“Women hold darkness,” came a voice. And I knew that voice: it belonged to the one who had walked with Burnwell. I knew him: great Nyarlathotep, Messenger of the Gods, the Crawling Chaos. The Egyptian who walked silently beside him. Who had raised his loyal servant, Burnwell, from the dead.
My voice raised in praise: “Ygnaiih! Ygbaiih! Y’btbn . . . h’ebye-n’grkdll’lb . . . Iä! Iä! Iä!”
“They hold more darkness.” His voice, filled with authority, and promises. I searched for him, lifting my eyes toward the fervent heavens. I saw . . .
Oh, I saw . . .
I saw that what I have called “madness” is transcendence; what I labeled “good” was weakness. Men cannot guide and correct; only the gods can. And they wish to. They desire to return and to raise and ennoble us; to make us more than we are now.
No. That is utter madness. That is my own weakness of mind, addled from my delusion. I feared insanity when Mary came to me; I was descending into a black voice of guilt and despair, and culpability. I feared that I should never be free of the dreams about Dracula and the unscientific threat he posed to my certainty of an ordered world. I suffered endless nightmares—that a vampire had walked among us—until Mary sat down with my phonograph diary, and listened, then bade me listen with her, a witness to the knowledge that there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. I know that she turned me back to the light of rational thought, and science. She was rock, anchor, and beacon. My angel.
Murderess. Thief.
She was on the run for years, and when she came to my asylum, she lied to me, lied, put me in harm’s way, from this Burnwell creature and his god—
Great Nyarlathotep of the Thousand Incarnations, who has shown me a miracle!
“He is in the wards!” Mary shouts through the door. Lightning crackles overhead and the building is shaken to its foundations. I see colors everywhere. Beautiful light. Clarity.
“The monster! The thing!” she cries.
I shake myself from my stupor. Yes, the thing. It is not a god. It is a supernatural being, like Dracula. Can be killed, like Dracula.
“Jack!” she cries. “They are coming! I hear them. I see them. George, oh, dear God, have pity! Have mercy!”
She is pounding on the door. I rouse myself. What am I doing, speaking into my phonograph? When the world is ending outside my door, and my beloved is in mortal jeopardy?
I throw open the door.
Mary falls forward, into my arms. I catch her awkwardly, burdened as my hands are. Then I look past her distraught form to the end of the corridor and I see—
—Eliza, eyes wide and unfocused, covered in blood from head to foot, her garments, her hair, her face; and behind her, not walking, but floating two feet off the ground: Burnwell, or what is left of him. Grave sheen covers him; his right arm has pulled from his body; his lips are gone. What he walks beside I cannot tell, for it is all light, but I know . . .
I drag Mary into the room and slam the door. Her arms go around me; her face is pressed against my neck; the gold of her hair casts a halo and I can almost see her gossamer wings. She came to me as an angel.
But I know better. Women hold more darkness. And it is this darkness I must cleave out. She will draw me down, and away, and if that happens, I will not walk with Him.
I have the sword that Burnwell sundered Duinsmire with; it is in my right hand, very heavy. But not too heavy. I am a man, vigorous and strong. Moral, and knowing.
Eliza chants:
“Ygnaiih! Ygbaiih! Y’btbn . . . h’ebye-n’grkdll’lb . . . Iä! Iä! Iä!”
As I raise the blade, a thought flashes through my mind: This is all a lie. I am being tricked. I must not do this.
But the light is shimmering off the blade as the Messenger glides through the door with his servants on either side. As he compels me: Women hold more darkness.
And before that darkness takes me, I must cut it out.
I must cut it—
I must—
I
Iä! Iä!
