The Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK ™, Vol. 3: Emil Petaja

by Emil Petaja

  I sought out Flann O’Shea about his duties, and questioned him about Suva.

  “Sure and Suva’s as good a worker as any man on this old tub. Strange? Well, you might say so. Not bein’ able to talk and all, naturally the men leave him pretty much to himself. I try and sound him out sometimes, but don’t have much luck. He’s shy of us all. Then, too, he’s a Finn.”

  “So what?” I blurted, in great surprise. I’d met many Finnish people, both in Europe and back in Idaho, and had been very favorably impressed with their friendliness and their scrupulous honesty.

  “Don’t you know?”

  “No!”

  Flann smiled wryly. “Understand, I don’t necessarily hold with any of it. Still, I have heard a lot of stories…

  “What on earth are you talking about?” I exclaimed, bursting with curiosity.

  “It’s all the old tales sailors tell about Finns. How they are a race of magicians and warlocks. How they can sing up a storm any time they’ve a mind to. Why, back in the old sailing days you’d be hard put to find a captain who would sign up a Finn—or a crew who would tolerate having him aboard!”

  “Ridiculous!” I cried. “Superstitious nonsense!”

  “Maybe…Flann shrugged and went on with his work.

  Back on deck, I leaned on the rail, and thought all this over in my mind. So that was why the crew disliked Martin Suva!

  Then I remembered what I had read about the Finns, as a “mystery race.” Their language, their legends, their physical characteristics—utterly different from those of their Scandinavian neighbors. Conjecture as to their origin has run rampant, in fact, is still under dispute. Some students claim that there is an ancient thread of connection with the Magyars, but this has scant proof. A subtle and highly intelligent people, as evidenced by their great architecture and important music, their civilization springs from an unknown “Land Of Heroes”—and their legends tell of mighty magicians who possessed vast power, were able to sing things into existence, and control the elements.

  My imagination went a step further. Suppose certain members of the Finnish race still remembered these ancient songs of magic—and with them were able to control the sea, the wind, the storm…

  This reverie was shattered by the sound of weird, tuneless keening. The sky was dark and sulphurous now, and a low, sibilant wind was stirring the jet sea. I whirled sharply to see where the weird singing came from.

  It came from Martin Suva, the Finn. He stood motionless, facing the north, and there was something of a worshipper of elemental things in his attitude, as he sang a soft, wordless chant which blended curiously with the sudden wind. I shivered.

  * * * *

  “PETER! Get up!”

  It was Flann O’Shea. He was quite drenched, and he was shaking me in great excitement. The ship pitched and rolled under his feet, and it was a wonder I hadn’t been flung awake before now. Probably the tablets the Bergen doctor gave me for my nerves were the answer.

  “What is it?” I cried sleepily.

  “Trouble!” he shouted back, for the wind was like a thousand banshees. “Engines have gone bad. We’re off course! Icebergs! Get dressed, and on deck at once!”

  He disappeared like a phantom, and I hurriedly scrambled into my clothes and staggered on deck as best I could, donning a life jacket as I went.

  First Mate Jorgsen was shouting orders through cupped hands to the deck crew, who labored like slickered shadows under the death-black sky.

  The snarling wind knocked the breath out of me, flung me back against the cabin door.

  I wanted to help, but knew I would only be in the way, so I stood by, watching with wide eyes. Within five minutes I was soaked to the bone.

  Icebergs… We were in northern waters, and the storm had catapulted us far off our course. I fully realized the great danger, with submerged icebergs lurking in wait, and the engines out of commission.

  The night crept on, filled with terror. I helped Flann the best I was able, and that kept me from thinking. It finally seemed as though the sun had forgotten to rise or—as if the ravening storm had driven us clear off the face of the earth, into some sinister other dimension. There are times when I think it did!

  Then we sighted the iceberg. It loomed ahead, cragged and white and terrifying. Under the impetus of the merciless wind, the little Bonheur was driven straight toward it. In the engine room men had been working like demons, and, just when all seemed lost, the heave of the engines sent hope flooding through our half-frozen veins.

