by Brian Lumley
“Wait, wait!” he cried, dragging her to a halt. “My head’s swimming.” He put out the hand that held the bottle, found a solid surface, pressed his knuckles against it and steadied himself. He leaned against a wall of sorts, dry and flaky to his touch, and gradually the dizziness passed.
This is no good, he told himself: I’ll be of no damn use to her unless I can control myself! To her he said, “Potent stuff, your local wine.”
“Only a few more steps,” she whispered.
She moved closer and again there came the sound of sliding silk, of garments falling. He put his arm around her, felt the flesh of her body against the back of his hand. The weight of the bottle slowly pulled down his arm. Smooth, firm buttocks—totally unlike Julia’s, which sagged a little—did not flinch at the passing of fingers made impotent by the bottle they held.
“God!” he whispered, throat choked with lust. “I wish I could hold on to you for the rest of my life ...”
She laughed, her voice hoarse as his own, and stepped away, pulling him after her. “But that’s your second wish,” she said.
Second wish ... Second wish? He stumbled and almost fell, was caught and held upright, felt fingers busy at his jacket, the buttons of his shirt. Not at all cold, he shivered, and deep inside a tiny voice began to shout at him, growing louder by the moment, shrieking terrifying messages into his inner ear.
His second wish!
Naked he stood, suddenly alert, the alcohol turning to water in his system, the unbelievable looming real and immense and immediate as his four sound senses compensated for voluntary blindness.
“There,” she said. “And now you may remove your blindfold!”
Ah, but her perfume no longer masked the charnel musk beneath; her girl’s voice was gone, replaced by the dried-up whisper of centuries-shrivelled lips; the hand he held was—
Harry leapt high and wide, trying to shake off the thing that held his hand in a leathery grip, shrieking his denial in a black vault that echoed his cries like lunatic laughter. He leapt and cavorted, coming into momentary contact with the wall, tracing with his burning, supersensitive flesh the tentacled monstrosity that gloated there in bas-relief, feeling its dread embrace!
And bounding from the wall he tripped and sprawled, clawing at the casket which, in his mind’s eye, he saw where he had last seen it at the foot of her couch. Except that now the lid lay open!
Something at once furry and slimy-damp arched against his naked leg—and again he leapt frenziedly in darkness, gibbering now as his mind teetered over vertiginous chasms.
Finally, dislodged by his threshing about, his blindfold—the red mask and black silk handkerchief he no longer dared remove of his own accord—slipped from his face ... And then his strength became as that of ten men, became such that nothing natural or supernatural could ever have held him there in that nighted cave beneath black ruins.
~ * ~
Herr Ludovic Debrec heard the roaring of the car’s engine long before the beam of its headlights swept down the black deserted road outside the inn. The vehicle rocked wildly and its tyres howled as it turned an impossibly tight corner to slam to a halt in the inn’s tiny courtyard.
Debrec was tired, cleaning up after the day’s work, preparing for the morning ahead. His handful of guests were all abed, all except the English Herr. This must be him now, but why the tearing rush? Peering through his kitchen window, Debrec recognized the car, then his weary eyes widened and he gasped out loud. But what in the name of all that... ? The Herr was naked!
The Hungarian landlord had the door open wide for Harry almost before he could begin hammering upon it, was bowled to one side as the frantic, gasping, bulge-eyed figure rushed in and up the stairs, but he had seen enough, and he crossed himself as Harry disappeared into the inn’s upper darkness.
“Mein Gott!” he croaked, crossing himself again, and yet again. “The Herr has been in that place!”
~ * ~
Despite her pills, Julia had not slept well. Now, emerging from unremembered, uneasy dreams, temples throbbing in the grip of a terrific headache, she pondered the problem of her awakening. A glance at the luminous dial of her wristwatch told her that the time was ten after two in the morning.
Now what had startled her awake? The slamming of a door somewhere? Someone sobbing? Someone crying out to her for help? She seemed to remember all of these things.
She patted the bed beside her with a lethargic gesture. Harry was not there. She briefly considered this, also the fact that his side of the bed seemed undisturbed. Then something moved palely in the darkness at the foot of the bed.
Julia sucked in air, reached out and quickly snapped on the bedside lamp. Harry lay naked, silently writhing on the floor, face down, his hands beneath him.
“Harry!” she cried, getting out of bed and going to him. With a bit of a struggle she turned him on to his side, and he immediately rolled over on his back.
She gave a little shriek and jerked instinctively away from him, revulsion twisting her features. Harry’s eyes were screwed shut now, his lips straining back from his teeth in unendurable agony. His hands held something to his heaving chest, something black and crumbly. Even as Julia watched, horrified, his eyes wrenched open and his face went slack. Then Harry’s hands fell away from his chest; in one of them, the disintegrating black thing seemed burned into the flesh of his palm and fingers. It was unmistakably a small mummified hand!
Julia began to crawl backwards away from him across the floor; as she did so something came from behind, moving sinuously where it brushed against her. Seeing it, she scuttled faster, her mouth working silently as she came up against the wall of the room.
