For at the base of the wall, behind the baseboard, there lay, among long yellowed papers half gnawed away by mice, yet still bearing on their surfaces the unmistakably cabalistic designs of some bygone day, among wicked implements of death and destruction—short, dagger-like knives rusted by what must surely have been blood— the small skulls and bones of at least three children!
I stared unbelievingly, for the superstitious nonsense I had heard only a day before from Ahab Hopkins now took on a more sinister cast. So much I realized on the instant. Children had disappeared during my great-grandfather’s aegis; he had been suspected of wizardry, of witchcraft, of playing roles in which the sacrifice of little children was an integral part; now here, within the walls of his house, were such remains as lent weight to the native suspicions of his nefarious activities!
Once my initial shock had passed, I knew I must act with dispatch. If this discovery were made known, then indeed my tenure here would be bitterly unhappy, made so by the God-fearing natives of the neighborhood. Without hesitating further, I ran for a cardboard box and, returning to the wall with it, gathered up every vestige of bone I could find, and carried this gruesome burden to the family vault, where I emptied the bones into the cubicle which had once held the remains of Jedediah Peabody, now long since gone to dust. Fortunately, the small skulls disintegrated, so that anyone searching there would find only the remains of someone long dead, and only an expert would have been able to determine the origin of the bones which remained sufficiently unimpaired to offer any key. By the time any report from the Polish workingmen came back to the architect, I would be able to deny the truth of them, though for this report I was destined to wait in vain, for the fear-ridden Poles never revealed to the architect a word of their real reason for deserting their job.
I did not wait to learn this from the architect, who was bound eventually to find someone who would undertake such alterations as I wished made, but, guided by an instinct I did not know I possessed, I made my way to the hidden room, carrying a powerful flashlight, determined to subject it to the most painstaking examination. Almost at once upon entering it, however, I made a spine-chilling discovery; though the marks the architect and I had made in our brief foray into the room were still identifiably evident, there were other, more recent marks which suggested that someone—or something—had been in this room since I had last entered it. The marks were plain to be seen—of a man, bare of foot, and, equally unmistakably, the prints of a cat. But these were not the most terrifying evidences of some sinister occupation—they began out of the northeast corner of the curiously-angled room, at a point where it was impossible for a man to stand, and scarcely high enough for a cat; yet it was here that they materialized in the room, and from this point that they came forward, proceeding in the direction of the black desk—where there was something far worse, though I did not notice it until I was almost upon the desk in following the footsteps.
The desk had been freshly stained. A small pool of some viscous fluid lay there, as if it had boiled up out of the wood—scarcely more than three inches in diameter, next to a mark in the dust as if the cat or a doll or a bundle of some kind had lain there. I stared at it, trying to determine what it might be in the glow of my flashlight, sending my light ceilingward to detect, if possible, any opening through which rain might have come, until I remembered that there had been no rainfall since my first and only visit to this strange secret room. Then I touched my index finger to the pool and held it in the light. The color was red— the color of blood—and simultaneously I knew without being told that this was what it was. Of how it came there I dared not think.
By this time the most terrifying conclusions were crowding to mind, but without any logic. I backed away from the desk, pausing only long enough to snatch up some of the leather-bound books, and the manuscript which reposed there; and with these in my possession, I retreated from the room into the more prosaic surroundings outside—where the rooms were not constructed of seemingly impossible angles, suggesting dimensions beyond the knowledge of mankind. I hastened almost guiltily to my quarters below, hugging the books carefully to my bosom.
Curiously, as soon as I opened the books, I had an uncanny conviction that I knew their contents. Yet I had never seen them before, nor, to the best of my knowledge, had I ever encountered such titles as Malleus Maleficarum and the Daemonialitas of Sinistrari. They dealt with witch-lore and wizardry, with all manner of spells and legends, with the destruction of witches and warlocks by fire, with their methods of travel—“Among their chief operations are being bodily transported from place to place . . . seduced by the illusions and phantasms of devils, do actually, as they believe and profess, ride in the night-time on certain beasts . . . or simply walk upon the air out of the openings built for them and for none other. Satan himself deludes in dreams the mind which he holds captive, leading it through devious ways . . . They take the unguent, which they make at the devil’s instruction from the limbs of children, particularly of those whom they have killed, and anoint with it a chair or a broomstick; whereupon they are immediately carried up into the air, either by day or by night, and either visibly or, if they wish, invisibly . . .” But I read no more of this, and turned to Sinistrari.
Almost at once my eye fell upon this disturbing passage—“Promittunt Diabolo statis temporibus sacrificia, et oblationes; singulis quindecim diebus, vel singulo mense saltem, necem alicujus infantis, aut mortale veneficium, et singulis hebdomadis alia mala in damnum humani generis, ut grandines, tempestates, incendia, mortem animalium . . .” setting forth how warlocks and witches must bring about, at stated intervals, the murder of a child, or some other homicidal act of sorcery, the mere reading of which filled me with an indescribable sense of alarm, as a result of which I did no more than glance at the other books I had brought down, the Vitae sophistrarum of Eunapius, Anania’s De Natura Daemonum, Stampa’s Fuga Satanae, Bouget’s Discours des Sorciers, and that untitled work by Olaus Magnus, bound in a smooth black leather, which only later I realized was human skin.
