by S. T. Joshi
There was surprisingly little blood as Peter’s mouth worked, but no sound came out. Finding strength in his mission, Bishop pushed Peter back and wrenched downward with the blade, slicing a gaping wound in the boy’s belly. That’s when the blood began to appear. He’d prepared for this earlier, though, by placing a bucket and several ceremonial carved bowls of obsidian close to hand on the cellar stairs.
With a gurgle, Peter stumbled backwards and coughed out his last breath. Bishop stared down at the dagger and his hand. Both were covered in gore. He’d been worried that killing the boy would unnerve him, or, worse, that he wouldn’t be able to do it. He was pleased with himself: he had found the strength to do what he’d set out to do.
Only the final steps were before him now: he affixed Peter’s body to the pulley system he’d attached to the ceiling and hauled him into the air by his ankles.
* * *
The sun had just dropped below the horizon, and there was a smell of cooking meat in the attic air. The smell wafted from the candles he’d just made from the fat he’d extracted from Peter’s body. The boy had fulfilled his purpose. His blood decorated the attic floor in a copy of the intricate pattern from the book he’d acquired in Spain, and his skull sat in front of Bishop, upside down and filled with his own blood, to be both sipped and offered at the appropriate times. The instructions had been quite particular.
Bishop felt he was now truly “The Gaunt” as he stood naked, covered in patterns painted on his skin in Peter’s blood, chanting an ancient language, walking a pattern prescribed by a forgotten Arab. He was certain that he looked quite like a savage, and indeed he supposed he was—vengeance incarnate. As he went through the steps he’d memorized, the room suddenly felt chill and the candles dimmed. The culmination was approaching.
He sat in the center of the symbol he’d drawn on the ground and kept chanting, pulling the dagger through his own flesh now, spilling his blood into the boy’s hollowed skull, when voices cried from without. He was only vaguely aware of them, and he refused to allow them to distract him, even though they hammered on the door below with great ferocity.
Finally he felt the connection. He had reached through the Void Between and made contact. It felt as though he had opened a doorway inside his mind and some Great Being had made an offer of acquaintance. The Presence that he felt, however, made him shudder. His mind pulled back from the chasm of enormity that it faced. Sweat poured off his body; he felt himself weakening.
Then he saw Charity’s face. He saw Faith. He saw them reaching for him as he was held back and they were being taken away. He saw their tears, the terror in their eyes. He knew there would be no trial. This was to be a burning. He heard his little girl cry “Papa!” as the flames rose around her.
With that, iron poured into his will, and his focus was the keenest razor. He raised his mind’s eye before the presence on the Other Side and offered up the board of selectmen, every one: all the self-proclaimed leaders of Arkham. All the petty, puny people who would rather lash out at the unfamiliar than stop to understand aid when it was offered. He prostrated himself and offered their souls on a gilded platter for the Being’s consumption.
Lightning flashed. Thunder and wind clashed outside. A gale began to howl just as they burst through the door downstairs.
But they were too late.
Arthur Bishop smiled: The Gaunt’s revenge was upon them. It was upon them all.
He felt the Being stir and take interest. He felt acceptance. He felt a fist close around his soul and lightning surge through his veins.
“Bishop!” cried Dalton from the parlor, standing with the bailiff and his deputy.
And Bishop, The Gaunt, stood before them, still naked and bleeding, still coated in ancient runes painted in young Peter Dalton’s blood. The runes glowed, pulsing with the fury of the storm.
Dalton saw him and started. His two toughs froze. The Gaunt saw the first selectman’s bravado waver. “Good God, man, clothe yourself!”
“You come face to face with your doom, and all you can think of is your puritanical aversion to nakedness? Surely I am serving the greater good.”
Dalton huffed a weak objection.
The Gaunt continued. “What of your son? Do you not wish to ask after him?”
“My . . . son?”
“Truly you are an idiot, Dalton. Goodbye.”
