by Greg James
As you might guess, I was Bernice’s ill-educated nurse throughout this time. Bathing her, dressing her, undressing her, changing her sheets, all fell to me. It hurt me to leave her alone in that place when I had to go to the village for medicines. I walked the crunching wintry paths in mortal fear, thinking I would come back and find her dead each time. No, Fate was to be far more cruel to me than that. She was to slip away before my eyes, I was to again feel the painful snapping of the web of Time as she was torn free of it. In a dream I may have had, or made up since, I saw that endless echoing tunnel I have spoken of and, in it, I saw a spider with Death’s head proudly painted upon its ridged, glistening back. It had bound her as an embalmer might, mummifying her from shoulders to ankles in sticky strands of shimmering night-silk, and it was dragging her along, away from me. I was held fast by the circumference of the tunnel, it being narrow and agonising to make passage through, much as Life is. All I could do, being so trapped, was snatch and grab at her ankles as she disappeared, taken away from me into the blackness of Hell. Her death-screams, imagined, wake me even now.
So, as you now know, I watched her die.
Those last moments, they haunt me, because she never looked lovelier to me than at that moment. On my knees by our low bed, cartilage grinding against the grubby ground, I kissed her many times. On the brow, the lips, the cheeks. On the knuckles and tips of her elegant fingers. On the ankles, the soles of her feet and the pads of her toes. Then, as she breathed her last, I kissed lightly each eyelid and held her close as Life left her for good. I could not bear to part with her. As soon as she was gone, I knew I could not lay Bernice to rest and let her rot away in muck and dust like all of the others. I could not consign her to Death and let His spider drag her away into the dark. So I set about my studies; the dream, I think, if it is not my brain’s lie, gave me the idea.
I quickly sent messages out for the ephemera necessary to preserve a corpse. Friends may desert one but business contacts never do, not when there is the chance of a cent or shilling to be made. It was the cold season so that bought me some time as no flies would come yet, scenting my love as a nesting ground. I spread salt upon her to drive out moisture and anointed her nudity with oils and scented ointment before closely wrapping her in linen; not seeing the similarity between how I was arranging her and her appearance in my dream, which as I say, might or might not have been a creation of later Time. It’s all a muddle and a mess in my head, to be sure. Nothing’s certain, now or ever.
I had left her feet bare and unbound, you see, and it looked decidedly odd with them poking out like that. Especially when everything was well covered by my treated linen wrappings. I confess I was somewhat fixated on them, couldn’t bear to cover them up. The ghost of my dark dream acting on my brain or something else at work? Who knows?
I would sit there, looking at them, counting those perfect toes over and over. I saw imaginary landscapes come alive in those long, lonesome hours. I bound her feet up in the end though I was sad to do so. It was then that they intervened – those who I can no longer call friends or family. The door of our hovel was struck from its frame and I was dragged, kicking and screaming, from my beloved. I watched them bear her away for the burial I had guarded against. They wished her to vanish beneath soil and grubs. They beat me until I was unconscious and, when I awoke, I was alone. The deed was done.
Bernice was gone.
II
Daybreak came after a long dark night, filtering in through the dusty grime-caked glass. I felt sick as I was alone. I cooked myself a meagre breakfast of beans and toasted bread on the stove, my mind was black and in chaos, and, at the heart of that dark storm, was Bernice. A candle flame, white with death, standing though blind and bound, patches showing on her bindings where oil and ointment had leaked through. There was something wrong with her feet though I couldn’t identify it. There was a smudge, a smear, obscuring those pretty porcelain things. Picking at my food, unable to shift this weird image from my troubled, fretting brain, I began to wonder. My eyes were searching the shack, darting from darkness to darkness, for it was everywhere, always there, evil iridescence. It gave me no clue. Told me nothing. So I spent the day aching and sore, not eating, nor drinking enough to ensure a peaceful night.
I awoke, this being my second night alone, to a shocking sight.
She was there, before me, standing in our shameful shack’s broken doorway. I could feel the cut of the night wind on my skin, raising gooseflesh so I knew this was no dream. She had returned though they had taken her from me.
