The Satyr's Head: Tales of Terror Read Online Free

(That would have sent me starko, despite my alleged skepticism.) They went on for maybe ten or fifteen minutes once or twice or even half a dozen times a night; there was never any way to predict. The rest of the time I used to occupy with reading, to fill up the gaps between my increasingly infrequent rounds.
    This particular night I’d forgotten to bring a book, so I rummaged around the cluttered office in the keep for something to browse through while I consumed my sandwich and coffee.
    I located some moldy old volumes sagging abandoned in a decrepit breakfront pushed back in one corner; they seemed mostly antiquarian guides, but my eye fell on a thin book with no title on the spine. I pulled it out and discovered it was a daily journal, dated 1925 and stamped with the name Frederick Ehlers. It was dusty enough that it might not have been opened in the thirty-odd years since Ehlers died, but I cleaned it up a bit and began to page through it.
    At first I was disappointed, although the human fascination with sticking one’s nose into someone else’s private business kept me reading.
    It was neither a diary nor a business journal, but seemed to consist mostly of accounts of dreams the old boy had had, plus speculations on their meaning, with occasionally a few rather visionary philosophical jottings thrown in.
    Some of the dreams were dillies. I remember one that went something like this: “Dreamed I was shut inside the new Iron Maiden from Dusseldorf. A noisy crowd outside was laughing, jeering, and hammering on it; and gradually it became red hot. Feeling of terror, not at the pain, but because I was certain those outside were not human. Meaning: birth trauma, or perhaps some ritual of spiritual purification?”
    There was a lot of stuff like that, not very reassuring as to the inner psychic life of Our Founder, and I had begun to tire of deciphering the jagged, fading ink strokes, when suddenly an extended passage caught my attention. I copied it down and still have it, so I can quote it accurately:
    “That objects with a long history, particularly those associated with passionate or violent people and events, soak up and retain an aura or atmosphere of their own I have no doubt. And that under certain conditions they may produce a tangible emanation, even sensory stimuli, is proved by my experiences as a collector. Perhaps one must be psychic, whatever that may mean, to receive these impressions, which would explain why not all collectors have had such experiences.
    “I don’t mean only manifestations like the squeaking of the ancient floorboards I brought over and installed from the wrecked Daimyo’s mansion after the Tokyo earthquake (though that is an especially unnerving instance), but also certain definite sights and emotional impressions, sounds, odours, etc. How otherwise explain the smell of blood, the feeling of horror surrounding most ancient torture instruments? It cannot be association, since the effects are felt even when the objects are hidden and unsuspected by the subjects in tests I have made.
    “These phenomena, of course, are not ‘ghosts’ in any literal or personal sense, but more like the recordings impressed on a phonographic cylinder. Still, since I am unsure whether or not such emanations can affect matter physically, there is a chance they may be more powerful, and perhaps dangerous, than mere recordings could be.”
    That was all; next came another crazy dream, and nothing else in the book continued this train of thought, although there were some weird, rather theosophical speculations on spiritual life inhabiting inorganic matter.
    Still, it meant that the man who had originally assembled this jumble-sale collection had himself heard, seen, and felt things here that he couldn’t explain, except through this fanciful theorising, over thirty years ago. And my guess about the Japanese origin of the Nightingale Floors was correct—an almost fantastic coincidence! (Could I myself