Terrors

by Richard A. Lupoff

  There was flash brighter than the noonday sun, and a coruscation of pulsing colors, and a strange display of chromatics that Cordelia Whateley could only describe, in the days and years that followed, as the very sky and earth screaming in terror and in pain.

  Then all was silence and all was darkness, and Cordelia Whateley knew nothing until she opened her eyes and looked into the face of a brawny individual wearing the garb of a Massachusetts State Trooper. He was shining a flashlight into her eyes, and when she blinked and moaned he said, “Are you all right, ma’am?”

  She lifted a hand to her face and said, “Yes. Yes. I just—I managed to escape from Dunwich Town.”

  The trooper frowned. “There’s been a terrible disaster there, ma’am. Looks as if some kind of giant meteor crashed on Dunwich. Wiped out the town, the hull entire town.” He shook his head. “Every man, woman and child. And there’s some kind of horrid goop all over the place, and a stench like to make you throw up. Pardon me, ma’am. Sorry about that.”

  Cordelia Whateley struggled to stand up.

  The trooper assisted her gently. “Can we take you somewhere, ma’am? Is there someone we should notify?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I just want to leave. I just want to get back to Montreal and forget this—this horror.”

  The trooper’s face was visible in the reflected illumination cast by his flashlight. “Should a lady your age be driving a car?” he asked. “Do you still have a driver’s license, ma’am? I mean, I know the laws are different there in Quebec. Your car has Quebec tags, ma’am. Are you from Quebec?”

  She said, “Yes. Thank you. I’m perfectly all right. I just want to get home.”

  The trooper looked dubious, but finally he said, “All right, ma’am. If you’re sure you’ll be all right.”

  “I’m perfectly all right,” she repeated, annoyed. The trooper released her and she climbed into her car. Her purse lay on the seat beside her and she found the cassette player and rewound the tape and hit play. From the player’s speaker there emerged only a hissing and crackling, and the occasional hint of an indecipherable whisper.

  Cordelia shut the player off. She tossed it into the back seat of her automobile. She switched on the engine. This time it started without hesitation. She reached up to adjust the rear-view mirror, but on an impulse turned it first toward herself. By the domelight of the sedan she studied her image. Her hair was white and her visage was the withered, wrinkled, desiccated face of a woman three times her age.

  The Horror South of Red Hook

  The food here is palatable although bland, wickedly bland, I suspect by design, for our keepers do not wish us to be over-stimulated in any way. Over-stimulation means excitement and excitement leads to the stirring up of memories, hideous memories of blasphemous horrors, unnatural recollections of savage and unnatural events upon which a gibbous moon leered monstrously.

  And yet they are permitting me to write this account of the terrible events that transpired in Dutchess City that horrid autumn day. They have granted me the use of this soft crayon and floppy-edged paper, that you whose blessed eyes are smitten by the impious and decayed occurrences which befell me may judge whether such things can be in this accursed and doom-clouded world, or whether it was all a monstrous dream, a figment of a blasted mind slithering its slime-laden way down the squirming path to madness.

  I have not always been the shattered and trembling husk of humanity I am today. Once I was a youthful and vigorous man, but recently graduated from the University with a degree in certain matters which excited the malicious interest of numerous prospective greedy employers. Residing happily as I was in the great Eastern metropolis, I received the awful summons to visit a small town some miles above Gotham on the edge of the dank and fetid river.

  Why I chose to accept that accursed invitation I will never know. Perhaps it was in the mistaken belief that a day’s excursion into the rank and weed-choked countryside would assuage the ennui provoked by the mad whirl of metropolitan existence, perhaps it was a desire to immerse myself in the ancient towns and countryside where my ancestors, blue-eyed, pale-skinned and roman-nosed, had settled incredible lustra ago, forsaking the looming towers and hideously shrieking boulevards of the city to the ill-spoken mongrel immigrant hordes who pollute its dreadful towers and disgusting byways with their evil-smelling viands and uncouth speech.

  O, how I curse the mad impulse that made me accept that accursed invitation, and yet, as I boarded the grimy and deteriorating coach at the rail terminus I felt only a slight foreboding of the doom-laden malign fate which lurked in that northern hamlet waiting to snare the innocent and unwary in its scaly claws.

