Creeps by Night: Chills and Thrills

A Visitor from Egypt by Frank Belknap Long, Jr.

On a dismal rainy afternoon in August a tall, very thin gentleman tapped timidly on the frosted glass window of the curator’s office in a certain New England museum. He wore a dark blue Chinchilla overcoat, olive-green Homburg hat with high tapering crown, yellow gloves, and spats. A blue silk muffler with white dots encircled his neck and entirely concealed the lower portion of his face and virtually all of his nose. Only a small expanse of pink and very wrinkled flesh was visible above the muffler and below his forehead, but as this exposed portion of his physiognomy contained his eyes it was as arresting as it was meager. So arresting indeed was it that it commanded instant respect, and the attendants, who were granted liberal weekly emoluments for merely putting yards of red tape between the main entrance and the narrow corridor that led to the curator’s office, waived all of their habitual and asinine inquiries and conducted the muffled gentleman straight to what a Victorian novelist would have called the sacred precincts.

Having tapped, the gentleman waited. He waited patiently, but something in his manner suggested that he was extremely nervous and perturbed and decidedly on edge to talk to the curator. And yet when the door of the office at last swung open, and the curator peered out fastidiously from behind gold-rimmed spectacles, he merely coughed and extended a visiting-card.

The card was conservatively fashionable in size and exquisitely engraved, and as soon as the curator perused it his countenance underwent an extraordinary alteration. He was ordinarily a supremely reticent individual with long, pale face and lugubrious, condescending eyes, but he suddenly became preposterously friendly and greeted his visitor with an effusiveness that was almost hysterical. He seized his visitor’s somewhat flabby gloved hand and gave it a Babbittesque squeeze. He nodded and bowed and smirked and seemed almost beside himself with gratification.

“If only I had known, Sir Richard, that you were in America! The papers were unusually silent — outrageously silent, you know. I can not imagine how you managed to elude the reporters. They are usually so persistent, so indecently curious. I really can not imagine how you achieved it!”

“I did not wish to talk to idiotic old women, to lecture before mattoids, to have my photo reproduced in your absurd papers.” Sir Richard’s voice was oddly high-pitched, almost effeminate, and it quivered with the intensity of his emotion. “I detest publicity, and I regret that I am not utterly unknown in this... er... region.”

“I quite understand, Sir Richard,” murmured the curator soothingly. “You naturally desired leisure for research, for discussion. You were not interested in what the vulgar would say or think about you. A commendable and eminently scholarly attitude to take, Sir Richard! A splendid attitude! I quite understand and sympathize. We Americans have to be polite to the press occasionally, but you have no idea how it cramps our style, if I may use an expressive but exceedingly coarse colloquialism. It really does, Sir Richard. You have no idea — but do come in. Come in, by all means. We are honored immeasurably by the visit of so eminent a scholar.”

Sir Richard bowed stiffly and preceded the curator into the office. He selected the most comfortable of the five leather-backed chairs that encircled the curator’s desk and sank into it with a faintly audible sigh. He neither removed his hat nor withdrew the muffler from his pinkish visage.

The curator selected a seat on the opposite side of the table and politely extended a box of Havana panetelas. “Extremely mild,” he murmured. “Won’t you try one, Sir Richard?”

Sir Richard shook his head. “I have never smoked,” he said, and coughed.

There ensued a silence. Then Sir Richard apologized for the muffler. “I had an unfortunate accident on the ship,” he explained. “I stumbled in one of the deck games and cut my face rather badly. It’s in a positively unpresentable condition. I know you’ll pardon me if I don’t remove this muffler.”

The curator gasped. “How horrible, Sir Richard! I can sympathize, believe me. I hope that it will not leave a scar. One should have the most expert advice in such matters. I hope — Sir Richard, have you consulted a specialist, may I ask?”

Sir Richard nodded. “The wounds are not deep — nothing serious, I assure you. And now, Mr. Buzzby, I should like to discuss with you the mission that has brought me to Boston. Are the predynastic remains from Luxor on exhibition?”

