The Weird Fiction Megapack
Page 50
And he smelled it now. It was like a miasma in the dark.
“It isn’t anything that Carruthers wears,” he grated. “It comes from—yes, the storage room. I realized that about a month ago. Just after you sailed—one night I stayed late at the office, and I went in there.… It seemed to be strongest around the vat—her vat—and I lifted the lid.
“The sweet, sticky musk-smell hit me like a blow in the face.
“And that isn’t all!”
* * * *
Terror stalked in this room. Asa Gregg crouched in his chair, felt the weight of fear on him like a submarine pressure. His cigar pitched to his knees, dropped to the floor.
“You won’t believe this, Jeannette.” He hammered the words like nails into the darkness in front of him. “You will say that it’s impossible. I know that. It is impossible. It is a physiological absurdity—it contradicts the laws of natural science.
“But I saw something on the bottom of that vat!”
He groped for the bottle. His wife would hear a long gurgle, and then a coughing gasp.…
“The vat was nearly full of this transparent, oily acid,” he went on. “What I saw was a lot of sediment on the golden floor. And there shouldn’t have been any sediment! The stuff utterly dissolves animal tissue, bone, even the common ores—keeps them in suspension.
“It didn’t look like sediment, either. I looked like a heap of mold.…gravemold!
“I replaced the lid. I spent a week convincing myself that it was all impossible, that I couldn’t have seen anything of the sort. Then I went to the vat again—”
Silence hung in the darkness while he sucked wind into his lungs. And the words burst—separate, yammering shrieks:
“I looked, night after night! For hours at a time I’ve watched the change.… Did you ever see a body decompose? Of course not! Neither have I. But you must know in a general way what the process is. Well, this has been the exact opposite!
“First, I stared at the heap of grave-mold as it shaped itself into bones, a skeleton.
“I watched the coming of hair, a yellow tangle of it sprouting from the bare round skull, until—oh, God!—the flesh began making itself before my eyes! I couldn’t bear any more. I stayed away—didn’t come to the office for five days.”
The tube slipped from his sweating, slick fingers. Panting, Asa Gregg fumbled in the dark until he found it.
Exhaustion, not self-control, flattened his voice to a deadly monotone. “I tried to think of a way out. If I could fish the corpse out of the tank! But I couldn’t smuggle it out of the plant—alone. You know that, and so do I. Besides, what would be the use? If acid can’t kill her, nothing can.
“That’s why I can’t have the lid cemented on. It wouldn’t do any good, either! Until three days ago, she hadn’t the least color, looked as white as a ghost in the vat. A naked ghost, because there’s been no resurrection for her clothing.…
“I’ve watched her limbs grow rosy! Her lips are scarlet! Her eyes are bright—they opened yesterday—and her breasts were rising and falling—oh, almost imperceptibly—but that was last night.
“And tonight—I swear it—her lips moved! She muttered my name! She turned—she’d been lying on her side—over onto her back!”
The record would be badly blurred. His hand shook violently, bobbled the tube against his lips. Gregg braced his elbow against the desk.
“She isn’t dead,” he choked. “She’s only asleep.…not very soundly asleep.… She’s waking up!”
The invisible needle quivered as it traced several noises. There was his tortured breathing, and the clawing of his fingernails rattling over the desk. The drawer clicked as it opened.
The loud click was the cocking of the revolver.
“Soon she’s going to get out of that vat!” Gregg bleated. “Jeannette, forgive me—God, forgive me—but I will not—I cannot—I dare not stay here to see her then!”
* * * *
The sound of the shot brought the watchman stumbling along the corridor. He crashed against the office door. It banged open in a shower of falling frosted glass. The watchman’s flashlight severed the darkness, and printed its white circle on the face of Asa Gregg.
He had fallen back into the chair, a blackish gout of blood running from the hole in his temple. He stared sightlessly into the light with his tyes that were two gnarls of shrunken brown flesh, like knots in a pine board.
Asa Gregg was blind…had been, since that night three years past when the acid splashed.…
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
JOHN GREGORY BETANCOURT used to be a fairly prolific author (publishing 40 books and more than 100 short stories) before turning to the dark side of publishing. He currently owns and operates Wildside Press. He is a former editor (and publisher) of Weird Tales (he passed it on to Marvin Kaye and John Harlacher, who own Nth Dimension Media, Weird Tales’s current publisher). He still manages to write at least one short story every year, though. His most recent book is Pit and the Pendulum, a collection of mystery stories, available from Wildside Press (paperback and ebook) and Thorpe U.K. (large print edition).
