Weird Tales, Volume 1, Number 1, March 1923: The unique magazine

How beautiful she had looked! But when I tried to picture that beauty, I could recall only her eyes. It mattered not whether I wished to see them--they filled my vision.

They seemed to haunt me. From being vaguely conscious of them, I became acutely so. Disconcertingly, they looked out at me from everywhere--eyes brimming with fear--eyes fixed and staring--filled with horrified accusation.

The beauty I had once coveted became a thing forbidden, even in memory. If I sought to peer through the veil as formerly--to witness her pathetic attempts to resume the old life with Louis--again those eyes!

It may perhaps sound strange for a disembodied creature--one whom you would call a ghost--to wail of being haunted. Yet haunting is of the spirit, and we of the spirit world are immeasurably more subject to its conditions than those whose consciousness is centered in the material sphere.

God! Those eyes. There is a refinement of physical torture which consists of allowing water to fall, drop by drop, for an eternity of hours, upon the forehead of the victim. Conceive of this torture increased a thousandfold, and a faint idea may be gained of the torture that was mine--from seeing everywhere, constantly, interminably, two orbs ever filled with the same expression of horror and reproach.

Much have I learned since entering the Land of the Shades. At that time I did not know, as I know now, that my punishment was no affliction from without, but the simple result of natural law. Causes set in motion must work out their full reaction. The pebble, cast into a quiet pool, makes ripples which in time return to the place of their origin. I had cast more than a pebble of disturbance into the harmony of human life, and through my intense preoccupation in a single aim had delayed longer than usual the reaction, I created for myself a hell. Inevitably I was drawn into it.

Gone was every desire I had known to hover near the two who had so long engrossed my attention. Haunted, harried, scourged by those dreadful accusers, I sought to fly from them to the ends of the earth. There was no escape, yet, driven frantic, I still struggled to escape, because that is the blind impulse of suffering creatures.

The emotions that had so swayed me when I tried to blast the lives of two who held me dear now seemed puny and insignificant in comparison with my suffering. No physical torment can be likened to that which engulfed me until my very being was but a seething mass of agony. Through it, I hurled maledictions upon the world, upon myself, upon the creator. Horrible blasphemies I uttered.

And, at last--I prayed.

It was but a cry for mercy--the inarticulate appeal of a tortured soul for surcease of pain--but suddenly a peace seemed to have come upon the universe.

Bereft of suffering, I felt like one who has ceased to exist.

Out of the silence came a wordless response. It beat upon my consciousness like the buffeting of the waves.

Words known to human ears would not convey the meaning of the message that was borne upon me--whether from outside source or welling up from within, I do not know. All I know is that it filled me with a strange hope.

A thousand years or a single instant--for time is a relative thing--the respite lasted. Then, I sank, as it seemed, to the old level of consciousness, and the torment was renewed.

Endure it now I knew that I must--and why. A strange new purpose filled my being. The light of understanding had dawned upon my soul.

And so I came to resume my vigil in the home of Velma and Louis.

_IX._

A brave heart was Velma’s--dauntless and true.

With the effects of the tragedy still apparent in her pallor and weakness, and in the shaken demeanor and furtive, self-distrustful attitude of Louis, she yet succeeded in finding a place for him as overseer of a small country estate.

I have said that I ceased to feel the torment of passion for Velma in the greater torment of her reproach. Ah! but I had never ceased to love her. As I now realized, I had desecrated that love, had transmuted it into a horrible travesty, had, in my abysmal ignorance, sought to obtain what I desired by destroying it; yet, beneath all, I had loved.

Well I know, now, that had I succeeded in my intention toward her, Velma would have ascended to a sphere utterly beyond my comprehension. Merciful fate had diverted my aim--had made possible some faint restitution.

I returned to Velma, loving her with a love that had come into its own, a love unselfish, untainted by thought of possession.

But, to help her, I must again hurt her cruelly.

Out of the chaos of her life she had slowly restored a semblance of harmony. Almost she succeeded in convincing Louis that their old peaceful companionship had returned; but to one who could read her thoughts, the nightmare thing that hovered between them weighed cruelly upon her soul.

