The Horror Megapack

by H. P. Lovecraft

  “See how vigorous I yet remain, and how mighty is my grasp,” he added, shaking my hand in the English fashion with a strength that buried my rings in the flesh of my fingers.

  He squeezed me so hard that I awoke, and found my friend Alfred shaking me by the arm to make me get up.

  “Oh, you everlasting sleeper! Must I have you carried out into the middle of the street, and fireworks exploded in your ears? It is afternoon. Don’t you recollect your promise to take me with you to see M. Aguado’s Spanish pictures?”

  “God! I forgot all, all about it,” I answered, dressing myself hurriedly. “We will go there at once. I have the permit lying there on my desk.”

  I started to find it, but fancy my astonishment when I beheld, instead of the mummy’s foot I had purchased the evening before, the little green paste idol left in its place by the Princess Hermonthis!

  PIT OF MADNESS, by E. Hoffmann Price

  Bayonne seemed incredibly ancient and lovely to Denis Crane as he headed from the wine shop to the Biarritz Highway and across the sombre parkway toward the Gate of Spain. The cathedral spires were silver lance-heads reaching into the moonglow, and the city was a pearl gray enchant­ment afloat on a sea of writhing river mists: yet that blood soaked soil whis­pered to Denis Crane as he walked.

  This was unholy ground, honeycombed with crypts in which Roman legionnaires had worshiped Mithra, and watched frenzied devotees slash and mutilate and emasculate themselves in honor of bloodthirsty Cybele. This cor­ner of France was the home of witch and wizard and warlock.

  A shiver rippled down Crane’s lean, broad-shouldered body as he glanced to his left and saw the ominous cluster of ancient trees that over­shadowed the low gray cupola of the spring where Satan and Saint Leon once had met—

  Another medieval legend. Well, and here is the causeway, and just ahead, rue d’Espagne, with the yellow glow from the windows of Basque wine shops breaking its narrow gloom.

  But the scream that came from his left told him how far from warm hu­manity he was, however near the lights might be. It was the sobbing, desperate outcry of some woman whose last gasp could not quite voice her terror.

  Crane’s suntan became a sickly yel­low in that spectral, mist-filtered moon­light. He wheeled, stared into the swirl­ing grayness of the dry moat that girdled the thirty-foot city wall. His face lengthened, tightened into grim angles, and his eyes narrowed as he lis­tened. Silence—sinister…poison­ous.…Then that dreadful wail again. It was closer now, and though it was inarticulate he knew that the woman was crying for help and despaired of getting it.

  An everlasting instant, and she burst from the mist and into the foreground at the foot of the causeway that blocked the moat. Her abrupt appearance shocked Crane, though he knew that it was but the illusion of fog and moon­light.

  Her hair was a streaming blackness, and her body a pearl-white glow. Her feet and legs were as bare as her torso. All she wore was a flimsy shawl caught at the shoulder, draping slantwise to veil one breast, and flaring out, to shroud the opposite hip. Crane distinguished no feature but her mouth. It was distorted in a cry she could not utter.

  He plunged down the steep slope of the causeway and into the moat. Her legs gave way, pitching her headlong to the sand. She lay there, arms sprawled out. As he reached her side, she shud­dered and slumped flat, no longer mak­ing instinctive efforts to protect herself.

  Crane rolled her over into the crook of his arm. He saw then what mist and motion had masked: her throat was savagely torn, her breast and stomach clawed and lacerated. Her face was a gory crisscross of bruises and slashes. The filmy fragility of the shoulder-to-hip shawl had not hampered her assail­ant enough for him to tear it from her body.

  Neither pulse nor breath was percep­tible. Though her sweetly curved body was blood-splashed, her wounds could not have killed her; but terror and des­pair could have.

  Her face must have been as lovely as her body; but horror blinded him to the sleekness of her hips and the shapeliness of her legs and firm young breasts. His eyes narrowed as he recovered sufficient­ly from the shock to interpret certain significant signs.

  Her hands had the incredible softness of one utterly a stranger to the lightest work; but what she still clenched in her fingers was a startling revelation.

