Even More Nasty Stories

by Brian McNaughton

  The house looked darker than the woods around it, as if it drank the moonlight, but one upper window mirrored blue sky and clouds brighter than the real thing. Looking at it made me dizzy, as if it was a window to a colder dimension, but I was probably light-headed from the thought that Oona might be lying asleep behind that bright window.

  Reading my mind, somebody said, “Here's where Roger's girl lives."

  “Up yours. Gimme a rock."

  “Does the Goon give good skull, Rog?"

  “Shut up!” I had sounded like it mattered to me, so I added, “You'll wake him up."

  I could have read a book by that moonlight, and the doctor would know me when he saw me again, but I had to nip this talk in the bud. After the others had retreated, I heaved the biggest rock I could. It hit just right, immediately below the swaybacked peak.

  After the first thud, it must have sounded to those inside like a cavalry charge on the roof. I cringed when a section of the rain gutter fell to the yard with a tinny crash; I hadn't meant to wreck the house. But when even that drew no reaction, I began looking for another rock.

  “Look out behind you, Rog!” I jerked around, my hands out to fend off the doctor's yellow claws, but it was Oona.

  “Aren't you ashamed of yourself?"

  The guys who were jeering at us might have been doing it from the moon. Her beauty shook my knees.

  “Yeah. I'm sorry."

  Her father opened the door next day.

  “Doctor, I'm Roger Burns. I came to apologize for throwing rocks at your house."

  “How many rocks?” Up close, those eyes were hard to take, but I don't think I flinched.

  “Six, maybe, over the past four years."

  “And so, after last night—that was your effort, was it?—having wrought your masterpiece, you feel that lapidation holds no further challenges for you. I agree, and I am profoundly grateful."

  “I'm sorry."

  “I accept your apology.” His voice carried a vibration that buzzed unpleasantly in my bones. “Is that all?"

  “Is Oo—” I coughed out the squeak and tried again: “Is Oona home?"

  Instead of yelling for her like your average father, he ushered me into a room, told me to make myself comfortable, and shut the door: just like Victorian times, except that a cat couldn't have made itself comfortable in that clutter. I was beginning to wonder if he had locked the door, and if I was to be added to a collection that included a shelf of skulls and an articulated skeleton, when Oona entered.

  She heaved piles of books and papers aside to disclose a brown couch. Further digging revealed that it had once been red. We sat, and while the universe of dust-motes she had created eddied in the ashen sunlight, we talked.

  It was like no other conversation I'd ever had. I had never suspected that anyone could be so finely tuned to my own wavelength. We kept finishing or starting each other's words eagerly as we discovered a whole world of thoughts and feelings we shared. I told her my darkest secret, that I wrote poetry, and she told me about the fairy tales she made up while pretending to pay attention in geometry.

  I stayed for supper—no, not hamburgers, it was frozen fish-sticks and peas from a can. She cooked it, so I never had such a feast. Her father brought out a bottle of wine. Despite a house that looked like a campsite, where exposed joists and absent floorboards still recalled the famous police search, his style suggested a more civilized place and time. His hospitality almost made me forget the way he looked and sounded.

  But he was the scenery; Oona was the show. For once I had an excuse to stare at her, to look straight into her bottle-green eyes, to admire the elfin ears disclosed by her pale coronet-braid. The secret smiles she exchanged with her father, that beaming crocodile, told me I was listening too hard and staring too long, but I couldn't help myself.

  Used to seeing the Ghourfanes as outcasts, I had supposed they wanted to be. That sounds stupid, I know, nobody wants to be shunned and mocked, but they had always acted above it all. Now I saw that they were starved for company. They made me feel as if they had been doing nothing for years but waiting for me to show up, and it was all they could do to keep from dancing around the table and singing about it now that I was here.

  I left feeling drained and dazed. I made love to Oona all night, but she kept changing into my pillow. I was still awake when the alarm clock rang.

  She glided past me in school with no hint of recognition. I must have made a fool out of myself last night, I must have said something unforgivable. I caught her between classes and asked, “What did I do?"

