by Del Howison
After a minute or so, during which time he stared out of the window at the night sky (though seeing, I think, nothing of its beauty) he turned back to us and rewarded our patience.
“The moon was full and white,” he said. “It showed me every detail. There were no great, noble tombs in this place, such as you’d see at the Ohlsdorf Cemetery; just coarsely carved headstones and wooden crosses. And in their midst, a kind of ceremony was going on. There were candles set in the grass, their flames steady in the still air. I suppose they made some kind of circle—perhaps ten feet across—in which the necromancer had performed his rituals. Now, however, with his work done, he had retired some distance from this place. He was sitting on a tombstone, smoking a long, Turkish pipe, and watching.
“The subject of his study, of course, was Elise. When I had first laid eyes on her I had guiltily imagined what she would look like stripped of her clothes. Now I had my answer. There she was, lit by the gold of the candle flames and the silver of the moon. Available to my eyes in all her glory.
“But oh God! What she was doing turned every single drop of pleasure I might have taken in her beauty to the bitterest gall.
“Those cries I’d heard—those sobs that had made my heart go out to her—they weren’t provoked by the pawings of Doctor Skal, but by the touch of the dead. The dead, raised out of their dirt to pleasure her! She was squatting, and there between her legs was a face, pushed up out of the earth. A man recently buried, to judge by his condition, the flesh still moist on the bone, and the tongue—Jesus, the tongue!—still flicking between his bared teeth.
“If this had been all it would have been enough. But it was not all. The same grotesque genius that had inspired the cadaver between her legs into this resemblance of life had also brought forth a crop of smaller parts—pieces of the whole, which had wormed their way out of the grave by some means or other. Bony pieces, held together with leathery sinew. A rib cage, crawling around on its elbows; a head, propelled by a whiplash length of stripped spine; several hands, with some fleshless lengths of bone attached. There was a morbid bestiary of these things. And they were all upon her, or waiting their turn to be upon her.
“Nor did she for a moment protest their attentions. Quite the contrary. Having climbed off the corpse that was pleasuring her from below, she rolled over onto her back and invited a dozen of these pieces upon her, like a whore in a fever, and they came, oh God they came, as though they might have out of her the juices that would return them to wholesomeness.
“Walter, by now, had caught up with me.
“ ‘I warned you,’ he said.
“ ‘You knew this was happening?’
“ ‘Of course I knew. I’m afraid it’s the only way she’s satisfied.’
“ ‘What is she?’ I said to him.
“ ‘A woman,’ Walter replied.
“ ‘No natural woman would endure that,’ I said. ‘Jesus! Jesus!’
“The sight before me was getting worse by the moment. Elise was up on her knees in the grave dirt now, and a second corpse—stripped of whatever garments he had been buried in—was coupling with her, his motion vigorous, his pleasure intense, to judge by the way he threw back his putrefying head. As for Elise, she was kneading her full tits, directing arcs of milk into the air so that it rained down on the vile menagerie cavorting before her. Her lovers were in ecstasy. They clattered and scampered around in the torrents, as though they were being blessed.
“I took the musket from Walter.
“ ‘Don’t hurt her!’ he begged. ‘She’s not to blame.’
“I ignored him, and made my way toward the yard, calling to the necromancer as I did so.
“ ‘Skal! Skal!‘
“He looked up from his meditations, whatever they were, and seeing the musket I was brandishing, immediately began to protest his innocence. His German wasn’t good, but I didn’t have any difficulty catching his general drift. He was just doing what he’d been paid to do, he said. He wasn’t to blame.
“I clambered over the wall and approached him through the graves, instructing him to get to his feet. He got up, his hands raised in surrender. Plainly he was terrified that I was going to shoot him. But that wasn’t my intention. I just wanted to stop this obscenity.
“ ‘Whatever you did to start this, undo it!’ I told him.
“He shook his head, his eyes wild. I thought perhaps he didn’t understand so I repeated the instruction.
