Fear and Trembling

by Robert Bloch

  Mole-like, clambering through the shaft, we descended. The utter immensity of the place precluded speech, and we went silently onward. It was quite hot, but jets of still warmer air were wafted from gulfs ahead.

  The way widened. We were approaching the caverns now. This, indeed, was no mine-shaft. And the pit we had just entered was unmistakable.

  It was a tomb. Basalt walls were carefully chiseled in geometric lines. The floor was set in stone, and here the dust was not so thick. This touch of artificial design was peculiarly disturbing after the utter crudity of the passageway. But what occupied the room was more disturbing still.

  Slabs of stone lined the walls—slabs of stone, and on them, mummy-cases; dust-covered, moldering, but unmistakable.

  It was true! There was no mistaking the familiar forms. And now, through the discolorations, I saw designs on the walls. Egyptian designs, four thousand miles away from Egypt and three thousand years away from the present!

  “The early priests,” Malcolm said, softly. “They were buried here, just as though they were at home.”

  I would have stopped and attempted to peer into some of the sarcophagi, but Malcolm intervened.

  “This is nothing,” he whispered. “There are—ah—real sights ahead.”

  We left the hall. I was beginning to feel the fear that crept upon me. Malcolm was right, and what did he mean now by showing me “real” sights?

  Gnawing curiosity overcame my dread, as I followed him through the ossuarium and into a second chamber. More slabs, more mummy-cases. There must have been hundreds of people dwelling here at one time! There were side-corridors now, all artificially hewn in the rock. These perhaps had led to the dwelling-places of the inhabitants.

  A question flashed through my thoughts. “Malcolm,” I said, “what did these people feed on here? There’s no place for cultivation of foodstuffs.”

  He faced me with that damned smile of his again. “Bubastis was, I told you, a ghoul-goddess. The priests and worshippers emulated her.”

  A wave of repulsion swept over me. I wanted very much to turn back, but Malcolm strode resolutely ahead, and he beckoned imperiously, leading on to further horrors. We entered pits.

  Our lights, while strong enough to penetrate ordinary darkness, proved eerily dim amidst these black and eldritch walls through which we now wandered. Bat-like shadows basked and hovered just outside the luminance of our torches, and occasionally dispersed to hint at what lay behind. At first I was irritated by the lack of illumination, but I was soon to give thanks that it was no brighter. As it was, I saw more than enough; for in this third room, Malcolm allowed me to examine some of the mummies.

  What unnatural life had festered and flourished here in the black bosom of earth? That first coffin held its own answer. I clawed the lid from the case and peered at what lay within. The thing was perfectly embalmed, and as I unwrapped it with trembling haste, the face came into view. It crumbled, thank heaven, almost immediately, but not until I saw the malformed creature within.

  Two dead eyes stared from the rigid face of a dark-skinned priest. Two dead eyes, set in a forehead withered with decay—a forehead from which protruded the hideous, misshapen head of a tiny serpent!

  “Skin-grafting,” I gasped, weakly.

  “No. Look closer.” Malcolm’s voice was grave, but I knew he smiled.

  I looked again, as the air putrefied that withered countenance before my eyes.

  I reeled. It was unmistakable, though sanity clutched vainly for another explanation. There was nothing to do but face the monstrous truth—that serpent’s head actually grew on the mummy’s brow. And since it, too, was mummified—but I dared not finish the thought. Malcolm again supplied the ghastly answer.

  “It was alive, when he was.”

  Malcolm was right. The priests had mated animals with humans. We opened other cases; that is Malcolm did, while I stood fixed and fascinated beside him. There was a Pan-thing, with a horned forehead and a face that even through centuries still held a goatish leer. In one spot we discovered a fiendish trinity—three dwarfed and stunted faces on a single head and neck. The most frightful ravings of archaic mythology were all duplicated here—gargoyle, chimera, centaur, harpy—parodied in the Gorgonic features of leering, long-dead priests.

