The Taint and Other Novellas

by Brian Lumley

  “Are you—sure?” the little man asked. “Are you sure you want me to do this?” His voice was dry, calm.

  “Eh?” Anderson questioned nervously, terrible suspicions suddenly forming in his mind. “Of course I’m sure—and what do you mean, ‘do this’? Do what?”

  Henley shook his head sadly. “Your brother was foolish not to see that you would cause trouble sooner or later!”

  Tharpe’s eyes opened wide and his jaw fell slack. “Police!” he finally croaked. “You’re from the police!”

  “No such thing,” the little man calmly answered. “I am what I told you I was—and something more than that—and to prove it…”

  The sounds Henley uttered then formed an exact and fluent duplication of those Tharpe had heard once before, and shocked as he was that this frail outsider knew far too much about his affairs, still Tharpe thrilled as the inhuman echoes died and there formed in the semicircle of grim tablets an expanding, glowing greenness that sent out writhing beams of ghostly luminescence. Quickly the tall man gathered his wits. Policeman or none, Hiram Henley had to be done away with. This had been the plan in any case, once the little man—whoever he was—had done his work and was no longer required. And he had done his work well. The invocation was recorded; Anderson could call up the destroying green light any time he so desired. Perhaps Henley had been a former colleague of Hamilton’s, and somehow he had come to learn of the younger Tharpe’s demise? Or was he only guessing! Still, it made no difference now.

  Henley had turned his back on Anderson, lifting up his arms to the hideous idol greenly illumined in the light of the pulsating witchfire. But as the showman slipped his brother’s knife from his pocket, so the little man turned again to face him, smiling strangely and showing no discernible fear at the sight of the knife. Then his smile faded and again he sadly shook his head. His lips formed the words, “No, no, my friend,” but Anderson Tharpe heard nothing; once more, as it had done before, the green light had cancelled all sound within its radius.

  Suddenly Tharpe was very much afraid, but still he knew what he must do. Despite the fact that the inner tent was far more chill even than the time of the year warranted, sweat glistened greenly on Anderson’s brow as he moved forward in a threatening crouch, the knife raised and reflecting emerald shafts of evilly writhing light. He lifted the knife higher still as he closed with the motionless figure of the little man—and then Hiram Henley moved!

  Anderson saw what the ex-professor had done and his lips drew back in a silent, involuntary animal snarl of the utmost horror and fear. He almost dropped the knife, frozen now in midstroke, as Henley’s black gloves fell to the floor and the thick white worms twined and twisted hypnotically where his fingers ought to have been!

  Then—more out of nightmare dread and loathing than any sort of rational purpose, for Anderson knew now that the ex-professor was nothing less than a Priest of Cthulhu—he carried on with his interrupted stroke and his knife flashed down. Henley tried to deflect the blow with a monstrously altered hand, his face contorting and a shriek forming silently on his lips as one of the wormish appendages was severed and fell twitching to the sawdust. He flailed his injured hand and white ichor splashed Tharpe’s face and eyes.

  Blindly the frantic showman struck again and again, gibbering mindlessly and noiselessly as he clawed at his face with his free hand, trying to wipe away the filthy white juice of Henley’s injured hybrid member. But the blows were wild and Hiram Henley had stepped to one side.

  More frantically yet, insanely, Tharpe slashed at the greenly pulsating air all about him, stumbling closer to the core of radiance. Then his knife struck something that gave like rotting flesh beneath the blow, and finally, in a shortlived revival of confidence, he opened stinging eyes to see what he had hit.

  Something coiled out of the green core, something long and tapering, grayly mottled and slimy! Something that stank of deep ocean and submarine weeds! It was a tentacle—a face-tentacle, Tharpe knew—twitching spasmodically, even as the hand of a disturbed dreamer might twitch.

  Tharpe struck again, a reflex action, and watched his blade bite through the tentacle unhindered, as if through mud—and then saw that trembling member solidifying again where the blade had sliced! His knife fell from a palsied hand then, and Tharpe screamed a last, desperate, silent scream as the tentacle moved more purposefully!

