Weird Tales volume 42 number 04 (17 page)

What if he were to assert himself, to go down to Anthi and tell her that he would do her work another night, when the light was better—?

But then she would laugh at his weakness. And she would be right. Was it not weakness?

He answered Costa's proposition shortly: "No." He set his teeth and plunged his spade into the earth. Hard, with renewed vigor. And suddenly the spade struck hol-lowness; sank into the earth as if hands had readied up from below and seized it. A dislodged pebble went rattling on down inside the hole, down, down, into gulf-like space.

Costa crossed himself again and gasped, "May the Panagia—may the Virgin and all the blessed saints preserve us!"

Earth and massive stones fell together with a great thud. A pit opened, almost beneath their feet. The Greek cried out and jumped back. But Philip laughed. His eyes were shining. He forgot Anthi; he forgot Dragoumis. This was what he had come to Greece to find; the discovery he had dreamed for years of making; this was triumph and fulfilment!

He dug feverishly; he urged Costa on with both praise and curses. Until the hole lay like a wide-open mouth at their feet, a mouth blacker, more thickly solid, than the blackness of the night.

Philip tied a rope to the lantern. He lowered it into the pit and leaned over, watching course after course of great stone blocks appear and disappear as its golden eye sank deeper, farther into the dark. At last it came to rest upon a rock floor many feet below, making a tiny brilliant island there.

Philip took an axe, a flashlight, and some cloths, set another rope around his waist and prepared to follow the lantern.

"Wait here, Costa. When I jerk the rope raise me."

He wondered fleetingly why he had said that. Surely it would have been simpler to say that he would shout up from the depths? Then he forgot it as he swung dowwatd into space.

HE LOOKED about him eagerly as he landed. To his right, within a few feet of his descent, the passageway was blocked by rough masses of earth and rock.

WEIRD TALES

Probably these covered the real entrance to the dromos t that which had been hidden for tens of centuries until Dragoumis pierced its age-old seals; on that fatal night it must have been crushed by the landslide that had buried his pursuers. But to the left the passage stretched on, seemingly endless, into the mountain's heart. For a little way only the lantern s light pierced it, breaking the darkness into pieces, into dancing shadows.

Did one of those shadows dart back as he looked, one a little thicker, a little blacker, than its fellows?

He did not heed it. His heart felt light, exultant, as he levelled his flashlight and walked on, toward the blackness that looked solid as a wall. He no longer even felt horror of the axe beneath his arm. If Dragoumis could have chosen, surely he would have had his dead body dismembered a thousand times rather than let his great discovery be lost again, hidden from mankind, perhaps for more centuries. For on no other terms would Anthi ever have disclosed the secret. Poor girl! Later, when her hysterical, superstitious obsession was over, she would regret this, she would be kind and gentle and fastidious again, as a woman should be. Now he must do whatever was necessary to bring her peace.

He went on into the shadows, and they retreated before him slowly, steadily. He followed them down that stone corridor that led through the earth's bowels.

Once or twice it seemed to him that he heard a faint curious rustling among those dark, wavering shapes that recoiled before his flashlight. As if someone were walking ahead of him, stealthily. He decided that it must be some trick of echoes, reverberating oddly in that subterranean place. It could not be bats, for there was never anything where the light came; throw his flashlight where he would, its beams found only great, bare blocks of stone.

Then he came at last to the black rectangle of the inner portal, the opening into that great, circular chamber Anthi had told him of. There Dragoumis had found golden vessels and golden filigree-work, and images of gods that no man had worshipped

for ages. There he had found bones, and there, perhaps, be had left his own.

And there, at last, fear took Philip. It closed round his throat like an icy hand. In his inner ears a far-off voice seemed to cry: "Do not disturb the dead! Do not disturb the dead!"

He shrugged. That voice came out of his childhood, out of superstitions and conventional moralities engraved upon the young mind as a phonograph record is engraved upon wax. He thought, "I am being foolish as Anthi. I have handled many mummies, I have felt their dry, withered flesh slough off my hands. What difference is there, what real difference? A man can be as dead in three minutes as he will be in three thousand years."

He swung the flashlight forward, toward the inner chamber.

He saw the gleam of gold, he saw strange, grotesque shapes of stone. He saw carved stone larnak't, and, in the far corner, a table of red marble. Its legs gleamed under the light, like blood.

Was there something on top of the table, among the shadows? Something long and dark and still, like the outstretched form of a man?

Once again fear took him. He could not bear to throw the flashlight upon the table-top, to see. He edged slowly into the chamber, moving cautiously, laboriously, as if through invisible barriers. There were no more echoes. In the deathly silence he heard nothing but the fierce, hard pounding of his heart.

Suddenly he stopped. He could not bear to go farther, to come within touching distance of that thing that might be lying there.

He set his teeth and his will. Slowly, as if it were a rock too heavy for him to move, the flashlight came up. Its beams touched something; something upon the table-top.

A man's hand that lay, lax and brown and leathery, upon red marble. A large hand, larger than most men's. Firm and sleek as leather it looked; and yet, in some curious and subtle way, as lifeless. None could have mistaken it for the hand of a living man. Philip's brain reeled; through it

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81

ran dizzily words he had heard among the Greek peasants and never heeded; the bodies of the walking dead—of those whom the earth had not loosed—were incorrup-: undecaying!

And as he looked the hand changed. The lingers tensed, the long tendons on the back of it rose and stiffened, as if that dark recumbent form were bracing itself to rise!

With a strangled cry of horror Philip hurled himself forward, the axe gleaming

COSTA shivered. The night wind was cold, and once a cry had seemed to drift up from the depths below. He had listened closely after that, but he had not been able to tell whether the cry was repeated, whether a faint horrible screaming, muffled by distance, had come up from the earth.

