"What do you think it was?" I asked him, though I had already dismissed his story; I'd been hoping it was the killers he had seen, making a getaway. "What did it look like?"
"I didn't make it out well...but best I can say is it looked like a cow. Big cow, all black...but with no head. Just this thing where a head should be – a clump of little squirmy arms like...look like one of those sea anemone things. Maybe it was really hair blowing, horse's mane, I don't know...but didn't look like there was a head there, to me. And no horse I ever heard of buried itself out in the middle of a field..."
V
Over a decade had passed. One time, after we had the water heater replaced, the worker told us he thought we had rats in the walls. I told him I'd look into it.
Mother died of cancer in 1956. All my medical training, and I was helpless as I watched her succumb to her torture. Ng was hit as hard by this as my father and I, as my mother would frequently visit her, saw her in fact more often than I did, in my school years. I slept most nights in Ng's little bed with her, and she was my solace. Thus, I became almost panicked with concern when, just a year later, Ng herself became ill.
I say ill. I don't know, even today, how to fully explain what I came to witness.
The first symptom was that a dark brown line appeared on her forehead running vertically down to the bridge of her nose. Even before this line began to open into a bloodless furrow, several weeks later, I was reminded of Ng's stern-faced companion who had perished in the inferno.
When I asked her what this condition was, which had been manifested in that other woman and now in her, she was very evasive, grew impatient with me, showed rare anger. The most she would relate was, "My people have this, if chosen. I not want it, but must. Nothing you can do. It will be worse. Nothing you or any doctor can do. I sorry. I chosen."
I thought it must be some self-inflicted wound, some ritual scarring, but it never showed bleeding, never grew infected. When, months later, the wound appeared very deep and began to widen, I finally exploded, attempted to drag her upstairs, meaning to get her to a hospital. She fought me, bit me; it was horrible. Even when my father joined in we could not restrain her wild struggles. She fled back to her room, and used the bolt I had installed on the other side at her insistence. She refused to allow me entrance for over a week and I did not try to force her again.
Despite the terrible appearance of the wound, how it marred her former unmarked beauty, we continued to make love. Though, Ng insisted, in the dark, and I silently agreed that was best. She was still beautiful...but as a Renoir would be, if slashed by a knife down the middle.
I studied everything I could find on medical anomalies, rare afflictions, when not assuming it was something self-inflicted. There were cases of hare-lip in which a median fissure resulted in a cleft face effect, but Ng did not have a cleft palate, and this condition would have been present at birth. Again, congenital division of the nose, as observed by Thomas of Tours, would have been apparent at birth.
And what could I make, later, of the black mass that began to show inside the wound, once it had reached a shocking depth? The black matter was shiny, smooth, as of some kind of membrane, firm to the touch. Ng took to wrapping her head in a scarf, by then, refused further examination, though the wound still showed down to the middle of her nose. And was it possible, as it appeared, that as the wound widened it was subtly pushing her orbits farther apart? So it seemed to me: that her eyes, still lovely, were being pressed out to the sides of her face.
By the time a year had passed since the beginning of her deformity, she no longer permitted me to make love to her, even in the dark. She was ashamed of her appearance, to the point where she began covering her face entirely with a kind of hood she made, revealing only her eyes through slitted holes. Her shame finally made me decide that this could not be a self-inflicted injury. I no longer believed that she had mutilated, disfigured herself as part of her duty as one "chosen".
By now one might wonder why I went on with this life; why I did not marry a woman of my own kind, without this poor creature's cursed existence. But despite the ravaging of her beauty, and the fact that we no longer were intimate - I loved her. As far as I was concerned, I already had a wife.
At her insistence, I made a hinged door within her door, low to the floor, so that I could pass food in to her without having to come inside. I dreaded this development, as I saw what was coming, but gave in to it fatalistically, as it seemed the natural progression for this unnatural relationship.
Another year passed, and I hadn't seen her face for all of that time. Most often I simply sat outside her room, on the cellar stairs, and spoke to her through the little open door. I brought her books. Her English improved, though she revealed no more about her people or her affliction, for that. One day, however, she permitted me entrance to her room, which I hadn't entered in months. I had been waiting for this chance; taken off guard, she was unable to stop me from tearing away her hood.
I fell back in shock and dismay, to witness the progression of her condition. Ng's slanted eyes had been thrust so far apart that they were like those of a fish, nearly on the sides of her head. And the black mass now protruded out of that great gaping wound. Further, still black and smooth, it had sprouted small growths like the beginnings of rubbery little tendrils.
"Out, get out!" Ng screamed at me, turning away. When I gathered the strength to reach out for her, she whirled at me with a knife, this time pointed at me, and snarled, "Get out! Get out!"
