The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard (13 page)

“One! Two! Three! Four!” the referee’s arm rose and fell.

Gomez was up, unhurt, wild with fury. Roaring like a wild beast, he plunged in, brushed aside Ace’s hammering arms and crashed his right hand with the full weight of his mighty shoulder behind it, full into Ace’s midriff. Jessel went an ashy color–he swayed like a tall tree, and Gomez beat him to his knees with rights and lefts which sounded like the blows of caulking mallets.

“One! Two! Three! Four!–”

Ace was writhing on the canvas, striving to get his legs beneath him. The roar of the fans was a torrent of sound, an ocean of noise which drowned out all thought.

“Five! Six! Seven!–”

Ace was up! Gomez came charging across the stained canvas, gibbering his pagan fury. His blows beat upon the staggering challenger like a hail of sledges. A left–a right–another left which Ace had not strength to duck.

“One! Two! Three! Four! Five! Six! Seven! Eight!–”

Again Ace was up, weaving, staring blankly, helpless. A swinging left hurled him back into the ropes and rebounding from them he went to his knees–the gong!

As his handlers and I sprang into the ring Ace groped blindly for his corner and dropped limply upon the stool.

“Ace, he’s too much for you.”

A grin bent Jessel’s bloody lips and an indomitable spirit looked out of his bloodshot eyes.

“Misto John, please suh, don’t t’row in de sponge. Must Ah take it, Ah takes it standin’. Dat boy cain’t last at dis pace all night, suh.”

No, but neither could Ace Jessel, in spite of his remarkable vitality and his marvelous recuperative powers which sent him back up for the next round, with a show of renewed strength and freshness, at least.

The sixth and seventh were comparatively tame. Perhaps Gomez really was fatigued from the terrific pace he had been setting. At any rate, Ace managed to make it more or less of a sparring match at long range and the crowd was treated to an exhibition showing how long a man, out on his feet, can stand off and keep away from a slugger bent solely on his destruction. Even I marveled at the brand of boxing which Ace was showing, even though I knew that Gomez was fighting cautiously, for him. He had sampled the power of Ace’s right hand in that frenzied fifth round and perhaps he was wary of a trick.

For the first time in his life he had sprawled on the canvas. He knew he was winning, and I think he was content to rest a couple of rounds, take his time for a space and gather his energies for a final onslaught.

This began as the gong sounded for the eighth round. Gomez launched his usual sledge hammer attack, drove Ace about the ring and floored him in a neutral corner. His style of fighting was such that when he was determined on a foe’s destruction, skill, speed and science could not avert but only postpone the eventual outcome. Ace took the count of nine and rose, back-pedalling. But Gomez was after him; the champion missed twice with his left and then sank a right under the heart that turned Ace ashy. A left to the jaw made his knees buckle and he clinched desperately. On the break-away Ace sent a straight left to the face and right hook to the chin, but the blows lacked their old force and Gomez shook them off and sank his left wrist deep in Ace’s midsection. Ace again clinched but the champion shoved him away and drove him across the ring with savage hooks to the body. At the gong they were slugging along the ropes.

Ace reeled to the wrong corner, and when his handlers led him to his own, he sank down on the stool, his legs trembling and his great dusky chest heaving from his superhuman exertions. I glanced across at the champion who sat glowering at his foe. He too was showing signs of the fray, but he was much fresher than Ace. The referee walked over, looked at Jessel hesitantly and then spoke to me.

Through the mists which veiled his bruised brain, Ace realized the import of his words and struggled to rise, a kind of fear flaming in his eyes.

“Misto John, don’ let him stop it, suh! Don’ let him do it! Ah ain’t hu’t nuthin’ like dat ’ud hu’t me!”

The referee shrugged his shoulders and walked back to the center of the ring, and I turned to one of the trainers and bade him bring me the flat bundle I had brought with me into the stadium.

There was little use giving advice to Ace. He was too battered to understand–in his numbed brain there was room only for one thought–to fight and fight, and keep on fighting–the old primal instinct that is stronger than all things save death.

