Weird Tales volume 31 number 03 (18 page)

But Mrs. Wright could not comply with the ransom demands of the thief who had snatched it and realized the esteem placed on the box by its

owner, because of the obvious care with which it was kept. The old woman was sniffling softly into a tiny, lace handkerchief which she clutched in thin, ivory-colored hands.

"One hundred and fifty bucks or noth-in'!" sneered San Pedro Joe. These old people got on his nerves. They were so damned irritating and slow.

"But I can't—can't get that much money," trembled Mrs. Wright, her fingers tightening around the phone receiver.

"You're out of luck then, old woman,'" deridingly returned the thief, and hung up. Ordinarily, he would have dickered to get the best price possible for the stolen object, even though it was lower than he first demanded. But in this case, it gave him a feeling of satisfaction to crush brutally the faltering woman's happiness. San Pedro Joe slowly stepped out of the phone booth, and quickened his pace as he neared the store entrance. He spat at the curbing.

His pasty, selfish face was set off by thin, twisting lips. The black suit he wore was ill-kept, bulging in the wrong places. It was young Joe's habit to drum his fingers on any surface convenient when he was uneasy, and that was most of the time. His watery, cold blue eyes were continually shifting, weighing people he encountered. Joe specialized in robbing ill-kept, run-down homes; there was nearly always something worth his troubles, and then his victims seldom could afford to have much investigation concerning their losses. He was like a cunning spider feeding on bewildered, fluttering moths caught in his net.

In half an hour Joe arrived at his apartment, located in a battered, two-story stucco in the southwest part of Los Angeles. A brief stretch of yellow, dry grass ran between the sidewalk and the

WEIRD TALES

plaster-chipped structure. Light from the disappearing sun was shining on the cheerless front windows. Leaving his poorly-kept coupe at the curb, he stepped quickly across the withered lawn and up the cement steps of the building to his rooms.

After a snack of cold beans and white bread, gulped with some warmed-over coffee, joe brought the teakwood box out from the place where he had hidden it under the messy sink. Darkness had come and the moon had not yet risen. Billows of black, angry clouds were' scattered in the sky. Putting the box on the kitchen table, he stood back and regarded the thing. It appeared ominous and resentful on the scarred table-top under the white ceiling light. Joe thought he sensed a feeling of unearthly life in the booty before him. Someone down the hall was coughing hoarsely, and the thief felt chilled.

Suddenly, Joe returned to himself and became intensely curious about that box. He considered what he had found out about it from Mrs. Wright, who, in her desire to get her treasure back, had breathlessly poured out the whole story when questioned. Maybe Mrs. Wright's old man had cached some precious stones or money in the container, conjectured Joe, and had fabricated the yarn about the curse in order to keep people from trying to open the box. The thief, flamed by his greed, decided the teak-wood curio deserved an investigation before he discarded it.

At first, he picked up a hammer which was kept in one of the dish-closet drawers, but after a moment's consideration, he determined to try and open the box by its mechanism. Perhaps he could sell it to an antique-dealer after examining what might be inside. Yet had that been the real reason for his decision to use

care? Joe wished that fool down the hall would keep quiet; for the first time in his life he felt uncertain, confused.

San Pedro Joe was proud of his ability to do a neat job on breaking into houses, opening strong-boxes, and his conceit prompted him again to forget his forebodings and test his skill by attempting to discover the combination of the box; otherwise, being increasingly nervous, he probably would not have taken the pains which he did to open it so carefully. His fingers trembled—he licked dry, swollen lips. After working for some minutes, he roughly pushed the box from him. Joe imagined the curse, the words of evil, an idol guardian might have incanted on the one who pried into the sacred box, for perhaps it contained some treasured jewels or a temple secret, rather than being simply a hiding-place for Wright's pen-

THE investigator eagerly, impatiently, bent over the shining teakwood again, as though suddenly possessed, and continued his manipulation of the curio's carved knobs and queer levers. For a moment, he thought he detected a slight, shrill cry, followed by a tiny, penetrating whistle. Sweat broke out on Joe's brow as he doggedly kept at his task, fascinated, now unable to pause. Shortly he-pressed an unobtrusive bump which had been revealed by sliding a ghoulish little figure ornamenting the container's front. to one side. The lid slowly raised upward, as though controlled by a hidden spring. The crook nervously pressed harder on the button he had discovered, in order to hasten the opening of the lid. He was waiting for something—his finger seemed frozen to the box, his whole body was stiffened. Sweat was trickling down his back, yet he was somehow cold.

Suddenly, a sharp, biting flame burned

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in his thumb, as though he had put it in a fire of hot coals. A strange numbness ran through his arm. He stared down at the table to see a neatly-concealed needle, probably hollow, slowly retreating into the side of the box; in the same glance he saw that the teakwood curio was empty, contained nothing.

Blood was on his thumb, dripping from under the finger-nail, where seemed to be an inflamed, tiny wound. He heard a peculiar, spine-stiffening cackle, on the same penetrating high key as the whistle.

