The Best of Weird Tales 1923 Read online

  I felt it was useless to knock, for the cabin had every appearance of being deserted. However, rap I did.

  No voice bade me enter, and with an effort I pushed open the door and staggered into the house. Almost immediately my weary legs crumpled under me, and I toppled and struck heavily on my face.

  When I regained consciousness, a rough room, scantily furnished, greeted my eye. There was an ill-looking table, the top of which was warped and rectangular in shape, standing in the center. To one side was a rustic chair. Beyond the table was a bunk built into the wall; and on this lay a man with shining eyes and a long, white beard. A heavy gray blanket covered all of him but his head.

  “You’re right on time,” he said in a high-pitched voice.

  I looked at him closely.

  “I don’t know you,” I said.

  “Nor I you; but I knew you would come.”

  “You are ill and need help?” I asked.

  “No,” he replied in his strange monotone. “But on this day some one always visits here. None has ever returned. But I have yet to be alone on the night of this anniversary.”

  There was something so weird in the way he looked at me out of those big, watery eyes that I

  involuntarily shuddered.

  “What anniversary?” I asked.

  “The murder of my father,” he answered. “It happened many years ago. A strange man came to this cabin just as you have done.”

  He paused. I said nothing.

  “You wish to stay all night?” he asked.

  “Yes, if I may,” I replied. A moment later, I regretted it.“Quite so,” said he, with a slight nod of his white head. “Those were the very words he addressed to us. We took him in. When morning came I found my father dead in there,” rolling his eyes and raising his head to indicate some point behind him,

  “with a dagger in his heart. You can see the room if you open the door behind me.”

  I looked at him a moment, hesitating. Then I went to the door and pushed it open. Cautiously glancing into the other room, I saw there was nothing there but a bunk similar to the one the old man occupied.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said, evidently sensing my fear. “Nothing will hurt you now. It’s after midnight when it happens.”

  “What happens?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. No two men have the same experience. It all depends on one’s state of mind.”

  “You mean—” I began.

  “Yes,” he interrupted. “One man saw hands reaching toward him and ropes in the air. He was escaping the gallows. Another saw faces of beautiful girls. He was on his way to a large church wedding. A third saw pools of blood and the white snow stained by human life. He was again living through a massacre in Russia.”

  “Do you live here?”

  “No. No one does. The cabin is quite deserted. I come each year to welcome the evening’s guest.”

  “Is there no other place to stay?” I asked, a sudden fear seizing me.

  “None. Besides, it is growing dark without, and you would lose your way even if you could leave.”

  There was something ominous in the way he uttered these last five words.

  “Yes,” he went on, as if I had asked the unuttered question in my mind, “you may think you can go, but you cannot. That is the curse my father placed on this cabin. And I come each year to see that his word is obeyed. Whoever enters that door yonder on this date must stay until morning, and endure the agonies that only the rising sun can dispel.”

  I looked about me to make sure that he and I were the only living things in the room.

  “What is to prevent my leaving?” I asked.

  “Try to,” he replied, an eerie note of glee in his queer voice.

  I walked to the door and gave a mighty pull. To my utter amazement, it was locked!

  I tried again, this time with greater determination; but the door remained unyielding. A sudden terror seized me. I turned to beseech the old man to let me go, but he was not there!

  I looked quickly about me. He was nowhere to be seen. I ran into the other room. It was as empty as before. I rushed to the door there and pulled vigorously, but my efforts were in vain.

  Returning to his bunk, I examined it closely. To my great astonishment, the heavy gray blanket was gone. In desperation I tried once more the door through which I had entered the cabin. It was still as inflexible as concrete.

  Darkness fell fast and the room became very dim. I groped about and discovered some matches and a candle on a shelf under the table. I struck a match and lighted the candle. Letting some of the tallow drip onto the table, I made a stick for it. I then sat down on the edge of the bunk and anxiously awaited developments. But nothing occurred to mar the somber silence of my prison.

  Thus I remained until my watch pointed to the hour of nine. My journey had greatly fatigued me, but my fears counterbalanced my weariness, so that I kept awake in spite of it.

  At length, however, my eyelids grew heavy; my eyes became bleary, so that the candle multiplied, and my head drooped until my chin rested on my chest.

  Letting the candle burn, I lay back on the hard bunk. I was cold and very nervous, and greatly felt the need of food and dry clothing. But my fatigue soon overcame me and I fell asleep.

  When I awakened, a sense of suffocation and bewilderment hung over me. Whereas the room had been cold when I lay down, it now seemed close and hot. I pulled myself to a sitting posture. The room was dark. The candle was out.

  I jumped to my feet and started toward the table. But in another moment I stood frozen to the spot, my eyes arrested and my body palsied by what I saw before me.

  At the far end of the room was a purple glow in the shape of a human heart. It was stationary when I saw it, but almost immediately it began to move about the room. Now it was at the window. Then

  beside the table. Again it moved quickly but silently into the other room.

  I pulled my frightened senses together and groped my way to the table. I found a match. With trembling hands, I struck it and lit the candle. To my surprise, it was almost as tall as when I had fallen asleep. I looked at my watch. It was one o’clock.

