notebook and stub of pencil. Busily he began to sketch the
more intricate structures. Perhaps someone could explain
them; perhaps there was something to their insane complexity
that warranted closer study for his own work.
Leverett was roughly two miles from the bridge when he
came upon the ruins of a house. It was an unlovely colonial
farmhouse, box-shaped and gambrel-roofed, fast falling into
the ground. Windows were dark and empty; the chimneys on
either end looked ready to topple. Rafters showed through
open spaces in the room, and the weathered boards of the
walls had in places rotted away to reveal hewn timber beams.
The foundation was stone and disproportionately massive.
From the size of the unmortared stone blocks, its builder had
intended the foundation to stand forever.
The house was nearly swallowed up by undergrowth and
rampant lilac bushes, but Leverett could distinguish what had
been a lawn with imposing shade trees. Farther back were
gnarled and sickly apple trees and an overgrown garden where
a few lost flowers still bloomed—wan and serpentine from
years in the wild. The stick lattices were everywhere—the
lawn, the trees, even the house were covered with the uncanny structures. They reminded Leverett of a hundred misshapen spider webs—grouped so closely together as to almost ensnare the entire house and clearing. Wondering, he
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sketched page on page of them, as he cautiously approached
the abandoned house.
He wasn’t certain just what he expected to find inside. The
aspect of the farmhouse was frankly menacing, standing as
it did in gloomy desolation where the forest had devoured the
works of man—where the only sign that man had been here
in this century were these insanely wrought latticeworks of
sticks and board. Some might have turned back at this point.
Leverett, whose fascination for the macabre was evident in
his art, instead was intrigued. He drew a rough sketch of the
farmhouse and the grounds, overrun with the enigmatic devices, with thickets of hedges and distorted flowers. He regretted that it might be years before he could capture the eeriness of this place on scratchboard or canvas.
The door was off its hinges, and Leverett gingerly stepped
within, hoping that the flooring remained sound enough to
bear even his sparse frame. The afternoon sun pierced the
empty windows, mottling the decaying floorboards with great
blotches of light. Dust drifted in the sunlight. The house was
empty—stripped of furnishings other than indistinct tangles
of rubble mounded over with decay and the drifted leaves of
many seasons.
Someone had been here, and recently. Someone who had
literally covered the mildewed walls with diagrams of the
mysterious lattice structures. The drawings were applied directly to the walls, crisscrossing the rotting wallpaper and crumbling plaster in bold black lines. Some of the vertiginous
complexity covered an entire wall like a mad mural. Others
were small, only a few crossed lines, and reminded Leverett
of cuneiform glyphics.
His pencil hurried over the pages of his notebook. Leverett
noted with fascination that a number of the drawings were
recognizable as schematics of lattices he had earlier sketched.
Was this then the planning room for the madman or educated
idiot who had built these structures? The gouges etched by
the charcoal into the soft plaster appeared fresh—done days
or months ago, perhaps.
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A darkened doorway opened into the cellar. Were these
drawings there as well? And what else? Leverett wondered if
he should dare it. Except for streamers of light that crept
through cracks in the flooring, the cellar was in darkness.
“ Hello?” he called. “ Anyone here?” It didn’t seem silly
just then. These stick lattices hardly seemed the work of a
rational mind. Leverett wasn’t enthusiastic with the prospect
of encountering such a person in this dark cellar. It occurred
to him that virtually anything might transpire here, and no
one in the world of 1942 would ever know.
And that in itself was too great a fascination for one of
Leverett’s temperament. Carefully he started down the cellar
stairs. They were stone and thus solid, but treacherous with
moss and debris.
The cellar was enormous—even more so in the darkness.
Leverett reached the foot of the steps and paused for his eyes
to adjust to the damp gloom. An earlier impression recurred
to him. The cellar was too big for the house. Had another
dwelling stood here originally—perhaps destroyed and rebuilt
by one of lesser fortune? He examined the stonework. Here
were great blocks of gneiss that might support a castle. On
closer look they reminded him of a fortress—for the dry-wall
technique was startlingly Mycenaean.
Like the house above, the cellar appeared to be empty,
although without light Leverett could not be certain what the
shadows hid. There seemed to be darker areas of shadow
along sections of the foundation wall, suggesting openings to
chambers beyond. Leverett began to feel uneasy in spite of
himself.
There was something here—a large tablelike bulk in the
center of the cellar. Where a few ghosts of sunlight drifted
down to touch its edges, it seemed to be of stone. Cautiously
he crossed the stone paving to where it loomed—waist-high,
maybe eight feet long and less wide. A roughly shaped slab
of gneiss, he judged, and supported by pillars of unmortared
stone. In the darkness he could only get a vague conception
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of the object. He ran his hand along the slab. It seemed to
have a groove along its edge.
