by Orrin Grey
I rolled the lad onto his right side, so that I might better view the pale flesh of his back. Here, my candle picked out the same dark growths, presented in rough alignment with the position of his lungs in his breast. ‘Twas a miracle, surely, that Martin yet lived, but I knew his chances of recovery to be slim. Nonetheless, I could not allow this illness to claim him uncontested.
I opened my bag, removing first the cups, then the curettes. By this time, John had joined us in the loft and I asked him to heat the glass cups in the fire downstairs. He returned shortly, at which time I took the cups from him and applied them directly to Martin’s back.
The skin swelled and blistered, and his mother winced at the sizzle of charred flesh. Incredible though it appeared, the sickness itself seemed to retreat from the outer edges of the cups, and even flamed up under the dome of the glass, where the heat was most intense. Slowly, boils took shape beneath the cups, drawing the ill-humours out of the body and concentrating them in a single place, so that they might be easily lanced and drawn away.
Removing the cups, I placed each of them twice more, so that a total of six boils had formed, three to either side of the spinal column. Selecting the slimmest and sharpest of the curettes, I lanced the fluid from each of these boils in turn, collecting the bloody runoff in a pewter dish, which I directed John to empty into the fire downstairs.
This being speedily accomplished, I bandaged the open wounds. Calling next for water, I scrubbed clean the cups of char and pus. Then I uttered a quick prayer for the boy’s recovery and wished his family farewell.
I was halfway home when the cough overtook me. My chest heaved with every painful hack, as though attempting to expel, by force, some foreign body that had lodged itself inside of me. I reined in the horse and gasped for air, lest I collapse, unconscious. At length, the fit passed, and when I wiped clean my mouth, my hand came away smeared and flecked with dark matter.
XI
The remainder of the day was spent in prayer and fevered meditation. I had already correlated the illness of the White child with that of the Verger Crabb; the onset of my own cough with my recent proximity to the aforementioned persons; the location of the infested graves with the site of the meetinghouse; and, perhaps most alarmingly, the onset of the rotting sickness with the arrival in Falmouth of the Reverend Stone. Confronted with such evidence, I knew not in which way I should proceed, but knew only that I could not stand idle.
And so, I rode for Meetinghouse Hill. Arriving at dusk, I climbed the hill to the Verger’s cottage, careful to avoid the windows of the parsonage, and rapped peremptorily at his door. No answering cry came within, no din of footsteps. I waited; knocked again. Receiving no response, I admitted myself to the common room.
Crabb lay sprawled, face-up, on the dirt floor. His mouth was wide, his cheeks so blue and swollen that I scarcely recognised him. ‘Twas likely he had died of suffocation, which was, I believe, a small mercy, as it spared him the sight with which I found myself confronted.
From his throat there protruded an erect black coil, three inches across and hooked at its end, terminating more than a yard above his mouth. Knotted, rope-like, it rippled and twitched in place, moving like a leech, clawing upward, as though to seek the light.
I turned and fled. I dared not halt until the door was shut behind me and I was well clear of the cottage. I thought of the Verger’s soul, on which the thing had fed itself, and forced myself to leave him, making for the graveyard, certain, as I was, that I could do nothing further for him.
By this time, the sun was all but gone, leaving behind a fragrant darkness, scented with the musk of spring shoots and the aroma of contagion. In less than a week, the sickness had germinated, rooted and given flower. The Reverend Cooper’s stone was crumbling into powder, as were the graves all around and there was not a single stone in that churchyard that did not carry the signs of infestation and decay. Only one place remained for me to explore.
I crossed the graveyard to the meetinghouse and unfastened the door to the sanctuary. The air inside was at once stale and damp and nauseating. The sweet stench of putrescence lay upon that place, as strong here as in the minister’s opened grave, but, even in the gloom, the interior appeared to me unaltered.
Lighting my lanthorn, I stepped through the doorway. The windows were dark and the shadows, layered thickly, unravelled in the lanthorn’s beam to reveal the same unpainted trusses, the familiar pews. I proceeded midway down the aisle and turned to scrutinise the balcony overhead. All was as it should have been and yet, the churchyard infestation had begun here; of that, there could be no doubt.
