“Come around here...please. Don’t be afraid...”
And so she did, the older woman reluctantly following, muttering in an alien tongue. In the back room I quickly washed my hands (afraid they would flee if I didn’t act fast), then ran to fetch some tape and gauze from one of the narrow aisles. Ng allowed me to unwrap her small hand, and I cleaned it in the sink, lathering it between my own. As the blood both dry and fresh was scrubbed away, I saw that the wounding consisted of four nasty lacerations across the top of her hand, deep but not requiring stitches. I wondered what machinery she had caught her hand in; to me it looked like a panther had raked her with its claws, but I told myself her exotic appearance was making my imagination too fanciful.
I bandaged her hand properly, as promised, and told her, “Come back when it needs to be changed again, will you?”
She smiled, nodded...and to my honest surprise, did return, the next day, and alone.
So it began, with my kindness, and our touching, and her blood. I couldn’t wait for the weekends; her lovely face was superimposed over the dusty text of my school books. Several weeks passed, and she managed to come in alone every Saturday and Sunday. Finally, one Sunday afternoon, as it was near my time to leave, I asked her if I could walk her home, or maybe to get some coffee. She was visibly hesitant, and I cursed my foolishness, but then she said, “Go your house? People see us coffee. They talk. Your people. My people...”
I wondered what my parents would say if I brought her home; I lived with them in their large old Victorian. But I was too excited to decline. So Ng waited until I closed up, and we stepped outside together into the biting February air, and there floating toward us like some apparition was the stern faced woman with her cracked doll’s head, extending a claw of a hand to Ng. Commanding her, come to fetch her.
Ng spoke defiantly in her native tongue, but the woman seized her roughly by the elbow and began dragging her off. I wanted to speak up, but was too timid, and Ng gave in, casting a sad look at me over her shoulder.
III
The next weekend there came a great snowstorm, a howling wrathful god of a blizzard that dumped thirty inches of heavy wet snow on Eastborough before it was spent. On such a night, one would expect even drunken brutes to remain in their warm homes. Instead, for whatever reasons led to the final decision, that was the night that seven men from the town set out with shotguns and cans of gasoline for the warehouse by the train tracks. Perhaps it was the way the deep snow transformed our familiar town into a savage, isolating, alien world that stirred their fears and restlessness beyond the point they could endure.
The first I learned of the incident was when – it being past midnight, and I the only one awake, pouring over a text book I heard a faint rapping at my bedroom window. I expected it to be the scraping of a whipped tree branch, but parted the curtains nonetheless and started violently when I saw a dark face peering in at me. I had a flashlight by my bed in case we lost power, pointed it at the glass, and saw Ng’s face hovering in the cold black beyond.
I let her in, of course, and took her into the basement so my parents wouldn’t hear us converse. She obviously had dressed hurriedly, inadequately, and was next to frozen. I took a blanket from the laundry corner and wrapped it around her shoulders, toweled her hair dry myself. “What are you doing here? How did you find me?” I whispered as I worked. And then I noticed the burnt smell about her. “What happened?”
“Grayeyes– “ she said. It was the first time she called me that, and she never called me anything else. Later, she would admit that the color of my eyes – more gray than blue – had fascinated her, as hers had me. “Men come to our place. Shoot boss. Make fire. Only Ng escape. They not see me, but if see me kill me. I must stay here. Please...please, Grayeyes.” She touched my face. Ah, seductress! But it wasn’t a charade, wasn’t insincere. I took her hand from my face...but I continued to hold it in my own.
In the morning, I confessed to my parents that I had taken her in. Naturally, they were alarmed, unhappy, concerned that the band that had gutted the warehouse would seek her out, too. I convinced them that the marauders didn’t know she survived, let alone here in our house. I pleaded, and at last they gave in. Ng would remain in the basement, however. There was a corner of the basement, away from the furnace, the water heater, the laundry area, on the other side of the stairs, where we stored boxes of Christmas decorations and the like. I carried what I could up to the attic to clear it out, and into that corner dragged our old sofa, which we kept down in the basement to sit and read on when doing the wash. This became Ng’s bed, our cellar her refuge, her sanctuary.
It was difficult returning to school, several days later, leaving this stranger – however meek and seemingly harmless – alone with my parents. Especially as the details of the brutal attack began to circulate...this, despite the fact that no one had been arrested in connection with it, yet. (And no one ever was, though three of the men said to have been responsible died unnatural deaths two in automobile accidents, and one having been found in his garage as late as 1969, with his throat cut, strung upside-down from the ceiling.)
