Final Reckonings (23 page)

The knocking persisted.

Krantz got out the burlap bag, filled it, and shoved it under his bed. Then he answered the door, straightening his collar and striving to control the trembling of his lips.

"
Lieber Gott
, let me in!"

It was Fritz, the scavenger. He stood quivering in the doorway until Otto Krantz dragged him across the threshold by the scruff of the neck. "What is it?"

"The Fulgers — their bodies have been claimed by a relative. A cousin, I think. He comes tonight to take them for burial."

"No, he can't do that!"

"But he is, he has received permission. And we shall be found out, and it will mean the axe for us."

Krantz managed to control his voice. He thought fast, frantically. Desperation blossomed into inspiration.

"Where are the bodies now?" he whispered.

"I have them out at the lime pits, behind the walls — near the old quarry."

"And this cousin of the Fulgers will not come for them until late tonight?"

"That is right. He has received permission to bring a hearse and two coffins."

Otto Krantz smiled. "Good. We shall be all right, then. This cousin of the Fulgers will not examine the bodies too closely, I think. He will not even bother to search for bullet wounds."

"But they are headless — "

"Exactly." A smile crept over Krantz's face. Even in the twilight Fritz could see that smile, and he shuddered. "What is it you will do?"

"Do you remember the last words of Joachim Fulger?" Krantz whispered. "Yes. As ye sow, so shall ye reap. That's from the Bible, isn't it?"

"Exactly." Krantz grinned. 'The old fool meant it as a warning. Instead, it will be our salvation."

"But I don't see — "

"Never mind. Go at once to the shop down the street. Purchase five yards of strong catgut and a surgical needle. I will meet you at the lime pits tonight at eight. I'll bring the sack with me. Now do you understand?"

Fritz understood. He was still shuddering as Krantz pushed him out into the hall toward the stairs.

4

It was a grisly ordeal. They worked in darkness, lest a light betray their presence to SS troopers on guard in the pits beyond.

They crouched in the little shed in utter blackness and groped their way about the business in silence. Fortunately, there was no trouble in locating the bodies. Fritz had carefully set them aside for immediate interment.

The rest was up to Krantz. He was no surgeon, but his fingers held a skill born of utter desperation. If he bungled the task, his life was forfeit, and he knew it. He strung the catgut and sewed.

The needle rose and fell, rose and fell, rose and fell in darkness as Otto Krantz pursued his fanciwork.

And then it was done — done amidst the shuddering whimpers that rose from Fritz's frantic throat.

But Krantz held his nerve to the last. It was he who added the final touch—binding the high collars about the two white throats and carefully patting the prison shirts into place beneath. His sense of touch served him well in this last gesture of precaution. At last he sighed, signifying that the task was complete.

Fritz wanted to bolt for it then. Krantz whispered that he must wait, must hide by the wall across the way from the shed, until they saw the cousin actually come and take the bodies away. Then and only then would he be certain of their safety.

So they waited, waited until midnight in the darkness. What phantasms it held for Fritz, Otto Krantz could not say. But as he stared into the night he saw the grinning faces of Joachim and Eva Fulger hanging bodiless in midair, their eyes alive with undying mockery.

Krantz pressed his eyelids together, but the faces remained, their leering mouths twisted as though in an effort to speak from beyond the barrier of death.

What were they trying to tell him?

Krantz didn't know. He didn't want to know. The hands which had wielded the surgical needle so expertly now hung limply at his sides as he waited.

Then the hearse came. The cousin, escorted by a guard, went into the little shed. Two mortician's assistants brought the coffins. Krantz held his breath as they disappeared inside the shed.

They were not inside long. Soon they reappeared, carrying the closed coffins. They did not speak, there was no sign of agitation. The coffins were placed inside the hearse and the car drove away.

It was then that Krantz broke and ran, sobbing, from the scene.

He was safe. Everything was over, and he was safe. The heads were back on their bodies.

He got to his room somehow. Perhaps he might snatch a few hours of sleep before dawn. Then he must get up and return to duty as though nothing had happened. But now, to sleep —

But Otto Krantz did not sleep.

