Page:Strange Tales Volume 02 Number 03 (1932-10).djvu/88

 peculiar to those late hours when we are lulled by cigarette smoke, the laughter of women, and cheap music.

Strange that out of such nightclub atmosphere—with its combination of gipsy music, cakewalk, and champagne—should develop a discussion of things supernatural! Lord Hopeless was telling a story.

Of a society which was really supposed to exist, of men and women—rather of corpses or apparent corpses—belonging to the best circles, who according to the testimony of the living had been dead a long time, even had grave markers and tombs with their names and the dates of their deaths, but who in reality lay somewhere in the city, inside an old-fashioned mansion, in a condition of uninterrupted catalepsy, insensate, but guarded against disintegration, neatly arranged in a series of drawers. They were said to be cared for by a hunchbacked servant with buckleshoes and a powdered wig, who was nicknamed Spotted Aron. During certain nights their lips showed a weak, phosphorescent gleam, which was a sign for the hunchback to perform a mysterious manipulation upon the cervical vertebrae of his charges. So he said.

Their souls could then roam about unhampered—temporarily freed from their bodies—and indulge in the vices of the city. With a greediness and intensity which transcended the imagination of the craftiest roué.

Among other things they knew how to attach themselves, in vampire fashion, to those living reprobates who stagger from vice to vice—sucking, stealing, enriching themselves with weird sensations at the expense of the living masses. This club, which, by the way, had the curious name, Amanita, possessed even by-laws, and rules and severe conditions concerning the admission of new members. But these were surrounded by an impenetrable veil of secrecy.

COULD not catch the last few words of Lord Hopeless' talk, due to the noisy racket of the musicians and the singers who dished up the latest couplet:

"I took the whitest flow-ower To cheer my darkest hou-our, Tra-la, tra-la, tra-la, Tra—la-la-la—tra-la."

The grotesque distortions of a mulatto couple, which accompanied the music with a sort of nigger cancan, added like the song to the unpleasant effect which the story had made on me.

In this night club, among painted prostitutes, slick waiters, and diamond-studded pimps the entire impression seemed to grow somewhat fragmentary, mangled-up, until it remained in my mind merely as a gruesome, half-real, distorted image.

As if time should suddenly, in unguarded moments, hurry with eager, noiseless steps, so can hours burn into seconds for one intoxicated—seconds which fly out of the soul like sparks, in order to illuminate a sickly web of curious, dare-devilish dreams, woven out of a confused mingling of the past and the future.

Thus I can still, out of the vagueness of my memory, hear a voice saying:

Judging by that, it seems that our talk must have repeatedly reverted to the same theme.

In between I seem to remember fragments of brief observations, like the breaking of a champagne glass, a whistle—then, that a French cocotte settled herself on my lap, kissed me, blew cigarette smoke into my mouth, and stuck her pointed tongue into my ear.