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Title: The fearsome touch of death
Author: Robert E. Howard
Illustrator: Hugh Rankin
Release Date: July 7, 2023 [eBook #71139]
Language: English
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FEARSOME TOUCH OF
DEATH ***
_A Tale of Stark, Unreasoning Terror_
The Fearsome Touch of Death
By ROBERT E. HOWARD
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Weird Tales February 1930.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
As long as midnight cloaks the earth
With shadows grim and stark,
God save us from the Judas kiss
Of a dead man in the dark.
Old Adam Farrel lay dead in the house wherein he had lived alone for
the last twenty years. A silent, churlish recluse, in his life he had
known no friends, and only two men had watched his passing.
Dr. Stein rose and glanced out the window into the gathering dusk.
"You think you can spend the night here, then?" he asked his companion.
This man, Falred by name, assented.
"Yes, certainly. I guess it's up to me."
"Rather a useless and primitive custom, sitting up with the dead,"
commented the doctor, preparing to depart, "but I suppose in common
decency we will have to bow to precedence. Maybe I can find some one
who'll come over here and help you with your vigil."
Falred shrugged his shoulders. "I doubt it. Farrel wasn't liked--wasn't
known by many people. I scarcely knew him myself, but I don't mind
sitting up with the corpse."
Dr. Stein was removing his rubber gloves, and Falred watched the
process with an interest that almost amounted to fascination. A
slight, involuntary shudder shook him at the memory of touching these
gloves--slick, cold, clammy things, like the touch of death.
"You may get lonely tonight, if I don't find anyone," the doctor
remarked as he opened the door. "Not superstitious, are you?"
Falred laughed. "Scarcely. To tell the truth, from what I hear of
Farrel's disposition, I'd rather be watching his corpse than have been
his guest in life."
The door closed and Falred took up his vigil. He seated himself in the
only chair the room boasted, glanced casually at the formless, sheeted
bulk on the bed opposite him, and began to read by the light of the dim
lamp which stood on the rough table.
Outside the darkness gathered swiftly, and finally Falred laid down
his magazine to rest his eyes. He looked again at the shape which had,
in life, been the form of Adam Farrel, wondering what quirk in the
human nature made the sight of a corpse not only so unpleasant, but
such an object of fear to many. Unthinking ignorance, seeing in dead
things a reminder of death to come, he decided lazily, and began idly
contemplating as to what life had held for this grim and crabbed old
man, who had neither relatives nor friends, and who had seldom left the
house wherein he had died. The usual tales of miser-hoarded wealth had
accumulated, but Falred felt so little interest in the whole matter
that it was not even necessary for him to overcome any temptation to
pry about the house for possible hidden treasure.
He returned to his reading with a shrug. The task was more boresome
than he had thought for. After a while he was aware that every time he
looked up from his magazine and his eyes fell upon the bed with its
grim occupant, he started involuntarily as if he had, for an instant,
forgotten the presence of the dead man and was unpleasantly reminded
of the fact. The start was slight and instinctive, but he felt almost
angered at himself. He realized, for the first time, the utter and
deadening silence which enwrapped the house--a silence apparently
shared by the night, for no sound came through the window. Adam Farrel
had lived as far apart from his neighbors as possible, and there was no
other house within hearing distance.
Falred shook himself as if to rid his mind of unsavory speculations,
and went back to his reading. A sudden vagrant gust of wind whipped
through the window, in which the light in the lamp flickered and
went out suddenly. Falred, cursing softly, groped in the darkness
for matches, burning his fingers on the hot lamp chimney. He struck
a match, re-lighted the lamp, and glancing over at the bed, got a
horrible mental jolt. Adam Farrel's face stared blindly at him, the
dead eyes wide and blank, framed in the gnarled gray features. Even
as Falred instinctively shuddered, his reason explained the apparent
phenomenon: the sheet that covered the corpse had been carelessly
thrown across the face and the sudden puff of wind had disarranged and
flung it aside.
Yet there was something grisly about the thing, something fearsomely
suggestive--as if, in the cloaking dark, a dead hand had flung aside
the sheet, just as if the corpse were about to rise....
Falred, an imaginative man, shrugged his shoulders at these ghastly
thoughts and crossed the room to replace the sheet. The dead eyes
seemed to stare at him malevolently, with an evilness that transcended
the dead man's churlishness in life. The workings of a vivid
imagination, Falred knew, and he re-covered the gray face, shrinking as
his hand chanced to touch the cold flesh--slick and clammy, the touch
of death. He shuddered with the natural revulsion of the living for the
dead, and went back to his chair and magazine.
At last, growing sleepy, he lay down upon a couch which, by some
strange whim of the original owner, formed part of the room's scant
furnishings, and composed himself for slumber. He decided to leave the
light burning, telling himself that it was in accordance with the usual
custom of leaving lights burning for the dead; for he was not willing
to admit to himself that already he was conscious of a dislike for
lying in the darkness with the corpse. He dozed, awoke with a start and
looked at the sheeted form on the bed. Silence reigned over the house,
and outside it was very dark.
