Tales of the Grotesque: A Collection of Uneasy Tales

by L. A. Lewis

  His uncle crossed over to a cupboard, lifted out something large and shiny, and stood it on the desk. It was an expensive instrument, covered with exciting little brass knobs, and Pete’s eyes gleamed when they saw it, ‘Coo, what a beauty,' he exclaimed rapturously. ‘Wish I had one!... Oh, and look, Uncle! Here’s daddy’s model fortress!

  I’ve never seen it properly before. Can we look at through the microscope?’

  ‘No, of course not, you silly kid. They’re for examining very tiny things like grains of dust, and you have to put them between the glass plates so as to light them from behind. If you just stood the end of the barrel against a lump of solid stuff you’d see nothing at all. Now then, here’s a slide,’ he went on, handing the boy two little oblongs of glass, ‘just get a wee flake of dirt on the tip of that silver paper-knife and park it between these. Then I’ll show you how the world looks to an influenza germ.’

  Pete giggled, and scraped up a speck of dust from the courtyard of the model fortress, wiped the paper-knife on the slide, and obediently passed it across. His uncle fitted it into a frame at the lower end of the barrel, bent down to the eye piece and began manipulating the brass knobs. Pete watched him, fascinated, and chafed at the time it took to get the adjustment right. He was on the point of asking how soon he might be allowed to have a look when he heard his uncle give a low whistle.

  ‘Pete,’ he said, in a funny unsteady voice, and without lifting his head from the eye-piece, ‘go and ask Mummy to come here, will you. And then hang on in the drawing-room till we call you, there’s a good chap. I’ve got something I want her to see first, and after that you shall have the microscope to yourself till you go to bed.’

  Though crestfallen at this further delay, Pete understood from the tone that it was not the time to argue, and presently Mrs. Hunt had taken his place by the desk. Her brother rose, and gave her a strange, searching glance.

  ‘Take a look at that, old girl’ he suggested, indicating the microscope, ‘and tell me if I’m dreaming.’

  Lydia sat down in the chair. ‘Why, Harry,’ she exclaimed, ‘they’re miniature skeletons! But how on earth can they be modelled so perfectly on such a scale?’

  Her brother shook his head. ‘Pete certainly scraped that bit of dust off the miniature,’ he answered. ‘But they are not models! Take a grip on yourself, shift the slide from right to left. This is the button that operates it.’

  Lydia obeyed the instruction and then broke out again in a tone of astonishment: ‘But it’s unbelievable! A pigmy race no bigger than bacilli, and shaped the exact pattern of humans? Why,’ she added, there are even buckles and bits of cloth just like we wear. But they must be models.’

  ‘Move the slide a bit further,' said Ham’ quietly, and then gripped her by the shoulders as she thrust her chair backwards from the desk with a cry of horror, cheeks blanched and eyes dilated.

  ‘Harry! Harry!' she gasped, ‘I can’t bear it! It’s Peter and Lord Knifton! That dressing gown. There’s not another like it in the world!... Oh, that horrible mess of blood... And the limbs were - were still twitching! What does it mean?'

  Her brother poured some whiskey into a glass and held it to her lips. ‘It means, I think, that there was truth in the legend of Lost Keep, and that Peter found the key. It would account for his mysterious disappearances - and other things...’ he concluded grimly.

  Lydia drained the tumbler and straightened up in the chair.

  ‘You mean that the original castle really exists, and that, in some beastly fashion, its happenings are mirrored in the model?... Then tell me, Harry. How can we find the real place? There may still be life in them. We must send help. We must!’

  Her brother sighed. ‘There is no journey to make. How such a thing can be, God knows - but that thing is Lost Keep, and there they are locked - multum in parvo - Ugh! It makes me sick!’

  Suddenly Lydia was galvanised into action. She began to turn out the drawers of the desk, scattering their contents on the carpet. ‘The lens, Harry. The lens!’ she cried hysterically. ‘We can go ourselves and find out!’

  Harry took her gently by the arm. ‘No, dear,’ he replied with finality, ‘Peter has the lens.’

