by Edward Lee
“Of course, darling. I’ll let you know when I’ve had enough,” for Lympton had listened to recitals of her dreams in the past which were often, to say the least, wordy.
She began, “I awoke quite agitated—which isn’t my wont—to the most horrific melody. It sounded like distant chime, Reginald, but chimes striking notes so, so—hee—vil that surely only the Enemy himself could’ve written them.”
Lympton’s bulbous face lengthened a bit.
“And knowing that we’ve no chimes whatever in the manor, I came upstairs to get you but doing so it was plain that these hideous chimes were coming from this room.”
Lympton gulped.
Collin’s gave her a copy of Country Life with which she fanned her perspiry face. “Before I could enter, though, the chimes stopped but then so did I, for in an instant I was accosted by the most fearful—well, odor, as what then filled the hallway just outside the door. Honestly, Reginald, it was so noxious, so disgusting, so unmitigatedly—”
“I, I,” Lympton interrupted, “receive your meaning, sweetheart. An unpleasant smell, yes.”
“Like nothing I’ve ever experienced. If a smell could be possessed of color, well, this one’s would be black. Rotten. But just as the chimes, it disappeared—of an instant, I tell you.”
These revelations did not set well with Lympton. Again, he interrupted. “I think she’s fine now, Collins. There’ll be no need for Dr. Lawrence. You may go now; thank you for your attendance.”
“Yes, sir, always at your service, sir, I do hope the missus will be back to rights, sir—”
“Yes, yes, your good wishes are much appreciated, and now—” Lympton took the porter aside and whispered, “be about that—that other matter in the water-closet, if you will.”
“Right enough, sir, you can count on me, sir,” thus Collin’s assured, and rustled away with obvious alacrity.
Lympton returned attention to his distraught wife. “Darling, you’re a bit shaken up is all…”
“No, no, Reginald,” came her insistence. “And that’s not the worst. When I came in here looking for you, I most certainly began to hear…voices.”
“Voices?”
“Yes, dear, the tiniest voices, and some of it—on my word—was Latin.”
Lympton sighed. “Sweetheart, you and I both know it is patently absurd for you to have heard someone speaking Latin in our house—”
She jittered where he sat, her eyes wide and unblinking on her husband. “Not exactly our house, Reginald,” and then she pointed—of course—to the Doll House. “That house.”
But with her revelation came another. Mary had been know to imbibe on occasion, and sometimes rather excessively, in the wares of Lympton’s wine cellar, the evidence of which he noticed just now from the trace fumes one her breath. Definitely not a claret, he noticed at once. A port, certainly a port, and I hope to Heaven she hasn’t gotten into one of my priceless 1702 bottles from the pre-Lord Methuen period…
“‘Pater terrae,’” she whispered dreadfully, “and ‘Pater tenebrarum,’ I distinctly heard. Honestly, Reginald! I’ve long forgotten my school day Latin. What does that mean? The very sound of the words are enough to put me beside myself.”
Lympton ignored the most jarring observation (he’d heard similar words before, had he not?) but instead advanced a more logical idea. “Mary, my love. Might a drop or two of wine be the culprit? I can’t reckon how words of any kind can have issued from a simple—”
“Oh, not only words,” she added, “but also those ghastly chimes. And if you look in the entry foyer of that—that thing, you’ll see one of those very old-fashioned grandfather-style chime clocks…”
Oh, what a nuisance! Lympton, with some effect, bent over to look into the Doll House, whose front was still raised. There, indeed, left of the foyer amid replicas in miniature of 17th Century decorum, was the Long-case clock.
He hadn’t noticed it before.
Of all the blasted things. But it goes without saying that this was a dummy version of the real thing, only inches tall where the actual clock had stood five or six feet. And—
“Mary, darling, it’s merely a tiny replica of a period-piece clock. It’s not at all functional, and it would be impossible for it to keep time or emit chimes.” He tried to lessen her upset by chuckling it off. “Your imagination ran wild, indeed, for you to scream so loud at such an hallucination.”
