The girl must have pleaded and argued with me for many minutes in that deserted hall. Listening to her, and trying to convince her of my inability to fulfill her request, was like a dialog in some futile and tedious nightmare. During the course of it, she told me a few details that I am unwilling to record in this narrative; details that were too morbid and too shocking for belief, regarding the mental alteration of Cyprian, and his new subject-matter and method of work. There were direct and oblique hints of a growing perversion; but somehow it seemed that much more was being held back; that even in her most horrifying disclosures she was not wholly frank with me. At last, with some sort of hazy promise that I would speak to Cyprian, would remonstrate with him, I succeeded in getting away from her, and returned to my hotel.
The afternoon and evening that followed were tinged as by the tyrannous adumbration of an ill dream. I felt that I had stepped from the solid earth into a gulf of seething, menacing, madness-haunted shadow, and was lost henceforward to all rightful sense of location or direction. It was all too hideous—and too doubtful and unreal. The change in Cyprian himself was no less bewildering, and hardly less horrifying, than the vile phantom of the bookshop, and the demon sculptures that displayed a magisterial art. It was as if the man had become possessed by some satanic energy or entity.
Everywhere that I went, I was powerless to shake off the feeling of an intangible pursuit, of a frightful, unseen vigilance. It seemed to me that the worm-gray face and sulfurous eyes would reappear at any moment; that the semi-canine mouth with its gangrene-dripping fangs might come to slaver above the restaurant table at which I ate, or upon the pillow of my bed. I did not dare to reopen the purchased Goya volume, for fear of finding that certain pages were still defiled with a spectral slime.
I went out and spent the evening in cafés, in theaters, wherever people thronged and lights were bright. It was after midnight when I finally ventured to brave the solitude of my hotel bedroom. Then there were endless hours of nerve-wrung insomnia, of shivering, sweating apprehension beneath the electric bulb that I had left burning. Finally, a little before dawn, by no conscious transition and with no premonitory drowsiness, I fell asleep.
I remember no dreams—only the vast, incubus-like oppression that persisted even in the depth of slumber, as if to drag me down with its formless, ever-clinging weight into gulfs beyond the reach of created flight or the fathoming of organized entity.
It was almost noon when I awoke, and found myself staring into the verminous, apish, mummy-dead face and hell-illumined eyes of the gargoyle that had crouched before me in the corner at Toleman’s. The thing was standing at the foot of my bed; and behind it as I stared, the wall of the room, which was covered with a floral paper, dissolved in an infinite vista of grayness, teeming with ghoulish forms that emerged like monstrous, misshapen bubbles from plains of undulant ooze and skies of serpentining vapor. It was another world, and my very sense of equilibrium was disturbed by an evil vertigo as I gazed. It seemed to me that my bed was heaving dizzily, was turning slowly, deliriously toward the gulf; that the feculent vista and the vile apparition were swimming beneath me; that I would fall toward them in another moment and be precipitated forever into that world of abysmal monstrosity and obscenity.
In a start of profound alarm, I fought my vertigo, fought the sense that another will than mine was drawing me, that the unclean gargoyle was luring me by some unspeakable mesmeric spell, as a serpent is said to lure its prey. I seemed to read a nameless purpose in its yellow-slitted eyes, in the soundless moving of its oozy lips; and my very soul recoiled with nausea and revulsion as I breathed its pestilential fetor.
Apparently, the mere effort of mental resistance was enough. The vista and the face receded; they went out in a swirl of daylight. I saw the design of tea roses on the wallpaper beyond; and the bed beneath me was sanely horizontal once more. I lay sweating with my terror, all adrift on a sea of nightmare surmise of unearthly threat and whirlpool madness, till the ringing of the telephone bell recalled me automatically to the known world.
I sprang to answer the call. It was Cyprian, though I should hardly have recognized the dead, hopeless tones of his voice, from which the mad pride and self-assurance of the previous day had wholly vanished.
“I must see you at once,” he said. “Can you come to the studio?”
