Dark Forces: The 25th Anniversary Edition

by Kirby McCauley

  “Was this ruined town a ‘real’ place? I cannot tell you. I am certain that I was not then experiencing a dream or vision, as we ordinarily employ those words. My circumstances were actual; my peril was genuine and acute. Whether such an object as that sacked city exists in stone somewhere in this world—I do not mean to seek it out—or whether it was an illusion conjured out of the Archvicar’s imagination, or out of mine, I do not know. Maya! But I sensed powerfully that whatever the nature of this accursed place, this City of Dis, I might never get out of it—certainly not if the corpse-candle came upon me.

  “For that corpse-candle must be in some way the Archvicar Gerontion, seeking whom he might devour. He had, after all, a way out of the body of this death: and that was to take my body. Had he done the thing before, twice or thrice before, in his long course of evil? Had he meant to do it with one of those beggars upon whom he had experimented, and been interrupted before his venture could be completed?

  “It must be a most perilous chance, a desperate last recourse, for Gerontion was enfeebled and past the height of his powers. But his only alternative was the executioner’s bullet. He meant to enter into me, to penetrate me utterly, to perpetuate his essence in my flesh; and I would be left here—or the essence, the ghost of me, rather—in this place of desolation beyond time and space. The Archvicar, master of some Tantra, had fastened upon me for his prey because only I had lain within his reach on the eve of his execution. And also there were those correspondences between us, which would diminish the obstacles to the transmigration of Gerontion’s malign essence from one mortal vessel to another: the obverse of the coin would make itself the reverse. Deep cried unto deep, evil unto evil.

  “Lying there among dry bones in the plundered graveyard, I had no notion of how to save myself. This town, its secrets, its laws, were Gerontion’s. Still—that corpse-candle form, gabbling and moaning as if in extremity, must be limited in its perceptions, or else it would have come through the wall-gap to take me a few minutes earlier. Was it like a hound on the scent, and did it have forever to track me down?

  “‘Arcane! Arcane!’ My name was mouthed hideously; the vocal ignis fatuus was crying from somewhere. I turned my head, quick as an owl. The loathsome glow now appeared behind the church, up the slope of the great graveyard; it was groping its way toward me.

  “I leaped up. As if it sensed my movement, the sightless thing swayed and floated in my direction. I dodged among tall grotesque tombstones; the corpse-candle drifted more directly toward me. This was to be hide-and-seek, blindman’s buff, with the end foreordained. ‘Here we go round the prickly pear at five o’clock in the morning!’

  “On the vague shape of phosphorescence came, with a hideous fluttering urgency; but by the time it got to the tall tombstones, I was a hundred yards distant, behind the wreck of a small mausoleum.

  “I never have been hunted by tiger or polar bear, but I am sure that what I experienced in that boneyard was worse than the helpless terror of Indian villager or wounded Eskimo. To even the worst ruffian storming an outpost at the back of beyond, the loser may appeal for mercy with some faint hope of being spared. I knew that I could not surrender at discretion to this ignis fatuus, any more than to tiger or bear. It meant to devour me.

  “Along the thing came, already halfway to the mausoleum. There loomed up a sort of pyramid-monument some distance to my right; I ran hard for it. At the lower end of the cemetery, which I now approached, the enclosing wall looked too high to scale. I gained the little stone pyramid, but the corpse-candle already had skirted the mausoleum and was making for me.

  “What way to turn? Hardly knowing why, I ran upward, back toward the dark hulk of the church. I dared not glance over my shoulder—no tenth of a second to spare.

  “This was no time to behave like Lot’s wife. Frantically scrambling, I reached a side doorway of the church, and only there paused for a fraction of a second to see what was on my heels. The corpse-candle was some distance to the rear of me, drifting slowly, and I fancied that its glow had diminished. Yet I think I heard something moan the word ‘body.’ I dashed into the immensity of that church.

