Gothic Lovecraft

by Lynne Jamneck

  I think it was four days after the death of Madeline, or it may have been five, that I was awakened in the night by a crash of thunder that shook the stone walls of the house to their foundations. I blinked the colours from my eyes and sat up in bed. A lightning flash while I lay asleep had impressed itself through my closed eyelids. For several minutes I sat in the darkness, listening to the wind throw the raindrops against my window like sheets of hailstones.

  It came to me that the lightning might have struck some portion of the house and that it would be prudent to investigate, since there was no one within its walls but Usher and myself, and Usher was in no mental condition to do any kind of practical work. I put on my dressing gown and slippers and made my way by touch along the walls out the door of my room. My night vision began to return, and I was able to distinguish the hallway and the banister at its middle section that marked the upper landing of the main stairs.

  I walked the length of the hall, sniffing for smoke. This may seem an insufficient precaution, but my sense of smell is uncommonly keen. I felt confident that if anything were burning above, I would detect the odour. There was no scent of smoke. I made my way toward the stairs, meaning to descend and go outside to examine the roofs and chimney pots of the house for damage. The lightning flashed periodically, giving me confidence that I would get brief but clear views of the roofs.

  The door to Usher’s bedroom was shut. I paused outside it and listened for the sound of movement, but heard nothing above the intermittent thunder aside from the gusts of wind against the walls and the rattle of rain against the windows. There seemed no reason to disturb the sleep of my troubled friend.

  When I reached the hall, a noise drew my attention to the rear of the house, where the kitchen and storeroom were located. I stood listening at the foot of the stairs, but it did not come again, and I could not imagine what might have caused it. I wondered if Usher had been awakened by a crash of thunder and had himself descended to investigate before I left my room.

  I walked toward the kitchen, moving cautiously through the darkness, which was infrequently broken by flashes from the windows. To my surprise, the door to the cellar stood open. Usher often descended to the crypt to mourn over the coffin of his sister, but so far as I knew, he had never done so in the middle of the night, even though it was perfectly possible that he went to her while I slept. It was not a topic I dared raise with him in his present unbalanced state.

  For a time I hesitated, unsure which course to follow. I had no wish to intrude on my friend’s mourning, but neither did I dare leave him alone in the cellars at night given his fragile condition. At last I descended the stones of the cellar stair and made my way along the damp lower corridor toward the crypt. A thin band of lamplight shone from under its iron-bound door.

  While I was still a dozen paces from the door, strange noises from within the crypt made me stop and advance more slowly. The windowless door stood shut, but the gap beneath it was wide enough to permit the transmission of sounds. I laid my fingers on the chill iron of the latch, but hesitated. The noises continued. There was the rhythmic creak of wood, as though something were rocking back and forth. An image came to me of Usher, kneeling on the stone floor, rocking back and forth in the extremity of his mourning. Then I heard his grunt. It was a bestial sound, like that of a boar rooting in the mud with its snout. Without pausing to think, I pressed down on the latch and opened the door.

  You may know the common expression, one’s heart grew cold. It is more than mere words. As I stood before the door with my hand on the latch, the blood drained from my chest, and I felt a tangible chillness under my ribs, as though cool

  well water were being poured over my heart. My head began to spin, and it was only my grip on the latch that prevented me from falling. I swallowed and licked my lips, which had suddenly grown numb. With greater care than I had used to approach, I withdrew from the door, walking backward, as though from the very gateway of hell.

  10

  I was in the library when Usher found me. I needed time to think. He entered through the hall door and stopped when he saw me sitting at the reading table, my head in my hands, my fingers laced through my hair, the flame of the lamp fluttering wildly within its glass shade because in my confusion I had neglected to set the height of the wick after lighting it.

  We stared at each other through the dancing shadows. Neither of us spoke. I could find no words, and Usher’s tongue seemed frozen to the roof of his mouth. But his dark eyes spoke volumes in those voiceless minutes. I saw there shame, regret, self-loathing, remorse, frustration, anger, and defiance. “You cannot understand,” he said at last, his clear voice ringing out like rifle shots above the howl of the wind, for the storm was increasing in its fury.

  “Usher, how could you—”

  “I am the last of my line, Randolph. For the Ushers, family is everything. This house is everything. Its walls are our skin, its windows our eyes. It has endured for more than two centuries; but when I die, as I shall soon enough, there is no other of my blood to receive it or care for it.”

  My glare of revulsion softened with compassion.

  “But surely there are other women.”

  “There have been many other women. But I loved none of them. All my life I have loved only one.”

  “Such an abomination cannot be called love.”

  His laughter horrified me. It had in it the ring of madness.

  “You are like a child, Randolph. You have explored the strange land of dreams, but you have never seen the things I have seen or done what I have done. What I have with my sister is pure compared to those things. Vile, disgusting things.”

  “Your sister is dead, Roderick.”

  He stared at me, wild-eyed, as though unable to comprehend my words.

  “Madeline is dead,” I repeated more slowly, emphasising each word.

  “Yes,” he said, nodding vigorously. A bit of spittle gleamed at the corner of his mouth. “But we came so close, Randolph, so very close, she and I.”

