Collected Short Fiction, page 226
Such horror couldn’t be. It was some nightmare.
But the nightmare didn’t end. She moved again, despite the renewed agony from her cruelly burdened thighs. She felt the wet roughness of the great rock upon them, as she tried in vain to push it away.
Endless, dull agony throbbed from her thighs. A strange, prickling numbness crept up toward her body. Chill seeped into her, from the clammy rocks. Her skin was rough with goose-pimples.
Again and again she tried to move, to escape. Always the pitiless talons of pain forced her to drop back.
She began screaming Carter’s name. Her voice echoed eerily In the cavern. The sea’s roar drowned it. It was no use. Carter could never hear. She would only bring back the thing.
Her thin, hysterical laughter went out into the darkness. The dark walls gibbered it back, insanely. She tried to stop it. The thing would hear, and come. But she could no longer control her mad laughter.
Panting, shivering, laughing in the darkness, she waited for the foul, crushing embrace of monstrous death.
Suddenly light was in the cavern. Dim and vague, it yet showed the low, dripping roof, the narrow, water-hewn walls. It shifted, grew stronger.
Surprise and sudden wild hope stopped her laughter. She twisted painfully, trying to see the source of the light. Her eyes fell upon the squat, ivory horror of the stolen image.
Above her prone body was a stone ledge, like a pedestal. The grey image loomed upon it. The flat horror of its head leered at her from the twisting maze of thick tentacles.
Her body lay below it, an offering upon the altar of unspeakable retribution. The ocean-god was being repaid—
And now a footstep drew her eyes.
SHE shrieked at the dark, twisting horror of a gigantic octopus, upreared in the cavern, at her glimpse of a wet human head, peering above its hideous body. It was swaying toward her. Then it divided. The grey, octopus part of it flung to the floor and lay inert, sucker-bearing tentacles sprawling lifeless. And a man, all human, stood in the low cave, holding a flashlight.
Robin’s mind recoiled from the unthinkable truth.
There had been no monster. The thing had been a man, masked in dead tentacles. The specimen of octopus punctatus, stolen from the museum, had been his cloak of fear.
Who, the question rocked her numbed brain, who was the man?
His face was in shadow, above the flashlight. She couldn’t see. Breathlessly she stared. Her heart beat a march of doom in her ears, and the time of each beat was a life-sapping age.
Then the light shifted.
Horror’s dark chasm swallowed her sanity.
For the man was Carter Dell! Good God, it couldn’t be! Her Carter, the killer!
He stepped quickly toward her. Robin screamed. Reckless of agony, she desperately writhed to escape. It was useless. The huge rock ground more cruelly into the bare white flesh of her thighs. She collapsed, gasping.
Carter was above her, silent, his face in shadow. In the broad flood of his flashlight she saw an axe, and the thin bronze blade of the sacrificial knife. They were leaning against the ledge, at the foot of the monstrous image. Both were red with blood.
Then it was Carter’s axe that made red mush of living men!
Her mind whirled to the black verge of insanity. Hot breath hissed through her fear-parched lips. Her eyes closed. Her panting was choked off. Palpitating, her soft flesh waited for the axe’s brutal impact. Or would it be the white, blinding agony of the ancient bronze blade?
The slow agony of time swept on.
No blow fell. Carter didn’t speak. She heard no sound, save his muted breath, and a muffled click.
Then a cautious, approaching step. A man was coming along the winding cave. The glow of his flashlight came past a jutting angle. She recognized the tall, hard bulk of Markham Dorn.
“Mark!” she screamed impulsively.
Reacting to her warning, the flashlight darted upward. It seized the crouching form of Carter Dell. Yellow flame jetted. Confined thunder shattered the cavern.
Carter Dell rose half to his feet. He gasped in the bitter smoke of powder. He staggered. A bullet struck fire from his revolver, tore it from his fingers. And Markham Dorn leaped down upon him, striking at his head with the heavy flatness of his automatic.
Carter fell heavily on his face across the narrow passage. Markham Dorn crouched over him. Whipping off Carter’s belt, he buckled it tight around his ankles. Then he set his shoulder to a massive, age-rounded stone, and rolled it grindingly upon Carter’s legs, imprisoning him the same way as Robin was, except that the girl lay on her back, and he on his face.