Then to my ears came the rustle of fabric, like a broom being dragged over the floor. I spun round, terrified, and directed my light toward the pulpit, beneath which stood the Reverend Stone.
His bearing was stiff, as from hours knelt in prayer, and he stood before me shirtless with a Cat O’ Nine Tails in hand. The barbed rope-ends shewed crimson in the lanthorn’s glow, beaded with blood where they had scourged his back. Worse still was the sight of his chest, which was covered with dark tumours in such thick profusion that I nearly mistook them for hair.
But it was his expression which froze me with horror, at the same time that I was moved, somehow, to pity. For never before had I seen such anguish in a human face, nor would I have dreamed it possible to bear such agony and live — if he were truly living.
The whip dropped from his hands. His eyes bulged, the whites shining and he stumbled toward me with arms outstretched, as though to catch me in an embrace.
Sickened and fearful, I forced myself to step backward, nearly tripping over the aisle’s skirting as I did so, but unable to turn around, unwilling to show my back, even for a moment, to this man — this thing — that continued to advance on me, not with menace but with pathetic desperation, murmuring his prayers all the while.
“O God, as You are my judge, You know I never meant for it to happen. You alone know what it is like to bear this burden, to be cursed with this affliction for the greater glory of Your Name. I ask only that You help me, for I cannot help myself.”
He lunged toward me. His bare arms, like his chest, were covered in black growths, and I understood at once the reasons for his habitual manner of dress. I threw myself backward, but caught my foot on the skirting so that I dropped heavily onto my back. The lanthorn went sailing through the dark, striking the low balcony overhead, where it shattered.
The wooden beams ignited. Fire raced up the tresses to the ceiling, traversing the sanctuary with shocking speed, as though the building were not merely infested with the black rot, but verily made of it, formulated entirely of the selfsame sickness as the minister possessed, the same corruptive influence of which Martin, Crabb and I, too, had been made a victim.
Stone paid the flames no heed, but fell upon me like a crying child, moaning as he fastened his arms round me. “Hold me,” said he. “Hold me.”
I smelled the sickness on him for the first time, the odour that lurked beneath the rose-water in which he regularly washed. I gagged, lost my breath and nearly fainted, but, by some supreme effort born out of terror, succeeded in dislodging the diseased minister and throwing him wide so that he landed in the aisle.
The ceiling dripped overhead. Coals fell, burning, from the balcony, igniting where they landed amidst the pews. The windows exploded outward, causing an in-rush of cool air that fanned the blaze ever-higher, sweeping toward us like a rolling wave. The heat was unbearable, the stench even more so, but I forced open the door and threw myself beneath the flames, which erupted at this new incursion of air, and rolled until I reached what I judged to be a safe distance.
I looked back toward the meetinghouse. Through the doorway, I glimpsed the minister, who continued to gaze at me through the flames, his face a mask of the uttermost anguish, watching me even as the fires broke over him and consumed him from the inside-out.
Shortly thereafter, the roof fell with a splitting crash, causing sparks to
fly loose in great clouds. I lurched to my feet once more, ignoring the pain of my many burns, and staggered down the slope of the drumlin, turning round one final time to watch the Reverend Cooper’s grave go up like a torch, followed by the whole of the northwest corner and the Verger’s cottage. I fell to the ground before the parsonage and there lay insensible until the villagers found me.
XII
I awoke in the custody of the law, accused of lighting the fire and of the two deaths that resulted. On the following morning, I was taken in chains to the courthouse in Westminster and detained until my trial. There, it emerged that the Falmouth meetinghouse had burned through in minutes, resulting in no ashes; only a greasy stain upon the ground. My lanthorn was recovered, though no traces of the man of whose murder I stand convicted, while Crabb’s cottage was likewise consumed with his body inside, leaving me as the final witness to the strange events on Meetinghouse Hill — or so, for a time, I allowed myself to believe.