  A moment later the flame was snuffed out and I was again in total darkness. I looked wildly about me.

  Horrors! The purple heart was beside me! I shrank back in terror. It came closer.

  Suddenly I acquired superhuman courage. I grasped for the spectre. I touched nothing. I placed my left hand before me at arm’s length. Lo! it was between me and my hand!

  Presently it moved away. A great calm settled over me and I began to sense a presence in the room.

  Now, without any fear and with steady hand, I again struck a match and lighted the candle. It was promptly extinguished. I struck another with similar results.

  And now something brushed my lips and an arm was passed lightly about my shoulders, but I was no longer afraid. The room continued cozily warm, and a greater sense of peace came over me.

  Presently I lay down again and watched the purple heart as it came toward me and took its place at the edge of the bunk, like some loved one sitting beside me.

  I must have fallen asleep again, for I knew no more until broad daylight awakened me, and I found myself lying in the middle of the room. There was no fog. The sun was shining brightly, and a broad beam was streaming through the dusty window pane. The candle and the matched were no longer

  visible.

  Suddenly I thought of the locked door. Springing to it, I gave a mighty pull. It opened easily!

  I snatched my cap from the rough floor and hurried into the warm sunlight.

  A short distance from me a man came trudging along. He was a powerful looking fellow of middle age and was dressed in coarse working clothes.

  “Do you know anything about that cabin?” I shouted, as we drew closer.

  “Sure. It’s haunted,” he replied. He looked hard at me. “Were you in there last night?”

  I related my experience.


  “That’s queer!” he muttered. “But I ain’t surprised. Last night was the night.”

  “What night?” I demanded.

  “Ten years ago an old man was murdered in that cabin, and his son swore on his deathbed he’d come back every anniversary and lure somebody into the cabin for the night and torture him.”

  He shuddered, his white face staring at the cabin.

  “Come away!” he whispered. “Come away! It’s haunted! It’s haunted!”

  JUNE 1923

  Despite the presence of such key contributors as Otis Adelbert Kline and George Warburton Lewis, forgettable stories fill the fourth issue of Weird Tales, which also included one article, a short-lived feature by Preston Langley Hickey, “The Cauldron,” and the perennial editorial column, “The Eyrie.”

  Seventeen stories comprise Volume I, Number 4, including the conclusion of A. G. Birch’s “The Moon Terror,” the first half of Paul Ellsworth Triem’s “The Evening Wolves” and a reprint of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

  June 1923 also contains the third of five stories that Julian Kilman wrote for Weird Tales (all were published during the first year). At least three of Kilman’s tales are so good that it was difficult for me to observe my longstanding “one entry per author” rule. I finally opted for “The Well” because I consider it the only story worth preserving from the fourth issue.

  THE WELL

  JULIAN KILMAN

  Jeremiah Hubbard toiled with a team of horses in a piece of ground some distance down the road from his dwelling. When it neared five o’clock in the autumn afternoon, he unwound the lines from his waist, unhooked the traces and started home with his horses.

  He was a heavy man, a bit under middle age, with a dish-shaped face and narrow-set eyes. He walked with vigor. One of the horses lagged a trifle, and he struck it savagely with a short whip.

  They came presently to the Eldridge dwelling, abandoned and tumbled down, on the opposite side of the road. The farm was being worked on shares by a man named Simpson, who lived five miles away and drove a “tin Lizzie.” An ancient oak tree, the tremendous circumference of its trunk marred by signs of decay, reared splendid gnarled branches skyward.

  These branches shaded a disused well—a well that had been the first one in Nicholas County, having been dug in the early fifties by the pioneering Eldridge family. It went forty feet straight down into the residual soil characteristic of the locale, but, owing to improved drainage, it had become dry. Nothing remained of the old pump-house, save the crumbling circle of stonework around the mouth, to give evidence of its one-time majesty.

  A child of eight ran from the rear of the premises. Hubbard frowned and stopped his team.

  “You better keep away from there,” he growled, “or you’ll fall into the well.”

  The girl glanced at him impishly.

  “You an’ Missus Hubbard don’t speak to each other, do you?”

  Hubbard’s face went black. His whip sprang out and caught the girl about the legs. She yelped and ran.

  An eighth of a mile farther along the road Hubbard turned in and drove his team to a big barn. He fed his stock. It was after six when he entered the house. This was a structure that, by comparison with the gigantic barn in the rear, seemed pigmy-like.

  A sallow, flat-chested woman, with a wisp of hair twisted into a knot, took from Hubbard the two pails of milk he carried. She set them in the kitchen. The two exchanged no words.

  Hubbard strode to the washstand, his boots thumping the floor, and performed his ablutions. He

  rumpled his hair and beard, using much soap and water and blowing stertorously. In the diningroom a girl of twelve sat with a book. As her father came in she glanced at him timorously.

  He gave no heed to her as he slumped down into a chair standing before a desk, The desk was littered with papers, among which were typewritten sheets of the sort referred to as “pleadings”; there was a title-search much bethumbed and black along the edges, where the “set-outs” had been scanned with obvious care.

