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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.
RGL e-Book Cover
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Terror Tales, Jan-Feb 1938, with "The Corpse In My Bed"
Suppose you had planned a little dinner in your apartment, a dinner just for you and your bride-to-be... Suppose you opened the door to your dumb-waiter and found there—not the choice viands you had ordered, but—the severed head of your fiancée!
I WAS very much in love with Leda, even though we had weathered a few lovers' quarrels. Leda Storm was an artist's model, and she had steadfastly refused to give up her profession until we were married.
Well, she had been a model for a number of years before I met her, and of course, I was hardly justified in demanding that she give it up the moment I asked her to marry me, especially when she was so proud of being known as the best model in the business. Still, I felt that she might have at least have made the concession of refusing to pose for Philip Van Doon. Leda knew of my intense dislike for Van Doon, and, although she also knew of the man's unsavory reputation, she maintained that his attitude towards her was purely professional. So, Leda had kept on posing even for him. In fact, she had an engagement with him this very afternoon—and although I had phoned his studio twice during the past half-hour, I had received no answer...
It was strange... Surely Leda might have called me to say she would be late for the little dinner I had arranged in celebration. For only yesterday we had planned our wedding. And Leda had seemed so happy...
I had begun to be genuinely worried when the sudden ripping peal of an electric bell brought me out of my thoughts with a start of pleasure—until I realized it was the dumb-waiter signal, and not the front door bell. The caterers must have arrived with desert and brandy.
I hastened to the small kitchen and pressed the button which put the mechanism of the service lift in motion. There was nothing to warn me that the last sane moments I would know for a long time were slipping away from me...
I heard the click which signified that the dumb-waiter had reached my floor. I opened the door, reached out to withdraw its contents.
I never completed that motion. The lift contained only one object—a gory-necked human head.
It was the head of a beautiful, blonde girl. It was the head of Leda Storm.
THE pain in my chest was like a white-hot knife.
I felt a burning wave ascend my neck, flood over my
face and penetrate to the center of my brain. It was a
shock-induced heart attack, as I knew in my last moments
of consciousness. I knew, too, that I was probably
dying—and I welcomed the knowledge...
A "heart patient" very literally never knows what moment may be his last. For years I had scoffed at the ominous croakings of the specialists whom my relatives had forced me to visit. And I had good reason, I felt, for my skepticism; for I had hardly ever listened to the same diagnosis twice. In those last horror-charged moments I was cured of my skepticism—cured of everything, indeed, including my desire to live any longer...
It was some moments after I regained consciousness that I realized where I was. For a while I thought I was dead, and that this soft, glowing light which seemed to emanate from nowhere in particular was the luminosity of the world of ghosts, where spirits of the dead await the beginning of eternity. Then my bleared eyes focused a little better, and I vaguely recognized some of the furnishings of my bedroom.
So I was not dead. Still, I hardly felt that I had returned to the land of the living, either. My head felt strange—hot and aching. My mouth and throat were dry, parched as though I had not tasted water for weeks...
Then memory came back, and I felt black despair descend on my brain like a pall, sweep downward until it lodged in my stomach like a heavy, dead thing. But through the dull stupefaction of my misery there was born a burning desire to look once more in that service lift, to sear my soul once again with the horror that dwelt there. It was as though that crypt in my kitchen had been a terrible sort of lodestone, drawing me irresistibly toward it, while my nerves shrieked in vain against it.
Like one moving through a nightmare, heavily, ploddingly, I staggered to my feet, weaved drunkenly out of the room and into the kitchen. My numb fingers fumbled for the switch tumbler, flipped it over. I advanced to the door of the dumbwaiter—and paused. Then a surge of strength came to me and my fingers fastened on the knob, pulled open the door exposing the shelves of the dumb-waiter behind it. They were empty.
I let the door swing back, and staggered back against the wall, overcome by a deathly weakness. Then, for the first time, a measure of sanity returned to me, and my reason began to assert itself.
