Five Stars: Five Outstanding Tales from the early days of Stupefying Stories Read Online Free

One vomited. They listened but heard only the wind and the occasional noise a body made when it sank down further on one of the spears. The others in the squad came through the gate.
    “What in the name of God happened here?” Huber, an NCO, who had led four back-up troops, gasped.
    Rupert only stared.
    “Let’s go on in,” he said. He turned to the pale figure of Huber.
    “Go get Cambridge,” he ordered. “Let’s see what he makes of this.”
    Cambridge was an NCO who had a college education and had taught Ancient Near Eastern history at London University. He knew Hebrew and a little Arabic. Plaud hurried off, glad to be away from the horrific display of naked, tortured men. “Come on,” Rupert said, his revolver held at ready.
    A little past the ranks of impaled men, they encountered more horror—and horror more heartbreaking and intense than what they had just seen. In a pool of congealed blood lay the bodies of possibly twenty women. All of them had been pregnant. Whoever took the city had stripped them naked, cut them open, and torn the fetuses from their wombs. Babies in various stages of development lay next to the mothers. A few feet away, a heap of small corpses rose under the bloody wall against which they been smashed. Further back, other corpses—what looked like dead soldiers and a few more women—lay in the dirt.
    “Turks?” one of the enlisted men asked. His soft question rang loud in the silence.
    “The Turks can be brutal,” Rupert answered, “But they’ve never done anything like this.”
    Philips had come back with Plaud. After getting over the initial shock, he walked around the heap of dead women toward the back of the town. He turned to Rupert.
    “Skins,” he said.
    The others looked at him in puzzlement.
    “These things we saw on the walls weren’t animal skins. They were human skins.” He walked ten yards and stopped. “Here.”
    The others went over to where he stood. They saw a human body—muscle and connective tissue laid bare, all the skin removed. Seven or eight similar bodies littered the ground by the back of the wall.
    “Brutality,” Plaud said. “It defies belief.”
    They heard footsteps. Cambridge approached. Pale, his steps uneven, his eyes darted from the different stations of mayhem. He halted next to the others and looked out at the staked corpses.
    “Flayed alive?” he asked.
    “It would appear so,” Rupert replied. “We thought an educated man like you might have some idea who could have done this. Turks? Bedouins?”
    “Neither,” he answered. “Under any other circumstances, you would think me stark, raving mad. But I can speak without fear of infamy with this witness all around. Only one culture could or would have done something like this: the ancient Assyrians. Commander, we have gone back in time.”
    They stared at him.
    “I thought as much when Giles took me out and showed me Thuban in place of the North Star and all the constellations off by twenty degrees. I did not study astronomy thoroughly, but I know the constellations and their placement in the sky. And being in ancient studies, I know how their positions were different in ancient times due to the polar drift of the Earth.”
    After another long silence, Rupert spoke.
    “Cambridge, you can’t expect us to believe this.”
    Cambridge went over and pulled an arrow from the ground.
    “Who uses iron-tipped arrows? The Ottomans? Even the Arab tribal groups have guns. No one impales enemies on bronze spears. It defines reason, Commander, but we’re back to biblical days.” He looked around them. “And who lives in walled cities anymore? A ridiculous precaution since the invention of gunpowder, wouldn’t you say?”
    The logic of his word struck home with Rupert, but he did not want to admit as much—not in front of the other men.
    “There has to be a logical explanation.”
    “That’s what we’re always told,” Cambridge said, his voice suddenly passionate. “But I know this