The hour was approaching midnight, with its accompanying eery
domination over the human mind. Falred glanced again at the bed where
the body lay and found the sight of the sheeted object most repellent.
A fantastic idea had birth in his mind and grew, that beneath the
sheet, the mere lifeless body had become a strange, monstrous thing,
a hideous, conscious being, that watched him with eyes which burned
through the fabric of the cloth. This thought--a mere fantasy, of
course--he explained to himself by the legends of vampires, undead,
ghosts and such like--the fearsome attributes with which the living
have cloaked the dead for countless ages, since primitive man first
recognized in death something horrid and apart from life. Man feared
death, thought Falred, and some of his fear of death took hold on
the dead so that they, too, were feared. And the sight of the dead
engendered grisly thoughts, gave rise to dim fears of hereditary
memory, lurking back in the dark corners of the brain.
At any rate, that silent, hidden thing was getting on his nerves. He
thought of uncovering the face, on the principle that familiarity
breeds contempt. The sight of the features, calm and still in death,
would banish, he thought, all such wild conjectures as were haunting
him in spite of himself. But the thought of those dead eyes staring in
the lamplight was intolerable; so at last he blew out the light and lay
down. This fear had been stealing upon him so insidiously and gradually
that he had not been aware of its growth.
With the extinguishing of the light, however, and the blotting out
of the sight of the corpse, things assumed their true character and
proportions, and Falred fell asleep almost instantly, on his lips a
faint smile for his previous folly.
* * * * *
He awakened suddenly. How long he had been asleep he did not know.
He sat up, his pulse pounding frantically, the cold sweat beading
his forehead. He knew instantly where he was, remembered the other
occupant of the room. But what had awakened him? A dream--yes, now he
remembered--a hideous dream in which the dead man had risen from the
bed and stalked stiffly across the room with eyes of fire and a horrid
leer frozen on his gray lips. Falred had seemed to lie motionless,
helpless; then as the corpse reached a gnarled and horrible hand, he
had awakened.
He strove to pierce the gloom, but the room was all blackness and all
without was so dark that no gleam of light came through the window.
He reached a shaking hand toward the lamp, then recoiled as if from a
hidden serpent. Sitting here in the dark with a fiendish corpse was bad
enough, but he dared not light the lamp, for fear that his reason would
be snuffed out like a candle at what he might see. Horror, stark and
unreasoning, had full possession of his soul; he no longer questioned
the instinctive fears that rose in him. All those legends he had heard
came back to him and brought a belief in them. Death was a hideous
thing, a brain-shattering horror, imbuing lifeless men with a horrid
malevolence. Adam Farrel in his life had been simply a churlish but
harmless man; now he was a terror, a monster, a fiend lurking in the
shadows of fear, ready to leap on mankind with talons dipped deep in
death and insanity.
Falred sat there, his blood freezing, and fought out his silent battle.
Faint glimmerings of reason had begun to touch his fright when a soft,
stealthy sound again froze him. He did not recognize it as the whisper
of the night wind across the window-sill. His frenzied fancy knew it
only as the tread of death and horror. He sprang from the couch, then
stood undecided. Escape was in his mind but he was too dazed to even
try to formulate a plan of escape. Even his sense of direction was
gone. Fear had so stultified his mind that he was not able to think
consciously. The blackness spread in long waves about him and its
darkness and void entered into his brain. His motions, such as they
were, were instinctive. He seemed shackled with mighty chains and his
limbs responded sluggishly, like an imbecile's.
A terrible horror grew up in him and reared its grisly shape, that the
dead man was behind him, was stealing upon him from the rear. He no
longer thought of lighting the lamp; he no longer thought of anything.
Fear filled his whole being; there was room for nothing else.
He backed slowly away in the darkness, hands behind him, instinctively
feeling the way. With a terrific effort he partly shook the clinging
mists of horror from him, and, the cold sweat clammy upon his body,
strove to orient himself. He could see nothing, but the bed was across
the room, in front of him. He was backing away from it. There was
where the dead man was lying, according to all rules of nature; if
the thing were, as he felt, behind him, then the old tales were true:
death did implant in lifeless bodies an unearthly animation, and dead
men did roam the shadows to work their ghastly and evil will upon the
sons of men. Then--great God!--what was man but a wailing infant, lost
in the night and beset by frightful things from the black abysses and
the terrible unknown voids of space and time? These conclusions he
did not reach by any reasoning process; they leaped full-grown into
his terror-dazed brain. He worked his way slowly backward, groping,
clinging to the thought that the dead man _must_ be in front of him.
Then his back-flung hands encountered something--something slick,
cold and clammy--like the touch of death. A scream shook the echoes,
followed by the crash of a falling body.
* * * * *
The next morning they who came to the house of death found two corpses
in the room. Adam Farrel's sheeted body lay motionless upon the bed,
and across the room lay the body of Falred, beneath the shelf where
Dr. Stein had absent-mindedly left his gloves--rubber gloves, slick
and clammy to the touch of a hand groping in the dark--a hand of one
fleeing his own fear--rubber gloves, slick and clammy and cold, like
the touch of death.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FEARSOME TOUCH OF
DEATH ***
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