Bates shook his head. “No, but for some reason, he destroyed most of it before his death. He suffered a heart attack, you know, while fitting that cover on the aquarium.”
Next day, by means of hard, if unskillful work, Miss Rhodes managed to get the frozen valves into operation. She drained the tank and when it was emptied saw that the bottom was made up of a thick layer of greyish sand upon which the shells rested or were partially buried.
While the tank was refilling, she turned her attention to the library desk and came upon a drawer she had not opened before. Here were several file folders with the name, Horatio Lear, stamped upon them. One contained a chart labeled Caribbean Area, Subdivision: Senarbin Deep. There were other charts, many of them illustrated with pen and ink drawings of marine shell life.
As Miss Rhodes looked through these papers, a desire to know more about the subject seized her. Across the room in a tiny alcove off the library proper Kuching, the Siamese, lay on a pillow, surrounded by her kittens, and watched through slitted eyes. Presumably, the alcove had been built for bookbinding, cataloguing, and other related tasks, but when Edith had seen it, she decided it was the place for her pet.
By carefully comparing some of the smaller shells from the tank with the illustrations on the charts, Miss Rhodes was able to catalogue a dozen or more specimens including a rare bluish Stimpson’s Colus, a deep water Solariella obscura, an albino Queen Conch and a Caribbean Vase.
Then she began to read from a typewritten paper which she found in another file folder. The manuscript seemed to be a hodgepodge of deep water scientific observations and autobiographical remarks. As she continued to read, a feeling of detachment and unease slowly stole over her. Her first impression was that Lear had been a very erudite man, completely absorbed in his work. But when she came upon several vitriolic notations concerning his brother, Edmund, her admiration changed to a feeling of repugnance.
Miss Rhodes went to bed that night, her head filled with unpleasant thoughts. What sort of man was this, who was so obsessed with anger for his own kin that he would violate the ethics of his profession by baring his soul in a paper ostensibly devoted to science? Moreover, his hatred seemed to have no greater motive than Edmund’s refusal to accept Horatio’s theory concerning some forms of deep marine life. What that theory was, was not explained.
Miss Rhodes tossed restlessly, finally dozed off. About two in the morning something awakened her.
The noises of the spring night drifted in her open window. Then she became aware of a distant mewing, coming from the lower floor. She got up, put on a robe and slippers, and descended the staircase. At the library door, she clicked on the light switch and entered the room.
Directly before her stood Kuching, her back arched, her tail stiffened, her head lifted upward. Even as she watched, the cat began to move forward like a creature in slow motion.
“Kuching!” called Miss Rhodes softly.
The Siamese swung and hissed, then turned uncertainly and headed for the pillow in the alcove. Miss Rhodes followed and bent down. Only three kittens were there. The fourth was missing.
She was in the midst of a search of the room when Edith Halbin entered.
“I thought I heard something,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“One of the kittens is missing,” replied Miss Rhodes. “It must be around here somewhere.”
But a complete investigation of the room failed to reveal the animal. Then Edith Halbin pointed to one of the small, open windows above the wall book shelves. Her voice betrayed her shock and dismay.
“Something must have come in there and carried it off. Poor Kuching!”
Miss Rhodes followed her gaze and her lips tightened. For some reason, she did not tell her friend that height made entrance or exit by the window impossible; nor did she show her what she saw now by the table midway across the room—the horrible tuft of blood-clotted fur, almost invisible in the shadows against the dark of the floor.
Next day, the two women embarked on a project which they hoped would lighten the mood into which they had both lapsed—the painting of Edith Halbin’s portrait. Miss Rhodes, genuinely concerned about her friend, reasoned that sitting for a picture would at least take her away from Horatio Lear’s book collection, for which the Bristol girl had displayed a strange and unhealthy interest.
To Miss Rhodes, everything about the collection was unhealthy— from the ancient mouldering covers to the quasi-factual, half mystical content, steeped in folklore and superstition. There was, for example, a copy of Gantley’s Hydrophinnae, containing some of the most hideous and horrible illustrations she had ever seen. There was a first edition of Dwellers in the Depths by Gaston Le Fe who, the foreword stated quite blandly, had died insane. And there was a pirated manuscript of the German Unter Zee Kulten, all copies of which had supposedly been destroyed in the seventeenth century.
