Ambrose was silent for some few moments, and a curious expression dimmed his eyes. “I ventured within that old place once, alone. You know that I am not a timid fellow. Even so, there was an aura of danger so palpable that it chased me from that place, as I didn’t want its power or its aura to corrupt my dreaming. I remain even now convinced there was a presence, and not at all certain it achieved no degree of dominion over me. I could almost taste it in the closed air of the house, the diseased dreaming of some nameless agency.”
“Very wise of you to forsake those sullen rooms. We Arkham devils are prudent indeed. As much as we love to evoke the sleeping dreams of a witch-town, we recognize those pockets of horror that are best left to their own anguished slow corrosion. We will not be found dancing beneath the moon in some ghoul-infested graveyard atop Hangman’s Hill, although we may whistle as we pass such a place so as to charm its sequestered denizens.”
“Will you not, then?” said Ambrose, clearly doubtful of my claim of reticence.
“Well, tonight, I confess, I am feeling bold, and bored.”
I rose to my feet and faced the house.
“Are you certain?” said my cousin, and I knew that had he the arm with which to take hold of me, he would have stayed my momentum. The jaundiced moon was no longer reflected on the attic window. I raised my hands toward the ancient edifice so as to feel its moody climate of daemonic decay. I sensed the things of the past, things long dead, and others not fully deceased. I felt them as a psychic pulse emanating from the house.
“Surely you don’t mean to venture into that den of madness and murder,” said Ambrose, but he already knew the answer. “I would counsel not!”
“Then why did you suggest this meeting place?”
“Not to tempt you, surely!” he protested.
Ignoring his alarm, I followed my own senses, walking out of the graveyard and across the road. I knew that I was answering an esoteric instinct, and my twin knew it as well, for she dug her nails deeper into my flesh and began a muted complaint of “Meh, meh, meh, meh!” She flung her long thin arms above her head and wrapped them around me. Blood issued from my bared shoulders, for my cape was left behind, and my sister kicked her tiny feet and thrashed her twiggy arms as if to convince me to pry no further into inapprehensible mystery.
I remained oblivious to Mehmeh’s tearing touch. I was more heedful of her palpitating little heart. But I could comprehend another pulsation before me, as if the house shuddered at the hazard of my advance. And it was queer, but I felt that this house was in some forgotten and foreboding manner the symbolic soul of our sorcerous village, this brooding Arkham, this realm of fantastic secrets. It stood before me like some dismal echo of distant pasts, a storehouse of filched hearts, the hub of prisoned souls. Although it had stood for centuries, for all its disrepair there was nothing decrepit or frail about its aura. It had a certain iron strength.
A curious blend of threat and welcome embraced me as I began to climb the steps to the porch, as though I were kindred, lost and newly found. The manse gathered its shadows around me. Here was an edifice as tainted as my witch-blood; I sense that very elixir surge through my veins with a queer vitality.
I stood before the door and saw that vandals had shattered one of the small windowpanes. There were small shards of glass at my feet. Crookedly, I smiled, for one windowpane only had been violated, among the rich offering of windows the dwelling presented. Whatever momentary courage the trespasser had gloried in it had been short-lived.
Bending low, I picked up a shard of glass and poked it into an extended finger. With beads of blood I wrote my name, Alluna, upon the ancient wood of the door. With the final pressure of my finger on the aged wood, the door opened, granting me ingress.
Shadows, dust, and cobwebs moved before me as I stepped into their region. A fungal gleam crept along the mildew walls, like some putrescent little cousin of St. Elmo’s Fire. My diminutive sibling had stopped ripping at my flesh; she clung to my shoulders from fright and no longer made a sound. I could feel palpitations of her puny heart at my—our—spine.
I climbed one interior staircase, and then a second, and a third, high and higher, toward an attic room where remnants of a broken lock hung on hinges and the door stood open bare inches, wedged upon the warped boards of the floor.
The room’s ceiling was quite low; I had to stoop as I squeezed through the door. How incomprehensible, the stench within this small area, like a peculiarly infected seepage.
A draft of cool air touched me. I turned to glance at the attic window whereon I had seen the distorted reflection of the sickly moon. I realized that I had seen no such thing, for there was no glass inside the window frame, and a cool night breeze began to pour inside the musty compartment. Shadows of various hue lurked at corners, one of which tickled my fancy in some fantastic way. I turned my head to gaze.