  Hybrid

  I have known Billy Cole, or, to give him his proper title, Dr X. W. Cole, MD, MRCS, since we were at school together. The ‘X’ stands for Xavier, a tradition in his family, but, of course, no one could be bothered with a mouthful like that.

  He is, both in character and appearance, what one generally refers to as a ‘hard case’. All doctors have to be, owing to their familiarity with pain and disease and the tragedy of their causes; but Billy is an exception even among his fraternity because most of his professional career has been spent in the capacity of a Ship’s Surgeon in the Mercantile Marine.

  Slight acquaintances get the impression that he is so calloused to human suffering and human vice as to be completely lacking in sympathy or sentiment, and indeed, his uncompromising, severely practical exterior supports the belief. In reality he is about the squarest and whitest soul I know, and it is only his first-hand experience of life’s seamy side among most of the world’s races that has developed his iron self-control. I think he could hear or witness any conceivable horror literally without turning a hair.

  On the occasion of his last shore leave prior to sailing for the Orient he followed his usual custom of spending a few days at my bachelor apartments in Town, and as his arrival had been too late for me to organize a satisfactory ‘night out’, we were passing a quiet evening in my library over nuts and wine.

  Since it will probably become self-evident later in the story, I may as well confess now to a strongly developed vein of morbid curiosity. Though I am pretty brawny in physique, I find something so uncanny in the actual spectacle of even a comparatively harmless lunatic as to give me feelings of absolute terror. At the same time maniacs and their more disgusting reactions hold me in a strange fascination.

  I had been listening avidly to Billy’s description of some of his most repulsive ‘cases’ when he concluded his recital with one about a dipsomaniac who ended his days chasing gigantic, violet wasps with a broom, and this yarn reminded me of some theories on the hallucinations accompanying ‘DTY which I had once heard in the course of an address by an eminent theosophical lecturer.

  ‘Billy,’ I asked him, without much expectation of tolerance from his pragmatic mind, ‘do you think there may be anything in the occultist’s notion that such monstrosities really exist, and are sometimes rendered visible through the medium of alcohol, drugs, and so forth?’

  Much to my surprise, he accepted the suggestion without a trace of mockery, and answered with considerable gravity.

  ‘You mean what they call breaking down the “web” that is supposed to divide the physical from the “astral”. Well, when I was a student, I should have laughed like hell at any such idea. But experientia docet. If you like, I’ll tell you about another case that appeared to confirm that hypothesis. At all events, it had some aspects that were beyond ordinary pathological reasoning.”

  ‘Fire away,’ I invited eagerly, the morbid streak well to the fore. Billy settled himself deeper in his chesterfield and helped himself to a handful of nuts which he began cracking methodically, if absently.

  ‘As far as I remember,’ he began, ‘we never had a schoolfellow named Chalmers so I will call my “case” by that name. You see, the man in question was one of our contemporaries at St Egbert’s, and I’ve no doubt you’d remember him well enough, but it wouldn’t be at all fair to him or to his admirable wife to give away their secret.

  ‘Chalmers was, to all outward appearances, a perfectly normal, healthy boy, good at games to an average degree, passable in his form work, though not brilliant. I’m not a bit afraid of your recognizing him from my description because he was so very average. He possessed one trait, though, of which I don’t suppose anyone suspected him.

  ‘Beneath his shell of seemingly thoughtless exuberance l
ay a deep strain of mysticism, all caused, so far as I could make out, by his having recurrent experiences of a singularly evil nightmare dating back to his very earliest recollections.

  ‘I think I was his only confidant, though why he should have picked on me as recipient of his confidences I can’t think. Fate, I imagine, and anyway it certainly helped me tremendously in understanding his symptoms afterwards.

  ‘Well, as Chalmers described it, he could not recall any time in his infancy when he was not haunted by an appalling fear the worse because it was ill-defined - of some horrible entity constantly lurking near him. The usual childish dislike of darkness was, in his case, raised to the nth degree, so that lie positively yelled with terror whenever he was left without light for a single instant. Up to the age of nearly nine he could not be induced to go to bed without a night-light, and a nurse or someone to share his room, but at about that period the new adventure of being sent to a day school and having a lot of fresh interests seems to have forced the thing into the back of his consciousness, where it remained for so long that he was finally able to forget it almost completely.

