Gathered Dust and Others

by W. H. Pugmire

  “What I feel – it’s a force from the past. Everything there seems rooted to some bygone era, the houses, that bewitching graveyard and those who have been planted in it. The grave for your distant ancestor, Carter, really affected me, to the point where his persona has invaded my dreaming. I find it all so strangely attractive. I hate this unimaginative modern age. Gawd, the life I was ‘living’ before I came into my inheritance, living in a small yet expensive apartment, slaving away as prep cook and dishwasher at a job that so exhausted me that I had no energy for anything once I got home from work. It was a non-life.”

  Carter moved away from us as I spoke and went to gaze at another work of art. “He was a dynamic force, old Obediah – and your conjuring of him is magnificent, dear Julia.” Miss Warren and I went to join him, and I was indeed impressed and mesmerized. The painting was a huge life-size representation of the ancient warlock, and the light from the nearest candelabra revealed that the paint was still fresh and wet. The face was nearly identical to that of the miniature on the tomb, with the one exception of the queer distortion of the right eye. I thought perhaps the paint there had somehow melted or run amok, but as I stepped closer to the canvas I saw that the disfigurement was deliberate. “Ah, yes,” Carter sighed, “the blemished eye. There have been some few Arkham families that have suffered individuals born with such an eye, linking them to whispers of witchcraft. Family legend has it that Obediah owned such an orb, although he had the fault corrected in all portraits painted of him.” I turned and studied Carter’s pale face, the painted lips, the dark spectacles. Laughing, he removed the eyewear and revealed two normal eyes of pale gray. “Not a hereditary ailment, I’m happy to report.” Frowning at the candlelight, he returned his spectacles to his face. “Anyway, Julia has restored nature and portrayed him with his imperfection. She’s good, isn’t she? You should have her paint you, Hayward, a lovely portrait to be used in place of author’s photograph for some future book.”

  “I can see the family resemblance,” I replied as I peered at the painting. “Despite your ridiculous tresses. You’re much younger than he is here depicted, far leaner; but it’s there in his expression, a kind of superior cynicism. What is it that sets your blood above us low mortals, Carter? What have you personally accomplished in life?”

  He seemed dumbfounded by my sudden criticism. “I appreciate art and literature.”

  “Is that all?”

  “It’s enough for now. As you have remarked, I’m wonderfully young, a mere child, really. Adulthood, from what I’ve seen of it, is hell. I have decided to live a life that is exquisitely Bohemian. Like you, I’ve come into my inheritance, and I delight in the freedom it allows.”

  The woman touched my hand. “It’s nice to have you venture out of that old house and brave the public. I suppose your publisher talked you into it, to help promote the book. We are happy to become more acquainted with such an enigmatic creature.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You’ve been a mystery ever since first moving to Arkham and claiming Elmer Harrod’s haunted house. Yes, we still call it, and always will. That marvelous place has such a hold on local imaginations because of seeing it on television week after week. And the place gained an additional sinister aura after Elmer’s grotesque corpse was discovered in the graveyard. I used to hang out at that graveyard just to be near the house and try to observe its inhabitant. I was but a child when my family settled in Arkham fifty-eight years ago, and that house has always beguiled me. There was usually a buzz of activity there, as if Elmer couldn’t stand to be inside it alone. He used to host an annual Halloween party for local kids, but I wasn’t allowed to attend until I was well into my teens. That place was never quiet – that’s my memory of it, there was almost always some kind of action, be it the student film crews from Miskatonic that were hired to film Elmer’s weekly television spot, or entertaining his B-film guests. That placed bubbled with life. It’s quite another matter with you.”

