by Anthology
I started to cry then, because I was lying, because the story didn’t go that way. It wasn’t as simple as that. It was so unfair that we couldn’t just be brothers and grow up together, like other kids did. I didn’t know how the story would end and was afraid that it never would; not because of anything we’d done, or even because of anything Father had done in his Royal Wrath or Mother had in her prayerful frenzies. No, it was nobody’s fault that our grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents had come from someplace up north called Dunwich and had been named Whateley; and that someone had passed on from generation to generation an old book called the Necronomicon, and that some of the words Jeffrey carved on his teeth were in that book and Daddy could read them, but would never tell me what they said.
It wasn’t fair that sometime back in the 1920s the Whateleys had tried a great Experiment and failed, but, somehow, that Experiment had worked its way down the years and through the bloodlines until it came out again in Jeffrey.
I cried because of all that, because it wasn’t fair.
And my brother did the most extraordinary thing. He touched me gently on the back of the neck, almost as if he were stroking me—if anybody else had done it, it would have been queer—and he told me a story, struggling for the words around the impediment of his ungainly tusks. I didn’t understand very much of it, but it was about how the Beast was not really a monster after all, but part of a different family, and how “Those of the Air,” as Jeffrey put it, would come someday and take him to a better place, maybe another planet. I couldn’t make that out. There were a lot of words in the story that were just buzzing and spitting and barking sounds.
“Does the younger prince get to come too?”
“No. Blood of Them in him, but not enough. He can just barely see them.”
And we sat for a long time in the darkness after that, and it seemed indeed—I was certain I imagined what I saw, that it was a kind of dream—that the wind circled around us again and again, with a whispered whoosh like a fleet of huge trucks passing, and sometimes I could see shapes among the trees, distorted bodies, and luminous faces floating among the branches. They called out to Jeffrey, and he answered back, in a language I didn’t know.
I nearly froze to death. Jeffrey had to carry me back to the house. He smashed in the back door because he couldn’t open it. Father was waiting for him, and in his Royal Wrath beat Jeffrey with a shovel, and locked him in the attic room, and never let him out again. I went to the hospital for frostbite and missed some school, and later, I could only talk to my brother through the locked door when I slid his meals in through the slot Father had installed. Jeffrey didn’t answer back much, and I never got to tell him any more of the story of the two princes.
* * * *
“You go upstairs and rest for a while, Son,” my father said. “You’ve had a long trip up from South America. I’ll fix us a little something in the kitchen. Then you come down again.”
I don’t know how he thought I’d want to rest, or linger here at all, considering what the inevitable outcome must be, but he, I think, wanted to delay it just a bit longer, and I granted him the courtesy of this reprieve. Maybe he just wanted to be a father again, one last time.
So, silently, I went upstairs, into my old bedroom. I flicked on the light and saw that absolutely nothing had changed since the day, when I was twenty-three, I had stormed out of the house. There was still a 1982 newspaper on the floor, under the dust. And a pair of dirty socks.
I sat down on the bed and just stared into the indeterminate distance of the room, which was not a matter of physical space at all: at the bookshelves, even the model airplanes which had dangled from the ceiling since my childhood.
And, irony of ironies: the sleeve for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was still on the shelf in front of me. I had never gotten around to replacing the record.
My hand found something on the bed, under the covers, something which had not been there before: a leather-bound photo album. I recognized some of the pictures, from family outings, graduations, and the like. I paged through it with a mixture of dull curiosity, then something almost like anger, then just exhausted sadness. The pictures had been altered, mutilated with a ballpoint pen. My own image had sometimes been made into that of a prince, with crown and flowing robes and a sword, sometimes the huntsman, with a gun or bow-and-arrows and a Robin Hood cap. Once, my eyebrows had been raised and I’d acquired long fingernails and a pigtail—a comic Chinaman. I had no idea why.
Mother’s image had been the object of anger, the eyes and sometimes the whole face gouged out. She’d been given ass’s ears more than once, and there was even an enormous posterior drawn in the sky over her wedding picture. There she was, a bride, on the church steps, her face scraped away, and it was raining shit.
