The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991)

by David G. Hartwell (Ed. )

answered, lighting a cigar and unfolding The Times.

  At Peasmarsh station we said good-bye, and he got out,

  and I saw him ride off; I went on to London, where I stayed

  the night.

  When I got home the next afternoon, a very wet one, by

  the way, my sister Fanny greeted me with: “ Where’s Mr.

  Charrington?”

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  E. Nesbit

  “ Goodness knows,” I answered testily. Every man, since

  Cain, has resented that kind of question.

  “ I thought you might have heard from him,” she went on,

  “ as you’re to give him away tomorrow.”

  “ Isn’t he back?” I asked, for I had confidently expected

  to find him at home.

  “ No, Geoffrey” —my sister Fanny always had a way of

  jumping to conclusions, especially such conclusions as were

  least favorable to her fellow-creatures—“ he has not returned,

  and, what is more, you may depend upon it he won’t. You

  mark my words, there’ll be no wedding tomorrow.”

  My sister Fanny has a power of annoying me which no

  other human being possesses.

  “ You mark my words,” I retorted with asperity, “ you had

  better give up making such a thundering idiot of yourself.

  There’ll be more wedding tomorrow than ever you’ll take the

  first part in.” A prophecy which, by the way, came true.

  But though I could snarl confidently to my sister, I did not

  feel so comfortable when late that night, I, standing on the

  doorstep of John’s house, heard that he had not returned. I

  went home gloomily through the rain. Next morning brought

  a brilliant blue sky, gold sun, and all such softness of air and

  beauty of cloud as go to make up a perfect day. I woke with

  a vague feeling of having gone to bed anxious, and of being

  rather averse to facing that anxiety in the light of full wakefulness.

  But with my shaving-water came a note from John which

  relieved my mind and sent me up to the Forsters’ with a light

  heart.

  May was in the garden. I saw her blue gown through the

  hollyhocks as the lodge gates swung to behind me. So I did

  not go up to the house, but turned aside down the turfed path.

  “ He’s written to you too,” she said, without preliminary

  greeting, when I reached her side.

  “ Yes, I ’m to meet him at the station at three and come

  straight on to the church.”

  Her face looked pale, but there was a brightness in her

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  eyes, and a tender quiver about the mouth that spoke of renewed happiness.

  “ Mr. Branbridge begged him so to stay another night that

  he had not the heart to refuse,” she went on. “ He is so kind,

  but I wish he hadn’t stayed.”

  I was at the station at half past two. I felt rather annoyed

  with John. It seemed a sort of slight to the beautiful girl who

  loved him that he should come, as it were, out of breath, and

  with the dust of travel upon him, to take her hand, which

  some of us would have given the best years of our lives to

  take.

  But when the three o’clock train glided in, and glided out

  again having brought no passengers to our little station, I was

  more than annoyed. There was no other train for thirty-five

  minutes; I calculated that, with much hurry, we might just

  get to the church in time for the ceremony; but, oh, what a

  fool to have missed that first train! What other man could

  have done it?

  That thirty-five minutes seemed a year as I wandered

  around the station reading the advertisements and the timetables, and the company’s by-laws, and getting more and more angry with John Charrington. This confidence in his own

  power of getting everything he wanted the minute he wanted

  it was leading him too far. I hate waiting. Everyone does,

  but I believe I hate it more than anyone else. The three thirty-

  five was late, of course.

  I ground my pipe between my teeth and stamped with impatience as I watched the signals. Click. The signal went down. Five minutes later I flung myself into the carriage that

  I had brought for John.

  “ Drive to the church!” I said as someone shut the door.

  “ Mr. Charrington hasn’t come by this train.”

  Anxiety now replaced anger. What had become of the man?

  Could he have been taken ill suddenly? I had never known

  him have a day’s illness in his life. And even so he might

  have telegraphed. Some awful accident must have happened

  to him. The thought that he had played her false never—no,

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  not for a moment—entered my head. Yes, something terrible

  had happened to him, and on me lay the task of telling his

  bride. I almost wished the carriage would upset and break

  my head so that someone else might tell her, not I, who—

  But that’s nothing to do with this story.

  It was five minutes to four as we drew up to the churchyard

  gate. A double row of eager onlookers lined the path from

  lych-gate to porch. I sprang from the carriage and passed up

  between them. Our gardener had a good place near the front

  door. I stopped.

  “ Are they waiting still, Byles?’’ I asked simply to gain

  time, for of course I knew they were by the waiting crowd’s

  attentive attitude.

  “ Waiting, sir? No, no, sir; why, it must be over by now.”

  “ Over! Then Mr. Charrington’s come?”