His groping fingers encountered fabric, something cold and
leathery and yielding. Mildewed harness, he guessed in distaste.
Something closed on his wrist, set icy nails into his flesh.
Leverett screamed and lunged away with frantic strength.
He was held fast, but the object on the stone slab pulled
upward.
A sickly beam of sunlight came down to touch one end of
the slab. It was enough. As Leverett struggled backward and
the thing that held him heaved up from the stone table, its
face passed through the beam of light.
It was a lich’s face—desiccated flesh tight over its skull.
Filthy strands of hair were matted over its scalp, tattered lips
were drawn away from broken yellowed teeth, and, sunken
in their sockets, eyes that should be dead were bright with
hideous life.
Leverett screamed again, desperate with fear. His free hand
clawed the iron skillet tied to his belt. Ripping it loose, he
smashed at the nightmarish face with all his strength.
For one frozen instant of horror the sunlight let him see
the skillet crush through the mould-eaten forehead like an
axe—cleaving the dry flesh and brittle bone. The grip on his
wrist failed. The
cadaverous face fell away, and the sight of
its caved-in forehead and unblinking eyes from between which
thick blood had begun to ooze would awaken Leverett from
nightmare on countless nights.
But now Leverett tore free and fled. And when his aching
legs faltered as he plunged headlong through the scrub-
growth, he was spurred to desperate energy by the memory
of the footsteps that had stumbled up the cellar stairs behind
him.
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Karl Edward Wagner
2
When Colin Leverett returned from the war, his friends
marked him a changed man. He had aged. There were streaks
of gray in his hair; his springy step had slowed. The athletic
leanness of his body had withered to an unhealthy gauntness.
There were indelible lines to his face, and his eyes were
haunted.
More disturbing was an alteration of temperament. A mordant cynicism had eroded his earlier air of whimsical asceticism. His fascination with the macabre had assumed a darker mood, a morbid obsession that his old acquaintances found
disquieting. But it had been that kind of a war, especially for
those who had fought through the Apennines.
Leverett might have told them otherwise, had he cared to
discuss his nightmarish experience on Mann Brook. But Leverett kept his own counsel, and when he grimly recalled that creature he had struggled with in the abandoned cellar, he
usually convinced himself it had only been a derelict—a crazy
hermit whose appearance had been distorted by the poor light
and his own imagination. Nor had his blow more than glanced
off the man’s forehead, he reasoned, since the other had recovered quickly enough to give chase. It was best not to dwell upon such matters, and this rational explanation helped restore sanity when he awoke from nightmares of that face.
This Colin Leverett returned to his studio, and once more
plied his pens and brushes and carving knives. The pulp
magazines, where fans had acclaimed his work before the
war, welcomed him back with long lists of assignments.
There were commissions from galleries and collectors, unfinished sculptures and wooden models. Leverett busied himself.
There were problems now. Short Stories returned a cover
painting as “ too grotesque.” The publishers of a new anthology of horror stories sent back a pair of his interior drawings—“ too gruesome, especially the rotted, bloated faces of
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those hanged m en.” A customer returned a silver figurine,
complaining that the martyred saint was too thoroughly martyred. Even Weird Tales, after heralding his return to his ghoul-haunted pages, began returning illustrations they considered “ too strong, even for our readers.”
Leveret tried half-heartedly to tone things down, found
the results vapid and uninspired. Eventually the assignments
stopped trickling in. Leverett, becoming more the recluse
as years went by, dismissed the pulp days from his mind.
Working quietly in his isolated studio, he found a living
doing occasional commissioned pieces and gallery work,
from time to time selling a painting or sculpture to major
museums. Critics had much praise for his bizarre abstract
sculptures.
3
The war was twenty-five years history when Colin Leverett
received a letter from a good friend of the pulp days—Prescott Brandon, now editor-publisher of Gothic House, a small press that specialized in books of the weird-fantasy genre.
Despite a lapse in correspondence of many years, Brandon’s
letter began in his typically direct style:
The Eyrie/Salem, Mass. /Aug. 2
To the Macabre Hermit o f the Midlands:
Colin, I ’m putting together a deluxe three-volume
collection o f H. Kenneth Allard’s horror stories. / well
recall that Kent’s stories were personal favorites o f
yours. How about shambling forth from retirement and
illustrating these fo r me? Will need two-color jackets
and a dozen line interiors each. Would hope that you
can startle fandom with some especially ghastly draw-
ings fo r these—something different from the hackneyed
skulls and bats and werewolves carting o ff half-dressed
ladies.
