The Dirigibles of Death

The Dirigibles of Death

by A. Hyatt Verrill

Copyright © 1930 by A. Hyatt Verrill

This edition published in 2012 by eStar Books, LLC.

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ISBN 9781612105871

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by A. Hyatt Verrill

I was living in England, at Ripley, when the first of the mysterious things arrived. I am an early riser and fond of taking a stroll along the lanes and across the fields at dawn, and on that particular morning—an epochal and terrible date in the world's history—I rose and with stick in hand prepared to start on my usual morning walk. As I opened my front door and glanced down the village street I actually gasped with astonishment. In the dim gray light an immense, dark-colored mass loomed through the soft morning mist above the roof of the Antelope public house on the opposite side of the road a few rods down the street. I was still gazing at the thing, wondering what on earth it could be, when old Tim Newbald appeared on the porch of his little cottage. Evidently he, too, saw the thing, for he uttered a surprised ejaculation, and adjusting his glasses, stared towards the Antelope.

"What be the drasted thing?" he demanded, without taking his eyes from the strange object.

Sudden realization came to me. "An airship!" I shouted to him. "A dirigible of some sort. Must have been forced down. Maybe persons injured or killed."

As I spoke I dashed to the street and ran towards the Antelope, my mind filled with visions of dead and injured persons in the gondola of the strange airship.

Old Tim came clumping at my heels, and as I passed Gilmore's house he too popped from the door and, instantly catching sight of the stranded balloon, came racing along with me. Whether it was the sounds of our running feet, whether we unconsciously shouted as we ran, or whether it was some inexplicable form of telepathy or intuition, I cannot say, but regardless of the early hour and the fact that ordinarily few persons are astir in the village before seven, everyone seemed to be up, everyone appeared to have seen the stranded dirigible. By the time I reached the Antelope I was leading a group of a dozen excited and curious people. The contraption was resting in an open pasture back of the inn, its rounded, slightly-swaying black mass rising perhaps twenty feet above the ridge of the inn. Apparently no one in the Antelope had noticed the strange arrival in the inn's backyard. Evidently old man Thorpe and the staff were still sleeping, for the windows were tightly shuttered, the doors closed and no sign of life showed about the premises. The gate in the inn wall was also closed and latched and some delay was caused by trying to open it. By this time a considerable crowd had gathered, and I was conscious of wondering how the inmates of the Antelope could sleep through the hubbub we were making. Then Bob Moore, the village constable, arrived on his bike and took official charge. I noticed, as I finally forced the gate and hurried to the rear of the inn, that someone was pounding lustily at the front door of the Antelope. Reaching the inn-yard, I had a clear view of the airship.

Although I am not at all familiar with the niceties of details of such contrivances, I realized at once that it was very different from anything of the sort I had ever before seen. The balloon or bag was perhaps 800 feet in length by forty feet in diameter, and appeared to be made of some metal. Below it, and forming an integral part of it, was a boat-shaped body or car that rested, slightly canted by the remains of a hay-rick under one side, at a sharp angle on the ground. Close at my elbow was the bobby, while the rest of the crowd swarmed into the inn-yard from all sides.

"Rum lookin' Zep Hi s'y," commented the representative of the law as we hurried forward towards the airship now but a few yards distant. "Queer, too ‘ow the blinkin’ thing got here. Wasn't 'ere when Hi parsed at three, Hi'll swear. Think'e, Doc, there'll be bodies 'urt into it?"

"Like as not," I replied. "Don't see anyone about. If they're not injured or dead they'd have let us know they were here long ago."

We had now reached the airship, and to my amazement I saw that the door of the body or car was wide open. Moore and I stepped close and peered inside, expecting to see dead or injured men, although looking back upon it I cannot understand why we should have thought the crew of the ship should be harmed when there was no sign of injury or even of an abrupt descent about the car. But we were so confident that we would find wounded occupants or bodies, that when we found it absolutely empty, we were completely flabbergasted.

