Moon of Skulls Read online

  At last, growing sleepy, he lay down upon a couch which, by some strange whim of the original owner, formed part of the room’s scant furnishings, and composed himself for slumber. He decided to leave the light burning, telling himself that it was in accordance with the usual custom of leaving lights burning for the dead; for he was not willing to admit to himself that already he was conscious of a dislike for lying in the darkness with the corpse. He dozed, awoke with a start and looked at the sheeted form of the bed. Silence reigned over the house, and outside it was very dark.

  The hour was approaching midnight, with its accompanying eerie domination over the human mind. Falred glanced again at the bed where the body lay and found the sight of the sheeted object most repellent. A fantastic idea had birth in his mind, and grew, that beneath the sheet, the mere lifeless body had become a strange, monstrous thing, a hideous, conscious being, that watched him with eyes which burned through the fabric of the cloth. This thought — a mere fantasy, of course — he explained to himself by the legends of vampires, undead ghosts and such like — the fearsome attributes with which the living have cloaked the dead for countless ages, since primitive man first recognized in death something horrid and apart from life. Man feared death, thought Falred, and some of this fear of death took hold on the dead so that they, too, were feared. And the sight of the dead engendered grisly thoughts, gave rise to dim fears of hereditary memory, lurking back in the dark corners of the brain.

  At any rate, that silent, hidden thing was getting on his nerves. He thought of uncovering the face, on the principle that familiarity breeds contempt. The sight of the features, calm and still in death, would banish, he thought, all such wild conjectures as were haunting him in spite of himself. But the thought of those dead eyes staring in the lamplight was intolerable; so at last he blew out the light and lay down. This fear had been stealing upon him so insidiously and gradually that he had not been aware of its growth.

  With the extinguishing of the light, however, and the blotting out of the sight of the corpse, things assumed their true character and proportions, and Falred fell asleep almost instantly, on his lips a faint smile for his previous folly.

  He awakened suddenly. How long he had been asleep he did not know. He sat up, his pulse pounding frantically, the cold sweat beading his forehead. He knew instantly where he was, remembered the other occupant of the room. But what had awakened him? A dream — yes, now he remembered — a hideous dream in which the dead man had risen from the bed and stalked stiffly across the room with eyes of fire and a horrid leer frozen on his gray lips. Falred had seemed to lie motionless, helpless; then as the corpses reached a gnarled and horrible hand, he had awakened.

  He strove to pierce the gloom, but the room was all blackness and all without was so dark that no gleam of light came through the window. He reached a shaking hand toward the lamp, then recoiled as if from a hidden serpent. Sitting here in the dark with a fiendish corpse was bad enough, but he dared not light the lamp, for fear that his reason would be snuffed out like a candle at what he might see. Horror, stark and unreasoning, had full possession of his soul; he no longer questioned the instinctive fears that rose in him. All those legends he had heard came back to him and brought a belief in them. Death was a hideous thing, a brain-shattering horror, imbuing lifeless men with a horrid malevolence. Adam Farrel in his life had been simply a churlish but harmless man; now he was a terror, a monster, a fiend lurking in the shadows of fear, ready to leap on mankind with talons dipped deep in death and insanity.

  Falred sat there, his blood freezing, and fought out his silent battle. Faint glimmerings of reason had begun to touch his fright when a soft, stealthy sound again froze him. He did not recognize it as the whisper of the night wind across the windowsill. His frenzied fancy knew it only as the tread of death and horror. He sprang from the couch, then stood undecided. Escape was in his mind but he was too dazed to even try to formulate a plan of escape. Even his sense of direction was gone. Fear had so stultified his mind that he was not able to think consciously. The blackness spread in long waves about him and its darkness and void entered into his brain. His motions, such as they were, were instinctive. He seemed shackled with mighty chains and his limbs responded sluggishly, like an imbecile’s.

  A terrible horror grew up in him and reared its grisly shape, that the dead man was behind him, was stealing upon him from the rear. He no longer thought of lighting the lamp; he no longer thought of anything. Fear filled his whole being; there was room for nothing else.

  He backed slowly away in the darkness, hands behind him, instinctively feeling the way. With a terrific effort he partly shook the clinging mists of horror from him, and, the cold sweat clammy upon his body, strove to orient himself. He could see nothing, but the bed was across the room, in front of him. He was backing away from it. There was where the dead man was lying, according to all rules of nature; if the thing were, as he felt, behind him, then the old tales were true: death did implant in lifeless bodies an unearthly animation, and dead men did roam the shadows to work their ghastly and evil will upon the sons of men. Then — great God! — what was man but a wailing infant, lost in the night and beset by frightful things from the black abysses and the terrible unknown voids of space and time? These conclusions he did not reach by any reasoning process; they leaped full-grown into his terror-dazed brain. He worked his way slowly backward, groping, clinging to the thought that the dead man must be in front of him.

