But in the light of day, she found herself unable to go through with it. When Brian had left her, only a week and a half ago, she had stayed out sick for two consecutive days. The company wouldn’t put up with much more of that.
But at the end of the shift, when Brett – Cornelia’s boss – asked her if she could stay an hour late tonight, she stammered her way out of it, claiming she had a headache.
And as soon as she unlocked the back door to her apartment she headed straight to the kitchen table...
The counter on her answering machine read 0.
Slowly she withdrew the finger that brushed the PLAY button.
Had he found the correct phone number, finally? Or had he given up on appealing to his former lover?
Unwilling to believe it was over, this little affair of hers with a man who didn’t even know she was receiving his communications, Cornelia checked the caller ID’s dim little window. It, too, showed no calls had been received.
Well, then. Well...
She took off her coat. Reluctantly trudged into her bedroom – where her computer waited for her like a paid lover – to check her email. She illogically hoped to find a message from her mysterious caller there. But...another chain letter. An animated email card from her mother. Not even anything from Brian. She looked at the contents of her email account’s trash can. It was empty.
They got him, she thought in a small, droning interior voice. They got him...
“He’s crazy!” she argued out loud. “You heard him! He’s...”
Cornelia disconnected from the internet. What if he had tried to call while she was online?
“He won’t call again!” she snapped. “Jesus! She doesn’t care – he knows that now! So he gave up on her!”
From the kitchen, the shrill alert of her telephone.
Cornelia pushed her chair back so hard that it nearly toppled. She plunged into the livingroom, on into the kitchen. She had programmed the machine to start recording after four rings. She knew she would get to it in time to pick up the call herself...
But when she stood over the kitchen table, even though there were still two rings left to go, she found herself unable to take the receiver off the wall. She had to listen first. Screen her call. See if it was him. And even if it was – would she really be able to speak back to him at last?
Third ring...
A glance at the caller ID display. UNAVAILABLE. It might as well be his name.
Fourth ring.
“Hi,” she heard her own recorded voice say. She hated her voice. Dark and gluey, it sounded -- morose, sulky, self-pitying. Weak. Lonely. It sounded just like her, she thought. “I’m not able to come to the phone right now,” she lied, so as to avoid bill collectors, so as to eavesdrop on desperate strangers, “but please leave a message after the beep and I’ll try to get back to you.”
The tape began to turn, to record...
Dead silence.
A bill collector? At one o’clock in the morning?
But then she heard a faint rustling noise. The subtle shifting of a body on the other end. A wet little sound like someone licking dry lips before speaking. But the static, worse than last night, might be fooling her. She might be hearing nothing at all...
And then the terrible noises began. They were animal cries of some kind, wild, deranged – deafening. Cornelia fell back from the table several steps, and clapped her hands over her ears. It was a cacophony. Voices filled with rage and glee. But they sounded like monkeys or tropical birds, whooping and shrieking, as if they were on fire. Banshee wails. The laughter of insane children with tumors like new brains crowding out their skulls.
“END OF – MESSAGES.”
Slowly, timidly, Cornelia lowered her hands from her ears. She heard the humming of her refrigerator directly behind her. And that was all.
Where had the calls been originating from? Several towns away? Another state?
She hoped, now, that he had lived very, very far away from her.
Tomorrow she would have her number changed. But for tonight...she took the phone off the hook.
She could only hope that it was the other woman – the nameless lover – and not her, not Cornelia, that tonight’s call had been intended for.
Despite her own fear, however, she felt fresh tears well in her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said very quietly to the two small machines. Wishing she could be speaking the words into a mouthpiece instead. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. And she reached out to the answering machine once more.
“MESSAGES – DELETED.”
The Writing on the Wall
(Author’s note: the following vignette appeared in the newsletter of the printing company I once worked for. It was supposed to be the second chapter in a comical series I was coerced into doing, called The History of Printing – but darker impulses seized my mind. I’m not sure if a story featuring Mythos elements ever before appeared in a company newsletter...but said publication did have the decidedly Lovecraftian-sounding title of The Nameless Newsletter.)
