by S. T. Joshi
The inspector let go of Blake’s arm and straightened up.
“So there is a scientific explanation,” said the inspector. “Birth defects—toxic material—Attwater adopted the runt. It all makes sense.”
“I’m glad I could help.”
“Thank you very much for your work, Mr. Blake,” said the inspector in a stronger voice. He shook Blake’s hand with a firm grip. “Your contribution towards clearing this up has been greatly appreciated. Let me know if there’s ever anything I can do.”
Walking home from the police station, Blake mulled over the things he had not said. Not that there was any need to say them; PC Robertson’s death and the shattering of the locked room had shaken the inspector quite enough. The solid certainties of walls and doors had been broken; the inspector would never be quite secure in the logic of the daylight world again. Blake did not feel he had the right to push the man any further towards the edge.
Mother Attwater was even older than the locals said. She was probably the original occupant of the seventeenth-century cottage. She would have taken over from the previous keeper of the Seesin’s Copse, probably by killing them if Frazer’s theories of pagan religion were correct. Blake knew enough of the practices hinted at by Hartmann and von Junzt to guess how she had unnaturally prolonged her life. Where the oldest trees grew would be an altar stone. Perhaps the old woman had only carried out one sacrifice a year on All Hallow’s Eve. The priestess would have had the first draught of life-giving blood; the rest of the sacrifice would have gone to the four-footed celebrants.
The altar was to Cerunnos, the Horned God, the ram-horned serpent, god of the Hunt, the stag—also god of rats. A deity with many forms and none, a trickster who was Pan and Herne and a thousand others, whose real self was veiled behind layers of allegory. A being quickly identified with the devil by horrified monks in the Dark Ages.
How stupid Potter had been to think he could take over. How ignorant not to realise that Cerunnos’ acolyte must be a woman.
The creature which looked down at them from the tree with its malevolent, impish eyes must have been Attwater’s familiar, the link between her and the rats. The devil gave witches their familiars—that was what the witch-finders said. Few scholars had troubled to dig deeper, and fewer still could follow the trail of disputed and mistranslated fragments recounting the blasphemous beings that Cerunnos and the other Old Gods had begotten on mankind.
Blake hoped that the police would move into the copse in force and bring a good number of terrier-men with them to kill every rat they found there. He hoped most especially they would kill the one which had looked down on them. The rat with the face of a cruel old woman.
To Court the Night
K. A. OPPERMAN
K. A. Opperman is a poet of horror and fantasy influenced by H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Edgar Allan Poe, and David Park Barnitz. His debut collection, The Crimson Tome, was published by Hippocampus Press in 2015. His poems “In Fits of Wildest Dreaming” and “The Blood Garden” appeared in Ellen Datlow’s recommended list in Best Horror of the Year, Volume Eight. His poem “The Lady in White” appeared in the HWA’s Poetry Showcase 2016.
It was at midnight, while the imp of Sleep
Yet frolicked with the sylphs beyond my grasp,
That I espied the blood-red book whose clasp
Was wrought of bronze, and then began to weep.
For was it not the fabled Crimson Tome
That I had once beheld in childhood dream?—
It lay upon my desk in doubtful gleam
Of sallow candles set against the gloam.
I had awaited this for fifty years—
To glimpse its haunted pages just one time!
So as the clock declared its thirteenth chime,
And daemons whispered madness in my ears,
I opened up the pretty clasp and pored
Over vermillion verses eviler
And more diseased than I could then endure—
I howled for mercy and misericord!
I heard the tainted laughter of the ghouls
Borne on the winds that through the window swirled
To strow dead leaves of autumn, sere and curled,
Upon the carpet, where strange pixie-stools
Began to fruit with foul fecundity
And sneer with half-formed faces—where the wild
Demesne of Nature had, I saw, defiled
My gloomy chamber’s far profundity.
Nearly ensnared, I braved the ivy vines
That slithered past the threshold of the night
To clutch the claw-foot chairs—an aconite
Of primal nature spreading creeping tines
Of pagan poison through my home’s warm heart!
I hurtled headlong through the window, wide
Unto the Night, to court my darkling bride,
A victim of her necromantic art.
O Nightmare Muse! She of the long, dark hair!—
She of fair flesh and poisoned apple lips!
She plied a pendulum of swaying hips,
Her sable gown whipped up on windy air.
Yes, I had seen her walking by the woods,
And so I hastened toward their gloomy verge;
A distant owl sang out its mournful dirge,
And somber monks, in ranks of brownish hoods,
Bore forth a coffin from a chapel carved
With evil gargoyles, which regarded them
With hungry grins, as if they would condemn
The precious corpse unto the ghouls long-starved.
The hungry ghouls! I heard their laughter still
And followed it among the clutching trees.
The scent of rot was strong upon the breeze—
Dead autumn leaves, exhumed cadavers chill.
The crescent moon ascended murky skies—
For night is darkest ’neath her silver horns;
Aldebaran, above the dream-held bourns,
Beamed like a crimson flame that slowly dies.
I came at last upon a graveyard gate
Whose Gothic lacework ivy-overgrown
Hung just ajar, in nightshade breezes blown,
The iron hinges crying ’neath its weight.
