by Brian Lumley
As we continued to watch him, a deathly pallor came over the medium’s features and his knuckles whitened as he gripped the arms of his chair. At this point I could have sworn that the temperature of the room dropped sharply, abruptly. The others did not seem to note the fact, being far too fascinated with the motion of Lavery’s exposed Adam’s apple to be aware of anything else. That fleshy knob moved slowly up and down the full length of his throat, while the column of his windpipe thickened and contracted in a sort of slow muscular spasm. And at last Lavery spoke. He spoke—and at the sound I could almost feel the blood congealing in my veins!
For this was in no way the voice of a man that crackled, hissed and gibbered from Lavery’s mouth in a—language?—which surely never originated in this world or within our sphere of existence. No, it was the voice of…something else. Something monstrous!
Interspaced with the insane cough, whistle and stutter of harshly alien syllables and cackling cachinnations, occasionally there would break through a recognizable combination of sounds which roughly approximated our pronunciation of “Atlach-Nacha”; but this fact had no sooner made itself plain to me than, with a wild shriek, Lavery hurled himself backwards—or was thrown backwards—so violently that he overturned his chair, rolling free of it to thrash about upon the floor.
Since I was directly opposite Lavery at the table, I was the last to attend him. Lord Marriot and Turnbull on the other hand were at his side at once, pinning him to the floor and steadying him. As I shakily joined them I saw that Old Danford had backed away into the furthest corner of the room, holding up his hands before him as if to ward off the very blackest of evils. With an anxious inquiry I hurried towards him. He shook me off and made straight for the door.
“Danford!” I cried. “What on earth is—” But then I saw the way his eyes bulged and how terribly he trembled in every limb. The man was frightened for his life, and the sight of him in this condition made me forget my own terror in a moment. “Danford,” I repeated in a quieter tone of voice “Are you well?”
By this time Lavery was sitting up on the floor and staring uncertainly about. Lord Marriot joined me as Danford opened the library door to stand for a moment facing us. All the blood seemed to have drained from his face; his hands fluttered like trapped birds as he stumbled backwards out of the room and into the passage leading to the main door of the house.
“Abomination!” he finally croaked, with no sign of his customary “Harumph!” “A presence—monstrous—ultimate abomination—God help us…!”
“Presence?” Lord Marriot repeated, taking his arm. “What is it, Danford? What’s wrong, man?”
The old man tugged himself free. He seemed now somewhat recovered, but still his face was ashen and his trembling unabated. “A presence, yes,” he hoarsely answered, “a monstrous presence! I could not even try to exorcise…
that!” And he turned and staggered along the corridor to the outer door.
“But where are you going, Danford?” Marriot called after him.
“Away,” came the answer from the door. “Away from here. I’ll—I’ll be in touch, Marriot—but I cannot stay here now.” The door slammed behind him as he stumbled into the darkness and a moment or two later came the roar of his car’s engine.
When the sound had faded into the distance, Lord Marriot turned to me with a look of astonishment on his face. He asked: “Well, what was that all about? Did he see something, d’you think?”
“No, David,” I shook my head, “I don’t think he saw anything. But I believe he sensed something—something perhaps apparent to him through his religious training—and he got out before it could sense him!”
• • •
We stayed the night in the house, but while bedrooms were available we all chose to remain in the library, nodding fitfully in our easy-chairs around the great fireplace. I, for one was very glad of the company, though I kept this fact to myself, and I could not help but wonder if the others might not now be similarly apprehensive.
Twice I awoke with a start in the huge quiet room, on both occasions feeding the red-glowing fire. And since that blaze lasted all through the night, I could only assume that at least one of the others was equally restless….
In the morning, after a frugal breakfast (Lord Marriot kept no retainers in the place; none would stay there, and so we had to make do for ourselves), while the others prowled about and stretched their legs or tidied themselves up, I saw and took stock of the situation. David, concerned about the aged clergyman, rang him at home and was told by Danford’s housekeeper that her master had not stayed at home overnight. He had come home in a tearing rush at about nine o’clock, packed a case, told her that he was off “up North” for a few days’ rest, and had left at once for the railway station. She also said that she had not liked his colour.
The old man’s greatcoat still lay across the arm of a chair in the library where he had left it in his frantic hurry of the night before. I took it and hung it up for him, wondering if he would ever return to the house to claim it.
Lavery was baggy-eyed and dishevelled and he com plained of a splitting headache. He blamed his condition on an overdose of his host’s sherry, but I knew for a certainty that he had been well enough before his dramatic demonstration of the previous evening. Of that demonstration, the medium said he could remember nothing; and yet he seemed distinctly uneasy and kept casting about the room and starting at the slightest unexpected movement, so that I believed his nerves had suffered a severe jolt.
It struck me that he, surely, must have been my assistant through the night; that he had spent some of the dark hours tending the fire in the great hearth. In any case, shortly after lunch and before the shadows of afternoon began to creep he made his excuses and took his departure. I had somehow known that he would. And so three of us remained…three of the original five.