  “You don't want your friends to see us together."

  “You're the only friend I want."

  She had always been absent from school a lot, and in the spring she stopped coming altogether. She told me she had to help her father, but I didn't believe her. She had developed an alarming habit: halfway through a word or gesture, she would freeze as if she were made of glass, as if she might shatter if she spoke or moved. I believed she was in pain. She would either laugh off my questions or snap at me for prying into female concerns.

  Death was on my mind that spring. Greg Moffett, whom I had known since I could walk, had died in a flash fire in his bedroom. If he had been smoking in bed, the story everyone repeated, it would have been his first cigarette. I asked Oona's father what was wrong with her. “She is very special."

  “She's wonderful! But is she sick?"

  “I need her help. She is already my equal in some ways. With more time—” He shrugged, and his hand chopped down in a gesture of futility. Or finality.

  As I said, he did little doctoring. Oona helped him with a hobby that kept him busy scribbling in the margins of wormy books, stinking up the house with chemicals and chalking formulas on a blackboard. I had once come upon her adding to his equations, which I hadn't begun to understand, and I could see how she was able to concentrate on fairy tales in our geometry class.

  They were both experts at ducking questions, but I kept my eyes and ears open and concluded that the doctor was trying to reconcile the principles of medieval magic with those of modern chemistry and physics. Good luck, I thought.

  When I pressed him about her absences, he sneered. “School! A day-care center for future bagboys and beauticians."

  Foreseeing a different future for myself, I laughed. His manner always implied that he and I were better than most people. He knew how to play on my faults. I stuck with my question: “Is she ill? Seriously ill?"

  “She is dying.” Before that could sink in deep enough to hurt, he gave his rattlesnake-laugh and turned it into one of his bad jokes: “As are we all."

  I was so enthralled by Oona that she became not just a girlfriend but a puzzle, a hobby, and a subject for study as inexhaustible and rewarding as music. I wanted her so completely that I wanted to be her. I consciously aped her neat little handwriting. Others told me, if only by their nudges and snickers, when I unconsciously aped her gestures or speech patterns. I grew thin and pale.

  She would suffer me to kiss her, nothing more, and she kissed with wide and watchful eyes, like a cat poking a suspicious toy. The first time I took her in my arms and all but forced her to accept a kiss, I felt less like a lover than a nasty child dropping a spider down her collar. But one day we climbed Hob's Cobble, a wooded hill above the town. We played and giggled in deep ferns, and I amazed myself by getting her blouse off. Sunlight and green shadow dappled her breasts. “Oh, I do want to. But only—"

  “Please!"

  “—only where we can hold each other all night.” Having set that impossible condition, she twisted away from me, and I stalked angrily apart. “Tonight,” she called. “In my bed.” “Sure.” I squashed a fiddlehead under my heel.

  “I'll leave the front door unlocked."

  I turned to look. Her eyes yearned. She meant it. I gave her back her blouse and apologized for having chewed it.

  “What about your father?"

  “He'll be working all night in his
study."

  She kept stopping on the way down the hill. I thought nothing could spoil my happiness, but her distress did. By the time we got to her house she was leaning heavily on me. Sweat glistened on her high white forehead.

  “If you're this sick, maybe we shouldn't—"

  “No. I want you. I need you."

  I said what she never did: “I love you."

  When I sneaked past the door of the doctor's study, he cried out. Before I could answer guiltily, his voice droned on. He was reciting or reading aloud in an unfamiliar language, and his tone suggested poetry or prayer. I had thought I was used to his antics, but in this dark house of childhood nightmares, at this hour—I concentrated on putting one foot softly ahead of the other.

  A dim bulb showed little more than a patch of water-stained plaster in the upstairs hall, and Oona's room was black. She drew me down while I was struggling out of my clothes. The shock of our bare skins touching was like plunging into chill surf, like sliding between crisp sheets, like—but those are only word-games. Like nothing else, it was being naked in bed with Oona.

  “We're so close,” she whispered. “We are one."