A perverse urge persuaded me to summon the beast of legend, for such it seemed I had seen as a blur of shadow expanding with motion. An upper portion of the vague shape blossomed into a sphere of sickly yellow hue; by its faint fungal glow I quietly studied the distorted head, the slit that was its slimy mouth, the blemished eye.
To outsiders, there is both horror and disdain for our inbred kind, but from within, those among us who are least human are most divine. And our desires, our natures, draw us toward the hallowed night, the aphotic marriage chamber. The pheromonal scent drew from me a smile of adoration, for I recognized in this creature’s pallid luminosity the true and divine spark of angels, inclusive of those fallen. An egomaniacal pride sprang within me, that I might be the Mother of the One, the darkly beatific and transcendently inhuman savior. Part instinct, part occult knowing, I was drawn toward the creature of the attic, as he was drawn to me.
His own excitement at scent of me increased his wan sheen. He took a step forward from out the darker shadows, and I saw by his nakedness his knobby, knotted, rawboned arms and legs, the sunken cavity of his skeletal chest and torso, the outsized and round head that wobbled and shined and oozed a greasy sweat.
I saw that this enticing monstrosity was aroused. I wanted to strip myself for his sake, but the glowering inflamed eye now held me in rapt thrall. He eased his way closer, closer, until his long bony arms could reach me. My arms were heavy, but I raised my hand, palm up, a finger extended, the finger with the tiny wound. He bent his head and I thought he would suck my finger for the blood, as indeed he seemed to contemplate.
But then swiftly the talons of his twisted fingers began to tear away my dress. I tried to find the strength to take him in a most loving embrace, but with a nearly angry swiftness he spun me round and shoved me violently, face first, into a rubble pile of bones of bats and birds and rodents. It was Mehmeh he desired; and it was I that was forsaken.
Mehmeh had for long moments grown stark still. But now she was mewling. She spread her dwarfish legs. She wrapped her spidery arms around her paramour. As she was part of me I felt as well as she the painful thrusting of the twisted member.
My face and breasts were poked and pierced by tiny bones upon the floor, as Mehmeh and the moonfaced creature rutted. I was no more than their bed, an object, not the beloved, and for the first time in my life I hated Mehmeh, hated that she and never I might be the Mother of Night’s Ally.
A spiteful delirium of animosity enveloped my psyche with such venom that I could not long remain conscious. I was benumbed. I felt myself fading from existence, failing in my battle to stay alert. The sound of repellent lovers receded, became fainter and more remote, as torpidity overcame all awareness, and oblivion devoured me.
For weeks or months I stayed inside myself, in cloudy depression, and had not Ambrose volunteered as nurse to me and Mehmeh, surely I would have dried up and died. He tended to us lovingly and tried not to reveal his favoritism for Mehmeh. In time my convalescence permitted me to sit while Ambrose read to me, to eat without his having to hold a spoon to my lips, even at times to converse without severe signs
of despondency.
One evening I lay on my side facing the wall, as Ambrose fed and cooed at Mehmeh, his toes as nimble as fingers when tending to his little cousin. Her stomach had become a taut protrusion. Ambrose murmured solemnly: “I will always take care of you Mehmeh, Alluna. The three of you. All I have ever wanted is a sweet nocturnal family.”
My spirits calmed, and both Mehmeh and I descended toward slumber as Ambrose intoned: “Thou art the Light. Thou art the Darkness. For what is the Pitch of Night but Light unmanifest? Yea, though I stride in the furnace of dawn, thou art my shade, my dark respite; thou art the cool air, the trinity of My Stygian Lord, the Mother of the Lord of Night, and Nursemaid of the Divine Illuminator. Amen.”
Spiderwebs In The Dark
Darrell Schweitzer
Darrell Schweitzer is the author of three novels, The White Isle, The Shattered Goddess, and The Mask of the Sorcerer, and about 300 short stories, which have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Twilight Zone, Interzone, Amazing Stories, Night Cry, Cemetery Dance, and Postscripts. He has been nominated four times for the World Fantasy Award and won it once, for Weird Tales, of which he was coeditor for nineteen years. He has also edited or coedited anthologies, including The Secret History of Vampires, Cthulhu’s Reign, Full Moon City, and That Is Not Dead (forthcoming from PS Publishing in 2014).