It was the cumulative effect these books had upon Edith Halbin that worried Miss Rhodes. She herself had spent an hour with the volumes, and had come away all but overwhelmed with loathing and shattered nerves.
But perhaps the portrait would change all that. . . .
Against her better judgement, Miss Rhodes consented to Edith’s request that she do the portrait against the background of the aquarium. Try though she would, however, to keep the likeness of the container of shells subdued, it persisted, by some trick of pigment or brush stroke, in standing forth in parallel importance to the figure in the painting.
Moreover, the effect of water in the tank was not at all realistic. A heavy shadow was concentrated here which no amount of reworking seemed able to lighten.
After two weeks, the portrait was done. Seeking relief from the finished task, Miss Rhodes strolled into the little yard behind the house, unmindful of the mizzling rain that dripped from a leaden sky. Presently, she became aware of a man on a stepladder on the adjoining property. It was Lucius Bates. She crossed over and bade him good morning.
“But a wet, gloomy one,” he said, resting his saw in the branch of the plane tree he had been trimming. “It seems one bad day follows another.”
They exchanged idle talk. “You still haven’t got rid of that stone monstrosity, I see,” he said.
“Monstros——? Oh, you mean the aquarium! But why...?”
Bates adjusted his oversized spectacles. “You have a rather nice library. That oversized tank is out of taste. I’ve often wondered why Horatio put it there in the first place.”
“Presumably because it was close to his place of work.”
“Fiddlesticks! I should think a dry table would have been as good a place to keep his shell specimens on. But then, Horatio was a little touched.”
Miss Rhodes was going to mention Lear’s queer papers and books when she thought better of it. Instead she said, “In what way— touched, I mean?”
Bates smiled slightly. “Well, for one thing, his pet theory about a form of undersea life. He had some wild idea that somewhere in the unplumbed ocean depths there exists a highly developed kind of mollusk capable of emulating certain characteristics of those life forms it devours.
“That was his original theory. In later years he apparently cloaked it with a pattern of demonology and what amounted to a modern adaptation of prehistoric superstition and folklore. He believed that these super undersea species are the incarnation of those Elder Gods who ruled the antediluvian deep and whose existence has been brought down to us in the dark myths and legends of a primitive past; that commanded by the great Cthulhu, they have lain dormant these eons in the sunken city of Flann, awaiting the time they would rise again to feed and rule. He believed further that this metempsychosis of the Elder Gods carried with it a latent incredible power and that if he could aid them to their destiny some of that power would be transmitted to him. Oh, Horatio really went all out in this mystic fol-de-rol. I even overheard him promise his brother, Edmund, all kinds of maledictions if he continued to ridicule his beliefs.”
“Curious,” said Miss Rhodes. “
How old a man was Horatio?”
“Old enough to know better. Somewhere near fifty, I should say.”
To Miss Rhodes’ disappointment, the painting of the portrait had little effect on Edith Halbin. The Bristol girl continued to haunt the library, lost in the conchologist’s deep-sea world of print. The more fantastic, the more macabre, the books and manuscripts were, the more absorbed she became in them. When she went about her everyday household tasks she did so mechanically, her mind obviously far removed from work. Yet Miss Rhodes refused to become unduly alarmed. Edith had always been an impressionable person. The artist reasoned that her friend would return to normalcy as soon as her fancy passed.
It was about this time that the sound began. It began as a subdued murmur, with only her vague awareness at first, so low that she took it to be another manifestation of the high blood pressure which had mildly troubled her for some time. Day by day it continued sporadically, now growing, now lessening in intensity; at times it would be gone and she thought with relief she was rid of it. Then it would return louder and more persistent than before. When she asked Edith if she heard anything unusual, the Bristol girl only looked blank.
