The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard (18 page)

I glanced up, then halted, frozen. Moonlight fell on the opposite wall and suddenly a shadow fell silently across it–I bounded to my feet, whirling toward the outer door as I did so. The doorway stood empty. I sprang across the room and went through another door, closing it behind me. Then I halted, shaken. Not a sound broke the stillness. What was it that had stood for an instant in the doorway opening into the hall, throwing its shadow into the room where I had stood? I was still trembling with a nameless fear. The thought of some desperate man was bad enough, but the glance I had had of that shadow had left upon my soul an impression of something strange and unholy–
inhuman!

The room in which I now was also opened in the hallway. I started to cross to the hall door and then hesitated at the thought of pitting my powers against whatever lurked in the outer darkness. The door sagged open–I saw nothing, but to my soul-freezing horror,
a hideous shadow fell across the floor and
moved toward me!

Etched blackly in the moonlight on the floor, it was as if some frightful shape stood in the doorway, throwing its lengthened and distorted shade across the boards to my feet. Yet I swear that the doorway was empty!

I rushed across the room and entered the door that opened into the next room. Still I was adjacent to the hallway. All these upstairs rooms seemed to open into the hall. I stood, shivering, my revolver gripped so tightly in my sweating hand that the barrel shook like a leaf. The pounding of my heart sounded thunderously in the silence. What in God’s name was this horror which was hunting me through these dark rooms? What was it that threw a shadow, when its own substance was unseen? Silence lay like a dark mist; the ghostly radiance of the moon patterned the floor. Two rooms away lay the corpse of a man who had seen a thing so unnamably terrible that it had shattered his brain and taken away his life.

And here stood I, alone with the unknown monster.

What was that? The creak of ancient hinges! I shrank back against the wall, my blood freezing. The door through which I had just come was slowly opening! A sudden gust of wind shuddered through. The door swung wide, but I, nerving myself to meet the sight of some horror framed in the opening, saw nothing!

Moonlight, as in all of the rooms on this side of the hall, streamed through the hall door and lay on the opposite wall. If any invisible thing was coming from that adjoining room, the moonlight was not at its back. Yet a distorted shadow fell across the wall which shone in the moonlight and moved forward.

Now I saw it clearly, though the angle at which it was thrown deformed it. A broad, shambling figure, stooped, head thrust forward, long man-like arms dangling–the whole thing was hideously suggestive of the human, yet fearsomely unlike. This I read in the approaching shadow, yet saw no solid form that might throw this shadow.

Then panic seized me and I jerked the trigger again and again, filling the empty house with crashing reverberations and the acrid smell of powder, aiming first at the doorway in front of me, then in desperation sending the last bullet straight into the gliding shadow. Just so Joe Cagle must have done in the last terrible moment which preceded his death. The hammer fell hollowly on a discharged shell and I hurled the empty gun wildly. Not an instant had halted the unseen thing–now the shadow was close upon me.

My back-flung hands encountered the door–tore at the knob. It held! The door was locked! Now on the wall beside me, the shadow loomed up black and horrific. Two great treelike arms were raised–with a scream I hurled my full weight against the door. It gave way with a splintering crash and I fell through into the room beyond.

The rest is nightmare. I scrambled up without a glance behind me and rushed into the hall. At the far end I saw, as through a fog, the stair landing and toward it I rushed. The hall was long–it seemed endless. It seemed as though it stretched into Eternity and that I fled for hours down that grisly corridor. And a black shadow kept pace with me, flying along the moonlit wall, vanishing for an instant in black darkness, reappearing an instant later in a square of moonlight, let in by some outer window.

Down the hall it kept by my side, falling upon the wall at my left, telling me that whatever thing threw that shadow, was close at my back. It has long been said that a ghost will fling a shadow in the moonlight, even when it itself is invisible to the human sight. But no man ever lived whose ghost could throw such a silhouette. Such thoughts as these did not enter my mind tangibly as I fled; I was in the grip of unreasoning fear, but piercing through the fogs of my horror, was the knowledge that I was faced by some supernatural thing, which was at once unearthly and bestial.

