Goat Mother and Others: The Collected Mythos Fiction of Pierre Comtois

by Pierre V. Comtois

  “Of course, but I can’t promise she’ll say yes.”

  “Understood. I’ll see you Monday.”

  Zarnak spent the weekend consulting with his friend Jules de Grandin, who steered him to a specialist named Stephen Strange, for information regarding the more offbeat details of the Geddes case.

  On Monday morning, he took his BMW roadster from the garage and left the city. It was a sunny day and, as buildings gave way to greenery, he took the time to enjoy the bucolic pleasures of the Long Island countryside. Following a brief stop for lunch, he soon arrived at the town of King’s Park where Resthaven was situated atop a low hill surrounded by great expanses of park-like lawn and copses of pine trees. He was breezed through the front gate by a security guard who had been told to expect him and drove up the long, curving approach to the old Horvath Manse that had been left to Dr. Ilya Lanewski at the turn of the century for use as one of the area’s first modern lunatic asylums.

  Zarnak almost regretted going indoors on such a beautiful day, but resigned himself. Inside, a pretty, plain-clothed nurse showed him to Scopes’ office. Zarnak favored her with a smile.

  “Right on time, Anton,” said Scopes rising. “We’ll waste no time; follow me.”

  Zarnak was led through a series of well-appointed corridors, obviously Horvath possessions kept in place to provide as normal a setting as possible for the patients. Examination rooms to the sides were similarly furnished as comfortable dens or small studies. In a few minutes however, they left these cozy surroundings and entered a more antiseptic wing of the hospital, a new addition to the facility placed in the rear of the Horvath mansion where it could not be seen from the road. Here, patients’ rooms were small cubicles secured by heavy doors, the halls were bare except for being painted in combinations of soothing colors. At last, they halted before one of the doors and Scopes handed Zarnak a clipboard tracking Geddes’ therapy sessions, medicine intake and behavioral symptoms over the previous week.

  “Has he been violent?” asked Zarnak, handing the board to a nearby orderly.

  “No,” said Scopes. “As I said before, my judgment is that he’s perfectly harmless to himself and anyone else except when it comes to his own son.”

  “He’s never given us any trouble, Doctor,” confirmed the orderly.

  “Very well, then. Will you introduce us?”

  Scopes nodded and knocked at the door. “Henry, this is Dr. Scopes, I have a visitor for you. Can we come in?”

  “Of course, Doctor,” came the reply.

  Scopes opened the door and stepped inside. “How are you this morning Henry? I’ve brought Dr. Zarnak to see you as I mentioned a few days ago.”

  Zarnak had followed Scopes inside the small room, which was well lit by an east facing window (covered on the outside by a heavy security screen) and filled but not crowded by small items of furniture.

  “How do you do Mr. Geddes?” said Zarnak, scrutinizing the man closely. He was of medium height, slightly pale (to be expected after a lengthy hospital stay), and relaxed.

  For his part, Geddes fastened Zarnak in a steady stare, brown eyes scrutinizing him carefully from beneath a furrowed brow.

  “How do you do, Doctor,” he said. “If you’ve come to give a second opinion about me, I’m afraid you’ll get nothing more than what the good Dr. Scopes here got. Namely, that I’m not insane.”

  “You jump to conclusions, Mr. Geddes,” said Zarnak, taking a chair. “I’m here neither to pass judgment nor to offer opinion, but simply to observe and offer some advice if I can.”

  “Are you telling me that you’re absolutely objective; that if you had any notions about me you’d keep them to yourself, no matter how strongly you felt about them? You’re only human after all, Doctor.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” conceded Zarnak, impressed.

  “Regardless of just why Dr. Scopes brought you here, I want you to know that I am not out of my mind. I’m as sane as you are, to paraphrase a hundred bad movies.”

  “That may be so,” said Zarnak, “but how does your assertion square with the actions resulting in your being sent to Resthaven?”

  Geddes paused a moment, took a deep breath and continued. “I suppose my words and deeds of six months ago could be construed as unreasonable by any normal person. I can see that. But they were well grounded in fact; I had my reasons for what I did.”