“Oh, no, Reginald. It wasn’t the chimes nor even the footsteps that set me to screaming at the pitch of my lungs—”
“Footsteps?”
“Oh, Lord, yes, the tiniest footsteps scampering about inside that thing, indeed, as if some teensy person were running about. No, not that. It was the man.”
Lympton’s jowls set. “What…man?”
“The footsteps seemed to come deeper from within the house, so I went round the back… Reginald, does the rear section of that thing raise like the front?”
“Regrettably, no, but, but—”
“Well, on my poor old mother’s grave, when I looked into a rear window, I swear I saw a man— a little tiny mini-kin of a man! And it seemed as if he were looking right at me with the most heinous grin!”
««—»»
Indeed, Lympton soon discerned that well more than a drop or two of port had caused Mary’s figment of mind. He assisted her downstairs, doing a sound job of convincing her that too much drink and too much pondering had triggered the entire episode, and after preparing her a cup of warm milk with a sedative he soon had her tucked in and settled down. “There, there, sweetheart. You’ll be fit as a fiddle in the morning,” he assured, (though he wondered with a frown how such a quip ever came to be. Just how fit was a fiddle, for goodness sake?) At any rate, it gladdened him to have her “out of his hair,” as I believe the saying is, for it was with the most urgent anxiety that he wished to get back upstairs to investigate. She was asleep in the space of a moment; the space of another moment he spent in visual appreciation of her body’s robust contours beneath the sheets.
Of all the bad timing!
Lympton’s member was in quite an adamantine mood of arousal, and… I am absolutely aching for another go! There’s some warm milk of my own I’ve a mind to administer! However…
This would hardly correspond to the behavior of a man of quality, and seemed a bit caddish given her upset and current unconsciousness.
Down boy! he thought with chuckle, and when he crudely patted his crotch (who could possibly see?) The wares therein seemed prodigious and feisty as ever; it proved quite the feeling of satisfaction for a man Lympton’s age.
Upstairs, the closest inspection of the Doll House revealed nothing untoward, nor out of place—though, honestly, what did he expect? A little man running around in the rear confines of the house? Lympton laughed. No, a drunken sot for a wife answered the question, and nothing more. She’s always been a trifle hare-brained. What nature gave her in tits, it surely took away in sense!
But Mary had not been the only one to experience a speck of the extraordinary, had she? Those luciferic chimes, the black ejaculation, and that corpse-pile stench.
He peeked into the open front of the Doll House; sure enough, there was the replica Longcase clock in the foyer. Even a craftsman of Patten’s caliber couldn’t possibly create something so tiny and still be functional.
No, he picked it up; it was just empty painted wood.
And no stench resurged when he limped down the hall; in the water-closet, noting was amiss: no light shone across the way in Leventhorp’s window, and no riotous plumes of sperm remained on the wallpaper. Collins had done the job, and now he could be heard snoring from his little nook at the end of the corridor.
All right as rain, Lympton was satisfied.
In the collection room, he dimmed the light, put himself abed, cast a gratified glance at the spacious Doll House risen before him, and fell smiling into slumber, never imagining that his life as he knew it would be irrecoverably lost by the time the
sun rose.
««—»»
Lympton dreamed, at first, not of sights but of sounds, voices…
Woman’s voice: “In order that one may serve the servants of the Prince of the Air—”
Man’s voice: “—convey first the hair—”
“—then the blood and the sperm—”
“—of the man who lives by greed—”
“In the crucible, mix these tinctures to thus plant the seed—”
“—and so burn them whilst the Lamb doth seethe—”
“—and into thy lungs such fumes thou shalt breathe…”
Then came sights: a few pubic hairs unknowingly filched, dropped into a mortar set over flames. Dropped in next: a rag plucked from a waste basket, a rag spotted with blood and semen. Tendrils of smoke rose, said tendrils then huskily drawn into the nostrils of a man and a woman, whose faces blankened, then set with devilish grins.
“Pater terrae—”
“Father of the Earth!”
“Rex Terore—”
“King of Terrors!”