  The car made its uneven way, swaying and lurching evilly with each hideous curve and devilish bump of the ancient and unholy rails, wicker seats that looked balefully out at archaic passengers in a forgotten past creaking cacophonically and ceiling lights in their ancient fluted cones faltering and dimming as the train rattled ever farther on its evil way to the indescribable terrors of the ancient exurb which was my ill-fated destination.

  At length, weary of peering anxiously through yellowed and cracking windows coated with savage centuries of black grime, I felt my blond-tousled and pure-bred head fall upon my cleanly garbed chest, my clear blue eyes closed and I dreamed. I dreamed a hideous and dreadful dream, a somnambulism in which certain awful shapes capered and howled beneath a leering moon and winking stars whose ancient malignity showered hollowly down upon a stench-ridden and blasphemous throng.

  It was the lurch of the car which awakened me, trembling and hot-eared, from my terrible dream. With grateful hands I took my hat from the high and terrifying rack and jammed it fearfully upon my aristocratic head, and with feet that quivered and jounced with relief I made my fearsome way from that terrible old car, watching gladly as the train pulled out and continued along its terrible route to the northward.

  I ascended an ancient and decaying stairway, drawing shudderingly away from the archaic creatures that seemed more to slither or to climb the stairs all about me than they did to walk as any natural creature would do. At incredible and weary length I found myself at the dizzying top of the terrible stairway, and forced to enter a gigantic room whose towering roof and vaulted windows seemed to smirk down evilly upon those of us who crept fearfully about on the frigidly dry flagging upon the floor.

  Involuntarily I crouched against a cruel and superannuated wall, my Anglo-Saxon fingers anxiously and without conscious will tracing the old scrollery that remained under untold eras of accumulated foetor. As I drew away from the horrible pediment I saw that my white patrician fingers were marked a grimy shade where they had contacted that dreadful wood!

  Screaming in terror I capered madly across the cold stones, crashing cacophonously into the ominously heavy and garment-clad figures that clustered and gibbered there in that awful room. Even as I burst through the tarnished portals the vaulted ceiling threw back my shrieks unmercifully, the dread portents of my own cries echoing horridly in my small and well-positioned ears.

  Not daring to stand exposed beneath the pollenous and smirking sky I hurled my trembling form into the back seat of an ancient but incredibly ill-preserved hack that stood beside the doors of that cursed and horrible building, never even taking note of the unholy coven of terrible creatures already inhabiting the passenger section of the dreadful vehicle.

  Recoiling in horror from them and sending another scream of monstrous fear crashing to the baleful roof of the hack I threw my entire weight upon the mouldy door and, gibbering a prayer of gratitude to whatever malign deity had seen fit to provide me with even the momentary succour of release, tumbled painfully upon the cruelly gravel-encrusted turf upon which the hack rested.

  Staring frantically in all directions in desperate hope of visioning an alternative means of transportation, I reached the harrowing conclusion that only that single hack stood ready to carry passengers from the station. Had I but noticed this evil and
maxillary anomaly my keen Caucasian suspicions had inevitably driven me to flee madly across the ancient fields and decrepit roadways that mark Dutchess City.

  But, terrified by the black and inescapable fate that seemed, with a tacit and noisome persistency to seek to ensnare me, I lurched despairingly around the rusted and grime-coated rear of the hack and made my unhappy way to the blasphemous door which let onto a seat beside that already occupied by the driver.

  May I never again gaze upon a countenance so filled with wise and cynical malignity as that of the hackman! His hair hung uncouthly to the grimy collar of his ancient and tattered camisole, his eyes glared redly out of a sallow skin marked with the awful signs of foreign blood and indescribable dissolution. His teeth showed blackened stumps of what once must have been hideous yellow fangs, while most terrible of all his frightful and malevolent nose showed incontestable signs of a fatal and hideous convexity.

