The Best of Weird Tales 1923 Read online

  The coroner had found nothing in his room but clothing, about five dollars in change, and a faded picture in a tarnished silver frame of an anemic looking woman who might have been a mother, wife or sister.

  Mrs. Buhler answered his questions nervously. Yes, the dead man had been with them about two years.

  They knew little of him, for he was very peculiar and never talked, and wouldn’t even allow the maid to come in and clean up his room. He had said, though, that he had no family and that his home was in Catawissa, Pennsylvania. She remembered the town because it had such an odd name.

  The coroner wrote to authorities in Catawissa, who replied that they could find no traces of anyone by the name of Scannon. No more mail ever came for the man except the occasional hay-fever cure

  circulars.

  The manager of the bakery telephoned to ask if the death notice in the paper referred to the same Dave Scannon who had been working for him. He knew nothing of the man except that he had been very

  punctual in his duties until that final day when he did not appear.

  Several weeks later, little Mrs. Varnes, who occupied a room at the rear of the second floor, stopped at the desk to leave her key. She hovered there for a few minutes of indecision, then impulsively leaned forward.

  “Mrs. Buhler, I just want to ask you something,” she said, lowering her voice. “One afternoon several weeks ago I saw some men carrying a long basket out of the back door, and I’ve been wondering what it was.”

  “Probably laundry,” hazarded Mrs. Buhler.

  “No, it was one of those baskets such as the undertakers use to carry the dead in. I’ve often thought about it, but I couldn’t figure out who could have died in this house, so I decided I would ask you. I told my husband about it, and he said I was dreaming.”

  “You must have been,” said Mrs. Buhler.

  APRIL 1923

  Copies of the first issue of Weird Tales are rare, but collectors claim the next one is even harder to find.

  Identical in size to its predecessor, the second number features a cover by R. M. Mally that illustrates Laurie McClintock & Culpeper Chunn’s “The Whispering Thing,” a two-part serial beginning in this issue, which also included eighteen other stories, as well as the closing portion of Otis Adelbert Kline’s

  “The Thing of a Thousand Shapes” and an article on the occult.

  The first issue had its share of inferior stories, but Volume I, Number 2 is considerably worse. Purple prose and wooden melodrama abound, as do ludicrously hyperbolic “horror,” predictable plotlines and, in the case of Carroll F. Michener’s “Six Feet of Willow Green,” offensive ethnic stereotyping.

  (Incredibly, this turgid item was resurrected in the January 1953 issue).

  From the handful of good pieces, I have selected J. Paul Suter’s haunted house-with-a-twist tale,

  “Beyond the Door.” Twice reprinted (in the September 1930 and May 1954 issues), it is one of the few early Weird Tales stories that H. P. Lovecraft deemed worthwhile.

  BEYOND THE DOOR

  J. PAUL SUTER

  “You haven’t told me yet how it happened,” I said to Mrs. Malkin.

  She set her lips and eyed me, sharply.

  “Didn’t you talk with the coroner, sir?”

  “Yes, of course,” I admitted, “but as I understand you found my uncle, I thought —”

  “Well, I wouldn’t care to say anything about it,” she interrupted, with decision.

  This housekeeper of my uncle’s was somewhat taller than I, and much heavier—two physical

  preponderances which afford any woman possessing them an advantage over the inferior male. She

  appeared a subject for diplomacy rather than argument.

  Noting her ample jaw, her breadth of cheek, the unsentimental glint of her eye, I decided on

  conciliation. I placed a chair for her, there in my Uncle Godfrey’s study, and dropped into another, myself.

  “At least, before we go over the other parts of the house, suppose we rest a little,” I suggested in my most unctuous manner. “The place rather gets on one’s nerves—don’t you think so?”

