Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories That Scared Even Me by Various.
Title: Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories That Scared Even Me.
Author: Irvin S. Cobb, Basil Copper, Miriam Allen deFord, Gerald Kersh, Damon Knight, John Burke, Fritz Leiber, Nugent Barker (selected by Alfred Hitchcock).
Genre: Literature, fiction, short stories, horror, mystery, crime.
Country: U.S., England, Ireland, U.K..
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1913, 1926, 1935, 1939, 1940, 1949, 1950, 1953, 1954, 1957, 1959, 1961, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, and 1967 (this collection 1967).
Summary: A collection of 24 short stories and a novel. Fishhead (1913) by Irvin S. Cobb is set in the backwoods bayous of the American South and details Reelfoot Lake and its most infamous resident, an outcast freak called Fishhead. In Camera Obscura (1965) by Basil Copper, a merciless money-lender visits an eccentric and views his strange camera, which displays a live image of the surrounding town reflected from high overhead, but when he refuses to show compassion, exits the house into a new, terrifying, and eerily familiar world. In A Death in the Family (1961) by Miriam Allen deFord, a mortician finds a tragic and disturbing way to fashion himself a full and happy family, but his fantasy-world begins to crumble around him when he decides it is time for a final addition to their family unit. In Men Without Bones (1954) by Gerald Kersh, a man believed to be mad by the locals wanders out of the jungles of Puerto Rico, and tells a fantastic tale of a doomed expedition, a discovery of a space-craft, and an encounter with humanoid, gelatinous-looking creatures of shocking origins. In Not With a Bang (1949) by Damon Knight, on a planet devastated by nuclear war and a deadly virus, the last man alive tries to convince the last woman to "marry" him and continue the human race. In Party Games (1965) by John Burke, a children's birthday party culminates in a gruesome twist ending when a disliked, creepy little boy is bullied to his limits. X Marks the Pedwalk (1963) by Fritz Leiber describes a hellish, dystopian world in which pedestrians and drivers have formed violent, armed, competing factions. In Curious Adventure of Mr. Bond (1939) by Nugent Barker, a lone traveler who, upon stopping at an inn, is forced to visit the inn-owner's two brothers' inns, as well, realizes too late the sinister nature of these strange siblings. In Two Spinsters (1926) by E. Phillips Oppenheim, a detective stranded in Devoshire fields during a storm seeks shelter at a farm, but the spinster sisters who give it to him have dark beliefs and plans for the stranger that, to them, is not a stranger at all. In The Knife (1951) by Robert Arthur, a weapon owned by an infamous serial killer, Jack the Ripper, possesses anyone who lays a hand on it. In The Cage (1959) by Ray Russell, when a nobleman discovers his wife is cheating on him, he decides to teach her a lesson in his castle's torture dungeons, but though his intentions are not as serious as he makes them out to be, unforeseen circumstances cause a horrifying turn of events. In It (1940) by Theodore Sturgeon, a horrible monster rises from the muck beside a family-owned farm struggling to survive. In Casablanca (1967) by Thomas M. Disch, a man and his wife are stranded in a increasingly-hostile to Americans Casablanca after U.S. is hit with a nuclear weapon. In The Road to Mictlantecutli (1965) by Adobe James, a fugitive on the run in the Mexican desert comes across a strange monk and a beautiful rider and, unbeknownst to himself, has to make the most important choice of his life. In Guide to Doom (1963) by Ellis Peters, a tour guide of a small castle addresses a visitor as he leads him to a place of a suicide, and tells his the dark story of its occurrence. In The Estuary (1950) by Margaret St. Clair, a man makes a good living stealing from a ship estuary, but discovers too late he's not alone amidst the rotting decommissioned hauls. In Tough Town (1957) by William Sambrot, a travelling salesman has a surprisingly bad and dangerous welcome in a small town he comes across. In The Troll (1935) by T.H. White, while staying in an inn in Finland, a man comes across a terrible troll, whose true nature only he, however, can see. In Evening at the Black House (1964) by Robert Somerlott, as a man visits a friend in Mexico and they suddenly find themselves under siege from unknown assailants, it turns out neither man is who he claims he is. In One of the Dead (1966) by William Wood, as a couple moves into a new neighbourhood for a bargain, strange, dark things begin to happen around them and their neighbors. In The Real Thing (1966) by Robert Specht, two men are trapped in an air-pocket in a sunken ship at the bottom of the ocean, and as their circumstances get more and more dire, the darkness inside them begins to take hold. In The Master of the Hounds (1966) by Algis Budrys, a couple vacationing in a remote house meets their strange landlord, a concentration-camp survivor who keeps extremely well-trained dobermans, and quickly discover they may be his prisoners. In The Candidate (1961) by Henry Slesar, a man gets approached with an invitation to a secret society of people who kills others with the power of suggestion and group-think, but it quickly turns out not to be an invitation at all. Out of the Deeps (a reworking of The Kraken Wakes)** (1953) by John Wyndham is a novel where an alien invasion begins with mysterious objects falling into the worlds' oceans, and ends with ecological and humanitarian disaster as the aliens get hostile and the water levels begin to rise.
**Refer to the title link for the original entry with quotes and information.
My rating: 7.5/10
My review:
♥ For myself, I do no more than affirm that the stories in this book all gave me one or more of the pleasurable sensations associated with fear. Some quite terrified me. Some profoundly disturbed me and left me with a sense of deep uneasiness. Others prickled my nerve ends pleasurably, touched my spine with chills, or made me swallow hard as I registered their impact. Some did several of these things at once.
On that basis I offer them to you, trusting you will share with me these emotions, so enjoyable when they can be experienced in the snug embrace of an easy chair in the comfort of one's home.
And now I relinquish the screen to the main feature.
~~from Introduction by Alfred Hitchcock.
♥ Reelfoot Lake is like no other lake that I know anything about. It is an afterthought of Creation.
The rest of this continent was made and had dried in the sun for thousands of years-for millions of years for all I know-before Reelfoot came to be. It's the newest big thing in nature on this hemisphere probably, for it wad formed by the great earthquake of 1811, just a little more than a hundred years ago.
..Reelfoot is, and has always been, a lake of mystery. In places it is bottomless. Other places the skeletons of the cypress trees that went down when the earth sank still stand upright, so that if the sun shines from the right quarter and the water is less muddy than common, a man peering face downward into its depths sees, or thinks he sees, down below him the bare top-limbs upstretching like drowned men's fingers, all coated with the mud of years and bandaged with pennons of the green lake slime. In still other places the lake is shallow for long stretches, no deeper than breast-deep to a man, but dangerous because of the weed growths and the sunken drifts which entangle a swimmer's limbs. Its banks are mainly mud, its waters are muddied too, being a rich coffee color in the spring and a copperish yellow in the summer, and the trees along its shore are mud-colored clear up to their lower limbs after the spring floods, when the dried sediment covers their trunks with a thick, scrofulous-looking coat.
