Weird Tales volume 42 number 04 (15 page)

A sob burst from the girl, and she buried her face against her fiance's shoulder, weeping wildly. Bob glared at Mr. Sproull.

"Yes!" he said harshly. "And Alan was

drowned yesterday—November 3rd, 1949! The death-date engraved on that damned . . . How the devil did you get hold of Alan's spoon?" He towered over the old cripple threateningly. "You . . . sadistic old . . . ! You took that seal off, didn't you? And welded the new one on, just to . . . to stir up some freak publicity and boom trade for your crumby little shop! But, Alan!" he ground out through clenched teeth. "Why did you have to pick on Alan? Because you knew he was moody and susceptible to suggestion? Because you knew he'd brood over your little hoax, not telling us? His painting wasn't going well lately ... so you thought it would be a cinch to drive him to suicide! Out there in the lake yesterday, he ... he just stopped swimming and went under. When I got his clothes from the locker room, I found this damned spoon you changed! Like a death-sentence . . . !"

Mr. Sproull gasped, looking first at the dead youth's angry friend, then at his grieving sister.

"Oh! Oh nol" he protested. "My dear young people, you surely don't accuse me of ... ? You're upset. Who wouldn't be? It's the curse," he said quietly. "Remember, I did my best to warn you . . ."

"To plant your story, you mean!" the young man snarled. Glaring at him furiously, he lead the girl toward the door. "Come on, darling, I might have known we'd get no satisfaction out of this . . . this coldblooded old ghoul! . . . But let me tell you," he threw back furiously at the antique dealer, "when I locate the engraver who changed that inscription, or find out how you learned Alan's birth date ... I'll come back here and kill you!"

The door slammed with an agitated jingle of the little bell. Mr. Sproull stood for a moment, wringing his hands miserably. He had liked those three light-hearted young people on sight, and would not for the world have wished harm to befall any of them. But . . . there were forces a crippled old man could not combat! Forces older than any item in his musty little shop. Older than logic. Older than time . . .

"Oh, dear heaven!" the hunchback

WEIRD TALES

moaned, "Why didn't I tell them to give those other two spoons away? Melt them down, bury them—anything! If that diary had only told how Van Grooten died, perhaps I could have warned them to avoid. . . . But there were only hints! The writer never did come out and say. . . . But that young man is intelligent. Perhaps lie could come to some conclusion that I've missed . . .!"

He turned and ran for the telephone directory, leafing through it hastily to find the names Fentress or Milam, the signature on the young man's check. For an hour he clung to the phone, calling every Fentress and Milam in the book—but there was no "Robert" Milam. Mr. Sproull tried the hotels, then the funeral homes to trace the dead brother, Alan. Finally he hung up, defeated, concluding that they were all from out of town. He sat staring at the telephone then, wringing his wrinkled old hands in the helpless anguish of one who cm only wait . . . wait ... for disaster.

But the period of waiting was not long.

THREE days later, just at noon, the doorbell tinkled again. Mr. Sproull looked up from a six-branched candelabra he was polishing, to see a disheveled figure swaying a few feet from him. It was Bob Milam, his face drawn and covered with a stubble of beard, his eyes bloodshot and puffy from drinking. In his hand he held an ugly little automatic.

Mr. Sproull caught his breath, and stood very still. Then, despite his own fear, he burst out:

"Oh, my poor young friend! The . . . tbe second spoon? Your . . . fiancee?"

The blond man's mouth twisted with pain and bitterness. For reply, he flung another of the monkey spoons at the old dealer's feet. Mr, Sproull stooped to pick it up. He paled, and nodded. The tiny oval seal on the handle was engraved to read:

Marcia Fentress Born April 17, 1927 Died November 6, 1949

At the old man's nod, Bob's eyes nar-

rowed. He said not a word, but the ominous click of the safety catch on his gun was eloquent enough. Yet there was more pity than terror in Mr. Sproull's face.

"Ohhl" His murmur of shocked sympathy had a genuine ring. "H-how did she . . .?"