I was about to refuse, to tell him that I had been called home suddenly, that there was no time, that I must catch the noon train—anything to avert the ordeal of another visit to that place of mephitic evil—when I heard his voice again.
“You simply must come, Philip. I can’t tell you about it over the phone, but a dreadful thing has happened: Marta had disappeared.”
I consented, telling him that I would start for the studio as soon as I had dressed. The whole nightmare had closed in, had deepened immeasurably with his last words; but remembering the haunted face of the girl, her hysteric fears, her frantic plea and my vague promise, I could not very well decline to go.
I dressed and went out with my mind in a turmoil of abominable conjecture, of ghastly doubt, and apprehension all the more hideous because I was unsure of its object I tried to imagine what had happened, tried to piece together the frightful, evasive, half-admitted hints of unknown terror into a tangible coherent fabric, but found myself involved in a chaos of shadowy menace.
I could not have eaten any breakfast, even if I had taken the necessary time. I went at once to the studio, and found Cyprian standing aimlessly amid his baleful statuary. His look was that of a man who has been stunned by the blow of some crushing weapon, or has gazed on the very face of Medusa. He greeted me in a vacant manner, with dull, toneless words. Then, like a charged machine, as if his body rather than his mind were speaking, he began at once to pour forth the atrocious narrative.
“They took her,” he said, simply. “Maybe you didn’t know it, or weren’t sure of it; but I have been doing all my new sculptures from life—even that last group. Marta was posing for me this forenoon—only an hour ago—or less. I had hoped to finish her part of the modeling today; and she wouldn’t have had to come again for this particular piece. I hadn’t called the Things this time, since I knew she was beginning to fear them more and more. I think she feared them on my account more than her own—and they were making me a little uneasy too, by the boldness with which they sometimes lingered when I had ordered then to leave, and the way they would sometimes appear when I didn’t want them.
“I was busy with some of the final touches on the girl figure, and wasn’t even looking at Marta, when suddenly I knew that the Things were there. The smell told me, if nothing else—I guess you know what the smell is like. I looked up and found that the studio was full of them—they had never before appeared in such numbers. They were surrounding Marta, were crowding and jostling each other, were all reaching toward her with their filthy talons; but even then, I didn’t think that they could harm her. They aren’t material beings, in the sense that we are, and they really have no physical power outside their own plane. All that they do have is a sort of snaky mesmerism, and they’ll always try to drag you down to their own dimension by means of it. God help anyone who yields to them; but you don’t have to go, unless you are weak, or willing. I’ve never had any doubt of my power to resist them, and I didn’t really dream they could do anything to Marta.
“It startled me, though, when I saw the whole crowding hell-pack, and I ordered them to go pretty sharply. I was angry—and somewhat alarmed, too. But they merely grimaced and slavered, with that slow, twisting movement of their lips that is like a voiceless gibbering, and then they closed in on Marta, just as I represented them doing in that accursed group of sculpture. Only there were scores of them now, instead of merely seven.
“I can’t describe how it happened, but all at once their foul talons had reached the girl; they were pawing her, were pulling at her hands, her arms, her body. She screamed and I hope I’ll never hear another scream so full of black agony and
soul-unhinging fright. Then I knew that she had yielded to them—either from choice, or from excess of terror—and knew that they were taking her away.
“For a moment, the studio wasn’t there at all—only a long, gray, oozing plain, beneath skies where the fumes of hell were writhing like a million ghostly and distorted dragons. Marta was sinking into that ooze, and the Things were all about her, gathering in fresh hundreds from every side, fighting each other for place, sinking with her like bloated, misshaped fen-creatures into their native slime. Then everything vanished—and I was standing here in the studio, all alone with these damned sculptures.”
He paused for a little, and stared with dreary, desolate eyes at the floor. Then:
“It was awful, Philip, and I’ll never forgive myself for having anything to do with those monsters. I must have been a little mad, but I’ve always had a strong ambition to create some real stuff in the field of the grotesque and visionary and macabre. I don’t suppose you ever suspected, back in my stodgy phase, that I had a veritable appetence for such things. I wanted to do in sculpture what Poe and Lovecraft and Baudelaire have done in literature, what Rops and Goya did in pictorial art.