“What are you—?” and his voice caught in his throat with a gurgle. His eyes bulged as The Gaunt’s gaze bored into his. Dalton drew his head back, trying to turn away but finding himself unable to do so. His face shook with exertion, his bountiful jowls quivering like holiday jelly, and still The Gaunt glared at him. “NnooOOO!”
The Gaunt stepped forward and reached into Dalton’s mind, finding a man whose whole ambition was to see himself on the throne, at the top of the heap. It was an image so easy to manipulate. Dalton’s heap festered with rot. The stomach-turning sweet smell of decay filled his fantasy. The selectman whimpered. The Gaunt then introduced Dalton’s family to the image; and there, while suddenly bound to a chair atop a pile of offal, The Gaunt defiled Dalton’s wife to her great pleasure while Dalton’s son watched, aroused. Upon completion of the act, The Gaunt snapped the woman’s neck and tore out young Peter Dalton’s throat. Dalton sat on his moldering throne and wept.
Back in the physical world, The Gaunt stepped swiftly forward and tore out each of Dalton’s eyes, blinding him to the outside world and dooming him to see nothing but the ruin of his own fantasy.
Dalton’s lackeys, suddenly free from the paralysis of fear and confusion, launched forward at their master’s screams— and dropped bonelessly at The Gaunt’s feet as he melted their minds with the power granted him by the Presence now within him.
The Gaunt grabbed Dalton by the back of his collar and kicked the backs of his knees, such that the portly mass of pomp dropped to the floor. The Gaunt grabbed Dalton’s thinning hair and pulled his head back. Dalton yelled in pain, and this suited The Gaunt perfectly. He reached into Dalton’s mouth and snatched out the man’s tongue.
Dalton’s cries grew shrill and choked as the pitch climbed and the blood flowed down his throat.
The Gaunt dragged the useless sack of humanity out of his house and into the pouring rain outside. He dropped the refuse in the mud on the road, to be collected by any who cared, or not.
Finally, he reached across into Dalton’s mind and bridged the gap to the Being. Bishop had promised burning and fire, and The Gaunt granted it. Dalton’s mind burned.
Lightning blazed across the night sky, capturing the image of the naked Gaunt, still glowing with bloody sigils, still wielding power from Beyond.
He had promised the Being all the selectmen, and as they had taken his family, so he would take theirs. Only then would The Gaunt’s vengeance be complete.
Missing at the Morgue
DONALD TYSON
Donald Tyson was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His first nonfiction book, The New Magus (expanded as New Millennium Magic), revolutionized the way practitioners of Western magic look at this ancient art. He has annotated and edited such classic texts as the Three Books of Occult Philosophy by Cornelius Agrippa, the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, and the Demonology of King James I. His horror stories have appeared in numerous anthologies. The Lovecraft Coven, a novel about H. P. Lovecraft (Hippocampus Press), and a collection of ten short stories about Abdul Alhazred, author of the Necronomicon, titled Tales of Alhazred (Dark Renaissance Books), are both currently available.
1
ONE OF MY SOURCES AT THE SEVENTEENTH PRECINCT gave me a hot tip that the body of serial killer James Aught was being held for autopsy in the morgue at St. James Hospital.
After he had strangled five young women and terrorized the city for twelve weeks, the police had finally cornered Aught in an abandoned tenement and killed him in an hour-long shootout that had been televised nationwide. However, no photograph of Aught had been released to the public. All the media had was a hy
pothetical police pencil sketch, done days ago based on the memory of a woman Aught had tried but failed to strangle to death.
I jumped into my car with my camera and smoked rubber getting over to the hospital before any other freelancer got wind of it. When I say smoked rubber, I’m speaking figuratively. My Smart Car doesn’t have enough horsepower to do any serious tire burning. But it is a wiz at snaking through crosstown traffic. I felt like the Purple Avenger, slipping in and out of traffic slots too small for any ordinary car or truck even to think about trying.
