Stephen Jones (ed) Read online

  "Stirling Manor," said the return address at the top of the page. Gender's heart twitched. Evelyn Stirling, he had hopes of her… but this was written in a masculine hand, strong and hasty.

  Sir:

  Circumstances that have come to my knowledge compel me, as a matter of duty, to command that you discontinue your attention to my daughter.

  Gender's eyes took on the pale tint of rage. One more result of the Britisher's letter, he made no doubt.

  I have desired her to hold no further communication with you, and I have been sufficiently explicit to convince her how unworthy you are of her esteem and attention. It is hardly necessary for me to give you the reasons which have induced me to form this judgement, and I add only that nothing you can say or do will alter it.

  Your obedient servant,

  Judge Forrester Stirling.

  Gender hastily swigged a portion of his drink, and crushed the paper in his hand. So that was the judge's interfering way - it sounded as though he had copied it from a complete letter-writer for heavy fathers. He, Gender, began to form a reply in his mind:

  Sir:

  Your unfeeling and arbitrary letter admits of but one response. As a gentleman grossly misused, I demand satisfaction on the field of honour. Arrangements I place in the hands of…

  By what friend should he forward that challenge? It seemed that he was mighty short of friends just now.

  He sipped more whisky and water, and tore the wrappings of the newspaper.

  It was a Massachusetts publication, and toward the bottom of the first page was a heavy cross of ink, to call attention to one item.

  A poem, evidently, in four line stanzas. Its title signified nothing -The Witnesses. Author, Henry W. Longfellow; Gender identified him vaguely as a scrawler of Abolitionist doggerel. Why was this poem recommended to a southern planter?

  In Ocean's wide domains,

  Half buried in the sands,

  Lie skeletons in chains,

  With shackled feet and hands.

  Once again the reader swore, but the oath quavered on his lips. His eye moved to a stanza farther down the column:

  These are the bones of Slaves;

  They gleam from the abyss;

  They cry, from yawning waves …

  But it seemed to Gender that he heard, rather than read, what that cry was.

  He sprang to his feet, paper and glass falling from his hands. His thin lips drew apart, his ears strained. The sound was faint, but unmistakable - many voices singing.

  The Negroes in his cabins? But no Negro on his plantation would know that song. The chanting refrain began:

  "Hailowa - Genda! Haipana - Genda!"

  The planter's lean mustaches bristled tigerishly. This would surely be the refined extremity of his persecution, this chanting of a weird song under his window-sill. It was louder now. I will bewitch, I will kill - but who would know that fierce mockery of him?

  The crew of his ship, of course; they had heard it on the writhing lips of the captives, at the very moment of their destruction. And when the ship docked in Charleston, with no profit to show, Gender had been none too kindly in paying them off.

  Those unsavory mariners must have been piqued. They had followed him, then, were setting up this vicious serenade.

  Gender stepped quickly around the table and toward the window. He flung up the sash with a violence that almost shattered the glass, and leaned savagely out.

  On that instant the song stopped, and Gender could see only the seaward slope of his land, down to the lip of the bluff that overhung the water. Beyond that stretched an expanse of waves, patchily agleam under a great buckskin-coloured moon, that even now stirred the murmurous tide at the foot of the bluff. Here were no trees, no brush even, to hide pranksters. The singers, now silent, must be in a boat under the shelter of the bluff.

  Gender strode from the room, fairly tore open a door, and made heavy haste toward the sea. He paused, on the lip of the bluff. Nothing was to be seen, beneath him or farther out. The mockers, if they had been here, had already fled. He growled, glared, and tramped back to his house. He entered the parlour once more, drew down the sash, and sought his chair again. Choosing another glass, he began once more to mix whisky and water. But he stopped in the middle of his pouring.

  There it was again, the song he knew; and closer.

  He rose, took a step in the direction of the window, then thought better of it. He had warned his visitors by one sortie, and they had hidden. Why not let them come close, and suffer the violence he ached to pour out on some living thing?

