by Brian Lumley
“That’s right,” she nodded. “They’re hardly children any more, but I think of them that way. They’ll be in their twenties now, your cousins. George’s wife wrote to me once many years ago. I’ve no idea how she got my address. She did it behind George’s back, I imagine. Said how sorry she was that there was ‘trouble in the family’. She sent me photographs of the kids. They were beautiful. For all I know there may have been other children later—even grandchildren.”
“I don’t think so,” I told her. “I think I would have known. They’re still pretty reserved, my folks; but I would have learned that much, I’m sure. But tell me: how is it that you and mother aren’t closer? I mean, she never talks about you, my mother, and yet you are her sister.”
“Your mother is two years younger than George and me,” my aunt informed me. “She went to live with her grandparents down South when she was thirteen. Sis, you see, was the brilliant one. George was a bit dim; I was clever enough; but Sis, she was really clever. Our parents sent Sis off to live with Granny, where she could attend a school worthy of her intelligence. She stayed with Gran from then on. We simply drifted apart…
“Mind you, we’d never been what you might call close, not for sisters. Anyhow, we didn’t come together again until she married and came back up here to live, by which time George must have written to her and told her one or two things. I don’t know what or how much he told her, but—well, she never bothered with me—and anyway I was working by then and had a flat of my own.
“Years passed, I hardly ever saw Sis, her little boy came along—you, Love—I fell in with a spiritualist group, making real friends for the first time in my life; and, well, that was that. My interest in spiritualism, various other ways of mine that didn’t quite fit the accepted pattern, the unspoken thing I had done to George…we drifted apart. You understand?”
I nodded. I felt sorry for her, but of course I could not say so. Instead I laughed awkwardly and shrugged my shoulders. “Who needs people?”
She looked shocked. “We all do, Love!” Then for a while she was quiet, staring into the fire.
“I’ll make a brew of tea,” she suddenly said, then looked at me and smiled in a fashion I well remembered. “Or should we have cocoa?”
“Cocoa!” I instinctively laughed, relieved at the change of subject.
She went into the kitchen and I lit a cigarette. Idle, for the moment, I looked about me, taking up the loose sheets of paper that Aunt Hester had left on her occasional table. I saw at once that many of her jottings were concerned with extracts from exotic books. I passed over the piece she had read out to me and glanced at another sheet. Immediately my interest was caught; the three passages were all from the Holy Bible:
“Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them.” Lev. 19:31.
“Then said Saul unto his servants, Seek me a woman that hath a familiar spirit, that I may go to her and enquire of her. And his servants said to him, Behold, there is a woman that hath a familiar spirit at En-dor.” I Sam. 28:6,7.
“Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men.” Acts 19:19.
The third sheet contained a quote from Today’s Christian:
“To dabble in matters such as these is to reach within demoniac circles, and it is by no means rare to discover scorn and scepticism transformed to hysterical possession in persons whose curiosity has led them merely to attend so-called ‘spiritual séances’. These things of which I speak are of a nature as serious as any in the world today, and I am only one among many to utter a solemn warning against any intercourse with ‘spirit forces’ or the like, whereby the unutterable evil of demonic possession could well be the horrific outcome.”
Finally, before she returned with a steaming jug of cocoa and two mugs, I read another of Aunt Hester’s extracts, this one again from Feery’s Notes on the Necronomicon:
“Yea, & I discovered how one might, be he an Adept & his familiar Spirits powerful enough, control the Wanderings or Migration of his Essence into all manner of Beings & Persons—even from beyond the Grave of Sod or the Door of the Stone Sepulchre…”
I was still pondering this last extract an hour later, as I walked Harden’s night streets towards my lodgings at the home of my friend.
• • •
Three evenings later, when by arrangement I returned to my aunt’s cottage in old Castle-Ilden, she was nervously waiting for me at the gate and whisked me breathlessly inside. She sat me down, seated herself opposite and clasped her hands in her lap almost in the attitude of an excited young girl.
“Peter, Love, I’ve had an idea—such a simple idea that it amazes me I never thought of it before.”