  The now completely sentient member wrapped its tip about Tharpe’s throat, constricting and jerking him forwards effortlessly into the green core. And as he went the last things he saw were the eyes in the vast face; the hellish eyes that opened briefly, saw and recognized him for what he was—a sacrifice to Cthulhu !

  Quickly then, as the green light began its withdrawal and sound slowly returned to the tent, Hiram Henley put on his gloves. Ignoring as best he could the pain his injury gave him, he spoke these words:

  “Oh, Great Cthulhu, dreaming in R’lyeh,

  Thy priest offers up this sacrifice,

  That Thy coming be soon,

  And that of Thy kindred dreamers.

  I am Thy priest and adore Thee…”

  And as the core grew smaller yet, he toppled the evil idol into its green center, following this act by throwing in the tablets and all those other items of fabled antiquity until the inner tent was quite empty. He would have kept all these things if he dared, but his orders—those orders he received in dreams from R’lyeh—would not allow it. When a priest had been found to replace Hamilton Tharpe, then Great Cthulhu would find a way to return those rudimentary pillars of His temple!

  Finally, Henley switched off the single dim light and watched the green core as it shrank to a tiny point of intense brightness before winking out. Only the smell of deep ocean remained, and a damp circle in the dark where the sawdust floor was queerly marked and slimy…

  • • •

  Some little time later the folk of the fairground were awakened by the clamour of a fire engine as it sped to the blaze on the border of the circling tents, sideshows and caravans. Both Tharpe’s caravan and The Tomb of the Great Old Ones were burning fiercely.

  Nothing was saved, and in their frantic toiling to help the firemen the nomads of the funfair failed to note that their dogs again crouched timid and whimpering beneath the nighted caravans. They found it strange later, though, when they heard how the police had failed to discover anything of Anderson Tharpe’s remains.

  The gap that the destruction of the one-time freak-house had left was soon filled, for “Madame Zala”, as if summoned back by the grim work of the mysterious fire, returned with her horse and caravan within the week. She is still with Hodgson’s Funfair, but she will never speak of the Tharpes. At certain times of the year well known to anyone with even the remotest schooling in the occult, she is sometimes seen crossing herself with an obscure and pagan sign…

  The Taint

  The Taint was written December 2002 to January 2003, specifically for editor Steve Jones’ proposed Mythos collection, “Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth,” a volume dedicated to H.P. Lovecraft’s darkly mysterious seaport ‘town of ill repute’ inhabited by the changeling Deep Ones, those less than human, amphibious worshippers of Lord Cthulhu in his house in R’lyeh. One of only a very few recent Mythos tales by my hand, apart from its unavoidable, indeed obligatory backdrop, this story escapes almost entirely from Lovecraft’s literary influence to become wholly original, and I consider it on a par with Born of the Winds written all of thirty years earlier. Fedogan & Bremer published The Taint in a limited edition of “Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth” in time to launch the book at the World Fantasy Convention, Madison WI, November 2005…

  James Jamieson looked through binoculars at the lone figure on the beach—a male figure, at the rim of the sea—and said, “That’s pretty much what I would have wanted to do, when I was his age. Beachcombing, or writing books; maybe poetry? Or just bumming my way around the world. But my folks had other ideas. Just as well, I suppose. ‘No future in poetry, son.
Or in daydreaming or beachcombing.’ That was my father, a doctor in his own right. Like father like son, right?” Lowering his binoculars, he smiled at the others with him. “Still, I think I would have enjoyed it.”

  “Beachcombing, in the summer? Oh, I could understand that well enough!” John Tremain, the middle-aged headmaster at the technical college in St. Austell, answered him. “The smell of the sea, the curved horizon way out there, sea breezes in your hair, and the wailing of the gulls? Better than the yelping of brats any time—oh yes! The sun’s sparkle on the sea and warm sand between your toes—it’s very seductive. But this late in the season, and in my career?” He shook his head. “Thanks, but no thanks. You won’t find me with my hands in my pockets, sauntering along the tidemark and picking over the seaweed.”

  He paused, shrugged, and continued, “Not now, anyway. But on the other hand, when I was a young fellow teaching arts and crafts: carpentry and joinery, woodcraft in general—I mean, working with woods as opposed to surviving in them—now would have been the ideal time for a stroll on the beach. And I used to do quite a bit of it. Yes, indeed. For it’s autumn when the best pieces get washed ashore.”