  Then his back-flung hands encountered something — something slick, cold and clammy — like the touch of death. A scream shook the echoes, followed by the crash of a falling body.

  The next morning they who came to the house of death found two corpses in the room. Adam Farrel’s sheeted body lay motionless upon the bed, and across the room lay the body of Falred, beneath the shelf where Dr. Stein had absent-mindedly left his gloves — rubber gloves, slick and clammy to the touch of a hand groping in the dark — a hand of one fleeing his own fear — rubber gloves, slick and clammy and cold, like the touch of death.

  A SONG OUT OF MIDIAN

  Weird Tales, April 1930

  These will I give you, Astair: an armlet of frozen gold,

  Gods cut from the living rock, and carven gems in an amber crock,

  And a purple woven Tyrian smock, and wine from a pirate’s hold.

  Kings shall kneel at your feet, Astair, emperors kiss your hand;

  Captive girls for your joy shall dance, slim and straight as a striking lance,

  Who tremble and bow at your mildest glance and kneel at your least command.

  Galleys shall break the crimson seas seeking delights for you;

  With silks and silvery fountain gleams I will weave a world that glows

  and seems

  A shimmering mist of rainbow dreams, scarlet and white and blue.

  Or is it glory you wish, Astair, the crash and the battle-flame?

  The winds shall break on the warship’s sail and Death ride free at

  my horse’s tail,

  Till all the tribes of the earth shall wail at the terror of your name.

  I will break the thrones of the world, Astair, and fling them at your feet;

  Flame and banners and doom shall fly, and my iron chariots rend the sky,

  Whirlwind on whirlwind heaping high, death and a deadly sleet.

  Why are you sad and still, Astair, counting my words as naught?

  From slave to queen I have raised you high, and yet you stare with a weary eye,

  And never the laugh has followed the sigh, since you from your land

  were brought.

  Do you long for the lowing herds, Astair? For the desert’s dawning white?

  For the hawk-eyed tribesman’s coarse hard fare, and the brown firm limbs

  that are hard and bare,

  And the eagle’s rocks and the lion’s lair, and the tents of the Israelite?

  I have never chained your limbs, Astair; free as the winds that whirl
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  Go if you wish. The doors are wide, since less to you is an empire’s pride

  Than the open lands where the tribesmen ride, wooing the desert girl.

  SHADOWS ON THE ROAD

  Weird Tales, May 1930

  Nial of Ulster, welcome home!

  What saw you on the road to Rome? —

  Legions thronging the fertile plains?

  Shouting hordes of the country folks

  With the harvest heaped in their groaning wains?

  Shepherd piping under the oak?

  Laurel chaplet and purple cloak?

  Smokes of the feasting coiled on high?

  Meadows and fields of the rich, ripe green

  Lazing under a cobalt sky?

  Brown little villages sleeping between?

  What saw you on the road to Rome?

  “Crimson tracks in the blackened loam,

  “Skeleton trees and a blasted plain,

  “A heap of skulls and a child insane,

  “Ruin and wreck and the reek of pain

  “On the wrack of the road to Rome.”

  Nial, what saw you in Rome? —

  Purple emperors riding there,

  Down aisles with walls like marble foam,

  To the golden trumpet’s mystic flare?

  Dark-eyed women who bind their hair,

  As they bind men’s hearts, with a silver comb?

  Spires that cleave through the crystal air,

  Arch and altar and amaranth stair?

  Nial, what saw you in Rome?

  “Broken shrines in the sobbing gloam,

  “Bare feet spurning the marble flags,

  “Towers fallen and walls digged up,

  “A woman in chains and filthy rags.

  “Goths in the Forum howled to sup,

  “With an emperor’s skull for a drinking-cup.

  “The black arch clave to the broken dome.

  “The Coliseum invites the bat.

  “The Vandal sits where the Caesars sat;

  “And the shadows are black on Rome.”

  Nial, Nial, now you are home,

  Why do you mutter and lonely roam?

  “My brain is sick and I know no rest;

  “My heart is stone in my frozen breast,

  “For the feathers fall from the eagle’s crest

  “And the bright sea breaks in foam —

  “Kings and kingdoms and empires fall,

  “And the mist-black ruin covers them all,

  “And the honey of life is a bitter gall

  “Since I traveled the road to Rome.”

  THE MOON OF SKULLS

  Weird Tales, June 1930 and July 1930 (2-part serial)

  “The wise men know what wicked things

  Are written on the sky;

  They trim sad lamps, they touch sad strings

  Hearing the heavy purple wings,

  Where the forgotten Seraph kings

  Still plot how God shall die.”

  — Chesterton.

  1. A Man Comes Seeking

  A great black shadow lay across the land, cleaving the red flame of the sunset. To the man who toiled up the jungle trail it loomed like a symbol of death and horror, a menace brooding and terrible, like the shadow of a stealthy assassin flung upon some candle-lit wall.

