The Horror In The Water Tower & Five More Tales Of The Cthulhu Mythos

by McLaughlin, Mark

  Black velvet walls and carpets. Tables and bookcases of gray wood. Huge purple vases veined with cobalt-blue. Faded paintings of grim old men. Sometimes he would set a portrait crooked on its hook, or tip a vase on its side, so he’d recognize the marker should he come across it again. Not that it did any good – in all of his wanderings, he never found any sign of his earlier passage.

  Whenever he was hungry, he came across a dining room with a meal set out for him. Whenever nature called, the appropriate facilities appeared. Whenever he was tired, a bedroom door would swing gently open.

  Was he lost in a huge mansion or a small, well-furnished planet? Timothy wished there were windows. He longed for sunlight – the oddly-shaped bluish bulbs mounted on the walls flickered slightly, making him nervous. The endless loneliness of this elegant exile gnawed at his sanity.

  Timothy touched one of the paintings. It depicted a gaunt old man with three warts on his left cheek. Many of the old men had blemishes – warts, port-wine birthmarks, and liver spots. He looked to a painting on the other side of the hall. This fellow had a cluster of reddish moles on his forehead.

  He turned back to the gentleman with warts. He briefly considered tearing the canvas. But no, the old rage was gone. Once, early in his solitude, he had torn away a strip of the wall’s black velvet, revealing pitted stone beneath. The maze was inescapable.

  He walked down the hall and found another gentleman with two warts on his right cheek. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a small, ratlike shape, scurrying in the shadows. He turned to look directly at it, but it was gone. This happened fairly regularly. He would notice the quick-moving shape in his peripheral vision, but the moment he gave it his full attention … it was gone. The only real detail he ever took in was that the dark shape had a small, lighter splotch on it.

  While looking around for the shape, he noticed a glint of white on the carpet. This was the first time he had ever seen a trace of pure white in the mansion. Even the teeth of the old men were gray or yellow.

  He stepped up to the white object and picked it up. It was a torn strip of paper the size of his index finger. There were words written on it in pencil.

  FOLLOW THIS HALL TO THE GREEN ROOM. I WILL WAIT FOR YOU.

  Timothy’s heart pounded so fiercely he thought it would shake him apart. He was not alone. The writing was rounded and feminine. There was a woman somewhere in the mansion. A lonely woman – but where was the green room?

  A hair was caught on the torn edge of the paper. He rolled the long, shining strand of red hair between his thumb and forefinger.

  His wife’s hair had been mouse-brown, long, straight and drab. She had been a bland, bookish creature. She was so mild and nondescript, he sometimes wondered if she was part of a witness protection program. It was as though fading into the background was her stock-in-trade. He couldn’t even remember why he had married her. Was there no one else for him to choose? Would no one else have him? There were no mirrors in the mansion, not even in the washrooms, and his memory of his face was flawed. He knew he was not ugly, yet he was far from sure that he was handsome.

  He used to ask his wife if she thought him handsome, and her reply was always the same. “You would be mine no matter how you looked.” He thought this indicated a certain degree of indifference on her part. Had she no taste?

  The early years of their marriage had been wonderful. They entertained guests and took trips. They dined in restaurants and enjoyed watching plays. But time passed, and soon they realized they were entertaining the same guests; taking the same trips; visiting the same restaurants. Even the plays were beginning to pall – the plots seemed so similar. One by one, each diversion was dropped. He spent more time at work and she spent more time reading. They settled into years of safe tedium, punctuated by occasional arguments.

  He hurried down the black velvet hall, ignoring corridors branching to the sides. He opened countless doors in search of the green room. He continued to roll the long hair between his fingers; finally he put it in his shirt pocket. He imagined what the woman would look like... Flowing red hair. Green eyes. Smooth skin.

  His life so far had been a waste. Maybe the green room would bring him happiness. Green was the color of life. Prosperity. Contentment.

