The Best of Robert E. Howard, Volume 1 (22 page)

The fantastic priest bounded high in the air, flinging away the red-dabbled switches, and the worshippers, howling and foaming at the mouths, turned on each other with tooth and nail, rending one another’s garments and flesh in a blind passion of bestiality. The priest swept up the infant with a long arm, and shouting again that Name, whirled the wailing babe high in the air and dashed its brains out against the monolith, leaving a ghastly stain on the black surface. Cold with horror I saw him rip the tiny body open with his bare brutish fingers and fling handfuls of blood on the shaft, then toss the red and torn shape into the brazier, extinguishing flame and smoke in a crimson rain, while the maddened brutes behind him howled over and over that Name. Then suddenly they all fell prostrate, writhing like snakes, while the priest flung wide his gory hands as in triumph. I opened my mouth to scream my horror and loathing, but only a dry rattle sounded; a huge monstrous toad-like
thing
squatted on the top of the monolith!

I saw its bloated, repulsive and unstable outline against the moonlight, and set in what would have been the face of a natural creature, its huge, blinking eyes which reflected all the lust, abysmal greed, obscene cruelty and monstrous evil that has stalked the sons of men since their ancestors mowed blind and hairless in the tree-tops. In those grisly eyes were mirrored all the unholy things and vile secrets that sleep in the cities under the sea, and that skulk from the light of day in the blackness of primordial caverns. And so that ghastly thing that the unhallowed ritual of cruelty and sadism and blood had evoked from the silence of the hills, leered and blinked down on its bestial worshippers, who groveled in abhorrent abasement before it.

Now the beast-masked priest lifted the bound and weakly writhing girl in his brutish hands and held her up toward that horror on the monolith. And as that monstrosity sucked in its breath, lustfully and slobberingly, something snapped in my brain and I fell into a merciful faint.

I opened my eyes on a still white dawn. All the events of the night rushed back on me and I sprang up, then stared about me in amazement. The monolith brooded gaunt and silent above the sward which waved, green and untrampled, in the morning breeze. A few quick strides took me across the glade; here had the dancers leaped and bounded until the ground should have been trampled bare, and here had the votaress wriggled her painful way to the Stone, streaming blood on the earth. But no drop of crimson showed on the uncrushed sward. I looked, shudderingly, at the side of the monolith against which the bestial priest had brained the stolen baby–but no dark stain nor grisly clot showed there.

A dream! It had been a wild nightmare–or else–I shrugged my shoulders. What vivid clarity for a dream!

I returned quietly to the village and entered the inn without being seen. And there I sat meditating over the strange events of the night. More and more was I prone to discard the dream-theory. That what I had seen was illusion and without material substance, was evident. But I believed that I had looked on the mirrored shadow of a deed perpetrated in ghastly actuality in bygone days. But how was I to know? What proof to show that my vision had been a gathering of foul specters rather than a mere nightmare originating in my own brain?

As if for answer a name flashed into my mind–Selim Bahadur! According to legend this man, who had been a soldier as well as a scribe, had commanded that part of Suleiman’s army which had devastated Stregoicavar; it seemed logical enough; and if so, he had gone straight from the blotted-out countryside to the bloody field of Schomvaal, and his doom. I sprang up with a sudden shout–that manuscript which was taken from the Turk’s body, and which Count Boris shuddered over–might it not contain some narration of what the conquering Turks found in Stregoicavar? What else could have shaken the iron nerves of the Polish adventurer? And since the bones of the Count had never been recovered, what more certain than that the lacquered case, with its mysterious contents, still lay hidden beneath the ruins that covered Boris Vladinoff? I began packing my bag with fierce haste.

Three days later found me ensconced in a little village a few miles from the old battlefield, and when the moon rose I was working with savage intensity on the great pile of crumbling stone that crowned the hill. It was back-breaking toil–looking back now I cannot see how I accomplished it, though I labored without a pause from moonrise to dawn. Just as the sun was coming up I tore aside the last tangle of stones and looked on all that was mortal of Count Boris Vladinoff–only a few pitiful fragments of crumbling bone–and among them, crushed out of all original shape, lay a case whose lacquered surface had kept it from complete decay through the centuries.