  With the engines working, the Bonheur was diverted from this icy doom. Then the wind subsided a little, and faint streaks of dawn caressed the eastern horizon.

  Jorgsen gathered the deck crew about him, and thanked them briefly but sincerely for their herculean efforts. I noticed Martin Suva standing by the rail, as he had earlier. He was staring northward and howling in a low, unnatural voice.

  Then they came.

  They came swathed in great purple-black clouds from out the north. Formless at first, like swift-rolling thunderheads, then they couched down in a sinister fashion against the black, choppy swells. The wind sobbed itself down to a whisper.

  “What are they?” one of the men demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Jorgsen cried grimly. “But I know who brought them.”

  He made a move toward Suva, who stood transfixed, staring at the weird phenomenon. Flann stopped him.

  “It’s only clouds, sir. Can’t hurt us.”

  The silence that followed was shattered by the sound of cackling laughter—shrill, sardonic, and wholly alien. It came from the unnatural bank of purple-black clouds.

  One of the men began to pray.

  Suddenly the clouds broke. A roaring rush of ice-cold wind hurtled out at us. There was yelling and screaming among the men, then a scramble for the life boats. There was no semblance of order, now. No attempt to save the ship. Only panic, and sheer unbridled fear. We had all seen—and we knew there was no hope.

  How shall I describe them? Like giant women in the wind, with long streaming ice-blue hair, with terrible, white, beautiful faces. Lightning seemed to flash from their fierce bright eyes, and the gleeful cackle of their laughter was like unholy thunder.

  I had the brief, tacit knowledge that their intention was to destroy us as a child might playfully destroy his dolls. They were elemental beings—creatures who belonged to the storm because they were a part of it, visible to us now under some special circumstance.

  All this was born in my tormented mind as I crawled painfully against the brutal wind, in a futile attempt to reach the remaining life boat. Then suddenly a catastrophic wave leaped up and swept me out into the freezing ocean, and consciousness left me.

  * * * *

  I shivered, coughed, then opened my eyes to find that I lay in the bottom of a life boat. Someone was forcing a fiery liquid between my shivering lips.

  It was Martin Suva.

  I drank, and the fiercely burning liquor helped. I lifted myself up on one elbow and looked about me. I saw Flann smiling at me encouragingly. And Jorgsen. That was all. And I was wearing Suva’s dry coat over my shoulders.

  “Are you all right?” Flann asked. “We thought sure you were a goner when we fished you out.”

  I felt my injured shoulder gingerly. It ached a little, and the bandage was gone. Otherwise I was all in one piece.

  Suva offered me food, and as I ate I noticed that the sun was directly overhead. I’d been out a long time.

  “The others?” I asked.

  “All dead,” Jorgsen said bitterly. “The stürm-frauen got them all!”

  I turned to Flann appealingly.

  “That’s what they’re called in old legends,” he told me. “Storm-wives. Some kind of elemental spirits who can’t make themselves seen or felt unless—”

  “Unless—what?”

  Flann sighed.

  “Unless there’s a jonah on board. The legends say that in the old days certain humans made unholy p
acts with these elementals. In return for certain favors the stürm-frauen are able to show themselves when there is a jonah on board ship; and they will never harm anyone who bears the mark of the jonah…

  The mark of the jonah.

  Preposterous, my mathematical mind insisted. And yet—I had seen.

  * * * *

  It was toward evening, after our frugal meal of hard tack and tinned fish, that Jorgsen went berserk.

  He went after Martin Suva with his strong, hairy hands, and would have choked the life out of him had not Flann and I pulled him off.

  “Let me kill him!” he panted eagerly. “Let me destroy the dirty jonah!”

  Flann gritted. “We can’t be sure.”

  “Don’t you understand?” he blared out. “Don’t you realize why we were saved, when all the others were taken? It’s because of him—the jonah!”

  “Maybe what we saw was an illusion,” I said weakly. “Like St. Elmo’s fire, or something. The storm and all. We were overwrought and—”

  “Why you poor over-educated idiot!” Jorgsen raged. “You think because you’ve never read of such things in books they don’t exist. Just wait and see, that’s all. Wait and see!”