  Then there was the section farther on with the bodies. Lycanthropic sights were revealed as Malcolm hacked away the case-coverings. The stench of natron hung like a miasma above the violated sarcophagi of creatures with human heads and the mummified bodies of apes. There was a hoofed horror with vestigial remnants of a tail, and a Ganesha-like thing with the enormous trunk of an elephant. Some of those we saw were evidently failures: noseless, eyeless, faceless freaks with extra arms; and finally an awful corpse without limbs, whose swollen neck grew into a gaping, headless maw. All mercifully dissolved into dust after a moment.

  Malcolm and I stumbled down a sable spiral of rock-hewn stairs. The memory of those things in the crypts above buzzed in my brain; else I would not have ventured on into the seething, slithering darkness in which our very shadows drowned.

  The winding walls of the shaft we descended were gelid black in the glare of our lights, but they were not bare. There were pictures—more Egyptian art, but not conventional ideographic work like that in the catacombs above. These sketches were disturbingly different, with great, sprawling figures, like those traced by an idiot in sand. Once again we viewed the monsters I was trying to forget; the snake-men, the satyr-creatures, the deformed cacodemons we found in the upper tombs. But now we saw them pictured in life, and it was worse than any imagining. These caricatures of humanity were shown while engaging in certain acts, and the deeds they performed were evil. There were scenes which told an ancient story all too well—glimpses of the living monsters sacrificing to their gods, and gratifying their lusts. Among these were pictures of normal men; high priests, I suppose, and they were mingled with the beast-herd in lechery so perverted that it sickened me.

  I turned the light of my torch away from the walls and went blindly forward down the remaining stairs.

  The caverns below were immense; perhaps they were the product of a great air-bubble in the earth’s inner crust. The floor of this pit stretched off into interminable burrows beyond, each gaping its black and hungry mouth. And before each mouth there was a little pile of bones. Bones, osseous dust; a shambles of skulls. Even from a distance I could see the marks of gnawing teeth in the splintered death’s-heads.

  There had been pictures on the wall—pictures of beast-men feeding on human flesh, on one another. Perhaps those buried in the tombs above were the human experiments; then these bones represented the other, nearly animal, creatures. Just how near the old priests had approached to their idea of a godhead I dared not surmise. Many of the bones before me hinted of ghastly spawnings between beast and man.

  It was then that I saw the altar. A bare black stone reared up in the center of the cavern floor; a stark, shining surface that sprang from the rock beneath. But the place where it met the floor was entirely buried beneath bones.

  These were no disarticulated skeletons; these osseous fragments before the sinister altar! These were fresh bones! And among the shredded, fleshy remnants that clung to them were tattered bits of cloth and leather—cloth and leather!

  What did it mean? The priests of Bast died, and their creatures devoured one another after them. But what did they sacrifice to on the black altar; what lurked in the ebon burrows beyond, that still crept forward to feast? And who fed it?

  “There’s no dust on this floor,” I found myself whispering. “No dust.”

  He glared into my eyes, as he gripped my wrists. “There’s no dust where things still move around.

  “Yes, tremble. It’s well you do. You’re not the first to follow me down these stairs in the past six months; those bones tell their own story. I’ve shown some of the local people this spot.

  “You see, the god is hungry. The god needs food. At first I was afraid
, but now I know that if I please the god with sacrifices it will not harm me. Perhaps in time it will teach me the secrets of the dead old priests, and then I shall know many things. But the god needs blood.”

  Before I was able to struggle or resist he had me up against the black altar, and we fought knee-deep in gleaming bones.

  I screamed until his hands grasped my throat and choked me. But even as I fought him, my brain battled against its own fears.

  A phrase from some book flashed through my head. “Ghoul—Chewer of Corpses.”

  Malcolm lifted me on the altar, then turned his head and gazed across the charnel chamber to the burrows. He called, shouted, in unintelligible gibberish that resembled the tongue of ancient Egypt.

  Then came the rustling from the black openings beyond. Something was waddling into view out of the pits; something emerged.

  Chewer of Corpses!