I say the car was empty, but I must qualify that statement slightly. It was empty of human beings, of furnishings, but the floor was covered with a thick layer of filthy straw or hay.

"Lor' love me, hif it aint a blinkin' fly in' cow-shed!" exclaimed the constable.

Then, removing his helmet and scratching his red head reflectively: "No sign hof them as came hin hit," he observed. "Gone off, they 'ave, an' left the bloomin' thing 'ere. Now what the blinkin' blazes ham Hi to do with hit, sir?

"You might put it in the village pound," I suggested with a grin. "But, seriously, I imagine whoever arrived with it are within the Antelope. Having landed in an inn's yard the most natural thing would be for them to patronize the said inn. I suppose—"

My words were interrupted by a shout and someone yelling for the constable, and I turned to see a man standing in the rear entrance to the inn, his face pale, his eyes wide and evidently greatly frightened.

"Hi, constable!" he yelled again. "Ye're wanted. The's been murder done!"

Murder! At the dread word we dashed to the inn. "What, who's murdered?" demanded Moore as we sprang up the steps.

"Everyone!" gasped the wild-eyed fellow at the door, who, I now saw, was Chris Stevens from over Clacton way. "Jim Thorne, Jerry, Ellen the bar-maid, and, and—"

We waited to hear no more. Into the hallway we rushed and came to an abrupt and sudden halt as we almost tripped over the body of Jerry the porter and man-of-all-work lying on the floor. I stopped and felt his pulse. He was dead, cold, and the pool of blood that surrounded his head had coagulated and hardened. Evidently he had been dead for several hours. Proceeding more cautiously, we passed through the bar-parlor to the room where old Jim Thorne had always slept. One glance was enough. Thorne's body lay sprawled on the floor, the face blood-covered, mutilated beyond recognition. The room was a mess. The bed-clothes were scattered about, chairs were upset, and it was obvious that a severe struggle had taken place. We hurried upstairs to find the body of Ellen, the bar-maid, a middle-aged woman, lying dead in the upper hallway, and gray-haired old Martha, the cook, stretched lifeless just within the door to her room.

"Hell's bells!" ejaculated Moore in a half-whisper. "Hit's like a blinkin' slaughter 'ouse so 'tis. Four o' 'em dead an' a bloomin' noise they must 'a made an' not a body hin the village havin' 'eard 'em. What make 'e on it. Doc?"

I shook my head. "Wholesale murder," I replied as I examined Martha's body. "And no sign of robbery or any motive. And the wounds! I've never seen any just like them. Look at poor old Martha's face, and at her chest—covered with cuts and slashes—cut to ribbons— as if she'd been hacked with a buzz-saw. And old Jim's face, did you notice it?"

"Did Hi!” exclaimed the constable. "Well, Hi should s'y! Looked 'e'd been chawed, 'e did; garstly, Hi call hit."

"Ellen, too," I remarked. "Her right hand and arm were torn to shreds. And that awful hole in Jerry's head! Whoever committed these crimes was a fiend— a giant in strength and used some strange weapon— perhaps a rake or a pitchfork. I should say, offhand, it was the work of a maniac—"

Moore seized my arm and I could feel him trembling. "Lor' love me. Doc, think' 'e hit might 'a been the bodies out of yon Zep?"

"Scarcely," I replied. "But it's damnably mysterious. And it surely is a remarkable coincidence that the airship should have descended in the inn-yard at or about the same time the murders were committed. And I'd like to know what became of the occupants of the dirigible. Anyhow, Moore, you'd best send to London for a good detective—this is a Scotland Yard job—and telephone to Guildford for the coroner. In the meantime—"

A shout from downstairs cut my sentence in two and, not knowing what next to expect, we dashed down. Jared Dunne, the postman, was standing at the doorway surrounded by an eager, questioning, excited throng.