  “And what were those reasons, Mr. Geddes?”

  “I had to kill my son to save him from a fate worse than continued life. He suffers from the Meir taint, Dr. Zarnak. I suffer from the same taint. To continue living under such a curse would be worse than death, it would be a living death! Each of us condemned to a lifetime of growing and ever-worsening imbecility and degeneracy! The Meir line came to an end decades ago, as well it should have, and I have every intention of making sure that it’s curse ends with my own generation.”

  “Then you would end your own…”

  “I fully intend to follow my son into oblivion.”

  Zarnak fell silent a moment as he absorbed this extraordinary delusion. “You say you and your son suffer from a ‘taint,’ where did you get this information? Have you always been aware of it or…”

  “Yes and no. If I had known of its significance, do you think I would have waited so long to act? Do you think I would have had the irresponsibility of bringing a child into the world under such a curse? No, I only recognized the taint for what it was after I moved into the Meir house nearly a year ago now.”

  “Just what is this ‘taint’ Mr. Geddes?”

  “Don’t patronize me, Doctor,” Geddes said with rising anger.

  Zarnak decided not pursue this obviously dangerous point.

  “And what was it that brought this all to your attention?”

  “My ancestor, Georg Meir, had left behind a number of personal papers and diaries, it was after reading them that I learned to recognize the family’s distinguishing feature… but why discuss it all? You’ll never believe me anyway.” Geddes turned in frustration and paced to the window.

  There was silence then, and sensing that the interview was at an end, Zarnak rose. “This has been a most enlightening conversation Mr. Geddes. Thank you for your time.” The patient grunted without turning from the window.

  “Were you able to make anything out of what Geddes said?” asked Scopes when he and Zarnak were out in the corridor again.

  “Somewhat,” replied Zarnak. “Were you able to make those arrangements for my visit to Mrs. Geddes?”

  “Yes, but is there any need for disturbing her? She’s still upset over this whole situation.”

  “That may be so, but if we are to get to the bottom of this mystery, I must examine the papers Geddes mentioned.”

  “Surely you don’t give credence to his assertion that secret knowledge found in his uncle’s library was enough to drive him to kill his son do you?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Zarnak. “But I do know that something has challenged Geddes’s belief system and he has surrendered to it. Evan, that man you have back there is not insane!”

  3. Sin of the Fathers

  Late the following evening, Zarnak arrived at the Geddes home. It was large, ornate as only a house built by the affluent early in the last century could be, and huddled frog-like in a thick forest of second-growth trees. Here and there amid the growth, one could see an ancient gazebo, a tumble-down carriage house, a splintered outhouse, a nearly invisible barn; the property, it seemed, had not been tended for a good many years. Lights were burning on the ground floor and Zarnak noticed an electrical wire or two strung from the house to a nearby pole that eventually led back to the county road beyond the trees.

  Zarnak had left Resthaven for Lefferts Corners immediately following his interview with Henry Geddes armed with a letter of introduction from Scopes to Geddes’ wife. The drive north had proved long but uneventful. He had called Mrs. Geddes from a restaurant in Lefferts Corners where he had eaten supper, and came on at h
er insistence that he spend the night at the house.

  Now Zarnak was slamming down the hood to the BMW’s trunk and, travel bag in hand, mounted the wooden steps to the front door. There was a bell pull and he used it. Presently a shadow moved across the light shining through the small paned, stained glass of the door and a voice asked, “Who is it?” He gave his name and slid the letter of introduction through the mail slot. At last, the door opened and the voice said “Please do come in, Doctor.”

  Zarnak did that, doffing his hat as he did so. Inside, it was warm and well lit and he could see that quite a bit of work must have been done on the house before Geddes’’ breakdown.

  “Let me take your things,” said Mrs. Geddes, an attractive woman wearing plaid shirt and loose fitting jeans. Her hair was slightly disheveled. She could not have been older than thirty. “Won’t you come into the parlor?” she said turning from the hall closet. “How was your trip? Did you have a hard time finding the house?”

