The Golden Age of Weird Fiction Megapack, Volume 5 Read online

  In preparation for this fate, he held a long, secret converse with his friend, the Emperor, and warned him of the danger of the explosions they were going to make. Once the bowels of the earth were teased till they vomited fire, it was hard to tell where the trouble would end. Would it not be best to prepare the Hall of the Dragon with beds and food and all necessary luxuries, and retire there with his Wise Men before the electric spark was fired? Would it not be wise to have the wires run into the Hall of the Dragon so that the Emperor himself could have the joy of personally pressing the golden button and thus, all by himself, have the satisfaction of blowing the Hell of the Bottomless Pits into the faces of his enemies of Mo? The Emperor was delighted with the plan. He agreed to all that was suggested. He even went further and arranged for a month of entertainment in the Hall of the Dragon, consisting of feasting and amusements and loving of strange women and the delightful killing of slaves in strange and unusual ways. He gave orders that for all that month he and his Seven Wise Men and the Priest and a few of the Nobles should lie on golden couches on pads of goose feathers covered with fine velvets and silks. There, on the soft bosoms of their women, they would drink the wine and eat the bee food that their friend Heracles had prepared for them; and, when the time came, the golden button would be pressed and Mo destroyed, and when it was safe, they would go to the seashore and sail over the land of their enemies and see for themselves the deadly fate their energy and hatred had prepared for them.

  Now all was to the liking of Heracles. During the month of drunken debauch, he would work his final plans. Then, on the day before the pressing of the button, Gobi would move slowly into the air, and what cared Heracles how long the Emperor and his advisers lived, so long as they lived the life he prepared for them?

  Thus, at the beginning of the debauch, Heracles changed the food. It tasted like, and had the fragrance of, the former food and wine, and it still contained large amounts of the bee jelly, but in addition there was opium added to lull their senses and allay their suspicion, and hyoscine to make their dreams more pleasantly erotic; and, finally, a secret compound made from the internal glands of actual men and women collected carefully during all these years from the bodies of slaves and criminals condemned to death.

  This medicine, given in proper doses, melted the bones of those who took it, so that finally they became boneless bags of skin within which bags they lived and thought but could not move, but simply lay where they were placed till someone placed them in a different shape.

  Men in their normal minds would know of the changes taking place in their bones; men walking or taking exercise would have fractures and strange changes in their shape due to the gradual weakening and bending of their long bones; but men who lay in a long debauch for a month dull with opium and pleasured with drug-dreams and fair women who were no dreams at all, would gradually weaken and become helpless without knowing what was happening to them.

  This was the final revenge of Heracles. To turn these men into boneless horrors, men without skeletons, jelly fishes of humanity, helpless in their despairing terror—and they would not die! That was the crowning horror of it all—that they would live on forever, like the queen bee. In their system was food, concentrated and powerful, to keep them alive a thousand years, yet what would such a life mean to them?

  And Heracles, in his joy, visioned these helpless men in the Hall of the Dragon hurled thousands of feet into the air. He saw them living in a palace, cold and cheerless, with the damp of doom at noonday turned into a freezing, living death of cold as soon as the weakened sun dropped behind the western mountains. There they would live, perhaps worshipped and cared for as Gods by a few shivering mountaineers, perhaps neglected and forgotten; but no matter what happened, they would never die. That was the beauty of it—the fact that they would keep on living. He was going to send them up, up, up, into the air, so high there would be no wolves to tear their boneless bodies and so cold that no flies would larvate in their helpless nostrils. Perhaps for a year or so he would visit them and talk over matters with them, or he might even induce the Emperor of Mo to come on an excursion and see for himself the fate that had come to those who plotted the destruction of Mo.

  So, to the bee food, and the opium, and the hyoscine, was added the juice of the internal glands of thousands of criminals and slaves, and the entertainment began. The Emperor of Gobi was happy in that he had such a wise Physician and such a long life ahead of him, and such a fine ending to Mo, and such lovely women, and such a skillful High Executioner who could think of so many new and novel ways of killing men slowly. They laughed, and loved, and drank, and stupidly thrilled over the men who died in front of them for their entertainment, not once realizing that their bones were slowly being dissolved within them; for each day Heracles increased the dose of opium.

  Across the Hall of the Dragon, Heracles had his seat of honor. He only, of all those in the hall, could come and go at will, for the Emperor had given command that of all who came into the hall at the onset of the month, none should leave it till the golden button was pressed—that is, none except the dead slaves and those who killed them. Heracles sat there day after day and saw his enemies weaken from the disease now known as osteomalacia but the servants and the queens and those concubines who were not beautiful enough to please the Emperor, yet were shapely enough to comfort the Emperor by serving as pillows for him and his Wise Men, all these servants, and concubines, and dancing girls, were spared the disease and simply lived on in a phantasmagoria of vice, thinking that the growing incapacity of the Emperor and the other great men was simply the reaction born of surfeit and drunkenness.

  Then on the twenty-eighth day, when Heracles knew that all of his plans were ready, he lessened the dose of the opium and thus allowed the drugged men to come to their senses. Leaving food and wine in abundance, he left the Hall of the Dragon; and, cautioning the guards to let no one in or out, he retired to his palace, there to finish the destruction of the hated country.