I staggered out to the stairs, leaned against them, and wept, hearing the bolt slam home behind me. Was it a cancer, eating her alive from within? It must be that; I had read harrowing reports of epithelial carcinoma, a case of sarcoma of the nasal septum that in mere months had made a monster out of a boy of nineteen, spreading his eyes to the sides of his head, his nose one huge distended mass. I should have men come and help me force her out of the house, drug her so that I could get her to a hospital, if it wasn't too late to save her...
But I didn't do that. Why? Was it that after these many years, I couldn't imagine Ng leaving the house any more than she could? Was I afraid someone might take her away forever, even kill her? I think it was that, even then, somehow I knew there was no cause for her ailment recorded in any medical text book, that there were mysteries regarding her origins that were only hinted at in books too obscure, ancient or controversial to be respected by men of a scientific mind. Scientific, in the conventional sense. I thought again of the burrowing creature my elderly patient had described, the carven heads my father had heard were found in the dirt cellar of that old warehouse. And I thought of what I believed I'd seen, when I ripped Ng's hood away. That those tiny rubbery growths extending from her wound had seemed to be moving of their own volition, writhing in the air.
VI
For weeks I returned to passing Ng's food through her little portal. And then, one morning, she did not answer my raps upon it. "Ng?" I called, thinking she was asleep. Louder: "Ng?" There was still no reply. I continued to rap, loudly. I called so loudly, in fact, that my father came downstairs to see what the matter was.
I banged the panel and shouted frantically. At last, in a grim tone, my father said, "I'll get a crowbar."
When he wedged the bar's blade between the apartment door and its frame, and then began to jerk at the bar to splinter the wood, I thought Ng would respond at last, crying out for us to stop. No protest came, however, and my father persisted, until – with a final heave against the lever – he burst open the door he had made.
I pushed past him into the threshold. And froze there. When he tried to move around me, I gave a strangled sob. "No...no...please don't."
But my father was strong, and wrenched me aside, yet he too froze, too afraid and in awe to cross that threshold.
Ng sat at her little table, back straight, one hand on its surface, where a sheet of paper lay. She was, as I had feared, dead. And although I had passed her a plate of supper only the eve
ning before, it was as though she had sat dead at that table since the reign of the pharaohs. For she was little more than a mummy, little more than a skeleton, her long glossy hair turned gray and straggly. And her skull – her poor face, that I remembered smiling shyly at me in the market, a lifetime ago...its crooked teeth now a death's head rictus - was riven down the middle straight through the bone so that even the hole of her nose was a part of that yawning pit. Only the black of emptiness showed within, now.
Webs covered her; webs growing down from the ceiling, up from the table and floor, webs of peculiar thickness and a strange yellowish color. Again, as if she had sat here in this tomb of my making for an eternity.
I might have broken down into sobbing, consumed by grief alone, if that was all we had found. But my grief was mixed with a kind of terrified wonder...
At some point she had turned her cot on its side, laid it up against the wall, and shoved her bureau aside, all to make room for what took up nearly half of her tiny little apartment. And that was a great stone head, that would seem to have risen up from the floor, the cement of which was shattered around its thick neck. Sculpted from some black rock, it put me in mind of both the solemn heads of Easter Island (its ears were similarly long-lobed) and the Asian visages at Angkor Vat. Its slant-eyed, blind-staring face was similarly shrouded in a caul of yellow web. How far down did it extend into the earth; was there an entire titan body beneath our house? If so, how many thousands of years had it waited to rise? Or had it risen not so much from beneath our world, but out of some other?
I noted that in the center of the statue's forehead there was a third blind, stone eye of sorts resting in a vertical opening.
"Jesus!" my father suddenly blurted, and he pushed me aside so violently that I fell. I saw him lunge between the table and the sculpture, holding the crowbar back like a harpoon he meant to jab into a whale's flank.
But the animal I saw scramble out from behind the great head, when I propped myself up on my elbows, was small. Black, rubbery, waddling awkwardly on two flipper-like feet, small as a human toddler. But it had no arms, and on its sides were pink gill slits that fluttered and wheezed, and it had no head...just a whipping mass of medusa-like feelers. It had only got a little closer to the door – horribly, lurching toward me – when father dashed back the other way and brought the crowbar swinging down upon it, again, again, until it fell with a terrible squeal. Father stopped clubbing it, skewered it straight through instead, and after it flopped convulsively for a few seconds the tiny monstrosity curled up like a fetus, and lay still.
Later, we burned the diminutive carcass in our yard.
I got to my feet, stared down at the thing in its pool of sap-thick clear ichor. Looked back up at the wide hole in the dried-out husk of Ng's body. In her cloak of yellow filaments, I was put in mind of the shell of an insect in a spider's web.
