SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: THE GRIP OF DEATH

"The Grip of Death" by Robert Bloch, with Henry Kuttner, uncredited co-author (from Strange Stories, December 1939; reprinted in Tales of Dungeons and Dragons, edited by Peter Haining, 1986)

This is one of the handful of stories by Robert Bloch that I had not previously read, and one of the few that has not been reprinted in any of the more than sixty collections of Bloch's short storties.  Bloch and fellow H. P. Lovecraft correspondent Henry Kuttner collaborated on three short stories early in their respective careers -- "The Black Kiss" (Weird Tales, June 1937, credited to Bloch alone; "The Body and the Brain" (Strange Stories, June 1939, credited to "Keith Hammond", and this one.  

Strange Stories, edited by Mort Weisinger, was a short-lived -- thirteen issues -- competitor to Weird Tales.  John W. Campbell's fantasy magazine, Unknown, was launched around the same time and Strange Stories had a hard time competing against the two.  The magazine folded when Weisinger left to edit the Superman comic book.

"The Grip of Death," as with much of both Bloch's and Kuttner's early work, opens with echoes of Lovecraft -- a decaying house overlooking the sea in New England, a strange old recluse dabbling in the Black Arts following a long sea voyage to the East, mysterious and unhuman sounds coming from the old man's room, hints of bloody sacrifice, a library of crumbling, queerly-bound books, and a reference to Ancient Ones...

Lionel Holland, delved into the Black Arts.  He had retired eight years earlier and, after a long trip to some unnamed loction in the East, returned to live a reclusive life with his arcane experiments.  For the last year, he had employed his only living relative, his nephew Luke, to be his "secretary."  Luke's duties were light:  send the old man's meals and anything else he requested to the locked upstairs room via a dumbwaiter, administer his uncle's medications, and chase away any unwanted (and they were all unwanted) visitors.  Durng the past year, Uncle Lionel kept promising that Luke would inherit his wealth after the old man died.  For his part, Luke was disgusted by his uncle, not only for his delving into sorcery, but also because of the man's general appearance:  "The invalid had changed terribly in that last shadow-shrouded year.  His face had become deeply reticulated, so that wrinkles shot from his eyes like the strands of spiderwebs,  His mouth was a toothless black slit in corpse-white skin, and his pallid face was framed by the dank locks of silver hair that hung below his brow,  Luke, gazing upon that countenance, was reminded of the mummied visage of some long-interred Mongol conqueror."

Luke hated his uncle but was looking forward to his eventual inheritance.  At night, he would hear his uncle open the window to his room, allowing something heavy to enter.  There would be the terrified cries of live roosters that Luke was ordered to send to his uncle through the dumbwaiter...then silence.  Luke's Puritan-like childhood rebelled against this.  He kept thinking, Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.   "He thought of how he hated his uncle and about how he feared the legends of his New England childhood that spoke of witchcraft and the nauseous beings that could be summoned from afar."  He also thought of how nice it would be to inherit his uncle's money sooner than later.

Luke managed to disable the dumbwaiter so he would have to bring the old man his meals in person.  He got the poison he needed by soaking it from some flypaper.  The poison went into a wine glass that he placed on a tray with the remaining decanter of port.  Then he carried the tray upstairs to kill his uncle.

Lionel uncharacteristically insisted that Luke share a glass of wine with him.  Luke carefully kept an eye on the old man to be sure that the glasses were not switched.  He poured his wine, drank it down, then realized that his uncle had not touched his.  Lionel knew!  Somehow the old man knew that Luke had poisoned his glass.  Well, yeah. Luke, your uncle's a sorcerer; of course he knew.  Lionel called a Luke a fool for trying to kill him.  The glass he has given his nephew was lined with another, more powerful poison --one that would cause the body to become paralyzed, giving the appearance of death while the brain kept functioning.  Lionel told Luke that his brain would continue working even as his frosen, supposedly dead, body was placed in his coffin and lowered to the ground.  Luke leaped to the old man, wrapped his fingers around the scrawny throat and strangled him,  But the poison in Luke's system was beginning to work.  His fingers were froze around his uncle's dead throat, locked in a type of rigor mortis.  The rest of Like's body was also beginning to freeze up.  Somehow Luke had to free his hands from the corpse and get help.  The rest of the story involves Luke's gruesome attempts to free himself.

The switch from Lovecraftian horror to grand guignol is a rather jarring one.  The end, however, has a pure Bloch-ian twist.  Certainly the tale does not rank with the best from either writer, but it does have its moments, expecially when invoking so many Lovecraftian tropes.

For those who are interested, the December 1939 issue of Strange Stories can be read at Luminist Archives.