Moon of Skulls Read online

  All this was told to me, for when I sank unconscious, Gordon, attributing my condition to exhaustion and a need of the hashish to the use of which he thought I was addicted, lifted me and with the aid of the stunned policemen got me to his rooms before returning to the scene of the explosion. At his rooms he found Hansen, and Zuleika handcuffed to the bed as I had left her. He released her and left her to tend to me, for all London was in a terrible turmoil and he was needed elsewhere.

  When I came to myself at last, I looked up into her starry eyes and lay quiet, smiling up at her. She sank down upon my bosom, nestling my head in her arms and covering my face with her kisses.

  “Steephen!” she sobbed over and over, as her tears splashed hot on my face.

  I was scarcely strong enough to put my arms about her but I managed it, and we lay there for a space, in silence, except for the girl’s hard, racking sobs.

  “Zuleika, I love you,” I murmured.

  “And I love you, Steephen,” she sobbed. “Oh, it is so hard to part now — but I’m going with you, Steephen; I can’t live without you!”

  “My dear child,” said John Gordon, entering the room suddenly, “Costigan’s not going to die. We will let him have enough hashish to tide him along, and when he is stronger we will take him off the habit slowly.”

  “You don’t understand, sahib; it is not hashish Steephen must have. It is something which only the Master knew, and now that he is dead or is fled, Steephen cannot get it and must die.”

  Gordon shot a quick, uncertain glance at me. His fine face was drawn and haggard, his clothes sooty and torn from his work among the debris of the explosion.

  “She’s right, Gordon,” I said languidly. “I’m dying. Kathulos killed the hashish-craving with a concoction he called the elixir. I’ve been keeping myself alive on some of the stuff that Zuleika stole from him and gave me, but I drank it all last night.”

  I was aware of no craving of any kind, no physical or mental discomfort even. All my mechanism was slowing down fast; I had passed the stage where the need of the elixir would tear and rend me. I felt only a great lassitude and a desire to sleep. And I knew that the moment I closed my eyes, I would die.

  “A strange dope, that elixir,” I said with growing languor. “It burns and freezes and then at last the craving kills easily and without torment.”

  “Costigan, curse it,” said Gordon desperately, “you can’t go like this! That vial I took from the Egyptian’s table — what is in it?”

  “The Master swore it would free me of my curse and probably kill me also,” I muttered. “I’d forgotten about it. Let me have it; it can no more than kill me and I’m dying now.”

  “Yes, quick, let me have it!” exclaimed Zuleika fiercely, springing to Gordon’s side, her hands passionately outstretched. She returned with the vial which he had taken from his pocket, and knelt beside me, holding it to my lips, while she murmured to me gently and soothingly in her own language.

  I drank, draining the vial, but feeling little interest in the whole matter. My outlook was purely impersonal, at such a low ebb was my life, and I cannot even remember how the stuff tasted. I only remember feeling a curious sluggish fire burn faintly along my veins, and the last thing I saw was Zuleika crouching over me, her great eyes fixed with a burning intensity on me. Her tense little hand rested inside her blouse, and remembering her vow to take her own life if I died I tried to lift a hand and disarm her, tried to tell Gordon to take away the dagger she had hidden in her garments. But speech and action failed me and I drifted away into a curious sea of unconsciousness.

  Of that period I remember nothing. No sensation fired my sleeping brain to such an extent as to bridge the gulf over which I drifted. They say I lay like a dead man for hours, scarcely breathing, while Zuleika hovered over me, never leaving my side an instant, and fighting like a tigress when anyone tried to coax her away to rest. Her chain was broken.

  As I had carried the vision of her into that dim land of nothingness, so her dear eyes were the first thing which greeted my returning consciousness. I was aware of a greater weakness than I thought possible for a man to feel, as if I had been an invalid for months, but the life in me, faint though it was, was sound and normal, caused by no artificial stimulation. I smiled up at my girl and murmured weakly:

  “Throw away your dagger, little Zuleika; I’m going to live.”

  She screamed and fell on her knees beside me, weeping and laughing at the same time. Women are strange beings, of mixed and powerful emotions, truly.

  Gordon entered and grasped the hand which I could not lift from the bed.

  “You’re a case for an ordinary human physician now, Costigan,” he said. “Even a layman like myself can tell that. For the first time since I’ve known you, the look in your eyes is entirely sane. You look like a man who has had a complete nervous breakdown, and needs about a year of rest and quiet. Great heavens, man, you’ve been through enough, outside your dope experience, to last you a lifetime.”

  “Tell me first,” said I, “was Kathulos killed in the explosion?”

  “I don’t know,” answered Gordon somberly. “Apparently the entire system of subterranean passages was destroyed. I know my last bullet — the last bullet that was in the revolver which I wrested from one of my attackers — found its mark in the Master’s body, but whether he died from the wound, or whether a bullet can hurt him, I do not know. And whether in his death agonies he ignited the tons and tons of high explosives which were stored in the corridors, or whether the Negroes did it unintentionally, we shall never know.