* * * *
And thus you have witnessed my client’s chief defense, my lords; for Mary Holder Burnwell Seward had no choice but to defend herself against the madman her husband had become. It is not suspicious but tragic that two gentlemen, charged with the protection of the fairer sex, both abrogated that responsibility and instead attempted to kill this poor lady. She has done nothing to deserve the gallows; indeed, she merits the collective apology of the sons of Adam for abandoning her to such darkness. Thus I say to you, you must acquit her and set her free. She has not seen the sun for seven months, and it is monstrous that her trial has lasted this long.
And in conclusion . . .
What is this? What has happened to the lights? They are so bright!
Mrs. Seward, what are you doing?
What the devil is that?
Never cross us. Do not trouble me or mine. I walk with a god, vengeance shall be mine.
I am the haunter of the dwark, the shadow over time. Mary Holder I have been; now I exist beyond your ken.
The brightness of our light burns out your eyes, it is the color out of space;
it is the darkness of your future and the end of your race.
Iä! Iä! Iä!
Discovered in Nancy Holder’s attic October 14, 2014,
San Diego, California
FRAMING MORTENSEN
ADAM-TROY CASTRO
Once I had become wealthy enough to buy miracles, I used one to obtain the living head and shoulders of my longtime enemy, Philip Mortensen.
The news services reported that a prominent attorney working behind closed doors had just been found dead in his favorite chair, intact up to the wound that ended his torso just below the collarbone. His two severed arms were found fallen to the floor at either side of him, forming parentheses. An autopsy revealed that all these remaining parts had been completely drained of blood, but was unable to determine what tool had been used to amputate everything above his collarbone. Some stories managed to report that not a single drop had escaped to stain his lush burgundy carpet.
This would no doubt go down in crime history as the most spectacular and baffling unsolved murder of all time, not just a whodunnit but a howdunnit.
Nobody, not the police, not his wife, not his children, and not his secret mistress, would ever know that it was not a murder but a kidnapping.
Mortensen’s head and shoulders became the prisoners of what looked like an oil painting, portraying some jowly, balding man with thin strands of hair floating above the round arc of his skull like cirrus clouds. It was the face of a well-fed man, a contented man . . . even, if you believed Mortensen’s public image, a good man.
It made little logical sense for the landscape behind him to be a stark image of arctic wastes and that nineteenth-century sailing vessel the Erebus, stuck in ice during its journey to discover the Northwest Passage, but I wanted him to begin his time in my possession aware of being cold and alone in a place far from home.
I hung the framed image over the fireplace, in the private study that neither my household staff nor my wife were allowed to enter. I had an excuse for declaring the room off-limits to anybody besides myself. Among my many enterprises were certain highly sensitive projects for the government that required me to keep particular documents of a sensitive nature at home; I even apologized, in full humility, for the necessity. Everybody understood. I was not some capricious tyrant who made that demand lightly. The routine maintenance of this one room, all on my own, was a small matter. Thanks in no small part to early financial reversals fomented by Mortensen’s enterprises, I had spent many of my early years poor enough to need to perform such chores all the time.
The miracle had not cost my soul, an artifact that the provider of miracles had no interest in. The price had been legal tender, cash, a sum greater than the annual budget of some fair-sized cities. It’s a given that I shuddered when I first heard it, an equal given that when
I had a little time to contemplate the purchase further, I found that it was a price well worth paying for power over the piece of garbage who had been my chief competitor for so long. Later, I might choose to pay that price again, for a second miracle and maybe even a third—as simply being able to exercise such power over the physical universe had been pleasurable all by itself—but right now, it was difficult to imagine any other I might even desire. I had my health. I had more wealth and power than any man could possibly use. I had a beautiful and obedient wife thirty years my junior, who by contract had to remain married to me for at least five more years in order to escape with alimony. I had a big house, a fine position in the community, a sterling reputation as a captain of industry, and now, a passion: being the personal Mephistopheles to my worst business rival’s eternally damned soul.