Last time we spoke of the use of Egyptian hieroglyphics as a major step in the history of the written word, the recording of language, and hence a prelude to printing. We also alluded to the theory that the pyramids and the plain of Giza were the first industrial park (the brain-child of that forgotten and very unpopular pharaoh, Immafartun). But with Halloween around the corner, we’ll concentrate on the pyramids in more recent times, and on those who study the writing of the ancients, like the archeologist and hierogylphist, Dr. Henry Paxton.
Paxton turned around...
He wanted to excitedly exclaim about the discovery he had just made, but then he remembered he was alone in the cellars of the pyramid. No one was there in the gloom of the tunnel behind him. The others waited above, outside, bored porters and tired assistants without his sense of dedication. How could they not be more enthusiastic? After all, no one had even suspected that these hidden chambers lay beneath the pyramid until Paxton had discovered them only a few days earlier.
He returned his attention to his latest discovery, moved the lantern closer and used a brush to sweep aside the dust of dreaming millenniums. He began to unveil a long series of hieroglyhs, carven in the stone blocks that formed this narrow corridor, which tapered into silent darkness at either end.
The figures in the hieroglyphics seemed more realistic, naturalistic than he was accustomed to. Normally they were more stylized. He recognized familiar symbols mixed in with others he had never encountered before. He had seen the scarab, but never the starfish with a human eye in its center. He had encountered the jackal-headed, baboon-headed and falcon-headed gods...but what of this alien god, with a head like an octopus and wings rather like those of a bat?
As he moved along the low-ceilinged tunnel in an uncomfortable crouch to remain at the level of the pictographs, he cleared away more and more of what appeared to be some story or myth that was unfolding. It was stifling in the confines of the tunnel, so he swept a free hand under the wide brim of his rumpled and sweat-stained hat to wipe away a trickle of sweat.
The story in stone carvings seemed to begin with stylized rays of light piercing into a burial chamber, where there was a sarcophagus inscribed with mysterious symbols. In the next uncovered image, Paxton saw the sarcophagus lid was now open and a terrible figure was revealed within...a skeletal mummy with a head like the remains of an octopus, withered tentacles where a human mouth should be.
The following panel showed the octopus-headed corpse having departed from its elaborate coffin, walking into a corridor of stone. Its body was bent forward, its bat wings were in tatters, its fingers spread like eagle’s talons.
“Remarkable!” Paxton whispered under his breath. “Such a find.” He dusted at the next picture. “Never seen anything like it! Never!”
Paxton stared at the next carving. It showed two figures. One was the resurrected bat-winged mummy, and it seemed to be sneaking up behind the other figure. A crouching figure. This crou
ching figure, carved in stone thousands of years earlier, somehow carried a modern lantern and worn a rumpled, wide-brimmed hat.
Paxton turned around...
Corpse Candles
That the old man – apparently in his nineties – was still alive was miracle enough. That he was conscious and capable of intelligible speech was, to Grange, shocking. He had been told that when the fire department answered a neighbor's call about smoke billowing from the attic windows of the old man's house, and upon discovering his charred body on the floor -- his hair and clothing entirely burned away - they had thought him dead. Until he groaned, and raked one man's leg with a hand like a blackened bird's claw.
"You know the first thing that went through my head?" this firefighter had related to Grange only an hour ago. "Spontaneous human combustion. I know, I know...but I'm telling you, the only thing burned in that attic was this guy. Even the old rug he fell on was barely scorched. There was a greasy kind of soot on the walls, but that came from him. Maybe it was spontaneous human combustion. Just, that in his case it didn't entirely do the job."
Grange didn't understand medicine, but knew there must be some good reason the elderly man's face was not entirely swathed in gauze. It had been difficult, upon entering the room, to conceal his revulsion. That hideous mask could not be the countenance of a human being. Grange had been told the body, covered in a sheet at least, was much worse. The frail little man's body barely tented the sheet; Grange had seen more substantial remains dug out of decades-old shallow graves.