“Again, he shook his head. All his composure was gone. He looked like a shabby little cutpurse who’d just been caught in the act. I was right in front of him, and I jabbed the musket in his belly. If he didn’t stop this, I told him, I’d shoot him.
“I might have done it too, but for Herr Wolfram, who had clambered over the wall and was approaching his wife, calling her name.
“ ‘Elise … please, Elise … you should come home.’
“I’ve never in my life heard anything as absurd or as sad as that man calling to his wife. ‘You should come home …’
“Of course she didn’t listen to him. Didn’t hear him, probably, in the heat of what she was doing, and what was being done to her.
“But her lovers heard. One of the men who’d been raised up whole, and was waiting his turn at the woman, started shambling toward Walter, waving him away. It was a curious thing to see. The corpse trying to shoo the old man off. But Walter wouldn’t go. He kept calling to Elise, the tears pouring down his face. Calling to her, calling to her—
“I yelled to him to stay away. He didn’t listen to me. I suppose he thought if he got close enough he could maybe catch hold of her arm. But the corpse came at him, still waving its hands, still shooing, and when Walter wouldn’t be shooed the thing simply knocked him down. I saw him flail for a moment, and then try to get back up. But the dead—or pieces of the dead—were everywhere in the grass around his feet. And once he was down, they were upon him.
“I told the Englishman to come with me, and I started off across the yard to help Walter. There was only one ball in the musket, so I didn’t want to waste it firing from a distance, and maybe missing my target. Besides I wasn’t sure what I was going to fire at. The closer I got to the circle in which Elise was crawling around—still being clawed and petted—the more of Skal’s unholy handiwork I saw. Whatever spells he’d cast here, they seemed to have raised every last dead thing in the place. The ground was crawling with bits of this and that; fingers, pieces of dried up flesh with locks of hair attached; wormy fragments that were beyond recognition.
“By the time we reached Walter, he’d already lost the fight. The horrors he’d paid to have resurrected—ungrateful things—had tom him open in a hundred places. One of his eyes had been thumbed out, there was a gaping hole in his chest.
“His murderers were still working on him. I batted a few limbs off him with the musket, but there were so many it was only a matter of time, I knew, before they came after me. I turned around to Skal, intending to order him again to bring this abomination to a halt, but he was springing off between the graves. In a sudden surge of rage, I raised the musket and I fired. The felon went down, howling in the grass. I went to him. He was badly wounded, and in great pain, but I was in no mood to help him. He was responsible for all this. Wolfram dead, and Elise still crouching amongst her rotted admirers; all of this was Skal’s fault. I had no sympathy for the man.
“ ‘What does it take to make this stop?’ I asked him. ‘What are the words?‘
“His teeth were chattering. It was hard to make out what he was saying. Finally I understood.
“ ‘When … the … sun … comes up …,’ he said to me.
“ ‘You can’t stop it any other way?’
“ ‘No,’ he said. ‘No … other … way …’
“Then he died. You can imagine my despair. I could do nothing. There was no way to get to Elise without suffering the same fate as Walter. And anyway, she wouldn’t have come. It was an hour from dawn, at least. All I could do
was what I did: climb over the wall, and wait. The sounds were horrible. In some ways, worse than the sight. She must have been exhausted by now, but she kept going. Sighing sometimes, sobbing sometimes, moaning sometimes. Not—let me make it perfectly clear—the despairing moan of a woman who understands that she is in the grip of the dead. This was the moan of a deeply pleasured woman; a woman in bliss.
“Just a few minutes before dawn, the sounds subsided. Only when they had died away completely did I look back over the wall. Elise had gone. Her lovers lay around in the ground, exhausted as perhaps only the dead can be. The clouds were lightening in the East. I suppose resurrected flesh has a fear of the light, because as the last stars crept away so did the dead. They crawled back into the earth, and covered themselves with the dirt that had been shoveled down upon their coffins …”
Haeckel’s voice had become a whisper in these last minutes, and now it trailed away completely. We sat around not looking at one another, each of us deep in thought. If any of us had entertained the notion that Haeckel’s tale was some invention, the force of his telling—the whiteness of his skin, the tears that had now and then appeared in his eyes—had thrust such doubts from us, at least for now.