The final picture in the book was one of father, exhausted, reclining on a plastic-covered sofa. I think it had actually been taken one Christmas, as he snoozed after all the preparations were done. But now there were wires going into his arms and sides, and a carefully-rendered monitor on the wall above him, the line on the screen a zig-zag, flattening out. Father in Intensive Care, dying.
The one truly frightening thing was that I didn’t know if this was Jeffrey’s work, which it should have been—but how had he known I was coming and how had he gotten out to place the book here for me to find?—or Papa’s own.
Above me, something stirred, then hit the upstairs floor hard, again and again, as if stamping its hooves.
God help me, I thought of that stupid TV sitcom theme: A horse is a horse—
And fully, and deeply, I wept, lying there on the bed, amid the dust and papers and old laundry.
* * * *
Father and I ate in silence, badly cooked eggs and bacon. He couldn’t look me in the eye. He stared at his plate, swirling his fork around in the grease.
I was thinking in clichés. I should have felt that there was so much I had to say to him: that I, his estranged son, truly loved him after all, that I wished our family could be together again, like old times, the whole routine. But there, sitting with him, I couldn’t think of anything to say at all. I was empty. I’d cried my last tears on the bedspread upstairs, and that was the end of that.
Two floors above us, the pounding was louder, insistent.
“Come on, Son,” he said at last. “We’ve got to finish this.”
So I followed him upstairs that last time. He paused at the first landing, staring into my bedroom, where I’d left the light on and the photo album out on the bed. Then he turned into his own room. I went to follow him. He held me back.
“Wait.”
He still had to have his little secret, his final one. All right. He could have it. I waited patiently while he rustled around in the dark. I could only imagine that the bedroom, too, hadn’t been touched, that my mother’s things were exactly as she’d left them. It sounded like her closet Father was rummaging in.
He came out with something wrapped in a garbage bag. Even before I felt the heavy, iron-bound covers through the plastic, I knew what it was: the ancient Necronomicon.
“You’ll have to study,” was all he said.
That was almost the very last thing he said to me, ever. He flicked on a light. We went up the attic steps in silence. He indicated that I should be the one to remove the heavy, five-pointed stone sigil that leaned against the door of the attic room. By now the smell was almost overpowering, the stench of garbage and excrement and something that almost might have been burning, sulfurous, vile, but ultimately unidentifiable. Why the neighbors didn’t have the Board of Health or the police in long ago was beyond me.
There was no sound at all from behind that door, as I dragged the heavy stone away, as Father undid the padlocks and slid the bolts back.
He opened the door, and I took the first step inside, my feet stirring what must have been old steak and pork bones.
“Jeff? You there?”
Father grabbed
me from behind with surprising strength, his arm in a chokehold around my neck. He hurled me back, across the tiny landing, against the opposite wall. He held me there with both hands, and for once his eyes met mine and his face was utterly, utterly inscrutable. I could make out the King with his Royal Wrath, and Papa, exhausted beyond words, despairing, wanting only for it all to end, and more. Possibly he wanted to explain it all to me, or ask my forgiveness, or merely wish that things had turned out differently. I don’t know. He was angry, sad, firm, and stoically uncaring all at once.
All he said to me was, “No. Wait here. It was supposed to be your mother. Now it has to be me.”
“Father, I—?”
He squeezed my hands tight over the Necronomicon, then turned from me and went, meekly but unhesitantly, into the dark room.
As a final offering. Because Jeffrey was grown up now, and it was time.
In the instant of silence that followed, I found myself plagued with another comic, irrelevant thought, a memory of a Gahan Wilson cartoon showing a puffy-faced young man confronting his seated, frog-faced father in what must have been the great hall of an old English manor. Portraits of frog-faced ancestors lined the walls, and the caption read, “Son, now that you’re of age, it’s about time I told you about the old family curse.”
About time.