I seized it with frenzied eagerness, and piling back some of the stones on the bones I hurried away; for I did not care to be discovered by the suspicious peasants in an act of apparent desecration.

Back in my tavern chamber I opened the case and found the parchment comparatively intact; and there was something else in the case–a small squat object wrapped in silk. I was wild to plumb the secrets of those yellowed pages, but weariness forbade me. Since leaving Stregoicavar I had hardly slept at all, and the terrific exertions of the previous night combined to overcome me. In spite of myself I was forced to stretch myself on my bed, nor did I awake until sundown.

I snatched a hasty supper, and then in the light of a flickering candle, I set myself to read the neat Turkish characters that covered the parchment. It was difficult work, for I am not deeply versed in the language and the archaic style of the narrative baffled me. But as I toiled through it a word or a phrase here and there leaped at me and a dimly growing horror shook me in its grip. I bent my energies fiercely to the task, and as the tale grew clearer and took more tangible form my blood chilled in my veins, my hair stood up and my tongue clove to my mouth. All external things partook of the grisly madness of that infernal manuscript until the night sounds of insects and creatures in the woods took the form of ghastly murmurings and stealthy treadings of ghoulish horrors and the sighing of the night wind changed to tittering obscene gloating of evil over the souls of men.

At last when gray dawn was stealing through the latticed window, I laid down the manuscript and took up and unwrapped the thing in the bit of silk. Staring at it with haggard eyes I knew the truth of the matter was clinched, even had it been possible to doubt the veracity of that terrible manuscript.

And I replaced both obscene things in the case, nor did I rest or sleep or eat until that case containing them had been weighted with stones and flung into the deepest current of the Danube which, God grant, carried them back into the Hell from which they came.

It was no dream I dreamed on Midsummer Midnight in the hills above Stregoicavar. Well for Justin Geoffrey that he tarried there only in the sunlight and went his way, for had he gazed upon that ghastly conclave, his mad brain would have snapped before it did. How my own reason held, I do not know.

No–it was no dream–I gazed upon a foul rout of votaries long dead, come up from Hell to worship as of old; ghosts that bowed before a ghost. For Hell has long claimed their hideous god. Long, long he dwelt among the hills, a brain-shattering vestige of an outworn age, but no longer his obscene talons clutch for the souls of living men, and his kingdom is a dead kingdom, peopled only by the ghosts of those who served him in his lifetime and theirs.

By what foul alchemy or godless sorcery the Gates of Hell are opened on that one eery night I do not know, but mine own eyes have seen. And I know I looked on no living thing that night, for the manuscript written in the careful hand of Selim Bahadur narrated at length what he and his raiders found in the valley of Stregoicavar; and I read, set down in detail, the blasphemous obscenities that torture wrung from the lips of screaming worshippers; and I read, too, of the lost, grim black cavern high in the hills where the horrified Turks hemmed a monstrous, bloated, wallowing toad-like being and slew it with flame and ancient steel blessed in old times by Muhammad, and with incantations that were old when Arabia was young. And even staunch old Selim’s hand shook as he recorded the cataclysmic, earth-shaking death-howls of the monstrosity, which died not alone; for a half-score of his slayers perished with him, in ways that Selim would not or could not describe.

And that squat idol carved of gold and wrapped in silk was an image of
himself
, and Selim tore it from the golden chain that looped the neck of the slain high priest of the mask.

Well that the Turks swept that foul valley with torch and cleanly steel! Such sights as those brooding mountains have looked on belong to the darkness and abysses of lost eons. No–it is not fear of the toad-thing that makes me shudder in the night. He is made fast in Hell with his nauseous horde, freed only for an hour on the most weird night of the year, as I have seen. And of his worshippers, none remains.