  That night Carl Jorgsen vanished.

  * * * *

  I groaned in the grip of nightmare, when Flann’s hand on my shoulder wakened me. It was hardly light enough to see yet. Martin Suva lay in exhausted slumber—or so it seemed—at the other end of the boat.

  “Jorgsen’s gone,” Flann said, in a dry hollow whisper.

  “Gone?” I blinked.

  “See for yourself.”

  I stared in bewildered amazement. It was as the boy said.

  “But how?” I protested. “I heard nothing!”

  “Nor I. But they came in the night and took him…

  There was no other explanation, and later, after a frugal breakfast and a few sips of precious water, we decided to question Martin Suva. Surely if what Jorgsen had believed was true, the Finn would betray himself.

  I wrote our questions, then handed him the paper and pencil, to scribble his answers. From the books Flann had seen in Suva’s gear, he was sure Suva understood English.

  “Do you believe the stürm-frauen legend?” I wrote.

  Laboriously he wrote, Yes.

  “Have you seen them before?”

  Yes.

  “Where do they come from?”

  From somewhere else.

  “Do they hate men?”

  No. They only love to destroy.

  I glanced over at Flann. I had been beating around the bush, and he knew it. He nodded grimly, and I wrote, “Did you call the stürm-frauen?”

  No.

  “Did you kill Jorgsen?”

  No.

  We gave up. It was natural that he would lie, if he had stealthily slain Jorgsen as he slept—it was more than possible—but his answer was given so unhesitantly that I was almost inclined to believe him. Perhaps the stürm-frauen did exist, were able to manifest themselves during peculiar storms, did murder the ship’s crew in the midst of their lustful sadistic revels. As for the rest of it—we had nothing to convince us that Suva was responsible, aside from the fact that he was a deaf-mute, was Finnish, and made weird noises when he thought no one was about…

  We determined to take turns sleeping, and the watcher was to waken the others at the slightest hint of trouble. Flann’s turn was first, and when he wakened me, I pulled Suva’s coat about me against the rising wind, and settled down to scan the dark sea for any signs of lurking terror.

  The sky, although clearer than on previous nights, was still draped with great scudding clouds, through which I could occasionally glimpse small patches of white stars. The sea was ink-black.

  My mind wandered over the hopelessness of our plight. Lost at sea, thousands of miles from any trafficked sea-lane; what difference would it make who got us—the stürm-frauen, or the ocean?

  The wind sang a sibilant song. Under its influence I became drowsier and drowsier. Finally I must have dropped off.

  I was startled by Flann’s shrill, boyish scream.

  I leaped to my feet, then stood frozen. Flann was writhing helplessly in the embrace of something I couldn’t quite see. Then, in a naked flash of lightning, Flann was torn from the boat into the air, and I saw her.

  Her maenadic hair whipping behind her in the singing wind, her eyes glowing down with fierce satisfaction at the boy in her embrace…

  Flann screamed in terror as his fists beat against her voluptuous breasts. She crushed him in her arms with savage delight.

  His last shrill plea, “Peter! Help!” shocked me out of my horror-hypnosis. I sprang forward to slash out at the stormy thing. But she evaded my feeble attempts easily, then, laughing in a manner that turned my spine to ice, she drifted off into the north sky, Flann still writhing impotently in her sadistic embrace.

  I fell sobbing to the bottom of the boat. Now I knew. Now all doubt was gone. The presence of Suva, the jonah, had enabled the stürm-frauen to appear and to destroy, and their storm-lust would not be sated until all but the jonah were dead. Tomorrow they would come for me…

  The night was alive with fear. Every sound the wind made played on my sick nerves as a fiddle bow plays on a taut E-string. The slapping of the black waves against the boat made me shudder. All of the elements had taught me to fear them—knowing as I did now that strange and terrible entities possessed and controlled them…

  When the sickly light of the mock-sun made its appearance I managed to fall into fitful slumber. I lay in a semi-stupor during the day, forgetting to eat or drink—remembering only my fear. It seemed the briefest of time-divisions before daylight faded and beclouded dusk crept stealthilv over the heavens.

