The Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK ™, Vol. 3: Emil Petaja Page 10

  * * * *

  Tessa lagged about her duties the next day. Try as she might she could never quite erase those words from her mind. Her head was fuzzy, too, from over-indulgence in the tea department the day before. She had been a fool to tell Herb she killed him! What a stupid thing to do! And now, typically, he wanted his revenge. That ugly rasped threat! Tomorrow night…

  He wasn’t giving her much time, was he? The more she thought about it the uneasier she became. She hadn’t a very clear idea just what Herb could do to her, dead and all. But he would do something. Trust Herb. And it wouldn’t be at all nice.

  Her frugal lunch of cottage cheese and canned peaches was interrupted by the strident tinkle of the cat-bell over the shop door. She hurried out in front.

  “Can I help you?”

  It was a young couple, happy honeymooners, trying to match their delirious mood in her quaint little shop, inasmuch as the lowering skies outside did not.

  “Tell me, is the shop really haunted?” the girl twittered.

  “Yes.” Tessa frowned. It used to be rather fun, building up sham gothic romances for tourists. Not now.

  “Really?” The new bride bubbled over. Her husband winked at her fondly.

  “Who haunts it?” he asked Tessa.

  “My husband.”

  “No!” The bride, fondling her new husband’s lapel, assumed interest in the shelf nearest her to hide her smile. “Look, dear. Isn’t this just the darlingest little Chinese elephant?”

  “If you think so, sweet. Why does he haunt it?” The young man’s lips twitched suspiciously.

  “He wants revenge,” Tessa found herself, blurting. “He was murdered, and he’s come back to—”

  “Who murdered him?” The young man peeled off a dollar for the elephant. Tessa took it, staring at him. “Nobody!” she snapped. “It’s just a story!”

  They left, the bride cooing about the quaintness of the shop and the darlingness of the driftwood sign and wasn’t Tessa the cutest thing. Tessa picked up the nearest object to hand with the idea of hurling it after them. It turned out to be the earthen pot, and it wasn’t quite empty. So she sank back in the chair by the window and had a slug.

  Two more and she began to relax.

  She must think, think, think. What did Herb have up his ghostly sleeve, and how was she going to circumvent him? It was past one already. Not much time…

  Think fast, Tessa!

  Something sifted into her thoughts, interrupting them. Music. Dirge-like music from upstairs. At this hour! Mr. Teufel was actually up at one-thirty, playing his blankety-blank phonograph. The dirge ended and was followed by some wild modern dissonances. Tessa couldn’t help listening. After a while it struck her that there was some insidious pattern to Mr. Teufel’s selection of music. It all suggested a particular train of emotion. And when a scratchy, banal interpretation of Good-bye began to smite her eardrums Tessa leaped to her feet.

  By the time it repeated for the third time Tessa was upstairs peeking through the bamboo slats into Mr. Teufel’s studio.

  “Mr. Teufel, no!” she exclaimed. “You mustn’t do that!”

  The young artist was inside, busily engaged in hanging himself from the middle rafter.

  Tessa banged on the door without result, so she whipped out her own door keys and tried them. One of them, with the added impetus of a severe inward push, sent her plunging through.

  The studio was sizable but dreary. The bare floor made it ice cold, and the artist’s furnishings consisted mainly of nail kegs and orange crates. Somehow the gay bohemian dash was utterly lacking. True, there was a half-completed oil on his easel, but the canvas had been slashed across as if in a spasm of despondent rage.

  “You stop that right now,” she told the emaciated young man on the nail keg. Mr. Teufel was endeavoring to thrust his head into an ill-made noose of clothesline rope.

  “Why should I?” he demanded, scowling down at her.

  “For one thing you’re not doing it right,” Tessa told him. “Always put the noose around your neck first, then wrap the rope twice around the rafter, overloop, and—never mind!” she finished off tartly.

  “What are we waiting for, oh, my heart?” queried the tenor dismally. “…the leaves must fall, and the lambs must die…”

  Tessa snapped him off. His voice deepened and mushed out and vanished. The artist stared at her sullenly, then collapsed his lanky frame to a sitting position on the keg. Tessa marched about the room briskly. Mr. Teufel’s studio was an exact replica of her own bedroom, except for the lack of furniture and the rafters. Paint it up a little, apply a few rugs and pictures, and it would be livable.