But it is the realization that such things once crouched beast-like above the souls of men which brings cold sweat to my brow; and I fear to peer again into the leaves of Von Junzt’s abomination. For now I understand his repeated phrase of
keys
!–aye! Keys to Outer Doors–links with an abhorrent past and–who knows?–of abhorrent spheres of the
present
. And I understand why the cliffs look like battlements in the moonlight and why the tavern-keeper’s nightmare-haunted nephew saw in his dream, the Black Stone like a spire on a cyclopean black castle. If men ever excavate among those mountains they may find incredible things below those masking slopes. For the cave wherein the Turks trapped the–
thing
–was not truly a cavern, and I shudder to contemplate the gigantic gulf of eons which must stretch between this age and the time when the earth shook herself and reared up, like a wave, those blue mountains that, rising, enveloped unthinkable things. May no man ever seek to uproot that ghastly spire men call the Black Stone!

A Key! Aye, it is a Key, symbol of a forgotten horror. That horror has faded into the limbo from which it crawled, loathsomely, in the black dawn of the earth. But what of the other fiendish possibilities hinted at by Von Junzt–what of the monstrous hand which strangled out his life? Since reading what Selim Bahadur wrote, I can no longer doubt anything in the Black Book. Man was not always master of the earth–
and is he now?

And the thought recurs to me–if such a monstrous entity as the Master of the Monolith somehow survived its own unspeakably distant epoch so long–
what nameless shapes may even now lurk in the dark places of the world?

The Song of a Mad Minstrel

I am the thorn in the foot, I am the blur in the sight;

I am the worm at the root, I am the thief in the night.

I am the rat in the wall, the leper that leers at the gate;

I am the ghost in the hall, herald of horror and hate.

I am the rust on the corn, I am the smut on the wheat,

Laughing man’s labor to scorn, weaving a web for his feet.

I am canker and mildew and blight, danger and death and decay;

The rot of the rain by night, the blast of the sun by day.

I warp and wither with drouth, I work in the swamp’s foul yeast;

I bring the black plague from the south and the leprosy in from the east.

I rend from the hemlock boughs wine steeped in the petals of dooms;

Where the fat black serpents drowse I gather the Upas blooms.

I have plumbed the northern ice for a spell like frozen lead;

In lost gray fields of rice, I have learned from Mongol dead.

Where a bleak black mountain stands I have looted grisly caves;

I have digged in the desert sands to plunder terrible graves.

Never the sun goes forth, never the moon glows red,

But out of the south or the north, I come with the slavering dead.

I come with hideous spells, black chants and ghastly tunes;

I have looted the hidden hells and plundered the lost black moons.

There was never a king or priest to cheer me by word or look,

There was never a man or beast in the blood-black ways I took.

There were crimson gulfs unplumbed, there were black wings over a sea;

There were pits where mad things drummed, and foaming blasphemy.

There were vast ungodly tombs where slimy monsters dreamed;

There were clouds like blood-drenched plumes where unborn
demons screamed.

There were ages dead to Time, and lands lost out of Space;

There were adders in the slime, and a dim unholy Face.

Oh, the heart in my breast turned stone, and the brain froze in my skull–

But I won through, I alone, and poured my chalice full

Of horrors and dooms and spells, black buds and bitter roots–

From the hells beneath the hells, I bring you my deathly fruits.

The Fightin’est Pair

Me and my white bulldog Mike was peaceably taking our beer in a joint on the waterfront when Porkey Straus come piling in, plumb puffing with excitement.

“Hey, Steve!” he yelped. “What you think? Joe Ritchie’s in port with Terror.”

“Well?” I said.

“Well, gee whiz,” he said, “you mean to set there and let on like you don’t know nothin’ about Terror, Ritchie’s fightin’ brindle bull? Why, he’s the pit champeen of the Asiatics. He’s killed more fightin’ dogs than–”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said impatiently. “I know all about him. I been listenin’ to what a bear-cat he is for the last year, in every Asiatic port I’ve touched.”