  ‘He became quite a normal boy, swotted his subjects reasonably, played his cricket and football, and went to bed at night healthily tired, sleeping soundly without recourse to night-lights. When his mind did, very occasionally, turn to the presence that had haunted his cradle and cot, its nature had become so indistinct that, as he told me, he could not have described it even in the vaguest terms.

  ‘Now, I’m sure you remember the phase we all went through at about fifteen when we fell easy prey to advertisers’ announcements on the covers of penny ‘shockers’, and were always wasting our pocket-money on dud water-pistols, electric tic-pins, et cetera. Some of us were most attracted by cheap-jack palmists and astrologers, and used to send in perfectly good half-crown postal orders together with time and place of birth in exchange for ‘an astounding character delineation and outline of your future’. Chalmers belonged to this school of thought and must have spent pounds on being told to “beware of a dark woman”, and all the usual bilge. He got fed up with it at last because, as he naively explained, no two forecasts corresponded.

  ‘Now, personally, I’m inclined to think that, have he left fortune-telling alone for good, he might have grown up into an absolutely fit, sane, and unimaginative human animal, and saved himself the hell of a nasty experience later. But, as Fate would have it, a most superior sort of fair came to the town for a few days, and one of the side-shows was a booth tenanted by a self-styled lady psychometrist.’

  ‘I remember,’ I interrupted. ‘Madame Caramel or Caramclla or something.’

  ‘Urn. Name like that,’ Billy agreed. ‘Anyway, somebody persuaded Chalmers to give her a trial, and he duly paid his dollar and was taken into a dark room where the lady seated herself beside him on a divan and proceeded to hold his hand. He’d always had his fortune told by post before, and this method was a new one on him, with the result that he thought first of all she wanted him to make love to her. Being then about sixteen and unversed in the ways of the world, he was trying to decide how he ought to begin when the lady suddenly began talking at a rapid rate and squeezing his hand with a great access of muscular strength. Looking at her sharply, he saw that her eyes were shut and that her complexion had gone quite white, while beads of sweat stood out on the forehead. So greatly was he fascinated by his first experience of somebody in an apparently genuine trance that he missed quite a lot of her opening statements, but his ears were sharpened when she began telling him that his was a destiny of abysmal horror, and that his feet would walk forever in the glades of hell overshadowed by a sin-bred monster of his own begetting. He told me about the whole thing quite unexpectedly when we were out on a bird’s-nesting ramble on a half-holiday, and, though he could not repeat the episode verbatim, the gist of it was that he had been addicted to the cult of Black Magic in a former life, and had begotten or caused to be begotten - some dreadful hybrid, part human, part fowl, which looked to him for the continuity of its earthly existence, life by life, as he himself was reincarnate. That his “ego” had long since dropped the cult and was now concerned only with the processes of natural law did not free him from the responsibility for his “creature”, and only by resuming his former malpractices at the cost of his own soul could he give this being its just chance of evolving through successive stages of bestiality until a wholly human vehicle could be attained.

  ‘Well, that sort of thing at the time seemed to me the last word in tripe, apart from its degenerate aspect, and I told Chalmers so pretty bluntly. He retorted that he would certainly have thought the same, but for the fact that the psychometrist’s affirmation had caused the resumption of his childish nightmares, and with greatly enhanced vividness.

  ‘He was in a highly excitable state, and absolutely shouted down my arguments when he came to describe the thing that overshadowed him. He swore that it was the same apparition that had lurked long ago in his nursery, and described it as mainly human in shape, standing erect on legs, but entirely covered by silver-grey feathers except for the neck, which was naked and scrawny like that of a vulture. It loped rather than walked, and constantly tilted its feathered face to this or that side like a fowl when it is listening. Its eyes were jet-black and beady and filled with a febrile glee whenever they met his own. In spite of my youthful scepticism I found myself powerfully impressed by Chalmers’ recital, and realized that his hallucination must, to him at any rate, be terribly existent. He became most convincing when he alluded to the creature’s habit of hopping or fluttering onto his bed, and perching, with crossed legs, upon his chest. Several times, he maintained, he had dropped off to sleep through sheer weariness, awakening to find the monstrosity crouching above him, its restless, glinting orbs flickering rapidly from his head to his feet with an expression of conquering delight, as though it had, after long search, found its appointed resting-place. He went back to night-lights after that not the old-fashioned wax wicks, but thirty-watt electric bulbs. The electric light switch in his bedroom remained depressed during the whole of his sleeping hours, and he craved for human companionship in those nocturnal stretches, though convention precluded the presence of a female nurse.