The physician in Harley Street she finally consulted gave her a routine examination. “I can find nothing wrong with you,” he said. “The auditory canals seem normal in all respects. A murmuring sound, you say?”
Miss Rhodes nodded. “Yes. A low throbbing as if . . . well, as if a large hollow shell were placed against the ear and held there. . . .”
He looked a little puzzled, went into a vague discourse on psychosomatic symptoms and ended by prescribing a mild sedative.
April slipped into May, the sound continued, and Miss Rhodes’ companion grew more restive. She became careless in her dress and forgetful in her speech. What was worse, she took to sleep-walking. On three successive nights Miss Rhodes, always a light sleeper, was awakened by the sound of steps on the uncarpeted floor of the outer corridor. The last night, tiptoeing to her door, she had seen Edith walk slowly, stiffly past and with robot-like movements descend the staircase to the ground floor. At the entrance of the library in the dim glow of the night light she paused a moment before entering.
Miss Rhodes stood by her door hesitantly. She had read somewhere that to awaken a somnambulist in the midst of his meandering might induce shock. Nevertheless, she couldn’t let her friend move about in this condition at random. She hurried down the stairs.
The library was in total darkness, but when she switched on the light, the sight she saw held her rigid for an instant. Edith had drawn up a chair in the middle of the room and sat there stiffly erect staring at the aquarium. Her hands hung at her sides; her head was slightly tilted downward like a bird watching.
There was something quietly horrible about the taut posture, her sightless concentration. Miss Rhodes touched her on the shoulder. She said gently, “You must have dozed off. I told you not to read so much. Come to bed.”
It was a curious fact that the sleep-walking incident marked the end of that chain of events which had so disturbed Miss Rhodes. As if by magic, Edith roused herself from the mood which had gripped her since coming to this house. And, as if by magic, too, the murmuring sound dwindled and finally passed away. The very weather underwent a change, overcast days giving way to those of brightest sunshine.
Yet deep within Miss Rhodes was the conviction that it was the pause before the storm.
On the night of the nineteenth of May, she was working in the conservatory-studio, doing a new painting. For an hour Edith had silently watched her friend wield her brushes. Then she rose to her feet.
“I have some letters to write,” she said.
Miss Rhodes nodded, absorbed in her work. Across on the far wall, the pendulum clock pushed its ticks through the quiet. The air was sultry. Outside a light rain was beginning to fall, and the smell of wet earth drifted through the open window.
The painting, a still life, was going well, far better than the portrait of Edith, and Miss Rhodes worked with enthusiasm. Perhaps a half hour passed before she became conscious of the silence of the house. Silence pervaded the conservatory like a living entity through which the faint hushing of her brush strokes sounded unnaturally loud. Frowning a little, she went to the connecting door and stood there, listening. There was no sound in the house—no creaking of a chair, no rustling of a paper, nothing. A little chill of unease began to move up her spine.
“Edith!” she called hesitantly. “Are you all right?”
Her voice went bounding down the corridor to stir up a fusillade of echoes, but brought no reply.
Miss Rhodes put down her brush and palette and headed for the library. She reached the entrance and halted uncertainly. The door was locked. She knocked on the panel.
“Edith!” she called. “Let me in.”
That same ringing silence answered her. Again she pounded on the door.
“Edith! Why don’t you answer?”
Her unease gave way to alarm. She turned and ran down the corridor to the kitchen where a master key hung from a hook on the wall. A moment later, she had unlocked the library door and entered the room.
At first glance, she thought the room was empty. Her eyes lowered to the floor and she advanced several steps. For a long moment she stood there, looking down. A dribble of saliva ran from a corner of her mouth. Then she turned very quietly and left the room.