CARTER stirred. He groaned thickly as the boulder settled upon his bound limbs.
“For God’s sake!” he whispered, in dazed agony. “Mark—”
Why, Robin asked herself, shaken with new dread—why the stone? It was so needlessly cruel.
Her voice was wild and husky, when:
“Mark!” she begged. “Mark, please release me!”
The giant figure of Markham Dorn loomed over her. On his hard face was shadowed a mocking, ironic grin. He played the flashlight, like a slow, obscene caress, over her naked slimness. Then he chuckled. It was a satyr’s laugh, slow, lecherous, diabolical.
“Mark!” she screamed. “Mark, you must—”
The light burned into her horror-strained face—a white mask of dread.
“You’ve been misled,” said the thick, deliberate voice of Markham Dorn. “By a pen and a button, by a clever plan and a bit of good acting.”
The lascivious satyr-chuckle came again. The obscene eye of the flashlight went back to her exposed, bloodstained body.
“What,” she gasped fearfully—“what are you going to do to us?”
For answer Markham Dorn set his foot on her chest. The brutal pressure drove the breath from her lungs in a scream of pain. Her body was pressed cruelly against the jagged rocks beneath. A track was left on the satin of her flesh—a bruise and a stain of foul redness.
“Robin ”—she was aghast at the sudden, terrible, sadistic passion that hissed through Markham Dorn’s set teeth—“I’ve wanted you since the day Carter introduced us. Now you’re—mine!” His voice was gasping with fearful lust. “More completely mine than you were ever his—for I shall take every shred of your body—with the knife!”
Through a red fog of despair and pain, Robin heard Carter’s quick struggle. She heard the snapping of his straining muscles, his involuntary, suppressed outcry of pain.
The flashlight shifted to him. She saw his great body arched upward, big muscles bulging, as he fought to move the rock. He fell back, defeated, and lay prone, gasping. Every breath was a moan of agony.
“Patience, Carter—my dear friend.” The terrible mockery of Dorn’s voice was a little calmer, sardonic. “Your turn will come. But your lovely bride demands my first attention.”
“Mark!” Carter panted. “Why have you done this? You’re mad! Stop, Mark—think!”
“Why do anything?” Markham Dorn’s voice was callously flat, unmoved. “Of course—for money. I had been a wet nurse of a college instructor too long. I wanted to—live! And I wanted Robin!”
Savagely he ground the hard, red-spangled toe of his shoe into the yielding softness of Robin’s side.
Then he placed the flashlight upon the stone ledge, so that it burned down upon Robin’s pulsating nakedness, picked up the bronze knife, and drew its keen point lightly across her bosom. She shuddered voicelessly from its cold sting.
“Money?” rapped Carter, in a queer, choking voice. “How does this make you money?”
Markham Dorn suppressed his panting eagerness.
“Delay me as much as you please,” he said, ironically suave. “You merely prolong my amusement. Money. Yes,” he confessed deliberately, “money was our object, from the first. Thurman was my partner. He was an expert in archeology and marine biology. And he also needed money—he’d taken a sleigh ride on Wall Street. I planned the thing. Dr. Thurman made the image and the knife, and sold Whipple the idea. He made the image out of ivory so that it couldn’t be traced as not coming from the sea. Then you came along with your robot diver. Your stupid honesty was just what we needed to fool Whipple and the reporters. One night I hung the image off the Avalon, on a piano wire. Next morning I fished it up—and there we were.
“Well, we fooled them—all but Wickard Kidd. He was doubtful. He never came near offering the sum we wanted. He kept putting us off. And the other big museums were full of a lot of old fogies that wouldn’t listen at all. Kidd was our only chance.
“Yesterday Thurman lost his nerve. He wanted to close out, at Kidd’s own price. Whipple would have got the lion’s share of it, for expenses. Just chicken feed left. Wouldn’t have paid my debts.
