← The Horror! (Old Time Radio)
The Horror! (Old Time Radio)
Whence Came You by Quiet, Please
This week on The Horror, we hear from Quiet, Please with their episode from February 16, 1948, Whence Came You? Listen to more from Quiet, Please https://traffic.libsyn.com/forcedn/e55e1c7a-e213-4a20-8701-21862bdf1f8a/TheHorror1267.mp3 Download TheHorror1267 | Subscribe | Spotify | Support The Horror
Loading summary
Transcript8 lines
- [00:06]
A
Oh, stories, real stories and murders do Turn out your lights. Turn them out. Good evening. Come in, won't you? Why, what's the matter? Surely you're not nervous? Perhaps you can't. By telling a story we are meant to call from out of the past. Stories strange and weird tales of mystery and terror by radio's masters of the macabre Story of the supernatural, the supernormal dramatized fantasy, the mystery of the unknown. We tell you this Frank frankly. So if you wish to avoid the excitement tension of these magnet play refer you our radio theory to turn off your radio.
- [01:02]
B
Welcome back to the horror supernatural stories from the golden age of radio every Saturday@ Relicradio.com. if you'd like to help support this podcast and all of the relic radio shows, visit donate. Relicradio.com or click on the support link in the show notes. You make this all possible. Thanks as always to those who have thanks for joining me this week we're going to hear from Quiet Please this Time, a series that debuted over the Mutual Network on June 8th of 1947. It aired until June 20th of 1949. By that time it had moved to ABC Radio. 106 episodes written by Willis Cooper and starring Ernest Chappell. The one we'll hear today is titled Whence came you? This one aired February 16, 1948.
- [01:52]
A
Quiet please. The Mutual Broadcasting System presents Quiet Please. Which is written and directed by Willis Cooper and which features Ernest Chappell. Quiet Please for tonight is called Whence came you? I came from Jerusalem. I've traveled in east a good deal in the last 20 odd years and I flatter myself but I know my way around. So when I got off the plane of Cairo, I didn't start for the camp right away as a good storybook archaeologist would have done. I made a beeline for shepherds in the room. I'd left a couple of days before when I went to Jerusalem. The bath, a gin and tonic and a large batch of males in the States. What more can a man ask in Cairo on a hot night? But of course it was too good to last. Just gonna let him knock. Go away, go away, go away. Hey, Austin, wake up. Oh, who this? Hey, it's. Hey, Feldman. Hey, Feldman. Hey. Hi, Austin. We got some Satan Madison. Well, I'll be darned. Come on in. What are you doing here? What do you got there? I do get around, don't I? Listen to this is gin and talic. How are you? Well, I'm fine, but come in. Well, sit down. You're the last man in the world. Here, take a gin and sonic before I drop it. Well, look, I'm in spade, eh? By golly, I'm glad to see you. Boy, I'm glad to see you. I've been looking here for three days, waiting for you to come back. Hey, you look skinnier. Well, you go out and dig holes out there for six months, lads. You take off some of that fat, too. Me fat? Go away. You're kidding. Well, get your shirt on and let's go see the town. Sit down. Come on. What you doing here? Business. What kind of business? Newspaper business, Nash. What's cooking in the Middle east and stuff. Say, how do you get more of these things? We'll get on the bar in a minute. They're colder down there. Go on, Go on. Tell me about it. Well, you know, Eddie Hefferkamp just called me in and said, draw some dough and go east and send us some stuff for the Sunday feature section. The trip's making a monkey out of us again. So? I remember the dear old days on the midway. You and me. And you're around here. So let's go see the town, huh? I'll be darned. When'd you leave Chicago? Day before yesterday. Oh, boy. Yep, the Loop's still there. They still got the barbecue shows on South State Street. The Michigan Avenue bridge is always up. The Cubs are in seventh place now. Now what? Now we go see the town. Come on. Put on your pants. You never been in Cairo before, have you? Me? Not me. Why? Well, if you had, you wouldn't care much about seeing it, my boy. Yeah, yeah, but women. You had a good look at any of them? Have I? Oh, boy. What? The one that's waiting for you downstairs. Waiting for me? Wow. What are you talking about? I don't know any women in Cairo. There's one who knows you. Why, you're crazy. I'm telling you. How do you know she's been waiting down there for three days? I've seen her. What she look like? Oh, boy. Not a native. Cleopatra. Is this one of your bum jokes, Abe? I give you my word of honor. I don't get it. Come on downstairs and you will. So we went downstairs. British colonels, American traveling salesmen, Egyptian army officers, a sea for two, a bevy of the ugliest women in the world. And I don't see any woman waiting for me there by the door to the bar. And I looked, and there by the door stood the one most beautiful woman I have ever seen in all my life. She Was no Egyptian native. She might have descended from one of the marvelously lifelike paintings of a queen of the Hatho dynasty that I'd seen on the walls of tombs. 