The mere possession of these books betokened a more than ordinary interest in the lore of witchcraft and wizardry; indeed, it was such manifest explanation for the superstitious beliefs about my great-grandfather which abounded in and about Wilbraham, that I understood at once why they should have persisted for so long. Yet there must have been something more, for few people could have known about these books. What more? The bones in the wall beneath the hidden chamber spoke damningly for some hideous connection between the Peabody house and the unsolved crimes of other years. Even so, this was surely not a public one.
There must have been some overt feature of my great-grandfather’s life which established the connection in their minds, other than his reclusiveness and his reputation for parsimony, of which I knew. There was not likely to be any key to the riddle among these things from the hidden room, but there might well be some clue in the files of the Wilbraham Gazette, which were available in the public library.
Accordingly, half an hour later found me in the stacks of that institution, searching through the back issues of the Gazette. This was a time-consuming effort, since it involved a blind search of issue after issue during the later years of my great-grandfather’s life, and not at all certain to be rewarding, though the newspapers of this day were less hampered and bound by legal restrictions than those of my own time. I searched for over an hour without coming upon a single reference to Asaph Peabody, though I did pause to read accounts of the “outrages” perpetrated upon people—primarily children—of the countryside in the vicinity of the Peabody place, invariably accompanied by editorial queries about the “animal” which was “said to be a large black creature of some kind, and it has been reported to be of different sizes—sometimes as large as a cat, and sometimes as big as a lion”—which was a circumstance no doubt due solely to the imagination of the reporting witnesses, who were principally children under ten, victims of mauling or biting, from which they had ma
de their escape, happily more fortunate in this than younger children who had vanished without trace at intervals during the year in which I read: 1905. But throughout all this, there was no mention of my great-grandfather; and, indeed, there was nothing until the year of his death.
Then, and only then, did the editor of the Gazette put into print what must have represented the current belief about Asaph Peabody. “Asaph Peabody is gone. He will be long remembered. There are those among us who have attributed to him powers which belonged rather more to an era in the past than to our own time. There was a Peabody among those charged at Salem; indeed, it was from Salem that Jedediah Peabody removed when he came to build his home near Wilbraham. The pattern of superstition knows no reason. It is perhaps mere coincidence that Asaph Peabody’s old black cat has not been seen since his death, and it is undoubtedly mere ugly rumor that the Peabody coffin was not opened before interment because there was some alteration in the body tissues or in the conventions of burial to make such opening unwise. This is again lending credence to old wives’ tales—that a warlock must be buried face downward and never thereafter disturbed, save by fire . . .”
This was a strange, oblique method of writing. Yet it told me much, perhaps uncomfortably more than I had anticipated. My great-grandfather’s cat had been looked upon as his familiar—for every witch or warlock has his personal devil in any shape it might care to assume. What more natural than that my great-grandfather’s cat should be mistaken for his familiar, for it had evidently in life been as constant a companion to him as it was in my dreams of the old man?
The one disturbing note struck by the editorial comment lay in the reference to his interment, for I knew what the editor could not have known—that Asaph Peabody had indeed been buried face downward. I knew more—that he had been disturbed, and should not have been. And I suspected yet more—that something other than myself walked at the old Peabody homestead, walked in my dreams and over the countryside and in the air!
IV
That night, once more, the dreams came, accompanied by that same exaggerated sense of hearing, which made it seem as if I were attuned to cacophonous sound from other dimensions. Once again my great-grandfather went about his hideous business, but this time it seemed that his familiar, the cat, stopped several times and turned to face squarely at me, with a wickedly triumphant grin on its evil face. I saw the old man in a conical black hat and a long black robe walking from woodland seemingly through the wall of a house, coming forth into a darkened room, spare of furnishings, appearing then before a black altar, where the Black Man stood waiting for the sacrifice which was too horrible to watch, yet I had no alternative, for the power of my dreams was such that I must look upon this hellish deed. And I saw him and his cat and the Black Man again, this time in the midst of a deep forest, far from Wilbraham, together with many others, before a large outdoors altar, to celebrate the Black Mass and the orgies that followed upon it. But they were not always so clear; sometimes the dreams were only arrow-swift descents through unlimited chasms of strangely colored twilight and bafflingly cacophonous sound, where gravity had no meaning, chasms utterly alien to nature, but in which I was always singularly perceptive on an extrasensory plane, able to hear and see things I would never have been aware of while waking. Thus I heard the eldritch chants of the Black Mass, the screams of a dying child, the discordant music of pipes, the inverted prayers of homage, the orgiastic cries of celebrants, though I could not always see them.
And on occasion, too, my dreams conveyed portions of conversations, snatches of words, meaningless of themselves, but capable of dark and disquieting explication.
“Shall he be chosen?”
“By Belial, by Beelzebub, by Sathanus . . .”