There are stretches of unbroken woodland around it and slashes where the cypress trees rise countlessly like headstones and footstones for the dead snags that rot in the soft ooze. There are deadenings with the lowland corn growing high and rank below and the bleached, fire-blackened girdled trees rising above, barren of leaf and limb. There are long, dismal flats where in the spring the clotted frog-spawn clings like patches of white mucus among the weed stalks and at night the turtles crawl out to lay clutches of perfectly round, white eggs with tough, rubbery shells in the sand. There are bayous leading off to nowhere and sloughs that wind aimlessly, like great, blind worms, to finally join the big river that rolls its semi-liquid torrents a few miles to the westward.
So Reelfoot lies there, flat in the bottoms, freezing lightly in the winter, streaming torridly in the summer, swollen in the spring when the woods have turned a vivid green and the buffalo gnats by the million and the billion fill the flooded hollows with their pestilential buzzing, and in the fall ringed about gloriously with all the colors which the first frost brings-gold of hickory, yellow-russet of sycamore, red of dogwood and ash and purple-black of sweet-gum.
♥ Fishhead was of a piece with this setting. He fitted into it as an acorn fits its cup. All his life he had lived on Reelfoot, always in the one place, at the mouth of a certain slough. He had been born there, of a Negro father and a half-breed Indian mother, both of them now dead, and the story was that before his birth his mother was frightened by one of the big fish, so that the child came into the world most hideously marked. Anyhow, Fishhead was a human monstrosity, the veritable embodiment of nightmare. He had the body of a man-a short, stocky, sinewy body-but his face was as near to being the face of a great fish as any face could be and yet retain some trace of human aspect. His skull sloped back so abruptly that he could hardly be said to have a forehead at all; his chin slanted off right into nothing. Hid eyes were small and round with shallow, glazed, pale-yellow pupils, and they were set wide apart in his head and they were unwinking and staring, like a fish's eyes. His nose was no more than a pair of tiny slits in the middle of the yellow mask. His mouth was the worst of all. It was the awful mouth of a catfish, lipless and almost inconceivably wide, stretching from side to side. Also when Fishhead became a grown man his likeness to a fish increased, for the hair upon his face grew out into a two tightly kinked, slender pendants that drooped down either side of the mouth like the beards of a fish.
♥ And then-his eye caught what another's eyes might have missed-the round, twin ends of the gun barrels, the fixed gleams of Joel's eyes, aimed at him through the green tracery.
In that swift passage of time, too swift almost to be measured by seconds, realization flashed all through him, and he threw his head still higher and opened wide his shapeless trap of a mouth, and out across the lake he sent skittering and rolling his cry. And in his cry was the laugh of a loon, and the croaking bellow of a frog, and the bay of a hound, all the compounded night noises of the lake. And in it, too, was a farewell and a defiance and an appeal. The heavy roar of the duck gun came.
~~Fishhead by Irvin S. Cobb.
♥ Strange how the story could have got to his ears; surprising how much information about the outside world a recluse could obtain just by sitting still.
♥ "This is the town center as far as I know, sir," said the lamplighter. As he spoke he stepped forward and the pale lamplight fell on to his face, which had been in shadow before.
Mr. Sharsted no longer waited to ask for any more directions but set off down the road at breakneck speed, not sure whether the green pallor of the man's face was due to a terrible suspicion or the green-tinted glasses he wore.
What he was certain of was that something like a mass of writhing worms projected below the man's cap, where his hair would normally have been. Mr. Sharsted hadn't waited to find out if this Medusa-like supposition were correct..
♥ He was a businessman, not like these bloodsuckers on society; the lost and the damned.
♥ He put a black velvet cloth over the image in the lens and went off slowly to bed.
Under the cloth, in pitiless detail, was reflected the narrow tangle of streets round Mr. Gingold's house, seen as through the eye of God; there went Mr. Sharsted and his colleagues, the lost and the damned, trapped for eternity, tumbling, weeping, swearing, as they slipped and scrabbled along the alleys and squares of their own private hell, under the pale light of the stars.
~~Camera Obscura by Basil Copper.
♥ All the time the naphtha flares were hissing, and from the hold came the reverberation of the roaring voice of the foreman of the gang down below crying: "Fruta! Fruta! FRUTA!" The leader of the dock gang bellowed the same cry, throwing down stem after stem of brilliant green bananas. The occasion would be memorable for this, if for nothing else-the magnificence of the night, the bronze of the Negro foreman shining under the flares, the jade green of that fruit, and the mixed odors of the waterfront. Out of one stem of bananas ran a hairy grey spider, which frightened the crew and broke the banana-chain, until a Nicaraguan boy, with a laugh, killed it with his foot. It was harmless, he said.
♥ "There was the weight of ages on the place. Respect old age, one is told... The greater the age, the deeper the respect, you might say. But it is not respect; it is dread, it is fear of time and death, sir!"
♥ "But, as the sun rose higher, the thing liquefied, melted, until by one o'clock there was nothing but a glutinous gray puddle, with two green eyes swimming in it. ...And these eyes-I can see them now-burst with a thick pop, making a detestable sticky ripple in that puddle of corruption..."
♥ "You may or may not know that, of all the beasts that live in that jungle, the most impregnable is the sloth. He finds a stout limb, climbs out on it, and hangs from it by his twelve steely claws; a tardigrade that lives on leaves. Your tardigrade is so tenacious that even in death, shot through the heart, it will hang on to its branch. It has an immensely tough hide covered by an impenetrable coat of coarse, matted hair. A panther or a jaguar is helpless against the passive resistance of such a creature."
♥ I said to him: "Assuming that what you say is true: these 'boneless men'-they were, I presume, the Martians? Yet it sounds unlikely, surely? Do invertebrates smelt hard metals and-"
"Who said anything about Martians?" cried Doctor Goodbody. "No, no, no! The Martians came here, adapted themselves to new conditions of life. Poor fellows, they changed, sank low; went through a whole new process-a painful process of evolution. What I'm trying to tell you, you fool, is that Yeoward and I did not discover Martians. Idiot, don't you see? Those boneless things are men. We are the Martians!"
~~Men Without Bones by Gerald Kersh.
♥ Ten months after the last plane passed over, Rolf Smith knew beyond doubt that only one other human being had survived. Her name was Louise Oliver, and he was sitting opposite her in a department-store café in Salt Lake City. They were eating canned Vienna sausages and drinking coffee.
Sunlight struck through a broken pane like a judgment. Inside and outside, there was no sound; only a stifling rumor of absence. The clatter of dishware in the kitchen, the heavy rumble of streetcars: never again. There was sunlight; and silence; and the watery, astonished eyes of Louise Oliver.