  In the livid burst of terror that swept over me when I realized it was almost time, I decided that I would kill Martin Suva. Of course! Why hadn’t I thought of it before? With him gone, the stürm-frauen would have no earthly contact—they would be unable to appear.

  Suva was asleep, exhausted. I chuckled. How simple! He was smaller than me. I could manage it easily. I seized a heavy iron oar-lock, and crept toward him. Careful, no noise. I would bash his brains out before he knew what was happening, then toss him to the fishes. I tittered feebly with joy. It was escape! Escape!

  I hung over him wild-eyed. He looked haggard and worn, near death already. His clothes, like mine, were in tatters. There were dark patches around his eyes. His cheeks were gaunt. As he slept he uttered frightened little moans.

  A last-moment shred of doubt assailed me. Was I sure? Did I have the right—? Just because Martin Suva was a deaf-mute, because he was Finnish, because he was secretive and strange, did that mean he…?

  The thought of Flann, of Jorgsen, and of all the others caused my misgivings to vanish in a wild burst of anger. Of course it was he! Who else?

  His eyes opened. They widened when he saw me there, the oar-lock poised. He gave a bleat of terror. I brought the weapon down, but he avoided it. He grabbed my arm, and then we were struggling, clawing like madmen to tear each other’s throats. I was bigger, and had a kind of insanely desperate strength. I knocked him backwards over a seat, while my fingers circled his throat, tightened.

  With a wild cry he flailed about with his arms, managing to grasp my—his—coat and tear it off my shoulder. Then his eyes bulged in their sockets, and he unleashed a harsh scream that shall haunt me to my dying day.

  I forgot then that I meant to kill him. My fingers slipped nervelessly away.

  It was a birthmark on my right shoulder, an odd bluish mark that resembled a woman’s head, a woman’s head as seen through swirls of her own long hair. I’d always been ashamed of that mark, even as a boy, keeping it always covered. And now, when Martin Suva screamed, I knew why…

  I fell back in a daze, only dimly conscious of Suva’s forlorn cry as he leaped into the sea and vanished.

  I came out of my stupor to find myself alone. Alone with the mocking wind
and the dreadful secrets the sea never tells. I was alone with the mind-blasting memory of the stürm-frauen, and of how they had killed my companions, one by one, leaving only the man whose distant ancestor had conceived an unholy bargain with them and they had presented him and his progeny with a token of immunity from their ravenings. The mark of the jonah. And that this man—who had unwittingly unleashed them to prey upon his companions as their prototype the storm preys upon all mankind was—myself.

  THE MUSIC-BOX FROM HELL

  Rolph Mace hunched under the awning of the antique shop, glowering at the March drizzle as he waited for his bus. If it hadn’t started to rain he could have walked, and saved seven pennies. Or if his Aunt Audrey would hurry up and die he wouldn’t have to make trips downtown for medicine.

  After she died he could shut up both the east and west wings of the old Mace Mansion, and live in two little rooms in back. Wouldn’t cost one-quarter the money it cost now, with the east wing open, and her burning gas all the time. And a part-time maid.

  Rolph’s pinched-up face grimaced at the thought of all that money going to waste, when it rightfully belonged to him—as her only heir.

  “Could I sell you anything?” a voice at his elbow asked suddenly.

  Rolph turned to see a cherub-faced little man wearing a frock coat and white side-whiskers smiling at him jovially. He was, apparently, the owner of the antique shop.

  Rolph gave a quick glance at the motley assortment of items in the pleasantly-littered window, and shuddered with actual horror at the thought of parting with hard cash for those things.

  His Aunt Audrey loved antiques. She loved music, too, and was forever ordering chamber music records on the sly. With her own money, of course—but Rolph had for more than ten years considered it his and resented every mouthful she ate.

  He turned his lean, stooped shoulders away from this shop-owner in high distaste, not deigning to even answer him.

  “I have just about anything you might want, inside,” the odd little man went on affably. “Anything.”

  “I don’t want anything,” snapped Rolph.