  “Pieces?” Jilly White came back from wherever her thoughts had momentarily wandered, blinked her pretty but clouded green eyes at Tremain, then glanced from face to face in search of a hint, a clue. “I’m sorry, John, but I wasn’t quite…?”

  “Driftwood,” the teacher smiled. “All those twisted, sandpapered roots that get tumbled in with the tide when the wind’s off the sea. Those bleached, knotted, gargoyle branches. It’s a long time ago now, but—” He almost sighed, gave another shrug, and finished off, “But searching for driftwood was as close as I ever got to being a beachcomber.”

  And Doreen, his tall, slender, haughty but not unattractive wife, said, “You’ve visited with us often enough, Jilly. Surely you must have noticed John’s carvings? They were all driftwood originally, washed up on the beach there.”

  And now they all looked at Jilly…

  There were four of them, five if you included Jilly White’s daughter, Anne, curled up with a book in the lee of a sand-dune some twenty-five yards down the beach and out of earshot. Above her, a crest of crabgrass like some buried sand-giant’s eyebrow framed the girl where her curled body described a malformed eye in the dune’s hollow. And that was where Jilly White’s mind had been: on her fifteen-year-old daughter, there in the lee of the dune; and on the muffled, shuffling beachcomber on the far side of the dunes, near the water’s edge where the waves frothed and the sand was dark and damp.

  All of them were well wrapped against a breeze off the sea that wasn’t so much harsh as constant, unremitting. Only endure it long enough, it would cool your ears and start to find a way through your clothes. It was getting like that now; not yet the end of September, but the breeze made it feel a lot later.

  “John’s carvings?” said Jilly, who was still a little distant despite that she was right there with the others on Doctor (or ex-Doctor) James Jamieson’s verandah overlooking the beach. But now, suddenly, she snapped to. “Oh, his carvings! The driftwood! Why, yes, of course I’ve noticed them—and admired them, honestly—John’s driftwood carvings. Silly of me, really. I’m sorry, John, but when you said ‘pieces’ I must have been thinking of something broken. Broken in pieces, you know?”

  And Jamieson thought: She looks rather fragile herself. Not yet broken but certainly brittle…as if she might snap quite easily. And taking some of the attention, the weight off Jilly, he said, “Scrimshaw, eh? How interesting. I’d enjoy to see your work some time.”

  “Any time at all,” Tremain answered. “But, er, while it’s a bit rude of me to correct you, er, James, it isn’t scrimshaw.”

  “Oh?” The old man looked taken aback. “It isn’t?”

  The headmaster opened his mouth to explain, but before he could utter another word his wife, Doreen, cut in with, “Scrimshaw is the art or handicraft of old-time sailors, Doctor.” She could be a little stiff with first names. “Well, art of a sort, anyway.” And tut-tutting—apparently annoyed by the breeze—she paused to brush back some ruffled, dowdy-looking strands of hair from her forehead before explaining further. “Scrimshaw is the name they’ve given to those odd designs that they carve on shells and old whalebones and such.”

  “Ah!” Jamieson exclaimed. “But of course it is!” And glancing at Jilly, now huddling to herself, shivering a little and looking pale, he smiled warmly and said, “So you see, Jilly my dear, you’re not alone in mixing things up this afternoon. What with driftwood and scrimshaw and the wind—which is picking up I think, and blowing our brains about—why, it’s easy to lose track of things and fall out with the facts. Maybe we should go inside, eh? A glass of cognac will do us the world of good, and I’ll treat you to something I’ve newly discovered: a nice slice of homemade game pie from that bakery in the village. Then I’ll be satisfied that I’ve at least fed and watered you, and warmed your bones, before I let you go off home.”

  But as his visitors trooped indoors, the ex-Doctor quickly took up his binoculars to scan the beach again. In this off-the-beaten-track sort of place, one wouldn’t really expect to see a great many people on the shore; none, at this time of year. The beachcomber was still there, however; hunched over and with his head down, he shambled slowly along. And it appeared that Anne, Jilly’s bookish, reserved if not exactly retiring daughter, had finally noticed him. What’s more, she had stood up and was making her way down the beach toward him.

