Sir Arthur, who had heard of me and my wealth, was prepared to receive me in the library. As I entered it the years seemed to fall away and I felt sure that he was going to recognise me, beard notwithstanding, but he did not. His manner was gracious if, understandably, distant. The years had not been kind to him. From being a heartily handsome young man, he had become florid and corpulent. The scarlet blooms of the habitual drinker showed on his cheeks. I had half a mind to pity him. He showed an interest in my doings and plans, which I suspected was not unconnected with the rumours of my fabulous wealth. I had noticed as I entered Cloyne House that the place was showing signs of neglect, and that there were a few naked patches on the walls where a valuable picture had once been.
As Sir Arthur and I were talking a woman in riding costume entered the room. She was introduced to me as Lady Felicia Fitzgerald, his wife: a tall lady with a slender figure and a face that was perhaps handsome rather than beautiful but which bore the unmistakable stamp of breeding and refinement. When she spoke her voice was low, melodious and somehow amused. I was captivated and wondered what she was doing with this clod.
Though our interview was brief, I believed a rapport had been established between Lady Felicia and myself. Soon after she had quitted the room I took my leave, having accepted an invitation to dine with them the following Saturday. When I made enquiries of my landlord about her he told me that Lady Felicia and Sir Arthur had been married barely a year, that she was the daughter of a local landowner, and that, as yet, she had not provided her husband with an heir.
At dinner on Saturday I think I managed to make a good impression. I regaled them with my traveller’s tales of Greece and the Levant. Lady Felicia’s eyes shone as she listened to me, for I fancy she was hungry for the kind of experience and cultivation which I could offer. Nevertheless I detected a certain reserve in her manner, as if she were not quite sure of my intentions. This only enhanced my admiration of her.
Sir Arthur fulfilled all my worst hopes. He listened to me at first with a dull sort of interest but then slowly, throughout the long evening, he managed to drink himself into a stupor. By the time the dessert was on the table he had fallen asleep in his chair at the head of the table.
Lady Felicia and I were now, in every meaningful sense, alone. Her skin glowed in the candlelight and I began to see her not simply as a fine specimen of womanhood but as a rare beauty. However, the possibility of a deeper acquaintance and intimacy was denied. With her husband’s unconsciousness, Lady Felicia had become more rather than less reserved in her manner. Perhaps she was afraid I might somehow take advantage of the situation, but nothing was further from my thoughts. Sensitive to this, however, I indicated that perhaps, under the circumstances, it would be best if I took my leave rather earlier than I might have done. Lady Felicia’s face flushed with relief and gratitude and I knew I had made the right move.
Later that night I stood by the well between four yews and summoned my familiar. The instructions, as before, were simple.
A few days later the whole district was agog with the latest news: Sir Arthur was dead. Lady Felicia had been away, spending the night with relatives, and her husband had dined alone. When the servant had come in to collect the dishes at the end of the meal he found his master, as usual, asleep, or so at first he thought. But Sir Arthur’s posture seemed unusually awkward and he was not emitting the stertorous snore which was the usual consequence of his potations. In short, Sir Arthur had died from some kind of seizure, perhaps brought on by a choking fit. Strange white marks had been observed around his throat, but, as nothing could be made of them by the men of science, they were dismissed as irrelevant. “Died of drink,” was the general verdict.
I attended the funeral and paid a call on Lady Felicia as soon as a decent interval of time had elapsed. She received me very graciously, but still with that reserve I had found in her before. Once, I thought, she gave me a look that could almost be described as suspicious. I realised that I was in for a long siege, but the prospect did not discourage me.
It had been several weeks since I had had any communication with my familiar and for some reason this preyed on my mind. As far as I was concerned she had performed her task, unless perhaps she could aid me in my suit to Lady Felicia, and I had a vague notion of dismissing the creature, releasing her from her servitude to me, as Prospero did with Ariel. My mind, however, was not made up. It was too full of Lady Felicia to be occupied with much else.
