The Horror Megapack. Robert E. Howard

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СКАЧАТЬ I find symptoms, however, that puzzle me beyond all calculation. That she is not in her normal condition of mind is evident; but I cannot discover the cause of this unnatural excitement. She is coherent, logical, but perfectly apathetic to all outward influences. At first I was certain that she was a victim of opium. Now I feel convinced that I was entirely wrong. It must be somnambulism. I will reside for a time in the house, and trust me to discover this mystery. Meanwhile she must be carefully watched.”

      Melony was as good as his word. He watched her incessantly, and reported to me her condition. The poor man was dreadfully puzzled. The strictest surveillance failed to elicit the slightest evidence of her taking any stimulants, although she remained almost all the time in the apathetic state which was so terrible to behold. The Doctor endeavored to arouse her by reproaches for her attempt on my life. She, in return, only smiled, and replied that it was a matter in which she had no further interest. Not a trace of any somnambulistic habit could be discovered. I was thoroughly wretched. I secluded myself from all society but that of Melony; and had it not been for him and my darling little Pearl I am certain that I should have gone mad. The most of my days I spent wandering in the great woods which lay in the neighborhood of my farm, and my evenings I endeavored to divert with reading or a chat with the good Doctor. Yet, talk of what we might, the conversation would always return to the same melancholy topic. It was a maze of sorrow in which we invariably, no matter in what direction we wandered, brought up at the same spot.

      IV

      The Doctor and myself were sitting one evening, late, in my library, talking gloomily enough over my domestic tragedy. He was endeavoring to persuade me to look more brightly on the future; to dismiss as far as possible from my mind the accursed horror that dwelt in my home, and to remember that I had still a dear object left on which to centre my affections. This allusion to little Pearl, in such a mood as I was then in, only served to heighten my agony. I began immediately to revolve the chances that, were my wife’s disease really insanity, it would be perpetuated in my dear child. Melony, of course, pooh-poohed the idea; but with the obstinacy of grief I clung to it. Suddenly a pause took place in the argument, and the dreary sounds that fill the air in the last nights of autumn swept around the house. The wind soughed through the treetops, which were now almost bare, as if moaning at being deprived of its leafy playmates. Inexplicable noises passed to and fro without the windows. Dead leaves rustled along the piazza, like the rustle of the garments of ghosts. Chilly draughts came from unseen crevices, blowing on back and cheek till one felt as if some invisible lips were close behind, pouring malignant breaths on face and shoulder. Suddenly the pause in our conversation was filled by a noise that we knew came neither from air nor dry leaf. We heard sounding through the night the muffled tread of footsteps. I knew that, except ourselves, the household had long since retired to bed. By a simultaneous action we both sprang to our feet and rushed to a door which opened into a long corridor leading to the nursery, and which communicated, by a series of rambling passages, with the main body of the house. As we flung back the door a light appeared at the further end advancing slowly toward us. It was borne by a tall, white figure. It was my wife! Calm and stately, and with her wonderful serene step, she approached. My heart was frozen when I saw spots of blood on her hands and night-robe. I gave a wild cry, and rushed past her. In another instant I was in baby’s room. The night light was burning dimly; the colored nurse was sleeping calmly in her bed; while, in a little cot in another part of the room, I saw—Ah! how tell it?—I cannot! well, little Pearl was murdered—murdered! My darling lay—It was I now who was insane. I rushed back into the corridor to slay the fiend who had done this horrible deed. I had no mercy for her then. I would have killed her a thousand times over. Great Heaven! She was leaning against the wall conversing as calmly with the Doctor as if nothing had happened; smoothing her hair with her reddened fingers, nonchalant as if at an evening party. I ran at her to crush her. Melony leaped between us.

      “Stop,” he cried. “The secret is out”;—and as he spoke he held up a little silver box containing what seemed to be a greenish paste. “It is hasheesh, and she is confessing!”

      Her statement was the most awful thing I ever listened to. It was as deliberate as a lawyer’s brief. She had contracted this habit in the East, she said, long before I knew her, and could not break it off. It wound her nature in chains of steel; by degrees it grew upon her, until it became her very life. Her existence lay as it were in a nut-shell, but that shell was to her a universe. One night, she continued, when she was under the influence of the drug, she went with me to see a play in which the wife abhors her husband and murders her children. It was “Medea.” From that instant murder became glorified in her sight, through the medium of the spell-working drug. Her soul became rapt in the contemplation of the spilling of blood. I was to have been her first victim, Pearl her second. She ended by saying, with an ineffable smile, that the delight of the taking away of life was beyond imagination.

      I suppose I must have fainted, for when I awoke from what seemed oblivion I found myself in bed, with Dr. Melony by my side. He laid his finger on his lip, and whispered to me that I had been very ill, and must not talk. But I could not restrain myself.

      “Where is she?” I muttered.

      “Where she ought to be,” he answered; and then I caught faintly the words, “Private madhouse.”

      * * * *

      O hasheesh! demon of a new paradise, spiritual whirlwind, I know you now! You blackened my life, you robbed me of all I held dear; but you have since consoled me. You thought, wicked enchanter, that you had destroyed my peace forever. But I have won, through you yourself, the bliss you once blotted out. Vanish past! Hence present! Out upon actuality! Hand in hand, I walk with the conqueror of time, and space, and suffering. Bend, all who hear me, to his worship!

      THE WALKING DEAD, by E. Hoffmann Price

      When Walt Connell heard the diffident tapping at the back door, he assumed an expression of judicial sternness. Plato Jones, who spaded Connell’s garden, must be returning with a fantastic story to account for a week’s absence and the six dollars which Connell had given him to buy some orange wine. But it was Plato’s wife who tapped at the door, a plump, comely black woman with a small parcel under her arm.

      “Evenin’, Mr. Walt,” she began. “My man Plato ain’t come back yet.”

      Tears were streaming down her face. Connell was saddled with a problem. Taking on a servant entailed responsibilities. He’d have to help her somehow.

      “That no-good man of yours probably drank my orange wine and now is afraid to come back,” Connell said.

      “No sir, no sir!” Amelia protested. “Plato don’t drink nuthin’!”

      “Well, maybe I can help,” Connell temporized.

      “Yes, sir, Mr. Walt!” Amelia beamed through her tears. “I knew you’d take care of me.”

      She thrust into his hands a paper-wrapped parcel.

      “I baked y’all a chocolate cake for lunch when you go to get that no-good man! And I fixed up some salt­ed cashew nuts, too.”

      Her guile had caught him totally off guard. He had accepted the present. Nothing to do but resign himself to a sixty-mile drive down the Mississippi Delta where the Cajuns convert under­sized oranges into fragrant, blasting wine; a no-man’s land, where a century or more ago, Lafitte’s pirates found refuge.

      * * * *

      The next morning Connell thrust Amelia’s gift of chocolate cake and ca­shew nuts into the parcel compartment and headed down the west bank. He spent the forenoon searching small town jails as he worked his way down the Delta, but no news of Plato. His last chance was Venice, at the end of the highway.

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