Mythos and Horror Stories

by Frank Belknap Long

  “Them things what live on the bottom of the arctic seas,” groaned Bill. “They comes up for air once in a hundred years. I’ll take my oath that there thing’s a Jormungandar.”

  Jormungandar or not, it was apparent to all of us that the monster meant business. It was bearing down upon the cutter with incredible ferocity. The water boiled and bubbled in its wake. On the other boats men rushed hysterically to the rails and stared with wide eyes.

  The officers of the cutter had recovered from their momentary astonishment and were gesticulating furiously and running back and forth on the decks. Three guns were lowered into position and directed at the onrushing horror. A little man with gilt braid on his sleeves danced about absurdly on his toes and shouted out commands at the top of his voice.

  “Don’t fire until you can look into his eyes,” he yelled. “We can’t afford to miss him. We’ll give him a broadside he won’t forget.”

  “It isn’t human,' sir!” someone yelled. “There never was nothing like it before in this world.”

  The men aboard the tug were obviously rejoicing. Caps and pipes ascended into the air and loud shouts of triumph issued from a hundred drunken throats.

  “Fire!” shouted the blue-coated midget on the cutter.

  “It won’t do ’em no good!” shouted Bill, as the thunder of the guns smote our ears. “It won’t do ’em a bit o’ good.”

  As it turned out, Bill was right. The tremendous discharge failed to arrest the progress of the obscene monster.

  It rose like a cloud from the Water and flew at the cutter like a flying-fish. Furiously it stretched forth its enormous arms, and embraced the cutter. It wrenched the little vessel from the trough of the wave in which it wal- ,lowed and lifted it violently into the air.

  Its great golden sides shone like the morning star, but red blood trickled from a gaping hole in its throat. Yet it ignored its wounds. It lifted the small steel ship into the air in its gigantic, weaving arms.

  I shall never forget that moment. I have but to shut my eyes and it is before me now. I see again that Brobdingnagian horror from measureless abysses, that twisting, fantastic monstrosity from sinister depths of blackest midnight. And in its colossal arms and legs I see a tiny ship from whose deck a hundred little men fall shrieking and screaming into the black maelstrom beneath its churning maws.

  Yards and yards it towered, and its glittering bulk hid the sun. It towered to the zenith and its weaving arms twisted the cutter into a shapeless mass of glistening steel.

  “We’re next!” muttered Bill. “There ain’t nothing can save us now. A man ain’t got a chance when he runs head-on against a Jormungandar!” “That ain’t qo Jormungandar,” piped Tom. “It’s a human being what’s been out all night. But I ain’t saying we’re not in for it.”

  My other companions fell upon their knees and little Harry O’Brien turned yellow under the gills. But the thing did not attack us. Instead with a heartbreaking scream that seemed outrageously human it sank beneath the waves, carrying with it the flattened, absurd remains of the valiant little cutter and the crushed and battered bodies of innumerable men. And as it sank loathsomely from sight the water about it flattened out into a tremorless plateau and turned the color of blood.

  Bill was at the oars now, shouting and cursing to encourage the rest of us. “Pull, boys,” he commanded. “Let’s try to make the south shore before that there fish comes up for breath. There ain’t one of us here what wants to live for the rest of his life on the bottom of the sea. There ain’t one of us here what ud care to have it out with a Jormungandar.”

  In a moment we had swung the boat about and were making for the shore.

  Men on the other ships were crying and waving to us, but we didn’t stop to hand in any reports. We weren’t thinking of anything but a huge monstrosity that we would see towering and towering into the sky as long as our brains hung together in our foolish little heads.

  8.News item in the Long Island Gazette

  The body of a young man, about 25 years old, was found this morning on a deserted beach near Northport. The body was horribly emaciated and the coroner, Mr. E. Thomas Bogart, discovered three small wounds on the young man’s thigh. The edges of the wounds were stained as though from gunpowder. The body scarcely weighed one hundred pounds. It is thought that the youth was the victim of foul play and inquiries are being made in the vicinity.