First it came spasmodically, but broke down into a low gurgle, a sucking sound. The thief's heart seemed to bloat and swell, yet tried to beat faster; Joe clutched at his hot brow with clammy, weak hands. Young San Pedro Joe, a short time ago successful light-finger man, fell dead on the kitchen floor. The white light shone on his ill-proportioned, slight body. For a moment, there seemed a slight rustling. A dirty, filth-incrusted window banged open. But all was quiet outside in the hot, choking night air.

o Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Master-writer of the weird, essayist, poet, 1890-1937

By FRANCIS FLAGG

He lived—and now is dead beyond all knowing Of life and death: the vast and formless sdieme Behind the face of nature ever showing Has swallowed up the dreamer and the dream. But brief the hour he had upon the stream Of timeless time from past to future flowing To lift his sail and catch the luminous gleam Of stars that marked his coming and his going Before he vanished: yet the brilliant wake His passing left is vivid on the tide And for the countless centuries will abide: The genius that no death can ever take Crowns him immortal, though a man has died.

c //ead in the Window

(Adapted from the German of Wilhclm von Scholz)

By ROY TEMPLE HOUSE

What strange prescience had the bearded man of his approaching death? An odd little story

IN THE art gallery of a North German city hangs a lurid oil painting which represents two Italians waylaying and attacking a third. I will tell you the history of the painting.

In the nineties of the last century, a young German painter was living in the outskirts of Rome, in an isolated little house surrounded by a vineyard. One fine, bright moonlight night, after sitting over the wine till a late hour with two or three friends down in the city, he came home about midnight. He had to walk some distance beyond the end of the street-car line, through a narrow road that ran between high walls. He never came through that lane late at night without a feeling of apprehension. He was a poor man, he never wore jewelry, his modest brown cape and dilapidated broad-brimmed hat were very much like the clothing of many of his modest neighbors, visibly not the appurtenances of a man of means, and he had had no love affairs in Rome; so that it did not seem as if any sort of ambush was likely. He thought a good deal about his fiancee back in Germany, and he almost always carried a letter from her in his left inside vest pocket, just over his heart. As he walked home he was in the habit of whistling to keep his courage up, of talking aloud to himself, bursting out every now and then with "That's certainly a fact!" or "Yes, I think that's what I'll do!" And he was likely to call out at intervals to his little dog, a Spitz who 362

never strayed far from his master's heels. He always carried a revolver on his person, although in all the years since he had acquired it, he had never once had occasion to fire it off.

But when he came near his garden gate, he never failed to find himself shivering with apprehension till his slightly trembling fingers had the gate unlocked. He could almost visualize a big fellow gliding around the corner and stepping out threateningly in front of him. He always had his key in his hand before he had reached the gate, and he always pushed the key into the lock with nervous haste; on dark nights he would hold his lighted cigar toward the lock with the other hand. Then he would lock the gate behind him in a great hurry, unlock his house door just as nervously, light the candle which stood waiting for him to the left of the door on the uneven tile floor, try the door which led into the ground-floor rooms, all of them unoccupied except the kitchen and utilized as lumber-rooms to store his artist's supplies, and climb the creaking stairs to the upper floor where were located his spacious studio and his little bedroom. The bedroom was scarcely more than an alcove, and it always stood wide open into the studio, so that as he lay in bed he could see the great wide window and the starry heavens outside.

His trip home on this particular evening had not been without disquieting incidents. Nothing very definite had hap-

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pened, and he might have attached no importance to anything that had occurred if he had not been made a little apprehensive by the eery turn the conversation in the artist group had taken. His Spitz had stopped and barked furiously into a linden-tree alley a few hundred yards from his garden gate. It was true that the dog had a nervous streak in him and often grew excited over nothing at all. A little earlier, as the artist was getting off the street-car, a very suspicious looking and acting man in ragged work-clothes had asked him how to reach the Valle San Giorgio, a lonely little valley with a chapel in the center of it, a sort of ravine which lay behind and below the eminence on which his house was built and which no human being in his senses would have thought of visiting at that hour of the night. Then, as he came through the narrow street between the high walls, he would have sworn he heard steps on the hard ground behind him. The impression was so strong that he turned and looked back more than once. But no one was visible, and it was only while he himself was walking that he seemed to hear the steps. They must have been only the echo of his own steps in the uncanny stillness of the night.

Finally, at a turn of the crooked little street, he had come suddenly within a few feet of a man who was going in the same direction, but more slowly. The man turned and looked at him, then walked slowly away on a path that branched off from the little street. The painter had had only an indefinite impression of the man's bearded face. But his artist eye had taken in the squat, heavy frame, which stood out plainly in the moonlight, the peculiar swing of the man's walk, and even the wavering shadow which showed rather distinctly on the wall beyond him before he turned into

the foot-path. When he had himself come abreast the path and peered fearfully down it, the man had disappeared. There were no buildings along the path, and it was distinctly visible for some distance. It seemed as if the earth had swallowed the man. Or he might have dodged behind a clump of bushes. But why-would he have done that? It was strange.

For a few minutes the young painter had been almost uneasy. Then all at once the artist in him had gained the upper hand. He realized that the shape and manner of the bearded pedestrian had been very much what he had had in mind for a figure in a violent night scene which he was planning to paint, and he regretted that he had not seen the man's face more distinctly. He began to lay plans for sketching what he remembered of the face and figure before he went to bed, and in his cheerful planning he completely forgot his apprehension—till his dog had begun to bark frantically at the entrance of the linden alley.

Arrived at home, the painter had hauled his preliminary sketch out of a corner, set it up on an easel and rapidly drawn in with charcoal the outlines of the man with the beard. He had originally planned to make this person the aggressor in an encounter. He had thought of him as rushing out from his concealment behind a wall and running with drawn sword at a favored rival who had just said good-bye to a lady at the gate of an imposing palazzo. But some mysterious influence seemed to guide him into a change of plan. He of the beard must needs be the victim, not the attacker, and he must be set upon by two men.

The painter took out a fresh sheet and sketched in the new idea. It was curious how definitely the impression had come to him. He knew exactly where to place each individual, how to direct each mo-