The curator was a trifle disconcerted. He had placed the Luxor remains on exhibition that very morning, but he had not as yet arranged them to his satisfaction, and he would have preferred that his distinguished guest should view them at a later date. But he very clearly perceived that Sir Richard was so intensely interested that nothing that he could say would induce him to wait, and he was proud of the remains and flattered that England’s ablest Egyptologist should have come to the city expressly to see them. So he nodded amiably and confessed that the bones were on exhibition, and he added that he would be delighted and honored if Sir Richard would view them.

“They are truly marvelous,” he explained. “The pure Egyptian type — dolichocephalic, with relatively primitive features. And they date — Sir Richard, they date from at least 8,000 B. C.”

“Are the bones tinted?”

“I should say so, Sir Richard! They are wonderfully tinted, and the original colors have scarcely faded at all. Blue and red, Sir Richard, with red predominating.”

“Hm. A most absurd custom,” murmured Sir Richard.

Mr. Buzzby smiled. “I have always considered it pathetic, Sir Richard. Infinitely amusing, but pathetic. They thought that by painting the bones they could preserve the vitality of the corruptible body. Corruption putting on incorruption, as it were.”

“It was blasphemous!” Sir Richard had arisen from his chair. His face, above the muffler, was curiously white, and there was a hard, metallic glitter in his small dark eyes. “They sought to cheat Osiris! They had no conception of hyperphysical realities!”

The curator stared curiously. “Precisely what do you mean, Sir Richard?”

Sir Richard started a trifle at the question, as though he were awakening from some strange nightmare, and his emotion ebbed as rapidly as it had arisen. The glitter died out of his eyes and he sank listlessly back in his chair. “I... I was merely amused by your comment. As though by merely painting their mummies they could restore the circulation of the blood!”

“But that, as you know, Sir Richard, would occur in the other world. It was one of the most distinctive prerogatives of Osiris. He alone could restore the dead.”

“Yes, I know,” murmured Sir Richard. “They counted a good deal on Osiris. It is curious that it never occurred to them that the god might be offended by their presumptions.”

“You are forgetting the Book of the Dead, Sir Richard. The promises in that are very definite. And it is an inconceivably ancient book. I am strongly convinced that it was in existence in 10,000 B. C. You have read my brochure on the subject?”

Sir Richard nodded. “A very scholarly work. But I believe that the Book of the Dead as we know it was a forgery!”

“Sir Richard!”

“Parts of it are undoubtedly predynastic, but I believe that the Judgment of the Dead, which defines the judicial prerogatives of Osiris, was inserted by some meddling priest as late as the historical period. It is a deliberate attempt to modify the relentless character of Egypt’s supreme deity. Osiris does not judge, he takes.”

“He takes, Sir Richard?”

“Precisely. Do you imagine any one can ever cheat death? Do you imagine that, Mr. Buzzby? Do you imagine for one moment that Osiris would restore to life the fools that returned to him?”

Mr. Buzzby colored. It was difficult to believe that Sir Richard was really in earnest. “Then you honestly believe that the character of Osiris as we know it is—”

“A myth, yes. A deliberate and childish evasion. No man can ever comprehend the character of Osiris. He is the Dark God. But he treasures his own.”

“Eh?” Mr. Buzzby was genuinely startled by the tone of ferocity in which the last remark was uttered. “What did you say, Sir Richard?”

“Nothing.” Sir Richard had risen and was standing before a small revolving bookcase in the center of the room. “Nothing, Mr. Buzzby. But your taste in fiction interests me extremely. I had no idea you read young Finchley!”

Mr. Buzzby blushed and looked genuinely distressed. “I don’t ordinarily,” he said. “I despise fiction ordinarily. And young Finchley’s romances are unutterably silly. He isn’t even a passable scholar. But that book has — well, there are a few good things in it. I was reading it this morning on the train and put it with the other books temporarily because I had no other place to put it. You understand, Sir Richard? We all have our little foibles, eh? A work of fiction now and then is sometimes... er... well, suggestive. And H. E. Finchley is rather suggestive occasionally.”

“He is, indeed. His Egyptian redactions are imaginative masterpieces!”

“You amaze me, Sir Richard. Imagination in a scholar is to be deplored. But of course, as I said, H. E. Finchley is not a scholar and his work is occasionally illuminating if one doesn’t take it too seriously.”