It was nine-thirty, still during evening visiting hours at the hospital. The public lot was full, but I managed to slide my car into a half-space at the end of the row, under an enormous aluminum lighting standard.
I was feeling pretty good about myself as I made my way through the hospital to the service elevator that led to the basement. The feeling ended when I stepped out of the elevator car and saw Detective Sergeant Leroy Biggs standing in the hall beside the door to the morgue. The expression on his face when he recognized me said he was experiencing the same regret.
“How the fuck did you find out about this, Dalhoy?”
“You know how it is. I keep my ear to the ground.”
“Did Mickelson on the front desk tip you?”
Damn, Biggs, you’re good, I thought, but shook my head with a solemn expression.
“You know I can’t let you in,” he told me, folding his massive arms on his chest. He cut an intimidating figure at six-foot-two and around two-eighty.
“Don’t you find it degrading, being assigned to guard a room full of dead people? It’s not like Aught’s going to wake up and strangle them.”
“I’m not here about James Aught.”
My ears pricked up like a retriever’s when it hears a shotgun. “What are you doing here, Biggs?”
“I can’t tell you that, Dalhoy.”
“Come on, you know I can keep my mouth shut. What’s going on?”
He sighed with exasperation and chewed his bottom lip. He was hurting for want of his usual cigar.
“It’s weird shit,” he grumbled. “I might have known you’d show up. You always seem to be around when something weird goes down.”
“What can I tell you, Biggs? It’s karma.”
“The head pathologist, Doctor Yeu, called to report the theft of organs from the corpses stored in the morgue.”
“Somebody’s stealing organs to sell for transplants?”
Biggs shook his head. “The bodies aren’t fresh enough for transplants.”
“A fetishist, then,” I said, beginning to get interested.
“It looks that way, unless Doctor Frankenstein is building another monster.”
The door opened behind Biggs and two police forensic techs came out carrying their gear.
“A uniform is being assigned to this door, Dalhoy,” Biggs told me as I watched the techs make their way toward the elevator. “No unauthorized personnel get in or out.”
“Just ten minutes. I go in, I snap a pic of Aught’s ugly dead face, and I’m out. Ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes,” Biggs repeated.
“Tops.”
He shook his head with disgust as he frowned down at me. I’m only five-foot-seven, so he had a long way to look.
“Get in, get your picture, and get out. Don’t make me regret it.”
I slipped past him into the morgue and shivered. It was cold in there. The stench of formaldehyde was strong in the air and left my nose dry and stinging. A Chinese woman in a white lab coat was bent over a stainless steel table that held the naked corpse of a man. She had short black hair and black-framed eyeglasses with thick lenses.
“Doctor Yeu?”
She turned to me. The lenses of her glasses made her dark eyes appear enormous.
“Is that the body of James Aught?”
“Who are you?” she asked. Her accent was so heavy I had a hard time understanding her.
“Police photographer.”
“I thought the police had all the pictures they needed already.”
“One of them was bad. I need to retake a photo of the corpse’s face.”
She stepped back from the table and gestured with her hand. “Be my guest.”
The man on the table had been shot through the face just above the corner of his upper lip. Someone had cleaned up the blood, but the hole was gaping and raw. It was a lovely detail. His eyelids were half-open and his glassy grey eyes stared at the ceiling. He was an ugly son of a bitch, but no worse than many others I had photographed over the years.
I moved to the head of the table and held my camera over his head, focusing on the plane of his face. It would put the tip of his nose slightly out of focus, but no matter. The picture I snapped was upside down, but that was easy enough to correct on the computer.
“So I hear somebody’s been stealing organs from the stiffs,” I said in a conversational tone.
The pathologist just looked at me. I’m tempted to say her expression was inscrutable.
“Any suspicions as to who is taking them?”
“That’s not my job. You should ask the police—you know, the ones you work for.”
So much for charm.
“There’s twenty dollars in it for you if you tell me what you know.”