“Well,” said Porkey, “I’m afraid we ain’t goin’ to git to see him perform.”

“Why not?” asked Johnnie Blinn, a shifty-eyed bar-keep.

“Well,” said Porkey, “they ain’t a dog in Singapore to match ag’in’ him. Fritz Steinmann, which owns the pit and runs the dog fights, has scoured the port and they just ain’t no canine which their owners’ll risk ag’in’ Terror. Just my luck. The chance of a lifetime to see the fightin’est dog of ’em all perform. And they’s no first-class mutt to toss in with him. Say, Steve, why don't you let Mike fight him?”

“Not a chance,” I growled. “Mike gets plenty of scrappin’ on the streets. Besides, I’ll tell you straight, I think dog fightin’ for money is a dirty low-down game. Take a couple of fine, upstandin’ dogs, full of ginger and fightin’ heart, and throw ’em in a concrete pit to tear each other’s throats out, just so a bunch of four-flushin’ tin-horns like you, which couldn’t take a punch or give one either, can make a few lousy dollars bettin’ on ’em.”

“But they likes to fight,” argued Porkey. “It’s their nature.”

“It’s the nature of any red-blooded critter to fight. Man or dog,” I said. “Let ’em fight on the streets, for bones or for fun, or just to see which is the best dog. But pit-fightin’ to the death is just too dirty for me to fool with, and I ain’t goin’ to get Mike into no such mess.”

“Aw, let him alone, Porkey,” sneered Johnnie Blinn nastily. “He’s too chicken-hearted to mix in them rough games. Ain’t you, Sailor?”

“Belay that,” I roared. “You keep a civil tongue in your head, you wharfside rat. I never did like you nohow, and one more crack like that gets you this.” I brandished my huge fist at him and he turned pale and started scrubbing the bar like he was trying for a record.

“I wantcha to know that Mike can lick this Terror mutt,” I said, glaring at Porkey. “I’m fed up hearin’ fellers braggin’ on that brindle murderer. Mike can lick him. He can lick any dog in this lousy port, just like I can lick any man here. If Terror meets Mike on the street and gets fresh, he’ll get his belly-full. But Mike ain’t goin’ to get mixed up in no dirty racket like Fritz Steinmann runs and you can lay to that.” I made the last statement in a voice like a irritated bull, and smashed my fist down on the table so hard I splintered the wood, and made the decanters bounce on the bar.

“Sure, sure, Steve,” soothed Porkey, pouring hisself a drink with a shaky hand. “No offense. No offense. Well, I gotta be goin’.”

“So long,” I growled, and Porkey cruised off.

Up strolled a man which had been standing by the bar. I knowed him–Philip D’Arcy, a man whose name is well known in all parts of the world. He was a tall, slim, athletic fellow, well dressed, with cold gray eyes and a steel-trap jaw. He was one of them gentleman adventurers, as they call ’em, and he’d did everything from running a revolution in South America and flying a war plane in a Balkan brawl, to exploring in the Congo. He was deadly with a six-gun, and as dangerous as a rattler when somebody crossed him.

“That’s a fine dog you have, Costigan,” he said. “Clean white. Not a speck of any other color about him. That means good luck for his owner.”

I knowed that D’Arcy had some pet superstitions of his own, like lots of men which live by their hands and wits like him.

“Well,” I said, “anyway, he’s about the fightin’est dog you ever seen.”

“I can tell that,” he said, stooping and eying Mike close. “Powerful jaws–not too undershot–good teeth–broad between the eyes–deep chest–legs that brace like iron. Costigan, I’ll give you a hundred dollars for him, just as he stands.”

“You mean you want me to sell you Mike?” I asked kinda incredulous.

“Sure. Why not?”

“Why not!” I repeated indignantly. “Well, gee whiz, why not ask a man to sell his brother for a hundred dollars? Mike wouldn’t stand for it. Anyway, I wouldn’t do it.”