Sure, I can tell you how I first met Walter Stephens,or G. C. Coleman or Charles Comnenus-Paleologus or whatever he was calling himself that week. Yes, the poet, sometime-novelist of indeterminate age, nationality, everything—and if you’re writing a book about him some of this may even prove to be of use. But I think I’d rather cast it as a tale. We can even imagine that you and I are two well-traveled gentlemen sitting together on a stormy, wintry night like this one, in some terribly exclusive club, and the fire is burning low, and after the waiter has served the last round of drinks and slipped out, silent as a cat—
I’m afraid not. Strictly no alcohol allowed here, but I could get you a bottled water, I suppose—
Never mind. In such an atmosphere, some old duffer (me) suddenly stirs and mumbles reflectively, “You know, it was on such a night as this when I happened to be in a particularly remote district of rural Sweden”—or maybe Zamboanga or Trebizond or just a part of the New Jersey Pine Barrens that nobody has ever heard of—”that I encountered something odd.”
Use your imagination. On a night like this, well into winter when the sun sets in the middle of the afternoon and if you look out of a window—and I ask you, how many people bother to look out beyond the immediate boundaries of their lives these days, or even out a window? But I digress. You see the landscape fade into muted browns and then grays and a steely blue, then it’s so black you can’t tell the earth from the sky and the few lights from the distant neighbors might also be stars—I digress again to explain that this was in the old days when I still ran the Headless Shakespeare Bookstore, on Paoli Pike, Chester County, well west of Philadelphia. Hence the specific, faded palette in winter, because this really was Andrew Wyeth country. It was called the Headless Shakespeare because the old barn with add-ons which I’d converted into both a dwelling and a place of business happened to have in the front yard a kitschy Victorian marble statue of the Bard, in doublet and tights, holding a pen in one hand and in the other a skull (engraved YORICK in large letters just in case you didn’t get it), but, alas, missing Sweet Will’s head. What to do with a fine old antique like that? Junk it? Hell no. I installed a little shelf, and in good weather used it to display a few of the four-for-a-dollar books, with my sign leaning against Will’s knees. It became something of a landmark. There are pictures of it in older editions of Weird Pennsylvania.
Suffice it to say that in such a place, on such an evening, I did indeed encounter something odd, in the person of Walter Padraic Eochaid Nera O’Blarney, the very subject of your investigative biography.
I was closing up. The last of the regulars, Mrs. Templeton, who sometimes seemed to spend all day in the romance section but always left with a satisfactory amount of purchases, had just gone. I flipped the sign around to read CLOSED. I flicked off the outside lights, and it was then that I heard a noise from deep within the store.
“Is anybody there?” I called out.
There was a distinct shuffling, and then a low voice. Something that almost sounded like chanting.
“Hello?”
I followed the sound around several corners and down a couple aisles until I saw, in front of the shelf in the Classics section, a quite large figure in a shabby raincoat, with his back to me. He was indeed muttering softly, in a kind of a sing-song. But more to the point, I distinctly saw him take a ballpoint pen and mark something in the book he holding—a little green volume, probably one of the Greek Loeb editions.
“Hey!” I said. “You scribble in it, you bought it!”
He turned around suddenly, and I will admit I really did cringe backward when confronted by—to reach for the nearest handy cliché—an immense bear of a man with wild black hair, enormous, drooping moustache, and scruffy beard, easily twice my own size, with a look on his face that was—I will not spare the phrase—quite, quite mad, as if he’d been utterly caught up in something and was decidedly unhappy about being interrupted. But that look was gone in an instant, like a mask falling off, and he said in a perfectly calm voice, “Of course I’ll pay for it.” He swept several more off the shelf. “I’ll take the whole set.”
