Where the yellow light fell against my skin, it burned, as though I had been exposed for too long to sunlight that was stained and dirty. Its source was not in the first room, which contained just the old sofa, but in the room beyond, through a second doorway in the far wall. I moved towards it, trying to shield my face and skin against the light, hating the way it felt against me and the way my eyes watered despite its apparent weakness. Something dark moved in the heart of the light, thrashing against that weak glare, writhing. Sandra made a choking sound and said, “Mummy,” and then fell silent, and I could do nothing but run to her, crying her name.
The next room wasn’t a room at all, but something else. I can’t explain what, exactly, but it was vast, cavernous, somewhere that glowed and raged with flames and stank of loss. The space dropped away from the doorway, falling an impossible distance from me and rising an impossible distance above me. It wasn’t an open space, however, but was divided, honeycombed by what looked like torn and hanging curtains of flesh, muscles and fat bunching and clenching and making the room contract and loosen around me.
Here and there, dangling from those shifting, weeping walls were cables that looked like writhing ganglia, and at the end of them were the husks of children. They were crumpled, their hair strawlike and lank, their skin roughened and dry, their limbs withered and white, and there were seemingly hundreds, thousands, more than I could count. Some still moved, twisting and thrashing weakly, their hands held out in front of them, shivering or punching at the air. Sounds filled the place, airless, hollow moans, weeping, occasional cries. All the children were naked.
Sandra was held in the air above me.
She was caught, I saw, by one of those black, weaving tendrils that snaked up from the place below. It pulsed and moved as it held her, bucking her back and forth, shaking her in a savage palsy. Something was being drawn out of her; I could see it, surging back along that black tube, making it bulge rhythmically. Even as I watched, Sandra’s arms seemed to shrivel, her legs to pull up like drying paper, her skin to wrinkle and peel. Her shoes fell from her feet as they curled up, and another one of the tendrils tore her dress away, leaving her clad only in socks and white panties, before punching into the skin of her chest. The pants had the word Tuesday and a picture of a princess printed on the front, and when I saw that I sobbed. In a voice that was weak and dustlike, Sandra said, “It was so pretty, and I only wanted to see it and hold it. I’m sorry, Mummy, I didn’t mean to be naughty. I’ll be good, I promise. I promise” She began singing again as her belly folded in on itself, gasping and jerking even as the wheels went around and around and around and as her moistness and life were finally sucked out. More of the tendrils rose up and pierced into her, tearing away first her socks and then her pants, Tuesday fluttering down into the fleshy catacombs below.
When she was little more than folded, crumpled caricature of the neat blond girl who had greeted Ben and me occasionally in the playground in the mornings, the tendrils relaxed, and Sandra dropped away to join the other dangling, desiccated corpses.
Another tendril rose in front of me, this one without a child at its end; instead, it held a shifting, blackly glinting mass that smelled of marshmallows and Wendy after a shower and Ben in the morning when he had just woken up, of comfort and safety and excitement and pleasure. In the centre of the mass I saw a swirling mess of all the fabulous things I had seen in my life; here was my wife, naked on a bed on our wedding night, there Benjamin asleep, here the curve of my first girlfriend’s neck, there the sun reflecting on water that I just knew was warm and inviting, and I felt myself take a step towards it. It darted closer to me, snakelike, now shaping itself into an image of our first dog when she was a puppy and smelling like newly baked biscuits, and now back to my wife, dressed this time but smiling at me and loving me, to Ben holding out his arms for a hug, so trusting, and then I remembered Sandra collapsing in on herself and I saw the jagged teeth that chattered at the edge of the mass, and I turned and ran.
I didn’t tell anyone. How could I? What could I say? That I had seen Sandra, seen the thing that had fished her out of Scale Hall with a lure made of …what? All the things she loved, wanted to see and hold and experience again? What would it be for her, I wondered? Teddies or dolls, Christmas presents, her parents? What else could I say? That the fishing thing had been doing it for years, had fished all those lost children from this place, all of them vanished and gone, sucked dry and left to dangle like insects caught on flypaper? No. People would think me mad.