  “Where might I possibly conceal myself from the faceless hunter? I blundered into a side-chapel, its floor strewn with fallen plaster. Over its battered altar, an icon of Christ the King still was fixed, though lance-thrusts had mutilated the face. I clambered upon the altar and clasped the picture.

  “From where I clung, I could see the doorway by which I had entered the church. The tall glow of corruption had got so far as that doorway, and now lingered upon the threshold. For a moment, as if by a final frantic effort, it shone brightly. Then the corpse-candle went out as if an extinguisher had been clapped over it. The damaged icon broke loose from the wall, and with it in my arms I fell from the altar.”

  ****

  I felt acute pain in my right arm: Whiston had been clutching it fiercely for some minutes, I suppose, but I had not noticed until now. Guido was crying hard from fright, his head in Melchiora’s lap. No one said anything, until Arcane asked Grizel Fergusson, “Will you turn up the lamp a trifle? The play is played out; be comforted, little Guido.”

  “You returned, Ras Arcane,” Wolde Mariam’s deep voice said, quavering just noticeably. “What did you do with the bad priest?”

  “It was unnecessary for me to do anything—not that I could have done it, being out of my head for the next week. They say I screamed a good deal during the nights. It was a month before I was well enough to walk. And even then, for another two or three months, I avoided dark corners.”

  “What about the Archvicar’s health?” I ventured.

  “About ten o’clock, Yawby, the servants had entered the old harem to tidy it, assuming that the Archvicar and I had retired. They had found that the Archvicar had fallen out of his wheelchair, and was stretched very dead on the floor. After a short search, they discovered me in this little room where we sit now. I was not conscious, and had suffered some cuts and bruises. Apparently I had crawled here in a daze, grasped the feet of Our Lord there”—nodding toward the Spanish Christ upon the wall—“and the crucifix had fallen upon me, as the icon had fallen in that desecrated church. These correspondences!”

  Tom Whiston asked hoarsely, “How long had it been since you were left alone with the Archvicar?”

  “Perhaps two hours and a half—nearly the length of time I seemed to spend in his damned ruined demesne.”

  “Only you, Manfred, could have had will strong enough to come back from that place,” Melchiora told her husband. She murmured softly what I took for Sicilian endearments. Her fine eyes were wet, though she must have heard the fearful story many times before, and her hands trembled badly.

  “Only a man sufficiently evil in his heart could have been snared there at all, my delight,” Arcane responded. He glanced around our unnerved little circle. “Do you suppose, friends, that the Archvicar wanders there still, among the open graves, forlorn old ghoul, burning, burning, burning, a corpse-candle forever and a day?”

  Even the Fitaurari was affected by this image. I wanted to know what had undone Gerontion.

  “Why,” Arcane suggested, “I suppose that what for me was an underdose of his kalanzi must have been an overdose for the poisoner himself: he had been given only a few seconds, while my back was turned, to fiddle with those raisins. What with his physical feebleness, the strain upon his nerves, and the haste with which he had to act, the odds must have run against the Archvicar. But I did not think so while I was in his demesne.” Arcane was stroking the boy’s averted head.

  “I was in no condition to give his mortal envelope a funeral. But our trustworthy Mohammed ben Ibrahim, that unsmiling young statesman, knew something of the case; and in my absence, he took no chances. He had Gerontion’s flaccid husk burnt that midnight, and stood by while the smoke and the stench went up. Tantric magic, or whatever occult skill Gerontion exercised upon me, lost a grand artist.

  “Had the creature succ
eeded in such an undertaking before—twice perhaps, or even three times? I fancy so; but we have no witnesses surviving.”

  “Now I don’t want to sound like an idiot, and I don’t get half of this,” Whiston stammered, “but suppose that the Archvicar could have brought the thing off… He couldn’t, of course, but suppose he could have—what would he have done then?”

  “Why, Mr. Whiston, if he had possessed himself of my rather battered body, and there had been signs of life remaining in that discarded body of his—though I doubt whether he had power or desire to shift the ghost called Manfred Arcane into his own old carcass—presumably he would have had the other thing shot the next day; after all, that body of his lay under sentence of death.” Arcane finished his glass of cognac, and chuckled deeply.