  9. The Box of Horror

  [Statement of Harry Olson]

  I hadn’t had a thing to eat for three days, and I was driven to the cans. Sometimes you find something valuable in the cans and sometimes you don’t; but anyhow, I was working ’em systematically. I had gone up the street and down the street, and hadn’t found a thing for my pains except an old pair of suspenders and a tin of salmon. But when I came to the last house I stopped and stared. Then I stretched out a lean arm and picked up the box. It was a funny-looking box, with queer glass sides and little peek-holes in the side of it, and a metal compartment about three inches square in back of it, and a slide underneath large enough to hold a man’s hand.

  I looked up at the windows of the house, but there wasn’t anyone watching me, and so I slipped the box under my coat and made off down the street. “It’s something expensive, you can bet your life on that,” I thought. “Probably some old doctor’s croaked and his widow threw the thing away without consulting anyone... This is a real scientific affair, this is, and I ought to .get a week’s board out of it.”

  I wanted to examine the thing better and so I made for a vacant lot where I wouldn’t be interrupted. Once there I sat myself down behind a signboard and took the contraption from under my coat and looked at it.

  Well, sir, it interested me. There was a little lever on top of it you pressed and the slide fell down and something clicked in the metal box in back of it, and the thing lighted up.

  I realized at once that something was meant to go on the slide. I didn’t know just what, but my curiosity was aroused. “That light isn’t there for nothing,” I thought. “This box means business.”

  I began to wonder what would happen if something alive were put on the slide. There was a clump of bushes near where I was sitting and I got up and made for it. It took me some time to get what I was after; but when I caught it I held it firmly between my thumb and forefinger so it couldn’t escape, and then I talked to it. “Grasshopper,” I said. “I haven’t any grudge against you personally, but the scientific mind is no respecter of persons.”

  The infernal varmint wriggled and wriggled and covered my thumb with molasses, but I didn’t let up on him. I held him firmly and pushed him onto the slide. Then I turned on the lever and peeped through the holes.

  The poor devil squirmed and fluttered for several minutes and then he began to dissolve. He got flabbier and flabbier and soon I could see right through him. When he was nothing but ooze he began to wriggle. I dumped him on the ground and he scurried away faster than a centipede.

  “I’m deluding myself,” I thought. “I’m seeing things that never happened.” Then I did a very foolish thing. I thrust my hand into the box and turned on the lever. For several moments nothing happened and then my hand began to get cold. I peeped through the holes and what I saw made me scream and scream and draw my hand out and go running about the lot like a madman. My hand was a mass of writhing, twisting snakes! Leastwise, they looked like snakes at first, but later I saw that they were soft and yellow and rubbery and much worse than snakes.

  But even then I didn’t altogether lose my head. Leastwise, I didn’t lose it for long. “This is a sheer hallucination,” I said to myself, “and I’m going to argue myself out of it.”

  I sat down on a big boulder and held my hand up and looked at it. It had a thousand fingers and they dripped, but I made myself look at ’em. I did some tall arguing. “Snap out of it,” I said. “You’re imagining things!” I thought the fingers began to shorten and stiffen a little. “You’re imagining all this,” I continued. “It’s the
sheerest bunk. That box isn’t anything out of the ordinary!”

  Well sir, you may not believe it, but I argued myself back into sanity. I argued my hand back to normal. The wriggling, twisting things got shorter and fatter and joined together and before very long I had a hand with fingers.

  Then I stood up and shouted. Luckily no one heard me, and there wasn’t anyone to watch me dancing about on my toes either. When I got out of breath I picked the infernal box up and walked away with it. I made directly for the river. “You’ve had your day,” I said. “You won’t turn any more poor critters into jelly-fish!”

  Well sir, I threw the vile thing into the river, but first I smashed it against the planks on the wharf until it looked like nothing on earth under the stars.

  And that’s the end of you!” I shouted as it sank. I ought to have got a medal for that, but I ain’t complaining. It isn’t every man has the pleasure of calling himself a disinterested benefactor of humanity.