~~Not With a Bang by Damon Knight.
♥ Alice went towards the kitchen and drew the curtains. It would soon be quite dark outside. In summer they could have had the party in the garden; but Ronnie had elected to be born in the winter, so most of his celebrations had been accompanied by a trampling of wet feet into the house and a great fussing over scarves and flowers and rain hoods and mackintoshes when the guests left.
Tom would be home in another twenty minutes or so. She would be glad to see him. Even though the din would not diminish, it would somehow be more tolerable when shared.
♥ It was all very well for Tom. He did not get home until after she had taken the first shock of the impact. Twenty children together were not just twenty separate children added together, one plus one and so on: they combined into something larger and more terrifying. There was no telling what they might do if the circumstances were right... or wrong, depending on the way you looked at it.
♥ From the kitchen door she glanced occasionally across the hall and then felt absurdly like a voyeur. Some of the boys behaved with a flamboyant confidence that indicated a prolonged study of films which they ought never to have been allowed to see. Some of the girls wriggled, others relaxed and enjoyed themselves. It was frightening to see in these children of eight and nine years of age the pattern of what they would be as adults-patterns already forming, some already established.
~~Party Games by John Burke.
♥ The little old lady dipped into her shopping bag and came up with a big blue-black automatic. She held it in both fists, riding the recoils like a rodeo cowboy on a bucking bronco.
Aiming at the base of the windshield, just as a big-game hunter aims at the vulnerable spine of a charging water buffalo over the horny armor of its lowered head, the little old lady squeezed off three shots before the car chewed her down.
From the right-hand curb a young woman in a wheelchair shrieked an obscenity at the car's occupants.
..Braking viciously, Smythe-de Winter rammed the car over the right-hand curb. Pedestrians scattered into entries and narrow arcades, among them a youth bounding high on crutches.
But Smythe-de Winter got the girl in the wheelchair.
Then he drove rapidly out of the Slum Ring into the Suburbs, a shred of rattan swinging from the flange of his right fore mudguard for a trophy. Despite the two-for-two casualty list, he felt angry and depressed. The secure, predictable world around him seemed to be crumbling.
♥ "Well, I suppose we must scrape out one more compromise," the one suggested hollowly, "though I must confess there are times when I think we're all the figments of a paranoid's dream."
Two hours of concentrated deliberations produced the new Wheel-Foot Articles of Agreement. Among other points, pedestrian handguns were limited to a slightly lower muzzle velocity and to .38 caliber and under, while motorists were required to give three honks at one-block distance before charging a pedestrian in a crosswalk. Two wheels over the curb changed a traffic kill from third-degree manslaughter to petty homicide. Blind pedestrians were permitted to carry hand grenades.
♥ Smythe-de suddenly gunned his motor. He didn't hit any of the children, but he got the dog.
..He turned toward Witherspoon-Hobbs and said with thoughtful satisfaction, "I like a normal orderly world, where you always have a little success, but not champagne-heady; a little failure, but just enough to brace you."
~~X Marks the Pedwalk by Fritz Leiber.
♥ "Come in, come in," the landlord whispered, "do come in. She is cooking a lovely broth to-night!"
He turned and chuckled, holding the lamp above his head.
Through the doorway of this lost, upland inn, Mr. Bond followed the monstrous back of his host. The passage widened and became a hall; and here, amongst the shadows that were gliding from their lurking-places as the lamp advanced, the landlord stopped, and tilted the flat of his hand in the air, as though enjoining his guest to listen. Then Mr. Bond disturbed the silence of the house with a sniff and a sigh. Not only could he smell the "lovely broth"-already, in this outer hall, he tasted it... a complex and subtle flavour, pungent, heavy as honey, light as a web in the air, nipping him in the stomach, bringing tears into his eyes.
♥ The room was filled with the mingled light of moon, fire, and candle.
Mr. Bond, eager at last for the dreamless rest, the abandoned sleep, of the traveller, turned and surveyed the room in which he was to spend the night.
♥ Breakfast was cold and short and silent. Words were delicate things to wear in this crystalline atmosphere.
♥ Where were the children, he wondered. Their voices could not be heard. Perhaps they had fallen asleep, suddenly, like animals. But Mr. Bond found it difficult to imagine those eyes in bed, asleep.
♥ A splinter flew into the room, and he knew in a flash that the end of his journey had come. Was it Stephen or Stennet, Stephen or Stennet behind the door? The candle flickered as he blundered to and fro. He had no time to think, no time to act. He stood and watched the corner of the axe-blade working in the crack in the panel.
..Mr. Bond remembered the creeper clinging beneath his window and as soon as possible he was floundering, scrambling, slipping down to the house-shadowed garden below. Puffing out his cheeks, he hurried onward, while the thuds of the axe grew fainter in his ears. Brickbats lay in his path, a zinc tub wrenched at his cape and ripped it loudly, an iron hoop caught in his foot and he tottered forward with outstretched hands. And now, still running in the far-flung shadow of the house, he was on the tufted grass, whimpering a little, struggling against desire to look back over his shoulder, making for the forest that lay in the full beams of the moonlight. He tried to think, and could think of nothing but the size and safety of the shadow on which he was running. He reached the roof of the inn at last: plunged aside from his course of flight: and now he was running up the monstrous shadow of the chimney, thinking of nothing at all because the forest stood so near. Blindingly, a moon-filled avenue stretched before him: the chimney entered the chasm, and stopped: and it was as though Mr. Bond were a puff of smoke blowing into the forest depths. His shadow, swinging its monstrously distorted garments, led him to an open space at the end of the avenue. The thick-set trees encircled it with silence deeper than any Mr. Bond had known. Here, in this glade, hung silence within a silence. Yet, halting abruptly, and pressing the flat of his hands to his ribs in the pain of his sudden burst if breathing, Mr. Bond had no ears for the silence, nor eyes for anything beyond the scene that faced him in the centre of the forest glade: a group of upright posts, or stakes, set in a concave semicircle, throwing long shadows, and bearing on each summit a human skull. "'The Traveller's Head,' 'The Headless Man,'" he whispered, stricken with terror, whipping his back on the skulls; and there was Stephen Sasserach in silhouette, leaping up the avenue, brandishing his axe as though he were a demented woodcutter coming to cut down trees.
The traveller's mind continued to run swiftly through the names of the three inns. "'The Traveller's Head,'" he thought, "'The Headless Man,' 'The Rest of the Traveller.'" He remembered the carrion pigeons that had flown ahead of him from inn to inn; he remembered the dust on the front of Martin's coat...