“I need him,” persisted D’Arcy. “A white dog with a dark man–it means luck. White dogs have always been lucky for me. And my luck’s been running against me lately. I’ll give you a hundred and fifty.”

“D’Arcy,” I said, “you couldst stand there and offer me money all day long and raise the ante every hand, but it wouldn’t be no good. Mike ain’t for sale. Him and me has knocked around the world together too long. They ain’t no use talkin’.”

His eyes flashed for a second. He didn’t like to be crossed in any way. Then he shrugged his shoulders.

“All right. We’ll forget it. I don’t blame you for thinking a lot of him. Let’s have a drink.”

So we did and he left.

I went and got me a shave, because I was matched to fight some tramp at Ace Larnigan’s Arena and I wanted to be in shape for the brawl. Well, afterwards I was walking down along the docks when I heard somebody go: “Hssst!”

I looked around and saw a yellow hand beckon me from behind a stack of crates. I sauntered over, wondering what it was all about, and there was a Chinese boy hiding there. He put his finger to his lips. Then quick he handed me a folded piece of paper, and beat it, before I couldst ask him anything.

I opened the paper and it was a note in a woman’s handwriting which read: “Dear Steve, I have admired you for a long time at a distance, but have been too timid to make myself known to you. Would it be too much to ask you to give me an opportunity to tell you my emotions by word of mouth? If you care at all, I will meet you by the old Manchu House on the Tungen Road, just after dark. An affectionate admirer. P.S. Please, oh please be there! You have stole my heart away!”

“Mike,” I said pensively, “ain’t it plumb peculiar the strange power I got over wimmen, even them I ain’t never seen? Here is a girl I don’t even know the name of, even, and she has been eatin’ her poor little heart out in solitude because of me. Well–” I hove a gentle sigh–“it’s a fatal gift, I’m afeared.”

Mike yawned. Sometimes it looks like he ain’t got no romance at all about him. I went back to the barber shop and had the barber to put some ile on my hair and douse me with perfume. I always like to look genteel when I meet a feminine admirer.

Then, as the evening was waxing away, as the poets say, I set forth for the narrow winding back street just off the waterfront proper. The natives call it the Tungen Road, for no particular reason as I can see. The lamps there is few and far between and generally dirty and dim. The street’s lined on both sides by lousy looking native shops and hovels. You’ll come to stretches which looks clean deserted and falling to ruins.

Well, me and Mike was passing through just such a district when I heard sounds of some kind of a fracas in a dark alley-way we was passing. Feet scruffed. They was the sound of a blow and a voice yelled in English: “Halp! Halp! These Chinese is killin’ me!”

“Hold everything,” I roared, jerking up my sleeves and plunging for the alley, with Mike at my heels. “Steve Costigan is on the job.”

It was as dark as a stack of black cats in that alley. Plunging blind, I bumped into somebody and sunk a fist to the wrist in him. He gasped and fell away. I heard Mike roar suddenly and somebody howled bloody murder. Then wham! A blackjack or something like it smashed on my skull and I went to my knees.

“That’s done yer, yer blawsted Yank,” said a nasty voice in the dark.

“You’re a liar,” I gasped, coming up blind and groggy but hitting out wild and ferocious. One of my blind licks musta connected because I heard somebody cuss bitterly. And then wham, again come that blackjack on my dome. What little light they was, was behind me, and whoever it was slugging me, couldst see me better’n I could see him. That last smash put me down for the count, and he musta hit me again as I fell.

I couldn’t of been out but a few minutes. I come to myself lying in the darkness and filth of the alley and I had a most splitting headache and dried blood was clotted on a cut in my scalp. I groped around and found a match in my pocket and struck it.

The alley was empty. The ground was all tore up and they was some blood scattered around, but neither the thugs nor Mike was nowhere to be seen. I run down the alley, but it ended in a blank stone wall. So I come back onto the Tungen Road and looked up and down but seen nobody. I went mad.