  He stopped in a dining room and ate steak with mushrooms. He moved on. A bedroom appeared and he slept. He continued on his way, touching the strand of hair in his pocket every now and then. He imagined that it made it fingers smell like perfume. In another dining room, he enjoyed a plate of vegetables and a glass of wine. He had long since ceased to question the source of his meals. He simply dismissed the phenomenon as another kindness of his velvet prison.

  And so time passed. Timothy ate and slept and tried door after door. He wondered how long the woman in the green room would wait. He also wondered how much time had passed since the note had been written. Weeks? Years? For all he knew, the message could be centuries old.

  What if there was no red-haired woman? Would he grow old and die in these halls? If only there were books. A good library could help to fill the hours. His wife had been a voracious reader, with huge volumes of Bierce, Hawthorne and Wilde stacked by her nightstand lamp for when she couldn’t sleep. She never read works by women, or even living authors. All of her selections were by morbid dead men. He would bring paperwork from his job to bed and she would bring The Collected Works of Theophile Gautier – or perhaps some large, dusty book that rustled and creaked. She had plenty of those.

  - - -

  While resting on a couch in one of the dining rooms, Timothy began to study the black velvet walls. He thought of the black stone beneath the velvet. Had it been all of one piece? That was how he remembered it. He crossed to the table, picked up a steak knife, and began to slice at the velvet.

  Yes, the pitted stone was completely seamless. He examined the holes in its surface, and began to dig into one with his knife. It took some time, but he managed to work the blade a half-inch into the hole. The even distribution of the holes reminded him of pores in flesh….

  Black, oily fluid oozed from around the blade. Timothy dug deeper. Suddenly, the surface of the wall softened and the knife slid through to the hilt.

  The wall began to shudder and swell. He pulled out the knife and a torrent of fluid gushed forth. On an impulse, he gouged at another hole. This time the knife slide in easily but stuck, as if lodged in bone. He released the knife and ran from the room.

  Timothy sped down the hall. In his panic he stumbled into a wall and upset a portrait. It fell to the floor, smashing a vase. Timothy noticed that the vase contained a pile of brownish-gray ashes. At last he stopped, out of breath. The entire episode was like a nightmare. For a moment, he wondered if he had fallen asleep on the dining room couch and dreamed up the bleeding wall. Then he saw that his hands were streaked with black oil. He glanced back and saw that a trickle of the fluid was following him.

  It was in a nightmare that he had first encountered the mansion. After a long argument with his wife, he had gone to bed tired and irritated. Mumbling angrily to herself, his wife had brought a book to bed. He dreamed for hours of roaming the endless mansion. The same dream occurred the next night, and the next.

  He had yet to awaken from the third dream.

  Since that time, the mansion nightmare had softened into a disturbing reality in which he ate, slept, and felt pain. His flesh tingled hotly where he had been splashed by the bleeding wall. He wiped his oily hands on the wall and saw that the fluid had bleached patches of his skin white. He found a washroom and rinsed the remaining oil away.

  Back in the hall, he put a hand on the wall to steady himself. The wall was no longer solid; it compressed slightly under pressure. In the hall, the trickle of oil had grown into a stream, covering a third of the floor. The fluid was beginning to rot – the charnel reek of it made Timothy gag. He noticed that the velvet of the walls and floor had lost its sheen.

  He had injured the mansion, even though it had
not harmed him. He found this realization disturbing. It reminded him of his last argument with his wife.

  “I try my best to make you happy,” she had said. “If I’m too nice, you call me an idiot. If I complain, I’m a shrew. Is it so evil of me to want to hear you say, ‘I love you’?”

  Timothy continued to search for the green room. At one point, he saw the ratlike shape out of the corner of his eye. This time, he did not look straight at it. He did his best to observe it without concentrating on it in any way. It seemed to be moving in a faltering manner, moving a short distance one way, then veering off in another direction. He did notice one thing before he lost track of it: the pale splotch he’d seen before was in fact, the rat-creature’s face.

  - - -

  The stench of the black stream was horrible. He had no desire to eat or even to think, for concentration of any kind sharpened his senses.

  At last he came to a door different from the rest. It was slightly taller, and crafted of a richer wood. When he turned the knob, he found it locked. He looked through the keyhole and glimpsed green wallpaper.