“He knows his Egypt.”

“Sir Richard, I can’t believe you really approve of him. A mere fictionist—”

Sir Richard had removed the book and opened it casually. “May I ask, Mr. Buzzby, if you are familiar with Chapter 13, The Transfiguration of Osiris?”

“Bless me, Sir Richard, I am not. I skipped that portion. Such purely grotesque rubbish repelled me.”

“Did it, Mr. Buzzby? But the repellent is usually arresting. Just listen to this:

“It is beyond dispute that Osiris made his worshipers dream strange things of him, and that he possessed their bodies and souls forever. There is a devilish wrath against mankind with which Osiris was for Death’s sake inspired. In the cool of the evening he walked among men, and upon his head was the Crown of Upper Egypt, and his cheeks were inflated with a wind that slew. His face was veiled so that no man could see it, but assuredly it was an old face, very old and dead and dry, for the world was young when tall Osiris died.”

Sir Richard snapped the book shut and replaced it in the shelf. “What do you think of that, Mr. Buzzby?” he inquired.

“Rot,” murmured the curator. “Sheer, unadulterated rot.”

“Of course, of course. Mr. Buzzby, did it ever occur to you that a god may live, figuratively, a dog’s life?”

“Eh?”

“Gods are transfigured, you know. They go up in smoke, as it were. In smoke and flame. They become pure flame, pure spirit, creatures with no visible body.”

“Dear, dear, Sir Richard, that had not occurred to me.” The curator laughed and nudged Sir Richard’s arm. “Beastly sense of humor,” he murmured, to himself. “The man is unutterably silly.”

“It would be dreadful, for example,” continued Sir Richard, “if the god had no control over his transfiguration; if the change occurred frequently and unexpectedly; if he shared, as it were, the ghastly fate of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

Sir Richard was advancing toward the door. He moved with a curious, shuffling gait and his shoes scraped peculiarly upon the floor. Mr. Buzzby was instantly at his elbow. “What is the matter, Sir Richard? What has happened?”

“Nothing!” Sir Richard’s voice rose in hysterical denial. “Nothing. Where is the lavatory, Mr. Buzzby?”

“Down one flight of stairs on your left as you leave the corridor,” muttered Mr. Buzzby. “Are... are you ill?”

“It is nothing, nothing,” murmured Sir Richard. “I must have a drink of water, that is all. The injury has... er... affected my throat. When it becomes too dry it pains dreadfully.”

“Good heavens!” murmured the curator. “I can send for water, Sir Richard. I can indeed. I beg you not to disturb yourself.”

“No, no, I insist that you do not. I shall return immediately. Please do not send for anything.”

Before the curator could renew his protestations Sir Richard had passed through the door and disappeared down the corridor.

Mr. Buzzby shrugged his shoulders and returned to his desk. “A most extraordinary person,” he muttered. “Erudite and original, but queer. Decidedly queer. Still, it is pleasant to reflect that he has read my brochure. A scholar of his distinction might very pardonably have overlooked it. He called it a scholarly work. A scholarly work. Hmm. Very gratifying, I’m sure.”

Mr. Buzzby clipped and lit a cigar.

“Of course he is wrong about the Book of the Dead,” he mused. “Osiris was a most benevolent god. It is true that the Egyptians feared him, but only because he was supposed to judge the dead. There was nothing essentially evil or cruel about him. Sir Richard is quite wrong about that. It is curious that a man so eminent could go so sensationally astray. I can use no other phrase. Sensationally astray. I really believe that my arguments impressed him, though. I could see that he was impressed.”

The curator’s pleasant reflections were coarsely and unexpectedly interrupted by a shout in the corridor. “Get them extinguishers down! Quick, you b—”

The curator gasped and rose hastily to his feet. Profanity violated all the rules of the museum and he had always firmly insisted that the rules should be obeyed. Striding quickly to the door he threw it open and stared incredulously down the corridor.

“What was that?” he cried. “Did any one call?”

He heard hurried steps and the sound of some one shouting, and then an attendant appeared at the end of the corridor. “Come quickly, sir!” he exclaimed. “There’s fire and smoke comin’ out of the basement!”

