Seven Horrible Horror Stories E-Book

H. P. Lovecraft

• Herausgeber: BoD - Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 134

Beschreibung

SEVEN HORRIBLE HORROR STORIES (published between 1902 and 1936) IN THE VAULT by H.P. Lovecraft (1925) RATTLE OF BONES by Robert E. Howard (1929) THE MONKEY'S PAW by W.W. Jacobs (1902) THE GHOST EXTINGUISHER by Gulett Burgess (1905) DOOM OF THE HOUSE OF DURYEA, by Earl Peirce Jr. (1936) THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT by William Hope Hodgson (1907) THE PHANTOM REGIMENT OF KILLIECRANKIE by Elliott O'Donnell (1911)

Leseprobe

Contents

IN THE VAULT

RATTLE OF BONES

THE MONKEY'S PAW

I.

II.

III.

THE GHOST EXTINGUISHER

DOOM OF THE HOUSE OF DURYEA

I.

II.

III.

IV.

THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT

I.

II.

THE PHANTOM REGIMENT OF KILLIECRANKIE

IN THE VAULT

by H. P. Lovecraft (1925)

Dedicated to C. W. Smith, from whose suggestion the central situation is taken.

As I view it, there is nothing more absurd than that conventional association of the homely and the wholesome that seems to pervade the psychology of the multitude. Mention a bucolic Yankee setting, a bungling and thick-fibred village undertaker, and a careless mishap in a tomb, and no average reader can be brought to expect more than a hearty, albeit grotesque, phase of comedy. God knows, though, that the prose tale that George Birch’s death permits me to tell, has aspects in it, besides which some of our darkest tragedies are light.

Birch acquired a limitation and changed his business in 1881, yet he never discussed the case when he could avoid it. Neither did his old physician, Dr. Davis, who died years ago.

It was generally stated that the affliction and shock were the results of an unlucky slip whereby Birch had locked himself for nine hours in the receiving tomb of Peck Valley Cemetery, escaping only by crude and disastrous mechanical means. Still, while this much was undoubtedly true, there were other and blacker things that the man used to whisper to me in his drunken delirium toward the end.

He confided in me because I was his doctor and because he probably felt the need to confide in someone else after Davis died. He was a bachelor, wholly without relatives.

Birch, before 1881, had been the village undertaker of Peck Valley, and was a very calloused and primitive specimen, even as such specimens go. The practices I heard attributed to him would be unbelievable today, at least in a city. Even Peck Valley would have shuddered a bit had it known the easy ethics of its mortuary artist in such debatable matters as the ownership of costly 'laying-out' apparel invisible beneath the casket’s lid and the degree of dignity to be maintained in posing and adapting the unseen members of lifeless tenants to containers not always calculated with the sublimest accuracy.

Most distinctly, Birch was lax, insensitive, and professionally undesirable, yet I still think he was not an evil man. He was merely crass of fiber and function – and thoughtless, careless, and fond of drinking, as his easily avoidable accident proves, and without that modicum of imagination that holds the average citizen within certain limits fixed by taste.

Just where to begin Birch’s story, I can hardly decide, since I am no practiced teller of tales. I suppose one should start in the cold December of 1880, when the ground froze and the cemetery delvers found they could dig no more graves till spring.

Fortunately, the village was small and the death rate low, so it was possible to give all of Birch’s inanimate charges a temporary haven in the single antiquated receiving tomb. The undertaker grew doubly lethargic in the bitter weather and seemed to outdo even himself in carelessness.

Never did he knock together flimsier and ungainlier caskets or disregard more flagrantly the needs of the rusty lock on the tomb door, which he slammed open and shut with such nonchalant abandon.

At last, the spring thaw came, and graves were laboriously prepared for the nine silent harvests of the grim reaper that waited in the tomb. Birch, though dreading the bother of removal and interment, began his task of transference one disagreeable April morning but ceased before noon because of heavy rain that seemed to irritate his horse after having laid but one mortal tenement to its permanent rest. That was Darius Peck, the nonagenarian, whose grave was not far from the tomb.

Birch decided that he would begin the next day with little old Matthew Fenner, whose grave was also nearby, but postponed the matter for three days, not getting to work till Good Friday, the 15th. Being without superstition, he did not heed the day at all, though ever afterward he refused to do anything of importance on that fateful sixth day of the week. Certainly, the events of that evening greatly changed George Birch.

It was on the afternoon of Friday, April 15th, when Birch set out for the tomb with horse and wagon to transfer the body of Matthew Fenner.