The—creature—went to Harry, snatched the shrivelled hand from him, turned away... then, as if on an afterthought, turned back. It arched against him for a moment, and, with the short feelers around its mouth writhing greedily, quickly sank its sharp teeth into the flesh of his leg. In the next instant the thing was gone, but Julia didn’t see where it went.
Unable to tear her eyes away from Harry, she saw the veins in his leg where he had been bitten turn a deep, dark blue and stand out, throbbing beneath his marble skin. Carried by the now sluggish pulsing of his blood, the creature’s venom spread through him. But... poison? No, it was much more, much worse, than poison. For as the writhing veins came bursting through his skin, Harry began to melt. It went on for some little time, until what was left was the merest travesty of a man: a sticky, tarry thing of molten flesh and smoking black bones.
Then, ignoring the insistent hammering now sounding at the door, Julia drew breath into her starving lungs—drew breath until she thought her chest must burst—and finally expelled it all in one vast eternal scream ...
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~ * ~
A THING ABOUT CARS!
Despite all government planning—the rapid construction of multiple road systems spanning the length and breadth of the country, population transplants of the human spillover from the cities to the previously thinly peopled regions, and the conversion of many areas of wasteland into vast farming concerns—the traveller in England will somewhere, sooner or later, still stumble across the quiet backwater surviving modernity, defying time, and sometimes, when the setting is just right, radiating an aura out of tune with the day and age which, as if in resentment of the slow but ever approaching encroachment of Man’s machineries, might in certain perspective appear ominous and even frightening.
There are places like this in the Severn Valley—Goatswood and Temphill spring unpleasantly to mind—and others in the North and North-East, like Harden on the coast and Tharpe-Nettleford on the North Yorkshire border, but between a certain triangle of ancient but updated towns in the Midlands, there exists an area of some hundred square miles simply abounding with tiny villages of hoary antiquity exuding an ancient nastiness, and I cannot think back on my experience in that region without shuddering abominably and knowing again the terror I knew then.
One village in particular—which I drove through on the morning of that fateful June day not so long ago, on what I hoped was to be the final leg of my search for my poor, unfortunate brother, Arnold Goyle—seemed by its... effusions... to set the mood for the rest of the day, a mood of foreboding which began the moment I drove past the village name board and which grew, dark and oppressive, to the moment of the final horror.
The fact that I missed the name on that board hardly surprised me; as I drove along I reflected deeply on the unhappy events responsible for my brother’s withdrawal. It had started while I was serving with the forces in the Far East. At that time Arnold had been living in his own house with his small family at Woodholme in Nottingham. He was a sparse correspondent, not much given to writing unless there was something really worth saying, so that when I received that rather bulky letter from him in February of ‘48 I knew before opening the envelope that its contents would be of some import. I could never have guessed, however, of the tale of grief to be unfolded at the reading. Arnold’s marriage to Helen twelve years earlier had been possibly the most perfect and harmonious union I had ever known. To say merely that they had been “devoted” to each other would be an utter understatement, and if anything, when their only child, Alan, came along at the end of the first year, they grew even closer, and Arnold’s happiness seemed complete. The letter told of the abrupt destruction of that happiness. Helen had been run down and killed in a car accident, struck down on a pedestrian crossing by a speeding motorist. Her death had been instantaneous. The driver had had his licence taken away and been gaoled for six months; a “blind and total injustice” in Arnold’s eyes, not unnaturally, but the letter went on in what I considered—even acknowledging Arnold’s awful agony—a morbid vein of self-pity and whining hypochondria. Of course, I immediately sent my condolences, and later a second letter gently enquiring as to the course my brother intended his now necessarily altered life to take. Neither of my letters received a reply, nor did the subsequent half-dozen enquiries which I despatched at regular intervals over the next seven or eight months.
Then, when I had almost given up hope, I received another letter from Arnold, the contents of which turned out to be no less depressing than those of that other. In horror I read how Alan, Arnold’s boy, had been given a lift to school by the father of a school friend in his car, and how the car had been involved in a serious accident. It appeared that there had been oil on the road, and that the car had been travelling a little “over the limit.”
I was able to derive nothing further from this second tragic letter, for it had obviously been written while my brother was still suffering from extreme shock. The writing was barely legible, the punctuation bad even for Arnold, and the whole thing—what there was of it other than bare, terrible facts—rambled incoherently. My pity knew no bounds. Again I wrote of my shock and pain on learning of this, the completion of the destruction of Arnold’s world, and again my letter went unacknowledged. I tried to get leave of absence, a compassionate flight to England, to no avail. My Company was due to proceed on exercise and all leave, especially that of junior officers, had been cancelled.
Another year passed before the time for my release from service came round. During that period I attempted, ever in vain, to contact my brother on numerous occasions. Only once did I learn anything of his whereabouts or circumstances. That was when a mutual friend in Woodholme wrote to tell me of how Arnold had gone “into a home” for a while to convalesce. Shortly before my discharge I wrote to an address given by my friend and the result of my enquiry was information to the effect that Arnold had lately recovered from what had seemed to be a series of traumatic lapses and had been, to quote the institution, “released back into society on partial recovery.” I was supplied with his last known address.