  Yet it was only the shadow of the great crag which reared up in front of him, the first outpost of the grim foothills which were his goal. He halted a moment at its foot, staring upward where it rose blackly limned against the dying sun. He could have sworn that he caught the hint of a movement at the top, as he stared, hand shielding his eyes, but the fading glare dazzled him and he could not be sure. Was it a man who darted to cover? A man, or —?

  He shrugged his shoulders and fell to examining the rough trail which led up and over the brow of the crag. At first glance it seemed that only a mountain goat could scale it, but closer investigation showed numbers of fingerholds drilled into the solid rock. It would be a task to try his powers to the utmost but he had not come a thousand miles to turn back now.

  He dropped the large pouch he wore at his shoulder, and laid down the clumsy musket, retaining only his long rapier, dagger, and one of his pistols. These he strapped behind him, and without a backward glance over the darkening trail he had come, he started the long ascent. He was a tall man, long-armed and iron-muscled, yet again and again he was forced to halt in his upward climb and rest for a moment, clinging like an ant to the precipitous face of the cliff. Night fell swiftly and the crag above him was a shadowy blur in which he was forced to feel with his fingers, blindly, for the holes which served him as precarious ladder. Below him, the night noises of the tropical jungle broke forth, yet it appeared to him that even these sounds were subdued and hushed as though the great black hills looming above threw a spell of silence and fear even over the jungle creatures.

  On up he struggled, and now to make his way harder, the cliff bulged outward near its summit and the strain on nerve and muscle became heartbreaking. Time and again a hold slipped and he escaped falling by a hair’s breadth. But every fiber in his lean hard body was perfectly coordinated, and his fingers were like steel talons with the grip of a vise. His progress grew slower and slower but on he went until at last he saw the cliff’s brow splitting the stars a scant twenty feet above him.

  And even as he looked, a vague bulk heaved into view, toppled on the edge and hurtled down toward him with a great rush of air about it. Flesh crawling, he flattened himself against the cliff’s face and felt a heavy blow against his shoulder, only a glancing blow, but even so it nearly tore him from his hold, and as he fought desperately to right himself, he heard a reverberating crash among the rocks far below. Cold sweat beading his brow, he looked up. Who — or what — had shoved that boulder over the cliff edge? He was brave, as the bones on many a battlefield could testify, but the thought of dying like a sheep, helpless and with no chance of resistance, turned his blood cold.

  Then a wave of fury supplanted his fear and he renewed his climb with reckless speed. The expected second boulder did not come, however, and no living thing met his sight as he clambered up over the edge and leaped erect, sword flashing from its scabbard.

  He stood upon a sort of plateau which debouched into a very broken hilly country some half-mile to the west. The crag he had just mounted jutted out from the rest of the heights like a sullen promontory, looming above the sea of waving foliage below, now dark and mysterious in the tropic night.

  Silence ruled here in absolute sovereignty. No breeze stirred the somber depths below, and no footfall rustled amid the stunted bushes which cloaked the plateau, yet that boulder which had almost hurled the climber to his death had not fallen by chance. What beings moved among these grim hills? The tropical darkness fell about the lone wanderer like a heavy veil through which the yellow stars blinked evilly. The steams of the rotting jungle vegetation floated up to him as tangible as a thick fog, and making a wry face he strode away from the cliff, heading boldly across the plateau, sword in one hand and pistol in the other.

  There was an uncomfortable feeling of being watched in the very air. The silence remained unbroken save for the soft swishing that marked the stranger’s catlike tread through the tall upland grass, yet the man sensed that living things glided before and behind him and on each side. Whether man or beast trailed him he knew not, nor did he care overmuch, for he was prepared to fight human or devil who barred his way. Occasionally he halted and glanced challengingly about him, but nothing met his eye except the shrubs which crouched like short dark ghosts about his trail, blended and blurred in the thick hot darkness through which the very stars seemed to struggle, redly.

  At last he came to the place where the plateau broke into the higher slopes and there he saw a clump of trees blocked out solidly in the lesser shadows. He approached warily, then halted as his gaze, growing somewhat accustomed to the darkness, made out a vague form among the somber trunks which was not a part of them. He hesitated
. The figure neither advanced nor fled. A dim form of silent menace, it lurked as if in wait. A brooding horror hung over that still cluster of trees.

  The stranger advanced warily, blade extended. Closer. Straining his eyes for some hint of threatening motion. He decided that the figure was human but he was puzzled at its lack of movement. Then the reason became apparent — it was the corpse of a black man that stood among those trees, held erect by spears through his body, nailing him to the boles. One arm was extended in front of him, held in place along a great branch by a dagger through the wrist, the index finger straight as if the corpse pointed stiffly — back along the way the stranger had come.