DARRELL SCHWEITZER is an award-winning editor (for Weird Tales) as well as an extraordinarily talented author. His work can be found in many Megapacks, and he has the distinction of being the very first living author to get his own volume in the series—The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack. Check it out!
STEVE RASNIC TEM’s most recent story collection is Here With the Shadows from Swan River Press, ghost stories in the traditional mode. His new novel is Blood Kin, a dark vision of ghosts, witchcraft, snake-handling, kudzu, and the Great Depression from Solaris Books (March).
MANLY WADE WELLMAN (1903–1986) wrote for many pulps, such as Astounding Stories, Startling Stories, Unknown, and Strange Stories, but he is best remembered as one of the most popular contributors to Weird Tales, and for his fantasy and horror stories set in the Appalachian Mountains, which draw on the native folklore of that region. Wellman also wrote in a wide variety of other genres, including historical fiction, detective fiction, western fiction, juvenile fiction, and non-fiction. Karl Edward Wagner referred to him as “the dean of fantasy writers.”
CLARK ASHTON SMITH (1893–1961) was a self-educated American poet, sculptor, painter and author of fantasy, horror, and science fiction short stories. He achieved early local recognition, largely through the enthusiasm of George Sterling, for traditional verse in the vein of Swinburne. As a poet, Smith is grouped with the West Coast Romantics alongside Ambrose Bierce, Joaquin Miller, Sterling, Nora May French, and remembered as “The Last of the Great Romantics” and “The Bard of Auburn.”
Smith was one of “the big three” of Weird Tales (along with Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft). L. Sprague de Camp said of him that “nobody since Poe has so loved a well-rotted corpse.” He was a member of the Lovecraft circle, and Smith’s literary friendship with H. P. Lovecraft lasted from 1922 until Lovecraft’s death in 1937. His work is marked chiefly by an extraordinarily wide and ornate vocabulary, a cosmic perspective, and a vein of sardonic and sometimes ribald humor.
HENRY KUTTNER (1915– 1958) was known for his literary prose and worked in close collaboration with his wife, C. L. Moore. They met through their association with the “Lovecraft Circle,” a group of writers and fans who corresponded with H. P. Lovecraft. Their work together spanned the 1940s and 1950s and most of the work was credited to pseudonyms, mainly Lewis Padgett and Lawrence O’Donnell.
H .P. LOVECRAFT (1890–1937) was an American author who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. Virtually unknown and only published in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, he is now widely seen as one of the most significant 20th century authors in his genre.
DUANE W. RIMEL (1915–1996) is chiefly remembered for his association with H.P. Lovecraft, who rewrote or ghost-wrote a number of Rimel’s stories in Weird Tales, though he went on to publish a number of original works on his own, including th
e novel Time Swap (1969).
NICTZIN DYALHIS (1873 – 1942) was an American chemist and short story writer who specialized in the genres of science fiction and fantasy. During his lifetime, he attained a measure of celebrity as a writer for the pulp fiction magazine Weird Tales.
HOWARD WANDREI (1909–1956) was a U.S. artist and writer. He contributed more than 200 stories to magazines, including Weird Tales, Astounding, Esquire, Black Mask, and others. He wrote under his own name and the pseudonyms “Robert Coley” and “H.W. Guernsey.”
JULIUS LONG (1907-1955) published about a dozen stories in his the 1930s and 1940s, mostly in Weird Tales and weird mystery pulps like Terror Tales and Dime Detective.
British author G. G. PENDARVES (1885-1938) has been experiencing something of a revival, with two collections of his fantasy and horror work appearing in the last decade. He was a frequent contributor to Weird Tales in the 1920s and 1930s.
MALCOLM JAMESON (1891–1945) was an American science fiction author. An officer in the US Navy, he was active in American pulp magazines during the Golden Age of Science Fiction. His writing career began when complications of throat cancer limited his activity. According to John W. Campbell Jr., Jameson “had much to do with the development of modern naval ordnance.”
