Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 3 (1925-03).djvu/30

 ''A Torture Chamber of the Middle Ages Becomes a Modern Means of Revenge''

ULLY seven feet high does she stand: a woman of studded iron, tall as the tallest giant, and robed as a devout nun of the Sixteenth Century. For more than four hundred years, since she was wrought and hammered into being in the forge of the stout blacksmith Denys, the existence of the Iron Lady has been one of many weird vicissitudes. From the glowing metal did the mighty Denys create her by the order of his liege lord: the Iron Lady, an effigy of the demure nuns of the time, a nun who smiles.

Tourists, visiting that quaint, gray-walled town of the Old World today, and gazing open-mouthed upon the Iron Lady as they harken to her grim history, often wonder why she smiles in such a cruel and cynical fashion. But the Iron Lady, like the Sphinx, only smiles on forever and makes no answer.

It is a somber place for smiling, this dark, cavernous, medieval crypt where the Iron Lady stands, this damp, stone-girt dungeon of creeping shadows, haunted—who will say me nay?—by the phantoms and blood stains of four hundred years. The crypt is peopled by the shades of those who came often, then, of a midnight, with flickering, smoking torches: armed guards and a prisoner who wore fetters. For it was the place of the Question in the ages past—this musty, underground chamber with the stone walls four feet thick, through which the shrillest scream of hapless wretch could never penetrate

All this I knew one night when my spirit was borne back and forth through the centuries on the fearsome wings of nightmare. Like the gaping sightseers of my dream, I wondered why the Iron Lady of the crypt still smiles such a crooked, cynical smile in this Twentieth Century, now that she is only a curio, the gruesome relic of an age that is happily long dead. For, as I beheld her in that horrid vision of my sleep, I knew that her smile, so cruel, so harrowing, was no triumph of the art of the blacksmith of long ago who had created her, but that she actually smiled—evilly, triumphantly—as some cold-blooded human brute of flesh and blood, but lacking bowels, might smile. At least, so it seemed to me.

I wondered why she smiled so, I say. The mystery tormented my waking mind for hours, while I tossed sleeplessly on my pillow. Finally I drifted off again into slumber, and, spanning seas and time, was borne back once more on the wings of nightmare to the Iron Lady in the crypt. In my dreams I saw her once more, and thus I came to know why she smiles. And this is what I saw in my dream