was surprised now tl}at he felt so lightheaded and

  weary. As he lay on his bed his body seemed to be floating motionless in space, without energy or movement. Now his mind was floating too . . . calm . . . light as a feather . . . floating

  . . . in space and silence. . . •

  He was aroused by a sharp sound . . . a scream. From the

  other room, through the hangings, came a faint ruddy glow. He

  rose, trembling, and parted the curtains. In the center of the

  floor, with the glow radiating from it, was the wire trap. But it

  was strangely larger than he remembered it . . . it was as large

  as a bushel basket. And crouching, imprisoned in the trap, with

  the wire bars pressing tightly against her flesh, was a beautiful

  woman. Her body was rosy, luminous. The wires encircled her

  so cruelly that she could scarcely move. She was moaning piteously and begging in a voice of agonized sweetness to be released. Artur moved toward her-but stopped in terror, for he saw that her breasts were pressed against the pointed barbs,

  and that from the wounds, instead of blood, were trickling

  little streams of fire! She was not a mortal woman, but a demon.

  He knew that if he freed her he would be consumed to ashes in

  her fiery embrace. He knew that he must kill her, if he could,

  while she was still captive in the cage. She was struggling now,

  straining with all the force of her cramped body against the

  taut wires. He would have to be quick! He remembered that

  there was a long curved paper knife on his writing table. He

  moved toward it. But it was too late. The wires of the cage

  were turning red! They were bending . . . breaking . . . she was

  free!

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  Nineteen Tales ol Terror

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  Rising to her full height, terrible, naked, beautiful, with

  the little streams of fire still trickling from her breasts, she came

  with outstretched arms toward him. He could feel her breath

  . . . her arms reaching to encircle him . • . already his own body

  was on fire . . . her burning lips . . . .

  Artur escaped from this fiery, erotic vision trembling and

  covered with perspiration. He was in a high fever. And the

  room was cold. Everything was in black darkness. From beyond the curtains, not a flicker of light. He groped his way blindly into the other room, found matches and a candle. The

  little wire tray lay empty in the center of the floor. The ball of

  cotton was burned to a charred crisp. The acanthus leaves in

  the cornice were cold, white, motionless.

  The next morning he was still feverish and a little delirious.

  Yet it seemed to him that his mind was singularly clear. He

  realized now as he lay in bed, thinking, that he might be mistaken about the salamander. Perhaps there was no salamander in the cornice; no demon woman either. Perhaps it bad all

  been an illusion of his distorted mind. Perhaps there were no

  such things as a salamander, no such thing as a divine spark.

  Somewhere in the back of his brain an absurd sentence

  began to form itself, a sentence which he had long ago heard, or

  read, while seated (it seemed to him) with a Capuchin monk in

  the kitchen of a queen. "My son, I am fifty years of age; I am

  a bachelor of arts and a doctor of theology; I have read all the

  Greek and Latin authors who have survived the injury done by

  time and the evil done by men, and I have never seen a salamander, whence I reasonably conclude that no such thing exists."

  As he lay and slowly repeated the forgotten sentence, he was

  seized by a spasm of rage. "God damn all bachelors of arts and

  doctors of theology!" he screamed aloud. "If salamanders no

  longer exist, it is because these men have murdered them !"

  After this outburst he lay quiet for a while, pondering. If the

  bachelors of arts and doctors of theology were right-if they

  were right about anything-dearly it was useless to go on living. It required no genius to see that, quite independently of the question of salamanders. But was there or was there not a

  salamander in the cornice? It was absolutely necessary to know.

  But how? He was thinking quite sanely now, he believed, and

  presently he began to formulate a plan-a plan that was simple

  and could not fail.

  That afternoon he went out again, and when be returned he

  carried two heavy cans of kerosene. He chose an hour when

  he knew the janitor would be in the basement. No one saw him

  leave or enter the bouse. He remembered that kindling and

  firewood were stored in the basement. It would be well to

  Tile Salalllander • 1&3

  bring up a few armfuls later, in case his furniture was not

  sufficient. Meanwhile he would lie down and rest. He was quite

  tired and ill.

  A little after dark he arose, lighted the gas, and began to

  work. But it was nearly midnight before his preparations were

  completed. The fire mounted quicker and more fiercely than

  he had anticipated. The brightness and roaring frightened him

  a little, but he stood with his arms shielding the lower part of

  his face, steadfastly watching the acanthus leaves. The flames

  were licking the wall, running along the cornice, spreading

  over the ceiling. Now the acanthus leaves began to writhe and

  glow. His eyes were smarting painfully and the smoke was beginning to hurt his lungs. He was growing dizzy. He felt that in a moment he would fall. But there, out of the glowing foliage, out of the heart of the flames, the salamander was coming, coming to him at last. And with transfigured face, with outstretched arms, he went to the fulfillment of his dreams.