  Jamieson gave a start as Jilly touched his arm. And: “It’s all right,” she said quietly, (perhaps even confidentially, the doctor thought). “It’s nothing you should feel concerned about. Young Geoff and Anne, they’re just friends. They went to school together…well, for a while anyway. The infants, you know?”

  “Oh dear!” Jamieson blinked his slightly rheumy old eyes at her. “I do hope you don’t think I was spying on them—I mean, on your daughter. And as for this, er, Geoff?”

  “It’s all right,” she said again, tugging him inside. “It’s quite all right. You’ve probably bumped into him in the village and he may well have sparked some professional interest in you. That’s only natural, after all. But he’s really quite harmless, I assure you…”

  • • •

  Eating slowly, perhaps to avoid conversation, Jilly wasn’t done with her food when the Tremains were ready to go. “Anyway,” she said, “I’ll have to wait for Anne. She won’t be long…knows better than to be out when the light starts failing.”

  “You don’t mind her walking with the village idiot?” John’s words sounded much too harsh; he was probably biting his lip as he turned his face away and Doreen helped him on with his coat.

  “Ignore my husband,” Doreen twisted her face into something that didn’t quite equal a smile. “According to him all children are idiots. It seems that’s what being a teacher does to you.”

  Jilly said, “Personally, I prefer to think of the boy as an unfortunate. And of course in a small seaside village he stands out like a sore thumb. I’m glad he has a…a friend in Anne.”

  And John half relented. “You’re right, of course. And maybe I’m in the wrong profession. But it’s much like Doreen says. If you work all day with kids, especially bolshy teenagers, and in this day and age when you daren’t even frown at the little sods let alone slap their backsides—”

  At the door, Doreen lifted her chin. “I don’t recall saying anything like that. Nothing as rude as that, anyway.”

  “Oh, you know what I mean!” John said testily, trailing her outside, and colliding with her where she’d paused on the front doorstep. Then—in unison but almost as an afterthought—they stuck their heads back inside to thank Jamieson for his hospitality.

  “Not at all,” their host answered. “And I’ll be dropping in on you soon, to have a look at those carvings.”

  “Please do,” John told him.

  And Doreen added, “Evenings or weekends, y
ou’ll be welcome. We’re so glad that you’ve settled in here, Doctor.”

  “Oh, call me James, for goodness sake!” Jamieson waved them goodbye, closed the door, turned to Jilly and raised an enquiring, bushy grey eyebrow.

  She shrugged. “A bit pompous maybe, but they’re neighbours. And it does get lonely out here.”

  They went to the bay window in the end wall and watched the Tremains drive off down the road to their home less than a mile away. Jilly lived half a mile beyond that, and the tiny village—a huddle of old fishermen’s houses, really—stood some four or five hundred yards farther yet, just out of sight behind the rising, rocky promontory called South Point. On the far side of the village, a twin promontory, North Point, formed a bay, with the harbour lying sheltered in the bight.

  For a moment more Jamieson watched the Tremains’s car speed into the distance, then turned a glance of covert admiration on Jilly. She noticed it, however, cocked her head on one side and said, “Oh? Is there something…?”

  Caught out and feeling just a little uncomfortable now, the old man said, “My dear, I hope you won’t mind me saying so, but you’re a very attractive woman. And even though I’m a comparative stranger here, a newcomer, I can’t say I’ve come across too many eligible bachelors in the village.”

  Now Jilly frowned. Her lips began to frame a question—or perhaps a sharp retort, an angry outburst—but he beat her to it.

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!” He held up his hands. “It’s none of my business, I know. And I keep forgetting that your husband…that he—”

  “—Died less than eighteen months ago, yes,” Jilly said.

  The old man sighed. “My bedside manner hasn’t improved any with age,” he said. “I retired here for what I thought would be solitude—an absence of everything that’s gone before—only to find that I can’t seem to leave my practice behind me! To my patients I was a healer, a father confessor, a friend, a champion. I didn’t realize it would be so hard not to continue being those things.”