  “ To the minute, sir, must have missed you somehow, and

  I say, sir,” lowering his voice, “ I never seen Mr. John the

  least bit so afore, but my opinion is he’s been drinking pretty

  free. His clothes was all dusty and his face like a sheet. I tell

  you I didn’t like the looks of him at all, and the folks inside

  are saying all sorts of things. You’ll see, something’s gone

  very wrong with Mr. John, and he’s tried liquor. He looked

  like a ghost, and in he went with his eyes straight before him,

  with never a look or a word for none of us, him that was

  always such a gentleman!”

  I had never heard Byles make so long a speech. The crowd

  in the churchyard were talking in whispers and getting ready

  rice and slippers to throw at the bride and bridegroom. The

  ringers were ready with their hands on the ropes to ring out

  the merry peal as the bride and bridegroom should come out.

  A murmur from the church announced them; out they

  came. Byles was right. John Charrington did not look himself. There was dust on his coat, his hair was disarranged.

  He seemed to have been in some row, for there was a black

  mark above his eyebrow. He was deathly pale. But his pallor

  was not greater than that of the bride, who might have been

  carved in ivory—dress, veil, orange blossoms, face and all.

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  As they passed, the ringers stopped—there were six of

  them—and then, on the ears expecting the gay wedding peal,

  came the slow tolling of the passing bell.

  A thrill of horror at so foolish a jest from the ringers passed

  through us all. Bu
t the ringers themselves dropped the ropes

  and fled like rabbits out of the church into the sunlight. The

  bride shuddered, and grey shadows came about her mouth,

  but the bridegroom led her on down the path where the people stood with the handfuls of rice; but the handfuls were never thrown, and the wedding-bells never rang. In vain the

  ringers were urged to remedy their mistake: They protested

  with many whispered expletives that they would see themselves further first.

  In a hush like the hush in the chamber of death, the bridal

  pair passed into their carriage and its door slammed behind

  them.

  Then the tongues were loosed. A babel of anger, wonder,

  and conjecture from the guests and the spectators.

  “ If I ’d seen his condition, sir,” said old Forster to me as

  we drove off, “ I would have stretched him on the floor of the

  church, sir, by Heaven I would, before I ’d have let him marry

  my daughter!”

  Then he put his head out of the window.

  “ Drive like hell,” he cried to the coachman. “ Don’t spare

  the horses.”

  He was obeyed. We passed the bride’s carriage. I forbore

  to look at it, and old Forster turned his head away and swore.

  We reached home before it.

  We stood in the hall doorway, in the blazing afternoon sun,

  and in about half a minute we heard wheels crunching the

  gravel. When the carriage stopped in front of the steps, old

  Forster and I ran down.

  “ Great Heaven, the carriage is empty! And yet—”

  I had the door opened in a minute, and this is what I saw—

  no sign of John Charrington; only May, his wife, a huddled

  heap of white satin lying half on die floor of the carriage and

  half on the seat.

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  E. Nesbit

  “ I drove straight here, sir,” said the coachman, as the

  bride’s father lifted her out; “ and I ’ll swear no one got out

  of the carriage.”

  We carried her into the house in her bridal dress and drew

  back her veil. I saw her face. Shall I ever forget it? White,

  white and drawn with agony and horror, bearing such a look

  of terror as I have never seen since except in dreams. And

  her hair, her radiant blonde hair, I tell you it was white as

  snow.

  As we stood, her father and I, half mad with the horror

  and mystery of it, a boy came up the avenue—a telegraph

  boy. He brought the orange envelope to me. I tore it open.

  Mr. Charrington was thrown from the dog-cart on his way

  to the station at half past one. Killed on the spot!

  And he was married to May Forster in our parish church

  at half past three, in the presence of half the parish.

  “ Alive or dead I mean to be married!”

  What had passed in that carriage on the homeward drive?

  No one knows—no one will ever know. Oh, May! Oh, my

  dear!

  Before a week was over, they laid her beside her husband

  in our little churchyard on the thyme-covered hill—the

  churchyard where they had kept their love-trysts.

  Thus was accomplished John Charrington’s wedding.

  Karl Edward Wagner

  Sticks

  Karl Edward Wagner is a young writer committed to the

  tradition of modern horror and dark fantasy. His mentor

  was Manly W ade Wellman but his influences range

  throughout contemporary horror. “Sticks” is generally

  regarded as his finest work to date. It is based upon an

  anecdote of the great horror artist, Lee Brown Coye,

  who told of strange, weird artifacts and drawings found

  in an abandoned farmhouse in upstate New York and

  around it. Although W agner’s story is overtly a Love-

  craftian story of historical and cosmic evil, a forbidden

  knowledge piece, it is also structured to awaken in the

  reader imaginative possibilities deeply embedded in the

  human subconscious. Wagner is a forceful personality in

  the contemporary field and editor of the annual volume,

  The Year's Best Horror Stories, as well as the small-

  press publisher of Carcosa House books.