He was staring at the figure in the soiled blue shirt. It had halted now, as still as a tree, on the verge of the moon-filled glade: but the whirling thoughts of Mr. Bond were on the verge of light more blinding than this; they stopped, appalled: and the traveller fled beyond the skulls, fruitlessly searching for cover in the farthest wall of trees.
Then Stephen sprang in his wake, flinging up a cry that went knocking against the tree-trunks.
The echoes were echoed by Mr. Bond, who, whiping round to face his enemy, was wriggling and jerking in his Inverness cape, slipping it off at last, and swinging it in his hand, for his blood was up. And now he was deep in mortal combat, wielding his Inverness as the gladiators used to wield their nets in the old arenas. Time and again the axe and the cape engaged each other; the one warding and hindering; the other catching and ripping, clumsily enough, as though in sport. Around the skulls the two men fought and panted, now in darkness, now in the full light pouring down the avenue. Their moon-cast shadows dought another fight together, wilder still than theirs. Then Stephen cried: "Enough of this!" and bared his teeth for the first time since the strife had started.
"B-but you're my friend!" bleated Mr. Bond; and he stared at the shining thread of the axe.
"The best you ever had, sir, Mr. Bond, sir!" answered Stephen Sasserach; and, stepping back, the landlord of "The Traveller's Head" cut off the traveller's head.
The thump of the head on the sticks and leaves and grass of the forest glade was the first sound in the new and peaceful life of Mr. Bond, and he did not hear it; but to the brothers Sasserach it was a promise of life itself, a signal that all was ready now for them to apply their respective talents busily and happily in the immediate future.
Stephen took the head of Mr. Bond, and with gentle though rather clumsy fingers pared it to a skull, grinning back at it with simple satisfaction when the deed was over, and after that he set it up as a fine mark for his brood of primitives, the game's endeavour being to see who could throw the ball into the eyesockets; and to his brother Marin, landlord of "The Headless Man," he sent the headless man, under the care of Stennet: and Martin, on a soft, autumnal day, reduced the headless body to a skeleton, with all its troubles gone, and through the days and nights he sat at work, with swift precision in his fingers, carving and turning, powdering his coat with dust, creating hid figures and trinkets, his paper-knives and salad-spoons and fretted boxes and rare chess-men; and to his brother Crispin, landlord of "The Rest of the Traveller," Martin sent the rest of the traveller, the soft and yielding parts, the scraps, the odds and ends, the miscellaneous pieces, all the internal lumber that had gone to fill the skin of the man from the Midlands and to help to render him in middle years a prey to dyspepsia. Crispin received the parcel with a a pursing of his small mouth, and a call to Myrtle in his clear falsetto: "Stennet's here!"
She answered from the kitchen. "Thank you, Cris!" Her hands were soft and swollen as she scoured the tureen. The back of the inn was full of reflected sunlight, and her dark hair shone.
"It's too late in the season now," she said, when tea-time came. "I don't suppose we'll have another one before the spring."
Yet she was wrong. That very evening, when the moon had risen from beyond the valley, Myrtle murmured: "There he comes," and continued to stir her ladle in the bowl.
Her husband strolled into the hall and wound the clock.
He took the lamp from its bracket on the wall.
He went to the door, and flung it open to the moonlight; holding the lamp above his head.
"Come in, come in," he said, to the stranger standing there. "She is cooking a lovely broth to-night!"
~~Curious Adventure of Mr. Bond by Nugent Barker.
♥ "I was going to kill you, William," she confessed.
"And why?" he demanded.
She shook her head sorrowfully.
"Because it is the only way," she replied.
"My name isn't William, for one thing," he objected, "and what so you mean by saying it is the only way?"
She smiled, sadly and disbelievingly.
"You should not deny your name" she said. "You are William Foulsham. I knew you at once, though you had been away so long. When he came," she added, pointing towards the other room, "Annabelle believed that he was William. I let her keep him. I knew. I knew if I waited you would come."
"Waiving the question of my identity," he struggled on, "why do you want to kill me? What do you mean by saying it is the only way?"
"It is the only way to keep a man," she answered. "Annabelle and I found that out when you left us. You knew each of us loved you, William; you promised each of us never to leave-do you remember? So we sat here and waited for you to come back. We said nothing, but we both knew."
"You mean that you were going to kill me to keep me here?" he persisted.
She looked towards the knife lovingly.
"That isn't killing," she said. "Don't you see-you could never go away. You would be here always."
He began to understand, and a horrible idea stole into his brain.
"What about the man she thought was William?" he asked.
"You shall see him if you like," she answered eagerly. "You shall see how peaceful and happy he is. Perhaps you will be sorry then that you woke up. Come with me."
He possessed himself of the knife and followed her out of the room and across the landing. Underneath the door he could see the little chink of light-the light which had been his beacon from the road. She opened the door softly and held the candle over her head. Stretched upon another huge four-poster bed was the figure of a man with a ragged, untidy beard. His face was as pale as the sheet and Grant knew from the first glance that he was dead. By his side, seated stiffly in a high-backed chair, was Annabelle. She raised her finger and frowned as they entered. She looked across at Grant.
"Step quietly," she whispered. "William is asleep."
~~Two Spinsters by E. Phillips Oppenheim.
♥ "And both of them said the same thing, when we questioned them."
"They did, eh? Just what did they say?"
"Well, sir, they said they got a warm, tingly feeling just from holding the knife. It came on all of a sudden like wen they got angry at the women. They didn't know why they got so angry, they just did... and just like that the women were dead! They said-" Sergeant Tobins allowed himself to smile-"that they didn't have anything to do with it. That the knife just sort of moved by itself, with them holding it."
"They said that, eh?...Good Lord!" The tall man stared at the knife with a new interest. "Sergeant, just where was the drain in which this thing was found?"
"Dorset street, sir," Sergeant Tobins stated. "Near the corner of Commercial street."
"Dorset street, did you say?" Inspector's Frayne's voice was sharp, his eyes alight. "By George, I wonder-"
Neither Tobins nor Miss Mapes interrupted. After a moment, Frayne put the knife back in its box on Sergeant Tobins' desk.
"I was having a brainstorm," he said, smiling. "This knife-well, do you know what happened on Dorset street a good while ago?"
Sergeant Tobins shook his head.
"I seem to remember of reading about it," he said. "But I can't just put my mind on where."
"It's mentioned in one of the largest files in our record department. It happens that in November of 1888 a woman was brutally murdered-with a knife-in Millers Court, off Dorset street. Her name was Marie Kelly."
Sergeant Tobins stared.
"I remember now," he blurted out. "Jack the Ripper!"
"Exactly. His last murder, we believe. The last of twelve. All women. He seemed to have a special, venomous hatred for women. And I was toying with the thought of a murderer hurrying from that spot in the dead of night, with a bloodstained knife in his hand. I could see him dropping it into a drain opening as he fled, to lie there until now... Well, as I say, a brainstorm."