  The man adjusted a pair of antiquated spectacles to his dish-face. To do this he was compelled to pull the ends over the ears as his nose afforded practically no bridge to support the glasses.

  Presently he spoke to the girl:

  “Tell your mother to bring on the supper.”

  The girl hastened out, and shortly thereafter the mother appeared carrying dishes. Food was disposed about the table in silence. The farmer ate gustily and in ten minutes finished his meal. Then he addressed his daughter, keeping his eyes averted from his wife. “Tell your mother,” he said, “that I’ll want breakfast at five o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  “Where you goin’, Pa?” asked the girl.“I’m goin’ to drive to the county seat to see Lawyer Simmons.”

  Hubbard’s gaze followed the girl as she helped clear the table.

  “Look’a here.” he said. “You been a-talkin’ to that Harper child?”

  “No,” returned the daughter, with a trace of spirit. “But I jest saw her father over by the fence.”

  “What was he a-doin’ there?”

  “I didn’t stay. I was afeared he’d catch me watchin’ him.”

  Hubbard glowered and reached for his hat.

  “I’ll find out,” he snarled.

  Walking rapidly, he crossed a field of wheat stubble, keeping his eyes fixed sharply ahead. It was dusk, but presently, at the northern extremity of his premises, he made out the figure of a man.

  “Hey, Harper!” he shouted. “You let that fence be.”

  He ran forward swiftly.

  The men were now separated by two wire-strand fences that paralleled each other only three feet apart.

  These fences, matching one another for a distance of about two hundred yards—each farmer claiming title to the fence on the side farthest from his own—represented the basis of the litigation over the boundary claim that had gone on between them for four years.

  The odd spectacle of the twin fences had come to be one of the show places in the county. It had been photographed and shown in agricultural journals.

  “I don’t trust ye, Harper,” announced Hubbard, breathing hard. “You got the inside track with Jedge Bissell, an’ the two of you are a-schemin’ to beat me.”

  A laugh broke from the other.

  “I’ll beat you, all right,” he said coolly. “But it won’t be because Judge Bissell is unfair.”

  His manner enraged Hubbard, who rushed swiftly at the first fence and threw himself over. With equal celerity, he clambered over the second fence.

  Startled by the sudden outburst of temper, Harper had drawn back. He held aloft a spade. Hubbard leaped at him. The spade descended.

  Harper was slightly-built, however, and the force of the blow did not halt the infuriated man, now swinging at him with all his might. They clinched. Hubbard’s fingers caught at the throat of the smaller man, and the two stumbled to the ground, Hubbard atop. The fall broke his grip. With his huge fists he began to hammer the body. He continued until it was limp.

  Then, his rage suddenly appeased, he drew back and stared at the inert figure lying strangely quiet.

  “So!” he gasped.

  There came the sound of someone singing, the voice floating distinctly through the night air. Hubbard recognized it for that of an itinerant Free Methodist minister, whose church in Ovid he and his family occasionally attended.

  The song rolling forth, as the Man of God drove along the highway in his rig, was Jesus, Lover of My Soul.

  For the moment, Hubbard shielded his face with an arm as if to ward off an invisible thing.

  Then, bending over the prostrate form, he ran his hand inside the clothing to test the action of the heart.

  He performed the act mechanically, because he knew he had killed his man.

  He discovered the handbag. Evidently Harper was on his way to Ovid to catch the train to the county seat for the trial on the morrow. This meant that he would not
be missed by his wife for at least twenty-four hours.

  The murderer studied his next move. Where to secrete the body? A piece of wood lay back of him, but he was aware that it was constantly combed by squirrel hunters. He thought of the railroad. Why not an accident? Killed by the very train he was bound for?

  He started to lug the body toward the track which passed half a mile to the north. Realizing, however, that for the time at hand the distance was too great, he let the body slide to the ground. Next he stole along the twin fences to the highway and peered both ways. No one seemed abroad.

  He came back on the dead run, and in twenty minutes he had carried the body to the Eldridge premises and flung it town the ancient well.

  When he returned he found his wife and daughter together in the parlor, where with the itinerant preacher, all three were kneeling on the floor in prayer. Hubbard unceremoniously nudged the

  clergyman.

  “That’ll do,” he said.

  The minister rose, his tall, lanky figure towering over Hubbard.

  “Brother,” he began, in an orotund voice, “come with the Lord—”

  “Yes, I know,” returned Hubbard, with a patience that surprised his wife. “But I’ve got something to talk over with my family.” He paused. “Here,” he added, feeling in his pocket and producing a small coin,

  “take this and go along.”

  When the preacher had left, Hubbard called to his daughter.

  “Harper was gone when I got over to the fence.”

  “What kept you so long?”

  “I walked over to the woods. There’s a nest of coons. They’re a-goin’ to play havoc with the corn.” He smiled unnaturally. “Look a-here! If we can catch ‘em, I’ll give you the money their pelts bring.”

  Hubbard divined that his acting was poor. Both the girl and his wife were frankly regarding him.

  “Well!” he shouted. “What’s the matter with ye?”