This evening, I learned of the fate of Martin White, who died three nights past of a “sickness like the pox,” and was buried quickly, for fear of spreading contagion. I hesitate to write this, for I am acquainted, intimately, with the hardships his family has endured during these latter days, but the lad’s body must be exhumed, and speedily, and burned as I am to be. He shall have neither corpus nor stone, but the Lord will not forget him, even as He has not forsaken me throughout these latest trials.
My illness has worsened in the days since the fire. The black tumours, now present in abundance, grow from my chest and back so that I scarcely sleep at night, and even then, I dream. In the mornings, I wake to this filthy cell, my shirtfront dirtied with blood and spittle, but I remain untroubled, knowing myself fortunate, for these sufferings will end — and soon.
Only with the most acute grief do I think of the Verger Crabb, who died in agony on the floor of his cottage, and of my dear friend the Reverend Cooper, the greatest man I have known, and of the black thing that fed upon them both, denying them, in this way, the promise to which Election made them heir. For them, there is only darkness, as there was for the Reverend Stone, and I can but mourn them as the unbeliever mourns all life, all loss, and the final passing of this world into a night unending.
Thus concludes my account.
May the peace of Our Lord Jesus Christ be upon your spirit —
H. Edwards
Westminster, 1773
A MONSTER IN THE MIDST
By Julio Toro San Martin
Julio Toro San Martin resides and grew up in Toronto, Canada and has had short stories published online in Innsmouth Magazine and The Lovecraft Ezine, and also in the print anthologies Historical Lovecraft and Future Lovecraft.
LE VICOMTE TRISTE TO LE GRAND DUC
NOW THAT THE WORLD is going to hell, I think of how I should have shot you with my gun and not my wit, oh, so long ago over our game of ecarte. But, oh well, what’s a Vicomte to do, monsieur?
You do remember my faithful clockwork man? Of course you must. He lies now how the world will soon lie, dead and undone by his master, oozing mucous and fungal matter. They will say: It was the glorious 158th year of our glorious mushroom age, when it all came to nothing. Or, hopefully, someone will say it. Hopefully, it will not be you. I will not, henceforth, address you as you so like, by the title of Monsieur le Grand Duc, but simply as monsieur, as I deem more appropriate, and as is still good etiquette, despite the diminishment of title.
Eight months ago, I remember watching my man grab great handfuls of fungal matter and fill my steam carriage and himself with the lumpy fuel. I winced, as you no doubt remember my disgust at the filthy growths and their smell, so sweet to most, so putrid to moi. It was with even greater trepidation that I witnessed how ravenously he stuffed himself with the new toxic outgrowths of the fungus. The stupid automaton had practically filled his head with some of the slimier and more liquescent green transmutations of the substance, so that it oozed over him and hung off his chin in flabby waves of solid jelly.
Then I noted how one of my valet’s eyes glowed with a lust and yearning unsettling to behold. He walked toward the clockwork man and dipped a greedy, jerking finger like a great plowing oar into the massy substance of my man’s egg-like head and then proceeded to hungrily lick the loathsome substance off his own finger, like a slobbering animal. His eyes took on a glossy, idiotic cast and he fell over.
I knew, of course, that he was now under the hypnotic fatal sleep of the green fungus and its slime. It had but recently manifested itself and I was closely studying it, to make a scientific treatise for L’École Mycologique, which I was readying to present at our next meeting.