  It was similar in shape to a military campaign badge; purple, with a rosette of the same color. A decoration awarded to an elect few.

  But most revealing of all was the silken shawl. It placed her beyond any question. There was only one house in Bayonne where the girls paraded in such costume; and that place was on the street that ran along the city wall.

  Then he noted that she was breathing; and a slash on her inside arm was bleed­ing. It might not be dangerous, but it was near an artery. He drew a clean handkerchief from his breast pocket, and devised a tourniquet.

  The town was asleep, and he’d have to carry her to the house on the wall; but first give that tourniquet a twist. He fumbled for a pencil—

  But Crane’s first aid was not com­pleted.

  The sand of the moat bottom gave no betraying crunch; the mist thinned moonlight cast no warning shadow; and Crane’s intuition was an instant too late. He dropped the battered girl, but before he caught more than a fleeting glimpse of the dark figure which loomed monstrously above him in the grayness, a flying tackle carried him crashing to the ground.

  The impact knocked him breathless. Iron hands clutched his throat; but Crane’s fist hammered home. Splintered teeth lacerated his knuckles, and blood gushed, drenching his face. His oppo­nent, snarling scarcely articulate curses, jerked back. Crane’s boot lashed out.

  But the moonlight was blocked by another figure with monstrous, out­spread wings. Bat wings, it seemed. It dropped, boring headlong, toppling Crane backward. A spicy, pungent odor, an odd blend of incense and cosmetics stung his nostrils. Then, still grappling with the thing which had swooped out of the upper mist, he crashed against the gray masonry of the bastioned wall. Crane’s hard head had not a chance against a fortress built to defy a bat­tering ram, but his shoulders absorbed enough of the terrific impact to save his skull Some lingering vestige of wits told him that once out of action, he no longer interested the enemy.

  Minutes elapsed before he could fight off the numbness and inertia that clogged his will. But he finally rolled over and clambered to his knees.

  He was alone in that gray, ghoulish moonglow. The girl was gone. He saw the prints of his own feet and those of the mysterious assailants that had swooped down on him. Blood flecked the sand, and one untrampled spot still held the imprint of that savagely slashed girl’s breasts. It had not been illusion; but for a moment Crane’s blood became ice.

  The laundry marks and monogram on the handkerchief he had bound to the girl’s arm would damn him beyond re­demption when her body was found. And aside from that, he could not hope to obliterate the traces of the struggle in the moat.

  The French police, inhumanly ef­ficient, would inevitably connect him with the outrage. When he returned to his quarters, the concierge would note the time of his arrival. The proprietor of the wine shop on the Biarritz Road would remember when he had left, and the direction he had taken. And every foreigner is conspicuous in sleepy Bayonne.

  Damn those experts with their om­niscient microscopes! Their chemical tests which would detect the faintest trace of blood on his clothing.

  And someone, watching from some darkened window of a house on the wall, might observe him as he left the moat, might already have heard and noted the encounter.

  Only one move for Crane: find that girl, dead or alive. Hit first before the merciless Sûreté Générate connected him with the work of night-roving ghouls. And find the man whose decoration she had clutched.

  As he hastened down the moat, he fol­lowed the girl’s small, shapely footprints along the sand. Wrath burned him as his first fear left. Though that gaudy shawl branded her, she was still a wom­an, and the victim of something mon­strou
s and deadly; something too eager for her torn flesh to bother with Crane beyond hammering him out of action.

  Or had the two spectral assailants al­ready arranged to frame him?

  Half way to the sombre Lachepaillet Gate he noted the spot where her bare feet first marked the moat-bottom sand. He entered the walled city and hastened to his room at the Panier-Fleuri. The concièrge regarded him with bleary eyes that suddenly sharpened. But she said nothing.

  Once in his room, he cleaned up, then stretched long legs toward rue Lachepaillet. He should report to the police; but who would believe such a story, told by an insane American, try­ing to implicate one who wore that cov­eted purple decoration the size of an A.E.F. campaign badge?

  Crane jabbed a pushbutton. A trim, sharp-eyed girl in black admitted him and led the way to a spacious hall whose walls and ceiling were a solid expanse of mirror.