Now I was almost at the stair;
but now the shadow fell in front of me!
The thing was at my very back–was reaching hideous unseen arms to clutch me! One swift glance over my shoulder showed me something else:
on the dust of the corridor, close upon the footprints I left, other footprints were
forming!
Huge misshapen footprints, that left the marks of talons! With a terrible scream I swerved to the right, leaping for an open outer window as a drowning man seizes a rope–without conscious thought.

My shoulder struck the side of the window; I felt empty air under my feet–caught one whirling, chaotic glimpse of the moon, sky and the dark pine trees, as the earth rushed up to meet me, then black oblivion crashed about me.

My first sensation of returning consciousness was of soft hands lifting my head and caressing my face. I lay still, my eyes closed, trying to orient myself–I could not remember where I was, or what had happened. Then with a rush it all came back to me. My eyes flared open and I struggled wildly to rise.

“Steve, oh Steve, are you hurt?”

Surely I was insane, for it was the voice of Joan! No! My head was cradled in her lap, her large dark eyes, bright with tears, gazed down into mine.

“Joan! In God’s name, what are you doing here?” I sat up, drawing her into my arms. My head throbbed nauseatingly; I was sore and bruised. Above us rose the stark grim wall of the Deserted House, and I could see the window from which I had fallen. I must have lain senseless for a long time, for now the moon lay red as blood close to the western horizon, glimmering in a scarlet wallow through the tops of the pines.

“The horse you rode away came back riderless. I couldn’t stand to sit and wait–so I slipt out of the house and came here. They told me you’d gone to find the posse, but the horse came back the old tote road. There wasn’t anyone to send so I slipt away and came myself.”

“Joan!” the sight of her forlorn figure and the thought of her courage and love took hold of my heart and I kissed her without speaking.

“Steve,” her voice came low and frightened, “what happened to you? When I rode up, you lay here unconscious, just like those other two men who fell from those windows–only they were killed.”

“And only pure chance saved me, despite my powerful frame and heavy bones,” I answered. “Once out of a hundred times a fall like that fails to injure a man–Joan, what happened in that house twenty years ago to throw a curse upon it?”

She shivered. “I don’t know. The people who owned it before the war had to sell it afterwards. The tenants let it fall into disrepair, of course. A strange thing happened there just before the death of the last tenant. A huge gorilla escaped from a circus which was passing through the country and took refuge in the house. He fought so terribly when they tried to recapture him that they had to kill him. That was over twenty years ago. Shortly after that, the owner of the house fell from an upstairs window and was killed.

Everyone supposed he committed suicide or was walking in his sleep, but–”

“No!” I broke in with a shudder. “He was being hunted through those horrible rooms by a thing so terrible that death itself was an escape. And that travelling man–I know what killed him–and Joe Cagle–”

“Joe Cagle!” she started violently. “Where–”

“Don’t worry, child,” I soothed. “He’s past harming you. Don’t ask me any more. No, I didn’t kill him; his death was more horrible than any I could have dealt. There are worlds and shadows of worlds beyond our ken, and bestial earth-bound spirits lurk in the dark shadows of our world, it may be. Come, let us go.”

She had brought two horses with her, and had tethered them a short distance from the house. I made her mount and then, despite her protests and pleas, I returned to the house. I went only as far as a first story window and I stayed only a few moments. Then I also mounted, and together we rode slowly down the old tote road. The stars were paling and the east was beginning to whiten with the coming morn.

“You have not told me what haunts that house,” said Joan in an awed voice, “but I know it’s something frightful; what are we to do?”

For answer I turned in my saddle and pointed. We had rounded a bend in the old road and could just glimpse the old house through the trees. As we looked, a red lance of flame leaped up, smoke billowed to the morning sky, and a few minutes later a deep roar came to us, as the whole building began to fall into the insatiate flames I had started before we left. The ancients have always maintained that fire is the final destroyer, and I knew as I watched, that the ghost of the dead gorilla was lain, and the shadow of the beast forever lifted from the pine lands.