  He knocked and called out. No one answered.

  What could he use to pick the lock? A few yards down the hall he found another portrait. He took it down and removed the wire from the back. As he set the painting against the wall, he noticed that the old man had three warts on his left cheek. A memory stirred. A short distance down the hall, he found an old gentleman with two warts on his right cheek.

  He was only a few steps from the spot where he had first found the slip of white paper. At the time, he had not considered that his destination could be directly behind him. So he had followed the hall in a circle so enormous that its curve was imperceptible. A dull anger brought tears to his eyes. What if he found no trace of the woman? He no longer dared to hope for escape. Now, if his new-found hope for companionship was crushed, life would be truly intolerable.

  Wire in hand, he returned to the locked door. He twisted the wire into a key-like shape and turned it in the lock, without success. He tried another configuration, then tried again. On the fourth try, the door clicked open.

  On a plump green sofa sat the most beautiful woman Timothy had ever seen. Her hair was red and flowing. Her eyes were green and her skin was milky smooth.

  “Hello, Timothy,” she said, examining her fingernails. Her small, cruel smile indicated a perplexing familiarity. “Don’t you remember me?”

  “Should I?” he replied. He realized that he presented a pathetic sight: stained clothes, bleached skin – and perhaps he was old. He didn’t know.

  The red-haired woman patted the seat cushion next to her. Timothy sat by her side.

  “I’m your wife,” she said. “Do you remember my name?”

  Speechless, Timothy shook his head.

  She pushed a luxurious lock of hair away from her eyes. “Do you know where you are?”

  Again, he shook his head.

  “You are in my soul,” she whispered. A broad grin stretched her red lips over perfect teeth. “I don’t love you anymore, but I surely do not want to surrender you.” Suddenly she inhaled deeply, as though startled.

  “Are you … a witch?” he asked.

  “Ah. You finally figured it out. Congratulations, genius.” A brief, unfocused look of worry crossed her face. Was she in pain? “You knew me as Cassandra, but my name is actually Keziah.” She began to massage her temples. “Keziah Mason. Arrested during the Salem Witch Trials in 1692. Famed occupant of a notorious witch-house in Arkham, Massachusetts. Didn’t know you were married to a celebrity, did you?”

  “Cassandra…” Timothy nodded. “Yes, Cassandra! Now I remember! But I met you at church. How can you be a witch?”

  “You met me outside the church, actually.” Keziah smiled. “That was at a time when I’d decided, once again, to try the domestic life of a plain, dutiful wife. I’d tried it many times before. Horror and blasphemy as a hideous hag can be so exhausting. But sadly, it’s addictive. So I keep switching between the two.” She raised her hands toward her face. “This is what I look like, here in my private domain. Like what you see?” She smiled seductively. “At any rate, I’ve decided to keep you here, as I’ve kept your predecessors. Someday you shall die … by your own hand, of course. Then there shall be another portrait in the black velvet hall, and another ash-filled vase.”

  Timothy blinked. He thought for a moment, then laughed softly. “I don’t think that’s going to happen. Forgive me for saying so! I know it’s awful for a husband to discourage his wife’s interests.”

  The red-haired woman glanced over Timothy’s shoulder into the hallway. “What… What is happening?”

  The putrescent stream began to flow into the room – and something ran in just ahead of it. Timothy recognized it as the ratlike shape. He was now able to focus on it, and he saw that it was, in fact, a large rat with a pale face like that of an ugly old man.

  “Brown Jenkin!” screamed Keziah. “Come to me!” The creature responded by leaping into the witch’s arms. Timothy recalled reading that witches were supposed to have familiars – magic creatures that assisted them. Apparently this little ghoul was his wife’s helper.

  Timothy moved to a wall and pushed a finger through the velvet into the softening mass. His finger sank in to the second joint.

  “Stop it! What have you done to me?” shrieked Keziah. “Beware, you fool! I can easily cover your body with biting camel spiders! I can fill your lungs with wasps and live coals! I can turn your intestines into electric eels! I can – I–” With a shriek of pain, she collapsed to the floor, crushing the rat-thing under her body.

