The Best of Weird Tales 1923 Page 2

  “So although I could not use my left arm as yet, I spent the rest of that day and all of the two following days in digging dirt from the entrance and carrying it back into the far corner of the dugout.

  “On the seventh day after regaining consciousness I was tired and stiff from my unwanted exertions of the three previous days. I could see by this time that it was a matter of weeks—two or three, at least—

  before I could hope to liberate myself. I might be rescued at an earlier date, but without outside aid, it would take probably three more weeks of labor before I could dig my way out.

  “Already dirt had caved in from the top, where the timbers had sprung apart, and I could repair the damage to the roof of the stairway only in a crude way with one arm. But my left arm was much better.

  With a day’s rest, I would be able to use it pretty well. Besides, I must conserve my energy. So I spent the seventh day in rest and prayer for my speedy release from a living grave.

  “I also reapportioned my food on the basis of three more weeks. It made the daily portions pretty small, especially as the digging was strenuous work. There was a large supply of candles, so that I had plenty of light for my work. But the supply of water bothered me. Almost half of the small keg was gone in the first week. I decided to drink only once a day.

  “The following six days were all days of feverish labor, light eating and even lighter drinking. But, despite all my efforts, only a quarter of the keg was left at the end of two weeks. And the horror of the situation grew on me. My imagination would not be quiet. I would picture to myself the agonies to come, when I would have even less food and water than at present. My mind would run on and on—to death by starvation—to the finding of my emaciated body by those who would eventually open up the dugout—even to their attempts to reconstruct the story of my end.

  “And, adding to my physical discomfort, were the swarming vermin infesting the dugout and my person. A month had gone by since I had had a bath, and I could not now spare a drop of water even to wash my face. The rats had become so bold that I had to leave a candle burning all night in order to protect myself in my sleep.

  “Partly to relieve my mind, I started to write this tale of my experiences. It did act as a relief at first, but now, as I read it over, the growing terror of this awful place grips me. I would cease writing, but some impluse urges me to write each day.

  “Three weeks have passed since I was buried in this living tomb.”

  “Today I drank the last drop of water in the keg. There is a pool of stagnant water on the dugout floor—

  dirty, slimy and alive with vermin—always standing there, fed by drippings from the roof. As yet I cannot bring myself to touch it.

  “Today I divided up my food supply for another week. God knows the portions were already small enough! But there have been so many cave-ins recently that I can never finish clearing the entrance in another week.

  “Sometimes I feel that I shall never clear it. But I must! I can never bear to die here. I must will myself to escape, and I shall escape!

  “Did not the captain often say that the will to win was half the victory? I shall rest no more. Every waking hour must be spent in removing the treacherous dirt.

  “Even my writing must cease.

  “Oh God! I am afraid, afraid!

  “I must write to relieve my mind. Last night I went to sleep at nine by my watch. At twelve I woke to find myself in the dark, frantically digging with my bare hands at the hard sides of the dugout. After some trouble I found a candle and lit it.

  “The whole dugout was upset. My food supplies were lying in the mud. The box of candles had been spilled. My fingernails were broken and bloody from clawing at the ground.

  “The realization dawned upon me that I had been out of my head. And then came the fear—dark, raging, fear—fear of insanity. I have been drinking the stagnant water from the floor for days. I do not know how many.“I have only about one meal left, but I must save it.

  “I had a meal today. For three days I have been without food.

  “But today I caught one of the rats that infest the place. He was a big one, too. Gave me a bad bite, but I killed him. I feel lots better today. Have had some bad dreams lately, but they don’t bother me now.

  “That rat was tough, though. Think I’ll finish this digging and go back to my regiment in a day or two.

  “Heaven have mercy! I must be out of my head half the time now.

  “I have absolutely no recollection of having written that last entry. And I feel feverish and weak.

  “If I had my strength, I think I could finish clearing the entrance in a day or two. But I can only work a short time at a stretch.

  “I am beginning to give up hope.

  “Wild spells come on me oftener now. I awake tired out from exertions, which I cannot remember.

  “Bones of rats, picked clean, are scattered about, yet I do not remember eating them. In my lucid moments I don’t seem to be able to catch them, for they are too wary and I am too weak.

  “I get some relief by chewing the candles, but I dare not eat them all. I am afraid of the dark, I am afraid of the rats, but worst of all is the hideous fear of myself.

  “My mind is breaking down. I must escape soon, or I will be little better than a wild animal. Oh, God, send help! I am going mad!

  “Terror, desperation, despair—is this the end?

  “For a long time I have been resting.

  “I have had a brilliant idea. Rest brings back strength. The longer a person rests the stronger they should get. I have been resting a long time now. Weeks or months, I don’t know which. So I must be very strong. I feel strong. My fever has left me. So listen! There is only a little dirt left in the entrance way. I am going out and crawl through it. Just like a mole. Right out into the sunlight. I feel much stronger than a mole. So this is the end of my little tale. A sad tale, but one with a happy ending.

  Sunlight! A very happy ending.”

  And that was the end of the manuscript. There only remains to tell Fromwillwer’s tale.