  With the strength of the doomed I leapt from the altar, and my fist crashed into Malcolm’s face. He topped across the black slab as I turned and ran across the cavern to the stairs. But by the time I reached it the thing had completely emerged; emerged, and stalked across the floor to the altar-stone where Malcolm lay. And it lifted him, though he moaned when he felt his body being dangled in those flabby paws. He hung like a broken doll, while the thing bent its rugose head and opened its mouth.

  Chewer of Corpses!

  That is what I sobbed as I turned and fought my way up those dark, basaltic stairs. And when the sudden shock of sunlight burst upon my face at the entrance to the ledge, I weakly murmured the words as I sank into unconsciousness.

  I was strangely calm when I recovered. I managed the climb to the top of the cliff, and even made the mile journey across the moor. Weak as I was, I packed and caught a train at the village station.

  Only that night did I sink into the fevered dreams that have made life an unbearable torment ever since. I was a sick man on the boat, and when I reached New York I shut up my apartment for ever.

  I can only surmise as to the termination of the affair. Whether Malcolm’s disappearance is ascribed to me I do not know; whether the disputed fate of the rustics he lured to death has been forgotten, I cannot say. Nor does it really matter.

  What does matter is the necessity for immediate investigation of the horror below those moors; that blasphemy that broods beneath.

  Now I know what those unholy wizards meant to do; why they mated beasts and men. I know what they wished to create to rule over them, and what they did create at the last—the thing that still lives in the farther pit.

  It came rustling out of the darkness in the pit; the great blind thing that seized Malcolm as he lay on its altar. It grasped him in cruel claws, and gnawed or nuzzled at his throat. It was the Chewer of Corpses.

  There on the altar it crouched, ten feet tall—the mockingly human figure, like that of the lioness-creatures pictured on the walls. The giant, human figure, but oh! that head! . . .

  The thing that killed him was the cat-goddess of Bubastis!

  Groovyland

  I

  I started my writing assignment at the studio on January 2nd. Ten minutes after I checked into my office I got a call from my producer, Effingwell Wright.

  Working for him was about as safe as practicing dentistry on an alligator, but I needed the bread. Besides, he did my kind of picture—he’d just finished a spooktacular, The Turn of the Screw, and was now considering a sequel, The Return of the Screw. Which was why I’d been hired.

  At least that’s what I thought until I arrived at Wright’s office.

  “We’re going to do Hamlet,” he announced.

  “Hamlet?”

  Wright nodded through a wreath of cigar-smoke. “That’s it, baby. Now we only got one problem. How do we lick the story?”

  I stared at him. “I’m afraid I’ve never had any experience with Shakespeare.”

  “Don’t worry, you won’t be working with him.” Wright’s cigar waved dismissal of the problem. “But there’s a ghost in this property, isn’t there? And that’s where you come in.”

  That, actually, is where Wright’s secretary came in and handed him a letter.

  “Here’s the censorship report. It just arrived.”

  “Censorship?” Wright scowled through the smoke.

  “From the Anti-Amusement League. They want some changes in the story-treatment.”

  Wright scanned the letter, shaking his head and muttering as he read.

  “Relationship between Hamlet and his mother is unacceptable to this office. Suggest you make him an orphan.” Wright frowned, then went on. “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern objectionable for ethnic reasons—no Jewish names. Recommend you make them blacks.”

  Wright sighed and continued. “Be sure to eliminate violence—no duels, no killings at the end.” He began to frown again. “Imperative that you cut the phrase To be or not to be. It might encourage suicide.” Wright’s frown darkened. “Remove business with skull in graveyard scene. Better still, drop graveyard scene entirely. Too gruesome for kiddies in audience. Finally, we cannot accept the ghost. There must be no cheap, morbid nonsense about spirits of the dead thirsting for revenge. Sincerely—”

  Wright shrugged at me. “Sorry, baby. You can’t fight progress.” He rose and moved with me to the door. “I’d like to use you on this project, but the Anti-Amusement League carries a lot of clout in the industry. I suggest you go back to your office and clean out your drawers.”

  I got the message. I was being tossed out on my assignment.

