"Dust in the House" by David H. Keller (1938)
This is one of those stories about a person who has to spend a night in a haunted house in order to gain an inheritance. Our hero has been living in Europe, where he knew some woman named Lilith Lameraux--Lameraux repeatedly tried to murder him, but he was witty enough to escape injury. Today he is back in New York because he is the only heir of his great-grandfather whom the family's lawyers could find. Exactly one hundred years ago, great-grandpa locked up the big family house, filled out a will, and then killed himself. The will directs that for one hundred years the house will remain sealed; when that period has passed, his descendants must spend a night in the house--those who fulfill this requirement must then destroy the house and all its furniture, then sell the land and divide the proceeds. The lawyer in charge of executing these ridiculous strictures tells our dude that he thinks it likely there is another living descendant of great-grandpa, a cousin of the male lead whom he can't find, a woman named Lilith Lameraux!
The main character is guided by the lawyer through the house to the dining room in which the will demands he spend the twelve hours spanning from 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM. Most of the house buried under inches of dust (the lawyer has anticipated this and wears "rubbers") but the dining room is spic and span, bereft of the dust Keller compares to the dunes of the Sahara. What it lacks in dust it makes up for in dead bodies and ealaborate weaponry--seated at the table are two skeletal mummies, one of a man, one of a woman, and buried in the male corpse is a dagger with a bright steel blade and an ivory handle carved into the shape of a nude woman!
The lawyer leaves and the heir waits, eating sandwiches and drinking whisky in the same room with the century-old corpses. Eventually Lilith Lameraux appears and uses hypnotism, or something, to get him to commit suicide with the dagger. The final scenes of the story depict LL talking to the lawyer, explaining that she used a secret passage originating in the house next door to tidy up the dining room and then confront her cousin, who, she implies, broke her heart over in Europe. (In Europe people are always having love affairs with their cousins.)
This story is pretty bad. For one thing it is clumsily written. More importantly, almost everything in "Dust in the House" is hard to believe, and there are lots of what I am considering loose ends (who are the two dead bodies? Why did great-grandpa set up this elaborate will?) The main character lacks personality (the male heir and the lead lawyer also lack names) and the behavior and motivations of all the characters are often inexplicable. The story also feels long and tedious; for example, many words are expended describing the male lead's thoughts as he considers or is beguiled into suicide, and it is not suspenseful, but rather mind-numbingly boring.
It is possible the story is meant partially or primarily to be a joke--Lilith Lameraux is a neat freak who uses her womanly charms to convince the lawyer not to sic the cops on her and the lawyer is a nervous wreck who keeps taking nitroglycerine pills because his heart might not be able to take all the shocks of this adventure--but the jokes are not funny and of course they undermine any thrills and chills we might hope to get from a story about a woman scorned who turns murderous and that features gruesome dead bodies.
Thumbs down for "Dust in the House." The story would be reprinted in the Keller collections The Folsom Flint and Other Curious Tales and Keller Memento. For more MPorcius coverage of Keller's work, click these links:
"Mother of Toads" by Clark Ashton Smith (1938)
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"Mother of Toads" is a monument to fatphobia! And a sex-swapped depiction of date rape! Ripped from today's headlines, right?
Set in Smith's fictional French province, Averoigne, what we have here is the sad tale of Pierre, an apprentice to an apothecary. Pierre has been sent to collect a vial of some substance or other for his master from the obese witch who lives by the swamp outside the village. This witch, whose monstrously fat body Smith describes at some length, is known as The Mother of Toads among the local people because an unusually large number of unusually large toads are always hanging around her hut and because she sort of looks a little like a big toad, what with her bulging eyes and sickly white flesh and so forth. It is also known that she has a crush on the apprentice, and as the story begins she is trying to seduce Pierre. Pierre resists her aggressive approaches, but accepts some wine. Of course the wine has a potion in it that arouses Pierre sexually and affects his sight and brain so that he is attracted to the witch and has sex with her.