The heads were back on their bodies, yet they would not go away. They were waiting for Krantz in his room. He saw them hanging in the shadows, even when he turned on the lights.

They hung there — the head of the old man with the long white hair, and the head of the girl with her flaming curls — and they laughed at Krantz. They laughed at him.

Krantz bared his teeth.

Let them laugh! He was Otto Krantz, Headsman of the Reich. Krantz, the executioner, whom all men feared.

He had outsmarted them after all. Now they would be buried away in a grave and no one would ever know that Krantz had murdered them.

Krantz told them this in whispers, and they nodded to each other, sharing secrets. But Krantz did not mind. He was no longer afraid.

He almost welcomed the coming of dawn in this changed mood. He donned his immaculate evening dress carefully. He brushed his stiff collar into place before the bureau. The heads laughed at him over his shoulder in the mirror, but he didn't care about that now.

He swaggered through the street on his way to Headquarters, cradling the axe in its case against his brawny chest. A passing guard drew stiffly to attention as Krantz marched by.

Krantz laughed. There — wasn't that proof of his importance, his cleverness? Let the heads understand that he was a man of position, of power.

Otto Krantz knew he had nothing to fear. He would go about his duties today without question. He squared his shoulders and marched up the steps, into the outer office. He wasn't worried. He knew no one else could see the heads but himself.

He smiled at the man behind the desk. That was the way — brazen it out! "I'd like to see Inspector Grunert, please. About today's orders. Is he here yet?"

"The Inspector left word for you to go right in."

There. The Inspector was waiting for him! That's the kind of a man Otto Krantz was. Inspectors waited for his arrival. He smiled derisively at the heads. Then he strutted into Inspector Grunert's office. The Inspector
was
waiting.

Krantz realized that just as soon as the two Gestapo men stepped from behind the door and pinned his arms close to his sides. They took the axe, they held him tightly, he could not struggle, he could only gape, he could only pant, he could only listen to what Grunert was saying.

"Otto Krantz, I arrest you in the name of the Third Reich, for the murder of Joachim and Eva Fulger."

But what was he talking about? The Fulgers were in their graves by now, buried.

No — they weren't.

The Inspector was pulling the sheet from the table over in the corner.

And Otto Krantz stared. He saw the heads again, and this time everyone could see them. They were grinning up at him now from over the tops of the sheets.

Somehow he dragged his captors forward with him. He bent over the bodies. He wanted to know how, know why they had been discovered.

They looked all right. The heads had been sewed on tightly. Perfectly. The high collars were still in place. Nothing was wrong with his work, nothing looked suspicious. Why, the collars hadn't even been pulled back to disclose any of the sewing!

Then what was wrong?

Krantz gazed at the still bodies, trying to read the secret. He didn't hear any of Inspector Grunert's mumblings about madmen, about murder. He was trying to remember what had happened.

"As ye sow," the old man had warned. "As ye sow — "

Then Otto Krantz's gaze traveled up again to the heads of the dead wizard and his daughter. He screamed, once.

"Too bad you didn't have any light to work with in that shed," Inspector Grunert purred.

Otto Krantz didn't hear him.

He was staring madly at the grinning heads of the old man and the girl — the heads he had sewed back on in the darkness and inadvertently
switched
.

The Shadow From the Steeple

W
ILLIAM
H
URLEY WAS BORN
an Irishman and grew up to be a taxicab driver—therefore it would be redundant, in the face of both of these facts, to say that he was garrulous.

The minute he picked up his passenger in downtown Providence that warm summer evening, he began talking. The passenger, a tall thin man in his early thirties, entered the cab and sat back, clutching a briefcase. He gave an address on Benefit Street and Hurley started out, shifting both taxi and tongue into high gear.

Hurley began what was to be a one-sided conversation by commenting on the afternoon performance of the New York Giants. Unperturbed by his passenger’s silence, he made a few remarks about the weather—recent, current, and expected. Since he received no reply, the driver then proceeded to discuss a local phenomenon, namely the reported escape, that morning, of two black panthers or leopards from the traveling menagerie of Langer Brothers Circus, currently appearing in the city. In response to a direct inquiry as to whether he had seen the beasts roaming at large, Hurley’s customer shook his head.