It was Purrucker who spoke first, inevitably. “So you killed a man,” he said. “I’m impressed.”
Haeckel looked up at him. “I haven’t finished my story,” he said.
“Jesus …,” I murmured, “… what else is there to tell?”
“If you remember, I’d left all my books, and some gifts I’d brought from Wittenberg for my father, at Herr Wolfram’s house. So I made my way back there. I was in a kind of terrified trance, my mind still barely able to grasp what I’d seen.
“When I got to the house I heard somebody singing. A sweet lilting voice it was. I went to the door. My belongings were sitting there on the table where I’d left them. The room was empty. Praying that I’d go unheard, I entered. As I picked up my philosophy books and my father’s gift the singing stopped.
“I retreated to the door but before I could reach the threshold Elise appeared, with her infant in her arms. The woman looked the worse for her philanderings, no question about that. There were scratches all over her face, and her arms, and on the plump breast at which the baby now sucked. But marked as she was, there was nothing but happiness in her eyes. She was sweetly content with her life at that moment.
“I thought perhaps she had no memory of what had happened to her. Maybe the necromancer had put her into some kind of trance, I reasoned; and now she’d woken from it the past was all forgotten.
“I started to explain to her. ‘Walter …,’I said.
“ ‘Yes, I know—,’ she replied. ‘He’s dead.’ She smiled at me; a May morning smile. ‘He was old,’ she said, matter-of-factly. ‘But he was always kind to me. Old men are the best husbands. As long as you don’t want children.’
“My gaze must have gone from her radiant face to the baby at her nipple, because she said:
“ ‘Oh, this isn’t Walter’s boy.’
“As she spoke she tenderly teased the infant from her breast, and it looked my way. There it was: life-in-death, perfected. Its face was shiny pink, and its limbs fat from its mother’s milk, but its sockets were deep as the grave, and its mouth wide, so that its teeth, which were not an infant’s teeth, were bared in a perpetual grimace.
“The dead, it seemed, had given her more than pleasure.
“I dropped the books and the gift for my father there on the doorstep. I stumbled back out into the daylight, and I ran—oh God in Heaven, I ran!—afraid to the very depths of my soul. I kept on running until I reached the road. Though I had no desire to venture past the graveyard again, I had no choice: it was the only route I knew, and I did not want to get lost, I wanted to be home. I wanted a church, an altar, piety, prayers.
“It was not a busy thoroughfare by any means, and if anyone had passed along it since daybreak they’d decided to leave the necromancer’s body where it lay beside the wall. But the crows were at his face, and foxes at his hands and feet. I crept by without disturbing their feast.”
Again, Haeckel halted. This time, he expelled a long, long sigh. “And that, gentlemen, is why I advise you to be careful in your judgments of this man Montesquino.”
He rose as he spoke, and went to the door. Of course we all had questions, but none of us spoke then, not then. We let him go. And for my part, gladly. I’d enough of these horrors for one night.
* * *
Make of all this what you will. I don’t know to this day whether I believe the story or not (though I can’t see any reason why Haeckel would have invented it. Just as he’d predicted, he was treated very differently after that night; kept at arm’s length). The point is that the thing still haunts me; in part, I suppose, because I never made up my mind whether I thought it was a falsehood or not. I’ve sometimes wondered what part it played in the shaping of my life: if perhaps my cleaving to empiricism—my devotion to Helmholtz’s methodologies—was not in some way the consequence of this hour spent in the company of Haeckel’s account.