“That was what led me into the occult, when I realized my limitations. I knew that I had to see the dwellers of the invisible worlds before I could depict them. I wanted to do it. I longed for this power of vision and representation more than anything else. And then, all at once, I found that I had the power of summoning the unseen.…
“There was no magic involved, in the usual sense of the word—no spells and circles, no pentacles and burning gums from old sorcery books. At bottom, it was just will power, I guess—a will to divine the satanic, to summon the innumerable malignities and grotesqueries that people other planes than ours, or mingled unperceived with humanity.
“You’ve no idea what I have beheld, Philip. These statues of mine—these devils, vampires, lamias, satyrs—were all done from life, or, at least from recent memory. The originals are what the occultists would call elementals, I suppose. There are endless worlds, contiguous to our own, or coexisting with it, that such beings inhabit. All the creations of myth and fantasy, all the familiar spirits that sorcerers have evoked, are resident in these worlds.
“I made myself their master, I levied upon them at will. Then, from a dimension that must be a little lower than all others, a little nearer the ultimate nadir of hell, I called the innominate beings who posed for this new figure-piece.
“I don’t know what they are,” but I have surmised a good deal. They are hateful as the worms of the Pit, they are malevolent as harpies, they drool with a poisonous hunger not to be named or imagined. But I believed that they were powerless to do anything outside their own sphere, and I’ve always laughed at them when they tried to entice me—even though that snakish mental pull of theirs was rather creepy at times. It was as if soft, invisible, gelatinous arms were trying to drag you down from the firm shore into a bottomless bog.
“They are hunters—I am sure of that—the hunters from Beyond. God knows what they will do to Marta now that they have her at their mercy. That vast, viscid, miasma-haunted place to which they took her is awful beyond the imagining of a Satan. Perhaps—even there—they couldn’t harm her body. But bodies aren’t what they want—it isn’t for human flesh that they grope with those ghoulish claws, and gape and slaver with those gangrenous mouths. The brain itself—and the soul, too—is their food: they are the creatures who prey on the minds of madmen and madwomen, who devour the disembodied spirits that have fallen from the cycles of incarnation, have gone down beyond the possibility of rebirth.
“To think of Marta in their power—it is worse than hell or madness. Marta loved me, and I loved her, too, though I didn’t have the sense to realize it, wrapped as I was in my dark, baleful ambition and impious egotism. She was afraid for me, and I believe she surrendered voluntarily to the Things. She must have thought that they would leave me alone if they secured another victim in my place.”
He ceased, and began to pace idly and feverishly about, I saw that his hollow eyes were alight with torment, as if the mechanical telling of his horrible story had in some manner served to requicken his crushed mind. Utterly and starkly appalled by his hideous revelations, I could say nothing, but could only stand and watch his torture-twisted face.
Incredibly, his expression changed, with a wild, startled look that was instantly transfigured into joy. Turning to follow his gaze, I saw that Marta was standing in the center of the room. She was nude, except for a Spanish shawl that she must have worn while posing. Her face was bloodless as the marble of a tomb, and her eyes were wide and blank, as if she had been drained of all life, of all thought or emotion or memory, as if even the knowledge of horror had been taken away from her. It was the face of the living dead, and the soulless mask of ultimate idiocy; and the joy faded from Cypian’s eyes as he stepped toward her.
He took her in his arms, he spoke to her with a desperate, loving tenderness, with cajoling and caressing words. She made no answer, however, no movement of recognition or awareness, but stared beyond him with her blank eyes, to which the daylight and the darkness, the void air and her lover’s face, would henceforward be the same. He and I both knew, in that instant, that she would never again respond to any human voice, or to human love or terror; that she was like an empty cerement, retaining the outward form of that which the worms have eaten in their mausolean darkness. Of the noisome pits wherein she had been, of that bournless realm and its pullulating phantoms, she could tell us nothing: her agony had ended with the terrible mercy of complete forgetfulness.