  I laughed. “And shall remain so. What I adore about the residence is its sense of solitude, the feeling there that I have escaped not only the world but time itself. It’s not a sense that comes over me just because of antique furnishings and endless quietude – it’s something…other. I never see anyone, except now and then the homeless vagrants who seek shelter in the vacated houses. Living in Harrod’s house is like…living in a book, I guess that’s how I can best explain it. It delights me with a feeling of real escape from insipid reality. I need no other realm, which I guess is why I’ve not explored much of Arkham. My existence before this – was no existence at all, just dull routine, day after relentless day. I was stifled, damned by a non-life that lacked art and imagination. My one escape, besides the library books I devoured, was to visit my uncle for two weeks every summer, curled up in his library with the astounding Elmer Harrod library, watching the collection of Harrod’s homemade films, exploring that house of secrets when left alone within it. I would pine, for the rest of the year, to be there again, even when my maturity dimmed my youthful admiration for my uncle, who was rather a blasé individual with no real grasp of life or art. Now I can dwell within that magick realm for the rest of my life, so why should I seek to roam anywhere else, even in a town of dark legend such as Arkham? Of late I have developed a new interest in the town, but it’s related to my interest in the Carter family, and my use of their history in a series of novels I hope to write.” I smiled at Carter. “How strange, then, to accompany you, the freakish remnant of that ancient line. Despite your absurdity, I can sense something about you – some rare element that is disguised by your outlandish appearance and adolescent ways. Your two ancestors fascinate me, more and more, they and their legends. They both vanished under queer circumstances, right?” The others glanced at each other, and the small woman smiled.

  “Oh, we know as little as anyone else. It was ages ago, all of that – ancient history, myth and legend.” Judging from the expression on her face, Julia seemed not to care that I knew she was lying. I returned her feeble smile.

  “And yet you’ve unearthed the furtive secret of Obediah and his blemished eye.” I pointed to the painting of the sorcerer. “There may be other secrets just waiting to be exposed, if only one knew where to hunt.” I winked at them, still smiling; and although they tried to keep their smiles, I detected something secretive and unspoken in the way they tried not to look at me, the emotions they were determined to conceal. I saw it, underneath their curving lips and in the shadows of their eyes.

  Young Carter blinked at me. “Well, I promised you dinner. Let us depart. Will you join us, Julia? No? My dear, I never see you eat! However do you nourish yourself?”

  “My art sustains me, Randy.” She looked at him for one mysterious moment, and then she turned her eyes to mine, and I imagined that they contained some secret that I was somehow supposed to understand.

  IV.

  Our taxi brought us to my haunted house, and we sat for some few silent moments before I opened the door. “Would you care to come in?”

  “That would be amazing!” Randolph enthused, taking out a billfold and paying the driver. We stood and watched the cab drive away, and then he turned to peer into the graveyard. The moon was very high above us, and the wooded area of the cemetery and the forested hills beyond it swayed softly in the evening wind. From somewhere among the trees or tombs something cried in eerie ululation.

  “That’s odd,” I spoke. “I’ve never witnessed any birds in that place, day or night.”

  “Was it a bird?” asked the lad’s faraway voice.

  I shrugged and turned to walk the path to the porch steps, with Carter behind me as I climbed them to the door, although he paused momentarily to tilt his head and watch the gargoyle that Harrod had attached to the building’s roof. I unlocked the door and waited for him to preceed me inside, and then I took his jacket and hung it on the coat rack. “Come on into the library. I’ll just pop into the kitchen; I have some excellent coffee.”
Entering the library, I motioned for him to either sit in one of the many comfortable chairs or prowl so as to study titles on the shelves that had been built into the walls; then I left him and went to the small kitchen, where I brewed coffee and selected a variety of cookies. From some distant place outside I heard a repetition of an inhuman cry from Old Dethshill Cemetery, and as the coffee was brewing I opened the door leading outside and stepped onto the stone walkway. I listened – and when the queer cry came again I parted my lips and uttered a replication of the sound. The air seemed to grow a little chilly as the sky darkened and the earth rumbled faintly with some deeply buried hill noises beyond the field of death. How strangely one’s imagination can play with one. I imagined that night’s silence transmuted, became quiet yet attentive – like an animal observing its prey. The bubbling of percolation came from the kitchen, and I returned inside and shut the antique door, yet I could not shake off a brooding sense of disturbance. “How the horror writer’s imagination loves to spook itself,” I told the cookies, chuckling. Preparing the tray, I picked it up and returned to the library, where I saw my guest return one book to a shelf and remove another. He turned to glance at me as I set the tray on a small table, and then he opened the book. We watched the particles of debris that fell from it to the floor.