"My fiancee," the young man grated bitterly, "was terribly grief-stricken at her brother's death—you figured on that, too, didn't you? You insane, twisted . . .1" His voice broke on a sob of impotent rage. "Alan and Marcia were inseparable; we three were, in fact. Marcia couldn't sleep, so last night she took a big dose of sleeping pills. While . . ." He gulped, then plunged on miserably, "While she was drugged, a ... a very large beauty pillow on her bed fell over her face, somehow. She ... It wasn't the sleeping pills; she . . . smothered to death! The coroner called it an accident," he lashed out. "But I call it murder! You murdered Alan, too! I can't prove it, but I surely as hell can . . .!"

With a sob he leveled the gun at the old antique dealer's heart, his mouth working with hate and grief. At sight of his tortured young face, Mr. Sproull dabbed at his eyes, oblivious to his own danger.

"My poor, unfortunate young friend!" he murmured pityingly. "You can't believe I would cause such tragedy, for a few paltry dollars? I did not change those seals —but I can not hope to persuade anyone as matter-of-fact as yourself to believe in ... in the supernatural. The diary recounts that . . . that, when each guest at Van Grooten's Dood Feest died, their spoons changed, too! Mrs. Haversham's seal altered also—the lawyer found it later among her effects, but assumed it to be the grim jest of some house-servant . . ."

Bob Milam snorted derisively. But the murderous anger in his eyes ebbed slowly, and the gun in his hand wavered.

"You're insane," he said heavily. "Maybe you don't even realize you changed those seals. Maybe your twisted mind really believes all that silly guff about . . . some old Dutchman who ..."

His shoulders slumped all at once. He swayed, passing one hand over his bleary

THE MONKEY SPOONS

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eyes. The gun in his other hand clattered to (he floor. Suddenly he snatched the morion and flung it down the furnace grating.

"Insane," he mumbled. "I ... I can't shoot a crazy, crippled old man in cold blood! But . . . Oh, why did you do it?" he groaned, staring at the hunchback. "Why, Mr. Sproull? Why? My best friend, and then my fiancee? I'd gladly have signed over my whole bank account to you, if it was money you . . .!"

"Oh, please!" the antique dealer cried out in despair. "You must believe that I had no part in ... I tried to phone you, to warn you! Tried to figure out the manner cti death, so you could avoid . . . But they all died so differently! Mrs. Haver-sham, asphyxiated. Your friend, drowned. And your lovely fiancee . . ." The old man's eyes widened suddenly. "Ah! Now I understand! It's true! It all ties together . . . Listen to me!"

Bob Milam had turned unsteadily toward the door, but Mr. Sproull sidled after him like a small persistent crab and seized him by the arm.

"No, no! Wait! You must listen!" he gasped. "The diary mentioned that Schuyler Van Grooten was subject to 'sleeping fits'—a cataleptic. His intimate friends and relatives must have known that, but . . . but they . . . wait!" he begged. "Your monkey spoon, where is it? You must give it away! At ttnce!" the old dealer insisted excitedly. "To ... to some impersonal agency. The Scrap-metal Drive—yes, that's it! Get it out of your possession, or you, too, will . . . ! So much hate, such hunger for revenge hovers about them! Like a piece of metal that has been magnetized, they can actually draw disaster to anyone who ..."

But at that moment the blond young man jerked his arm loose and plui into the street, wanting only to get away from this crazy old man who had caused him so much grief in the space of a few short days. Mr. Sproull pattered after him, calling excitedly for him to wait. But by the time he reached the curb, Bob Milam

had whistled down a passing cab and was climbing into it. The old hunchback hurried to the curb and strained to catch the address. But the young man was only telling the driver, wearily:

"Drive around. Just drive. Anywhere ... I don't care."

The antique dealer's arms dropped to his sides limply in defeat. He watched the tixi speed out of sight, then turned slowly and walked slowly, thoughtfully, back into his shop.