But if Danford’s unexplained departure of the previous evening had disheartened Lord Marriot, and while Lavery’s rather premature desertion had also struck a discordant note, at least Turnbull stood straight and strong on the side of our host. Despite Old Danford’s absence, Turnbull would still go ahead with his part in the plan; an exorcist could always be found at some later date, if such were truly necessary. And certainly Lavery’s presence was not prerequisite to Turnbull’s forthcoming performance. Indeed he wanted no one at all in attendance, desiring to be left entirely alone in the house. This was the only way he could possibly work, he assured us, and he had no fear at all about being on his own in the old place. After all, what was there to fear? This was only another experiment, wasn’t it?
Looking back now I feel a little guilty that I did not argue the point further with Turnbull—about his staying alone in the old house overnight to sketch his automatic portrait of the unwanted tenant—but the man was so damned arrogant to my way of thinking, so sure of his theories and principles, that I offered not the slightest opposition. So we three all spent the evening reading and smoking before the log fire, and as night drew on Lord Marriot and I prepared to take our leave.
Then, too, as darkness fell over the oaks crowding dense and still beyond the gardens, I once again felt that unnatural oppressiveness creeping in upon me, that weight of unseen energies hovering in the suddenly sullen air.
Perhaps, for the first time, Lord Marriot felt it too, for he did not seem at all ill-disposed to leaving the house; indeed, there was an uncharacteristic quickness about him, and as we drove away in his car in the direction of the local village inn, I noticed that he involuntarily shuddered once or twice. I made no mention of it; the night was chill, after all….
At The Traveller’s Rest, where business was only moderate, we inspected our rooms before making ourselves comfortable in the snug. There we played cards until about ten o’clock, but our minds were not on the game. Shortly after 10.30 Marriot called Turnbull to ask if all was going well. He returned from the telephone grumbling that Turnbull was totally ungrateful. He had not thanked Lord Marr
iot for his concern at all. The man demanded absolute isolation, no contact with the outside world whatever, and he complained that it would now take him well over an hour to go into his trance. After that he might begin to sketch almost immediately, or he might not start until well into the night, or there again the experiment could prove to be completely fruitless. It was all a matter of circumstance, and his chances would not be improved by useless interruptions.
We had left him seated in his shirtsleeves before a roaring fire. Close at hand were a bottle of wine, a plate of cold beef sandwiches, a sketch pad and pencils. These lay upon an occasional table which he would pull into a position directly in front of himself before sleeping, or, as he would have it, before “going into trance”. There he sat, alone in that ominous old house.
Before retiring we made a light meal of chicken sandwiches, though neither one of us had any appreciable appetite. I cannot speak for Marriot, but as for me, it took me until well into the “wee small hours” to get to sleep….
• • •
In the morning my titled friend was at my door while I was still halfway through washing. His outward appearance was ostensibly bright and breezy, but I sensed that his eagerness to get back to the old house and Turnbull was more than simply a desire to know the outcome of the latter’s experiment; he was more interested in the man’s welfare than anything else. Like my own, his misgivings with regard to his plan to learn something of the mysterious and alien entity at the house had grown through the night; now he would be more than satisfied simply to discover the medium well and unharmed.
And yet what could there possibly be at the place to harm him? Again, that question.
The night had brought a heavy frost, the first of the season, and hedgerows and verges were white as from a fall of snow. Halfway through the woods, on the long gravel drive winding in towards the house, there the horror struck! Manoeuvring a slight bend, Lord Marriot cursed, applied his brakes and brought the car skidding to a jarring halt. A shape, white and grey—and hideously red—lay huddled in the middle of the drive.
It was Turnbull, frozen, lying in a crystallized pool of his own blood, limbs contorted in the agony of death, his eyes glazed orbs that stared in blind and eternal horror at a sight Lord Marriot and I could hardly imagine. A thousand circular holes of about half an inch in diameter penetrated deep into his body, his face, all of his limbs; as if he had been the victim of some maniac with a brace and bit! Identical holes formed a track along the frosted grass verge from the house to this spot, as did Turnbull’s flying footprints.
Against all my protests—weakened by nausea, white and trembling with shock as he was—still Lord Marriot raced his car the remainder of the way to the house. There we dismounted and he entered through the door which hung mutely ajar. I would not go in with him but stood dumbly wringing my hands, numb with horror, before the leering entrance.
A minute or so later he came staggering to the door. In his hand he carried a leaf from Turnbull’s sketchpad. Before I could think to avert my eyes he thrust the almost-completed sketch toward me, crying, “Look! Look!”
I caught a glimpse of something bulbous and black, hairy and red-eyed—a tarantula, a bat, a dragon—whose joined legs were tipped with sharp, chitinous darts. A mere glimpse, without any real or lasting impression of detail, and yet—
“No!” I cried, throwing up my hands before my face, turning and rushing wildly back down the long drive. “No, you fool, don’t let me see it! I don’t want to know! I don’t want to know!”