  He moved, not to the window, but to a mantelpiece opposite. From a box of dark, polished wood he lifted a pistol, then another. They were duelling weapons, handsomely made, with hair-triggers; and Gender was a dead shot. With orderly swiftness he poured in glazed powder from a flask, rammed down two leaden bullets, and laid percussion caps upon the touchholes. Returning, he placed the weapons on his centre table, then stood on tiptoe to extinguish the hanging lamp. A single light remained in the room, a candle by the door, and this he carried to the window, placing it on a bracket there. Moving into the gloomy centre of the parlour, he sat in his chair and took a pistol in either hand.

  The song was louder now, lifted by many voices:

  "Hailowa - Genda! Haipana - Genda!"

  Undoubtedly the choristers had come to land by now, had gained the top of the bluff. They could be seen, Gender was sure, from the window. He felt perspiration on his jowl, and lifted a sleeve to blot it. Trying to scare him, hmm? Singing about witchcraft and killing? Well, he'd show them who was the killer.

  The singing had drawn close, was just outside. Odd how the sailors, or whoever they were, had learned that chant so well! It recalled to his mind the slave trail, the jungle, the long procession of crooning prisoners. But here was no time for idle revery on vanished scenes. Silence had fallen again, and he could only divine the presence, just outside, of many creatures.

  Scratch-scratch-scratch; it sounded like the stealthy creeping of a snake over rough lumber. That scratching resounded from the window where something stole into view in the candlelight. Gender fixed his eyes there, and his pistols lifted their muzzles.

  The palm of a hand, as grey as a fish, laid itself on the glass. It was wet; Gender could see the trickle of water descending along the pane. Something clinked, almost musically. Another hand moved into position beside it, and between the two swung links of chain.

  This was an elaborately devilish joke, thought Gender, in an ecstasy of rage. Even the chains, to lend reality… and as he stared he knew, in a split moment of terror that stirred his flesh on his bones, that it was no joke after all.

  A face had moved into the range of the candlelight, pressing close to the pane between the two palms.

  It was darker than those palms, of a dirty, slaty deadness of colour. But it was not dead, not with those dull, intent eyes that moved slowly in their blistery sockets… not dead, though it was foully wet, and its thick lips hung slackly open, and seaweed lay plastered upon the cheeks, even though the flat nostrils showed crumbled and gnawed away, as if by fish. The eyes quested here and there across the floor and walls of the parlour. They came to rest, gazing full into the face of Gender.

  He felt as though stale sea-water had trickled upon him, but his right hand abode steady as a gun-rest. He took aim and fired.

  The glass crashed loudly, and fell in shattering flakes to the floor beneath the sill.

  Gender was on his feet, moving forward, dropping the empty pistol on the table and whipping the loaded one into his right hand. Two leaping strides took him almost to the window, before he reeled backward.

  The face had not fallen. It stared at him, a scant yard away. Between the dull, living eyes showed a round black hole, where the bullet had gone in. But the thing stood unflinchingly, somehow serenely. Its two wet hands moved slowly, methodically, to pluck away the jagged remains of the glass.

  Gender rocked where he stood, unable
for the moment to command his body to retreat. The shoulders beneath the face heightened. They were bare and wet and deadly dusky, and they clinked the collar-shackle beneath the lax chin. Two hands stole into the room, their fish-coloured palms opening toward Gender.

  He screamed, and at last he ran. As he turned his back, the singing began yet again, loud and horribly jaunty - not at all as the miserable slaves had sung it. He gained the seaward door, drew it open, and looked full into a gathering of black, wet figures, with chains festooned among them, awaiting him. Again he screamed, and tried to push the door shut.

  He could not. A hand was braced against the edge of the panel - many hands. The wood fringed itself with gleaming black fingers. Gender let go the knob, whirled to flee into the house. Something caught the back of his coat, something he dared not identify. In struggling loose, he spun through the doorway and into the moonlit open.