In the room, my father was screaming. But I knew he wouldn’t want me to come in.
The screaming stopped. Something heavy and wet dropped to the floor. Then I heard a sucking sound, like an electric pump struggling with a clogged drain, and after that a series of snaps, which I knew were bones breaking.
Again, silence. The smell grew even worse.
I knew what I had to do. There was only one possibility left.
“Jeffrey,” I said. “It’s me. It’s Jerry. Come out. I want to tell you a story. Remember?”
And from within the darkness came my brother’s voice, “Play?”
“Yes,” I said. “Let’s go out and play.”
Holding the book, I backed down the steps, and he came out onto the landing, whimpering a little as he brushed against the five-pointed stone; for he had grown so huge that he could not help but touch it.
He didn’t wear clothes anymore. His whole body, even his tusks, had turned a greenish-black, the color of tarnished metal; but his muscles and numerous limbs I couldn’t quite make out seemed more like a huge tangle of ropes come alive. He stumbled and thumped down the stairs, squeezing between the walls, one surprisingly human hand grasping the railing. His head, on top, seemed almost an irrelevancy, like a basketball floating on frothing water. But I could still see his eyes, and they were my brother’s eyes.
Of course his passage made complete havoc of Mother’s immaculate living room. It was only there, in the better light, that I realized that Jeffrey had an extra mouth where his chest should be, vertical, like an insect’s mouth, lined with needle-teeth. Praying-Mantis claws held the remains of our father firmly in place. Jeffrey streaked the living room, and the kitchen, and the back stairs, with slime and blood and the debris of smashed furniture.
Outside, in the darkness, in the swirling snow, I coaxed him through the fence, into the park. We waded through the stream once again, as he had when we were boys, and it was just as cold now, and once again I didn’t care. This time I didn’t fall, though. I clutched the plastic-wrapped Necronomicon tightly under one arm.
“Play,” Jeffrey said, clapping his hands. “Play.”
Once more we climbed the hillside, in the darkness, Jeffrey shoving the trees aside, making a terrible racket—but no one disturbed us—until we reached the terraces.
And in our secret place, we sat together, and I told him the rest of the story of the Prince and the Beast, how the younger brother released the elder from the castle’s dungeon, how the Beast devoured the King, as was only fitting; and the King’s guards fled in terror at their approach, and the two of them retreated far, far into the forest, where no huntsman could ever follow, until they reached the secret and eternal land of the beasts, where animals spoke in their own languages, and no human being was ever admitted.
But because the Prince was the Beast’s brother, he was allowed to the very threshold of that land. He could see into it through the thick underbrush, just for an instant, as the leaves parted when the Beast and those who had come for him went back inside. The other animals did not kill the Prince, and, knowing that he would not betray them, they allowed him to leave.
“Is that the end of the story?” said Jeffrey.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” I should have been sobbing. That would have been right. But I had run out of tears. As before, when I sat with Father in the kitchen during his last meal, I felt only empty and had nothing more to say.
Then They of the Air finished the story, whispering to Jeffrey in their own language. I saw them, clearly this time, huge, winged, impossible shapes with fiery faces, half like smoke, swirling in the night sky, weaving between the trees, their passage a great whirlwind. Branches flew. Trees creaked and swayed. Jeffrey, wild with excitement, leapt up, doing a kind of dance on the hilltop, howling and hooting, stamping his several enormous feet. I was irrelevant to all this, like a pigeon that’s wandered into a parade. I could have been crushed. I scrambled down the hillside, out of my brother’s way, and looked up just once as a particularly brilliant flash of lightning tore the sky apart. My eyes were dazzled. I couldn’t be sure. But Jeffrey seemed transformed once more, into something utterly indescribable and powerful, with wings that reached out to touch the horizons. He and the others filled the sky, rising up.
And then there was just me, sitting alone in the cold and the dark on the hillside, still clutching the plastic-wrapped book I didn’t know how to read, unable to understand how the story had turned out.