  It was sheer luck—I claim no credit for it. My chance reflection found the weak spot in her

  fortifications. She replied to it with an undoubted smack of satisfaction:

  “It’s more than seven years that I’ve been doing for Mr. Sarston, sir. Bringing him his meals regular as clockwork, keeping the house clean—as clean as he’d let me—and sleeping at my own home, o’ nights; and in all that time I’ve said, over and over, there ain’t a house in New York the equal of this for queerness.”

  “Nor anywhere else,” I encouraged her, with a laugh; and her confidences opened another notch:

  “You’re likely right in that, too, sir. As I’ve said to poor Mr. Sarston, many a time, ‘It’s all well enough,’

  says I, ‘to have bugs for a hobby. You can afford it; and being a bachelor and by yourself, you don’t have to consider other people’s likes and dislikes. And it’s all well enough if you want to,’ says I, ‘to keep thousands and thousands o’ them in cabinets all over the place, the way you do. But when it comes to pinnin’ them on the walls in regular armies,’ I says, ‘and on the ceiling of your own study, and even on different parts of furniture, so that a body don’t know what awful things she’s agoin’ to find under her hand of a sudden when she does the dusting; why then,’ I says to him, ‘it’s drivin’ a decent woman too far.’”

  “And did he never try to reform his ways when you told him that?” I asked, smiling.

  “To be frank with you, Mr. Robinson, when I talked like that to him, he generally raised my pay. And what was a body to do then?”

  “I can’t see how Lucy Lawton stood the place as long as she did,” I observed, watching Mrs. Malkin’s red face very closely.

  She swallowed the bait and leaned forward, hands on knees.

  “Poor girl, it got on her nerves. But she was the quiet kind. You never saw her, sir?”

  I shook my head.

  “One of them slim, faded girls with light hair, and hardly a word to say for herself. I don’t believe she got to know the next-door neighbor in the whole year she lived with your uncle. She was an orphan, wasn’t she, sir?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Godfrey Sarston and I were her only living relatives. That was why she came from Australia to stay with him, after her father’s death.”

  Mrs. Malkin nodded. I was hoping that, putting a check on my eagerness, I could lead her on to a number of things I greatly desired to know. Up to the time I had induced the housekeeper to show me through this strange house of my Uncle Godfrey’s, the whole affair had been a mystery of lips which closed and faces which were averted at my approach. Even the coroner seemed unwilling to tell me just how my uncle had died.

  “Did you understand she was going to live with him, sir?” asked Mrs. Malkin, looking hard at me.

  I confined myself to a nod.

  “Well, so did I. Yet after a year, back she went.”

  “She went suddenly?” I suggested.

  “So suddenly that I never knew a thing about it till after she was gone. I came to do my chores one day, and she was here. I came the next, and she had started back to Australia. That’s how sudden she went.”

  “They must have had a falling out,” I conjectured. “I suppose it was because of the house.”

  “Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t.”

  “You know of other reasons?”

  “I have eyes in my head,” she said. “But I’m not going to talk about it. Shall we be getting on now, sir?”

  I tried another lead: “I hadn’t seen my uncle in five years, you know. He seemed terribly changed. He was not an old man, by any means, yet when I saw him at the funeral —” I paused, expectantly.

  To my relief, she responded readily: “He looked that way for the last few months, especially that last week. I spoke to him about it, two days before—before it happene
d, sir—and told him he’d do well to see the doctor again. But he cut me off short. My sister took sick the same day, and I was called out of town. The next time I saw him, he was —”

  She paused, and then went on, sobbing: “To think of him lyin’ there in that awful place, and callin’ and callin’ for me, as I know he must and me not around to hear him!”

  As she stopped again, suddenly, and threw a suspicious glance at me, I hastened to insert a matter-of-fact question: “Did he appear ill on that last day?““Not so much ill, as —”

  “Yes?” I prompted.

  She was silent a long time, while I waited, afraid that some word of mine had brought back her former attitude of hostility.

  Then she seemed to make up her mind. “I oughtn’t to say another word. I’ve said too much, already. But you’ve been liberal with me, sir, and I know somethin’ you’ve a right to be told, which I’m thinkin’ no one else is agoin’ to tell you. Look at the bottom of his study door a minute, sir.”