Mr. Buzzby groaned. What a dreadful thing to happen when he had such a distinguished guest! He raced down the corridor and seized the attendant angrily by the arm. “Did Sir Richard get out?” he demanded. “Answer me! Is Sir Richard down there now?”

“Who?” gasped the attendant.

“The gentleman who went down a few minutes ago, you idiot. A tall gentleman wearing a blue coat?”

“I dunno, sir. I didn’t see nobody come up.”

“Good God!” Mr. Buzzby was frantic. “We must get him out immediately. I believe that he was ill. He’s probably fainted.”

He strode to the end of the corridor and stared down the smoke-filled staircase leading to the lavatory. Immediately beneath him three attendants were cautiously advancing. Wet handkerchiefs, bound securely about their faces, protected them from the acrid fumes, and each held at arm’s length a cylindrical fire extinguisher. As they descended the stairs they squirted the liquid contents of the extinguishers into the rapidly rising spirals of lethal blue smoke.

“It was much worse a minute ago,” exclaimed the attendant at Mr. Buzzby’s elbow. “The smoke was thicker and had a most awful smell. Like them dinosaur eggs smelt when you first unpacked ’em last spring, sir.”

The attendants had now reached the base of the staircase and were peering cautiously into the lavatory. For a moment they peered in silence, and then one of them shouted up at Mr. Buzzby. “The smoke’s dreadfully dense here, sir. We can’t see any flames. Shall we go in, sir?”

“Yes, do!” Mr. Buzzby’s voice was tragically shrill. “Do all you can. Please!”

The attendants disappeared into the lavatory and the curator waited with an agonized and expectant air. His heart was wrung at the thought of the fate which had in all probability overtaken his distinguished guest, but he could not think of anything further to do. Sinister forebodings crowded into his mind, but he was powerless to act.

Then it was that the shrieks commenced. From whatever cause arising they were truly ghastly, but they began so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that at first the curator could form no theory as to what had caused them. They issued so horribly and suddenly from the lavatory, echoing and reechoing through the empty corridors, that the curator could only stare and gasp.

But when they became fairly coherent, when the screams of affright turned to appeals for mercy, for pity, and when the language in which they found grim expression changed too, becoming familiar to the curator but incomprehensible to the man beside him, a dreadful incident occurred which the latter has never been able to consign to a merciful mnemonic oblivion.

The curator fell upon his knees, literally went down upon his knees at the head of the staircase and raised both arms in an unmistakable gesture of supplication. And then from his ashen lips there poured a torrent of grotesque gibberish:

“sdmw stn Osiris! sdmw stn Osiris! sdmw stn Osiris! sdm-f Osiris! Oh, sdm-f Osiris! sdmw stn Osiris!”

“Fool!” A muffled form emerged from the lavatory and ponderously ascended the stairs. “Fool! You — you have sinned irretrievably!” The voice was guttural, harsh, remote, and seemed to come from an immeasurable distance.

“Sir Richard! Sir Richard!” The curator got stumblingly to his feet and staggered toward the ascending figure. “Protect me, Sir Richard. There’s something unspeakable down there. I thought — for a moment I thought — Sir Richard, did you see it? Did you hear anything? those shrieks—”

But Sir Richard did not reply. He did not even look at the curator. He brushed past the unfortunate man as though he were a mere meddling fool, and grimly began to climb the stairs that led to the Hall of Egyptian Antiquities. He ascended so rapidly that the curator could not catch up with him, and before the frightened man had reached the half-way landing his steps were resounding on the tiled floor above.

“Wait, Sir Richard!” shrieked Buzzby. “Wait, please! I am sure that you can explain everything. I am afraid. Please wait for me!”

A spasm of coughing seized him, and at that moment there ensued a most dreadful crash. Fragments of broken glass tinkled suggestively upon the stone floor, and awoke ominous echoes in the corridor and up and down the winding stairway. Mr. Buzzby clung to the banisters and moaned. His face was purplish and distorted with fear and beads of sweat glistened on his high forehead. For a moment he remained thus cowering and whimpering on the staircase. Then, miraculously, his courage returned. He ascended the last flight three steps at a time and dashed wildly forward.