  Tessa turned her attention to the artist. “You make an awful amount of noise nights,” she reprimanded him. “Don’t you realize you’re supposed to sleep nights and work days?”

  “Then why didn’t you let me go through with it?” he demanded bitterly. “Suppose you go downstairs now and forget what you saw.” He brightened perceptibly.

  “That wouldn’t help,” Tessa said. “You need furniture. The place is like a barn.”

  “I need a lot of things—including talent.” He got up and began to pace. The clump of his army surplus shoes oh the bare floor was all too familiar, although easier to take here than downstairs. Pacing up and down was, then, one of the best things Mr. Teufel did. And his self-expressed lack of talent was the bone of contention.

  “Who says you have no talent?” Tessa’s sharp eyes traveled to a nearby corner, to a heap of canvases carelessly tossed therein. They, like the one on the easel, had been slashed across.

  “Everybody says so,” the artist growled irritably. “Yesterday was my last chance to prove to myself that I might someday be an artist, even a passable good artist. A critic from Paris was visiting San Francisco. All the others said I stink, but Charles Demeaux is notoriously aloof from them. He helped a friend of mine once, a nobody like me, just on the strength of what he saw in his paintings. My friend told him about me, and yesterday a letter came saying Charles Demeaux would see me if I could get over there yesterday, as he was leaving today. I waited until twelve-thirty last night in the rain, until he came home from the ballet. Demeaux was very kind. He fed me I don’t know how many crepe suzettes and how many glasses of wine. But when it came to my paintings—”

  “He didn’t like them?”

  A spasm of utter misery crossed the artist’s gaunt face. “He didn’t say it like that. He was too kind, too polite. But that’s what it boiled down to. No talent. No expression. No future in art. Nothing!”

  Mr. Teufel was plainly a man obsessed. His world had crumbled. Tessa made a tentative effort to cheer him up.

  “There must be other critics. Maybe you are ahead of your time.”

  “They all pretend that.” Mr. Teufel’s lip curled. “Not me. At least I can be honest with myself. I’m no good. I never have been and I never will be.”

  “Of course I don’t exactly understand—” Tessa said soothingly.

  “No, you don’t!” Mr. Teufel raged. “You don’t know a damn thing about it, so why don’t you get the hell out of here and leave me alone? Nobody understands anything! The world is full of sadistic morons who pretend to mean well. Bah! Bring on your atom bombs! The sooner the better!”

  Tessa’s sharp eyes widened, then closed.

  “Well?” Mr. Teufel glared at her scornfully. “Aren’t you going to go call the police or something?”

  “Nope,” Tessa said. “I’ve got a job for you.”

  Mr. Teufel’s expression told her what he thought of work. Tessa just waited.

  “Well, if I’m forced to delay my departure I guess I’ll have to eat sometime. What kind of a job?”

  “I want you to help me move some furniture. Yes, I’m giving it to you, Mr. Teufel—in return for a small favor.”

  Tessa slept well that night. She went to sleep brimming over with great, satisfaction in having done a good deed. There was nothing, she told herself before
Morpheus took over, quite as edifying to a human being as having performed a kindness for another human being.

  * * * *

  Near dawn she woke with a start. The thought that awakened her was the illusion that she had missed her cue, that her alarm clock hadn’t gone off, that she had left a dangerous heater burning all night. Something…

  And yet full consciousness assured her it was actually none of those things.

  The springs creaked as she hiked herself up on the pillows. She cast her eyes about the darkness but she saw no shred of light anywhere. It was as if she had just missed hearing something.

  “Herb?”

  Her whisper vibrated into the dark, but there was no answer.

  Then it came, a far-off sound like a sigh. Or was it only a seagull calling mournfully over the dark waters? Tessa chose to think it wasn’t a seagull. She folded aside the covers and slid her legs down on the shag rug. Her feet groped for her sheepskin-lined slippers and invaded them. Without snapping on a light she found her robe and wrapped it around her. A habitual toss of her long black hair to unsnarl it from the collar and she went to the outside door.