I remember little about my dash home except that when I got out of the Merry House, clambering through the hole in the doorway and then pushing at the gate, the dogs wouldn’t let me near them. Although I managed to unclip the leads from the college fence, they strained to escape from me all the way home, their hackles high and their lips drawn back from teeth that were only slightly whiter than the gums in which they sat. It took them days to be comfortable with me, because I smelled; I could almost taste the stench of that place on myself, smell it on my skin and in my sweat. I ended burning all the clothes I had been wearing because, even after washing, they were sour with its smell. I haven’t walked past the Merry House since then, have stayed as far from it as I can, and it has sat in my nightmares each night.
It has followed me, and has set its lure towards Benjamin. I have no idea if it is a deliberate thing, an attempt to silence me, or simply the blind appetite of a thing I cannot hope to understand and that has smelled or tasted my son somehow, but I am know that he is being hooked by it. Even as I write this, he is watching something that I cannot see, standing at the garden gate and looking along the road in the direction of the Merry House. If I tell him to stop, I know that it will take me several attempts to gain his attention, and that even if he does, it won’t be long before he is back at the gate. How long before he waits until my back is turned and tries to go to it? How long? Minutes? Hours? How long can I keep my eyes on him? How long before my son becomes one of the dry, crumpled things hanging from clawing, sucking tubes that have drained the vitality out of him?
How long?
I keep thinking about fire, about the lichen patterns of soot and burning on the outside of the Merry House, about the patch inside. About other adults, perhaps, who saw something of the things that I saw and tried to take action. Perhaps the fire needs to be deeper, though, set into the heart of the fishing thing so that it cannot escape the flames. Whatever it is, however it has managed to break through the skin between worlds, it is sending out its lines and catching things, catching children, and it needs stopping. It should beware; sometimes, those who fish may catch sharks.
I shall go to it tonight, carrying matches and fluid that flames easily. I do not have the luxury of hoping I will return, but what choice do I have? I love Wendy and love the life we have made, and don’t want to lose it, but I love Ben, and cannot risk him coming to harm. I cannot let him be fished. If I am to be the sacrifice that allows them to live on, then so be it. What else can I do? What? I love you, Dad, and Mum as well.
Pray for me; pray for Ben.
Pray for Scale Hall.
Simon Kurt Unsworth was born in Manchester in 1972 on a night when, despite extensive research, he can find no evidence of mysterious signs or portents. He currently lives on a hill in the north of England with his wife and child awaiting the coming flood, where he writes essentially grumpy fiction (for which pursuit he was nominated for a 2008 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story). He is tall, grouchier than he should be and the owner of a selection of really rather garish shirts. His work has been published in a number of critically acclaimed anthologies, including the critically acclaimed At Ease with the Dead, Shades of Darkness, Exotic Gothic 3, Gaslight Grotesque: Nightmare Tales of Sherlock Holmes, Never Again and Lovecraft Unbound. He has also appeared in three of Stephen Jones’ Mammoth Book of Best New Horror anthologies (19, 21 and 22) and is due to appear in 23 due out later this year, and also The Very Best of Best New Horr
or. His first collection of short stories, Lost Places, was released by the Ash Tree Press in 2010 and his second, Quiet Houses, from Dark Continents Publishing in 2011. He has a further collection, Strange Gateways, due out from PS Publishing in 2012 and his as-yet-unnamed collection will launch the Spectral Press Spectral Signature Editions imprint in 2013, so at some point he needs to write those stories.
Buy Simon’s short story collections: Lost Places, Quiet Houses, and Strange Gateways.
Story illustration by Robert Elrod.
Return to Table of Contents
The Dog Who Wished He’d Never Heard of Lovecraft
by Anna Tambour
THERE WAS A MAN who had a dog who had–for the good part of every day–never heard of H. P. Lovecraft, though this dog enjoyed his Will Cuppy, always licking his chops over the line, “The nuthatch cannot sing and does not try.”
Now this dog–and since we didn’t catch his name, we’ll just call him Ibsen–was a rough-haired, right-flop-eared bitser of no particular color except for the black patch around his left eye. Being a virile male of middle years whose chin badly needed a shave, one could easily have said he had a morbid cast but one would be wrong.