  ‘You must understand that Chalmers was then going through a sort of private hell, and would have hated to take his people into his confidence for fear of ridicule. He could not, therefore, ask his brother to share his room, and must needs fight his own damnable destiny with his own resources.

  ‘About twenty boys left St E’s at the end of that term - so you can amuse yourself guessing at Chalmers’ identity. He was numbered among the twenty, and I didn’t set eyes on him again for about two years, when I happened to bump across him in Oxford. No. He wasn’t an “undergrad”. His parents were both dead, and had left him enough money to treat Life as a kind of prolonged “Cook’s Tour”. That advantage didn’t seem to have helped much. He had evidently undergone a tremendous change. In that brief period all his boyhood and good-nature had dropped away from him, and left a miserable, human hulk, unable or unwilling to discuss any ordinary human pleasantries, such as theatres, and concerned only with an abysmal introspectivness.

  ‘It was close to Carfax I met him, and, after listening to his sorrows as long as I thought judicious, I took him into the first licensed restaurant I could think of- it happened to be the “George” and bought him a feed, complete with alcoholic extras. That didn’t seem to do him much good, and, having ascertained that he was temporarily residing at the ‘’Crown and Thistle” at Abingdon, I ran him home in my car. That was the last I saw of Chalmers for about twelve years, and by the time I next heard of him both the man and his delusion had pretty well faded from my memory.

  ‘It was during one of my visits to the old people at their house near Worcester that our paths crossed again, and it happened in this way. The governor, as you know, still keeps his practice going, and we were discussing one of his invalids at a rather late hour
one evening in his study.

  ‘The housemaid presently announced a lady visitor whom she had shown into the consulting-room, and the Pater, who is very easy-going about surgery hours, went straight in to sec her. He came back almost at once, however, and told me I was the doctor she wished to see.

  ‘This surprised me a bit as, apart from giving the old man occasional advice with some difficult case, I had never been concerned in his practice and was, in fact, very rarely at liberty to go and stay with him.

  ‘The girl who confronted me was tall and well formed, her untouched complexion testifying to a country upbringing. She introduced herself, without preamble, as Mrs Cyril Chalmers, and said how thankful she was that I happened to be on shore leave. She looked intelligent and level-headed, though her face showed lines of worry, and I noticed it is a doctor’s job to notice such things that she was about to become a mother. Chalmers and his obsession came back to me as soon as she mentioned the name, but I quite naturally supposed that it was about her pregnancy she wished to consult me. This supposition was strengthened when she asked how soon my leave expired, and I told her Istill had three weeks to go.

  ‘“In that case,” she went on, “perhaps you wouldn’t mind attending to my confinement, but it’s really about Cy that I’ve come to see you. He tells me you know all about the thing which he believes overshadows him.”

  ‘I nodded, and she gave me a look of relief’.

  “That helps,” she continued, “because, when I tell you that the thing has mastered him and turned him into a raving lunatic, you’ll understand how to approach his case. He’s been completely uncontrolled for months now, and the only reason I’ve been able to keep him at home is because he hasn’t actually attacked anyone at least not murderously. I’ve had to get rid of all female servants, you understand, and our staff now consists of two ex-service men, one acting as male nurse and the other as cook-general. Of course, I could quite easily get him certified and put in a mental home, only it’s sometimes difficult to get a patient out again even when they are cured. Often I fear he is incurable, but you will be a better judge of that, and if there is any treatment available for such a case I’d like it done at home. Cy takes the same view, but doesn’t want to be attended by anyone but yourself. He has great faith in you.”