  A bell tinkled, and a half a dozen girls lounging on upholstered benches lined up on parade as several others emerged from a rear apartment to join them.

  They wore satin slippers and knee length silk hosiery. Their professional smiles, and the flimsy chiffon shawls draped from right breast to left hip completed their costume. Not a bad ar­ray; though some had over-plump legs, and breasts that would have been the better for a brassiere. A few were love­ly in face and body, but there was some­thing infinitely repulsive about that gro­tesque multiplication of bare flesh in those mirrored panels whose angles probed the concealment of chiffon shawls and made the glaring room a patchwork of feminine curves.

  Crane caught a freshly mirrored whiteness and turned toward the door. The shock for an instant numbed him. A full moment elapsed before he real­ized that he was not looking at the girl who had vanished from the moat.

  She had the same gracious inward dip at the waist, the same heart-warming flare of the hips, and one lovely breast peeped alluringly through the heavy strands of hair that trailed down over her left shoulder. Her blue eyes were almost black. Their troubled darkness matched the sombre droop of her lips.

  Tears had smudged the mascara of her lashes and a trace of redness lin­gered. Crane perceived the tensity of her body and saw her fingers twisting the trailing fringe of her shawl.

  Why had she been reserved from the lineup? Why that startling resemblance to that savagely mutilated girl in the moat? Why that black fear in her eyes?

  The girl’s fingers sank insistently into his wrist, and he felt the firm pressure of her hip and shoulder against him as she paused in the doorway.

  More than her resemblance to the girl in the moat told Crane that this was the one who could give him the most help—or damn him soonest. He followed his hunch.

  “Allons!” he whispered. “Let’s go.”

  He tossed the three hundred pound keeper of the house a purple Banque de France note, and followed the girl in the scarlet shawl up a flight of stairs and into a sombrely furnished room.

  Her name was Madeline, but all the coquetry of the game was missing, though she contrived a friendly smile as her fingers plucked the shoulder knot of her shawl.

  Crane checked her.

  “What’s wrong?” he demanded.

  “Diane—my sister,” she answered. “I’m terribly worried. She hasn’t come back. That awful Arab—or Turk—”

  Crane frowned. That was an odd touch. Who ever heard of an Algerian wearing that decoration?

  As she spoke, she abstractedly kicked off her slippers and leaned back among the cushions. She regarded Crane curi­ously, seeing that his face was gray and grim.

  “What’s the matter…don’t you like me?”

  “That will keep!” His voice was harsh and low. “Tell me about that Arab. What was wrong with him?”

  “Some of the things he did, the first night he was here. Before he took Diane—wherever he’s taken her. It was in the room next door, No, he didn’t hurt her at all—I mean the other girl, not Diane. But he frightened her ter­ribly. I saw him leave. His pupils were like black saucers. Mon Dieu! Such eyes. Like Satan eating opium.”

  She was wrong. Opium contracted the pupils, but her very intensity gave Crane the picture.

  “Are you sure he didn’t wear the Or­der of Saint Léon?”

  “Mumm…no, of course not! But he dropped something in her room, and she showed it to me, and left it here.” Madeline slid to her feet and stepped to the dresser. She returned with a small silver watch charm. It was a tiny peacock with ruby eyes; an exquisitely tooled bit of metal.

  “A soldier who’d served in Syria once told me,” explained Madeline, “that that is a symbol of the devil-worshipers. That’s what’s been worrying me. If I’d known in time, I’d never have let her go. But why should you care?”

  “I’m a damn’ fool who can’t mind his business,” Crane smiled grimly. “I’ve got to find your sister.” She sceptically eyed him.

  “Then you don’t want me? But you paid—”

  Crane shrugged. “If you knew, you’d understand.”

  “Oh…” Very slowly, like a dying echo. She caught him by the shoulders, stared him full in the face; and bit by bit she read that the sombre riddle in his gray eyes concerned her missing sister.

  “I didn’t realize you knew Diane…” Her arm slipped about his neck and she drew closer as she continued, “I’ll go with you. I’ll help.”