He could have been a cert in the movies, but if he’d ever wanted to sit at the drugstore counter to be discovered, he’d never have been allowed to, in that town–and besides, he probably would have preferred to work on the stage, though that is a speculation. The town’s Players didn’t tolerate children at performances and eschewed Little Orphan Annie because of Merrilee Fairweather’s purported allergy.
Ibsen didn’t feel the loss, and not because he was blissfully ignorant. He was self-employed, is all. And by that, we don’t mistake busyness for work. He wasn’t one of those dogs who spends his waking hours scratching his ears and falling over backwards after trying to bite the root of his tail, or whining to be noticed, or acting like a butler who never mentions the stench of slippers. And he certainly wasn’t a dog who lives for chasing, or any purposeless expenditure.
Say Ibsen were famous and some dog were cast as him. That dog would have to learn how to sit in a loose-boned slump, tilt his head about 26 degrees, and quarter-close his eyes. As the script would direct, if a dairy farmer were to write it:
IBSEN. [ruminating]
For Ibsen was above all, a thinker. Sure, he read a lot (see ref. to Cuppy above), but in his limited way, he was an observer, and that limitation sometimes roiled. He often, as fall rain merrily ran down the windows, wistfully wondered whether Cuppy had been intentionally hurtful when he wrote “Hasn’t everybody? [been to Ceylon]“. The first time Ibsen read that unthoughtfully hurtful comment, he felt like he’d just swallowed a stone in his dogbowl, thinking he’d bolted a hardboiled egg. Though even with that provocation, Ibsen would most likely have jibed at the globetrotting life of a celebrity–all that interruption. His eyes, under that wild hedge of eyebrow, were deep wells into which his observations dropped. What did he make of all he learned? Who knows? His hairy face was as expressionless as a barber’s floor.
The problem with not knowing his Lovecraft is that his master (we’ll humor the man), Hylam P. Hector, lived and breathed the man he called ‘the Master’.
It might be that Ibsen was, at heart, a contrarian, or possibly the strain of acting faithful when assaulted by the man (the ‘P’ stood for Pituitary, an attempt by Hylam’s father, an internist, to infuse enthusiasm in the fruit of his loins, to take up his own adventurous practice)–the man who is Mr Hector to most of us and Hylam to some but who encouraged Ibsen to think of him as ‘Daddy’, to, where were we?
The strain, yes. Mr Hector had got in the habit, bad, of writing Lovecraft-influenced poetry. If only this disease had progressed silently, but it would out. Every evening, Ibsen was interrupted by a long portentous “Ahhh,” followed by the dread Introduction:
“Daddy’s finished.”
And the poem would come out of Ibsen’s master’s mouth, the poem in all its rambling incoherent imperturbable interminability.
Ibsen didn’t, in all honesty, consider himself capable of critical literary analysis. He would have been the last dog on earth to decry this drivel as mere pastiche. That it was as nonsensically dallying as the man who thoughtlessly tosses a ball in his hand while talking to a friend when his ball-besotted dog is at his feet, waiting, was as clear to Ibsen as the fanatic eyeglow of achievement in Hylam Hector’s eyes upon finishing a reading.
So Ibsen humored the man, his master. But, like ‘Pituitary’, Hylam Hector’s zealotic enthusiasm was inadvertently the One Surefire Method to turn Ibsen from anything Lovecraftian.
Indeed, these readings set Ibsen upon a new short course of learning, one clipped for purely pragmatic ends: Ibsen’s Method of Self-hypnosis that Really Really Works, which he used to flush his mind after every reading, to convince himself that he’d never heard of Lovecraft. It worked until the next dread Introduction.
So the tragedy is set. On the left side of the stage, clutching a sheaf of pages, paces Hylam P. Hector, eyes bright, head thrown back in post-declamatorious rapture–a man who looks like the kind of bachelor to live in one of those dark-eyed apartments over the town’s drugstore (but who in fact lives in a house too featureless to notice in one of those streets named after numbers).