Sergeant Tobins watched the door close, then turned.
"The inspector would do great writing thrillers," he said with ponderous humor. A regular information for it, he has!"
He picked up the knife, gripped it firmly, and struck a pose, winking broadly.
"Be careful, Miss Mapes!" he said. "Jack the Ripper!"
Miss Mapes giggled.
"Well now," she breathed. "Let me look at it, may I Sergeant Tobins, if you don't mind?"
Her fingers touched his, and Sergeant Tobins drew his hand back abruptly. His face flushed, and a fierce anger unaccountably flared up in him at the touch of Miss Mapes' hand. But as he stared into her plain, bewildered face, the anger was soothed by the pleasurable tingling warmth in his right wrist and arm. And as he took a swift step toward her, there was a strange, sweet singing in his ears, high and shrill and faraway.
Or was it the sound of a woman screaming?
~~The Knife by Robert Arthur.
♥ "They say," said the Countess, absently fondling the brooch at her young throat, "that he's the devil."
Her husband snorted, "Who says that? Fools and gossips. That boy is a good overseer. He manages my lands well. He may be a little-ruthless? cold?-but I doubt very much that he is the Enemy Incarnate."
"Ruthless, yes," said the Countess, gazing a the departing black-cowled, black-hosed, black-gloved figure. "But cold? He seems to be a favorite with the women. His conquests, they say, are legion."
"'They' say. Gossips again. But there you are-would the angel Lucifer bed women?" The Count snorted again, pleased at his logical triumph.
"He might," replied his wife. "To walk the earth, he must take the shape of a man. Might not the appetites of a man go with it?"
~~The Cage by Ray Russell.
♥ It walked in the woods.
It was never born. It existed. Under the pine needles the fires burn, deep and smokeless in the mold. In heat and in darkness and decay where is growth. There is life and there is growth. It grew, but it was not alive. It walked unbreathing through the woods, and thought and saw and was hideous and strong, and it was not born and it did not live. It grew and moved about without living.
It crawled out of the darkness and hot damp mold into the cool of a morning. It was huge. It was limped and crusted with its own hateful substances, and pieces of it dropped off as it went its way, dropped off and lay writhing, and stilled, and sank putrescent into the forest foam.
It had no mercy, no laughter, no beauty. It had strength and great intelligence. And-perhaps it could not be destroyed. It crawled out of its mound in the wood and lay pulsing in the sunlight for a long moment. Patches of it shone wetly in the golden glow, parts of it were nubbled and flaked. And whose dead bones had given it the form of a man?
♥ Alton Drew walked up the path toward the wood, thinking about Babe. She was a phenomenon-a pampered farm child. Ah well-she had to be. They'd both loved Clissa Drew, and she'd married Cory, and they had to love Clissa's child. Funny thing, love. Alton was a man's man, and thought things out that way; and his reaction to love was a strong and frightened one. He knew what love was because he felt it still for his brother's wife and would feel it as long as he lived for Babe. It led him through his life, and yet he embarrassed himself by thinking of it. Loving a dog was an easy thing, because you and the old devil could love one another completely without talking about it. The smell of gun smoke and wet fur in the rain were perfume enough for Alton Drew, a grunt of satisfaction and the scream of something hunted and hit were poetry enough. They weren't like love for a human, that choked his throat so he could not say words he could not have thought of anyway. So Alton loved his dog Kimbo and his Winchester for all to see, and let his love for his brother's women, Clissa and Babe, eat at him quietly and unmentioned.
♥ He cocked his .32-40 and cradled it. At the county fair someone had once said of Alton Drew that he could shoot at a handful of corn and peas thrown in the air and hit only the corn. Once he split a bullet on the blade of a knife and put two candles out. He had no need to fear anything that could be shot at. That's what he believed.
♥ It was growing late, and the sun reddened and rested awhile on the hilly horizon, teaching the clouds to be inverted flames. The thing threw up its head suddenly, noticing the dusk. Night was ever a strange thing, even for those of us who have known it in life. It would have been frightening for the monster had it been capable of fright, but it could only be curious; it could only reason from what it had observed.
What was happening? It was getting harder to see. Why? It threw its shapeless head from side to side. It was true-things were dim, and growing dimmer. Things were changing shape, taking on a new and darker color. What did the creatures it had crushed and torn apart see? How did they see? The larger one, the one that had attacked, had used two organs in its head. That must have been it, because after the thing had torn off two of the dog's legs it had struck at the hairy muzzle; and the dog, seeing the blow coming, had dropped folds of skin over the organs-closed its eyes. They remained open and staring. The logical conclusion was, then, that a being that had ceased to live and breathe and move about lost the use of its eyes. It must be that to lose sight was, conversely, to die. Dead things did not walk about. They lay down and did not move. Therefore the thing in the wood concluded that it must be dead, and so it lay down by the path, not far away from Kimbo's scattered body, lay down and believed itself dead.
♥ The thing knew it was dead now, and like many a being before it, it wondered how long it must stay like this. And then the sky beyond the trees grew a little lighter.
..The sun came hand over hand up a beam of light. A bird somewhere made a high yawning peep, and as an owl killed a shrew, a skunk pounced on another, so that the night-shift deaths and those of the day could go on without cessation. Two flowers nodded archly to each other, comparing their pretty clothes. A dragonfly nymph decided it was tired of looking serious and cracked its back open, to crawl out and dry gauzily. The first golden ray sheared down between the trees, through the grasses, passed over the main in the shadowed bushes. "I am alive again," thought the thing that could not possibly live. "I am alive, for I see clearly." It stood up on its thick legs, up into the golden glow. In a little while the wet flakes that had grown during the night dried in the sun, and when it took its first steps, hey cracked off and a small shower of them fell away. It walked up the slope to find Kimbo, to see if he, too, were alive again.
~~It by Theodore Sturgeon.
♥ Fred spoke "four languages: English, Irish, Scottish, and American." With only those languages, he insisted, one could be understood anywhere in the free world.
♥ The hardest lesson to learn (and he had not yet learned it) was to keep from thinking. When he could do that, he wouldn't become angry, or afraid.
~~Casablanca by Thomas M. Disch.
♥ Morgan asked, "Is Linaculan the nearest town?"
"Yes."
"Is that where you were going?"
"No."
Hopefully then, "Do you have a church near by?"
"No. But I frequently trod this road."
"For Christ's sake, why walk this miserable road?"
"For the very reason you mentioned, for Christ's sake."
Now Morgan was completely at ease. The padre was harmless.
♥ They plodded on, two dark figures-shadows almost-walking a desolate road. They climbed a short hill and were bathed in moonlight again. Morgan liked that. The darkness had been too dark; it seemed to him that there were things-unseen, unreal-out there beyond the moonlight.