“An idea? How do you mean, Aunt Hester—what sort of idea? Does it involve me?”
“Yes, I’d rather it were you than any other. After all, you know the story now…”
I frowned as an oddly foreboding shadow darkened latent areas of my consciousness. Her words had been innocuous enough as of yet, and there seemed no reason why I should suddenly feel so—uncomfortable, but—
“The story?” I finally repeated her. “You mean this idea of yours concerns—Uncle George?”
“Yes, I do!” she answered. “Oh, Love, I can see them; if only for a brief moment or two, I can see my nephew and niece. You’ll help me? I know
you will.”
The shadow thickened darkly, growing in me, spreading from hidden to more truly conscious regions of my mind. “Help you? You mean you intend to—” I paused, then started to speak again as I saw for sure what she was getting at and realised that she meant it: “But haven’t you said that this stuff was too dangerous? The last time you—”
“Oh, yes, I know,” she impatiently argued, cutting me off. “But now, well, it’s different. I won’t stay more than a moment or two—just long enough to see the children—and then I’ll get straight back…here. And there’ll be precautions. It can’t fail, you’ll see.”
“Precautions?” Despite myself I was interested.
“Yes,” she began to talk faster, growing more excited with each passing moment. “The way I’ve worked it out, it’s perfectly safe. To start with, George will be asleep—he won’t know anything about it. When his sleeping mind moves into my body, why, it will simply stay asleep! On the other hand, when my mind moves into his body, then I’ll be able to move about and—”
“And use your brother as a keyhole!” I blurted, surprising even myself. She frowned, then turned her face away. What she planned was wrong. I knew it and so did she, but if my outburst had shamed her it certainly had not deterred her—not for long.
When she looked at me again her eyes were almost pleading. “I know how it must look to you, Love, but it’s not so. And I know that I must seem to be a selfish woman, but that’s not quite true either. Isn’t it natural that I should want to see my family? They are mine, you know. George, my brother; his wife, my sister-in-law; their children, my nephew and niece. Just a—yes—a ‘peep’, if that’s the way you see it. But, Love, I need that peep. I’ll only have a few moments, and I’ll have to make them last me for the rest of my life.”
I began to weaken. “How will you go about it?”
“First, a glance,” she eagerly answered, again reminding me of a young girl. “Nothing more, a mere glance. Even if he’s awake he won’t ever know I was there; he’ll think his mind wandered for the merest second. If he is asleep, though, then I’ll be able to, well, ‘wake him up’, see his wife—and, if the children are still at home, why, I’ll be able to see them too. Just a glance.”
“But suppose something does go wrong?” I asked bluntly, coming back to earth. “Why, you might come back and find your head in the gas oven! What’s to stop him from slashing your wrists? That only takes a second, you know.”
“That’s where you come in, Love.” She stood up and patted me on the cheek, smiling cleverly. “You’ll be righ
t here to see that nothing goes wrong.”
“But—”
“And to be doubly sure,” she cut me off, “why, I’ll be tied in my chair! You can’t walk through windows when you’re tied down, now can you?”
• • •
Half an hour later, still suffering inwardly from that as yet unspecified foreboding, I had done as Aunt Hester directed me to do, tying her wrists to the arms of her cane chair with soft but fairly strong bandages from her medicine cabinet in the bathroom.
She had it all worked out, reasoning that it would be very early morning in Australia and that her brother would still be sleeping. As soon as she was comfortable, without another word, she closed her eyes and let her head fall slowly forward onto her chest. Outside, the sun still had some way to go to setting; inside, the room was still warm—yet I shuddered oddly with a deep, nervous chilling of my blood.
It was then that I tried to bring the thing to a halt, calling her name and shaking her shoulder, but she only brushed my hand away and hushed me. I went back to my chair and watched her anxiously.
As the shadows seemed visibly to lengthen in the room and my skin cooled, her head sank even deeper onto her chest, so that I began to think she had fallen asleep. Then she settled herself more comfortably yet and I saw that she was still awake, merely preparing her body for her brother’s slumbering mind.