That said, as she was bound, so was I, I could not move though I was wide awake. I could see her face showing through the linen, now rags, for she had been determinedly chewing it away with her teeth. I could see marks of chafing on her chin and lips; raw and vampiric they were. Her eyes, the emptiness in them, bored into me, black needles of ice driving through my heart, transfixing it. She swayed before me, a shorn and lonely harvest reed, her mouth open and uttering a cry. If I could have, I would have covered my ears. The sound was awful; a grating of dead tissue, dried muscle, cartilage and arteries. I didn’t understand, why was she here?
Then I saw it, that smear, that smudge espied the night before, a grim, discolouration below the ankles. I tried to perceive it clearly but my eyes remained unable to focus, I fell back into sickly sleep, my ears ringing with the discordant notes made by Bernice’s howl.
The light of day speared through the shack, forming a whitish web of motes and faerie dust. I got to my feet, skipping breakfast, I dressed and hurried out, stopping only to fetch a spade. I had to know, the suspicion wrestling in my gut, it talked to me of one thing alone. A reason and cause for these nightly visitations from my dear dead Bernice.
She was interred in the family plot and, all things considered, I should have waited until twilight at the earliest to go about my business, but I was frantic and this made me reckless. I hacked away soil, I tore up turf, using the spade more as an axe than any other thing. The coffin showed, whole and unbroken, making my heart miss a beat.
Wedging the blade of the spade in, inch by inch, I braced myself against the lips of sundered earth I’d made. I pushed down and pulled up, pushed down, pulled up; my eyes shut, listening to the sharp sounds of wood splitting, nails prying free. It was open, so in I looked, my eyes hungrily searching, knowing but not wanting to. I then saw what I had come to find. Why I had violated my beloved’s gravesite. Below her ankles, there was a smudge, an ugly smear, of blood and unctuous graveyard juices. Flesh and bone had been cut through. Bernice’s feet were gone.
III
Back to the shack I strode, sweat running in greasy rivulets down my face. I had left the spade in the ground, where I had slashed at the earth upon my bitter discovery. The door, I threw it open. The bed, our lowly resting place, I tore it apart. I found what I was seeking; a jewellery box, polished and decorated with orgiastic swirls of brass. It had been Bernice’s, where she kept her few precious items. I snapped it open and stared at what was inside, resting on the blue velvet lining.
Ten white treasures. All fine in form. The blood had been carefully cleaned off from them and rough edges left by the initial cutting and sawing had been smoothed and neatly trimmed. Wrought from ivory, perhaps, fashioned from marble, masterfully carved. That’s what one might think, at first sight.
I, however knew the truth, and in that moment, there was a snap inside my brain. Something came away that held strong before though tightly stretched. I opened my mouth to cry out but all I could hear was my throat, possessed, making the horrible charnel howl as Bernice’s spectre. I could feel her, she was there, inside me, at one with the rotting darkness that hung about in that dwarven house, looking out, hatefully, through my eyes at what was within that benighted box, at what I had taken from her in death – her stolen toes …
A Soul who Wrote by Strange Starlight
The tower was a thing of echoes. A lonesome hooning sounded from it throughout the wee small hou
rs of each and every morning; keeping dreams at bay from the minds of those who heard it, instead inviting nightmares in. Sarah had been listening to the sonorous songs of the tower all of her life. Every night, she would lie awake when she should have slept, her ears tuning into the emptiness which had settled and found its voice in that crumbling horn of stone. There were no houses near to the tower, it was a thing alone, a beacon of solitude, hemmed in by a wasteland of shattered rock and excavated mud. From her window, Sarah could see it and, when the house was quiet, and she was alone, she looked out upon the tower, wishing it would sing to her but it never did, not in the daylight.