They started down the other side of the hill, and the darkness crept back...
♥ Her whip bit into the horse; neck and her spurs dew blood. They tore down the road, galloping, galloping, galloping toward the night. The stench was back again, and shreds of the girl's flesh began sloughing off in the wind.
She turned... slowly, this time... and Morgan saw the horrible grinning expression of a skeleton.
He twisted around, unable to face the apparition, and cried out once more for the priest. Far back in the distance-as if he were viewing something in another world-Morgan could see the padre's solitary figure at the top of a hill, plodding towards the east, the rising sun, and a new day.
When Morgan turned back again, weeping and knowing now the desperate futility of hope, they had already reached the edge of night... and the oppressive darkness reached out to engulf them.
~~The Road to Mictlantecutli by Adobe James.
♥ She was hating herself, and wanting to be honest, and wanting her lover to stand by her even in that.
♥ And the way I see it, she was too young and inexperienced to understand that you don't hit out at somebody who means nothing to you. She thought he was finished with her. And if he was gone, everything was gone. She didn't know enough to wait, and bear it, and hope.
~~Guide to Doom by Ellis Peters.
♥ Something horrible had happened to this town, the people. The word of him had spread like a crown fire in a forest and they were out to get him. Why? He was no criminal. What could he possibly have done to start them off? He shifted his sample case, trying to think. And then he remembered the newspaper he'd read. The little girl. Missing. Foul-play suspected. Good God! Could it be they-?
He hurried. He realized his danger. He was The Stranger. Outsider. Beyond the sacred community pale.
He broke into a shambling staggering run. Across the street, through an empty lot, down an embankment and up the other side. There was no choice now. He had to cut across the fields, running heavily, the case banging against him, clutching the newspaper, while behind, the shouts rose. He tried to duck behind a huge oak tree but already they'd spotted him. The pursuit became bedlam.
He ran. He was every frightened man ever pursued. The night surrounded him, hideous with piercing calls. He moved spasmodically, a man in a nightmare. The town was after him, baying, slavering, with red red mouth. He should never have ignored that gigantic neon-lit NO PEDDLERS that burned and flared behind the eyes.
From all about they converged, seeing beyond the flimsy camouflage of his jaunty carriage, seeing the cracked shoes, the shining serge, the battered sample case. They knew. Canvasser. Peddler. Keep out. This is a tough town.
Suddenly he was down and they were on him, shouting, hands pulling at him.
"It's him. The guy the radio described-"
"He's the one the sheriff's after-"
"He did it. Killer. Rapist!"
Killer. Rapist. The words roared and crashed against his body from all angles, leaving great hurting welts. Dimly he heard a siren approaching, wailing thin and clear above the surf-sounds of the mob. Brakes squealed. There was an obscure scuffle, and still the mob pounded and pulled at him alternately.
"-not wanted for the girl!" a voice roared. "Let him go!" The voice was swallowed up in the huge murmuring. "He's been bitten by a mad dog. Stand back. In the name of the law, stand back or I'll shoot!"
Mad dog! The words swept through the mob like a tremendous wave, battering and buffeting, surging back again.
"He's a mad dog!"
One voice, howling, horrible to hear rising above the others: "You heard the sheriff. He's a mad dog killer! You know what he did to Julie Howell. What are we waiting for?"
Another voice, lost, remote: "Stop! In the name of-"
There were shots, the mob shouted in unison, then swept forward like one kill-crazy animal. He was picked up. Hands plucked and tore at him. Faces, red, sweaty, glaring-eyed, came and went. Sounds swelled and swelled. This couldn't be real. This must be delirium, the result of the venom the mad dog had introduced into his blood. He'd heard the sheriff's words. He understood at last. It would be all right. This was fever. Soon, they'd put him between cool sheets and kind nurses would bathe his hot forehead.
He tried to move his broken mouth, to tell them this. He'd misjudged the people, the town. They weren't rough. Not really. It was just that he'd been bitten by a mad dog and they'd wanted to find him, to help him. They meant him no harm. All this, the noises, the battering blows, the mob-this wasn't really happening. Not really. It was the delirium.
Brilliant lights flared in his face. He opened his swollen eyes, squinting against the glare. Above was the massive outline of a great tree. An oak tree. Something moved up there, then came dropping toward him, alien, sinuous, like a brown hairy snake.
It dangled before his face and he smiled at it while lights flared and diminished in his eyes. It looked like a rope, it felt harsh when they put it around his neck, but it couldn't be a rope. Not really. The crowd screamed, a strangely feminine sound that lifted him up, up on a shrill crest of unbelievable sound, then suddenly he felt himself dropping, dropping.
It wad just part of the nightmare. They meant him no harm. Soon they'd put him between cool sheets and kind nur-
~~Tough Town by William Sambrot.
♥ "My father," said Mr. Marx, "used to say that an experience like the one I am about to relate was apt to shake one's interest in mundane matters. Naturally he did not expect to be believed, and he did not mind whether he was or not. He did not himself believe in the supernatural, but the thing happened, and he proposed to tell it as simply as possible. It was stupid of him to say that it shook his faith in mundane affairs, for it was just as mundane as anything else. Indeed the really frightening part about it was the horribly tangible atmosphere in which it took place. None of the outlines wavered in the least. The creature would have been less remarkable if it had been less natural. It seemed to overcome the usual laws without being immune to them."
♥ He went to bed early, sleeping almost immediately, although it was bright daylight outside; as it is in those parts throughout the night at that time of the year. Not the least shaking part of his experience was that it should all have happened under the sun.
♥ "I suppose the best way to tell the story is simply to narrate it, without an effort to carry belief. The thing did not require belief. It was not a feeling of horror in one's bones, or a misty outline, or anything that needed to be given actuality by an act of faith. It was as solid as a wardrobe. You don't have to believe in wardrobes. They are there, with corners."
♥ "What my father saw through the keyhole in the next room was a Troll. It was eminently solid, about eight feet high, and dressed in brightly ornamented skins. It had a blue face, with yellow eyes, and on its head there was a woolly sort of nightcap with a red bobble on top. The features were Mongolian. It's body was long and sturdy, like the trunk of a tree. Its legs were short and thick, like the elephant's feet that used to be cut off for umbrella stands, and its arms were wasted: little rudimentary members like the forelegs of a kangaroo. Its head and neck were very thick and massive. On the whole, it looked like a grotesque doll.
"That was the horror of it. Imagine a perfectly normal golliwog (but without the association of a Christie minstrel) standing in the corner of a room, eight feet high. The creature was as ordinary as that, as tangible, as stuffed, and as ungainly at the joints: but it could move itself about.