  Timothy thrust his hand into the rotting flesh of the wall. The black oil splashed on his face and chest. He dug in with his other hand. He gouged and punched and kicked as the wall grew ever softer. Keziah writhed on the floor, screaming and cursing.

  Timothy walked into the gelled blackness of the mansion’s very heart. His dissolving flesh began to tingle madly. He was dying with and within his wife – his beautiful, vicious witch-wife – and they would be together forever, locked in the tightest of all embraces.

  He would never be alone again.

  The Hungry One Must Feed

  by Mark McLaughlin

  Three days after Mr. Root OD’ed in his backyard, I found his kitty out by the trashcans.

  I didn’t know Randy Root personally, but I often saw him come and go. Literally. He rented the house next door, and my bedroom window overlooked his fenced-in backyard. There, he entertained a wide variety of companions in an oversized hammock hung between an oak and a catalpa tree. Often Mr. Root would relieve himself on the catalpa tree. I wouldn’t have minded pissing on that damned tree myself. It dropped most of its blossoms, beans and leaves on my side of the fence.

  At age forty, Mr. Root was a successful retiree of the adult film industry. Randy’s considerable talents were featured in dozens of erotic epics. This I learned from my own DVD rental experience. Most of his titles were on hand at the Freemont Adult Arcade: Pizza Studs, Twin Action, Bi and Large, Man to Man, and more. I never watched online porn. I was afraid the government would be able to trace the websites I visited online.

  Did I lust after Mr. Root? Envy him? Seek to emulate him? No, no and no. The truth is, I had no real sexual identity. I’d tried sex, of course. Enjoyable? Yes. Worth the bother? Not hardly. Most men would have consulted a psychiatrist or a sex therapist – but I knew what my problem was. I had never really loved anyone (except maybe Mom). Since that time, circumstances have changed.

  I did not mind a sexless life. And yet, some curiosity remained. Enough to rent videos. Enough to watch Mr. Root’s backyard antics. Soon I came to realize that I was not the only one watching.

  His kitty watched from the bottom branch of the catalpa tree. A huge yellow kitty with one black ear.

  He simply sat there, looking on. You could tell it was a tomkitty. The shoulders were chunky and the hips were lean. He had a big round head and
huge paws. When Mr. Root was done, his spectator-cat would climb down and saunter off while his master pissed on the tree.

  I wasn’t watching on the night Mr. Root had his fatal heart attack. I was at my supervisor’s birthday party. I worked for a local TV station as a cameraman, and I had to shoot video at company get-togethers. By the time I returned home, Mr. Root was being loaded into the ambulance. The next day, I read in the newspaper that he’d been doing cocaine with two prostitutes. Two days after that, I found the kitty.

  I noticed the kitty had a silver tag. The tag read GAT – no address, no telephone number. Gat? What kind of a name was that? I eventually decided that ‘Gat’ was short for ‘Giant Cat,’ since he was such a big kitty.

  I took Gat home and gave him some leftover salmon. He wouldn’t eat any, though. He simply sniffed at it. After a while, he curled up in a corner and stared at me. One eye was green and the other was blue.

  I checked and found that he was declawed, which made me wonder how he managed to get up that tree. There was something funny about his paws. His toes were too long and the end-joints seemed flattened. You couldn’t tell where his claws had been.

  I called my brother Philip, a vet, and asked if some kitties were born without claws. “That’s funny,” he said. “You still call them kitties.” For a vet who’s supposed to be so caring, he can be quite callous. He doubted that a kitty could be born without claws – “But hey, anything is possible,” he added. Later, I bought Gat a litter box and assorted cans of kittyfood.

  Gat and I settled into a casual relationship. It was nice to be sharing the house with someone again.

  I’d lived with Mom in our big old house for years before she passed away. Mom was always pestering me to meet girls and go out on dates. “It’s not healthy for a man to be alone,” she’d say as she scrambled up my breakfast eggs. “Especially at your age.”