Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Weird Tales August-September 1936. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
The Medici Boots
By PEARL NORTON SWET
The amethyst-covered boots had been worn by an evil wantonin medieval Florence—but what malefic power did they carryover into our own time?
or fifty years they lay under glass in the Dickerson museum and theywere labeled "The Medici Boots." They were fashioned of creamyleather, pliable as a young girl's hands. They were threaded withsilver, appliqued with sapphire silks and scarlet, and set on the tipof each was a pale and lovely amethyst. Such were the Medici boots.
Old Silas Dickerson, globe-trotter and collector, had brought theboots from a dusty shop in Florence when he was a young man filledwith the lust for travel and adventure. The years passed and SilasDickerson was an old man, his hair white, his eyes dim, his veinedhands trembling with the ague that precedes death.
When he was ninety and the years of his wanderings over, SilasDickerson died one morning as he sat in a high-backed Venetian chairin his private museum. The Fourteenth Century gold-leaf paintings, theJapanese processional banners, the stolen bones of a Normandysaint—all the beloved trophies of his travels must have watched thedead man impassively for hours before his housekeeper found him.
"She imparted to me those terrible secrets of the BlackArts which were deep in her soul."The old man sat with his head thrown back against the faded tapestryof the Venetian chair, his eyes closed, his bony arms extended alongthe beautifully carved arms of the chair, and on his lap lay theMedici boots.
It was high noon when they found him, and the sun was streamingthrough the stained-glass window above the chair and picking at theamethysts, so that the violet stones seemed to eye Marthe, the oldhousekeeper, with an impudent glitter. Marthe muttered a prayer andcrossed herself, before she ran like a scared rabbit with the news ofthe master's death.
ilas Dickerson's only surviving relatives, the three youngDelameters, did not take too seriously the note which was found amongthe papers in the museum's desk. Old Silas had written the note. Itwas addressed to John Delameter, for John was his uncle's favorite,but John's pretty wife, Suzanne, and his twin brother, Doctor Eric,read it over his shoulder; and they all smiled tolerantly. OldDickerson had written of things incomprehensible to the young moderns:
"The contents of my private museum are yours, John, to do with as yousee fit. Merely as a suggestion, I would say that the AntiquarianSociety would snap up many of the things. A ve