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Karl Edward Wagner
Interested? I ’ll send you the materials and details,
and you can have a free hand. Let us hear— Scotty.
Leverett was delighted. He felt some nostalgia for the pulp
days, and he had always admired Allard’s genius in transforming visions of cosmic horror into convincing prose. He wrote Brandon an enthusiastic reply.
He spent hours rereading the stories for inclusion, making
notes and preliminary sketches. No squeamish subeditors to
offend here; Scotty meant what he said. Leverett bent to his
task with maniacal relish.
Something different, Scotty had asked. A free hand. Leverett studied his pencil sketches critically. The figures seemed headed in the right direction, but the drawings needed something more—something that would inject the mood of sinister evil that pervaded Allard’s work. Grinning skulls and leathery bats? Trite. Allard demanded more.
The idea had inexorably taken hold of him. Perhaps because Allard’s tales evoked that same sense of horror; perhaps because Allard’s vision of crumbling Yankee farmhouses and
their depraved secrets so reminded him of that spring afternoon at Mann Brook . . .
Although he had refused to look at it since the day he had
staggered in, half-dead from terror and exhaustion, Leverett
perfectly recalled where he had flung his notebook. He retrieved it from the back of a seldom used file, thumbed through the wrinkled pages thoughtfully. These hasty sketches
reawakened the sense of forboding evil, the charnel horror
of that day. Studying the bizarre lattice patterns, it seemed
impossible to Leverett that others would not share his feeling
of horror that the stick structures evoked in him.
He began to sketch bits of stick latticework into his pencil
roughs. The sneering faces of Allard’s degenerate creatures
took on an added shadow of menace. Leverett nodded,
pleased with the effect.
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4
Some months afterward a letter from Brandon informed
Leverett he had received the last of the Allard drawings and
was enormously pleased with the work. Brandon added a
postscript:
For God’s sake Colin—What is it with these insane
sticks yo u ’ve got poking up everywhere in the illos! The
damn things get really creepy after awhile. How on
earth did you get onto this?
Leverett supposed he owed Brandon some explanation.
Dutifully he wrote a lengthy letter, setting down the circumstances of his experience at Mann Brook—omitting only the horror that had seized his wrist in the cellar. Let Brandon
think him eccentric, but not madman and murderer.
Brandon’s reply was immediate:
Colin—Your account o f the Mann Brook episode is
fascinating—and incredible! It reads like the start o f
one o f Allard’s stories! I have taken the liberty o f forwarding your letter to Alexander Stefroi in Pelham. Dr.
Stefroi is an earnest scholar o f this region’s history—
as you may already know. I ’m certain your acco
unt will
interest him, and he may have some light to shed on
the uncanny affair.
Expect 1st volume, Voices from the Shadow, to be
ready from the binder next month. The proofs looked
great. Best—Scotty.
The following week brought a letter postmarked Pelham,
Massachusetts:
A mutual friend, Prescott Brandon, forwarded your
fascinating account o f discovering curious sticks and
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Karl Edward Wagner
stone artifacts on an abandoned farm in upstate New
York. I found this most intriguing, and wonder i f you
recall fiirther details? Can you relocate the exact site
after thirty years? I f possible. I ’d like to examine the
foundations this spring, as they call to mind similar
megalithic sites o f this region. Several o f us are interested in locating what we believe are remains o f megalithic constructions dating back to the Bronze Age, and to determine their possible use in rituals o f black magic
in colonial days.
Present archaeological evidence indicates that ca.
1700-2000 b.c . there was an influx o f Bronze Age peoples into the Northeast from Europe. We know that the Bronze Age saw the rise o f an extremely advanced culture, and that as seafarers, they were to have no peers until the Vikings. Remains o f a megalithic culture originating in the Mediterranean can be seen in the Lion Gate in Mycenae, in the Stonehenge, and in dolmens,
passage graves and barrow mounds throughout Europe.
Moreover, this seems to have represented fa r more than
a style o f architecture peculiar to the era. Rather, it
appears to have been a religious cult whose adherents
worshipped a sort o f Earth-mother, served her with fertility rituals and sacrifices, and believed that immortality o f the soul could be secured through interment in megalithic tombs.
That this culture came to America cannot be doubted
from the hundreds o f megalithic remnants found—and
now recognized—in our region. The most important
site to date is Mystery Hill in N .H ., comprising a great
many walls and dolmens o f megalithic construction-
most notably the Y Cavern barrow mound and the
Sacrificial Table (see postcard). Less spectacular megalithic sites include a group o f cairns and carved stones at Mineral M t., subterranean chambers with stone passageways such as at Petersham and Shutesbury, and
The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991) Page 40