Dubious, I led him back to the counter. On the way I caught about half of his babble about how words of power, or keys to vibration or somedamnsuch were to be found randomly scattered throughout books, as if all literature were one vast cipher to be decoded with “cosmic results,” and I thought, well, sure, fine, he was a complete wacko, and I could only hope he was a wacko with money, which he was. He paid for the books with dirty, wadded-up twenty-dollar bills that seemed to be rolled into balls in his pockets. I never saw a wallet. The books turned out to be a set of Euripides, and he even showed me, for just a second, the passage he had underlined, but it was on the Greek side of the text and I couldn’t make it out. As I was ringing it up and uncrumpling those bills, he tapped a finger on the glass case and said, “Oh, and I’ll take that too,” indicating a fine first edition of Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House that was priced at five hundred dollars. I didn’t doubt he had more of those bills. He went on producing them, but still I hesitated for just a second, reluctant to turn over a volume as nice as that to somebody who might scribble in it, but he met my gaze and he seemed to read my thought and he said, with a half-laugh, “Oh no, that’s not for my research. It’s for leisure reading.” Then he loomed up over me—it was as if he’d been slouching all this time—like an avalanche ready to let go, and he said, “Philip, you and I are going to be fast friends.”
I supposed he’d gotten my name from somewhere, like the little stack of my business cards on the counter.
And he said further, “Don’t ask how I know. I just do. I’ve looked back on it all and seen it.” There was one more word I couldn’t make out, something almost unpronounceable, sort of like “fhtagn.”
Which was odd, you must admit, and it was stranger still that when he went out the door and I locked up after him I didn’t see any headlights or hear a car pull away—hard to imagine a big, fat guy like that walking for miles in the dark and the wet, no matter how well the books were wrapped in plastic. I didn’t even hear footsteps on the gravel driveway. Just sleet rattling against the glass. I almost expected him to come back in a minute, but he didn’t; which was, undeniably, at least mildly inexplicable, if not nearly as much so as the fact that his prediction or prophecy or whatever you want to call it actually came true.
You have to give Walrus credit—yes, he insisted that his closest friends, none of whom I ever met, really did fondly alter his first name Walter into Walrus; and sometimes his moustache and his girth did give that impression—he was a really good storyteller. The be
st I have ever known. The very next night, at precisely the same hour, he appeared in precisely the same manner (how did he get in past me, when I was sitting at the counter by the door?) and told me a perfectly fascinating story of how he’d met Shirley Jackson once and what she’d told him, which revealed a secret of her life that has evaded all biographers, and which changed his. And before I could think it through—wait a minute, she died in 1965, which would make him how old?—he merely said, “Of course I was quite a bit younger then.” Then he started talking about Paris, and some of the people he knew when he lived there. I almost thought he’d start telling me about Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, but, no, it was a very funny if disquieting story about getting drunk with Gore Vidal when he lived there. Did Vidal ever live in Paris? I’d have to look it up in the biography. Before I could even think about it, Walrus was right past me with something else. He had lots of stories like that. He told them supremely well. He kept me entertained for a lot of long evenings, well after closing.
He was independently wealthy, so it seemed, and very widely traveled. I will tell you that sometimes he disappeared for weeks at a time, and postcards arrived from very distant parts of the world, with real (sometimes) messages in his handwriting and real, foreign postage stamps. Yes, once I actually got one from Zamboanga. (I didn’t make that up; real place, in the Philippines. “The monkeys have no tails there,” he said obscurely.) But much of the time he showed up at the Headless Shakespeare. (“I think I know where the head is,” he told me once. “But it’s like the arms of the Venus de Milo. You don’t want ‘em.”) You know, I don’t think I ever did see him come in through the front door. I’d just turn around and he’d be there. “Boo!” And I’d say “How the fuck did you do that?” and he’d just tell me a story. He was there so much that sometimes people I half knew would give me that look as if to say, Good for you Philip, you’ve finally found someone, but, no, it was not like that at all, it was never like that, even when we got very, very close, as it worked out, because in addition to his having been everywhere and met everyone, Walrus had the disconcerting habit of knowing everything about someone he met. I saw him do it to others. It really spooked them. He did it to me. He’d make a casual reference to an incident in my childhood, maybe something really painful, like, “That time you caught your sister stealing and she got you blamed for it, and you never forgave her, well maybe you should have because once she was dead it was too late.” And before I could say, “Wait a minute, I never told you that!” he would be on with some other anecdote (involving famous people, in exotic parts of the world) that illustrated in a very gentle, very real, very emotionally resonant manner why I should have forgiven her, because sometimes to get anywhere in the world you have to know when to let go and just let things happen, as if you’re a leaf floating in a stream.
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