  The Were-Snake

  “What a perfectly adorable ruin,” said Miss Beardsley. “I love deepest gloom, and this place is as mournful as Erebus! The perversity of nature has entered into the rocks; they seem alive!”

  “These people worshipped a curious pantheon,” I explained. “Ishtar was represented here. Hellish rites were performed on the altar before you. The modern mind cannot conceive them, and to describe them would require the invention of a new language. These piles are older than Stonehenge or Egypt. They antedate the pyramids by thousands of years, and probably go back to the neolithic age.”

  “Who was Ishtar?” asked Miss Beardsley.

  “The great mother goddess, the magna mater of the Babylonians, the Assyrians and darker, more sinister peoples whose civilizations were legends in the age of Homer. The worship of Ishtar, variously called Innanna, Nina, Astarte, extended over the whole of Asia; and her altars are to be found in Persia, India, China, Arabia and Siberia... Ishtar’s earthly counterpart was a woman of devastating beauty, who possessed the cruel and vicious nature of the Roman empress Messalina. In Nineveh, in Tyre, in Erech her terrestrial manifestations lured camel-drivers in from the desert, and destroyed them with kisses. It has been estimated that her victims in a single year outnumbered armies of locusts!”

  Miss Beardsley scowled and poked with her parasol among gray, antiquated stones. “It isn’t that I don’t trust you. But they told me in the village that native girls walk here at night and pretend to be reincarnations of that goddess.”

  “The native girls are very ugly,” I assured her. “They have flat noses and square ears and they wear rings through their lips. No white man could love them.”

  “I never liked them,” murmured Miss Beardsley.

  I took Miss Beardsley’s hand and smiled into her nervous blue eyes. I found her anger more delightful than the impecunious glory of archeology, but like most stubborn men I invariably sought excuses. “There is no truth in those silly old tales,” I said, “But it is something to sleep here. The place is haunted and it will give me prestige.”

  “But what has superstition to do with archeology?” demanded Miss Beardsley.

  “We must investigate all superstitions,” I responded. “They often furnish us with invaluable data. Lord Clayton-Maddox ignores haunted ruins, and the Royal Society ignores Clayton-Maddox.”

  “What of it?” pouted Miss Beardsley. I felt that her frivolity did not become her.

  “I fear,” I said, “that you underestimate the satisfaction of achievement and the value of rewards!”

  Miss Beardsley made a gesture indicating contempt. “But they are both quite worthless,” she snapped. “In fifty years you will no longer desire them!” She stooped, and picked up a handful of grayish sand. “You will be less than that!” she said.

  My guide’s eyes sparkled, and he smiled at Miss Beardsley. “It is encouraging,” he said, “to hear a woman talk like that. We of the East place less value upon externals. We educate the soul and we do not value rewards. With us it is a distinction to remain humble and unknown. We rather despise those who are rich in the world’s goods.”

  “And what is the purpose of such a ridiculous attitude?” I asked.

  There was a hint of reluctance in his voice when he answered me. “You Saxons are primitive and uncivilized. You amuse yourselves with absurd toys; you are proud of your bridges and your automobiles, your telephones, and fireless cookers, and your vile, vicious factories; but we seek true culture and understanding. Your culture decayed before the invention of printing. Your middle ages were glorious. You had then great cathedrals, sacred and profane mysteries, magic and holy symbols. You had one great seer who surpassed the ancient East in wisdom. John Dee knew the secrets and terrors that lurk in lonely souls, and had you followed Dee instead of such children as Newton and Watt you might now be in direct communication with the unknown. The true culture of Greece vanished when the philosophers entered Athens; your civilization took the wrong path and perished with the Italian renaissance. You ask me why we educate the soul. We educate the soul to make it strong. When the soul is strong it is able to conquer—but there are things which I can not name!”

  “Fiddlesticks!” I retorted. “But tell me, do any nameless things haunt these ruins?

  My guide looked at me evasively and avoided a direct reply. “You will need a knife, Heaven-born!” he informed me.

  “And a gun?” I queried.

  “It does no good to shoot when you see the eyes. They are invulnerable. But a knife you might find useful.”

