Danse Macabre Read Online Free PDF

into the mouth of hell if ever there was one!
    In the course of the novel, the private plane of W. D. Donovan, a rich and domineering millionaire, crashes near the scientist's desert lab. Recognizing the knock of opportunity, the scientist removes the dying millionaire's skull and pops Donovan's brain into his tank.
    So far, so good. This story has elements of both horror and science fiction; at this point it could go either way, depending on Siodmak's handling of the subject. The earlier version of the film tips its hand almost at once: the removal operation takes place in a howling thunderstorm and the scientist's Arizona laboratory looks more like Baskerville Hall. And neither film version is up to the tale of mounting terror Siodmak tells in his careful, rational prose. The operation is a success. The brain is alive and possibly even thinking in its tank of cloudy liquid. The problem now becomes one of communication. The scientists begins trying to contact the brain by means of telepathy . . . and finally succeeds. In a half-trance, he writes the name W. D. Donovan three or four times on a scrap of paper, and comparison shows that his signature is interchangeable with that of the millionaire. In its tank, Donovan's brain begins to change and mutate. It grows stronger, more able to dominate our young hero. He begins to do Donovan's bidding, said bidding all revolving around Donovan's psychopathic determination to make sure the right person inherits his fortune. The scientist begins to experience the frailties of Donovan's physical body (now moldering in an unmarked grave): low back pain, a decided limp. As the story builds to its climax, Donovan tries to use the scientist to run down a little girl who stands in the way of his implacable, monstrous will.
    In one of its film incarnations, the Beautiful Young Wife (no comparable creature exists in Siodmak's novel) rigs up lightning rods, which zap the brain in its tank. At the end of the book, the scientist attacks the tank with an ax, resisting the endless undertow of Donovan's will by reciting a simple yet haunting mnemonic phrase— He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he seer the ghosts . The glass shatters, the saline solution pours out, and the loathsome, pulsing brain is left to die like a slug on the laboratory floor.
    Siodmak is a fine thinker and an okay writer. The flow of his speculative ideas in Donovan's Brain is as exciting to follow as the flow of ideas in a novel by Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke or my personal favorite in the field, the late John Wyndham. But none of those esteemed gentlemen has ever written a novel quite like Donovan's Brain . . . in fact, no one has. The final tip-off comes at the very end of the book, when Donovan's nephew (or perhaps it was his bastard son, I'll be damned if I can remember which) is hanged for murder. * Three times the scaffold's trapdoor refuses to open when the switch is thrown, and the narrator speculates that Donovan's spirit still remains, indomitable, implacable . . . and hungry.
    *You can see why Donovan liked the kid enough to want to leave him his money, I think. Just a chip off the old block. For all its scientific trappings, Donovan's Brain is as much a horror story as M. R. James's "Casting the Runes" or H. P. Lovecraft's nominal science fiction tale, "The Colour Out of Space." Now let's take another story, this one an oral tale of the sort that never has to be written down. It is simply passed mouth to mouth, usually around Boy Scout or Girl Scout campfires after the sun has gone down and marshmallows have been poked onto green sticks to roast above the coals. You've heard it, I guess, but instead of summarizing it, I'd like to tell it as I originally heard it, gape-mouthed with terror, as the sun went down behind the vacant lot in Stratford where we used to play scratch baseball when there were enough guys around to make up two teams. Here is the most basic horror story I know:
    "This