Best Little Witch-House in Arkham

by Mark McLaughlin

  “You’re putting that juice in metal containers,” I said. “So how come you had to take my ring off?”

  “The ‘juice’, as you call it, is the Milk of Time,” Maria said. “It can be stored in any type of container. But the source of the Milk cannot be allowed to come in contact with metal. Do you like our laboratory? We are very scientific, yes?”

  On tables and counters, the blue fluid was being tested and processed by about a dozen workers in white smocks. “They all work in shifts,” Maria said. “Production never stops. There is a great demand for our product. That is why it is so expensive. Only the very rich can afford to use it on a regular basis. And they do. Even though long-term use has its side effects, like sensitivity to most forms of light. And of course, the extreme dependency. The addicts eventually come here to work in their old age—they give the fat man all their money and in return, they get to live here and have the Milk for free.”

  “But—what does the stuff actually do to people?” I said, watching one of the workers pour the goop into a test tube.

  “This marvelous compound,” Maria said, “makes a person feel like God. Your grandmother never let a drop touch her lips. Me? That’s another story. The scientific principle is a bit too complex to explain quickly, but basically, it interacts with the body’s hormones, male and female. That is why only the very old are allowed to work with it. Their hormones have dried up, so they won’t be compelled to swill it down like hogs all day long. They only need a little every day—enough to keep them alive.”

  I thought about this for a moment. “So it’s some kind of aphrodisiac?”

  Maria shrugged. “Perhaps. If you think that God is sex personified. I don’t know. I am far too old to remember how it felt. That is another side effect. It makes a person live a very long time. Even after the wonderful feelings go away.” She sighed sadly. “We have a very nice room for visitors. You can stay there tonight. The fat man will be here in the morning. You can fire him then.”

  “There’s a lot I still don’t understand,” I said as we walked through the lab and into another passageway, Maria leading the way with her lantern. “Maybe I’ll fire the fat man—Nick—eventually, but I don’t think I should do it tomorrow. I need to talk to him about some things. Like how this stuff gets sold, who buys it. Maybe I don’t want people to have it any more. Hell, maybe I should shut this whole place down.”

  “Elena talked that way sometimes,” Maria said, “back when she used to visit us. I would say to her, ‘Ellie! The Milk of Time is the only thing keeping your poor old Jia-Jia alive! Do you want to see me die?’” The old woman wagged a finger at me. “Now I ask you the same question. Do you want me to die? Your own flesh and blood—your Jia-Jia’s Jia-Jia! Is that what you want?”

  “I wouldn’t wish death on anyone,” I said, wondering if she could possibly be who she said she was. My grandmother’s grandmother! I tried to figure out her age in my head. All her talk of death suddenly made me remember the driver’s story about the dead baby. “Did a young girl once visit here and…?” I wasn’t sure how to continue. Finally I just said, “Her baby was stillborn.”

  Maria waved a hand slowly, dismissively. “A stupid whore. The fat man arranged for her to entertain a business associate here. A very handsome man. That crazy whore, she got drunk and didn’t even do her job. Instead she somehow managed to wander into the forbidden areas of the building. Then she passed out and some of the old fellows who help gather the Milk of Time had their way with her.” She barked out a dry laugh. “Not all of us are completely dead below our belts! Men with seed so very old…older than you or anyone else from the outside might guess…what sort of awful baby would that make? You cannot make fresh bread from moldy flour! Better off that it died, I think. Ah, here is your room for the night. A very nice room.”

  The nice room Maria mentioned was in fact a spacious, well-furnished suite, with redwood furniture draped with quaint old doilies. Thankfully, it had modern lighting fixtures, along with a refrigerator, television, and a bar. So the building did indeed have an electrical connection. Maria didn’t enter the room. I asked if she wanted to come in, but she just shook her head and hurried away, down the long hall. Maybe all those modern conveniences scared her. But I did notice one thing, just before she turned and rushed off. She took just a moment to stare—with an odd look of what might have been fear, worry or curiosity—at a beige door in a corner of the suite.

