“Yes, yes, what is it?” barked Uncle Giles impatiently.
“A message for you sir,” said Bruce, unperturbed.
Uncle Giles snatched the note from his hands and tore it open. I could see the crumpled paper shaking visibly in his hands. Abruptly he whirled toward me and screamed furiously. “Get out! Out! I must be alone to think, to plan!”
“But Uncle Giles, I think I really ought to stay and…”
“Leave me!” he shouted.
After my uncle’s abrupt dismissal, I needed some time to clear my thoughts and wandered outdoors for some fresh air. Slowly, I wandered beneath the arcing boughs of the great oaks and maples that edged the immediate environs of the house and in a little while I began to feel like myself again.
I’d been walking for about a half hour along a trail that meandered into the nearby forest when the ground began to slope upward and I realized that I’d reached the foot of the hill where the private cemetery was located. Ahead of me, I could see the old gravestones leaning crazily against some unseen wind. Slowly, I began to make my way among them, glancing at the faded inscriptions until I stumbled onto that of Ruth Wilcox. Shiny and erect, inscribed simply with a name and no dates, the stone communicated coldness and a love that had withered and died. What exactly had gone on between my uncle and his wife? Was she murdered over a simple paranoiac impulse or was there more to it than that? The police should be informed of course, no matter my uncle’s excuses. A woman was dead after all…
With a light rain beginning fall, I suddenly no longer felt alone on the hill.
Turning, I spotted Stout leaning under a nearby tree.
“It’s only me, Mr. Cole, sorry about the fright,” he said over the gentle hiss of the falling rain. “Why don’t you join me over here, out of the rain.”
I saw no reason why not and stepped beneath the protective canopy of the tree.
“Bruce told me you were headed this way.”
“Did you want me for something?” I really wasn’t in the mood for talking about South Pacific fetishes.
“As a matter of fact, I do. Have you come out here to see the grave?”
The question caught me by surprise. “Yes.”
“Then Giles has already told you.”
“Told me what?” I asked, not wanting to tip my hand too soon.
“Why, about his wife’s death of course.”
Stout obviously knew or at least guessed more than he let on. I was surprised, but decided to play dumb. I still didn’t trust him after all. “Only that she fell down a flight of stairs.”
“Come now, Mr. Cole, don’t mince words with me.”
Stout looked me steadily in the eyes and I knew I wasn’t fooling him. “All right. How do you know? Have you been listening in on our private conversations?”
“You can do better than that, Mr. Cole!” There was no hint of insult in his voice, only impatience.
“Has he told you?”
“Of course,” he replied. “And what did you think of it all?”
I didn’t reply right away. I was still reluctant to give too much away.
“Look,” he said, seeming to take a different tack. “I might as well level with you. At this point, it can’t hurt.”
“What can’t hurt?” Stout’s attitude was really beginning puzzle me. He seemed to know more than I did, in fact, he seemed to have known whatever it was that I didn’t all along. But what exactly was it that he knew?
“That I never found those marble fetishes, never found even the L’isle Mystere.” He laughed shortly.
“I don’t understand…”
“What say I tell you the whole story in one fell swoop?” He’d taken a deep breath, straightened and dug his hands deeper into the pockets of his coat.
“All right,” I said. The wind had picked up a bit, tearing leaves from the tree overhead.
“First of all, I’m not an explorer, but a physician…a psychiatrist. I came to visit with your uncle some months ago and noticed his odd behavior…you saw a sample of it last night. I suspected it had something to do with the recent death of his wife and being his friend, invited myself to stay on a bit to keep him under observation until you arrived. It was at my suggestion that he invite you here and he agreed. Unfortunately, he soon changed his mind, but it was too late. You’d already left home. Embarrassed with my presence, Giles asked me to pose as an explorer friend so you wouldn’t suspect his nervous condition. I agreed and used some of his latest discoveries to complete my masquerade.”
“No wonder I’d never heard of you before.”