In another moment I knew that something had changed. Her position was as it had been; the shadows crept slowly still; the ancient clock on the wall ticked its regular chronological message; but I had grown inexplicably colder, and there was this feeling that something had changed…
Suddenly there flashed before my mind’s eye certain of those warning jottings I had read only a few nights earlier, and there and then I was determined that this thing should go no further. Oh, she had warned me not to do anything to frighten or disturb her, but this was different. Somehow I knew that if I didn’t act now—
“Hester! Aunt Hester!” I jumped up and moved toward her, my throat dry and my words cracked and unnatural-sounding. And she lifted her head and opened her eyes.
For a moment I thought that everything was all right—then…
She cried out and stood up, ripped bandages falling in tatters from strangely strong wrists. She mouthed again, staggering and patently disorientated. I fell back in dumb horror, knowing that something was very wrong and yet unable to put my finger on the trouble.
My aunt’s eyes were wide now and bulging, and for the first time she seemed to see me, stumbling toward me with slack jaw and tongue protruding horribly between long teeth and drawnback lips. It was then that I knew what was wrong, that this frightful thing before me was not my aunt, and I was driven backward before its stumbling approach, warding it off with waving arms and barely articulate cries.
Finally, stumbling more frenziedly now, clawing at empty air inches in front of my face, she—it—spoke: “No!” the awful voice gurgled over its wriggling tongue. “No, Hester, you…you fool! I warned you…”
And in that same instant I saw not an old woman, but the horribly alien figure of a man in a woman’s form!
More grotesque than any drag artist, the thing pirouetted in grim, constricting agony, its strange eyes glazing even as I stared in a paralysis of horror. Then it was all over and the frail scarecrow of flesh, purple tongue still protruding from frothing lips, fell in a crumpled heap to the floor.
• • •
That’s it, that’s the story—not a tale I’ve told before, for there would have been too many questions, and it’s more than possible that my version would not be believed. Let’s face it, who would believe me? No, I realised this as soon as the thing was done, and so I simply got rid of the torn bandages and called in a doctor. Aunt Hester died of a heart attack, or so I’m told, and perhaps she did—straining to do that which, even with her powers, should never have been possible.
During this last fortnight or so since it happened, I’ve been trying to convince myself that the doctor was right (which I was quite willing enough to believe at the time), but I’ve been telling myself lies. I think I’ve known the real truth ever since my parents got the letter from Australia. And lately, reinforcing that truth, there have been the dreams and the daydreams—or are they?
This morning I woke up to a lightless void—a numb, black, silent void—wherein I was incapable of even the smallest movement, and I was horribly, hideously frightened. It lasted for only a moment, that’s all, but in that moment it seemed to me that I was dead—or that the living me inhabited a dead body!
Again and again I find myself thinking back on the mad Arab’s words as reported by Joachim Feery: “…even from beyond the Grave of Sod…” And in the end I know that this is indeed the answer.
That is why I’m flying tomorrow to Australia. Ostensibly I’m visiting my uncle’s wife, my Australian aunt; but really I’m only interested in him, in Uncle George himself. I don’t know what I’ll be able to do, or even if there is anything I can do. My efforts may well be completely useless, and yet I must try to do something.
I must try, for I know now that it’s that or find myself once again, perhaps permanently, locked in that hellish, nighted—place?—of black oblivion and insensate silence. In the dead and rotting body of my Uncle George, already buried three weeks when Aunt Hester put her mind in his body—the body she’s now trying to vacate in favour of mine!
The Kiss of Bugg-Shash
In 1972 in the UK, Sphere Books had published an anthology titled New Writings in Horror and the Supernatural, Vol 2, which contained among others a story called “Demoniacal” by David Sutton. This story seemed to me so very much a Mythos-story that I obtained David’s permission to write a sequel. The sequel was/is the following story. Both tales would later (1978) appear in tandem in a pamphlet from Jon M. Harvey’s small press (Spectre Press), under the title Cthulhu 3. I believe they’ve subsequently seen print in The Crypt of Cthulhu, edited by Robert M. Price, and likewise in Price’s Fedogan & Bremer anthology, The New Lovecraft Circle, 1995.