Center-stage is the dog you know as ‘Ibsen’. Luckily for Mr. Hector, the pallid sea of light flowing from the green-shaded lamp laps not upon the shores of Ibsen’s eyeballs. Yet if some foul fiend should, in a trice too quick for Ibsen to react, wipe from the dog’s brow that rampant brush and shine upon the eyes of the hound, the unswerving gaze of a hundred-watt fluorescent bulb–if Hylam P. Hector had looked into his dog’s eyes then, he would have been struck dumb.
For on that particular damp and gloomy evening indoors, Mr. Hector’s poem, Moon Something-or-other Someplace-else, must have had a dozen lines that in their hysterically romance-tinged paranoia, their frustrating inexactitude, made Ibsen itch as bad as if he’d been licked by a thousand fleas. But he was used to that from ‘Daddy’.
No, what finally raised the hair on his spine and made him loll his tongue to keep himself from raising his lip and letting his canines glow, was, not that invidious use of the word that should only be heard in another context, the casually friendly ‘hi’. Ibsen’s sensitive hearing was bruised every time Hylam Hector read out hie (and two hies made Ibsen want to bite). But that wasn’t the snap of tragedy’s jaw.
An observant master would have noticed the growing furrow under that hedge of brow, but Hylam P. Hector noticed nothing.
And Ibsen, never a demonstrative dog, showed as little emotion as the palace guard with heat rash. The hound was long inured to too many moons, hideouses, not to mention the abomination shewed; Ibsen, toughened by countless lurks, suffered silently also through too many exotic places celebrated (especially galling coming from this man who wouldn’t even walk his dog); and still, Ibsen soldiered on, carrying out his duty, evening after evening after evening, and always interrupted, at that.
Ibsen, on the evening of evenings just ebbing into night, had managed dogfully to maintain composure, forgive his master’s interruption (Ibsen had felt that evening, a whisker away from answering the age-old conundrum: Why, when you dig a hole, is the earth you toss out never enough to fill it?).
Anyone really observing Ibsen then would have known that if he were a human, the only interruption he might possibly appreciate: a stealthy refill of his tobacco pouch.
His eyebrows threw deep shadows, but they were twitching with deeper thought when, “Listen to this, Rover!” (We sense a deep sense of outrage that Ibsen might feel at this common tag, but since he is middle-aged, and a dog at that, this tragedy is a burden that he must have borne so long that he hardly winces.) “Daddy’s most luscious poem of all!”
And forthwith, Hylam Pituitary Hector commenced to read.
While poetising, his eyes were always either fixed on his sheaf of pages or closed, so he never saw
the moment when his dog’s faithfulness turned from the tolerance of proprietal deference, to bitterly apathetic scorn.
It’s a terrible thing to see in a dog, but ask yourself: Could YOU have withstood as much?–the one-and-ten-thousandth “O!“!
But for an ‘h’ . . .
And isn’t that par for all our tragedies? If those two had shared a toothpaste tube, the rift would sundered them e’en before Ibsen was old enough to shave.
So
HYLAM P HECTOR. [triumphantly brushing his fingertips over his chin that he tries in vain to unrecede] What a treat that was for you, tonight, Rover. [exits left. sounds of water running, tooth brushing as Mr Hector prepares for bed.]
IBSEN. [stands and shakes himself as vigorously as if he'd just been washed. walks off stage left. His steps down the wooden hall are abundantly clear. This dog doesn't get enough walking and has never had his nails clipped. Thuds and scrabble in the kitchen, as Ibsen opens the door and takes himself out, as usual, for his evening constitutional.]
A nearby sash window opens with a creak, and an inarticulate but musical cry of pleasure is thrown from it by what sounds like a tiny bird, so must be a little old lady. In all modern theaters at this juncture, audiences are wafted with the Pavlovian smell of roast chicken.
ACT II
Outdoors, under the stars, on the lawn at the base of the neighbor’s kitchen steps.
Ibsen is eating chicken out of the neighbor’s right hand. She looks exactly like the little old lady who Tweetie Pie owns. Like all ladies of this type, she wears orthopaedic shoes that look as comfortable as a muzzle.
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2012 - Issues 10 through 20 Page 20