  “How our malicious Archvicar Gerontion would have exulted in the downfall of his host! How he would have enjoyed that magnificent irony! I almost regret having disobliged him. Then he would have assumed a new identity: that of Manfred Arcane, Minister without Portfolio. He had studied me most intensely, and his acting would have adorned any stage. So certainly he could have carried on the performance long enough to have flown abroad and hidden himself. Or conceivably he might have been so pleased with his new identity, and so letter-perfect at realizing it, that he merely could have stepped into my shoes and fulfilled my several duties. That role would have given him more power for mischief than ever he had known before. A piquant situation, friends?”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the splendid Melchiora shudder from top to toe.

  “Then how do we know that he failed?” my charge Tom Whiston inquired facetiously, with an awkward laugh.

  “Mr. Whiston!” Melchiora and Grizel Fergusson cried with simultaneous indignation.

  Manfred Arcane, tough old charmer, smiled amicably. “On Tuesday morning, when we negotiate our new oil contract over brandy and raisins, my Doubting Thomas of Texas, you shall discover that, after all, Archvicar Gerontion succeeded. For you shall behold in me a snapdragon, Evil Incarnate.” Yet before leading us out of that little room and back to the Christmas waltzers, Arcane genuflected before the crucified figure on the wall.

  Where The Stones Grow

  Lisa Tuttle

  He saw the stone move. Smoothly as a door falling shut, it swung slightly around and settled back into the place where it had stood for centuries.

  They’ll kill anyone who sees them.

  Terrified, Paul backed away, ready to run, when he saw something that didn’t belong in that high, empty field which smelled of the sea. Lying half-in, half-out of the triangle formed by the three tall stones called the Sisters was Paul’s father, his face bloody and his body permanently stilled.

  ****

  When he was twenty-six, his company offered to send Paul Staunton to England for a special training course, the offer a token of better things to come. In a panic, Paul refused, much too vehemently. His only reason—that his father had died violently in England eighteen years before—was not considered a reason at all. Before the end of the year, Paul had been transferred away from the main office in Houston to the branch in San Antonio.

  He knew he should be unhappy, but, oddly enough, the move suited him. He was still being paid well for work he enjoyed, and he found the climate and pace of life in San Antonio more congenial than that of Houston. He decided to buy a house and settle down.

  The house he chose was about forty years old, built of native white limestone and set in a bucolic neighborhood on the west side of the city. It was a simple rectangle, long and low to the ground, like a railway car. The roof was flat and the gutters and window frames peeled green paint. The four rooms offered him no more space than the average mobile home, but it was enough for him.

  A yard of impressive size surrounded the house with thick green grass shaded by mimosas, pecans, a magnolia, and two massive, spreading fig trees. A chain-link fence defined the boundaries of the property, although one section at the back was torn and sagging and would have to be repaired. There were neighboring houses on either side, also set in large yards, but beyond the fence at the back of the house was a wild mass of bushes and high weeds, ten or more undeveloped acres separating his house from a state highway.

  Paul Staunton moved into his house on a day in June, a few days shy of the nineteenth anniversary of his father’s death. The problems and sheer physical labor involved in moving had kept him from brooding about the past until something unexpected happened. As he was unrolling a new rug to cover the ugly checkerboard linoleum in the living room, something spilled softly out: less than a handful of grey grit, the pieces too small even to be called pebbles. Just rock-shards.

  Paul broke into a sweat and let go of the rug as if it were contaminated. He was breathing quickly and shallowly as he stared at the debris.

  His reaction was absurd, all out of proportion. He forced himself to take hold of the rug again and finish unrolling it. Then—he could not make himself pick them up—he took the carpet sweeper and rolled it over the rug, back and forth, until all the hard grey crumbs were gone.