I
You let it out?” Thomas Millwright incredulously repeated Ray Nuttall’s obliquely offered admission. Alan Bart, Nuttall’s somewhat younger companion, nodded in eager if apprehensive agreement, shivering despite the warmth of the Londoner’s city flat.
“Yes, we did, sir,” he blurted. “But not intentionally, you must understand that. God, never that and certainly not if we’d known what we were doing, but—”
“Christ, Alan, but you’re gibbering!” Nuttall’s disgusted exclamation cut Bart off in mid-sentence, his weak eyes peering nervously about the flat and giving the lie to his cool controlled tone of voice. “I’m sure Mr. Millwright understands everything we’ve told him. There’s really no need to go on so.”
Alan Bart’s cynical-seeming friend had pulled himself together somewhat. He had accepted the horror of the thing far more readily than the younger man, since that series of events which three nights earlier had culminated when the two, albeit unwittingly, had indeed called up a demon, or demonic device, from nameless nether-gulfs into the world of men.
“Oh yes, I understand perfectly what you’ve told me,” answered the saturnine, dark-eyed occult scholar, “though I must admit to finding some difficulty in believing that—”
“That a couple of rank amateurs, bungling about with a rather weird and esoteric gramophone record and an evocation from some old eccentric’s book of spells, could actually conjure such a being?” Nuttall finished it for him.
“In a nutshell, yes…exactly.” The occultist made no bones of it. “Mind you, I can readily enough understand how you might have convinced yourselves that it was so. Self-hypnosis is the basis of many so-called cases of demonic possession.”
“We thought you might say something like that,” Nuttall told him, “but we can prove our story very easily.” His voice was suddenly trembling; he plainly fought to maintain a grip on himself. “However, it’s not a pleasant experience�
�”
“It’s horrible, horrible!” The younger man, Bart, jumped up. His normally sallow features were suddenly many shades lighter. “Don’t make us prove it, Mr. Millwright! Not that again, God, not that!” his voice began to rise hysterically.
“You needn’t stay for it, Alan,” Nuttall took pity on the weaker man. “I can stand it on my own, I think, and anyway it will only be for a second. And I won’t really be alone, as Mr. Millwright will be with me.”
Millwright frowned and rose to his feet from the couch where he had been reclining. His face plainly showed his interest. “Just what would this ‘proof’ of yours consist of?”
“We would simply turn off the lights for a moment,” Nuttall answered, reaching his hand out to the light switch on the wall.
“Wait!” Bart screamed, grabbing his companion’s arm. “Wait,” he gulped, his eyes wide and fearful. He turned to the occultist: “Is there a light in your bathroom?”
“Of course,” Millwright answered, frowning again. He showed Bart to the bathroom door and watched bemused as the young man tremblingly entered. He noticed how Bart made sure that the light in the small room was on before he went in. Then he heard the catch go home on the inside of the door.
Suddenly Millwright began to believe. These two night visitors, with their arsenal of pocket torches and their patently psychotic fear of darkness, were not really pulling his leg. But most probably it was as he had diagnosed; the odds were all in favour of self-hypnosis. They had desired so badly that their experiment should work and they had probably been in such a state of self-induced hysteria at the time, through the music and their esoteric chantings, that they actually believed they had called up a demon from hell.
On the other hand…well, Millwright was not inexperienced in the darker mysteries. Black Magic, practised with a degree of discretion, and the various carefully edited works he had written in the same vein, had made life very easy for him for the past fifteen years. Now, though, he had to see for himself—or, at least, experience—this “proof” that these young men had offered him. Such proof would not be pleasant, the man called Nuttall had warned him. Well, very few magical or necromantic experiences were pleasant; but of course, Nuttall would hardly be willing to demonstrate the thing—whatever it was—if it were really dangerous…