A busy schedule prevented me from initiating my fun for a few months, but I did make a point of a weekend aside, late in the fall. That night, I was able to give my beautiful wife a break from the responsibility to pretend that her skin did not crawl at my touch, by telling her I would be working in the study all evening, and indeed that she should not be concerned if I remained in seclusion for several days. She left the house with the credit cards and a visible air of relief. I locked myself in the study, set a fire in the hearth, settled into my most comfortable high-backed chair with a snifter of brandy, and spoke the words that would, by prior arrangement, restore my enemy to awareness of his predicament.
“Hello, Mortensen.”
The figure in the painting blinked, in the stupid way men have when they’re first returning to consciousness and have yet to know that they’ve been taken to a place absent of hope. It was a look I already knew from the faces of any number of other associates facing their last hours in darkened rooms; though their fates had been significantly more mundane than the one Mortensen faced, the principle was the same, and I was able to follow the rapid evolution from confusion to concern to genuine dismay and fear with ease despite the less than five seconds it took the damned man to travel it. “Hello?” he said. And then, rising to a cry: “Hello! Hello! Is anybody here? Hello?”
I reached into the painting and slapped him twice, once on each cheek. He gasped. I pulled back my hand and registered not just the pleasant sting of flesh against flesh, but also the impression of the great, indeed inhuman cold of the place where I had trapped him: the kind of environment that would drop an unprotected man in seconds.
I said, “Hello, Mortensen. Can you hear me?”
I had asked the dealer in miracles to arrange for my voice, as heard by the trapped man, to possess the distant but resonant and echoing tones that motion pictures of a certain sort attribute to the Lord God. This was not because I’d ever possessed any fantasies of playing God, but because I’d wanted to amuse myself by seeing whether Mortensen’s first explanation for his plight would involve any of that religious rot.
In this small matter, I was doomed to disappointment. He did jerk as if stung, but a certain animal craftiness entered his eyes as his petty little mind began seeking some means of controlling whatever happened to him. He said, “I . . . I know that voice. I’ve heard that voice. Recently.”
“Please, sir. Until now, we have not been in the same room for five years.”
“Oh, my God. Perkins? It’s you, isn’t it? It’s you, you son of a bitch! What have you done to me? Why can’t I feel anything below my shoulders?”
I grinned at him. “You certainly do have a great number of questions, my good fellow. But I will attempt to provide all the necessary intelligence as expeditiously as I can. First, you are right. I am your old friend, and as for where I’ve taken you, it’s a place that I control utterly. You cannot feel anything below your shoulders because there is no longer anything to feel. I do hope these answers prove a comfort to you, because they are the last comforts you shall ever know.”
He began to scream.
I can afford to be clear on this. I have witnessed any number of enemies taken to dark subterranean places for vicious treatment. I relegated all of them to that fate out of business necessity, rather than the kind of personal animus I harbored for Mortensen. He evaded my wrath for as long as he did because I’d put off dealing with him for the day when I could find means that fulfilled the bottomless depths of my malice for him. But I’d learned a great deal about screaming from the others. I’d determined that screams of anticipatory fear like these were best permitted to go on for however long it took the subject in question to exhaust himself and come to terms with the knowledge that none of this melodramatic fulmination had profited him one iota. This epiphany can arrive in minutes. I’ve seen it take days.
Sometimes, it’s more productive to cut it off at the start.
I went to the dartboard that had until recently been my chief recreation in this room, and plucked one of the darts from the bull’s-eye. It was gratifying to learn that I was still as skilled at the pastime as I had been in college. The dart flew true and embedded its point in the center of Mortensen’s forehead, right above the bridge of his nose.
His reaction to this was instant, disbelieving silence. Blood flowed freely from the point of the puncture, forming a rivulet that split at the bridge of his nose and followed the line of his cheeks toward his jaw. His gaze moved upward, struggling to make out what had just impaled him, just barely managing to pull the stabilizing fan of the tail-feathers into focus. His response reeked of disbelief. “A dart.”