One night – it was a full moon – I found I could not sleep. I was drawn to the window of my bedroom and there I saw, standing in the road in front of the inn, looking up at the window, the pallid, emaciated figure of my familiar. Slowly it raised an arm and beckoned.
By the time I was dressed and down in the street the thing was gone, but I knew where it would be. I walked – or perhaps ran – the five miles to the well at Cloyne in a daze, barely knowing what I did.
She stood by the well, the gold chain with its token of my possession glinting under the moon. I cannot say we spoke together. It is difficult to describe. Our communication was not so much in speech as in thoughts: certainly I cannot recollect the tone of my familiar’s voice. I said I was grateful for her services but that our association must end. She replied that this could not be as we were bound to one another. I replied that if she could deliver to me Lady Felicia as my bride then she would have done me the last and greatest service. She said that I belonged to her and not Lady Felicia and – did I not know? – Lady Felicia was with child. She said that Lady Felicia must be destroyed like the others if I was to enter into my inheritance at Cloyne. I asked by what right she dictated to me what I should do with my life. With a thin skeletal hand my familiar held up the coin on its chain and said – or I think it said because I remember the exact words: “Jure possessionis” – “By right of ownership.”
Enraged by this I grasped at the coin and tore the chain from her neck. Then I took hold of that bag of bones – how hideous and cold to the touch! – and made to hurl it down the well. The creature wrapped its limbs round me in a strangling grip and I felt my strength fade as it started to squeeze the breath from my body. I found myself being propelled towards the edge of the well with it. In a final desperate effort I steeled myself to bite through one of its arms. It was like cracking the shell of a lobster with one’s teeth. An awful odour of decay filled my mouth but the arm fell away. A piercing high-pitched scream sang in my ears. Seizing the advantage, I began to tear the vile thing limb from limb and throw each individual part down the well.
Despite my fury I was thinking with icy clarity. Once the creature was dispatched I gathered branches of trees and rocks from all around – I even broke off boughs from some of the yews – and hurled them into the well. Eventually I managed to cover the mouth of the well so thoroughly with stones and pieces of wood I doubt if a mouse could have escaped from it. Having completed the task to my satisfaction I returned to the inn and slept soundly until midday the following morning.
The next day a letter arrived from Mr Lagrange, summoning me to London. Thinking that perhaps a break from Ireland might do me good I went willingly. My suit with Lady Felicia could be resumed at a later time, perhaps when she had been delivered of her child.
So it was with a light heart that I arrived in London, little knowing the disaster that awaited me. It turned out that some of the finest items which I had shipped, in all innocence, to Mr Lagrange had been looted from a Peer of the Realm by brigands while he was travelling through the Morea. The indignant milord was demanding full restitution and threatening worse. I was embroiled in several complicated lawsuits and, in short, lost my entire fortune. I was, of course, dismissed from Mr Lagrange’s service and so once again found myself destitute. My only friend in the world, Dr Sampson, was able to supply me with an excellent academic reference so that, though my notoriety was still too great for me to apply to one of the more prominent educational establishments, I was able to secure a position as assistant mast
er at Abbey Grove, a small private preparatory school not far from London.
Here, at long last, after many months of agony, I have begun to enjoy a measure of safety and serenity. It is for this reason that I now feel I can discharge myself of the burden that has been weighing upon me. Is it the burden of guilt? I cannot say. It is more like freeing oneself from the exhaustion of a long and arduous journey.
I can even amuse the boys with my traveller’s tales, and I keep my familiar’s token like a charm on my watch chain.
Later:
Something occurred in class yesterday that hints to me that I may not, after all, be away and free.
Parce mihi, Domine! Parce mihi, Christe, per tuam misericordiam! Parce mihi, Domine! [Spare me, o Lord! Spare me, o Christ, by your mercy! Spare me, o Lord!]
When Peter came down to breakfast the following morning his uncle was already up.
“You’re looking a little pale this morning,” said Edward. “Sleep all right?”
Peter threw the black notebook onto the kitchen table, saying as he did so: “I don’t believe a word of it.”