The rain, coming down harder, wrapped itself about her as she went out the door and down the outside steps to the street. She walked down Haney Lane to Brompton Road, heading south east toward Embankment. She moved into Basil Street and followed Basil into Walton, threading her way blindly through the night traffic, unaware of her surroundings, not knowing where she was or where she was going. She entered Pont Street and as she went on, she saw again in her mind’s eye what she had seen in the library—the sight which would live forever in her memory—the body of Edith Halbin lying limp on the floor . . . a body that was all but unrecognizable because the head and face had been partially devoured! And the aquarium that no longer showed a milky grey solution, was now a sickening pink. And most hideous of all—the marks on the floor, the still wet red convolutions extending from the aquarium to the body of Edith Halbin and from there back to the tank again—marks that might have been made by some crawling thing, satiated and slobbered with blood.
Miss Rhodes came into Cadogan Square. Here she suddenly stopped, threw back her head and screamed. . . .
The Horror out of Lovecraft
Donald A. Wollheim
“Oh my Gawd, my Gawd,” the voice choked out. “It’s ago’n agin, an’ this time by day! It’s aout an’ a-movin’ this very minute, an’ only the Lord knows when it’ll be on us all!”
—H. P. LOVECRAFT
I do not know what strange thing came over me when I determined on my investigation of the mysterious doings of Eliphas Snodgrass that winter in ’39. There are things that it is better no man know, and there are mysteries that should remain forever hidden from mortal knowledge. The whereabouts of Eliphas Snodgrass during the autumn of ’39, and the ensuing winter, are among these things. Would that I had had the stamina to restrain my curiosity.
I first heard of Eliphas Snodgrass when I was visiting my aunt Eulalia Barker, at her home in East Arkham, in the back districts of Massachusetts. A forgotten terrain, dark and somber, it was a region amongst the oldest in America, not only in the origin of its white settlers (it was settled by several boatloads of surly bondsmen brought over on the packet Nancy B. in 1647, commanded by the time-befogged Captain Hugh Quinge, about whom little is known save that it is believed that he was part Hindoo and that he married an Irish girl from Cork under mysterious circumstances), but in other elder traditions. My maiden-aunt Eulalia was a pleasant enough spinster—she was related to me on my mother’s side, mother being a Barker from Bowser, a little, scarce-known fishing town.
Eulalia (she had moved from Bowser suddenly, many years ago, under circum
stances which were never made clear) had struck up a passing acquaintance with the Snodgrass family, who occupied the sedate old Crombleigh mansion on the other side of West Arkham. How she happened to meet Mrs. Snodgrass, she was seemingly reticent to discuss.
Nonetheless, I had been staying at her house while pursuing my studies in the famous library at Miskatonic University, located in Arkham, but a scant three weeks before she mentioned Eliphas Snodgrass. She spoke of him to me in a troubled tone; she seemed reluctant to do so, but confessed that Eliphas’ mother (who must have had Asiatic blood several generations back) had asked her to communicate to me her worries. As I was known to them for my scholarly research in the realm of the ancient mythologies, she knew me as a scholar. It seemed that Eliphas Snodgrass had been acting oddly. This was not new, as I learned later; it was only that his oddness had taken a curiously disturbing turn.
Eliphas Snodgrass, as I learned from my aunt and from other subsequent investigations, was a young man of about 27—tall, thin, gaunt, rather stark of countenance, vaguely swarthy (probably an inheritance from his father, Hezekiah Snodgrass, who was reputed to have African blood on his mother’s side, six generations removed) and was given to long spells of brooding. At other times, he would be normal and almost cheerful (as much so as any other Arkham youth) but there were periods when, for weeks at a stretch, he would lock himself away in his chambers and remain grimly quiet. Occasionally strange noises could be heard issuing from his rooms—weird singing and odd conversations. Once in a while, the house would be thrown into a paroxysm of terror by unearthly screeches and a howling that would usually be cut off short in a manner dreadful to contemplate. When queried as to the nature of these noises, Eliphas would turn coldly, and, fixing the inquirer with a chilly stare, mumble something about trouble with his radio.
Naturally, you will understand how grimly disturbing these things were. And, since I owed my aunt Eulalia a debt which I dare not explain here, I felt it incumbent upon me to make a brief inquiry into Eliphas’ doings. I secured entry to the Snodgrass mansion by means of my aunt, who invited me to accompany her on a social call.
Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos Page 40