“Quite. Anyway, after meeting you and seeing your genuine concern for Giles, I decided that it would be best for everyone if I dropped my pose and filled you in on the situation. Together, I’d hoped we could help Giles overcome this brooding fear that seems to dominate his thoughts.”
“I’m glad you’ve come clean, doctor…I’m assuming Stout is your real name?” He nodded. “But at the moment, I’m afraid I can’t add much to the situation. I don’t know anything as to the reasons why my uncle did what he did. That is, if he really did murder his wife…?”
“I’m not even sure of that myself,” admitted Stout. “We only have his word for the deed and in his current emotional condition, it could very well have been an accident after all. He could be blaming himself as part of a guilt complex for not being able to do anything to prevent the fall.”
“That makes more sense than his ramblings about other intelligences and their plans to conquer the human race,” I said, not a little relieved at the welcome intrusion of sanity on the situation.
“Maybe if we went up to see him together, we could get him to talk about what’s really bothering him?” I suggested.
“My thoughts exactly.”
The gentle rainfall had become a torrent with lightning occasionally flashing across the heavens by the time we entered the house and made our way to the study. There, we found Uncle Giles sitting dejectedly in a chair, a defeated man.
So absorbed was he in depression that he didn’t even notice that we’d entered the room. Clicking the door shut softly behind us, Stout cleared his throat.
“Giles,” Stout began as my uncle lifted his head. “I’ve had a long talk with your nephew here and in short, there’s no longer any need for subterfuge.” There was a noncommittal grunt from my uncle. “Up to now, I’d intended to take the easy approach in working through the grief process with you, but after your display last night and the behavior described by your nephew that took place this morning, I must insist that the whole matter be brought out into the open and discussed frankly.”
“So, it’s a candid discussion you want, is it?” asked Uncle Giles, in a voice that was suddenly quite firm.
We each nodded.
Leaning back in his chair, Uncle Giles took a deep breath and considered, then began.
“Gentlemen, man is not alone on the earth,” he said. “He shares it with others. Others who, quite possibly, have a prior claim to it. In effect, they were here first. No, let me finish! As you know, I’ve made a career of exploring the globe, poking my nose in the most obscure of corners, L’isle Mystere being only the last. I had long since come to the conclusion that man shares his home with malign and vast intelligences that are not at all disposed to trafficking in any way with us. And although these…things, seem to come in a confusing and senseless variety of shapes, unlike man, they seem to act in a strange concert. Personally, I had never come into actual contact with any of these beings, but a fellow researcher and correspondent of mine, a Henry W. Akeley, did. In his last letters to me dated almost ten years ago, he described evidence found in rural Vermont of a certain race of terrible creatures that mined the old mountains in the area of his home. For what mineral these ‘Outer Ones,’ as he called them, mined, he was never able to ascertain. But he was able to identify the sounds they made to communicate with one another. A sort of clicking and buzzing…”
Here he interrupted his na
rrative with an audible gulp. “Soon after, Akeley’s letters ceased and my work carried me overseas. I was not reminded of the matter until after I had met and married my wife, Ruth, upon my return from L’isle Mystere. I had known her for years through her job at a Post Office in a neighboring town where I used to go to mail my correspondence. Although her mannerisms were stiff and her speech halting, we nevertheless seemed to develop a rapport, an old recluse and an old maid together. The wedding itself was a simple affair and we came straight back here, we’d never planned a honeymoon you see. That night, I was here reading until late. I hadn’t realized the lateness of the hour and when I did, I immediately thought of Ruth. It was our wedding night after all, and I figured the poor thing was waiting for me upstairs but too shy to interrupt me while I was reading. Feeling a bit guilty for neglecting her, I went upstairs and entered the bedroom on tiptoe in case she’d fallen asleep. But imagine my surprise after approaching the bed to find it empty! Naturally, I wondered where Ruth had gone to and decided to go and find her. Perhaps she’d gone down to the kitchen for a cup of tea. I’d only reached the landing on the back staircase when I heard her voice as it drifted up from downstairs. Wondering who she