THE THIEF IMMORTAL
Klaus August Scharme was born in a tiny village called Paradise close to Köln in the middle of the year 1940. The name of his birthplace has nothing to do with Scharme’s story; the village was anything but paradisiacal, being a collection or huddle of farm buildings, some middling private dwellings and a grubby gasthaus, all reached along unmetalled roads, which, for at least four months of the year were little more than ruts around the perimeters of boggy fields.
Therefore, neither the date nor location of his origin was especially auspicious. The best we can say of them is that they were uninspired…drab beginnings for a man whose longevity would make him a legend of godlike proportions, not only in his own lifetime but also in every one of the countless millions of lives which would come and be lived and go—often in unseemly haste—before Scharme himself was yet fifty years old.
But here the paradox: he achieved that age not as might be expected in 1990, but in the summer of 2097. And the following story includes the facts of how that came about.
• • •
Aged sixteen years and three months, Scharme left Paradise and became an apprentice signwriter. He took up lodgings in Köln at the house of his master, where for the next five years he learned how to paint those intricate Kreise signs which signify with heraldic sigils the boundaries of the many and various districts of Germany. At that time such signs could be found on all major roads where they approached any specific district, and where for many years they had been the prey of avid “art collectors” from England, France, the USA—the troops of NATO in general—energetically manoeuvring and war-gaming across the long-since conquered German countryside. But this too is a mere detail and should not be allowed to detract…except that it also served as Scharme’s launching point on his trajectory of four hundred years’ duration.
It started as a dream: Scharme dreamed that he was growing old at an unprecedented rate. He aged a day for every hour, then a week for every minute, finally a year for every second, at which point he collapsed in upon himself, died, crumbled into dust and blew away.
He woke up screaming, and it was the morning of his twenty-first birthday. Perhaps the dream had come about through a subconscious awareness of his proximity to the age of manhood; perhaps it had dawned on him that the first part of his life was done, ended like a chapter closed. But that same day, as Scharme replaced a purloined sign upon its post, he saw speeding by him a military Land Rover…and reclining in the open back of the vehicle a good half-dozen of these very signs over which he laboured so long and hard! The driver of this vehicle, a young Corporal in British uniform, laughed and waved as he sped into the distance; Scharme, wide-eyed in anger where he gazed after him, thought: “Damn you…you should age a year for every sign you’ve stolen!”
At which he was horrified to see the Land Rover swerve violently from the road to strike a tree!
Leaping onto his bicycle, Scharme raced to the scene of the accident. The Corporal, alas, was dead; also, he was old; moreover (and as Scharme would later work it out) it was probably the instantaneous aging which had caused him to swerve—making Klaus August Scharme a murderer! And he knew it was so, for at the moment of his wish—that the Corporal should age commensurate with his thieving—he had felt himself the beneficiary of those years, some thirty-five in number. The Corporal had been twenty-five years of age; he was now sixty. Scharme had been twenty-one and still looked it, but some strange temporal instinct within told him that he would be fifty-six before he began to age again. Somehow—in some monstrous and inexplicable fashion—he had stolen all the young soldier’s years!
And so for the next thirty-five years Scharme aged not at all but remained twenty-one; but—and most monstrously—in the twelve-month after that he aged altogether too many years, so that while by rights (?) he should only be twenty-two, his internal hourglass told him that in fact he had spilled the sands of ten whole years! It was the summer of 1997; K. A. Scharme had lived for fifty-seven years, should have aged by only twenty-two of them, and yet knew that physically he had aged thirty-two of them. In short, he knew that he was now getting old at ten times the normal rate, and that therefore he had started to pay the world back for the time he owed it. In just two and a half more years he’d be pushing sixty, and all the pleasures of an apparently eternal youth would be behind him and senility just around the corner. It was all grossly unfair and Scharme was very bitter about it.
So bitter,
indeed, that the guilt he had felt over the past thirty-five years quite melted away. He determined to do something about his predicament, and of course it must be done quickly; when one is aging an entire year for every five weeks, time grows very short. But still Scharme was not a cruel man, and so chose his next victim (the very word left an unpleasant echo in his mind) with a deal of care and attention.
He chose, in fact, a crippled greypate who suffered incessant arthritic pains, stealing his last four years with the merest glance. The old man never knew what hit him but simply crumpled up in the street on his way to collect his pension. And Scharme was pleased that (a) the old boy would know no more pain, and (b) that the state was plainly a benefactor, likewise every taxpayer, and (c) that he himself, K. A. Scharme, would now live for a further four years at the constant age of only thirty-two and some few months. Which would surely be sufficient time to work out some sort of humane strategy.
Except…no sooner had his mental meter clocked up the defunct dodderer’s four years, than it inexplicably halved them, allotting Scharme only two! Alarmed, he returned home and collapsed before his TV, where at that very moment they were showing an interview with a prisoner on Death Row. It was reckoned that this one could stave off his execution by a maximum of only two years, and that only at great expense. Scharme decided to save him and the state both money and trouble, and snatched his two remaining years right through the screen! The prisoner died right there in full view of many millions (good riddance, the majority said) but Scharme only gasped as the stolen time registered within him at a mere fraction of the time perceived: namely, six months!