  A crash of thunder outside the front windows of the house made us both turn at the same instant toward the sitting room. She stood framed in the dividing archway. Her white limbs were naked save for a few scraps of her burial dress which she had torn away with her fingernails. Her belly, rounded no longer, was rent by a ragged gash that streamed blood and other effluvia over her thighs and shins. The severed umbilical cord hung down between her legs. In the hooked claws of her blood-soaked hands she held something small and red that wriggled feebly and waved its tiny arms in the air. A kind of mewing sound came from its lips, weak but already demanding attention.

  In an instantaneous flash of lightning I saw more clearly that the premature fruit of her womb had other moving appendages beside its wriggling arms and legs. The motions of these false limbs were insect-like, too quick and skittering to be human. For some reason I cannot conceive I was reminded of the waving legs of a live lobster when it is dropped into a pot of boiling water. From its sloped forehead something projected that was like a single great blood-stained horn, and I know how Madeline’s belly had been opened.

  Thunder crashed with deafening force, shaking the entire house under our feet. In the wildly fluttering shadows from the lamp Usher took a step forward and reached out his hands.

  “What miracle is this?” he asked with bursting joy. “Madeline, my dear love, you live!”

  Her eyes stood open so wide their whites were visible all around their edges, and she smiled horribly, showing her teeth. A growling noise began deep in her throat and became progressively louder. As Usher took another step, she raised the writhing horror in her hands and brought it to her face as though to kiss it. A keening screech burst from its tiny mouth. With a violent jerk of her head, Madeline tore away its throat and began to chew its flesh, its blood glistening on her grinning lips and running down her chin.

  Usher screamed like a damned soul and rushed toward her. She threw the monstrous infant at his face, and when
he paused to brush it aside, she darted at him with inhuman quickness and fastened her long fingers around his neck. The two struggled. Usher seemed dazed, but Madeline was possessed of an unnatural strength. She pulled her brother’s face toward hers and bit him on the cheek while his arms flailed impotently over her hunched naked shoulders.

  It was the snapping of Usher’s neck that roused me from my trance. I made no effort to speak to this mad thing that was no longer human but ran past her through the drawing room and into the hall, where I tore open the front door and dashed into the rain and the wind. So great was the fury of the storm that I could not hear my slippered feet as they pounded across the bridge. I did not pause or look behind until I had reached the crest of the hill at the edge of the forest. Only then did I collapse to the road and turn to view the house.

  The flashes of lighting and crashing of thunder were almost continuous. By this hellish illumination I watched the main roof of the house of the Ushers fall slowly in upon itself, and after it the walls collapse inward. I blinked the rain from my eyes and squinted against the electric glare. It seemed to me that something extended itself up from the boiling waters of the tarn, which were whipped by the gusts of wind. Whatever it may have been, it was long and black, so that it was almost invisible to my sight save where the lightning was reflected from its gleaming curves. It wrapped around a chimney that still remained and, with a wrench that I heard from the hill, hurled it down into the tarn with the other building rubble.

  It is long to write of this destruction, which took only a few heartbeats to accomplish. I sat for a while in the rain, staring at the low pile of jumbled stones that had once been the ancient home of a proud family, but was now returned forever to its primal chaos. The curse of Usher was fulfilled, and the house of Usher stood no more.

  The Rolling of Old Thunder

  After R. L. Stevenson’s “The Body Snatcher”

  Mark Howard Jones

  That late summer Edinburgh had been plagued with thunderstorms, yet very little rain. It seemed to the inhabitants of the city as if the clouds were reluctant to release their balm, to ease the pressure and freshen the air. Instead the storms insisted on oppressing them, doing nothing to relieve the heat. The mornings were cool, on the other hand—cold enough for the mist to cling to the streets until mid-morning, lending them a near-spectral glow.

  The sun was many hours from burning away the mist one morning when a tightly bundled figure hurried across Surgeon’s Square. Pausing briefly, the man checked one of his pockets before disappearing down a flight of stone steps leading to an almost hidden door. Once inside, Macfarlane spent a few moments trying to brush the stink of the cramped, mist-wreathed streets from his clothes. He shook the thin layer of water droplets from his coat and hung it up. “Filthy weather again,” he complained. “You’re here early, Fettes.”

  The other man looked up from a small desk, where he was writing in a large ledger. “We had a delivery last night. I thought I’d best get things ‘tidied away.’”

  “Very diligent of you. It does you credit,” said Macfarlane. He walked over to the examination slab and pulled back the grubby sheet. The skin of the corpse was an unsettling blue. The doctor put his hand over his nose to block out the smell. “Uuugh! Hardly fresh, is it?”

  “He was hanged yesterday, according to the orderly who delivered the poor unfortunate fellow,” said Fettes. His companion snorted in obvious disbelief.

  Fettes looked down with distaste at the black tongue and swollen face so typical of a victim of hanging. He’d seen so many hanged criminals come through this place over the years that he’d almost forgotten what the face of someone who’d died peacefully looked like.