  Figures surrounded him, black, naked, wet figures; dead as to sunken faces and flaccid muscles, but horribly alive as to eyes and trembling hands and slack mouths that formed the strange primitive words of the song; separate, yet strung together with a great chain and collar-shackles, like an awful fish on the gigantic line of some demon-angler. All this Gender saw in a rocking, moon-washed moment, while he choked and retched at a dreadful odour of death, thick as fog.

  Still he tried to run, but they were moving around him in a weaving crescent, cutting off his retreat toward the plantation. Hands extended toward him, manacled and dripping. His only will was to escape the touch of those sodden fingers, and one way was open - the way to the sea.

  He ran toward the brink of the bluff. From its top he would leap, dive and swim away. But they pursued, overtook, surrounded him. He remembered that he held a loaded pistol, and fired into their black midst. It had no effect. He might have known that it would have no effect.

  Something was clutching for him. A great, inhuman talon? No, it was an open collar of metal, with a length of chain to it, a collar that had once clamped to an anchor, dragging down to ocean's depths a line of shackled men. It gaped at him, held forth by many dripping hands. He tried to dodge, but it darted around his throat, shut with a ringing snap. Was it cold… or scalding hot? He knew, with horror vividly etching the knowledge into his heart, that he was one at last with the great chained procession.

  "Hailowa - Genda! Haipana - Genda!"

  He found his voice. "No, no!" he pleaded. "No, in the name of-"

  But he could not say the name of God. And the throng suddenly moved explosively, concertedly, to the edge of the bluff.

  A single wailing cry from all those dead throats, and they dived into the waves below.

  Gender did not feel the clutch and jerk of the chain that dragged him alone. He did not even feel the water as it closed over his head.

  4 - R. Chetwynd-Hayes - The Ghouls

  The doorbell rang. A nasty long shrill ring that suggested an impatient caller or a faulty bell-button. Mr Goldsmith did not receive many visitors. He muttered angrily, removed the saucepan of baked beans from the gas ring, then trudged slowly from the tiny kitchen across the even smaller hall and opened the front door. The bell continued to ring.

  A tall, lean man faced him. One rigid finger seemed glued to the bell-button. The gaunt face had an unwholesome greenish tinge. The black, strangely dull eyes stared into Mr Goldsmith's own and the mouth opened.

  "Oosed o love hore…"

  The shrill clatter of the doorbell mingled with the hoarse gibberish and Mr Goldsmith experienced a blend of fear and anger. He shouted at the unwelcome intruder.

  "Stop ringing the bell."

  "Oosed o love hore…" the stranger repeated.

  "Stop ringing the bloody bell." Mr Goldsmith reached round the door frame and pulled the dirt-grimed hand away. It fell limply down to its owner's side, where it swung slowly back and forth, four fingers clenched, the fifth - the index finger - rigid, as though still seeking a bell-button to push. In the silence that followed, Mr Goldsmith cleared his throat.

  "Now, what is it you want?"

  "Oosed o love hore." The stranger said again unintelligibly, then pushed by Mr Goldsmith and entered the flat.

  "Look here…" The little man ran after the intruder and tried to get in front of him, but the tall, lean figure advanced remorselessly towards the living room, where it flopped down in Mr Goldsmith's favourite armchair and sat looking blankly at a cheap Gauguin print that hung over the fireplace.

  "I don't know what your little game is," Mr Goldsmith was trying hard not to appear afraid, "but if you're not out of here in two minutes flat, I'll have the law around. Do you hear me?"

  The stranger had forgotten to close his mouth. The lower jaw hung down like a lid with a broken hinge. His threadbare, black overcoat was held in place by a solitary, chipped button. A frayed, filthy red scarf was wound tightly round his scrawny neck. He presented a horrible, loathsome appearance. He also smelt.

  The head came round slowly and Mr Goldsmith saw the eyes were now watery, almost as if they were about to spill over the puffy lids and go streaming down the green-tinted cheeks.

  "Oosed o love hore."

  The voice was a gurgle that began somewhere deep down in the constricted throat and the words seemed to bubble like stew seething in a saucepan.

  "What? What are you talking about?"

  The head twisted from side to side. The loose skin round the neck concertinaed and the hands beat a tattoo on the chair arms.