My eyes lifted to the boarded up window behind her. Mounted below the window was a contraption I had never seen in here before. I can only assume that she had possessed it all along, had spirited it away from the burning warehouse inside her bag of belongings. It was little more than a crystal lens the size of a shaving mirror, set in a tarnished metal frame which sprouted a few odd knobs and levers. She had wedged the prong of its base into a crack in the wall, so that the lens was on level with the window; in particular, I would find, with a small slit between two boards of the window which I feel she herself had widened a bit for the purpose.
Afraid to near the wall, and thus Ng's corpse, I had to steel myself...but I approached the lens, pushing through the ghastly, clinging webs. For even from across her room, and at an indirect angle, I thought I saw blurry movement in the glass.
If only I hadn't looked through it! But then, I wouldn't have been inspired to shatter that lens (with difficulty, using a hammer) afterwards. I can only hope that the telescope, as such it was, was not merely an instrument for viewing, but for summoning, as I suspected it to be. I can only hope that in smashing it, I prevented more of those Outsiders from coming here. It has been many years since that terrible day, and perhaps I was successful. But who knows what mysteries, what horrors, lurk behind the innocent facades of old houses, here in this haunted town, and in every town?
My first impression was that it was a magnifying glass, trained on several beetles or slugs...a sort of microscope. These creatures I observed in the grain of the wood boarding the window were hideous, and all the more so for their familiarity. For they were black rubbery things, loosely bovine in their general outline...their blocky forms moving with great slowness. Only the nests of tentacles moved quickly, these seeming to feed from the ground, perhaps on creatures as tiny to them as these things were to me.
The creatures – one in the foreground, two further back - moved across a jagged bed of irregular dark crystal. In the background there was a forbidding sky of molten orange and dark brown cloud.
I looked up from the lens sharply. The mysterious instrument was not trained on the wood, but on the sky outside, seen through the crack. And yet...and yet...the sky outside was blue and clear. What sky was this I was seeing?
I realized, of course, that it was the sky of some other world. Some world separated by space, perhaps dimension, perhaps dream.
And I also realized that those were not tiny, microscopic monstrosities (those things that resembled the creature my father had killed, except for that creature having been bipedal, as if mixed blasphemously with human genes)...they were, instead, immense beyond anything that had walked on Earth, or God willing, ever would. For it was not a bed of dark crystal they strode upon, and crushed beneath their bulk, and fed from...but a city, an alien city, as great in size as New York...greater...but no more protected, no less vulnerable, for all that.
The creature in the foreground lifted the nest of worms that was all it owned for a head, and seemed to gaze back at me through the glass. I backed away from it with a cry of terror, and swatted the instrument out of the wall with the sticky crowbar that I seized out of my father's hands.
Panting, tears streaming down my face, I again regarded the shell of what had been my lover. Then, finally, I noticed the sheet she had written on. It was, I saw, a final message to me.
That note was the only thing I removed from her room before I sealed it up. Yes, even now, decades past her death, Ng sits in her chair in her room below me, much as she had in life. Her presence gives me comfort, and sometimes I sit on the cellar stairs, and talk to her through the wall.
When I decided to entomb her there, I wondered what the next owner of the house would think if they ever tore out that wall and found her...and the colossal stone head. But shortly before I sealed the room, I discovered that the head was gone, presumably sunken back into the earth or other world that it had risen from, leaving only a broken place in the cement, like a wound clotted with dirt.
I still don't know for certain, entirely, what Ng meant by her note. But I think she was apologizing for having followed the call of her kind, for having attempted to perform her chosen duty, despite her feelings for me and my family. I don't think she really wanted to do what she did. I must believe that.
But I also think she was apologizing for causing me worry and pain, over the years. And it caused me more pain to think she might not have realized that I had no regrets about our relationship. That I had loved her deeply, and would have wanted no other wife.
To the end, she was cryptic. To the end, a mystery. My mystery.
For the note she had left me said only, "I am sorry, Grayeyes" – and no more.
*****
About the Author:
Jeffrey Thomas is the author of such novels as Deadstock (finalist for the John W. Campbell Award), Blue War, Monstrocity (finalist for the Bram Stoker Award), Letters from Hades, The Fall of Hades and A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Dealers, and such short story collections as Punktown, Nocturnal Emissions, Voices from Hades, Voices from Punktown, Aaaiiieee!!! and (with his brother Scott Thomas)
Punktown: Shades of Grey. Several of his books have been translated into German, Russian, Greek, Polish and Taiwanese editions. His stories have appeared in the anthologies The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Year’s Best Horror Stories, Leviathan 3, The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases and The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction. Thomas lives in Massachusetts.
Discover other titles by Jeffrey Thomas at Amazon.com:
Encounters with Enoch Coffin (with W. H. Pugmire)
Ghosts of Punktown
Red Cells
Letters from Hades
The Fall of Hades
JEFFREY THOMAS’ AUTHOR’S PAGE AT AMAZON.COM
Learn more about Jeffrey Thomas at:
Wikipedia
His blog “Punktalk”
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