2000 years old. How can I describe her? I say her eyes were black, her hair was black and cut in the manner of the days of the shepherd kings that ruled the valley of the Nile a thousand years before the pyramids were built. Red lips that smiled at me slowly. I felt my knees tremble as she looked into my eyes. Come on, let's go ask her if she's got a friend. And when I look back at her, Where'd she go? It was midnight then one o' clock and two, then three. We still walked the streets of Cairo. The waning moon was rising in the northeast behind our shoulders as we turned our steps back to the hotel. Twice I thought I'd seen her, and twice she, if she, it was, disappeared into a narrow winding street where we couldn't follow. No, I never followed women about the streets of a foreign city before. Not in all my life. Well, there's little enough of that in the life of an archaeologist. The women we follow died a thousand, ten thousand years before we were born. We know them only by their portraits painted on the walls of a musty tomb. By what we find in great hermetically sealed stone caskets wrapped in rust colored linen and smelling of the ghost of cinnamon and myrrh and spikenard. I don't know why I did that. I know she wanted you to come after her. That's ridiculous. Eh, I heard her ask for you. Well, what would she want of me? What does a pretty gal usually want of a guy? Drinks, something to eat, a good time. She could have had that from anybody. Yeah, me for instance. But she wanted you, Austin. Why? Maybe she's a spy or something. A spy? Maybe she wanted to sell you something. You know, you grave robbers. Maybe she knows where some old sorrow or somebody has planted that. Could be, I suppose. Well, I'm forbid I gotta get out of the diggings early. Fine night we had. Forget it. You got a room, huh? Yeah, right down the hall. Well, knock on my door when you get up. All right. Good night. Night. Say, they have this incense all the time around this place. What do you mean? Don't you smell it? Smells like a funeral. I don't. Oh, yeah, I suppose. Night. Night, Austin. I could have told him what the incense was. I smelled cinnamon and myrrh and spikenard too often not to recognize it instantly when I opened the door to my room. The smell was almost overpowering. Used as I am to the funeral spices of ancient Egyptian tombs. No, no, I'm not going to tell you what a beautiful Egyptian princess of the days of Hyksos was waiting for me in the darkness. This isn't a ghost story. It's a true story. There wasn't anyone in the room. I turned on the lights, opened the window. There wasn't anyone in the room. So I went to bed. Dreamed about sailing on Lake Michigan. The storm came up and the thunder cracked, and I was scared to death. Then I woke up and the thunder was the servant knocking on my door, bringing them a morning cup of tea. Abe and I got in my jeep and rode out to the excavation. It's quite a distance from Cairo. Don't ever mind just where it is, because that's my business and the university. That right rear tire went flat, just as I've been expecting. I forgot to put air in a spare. So we took quite a while getting it pumped up. It was late in the afternoon when we got there. Abe had never seen anything of this sort. You see, Abe, these places are built one on top of another. Almost every village and town in the east is different periods of time, huh? Yeah, that's right. There may be any number of cities built about the ruins of another. All we do is dig out the top. When you see. Recover everything we can that's of historical importance. Then go on carefully down to the next. What do you do with the stuff that's on top? It has to be destroyed, naturally. Gee, that's too bad, ain't it? Well, we make careful records, photographs, and then you just peel off the stuff and go on to the next. That's right. This is the fourth city from the top we're working on now. See those big. That big pile of rubble over there? Yeah. That's the remains of the other three cities. Gee, that seems a shame. All those years of work and living and everything. Well, we save artifacts, of course. Save what? Things that people made. Pot shards, fragments of wall painting, decorations, that sort of thing. What do you do with the people? You find people? Yes. Oh, mummies, various things. We read the inscriptions, decide whether the fellow is important enough to investigate further. The Egyptian government has a great deal to say about the contents. Tombs, you know. Find any gold? Not here so far, but we probably will. This part where we're standing was the necropolis of this particular city. Huh? The cemetery, you see. Oh, yeah. It's reasonable to suppose that there are other tombs under here. That's where you find the jewels and the golden stones? Generally, yes. Say, Austin, why don't you get a steam shovel in here? You'd move this stuff a lot quicker. And probably smash some priceless inscriptions or paintings into bits. No, my boy, we do this gently. Uh huh. And you can read this stuff. Hieroglyphics. Hieroglyphics comes from two Greek words originally meaning carving by priests. Okay, professor, can you read it? Yeah, of course. I can read a good deal of the later writings by sight. When we get down to the real ancient stuff, that's a little more difficult. What does this say? What? This slab here. Now let's see here. Was I, Hotep, presented with a, I guess you'd say invested with the working tools of those who build in my hand. I, hotep did take. Took the tools of the second grade of workman in stone. The plum, the square and the level. Huh? How'd you know there were masons in those days? Well, sure. How do you think they built all this stone stuff? Hey, look at that. What's that there? It's a name. Sholem. That's probably Solomon. Yeah, this was in Solomon's time. Right alongside the name. The middle stone of an arch, which is the secret. The keystone. These fellas didn't know how to build an arch. That's right, they didn't. Why are you so excited about it though? Hey. What? Look at that. This? Yeah. That's a very fine example of wall painting. Look how the colors are still bright. Look how they. Yeah, you see the same thing I see, don't you? You know what I saw? You know whose portrait was painted on the edge of the slab that came from a tomb that was old in the time of August. Coincidence or not, here was the face of the woman who waited for me the night before in Shepherd's Hotel. It's amazing how racial characteristics persist through centuries in Egypt, I have seen Egyptian men who might have been Tutankhamun's own brother. I've seen women. But you wouldn't blame me for feeling my hackles rise a little at this uncanny resemblance to the woman who disappeared. I kept smelling myrrh and spikenard cinnamon, but I hadn't much time to think of it. Then Martin Weaver, who was in charge of the actual excavation, came up behind us. Well, I'm glad you're back. Or. Oh, hello, Martin. How we doing? Zane Feldon, Martin Weaver. Oh, hello. A day before yesterday we broke through a place, Austin, that goes down to the city underneath this one. You did? Yeah, one of the workmen found a big sandstone slab and we cleared it away completely. I've got the big shears rigged over it now, and I thought we'd wait till you got here to lift the slab. And you want to do it tonight or what? Oh, gosh, let's do it now, Austin. Well, what do you think? Getting dark. Let's have a look at it. Okay. Well, I'm glad you're back. Bring anything to drink with you? We walked half a mile. There was a little clearing at one corner of the necropolis. The beams of the shears stood stock against the darkening sky. There was something elemental, something deathly about them. Not an archaeologist's job to be sentimental or superstitious. None of us would stay on the job very long if we were. But the half inch steel cable was attached to a block of stone. That was the only thing that separated us from something that happened perhaps 40 centuries ago. And there are times when a man's entitled to shiver a little in the wind that rises over the desert at sunset. Abe was beside himself with excitement. Let's pull it up, Austin. Go on, let's pull it up, huh? Go ahead, Martin. Okay. Glad we got the engine. That slab weighs about 70 tons. Go ahead. Little higher. Gosh, the air force down there. That air you're breathing, Abe, was breathed by pharaohs long before Moses led his people out of this country. It's me.
- [17:36]
B
Okay.
- [17:36]
A
Hold it, Martin. You going down there, Austin? Tomorrow? Oh, not now. No, no, it's late. Gee, I'd like to go down there. We will in the morning. How is it? Let's take your flashlight. Yeah. Mummy case. Some wall paintings. Let me see. Take the flashlight. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. It isn't far down there. I'm gonna jump down. No, no, no, wait. Don't do that. I'll be all right. Now don't go running all over that place. Tracking it up, Abe. I won't play dark out here. Get a ladder, Mark. Yeah, okay. You hear me, Abe? I hear you. Go get your flashlight. Oh, gone. If that's the last time you. Here. Now stand still. I'm standing still. They are. What? The picture on the wall. What picture? Over here on the wall. Scarlet. I dropped the light. Well, stand still. Martin will be back in a minute with his light. Martin. What? There's something in here. Well, be careful. It might be a snake. No, it ain't a snake. Dave. Dave. Dave. What happened? Look out, Austin. Look out. The slab. We worked all night long, Martin and I. Splicing that steel cable and raising the heavy Slab that had imprisoned Abe in that place of event. We had no hope. But what could we do? A miracle might have happened. There might have been a chink between the slab and the opening. It covered an opening through which a few breaths of air might have seeped into the tomb. The snake might not have bitten them. He might have killed it. So we told each other all through the night. A stubborn cable cut our hands and refined our every effort. The sun was just rising when we at last had made it fast and smart and started the engine. We fastened the rope onto the cable which swung the great stone slab aside. I was down in the tomb almost before it had cleared the opening. It was too late. I nearly sickened as I called the. Martin. He jumped out too. Oh, my good. What happened to him? He thought it was a snake. No snake did that. No. I saw a pigeon once that a hawk had been at. We'd have been too late even if the slab hadn't fallen.
- [20:22]
B
Well.
- [20:25]
A
Martin. What? That mummy case. Was the COVID off it last night when you looked at me? No, my Abe couldn't have. That lid weighs 10 tons. Then we looked down into the stone coffin. I hope I shall never see the like of that again. What is it? The mummy of a man. A tall man in a robe of gold cloth. Not wrapped in linen bindings. Just a robe of gold cloth. With strange symbols woven into the cloth. And his head? Not a man's head. The head of a hawk. No, not a mask. We look carefully. A man with a head of a hawk and the hawk's beak all dabbled with rest. I didn't believe it either. It couldn't be. But it was. It was a father of all the Egyptian gods. Osiris. Osiris, the brother husband of Isis, the founder of the world's first empire. Osiris, who was murdered 16,000 years ago. And his body was hidden by Isis, his wife. With a blasting curse on any who might find his tomb. It was impossible. It couldn't be. But there it was. And Martin and I and a dead man were there in his tomb with him. And the curse hung heavy in the musty air around it. Then the first rays of the sun reflected from something above us stole down into the tomb. And I saw the pictures on the wall. I saw Osiris with his hawk's head and the robe he wore. And the mire on his hawk's head was the same that the mummy wore in a casket. I saw Isis, his wife, weeping over the body of her murdered husband. And the beauty of the work of the long dead artist was unbelievable. And I saw another picture. There was the daughter of Isis and Osiris. Yes, of course I could read the inscriptions. Yes, of course I could recognize her face. I'd seen it before in the lobby of Shepherd's Hotel. And the inscriptions on the wall were terrifying. There were secrets there that men would give their lives to possess today. There were secrets there that we've only begun to imagine today. I'm a scientist. I know. Or do I? We forgot the thing in the coffin. We. We forgot the thing on the floor. And it grew darker and darker in the tomb. And I read on and on. I stood before the painting of the one who was Osiris daughter. Long black hair, red lips that smiled at me. And my heart stopped at the inscription under the portrait. I read it over again. Be not afraid. Ah. Loose pin carved into the living rock. In the ancient hieratic characters uncounted centuries ago. Not by the hand of the artist I knew who had carved my nature. Be not afraid, Austin. And I wasn't afraid at all when I discovered that the thing that was making a dot down there was a great slab of sandstone. Slowly swinging around and down to imprison us all in the tomb that the white ovo Tyrus had cursed. Martin Weaver was a very brave man. Martin Weaver didn't scream and cry in the heavy dark. Martin Weaver talked to me quietly. It'll be all right, Austin. The workmen will be here before long and they'll see the slab. And Ibrahim knows how to run the engine. I hope so, Martin. I hope they'll be in time. They'll be in time. He'll start the engine and pull the thing off, all right. I hope so, Martin. Sure. They'll know that something's wrong. Where are you? Right here. Well, stand still. I am standing still. I thought I heard you move. Oh. You afraid, Austin? Are you? Not particularly, but I. Yes? Well, the thing in the. Where are you going? I haven't moved. I thought I felt your hand on my arm. No, sit still. Don't use up the air. So you sit still. Well, I tell you I didn't move. Something's moving. It couldn't be. Martin. What? Martin. Martin. Martin, answer me. Martin. And there was nothing but silence. And then another footstep. And I felt a hand on my arm. And I screamed with terror. But it was a gentle hand. And it led me gently away from where I stood in the dark. And I followed. I hit my head on a solid stone wall. My feet dragged as I followed whoever at once through a door what I knew couldn't be there, and a voice breathed in my ear and I smelled tenement and myrrh and spike and art and I followed on and soon there was a glimmering of light ahead of me and I felt the hand release my arm and I walked on toward the light. Then in a little while another little room hewn out of a solid rock and the light burning. A little bronze lamp at the head of a mummy case of lacquered painted wood and the portrait image on the lid of the sarcophagus, the same face with smile and I came closer to read the inscription I knew would be there, an inscription put there so many, many years ago. I have freed you, Austin. Now free me. My hand went to the fastening of the lid when I looked up to the wall above the portrait again, but with a difference. The same costume, the same jewelry, the same headdress, but the head was the head of a hawk, the head of Osiris daughter. So I sit here and the little bronze lamp is flickering low. No, I haven't opened the coffin. I'm afraid to. Sam, You have listened to Quiet Please, which is written and directed by Willis Cooper. The man who spoke to you was Ernest Chapel, and Murray Forbes played a Feldman Martin Weaver with Don Brad. As usual, the original music for Quiet Please is composed and played by Albert Berman. Now for a word about next week's Quiet Please. Here is my good friend, our writer director, Willis Cooper. I've got a story for you next week called Put on the Dead Man's Coat. It's about a man who had an idea that wasn't good for him. Put on the Dead Man's Coat, the title of next week's Quiet Place. And so until next week at this time, I am quietly yours, Ernest Chapel. Quiet please comes to you from new york. This is mutable broadcasting system.
- [31:18]
B
That's it for this episode of the Horror. You can find more from Quiet Please at the website relicradio.com alongside all of the other Relic Radio podcasts. Thousands of episodes to listen to and a shout cast stream with even more. Thanks again to those who have supported this and all, all of the shows and thanks for joining me this week. I'll be back tomorrow with Strange Tales next Saturday with our next episode of the Horror.