  She had guts. Crane’s smile lost his bleakness. For a long moment their glances blended. She sighed, and her breasts crept through their screen of dark curls. Her smile was a revelation, and suddenly Crane’s blood quickened from the soft caress of her arm and the warmth of her body.

  “Tenez!” protested Crane. “Stop it, you damn’ little fool. I’ve got some busi­ness to attend to—”

  “You wouldn’t buy me,” she whis­pered. “Somehow, that’s rather wonderful…but you like me just a little, don’t you? Wouldn’t that make it different?”

  Somehow, it did; and Crane’s sensible effort to break away failed. She was lonely and worried. He couldn’t repulse her friendliness.

  “Cut it out!” he growled, though his protest was weakening. He laughed harshly, thinking of the one about the mail-carrier who hiked on Sundays; but Madeline seemed no longer one of those who lined up in that mirrored hell glare. She had become a bright flame in the foulness that crept through the mists of that fiend-haunted gray city.

  Those were not bought lips that clung thirstily to Crane’s mouth, and the shud­der that rippled down her throbbing body was instinctive…and as her arms closed about him, Crane defied the peril that was gathering outside. He could not repulse the first glow of friendliness in that drab lupanar…

  Madeline’s eyes were tear-sparkling when she slipped from Crane’s arms and said, “I know now that she is dead.”

  “The devil you do!”he snapped, feel­ing decidedly stupid about the interlude that might in the end cost him all but his head—literally, as they use the guillo­tine in France.

  “Yes. Or you’d not have lingered, with that wrath in your eyes. So I know you can’t find her alive.”

  No use explaining his true motives. He took a key from his pocket.

  “Go to the Panier-Fleuri. Stay under cover. What you told me about an Arab has entirely upset my assumption. I thought you could tell me about someone wearing the Order of Saint Léon. But no matter—I’ve got a fresh hunch. Now run along.”

  They waited for the cessation of laugh­ter and footsteps in the hall. A latch click. Silence, except metallic voices from the reception room on the ground floor.

  Crane watched Madeline slip toward the further stairway. A moment later, looking from the window that overlooked the narrow black alley that skirted the rear of the house, he saw the white blur of her face, and caught the gesture of her hand.

  She was on her way. He slammed the door and strode down the main stairway. He forced a laugh at the door­keeper’s vulgar farewell; but as he crossed the threshold, he began to see that his investigation, despite the delay, had gained him an ally
if the police should catch up with him.

  But that silver peacock was an omi­nous hint. Devil worship…some damnable Asiatic cult. He’d heard it ex­isted in the mountains of Kurdi­stan.

  Yet for all that thickening menace, the riddle in some respects was less baf­fling in the light of reflection.

  Diane had been headed off by the monsters that had swooped down on Crane from the lip of the moat. They must have held to a straight line across the parkway. That gave him a start toward tracing the point from which she had made her futile break.

  The mist was thinning, yet enough re­mained to envelop Crane in a spectral veil that protected and at the same time hampered him. He was unarmed; but he paused long enough to remove his socks, stuff one inside the other, and then slip in a rock the size of his fist. Very pleasant, if he got the edge on the two who had laid him out.

  For half an hour he circled, trying to pick a course that the two monsters would have used to head off the man­gled fugitive.

  “Her instinct would drive her to the closest route to safety,” he reasoned. “To her sister. Then if the Gate of Spain was the closest, her direction must have been more to my left. Otherwise she’d have gone through the Lachepaillet Gate.”

  Half an hour search vindicated the hunch. A shred of scarlet chiffon. A splash of blood.

  He looped left. He found footprints heading toward the Gate of Spain—her pursuers, eager to cut off a flight that would betray their rendezvous.

  Ahead of him a masonry lunette loomed low in the mist. One of the outer defenses erected by Vauban—or perhaps something much more ancient, and conceived by no honest engineer.

  Crane now crept through the mists until a whiff of stale tobacco warned him of a watcher’s presence.

  He rose and boldly stalked toward the lunette. A jet of light flared in his face, blinding him. He was challenged in French.

  “I’ve got to see the émir at once!” Crane bluffed, using a plausible Arabic title that would flatter anyone of lower rank.