“I thought it over, and hit on this little elaboration of the original hoax. If it went over, I reasoned, the image would belong entirely to me. And the publicity, the newspaper stories of invaders from the sea, will make it worth a quarter of a million, easy. Not to mention my signed articles on Atlantis, and lecture tours, and the movies.
“I’ve changed my plans, however.
I’ve decided for you to take the rap, Carter. I left clues pointing to you. You did it because you were discontented with your five per cent. I caught you here. We had a fight and—you fell to the rocks below. Of course you’ll be dressed in the octopus suit when your body will be dragged up. Since I’ve already killed Thurman and Whipple, the image will still be all mine, of course. By the way, I caught you here just after you’d murdered and mutilated your wife.
“And now. Carter, if you will excuse me, a delightful duty demands my attention.”
Markham Dorn dropped on his big knees beside Robin. He tried the point of the long bronze blade against her breast, then began whetting it upon a flat fragment of sandstone.
His grim face was leering over her, now a mask of hideous, perverted passion. The brightness of sadistic insanity glittered in his eyes. His thick nostrils dilated to his hot, panting breath.
ROBIN heard Carter struggling again. Heard his muted gasps of pain, the rending of his clothing, the contortions of his giant body.
But Carter alone, she knew, could never move the stone that pinned him down. All hope fled from her. She was too chilled, too sick with despair, to make any further effort.
She lay motionless, upon her cold stone couch, surrendering to the penetrating cold, to the numbing agony that mounted leadenly from the pitiless weight on her thighs. She could hear the swift, bestial breathing of Markham Dorn, his absorbed grunts and mouthings of sadistic satisfaction.
“Now!” Dorn panted over her. “Now I’ll do what—”
Robin shrieked, shrinking from the burning blade.
She had heard the fall of a pebble, a rattle on the cave’s hard sand. Carter probably putting up a last, desperate struggle. But Markham Dorn paid no attention to the contortions of Carter’s great body. He held Robin by the throat now, with his left hand, the bronzed knife in his right poised over her.
And she saw Carter’s bleeding body behind her. Saw the axe handle he held gripped in both bands crash down on Dorn’s head. The knife in the madman’s hand clanged to the rocks. His body crumpled.
Carter’s great muscles were cracking as he lifted the stone from her thighs. Tenderly he picked her up and lowered her again on the clean white sand further within the cave. Covering her with a coat, he began rubbing away the frozen numbness of her limbs.
She submitted gratefully. Incredulous thanksgiving sang in her. For a time she was too weary to speak. Then curiosity prompted her to ask:
“Carter, how did you get free?”
Wearily he wiped the sweat off his bruised, swelling forehead. Then be showed her a string, with a pebble knotted at its end.
“Tore strips off my shirt to make it,” he said. “Mark was too absorbed in his torture to notice me. The axe was leaning on the rock, there. I caught it with the string, dragged it to me. With the handle I managed to lever the rock off my legs. And then—I guess I hit him pretty hard. He’s dead.”
She shuddered. “Forgive me!
“And why were you carrying that octopus thing when you walked in here?”
“Oh, Mark’s octopus suit, you mean? Why, I had just picked it up where he left it, further back in the cave. Our missing specimen. I was studying the thing. It’s a diabolical contraption. The tentacles are really flexible, hollow, springlike affairs that can be operated from inside the suit. The tips of them are barbed with sharp steel prongs which can easily rip the flesh. Arid the suction which gripped the flesh was caused by a small but powerful vacuum cylinder he had concealed within the suit.”
“But,” she said incredulously, “he was with us in the house when we heard that terrible crying of the thing—outside.”
“That had me fooled, at first,” Carter confessed. “Until I remembered his father’s Punch and Judy act. Mark was a ventriloquist. He made those noises, apparently coming from outside, when he was standing beside us! He’d probably killed Thurman just before making his appearance as the ‘thing’ on the cliffs there, when you first saw it. And it wasn’t Thurman whom we heard screaming near the house—it was Mark, putting on another ventriloquism act.”
“But Whipple,” she went on, “how was he killed? Wasn’t he armed? He could have shot Mark.”
Carter smiled grimly.
“Mark was clever, darling,” he said. “Remember, he supplied Whipple with the automatic? I’ll bet it was loaded with blanks. Let’s get out into the daylight.”