A single lantern charmed the mist beyond,
And toward its ghostly light I slowly passed
’Mid ruined graves gray weeds had over-grassed,
Upon whose plots disturbing mushrooms spawned.
A pack of ghouls dispersed at my approach—
Mere phantom shapes that roamed the greenish mist
In search of corpses whom decay had kissed,
The rotting province of the pestful roach.
The lantern shone upon an open grave,
And in the coffin’s purple velvet slept
A pallid beauty waiting to accept
The adoration of a living slave.
I laid me down inside her lavish bed,
To taste her lips, fair Proserpina’s fruits;
In necrophilia’s most proud pursuits
I would indulge, a lover of the dead.
But lo, her bosom held a heart’s dim beat,
And from her mouth there stole a ghost of breath. . . .
Her lashes’ fringed portcullis, closed on death,
Began to lift, her lilac lids replete
With promises of life ephemeral,
If only for a moment’s romance doomed
Ere dawn of time. . . . But then some devil loomed
Above the grave, so fair, funereal.
And it was she, the Nightmare Muse, my queen,
Engowned in black, encrowned with cold, dead stars!
Her lips, a rose-bloom sapped with poison tars,
Promised a luscious kiss so deep, obscene,
And sensual that I could not resist
The promise of their cup, despite the pale
White-gownèd beauty waking from the dwale
Of death beneath me,
cheeks now scarlet-kissed.
And so I turned to bid the girl goodbye—
But only saw a desiccated corpse
Afruit with that foul mushroom-cap which warps
The dreams of men, and drinks them when they die.
I heard the harlot’s laughter on the air,
And from that fungus-drugged mirage I fled
Into the autumn woodlands filled with dread,
Aldebaran an orange, eternal glare.
Among the ghouls, toward that dreamward star,
I stumbled on through Slumber’s ebon gates,
After that black-gowned beauty who awaits
All foolish dreamers who dare dream too far.
To Move Beneath Autumnal Oaks
W. H. PUGMIRE
W. H. Pugmire has been writing Lovecraftian weird fiction since the mid-1970s, after having first read H. P. Lovecraft while serving as a minister in Northern Ireland. A novel set entirely in Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, written with David Barker, will be published in 2018. A new hardcover collection, An Ecstasy of Fear and Others, is forthcoming from Centipede Press.
ISTOOD IN THE HUNGRY PLACE AND WATCHED AS shovels dropped dirt over Catherine’s lowered casket. A sudden breath of wind playing with my hair made me raise my eyes to the pale September sky, and I marveled again at the misty light of Sesqua Valley, how soft particles of daylight seemed to sparkle as they drifted high above our little congregation. Dante Chambers, attired in his clerical adornment, smiled sadly as he stepped to me and shook my hand.
“Thank you for your uttered prayers,” I told him. “She loved the sound of Latin, and you spoke it beautifully.”
“Peace be with you, Charles.” As Dante turned to glance at the fellow nearest me, his mouth turned down with displeasure. “Good day, Mr. Williams,” he intoned, and then he moved away from us and walked solemnly out of the walled graveyard. I turned and frowned also at the creature near me, noting how the fragrance emitted from his sallow flesh was similar to the sweet scent of the valley. The breeze moved the strands of dark hair that escaped from underneath his black Fedora-style hat, the rim of which partially concealed the fellow’s fantastic silver eyes. The grotesque features of his face seemed, in some weird way, an actual assault on normalcy, and filled one with the outrageous idea that Simon Gregory Williams was not entirely human. His misshapen mouth suddenly curled and moved.
“Why do you gaze at me so, Stanton?”
“Do I? Sorry. I was trying to remember something from my childhood—something about this graveyard and how it was, in some odd way, disliked by you and your kind.”
His eyes slanted. “My kind?”
“You silver-eyed children of the valley. What did my father used to call you? ‘The shadow-spawn of Sesqua Valley’— something like that. And there was something about the ground of the Hungry Place being forbidden to your kind.”
“Pah. Nothing is forbidden me. You’ve been away for so long a time, perhaps you have forgotten there are places in the valley that wear a kind of taint, where the ground is diseased and unhealthy. This is one such place. But you were always fond of this plot of death, and I remember when, as a child, you used to come to dance among its slates in moonlight.”
I chuckled at the memory. “And my mother would discover me and scold and snatch me away. She was always so nervous.”
My companion shrugged. “Your parents were problematic. Little wonder they escaped the valley once your sister reached womanhood. How they fled! How defiantly their offspring insisted on staying put.” His voice altered in tone, and his expression became sardonically playful. “But perhaps it was your sibling’s insanity they were fleeing, not the valley itself. How frightfully she shrieked at them when angry, and how the blood would trickle down her unfortunate face from the slashes her nails dug into her visage. How she would call out in darkness, your sister, to a thing she could not name. I found it so intriguing.”
“It’s amusing,” I told him, “to hear one as ugly as you speak of unfortunate faces.” A spasm of violent anger began to overwhelm me, and I could sense clouds of emotion gathering inside my eyes.