  She idled a second or two, listening to the swirling sucking noises the tide made as it drained away from the rocks, then she pattered to Mr. Teufel’s door and listened. She heard nothing.

  She applied her key and pushed…there had been sounds in there, mysterious sounds, and movements. She could sense their aftermath. Now there was only darkness and the cold swirling of air, as if a grave had opened and closed.

  “Mr. Teufel!” she called across the room. She knew exactly where the bed was. She knew just where everything was, inasmuch as she had given Mr. Teufel most of this furniture and had helped him arrange it.

  “Are you there, Mr. Teufel?”

  Still no answer.

  “Herb?”

  Nothing.

  Tessa took a deep breath and pulled the string that switched on the ceiling light. The room leaped harshly to life. Ah. There was Herb’s big chair, which she had given Mr. Teufel. And by it was Herb’s old table, the one that used to be so cluttered. All there was on it now was an empty bottle.

  There was no label on the bottle none at all, but it looked like some kind of medicine Herb had taken at one time but which a normal heart could never stand. It was rather careless of Tessa not to have thrown it out, and to have scrupulously removed the label.

  She didn’t touch it. There would be fingerprints.

  The bed was quite a mess, as if Mr. Teufel had threshed about in the throes of great misery—or under the hypnotic influence of some demanding spectre. But now that he was dead Mr. Teufel looked so calm, so peaceful, so happy with the world—or to be leaving it.

  Tessa smiled there a moment, as at some teasing memory. Then she stepped softly out on the veranda and locked the door behind her. The sky was brighter now. There would be sun today, bright sun.

  Tessa leaned on a rococo pillar and sighed. If Herb hadn’t been quite so insistent on his revenge—anyway, now he could rest in peace. And so could dear Mr. Teufel. He had been so definite about destroying himself, and who can stop a man from doing that if he has firmly made up his mind? And it was so much nicer than hanging himself, so neat. No bother for anybody.

  Herb had followed his cue to perfection. His ironic revenge had consisted of forcing Tessa to drink medicine that would kill her, too. Only Herb couldn’t know that Tessa had got Mr. Teufel to exchange flats with her this afternoon, and poor Herb was so nearsighted—

  THE JONAH

  Does the crash of thunder and the zigzag streak of lightning across a storm-flayed sky send you cowering into the furthest cellars? It does me—and for good reason…

  I was the sole survivor of the Bonheur, the ill-starred and badly named little tramp steamer which perished in North Atlantic waters some fifteen years ago. You will recall how the newspapers termed it “a sea mystery to rank with the Marie Celeste,” rehashing the oft-told tale about how that vessel sailed into harbor in perfect condition, but minus its human cargo, as if every living soul on it had been snatched off the face of the earth.

  The derelict Bonheur was sighted by a coast guard off the Ungava shore, but hardly in perfect condition. It gave the appearance of having been battered about by gigantic, playful hands. The most curious fact—and this was what coupled its unguessed-at tragedy with that of the Marie Celeste—was that no single body was to be found on board, neither living nor dead.

  A life boat was picked up at sea, drifting at will, with a wreck of a man in it. He was, from his sodden but readable papers, identified as one Peter Drang, a mathematics teacher from North Falls, Idaho. All but dead, he could do nothing but babble wild incoherencies.

  An enterprising newshawk discovered that Drang had shipped as the sole passenger on the Bonheur from Bergen, Norway, months before. As the only living man who could solve the mystery of the Bonheur, Drang was hounded unmercifully by newspapermen after he was released from a New York hospital. But Drang refused to talk. He would say nothing of his experiences, even became violent on several occasions.

  How did it happen, they asked, that he—a timid, small, scholarly man in his late thirties, whose heavy glasses and nervous mannerisms indicated anything but a robust, swashbuckling character—should contrive to escape the doom that had obviously overtaken the hard-bitten, horny-handed ship’s crew?

  Peter Drang said nothing, and, as soon as he was able, returned to Idaho to resume his prosaic life as an algebra instructor in a small town high school.