  “That’s the third book I’ve opened that has dirt between the pages. What the hell?”

  I shrugged. “Both Harrod and Uncle Silas were wont to take books into the graveyard.” I pointed to a framed newspaper photo on one wall of the horror host in ghoulish garb, posing with an edition of Blackwood as he perched upon a tombstone. “I think perhaps one or both had a habit of sprinkling cemetery sod into the books. It’s certainly strange.”

  Carter returned the book to its place on the shelf and sauntered about the room. “There’s a lovely ambiance here, what with the soft light, the antique furnishings, and that delicious aroma of old books. I can understand why you don’t like leaving this realm. However, I’m just slightly disappointed with the house – I expected it to feel more haunted. I mean, the previous two tenants were so queer, no one really knew what Harrod did with his private time – he seems to have spent so much effort in not being alone in this house, which is so suggestive. He used to hint that there were secret passageways beneath the house or some such thing, but he never showed these tunnels to anyone because he protested that if he did they would no longer be ‘secret.’ He was rarely alone: film crews made up of students from Miskatonic, constant houseguests, visiting fans who were treated to tea and tall tales. His entire persona was founded on performance, and the show never ended; even his death was pure theatre.” He smiled wickedly. “And then your enigmatic uncle did quite the reverse and never entertained, except apparently yourself when you were an adolescent. He seems a very strange old duck, your uncle.”

  “Uncle Silas was a loner, certainly. A strange man, as you say, but not, in the final assessment, an interesting one. He either made or inherited a lot of money when he was young; I never knew the story of his wealth. I certainly didn’t expect him to leave everything to me, but perhaps he didn’t notice how critical I had become of him as I matured. He knew I loved this house and its library, and he encouraged my early efforts at writing. His big love in life was watching horror films, and that was fine when I was a kid, but…” I looked at him and returned his smile. “How amusing, though, for you to speak of how odd my relative was. I’ve read your namesake’s book, with its brief biographical introduction. The original Randolph Carter – now there’s an enigma! A mystic, people called him, but what exactly does that mean? Was he some kind of occultist, as Obediah Carter is rumored to have been?”

  The young creature’s voice was very quiet in reply. “Obediah was much more than that.” He stood regarding me with a peculiar expression on his face as the room’s soft light glimmered on his black spectacles. Reaching into his shoulder bag, he produced a small book that was bound in red cloth, and he stared at the thing for some silent moments before handing it to me. “That’s the diary of Randolph W. Carter, written before he became middle-aged and disillusioned, before the incident with Julia’s ancestor, with whom Carter lived and studied until the night of mystery and doom. You look lost, Hayward. I thought you were familiar with that other Randolph’s history.”

  “I know some of the legend from studying your family history for fictional purposes. There’s not really much solid biographical information on him, although he supposedly hinted of things in his short fiction. I’ve never bothered reading his novels, which are rumored to be poor and unimaginative.”

  “No, they’re fascinating, and proved popular in his day. His current reputation is stupidly tied to the mystery of his disappearance and little else, although his books are mostly back in print. I grew up in a family of staid Bostonians who were slightly embarrassed by family ties to Arkham and its ‘mystics.’ Family legend hints that no one paid much attention to Randy’s estate, although there are now doubts as to how vigorously the family was sought by the queer fellow in New Orleans who had been named in the will as literary and financial executor. Randy’s early work was a shunned subject when I grew up because it’s tied too intimately to his link with magick and madness, and with Arkham. They don’t like Arkham in Boston, and the family was never forgiven for returning here and disappearing somewhere near the ruins of the family’s ancestral mansion just outside of town. You’ve noticed that that diary is almost exclusively a record of time spent in cemeteries. You’re looking for mention of Old Dethshill Cemetery, aren’t you? You won’t find it. It seems implausible that Randy never visited it, so many of our kindred dead have been dumped there. His story, ‘Return of the Warlock,’ is said to have been inspired by Edmund Carter, a sensational sorcerer who barely escaped hanging and whose secret journal Randy had found in some ancestral attic – and it so disturbed him that he had the pages sealed!”