  “Only moderately, I’m familiar with the upstate area,” Zarnak replied, following her into the parlor. A tray and coffee pot were waiting there for them. They sat down as Mrs. Geddes poured some coffee without bothering to ask him if he would care for any.

  “Dr. Scopes says you’re some kind of expert?”

  “Of a sort, yes. I hold a number of degrees from different universities and Dr. Scopes and I studied together in Germany.”

  “I notice you didn’t answer my question, Doctor,” said Mrs. Geddes handing him a cup of coffee. “But that’s all right. All I’m really interested in is your opinion of my husband. How is he? Will he be all right?”

  “Mrs. Geddes…”

  “Please call me Sondra, Mrs. Geddes makes me sound so old.”

  Zarnak smiled. “Sondra, it is my opinion that your husband is perfectly fine. He is not insane. But he does suffer from some inexplicable delusion that, he believes, necessitates the death of your son.”

  “Well, forgive my ignorance Doctor, but that sounds insane to me.”

  “Whatever a person does or thinks that is out of the ordinary has always been considered ‘insane’ by larger society, but in your husband’s case, I believe that he has been exposed to a number of facts, and has aligned them in such a manner that he was forced to come to a single conclusion. No matter how inexplicable others may find his insistence that your son must die, to him it is perfectly logical. The way to cure your husband of this delusion, I feel, is to learn the facts that have led him on this train of thought and convince him of the error in his logic. That done, he must admit he drew the wrong conclusions and cure himself so to speak.”

  “You make it sound so simple.”

  “Although the human mind is an extremely complex organism, and contrary to what others, and particularly those in my own profession, sometimes say, many of its problems do have simple solutions. Tell me a bit about why you decided to seek help for your husband?”

  “Well, I’m sure I can’t provide any more information than Dr. Scopes probably gave you,” said Mrs. Geddes, “but I think my husband’s breakdown began slowly over the course of time and not suddenly.”

  “Were there any indications of this coming breakdown before you moved to this house? Were you having any marital problems, family difficulties, pressures of any kind before then?”

  “Only the ordinary stresses and strains of any normal marriage. No, I’m sure the problem began only after we moved here. At first, everything was fine. For the first four or five months we worked fixing up the place, we could see it was a gorgeous house even under all the neglect, then, in that last month, Henry began to change, at first in subtle ways, then he became more antic, more unpredictable and short tempered.”

  “What was different in your lives after moving here than before? Anything at all?”

  “Nothing except maybe the gloomy surroundings of the forest and such, maybe we were a bit more isolated. But I’m sure that couldn’t be it. I know that Henry began spending more time in the library. He’d found all sorts of personal papers and such belonging to his distant relative, Georg Meir…”

  “How long ago did he develop the delusion that your son must be destroyed?”

  “Oh, I don’t…well I remember he began to say things like he had the Meir look, that he had to look into that. Then he began watching little Luke, not watching him like a parent ought to, but studying him, staring at him as if he was waiting for him to make some expected move, waiting for him to do something that would give him away…but that’s silly, it’s just something I’ve started dwelling on these past…”

  “No, no, Sondra. The mind is a very intuitive organ, it correlates data and sometimes it allows the sub-conscious to arrive at conclusions faster than the conscious mind. That sub-conscious may be trying to tell you something. Now this strange behavior culminated in…what exactly?”

  “Well, I had been growing more nervous with every passing day, Henry had begun to have a strange, wild look in his eyes. And then…on that night…I woke up and found that Henry was not in bed. I got up to check on Luke and when I did, I caught Henry…he was leaning over Luke with a pillow clutched in his hands. He was going to suffocate him! I screamed, grabbed Luke from the bed and ran from house. The next thing I realized, I was at the police station in my night gown. I…well, they came for Henry the next day. He was still at home.”

  “Did he say anything about the reason for his actions?”

  “Something about how he had to kill Luke for his own good or something.”

  Zarnak replaced his cup on the tray and leaned back in his chair. There was silence a moment.

  “I’ve upset you, I know,” he said at last. “Why don’t you retire early tonight and if you don’t mind, I’d like to go through some of the things in the library.”