could be talking to, I descended the stairs until I could see the moonlight from the kitchen windows as it spilled across the room. Crouching there, I heard Ruth apparently answering questions put to her by someone who’s voice I could not recognize. Although my first impulse was to descend the stairs and confront this person, something restrained me from doing so. Thus it was that I was able to hear the stranger’s voice, which was not a voice at all but a series of buzzing, clicking, droning sounds…which Ruth replied to in kind! Suddenly, I felt myself break out into a cold sweat and unwanted, the realization dawned on me that I was hearing the same voices heard by Akeley in the hollows of those Vermont mountains. In that moment, all the horror of Akeley’s account of the creatures in the Vermont hills that had escaped me ten years before, revisited me in their full force. And Ruth seemed to be in league with them! Slowly, dazedly, I half-crawled, half-crept back up the stairs, praying fervently not to see what body belonged to that hellish voice. I crouched there at the top of the stairs with only a hall lamp throwing its feeble glare across the corridor, and the faraway drone of that voice ringing dully in my ears. I was so distracted that I never noticed when the dim light from the kitchen had been extinguished. What finally caught my attention was the sound of the kitchen door being stealthily opened, and a rhythmic clicking sound that suggested the shambling gait of an ambulatory creature with feet of tough, bony construction like the appendages of some fantastic crab. All I can think of now is that I must have been slightly mad then, because my first reaction upon my wife’s appearance at the top of the stairs was to shove her back in a blind, unthinking panic. I…don’t know exactly what happened then, I think that I must have blacked out because when I came to my senses, there was Ruth, at the bottom of the stairs, grotesquely twisted, her spine shattered.
“You know of course that she lived for two days following the ‘accident’ unable to speak, and that after a brief wake, for appearances sake, I buried her myself. But although she was gone, the horror continued. Since her death, I’ve been plagued with phone calls, letters, and notes threatening me, cajoling me, flattering me to abandon my home here, presumably so that they, the Outer Ones, can begin their mining operation in the surrounding hills as they have in Vermont. With each contact I find myself losing self-control. They’ve done hellish things to people in the neighborhood; nothing I could prove however, and heaven knows what they did to Ruth to gain her cooperation. They’ll stop at nothing, and killing a person is the least that they’re capable of. And now that you’ve been warned, I’m warning you, if you value your lives, your sanity, get out!”
But Stout and I were left speechless after my uncle’s inane story. Clearly, his paranoia was completely out of control.
“Leave here and don’t come back!” he shouted, oblivious to our reactions to his tale. “It’s not worth the…” at that point the phone rang and my uncle jumped to his feet and snatched for the receiver.
From where I stood, I could plainly hear a sort of buzzing sound from the earpiece.
“No! Leave me alone! I’ll never surrender my home! Stay away!” shouted my uncle into the receiver. Then, slamming it onto its cradle, he threw the phone violently across the room.
Shocked at this total loss of temper, I had to try and calm him down.
“Uncle Giles! Please relax…”
“Shut up! If you refuse to accept the danger you’re in, you leave me with no choice.”
Then, with as little warning as that, Uncle Giles flung himself through a nearby window, glass shattering, and dashed himself to death on the broken flagstones two stories below. He’d acted so suddenly, that neither Stout nor I had time to divine his intentions let alone to stop him. For a few moments, all I could do was stare in horror at the broken window, not moving until a white faced Stout beckoned me to the phone he’d retrieved from the floor. Placing the receiver to my ear, I heard a grotesque parody of human speech mingled with what I can only describe as an unearthly buzzing or clicking sound that repeated my uncle’s name over and over again. I looked at Stout, that buzzing still emanating from the earpiece, and knew we were thinking the same thing. However the human voice can be disguised, it was impossible to even entertain the thought for a second that what I’d heard was anything but the voice of hell itself.
The rest of the day was a blur to me as Stout and I gathered up the body of my uncle and laid him upon his own bed, dismissed Bruce with a handsome retainer that would see him to his grave, and fortified ourselves liberally from the bar.