  “I wish your father—it's kind of distracting...."

  “It only means he can't hear us. Don't think about him. Think about me."

  His voice was more than distracting. It filled the bedroom, it vibrated in my skull. It matched our most secret motions, as if his vulturish face were tilted to the ceiling and his wicked old eyes were peering through the plaster and the laths and the floorboards, through the darkness, through the stretching and squeezing springs of the mattress.

  I climbed to a glimmer that brightened and exploded through me. Then I fell. I kept falling. I panicked, thrashing, and at last I felt the bed once more beneath me. I believed I must have fainted for a moment. I didn't know whether to be embarrassed by this or awed. Bare feet whispered on the floor like dead leaves in a crypt.

  “Oona?” Something was wrong with my voice, and no amount of throat-clearing would help.

  My writing was interrupted at that point by one of Mom's rare visits. It's nice of her to come and see me at all, considering, but her visits take a lot out of me. I can't be sure, but I think it's been a week now since I entered anything in this notebook. The visits take a lot out of Mom, too, I guess.

  “I'm putting it all down on paper,” I told her. “I want you to have it after.... Make sure you get it."

  She gave me that guarded smile she uses for callers who might turn out to be salesmen or evangelists. “Putting all what down?"

  “How it happened. What I told you, that night when I came home and woke you up."

  “I thought we weren't going to talk about that anymore. We understand, we don't blame you, really, but if you're going to start again—"

  “We.” I laughed bitterly, then regretted it. I know I will die laughing. “Listen, you've got to read this when I'm dead, it's important."

  “Shouldn't your father—"

  “Don't tell him about it, please!"

  “If you insist. Oh, I almost forgot!” She rooted in her bag, eager to change the subject. When I recognized the bedraggled wad she pulled out, I started to laugh again. I couldn't stop. Skeletal titters stirred among the IV tubes above me as my laughter, rousing pain to full fury, turned to screams. But before Mom understood that I was sliding out of control, before a nurse came running with a needle, she said, “Roger understands why you don't want to see him, that it would only upset you, but he went and got this from your father. He said it was your favorite doll when you were a little girl."

  * * *

  Ghoulmaster

  Finding gifts to please my baby sister wasn't easy. She was married to J. Carter Hazard and lived in a mansion on Zaman's Hill, while I had rooms on the raffish side of the Miskatonic. I brought some flowers I'd picked and a bottle of wine when I came to dinner.

  “Felix!” She was delighted to see me, but strangely surprised. After our fond embrace, she held me at arms’ length and stared. “What happened to you?"

  I examined my new cashmere topcoat. It displayed no ghastly stains. My stomach thwarted an attempt to examine my shoes, but I was ninety per cent certain I was wearing them. I said, “When?"

  “Last night. Dinner?"

  “Oh. I thought...."

  “Yes, obviously, but how could you confuse the date of your own birth?"

  “It is?” I could have sworn my latest birthday had been celebrated only last week, when she had given me this very coat. I had thought to please her by wearing her gift so soon.

  “It was. Yesterday. We sent more than once to remind you, since you refuse to have a telephone, but that infuriating servant of yours only answers the door when it suits him."

  “I often sleep at my office...."

  “Which no one can find. Are you sure you have an office at the Old Lecture Hall? Well, there's no harm done. I had run out of Aubrey stories, and they're wildly popular. The Senator always asks about you."

  “That's not a bad thing at all, you know,” said my brother-in-law. We had walked through the atrium while we talked and entered the dining room, where he was well into his meal. “Half the time he can't recall my name, and I'm his cousin.” For a wealthy and well-connected man, he worried a lot about such slights. “But he certainly knows you, Doctor. Belated best wishes, by the way."

  I was curious to know how old I was, but I didn't want to improve their newest “Aubrey story” by asking.

  “What's this?” Carter examined the bottle Sarah had handed him through a servant. “I didn't know they made wine in El Salvador."

  “The bartender at Kinsella's recommended it highly,” I said.

  “Oh. That place by the tannery?” He returned the bottle to the maid and waved her off. “We'll have to try it some day."