  In a cabinet at the bar, I found bottles of vodka, whiskey, gin—and a half-dozen old bottles of ouzo. I recalled that my grandmother used to enjoy the occasional nip of the stuff. It’s not the sort of drink one can chug down. It’s too strong, thick and licorice-sweet. Perhaps Mr. Pileggi enjoyed it, too. There was tonic in the refrigerator, so I made a gin and tonic. I looked around for a phone, but apparently Maria hadn’t been lying when she’d said there wasn’t one. I suppose that had something to do with their need for secrecy. Even then, Der Fleischbrunnen wasn’t such a secret—the driver had known its location and a little more, too, though most of his facts were wrong.

  As I finished my drink, I looked over some of the books on a shelf by the television. I was amused to see a book with the title, Put A Little Greece In Your Cooking! There were many other dusty old cookbooks there—those must have been my Jia-Jia’s. I then saw that all the cookbooks had the same name on the spine. My grandmother had written them. She’d always had some difficulty writing in English, so she must have had the help of a ghost-writer who knew both Greek and English.

  One book on the shelf had the intriguing title, The Seven Blasphemies of Ghattambah. I recognized part of the title as the word I’d heard the old people whispering as they gathered the Milk of Time. It was a very large book, bound in leather that had thick, bristly black hair sprouting from it in spots. Utterly disgusting. The title had been burned—or rather, branded—onto the spine and front cover. Certainly a unique printing process. I wondered what kind of animal the leather had come from, and decided it must have been a pig.

  I opened the book. Each page was divided into quadrants, each in a different language: English, Greek, German and another I didn’t recognize. Also, in the middle of each page was an illustration. These depicted a variety of nauseating subjects: mostly bizarre sexual practices and cut-off or cut-up body parts. I stared at one picture for about three minutes—basically because I couldn’t decide what the thing in the picture was supposed to be. It had a puffy, tubular body with a multitude of pincer-legs, like a caterpillar. It also had long, heavily veined spiral wings. I had no idea how any creature could fly with wings like that. The head of the thing didn’t have a brainpan—it was just a huge, gaping mouth filled with sharp, crooked teeth. The thick lips were dotted with small, black eyes.

  At the base of the wings was a large, knobby hump. Perhaps that was the location of the brain, if indeed the thing had a brain of any size. A cluster of extremely long tendrils grew out of the top of the hump.

  The caption informed me that this creature was Ghattambah.

  I wanted to read the book, but decided I could do that later. In fact, I would take it with me when I left. I put it back on the shelf and decided to try opening that beige door. I wasn’t surprised to find that it was locked. I thought for a moment. If the key was in the room, where might it be hidden…?

  I reached up and checked the top of the door-frame. Nothing.

  One by one, I opened the books and shook them, hoping a key would fall out. But it wasn’t hidden among their pages.

  Then I thought about all those ouzo bottles. I went back to the cabinet and examined them. Sure enough, a rusty old key was taped to the side of an ouzo bottle at the back of the cabinet. A fine hiding place, since ouzo is not for all tastes, and there were five other bottles of the stuff in front of it.

  I unlocked the door—and found myself staring down a crude tunnel supported by wooden beams, with thick planks for walls, ceiling and floor. On a small shelf on the tunnel wall I found a box of wood
en matches and a glass and stone lantern with a yellow candle inside.

  I lit the candle and walked down the tunnel. I simply had to. I’d already seen so many bizarre sights in that building, and the fact that Maria had cast such a strange look at the door made me intensely curious.

  As I walked down the tunnel, a thought entered my mind. I knew the soft-drink industry pretty well. A drink that contained the Milk of Time could easily enslave the world. After all, millions of people were already addicted to caffeinated beverages. The addiction of that Milk would just further strengthen the enslavement. But did I want to enslave, therefore rule, the world? Of course not. I was already filthy rich. Why would I want the extra responsibility? I wasn’t about to let greed evolve into destructive stupidity.

  The tunnel took a turn and sloped gently downward. As I followed the way, I began to hear noises: movement, voices, and incessant dripping. Suddenly the tunnel opened up into a huge cave.