But the first day I rushed home from school to find all three of them alive and well. My mother had brought food down to Ng, who had only ventured upstairs to use the toilet and bathe. Ng smiled her crooked, sweet smile upon seeing me return, but my father drew me into the living room to whisper to me with a harshness born of nervousness.
“I heard some of what they saw in the warehouse...weird stuff. Animal bones hanging from the ceiling in the cellar, and symbols painted on the walls, and the weirdest thing: out of the cellar floor there was sticking these two big statues, just heads, coming right out of the dirt. Like the warehouse was built around them, but how could that be? They weren’t dug up out of the floor by those people, either, and they were too big to have been dragged in there...”
“Statues of what?”
“Just heads, is all. Slanty eyed heads. Old...real old.”
IV
It was again past midnight, the first time we made love; on that narrow musty sofa in the basement, my parents asleep in their comfortable large bed above us.
I still remember the feel, the smell, the taste of her flesh. In the intimate soft glow of her one lamp, it had a warm honey color. She was so tiny, delicate but not weak, her breasts with their brown nipples adolescent, her skin flawless and so smooth, so unlined, barely creased, showing no muscle definition and yet her limbs so slender, that she resembled a child or a doll, not yet fully formed. There was but the barest wisp of coarse hair at the meeting of her legs, her small strong legs that hitched around me, squeezed me, as she squeezed her eyes tightly shut and bared her crooked teeth as if in agony, but moaning so softly in pleasure, her black hair flowing silken over my arms, her arms wrapped desperately around me, as if she would never let me go.
It was the first of many such times, and my parents of course knew what was happening. Soon they never came down cellar without knocking first. The weeks passed. It was now spring. But Ng would not leave the house; she was convinced, and I could not really deny it, that the police knew who the killers were, and would not protect her as they protected them. She feared, as my family did, that our house would be attacked next if her presence came to light. And so, it became summer. We had so much more time together that I almost did not want to return to school that fall. But during the summer I helped my father transform our basement for Ng. We built a wall that divided off her room from the rest of the basement, starting just where the stairs descended, so that the entrance to her tiny apartment (compartment would be fairer) was concealed in the dark beneath the stairs. My father was not cheerful about his labors and the expense, but it didn’t show in his work (or was it that his love for me, and pity for Ng, showed in his work?). We installed a toilet and a cramped shower stall in her corner, and I bought her a narrow child’s bed. We boarded up the one small window in her room so she wouldn’t be as nervous about using her lamp at nigh
t. I purchased a second hand bureau, and in Worcester I bought clothing for her; up to now she had been wearing some of my mother’s things. (When first she came to my home she had only the clothes on her back, and some few possessions she had gathered into a burlap sack.) After a time we stopped wondering how long we might have to take these precautions; it became our way of life, as it had for the family of Anne Frank, hiding from their persecutors..
And so, years began to pass.
I became a doctor, a general practitioner, and converted rooms in the hulking Victorian to make my office and two examination rooms. My parents, good as always, all but moved to the second floor. After a time I could have bought my own house, and moved Ng into it, but she would not leave her place of asylum. I told her in Worcester she would not be so alien in the more heterogeneous throngs of the city, but still she passionately refused. One time when I became especially insistent, and grabbed her arm as if to drag her upstairs, where she hadn’t ventured in months, she snatched up a steak knife from the small table I’d given her and pressed its tip under her own jaw. I let her go.
And so I never married, as the years continued by. I declined dates, and once heard it rumored I was disinclined toward my own sex. I felt like the Beast, keeping his Beauty hostage in his castle dungeon, except that she was my willing prisoner. As time turned reality to history, even folklore, some of the rumors about that night of the blizzard also took on a fairy tale quality...
One patient of mine was an elderly man who lived with his son, and who drank too much and constantly injured himself in falls and such. One afternoon, as I was treating him, he began to speak of that night. Naturally, I encouraged him, though I could plainly tell he was already drunk. And this is what he said he saw, peeking out his window into the wild storm.
“I heard a noise, and I looked out the window, and I seen this plow, I thought, moving through Parker’s Meadow, where there’s houses now. I thought, what the hell’s a plow doing in that field? But as I watched it, I saw it wasn’t any truck. It was some kind of big animal, I swear to God...big and black, and it started nosing down into the snow, right there in the middle of the meadow, burrowing right down ‘til in about fifteen minutes the damn thing was gone. And the snow covered up the spot, of course, and come spring I went out there one day and there was no sign of the spot. But I saw that thing, whatever it was, and it must’ve come through the woods from Eastborough Swamp.”
“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 st
aggered 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.
Cthulhu Mythos Writers Sampler 2013 Page 4