  Emitting from his aged and terrible throat a chuckle of indescribable hideousness the driver threw his gears into motion with a terrifying clash that rattled and boomed horribly off the echoing rocks that surround the rutted roadway leading away from the stagnant and odorous river. I cast fear-sharpened vision into the rear compartment of the hack where the dread creatures I had so narrowly escaped awful moments earlier were gathered in evil comity, nodding and hissing scabrously over stacks of books whose very titles I dared not whisper under my breath lest the ancient gods of madness come crashing up from the abyss into which they had long been cast and uncertainly chained by sorcerers of incredible antiquity and wicked puissance.

  “You girls all going to the college,” the driver hissed in a dry and serpentine sibilance that sent tremors shuddering up and down my well-clad spine. From the terrifying creatures in the rear compartment there echoed a terrible cackle of affirmation, whereupon the aged but somehow dreadfully strong driver turned to me, his baleful gimlet eyes taking in my noble native-born countenance and modern garb. “And you, sir?” he mouthed arcanely.

  Aye had I but had the presence of mind to cancel then and there my projected interview, to return even with that mind-blasting monstrosity of a driver to the terrible towering terminal and return to the metropolis where I had my mad and abandoned abode in those days, what horrors might have I avoided! But no, driven by the noble honesty of mine ancestors I whispered fearsomely, “To the factory.”

  What expression of terror those words provoked upon his face, what new paleness infused his mottled and wattled epidermis when he heard me croak those foully portentous words, and yet, pursuing his evil course to the end, he replied in that terrible and incredibly malign voice, “What building number?”

  Numbed with fear at this new demand I clawed frantically at my breast, extracting from the neatly-tailored pocket of my modern jacket the very invitation in response to which I had undertaken this terrible and unprecedented journey. My eye slithered across the deathly pale document which, claw-like, my fingers unfolded and, reading the terrible words again I hissed back in terror and remorse the number which he required.

  Down decaying byways and along rutted lanes the terrible hack swayed and clattered, its ancient frame protesting with frightful squeaks each new turn and grade. Hideous buildings of terrifying and unholy antiquity leered down upon us, cracked and discoloured windows peering balefully at the noisome intruders while rotting walls, long bared of cracked and flaking paint, loomed obscenely in the terrible afternoon sunlight. What horrors had they witnessed in untold eons that stretched hack before the recollection of infant humanity!

  For what seemed endless intervals we swayed and rattled between the shacks and shanties of Dutchess City. My blood crept fearfully through my terrified veins and arteries while tremors of fear shook my gorgeous frame as my terrified glances into the rear compartment were met by impudent and unfathomably evil glares from the kohl-lined orbs of the terrible creatures there clustered.

  At length the hack drew up before the vine-coated and stone-walled buildings of the college, buildings in which untold rites were performed by flickering tapers as the horrible creatures of which a clutch gathered and writhed behind me pursued such blasphemous studies as the merest syllabus of which would drive any sane and wholesome Celt gibbering and drooling down the awful corridors of madness in horror and fright.

  The hackman exited mercifully from his side of the ancient vehicle to aid the creatures in extricating themselves from the rear compartment while I fearsomely sought to ascertain that the lock which might hold any menace out of my own section of the conveyance was well secured. With savage cries and malign laughter the creatures retrieved their noisome and menacing luggage from the rear of the hack and made their way into the menacing gate-arch of that savage institution.

  I cringed away from that terrible strong driver as he remained in his seat at the wheel of the hack and, engine droning menacingly, we rolled once more in the direction of the establishment to which the terrible pale document had summoned my pitiable but handsome figure. The hackman sought to draw from me, as we rode down one decrepit thoroughfare after another beneath looming structures of ramshackle menace, such pitiful few secrets as remained mine. “Up from the city, huh?” he queried in that dry, frightening voice of his. “Come t’ work at the factory?”

  My throat too dry with terror and apprehension to permit the formation of even simple answers, I nodded a silent yes or no as each question threatened the poor tottering remnant of my once proud sanity. What awful motive could this hideous and clammy driver have for probing, digging, seeking out the very secrets of my existence?

  Finally he pulled up at the frightful doors of the building to which I had been summoned. I pressed the full sum demanded into the hideous claw and fled in terror through the awful and aged portal which presented itself to my terrified eyes. Another of those frightful creatures awaited within, but thankfully, even as I could feel a scream of indescribable terror welling up within my throat, I espied a figure of tolerable horror hastening down a balefully lighted corridor to conduct me, trembling as with an ague, into a cubicle where I was permitted to sit in a frightful chair of incalculable antiquity and gradually regain possession of my shattered wits.