  “The head goes to Richardson again, I suppose?” he asked.

  Macfarlane nodded. “I hesitate to speculate why he has such a liking for the human cranium. I have no idea what he expects to find in there.

  “The soul maybe.” Fettes saw himself as a rational man, who looked down on those holding religious beliefs as being worthy of nothing but pity. “Well, after all, his father was a preacher, wasn’t he?”

  Richardson sat in Mr. Killian’s class later that day, gazing glumly down as the surgeon explained the intricacies of the blood vessels running through the arm.

  Though the topic did not excite him much, Richardson knew that the mechanics of medicine had to be mastered if he was to become anything more than a merely competent doctor. Competence was anathema to him; he demanded far more of himself.

  The stink of the cadaver laid before the students as they clustered around the dissection table was nearly overpowering. One, a young Englishman called Purcell, had already succumbed to the lethal combination of summer heat and the stench. Richardson wasn’t about to follow him.

  He watched as the surgeon parted a delicate blue vein from its shiny, fragile moorings, all the while explaining the function of the circulatory system in the anatomy of the arm.

  Poking about in rotting flesh seemed an odd path to take to become a doctor, he thought. Indeed, it was an uncomfortable and vaguely obscene route into medicine, it seemed to him. Yet what other method was open to them? They had to have material to work on. There was no other way to learn.

  There were even dark rumours of two detestable Irishmen, low types who weren’t beyond the practice of rudely “resurrecting” those recently laid to rest. It caused him acute discomfort to think that the heights of science might be built on a foundation of filthy business conducted in graveyards and cellars. Yet like his fellow students, Richardson put whatever qualms he had to one side in the name of medicine and advancement, both scientific and personal.

  When he was being honest with himself, Richardson admitted that, like his father before him, he hoped for resurrection. Not the feeble promises of his Christian counterparts, nor yet the unholy desecrations meted out by the so-called Resurrection Men, but something that spoke of true glory and a return to man’s original form.

  And now, finally, he was certain he’d found the means to achieve his goal.

  “All right gentlemen, you may resume your seats.” Killian’s words broke the spell, and the students all drifted listlessly back to their seats in the hot stench of freshly gained knowledge.

  As they all filed out of the lecture room, Richardson glanced around at his fellow students. They seemed so small—both their bodies and their ambitions. They might as well be animated wax simulacra for all the good they’ll ever do, he thought.

  In his mind, he turned the book of miracles over and over in his hands, just as he’d done in his room last evening, relishing the uncommon texture of its strange binding. Its contents were a map to a hidden domain of strange and wonderful learning.

  Why spend his time labouring with the other worker bees when he could be brilliant, celebrated? He might know in mere moments what it would take them years to discover— and then go on to learn far, far more than they would ever know.

  He had the two keys that could open these unimagined new avenues of knowledge—the book and his serum, which alone allowed him to decipher it.

  Outside the sky was heavy and threatening yet still, reminding Richardson of a hastily painted backdrop to a lacklustre play.

  Although he was a Highlander and not a native of Auld Reekie, Richardson had grown to feel at home in the place. He’d even been known to seek out some of the more disreputable taverns, where he’d find a secluded corner if possible, there to nurse a glass of ale and watch the behaviour of the inhabitants. He’d sit and watch their pleasures and their torments pass by like a spectator at the circus or, perhaps more accurately he often thought, a visitor to the zoo. The pastimes, half bestial and half angelic, of the tavern’s habitues fascinated him.

  He often pondered on what kept mankind in this semi-animal state. Surely it couldn’t be natural? He returned to his studies with renewed vigour following a visit to the dirty, rowdy taverns. Then he was more determined than ever to release the secrets that lay locked withi
n each person’s head.

  In his anatomy classes, he handled the cadavers with a degree of dismay at how life could be reduced to these cold, dead remnants. He’d asked Mr. Killian for the opportunity to study the brain as his area of specialism. The head of each corpse was duly delivered to his table, though he was always glad to extract the cold, white orbs and pass them to another student to study. His area of interest lay behind the eyes.

  The more he’d studied the pine cone–shaped structure buried deep within the brain, the more he’d become convinced that the overlooked pineal gland, as small as it was, held the key to opening new horizons for mankind.

  Like the Frenchman Descartes before him, he was fascinated by the strange little structure. But he’d gone far further than the illustrious philosopher ever had in probing its secrets. With only the simplest of scientific instruments available to him in his humble lodgings, Richardson had made the best of his situation. Fortunately all the hard work could be done at the anatomy class.

  It took the secretions of the pineal glands of two average-sized adults to prepare the formula he needed. There was, of course, no other method open to him than to experiment upon himself. He knew it was a great risk, but in his mind the potential rewards more than outweighed any danger.

  One remarkable piece of equipment was available to him. Less than a decade ago, Dr. Alexander Wood had created the device not so far from the poor lodgings in which Richardson now sat. The hypodermic syringe that he’d “borrowed” from the dissection room allowed him to administer the formula himself. Without it he would almost certainly have needed assistance, and that would not do. This was a road he knew he had to travel alone.