He subsequently admitted that he was not perfectly sober, though he had, by then, not been taken to wholesale drinking, by which he later tried to forget certain things. He was just dizzy and careless enough to annoy his sensitive horse, which, as he drew it viciously up at the tomb, neighed and pawed, and tossed its head, much as on that former occasion when the rain had vexed it.

The day was clear, but a high wind had sprung up, and Birch was glad to get shelter as he unlocked the iron door and entered the side-hill vault.

Another might not have relished the damp, odorous chamber with the eight carelessly placed coffins, but Birch in those days was insensitive and was concerned only about getting the right coffin for the right grave. He had not forgotten the criticism aroused when Hannah Bixby’s relatives, wishing to transport her body to the cemetery in the city where they had moved, found the casket of Judge Capwell beneath her headstone.

The light was dim, but Birch’s sight was good, and he did not get Asaph Sawyer’s coffin by mistake, although it was very similar. He had, indeed, made that coffin for Matthew Fenner, but had cast it aside at last as too awkward and flimsy, in a fit of curious sentimentality aroused by recalling how kindly and generous the little old man had been to him during his bankruptcy five years before.

He gave old Matt the very best his skill could produce but was thrifty enough to save the rejected specimen and to use it when Asaph Sawyer died of a malignant fever. Sawyer was not a lovable man, and many stories were told of his almost inhuman vindictiveness and tenacious memory for wrongs, real or imagined. To him, Birch had felt no compunction in assigning the carelessly made coffin, which he now pushed out of the way in his quest for the Fenner casket.

It was just as he had recognized old Matt’s coffin that the door was slammed shut in the wind, leaving him in a dusk even deeper than before. The narrow transom admitted only the feeblest of rays, and the overhead ventilation funnel virtually none at all, so that he was reduced to profane fumbling as he made his halting way among the long boxes toward the latch.

In this funereal twilight, he rattled the rusty handles, pushed at the iron panels, and wondered why the massive portal had grown so suddenly recalcitrant. In this twilight, too, he began to realize the truth and to shout as if his horse outside could do more than neigh an unsympathetic reply. The long-neglected latch was obviously broken, leaving the careless undertaker trapped in the vault, a victim of his own oversight.

The thing must have happened at about three thirty in the afternoon. Birch, being by temperament phlegmatic and practical, did not shout long but proceeded to grope about for some tools, which he recalled seeing in a corner of the tomb. It is doubtful whether he was touched at all by the horror and exquisite weirdness of his position, but the bald fact of imprisonment so far from the daily paths of men was enough to exasperate him thoroughly.

His day’s work was sadly interrupted, and unless chance presently brought some rambler hither, he might have to remain all night or longer.

The pile of tools soon reached, and with a hammer and chisel selected, Birch returned over the coffins to the door. The air had begun to be exceedingly unwholesome, but to this detail he paid no attention as he toiled, half by feeling, at the heavy and corroded metal of the latch.

He would have given much for a lantern or bit of candle, but lacking these, he bungled semi-sightlessly as best he might.

When he perceived that the latch was hopelessly unyielding, at least to such meager tools and under such tenebrous conditions as these, Birch glanced about for other possible points of escape.

The vault had been dug from a hillside, so that the narrow ventilation funnel at the top ran through several feet of earth, making this direction utterly useless to consider.

Over the door, however, the high, slit-like transom in the brick facade gave promise of possible enlargement to a diligent worker. Hence, upon this, his eyes long rested as he racked his brains for means to reach it.

There was nothing like a ladder in the tomb, and the coffin niches on the sides and rear – which Birch seldom took the trouble to use – afforded no ascent to the space above the door. Only the coffins themselves remained as potential stepping stones, and as he considered these, he speculated on the best mode of arranging them. Three coffin heights, he reckoned, would permit him to reach the transom, but he could do better with four.

The boxes were fairly even and could be piled up like blocks, so he began to compute how he might most stably use the eight to rear a scalable platform four deep. As he planned, he could only wish that the units of his contemplated staircase had been more securely made. Whether he had imagination enough to wish they were empty, is strongly to be doubted.

Finally, he decided to lay a base of three parallel with the wall and to place upon this two layers of two each, and upon these a single box to serve as the platform. This arrangement could be ascended with a minimum of awkwardness and would furnish the desired height.

Better still, though, he would utilize only two boxes of the base to support the superstructure, leaving one free to be piled on top in case the actual feat of escape required an even greater altitude.