She glanced toward the door. We were alone with the dead. She extended her tiny hand. I put a twenty in it and the bill disappeared into her pocket.
“It started two weeks ago. First it was a heart. Then a liver. We started to notice and keep track of what was missing.”
“How many people have access?”
She shrugged. “Half a dozen. Myself, my assistant Arthur Kurtz, cleaners, the orderlies who move the bodies.”
“So it must be one of you who stole the organs, right?”
“That’s what the police believe.”
“What do you believe?”
She looked at me seriously. “The organs go missing when the morgue is empty and the door is locked.”
“You mean, there’s nobody in here, the door is locked from the outside, and the organs disappear?”
“That’s right.”
“That’s impossible.”
Her face hardened. “I’m not saying anything more.”
Biggs poked his head through the door. “You’re time is up, Dalhoy. Get your ass out here.”
I smiled at the pathologist. “My boss. A real slave-driver.”
“You know what you’ve got in there, Biggs?” I said when I exited to the hallway.
“What have I got?” Biggs asked without curiosity.
“You’ve got a locked-room mystery.”
“There’s no such thing as a locked-room mystery,” he said.
“Don’t you read Agatha Christie?”
“I’ve got too much work to waste my time reading.”
“The head pathologist says the organs go missing when there’s nobody in the morgue and the door is locked.”
“So she’s lying, or she’s mistaken.”
“You don’t sound very intrigued.”
“It’s parts of corpses, Dalhoy. I’ve got murders to solve.”
2
THE AUGHT PHOTO GAVE ME THE BEST PAYDAY I’D had all year. I sold it to the television news, a newspaper syndicate, a wire service, and the tabloids. That’s the way it was when you were a freelancer—long droughts were followed by heavy rain. I used the money to pay up my back rent and pay off the remainder owing on my car. It still left me with a nice piece of change in my checking account. I celebrated by buying some groceries.
I might have forgotten about the mystery of the missing organs, but later that afternoon Michelson phoned.
“You remember that morgue where they took Aught’s corpse?”
“The morgue at St. James Hospital. What about it?”
“Something’s gone missing.”
Immediately I thought of the organ thefts. “You mean another organ was stolen?”
“Organ? Wha
t? No.”
“What are you talking about, then?”
He lowered his voice. “Last night somebody stole Aught’s corpse.”
“What? You mean they took his whole body?”
“That’s what I mean. The department is keeping it quiet while they try to track down its whereabouts. Is that sick or what? Should be right up your alley, Dalhoy.”
I broke the connection and sat back on my couch to think. The cushions and back of the couch were covered with strips of silver duct tape. A while ago someone had broken into my apartment and ransacked it, cutting up my couch in the process. One of these weekends I’d have to look around the garage sales for another one.
The organ thief was getting bolder, as he continued to pursue his hobby without getting caught. He or she, I corrected myself. It could be a woman who was doing it. Usually, however, it was a man who indulged in this sort of fetish obsession. I didn’t want to know what he was doing with the organs, but I had a nasty suspicion that turned my stomach. He probably liked fava beans and Chianti. But why would he steal an entire corpse? Was it just coincidence that he had taken the infamous corpse of James Aught, or had it been purposeful?
I’ve got a number of personal problems myself. Happily, fetishism isn’t one of them, and neither is necrophilia. But I’ve got a heart condition that will probably kill me one of these days, when I overstrain myself. And I’ve been told by a psychologist that I’ve got a mild form of autism spectrum disorder—what they used to call Asperger’s Syndrome. I’m also compulsive, in that I can’t resist the urge to solve a mystery when it falls into my lap. I knew I had to investigate the theft of Aught’s corpse, even if there was no payday in it for me. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I didn’t do it.
I drove over to St. James and made my way down to the morgue. Biggs and his crew were already there. He looked about ready to tear his hair out. Not being able to smoke his stogies while in the hospital was really getting to him.