This correspondence did not reach me until a month or so before I was due to return to England, so I made no immediate attempt to write to Arnold. It seemed pointless to do so when I could see him personally in only a few week’s time. It goes without saying that I was very worried over his welfare. He had never been a very steady type and I was afraid that the tragic loss of his family might have done him far more permanent harm than that of which I knew.
Back in England I soon discovered that Arnold no longer lived at the address given me by the institution. I was fortunate to learn, however, that he had left a forwarding address, necessary in that he seemed to receive a lot of mail. And so it was that on that morning last June I drove in search of the village of Boresby in the Midlands, and, reflecting on my reason for being there, missed the name on the village name board; but the hedgerows had been tall for many a mile, excluding all but an occasional glimpse of the surrounding country, and the road had been narrow, winding, and bumpy, demanding that I divide my attentions equally between my reflections and my driving and forget all else. Yet in a twinkling, as I passed that name board, everything changed. The condition of the road improved and its width increased slightly; the hedgerows were replaced by tall, gnarled oaks letting through only a minimum of sunlight to weirdly dapple the road; and, as I cut down my speed to adjust to the sudden near-darkness, I felt the first pangs of a lurking and centuried outsidedess. This, I fancied, was one of those places, like Temphill or Harden, where almost anything might happen, an area literally exuding strangeness, to which all manner of strangeness might therefore be expected to be drawn.
The village proper was no more than a quarter mile in length, a single street wherein the oaks in their turn gave way to high, stark garden walls of buttresslike outer proportions suggestive of immense thickness, with shady gates beyond which I could not see; and only rarely I viewed over the tops of those walls the steeply sloping, thatched roofs of the houses beyond. Many of the great walls, moss-and ivy-grown, leaned perilously towards the road with no sidewalks lining them, so that the trees overhanging from the unseen gardens helped create for me the impression of driving between immense jaws ready at any moment to snap shut. But worst of all was the fact that in the entire quarter-mile I saw only one living creature— and then not until I stopped at the ancient village post office to enquire about the location of Arnold’s address.
Inside the dim, dusty office I found a veined and elderly attendant drowsing behind a partitioned counter. He snorted into wakefulness when I let the spring-governed door slam shut behind me. This action of mine was no display of latent aggressiveness, I simply wished to demonstrate to myself my ability to shatter the leering silence; like a traveller who whistles on a dark and lonely road. It was then, from the old man, that I learned I was indeed in Boresby, and from this beginning I went on to determine the rough whereabouts of my brother’s habitat. Obtaining anything other than the most rudimentary information—mumbled directions, the mention of a wooded “T” junction and a rough track through the woods—from the slow-thinking ancient behind the counter, however, was the nearest I had ever come to extracting the proverbial “blood from a stone,” and what little he did know was passed on to me in an old, whistling, sibilant hiss of a voice which vaguely reminded me of autumn leaves blowing over early-frosted cobbles. I eventually left the post office with a number of large envelopes of the magazine-subscription type bearing Arnold’s name and address. The old attendant had reckoned that as I was going to see my brother anyway, there could be no harm in my taking his mail along with me. One of the half-dozen envelopes was torn at one corner, making the title of the publication within—Motoring Magazine— easily read. Perhaps, I conjectured, Arnold was considering buying a machine? Certainly the size and shape of the other envelopes was suggestive of like contents. Yes, it could well be, I decided, that Arnold was giving the purchase of a motorcar some consideration. And not a bad idea, what with him living in such an out-of-the-way spot. It did surprise me that my brother had not bought a machine before; yet the old man had said that Arnold usually came into the village on his bicycle. I gave the matter no further thought—not then.
Even after leaving the p
ost office and village behind—when the hedgerows again took up their march on both sides of the road, shutting out as before whatever scenery lay beyond them—the feeling of dark, oppressive effusions remained with me, as if all the poisons of unknown centuries had found a temporary outlet in that soul-disturbing region. I barely noticed the great forest growing up on my right, the increasing dappling on the road, the slow shutting out again of the sunlight, but within no more than a mile of leaving the village behind I found myself at the wooded “T” junction mentioned by the gnarled ancient at the post office. There I turned right, as directed, taking the leg of the ‘T’ and penetrating into the leafy cool of the trees. The old attendant had been unable to state exactly the location of my brother’s house—all registered addressees at the post office collected their own mail, precluding any visits to Arnold’s place—but he had told me that the track to Arnold’s house through the woods was forbidden to all unauthorized motor vehicles, and also that my brother had sole custody, was the gamekeeper and forest officer commissioned by the forestry authorities to protect the creatures of the woods and the woodlands themselves. Indeed, I shortly passed a huge, official notice board fastened to a tree, bearing a legend defining exactly the penalties to be incurred in ignoring the road’s restrictions, but then, when one’s own brother is the only authority, and when one is in a hurry, as I was, such restrictions do not mean very much. I had no doubt that Arnold would forgive me my laxity in this matter.