Had not the whole fantastic experience been an illusion, some weird product of my diseased heart, perhaps? How could such a thing have actually occurred, anyway? The very nature of the thing argued against any possibility of its having really happened. No conceivable combination of heinous circumstances could have had the result of decapitating my beloved Leda and depositing her gore-smeared head in that crypt in my kitchen. What I needed was the attentions of another and more skillful heart specialist—
So it was with something approximating a normal state of mind that I moved weakly, but more steadily than before, back toward my bedroom. My first concern was for Leda. I would call her house, discover what had become of her. Probably there was some very ordinary explanation for her absence. I would doubtless be hearing that explanation from her own lips, in a minute or so. As yet my still actually befogged brain had not questioned the circumstance that some agency other than my own muscles must have transported me from the spot in front of the dumb-waiter, where I had fallen, to my bed where I had regained consciousness. But had it done so, my groggy optimism would no doubt have held forth the probability that there was some ordinary explanation for that, also. Rather than face horror I was taking refuge in rosy, substanceless illusions...
I entered my bedroom, staggered weakly to the bed and fell upon it. I reached out with my left hand, as I lay there, for the hand-set telephone which rested on the table beside my bed—and only then did my dulled intellect register the fact that something lay beside me on the bed.
The wave of dread that swept over my nerves in that moment could never be conveyed to a reader—it was beyond all human expression. Yet my head turned, as though of its own volition, and I saw...
What I saw was the nude, deliciously curved body of Leda, lying beside me on the bed, bathed in the dull, soft glow of the night light. And it was no horrible, gory-necked, decapitated body which reposed there, but Leda, herself, her small, golden-crowned head nestling in the pillow where, in my dreams, I had so often envisioned it.
With a wild cry on my lips I reached hungrily out for her, my fingers trembling with desire for contact with that warm, satiny flesh...
But before I had touched her my hands jerked back as though I had been about to thrust them into a nest of adders. In the last split-second I had seen it—the ghastly, unutterably gruesome detail of that otherwise perfect body which had escaped my first joy-blinded sight of it. There was a thin, ruddy line running about the base of Leda's neck—a line which showed close-spaced little nipped-in places, such as expertly sutured human flesh always shows. Such as a wound shows when sewed together by the sure hands of a surgeon...
I MUST have lain there in a state-like catalepsy
for fully two minutes, staring at that beautiful yet
inexpressibly horrible body, unable to move a single
muscle—unable even to draw a breath. And in that time
a strange, evil change came over me. I had had a surfeit
of horror, I know—so that had the heavens fallen I
could have felt no more dread, no more terror. But I felt
something else, and not even enough sanity was left me
so that I could know the abysmal shame and disgust which
should have accompanied that feeling...
I began to desire Leda, even as she lay there, an insensate, decapitated corpse. The lust rose in me like a molten fountain, drowning, burning away the sickly, weakened manhood that remained. It was stronger than any passion the living Leda had ever aroused in me—stronger than any healthy, normal desire could ever be. Once more my hands reached tremblingly for that ominously quiet body—and this time there was no hesitation, no drawing back from the brink of the hell that yawned for my soul.
My hand slid over those perfect, firmly rounded breasts, crept with growing avidity down that exquisite torso which had drawn the praises of the country's greatest artists. The pulses throbbed in my temples like voodoo drums, and my heart swelled and contracted as if a hand were squeezing and releasing it by turns...
My lips burned to press against those of my dead Leda; my arms hungered to gather her naked form in an embrace which would be a transposition of hell to earth. I slid my hand around the cold, dead flesh of her smooth back, drew her body roughly toward me as satanic passion flamed high in my brain...
A shadow seemed to detach itself from the corner of the room beyond the head of the bed—beyond the rays of the feeble little nightlight—a shadow which was like the form of a huge bat. It swept toward me out of the murkiness of the corner—and as it came it emitted a sound which was like a choked scream of rage.
The sight was like a dash of cold water in my face. It roused me from the stupor of horror and lust which had befogged my senses, submerged my intellect until I had become more a beast than a human being. I surged erect on the bed—and the next moment I was grappling with the thing from the corner, fighting to keep a flashing blade from burying itself in my chest.
The force of my antagonist's charge rolled both of us from the bed. We fell crashing to the floor—and as we did so the bed-table with its nightlight went with us. Then we were struggling in the darkness. My fingers gripped a sinewy wrist, the hand of which, I knew, held a knife that threatened at any moment to plunge into my heart. The fingers of my other hand dug into a muscle-corded throat with the desperation-born strength of my conviction that I must kill or be killed.