Sevengraves was a queer town on the coast of England in the south-eastern county of Felfolk. It was not quite there, time ran slow around its borders and mermaids were said to safely frolic in its waters without fear of capture or torture by lascivious men. The manners and mode of dress there were considered to be quaint by outsiders who strayed along its ornate streets and cobbled roads. Few of them stayed though, because the tower, when it sang in the night, sent those not of the town into spasms of fear and desperate self-loathing. They often fled on foot, crying out to all they passed that demons were after them; bulbous creatures with porcine features and long black knives for fingernails. No such demons were seen and the townsfolk let the outsiders go on their way.
Sarah was the daughter of a merchant. A heavy-hearted man who had lost his wife to the wasting sickness, which often plagued Sevengraves during the winter season. For this reason, Christmastide was a sombre affair in their household, being a festival spent in memoriam. Sarah found it hard-going, year after year, because she had never known her mother. It was difficult to annually mourn someone who was not even a pleasant remembrance from childhood afternoons. Sarah understood her father, that he meant well, but she also knew that he was keeping her. She had not been schooled and had no profession she could call her own. In her father’s eyes, she was meant to forever sit upstairs in her room, a hermetically-sealed miniature of her mother, to be fed and tended to but never allowed out into the world. She knew that was the thought her father could not bear; of harm coming to her in any form. It was in his eyes when they were together at breakfast, lunch and dinner. His eyelashes would shimmer with the expectorant that comes before true tears. A tremble would pass through him, from head to toe and then he would suddenly be sober again and the sudden tightness in her chest would come undone. Thus trapped and restricted in her life and movements, Sarah turned inward, fashioning her own world, using the books from her dead mother’s modest library for inspiration. She read of the Greeks, the Romans, the Norse and the Celts. Her dreams would be peopled with the gods and goddesses of yesteryear. The gay abandon of dances at midnight in woodland faerie rings, grand high adventures in forgotten cities, exploring the burial grounds of black-hearted dragons, these were her fantasies. For a time, in this way, she was content. But as she grew and blossomed, she came to know that fantasy was not enough alone.
“Something must be done,” she said to no-one, one day, for she had no friends, apart from her black cat, Entwhistle, who she sometimes liked to pretend was her Familiar.
Sarah sat down and began to write. Not at the usual times, for her father was a worrisome man and might be suspicious if he saw her scribbling away in the daylight hours. Writing was a long-recorded symptom of discontent and he would deduce that meant she was moving away from him, if not in body, in thought and spirit. So, Sarah wrote at night, by starlight; keeping a lone candle burning low as she scratched her words down onto paper. She listened always to the sound of her father’s snoring, stopping her work and snuffing the candle if she heard him become disturbed in his sleep. This was not a frequent occurrence though as the man was a heavy sleeper; a fact for which she gave thanks to the gods.
As she wrote and her portfolio of poems, tales and vignettes proliferated, she noticed odd words appearing, curious phrases that she could not remember putting down. Writing at night, she often found herself dozing, leaning over into the inviting abyss of sleep. Most times, she rallied herself but sometimes she did not. She became certain that it was on these latter occasions that she wrote the strangest of her stories, her fingers guided by some subtle Other hand. These stories were not of the Greeks, the Romans, the Norse or even the Celts but drawn from some alien sphere of influence, some darker doctrine she could not recall having read at all. I have puzzled long over these passages she left behind, they read not as narrative but almost as incantations, prayers invoking unpronounceable names, histories of planets where the cities are fashioned glass, people are wreaths of smoke, and flowing through it all there is a music, an ancient sonorous song conveyed not by mere words but by some arcane syllabic construction of sound that it is beyond my mortal ability to entirely decipher. Now, I am not going to tell you that she was somehow able to free herself of her father’s suffocating influence and then elope with a fair young man for that is the stuff of saccharine romances and not the truth I wish to impart here.
Her father did die eventually and so one might expect Sarah to have left the merchant’s ageing hovel for the wider world but she did not. However, from reading her work since, I now know that an escape was always uppermost in her mind though none of us guessed back then what manner of escape this would be. Sarah's fantastic dreams had given her a sensitivity, a yearning that might be best described as the most exquisite form of sehnsucht possible; as a magician is able to divine places both blessed and cursed by the working of spells, Sarah was able to divine her path out of this world and into one more in keeping with her desires by the exercise of this finely-wrought emotive acumen. The tower, her lonesome companion down through the years, which sang to her when she was writing out her sweetest and darkest of dreams, was to be the key to her escape.