  “The flowers are lovely,” Sarah said, primping them in a vase. “I'm sure few people have the unspoiled eye to see that goldenrod is beautiful."

  I admired the elegant tact of that compliment, but she spoiled it by sneezing. Anxious to divert their attention from my sorry gifts, I said, “Where are Susan and—?” To my chagrin, I had forgotten my nephew's name.

  “Frederick, of course, has been with that Chicago law firm for the past two years.” Most fathers would have used his tone to confess that a son was riding with Hell's Angels. “Susan.... “Saying nothing more about her, he brooded darkly. I had fond memories of Susan scrambling over me like a little monkey to discover gifts I would hide about my person. As she was only a year younger than Frederick, she would be less than enraptured with the rag doll in my pocket. I dimly recalled an embarrassment last year, or perhaps the year before, when a handsome young lady had ransacked my garments and feigned delight with the bird-shaped whistle she had found.

  “We fear Susan has fallen in with evil companions,” Sarah said. “Do you know of Mrs. Kilpatrick?"

  “I know who she is. There was some unpleasantness...?"

  “Very good!” Hazard laughed without humor. “'Unpleasantness,’ indeed! A couple of years ago, her son, Roger, disappeared after killing his bride. But since the lady is the only one left on the scene, I should put her on my list of suspects, wouldn't you, Doctor?"

  “What's she got to do with little Susan? The woman must be my age."

  “Sixty, actually, though she looks absurdly younger,” Sarah said, denying me any clue I might have used. But she sensed my confusion and kindly added, “You're fifty, Felix."

  “And a day,” I said, and this pleasantry lifted some of the gloom from the table; though not all of it.

  They didn't ask for my help, but I was uniquely placed to give it. Through the window of my office that faced Mt. Tabor Cemetery, after I had removed a clutter of papers and bones, I could look down on the home of Mrs. Kilpatrick. An unhealthy place to live, I thought, with its unkempt grounds blending into the necropolis.

  Now you may think from my account of my birthday party that I am a dunce. If my own w
ord counts for anything, I'm not, but my mind keeps different time from others'. Not until a full day after Carter mentioned those murders, when I looked on the Kilpatrick home and thought of its unhealthiness, did I connect the scandal with a girl I'd known, Amy Winfield.

  Among the follies of my youth had been an ill-advised book that elaborated on certain queer local folktales about ghouls. Folklore was not my specialty. I am a physician, and was at that time working toward a second doctorate in comparative anatomy. But some imp of the perverse prompted me to relax from my studies by writing that stupid book. It was printed in a small edition by Derby & Son, a local firm notorious for publishing anything about the history, real or imagined, of Arkham.

  Why legends of ghouls should have taken such firm root in New England as early as the seventeenth century was a mystery, but H.P. Lovecraft had not been wrong in tracing hints of this myth back to Puritan times in his disturbing story, “Pickman's Model.” This tale had given me nightmares as a boy and later impelled me to an ill-advised midnight ramble through Boston's North End, in search of the approximate locale of Pickman's studio, when I was a Harvard undergraduate. Fortunately I was a large and rather mad-looking undergraduate, and the knots of ducktailed thugs who clustered at every other street-corner let me pass without drawing their switchblades. Even they avoided some of the darker and twistier alleys, and I suspected I might be onto something as I threaded my way through the slum, but I only succeeded in getting myself braced and frisked by a couple of suspicious police officers and giving myself a few more nightmares.

  The legend of the ghoul and the word itself are of Arabic origin, so one wonders how they could have impinged upon the consciousness of our earlier settlers, when the Arabian Nights had not been available in popular translation, and when Puritans would have abhorred it if it had, but a 1680 entry in the journal of my ancestor, Preserved Aubrey, speaks of “ye foule Gowles that maketh a mockerie of Christian burial in ye Precincts of Mt. Tabor cemetery.” I must admit that he tended to be a ranter, never entirely coherent, and he may have been writing figuratively in connection with one of the many religious disputes that all too often seized his attention.