  As you have guessed by now, I am that Peter Drang. I alone survived the Bonheur disaster, and now it pleases me to present, for the first time, the truth behind the “mystery of the Bonheur,” under the guise of fiction. I do not expect to be believed. I do not want to be believed.

  But now, to begin my story…

  * * * *

  This sheltering green Idaho valley, many miles from the ocean, gave me birth. But my earliest childhood memories are all curiously tangled up with a powerful, strange longing for the sea.

  But my odd, inborn impulse was many years in awaiting fulfillment. When my father was struck by lightning, during a terrific summer storm, on one of his frequent rambling foot-journeys, it was left to me to care for my invalid mother. I found myself trapped in this prosaic teacher’s job—far from the calling sea.

  When my mother died I decided to take a long holiday. The money I had painstakingly saved was sufficient for a six months’ trip to Europe, where I spent a good deal of my time delving into the lives of my antecedents. Genealogy was my hobby, and in my case it was necessary to journey across half of Europe to unravel the tangled skeins of my mingled ancestry. It was in a small Norwegian village that I came upon some odd facts, and it was here too that I suffered a painful shoulder injury which was complicated by a ghastly return of an old nerve complaint.

  The doctor in Bergen told me this nerve illness was brought about by over-exertion. For weeks I lay in a raging fever, plagued by hideous dreams, but then at last it was over.

  It left me weak and enervated. My mind, which had always been sharp and precise, became foggy and confused. I found it difficult to remember things, and had lost all interest in genealogy. My shoulder gave me considerable pain, so I kept it tightly bandaged, and that helped.

  Most of all, I was possessed with a deep longing for home. I decided not to go back to London, but to return on the first boat leaving Bergen. And that boat was the little Bonheur.

  We were three days out. The engines had begun to give trouble, and to make matters worse, the Captain was taken ill and confined to quarters. I myself had been under the weather, kept to my cabin, and the only crew member I’d talked with was Flann O’Shea, the Irish lad who brought me my meals. He was a handsome chap, with curly auburn hair and lively brown eyes, and I found him to be very intelligent and filled with Irish wit.

  “How is it today?” I inquired, over my breakfast tray.

  “Smooth as a baby’s h
and, sir,” he grinned. “But the sky’s dull and strange. Looks like it looked off Tahiti just before the typhoon.”

  “I think I’ll chance a turn around the deck,” I smiled.

  I found it to be as he said. Sea and sky blended in an ominous slate grey hue, and the glassy appearance of the water had a forbidding look.

  In my stroll I passed one of the crew, wearing the usual striped dark sweater and wide-bottom dungarees, but with something unusual about him. He was a small man, with a somber, stony face staring out to sea, and his knotty fingers clenched the rail tightly.

  “Good morning,” I offered.

  He didn’t so much as bat an eyelash. “Do you think we’ll—” I tried again.

  “No use talking to Suva,” a deep voice behind me broke in. “He won’t answer you.”

  It was big First Mate Carl Jorgsen, and he was puffing on his curved pipe, as he had been that day when I signed up as the Bonheur’s only passenger. His creased leathery cheeks and black beard, and intensely blue eyes, suggested somehow that here was a man who had followed the sea all his life—that it was in his blood, and that he would die aboard ship and be buried in it.

  He sauntered along with me in silence for a time, then I asked, “Why won’t he answer me?”

  “Martin Suva’s a deaf-mute.’”

  “Oh.” I nodded, feeling a little foolish.

  I knew the crew considered me a landlubber of the most useless specie, and I felt uneasy about displaying my vast ignorance of maritime matters. “I—I suppose that makes it rather difficult,” I ventured.

  Jorgsen’s eyes gleamed out, and his jaw went out, as if I’d touched on a sore spot.

  “That’s not the half of it. If I’d had my way Suva wouldn’t be here now—or ever.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Don’t the men like him?”

  “No,” he replied succinctly, and moved swiftly away down the deck.

  My curiosity was aroused. Martin Suva. A deaf-mute. He looked harmless enough. Surely that was no reason to band against him. I felt a wave of sympathy for him as I watched him covertly. Imagine the desolation of it—cut off forever from normal contact with his fellow-beings; a shunned, miserable derelict.