"The Troll was eating a lady. Poor girl, she was tightly clutched to its breast by those rudimentary arms, with her head on a level with its mouth. She was dressed in a nightdress which had crumpled up under her armpits, so that she was a pitiful naked offering, like a classical picture of Andromeda. Mercifully, she appeared to have fainted.
"Just as my father applied his eye to the keyhole, the Troll opened its mouth and bit off her head. Then, holding the neck between the bright blue lips, he sucked the bare meat dry. She shrivelled, like a squeezed orange, and her heels kicked. The creature had a look of thoughtful ecstasy. When the girl seemed to have lost succulence as an orange she was lifted into the air. She vanished in two bites. The Troll remained leaning against the wall, munching patiently and casting its eyes about it with a vague benevolence. Then it leant forward from the low hips, like a jack-knife folding in half, and opened its mouth to lick the blood from the carpet. The mouth was incandescent inside, like a gas fire, and the blood evaporated before its tongue, like dust before a vacuum cleaner. It straightened itself, the arms dangling before it in patient uselessness, and fixed its eyes upon the keyhole."
♥ "A man can attribute many night-time appearances to the imagination, and can ultimately persuade himself that creatures of the dark did not exist. But this was an appearance in a sunlit room, with all the solidity of a wardrobe and unfortunately almost none of its possibility. He spent the first ten minutes making sure that he was awake, and the rest of the night trying to hope that he was asleep. It was either that, or else he was mad."
♥ "Life is such unutterable hell, solely because it is sometimes beautiful. If we could only be miserable all the time, if there could be no such things as love or beauty or faith or hope, if I could be absolutely certain that my love would never be returned: how much more simple life would be. One could plod through the Siberian salt mines of existence without being bothered about happiness. Unfortunately the happiness is there. There is always the chance (about eight hundred and fifty to one) that another heart will come to mine. I can't help hoping, and keeping faith, and loving beauty. Quite frequently I am not so miserable as it would be wise to be."
♥ "And yet, when he had eaten the chocolate-perhaps it was heavy on his stomach-there was the memory of the Troll. My father fell suddenly into a black mood, and began to think about the supernatural. Lapland was beautiful in the summer, with the sun sweeping round the horizon day and night, and the small tree leaves twinkling. It was not the sort of place for wicked things. But what about the winter? A picture of the Arctic night came before him, with the silence and the snow. Then the legendary wolves and bears snuffled at the far encampments, and the nameless winter spirits moved on their darkling courses. Lapland had always been associated with sorcery, even by Shakespeare. It was at the outskirts of the world that the Old Things accumulated, like driftwood round the edges of the sea. If one wanted to find a wise woman, one went to the rims of the Hebrides; on the coast of Brittany one sought the mass of St. Secaire. And what an outskirt Lapland was! It was an outskirt not only of Europe, but of civilisation. It had no boundaries. The Lapps went with the reindeer, and where the reindeer were was Lapland. Curiously indefinite region, suitable to the indefinite things. The Lapps were not Christians. What a fund of power they must have had behind them, to resist the march of mind. All through the missionary centuries they had held to something: something had stood behind them, a power against Christ. My father realised with a shock that he was living in the age of the reindeer, a period contiguous to the mammoth and the fossil."
♥ The Professor was still sitting in his corner, a sandy-headed man with thick spectacles and a desolate expression. He was looking at my father, and my father, with the soup spoon half-way to his mouth, looked at him. You know that eye-to-eye recognition, when two people look deeply into each other's pupils, and burrow to the soul? It usually comes before love. I mean the clear, deep, milk-eyed recognition expressed by the poet Donne. Their eyebeams twisted and did thread their eyes upon a double string. My father recognised that the Professor was a Troll, and the Professor recognised my father's recognition. Both of them knew that the Professor had eaten his wife."
♥ "The relief about his sanity soon gave place to other troubles. The Troll had eaten its wife and given him a blister, but it had also made an unpleasant remark about its supper that evening. It proposed to eat my father. Now very few people can have been in a position to decide what to do when a troll earmarks them for its next meal. To begin with, although it was a tangible Troll in two ways, it had been invisible to the other diners. This put my father in a difficult position. He could not, for instance, ask for protection. He could scarcely go to the manageress and say, 'Professor Skål is an is an odd kind of werewolf, ate his wife last night and proposes to eat me this evening.' He would have found himself in a looney-bin at once. Besides, he was too proud to do this, and still too confused. Whatever the proofs and blisters, he did not find it easy to believe in professors that turned into Trolls. He had lived in the normal world all his life, and, at his age, it was difficult to start learning afresh. It would have been quite easy for a baby, who was still co-ordinating the world, to cope with the Troll situation: for my father, not. He kept trying to fit it in somewhere, without disturbing the universe. He kept telling himself that it was nonsense: one did not get eaten by professors. It was like having a fever, and telling oneself that it was all right, really, only a delirium, only something that would pass.
"There was that feeling on the one side, the desperate assertion of all the truths that he had learned so far, the tussle to keep the world from drifting, the brave but intimidated refusal to give in or to make a fool of himself.
"On the other side there was stark terror. However much one struggled to be merely deluded, or hitched up momentarily in an odd pocket of space-time, there was panic. There was the urge to go away as quickly as possible, to flee the dreadful Troll. Unfortunately the last train had left Abisko, and there was nowhere else to go."
♥ "My father was an agnostic, but, like most idle men, he was not above having a bee in his bonnet. His favourite bee was the psychology of the Catholic Church. He was ready to talk for hours about psycho-analysis and the confession. His greatest discovery had been the rosary.
"The rosary, my father used to say, was intended solely as a factual occupation which calmed the lower centres of the mind. The automatic telling of the beads liberated the higher centres to meditate upon the mysteries. They were a sedative, like knitting or counting sheep. There was no better cure for insomnia than a rosary. For several years he had given up deep breathing or regular counting. When he was sleepless he lay on his back and told his beads, and there was a small rosary in the pocket of his pyjama coat.
~~The Troll by T.H. White.
♥ "Then I felt-I don't know-they just didn't walk like Mexicans. I suppose that's ridiculous, but-"
"No, Eric, it's not!" His sudden excitement carried him to his feet. "Every race, every nationality moves differently. Like breeds of dogs-each has its own gait. Some people would never notice the difference, but you and I would."
~~Evening at the Black House by Robert Somerlott.
♥ But the child had not come. It was a source of anxiety and sadness to us both and lay between us like an old scandal for which each of us took on the blame.
♥ Everything he said seemed hollow. Something came from him like a vapor. I thought it was grief.
♥ I slipped my arm around her shoulders. She knew I understood. It was a delicate matter. She raised her face and I kissed her between her brows. Signal and countersignal, the keystones of our life together-a life of sensibility and tact.
