New Fears--New horror stories by masters of the genre

by Mark Morris

  “It is rather impressive work,” said Caul.

  Alice surprised herself. “I say we listen to this thing before I call Professor Hastings.”

  Equally surprising, Caul nodded. “Agreed.”

  * * *

  Alice unpacked the Archéophone and wasted no time in calibrating it for the mystery cylinder. It fit one of the machine’s common spindles and didn’t require much tinkering as far as balancing the rotation. She set it to record to a WAV file, blew a stray bit of hair from her face and turned to Caul. “I think it’s ready,” she said.

  Mr. Caul raised his eyebrows.

  Alice flipped on the power switch, keeping her hand on the machine’s speed adjustment knob as the cylinder began turning on the Archéophone’s spindle. After several seconds of scratchy white noise, the recording began.

  Caul’s eyes went wide with disbelief.

  * * *

  Before she could stop herself, Alice reached over and switched off the machine. The now silent room still echoed with what they had just heard.

  “What the hell was that?” said Alice. Had that been Salter’s voice? What language had he been speaking? And what were those… other sounds?

  Caul looked like he had just been slapped across the face. Without a word, he began gathering up his equipment and putting it back into his haphazard cart.

  “That wasn’t real, right?” said Alice. “It couldn’t be. Could it?” She could swear she smelled smoke, but the Archéophone wasn’t overheating and the cylinder sat innocently on the spindle, undamaged.

  “I have no idea what we just listened to, but I suggest we let someone else deal with it.”

  “Were those dogs? Didn’t it sound like dogs were attacking somebody?”

  “Enough, woman!” said Mr. Caul, raising one finger into the air. “Please show me out of here, now.”

  * * *

  Alice busied herself after lunch by helping Connie put together a complicated pull for the classics department. Alice didn’t mention the situation with the wax cylinder, and Connie was too flustered to worry about anything other than finding several issues of Hesperia that seemed to have gone missing from their prescribed shelf. At about three-thirty Connie ventured back into the stacks for one last look and Alice immediately picked up her desk phone. Rafael answered after several rings.

  “Security, Fuentes.”

  “Have you found anything?” blurted Alice.

  “Well hello to you, too, missy.”

  “Sorry.”

  Rafael laughed. “No problems. So, I checked the key card log for Special Collections and nothing registered after ten last night, until your card around seven-thirty this morning. Even if somebody used a skeleton key, it would’ve still registered as a hit on the log.”

  “What about the camera footage?”

  “Like I said, nobody opened the Special Collections door last night after ten. I don’t see what the recording would show us.”

  “Please,” said Alice. “As a favor to me, would you consider looking at our lobby footage from last night? I’m trying to find an explanation for something odd.”

  Rafael sighed. “Okay, for Alice the Librarian I will do this thing.”

  “Thank you,” said Alice. “Let me know if you see anything out of the ordinary, okay?”

  “Will do,” said Rafael. “By the way, I prefer chocolate-chip cookies.”

  “Done,” said Alice. She hoped he wouldn’t mind Chips Ahoy!, since she hadn’t baked anything since high school, and wasn’t about to start again now.

  * * *

  Whoever designed Market Street back in the 1920s had done a brilliant job of harnessing the gusts off of Carlyle Lake, creating a ceaseless wind tunnel between the tall buildings there, and making the trudge from the bus stop to Alice’s apartment as godawful cold as possible. She was not what anyone would ever describe as a “winter person”, but tonight the icy lashing actually felt good, helping to break the drowsy spell of the bus.

  As per routine, the lobby of Alice’s building was deserted and she had no mail. Her apartment still reeked of wet dog, nearly a full week after Lester had gone back home to Mags and Lisa. The smell hit her the moment she opened the door. Though it had been a pain in the ass walking that grouchy old mutt twice every day in the snow and slush, the place did feel emptier than usual now. She had even gotten used to him snoring on the rug next to her bed.

  At that image, her mind suddenly flashed to the secret recording—the canine gnashing, the screaming, the look of utter horror on Mr. Caul’s pinched face. The alien words.