“Philip D’Arcy!” I yelled all of a sudden. “He done it. He stole Mike. He writ me that note. Unknown admirer, my eye. I been played for a sucker again. He thinks Mike’ll bring him luck. I’ll bring him luck, the double-crossin’ son-of-a-seacook. I’ll sock him so hard he’ll bite hisself in the ankle. I’ll bust him into so many pieces he’ll go through a sieve–”

With these meditations, I was running down the street at full speed, and when I busted into a crowded thoroughfare, folks turned and looked at me in amazement. But I didn’t pay no heed. I was steering my course for the European Club, a kind of ritzy place where D’Arcy generally hung out. I was still going at top-speed when I run up the broad stone steps and was stopped by a pompous looking doorman which sniffed scornfully at my appearance, with my clothes torn and dirty from laying in the alley, and my hair all touseled and dried blood on my hair and face.

“Lemme by,” I gritted, “I gotta see a mutt.”

“Gorblime,” said the doorman. “You cawn’t go in there. This is a very exclusive club, don’t you know. Only gentlemen are allowed here. Cawn’t have a blawsted gorilla like you bursting in on the gentlemen. My word! Get along now before I call the police.”

There wasn’t time to argue.

With a howl of irritation I grabbed him by the neck and heaved him into a nearby goldfish pond. Leaving him floundering and howling, I kicked the door open and rushed in. I dashed through a wide hallway and found myself in a wide room with big French winders. That seemed to be the main club room, because it was very scrumptiously furnished and had all kinds of animal heads on the walls, alongside of crossed swords and rifles in racks.

They was a number of Americans and Europeans setting around drinking whiskey-and-sodas, and playing cards. I seen Philip D’Arcy setting amongst a bunch of his club-members, evidently spinning yarns about his adventures. And I seen red.

“D’Arcy!” I yelled, striding toward him regardless of the card tables I upset. “Where’s my dog?”

Philip D’Arcy sprang up with a kind of gasp and all the club men jumped up too, looked amazed.

“My word!” said a Englishman in a army officer’s uniform. “Who let this boundah in? Come, come, my man, you’ll have to get out of this.”

“You keep your nose clear of this or I’ll bend it clean outa shape,” I howled, shaking my right mauler under the aforesaid nose. “This ain’t none of your business. D’Arcy, what you done with my dog?”

“You’re drunk, Costigan,” he snapped. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That’s a lie,” I screamed, crazy with rage. “You tried to buy Mike and then you had me slugged and him stole. I’m on to you, D’Arcy. You think because you’re a big shot and I’m just a common sailorman, you can take what you want. But you ain’t gettin’ away with it. You got Mike and you’re goin’ to give him back or I’ll tear your guts out. Where is he? Tell me before I choke it outa you.”

“Costigan, you’re mad,” snarled D’Arcy, kind of white. “Do you know whom you’re threatening? I’ve killed men for less than that.”

“You stole my dog!” I howled, so wild I hardly knowed what I was doing.

“You’re a liar,” he rasped. Blind mad, I roared and crashed my right to his jaw before he could move. He went down like a slaughtered ox and laid still, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. I went for him to strangle him with my bare hands, but all the club men closed in between us.

“Grab him,” they yelled. “He’s killed D’Arcy. He’s drunk or crazy. Hold him until we can get the police.”

“Belay there,” I roared, backing away with both fists cocked. “Lemme see the man that’ll grab me. I’ll knock his brains down his throat. When that rat comes to, tell him I ain’t through with him, not by a dam’ sight. I’ll get him if it’s the last thing I do.”

And I stepped through one of them French winders and strode away cursing between my teeth. I walked for some time in a kind of red mist, forgetting all about the fight at Ace’s Arena, where I was already due. Then I got a idee. I was fully intending to get ahold of D’Arcy and choke the truth outa him, but they was no use trying that now. I’d catch him outside his club some time that night. Meanwhile, I thought of something else. I went into a saloon and got a big piece of white paper and a pencil, and with much labor, I printed out what I wanted to say. Then I went out and stuck it up on a wooden lamp-post where folks couldst read it. It said: