“Rattle of Bones”
The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard
Del Rey
Paper $20.00
Ebook $7.99

This post could just have easily been one of the Solomon Kane posts since Kane is the central character.  It’s not regarded as a major work in either the Solomon Kane series or among Howard’s horror fiction.  Be that as it may, I still like it.  It’s short, creepy, and has a couple of twists, even if you can see the final one coming a mile off.

Spoilers to follow below the “fold”.

Kane and another man, calling himself Gaston l”Armon, have stopped at an isolated inn somewhere in the Black Forest.  The innkeeper isn’t a friendly sort, but he serves them a meal and then shows them to their room.  A room down a dark corridor.  A room with no bar for the door.

Kane and l’Armon go looking for a bar in one of the other rooms, neither trusting the innkeeper.  They stumble upon a secret closet in a room at the end of the corridor, where they find a skeleton chained to the floor. In an act of bravado, l’Armon severs the chain with his sword then closes the door.

As they’re leaving, Kane feels a pistol placed against the back of his neck. It turns out l’Armon is really Gaston the Butcher, a notorious murderer.  He recognized Kane when they ran into each other in the forest and knew Kane was in the habit of carrying a large amount of coin on his person. The two men exchange some words, accompanied by the rattling of bones on the other side of the secret closet door, presumably due to rats.

The innkeeper steps in from the hall and kills Gaston from behind, then tells Kane he had been imprisoned for years for a crime he didn’t commit before he escaped. Because no man helped him, he now regards all men as his enemies.  The bones chained to the floor belonged to one of his victims, a sorcerer who swore his bones would rise up in vengeance.

The innkeeper says he will put Kane’s body in the closet with the sorcerer’s bones.  As he opens the door to the closet, a gust of wind blows the candle out…

You’ll have to read the rest of the story yourself.  As I said above, this isn’t a major story in the Solomon Kane series, but It’s a solid piece of work, even if it’s a bit predictable.  Even when Howard is being predictable, he tells a story better than most of his competitors.