  DOROTHY CANFI ELD FISHER

  THE M U R DER O N J EFFERSON STREET

  WITH its low, bungalow-style, stucco cottages,

  and its few high old-fashioned clapboarded houses, Jefferson

  Street looked like any side street in the less expensive part of

  any American large-town, small-city. And it was like any one

  of them. Like all collections of human habitations, everywhere,

  its roofs sheltered complex and unstable beings, perilously feeling their way, step by step, along the knife-edge narrow path of equilibrium that winds across the morasses and clings to the

  precipitous cliffs of life.

  Mrs. Benson, the slender, middle-aged, well-bred widow who

  had moved to Jefferson Street because it was cheap, was the

  only one of them-as yet-whose foot had slipped too far from

  the path for recovery. With her every breath since her husband's death, she had slid down towards that gray limbo of indifference in which all things look alike. She was lost and she knew it; but as she fell, she grasped at anything that could hold

  her for a little longer; till her daughter grew up. At fourteen
,

  Helen, plain, virtuous, intelligent, charmless, needed all the

  help she could get, if she were to have even a small share of

  the world's satisfaction.

  Although Mrs. Benson went through the normal manoeuvres

  of life, speaking, smiling, asking and answering questions, her

  secret aloofness from what other people prized was, of course,

  obscurely felt by the people around her. It was both felt and

  feared by the Warders, who were her next-door neighbors. It

  was one of the many things that made them feef insecure in

  Jefferson Street life. They felt everything, feared everything,

  started back at the snapping of a twig, all. their senses strained

  like those of nervous explorers cautiously advancing, hand on

  cocked trigger, into an unknown jungle. For they were undertaking a hazardous feat compared to which hunting big game

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  The Murder on Jefferson Street • 155

  or living among hostile savages is sport for children. They were

  moving from one social class to the one above it.

  Their family (as far as Jefferson Street knew it) was made up

  of Bert Warder, his wife, their daughter Imogene and a brother

  Don, employed in a bank in Huntsville. But this presentable

  floe, visible above the white-collar surface was the smallest part

  of the tribe. Below it was a great substructure, sunk deep in the

  ocean of manual work--()veralled uncles who were factoryhands, drab, stringy-necked aunts who "worked out," brothers who were garage mechanics, sisters who sold over the counters

  of ten-cent stores. Only Bert and his bank-clerk brother Don

  sat at desks with pens in their hands. Bert like most of the men

  who lived on Jefferson Street, was an employee of the great

  Stott McDevitt Electric Company. His desk there felt to him

  like a pedestal. His bungalow-home was another. To the occasional Packard car which, trying to locate a dressmaker or a trained nurse, sometimes purred into it and rolled noiselessly

  out, Jefferson Street looked plebian and small-employee-ish

  enough. For Bert Warder and his wife, brought up in tenement

  houses in a black brutally industrial city, Jefferson Street was

  patrician with its small lawns, its shade trees, its occasional

  .flowerbeds, above all, its leisure-class tennis courts on the two

  vacant lots at the end. They could hardly believe that Bert's

  night-school-educated brains had lifted them to such a height.

  The watchful tips of their antennae soon told them that in the

  class into which they were transferring themselves it was considered no notable feat to live in a home with a yard, so they took care to speak of the street as other people did, with

  amused condescension for its hwribleness; but in reality they

  all three worshipped it, admired, feared and tried to imitate its

  inhabitants, lived in dread that something from their past

  might cast them out from it, and did what we all do, passionately

  collected their neighbors' weak points as potential ammunition

  with which to resist attacks on their own. They would have

  fought to the death against a threat to their social standing on

  the street-as indeed they did, quite literally, when they felt

  themselves so threatened.

  Tautly on the look-out as they were, they naturally felt that

  Mrs. Benson's pre-occupied good manners might be intended

  as a reflection on their own, and suspected that the Tuttles

  (neighbors on the other side) looked down on them and on

  Jefferson Street. There was nothing definite in Francis and

  Mary Tuttle around which this suspicion could crystallize. It

  was everything. In their every contact with the Tuttles, the

  Warders uneasily felt the need to make an effort towards more

  ease, pleasantness, reticence and quietness than was natural to

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  Nineteen Tales of Terror

  •

  them. It was fatiguing. And they were never sure they had

  quite caught the new tune.

  Yet, as a matter of fact, the Tuttles did not look down on

  Jefferson Street but were as glad to live there as the Warders.