  “You think Henry got those ‘facts’ you were talking about earlier from some of Georg Meir’s papers?” She was quick. Under other circumstances, Zarnak might have considered pursuing such a woman.

  “You’ve read my mind.”

  She laughed then. “That’s a funny line coming from a psychologist! Well then, I’ll leave you to your research. Everything is just as Henry left it. When you’re ready to go to bed, I’ve prepared the room just off the library for you, you can’t miss it. Oh, and take the coffee pot with you.”

  “Thank you, that’s a good idea.”

  After placing his things in the guest room, Zarnak poured himself another cup of coffee and moved behind the big desk that dominated the library. Around him, old books were ranged on shelves that rose to the high ceiling. Some were of newer manufacture, obviously belonging to Henry Geddes. Others, Zarnak noticed with misgiving, were volumes of questionable content, books of sorcery and black magic long banned by sensible authorities.

  He lit the reading lamp over the desk and saw that its surface was littered with old papers yellowing with time and small notebooks filled with neat handwriting. Georg Meir’s private papers he presumed. He sat down and began ordering material by date; that done, he spent the next several hours reading through them. When he had finished, he found that most of the information contained in the old papers and diaries substantially matched that of the news reports he had read at the New York Public Library.

  The Martense and Meir lines had degenerated into incest and mongrelization nearly a century ago, until the families eventually vanished. But people, especially whole families, just do not disappear, they go somewhere, even if it is into other family units. But in the case of the Martense and Meir lines, there was no evidence that they had ever merged with other local families. In fact, the people round about shunned and feared the two clans because of their insular and eccentric ways. So where did they go? Zarnak believed he had the answer. There were hints in some of the papers of “deep cellars” beneath the Martense and Meir properties that, in fact, the tunnels that honeycombed the area were the very reason that the families built their homes here. Through the papers, the news articles and scattered informa
tion provided by Dr. Strange, Zarnak deduced that far from vanishing, the degenerate remains of the Meir family had retreated to these “deep cellars” and never reemerged. It was his intention to explore the house basement to find the entrance to these catacombs.

  There was one other thing. He had discovered what Henry Geddes had meant by the Meir “taint.”

  Zarnak retreated to the bedroom and took a flashlight from his travel bag. He pocketed some extra batteries. Going back into the darkened parlor, he found the door to the basement where he expected it beneath the front stairway. He pushed it open and found a light switch on the wall. He flipped it on and immediately the gloom below became lit in the sickly yellow glow of a bare bulb just visible beyond the end of the staircase. At the bottom, Zarnak saw that the floor was bare earth with here and there, naked ledge clearly exposed. There was evidence of some storage but not of a recent variety, the dank of the basement would have damaged any items of a more modern manufacture. Parts of the basement were divided by a wooden framework stapled over with chicken wire and overhead, the ancient beams were choked with cobwebs.

  In a few minutes, Zarnak had arrived at the furthest reaches of the basement where the flooring was all of rock that gently sloped toward the corner of the house. A few moldy boxes and barrels of wood were enough to hide the cavern entrance beyond as the top of its arched entrance barely rose above the level the floor. Zarnak shone the beam of his flashlight into its inky depths but saw nothing. So this was the “deep cellar.” It was incredible that human beings could actually retreat there to live, but if the accounts were to be believed, the Meir’s did exactly that. Whether any of them were still alive, Zarnak now intended to find out.

  Slowly, he negotiated the uneven slope to the entrance of the cave; he played the beam of his flashlight inside, but again saw nothing. In another moment, he was swallowed up within its confines and almost immediately, he came upon evidence of human habitation. But by the appearance of scattered bones and such bits of metal as a belt buckle and buttons, it had been many years, perhaps decades, since anyone had disturbed them. He continued on. Time passed. According to his watch, he had been walking for nearly an hour in total silence except for the scuffling of his own feet on the uneven floor when the tunnel widened into a large cavern where his beam had difficulty reaching the opposite end. A thin stream of water, heavy with sediment, passed through one corner of the room and on the shelf of rock that sloped up from its bank, Zarnak was able to see the terrible fate that had finally caught up to the vanished Meir clan.