At the sound of the gong he reeled out to meet his doom with an indomitable courage that brought the crowd to its feet yelling. He struck, a wild aimless left, and the champion plunged in hitting with both hands until Ace went down. At “nine” he was up and back-pedalled instinctively until Gomez reached him with a long straight right and sent him down again. Again he took “nine” before he reeled up and now the crowd was silent. Not one voice was raised in an urge for the kill. This was butchery, primitive slaughter, and the courage of Ace Jessel took their breath as it gripped my heart.

Ace fell blindly into a clinch, and another and another, till the Mankiller, furious, shook him off and sank his right to the body. Ace’s ribs gave way like rotten wood, with a dry crack heard distinctly all over the stadium–a strangled cry went up from the crowd and Jessel gasped thickly and fell to his knees.

“–Seven! Eight!–” and the great black form was writhing on the canvas.

“–Nine!” and the miracle had happened and Ace was on his feet, swaying, jaw sagging, arms hanging limply.

Gomez glared at him, not in pity, but as if unable to understand how his foe could have risen again, then came plunging in to finish him. Ace was in dire straits. Blood blinded him and his feet slipped in great smears of it on the canvas–his blood. Both eyes were nearly closed, and when he breathed gustily through his smashed nose, a red haze surrounded him. Deep cuts gashed cheek and cheek bones and his left side was a mass of battered red flesh. He was going on fighting instinct alone now, and never again would any man doubt that Ace Jessel had a fighting heart.

Yet a fighting heart alone is not enough when the body that holds it is broken and battered and mists of unconsciousness veil the brain. Ace sank down before Gomez’s panting onslaught and this time the crowd knew that it was final.

When a man has taken the beating that Ace had taken, something more than body and heart must come into the game to carry him through. Something to inspire and stimulate the dazed brain, to fire it to heights of super-human achievement. I had planned to furnish this inspiration, if the worst came to the worst, in the only way which I knew would touch Ace.

Before leaving the training quarters, I had, unknown to Ace, removed the picture of Tom Molyneaux from its frame, and brought it to the stadium with me, carefully wrapped. I now took this, and as Ace’s eyes, instinctively and without his own volition, sought his corner, I held the portrait up, just outside the glare of the ring lights, so while illumined by them, it appeared illusive and dim. It may be thought that I acted wrongly and selfishly, to thus seek to bring to his feet for more punishment a man almost dead from the beating, but the outsider cannot fathom the souls of the children of the fight game, to whom winning is greater than life, and losing, worse than death.

All eyes were glued on the prostrate form in the center of the ring, on the wind-blown champion sagging against the ropes, on the arm of the referee, which rose and fell with the regularity of doom. I doubt if four men in the audience saw my action, but Ace Jessel saw. I caught the gleam that came into his bloodshot and dazed eyes. I saw him shake his head violently. I saw him begin sluggishly to gather his long legs under him. It seemed a long time; the drone of the referee rose as it neared its climax–then, by all the gods, Ace Jessel was up! The crowd went insane and screaming.

I saw his eyes blaze with a strange wild light. And as I live today,
the picture in my hands shook
suddenly and violently!

A cold wind passed like death across me and I heard the man next to me shiver involuntarily as he drew his coat closer about him. But it was no cold wind that gripped my soul as I looked, wide-eyed and staring, into the ring where the greatest drama the boxing world has ever known was being enacted.

There was Ace Jessel, bloody, terrible, throbbing and pulsing with new dynamic life, fired by a superhuman power–there was Mankiller Gomez, speechless with amazement at his foe’s new burst of fury–there was the immobile-faced referee–
and to my horror I saw that there were four men in that
ring!

And the fourth–a short, massive black man, barrel-chested and mighty-limbed, clad in the long tights of another day. And as I looked I saw that this man was not as other men for beyond him I saw the ropes of the ring and dimly, the ring lights, as if I were looking through a dark mist–as if I were looking through him.