She was never quite able to look into her husband’s eyes without a lurking suspicion of what might lie in their depths; never able to compose herself for sleep without a tremor lest she should wake to find herself confronted by a fiend in his form. I had done my work only too well!

Now, slowly and inexorably, I began again undermining Louis’ mental control. The old ground must be traversed anew, because he had gained in strength from the respite I had allowed him, and his outdoor life gave him a mental vigor with which I had not been obliged to contend before. On the other hand, I was equipped with new knowledge of the power I intended to wield.

I shall not relate again the successive stages by which I succeeded, first in influencing his will, then in partially subduing it, and, finally, in driving his personality into the background for indefinite periods. The terror that overwhelmed him when he realized that he was becoming a prey to his former aberrations may be imagined.

To shield Velma, I performed my experiments, when possible, while he was away from her. But she could not long be unaware of the moodiness, the haggard droop of his shoulders which accompanied his realization that the old malady had returned. The deepening terror in her expression was like a scourge upon my spirit--but I must wound her in order to cure.

More than once, I was forced to exert my power over Louis to prevent him from taking violent measures against himself. As I gained the ascendancy, a determination to end it all grew upon him. He feared that unless he took himself out of Velma’s life, the insanity would return and force him again to commit a frenzied assault upon the one he held most dear. Nor could he avoid seeing the apprehension in her manner that told him she knew--the shrinking that she bravely tried to conceal.

Though my power over him was greater than before, it was intermittent. I could not always exercise it. I could not, for example, prevent his borrowing a revolver one day from a neighboring farmer, on pretense of using it against a marauding dog that had lately visited the poultry yard.

Though I knew his true intention, the utmost that I could do--for his personality was strong at the time--was to influence him to postpone the deed he contemplated.

That night, I took possession of his body while he slept. Velma lay, breathing quietly, in the next room--for as this dreaded thing came upon him they had, through tacit understanding, come to occupy separate bedrooms.

Partially dressing, I stole downstairs and out to the tool-shed where Louis--fearing to trust it near him in the house--had hidden the revolver. As I returned, my whole being rebelled at the task before me--yet it was unavoidable, if I would restore to Velma what I had wrenched from her.

Quietly though I entered her room, a gasp--or rather a quick, hysterical intake of breath--warned me that she had wakened.

I flashed on the light.

She made no sound. Her face went white as marble. The expression in her eyes was that which had tortured me into the depths of a hell more frightful than any conceived by human imagination.

A moment I stood swaying before her, with leveled revolver--as I had stood on that other occasion, months before.

Slowly, I lowered the revolver, and smiled--not as Louis would have smiled but as a maniac, formed in his likeness, would have smiled.

Her lips framed the word “Louis,” but, in the grip of despair, she made no sound. It was the despair not merely of a woman who felt herself doomed to death, but of a woman who consigned her loved one to a fate worse than death.

Still I smiled--with growing difficulty, for Louis’ personality was restive and my time in the usurped body was short.

In that moment, I was not anxious to give up his body. At this new glimpse of her beauty through physical sight, my love for Velma flamed into hitherto unrealized intensity. For an instant my purpose in returning was forgotten. Forgotten was the knowledge of the ages which I had sipped since last I occupied the body in which I faced her. Forgotten was everything save--Velma.

As I took a step forward, my arms outstretched, my eyes expressing God knows what depth of yearning, she uttered a scream.

Blackness surged over me. I stumbled. I was being forced out--out---- That cry of terror had vibrated through the soul of Louis and he was struggling to answer it.

Instinctively, I battled against the darkness, clung to my hard-won ascendancy. A moment of conflict, and again I prevailed.

Once more I smiled. The effect of it must have been weird, for I was growing weaker and Louis had returned to the attack with overwhelming persistence. My tongue strove for expression:

“_Sorry--Winkie--it won’t happen again--I’m not--coming--back----_”

* * * * *

When I recovered from the momentary unconsciousness that accompanies transition from the physical to spiritual, Louis was looking in affright at the huddled figure of Velma, who had fainted away. The next instant, he had gathered her in his arms.