Finally, before we called in the police, Stout suggested what he’d had in mind to do since my uncle first confessed to him his murder of Ruth Wilcox; the disinterment of the body. Despite my emotional exhaustion, I agreed to accompany him to the grave holding aloft an electric lamp as he worked the spade. Though the rain had eased by dusk, taking the wind with it, I was still chilled and shaking when Stout finally cleared the moist soil from the lid of the coffin.
I stared in morbid fascination as he pried it open with the spade and motioned for me to hold the lamp closer. At first, the light revealed nothing more terrible than what I’d expected to see, the emaciated, dehydrated body of Ruth Wilcox, hands folded across her chest; but as I brought the light along her body to her feet, Stout gasped and staggered back, scrambling from the pit, falling and stumbling along the hill as he ran for the house. Clenching the lamp handle tightly, I leaned forward, riveted there at the grave despite every instinct that told me to run. Just as the light shone on the corpse’s feet I saw a sight that blasted my senses; I reeled, dropping the lantern. I think I screamed. I don’t know. All I remember is running, running… and the old house burning beyond the trees. I ran because the sight of Ruth Wilcox’s feet showed that they were not feet at all. Where the fiendishly designed skin of her human feet lay beside them in a hideously wrinkled heap, I saw not human feet but the chitinous footpads of some monstrous human crab!
Despite my emotional exhaustion, I agreed to accompany him to the grave holding aloft an electric lamp as he worked the spade. Though the rain had eased by dusk, taking the wind with it, I was still chilled and shaking when Stout finally cleared the moist soil from the lid of the coffin.
t of rain.
Second Death
nton Zarnak enjoyed autumn in New England. Though it was late in the season now with the colorful leafage long since gone, the grayish forests standing against overcast skies and empty, stubbled fields that characterized the countryside still held a somber beauty of their own.
Just now, he was motoring up Interstate 495 heading north to Arkham and the campus of Miskatonic University. His office in Manhattan had received a call from a Dr. Aaron Stillnor, director of the Pickerton Rehabilitation Hospital, requesting help on a case involving a patient who had recently emerged from a coma. It seemed th
e patient…Zarnak reached over and slipped a chart out from a folder on the seat beside him…a Charles Danforth, had been in a comatose state for almost forty years before suddenly coming to his senses a few weeks ago.
Danforth had been a resident of the hospital since 1962 when family members asked that he be transferred from the Danvers State Insane Asylum. Before agreeing to extend his consultative services, Zarnak decided to conduct a little research at the New York Public Library and was surprised to discover that Danforth had been a member of the tragic Dyer Expedition that Miskatonic University had sent to explore the region beyond the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. That was in 1930, before the age of satellites and such when exploration still meant wooden ships and dog sleds. The Dyer Expedition, however, had been equipped with the most modern conveniences including a few Dornier airplanes and the latest drilling apparatus. In any case, the expedition met disaster when an advanced party was killed…presumably from harsh weather…with starving sled dogs unfortunately digging out the bodies before relief arrived in the person of the expedition’s leader and Charles Danforth.
The remnants of the advance campsite were found by the later Starkweather-Moore Expedition of 1935, an effort initially opposed by Prof. William Dyer in a monograph filled with what the kindest critic might describe as delusions inspired by Antarctic isolation and shock at the condition of the bodies found at the advanced campsite.
Although the existence of a megalithic city described by Dyer in his monograph was confirmed by Starkweather-Moore, its conclusions as to its origins were at variance with those of the professor who claimed they were millions of years old and built by some pre-human race from another planet. The stone construction and reliance on the arch as a key component of its architecture alone precluded any belief that the city was built by a culture any more advanced than the Romans. In fact, it had been the conclusion of academics as far back as the late 1930s that the stone city was likely built by ancestors of cultures represented by the builders of Machu Picchu or Teotihuacan.
Goat Mother and Others: The Collected Mythos Fiction of Pierre Comtois Page 32