"Mr. Brill, I'm Detective Grange..." he said, leaning a bit over the bed, expecting the old man's eyes to open. The nurse, before letting him in, had assured him Brill was awake. But when Brill replied, he still did not open his eyes, and Grange queasily wondered if his eyelids were fused shut, or if those orbs had turned to gelatin beneath them.
"Detective," Brill greeted him. "Sit down. Uh, have I done something wrong?"
Taking a seat at the bedside, Grange couldn't prevent himself from chuckling uncomfortably. "Well, setting yourself on fire is wrong, I guess, but I didn't come here to arrest you...just to find out what happened."
"I didn't set myself on fire," Brill told him. His voice was both an agonized rasp, and weirdly calm.
"So it wasn't intentional...that's a good thing. How did it happen? Were you smoking?"
"I told you - I didn't set myself on fire."
Grange took in the man's ruined profile for several beats. He was reminded of the fireman's talk of spontaneous human combustion. Stupid, he scolded himself. The old man was senile; of course he had set himself ablaze. He might not know how he had done it, but done it he surely had. Nevertheless Grange asked him again, "So how did it happen?"
There was a long pause. Life support equipment hissed, red numbers fluctuated on monitor screens as if flashing an encoded message. "It was my brother. Martin Brill. He did this to me."
"Your brother?" Grange sat forward. "Where is he? I was told you didn't have any family."
"He lives across town. On Pine Street, right on the outside of Eastborough Swamp."
"And he set you on fire? Purposely?"
A slight nod of a head like that of a peeling, unwrapped mummy, horribly contrasted against the pristine white pillows.
"Why?"
"We haven't spoken much in years. We had a falling out a long, long time ago. For a while we made up, and moved out here to Massachusetts together, but..." A cough painful even to hear. "We have...different philosophies." After a moment, Brill amended, "Different religions."
"So he came to your house and set you on fire? Where is he now?"
"He's home. But he never left his house to do this to me. He sent...something else to my house to do it for him."
Had the old man meant to say someone else? "Who was that?" he asked, wondering if this story were all a delusion born of pain, delirium, paranoia.
Again, just the hissing, the beeping, a rattling cart being pushed past the door. Then: "An elemental. A fire vampire. One of the minions of the god Martin worships."
Grange found himself sitting back in his chair, his hands untensing on his knees. Yes, the elderly man was delusional. Yes, he had to have unconsciously immolated himself. No...Grange did not believe that Brill's brother had set him ablaze...with or without the help of any "minion".
Still, he at least had to talk to this next of kin. At the very least, all feuding aside, he should know that his brother was probably not going to survive.
Before Grange sought out this Martin Brill on Pine Street, however, upon returning to Eastborough from the hospital in Worcester he first stopped at Edgar Brill's own home. He himself had not yet viewed the scene, had only spoken with the men who had sprayed the coal-like smoldering crisp of Brill's body, and the uniformed men who had initially responded to the call.
With Brill's own keys, Grange let himself into the now empty old house.
That the old man was an eccentric, strange even when he wasn't delirious with pain, was readily apparent. The squalor of the house was bad enough - filthy clothing strewn about, food-encrusted dishes resting throughout the house, newspapers, magazines and books stacked precariously in each room to the point where some rooms had mere pathways through this landscape of paper mesas and plateaus. But this in itself was not surprising for an elderly person living by himself. It was, rather, the...decor...that mystified the small town detective.
One room's ceiling was painted black, for instance. Large eye-hooks had been screwed into the ceiling, and metal wire threaded through them, making a kind of hanging web...from the middle of which dangled an intricate contraption like a box kite, but much more elaborate, constructed of sticks and paper, that twirled gently in the breeze of Grange's movement. Odd symbols or markings on the various faces of the mobile revealed themselves as it turned in the displaced air.