Like one who confronts the Gorgon, I was frozen by her wide and sightless gaze. Then, behind her, where stood an array of carven Satans and lamias, the room seemed to recede, the walls and floors dissolved in a seething, unfathomable gulf, amid whose pestilential vapors the statues were mingled in momentary and loathsome ambiguity with the ravening faces, the hunger-contorted forms that swirled toward us from their ultra-dimensional limbo like a devil-laden hurricane from Malebolge. Outlined against that boiling, measureless cauldron of malignant storm, Marta stood like an image of glacial death and silence in the arms of Cyprian. Then, once more, after a little, the abhorrent vision faded, leaving only the diabolic statuary.
I think that I alone had beheld it; that Cyprian had seen nothing but the dead face of Marta. He drew her close, he repeated his hopeless words of tenderness and cajolery. Then, suddenly, he released her with a vehement sob of despair. Turning away, while she stood and still looked on with unseeing eyes, he snatched a heavy sculptor’s mallet from the table on which it was lying, and proceeded to smash with furious blows the newly-modeled group of gargoyles, till nothing was left but the figure of the terror-maddened girl, crouching above a mass of cloddish fragments and formless, half-dried clay.
GHOULMASTER, by Brian McNaughton
Finding gifts to please my baby sister wasn’t easy. She was married to J. Carter Hazard and lived in a mansion on Zaman’s Hill, while I had rooms on the raffish side of the Miskatonic. I brought some flowers I’d picked and a bottle of wine when I came to dinner.
“Felix!” She was delighted to see me, but strangely surprised. After our fond embrace, she held me at arms’ length and stared. “What happened to you?”
I examined my new cashmere topcoat. It displayed no ghastly stains. My stomach thwarted an attempt to examine my shoes, but I was ninety per cent certain I was wearing them. I said, “When?”
“Last night. Dinner?”
“Oh. I thought.…”
“Yes, obviously, but how could you confuse the date of your own birth?”
“It is?” I could have sworn my latest birthday had been celebrated only last week, when she had given me this very coat. I had thought to please her by wearing her gift so soon.
“It was. Yesterday. We sent more than once to remind you, since you refuse to have a telephone, but that infuriating servant of yours only answers the door wh
en it suits him.”
“I often sleep at my office.…”
“Which no one can find. Are you sure you have an office at the Old Lecture Hall? Well, there’s no harm done. I had run out of Aubrey stories, and they’re wildly popular. The Senator always asks about you.”
“That’s not a bad thing at all, you know,” said my brother-in-law. We had walked through the atrium while we talked and entered the dining room, where he was well into his meal. “Half the time he can’t recall my name, and I’m his cousin.” For a wealthy and well-connected man, he worried a lot about such slights. “But he certainly knows you, Doctor. Belated best wishes, by the way.”
I was curious to know how old I was, but I didn’t want to improve their newest “Aubrey story” by asking.
“What’s this?” Carter examined the bottle Sarah had handed him through a servant. “I didn’t know they made wine in El Salvador.”
“The bartender at Kinsella’s recommended it highly,” I said.
“Oh. That place by the tannery?” He returned the bottle to the maid and waved her off. “We’ll have to try it some day.”
“The flowers are lovely,” Sarah said, primping them in a vase. “I’m sure few people have the unspoiled eye to see that goldenrod is beautiful.”
I admired the elegant tact of that compliment, but she spoiled it by sneezing. Anxious to divert their attention from my sorry gifts, I said, “Where are Susan and—?” To my chagrin, I had forgotten my nephew’s name.
“Frederick, of course, has been with that Chicago law firm for the past two years.” Most fathers would have used his tone to confess that a son was riding with Hell’s Angels. “Susan.…” Saying nothing more about her, he brooded darkly. I had fond memories of Susan scrambling over me like a little monkey to discover gifts I would hide about my person. As she was only a year younger than Frederick, she would be less than enraptured with the rag doll in my pocket. I dimly recalled an embarrassment last year, or perhaps the year before, when a handsome young lady had ransacked my garments and feigned delight with the bird-shaped whistle she had found.
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