PAUL COMPTON is a mystery to us—we know nothing about him, nor have we been able to find out anything from our usual reference sources. We can say with some authority that he is not the an English former professional footballer and football club manager of the same name.
PAUL ERNST (born between 1899 and 1902 – died between 1983 and 1985) was an American pulp fiction writer. He is best known as the author of the original 24 “Avenger” novels, published by Street and Smith Publications under the house name Kenneth Robeson.
E. HOFFMANN PRICE (1898– 1988) was an American writer of popular fiction (he was a self-titled “fictioneer”) for the pulp magazine marketplace. He collaborated with H. P. Lovecraft on “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” and was the only person to have met both Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard in person. He was a frequent contributor to Weird Tales and many other pulps.
MARY ELIZABETH COUNSELMAN (1911–1995) was an American writer of short stories and poetry. In describing her philosophy of writing horror fiction, she said, “The Hallowe’en scariness of the bumbling but kindly Wizard of Oz has always appealed to me more than the gruesome, morbid fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and those later authors who were influenced by their doom philosophies. My eerie shades bubble with an irrepressible sense of humour, ready to laugh with (never at) those earth-bound mortals whose fears they once shared.”
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS (1911– 1983) was an American playwright and author of many stage classics. Did you know he published his very first short story in Weird Tales?
BASSETT MORGAN was a Canadian author who published more than a dozen stories in the pulps in the 1920s and 1930s.
ZEALIA BISHOP (1897–1968) was an American writer of short stories. Her stories appeared in the magazine Weird Tales. However, they were extensively revised by H. P. Lovecraft to the point of being ghostwritten.
ROBERT E. HOWARD (1906 – 1936) was an American author who wrote pulp fiction in a diverse range of genres. He is well known for his character Conan the Barbarian and is regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery subgenre.
PEARL NORTON SWET published a pair of stories in Weird Tales in the early 1930s, and one in WT’s sister magazine, Oriental Stories.
DOROTHY QUICK (1896–1962) was a playwright, poet and author who wrote for Weird Tales, Unknown, Fantastic Adventures, and other pulps—one of the handful of women who published regularly in the fantasy field. Wildside Press is working on digitizing more of her fine stories.
EARL PEIRCE, JR. published fewer than a dozen stories in the weird fiction pulps, including Weird Tales and Strange Stories. Little is known about him.
RONAL KAYSER (1905-1988), who also published as “Dale Clark” and “Dale Clarke,” is better known in the mystery field for novels such as The Blonde, the Gangster, and the Private Eye and The Red Rods. He published 7 stories and a poem in Weird Tales.
Table of Contents
COPYRIGHT INFO
A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER
THE MEGAPACK SERIES
BOY BLUE, by Steve Rasnic Tem
TAP DANCING, by John Gregory Betancourt
TO BECOME A SORCERER, by Darrell Schweitzer
THE GOLGOTHA DANCERS, by Manly Wade Wellman
THE DEATH OF ILALOTHA, by Clark Ashton Smith
THE SALEM HORROR, by Henry Kuttner
THE DISINTERMENT, by H.P. Lovecraft and D.W. Rimel
THE SEA-WITCH, by Nictzin Dyalhis
VINE TERROR, by Howard Wandrei
THE PALE MAN, by Julius Long
WEREWOLF OF THE SAHARA, by G.G. Pendarves
TRAIN FOR FLUSHING, by Malcolm Jameson
THE DIARY OF PHILIP WESTERLY, by Paul Compton
MASK OF DEATH, by Paul Ernst
THE GIRL FROM SAMARCAND, by E. Hoffmann Price
THE MONKEY SPOONS, by Mary Elizabeth Counselman
THE VENGEANCE OF NITOCRIS, by Tennessee Williams
THE NINTH SKELETON, by Clark Ashton Smith
BIMINI, by Bassett Morgan
THE CURSE OF YIG, by H.P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop
THE HAUNTER OF THE RING, by Robert E. Howard
THE MEDICI BOOTS, by Pearl Norton Swet
THE LOST DOOR, by Dorothy Quick
DOOM OF THE HOUSE OF DURYEA, by Earl Peirce, Jr.
IN THE DARK, by Ronal Kayser
ABOUT THE AUTHORS