THE evening paper, left under his door as usual, carried the story. A taxi was ambling along 187th Street, where wreckers were busy razing an old warehouse. Somehow the dynamite charge went off sooner than was intended . . . and a crumbling wall of bricks and mortar fell on the cab as it passed. The cabby managed to dig his way out. But the single passenger, an intoxicated young man identified as one Robert Milam of New Jersey, could not be pulled out of the wreckage for almost an hour. He was dead when frantic workmen did finally reach him—not crushed, but trapped without air in the rear seat of the taxi cab . . .

And in his pocket the police found a peculiar-looking spoon, inscribed with his name, the date of his birth—and the very date of his death!

Mr. Sproull finished reading, then took off his square-Icnsed glasses and polished them with a hand that trembled. There was nothing, he mused philosophically, really nothing at all that he could have done to save those three nice young people, who had all three died the same way—fighting for breath; smothered to death by one agency or another. Just exactly as Mrs. Haversham had died, in her exhaust-filled garage.

And just as, centuries ago, an old Dutch patroon, one Schuyler Van Grooten, had died — clawing and screaming and gasping for breath in his coffin, awakened from one of his cataleptic trances to find that his greedy heirs had deliberately buried him alive . . .

/k the End of the Corridor

^^* i _

Heading by John Giunta

BY

EVANGELINE WALTON

WHENEVER Philip Martin felt like being funny he would say that he was & professional grave-tet^t. If people looked properly shocked

"Some day you may rob one grave too many."

AT THE END OF THE CORRIDOR

75

he would add, "I began with a king's grave," and then grin. A mild joke, not in the best of taste perhaps, but then everything about Philip was mild; his nearsighted brown eyes, his tall, shambling frame, his face that never had been quite young. Even his shy way of showing off, of hoping, a little wistfully, that he could shock people or make them laugh.

As a matter of fact, His Majesty the King had been dead about 3,000 years when Philip and his father, the late and distinguished James K. Martin, Ph.D., had dug him up. It is generally considered respectable to rob a man's grave if he has been dead long enough. The Martins, father and son, had always made a most correct and respectable thing of grave-robbing, just as they had of everything else they turned their well-kept, somewhat dry Bostonian hands to. That anything could ever change this (or indeed his own prim, proper personal life) Philip never dreamed when he set out for Greece to carry on the work of the late Dr. Kimon Dragoumis. He was contemptuously amused when, at a farewell dinner, a slightly tipsy Parisian savant said to him:

"Some day you may rob one grave too many, my friend."

Philip grinned. "You mean curses? That old tripe about ancient tombs having invisible guardians?"

M. de Lesseps smiled. "You think me a foolish old man, hem? Not all ancient things are toothless. Yet you may be wise, my young friend. Perhaps it-is safer to rob the tombs of the ancient dead, of those who have had time to forget their wrongs. When I was young I too went to Greece, to Maina where the old blood is purest, to write a book. But I saw what I dared not write. There are dead there who need no curses—they can act\" He shuddered and crossed himself.

Philip said indulgently, "If dead men could walk because they had reason for revenge, a lot of them would have done it these last few years. The men who died in concentration camps, for instance."

The savant said seriously, "That depends on the man, my friend. On what he studied

while he was alive, what he knew and believed. On what his background was. Among simple yet ancient peoples, who are still near the source of things, there are survivals—" He rambled on, learnedly yet drunkenly, about primeval man, about vision and gifts that his modern descendants had lost. Until Philip got very bored, and took too many drinks.

He had a headache next morning, when he boarded the plane for Athens. But it was only the beginning of his headaches. For when he reached the little seaside village that had been the site of Dragoumis' work he found—nothing. Only the few tholoi that the great Greek had first found and explored were still visible. The bulk of that underground collection of mysterious My-cenean tomb-chambers had vanished as if the hills out of whose sides they had been carved had swallowed them up again.

It seemed strange, in spite of the disaster that had come upon Dr. Dragoumis and his co-workers; the guerrilla warfare that had raged for years afterward through this grim land, of sea and mountains, and was still uncomfortably near. So near, in fact, that it had taken Philip years to get his own permit to dig.