Though I had come near failing in the attempt to deliver my message, I had no fear that my visit would prove in vain. With clear prescience, I knew that my utterance of that old familiar nickname, “_Winkie_,” would carry untold meaning to Velma--that hereafter she would fear no more what she might see in the depths of her husband’s eyes--that with a return of her old confidence in him, the specter of apprehension would be banished forever from their lives.

OOZE

_A Novelette of a Thousand Thrills_

_By_ ANTHONY M. RUD

In the heart of a second-growth piney-woods jungle of southern Alabama, a region sparsely settled save by backwoods blacks and Cajans--that queer, half-wild people descended from Acadian exiles of the middle eighteenth century--stands a strange, enormous ruin.

Interminable trailers of Cherokee rose, white-laden during a single month of spring, have climbed the heights of its three remaining walls. Palmetto fans rise knee high above the base. A dozen scattered live oaks, now belying their nomenclature because of choking tufts of gray, Spanish moss and two-foot circlets of mistletoe parasite which have stripped bare of foliage the gnarled, knotted limbs, lean fantastic beards against the crumbling brick.

Immediately beyond, where the ground becomes soggier and lower--dropping away hopelessly into the tangle of dogwood, holly, poison sumac and pitcher plants that is Moccasin Swamp--undergrowth of titi and annis has formed a protecting wall impenetrable to all save the furtive ones. Some few outcasts utilize the stinking depths of that sinister swamp, distilling “shinny” or “pure cawn” liquor for illicit trade.

Tradition states that this is the case, at least--a tradition which antedates that of the premature ruin by many decades. I believe it, for during evenings intervening between investigations of the awesome spot I often was approached as a possible customer by wood-billies who could not fathom how anyone dared venture near without plenteous fortification of liquid courage.

I knew “shinny,” therefore I did not purchase it for personal consumption. A dozen times I bought a quart or two, merely to establish credit among the Cajans, pouring away the vile stuff immediately into the sodden ground. It seemed then that only through filtration and condensation of their dozens of weird tales regarding “Daid House” could I arrive at understanding of the mystery and weight of horror hanging about the place.

Certain it is that out of all the superstitious cautioning, head-wagging and whispered nonsensities I obtained only two indisputable facts. The first was that no money, and no supporting battery of ten-gauge shotguns loaded with chilled shot, could induce either Cajan or darky of the region to approach within five hundred yards of that flowering wall! The second fact I shall dwell upon later.

Perhaps it would be as well, as I am only a mouthpiece in this chronicle, to relate in brief why I came to Alabama on this mission.

I am a scribbler of general fact articles, no fiction writer as was Lee Cranmer--though doubtless the confession is superfluous. Lee was my roommate during college days. I knew his family well, admiring John Corliss Cranmer even more than I admired the son and friend--and almost as much as Peggy Breede whom Lee married. Peggy liked me, but that was all. I cherish sanctified memory of her for just that much, as no other woman before or since has granted this gangling dyspeptic even a hint of joyous and sorrowful intimacy.

Work kept me to the city. Lee, on the other hand, coming of wealthy family--and, from the first, earning from his short-stories and novel royalties more than I wrested from editorial coffers--needed no anchorage. He and Peggy honeymooned a four-month trip to Alaska, visited Honolulu next winter, fished for salmon on Cain’s River, New Brunswick, and generally enjoyed the outdoors at all seasons.

They kept an apartment in Wilmette, near Chicago, yet, during the few spring and fall seasons they were “home,” both preferred to rent a suite at one of the country clubs to which Lee belonged. I suppose they spent thrice or five times the amount Lee actually earned, yet for my part I only honored that the two should find such great happiness in life and still accomplish artistic triumph.

They were honest, zestful young Americans, the type--and pretty nearly the _only_ type--two million dollars cannot spoil. John Corliss Cranmer, father of Lee, though as different from his boy as a microscope is different from a painting by Remington, was even further from being dollar conscious. He lived in a world bounded only by the widening horizon of biological science--and his love for the two who would carry on that Cranmer name.

Many a time I used to wonder how it could be that as gentle, clean-souled and lovable a gentleman as John Corliss Cranmer could have ventured so far into scientific research without attaining small-caliber atheism. Few do. He believed both in God and human kind. To accuse him of murdering his boy and the girl wife who had come to be loved as the mother of baby Elsie--as well as blood and flesh of his own family--was a gruesome, terrible absurdity! Yes, even when John Corliss Cranmer was declared unmistakably insane!