"T-t-there's a m-m-murder d-daown tha r-r-road," stuttered Jared. "I w-was a-c-comin’ up through C-C-Cobham an' I s-seen a G-Gypsy c-c-caravan b-beside the road. An' t-the G-Gypsies all l-lyin' raon'd d-d-deader'n N-N-Nelson."

"My God!" gasped poor Moore. "Haint four bodies murdered 'ere to the blinkin' Antelope henough? An’ you to come with this 'ere story o' a crew o’ bloomin’ Gypsy-folk murdered hover to Cobham side!"

By this time word of the four murders in the inn and the murdered Gypsies had spread through the village and the place was in an uproar. Closing the inn door and cautioning the people to keep clear, Moore shooed them from the premises, deputized four men to keep guard over the airship, the inn-yard and the pasture, and having telephoned to Guildford for the coroner and to Scotland Yard for an inspector, he locked his cubbyhole of a police station, climbed into my car and we raced off towards Cobham.

We had no difficulty in finding the Gypsy caravan. It stood a few yards from the road at the edge of a spinney of birch and larch trees; a gaudy, high-wheeled red and gilt affair and even from the road we could see the huddled bundles of clothes that marked the dead owners of the van.

But as we drew closer and had a nearer view of the bodies, even Moore—who was the most unemotional of men—drew back with an exclamation of horror. And though, in my profession, I am constantly facing grew-some sights, and in the World War became callous of death in its most horrible forms, I could not repress a shudder and a sensation of nausea as I looked at the dead Gypsies sprawled upon the dew-sprinkled grass. There were five of them—two men, a woman and two children, and with the exception of one of the men, all had been mutilated in the most horrible and revolting manner. The woman's head had been torn—actually torn, not cut—from her body, and one of her arms had been stripped of flesh, leaving only shreds adhering to the bloody bones.

The man beside her was almost as awful. His eyes had been gouged from their sockets, his lips and nose torn off, and in his bared chest was a ragged opening through which his heart had been removed. The bodies of the two children were scarcely recognizable. They appeared as if gnawed and devoured by famished wolves. But terrible as were these revolting sights, I scarcely noticed them at the time, for my eyes were staring incredulously at another body, the body of a creature—no, I cannot call it a man—that lay with a long bladed Gypsy knife sticking in its breast. Never would I have believed it possible that anything in human form could have been so repulsively loathsome, so gruesomely horrible. Instantly I realized that this dead thing was the murderer, that by a lucky stroke the last Gypsy to die had plunged his knife in the fiend's heart before he, too, expired. Words cannot adequately describe the horrible creature lying there with ghastly face upturned to the sky. He, it, the thing, was of gigantic size; he must have stood well over six feet and weighed fully eighteen stone or two hundred and fifty two pounds; with enormously long gorilla-like arms ending in knotted claw-like fingers whose nails—reeking with blood and human flesh, were veritable talons. His face was that of a Caliban, a distorted, flat, blob of pasty white where not smeared with blood, with loose, flabby, pendulous lips that exposed protruding yellow teeth. He had no nose; the forehead was almost nonexistent, and the tousled, straw-colored hair grew from the eyebrows ever the misshapen skull that was that of an idiot. But even these repulsive physical characters paled beside the inexpressibly loathsome and revolting appearance of his body, that was almost nude. Everywhere it was covered with festering open ulcers, that I instantly recognized as those of the terrible tropical disease known as the Yaws.

Even in my horror, my amazement at the thing, I felt positive that it must have arrived in the mysterious airship, that it or its fellows, for I had a premonition that there was more than one of the murderers, had rushed upon the inmates of the Antelope and had ruthlessly murdered them, and that with the others still at large no one was safe. Yet somehow it seemed so unreal, so incredible that such things could be taking place in this quiet, peaceful bit of suburban England, that I could not avoid feeling that I was passing through some horrible nightmare. I turned to Moore. "Nothing we can do here," I said. "We'll have to leave the bodies as they are until the coroner arrives. Too bad you didn't bring someone along to keep watch here until then. As it is, you'll have to remain yourself, I suppose."