“Yes. And don’t get your hopes up, my old friend. It shan’t kill you. Nothing I will do to you in this room, tonight or in any of the other long nights to come, will kill you. You will stay alive for as long as I wish, enduring all the ways I shall twist your present form to the cause of my own amusement.”
“You’re insane,” he said.
I had, of course, expected precisely that banal observation, precisely this early in our evening together.
“I suppose, on the subject of you, I am. I must confess it, Mortensen. I loathed you from the very first moment I set eyes on you. I loathed you more every time we spoke, every time your enterprises ran into conflict with mine. For decades now, I have had few ambitions that excited me more than the prospect of ensuring that you experience more suffering, at greater length, than any living man has ever known. You have no idea how many plans I’ve discarded because they were not elaborate enough. You don’t know how many times that’s saved you for another day, another year.” I chuckled. “Of course, I am so glad that I held out. This is so much more satisfying than a simple assassin garroting you in the dead of night.”
“But you can’t!” he cried. And then, another sentence I’d known he would get around to, sooner or later. “You’ll never get away with it!”
I laughed again, this time with genuine affection. “Oh, Mortensen.”
I readied a handful of darts.
“You don’t know how fully I intend to test that hypothesis.”
* * * *
The outside world continued to turn in the manner it always has. Empires rose and fell. Mortensen’s supposed death became one of those notorious mysteries that vanish in the tabloid press when new atrocities arrive to supplant them. I arranged various entertaining fates for his wife and children, and brought the news back for Mortensen to enjoy. Some of the details would have been enough to drive most men in his predicament mad, but there was no pleasure to be had in tormenting a shattered soul. I’d therefore denied him the respite of madness.
My associates took note of how much time I spent ensconced in my study. My wife, acting out of the need to document that she’d noticed, remarked that I hadn’t spent any time with her in three weeks. My board of directors told me that I needed to attend more corporate functions. My friends said that they missed me at the club. I obliged the wife with a night plying her erotic trade and an increase in her allowance sufficient to mollify her for what I expected to be a number of additional months of neglect. I fired three members of the board and gave
the others a detailed business plan for the next year. I went to the club and spent a fine evening trading industry gossip that included extensive speculation over the leftist conspiracy behind the strange assassination of poor Mortensen. I did a quick run around the world and returned to the one room in my home—and by extension, the one place in the entire world—that held any interest to me.
Outside my study windows, it was the height of summer, the golden rays of the sun casting their blessed light on a countryside overflowing with life’s wondrous bounty. Inside the frame, it was still arctic wasteland, the air so frigid that if I did not use the paints I’d been provided to maintain the image as only I could, Mortensen’s skin turned black with frostbite, and his eyes froze shut beneath blindfolds of pure ice.
Have I mentioned that I was once quite the talented painter of portraits, in my university days? It never took any real time at all to retouch his skin and undo whatever the climate had done to him, restoring to his jowly features to the very pink of health . . . which, of course, the frigid air never wasted any time ravaging again. This did, of course, involve more and more effort the more time I spent away, and on this particular occasion, I’d just returned from a two-week industrial conference in Rotterdam. The wind-rotted fissures in the flesh of his cheeks had grown so ravaged that it was now, in spots, possible to see the teeth behind them.
I removed his painting from the wall and set it against my easel. “You’re not looking well, Mortensen. You should take better care of yourself.”
“P-please,” he begged. “Enough . . . is enough. In the name of decency, please stop.”
“I told you, my old friend. In a relationship such as ours, begging only increases the pleasure taken by the one wielding the power.” I dabbed my brush in some jet-black paint and touched the bristles to his forehead. A few simple movements and I had added a tick to his forehead: a swollen, gruesome, blood-saturated blot of a thing, with a proboscis sunken deep into his flesh. It was my will that the thing be venomous, and so the flesh around the spot began to pucker, to swell, to grow rank and infected. “For instance, that. Do you have even the slightest idea how satisfying I find that?”
What the #@&% Is That? Page 26