  It was time for a break. Paul got himself a beer from the refrigerator and a folding chair from the kitchen and went out to sit in the backyard. He stationed himself beneath one of the mimosa trees and stared out at the lush green profusion. He wouldn’t even mind mowing it, he thought as he drank the beer. It was his property, the first he’d ever owned. Soon the figs would be ripe. He’d never had a fig before, except inside a cookie.

  When the beer was all gone, and he was calmer, he let himself think about his father.

  ****

  Paul’s father, Edward Staunton, had always been lured by the thought of England. It was a place of magic and history, the land his ancestors had come from. From childhood he had dreamed of going there, but it was not until he was twenty-seven, with a wife and an eight-year-old son, that a trip to England had been possible.

  Paul had a few dim memories of London, of the smell of the streets, and riding on top of a bus, and drinking sweet, milky tea—but most of these earlier memories had been obliterated by the horror that followed.

  It began in a seaside village in Devon. It was a picturesque little place, but famous for nothing. Paul never knew why they had gone there.

  They arrived in the late afternoon and walked through cobbled streets, dappled with slanting sun-rays. The smell of the sea was strong on the wind, and the cry of gulls carried even into the center of town. One street had looked like a mountain to Paul, a straight drop down to the grey, shining ocean, with neatly kept stone cottages staggered on both sides. At the sight of it, Paul’s mother had laughed and gasped and exclaimed that she didn’t dare, not in her shoes, but the three of them had held hands and, calling out warnings to each other like intrepid mountaineers, the Stauntons had, at last, descended.

  At the bottom was a narrow pebble beach, and steep, pale cliffs rose up on either side of the town, curving around like protecting wings.

  “It’s magnificent,” said Charlotte Staunton, looking from the cliffs to the grey-and-white movement of the water, and then back up at the town.

  Paul bent down to pick up a pebble. It was smooth and dark brown, more like a piece of wood or a nut than a stone. Then another: smaller, nearly round, milky. And then a flat black one that looked like a drop of ink. He put them in his pocket and continued to search hunched over, his eyes on the ground.

  He heard his father say, “I wonder if there’s another way up?” And then another voice, a stranger’s, responded, “Oh, aye, there is. There is the Sisters’ Way.”

  Paul looked up in surprise and saw an elderly man with a stick and a pipe and a little black dog who stood on the beach with them as if he’d grown there, and regarded the three Americans with a mild, benevolent interest.

  “The Sisters’ Way?” said Paul’s father.

  The old man gestured with his knobby walking stick toward the cliffs to their right. “I was headed that way myself,” he said. “W
ould you care to walk along with me? It’s an easier path than the High Street.”

  “I think we’d like that,” said Staunton. “Thank you. But who are the Sisters?”

  “You’ll see them soon enough,” said the man as they all began to walk together. “They’re at the top.”

  At first sight, the cliffs had looked dauntingly steep. But as they drew closer they appeared accessible. Paul thought it would be fun to climb straight up, taking advantage of footholds and ledges he could now see, but that was not necessary. The old man led them to a narrow pathway which led gently up the cliffs in a circuitous way, turning and winding, so that it was not a difficult ascent at all. The way was not quite wide enough to walk two abreast, so the Stauntons fell into a single file after the old man, with the dog bringing up the rear.

  “Now,” said their guide when they reached the top. “Here we are! And there stand the Sisters.”

  They stood in a weedy, empty meadow just outside town—rooftops could be seen just beyond a stand of trees about a half a mile away. And the Sisters, to judge from the old man’s gesture, could be nothing more than some rough grey boulders.

  “Standing stones,” said Edward Staunton in a tone of great interest. He walked toward the boulders and his wife and son followed.

  They were massive pieces of grey granite, each one perhaps eight feet tall, rearing out of the porous soil in a roughly triangular formation. The elder Staunton walked among them, touching them, a reverent look on his face. “These must be incredibly old,” he said. He looked back at their guide and raised his voice slightly. “Why are they called the ‘Sisters’?”

  The old man shrugged. “That’s what they be.”