Creeps by Night: Chills and Thrills

A sudden gust, stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript and bore it toward the window. I followed the flying sheets in desperation, but they were gone before I reached the demolished panes. Then I remembered my old wish to gaze from this window, the only window in the Rue d’Auseil from which one might see the slope beyond the wall, and the city outspread beneath. It was very dark, but the city’s lights always burned, and I expected to see them there amidst the rain and wind. Yet when I looked from that highest of all gable windows, looked while the candles sputtered and the insane viol howled with the night-wind, I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleamed from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance of anything on earth. And as I stood there looking in terror, the wind blew out both the candles in that ancient peaked garret, leaving me in savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium before me, and the demon madness of that night-baying viol behind me.

I staggered back in the dark, without the means of striking a light, crashing against the table, overturning a chair, and finally groping my way to the place where the blackness screamed with shocking music. To save myself and Erich Zann I could at least try, whatever the powers opposed to me. Once I thought some chill thing brushed me, and I screamed, but my scream could not be heard above that hideous viol. Suddenly out of the blackness the madly sawing bow struck me, and I knew I was close to the player. I felt ahead, touched the back of Zann’s chair, and then found and shook his shoulder in an effort to bring him to his senses.

He did not respond, and still the viol shrieked on without slackening. I moved my hand to his head, whose mechanical nodding I was able to stop, and shouted in his ear that we must both flee from the unknown things of the night. But he neither answered me nor abated the frenzy of his unutterable music, while all through the garret strange currents of wind seemed to dance in the darkness and babel. When my hand touched his ear I shuddered, though I knew not why — knew not why till I felt of the still face; the ice-cold, stiffened, unbreathing face whose glassy eyes bulged uselessly into the void. And then, by some miracle, finding the door and the large wooden bolt, I plunged wildly away from that glassy-eyed thing in the dark, and from the ghoulish howling of that accursed viol whose fury increased even as I plunged.

Leaping, floating, flying down those endless stairs through the dark house; racing mindlessly out into the narrow, steep, and ancient street of steps and tottering houses; clattering down steps and over cobbles to the lower streets and the putrid canyon-walled river; panting across the great dark bridge to the broader, healthier streets and boulevards we know; all these are terrible impressions that linger with me. And I recall that there was no wind, and that the moon was out, and that all the lights of the city twinkled.

Despite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never since been able to find the Rue d’Auseil. But I am not wholly sorry; either for this or for the loss in undreamable abysses of the closely-written sheets which alone could have explained the music of Erich Zann.

The Strange Case of Mrs. Arkwright by Harold Dearden

At first, when she awoke, she was too terrified to move. She lay rigid in her bed for a minute or two, her heart pounding madly and her breathing strangled. Then, with an effort, she reached for the switch above her head and flooded the room with light.

It was a typical bedroom in an expensive English hotel, and the sight of it reassured her.

She got out of bed quickly, her breathing still rapid, her heart still racing like a runner’s, and made her way unsteadily to a door across the room. Her hands trembled so that at first she could not open it; but at length she succeeded, and almost stumbled into the darkness it revealed.

“Derek!” she called, and again, “Derek! Derek!”

A man’s voice answered, sleepily, “Hello! What is it?”

A switch snapped, and a moment later she was in the arms of her husband. She clung frantically to him.

“That dream! That awful dream! It’s come again!” she panted.

Her eyes were still wide and staring with the horror of its recollection.

Her husband comforted her, though he himself felt the skin crawl upon his back.

“Don’t think of it,” he urged her. “To-morrow you’ll be seeing this Doctor Channing; and if he is half as good as they say, he’ll certainly put an end to it.”

Her grip tightened on his shoulders. “But suppose he can’t? Suppose he’s no better than all the others?” Her voice rose almost to a scream. “I can’t stand it, Derek!” She was on the brink of hysteria.