“Ah—the Hungry Place is beginning to have its effect on your human senses. That is one aspect of the taint it wears, you see—how it inspires a kind of maniacal emotion that aches to break out in violence. Does your blood begin to boil boil its veins? Do coiling clouds of gloom begin to seethe inside your brain?” He laughed as mockery twisted the shape of his repugnant mouth, and then he walked away and vanished into the woodland.
I loathed the beast, and yet I knew he was right; for as I knelt and clawed my fingers into the ground, a part of me wanted to sink beneath the sod and smell its varied elements of human rot, to blink specks of dirt from my eyes as my tongue paid tribute to the flesh of worms. I spat at earth, stood, and vacated the Hungry Place, then followed the road that led me to our family home, where I had spent many happy years of childhood. I wondered if I could be content, living there again. The one aspect of the valley that I really missed, on those few occasions when the valley came to mind, was the fantastic grove of gigantic ancient oaks not far behind our house, where Catherine and I often played when young. It was strange that the memory of that grove was indeed the only recollection I had of Sesqua Valley after I had moved to another part of the country. All other memories had been wiped from reminiscence, as if some mental veil had been erected that kept the valley far from mind.
I reached my destination, but rather than go inside my home I walked toward the oak trees and their outspread limbs. Someone, long ago, had encircled the thick trunks with large rocks on which mystifying sigils had been etched, although most of the symbols were now so weathered as to be beyond deciphering. I approached the small shrine that our parents had helped us to erect out of blocks of stone and large bricks, a construction that resembled some religious shrines of Father’s Roman Catholic faith. Our place of pilgrimage contained a small altar on which we would burn offerings to the gods of the woods; and as I approached that altar I was surprised to see the small pale object that rested on its long-abandoned platform. Strangely cautious, I went to the object and then, seeing clearly what it was, felt my blood grow cold; for it was my sister’s favorite toy, an antique French doll attired in what had once been a lovely gown of white silk and lace. Now the gown and portions of the thing’s face had been blackened by fire.
From some far-off place within the woodland I heard a melancholy playing of pipes, and I knew that Simon Gregory Williams was at his diabolic play. A chill wind began to whisper through the dendroidal stems above me, a noise that reminded me of the thing my sister and I had tried to evoke audibly as we chanted to imagined music. I began to hum the music that floated from the woodland, and as I peered into that distant expanse of trees I thought I saw two points of alabaster illumination that seemed to observe me. I thought again of the “children” of the valley, they who were called the valley’s “shadow-spawn,” of whom Simon was the eldest. Indeed, I remembered him from my childhood, as someone my kindred taught me to distrust and shun. There were only a handful of such beings in the valley at a given time—they came and then they disappeared, mysteriously; except for Simon, who seemed always to have been around, unchanging and aloof. We knew their race by their faces, a grotesque combination of frog-like and wolfish features, and by the almost magical quality of their silver eyes, the surface of which shone like pale and polished nickel. These beings were rooted absolutely to the valley in which they lingered, and if anyone could connect with the spirit of the valley that my sister and I had tried to induce with childish ritual, it was this shadow-spawn.
Thus I listened attentively to the music from Simon’s flute and imagined that the breeze that brushed my face grew cooler as it carried the remote music to my ears. From underneath the ground on which I stood came a subtle pounding, which I felt deep inside my bones. The dappled light that slipped to me through the limbs of trees darkened, as if it had turned to particles of ash; and as I
gazed at that fuliginous curtain I seemed to sense the darker shadow that coiled behind it. Something in my brain snapped violently, and I rushed from the place and sped homeward, where I busied myself in the kitchen brewing water and preparing tea and toast.
How strange that I did not dream that night; for one would imagine that my brain would dwell on hinted horrors and infest my slumber with horrid vision, but instead I fell into a vacuum, sans imagined sight or sound. Having neglected to draw the bedroom curtains before going to bed, I was awakened by sunlight on my eyelids and found that I had slept in the clothing I had worn the previous day. Not bothering to change into fresh attire, I stumbled to the kitchen and made myself a cup of coffee, which I took to the porch and drank as I sat on Mother’s old rocking chair. It did not surprise me when Simon Gregory Williams sauntered down the road before my home, pretending to read the book held in one hand.
“Are you haunting me?” I queried.
“I beg your pardon, sirrah.”
“They were very clever, your tricks last night. What was it, exactly, that you summoned? Has it a name?”
He knitted his brow and frowned. “Sorry, I don’t follow you. Do you think I have nothing better to do than oppress you with playful alchemy?”
“Oh, but I heard your damn flute performance while visiting the grove of oaks. And I sensed—”
“My dear fellow, if you’re going to go dreaming at your childhood altar, it has nothing to do with me. Do you imagine that you can return to the valley and not be infected by your past? Do you think that children can call to Outer Darkness in ritual and not be answered? A thing evoked in infanthood does not die merely because you flee the valley and linger in some far-off city for many years. That which is summoned with esoteric language does not dissipate; it links to the soul of whoever has called it, and however far that soul may journey, it always returns to the place of ceremony. As you have now returned.”