Lacking a relative in the world, baby Elsie was given to me--and the middle-aged couple who had accompanied the three as servants about half of the known world. Elsie would be Peggy over again. I worshiped her, knowing that if my stewardship of her interests could make of her a woman of Peggy’s loveliness and worth I should not have lived in vain. And at four Elsie stretched out her arms to me after a vain attempt to jerk out the bobbed tail of Lord Dick, my tolerant old Airedale--and called me “papa.”

I felt a deep down choking ... yes, those strangely long black lashes some day might droop in fun or coquetry, but now baby Elsie held a wistful, trusting seriousness in depths of ultramarine eyes--that same seriousness which only Lee had brought to Peggy.

Responsibility in one instant became double. That she might come to love me as more than foster parent was my dearest wish. Still, through selfishness I could not rob her of rightful heritage; she must know in after years. And the tale that I would tell her must not be the horrible suspicion which had been bandied about in common talk!

I went to Alabama, leaving Elsie in the competent hands of Mrs. Daniels and her husband, who had helped care for her since birth.

In my possession, prior to the trip, were the scant facts known to authorities at the time of John Corliss Cranmer’s escape and disappearance. They were incredible enough.

For conducting biological research upon forms of protozoan life, John Corliss Cranmer had hit upon this region of Alabama. Near a great swamp teeming with microscopic organisms, and situated in a semi-tropical belt where freezing weather rarely intruded to harden the bogs, the spot seemed ideal for his purpose.

Through Mobile he could secure supplies daily by truck. The isolation suited. With only an octoroon man to act as chef, houseman and valet for the times he entertained no visitors, he brought down scientific apparatus, occupying temporary quarters in the village of Burdett’s Corners while his woods house was in process of construction.

By all accounts the Lodge, as he termed it, was a substantial affair of eight or nine rooms, built of logs and planed lumber bought at Oak Grove. Lee and Peggy were expected to spend a portion of each year with him; quail, wild turkey and deer abounded, which fact made such a vacation certain to please the pair. At other times all save four rooms was closed.

This was in 1907, the year of Lee’s marriage. Six years later when I came down, no sign of a house remained except certain mangled and rotting timbers projecting from viscid soil--or what seemed like soil. And a twelve-foot wall of brick had been built to enclose the house completely! One portion of this had fallen _inward_!

_II._

I wasted weeks of time at first, interviewing officials of the police department at Mobile, the town marshals and county sheriffs of Washington and Mobile counties, and officials of the psychopathic hospital from which Cranmer made his escape.

In substance the story was one of baseless homicidal mania. Cranmer the elder had been away until late fall, attending two scientific conferences in the North, and then going abroad to compare certain of his findings with those of a Dr. Gemmler of Prague University. Unfortunately, Gemmler was assassinated by a religious fanatic shortly afterward. The fanatic voiced virulent objection to all Mendelian research as blasphemous. This was his only defense. He was hanged.

Search of Gemmler’s notes and effects revealed nothing save an immense amount of laboratory data on _karyokinesis_--the process of chromosome arrangement occurring in first growing cells of higher animal embryos. Apparently Cranmer had hoped to develop some similarities, or point out differences between hereditary factors occurring in lower forms of life and those half-demonstrated in the cat and monkey. The authorities had found nothing that helped me. Cranmer had gone crazy; was that not sufficient explanation?

Perhaps it was for them, but not for me--and Elsie.

But to the slim basis of fact I was able to unearth:

No one wondered when a fortnight passed without appearance of any person from the Lodge. Why should anyone worry? A provision salesman in Mobile called up twice, but failed to complete a connection. He merely shrugged. The Cranmers had gone away somewhere on a trip. In a week, a month, a year they would be back. Meanwhile he lost commissions, but what of it? He had no responsibility for these queer nuts up there in the piney-woods. Crazy? Of course! Why should any guy with millions to spend shut himself up among the Cajans and draw microscope-enlarged notebook pictures of--what the salesman called--“germs?”