  I followed her direction. What I saw led me to drop to my hands and knees the better to examine it.

  “Why should he put a rubber strip on the bottom of his door?” I asked, getting up.

  She replied with another enigmatical suggestion: “Look at these, if you will, sir. You’ll remember that he slept in this study. That was his bed, over there in the alcove.”

  “Bolts!” I exclaimed. And I reinforced sight with touch by shooting one of them back and forth a few times. “Double bolts on the inside of his bedroom door! An upstairs room, at that. What was the idea?”

  Mrs. Malkin portentously shook her head and sighed, as one unburdening her mind. “Only this can I say, sir; he was afraid of something—terribly afraid, sir. Something that came in the night.”

  “What was it?” I demanded.

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “It was in the night that—it happened?” I asked.

  She nodded; then, as if the prologue were over, as if she had prepared my mind sufficiently, she produced something from under her apron. She must have been holding it there all the time.

  “It’s his diary, sir. It was lying here on the floor. I saved it for you, before the police could get their hands on it.”

  I opened the little book. One of the sheets near the back was crumpled, and I glanced at it, idly.

  What I read there impelled me to slap the cover shut again.

  “Did you read this?” I demanded.

  She met my gaze, frankly.

  “I looked into it, sir, just as you did—only just looked into it. Not for worlds would I do even that again!”

  “I noticed some reference here to a slab in the cellar. What slab is that?”

  “It covers an old, dried-up well, sir.”

  “Will you show it to me?”

  “You can find it for yourself, sir, if you wish. I’m not goin’ down there,” she said, decidedly.

  “Ah, well, I’ve seen enough for today,” I told her. “I’ll take the diary back to my hotel and read it.”

  I did not return to my hotel, however. In my one brief glance into the little book, I had seen something which had bitten into my soul, only a few words, but they had brought me very near to that queer, solitary man who had been my uncle.

  I dismissed Mrs. Malkin and remained in the study. There was the fitting place to read the diary he had left behind him. His personality lingered like a vapor in that study. I settled into his deep morris chair and turned it to catch the light from the single, narrow window—the light, doubtless, by which he had written much of his work on entomology.

  That same struggling illumination played shadowy tricks with hosts of wall-crucified insects, which seemed engaged in a united effort to crawl upward in sinuous lines. Some of their number, impaled to the ceiling itself, peered quiveringly down on the aspiring multitude. The whole house, with its crisp dead, rustling in any vagrant breeze, brought back to my mind the hand that had pinned them, one by one, on wall and ceiling and furniture. A kindly hand, I reflected, though eccentric; one not to be turned aside from its single hobby.When quiet, peering Uncle Godfrey went, there passed out another of those scientific enthusiasts whose passion for exact truth in some one direction has extended the bounds of human knowledge. Could not his unquestioned merits have been balanced against his sin? Was it

  necessary to even-handed justice that he die face-to-face with the thing he most feared? I ponder the question still, though his body—strangely bruised—has been long at rest.

  The entries in the little book began with the fifteenth of June. Everything before that date had been torn out. There, in the room where it had been written, I read my Uncle Godfrey’s diary.

  “It is done. I am trembling so that the words will hardly form under my pen, but my mind is collected.

  My course was for the best. Suppose I had married her? She would have been unwilling to live in this house. At the outset, her wishes would have come between me and my work, and that would have been only the beginning.

  “As a married man, I could not have concentrated properly. I could not have surrounded myself with the atmosphere indispensable to the writing of my book. My scientific message would never have been delivered. As it is, though my heart is sore, I shall stifle these memories in work.

  “I wish I had been more gentle with her, especially when she sank to her knees before me, tonight. She kissed my hand. I should not have repulsed her so roughly. In particular, my words could have been better chosen. I said to her, bitterly: ‘Get up, and don’t nuzzle my hand like a dog.’ She rose, without a word, and left me. How was I to know that, within an hour —

  “I am largely to blame. Yet, had I taken any other course afterward than the one I did, the authorities would have misunderstood.”