  I was half-listening to his prattling as I scanned the pages in the small book I held, the history of Carter’s seeking lost and forgotten ancestors in the burying grounds of New England. More interesting than his historical pursuit, however, was his obvious affection for these fields of death. The combination of my visitor’s tale, told in his faint voice, with the imaginative lines of his forebear’s diary, so beautifully expressed, filled me with an overwhelming desire to dream and write. I sensed the beginning of my own first novel, one that would relate the history of the Carter family and its ties to witch-haunted Arkham. I would have to alter the name and much of that history – that would be part of the creative fun of the work – but locals would certainly guess the origin of the family whose dark history I would relate. I looked up as Carter walked away from me and to a window. I said, “I suppose your family changed its tune about Carter’s books once the novels began to sell again.”

  “That was part of it. We heard from some old writer in Providence, who had saved a packet of letters that Randy had written him. The guy wanted to reprint some of Randy’s horror stories in a handsome hardcover edition and include the best of the letters as an appendix. He had sought out my grandfather’s permission. That was followed by someone wanting to write a biographical novel about Randy’s weird mysticism and his vanishing into the Arkham hills – and that Grandpa would not allow. But the family sensed a growing interest in our weird one, and began to think about the possible financial assets such a thing might develop. You know,” spoke his low faint voice as he pushed aside a curtain and peered into outer darkness through black lens, “Randy wasn’t the only Carter to vanish somewhere in the hills of Arkham. Another of the clan went missing under mysterious circumstances in 1781. Less than ten years later Obediah was born under what were whispered to be savage conditions linked to alchemy. God, what a heritage!” I studied his slim feminine figure, the tight-fitting black apparel, the impossible hair piled in coils on his head. This was the first time I had studied that hair in decent light, and I marveled that human hair could look so artificial, more like vin
es or tubes than anything else. The more I stared at it the more I was certain that it was not his natural growth but rather some clever synthetic attachment.

  I didn’t know how to respond to his talk, and so I remained silent as he moved from the window and to another wall shelf lined with books. I watched as he removed a volume of Henry James’s ghost stories and raised the book to his delicate nostrils, and I imagined him shutting his eyes as he sucked in the old book’s fragrance, even though those eyes were concealed behind the dark lens of his absurd glasses. Opening the book, Carter allowed some particles of dirt to fall into one hand. His face darkened as he stared at the rubble in his palm, and then he brought that palm to his mouth and touched the debris with his tongue, as from some distant place outside a thing cried to twilight.

  V.

  My guest insisted that he wanted to walk home, and so I stood on the porch and watched him cross the road and enter into Old Dethshill Cemetery. He turned to me, waved and smiled, and did a little jig among the stones. He was a silly creature, but I was getting to like him. I returned his wave and then returned into my home, happy to be alone. I had not yet removed Harrod’s heavy cloak, and so I climbed the stairs to his room and began to undress, breathing easier as the tie was removed and the shirt’s top button released. Standing in my underwear, I put the discarded clothes into the closet and then sat upon the dead man’s massive bed, which proved extremely comfortable. Because I had closed all of the vents in the upstairs section of the house, the room was chilly; and when I reached down to open a bedside bureau I smiled to find a pair of yellow pajamas. Pulling on bottoms, I was happy to find them a perfect fit for me, and the thick material was certainly comfortable. I pulled the top part of the pajamas over my head and reclined on Harrod’s bed, contemplating his possible sex life. Most of his visitors, from what I could ascertain, had been men. Perhaps he had been queer – or perhaps, like me, he had no interest in sex, preferring to be alone with his books and dreams. I rose and turned off the overhead light, then went to open the curtains of one window and thus allow moonlight to beam into the cozy room. Returning to the bed, I rested my shoulders and head on a pile of pillows and closed my eyes.