  Alice shook her head as if she could dislodge the memory physically. Worry about this tomorrow, she told herself, hurriedly unbuttoning and unwrapping all her myriad wintertime layers and slipping into the old moccasins she kept by the door. Five minutes later, she was on the couch with a beer and a Tupperware full of last night’s fried rice, her mom’s old quilt across her lap.

  In her more optimistic youth she had imagined that by now, well into her thirties, she would be living in a warmer state, in a sunny house with huge gardens, and writing full time. Zero out of three. On winter nights like this one, the weight of that became almost surreal. She sighed and took a swig of beer, which she could barely taste.

  Eventually, to take her mind off the wax cylinder and her sour mood, Alice put on some music and picked up the book she’d been hammering away at for the past couple weeks, Herman Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. The only ambiguity was why she was making herself finish the ponderous thing, since no one else on earth cared if she was a Melville completist or not.

  No wonder she lived alone.

  * * *

  Alice woke around two a.m., disoriented. For a moment she thought she was back at the library, that she had somehow fallen asleep at her desk. She panicked. Had she been looking for something in the Salter Collection?

  The familiar smell of the quilt snapped Alice back to reality. She flashed for a moment on her tiny, severe, disappointed mother, and flung the blanket away as if it had bitten her. She couldn’t find her moccasins so she switched off the living room lamp and hurried barefoot across the icy floor to her bedroom, where she slipped under the equally icy covers. Her mind refused to calm and let her go back to sleep. She spent the rest of the night listening to the wind rattle the old windows, while trying not to think about the recording or why she hadn’t yet called her boss, Greta Green, or Professor Hastings about it.

  * * *

  Alice arrived late the following morning, having missed her regular bus. No amount of Tylenol nor a scalding shower had managed to touch the throbbing in her head. After hanging up her coat, she slumped into her desk chair wanting nothing more than to lay her head down and go back to sleep. She noticed the message light on the phone was blinking.

  It was Rafael. “Hey, Alice the Librarian,” the message began. “When you get this, bop on down to first floor security and find me.”

  * * *

  Rafael was leaning across the front security desk, flirting with a work-study student at least half his age. “Ah, there you are,” he said when he saw Alice. He excused himself and hustled Alice into a closet-sized room across the hall. It consisted of an ancient table with two chairs, a bank of old monitors showing blurry black-and-white shots from around the library, and a keyboard with a big toggle switch. “Welcome to the nerve center.”

  “Impressive,” said Alice.

  After they squeezed themselves into the seats, Rafael spent a few minutes trying to cue up one of the monitors. Alice half watched the camera feeds on the other five screens. Things looked slow all over the library, which was pretty common on Friday mornings, exacerbated by the day’s weather prediction for heavy snow by noon.

  “Almost there,” said Rafael, using the toggle to fast-forward through footage from the Special Collections lobby. The only thing onscreen that appeared to be moving was the time stamp in the corner and some wobbly scan lines, otherwise nothing much was happening. “I bar
ely caught this the first time as I was fast-forwarding,” he said. He slowed the playback to regular speed, where the time stamp read 12:38:45, and tapped Alice lightly on the shoulder. “Now, missy, watch the door.”

  The door in question was the one between Alice and Connie’s desks, the entrance to the Special Collections wing. The camera angle was above and to the right, so only about two thirds of the entryway was visible. “What am I looking for?” asked Alice, leaning toward the monitor.

  “Wait for it…”

  There was no movement for another several seconds, but just as the time stamp turned over to 12:40:00, a tall figure walked purposefully out of Special Collections, causing Alice to flinch. The man on the video made a beeline across the lobby, off screen, and was gone. Grand total, maybe two seconds of footage.

  “Who was that?” said Alice.

  “I was hoping you’d tell me.” Rafael paused the video and toggled it back until the figure was caught midstride in the center of the screen. “Look familiar?”

  “Can you, you know, enhance the picture or zoom in or something?”

  Rafael laughed. “Silly librarian. These monitors are practically steam-powered.”