And so the prisoner toiled in the twilight, heaving the unresponsive remnants of mortality with little ceremony as his miniature Tower of Babel rose, course by course.

Several of the coffins began to split under the stress of handling, and he planned to save the stoutly built casket of little Matthew Fenner for the top so that his feet might have as certain a surface as possible.

In the semi-gloom, he trusted mostly to touch to select the right one, and indeed came upon it almost by accident, since it tumbled into his hands as if through some odd volition after he had unwittingly placed it beside another on the third layer.

The tower at length finished, and his aching arms rested by a pause during which he sat on the bottom step of his grim device. Birch cautiously ascended with his tools and stood abreast of the narrow transom.

The borders of the space were entirely brick, and there seemed little doubt but that he could shortly chisel away enough to allow his body to pass.

As his hammer blows began to fall, the horse outside whinnied in a tone that may have been encouraging and may have been mocking. In either case, it would have been appropriate, for the unexpected tenacity of the easy-looking brickwork was surely a sardonic commentary on the vanity of mortal hopes and the source of a task whose performance deserved every possible stimulus.

Dusk fell and found Birch still toiling. He worked largely by feeling now since newly gathered clouds hid the moon, and though progress was still slow, he felt heartened at the extent of his encroachments on the top and bottom of the aperture. He could, he was sure, get out by midnight, though it is characteristic of him that this thought was untinged with eerie implications.

Undisturbed by oppressive reflections on the time, the place, and the company beneath his feet, he philosophically chipped away the stony brickwork, cursing when a fragment hit him in the face, and laughing when one struck the increasingly excited horse that pawed near the cypress tree.

In time, the hole grew so large that he ventured to try his body in it now and then, shifting about so that the coffins beneath him rocked and creaked. He would not, he found, have to pile another on his platform to make the proper height, for the hole was on exactly the right level to use as soon as its size might permit.

It must have been midnight, at least, when Birch decided he could get through the transom. Tired and perspiring despite many rests, he descended to the floor and sat a while on the bottom box to gather strength for the final wriggle and leap to the ground outside.

The hungry horse was neighing repeatedly and almost uncannily, and he vaguely wished it would stop. He was curiously unelated over his impending escape and almost dreaded the exertion, for his form had the indolent stoutness of early middle age.

As he remounted the splitting coffins, he felt his weight very poignantly, especially when, upon reaching the topmost one, he heard that aggravated crackle that bespeaks the wholesale rending of wood.

He had, it seems, planned in vain when choosing the stoutest coffin for the platform, for no sooner was his full bulk again upon it than the rotting lid gave way, jouncing him two feet down on a surface that even he did not care to imagine.

Maddened by the sound or by the stench that billowed forth even into the open air, the waiting horse gave a scream that was too frantic for a neigh and plunged madly off through the night, the wagon rattling crazily behind it.

Birch, in his ghastly situation, was now too low for an easy scramble out of the enlarged transom, but he gathered his energies for a determined try.

Clutching the edges of the aperture, he sought to pull himself up, when he noticed a queer retardation in the form of an apparent drag on both his ankles.

In another moment, he knew fear for the first time that night, for struggle as he would, he could not shake clear of the unknown grasp that held his feet in relentless captivity.

Horrible pains, as of savage wounds, shot through his calves, and in his mind was a vortex of fright mixed with unquenchable materialism that suggested splinters, loose nails, or some other attribute of a breaking wooden box.

Perhaps he screamed. At any rate, he kicked and squirmed frantically and automatically while his consciousness was almost eclipsed in a half-swoon.

Instinct guided him in his wriggle through the transom and in the crawl that followed his jarring thud on the damp ground.

He could not walk, it appeared, and the emerging moon must have witnessed a horrible sight as he dragged his bleeding ankles toward the cemetery lodge, his fingers clawing the black mold in brainless haste, and his body responding with that maddening slowness from which one suffers when chased by the phantoms of a nightmare.

There was, however, no pursuer, for he was alone and alive when Armington, the lodgekeeper, answered his feeble clawing at the door.

Armington helped Birch to the outside of a spare bed and sent his little son Edwin for Dr. Davis. The afflicted man was fully conscious, but would say nothing of any consequence, merely muttering such things as 'Oh, my ankles!', 'let go!', or 'Shut in the tomb'.

Then the doctor came with his medicine case, asked crisp questions, and removed the patient’s outer clothing, shoes, and socks.

The wounds – for both ankles were frightfully lacerated about the Achilles’ tendons – seemed to puzzle the old physician greatly and finally almost frightened him.