Locked in blind, savage combat we rolled about in the darkness, crashing into furniture, landing with stunning force against the walls. And always I could feel the steel being forced nearer my heart, could feel my own fingers weakening, losing the grip which, alone, preserved my life thus far.
Then at last, when I had given up hope, and my fingers felt as though of their own accord they would release themselves from the throat of my enemy, there was a final crash—the sound of something heavy falling with a sickening thud on vulnerable flesh and bone—and my antagonist went limp...
For a long time I lay there in the dark gasping for breath, trying to regain enough strength to get to my feet. Finally I accomplished it, lurched erect, fumbled my way across the darkened room until I reached the light switch, flipped it on.
I leaned back against the wall, stared down at the form of my late adversary—and as I knew I would, I recognized the black-coated figure of Philip Van Doon.
I staggered over to the bed where Leda still lay, faintly moaning, now, and moving her limbs weakly. I ran my fingers over that ghastly red mark about her throat—and assured myself that it was nothing in the world except a necklace of wax, cleverly applied to create the semblance of a sutured wound...
PHILIP VAN DOON had not been killed by the heavy vase
which had fallen on his head when we crashed into my small
bookcase. I bound up the gash it had made in his head and
nearly drowned him in cold water until he came to. Then I
shook the whole fantastic story from him as he cowered on
the floor, gibbering with the fear that I would yet kill
him, or at least beat him up.
He had longed for Leda for as many years as he had known her, but she had coolly kept him in his place with that perfection of technique which serious models learn early. He had been able to stand it until I had met and fallen in love with her. When he discovered that she returned my feelings for her he had gone mad with jealousy.
With her usual self-sufficiency, Leda had, of course, kept all this from me, had given me no intimation that her visit to Van Doon this evening had been for the express purpose of telling him that she would never see him again. But Van Doon had already foreseen such a climax to his relations with Leda, and had taken his own insane measures for doing away with me and—as he believed, leaving the way open for himself.
A sculptor as well as an artist, he had fashioned the gruesome, bloody-necked head of Leda from wax, coloring it with a perfection which would have fooled anyone who didn't take the thing into his hands. And Van Doon had reason for believing that I would never do that. He had learned of my heart ailment, believed that the shock of seeing that grim replica of the head of the girl I loved would be enough to kill me on the spot. Then he could easily retrieve it by the simple expedient of lowering the dumb-waiter. After which he could melt the head back to its original formlessness.
He had given Leda a doped drink as soon as she came into his studio, and had then gone out to put his weird plan into action. But he had to be sure of its success. After a few moments he had ascended in the lift, himself, discovered my unconscious but still living body. Beside himself at the failure of his plan, but fearful of thrusting a knife into my heart, or otherwise doing away with me violently, he had gone back to his studio, caught up Leda's sleeping form, brought her back to my apartment—again via the dumbwaiter—and then stripped her and put that fiendishly clever mark on her neck.
But that plan, too, had back-fired—he had over-stepped himself in one particular. Fearful that, in full possession of my faculties, I would detect the ruse, he had given me a couple of grains of heroin—hypodermetically. The result of that had been to dull the functioning of my conscious brain, all right—but it had also deadened those inhibitions which are the main things which distinguish men from beasts. It had resulted, too, in diminishing the shock of seeing, as I supposed, the dead body of my loved one...
I made Van Doon put this all in writing and sign it. Then I gave him twelve hours to get out of town—for of course, I had no intention of carrying the matter to court. But Van Doon did not obey my order. He left my apartment—and was picked up in the streets a few hours later, a raving maniac, and remanded to the state asylum.
Before Leda and I were married I visited a world-renowned specialist in diseases of the heart, and of course substituting something else for the actual occurrence, detailed to him my reaction at finding what I supposed to be Leda's head on the service lift. He gave me a thorough examination, asked innumerable questions and finally turned in his verdict: "Your heart, young man, would benefit if you gave up cigarettes, excessive liquor and late hours. If you do that you might live to be a hundred. Frankly, you might anyway. Your reaction to such a tremendous shock was entirely normal. In a word, you fainted."
Leda thought that was very funny, but although I was relieved, I couldn't share her amusement. If ever a man had cause to do so maidenly a thing as faint, I had it.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.