The Black Gargoyle and Other Stories by Hugh B. Cave

Book Details

The Black Gargoyle and Other Stories – from the Amazon, to darkest Africa, to Borneo and the East Indies, four stories of the monsters and eldritch demons that inhabit the deep jungles around the world.

The Crawling Curse (1933) – A shivery tale of an East Indian murder and the ghastly fate that hounded the murderer to his doom

The Cult of the White Ape (1933)- An eldritch story of blackest Africa, where strange occult magic is still worked —a horror-story of the Dark Continent

The Black Gargoyle (1934) – A tale of goose-flesh horror in the jungles of Borneo—a story of stark terror and the strange doom of an evil white man

The City of Crawling Death (1932) – Ants—droves of them—as big as panthers—ants that made slaves of men and threatened civilization with destruction

Hugh Barnett Cave (1910–2004) was a very prolific writer of horror, weird menace and science fiction. After World War II, Cave lived in Haiti for five years and wrote Haiti: High Road to Adventure, a nonfiction work acclaimed critically as the “best report on voodoo in English.”

The Black Gargoyle and Other Stories has 6 illustrations.

The Black Gargoyle and Other Stories is also available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble

Files:

1. Cave-TheBlackGargoyle.epub

Excerpt: The Cult of the White Ape

THE hour is midnight. The oil lamp on the table before me, casting its weird glow over my face, is a feeble, inadequate thing that flickers constantly as the corrugated iron roof of the shack trembles with the throbbing beat of incessant rain. It has rained here in the village of Kodagi for the last four months —a horrible, maddening dirge that drives its way into a man’s brain and undermines his reason. The M’Boto Hills of the Congo, sunk in the stinking sweat of the rain belt, are cursed with such torment.

It was raining when Matthew Betts came here. I was outside at the time, working on the veranda inside my cage of mosquito-netting. A man must have some relief from the monotony or else go mad; and I had found, after being sent here by the Belgian government to fill the position of chef de poste, that my hobby of entomology was a heaven-sent blessing.

When Betts came, I was busily sorting specimens and mounting them on the little oki-wood table in my veranda laboratory. Beside me, on the stoop, squatted old Kodagi. A cunning man, Kodagi. A wizened monkey of man with parchment face and filed teeth and a broad grin that bespeaks much hidden knowledge. He belongs, I believe, to the Zapo Zaps— a queerly deformed race which inhabits these mysterious jungles. For years he has been the village Ngana, the witchdoctor and magician of the tribe.

Kodagi, I like to believe, is my friend. It is a peculiar half-dead friendship at most, and yet I am thankful for the little that is allotted me. There are rumors— more than rumors—that Kodagi disliked intensely the white man who held the position of chef de poste before me, and that this white man died a slow, unpleasant, and altogether inexplicable death. More than once I have suspected that Kodagi is one of the all-powerful members of the Bakanzenzi—the terrible, cannibalistic secret cult which even the natives of my village speak of in fearful undertones.

Kodagi was watching me astutely as I went about my work. His beady eyes followed me everywhere, saw every movement. Occasionally he muttered something to me under his breath; but the monotonous beat of the rain smothered his voice.

All at once he turned, to stare at the opposite wall of the clearing.

“Look, Bwana!” he pointed.

I jerked about obediently, to see the nose of a safari winding its sluggish way into our silent domain. Sloshing through the soft mud they came, with heads down and backs bowed under the weight of their burdens. At their head strode a white man—a hulking buffalo of a man with coarse red face and loose-fitting white drill which hung from him like a drenched winding-sheet. In one hand he carried a kiboko. The other hand he flung up to salute me, and shouted boisterously, at the same time turning in his tracks to snarl at the cringing natives behind him. They were afraid of him evidently, for they cowered back in silence and huddled together in whispering groups while he strode forward to the veranda.

I watched him quietly. I thought I knew his identity, since I had been informed that certain land close to the village had been leased by the officials of a powerful rubber company. This company, the report stated, would send a chap named Betts—Matthew Betts—to the village of Kodagi, where he would experiment with various types of latex-producing trees and vines.

If this was the man they were sending, I decided instantly that I disliked him. He was drunk; and it is not good for white men to drink native rum in the sweating, fever-ridden murk of the Congo, less than five degrees from the equator. I was infinitely glad when my Jopaluo house-boy, Njo, relieved me of the task of opening the veranda door for him.

I  SAW then that he was very drunk. He stumbled on the step and lurched forward. Perhaps he did not see Kodagi crouching there; perhaps he saw but did not care. At any rate, his outstretched foot entwined between Kodagi’s black legs. He stumbled and caught himself on the mosquito-netting. Then, before I could prevent it, he swung upon Kodagi with a rasping snarl. His heavy boot drove into the Ngana’s naked ribs. Kodagi, screaming in pain and writhing hideously, tumbled off the stoop into the mud.

The result was instantaneous. Straightening up, Betts stepped toward me with a livid grin. Two steps he took, and opened his mouth to speak. Then the grin faded with uncanny abruptness, leaving an expression of unholy fear on his bloated face. I saw his eyes dilate. His features lost color. He flung himself sideways and jerked up a Luger in his fist. A sudden belch of flame seared through the muzzle; and the bullets, whining dangerously close to me, roared blindly into a patch of thick scrub beside the veranda rail.

After that there was complete silence for a moment. Betts stood rigid, trembling. Behind him, at the rim of the clearing, the porters of his safari were running madly to safety, screeching in terror. Njo, my house-boy, was down on his knees in the middle of the doorway, muttering in his native tongue. Kodagi, who had been lying prone in the mud at the foot of the stoop, had vanished!”

Excerpt From: Hugh B. Cave. “The Black Gargoyle and Other Stories.”