  And I was not alone.

  I put down my lantern at the mouth of the tunnel, since there was already light in the cave. Dozens of lanterns were set in niches cut into the rock of the cave walls. Several of the old workers were dancing and whisper-chanting, while others collected the Milk of Time from the cave floor with wooden spoons. They ignored me as they went about their duties. The Milk itself was dripping down—

  —down from an enormous cocoon, which was lashed to the roof of the cave by hundreds of thick ropes of silk. The cocoon was about the size of two bulldozers parked end to end. The surface of the huge pod was rough and filthy, with several oozing holes along the sides.

  I thought about how far I had walked, and the direction the path had taken…The cave was directly under the huge room which housed that fleshy volcano. That meant that the volcano was growing out of the top of cocoon, extending through a hole between the cave and that warehouse room. The cocoon seemed to be constantly oozing fluid—plenty for the workers to collect. As one of the dancing workers moved past me, she whispered, “Ghattambah.”

  I noticed a structure along a wall of the cave near the cocoon. Steps built onto wooden scaffolding led up to a platform at a level less than five feet away from the pod.

  As I watched, an old man with a long wooden pole, sharpened at one end, walked up to the platform and began to prod at the cocoon, ripping a couple more holes into it. These began to ooze the Milk of Time almost immediately.

  Milk? A quaint euphemism for blood, or ichor, or whatever that vile slime was.

  I decided to get a closer look.

  I walked up the wooden steps to the platform. I passed the old man on the way and he simply gave me a small nod.

  I stood high above the cave floor, watching the cocoon. The liquid oozed from the holes with a slow, gently pulsing regularity. I was in awe of this creature. What sort of being could constantly lose vital fluids without dying? It couldn’t be a creature from Earth. I was eager to read that hide-bound book—hopefully it would shed some light on this nightmare scenario.

  At this point, I did something utterly senseless. And I did it without thinking.

  I thought about the name Hitler had given the place—Der Fleischbrunnen. Maria had mentioned it meant ‘meat fountain.’ Everyone knows it’s good luck to toss a coin into a fountain. So I absent-mindedly dug a penny out of my pocket and flicked it toward the cocoon—and it landed right in one of the gaping, oozing holes.

  Only then did I remember what Maria had said.

  No metal. Never metal.

  It was a stupid thing to do, but I guess I was meant to do it. Maria had said there was no such thing as an accident.

  The cocoon began to rock back and forth, faster and faster. I hurried down the wooden steps. Writhing tendrils began to tear through the holes in the horrible bundle. A deafening, high-pitched shriek of rage echoed off the stone walls. I ran back to the mouth of the tunnel—and just in time. The agitated cocoon tore free of its moorings and fell with a sickening thud to the floor of the cave. There the casing tore open and a huge, slick, squealing thing scrambled out. It looked like a twisted, sickly version of the creature in the book’s drawing. The ravenous mouth-head whipped around, looking for prey, and fastened upon the nearest worker. That insane turbine of a mouth shredded the old man to red ribbons and sucked him down in a matter of seconds.

  With this nourishment, the body of Ghattambah began to plump up. The creature ate another of the workers, then another and yet another. The strange curving wings of the creature spread majestically. I wanted to run, but I found myself transfixed by the sight of such ravenous carnage. Soon the head whipped in my direction. I regained my senses, grabbed my lantern from where I’d set it earlier, and ran back through the tunnel. Fortunately, I couldn’t hear anything following me. The lantern slipped out of my hand and broke about halfway back to the room. I actually yelped when its feeble yellow light went out. I ran with one hand tapping the wall beside me, so I would be able to find the turn along the way.

  Once I was back in the room, I grabbed The Seven Blasphemies of Ghattambah and popped it into my bag. Then I hurried out of the room, through the labyrinth of the building’s halls, in a direction that I hoped would return me to the main entrance. The halls were dark, so again I had to run with one hand madly tapping the wall to my side. I could hear plenty of running and screaming, though I couldn’t tell what direction any of it was coming from. Soon the floor began to shake, and the squealing of the monster pealed through the building. The creature was trying to break out of its confinement—probably through the hole in the roof of the cave. As I ran through the halls, I kept thinking to myself, That thing is mine! Mine! And now my own property is going to kill me!