  “My God, Costigan, did you ever see such a honeycomb? And we know not how many miles in either direction the passages reached. Even now Scotland Yard men are combing the subways and basements of the town for secret openings. All known openings, such as the one through which we came and the one in Soho 48, were blocked by falling walls. The office building was simply blown to atoms.”

  “What about the men who raided Soho 48?”

  “The door in the library wall had been closed. They found the Chinaman you killed, but searched the house without avail. Lucky for them, too, else they had doubtless been in the tunnels when the explosion came, and perished with the hundreds of Negroes who must have died then.”

  “Every Negro in London must have been there.”

  “I dare say. Most of them are voodoo worshipers at heart and the power the Master wielded was incredible. They died, but what of him? Was he blown to atoms by the stuff which he had secretly stored, or crushed when the stone walls crumbled and the ceilings came thundering down?”

  “There is no way to search among those subterranean ruins, I suppose?”

  “None whatever. When the walls caved in, the tons of earth upheld by the ceilings also came crashing down, filling the corridors with dirt and broken stone, blocking them forever. And on the surface of the earth, the houses which the vibration shook down were heaped high in utter ruins. What happened in those terrible corridors must remain forever a mystery.”

  My tale draws to a close. The months that followed passed uneventfully, except for the growing happiness which to me was paradise, but which would bore you were I to relate it. But one day Gordon and I again discussed the mysterious happenings that had had their being under the grim hand of the Master.

  “Since that day,” said Gordon, “the world has been quiet. Africa has subsided and the East seems to have returned to her ancient sleep. There can be but one answer — living or dead, Kathulos was destroyed that morning when his world crashed about him.”

  “Gordon,” said I, “what is the answer to that greatest of all mysteries?”

  My friend shrugged his shoulders.

  “I have come to believe that mankind eternally hovers on the brinks of secret oceans of which it knows nothing. Races have lived and vanished before our race rose out of the slime of the primitive, and it is likely still others will live upon the earth after ours has vanished. Scientists have long upheld the theory
that the Atlanteans possessed a higher civilization than our own, and on very different lines. Certainly Kathulos himself was proof that our boasted culture and knowledge were nothing beside that of whatever fearful civilization produced him.

  “His dealings with you alone have puzzled all the scientific world, for none of them has been able to explain how he could remove the hashish craving, stimulate you with a drug so infinitely more powerful, and then produce another drug which entirely effaced the effects of the other.”

  “I have him to thank for two things,” I said slowly; “the regaining of my lost manhood — and Zuleika. Kathulos, then, is dead, as far as any mortal thing can die. But what of those others — those ‘ancient masters’ who still sleep in the sea?”

  Gordon shuddered.

  “As I said, perhaps mankind loiters on the brink of unthinkable chasms of horror. But a fleet of gunboats is even now patrolling the oceans unobtrusively, with orders to destroy instantly any strange case that may be found floating — to destroy it and its contents. And if my word has any weight with the English government and the nations of the world, the seas will be so patrolled until doomsday shall let down the curtain on the races of today.”

  “At night I dream of them, sometimes,” I muttered, “sleeping in their lacquered cases, which drip with strange seaweed, far down among the green surges — where unholy spires and strange towers rise in the dark ocean.”

  “We have been face to face with an ancient horror,” said Gordon somberly, “with a fear too dark and mysterious for the human brain to cope with. Fortune has been with us; she may not again favor the sons of men. It is best that we be ever on our guard. The universe was not made for humanity alone; life takes strange phases and it is the first instinct of nature for the different species to destroy each other. No doubt we seemed as horrible to the Master as he did to us. We have scarcely tapped the chest of secrets which nature has stored, and I shudder to think of what that chest may hold for the human race.”

  “That’s true,” said I, inwardly rejoicing at the vigor which was beginning to course through my wasted veins, “but men will meet obstacles as they come, as men have always risen to meet them. Now, I am beginning to know the full worth of life and love, and not all the devils from all the abysses can hold me.”

  Gordon smiled.

  “You have it coming to you, old comrade. The best thing is to forget all that dark interlude, for in that course lies light and happiness.”

  DEAD MAN’S HATE

  Weird Tales, January 1930

  They hanged John Farrel in the dawn amid the market-place;

  At dusk came Adam Brand to him and spat upon his face.

  “Ho, neighbors all,” spake Adam Brand, “see ye John Farrel’s fate!

  “Tis proven here a hempen noose is stronger than man’s hate!

  “For heard ye not John Farrel’s vow to be avenged on me

  Come life or death? See how he hangs high on the gallows tree!”

  Yet never a word the people spake, in fear and wild surprize —

  For the grisly corpse raised up its head and stared with sightless eyes,

  And with strange motions, slow and stiff, pointed at Adam Brand

  And clambered down the gibbet tree, the noose within its hand.

  With gaping mouth stood Adam Brand like a statue carved of stone,

  Till the dead man laid a clammy hand hard on his shoulder-bone.

  Then Adam shrieked like a soul in hell; the red blood left his face

  And he reeled away in a drunken run through the screaming market-place;

  And close behind, the dead man came with face like a mummy’s mask,

  And the dead joints cracked and the stiff legs creaked with their

  unwanted task.