  “A gun should be sufficient,” I insisted. “And I do not think that I shall take a knife!”

  “You must take a knife, too,” said Miss Beardsley. “And if the native girls—.” Her eyes hardened, and I saw that there were possibilities and depths in her which I had not suspected.

  2

  That night I camped in the gray and ominously deserted temple of Ishtar. It wasn’t pleasant. The wind swept in from the desert and whistled eerily about lonely altars and dark amorphous piles. Locusts alighted upon my nose and ears; and they made molasses upon my beard and refused to disembark. Nothing is more repulsive to me than insects, and yet it was no good being angry with them. I sat and dozed, or stared drowzily into the darkness, and thought of the charnel worms which the mad Arab Alhazred bred in the bellies of slain camels. I wondered if I should have the moral courage to face the apparition when it came. It would be necessary to challenge and expose it.

  What impressed me above all things was the survival of the Ishtar legend among the natives. I recalled the horrible rites connected with her worship, and curiously enough, I could not rid my mind of a vague longing to sit enraptured at the spectacle of a living sacrifice to the Assyrian pantheon on the dark, ageless altar before me. Like an idiot, I imagined one. The sacrifice took the most loathsome form. The victim was fastened to the gray stone altar by six hooded priests of Ishtar and hacked to pieces with little knives. And while the horrid priests wrought their unhallowed butchery Ishtar smiled, and standing at the base of the altar comforted the victim by stroking his hair.

  And yet in spite of Ishtar’s cruelty the Babylonians and Assyrians had worshipped her with a curious devotion. Ishtar, I had been told, was so beautiful that no man could look upon her unveiled face and retain the sight of his eyes. Her hair was bronzed, like the sands of the desert near an oasis, and her lips placed the beholder in immediate danger. Men forgot their wives, and sometimes even their merchandise and camels, and fell down and worshipped. All day over the smooth sands processions of men crawled toward her on their hands and knees. Imperial edicts had been levied against her; but men risked death and exile and crawled toward her on their hands and knees. She was more beautiful than the dawn when it comes up all white and purple and fragrant with the odors of paradise. There was something in her movements, in the way in which she held her head, in the curve of her elbow or in the glimmer of light on her tapering ankles that sent a bright, impossible joy into the hearts of her devo
tees; and no man who had once beheld Ishtar could be satisfied for long with an ordinary woman,

  *

  I awoke from a dream of Ishtar and incredible, antique dawns and stared into a darkness that shamed the stars. Only in the desert does the darkness thicken, like whipped cream, and stream past with an audible whisper.

  The darkness was like a great black beetle covering the world with its wings. No shadows moved in it and no one breathed in it, but the dark itself was alive, and it whispered. The night was like an old woman that had given birth to the darkness. Up beyond the darkness sat the mother of the darkness, with her changeling upon her knees. And then in that desolate wilderness of smothering black I saw two luminous green eyes that stared and did not blink.

  I got nervously to my feet and told the eyes that I didn’t care. The sound of my own voice reassured me. “You are not really the eyes of Ishtar!” I said. “This is some trick—some ridiculous, shameful trick! You take advantage of Americans. But I shall inform the consul. We are not to be trifled with. Our consul has red hair, and he beats his wife and he judges men by the color of their skin. He will not even complain to our government. He will take a delightfully unconventional view of the affair. He has a nervous dislike for imposters. He will fasten you to a post, and pull out your teeth, and tickle you upon the soles of your feet until you scream, and gibber, and a nameless horror fastens upon your brain.”

  The feyes did not even blink. The eyes were green coals in a whispering void. They stared lidlessly in the dark and I thought: “These are surely the eyes of Ishtar!”

  An extraordinary numbness passed over me. It seemed to me then that nothing mattered; and my excitement gradually gave way to a stoical indifference. And yet in the back of my mind there lurked godless horror, and my heart beat with tragic unsteadiness. The eyes were a seal of the unspeakable horror of the night. They confirmed my hatred of the dark, made the dark more mephitic, more vividly malevolent. The eyes emitted two greenish rays, which traversed the dark but did not illume it.