  When he had shut and barred and double-locked the room in his castle wherein stood the table with the map of Gobi on it, he had left everything in readiness for the debacle. The tank was full of compressed air. From it ran a tube divided finally in such a way that each of its four parts connected with the hollow of the telescopic legs. The joints of these legs had been carefully oiled with grease obtained by boiling the bodies of virgins. On the table was the finished map, perfect in every detail. A turn of the screw loosened the compressed air, the pressure of which would raise the map thirty feet into the air. As the map would rise, so would all of Gobi.

  The secret of such scientific magic is now lost to mankind.

  Heracles had left all in readiness when he went away.

  Now he had come back.

  He turned on the screw, and there was a hiss of air.

  Nothing happened.

  For a very little and unexpected and unheard-of event had taken place during the twenty-eight days the chamber had been tenantless. A little, hungry mouse had wandered into the room, and for some reason had taken a fancy to the taste of the fibre tube through which the air passed. During many hours, that mouse had eaten of the tube in a great many places little holes hardly to be seen, yet large enough to prevent the tube from holding the air.

  Heracles, for all his wisdom, had not been able to forsee this mouse. Now, with but two days at his command, the entire plan was ruined unless he could repair the tube. It was useless to try and make a new one. There was nothing else to do except go to work; and this he did, tirelessly, systematically, persistently, repairing hole after hole. But even with all his ability, the tube remained weak and not fully worthy of trust. Finally, when the full pressure of air was turned into it, it still leaked, so that it was not sufficient to raise the table. Heracles spent more precious hours refilling the tank with compressed air, and then he did the only thing he could do. He took part of the map off the table to lighten the load. Thus all of the map representing what is now Southern
China and Burma and the lower part of India were taken off the table and shared no part in the cataclysm that befell the rest of Gobi.

  Eventually, all was ready, yet in this delay many precious hours had been wasted. Heracles stood there, swaying from tiredness, and nervous fatigue, and worry. Beneath his hand lay the screw that, turning, would destroy Gobi.

  Yet he waited.

  Suddenly, he heard a dull roar, and then another and another, like a distant thunder storm, and he sickened, for he knew that he had waited too long.

  There being nothing else to do, he turned the screw and sent the full force of the air into the legs of the table. It worked, and up went the map of Gobi into the air; but one leg was weaker than the rest, so the table rose unevenly and there was some sliding and slithering of the earth forming the map.

  Heracles and the palace he was in went up into the air slowly because all of the land under it was in upward motion. It was a slow movement and hard to realize in that part of Gobi, for all of the land for thousands of miles was going upward in perfect harmony. There was no way, in that part of the country, to detect the movement save by the gradual increase in the coldness of the air.

  Heracles knew that his experiment had been a success.

  Yet, from far away, there came the rolling thunder; and, with a sickening sense of failure, he knew that he had been a little late and that already Mo was sinking under the tormented waves of the Great Ocean.

  Sighing, he put on the heavy furs he had prepared against this hour, and walked slowly through the deserted streets of the great city. Here and there a small house had fallen, but all of the royal palaces remained as they had been. For the most part, the people, accustomed to a semi-tropical climate, were seeking warmth in their houses. Thus the streets were deserted. On the great Physician went to the Royal Palace and on to the Hall of the Dragon. There he found the guard on duty but almost numb from cold. With pity in his heart, he bade them seek warmth if they could find it. Then he went into the inner Hall of the Dragon where he knew the Emperor of Gobi and his Seven Wise Men and his High Priest lay helpless. Perhaps with them would be a few of the queens, but of this he was in doubt.

  While he had been working in almost a frenzy to repair the air tube, the Emperor and his advisers had slowly regained their normal senses. Almost dazed, it was hard for them to realize what had happened to them; but of one thing they were sure, and that was the useless state of their bodies, for a strange sense of helplessness overcame them, and all efforts to move resulted in a peculiar writhing and a sad changing of their shape, but there was no progression.

  The Emperor was no fool. While unable to know what had really happened to him, he had no difficulty in determining who was at the bottom of it. Only one man in all Gobi could work such a wonder as dissolving of a man’s bones in his body! He looked upward and saw that he was being supported on cushions held by his favorite fancy-woman; and, not daring to speak, he made signs with his eyes that he should be lifted up a little. She did so, but slowly, for the sudden bending of that which had been his backbone caused fearful pains to shoot through him which nearly killed him with the dreadful agony.

  The woman wiped the sweat from his face, and he looked around him. There, on the divans, he saw the men who had been his counselors. They lay in odd shapes like leather bags full of thin sausage. On the face of all of them was a Hell of despair, because something had come over them, and they knew not what it was, save that they could not move and were growing cold and realized that they could not die.

  One by one, the women took the gold, and the silver, and the precious gems, and fled from that accursed place. Only one remained; and she held the head of the Emperor and tried to ease him of his pain, for she was his favorite woman and was going to bear him a son.