  Again, there followed a space from which the sheets had been torn; but from the sixteenth of July, all the pages were intact. Something had come over the writing, too. It was still precise and clear—my Uncle Godfrey’s characteristic hand—but the letters were less firm. As the entries approached the end, this difference became still more marked.

  Here follows, then, the whole of his story; or as much of it as will ever be known. I shall let his words speak for him, without further interruption:

  “My nerves are becoming more seriously affected. If certain annoyances do not shortly cease, I shall be obliged to procure medical advice. To be more specific, I find myself, at times, obsessed by an almost uncontrollable desire to descend to the cellar and lift the slab over the old well.

  “I never have yielded to the impulse, but it has persisted for minutes together with such intensity that I have had to put work aside and literally hold myself down in my chair. This insane desire comes only in the dead of night, when its disquieting effect is heightened by the various noises peculiar to the house.

  “For instance, there often is a draft of air along the hallways, which causes a rustling among the specimens impaled on the walls. Lately, too, there have been other nocturnal sounds, strongly

  suggestive of the busy clamor of rats and mice. This calls for investigation. I have been at considerable expense to make the house proof against rodents, which might destroy some of my best specimens. If some structural defect has opened a way for them, the situation must be corrected at once.

  “July 17th. The foundations and cellar were examined today by a workman. He states positively that there is no place of ingress for rodents. He contented himself with looking at the slab over the old well, without lifting it.

  “July 19th. While I was sitting in this chair, late last night, writing, the impulse to descend to the cellar suddenly came upon me with tremendous insistence. I yielded—which, perhaps, was as well. For at least I satisfied myself that the disquiet which possesses me has no external cause.

  “The long journey through the hallways was difficult. Several times, I was keenly aware of the same sounds (perhaps I should say, the same IMPRESSIONS of sounds) that I had erroneously laid to rat
s. I am convinced now that they are more symptoms of my nervous condition. Further indications of this came in the fact that, as I opened the cellar door, the small noises abruptly ceased. There was no final scamper of tiny footfalls to suggest rats disturbed at their occupations.

  “Indeed, I was conscious of a certain impression of expectant silence—as if the thing behind the noises, whatever it was, had paused to watch me enter its domain. Throughout my time in the cellar, I seemed surrounded by this same atmosphere. Sheer ‘nerves,’ of course.

  “In the main, I held myself well under control. As I was about to leave the cellar, however, I unguardedly glanced back over my shoulder at the stone slab covering the old well. At that, a violent tremor came over me, and, losing all command, I rushed back up the cellar stairs, thence to this study.

  My nerves are playing me sorry tricks.

  “July 30th. For more than a week, all has been well. The tone of my nerves seems distinctly better. Mrs.

  Malkin, who has remarked several times lately upon my paleness, expressed the conviction this

  afternoon that I am nearly my old self again. This is encouraging. I was beginning to fear that the severe strain of the past few months had left an indelible mark upon me. With continued health, I shall be able to finish my book by spring.

  “July 31st. Mrs. Malkin remained rather late tonight in connection with some item of housework, and it was quite dark when I returned to my study from bolting the street door after her. The blackness of the upper hall, which the former owner of the house inexplicably failed to wire for electricity, was profound. As I came to the top of the second flight of stairs, something clutched at my foot, and, for an instant, almost pulled me back. I freed myself and ran to the study.

  “August 3rd. Again the awful insistence. I sit here, with this diary upon my knees, and it seems that fingers of iron are tearing at me. I WILL NOT go! My nerves may be utterly unstrung again (I fear they are), but I am still their master.

  “August 4th. I did not yield, last night. After a bitter struggle, which must have lasted nearly an hour, the desire to go to the cellar suddenly departed. I must not give in at any time.