  1

  The lashed-together framework of sticks jutted from a

  small caim alongside the stream. Colin Leverett studied

  it in perplexment—half a dozen odd lengths of branch, wired

  together at cross angles for no fathomable purpose. It reminded him unpleasantly of some bizarre crucifix, and he wondered what might lie beneath the caim.

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  Karl Edward Wagner

  It was the spring of 1942—the kind of day to make the war

  seem distant and unreal, although the draft notice waited on

  his desk. In a few days Leverett would lock his rural studio,

  wonder if he would see it again—be able to use its pens and

  brushes and carving tools when he did return. It was good-

  by to the woods and streams of upstate New York, too. No

  fly rods, no tramps through the countryside in Hitler’s Europe. No point in putting off fishing that troutstream he had driven past once, exploring back roads of the Otselic Valley.

  Mann Book—so it was marked on the old Geological Survey map—ran southeast of DeRuyter. The unfrequented country road crossed over a stone bridge old before the first

  horseless carriage, but Leverett’s Ford eased across and onto

  the shoulder. Taking fly rod and tackle, he included pocket

  flask and tied an iron skillet to his belt. He’d work his way

  downstream a few miles. By afternoon he’d lunch on fresh

  trout, maybe some bullfrog-legs.

  It was a fine clear stream, though difficult to fish as dense

  bushes hung out from the bank, broken with stretches of open

  water hard to work without being seen. But the trout rose

  boldly to his fly, and Leverett was in fine spirits.

  From the bridge the valley along Mann Brook began as

  fairly open pasture, but half a mile downstream the land had

  fallen into disuse and was thick with second growth evergreens and scrub-apple trees. Another mile, and the scrub merged with dense forest, which continued unbroken. The

  land here, he had learned, had been taken over by the state

  many years back.

  As Leverett followed the stream he noted the remains of

  an old railroad embankment. No vestige of tracks or ties—

  only the embankment itself, overgrown with large trees. The

  artist rejoiced in the beautiful dry-wall culverts spanning the

  stream as it wound through the valley. To his mind it seemed

  eerie, this forgotten railroad running straight and true through

  virtual wilderness.

  He could imagine an old wood-burner with , its conical

  stack, steaming along through the valley dragging two or three

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  wooden coaches. It must be a branch of the old Oswego Midland Rail Road, he decided, abandoned rather suddenly in the 1870’s. Leverett, who had a memory for detail, knew of

  it from a story his grandfather told of riding the line in 1871

  from Otselic to DeRuyter on his honeymoon. The engine had

  so labored up the steep grade over Crumb Hill that he got off

  to walk alongside. Probably that sharp grade was the reason

  for the line’s abandonment.

  When h
e came across a scrap of board nailed to several

  sticks set into a stone wall, his darkest thought was that it

  might read “ No Trespassing.” Curiously, though the board

  was weathered featureless, the nails seemed quite new. Leverett scarcely gave it much thought, until a short distance beyond he came upon another such contrivance. And another.

  Now he scratched at the day’s stubble on his long jaw. This

  didn’t make sense. A prank? But on whom? A child’s game?

  No, the arrangement was far too sophisticated. As an artist,

  Leverett appreciated the craftsmanship of the work—the calculated angles and lengths, the designed intricacy of the maddeningly inexplicable devices. There was something distinctly uncomfortable about their effect.

  Leverett reminded himself that he had come here to fish

  and continued downstream. But as he worked around a thicket

  he again stopped in puzzlement.

  Here was a small open space with more of the stick lattices

  and an arrangement of flat stones laid out on the ground. The

  stones—likely taken from one of the many dry-wall culverts—made a pattern maybe twenty by fifteen feet, that at first glance resembled a ground plan for a house. Intrigued,

  Leverett quickly saw that this was not so. If the ground plan

  were for anything, it would have to be for a small maze.

  The bizarre lattice structures were all around. Sticks from

  trees and bits of board nailed together in fantastic array. They

  defied description; no two seemed alike. Some were only one

  or two sticks lashed together in parallel or at angles. Others

  were worked into complicated lattices of dozens of sticks and

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  boards. One could have been a child’s tree house—it was built

  in three planes, but was so abstract and useless that it could

  be nothing more than an insane conglomeration of sticks and

  wire. Sometimes the contrivances were stuck in a pile of

  stones or a wall, maybe thrust into the railroad embankment

  or nailed to a tree.

  It should have been ridiculous. It wasn’t. Instead it seemed

  somehow sinister—these utterly inexplicable, meticulously

  constructed stick lattices spread through a wilderness where

  only a tree-grown embankment or a forgotten stone wall gave

  evidence that man had ever passed through. Leverett forgot

  about trout and frog-legs, instead dug into his pockets for a