  Men fled before the flying twain or shrank with bated breath,

  And they saw on the face of Adam Brand the seal set there by death.

  He reeled on buckling legs that failed, yet on and on he fled;

  So through the shuddering market-place, the dying fled the dead.

  At the riverside fell Adam Brand with a scream that rent the skies;

  Across him fell John Farrel’s corpse, nor ever the twain did rise.

  There was no wound on Adam Brand but his brow was cold and damp,

  For the fear of death had blown out his life as a witch blows out a lamp.

  His lips writhed in a horrid grin like a fiend’s on Satan’s coals,

  And the men that looked on his face that day, his stare still haunts their souls.

  Such was the fate of Adam Brand, a strange, unearthly fate;

  For stronger than death or hempen noose are the fires of a dead man’s hate.

  THE FEARSOME TOUCH OF DEATH

  Weird Tales, February 1930

  As long as midnight cloaks the earth

  With shadows grim and stark,

  God save us from the Judas kiss

  Of a dead man in the dark.

  Old Adam Farrel lay dead in the house wherein he had lived alone for the last twenty years. A silent, churlish recluse, in his life he had known no friends, and only two men had watched his passing.

  Dr. Stein rose and glanced out the window into the gathering dusk.

  “You think you can spend the night here, then?” he asked his companion.

  This man, Falred by name, assented.

  “Yes, certainly. I guess it’s up to me.”

  “Rather a useless and primitive custom, sitting up with the dead,” commented the doctor, preparing to depart, “but I suppose in common decency we will have to bow to precedence. Maybe I can find someone who’ll come over here and help you with your vigil.”

  Falred shrugged his shoulders. “I doubt it. Farrel wasn’t liked — wasn’t known by many people. I scarcely knew him myself, but I don’t mind sitting up with the corpse.”

  Dr. Stein was removing his rubber gloves and Falred watched the process with an interest that almost amounted to fascination. A slight, involuntary shudder shook him at the memory of touching these gloves — slick, cold, clammy things, like the touch of death.

  “You may get lonely tonight, if I don’t find anyone,” the doctor remarked as he opened the door. “Not superstitious, are you?”

  Falred laughed. “Scarcely. To tell the truth, from what I hear of Farrel’s disposition, I’d rather be watching his corpse than have been his guest in life.”

  The door closed and Falred took up his vigil. He seated himself in the only chair the room boasted, glanced casually at the formless, sheeted bulk on the bed opposite him, and began to read by the light of the dim lamp which stood on the rough table.

  Outside, the darkness gathered swiftly, and finally Falred laid down his magazine to rest his eyes. He looked again at the shape which had, in life, been the form of Adam Farrel, wondering what quirk in the human nature made the sight of a corpse not so unpleasant, but such an object of fear to man. Unthinking ignorance, seeing in dead things a reminder of death to come, he decided lazily, and began idly contemplating as to what life had held for this grim and crabbed old man, who had neither relatives nor friends, and who had seldom left the house wherein he had died. The usual tales of miser-hoarded wealth had accumulated, but Falred felt so little interest in the whole matter that it was not even necessary for him to overcome any temptation to prey about the house for possible hidden treasure.

  He returned to his reading with a shrug. The task was more boresome than he had thought for. After a while he was aware that every time he looked up from his magazine and his eyes fell upon the bed with its grim occupant, he started involuntarily as if he had, for an instant, forgotten the presence of the dead man and was unpleasantly reminded of the fact. The start was slight and instinctive, but he felt almost angered at himself. He realized, for the first time, the utter and deadening silence which enwrapped the house — a silence apparently shared by the night, for no sound came through the window. Adam Farrel lived as far apart from his neighbors as possibl
e, and there was no other house within hearing distance.

  Falred shook himself as if to rid his mind of unsavory speculations, and went back to his reading. A sudden vagrant gust of wind whipped through the window, in which the light in the lamp flickered and went out suddenly. Falred, cursing softly, groped in the darkness for matches, burning his fingers on the lamp chimney. He struck a match, relighted the lamp, and glancing over at the bed, got a horrible mental jolt. Adam Farrel’s face stared blindly at him, the dead eyes wide and blank, framed in the gnarled gray features. Even as Falred instinctively shuddered, his reason explained the apparent phenomenon: the sheet that covered the corpse had been carelessly thrown across the face and the sudden puff of wind had disarranged and flung it aside.

  Yet there was something grisly about the thing, something fearsomely suggestive — as if, in the cloaking dark, a dead hand had flung aside the sheet, just as if the corpse were about to rise. . . .

  Falred, an imaginative man, shrugged his shoulders at these ghastly thoughts and crossed the room to replace the sheet. The dead eyes seemed to stare malevolently, with an evilness that transcended the dead man’s churlishness in life. The workings of a vivid imagination, Falred knew, and he re-covered the gray face, shrinking as his hand chanced to touch the cold flesh — slick and clammy, the touch of death. He shuddered with the natural revulsion of the living for the dead, and went back to his chair and magazine.