  My host made small talk of a dark and foreboding nature, then, drawing from his pocket a packet of rolled tobacco, offered me a smoke which I declined with a violent wave of my trembling hand and fearful shake of the head. He lit a terrible cylinder of tobacco himself, dropping his baleful and malevolent matchstick into an ancient and hideously menacing ashtray that stood in all its menacing frightfulness on the edge of his cruel and impious desk.

  What events then transpired I shudder to recollect. The terrors to which I was subjected no sound mind could comprehend and yet retain its sanity as, mine host ever at my elbow, murmuring obscenities foul beyond decent repetition, we toured corridors and chambers of untold horror wherein laboured pale-faced and pale-shirted creatures whose awful and scabrous countenances bespoke such horrors as only some denizen of the nether regions might conceive in a hideous nightmare of terrifying decay.

  Whether the creatures we viewed, at once terrifying and pitiable, were the malign perpetrators of unfathomable horrors, or wore themselves the whimpering victims of indescribable maltreatment it was impossible to fathom, for upon each visage there was written a foul compendium of the terrifying characteristics that tend to mark eldritch fiend and tortured subject alike: cruelty, vice, greed, dissipation, suffering, nausea, hatred, bitterness, ineffable sadness and fierce ambition, indescribable yearnings for unnameable satisfactions, these and a thousand more emotions met and were blended into the expressions of anger, misery, and terrible satisfactions far more revolting than their denials.

  Beside each of the things that we saw, both pitiable and fearsome in their visage, stood either or both of a pair of artefacts of malign and baleful significance. Many of the wretches had seemingly been furnished by their masters with ashtrays as terrible as that which I had seen on the desk of my terrible
host, ashtrays which they perpetually filled and emptied, filled and emptied with a terrible nervous compulsiveness which caused me to avert my eyes in nausea and pity.

  Others seemed to have chosen to forgo the questionable relief of the ashtrays, and were furnished instead with little pasteboard cups the exteriors of which were blazoned with arcane slogans of such mind-blasting savagery that I dare not set them down in this document, even though my keepers assure me that I am perfectly safe and even though they permit me, nay, encourage me to record with my soft crayon every detail of the horror which sent me shrieking and capering to the very doorways of madness and beyond.

  Ho! There are some blasphemies too horrid to be repeated, even in a private document such as this, which is unlikely to be read save by my keepers and, if they deem it helpful, perhaps someday by those members of my family adjudged strong and calm-natured enough to face truths more horrible than the average man can even imagine.

  And yet those pasteboard cups were filled, many of them, with a brownish and murk-tempered liquid of such disgusting appearance that only once did I permit myself to approach a cup closely enough for my nostrils to he assailed by the fetor that rose from the noxious brew along with a hideous and unwholesome steam. Further, and by far the most terrifying of all, those frightful creatures of pity and cruelty were compelled by some unseen agency to take that disgusting and horrifying liquid into their very mouths, where some I saw swirling it about with signs of the most frightful agony before swallowing, whereupon it might commence whatever work of terrible malignity as its manifest evil nature might dictate.

  Aye, the rooms in which those poor demons, if such be what they were, and may such gods as exist and loom terribly over mankind, take rare pity and grant that I never again return there to find out, the rooms I say in which they were penned, were small, there being in most cases a mere handful of the brutes in each, a few being penned in solitary misery, while hideous black objects resting near them would eternally burst upon what peace they might attain through resignation to their miserable state, shrilling hellishly until they would detach part of the object and hold it to their tortured faces, hold it like a half-mask covering one side of their countenance from ear to mouth, while to my sickness I could hear the murmuring tones of their masters oozing slimily from the ear-piece into their poor organs while they made quick and obsequious obeisance in their own pained murmurs into the mouth pieces of the instruments, replacing them and returning to whatsoever terrible and squishy task they might have been engaged in when the shrill summons came, thus to occupy themselves miserably until such time as another shrill summons should again call them to the terrible black things.