An intolerable thought had abruptly been born in the poor, bewildered brain of Mr. Buzzby. It had suddenly occurred to him that Sir Richard was an impostor, a murderous madman intent only upon destruction, and that his collections were in immediate danger. Whatever Mr. Buzzby’s human deficiencies, in his professional capacity he was conscientious and aggressive to an almost abnormal degree. And the crash had been unmistakable and susceptible of only one explanation. Mr. Buzzby completely forgot his fear in his concern for his precious collections. Sir Richard had smashed one of the cases and was extracting its contents! There was little doubt in Mr. Buzzby’s mind as to which of the cases Sir Richard had smashed. “The Luxor remains can never be duplicated,” he moaned. “I have been horribly duped!”

Suddenly he stopped, and stared. At the very entrance to the Hall lay an assortment of garments which he instantly recognized. There was the blue Chinchilla coat and the Alpine Homburg with its high tapering crown, and the blue silk muffler that had concealed so effectively the face of his visitor. And on the very top of the heap lay a pair of yellow suede gloves.

“Good God!” muttered Mr. Buzzby. “The man has shed all of his clothes!”

He stood there for a moment staring in utter bewilderment and then with long, hysterical strides he advanced into the hall. “A hopeless maniac,” he muttered, under his breath. “A sheer, raving lunatic. Why did I not—”

Then, abruptly, he ceased to reproach himself. He forgot entirely his folly, the heap of clothes, and the smashed case. Everything that had up to that moment occupied his mind was instantly extruded and he shriveled and shrank with fear. Never had the unwilling gaze of Mr. Buzzby encountered such a sight.

Mr. Buzzby’s visitor was bending over the shattered case and only his back was visible. But it was not an ordinary back. In a lucid, unemotional moment Mr. Buzzby would have called it a nasty, malignant back, but in juxtaposition with the crown that topped it there is no Aryan polysyllable suggestive enough to describe it. For the crown was very tall and ponderous with jewels and unspeakably luminous, and it accentuated the vileness of the back. It was a green back. Sapless was the word that ran through Mr. Buzzby’s mind as he stood and stared at it. And it was wrinkled, too, horribly wrinkled, all crisscrossed with centuried grooves.

Mr. Buzzby did not even notice his visitor’s neck, which glistened and was as thin as a beanpole, nor the small round scaly head that bobbed and nodded ominously. He saw only the hideous back, and the unbelievably awesome crown. The crown shed a fiery radiance upon the reddish tiles of the dim, vast hall, and the starkly nude body twisted and turned and writhed shockingly.

Black horror clutched at Mr. Buzzby’s throat, and his lips trembled as though he were about to cry out. But he spoke no word. He had staggered back against the wall and was making curious futile gestures with his arms, as though he sought to embrace the darkness, to wrap the darkness in the hall about him, to make himself as inconspicuous as possible and invisible to the thing that was bending over the case. But apparently he soon found to his infinite dismay that the thing was aware of his presence, and as it turned slowly toward him he made no further attempt to obliterate himself, but went down on his knees and screamed and screamed and screamed.

Silently the figure advanced toward him. It seemed to glide rather than to walk, and in its terribly lean arms it held a queer assortment of brilliant scarlet bones. And it cackled loathsomely as it advanced.

And then it was that Mr. Buzzby’s sanity departed utterly. He groveled and gibbered and dragged himself along the floor like a man in the grip of an instantaneous catalepsy. And all the while he murmured incoherently about how spotless he was and would Osiris spare him and how he longed to reconcile himself with Osiris.

But the figure, when it got to him, merely-stooped and breathed on him. Three times it breathed on his ashen face and one could almost see the face shrivel and blacken beneath its warm breath. For some time it remained in a stooping posture, glaring glassily, and when it arose Mr. Buzzby made no effort to detain it. Holding the scarlet bones very firmly in its horribly thin arms it glided rapidly away in the direction of the stairs. The attendants did not see it descend. No one ever saw it again.

And when the coroner, arriving in response to the tardy summons of an attendant, examined Mr. Buzzby’s body, the conclusion was unavoidable that the curator had been dead for a long, long time.