  At first I didn’t believe it. But now I do. I shall put it down, though, just as Fromwiller told it to me, and you can take it or leave it as you choose.

  “Soon after we were billeted at Watou,” said Fromwiller, “I decided to go out and see Mount Kemmel. I had heard that things were rather gruesome out there, but I was really not prepared for the conditions that I found. I had seen unburied dead around Roulers and in the Argonne, but it had been almost two months since the fighting on Mount Kemmel and there were still many unburied dead. But there was another thing that I had never seen, and that was the buried living!

  “As I came up to the highest point of the Mount, I was attracted by a movement of loose dirt on the edge of a huge shell hole. The dirt seemed to be falling in to a common center, as if the dirt below was being removed. As I watched, suddenly I was horrified to see a long, skinny human arm emerge from the ground.

  “It disappeared, drawing back some of the earth with it. There was a movement of dirt over a larger area, and the arm reappeared, together with a man’s head and shoulders. He pulled himself up out of the very ground, as it seemed, shook the dirt from his body like a huge, gaunt dog, and stood erect. I never want to see such another creature!

  “Hardly a strip of clothing was visible, and, what little there was, was so torn and dirty that it was impossible to tell what kind it had been. The skin was drawn tightly over the bones, and there was a vacant stare in the protruding eyes. It looked like a corpse that had lain in the grave a long time.

  “This apparition looked directly at me, and yet did not appear to see me. He looked as if the light bothered him. I spoke, and a look of fear came over his face. He seemed filled with terror.

  “I stepped toward him, shaking loose a piece of barbed wire which had caught in my puttees. Quick as a flash, he turned and started to run from me.

  “For a second I was too astonished to move. Then I started to foll
ow him. In a straight line he ran, looking neither to the right or left. Directly ahead of him was a deep and wide trench. He was running straight toward it. Suddenly it dawned on me that he did not see it.

  “I called out, but it seemed to terrify him all the more, and with one last lunge he stepped into the trench and fell. I heard his body strike the other side of the trench anf fall with a splash into the water at the bottom.

  “I followed and looked down into the trench. There he lay, with his head bent back in such a position that I was sure his neck was broken. He was half in and half out of the water, and as I looked at him I could scarcely believe what I had seen. Surely he looked as if he had been dead as long as some of the other corpses, scattered over the hillside. I turned and left him as he was.

  “Buried while living, I left him unburied when dead.”

  THE BASKET

  HERBERT J. MANGHAM

  Mrs. Buhler told him at first that she had no vacancies, but as he started away she thought of the little room in the basement.

  He turned back at her call.

  “I have got a room, too,” she said, “but it’s a very small one and in the basement. I can make you a reasonable price, though, if you’d care to look at it.”

  The room was a problem. She always hesitated to show it to people, because so often they seemed insulted at her suggestion that they would be satisfied with such humble surroundings. If she gave it to the first applicant, he would likely be a disreputable character who might detract from the respectability of the house, and she would have to face the embarrassment of getting rid of him. So she was content for weeks at a time to do without the pittance the room brought her.

  “How much is it?” asked the man.

  “Seven dollars a month.”

  “Let me see it.”

  She called her husband to take her place at the desk, picked up a bunch of keys and led the way to the rear of the basement. The room was a narrow cell, whose one window was slightly below the level of a tiny, bare back yard, closed in by a board fence.

  A tottering oak dresser was pushed up close to the window, and a small square table, holding a pitcher and washbowl, was standing beside it. An iron single-bed against the opposite wall left barely enough space for one straight-backed chair and a narrow path from the door to the window. A curtain, hanging across one corner, and a couple of hooks in the wall provided a substitute for a closet.

  “You can have the use of the bathroom on the first floor,” said Mrs. Buhler. “There is no steam heat in the basement, but I will give you an oil stove to use if you want it. The oil won’t cost you very much.

  Of course, it never gets real cold in San Francisco, but when the fogs come in off the bay you ought to have something to take the chill off the room.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  The man pulled out a small roll of money and counted off seven one-dollar bills.

  “You must be from the East,” remarked Mrs. Buhler, smiling at the paper money.

  “Yes.”

  Mrs. Buhler, looking at his pale hair and eyes and wan mustache, never thought of asking for

  references. He seemed as incapable of mischief as a retired fire horse, munching his grass and

  dreaming of past adventures.He told her that his name was Dave Scannon.

  And that was all the information he ever volunteered to anybody in the rooming-house.

  An hour later he moved in. By carrying in one suitcase and transferring its contents to the dresser drawers he was installed.

  The other roomers scarcely noticed his advent. He always walked straight across the little lobby without looking directly at anyone, never stopping except to pay his rent, which he did promptly on the fifth of every month.

  He did not leave his key at the desk when he went out, as was the custom of the house, but carried it in his pocket. The chambermaid never touched his room. At his request she gave him a broom, and every Sunday morning she left towels, sheets and a pillowcase hanging on his doorknob. When she returned, she would find his soiled towels and linen lying in a neat pile beside his door.