Nor do I think I was alone in my preoccupation with what I heard. Though I saw less and less of the other members of the group as the years went by, on those occasions when we did meet up the conversation would often drift round to that story, and our voices would drop to near-whispers, as though we were embarrassed to be confessing that we even remembered what Haeckel had said.
A couple of members of the group went to some lengths to pluck holes in what they’d heard, I remember; to expose it as nonsense. I think Eisentrout actually claimed he’d retraced Haeckel’s journey from Wittenberg to Luneburg, and claimed there was no necropolis along the route. As for Haeckel himself, he treated these attacks upon his veracity with indifference. We had asked him to tell us what he thought of necromancers, and he’d told us. There was nothing more to say on the matter.
And in a way he was right. It was just a story told on a hot night, long ago, when I was still dreaming of what I would become.
And yet now, sitting here at the window, knowing I will never again be strong enough to step outside, and that soon I must join Purrucker and the others in the earth, I find the terror coming back to me; the terror of some convulsive place where death has a beautiful woman in its teeth, and she gives voice to bliss. I have, if you will, fled Haeckel’s story over the years; hidden my head under the covers of reason. But here, at the end, I see that there is no asylum to be had from it; or rather, from the terrible suspicion that it contains a clue to the ruling principle of the world.
BEFORE YOU LEAVE
DEL HOWISON
THERE HAVE BEEN two schools of thought regarding tales of darkness and dread. One was that the theater of the macabre was for young people who liked sensationalized stories of the shadowlands they had yet to experience. They would grow out of their obsessions in time. So horror was marketed to teens. The other thought was that legends and tales of the supernatural occupied a basement room filled with folklore or campfire tales or (more recently) urban legends to teach a lesson. But beyond their moralistic teachings, tales of horror and the supernatural didn’t count for much when compared to “real writing.”
Horror has always been the blues of literature. However, like the blues in music, everything in literature can be traced back to its roots. It’s unavoidable. Whether it is Beowulf, The Iliad, and The Odyssey, or Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, there have always been imps and monsters, supernatural events and psychological terror. There was horror in an eclipse and horror in religion. Nowadays there is horror in politics and horror in your daily newspaper. There has always been horror, and there will always be horror. Sometimes, in an effort to be current with the times, there have been efforts by people in the field to legitimize horror by claiming it’s not a genre. They try to put other names on it to mask what we all know is true. It’s not Dark Fantasy. It’s not a Thriller. It’s not even an alternate state of mind. Because horror
is involved in every other genre, they want to say it is not a genre itself. All I can say is hogwash. Face the truth. Sure, there are horror mysteries, horror westerns, horror thrillers, supernatural horror, etc. Everybody in this book knows what horror is. They are all wearing different masks but they have all come to the same party. For that I thank them sincerely and hope to see them back at my next party.
* * *
But horror is horror. Putting a little mystery in a story does not make that story a mystery, but it doesn’t eliminate mysteries from being their own genre. Watch a film or read a book. If it’s horror, you know it, and nobody, no matter how learned, can tell you different. You’re scared. You’re disturbed. You’re repelled as the worm turns within your own brain and sensibilities and it touches you in that deep, dark personal spot in your stomach. Horror has a smell, a taste, and a touch all its own. You know what that is. In fact, you’ve just read it. It makes you smile and shiver at the same time. You, like Jeff Gelb and myself, love it and embrace it. That’s why we’re all here together. Like the roller coaster at the park, you want to ride again. You want to “blow it out.”
* * *
You’re still holding this book. Go ahead.
* * *
Or you can just roll over and go to sleep.
* * *
Fat chance.
CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES
CLIVE BARKER—The bestselling author of twenty books, including the New York Times bestseller Abarat, Clive Barker is also an acclaimed artist, film producer, and director. Mr. Barker lives in California with his partner, the photographer David Armstrong, and their daughter, Nicole. They share their house with five dogs, sixty fish, nine rats, innumerable wild geckos, five cockatiels, an African gray parrot called Smokey, and a yellow-headed Amazon parrot called Malingo.