“Princeps Tenerbrarum—”
“Price of Darkness!”
“Vivimus ut viventes serviamus—”
“We live to serve you!”
“Through your loyal servant, Lancaster Patten!”
Just blackness now opened before Lympton’s dreaming mind. The next sounds he heard were clearly those lust-driven exertion and sexual congress, not a good sign (in spite of the dream’s already negative implications) because the participants, as the reader will have already guessed, could be none other then Septimus Brown and his daughter Emily. But rules of morality are rarely abided by in dream, correct? And Lympton could hardly be called a man of great moral fiber.
“Thar, thar, that’s me girl!”
“Oh, father! Ye remembered the rite well enough.”
“Trans—Trans-my—”
“He-he, and ’twill be a fine time for us all when the fat man is in with us proper.”
This brought the dream to a shuddering halt. Lympton needn’t be told the identity of the “fat man…”
A man’s—Brown’s—whisper: “’Tis working, angel,” but naturally he’d pronounced the word as warking.
Then a sound broke, a sound like the earth splitting in half. Lympton’s eyes shot open in sheer terror and he came awake.
Blurred vision faltered him but it didn’t seem like he’d wakened where he should have: on the day bed in his collection room.
He bit his lip to ensure genuine wakefulness.
Arg! For pity’s sake!
More voices, but unfamiliar ones: two men. “In this refined age? How can such things be, sergeant?”
“Seek no solace in this age, boy. It’s the time of the devil, I do reckon. I seen a lotta arful doings in my time on the beat, but nothin so’s hee-vil as this.”
“Aye, and I’ve heard the name Leventhorp a’fore. A rich gentleman, ain’t he?”
“Armament maker, made his fortune in the Great War, he did. Just after the Treaty’s when Leventhorp’s daughter were born. Poor bird’s head was no doubt cut clean off her neck, it was, and that were in the bed chamber, but the body was drug out into the hall, and it’s clear the culprit put a fucking to her arfter she were beheaded. Poor thing were just lying there, headless, gams spread, and a great gout of jism leaking out the whisker biscuit. Then we found Leventhorp himself, dead in his own bed, innards pulled out and dumped on the carpet, and his works cut off and stuffed up his arse.”
“How no earth could someone…”
“Leave it rest, boy. Best way to do this dirty job is with a cold eye. God only knows where Lympton’s got off to by now. A queer thing, though, that he didn’t take the Lagonda. A man fat as he, with a cane?”
“But, sergeant, how do we know for sure it was Lympton and not a passerby ruffian or train tramp?”
“Oh, it was him just as sure as Cromwell’s grave has been pissed on a million times if just once. The porter seen him leave the house round ‘bout three in the morn, scarfin’ a slice’a flummery tart with one hand and holdin’ somethin’ shiny in the other.”
“The knife?”
“The knife, boy, a carving knife from the selfsame set in the kitchen, Edinburgh silver, no less. Not to mention, the wife said he’d been acting peculiar of late, though what I’ve heard is the bloke was always peculiar. A stuffy fat oddball.”
“Speakin’ of the wife, where is she?”
“Downstairs with the inspector from the Yard, but when I come in she was all sobbing and telling the lady constable what Lympton done to her.”
A hollow pause. “What—what he do to her, sergeant?”
“Well, between me, you, and my next brown trout, the right bastard put knock-out drops in her milk and then, well, how do the fellas in the shipyards say it? Had hisself a ‘back-door’ party.”
“There ain’t much I wouldn’t give to be the one who catches him…”
Hearing all of this, naturally, left Lympton in a state of paralysis. Two police constables clearly were summing up the “case,” the suspect of whom was Lympton himself. He could actually see them now, standing in his collection room; he could see them through an open window…
But how could this be?
What open window?