THE GRAVEYARD RATS, by Henry Kuttner
Old Masson, the caretaker of one of Salem’s oldest and most neglected cemeteries, had a feud with the rats. Generations ago they had come up from the wharves and settled in the graveyard, a colony of abnormally large rats, and when Masson had taken charge after the inexplicable disappearance of the former caretaker, he decided that they must go. At first he set traps for them and put poisoned food by their burrows, and later he tried to shoot them, but it did no good. The rats stayed, multiplying and overrunning the graveyard with their ravenous hordes.
They were large, even for the mus decumanus, which sometimes measures fifteen inches in length, exclusive of the naked pink and grey tail. Masson had caught glimpses of some as large as good-sized cats, and when, once or twice, the grave-diggers had uncovered their burrows, the malodorous tunnels were large enough to enable a man to crawl into them on his hands and knees. The ships that had come generations ago from distant ports to the rotting Salem wharves had brought strange cargoes.
Masson wondered sometimes at the extraordinary size of these burrows. He recalled certain vaguely disturbing legends he had heard since coming to ancient, witch-haunted Salem—tales of a moribund, inhuman life that was said to exist in forgotten burrows in the earth. The old days, when Cotton Mather had hunted down the evil cults that worshipped Hecate and the dark Magna Mater in frightful orgies, had passed; but dark gabled houses still leaned perilously towards each other over narrow cobbled streets, and blasphemous secrets and mysteries were said to be hidden in subterranean cellars and caverns, where forgotten pagan rites were still celebrated in defiance of law and sanity. Wagging their grey heads wisely, the elders declared that there were worse things than rats and maggots crawling in the unhallowed earth of the ancient Salem cemeteries.
And then, too, there was this curious dread of the rats. Masson disliked and respected the ferocious little rodents, for he knew the danger that lurked in their flashing, needle-sharp fangs; but he could not understand the inexplicable horror which the oldsters held for deserted, rat-infested houses. He had heard vague rumors of ghoulish beings that dwelt far underground, and that had the power of commanding
the rats, marshalling them like horrible armies. The rats, the old men whispered, were messengers between this world and the grim and ancient caverns far below Salem. Bodies had been stolen from graves for nocturnal subterranean feasts, they said. The myth of the Pied Piper is a fable that hides a blasphemous horror, and the black pits of Avernus have brought forth hell-spawned monstrosities that never venture into the light of day.
Masson paid little attention to these tales. He did not fraternize with his neighbors, and, in fact, did all he could to hide the existence of the rats from intruders. Investigation, he realized, would undoubtedly mean the opening of many graves. And while some of the gnawed, empty coffins could be attributed to the activities of the rats, Masson might find it difficult to explain the mutilated bodies that lay in some of the coffins.
The purest gold is used in filling teeth, and this gold is not removed when a man is buried. Clothing, of course, is another matter; for usually the undertaker provides a plain broadcloth suit that is cheap and easily recognizable. But gold is another matter; and sometimes, too, there were medical students and less reputable doctors who were in need of cadavers, and not overscrupulous as to where these were obtained.
So far Masson had successfully managed to discourage investigation. He had fiercely denied the existence of the rats, even though they sometimes robbed him of his prey. Masson did not care what happened to the bodies after he had performed his gruesome thefts, but the rats inevitably dragged away the whole cadaver through the hole they gnawed in the coffin.
The size of these burrows occasionally worried Masson. Then, too, there was the curious circumstance of the coffins always being gnawed open at the end, never at the side or top. It was almost as though the rats were working under the direction of some impossibly intelligent leader.
Now he stood in an open grave and threw a last sprinkling of wet earth on the heap beside the pit. It was raining, a slow, cold drizzle that for weeks had been descending from soggy black clouds. The graveyard was a slough of yellow, sucking mud, from which the rain-washed tombstones stood up in irregular battalions. The rats had retreated to their burrows, and Masson had not seen one for days. But his gaunt, unshaved face was set in frowning lines; the coffin on which he was standing was a wooden one.