She had once gone wandering to it as a small child, her heart possessing her in sleep. Her frantic father found her there, stumbling, chafing her knees as she tried to ascend the broken steps leading to the tower’s apex. He brought her home and spent whole nights awake watching over her, this was before the time her writing began, but she never repeated the expedition and he believed the fixation was a thing of the past. Dull naivety on his part, this assumption, for a careful soul can keep deep and profound love a secret if it so wishes and so Sarah did for many, many years.
The night of her second expedition to the tower is the tale I now have to tell. It was late on a Christmas Eve, when the town was drowning in the sound of boisterous revels, that she set out, crossing the coarse wastes surrounding the tower's base, she felt a gust of fetid wind tugging at her clothes, whispering to her in warning astral tones but she was not so easily deterred. Coming to the tower she found that, while there was no doorway, decay had left certain openings. Being petite, she was able to squirm her way through, revelling briefly in the dirt and roughness that her sheltered home-life had denied her. Then, she was through and inside, climbing the spiral staircase that wound around the tower’s interior. She came across a number of curious eldritch signs carved into the bare stone, their curvatures made her think of the Medusa with serpents in her hair. Running her fingertips over these queer depressions made her start as wet, electric shocks passed through her as words of diseased gold and enseamed silver took shape behind her eyes. These words she would need to know when she came to the top of the tower for they were a prayer to the thing she sought to bring forth from Outside.
There was a nocturnal rustling, followed by a weird whooping call, and then a fluttering as of colossal wings. Air whistled, parting violently, and it came soaring up, out of the black space below; thin and faceless with skin the colour and texture of spilt ink, its pterodactyl wings were beating into sure flight, and long-nailed hands thrust out while the scorpion barb of its segmented tail trailed, swaying, passing close to her. The hook of it glistened with a noxious bead of benighted venom. Then, it was gone, leaving a scented violet mist trailing in its wake. It was a demon from her dreams – one of the Night-Gaunts – the
y who carry their victims away to abysmal mountain lairs, using wicked fingernails and tail-barbs to tickle such unfortunates into insensibility. Fortunately for Sarah, this one appeared to have another purpose tonight than seeking out prey for such games. When the tower was once more quiet and the air settled, still, she continued her ascent.
Atop the tower, Sarah stood, looking out over the festive vista of the town and its harbour. Men and women were dancing in the streets, shouting and yelling their joy, their greetings. Children were all abed, stockings hanging. Parents, in the dark, were sneaking parcels into these cotton sheaths; leaving soft kisses on their little ones’ brows. This was what she was leaving behind and she felt a twinge in her heart but no more than that. The words of the prayer were acrid on her tongue, bitter from being kept there, unspoken. Sarah drew upon the forlorn depths of bound and fettered power that resided in the tower. Closing her eyes, she spoke, feeling storm-winds lashing about her as she did, hearing the Night-Gaunts, their charnel fingers and tail-tips clicking, swirling down out of the sky and then circling her, in orbit around the tower. This is what she cried out from on high that weird, wonderful night, “Ia! Ia! Shub-Niggurath! Ygnaiih! Ygnaiih! I call upon you, the Black Goat, she who bore the Thousand Young. Hear me and heed my words for they are true and of my heart.”
So called upon, Shub-Niggurath came, out of the night, at one with the storm, a boiling black froth of protean cloud edged with sickly silver traces; depths streaking and screaming with a thousand lost faces, maybe more, all of them singing the same desolate, wordless song as the tower. Sarah found that she was singing too though she was cold and the wind of the storm cut her to the bone. She felt nacreous lines of electricity set her heart throbbing in time with the febrile humming of the tower’s tortured matter. She called out to the spreading storm above, which now hung so low overhead; waiting, eager, fierce and intent on her – its diminutive summoner.