The Dead Slaver’s Tale

Dim and grey was the silent sea,

Dim was the crescent moon;

From the jungle back of the shadowed lea

Came a tom-tom’s eerie croon

When we glutted the waves with a hundred slaves

From a Jekra barracoon.

Our way to bar, a man of war

Was sailing with canvas full;

So the doomed men up from the hold we bore,

Hacked them to pieces and hurled them o’er,

And we heard the grim sharks as they tore

The flesh from each sword-cleft skull.

Then fast we fled toward the rising sun

But we could not flee the dead

And ever behind our flying ship

Wavered a trail of red.

She sank like a stone off Calabar

With all of her bloody crew.

There was no breeze to shake a spar,

No reef her hull to hew.

But dusky hands rose out of the deep,

And dragged her under the blue.

Dermod’s Bane

If your heart is sick in your breast and a blind black curtain of sorrow is between your brain and your eyes so that the very sunlight is pale and leprous–go to the city of Galway, in the county of the same name, in the province of Connaught, in the country of Ireland.

In the grey old City of Tribes, as they call it, there is a dreamy soothing spell that is like enchantment, and if you are of Galway blood, no matter how far away, your grief will pass slowly from you like a dream, leaving only a sad sweet memory, like the scent of a dying rose. There is a mist of antiquity hovering over the old city which mingles with sorrow and makes one forget. Or you can go out into the blue Connaught hills and feel the salt sharp tang of the wind off the Atlantic, and life seems faint and far away, with all its sharp joys and bitter sorrows, and no more real than the shadows of the clouds which pass.

I came to Galway as a wounded beast crawls back to his lair in the hills. The city of my people broke upon my gaze for the first time, but it did not seem strange or foreign. It seemed like a homecoming to me, and with each day passing the land of my birth seemed farther and farther away and the land of my ancestors closer.

I came to Galway with an aching heart. My twin sister, whom I loved as I never loved anyone else, had died. Her going was swift and unexpected. It seemed to my mazed agony that one moment she was laughing beside me with her cheery smile and bright grey Irish eyes, and the next, the cold bitter grass was growing above her. Oh, my soul to God, not your Son alone endured crucifixion.

A black cloud like a shroud locked about me and in the dim borderland of madness I sat alone, tearless and speechless. My grandmother came to me at last, a great grim old woman, with hard haunted eyes that held all the woes of the Irish race.

“Let you go to Galway, lad. Let you go to the ould land. Maybe the sorrow of you will be drowned in the cold salt sea. Maybe the folk of Connaught can heal the wound that is on you–”

I went to Galway.

Well, the people were kind there–all those great old families, the Martins, the Lynches, the Deanes, the Dorseys, the Blakes, the Kirowans–families of the fourteen great families who rule Galway.

Out on the hills and in the valleys I roved and talked with the kindly, quaint country folk, many of whom still spoke the good old Erse language which I could speak haltingly.

There, on a hill one night before a shepherd’s fire I heard again the old legend of Dermod O’Connor. As the shepherd unfolded the terrible tale in his rich brogue, interlaced with many Gaelic phrases, I remembered that my grandmother had told me the tale when I was a child, but I had forgotten the most of it.

Briefly the story is this: there was a chief of the Clan na O’Connor and his name was Dermod, but people called him the Wolf. The O’Connors were kings in the old days, ruling Connaught with a hand of steel.

They divided the rule of Ireland with the O’Briens in the South–Munster–and the O’Neills in the North–Ulster. With the O’Rourkes they fought the MacMurroughs of Leinster and it was Dermot MacMurrough, driven out of Ireland by the O’Connors, who brought in Strongbow and his Norman adventurers. When Earl Pembroke, whom men called Strongbow, landed in Ireland, Roderick O’Connor was king of Ireland in name and claim at least. And the clan O’Connor, fierce Celtic warriors that they were, kept up their struggle for freedom until at last their power was broken by a terrible Norman invasion. All honor to the O’Connors. In the old times my people fought under their banners–but each tree has a rotten root. Each great house has its black sheep. Dermod O’Connor was the black sheep of his clan and a blacker one never lived.