I observed how, almost instantaneously, my valet’s lower jaw began to putrefy and turn into mush. In seconds, his jaw was a fetid liquid. Soon, monsieur, the man was liquid himself. I was alarmed to find this new anomalous metamorphic by-product of the green fungus. Up until then, it had only worked as a sort of opiate that led to death in about ninety-five percent of its consumers. The other five percent, who awoke, described its effects as hallucinatory, a shamanistic type of experience, which involved travelling to strange, exotic locales … or perhaps other worlds … seeing queer dark beings and culminating in an encounter with a strange, green star-shaped or jellyfish-like entity that imparted (as far as I am aware) no wisdom, but merely was, and pulsated at the centre of a gigantic mushroom world. This was the first observation which I made and which was later observed and confirmed by all of Europe, including yourself. Later (as you know), I also documented how a strong compulsion affected some innocents to eat of the substance: how only some takers were liquefied; how, of those who awoke from its effects, a small percentage were transformed into a new aesthetic of the grotesque; and how the survivors of the opiate soon started their own cult, centred around the green godling (May God in Heaven have mercy on their souls). The frighteningly deformed members are held in high esteem, now. The most monstrous are high priests, of which there are some whispers … dare I say it … that there are even some who are unnameable in their horror, and who are considered demi-gods, the highest masters of earth’s great chain of being.
But that is all too far in the past.
You are aware, monsieur, how, 19 days ago, I presented myself before L’École Mycologique, with a petition to seek out the source, if there was one, for the green fungal menace. I only asked for a vast, steampowered airship, from the King’s royal navy, and permission to leave early to attend a mecanique performance of both Moliere’s Les Precieuses Ridicules and Beaumarchais’ Le Mariage de Figaro, at the Theatre-Francais. I was nearly denied all three requests, by you. But thankfully (or not, as it would seem), your dissenting vote, and that of your colleagues in your absences, was annulled by our esteemed secretary of L’Academie des Sciences, the Marquis de Condorcet.
In two days’ time, I was ready to leave on my mission, monsieur.
I dressed for the occasion in a wine-dark, silk-velvet suit of the highest courtly fashion, the richly embroidered coat high-collared, and the waistcoat opulently decorated with diamonds for buttons. I also wore shoes and breech buckles, and a jewelled scabbard at my side, a white flounced frill at the neck and sleeves and, atop my head, an auburn, small-yet-stylish, lightly powered wig with, of course (since I was, in a sense, going to war), a military cocked hat of fine fabric atop the wig. My clockwork man and valets were also dressed impeccably.
At our farewell, damsels wept to see me go and Mademoiselle Tussaud fainted horribly. Do tell the poor creature not to wait for me.
I stood at the stern of the ship, a chambered cannongun slung over my left shoulder. After saluting the officers, the pageantry and science members, and our King Louis and Queen Marie Antoinette, who had both come especially from Versailles to see me go, I asked the helmsman to circle Paris once and then to head off into the bright, cerulean sky.
Cheering crowds followed us, trumpeters trumpeted gaily below and French flags waved proudly. We flew over large
buildings, streets, cabs, coaches, parks, vendors, the Louvre, the districts, the filthy populace — in short, over everything. I saw street urchins and city-workers picking and cleaning the membranous film of fungi which grew on the walls and on the ground, on trees everywhere, and threatened to engulf the city, if it were left to spread unchecked. Here and there, I noted drooling supine bodies, no doubt victims of their own uncontrollable urges for the deadly green slime mold.
In no time, our steamship and attached aerostat, with its three accompanying smaller dirigibles, flew over the naval harbour. We cruised calmly onto the Seine and followed the course of the river. I read alarm and fear in some of the men, but that was of no great concern to me, since I reasoned my adventurous spirit was enough joy for everyone.
“Vive la France! Vive la liberté!” I yelled, as I stood courageously at the bow of the ship, a good, strong breeze blowing through my wig. A young boy, a sullen naval student named ‘Napoleon’, was so touched by my enthusiasm for this liberty and patriotism that I now felt that he also joined me in hollering passionately at the sky.
It was a clear day, with only a few clouds not far above us and a hot sun flaring down. We travelled at a good nautical pace, the sailors keeping the coals and fungus burning. The combined steam allowed the overhead large aerostat to easily bear the burden of our heavily ironclad warship.
In no time, we flew onto the Atlantic Ocean and I marvelled nauseatedly to behold, outstretched before me in all directions, a vast, viscous, bobbing desert of slime and mushroom. Indeed, here it was impressed on me nakedly and powerfully, how much of our earth the organism was truly lord of!