  Alice stared at the fuzzy image on the screen, and had no idea who the man could be. “Oh, wait,” she said, before she could stop herself. “Mystery solved. I know who that is. It’s Steve something-or-other, a grad student from Professor Olvidar’s Civil War Studies class. I forgot I gave him permission to stay after close if he needed to. Which explains the whole key card thing.”

  Rafael squinted at Alice. “You have a terrible memory,” he said.

  “I’m sorry I dragged you into this. I feel like an idiot.” Actually, she felt like a big fat liar, and couldn’t fathom what she was up to.

  * * *

  Alice was alone at her desk all morning, the only living thing on the fifth floor. No students, no TAs or faculty, nothing but the thumping of the library’s ancient pipes, the wheezing of its heat ducts. She hated being situated in the echoey lobby to begin with, but today it felt even more like working in a huge cave.

  Connie called around nine-thirty to say that she wasn’t going to be able to make it in. Her vanpool had been canceled as the weather reports had turned more ominous, and she couldn’t afford to be stranded.

  Alice logged in to the digital archive and searched “Salter, Eaton” for something to do. After putting together the finding aids for the last few major donations to the collection, she already knew a lot about him: Salter had come over from England around 1860, had died in the famous Minton lumber mill fire in 1911, and in between had become one of the richest men in the Midwest. He and his partner, Cornelius Wilks, had made a fortune clear-cutting the state’s ample virgin-white pine forests and selling the lumber to builders and shipwrights on the east coast. Their company, S&W Lumber, had built several logging towns throughout the state, most of which had been abandoned by the 1930s. Salter had erected his famous log mansion, Castra Saltus, on the banks of the Barrow River near Carlyle Lake. The little settlement that sprang up around the mansion eventually became the town of White Hill, home of the university.

  Salter was an avid hunter and outdoorsman. Many of the online photos, Alice noted, were the same as those that hung on the walls back in the collection. They featured Salter at various ages: paddling in canoes, climbing huge trees, standing proudly on a bluff with his rifle at the ready. She had seen all of the images several times before, had handled hard copies of most of them. But this time, one particular photo caught her eye, one that she could not recall seeing. It featured Salter and Wilks, middle-aged and both in double-breasted coats and silk top hats, standing unsmiling in a forest clearing before a pair of huge metal wheels. To one side of the photograph, Salter’s side, a pair of large dogs sat imperiously. On the other side stood a group of grimy-looking men in suspenders, staring at the dogs, as if expecting them to attack at any moment. The caption read “July 29, 1903. Arlington County, Camp 12. One cannot discern with true conviction whether the assembled lumbermen are spooked by the proximity of their employers, or by Sköll and Hati.”

  * * *

  After lunch, which she ate alone at her desk, Alice grabbed her key cards and a third cup of coffee, and entered Special Collections. It was rare to be in there alone amongst the archived flotsam and jetsam of the past, all neatly codified and put away. It was so quiet that the air seemed cottony, swollen. Maybe she was coming down with something.

  Without consciously planning it, Alice found herself outside the Salter Collection. She held her mug of coffee close to her face, breathing in the steam as she swiped her card and punched in the code. She opened the door and was about to step through when the lights came on fully, illuminating the portrait of Salter at the entrance.

  She stared into his painted eyes.

  Strange words echoed in her head.

  Her life felt so…

  “My dear, how are you on this blustery afternoon?”

  Startled, Alice let out a shriek and spun around, almost dropping her coffee. She came face-to-face with Professor Hastings, who took a step back, eyes wide. “I’m sorry if I frightened you,” he said sheepishly. “I thought you had heard me approaching.”

  Alice caught her breath. “No, no, it’s okay. I get a little high strung sometimes.” She looked down and realized she was holding a black document case. When had she picked that up?

  Hastings was as dapper as ever in a bow tie, his bone-white hair coiffed. “I assumed everyone would have stayed home today, what with this glorious weather we’re having,” he said.

  “I’m beginning to think I should have.”

  Hastings smiled and nodded toward the open door. “Were you about to visit old Eaton’s treasure trove?”