The driver then made several uncomplimentary remarks about the local police force and their inability to capture the beasts. It was his considered opinion that a given platoon of law enforcement officers would be unable to catch a cold if immured in an ice-box for a year. This witticism failed to amuse his passenger, and before Hurley could continue his monologue they had arrived at the Benefit Street address. Eighty-five cents changed hands, passenger and briefcase left the cab, and Hurley drove away.

He could not know it at the time, but he thus became the last man who could or would testify to seeing his passenger alive.

The rest is conjecture, and perhaps that is for the best. Certainly it is easy enough to draw certain conclusions as to what happened that night in the old house on Benefit Street, but the weight of those conclusions is hard to bear.

One minor mystery is easy enough to clear up—the peculiar silence and aloofness of Hurley’s passenger. That passenger, Edmund Fiske, of Chicago, Illinois, was meditating upon the fulfillment of fifteen years of questing; the cab-trip represented the last stage of this long journey, and he was reviewing the circumstances as he rode.

Edmund Fiske’s quest had begun, on August 8, 1935, with the death of his close friend, Robert Harrison Blake, of Milwaukee.

Like Fiske himself at the time, Blake had been a precocious adolescent interested in fantasy-writing, and as such became a member of the “Lovecraft circle”—a group of writers maintaining correspondence with one another and with the late Howard Phillips Lovecraft, of Providence.

It was through correspondence that Fiske and Blake had become acquainted; they visited back and forth between Milwaukee and Chicago, and their mutual preoccupation with the weird and the fantastic in literature and art served to form the foundation for the close friendship which existed at the time of Blake’s unexpected and inexplicable demise.

Most of the facts—and certain of the conjectures—in connection with Blake’s death have been embodied in Lovecraft’s story, “
The Haunter of the Dark
,” which was published more than a year after the younger writer’s passing.

Lovecraft had an excellent opportunity to observe matters, for it was on his suggestion that young Blake had journeyed to Providence early in 1935, and had been provided with living-quarters on College Street by Lovecraft himself. So it was both as friend and neighbor that the elder fantasy writer had acted in narrating the singular story of Robert Harrison Blake’s last months.

In his story, he tells of Blake’s efforts to begin a novel dealing with a survival of New England witch-cults, but modestly omits his own part in assisting his friend to secure material. Apparently Blake began work on his project and then became enmeshed in a horror greater than any envisioned by his imagination.

For Blake was drawn to investigate the crumbling black pile on Federal Hill—the deserted ruin of a church that had once housed the worshippers of an esoteric cult. Early in spring he paid a visit to the shunned structure and there made certain discoveries which (in Lovecraft’s opinion) made his death inevitable.

Briefly, Blake entered the boarded-up Free-Will Church and stumbled across the skeleton of a reporter from the
Providence Telegram
, one Edwin M. Lillibridge, who had apparently attempted a similar investigation in 1893. The fact that his death was not explained seemed alarming enough, but more disturbing still was the realization that no one had been bold enough to enter the church since that date and discover the body.

Blake found the reporter’s notebook in his clothing, and its contents afforded a partial revelation.

A certain Professor Bowen, of Providence, had traveled widely in Egypt, and in 1843, in the course of archaeological investigations of the crypt of Nephren-Ka, had made an unusual find.

Nephren-Ka is the “forgotten pharaoh,” whose name has been cursed by the priests and obliterated from official dynastic records. The name was familiar to the young writer at the time, due largely to the work of another Milwaukee author who had dealt with the semi-legendary ruler in his tale, “
Fane of the Black Pharaoh
.” But the discovery Bowen made in the crypt was totally unexpected.

The reporter’s notebook said little of the actual nature of that discovery, but it recorded subsequent events in a precise, chronological fashion. Immediately upon unearthing his mysterious find in Egypt, Professor Bowen abandoned his research and returned to Providence, where he purchased the Free-Will Church in 1844 and made it the headquarters of what was called the “Starry Wisdom” sect.