  "O-o-sed t-o-o 1-o-v-e h-o-r-e."

  "Used to live here!" A blast of understanding lit Mr Goldsmith's brain and he felt quite pleased with his interpretative powers. "Well, you don't live here now, so you'll oblige me by getting out."

  The stranger stirred. The legs, clad in a pair of decrepit corduroy trousers, moved back. The hands pressed down on the chair arms, and the tall form rose. He shuffled towards Mr Goldsmith and the stomach-heaving stench came with him. Mr Goldsmith was too petrified to move and could only stare at the approaching horror with fear glazed eyes.

  "Keep away," he whispered. "Touch me and… I'll shout…"

  The face was only a few inches from his own. The hands came up and gripped the lapels of his jacket and with surprising strength, he was gently rocked back and forth. He heard the gurgling rumble; it gradually emerged into speech.

  "Oi… um… dud… Oi… um… dud…"

  Mr Goldsmith stared into the watery eyes and had there been a third person present he might have supposed they were exchanging some mutual confidence.

  "You're… what?"

  The bubbling words came again.

  "Oi… um… dud."

  "You're bloody mad," Mr Goldsmith whispered.

  "Oi… um… dud."

  Mr Goldsmith yelped like a startled puppy and pulling himself free, ran for the front door. He leapt down the stairs, his legs operating by reflex, for there was no room for thought in his fear misted brain.

  Shop fronts slid by; paving stones loomed up, their rectangular shapes painted yellow by lamplight; startled faces drifted into his blurred vision, then disappeared and all the while the bubbling, ill-formed words echoed along the dark corridors of his brain.

  "Oi… urn… dud."

  "Just a moment, sir."

  A powerful hand gripped his arm and he swung round as the impetus of his flight was checked. A burly policeman stared down at him, suspicion peeping out of the small, blue eyes.

  "Now, what's all this, sir. You'll do yourself an injury, running like that."

  Mr Goldsmith fought to regain his breath, eager to impart the vital knowledge. To share the burden.

  "He's… he's dead."

  The grip on his arm tightened.

  "Now, calm yourself. Start from the beginning. Who's dead?"

  "He…" Mr Goldsmith gasped… "he rang the bell, wouldn't take his finger off the button… used to live there… then he sat in my chair… then got up… and told me… he was dead…"

  A heavy silence followed, brok
en only by the purr of a passing car. The driver cast an interested glance at the spectacle of a little man being held firmly by a large policeman. The arm of the law finally gave utterance.

  "He told you he was dead?"

  "Yes." Mr Goldsmith nodded, relieved to have shared his terrible information with an agent of authority. "He pronounced it dud."

  "A northern corpse, no doubt," the policeman remarked with heavy irony.

  "I don't think so," Mr Goldsmith shook his head. "No, I think his vocal cords are decomposing. He sort of bubbles his words. They… well, ooze out."

  "Ooze out," the constable repeated drily.

  "Yes." Mr Goldsmith remembered another important point.

  "And he smells."

  "Booze?" enquired the policeman.

  "No, a sort of sweet, sour smell. Rather like bad milk and dead roses."

  The second silence lasted a little longer than the first, then the constable sighed deeply:

  "I guess we'd better go along to your place of residence and investigate."

  "Must we?" Mr Goldsmith shuddered and the officer nodded.

  "Yes, we must."

  The front door was still open. The hall light dared Mr Goldsmith to enter and fear lurked in dark corners.

  "Would you," Mr Goldsmith hesitated, for no coward likes to bare his face, "would you go in first?"

  "Right." The constable nodded, squared his shoulders, and entered the flat. Mr Goldsmith found enough courage to advance as far as the doormat.

  "In the living room," he called out. "I left him in the living room. The door on the left."

  The police officer walked ponderously into the room indicated and after a few minutes came out again.

  "No one there," he stated simply.

  "The bedroom." Mr Goldsmith pointed to another door. "He must have gone in there."

  The policeman dutifully inspected the bedroom, the kitchen, then the bathroom before returning to the hall.