  Impelled by curiosity, Mrs. Buhler once entered the room with her master key. There was not so much as a hair to mar the bare tidiness. A comb and brush on the dresser, and a pile of newspapers were the only visible evidences of occupancy. The oil stove was gathering dust in the corner; it had never been used. She carried it out with her; it would be just the thing for that old lady in the north room who always complained of the cold in the afternoons, when the rest of the hotel was not uncomfortable enough to justify turning on the steam.

  The old lady was sitting in the lobby one afternoon when he came home from work.

  “Is that your basement roomer?” she asked.

  She watched him until he disappeared at the end of the hall.

  “Oh, I couldn’t think where I’d seen him. But I remember now—he’s a sort of porter and general helper at that large bakery on the lower Market Street.”

  “I really didn’t know where he worked,” admitted Mrs. Buhler. “I had thought of asking him several times, but he’s an awfully hard man to carry on a conversation with.”

  He had been at the rooming-house four months when he received his first letter. Its envelope

  proclaimed it a hay-fever cure advertisement.

  As he was not in the habit of leaving his key at the desk, the letter remained in his box for three days.

  Finally Mr. Buhler handed it to him as he was passing the desk on the way to his room.

  He paused to read the inscription.

  “You never receive any mail,” remarked Mr. Buhler. “Haven’t you any family?”

  “No.”

  “Where is your home?”

  “Catawissa, Pennsylvania.”

  “That’s a funny name. How do you spell it?”

  Scannon spelled it, and went on down the hall.

  “C-a-t-a-w-i-double s-a,” repeated Mr. Buhler to his wife. “Ain’t that a funny name?”

  In his room, Scannon removed the advertisement from its envelope and read it soberly from beginning to end.

  Finished, he folded it and placed it on his pile of newspapers. Then he brushed his hair and went out again.

  He ate supper at one of the little lunch counters near the Civic Center. The rest of the evening he spent in the newspaper room at the public library. He picked up eastern and western papers with impartial interest, reading the whole of each page, religiously and without a change of expression, until the closing bell sounded.

  He never ascended to the reference, circulation or magazine rooms. Sometimes he would take the local papers home with him and read stretched out on his bed, not seeming to notice that his hands were blue with the penetrating chill that nightly drifts in from the ocean.

  On Sundays he would put on a red-striped silk shirt and a blue serge suit and take a car to Golden Gate Park. There he would sit for hours in the sun, impassively watching the hundreds of picnic parties, the squirrels, or a piece of paper retreating before the breeze. Or perhaps he would walk west to the ocean, stopping for a few minutes at each of the animal pens, and take a car home from the Cliff House.

  For two years the days came and passed on in monotonous reduplication, the casual hay-fever cure circulars supplying the only touches of novelty.

  Then one afternoon as he was brushing his hair, he gasped and put his hand to his throat. A sharp nausea pitched him to the floor.

  Inch by inch, he dragged himself to the little table and upset it, crashing the bowl and pitcher into a dozen pieces.

  His energy was spent in the effort, and he lay inert.

  Mrs. Buhler consented to accompany her friend to the spiritualist’s only after repeated urging, and she repented her decision as soon as she arrived there.

  The fusty parlor was a north room to which the sun never penetrated, and in consequence was cold and damp. The medium, a fat, untidy woman whose movements were murmurous with the rustle of silk and the tinkle of t
awdry ornaments, sat facing her with one hand pressed to her forehead, and delivered mysteriously-acquired information about relatives and friends.

  “Who is Dave?” she asked finally.

  Mrs. Buhler hastily recalled all of her husband’s and her own living relatives.

  “I don’t know any Dave,” she said.

  “Yes, yes, you know him,” insisted the medium. “He’s in the spirit land now. There’s death right at your very door!”

  She put her hand to her throat and coughed in gruesome simulation of internal strangulation.

  “But I don’t know any Dave,” reiterated Mrs. Buhler.

  She regained the street with a feeling of vast relief.

  “I’ll never go to one of those places again!” she asserted, as she said goodbye to her friend. “It’s too creepy!”

  A great fog bank was rolling in majestically from the west, blotting out the sun and dripping a fine drizzle on the pavements. Drawing her coat collar closer about her neck, Mrs. Buhler plunged into the enveloping dampness and started to climb the long hill that led to her rooming-house.

  Her husband’s distended eyes and pale face warned her of bad news.

  “Dave Scannon’s dead!” he whispered hoarsely.

  Dave Scannon! So that was “Dave!”

  “He’s been dead for two or three days,” continued Mr. Buhler. “I was beating a rug in the back yard a while ago when I noticed a swarm of big blue flies buzzing about his window. It flashed over me right away that I hadn’t seen him for several days. I couldn’t unlock his door, because his key was on the inside, so I called the coroner and a policeman, and we broke it in. He was lying between the bed and the dresser, and the bowl and pitcher lay broken on the floor, where he had knocked it over when he fell. They’re taking him out now.”

  Mrs. Buhler hurried to the back stairway and descended to the lower hall. Two men were carrying a long wicker basket up the little flight of steps between the back entrance and the yard. She remained straining over the banister until the basket had disappeared.