His mighty arm was about Ace Jessel’s waist as my fighter crashed upon the weary and disheartened Gomez; his bare hard fists fell with Ace’s on the head and body of the desperate Mankiller. Whether Gomez saw or realized he saw this Stranger, I do not know. Dazed by the unnaturalness of Ace’s sudden comeback, by the uncanny strength of Ace who should have been fainting on the canvas, Gomez staggered, weakening; bewildered and mazed he was unable to decide upon a stand to make, and before he could rally was beaten down, crashed and battered down and out by long straight smashes sent in with the speed and power of a pile driver. And the last blow, a straight right that would have felled an ox, and did fell Mankiller Gomez, was driven not alone by the power of Ace’s mighty shoulder, but by the aid of a shadowy black hand on Jessel’s wrist. As I live today, that Fourth Man guided Ace’s hand to Gomez’s chin and backed the blow with the power of his own tremendous shoulders.

A moment the strange tableau burned itself into my brain. The astounded referee counting over the prostrate champion, and Ace Jessel, standing, head lowered and arms dangling, supported by a short, mighty figure in long ring tights. Then this figure faded before my very gaze and, as the portrait of Tom Molyneaux fell from my nerveless fingers, I felt it shake as if it shuddered.

As I climbed into the ring with the roar of the insane fans thundering in my brain, I wondered dazedly as I wonder today–was I given to see that sight alone of all that throng because I held the picture in my hands?

The crowd saw only a miracle, a man beaten nearly to death coming back with unexplainable strength and vitality to conquer his conqueror. They did not see the Fourth Man. Nor did Mankiller Gomez.

Ace Jessel? A negro never talks on some subjects and I have never asked him any questions on that matter. But as he collapsed in his corner, I bent over him and heard him murmur as he lost consciousness:

“Misto Tom–he done it, suh–his han’ was on mah wrist–when–Ah–dropped–Gomez.”

That old superstition is justified as far as I am concerned. Hereafter I will not doubt that deep devotion coupled with the possession of a life-like portrait, can conjure back from the unknown voids of the astral world, the soul or spirit or ghost which inhabited the living body of which the portrait is a likeness. A door perhaps, a portrait is, through which astral beings pass back and forth between this world and the next–whatever that world may be.

But when I said no man save Ace Jessel and I saw the Fourth Man, I am not altogether correct. After the bout the referee, a steely-nerved, cold-eyed son of the old-time school, said to me:

“Did you notice in that last round that a cold wind seemed to blow across the ring? Now tell me straight, am I going crazy or did I see a dark shadow hovering about Ace Jessel when he dropped Gomez?”

“You did,” I answered. “And unless we are all insane, the ghost of Tom Molyneaux was in that ring tonight.”

Casonetto’s Last Song

I eyed the package curiously. It was thin and flat, and the address was written clearly in the curving elegant hand I had learned to hate–the hand I knew to now be cold in death.

“You had better be careful, Gordon,” said my friend Costigan. “Sure, why should that black devil be sending you anything but something to do you harm?”

“I had thought of a bomb or something similar,” I answered, “but this is too thin a package to contain anything like that. I’ll open it.”

“By the powers!” Costigan laughed shortly. “’Tis one of his songs he’s sending you!”

An ordinary phonograph record lay before us.

Ordinary, did I say? I might say the most extraordinary record in the world. For, to the best of our knowledge, it was the only one which held imprisoned in its flat bosom the golden voice of Giovanni Casonetto, that great and evil genius whose operatic singing had thrilled the world, and whose dark and mysterious crimes had shocked that same world.

“The death cell where Casonetto lay awaits the next doomed one, and the black singer lies dead,” said Costigan. “What then is the spell of this disc that he sends it to the man whose testimony sent him to the gallows?”

I shrugged my shoulders. By no art of mine, but purely through accident had I stumbled upon Casonetto’s monstrous secret. By no wish of mine had I come upon the cavern where he practiced ancient abominations and offered up human sacrifices to the devil he worshipped. But what I had seen I told in court, and before the hangman adjusted the noose, Casonetto had promised me such a fate as no man had ever experienced before.

All the world knew of the atrocities practiced by the inhuman demonic cult of which Casonetto had been high priest; and now that he was dead, records made of his voice were sought by wealthy collectors, but according to the terms of his last wishes, all of these had been destroyed.

At least I had thought so, but the thin round disc in my hand proved that at least one had escaped the general destruction. I gazed at it, but the surface in the center was blank and without title.

“Read the note,” suggested Costigan.

A small slip of white paper had been contained in the package also. I scanned it. The letters were in Casonetto’s handwriting.