  Alice’s mind went blank. What had she been doing back here? She waved the document case. “Actually, I was just grabbing some papers and locking up,” she said, pulling the door shut. “What are you up to back here, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  The professor sighed. “I have been working on an article on Alexander Scriabin of all people and realized I needed Nemtin’s arrangement of his Prefatory Action, a copy of which I happen to know resides in the Casey Collection.” He held up a slim, buckram-bound volume. “So, I thought I’d hightail it over here and abscond with the little bugger before the polar vortex shuts the whole city down.”

  Alice escorted Professor Hastings to the lobby, only half listening to him babble about Scriabin’s Mysterium and how performing the unfinished piece was supposed to have ushered in a new golden era for the world. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d left something behind.

  Hastings gave a little wave as the elevator doors slid closed, and it wasn’t until that moment Alice realized she had failed, yet again, to report the situation with the cylinder. She hadn’t mentioned it to Hastings, nor had she called Greta. Alice hoped Mr. Caul had been similarly tight-lipped, but had no idea why.

  * * *

  The document case held several old newspaper clippings in Mylar sleeves and a book called Timber Tramps & Widow Makers: A Short History of Logging in the Midwest. Alice spread the articles out across her desk. A cursory read showed that most were accounts of S&W’s unstoppable growth during its heyday, successful business dealings and the like, all ranging from the late 1800s to 1905. The final clipping was Cornelius Wilks’s obituary from the Minton Messenger, dated April 17, 1905. “Inflammation of the lungs” had been the cause of death.

  Alice picked up the book and riffled through it. There were a few chapters devoted to S&W and its competitors in the state, with several photos interspersed. A sidebar article grabbed her attention:

  WHERE OH WHERE HAS OUR LITTLE MILLIONAIRE GONE?

  One enduring mystery from the annals of our lumbering past is this: where did Eaton Salter disappear to between July and November of 1909?

  The story goes that he embarked on a solo camping trip (of which he was quite fond) just after Independence D
ay ’09, boarding the Suttree Special in Iron City, and getting off 200 miles north, somewhere near what is now Walleye Lake State Forest. The plan was for the gray-haired but still hearty lumber baron to camp and fish for a few weeks before meeting up with Cornelius Wilks’s sons, Edmond and Grant (who had inherited their late father’s share of S&W), for the annual summer business meeting in Minton.

  When Salter failed to return by mid-August the company sent a small army of searchers north, via train, to find him. Some say that it was all for show and that the so-called “rescuers” spent most of their time drinking and playing cards, waiting for winter to arrive so they could call off the search and so the Wilks brothers could announce Salter’s death. In fact, a death certificate was drawn up in early November of that year. S&W was within days of filing it with the state, and had brought back most of the men they’d sent up, when Salter stumbled into the train depot in Calhoun, a good sixty miles from where he’d walked into the forest more than four months earlier. The story goes that he didn’t have a scratch on him.

  Information gets murky after his return, but we do know that this was the beginning of Salter’s late-period “eccentricities”. After returning home from his extended hike up north, Salter divested himself of his share of S&W and became what could only be described nowadays as an early “tree hugger”. All of this would come to a head just two years later, in Minton, when he set fire to his own lumber mill, killing himself, his beloved dogs, and Edmond Wilks in the process.

  At the bottom of the page were two photos. One of them was the famous shot of a gray-haired Salter standing on a bluff with his rifle, his eyes bright and full of confidence. The other was a photo of Edmond Wilks, and when Alice saw it, she almost screamed.

  * * *

  Around three p.m. Alice delivered her one and only order for the day, a pull for a pair of linguistics students in the second floor carrels. Just as she was walking back to the elevators, an announcement came over the tinny PA that, because of the blizzard, they were closing the library for the day. Alice took the service elevator back up to the fifth floor, her head swimming with visions of Edmond Wilks somehow sneaking into Special Collections a hundred years after his death. As the chipped doors slid open to deposit her in the fifth-floor lobby, she was shocked to see Mr. Caul, sans cart, standing nervously by her desk. He looked up as she left the elevator.