  I turned a corner and suddenly I saw Maria, holding a lantern.

  “What is happening?” she said. “I was sleeping and—”

  “We’ve got to get out of here!” I said. “The door! Where’s the door?”

  She took my hand. “There is another way out that is close,” she said. “Follow me.” She led me down a nearby hallway. “Is there a fire? Is the fountain safe?”

  “The fountain has dried up,” I said. “It’s over. All over.”

  “What? That cannot be!” she cried. “I will die. I need the Milk of Time to survive!”

  “There must be some stored somewhere,” I said.

  “Of course,” she said. “Hundreds of gallons. But the customers—”

  “To Hell with the customers,” I said. “It’s mine, remember? Get me out of here and you and the other workers can have the rest. Every drop.”

  “Ah! I knew you were a good man.” She flashed a huge grin at me. She still had a stringy piece of lamb stuck between her front teeth. “Just around this next corner. An emergency exit.”

  Maria did indeed get me out of the building, but she did not accompany me any further. She simply slipped into one of the other warehouses. As I ran from the building, I heard a crash of timber and turned just in time to see an enormous, shrieking shape soar up out of the ruined roof.

  In flight, Ghattambah looked like a nightmarish four-way cross between a moray eel, a caterpillar, a bat and an eggbeater gone berserk. Green static danced upon its impossible spiral wings. Suddenly there was a flash of dark-green light and the creature disappeared.

  I eventually did meet—and fire—Mr. Pileggi. I moved Maria to a nice little house in the United States, and she now has all the Milk of Time she could ever need. I also made similar arrangements for the rest of the workers who had tended to Der Fleischbrunnen. That’s the nice thing about having loads of money. It makes taking care of problems that much easier.

  I also hired some folks from the island to fix the damage to the warehouse. It’s a big, sturdy building. As I said before, it’s empty now. And in the future, it’s only going to be used for storage.

  As for that abhorrent hide-bound book—I have read it from cover to cover. I now know all the mysteries of Ghattambah the Undying, whose soul dwells beyond time.

  The crea
ture’s cult has existed on this world for thousands of years. Some of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt used to make sacrifices to Ghattambah. The island’s great cave had been a center of worship for centuries. Somehow the cult had evolved into a business, which had eventually found its way into my grandmother’s possession.

  Having read the book, I now know how to bring the creature back to this world—as a rampaging winged god, as an enormous larva inside a cocoon, even as a black, octagonal egg. But I have no wish to summon the thing.

  And yet I cannot bring myself to destroy the book. I know I should. It contains secrets of incredible power. I hope there will never come a day when I’ll want or need that sort of power.

  Still, who knows what the future will bring?

  That book is filthy. Wicked. Dangerous.

  Yet it feels so comforting to own it.

  About the Author

  Mark McLaughlin’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in almost one-thousand magazines, newspapers, websites, and anthologies, including Living Dead 2, Black Gate, Galaxy, Fangoria, Writer’s Digest, Cemetery Dance, Midnight Premiere, Dark Arts, and two volumes each of The Best of the Rest, The Best of HorrorFind, and The Year’s Best Horror Stories (DAW Books).

  Collections of McLaughlin’s fiction include Beach Blanket Zombie, Motivational Shrieker, Slime after Slime, and Pickman’s Motel from Delirium Books; At the Foothills of Frenzy (with coauthors Shane Ryan Staley and Brian Knight) from Solitude Publications; and Raising Demons for Fun and Profit from Sam’s Dot Publishing.

  An expert on B-movies, McLaughlin writes two columns on the topic. HorrorGarage.com features his online column, Four-Letter Word Beginning with ‘F’ (the word in question is Fear). Also, GravesideTales.com features his horror-movie history column, Time Machine of Terror!

  McLaughlin is the coauthor, with Rain Graves and David Niall Wilson, of The Gossamer Eye, which won the 2002 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Poetry.