In another room, in amongst an abundance of crumbling ancient books that filled a number of built-in shelves, Grange's eye was drawn to a biological specimen preserved for display in a greenish-tinted block of Lucite or some such substance. The frayed, grayish-pink matter in this block was not even remotely recognizable except as something organic. This wasn't some human organ, was it? On the top he noticed a narrow label, the typed ink very faint on the yellow paper. Grange had to take the object down from the shelf to read it. It read: Saint Augustine, Florida, 1896. Replacing the heavy block, Grange took note of a photograph cut from a book and tacked to the wall beside the bookshelf. A similar typed label was taped across its bottom. It appeared to show some blob-like rotting carcass washed ashore on a beach, obviously in Saint Augustine, Florida. A typed letter was tacked below the photo, and read simply: Edgar, Here is that chunk I alluded to; methinks it was a Spawn of C------. Photo enclosed, as well. Best, S. Sargent.
In other rooms, more photographs and cryptic correspondence, and articles clipped from newspapers and magazines such as National Geographic and Fate, adorned the walls, sometimes in great profusion, like a kind of patchwork wallpaper.
At last, Grange mounted a narrow, creaking staircase to the attic, passing through beams of late afternoon sunlight in which dust motes swarmed like plankton. The attic, which had once been a third floor apartment, was more of the same clutter, only worse. The walls had been stripped down to the plaster but never papered again except for more clippings. Halfway up the stairs, he had paused to read about a family plagued by poltergeist activity, including a profusion of mysterious fires. Just beyond the top of the stairs, Grange paused to read from a lengthy article -- very yellowed and crumbling, as it was dated 1971 - written on the hundredth anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire.
Grange had never realized just what a horrific tragedy that had been, or how strangely widespread the fiery devastation had been all on that night of October 8, 1871. Tremendous fires had swept through Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and Wisconsin. Twenty-four towns burned to charcoal, 2,000 lives lost. Of these, 1,500 had been lost in a 40
0 square mile area of Wisconsin. The town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin suffered the greatest violence, when monstrous windstorms of fire had descended from the sky with Biblical fury. One house had been lifted by the hellish winds one hundred feet into the air, there to erupt into flame. An eyewitness to the nightmare had written: "In one awful instant a great flame shot up in the western heavens, and in countless fiery tongues struck downward into the village, piercing every object that stood in the town like a red-hot bolt...the flaming whirlwind swirled in an instant through the town. All heard the first inexplicable roar...while a few avow that the heavens opened and the fire rained down from above."
"So much for a cow kicking over a lantern," Grange muttered. He read on...eerie details about the mysterious, often fickle behavior of the blazing tornado. One man had been found dead, but strangely untouched by the fire...and yet some coins in his pocket were partly fused from the heat. And another man was found alive, staggering along in a stupor, his hair and clothes seared away but an oddly carved musical instrument merged with the hand that clutched it. He had been mumbling repeatedly about something called Cthugha, which he blamed for the conflagration, and spoke of as an entity, leading those who found him to believe he was referring to some Indian god. The man, one Edgar Brill, had ended up in a sanitarium, his mind blasted.
Edgar Brill. So that explained the interest of Eastborough's Edgar Brill in this story. His grandfather, perhaps, for whom he had been named?
Grange sighed, straightened, barely able to take in the enormity of the horror described. He moved further into the attic, turning into a front room from which emanated a burnt smell.
The walls in here were indeed coated in a black soot, but other than that and the blackened scrap of rug on the floor, fire damage was not apparent. The room was unsettling enough without it.
It was a small room with slanted walls, again covered in clippings, most obscured by the soot but barely scorched. One photo drew Grange closer. It showed a man presenting an object before him in both hands. Was it a carved walking stick? Some primitive club? The end of it was bell shaped, so Grange concluded it was a musical instrument. The photo was labeled: Rick's Lake, Wisconsin. Wisconsin again. Was that, then, the musical instrument that had been fused to the earlier Edgar Brill's hand? If so, the photo was more recent than that.
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