He lifted her again. Sighing with grateful relief, she slipped her arms about his neck.
“Into the daylight,” she echoed happily.
1936
The Ruler of Fate
A thrilling, fascinating, thought-provoking tale of romance and a weird creature that rules our Earth from a cavern of horror on the Moon
1. To Avert a War
“H’LO, kid.”
The warm, quiet greeting came out of the dark beyond the opening door, suddenly. The girl, sitting in the pool of light in the middle of the big room, had not heard the door. She was startled. Her wide-browed face drained white, and one hand clutched at her throat.
Shiela Hall was tall for a girl, and she sat very straight in the swivel chair behind the battered desk. Usually Shiela appeared the very efficient secretary for the Montel Foundation that she was. Beyond her trim, secretarial efficiency, however, welled up eternal surprize.
Her waved hair was commonly a pale, tawny brown—until some trick of light unveiled glories of unsuspected gold. Her eyes were usually brown, level eyes, honestly quizzical—until quick emotion flooded them with purple. She was ordinarily composed, serene—yet sudden feeling could, as it had now, bleach her skin to an unflawed, telltale transparency.
Kane Montel came through the door, into the large, bare office. A hastily walled-off corner of a larger interior, it had never been finished. The floor was bare concrete, the walls sheet metal and fiber-board. The ceiling was crossed with dusty girders.
Kane Montel was a slim-waisted, bigchested giant. He stood six-feet-two, weighed two-twenty. He was limping a little, now, upon one bandaged foot. One big arm hung in a white sling. His square jaw was crossed with plaster. Keen gray eyes smiled beneath the bandage around his forehead. The hair above it was black.
He came from the door to the big desk. He sat down on the corner of it, to swing his injured foot clear of the floor. Under the bandage, his gray eyes looked warmly down at Shiela Hall.
She was still staring up at him, with the purple in her eyes. One white hand was still pressed to her throat, and the other, on the desk, was convulsively crushing a sheet of paper. But she was beginning to smile, faintly, and a slow pink was coming into her blanched skin.
“Matter, kid?” Concern spoke through the lightness of Kane’s tone. “Look as if the skeleton in chains had walked in on you. Shouldn’t be here so late, kid—you work too hard.”
She swallowed, and the hand came away from the white column of her throat. The brilliance of a sudden smile transfigured her face, and she breathed, softly:
“Oh, Monty!”
Kane Montel bent a little toward her, over the telephone on the desk, his gray eyes drinking in her loveliness.
“Most amazing kid, Shiela,” he whispered. “Always pretty. But sometimes, just a moment, you’re so perfectly, blindingly beautiful that it hurts. Tell me—what scared you?”
“Thank you, Monty.”
Her wide eyes were looking up at him, steadily, candidly, still purple.
“Somehow, Monty,” she said slowly, “the sound of your voice made—this afternoon—all come back.” Her voice fell to a shaken whisper. “Somehow, just for a moment, I was back there at the edge of the field. I saw the flyer rise again.
“For a moment, then, I was so glad, Monty—even if I was afraid for you. As the flyer lifted, I could read her name—Spirit of Man. It made me proud and happy, for a moment, because I was a human being, and because you were on the flyer, going out to the moon.
“And then that horrible, horrible instant! Shining in the sun, the flyer had come up like a bright, living thing. And suddenly it was dead. It tilted a little, and fell.
“There was a dreadful, hanging silence as it came down, and then the terrible grinding crash when it struck the field. My feet felt the shock of it. And that was about all I did feel, for hours. I thought you were—were—dead, Monty.
“Somehow, your voice made it all come back.”
“Just luck I’m not. Or I’m such a big brute you can’t kill me,” His lean face twisted grimly. “Others are, who had more right to live than I do. Harper—and Benning.”
“Farris?” she asked, mechanically.
“Hospital,” he said. “Nine bones broken. Punctured lung. Docs won’t say.
“But, kid, what are you doing at the shop at midnight? Think you are a robot secretary, or something? Hadn’t realized what a shock the—we must have given you. Ought to be home in bed, kid.”