His uncle merely smiled and remarked: “I’m delighted to hear it. Tea or coffee?”
When Edward died suddenly the following year from a stroke Peter found that his uncle had been as good as his word and left him his entire estate. Though this was little more than the cottage near Aldeburgh and its contents, their total value was far from negligible. As Peter began to clear out the cottage he found a room full of papers and diaries concerning his uncle’s life. These included the box file relating to Abbey Grove that contained photographs letters, old school reports and a black leather bound note book with G.W.S stamped in gold on the cover.
Peter made a bonfire in the garden of the cottage and incinerated all of Edward’s papers. Much as he had liked his uncle, Peter did not share his views on the preservation of memory. He belonged to a different generation.
However, when he threw the Abbey Grove file onto the flames, he did, for a fleeting moment, have the odd sense that he was being watched. It was only for a moment, though. These things pass and normality, as we are pleased to call it, returns.
GEMMA FILES
Slick Black Bones and Soft Black Stars
GEMMA FILES was born in England and raised in Toronto, Canada. She has been a film critic, teacher and screenwriter. Her 1999 International Horror Guild short fiction winner (and Aurora Award finalist) “The Emperor’s Old Bones” appears in her collection The Worm in Every Heart. Both it and her earlier collection, Kissing Carrion, feature two stories that were adapted into episodes of The Hunger, an anthology TV show produced by Ridley and Tony Scott’s Scott Free Productions.
Recent short fiction appears in such anthologies as Hauntings, The Grimscribe’s Puppets, Magic, Mighty Unclean, Dark Faith Invocations, Clockwork Phoenix 4 and the previous edition of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror.
Her first novel, A Book of Tongues: Volume One of the Hexslinger Series was a Bram Stoker first novel finalist and won a DarkScribe Magazine Black Quill Award for “Best Small Press Chill” in both the Editor’s and Readers’ Choice categories. A Rope of Thorns and A Tree of Bones complete the trilogy. She has also published two chapbooks of poetry, Bent Under Night and Dust Radio. The author is currently hard at work on a new novel.
“Writing someone else’s Mythos, of any sort, is necessarily hard,” observes Files. “You have to keep within the boundaries, coming up with something distinctive enough to be ‘your own’ while still staying true to the canonical spirit of the source material.
“And with this story I had a particularly difficult time of it, since Robert W. Chambers’ King in Yellow stories, unlike those of his contemporary H. P. Lovecraft, create a mood of creeping horror mainly composed of lacunae, snatches of impenetrable dialogue and rhyme, names literally without faces – empty places, all waiting to be filled with images that can never truly hope to approximate the shadowy form behind the curtain conjured by Chambers’ original words.
“So when I was set the challenge of writing something Chambers-esque for Joseph S. Pulver, Snr’s A Season in Carcosa, I found myself moving away from simple pastiche towards a confluence of two real-life things I’d always wanted to write about, but never as yet found the right sort of glue to tie together: the grotesque yet weirdly fulfilling day-to-day grind of forensic archaeology and grave excavation, as outlined in Clea Koff’s autobiographical memoir The Bone Woman, vs the odd latter-day history of Pitcairn Island, where the mutineers from The Bounty fetched up, as explored in Dea Birkett’s Serpent in Paradise.
“I saw it as a bit of an experiment, both because I deliberately chose to tell the story in second-person present tense and because the notion of the Hali Islanders’ extreme insularity, coupled with their physiological as well as philosophical ‘slipperiness’, seemed almost Kafka-like. The basic thesis: when you find yourself trapped by circumstance in a place so small it barely appears on maps, how can you ever be sure that anything any of the natives around you tell you is – or isn’t – true?
“The story came out blessedly quickly after that, in a dreaming, trance-like rush, and I can only hope some of that feeling manages to communicate itself to the reader.”
ALL GRAVES LOOK the same, generally: sunken or up-thrust, backdirt slightly looser than whatever lies around it, sometimes of a different colour, a different composition. Anything that shows something’s been scooped out and reapportioned, piled back in atop what lies beneath.