  Meanwhile, back at the Unemployment Office—

  II

  The first thing I did at the Unemployment Office was read the bulletin board to see if there were any openings. It had only one listing today, and I glanced at it.

  “Nit-pickers wanted. Must be experienced quibblers.”

  I shook my head. No government job for me. Better off to apply for compensation. So I bought a paper and got in line to wait for my interview.

  From the look of the headlines, the year was starting off with a bang. Wars were escalating abroad, prices were escalating at home and taxes were just plain rising. Eighteen people had been killed in a riot for peace, and there was talk that no such groups would be allowed to demonstrate in the future without a riot-permit. A small box contained a bulletin on 981 traffic fatalities and a large front-page story dealt with the arrest of a local museum guard who had been accused of mummy-molesting.

  I sought solace in the sports section, reading the scores of the New Year’s football games—the Rose Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Toilet Bowl—

  “Pardon me,” the soft voice murmured.

  Glancing up, I saw this unnatural blonde, the lass with the psychedelicate air.

  “Are you three o’clock?” she asked. It took me a moment to interpret her question; she wanted to know the time of my interview.

  “That’s right,” I nodded.

  “Mind if I slip in ahead of you? I’m two-forty-five.”

  Actually, I’d have guessed her to be 36-24-36, so I gallantly allowed her to precede me and returned to my reading. When I looked up again, she was gone, and I stepped before the window to do the interview bit.

  It wasn’t until I went outside that I saw her again.

  She was standing on the curb beside the car parked just ahead of mine—a beat-up old heap with a bumper-sticker reading I Want to Be Conspicuous. The car was decorated with the usual floral designs, but from the look on the girl’s face I gathered that her Flower Power had wilted.

  “Trouble?” I inquired.

  She glanced up. “Oh, it’s you!”

  There was no point in denying it, so I nodded. “What’s the matter—car won’t start?”

  It was her turn to nod.

  I opened the door and got behind the wheel. “Here, let me give you a hand.” I gave her more than a hand; I gave her a foot, on the gas-pedal. The motor coughed, spluttered, then gave an unmistakable death-rattle.

&
nbsp; “Don’t bother,” she told me. “It’s totalled.” And she started to walk away.

  “Hey, aren’t you going to call the Auto Club?”

  “Not unless they’ll give me a lift home.”

  I climbed out hastily. “Where’s that?”

  “Above the Strip. On Basic Drive. You know where that is?”

  I opened the door of my own car. “Get in, and I’ll prove it.”

  “Thanks.” She slid across the seat, snuggling over on the passenger side. I climbed in after her and we peeled off.

  As we turned up Highland, I learned that her name was Sandy Simpson. Making a left on Sunset, I discovered that she was a professional body.

  “That’s right,” she said, as I reacted by nearly ramming the car into a lamp-post. “I sell my body for a living. All, or any part of it. You know, like in a TV commercial with a star—sometimes her hands show her age, so when they cut to a tight closeup, it’s my hands in the shot. Or maybe my feet. I do knees and elbows, too, and I’m very good at cleavage.”

  “In other words, you’re a double?”

  “A dubber, too. I specialize in howls for the laugh-tracks on comedy shows.” And she gave out with an ear-splitting screech.

  “Sounds like a good racket.”

  “Not lately.” Sandy sighed heavily. “Haven’t had a studio call in three months. I’d have starved to death if it wasn’t for a couple of nose residuals I got from an old sinus-tablet commercial.”

  “So that’s why you were down collecting compensation.”

  Sandy nodded. “What’s your excuse?”

  “I’m a writer. In this business we are constantly starving.”

  “TV or movies?”

  “I’m versatile. I starve in both.” I crossed Crescent Heights and moved on into Sunset Strip.

  “Couldn’t you do like, books?”

  “I’ve done like, books. Three of them, to be exact. How to Drown a Fish, The Romance of Sewage Disposal, and one of those big special gift-books—A Pictorial History of Dandruff.”

  “Did they sell?”

  “Like hot-cakes.” I shrugged. “Trouble is, nobody buys hot-cakes in a bookstore.”