  And, exactly like the Warders, had escaped to it from a life they

  shuddered to look back on. It was true, as Bert Warder's quiveringly suspicious nose for class differences told him, that both Francis and Mary his wife had been brought up in a house

  grander than any Bert had ever set foot in, and that Francis'

  youth (which he mentioned as little as Bert mentioned his) had

  been spent not with hired girls and factory hands but with

  Senators and Bank Presidents. But his past had something else

  in it-mi�ery and failure, and a period of total black eclipse

  such as the vigorous Bert had never dreamed of. Francis

  thought of his past as seldom as possible. Till Mary had dragged

  him up out of the morass of self-contempt in which he lay, already half drowned, and set his feet beside hers on the knifeedge narrow path of equilibrium, he had taken for granted that his failure in life was inevitable, was because he was an allaround misfit. Living with her he had · begun to hope that perhaps it was only his family he did not fit. He said-he thought

  -"family." What he meant was "brother." Away from Roger

  there might be a place for him in the world, after all, he began ·

  to hope.

  When Mary thought of that past, as wretched for her as for

  Francis, it was to Francis' mother not his brothers, she cried,

  "Shame on you! Shame !" His mother had long been dead but

  _

  no tombstone could hide her from Mary's wrath. In the old bad

  days when both sons were little boys, and the mother's favoritism was at its maddest worst, people used to say, if they noticed Francis at all, "It's hard on an ordinary boy, and rather a weakling at that, to have such a successful older brother.

  Doesn't give him a chance, really." But Mary knew that Roger

  was not the one to blame for the tragedy of their relation. She

  had thought him stub-fingered and tiresome, the sort of successful person who bores sensitive and intelligent ones; but living as she did-mouselike invisible poor relative-close to both of

  them, she had always known that Roger felt wistful and clumsy

  beside Francis' accurate rightness of taste, and that he had

  even a dim divination of Francis' exquisite undeveloped gift.

  No, part of Roger's exasperating rightness was that he had

  never accepted his mother's over-valuation. The older brother

  had steadily tried to be friendly; but Francis' mother had early

  conditioned the younger to see in any friendliness from anyone

  only a contemptuous pity for his own ineptitude. "You, you!"

  cried Mary ragingly to the wqman in her grave. "Before your

  little poet-son could walk alone, you had shut him into the

  Tile Murder on JeHerson Street • 151

  black vault with your stupid admiration of Roger's commonplace successses, your stupid notion that Francis' fineness was weakness. And every year you added another padlock to the

  door. What strange hateful mania possessed you, you wicked

  woman with your mean perverted bullying . • . " Whenever

  another bitter adjective came into her mind she said all this and

  more to Francis' dead mother, ending triumphantly, "But I

  know what he is and I've always known-a poet, a spirit so

  fine and true that j
ust to breathe the air with him lifts an ordinary human being to nobility ! I, the little poor young cousindrudge you never noticed, I married a broken man, and he's a whole man now--or will be soon. I've given him children who

  adore him, who depend on him! And I depend on him. He earns

  their living and mine. He's escaped from the role of defeated

  weakling you bullied him into. He creates happiness and knows

  it! He's coming to life. And every day I bury you � little deeper,

  thank God!"

  Never a word of this did she say to Francis. He did not recognize personal resentment as one of the permissible elements in life. Not in his life. It belonged in a lower, meaner world

  than his. Mary had climbed through the keyhole of his vault,

  had triumphantly thrown open the door and led him out to

  happiness, without letting him hear a single reproach to his

  mother or brother at which his magnanimity could take fright.

  She knew magnanimity to be the air he must breathe or die.

  It was part of what she adored in him, part of what she loved

  in the world he shared with her. But she did not practise it in

  her own thoughts. Francis, she knew, would have cut his hand

  off before he would have admitted even to himself that the

  smallest part of his passionate delight in the twins came from

  the knowledge that Roger's brilliant marriage was childless,

  and that he had-at last-something that Roger envied. She

  felt no such scruples. Hugging her babies to her, she often

  revelled, unabashed, in happy savagery, "You dumb conspicuous go-getter, you haven't anything like this in your expensive empty house!" Sometimes in reaction from the loftiness of

  Francis' ideals she thought, "Why can't he be unfair like anybody, and hate Roger, even if Roger's not to blame? It's nature. Who but Francis could feel guilty-not over being unfair, but over the mere temptation to be not angelically just. It'd do

  him good to let himself go."

  But she did not believe this. "He couldn't let himself go into

  unfairness like just anybody," she thought, "for he's not just

  anybody. He's a poet with a poet's fineness of fibre. And about

  the only civilized being on the globe."

  So there was Jefferson Street; its low bungalows, its awk-

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  Nineteen Tales ol Terror