♥ "Incidents began again and continued at intervals. Guy Relling, whom I never met but whose pronouncements on the supernatural reached me through others from time to time like messages from an oracle, claims that the existence of the living dead is a particularly excruciating one as they hover between two states of being. Their memories keep the passions of life forever fresh and sharp, but they are able to relieve them only at a monstrous expense of will and energy which leaves them literally helpless for months or sometimes even years afterward. This was why materializations and other forms of tangible action are relatively rare. There are of course exceptions, Sondra, our most frequent translator of Relling's theories, pointed out one evening with the odd joy that accompanied all of her remarks on the subject; some ghosts are terrifically active-particularly the insane ones who, ignorant of the limitations of death as they were of the impossibilities of life, transcend them with the dynamism that is exclusively the property of madness. Generally, however, it was Relling's opinion that a ghost was more to be pitied than feared. Sondra quoted him as having said, "The notion of a haunted house is a misconception semantically. It is not the house but the soul itself that is haunted."
♥ Sondra's eyes were blue, the color of shallow water. She seemed faintly amused, as if we were sharing in a conspiracy-a conspiracy I was anxious to repudiate by making some prosaic remark in a loud voice for all to hear, but a kind of pain developed in my chest as the words seemed dammed there, and I only smiled at her foolishly. With every passing minute of silence, the more impossible it became to break through and the more I felt drawn in to the intrigue of which, though I was ignorant, I was surely guilty. Without so much as a touch she had made us lovers.
♥ ..I said, with a pleasant glance straight into Ellen's eyes; there I encountered only the reflection of the glass doors, even to the rain trickling down them, and I had the eerie sensation of having been shown a picture of the truth, as if she were weeping secretly in the depths of a soul I could no longer reach. For Ellen did not believe in my innocence; I'm not sure I still believed in it myself..
♥ The human mind, just like other parts of the anatomy, is an organ of habit. Its capabilities are bounded by the limits of precedent; it thinks what it is used to thinking. Faced with a phenomenon beyond its range it reels, it rejects, sometimes it collapses.
♥ We were "breaking the ice." Jeff grinned at me with that crooked trick of his mouth, and I grinned back. "We are friends"-presumably that is the message we were ginning at each other. Was he my friend? Was I his friend? He lived across the street; our paths crossed perhaps once a week; we joked together; he sat always in the same chair in our living room twisting from one sprawl to another; there was a straight white chair in his living room that I preferred. Friendships have been founded on less, I suppose. Yet he had an idiot child locked off in an asylum somewhere and a wife who amused herself with infidelity by suggestion; I had a demon loose in my house and a wife gnawed with suspicion and growing remote and old because of it. And I had said, "I see what you mean." It seemed insufferable.
♥ "Can't you do anything?"
"Sure. Joyce Castle. I don't know what I'd have done without her."
"I mean divorce."
"Sondra won't divorce me. And I can't divorce her. No grounds." He shrugged as if the whole thing were of no concern at all to him. "What could I say? I want to divorce my wife because of the way she looks at other men? She's scrupulously faithful."
"To whom, Jeff? To you? To whom?"
"I don't know-to herself, maybe," he mumbled.
♥ I sensed that with this enigmatic remark he was giving me my cue and that if I had chosen to respond to it he would have told me what I had asked him to lunch to find out-and all at once I was terrified; I did not want to hear it; I did not want to hear it at all. And so I laughed in a quiet way and said, "Undoubtedly, undoubtedly," and pushed it behind the closed door of my mind where I had stored all the impossibilities of the last months-the footsteps, the sounds in the night, the mutilated raccoon-or else, by recognizing them, go mad.
♥ I seemed to lose my balance; my head swam; it was as if this darkness and silence were the one last iota that the chamber of horrors in my mind could not hold, and the door snapped open a crack, emitting a cloudy light that stank of corruption, and I saw the landscape of my denial, like a tomb. It was the children's room. Rats nested in the double bunks, mold caked the red wallpaper, and in it an insane Spanish don hung by his neck from a dead tree, his heels vlumping against the wall, his foppish clothes rubbing as he revolved slowly in invisibly currents of bad air. And as he swung toward me, I saw his familiar reptile eyes open and stare at me with loathing and contempt.
I conceded: It is here and It is evil, and I have left my wife alone in the house with It, and now she has been sucked into that cold eternity where the dumb shades store their plasms against an anguished centenary of speech-a single word issuing from the petrified throat, a scream or a sigh or a groan, syllables dredged up from a lifetime of eloquence to slake the bottomless thirst of living death.
~~One of the Dead by William Wood.
♥ And then the ship seemed to poise, to stop and hold itself immobile wile time flashed by, and I struggled to my feet, hearing the hum of absolute silence, of a broken world suddenly without time or movement.
♥ We looked up, staring at the dimming bulbs. Yet a third time they flickered, and all at once they went out. We were in the dark, in pitch blackness, alone beneath the sea.
In the blackness, Cowley said, "I suppose you're right. There's nothing to lose but our sanity. We'll wait."
♥ Cowley laughed suddenly, a shrill and harsh sound in the closed room, and I realized that he wasn't as calm as he had seemed. "If this were fiction," he said, "they would come at the last minute. In the nick of time. Fiction is wonderful that way. It is full of last minutes. But in life there is only one last minute. The minute before death."
~~Journey to Death by Donald E. Westlake.
♥ "For Pete's sake! They're only dogs-what do they know about anything?"
"They know about happiness," Virginia said. "They know what they do in life."
♥ "In action, Mr. Lawrence, or simply in view, a trained dog is far more terrifying than any soldier with a machine pistol. It takes an animal to stop a man without hesitation, no matter if the man is cursing or praying. ..A Doberman, you see, has no conscience, being a dog. And a trained Doberman has no discretion. From the time he is a puppy, he is bent to whatever purpose has been preordained for him. And the lessons are painful-and autocratic. Once an order has been given, it must be enforced at all costs, for the dog must learn that all orders are to be obeyed unquestioningly. That being true, the dog must also learn immediately and irrevocably that only the orders from one particular individual are valid. Once a Doberman has been trained, there is no way to retrain it. When the American soldiers were seen coming, the Germans in the machine-gun towers threw down their weapons and tried to flee, but the dogs had to be shot. I watched from the hospital window, and I shall never forget how they continued to leap at the kennel fencing until the last one was dead. Their Hundührer had run away..."
♥ "How are you going to solve it? This is a man who always uses everything he's got! He never quits! How is somebody like you going to solve that?"
All these years, it occurred to Malcolm, at a time like this, now, she finally had to say the thing you couldn't make go away.
~~The Master of the Hounds by Algis Budrys.
♥ "A man's worth can be judged by the calibre of his enemies."
~~The Candidate by Henry Slesar.