The Haunts & Horrors MEGAPACK®. Lawrence Watt-Evans

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СКАЧАТЬ in heaven’s name are you driving at, Al?” I broke in. “What’s Felicia’s being in delirium got to do with—”

      “Sorry,” he apologized. “I hadn’t told you what it was I suspected.

      “Remember the other night at your quarters I told you I thought medical opinion and theories were due for overhauling?

      “Yes, but—”

      “Never mind the buts, old man. Ever since we found that Jerry secret agent throttled in our railway coach, I’d puzzled over his bruises. The evidence all pointed to a great ape having throttled him, but that was palpably absurd. I’d found Felicia’s puttee and shoe unfastened, but that could have had have no bearing on the case—I thought. Then the other night you told me what Ten Eyck had said before he died—Felicia’s mother had been frightened into madness by a gorilla just before she had her baby; Felicia never showed her feet to anyone; seemed sensitive about them; you saw her almost faint when young Ten joked about her ability to feed herself with her feet remember?

      “Yes, of course; but—”

      “Hold hard, feller; let me finish. Nearly everybody’s heard—and most laymen believe stories—of pre-natal influence; if a mother’s frightened by an an animal, her baby’s likely to be marked with some characteristic of the beast. A mother terrified by a vicious dog, for instance, may give birth to a dog-faced child; or one who’s been chased by a bull may bear a child with vestiges of horn upon its head—”

      “What are you building up to?” I demanded. “Those old wives’ tales of prenatal influence have been discredited a century and more. Davenport in his Heredity in Relation to Eugenics states clearly that—”

      “Sure,” he broke in sarcastically, “and you can find plenty o’ people who believe that Bacon wrote Shakespeare, and just as many others who’ll tell you that Bacon laid an egg, but let me tell you something, Pat Carmichael: Felicia Watrous killed that German spy and saved us all from asphyxiation. She must have wakened when he got his gas-kit out and saw that he was up to—remember you told me how her eyes seemed to glow in the dark? She was probably better able to see in dim lights than we are, just as animals can. So she whipped her shoe and puttee off and killed him with a single grasp of her foot, but the gas got her before she’d quite finished redressing, so—”

      “Al, you’re drunk or crazy; maybe both!” I interrupted. “How in blazes could she have throttled him with her foot? I suppose you’ll tell me next she killed that crazy miner and saved those nurses—”

      “Of course she did,” he broke in almost savagely. “Come here—”

      Seizing me by the cuff he led me up the stairs and down the almost lightless corridor to the room where they had laid her.

      She was so peaceful, so lovely, lying in her white cot with the blankets drawn up cozily about her throat, that though I’d seen her die, I had to look a second time to make sure that I did not see the flutter of her bosom underneath the coverlet. The rain had stopped some time before, and now an early-morning beam of sunshine slanted through the window. But for Felicia, as for the boy who’d loved her since their childhood, the night had come.

      “Look here, Pat,” commanded Weinberg, “look and tell me if those ‘old wives’ tales’ have been completely discredited.”

      He drew the covers almost reverently from the foot of the cot.

      Her lovely legs were shaped as graciously as any ever sculptured by the master-craftsmen of old Greece, her ankles were as sharply turned and clean-cut as a thoroughbred race horse’s, but her feet—

      “Good heavens!” I cried as I looked.

      They were like hands; like powerfully-sinewed hands with scarcely any palms, but with fingers of abnormal length and thickness. The thumbs—or great toes—were mere vestigial stumps, and over all was thick, lead-colored hide, coarse and tough and callous as the skin that covers a gorilla’s foot.

      THE MONKEY’S PAW, by W.W. Jacobs

      I.

      Without, the night was cold and wet, but in the small parlour of Laburnam Villa the blinds were drawn and the fire burned brightly. Father and son were at chess, the former, who possessed ideas about the game involving radical changes, putting his king into such sharp and unnecessary perils that it even provoked comment from the white-haired old lady knitting placidly by the fire.

      “Hark at the wind,” said Mr. White, who, having seen a fatal mistake after it was too late, was amiably desirous of preventing his son from seeing it.

      “I’m listening,” said the latter, grimly surveying the board as he stretched out his hand. “Check.”

      “I should hardly think that he’d come tonight,” said his father, with his hand poised over the board.

      “Mate,” replied the son.

      “That’s the worst of living so far out,” bawled Mr. White, with sudden and unlooked-for violence; “of all the beastly, slushy, out-of-the-way places to live in, this is the worst. Pathway’s a bog, and the road’s a torrent. I don’t know what people are thinking about. I suppose because only two houses in the road are let, they think it doesn’t matter.”

      “Never mind, dear,” said his wife, soothingly; “perhaps you’ll win the next one.”

      Mr. White looked up sharply, just in time to intercept a knowing glance between mother and son. The words died away on his lips, and he hid a guilty grin in his thin grey beard.

      “There he is,” said Herbert White, as the gate banged to loudly and heavy footsteps came toward the door.

      The old man rose with hospitable haste, and opening the door, was heard condoling with the new arrival. The new arrival also condoled with himself, so that Mrs. White said, “Tut, tut!” and coughed gently as her husband entered the room, followed by a tall, burly man, beady of eye and rubicund of visage.

      “Sergeant-Major Morris,” he said, introducing him.

      The sergeant-major shook hands, and taking the proffered seat by the fire, watched contentedly while his host got out whiskey and tumblers and stood a small copper kettle on the fire.

      At the third glass his eyes got brighter, and he began to talk, the little family circle regarding with eager interest this visitor from distant parts, as he squared his broad shoulders in the chair and spoke of wild scenes and doughty deeds; of wars and plagues and strange peoples.

      “Twenty-one years of it,” said Mr. White, nodding at his wife and son. “When he went away he was a slip of a youth in the warehouse. Now look at him.”

      “He don’t look to have taken much harm,” said Mrs. White, politely.

      “I’d like to go to India myself,” said the old man, “just to look round a bit, you know.”

      “Better where you are,” said the sergeant-major, shaking his head. He put down the empty glass, and sighing softly, shook it again.

      “I should like to see those old temples and fakirs and jugglers,” said the old man. “What was that you started telling me the other day about a monkey’s paw or something, Morris?”

      “Nothing,” СКАЧАТЬ