“Of the blood of Jedediah, of the blood of Asaph, companioned by Balor.”
“Bring him to the Book!”
Then there were those curious figments of dreams in which I myself appeared to be taking part, particularly one in which I was being led, alternately by my great-grandfather and by the cat, to a great black-bound book in which were written names in glowing fire, countersigned in blood, and which I was instructed to sign, my great-grandfather guiding my hand, while the cat, whom I heard Asaph Peabody call Balor, having clawed at my wrist to produce blood into which to dip the pen, capered and danced about. There was about this dream one aspect which had a more disturbing bond to reality. In the course of the way through the woods to the meeting place of the coven, the path led beside a marsh where we walked in the black mud of the sedge, near to foetid sloughs in a place where there was a charnel odor of decay; I sank into the mud repeatedly in that place, though neither the cat nor great-grandfather seemed to more than float upon its surface.
And in the morning, when at last I awoke after sleeping over long, I found upon my shoes, which had been clean when I went to bed, a drying black mud which was the substance of my dream! I started from bed at sight of them, and followed the tracks they had made easily enough, tracing them backwards, out of the room, up the stairs, into the hidden room on the second storey and, once there, back, inexorably, to that same bewitched corner of peculiar angle from which the footprints in the dust had led into the room! I stared in disbelief, yet my eyes did not deceive me. This was madness, but it could not be denied. Nor could the scratch on my wrist be wished out of existence.
I literally reeled from the hidden room, beginning at last vaguely to understand why my parents had been loath to sell the Peabody homestead; something had come down to them of its lore from my grandfather, for it must have been he who had had great-grandfather buried with his face downward in the family crypt. And, however much they may have scorned the superstitious lore they had inherited, they were unwilling to chance its defiance. I understood, too, why periods of rental had failed, for the house itself was a sort of focal point for forces beyond the comprehension or control of any one person, if indeed any human being; and I knew that I was already infected with the aura of the habitation, that, indeed, in a sense I was a prisoner of the house and its evil history.
I now sought the only avenue of further information open to me—the manuscript of the journal kept by my great-grandfather. I hastened to it directly, without pausing for breakfast, and found it to be a sequence of notes, set down in his flowing script, together with clippings from letters, newspapers, magazines, and even books, which had seemed to him pertinent, though these were peculiarly unconnected, yet all dealing with inexplicable events— doubtless, in great-grandfather’s eyes, sharing a common origin in witchcraft.
His own notes were spare, yet revealing.
“Did what had to be done today. J. taking on flesh, incredibly. But this is part of the lore. Once turned over, all begins again. The familiar returns, and the clay takes shape again a little more with each sacrifice. To turn him back would be futile now. There is only the fire.”
And again:
“Something in the house. A cat? I see him, but cannot catch him.”
“Definitely a black cat. Where he came from, I do not know. Disturbing dreams. Twice at a Black Mass.”
“In dream, the cat led me to the Black Book. Signed.”
“In dream an imp called Balor. A handsome fellow. Explained the bondage.”
And, soon after:
“Balor came to me today. I would not have guessed him the same. He is as handsome a cat as he was a young imp. I asked him whether this was the same form in which he had served J. He indicated that it was. Led the way to the corner with a strange and extra-dimensional angle which is the door to outside.
J. had so constructed it. Showed me how to walk through it . . .”
I could bear to read no further. Already I had read far too much.
I knew now what had happened to the remains of Jedediah Peabody. And I knew what I must do. However fearful I was of what I must find, I went without delay to the Peabody crypt, entered it, and forced myself to go to the coffin of my great-grandfather.
There, for
the first time, I noticed the bronze plate attached beneath the name of Asaph Peabody, and the engraving upon it: “Woe betide him who disturbs his rest!” Then I raised the lid.
Though I had every reason to expect what I saw, I was horrified no less. For the bones I had last seen were terribly altered. What had been but bone and fragments, dust and tatters of clothing, had begun a shocking alteration. Flesh was beginning to grow once again on the remains of my great-grandfather, Asaph Peabody—flesh that took its origin from the evil upon which he had begun to live anew when I had so witlessly turned over his mortal remains—and from that other thing within his coffin—the poor, shriveling body of that child which, though it had vanished from the home of George Taylor less than ten days ago, already had a leathern, parchment appearance, as were it drained of all substance, and partially mummified!
I fled the vault, numb with horror, but only to build the pyre I knew I must gather together. I worked feverishly, in haste lest someone surprise me at my labors, though I knew that people had shunned the Peabody homestead for decades. And then, this done, I labored alone to drag Asaph Peabody’s coffin and its hellish contents to the pyre, just as, decades before, Asaph himself had done to Jedediah’s coffin and what it had contained! Then I stood by, while the holocaust consumed coffin and contents, so that I alone heard the high shrill wail of rage which rose from the flames like the ghost of a scream.
All that night the diminishing ashes of that pyre still glowed. I saw it from the windows of the house.
The Lurker at the Threshold: Posthumous Collaborations Page 7
