The Black Kiss
by Robert Bloch and Henry Kuttner
This story, the second in an abortive series featuring occult investigator Michael Leigh, is a collaboration between Henry Kuttner and Robert Bloch. Bloch recalls that “The Black Kiss was basically his {Kuttner’s} concept”, as opposed to their other team efforts which had been “worked out mutually in advance or during the course of our consecutive drafts. “Kuttner, as in the case of all their collaborations, wrote the first draft, which his partner then completely rewrote (Bloch letter to Robert M. Price, January 25, 1994).
One wonders at the tangential role of Michael Leigh in the story. He remains offstage for most of the story, represented by proxy in the form of an inscrutable Oriental colleague. Perhaps it was to mask the fact that Leigh would have played an almost identical role here as in “The Salem Horror", saying almost precisely the same things in both stories, which after all appeared in rapid succession. Just as Bloch became “Tarleton Fiske” and Kuttner became “Keith Hammond” when either had two stories slated for the same issue of Strange Stories, perhaps Michael Leigh in effect assumed an alias as well!
First publication: Weird Tales, June 1937.
1. The Thing in the Waters
Graham Dean nervously crushed out his cigarette and met Doctor Hedwig’s puzzled eyes.
“I’ve never been troubled like this before,” he said. “These dreams are so oddly persistent. They’re not the usual haphazard nightmares. They seem—I know it sounds ridiculous—they seem planned. ”
“Dreams planned? Nonsense.” Doctor Hedwig looked scornful. “You, Mr. Dean, are an artist, and naturally of impressionable temperament. This house at San Pedro is new to you, and you say you’ve heard wild tales. The dreams are due to imagination and overwork.”
Dean glanced out of the window, a frown on his unnaturally pale face.
“I hope you’re right,” he said, softly. “But dreams shouldn’t make me look like this. Should they?”
A gesture indicated the great blue rings beneath the young artist’s eyes. His hands indicated the bloodless pallor of his gaunt cheeks.
“Overwork has done that, Mr. Dean. I know what has happened to you better than you do yourself.”
The white-haired physician picked up a sheet covered with his own scarcely decipherable notes and scrutinized it in review.
“You inherited this house at San Pedro a few months ago, eh? And you moved in alone to do some work.”
"Yes. The seacoast here has some marvelous scenes.” For a moment Dean’s face looked youthful once more as enthusiasm kindled its ashy fires. Then he continued, with a troubled frown. “But I haven’t been able to paint, lately—not seascapes, anyway, it’s very odd. My sketches don’t seem quite right anymore. There seems to be a quality in them that I don’t put there—”
“A quality, did you say?”
“Yes, a quality of malignness, if I can call it that. It’s indefinable. Something behind the picture takes all the beauty out. And I haven’t been overworking these last weeks, Doctor Hedwig.”
The doctor glanced again at the paper in his hand.
“Well, I disagree with you there. You might be unconscious of the effort you expend. These dreams of the sea that seem to worry you are meaningless, save as an indication of your nervous condition.”
“You’re wrong.” Dean rose, suddenly. His voice was shrill.
“That’s the dreadful part of it. The dreams are not meaningless. They seem cumulative; cumulative and planned. Each night they grow more vivid, and I see more of that green, shining place under the sea. I get closer and closer to those black shadows swimming there, those shadows that I know aren’t shadows but something worse. I see more each night. It’s like a sketch I’d block out, gradually adding more and more until—”
Hedwig watched his patient keenly. He suggested, “Until—”
But Dean’s tense face relaxed. He had caught himself just in time. “No, Doctor Hedwig. You must be right. It’s overwork and nervousness, as you say. If I believed what the Mexicans had told me about Morelia Godolfo—well, I’d be mad and a fool.”
“Who is this Morelia Godolfo? Some woman who has been filling you with foolish tales?”
Dean smiled. “No need to worry about Morelia. She was my great-great-grand-aunt. She used to live in the San Pedro house and started the legends, I think.”
Hedwig had been scribbling on a piece of paper. “Well, I see, young man! You heard these legends; your imagination ran riot; you dreamed. This prescription will fix you up.”
“Thanks.”
Dean took the paper, lifted his hat from the table, and started for the door. In the doorway he paused, smiling wryly.
“But you’re not quite correct in thinking the legends started me dreaming, Doctor. I began to dream them before I learned the history of the house.”
And with that he went out.
Driving back to San Pedro, Dean tried to understand what had happened to him. But always he came up against a blank wall of impossibility. Any logical explanation wandered off into a tangle of fantasy. The one thing he could not explain—which Doctor Hedwig had not been able to explain—was the dreams.
The dreams started soon after he came into his legacy: this ancient house north of San Pedro, which had so long stood deserted. The place was picturesquely old, and that attracted Dean from the first. It had been built by one of his ancestors when the Spaniards still ruled California. One of the Deans—the name was Dena, then—had gone to Spain and returned with a bride. Her name was Morelia Godolfo, and it was this long-vanished woman about whom all the subsequent legends centered.
Even yet there were wrinkled, toothless Mexicans in San Pedro who whispered incredible tales of Morelia Godolfo—she who had never grown old and who had a weirdly evil power over the sea. The Godolfos had been among the proudest families of Granada, but furtive legends spoke of their intercourse with the terrible Moorish sorcerers and necromancers. Morelia, according to these same hinted horrors, had learned uncanny secrets in the black towers of Moorish Spain, and when Dena had brought her as his bride across the sea she had already sealed a pact with dark Powers and had undergone a change.
So ran the tales, and they further told of Morelia’s life in the old San Pedro house. Her husband had lived for ten years or more after the marriage, but rumors said that he no longer possessed a soul.
It is certain that his death was very mysteriously hushed up by Morelia Godolfo, who went on living alone in the great house beside the sea.
The whispers of the peons were hereafter monstrously augmented. They had to do with the change in Morelia Godolfo, the sorcerous change which caused her to swim far out to sea on moonlit nights so that watchers saw her white body gleaming amidst the spray. Men bold enough to gaze from the cliffs might catch glimpses of her then, sporting with queer sea creatures that gamboled about her in the black waters, nuzzling her with shockingly deformed heads. These creatures were not seals, or any known form of submarine life, it was averred, although sometimes bursts of chuckling, gobbling laughter could be heard. It is said that Morelia Godolfo had swum out there one night, and that she never came back. But thereafter the laughter was louder from afar, and the sporting amidst the black rocks continued, so that the tales of the early peons had been nourished down to the present day.