The rope at his feet jerked suddenly, convulsively, like a great snake. He cried out and jumped bade, then remembered and gasped with relief.

The signal!

Gladly he hauled his master up. "The saints be thanked, kyrie! You are safe! I thought I heard something—"

The tall man did not answer. He turned and strode off down the mountainside, with long, swift strides. "He goes very fast," Costa thought, "as if there were something before—or behind him—for which he could not bear to wait. He does not even stop to give me any of the bundles he carries." He followed with the lantern, looking curiously at those bundles. They were long and narrow, they looked like human arms and legs. When he saw a limp hand dangling from one of them he crossed himself.

"The old king must have come all to pieces. Who would have thought he would still have looked so human?"

He gained a little on his master. The lantern rays fell on those packages, and Costa's eyes grew large and round. After that he walked more slowly, and let the distance widen between himself and the tall figure ahead. For through the cloth

wrappings something dark was seeping, something that stained the white linen.

He dropped farther behind, when they came within sight of the shore and his master spurted suddenly, running out with daemonic speed onto the white sands. The clouds had left the moon; the beach was almost as bright as day.

A cry came from the boat. The waiting woman tugged at the oars and swung it in, closer. She leaped out upon the sands. Her voice pealed out, a song of gladness:

"You have them, Philip! You have them—"

She ran forward, her arms outstretched, her face bright with triumph. The man waited for her. He had stopped and stood very still; he made no move, either to meet or welcome her. And when she reached him she did not even look at him. She only clutched, with hands as terribly eager as her eyes, at those packages he carried.

Silently, he let her take them. Silently, he stood over her as she unwrapped them. As their ugly, stained contents fell from her paralyzed hands to the earth—

And then she screamed. Terribly and horribly she screamed. For the first time she looked up into his face, and saw it. He took off his hat, Philip Martin's hat, and moved toward her, and in that clear moonlight, for all the distance, Costa saw that his head was not Philip Martin's head.

After that Costa's eyes closed and he knelt and prayed. He did not see what made the lady scream again. Her cries kept on for quite a long time, but at last the beach was silent. There was no sound on it, even the sound of a retreating footstep. And then, and only then, did Costa find the strength to run away.

Later, the Athenian newspapers carried feature headlines: fresh guerrilla outrages! MUTILATED BODY OF AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGIST FOUND IN MYCENEAN

tomb! On a nearby beach had been found the bodies of Kyria Anthi Dragoumis and of a man who must have been one of the guerrilla murderers. A giant of a man, whose body, unaccountably, crumbled and fell apart when it was touched.

Mr.

jffyde-and Seek

BY

MALCOLM M. FERGUSON

A New England farmhouse, could it shelter a poltergeist,

\ ROM the way you describe it, doctor, the Orne Place does indeed sound as if it had a poltergeist bouncing around inside it," Thomas Chadwick reflected, turning the nutmeg grounds about in the tumbler in his gaunt, weatherstained hand. "Which is, of course

more readily said than settled. For how does one cope with such a critter? Assuming that Eliza Blaine is host-—or hostess, rather—for this manifestation, should she and it be treated according to the concepts which the psychologists use when they so gingerly deal with such a phenomenon, or

Heading by Matt Fox

MR. HYDE—AND SEEK

87

in terms of the specialists in psychic affairs?"

"For my part, sir, if I were more deeply

involved, I'd try neither, but record any

phenomena in simple terms and try to settle

in my own mind enough of their nature to

it an attempt to break them up."

"Good. Good. Now can we start from beginning, with some idea what the means to you?"

'Yes. Sometimes strange supernormal cnings occur in the vicinity of an adolescent which come to be attributed to the operation of an alien power, dir: agent, elemental force, or what you will, upon his victim's personality. The picture is that of a hermit crab in the shell of a periwinkle—only here the same skull quarters are shared simultaneously by an alternately dominant and dormant power and victim. The psychologist is on a spot, since this set-up would be duck soup for a Freudian explanation if it weren't for the recorded hell-raisings outside of the subject's accum-plishrnents—such unaccountable but recurrent pranks as a deluge of stones, strange pc-Uings which explain the German name poltergeist—pelting ghost—and a variety of caprices worthy of a Puck or a Kobold."

I refilled Chadwick's glass and my own, taking the hot water with which to dilute the rum from a kettle in a chimney niche built a century back for this purpose.

"But the hell of it is, the symptoms are external to the subject," Chadwick argued. "And the creditability of such evidence must be tested before we can establish a satisfactory attitude regarding the poltergeist."

I was just agreeing with my elderly friend when a car's headlights swept Chadwick's window.

"That's probably Oliver Orne now," I commented, going to the door.

Orne was a strong, wiry man in his late forties. He greeted Chadwick and explained that he had learned of my whereabouts from the switchboard operator, who habitually rerouted the calls of my practice at my request.

"Mr. Chadwick and I were just talking about your ward's case. He has lived and

worked in many parts of the world, and exercised common sense on plenty of problems which v, ould stump a young country doctor like myself."

Chadwick cut my eulogy with an ephithet of mock contempt, and turned inquiringly to Orne.

"Well, what I came for is this. Eliza went up to bed about nine, while my wife and I sat in the kitchen listening to the radio. Just after Eliza went upstairs the radio began to static badly, so I turned it off. I went on reading the newspaper, but noticed that everything was real quiet; the sounds Eliza made getting ready for bed sounding miles away. Suddenly she screamed. Then we heard scraping noises ending in a loud crash. I ran upstairs as fast as I could, and found the kid fainted across her bed, with all the furniture drawn in a heap around her—the dresser, chairs, the heavy linen chest. I don't see how St happened."