In the morning the potion has worn off and Pierre tries to sneak off while the witch sleeps, but the thickest fog he has ever seen and an army of toads that are capable of attacking him like "a monstrous hail" and even "a surging solid wave that towered over his [Pierre's] head" drives him back to the hut. When he rejects the witch's offer of another dose of aphrodisiac wine and tries to flee the scene, the toads, and the witch, apparently a giant toad herself, drown Pierre under their disgusting bodies.
This story isn't bad, but feels a little simple and slight compared to many of Smith's other stories, and it is not particularly well-constructed. For example, the climactic scene of Pierre running through the foggy swamp, pursued and attacked by thousands of toads, isn't that different than the scene in the middle of the story about him being chased through a foggy swamp pursued and attacked by thousands of toads. I'm judging "Mother of Toads" just "OK."
"Mother of Toads" is of course available in a host of Smith collections and horror anthologies in English and several other tongues, with or without sexually provocative/kind of gross cover art.
(We've been reading lots of women-force-themselves-on-men stories lately, haven't we? There was Richard Matheson's "Lover When You're Near Me," then Robert Bloch's "I Kiss Your Shadow" and now this one, and even Charles L. Grant's execrable "The Last and Dreadful Hour" has that childish seduction scene. And, you know, if we expand our criteria a little we'll find that almost everything we've read this month has been about how women are a menace to men. Sorry, ladies!)
Our narrator begins his story with a discussion of the lengths true lovers of oriental rugs will go in pursuit of their passion, and then describes his discovery of a fragment of a particularly ancient and magnificent rug in a Chicago auction house and his desperate, and ultimately unsuccessful, efforts to secure it at the auction. This part of the story is very fun and engaging--Price's writing succeeds in transmitting to the reader the passion of the collector and the excitement of the auction.
Ilderim Shirkuh bin Ayyub is the "Moslem" who wins the rug out from under the narrator, a man who looks like "a Kurd whom civilization had not robbed of his alert predatory air and desert gauntness." He befriends the narrator and invites him over to his mansion to talk to him about how he has been searching the Near East, Europe and America for this half of a rug for years. Bin Ayyub is a descendent of Saladin himself, and the fragment he has finally secured is the missing piece of the rug that adorned his esteemed ancestor's throne. Finally the rug can be restored to its former glory!
Our narrator spends quite an afternoon at the mansion. He is served coffee by bin Ayyub's "negro" servant, the bitter black brew spiced with a powerful concoction of "countless myriads of blossoms and herbs, spices and gums...." He catches a glimpse of bin Ayyub's mistress, "a Transcaucasian, a Gurjestani, the most flawlessly lovely of all Oriental women." And he receives an awesome gift from bin Ayyub, a rug of such value he could never have afforded to buy it himself, a sort of consolation prize.
That evening the narrator tells a friend about his adventure at bin Ayyub's mansion, and two weeks later he learns that his unscrupulous pal has contrived to acquire through subterfuge the now-restored rug which covered Saladin's throne! This jerk off took advantage of the ignorance and poor taste of the beautiful Gurjestani girl, trading her a flashier but far inferior rug for the throne rug. (Bin Ayyub never told her how important the throne rug was--she's just a woman, after all, you don't keep them around for conversation purposes!) The narrator seizes the throne rug and rushes to the mansion with it, but not fast enough to avert a tragedy!
Thumbs up for this orientalist tale that convincingly depicts the experience of being an avid collector and exploits the fascination of Westerners with the exotic culture of the Muslim Near East, its decadence and its barbarisms, its beauties and its cruelties. If you are writing your master's thesis on orientalism in American pulp fiction this is a story you gotta check out, bucko.
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The Keller is an embarrassment, and the Smith is a weaker sample of his generally fine work, but the Price is quite good. This is a good issue of Farnsworth Wright's magazine, which even includes in the letters column a missive from Henry Kuttner, bragging that he had a chance to visit Clark Ashton Smith's house and see Smith's sculpture, paintings, and his scary cat!
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