  The Emperor tried to remember what it was all about, and how he had come to this depth of trouble.

  Then he recalled his bitter hate, and knew that Mo still remained undestroyed; and he breathed harshly, and his woman knew that he desired to talk. She put her pink shell near his mouth; and, with a great effort, he told her to press the golden button. This she did.

  Thus Mo was destroyed by the dainty fingers of a slave woman who had no name and was simply there and faithful to the Emperor, whom all others had left, because she loved him, and was to bear him a son.

  In the room it grew colder, and the woman gathered the rugs and the silken sheets, and wrapped each jelly fish of a man up as warm as she could; but the warmest things she put around the Emperor. There the nine lay, boneless and unable to die, while the breath from their nostrils congealed like steam in the frosty air.

  Thus Heracles found them.

  He sat down by the Emperor, and told the story of what he had done; how he had planned that his enemies should live on for centuries filled with the long life of the bee jelly and boneless because of the gland juice he had given. The Emperor heard it all, but was soundless and motionless. In his eyes was a look of hatred that only a great man can devise, and in his heart was a deep content for he knew from the rolling thunder that Mo was being destroyed.

  Meantime, it grew colder.

  The woman, shivering, feared for her unborn son.

  Mo was being blown to pieces. The damage done by the thousands of tons of powder was only a small part of the harm done to that fair land. The buried gases, exploding, tore the deep rocks into a million fragments; and all over Mo, volcanoes burst into activity. Tidal waves overflowed the land; lava buried it. Sixty million people were drowned, burned, or suffocated with the poisonous fumes. A continent was destroyed, leaving scattered islands as small fragments—Borneo on one side and the Easter Islands on the other—Australia to the South was formed, arid, cheerless, a fit home for Bushmen. Some of the citizens of Mo survived on the mountain peaks hurled upward as in the Hawaiian group, but their culture, temples, wealth, and even their tradition, were hopelessly lost.

  The Emperor of Mo, with his favorite wives and nobles, was feasting in their small city of refuge. The shock of the cataclysm reached them even in that far away rock-bound enclosure. They feasted on, each man and woman pretending to his neighbors at the banquet table that the sound was thunder.

  The banquet passed on through the night, and the next day, a breathless messenger arrived with news that could be given only to the Emperor. This news was whispered in the royal ear as the great man sat at the head of the table. Shivering, he commanded a certain wine to be served and, in all seriousness, that a health be drunk to their beloved land of Mo. All of the great men and their lovely women drank of this wine and then sat down and died, while their servants fled in terror to press on into the desert where they died in various ways.

  Fourteen thousand years later, three prospectors, typical desert rats of Arizona, prospected for gold near the Colorado river. One day, while working in a twenty-nine foot shaft, one of them drove his pick through the roof of what seemed to be an abandoned mine shaft. It was paved with square, beveled stones fastened together with cement. These stones had the appearance of great age. Descending into this shaft with torches, they followed it for twenty-eight miles and came to a buried city. Here they found many old buildings, one of which was a circular chamber with a large table of marble around which sat the dead, dried bodies of seventy-two persons, all over six feet tall, with blue eyes and white skins. Their flesh was white and firm, being preserved in some wonderful manner. On these dead bodies, was wonderful jewelry, but most of the clothing had fallen into dust. In another large room, were the dead bodies of over two hundred women who looked as though they were lovely in their day. This place, the desert rats thought, might have been a harem. Throughout the city there were peculiar trap doors and all kinds of interesting levers and mechanisms, the use of which was hard to determine.

  Taking a lot of the jewelry with them, they sought civilization to secure help in the exploration of this city. When they returned, a freshet of the Colorado had covered the opening of the tunnel with sand, and they
were unable to locate it.

  Thus died the great land of Mo.

  The fair country of Atlantis had no enemies. It lived only for pleasure and art. From Ireland to the shores of America it lay in the sunshine. Then one day, a continent across the globe was destroyed. A terrific shifting of balance of weight took place; large tidal waves rolled from one sea to the other; and suddenly, the continent of Atlantis was swallowed up by the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Thus a kindly, lovable, people paid the price of the hatred between two nations they had never harmed. So perished the second of these great lands.

  Where Gobi once ruled supreme now rule the Himalayas. These mountains, the greatest in the world, run nineteen hundred miles from east to west, and an average of ninety miles from north to south. They cover a total of one hundred and sixty thousand square miles. Of these mountains, the greatest peak, Mount Everest, reaches upward to the sky twenty-nine thousand one hundred and forty feet above the sea level. Immense sections of these mountains are inaccessible to modern man. Mount Everest remains unconquered.

  Hidden in the tops of these mountains, unknown to man save by tradition, lies the ancient capital of the lost Empire of Gobi. Half-frozen Tatars, insect-ridden Lamas, barbarians of every description, remain as the sole descendants of what was once a great people. Even the memory of their former greatness has been lost in the changing struggles of fourteen thousand years. If they are asked how old these mountains are, they will reply that they have always been there. How could they know that once all this land was lowland, forest land, a pleasant country for rich folk to live in? How could they know of the physician from Mo and his magical table and map thereon?