I’m sure the reader has deduced—in less time than Lympton made the same deduction—that the window was one of the windows in the Doll House, and that, given, the previous exposition, some crafty mode of diablerie, occult-science, wicked arts, sorcery or whatever one chooses to call it, proved the full explanation of his quandary, and the “sorcerers” were Brown and his strumpet daughter Emily. The floozy had clearly pilfered his blood, sperm, and a stray hair with which to concoct…
Well, he didn’t know what. However, it required no component of scholarship for him to reckon these things: the house in which he sat was indeed an exact replica of Brown’s old mansion, minus the accrual of centuries; he sat in a chair but could not move, the two constables he viewed through the parlor window were huge, and this could only mean that Lympton himself had been reduced to doll-size. And if he’d been reduced to doll-size, then he must also now be—
He looked down at his hand on the arm of the chair. The hand was fashioned of meticulously carved wood.
Great Hadrian’s ghost! I’m a doll!
“With that scoundrel still on the loose,” surmised the sergeant, “I suspect they’ll be posting one of us here for the night.”
“Oh, sign me up for that duty!” said the other. “Did you see the rib melons of the fat sod’s wife?” “Watch that talk, boy, or I’ll have you walking a beat on Spit Row faster than you can say widdiful cockalorum.” Here a pause. “But you’re not wrong. Why, if she was to lower those dairy wagons over my face, there’d be garlands a-hanging from the ceiling!”
Lympton remained mortified.
“We’d best be back downstairs,” suggested the sergeant’s echoic voice. “The man from the Yard may need us, and…well I could do for a bit of tea.”
“Likewise, sergeant.”
The two giants moved out of the window frame’s view, thundering into the hall quite like the bluegarbed colossi they were.
I do not know the likely reaction of one in a similar predicament; I can only tell you Lympton’s reaction. He screamed, cried, pleaded to a God he’d disregarded his entire life, begged forgiveness for his misdeeds, and even pleaded to Lucifer.
Lucifer, as was the case with God, wasn’t listening, but the unfortunate subject of this tale did think he heard the darkest drift of a chuckle disembogue from some unseen channel of the recesses of the Doll House.
Now came smaller footsteps, from within the Doll House. He tried for all his worth to prize himself from the chair but paralysis remained— No! Suddenly the fingers of his wooden right hand begun to twitch.
But…what of the footsteps?
One of the wooden servants—in fact a bosomy chambermaid—approached in awkward steps, sto
pped before him, and looked at him with the two tiny drill holes she had for eyes. She had a little white bow on a black hat. “Ye needn’t fear, sir,” the words issued from her twitching drill-hole mouth. “Soon ye’ll be up’n amblin’ about just like all of us. When no one alive is in the room, we may all walk about the house as we please.”
This, at least, was a sliver of good news, if indeed any consolation could be recognized after one has been turned into a Lilliputian doll by some Charonian spell.
The maid’s wooden hand patted Lympton’s shoulder in some gesture of compassion. “Patience, sir. It’ll all make sense to ye in due time. See, we get to live forever here, and ‘tis our duty to serve the Master.”
Lympton croaked out his first words as a…well, as a doll. “I’m a well-born English gentleman of a titled estate! I don’t serve anyone!”
Another tiny voice effused from somewhere, along with more footsteps. “Oh, ah! So what we’ve got here is a ‘well-born English gentleman of a titled estate,’ eh? Well, I ain’t so young as I used to be, but let’s see what the ‘gentleman’ thinksa this!” and with that another wooden phantom emerged from the study and approached: apparently this was the butler, clad in cuffed slacks and a long-tailed coat. He hobbled right up to Lympton, extracted an erect penis made of wood, and inserted it immediately and directly into Lympton’s drill-hole mouth. What entered felt nothing like a miniature wooden peg but much more like—
This nefarious wooden figure more than vigorously “copulated” with Lympton’s drilled mouth until he—
Well, well, the result need not be described in full to the dutiful reader. All we’ll say is the that moment of climax emptied into Lympton’s artificial oral cavity an influx of not commonplace semen but something reminiscent of the hellish brown-black ooze that Lympton hallucinated in the water-closet last night, and with it the soul-upheaving odor that could only be likened to the bowels of hell.
Lympton gagged; much of the stuff forced its way down his “throat,” while the remnants leaked from his mouth.