You start with trowel and probe, cleaning the surface near what you suspect is the grave’s edge, thrusting the probe in as far as it’ll go, then sniffing it for decomp. If you strike something soft, that’s a find. Satellite photos also help, as do picks, shovels; Ken Kichi sets up nearby to run the electronic mapping station, charting the site’s contours, eventually providing a three-dimensional outline of every body and its position when found, while Judy Moss – your usual dig partner – shares process photography duties with Guillaume Jutras, head of this particular Physicians for Human Rights forensic anthropology team. Their shutters buzz constantly like strange new insects in the oven-door heat, snap-flash, snap-flash, whirrrr.
And you, meanwhile – you’re crouched down in the stench feeling for bones, finding rotten cloth, salt-stiff flesh.
The grave is humid, seawater-infused. Sand clings to everything, knitting with bone itself. At the very top, exposed to air and scavengers alike – crabs, birds – the bodies are slimy, broken down for parts, semi-skeletonised. Down further, they’re still fleshed, literally ripe for autopsy; those are the ones Jutras wants in the worst way. While down further still . . .
Each stratum is an era, a span of time between massacres. The numbers vary: twos and threes, five-person groups at most, as opposed to the first and second layers’ twenty-three. Deeper than that is where your particular skills will come most into play, differentiating one body’s bones from another’s, telling male from female, adult from child. You try not to feel bad about wanting to get down there as fast as possible, to see just how far down it all goes.
This tower of murder, thrown down, inverted. To you, it’s a mystery, a challenge; to the people whose fragments it’s made from – their relatives, at any rate – it’s an obscenity, a disgrace. But you can’t think about that, because it’ll only slow you down, make you sloppy. Sentiment breeds mistakes.
Crouching down, feeling with both hands, gently but firmly. And saying silently to yourself, with every breath: keep working, keep quiet, keep sharp. Miss nothing. Assuring them, at the same time: lie still, we’re coming, finally. At long last.
We’re coming to bring you home.
You reached the island of Carcosa seven days ago, at 6:35 p.m. by your watch, only to find what looked like two suns staring down, one centred, the other offset – an upturned pupil, cataract-white, with a faint bluish tinge. It’s an optical illusion, Jutras told you, during your conference-Skype briefing; Everyone sees them. There’s other thi
ngs, too.
Like what?
Just . . . things. It’s not important.
(The clear implication: you won’t be there long enough for them to matter. An assumption you don’t question, since it suits you fine; you’ll remember it later, though. And laugh.)
So yes, it’s strange, though not unbearably so – no more so than the incredible heat or the smell accompanying it, rancid and inescapable, though you haven’t even come near the dig site as yet; the black beaches with their smooth-washed half-glass sand, the masses of shrimp-coloured flowers and spindly nests of stick-insects creeping up every semi-vertical surface. Actually, all the colours are different here, just ever-so-slightly “off”: the green laid on green of its grasses, fronds and vines isn’t your green, not exactly. More like your green’s occluded memory.
There’s a wet woodsmoke tang to the air, like they’ve just doused a forest-fire. Breathing it in gives you a languorous, possessive contact high – opium smoke mixed with bone-dust.
According to Jutras, the island – itself just the merest jutting peak of an underwater mountain-range ringed with black smokers, incredibly volatile – was once centre-set with a volcano that exploded, Thera-style, its caldera becoming what’s now known as “Lake” Hali. The quote-marks are because the lake itself is filled and re-filled with seawater brought in through a broken end-section that forms the island as a whole into a wormy crescent. Carcosa City occupies the crescent’s midsection, its highest peak, while the two peninsulas formed by the crescent’s horns almost overlap. The longer of the two is called Hali-joj’uk, “Hali-door” or “-gate”, in the island’s highly negotiable yet arcanely individual tongue. Wouldn’t think there could be quite so many sub-dialects supported on an island whose entire population has never historically topped four hundred, and yet.
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