Mammoths!
I must tell the tribe. The furs are heavy on my shoulders, but I can still run. Not far to Hrulskala, the lookout rock—from there they will hear my hunting horn. I will sound the mammoth-sound.
Here is Hrulskala, and now the horn…
Yes, the sound flies well. The hunters will hear me, wherever they roam in the Snow Trees. Even Umyi will hear me, deep in the caves, where she suckles our second son. She will know that Roga is the meat bringer.
Ah, my breath-clouds come quick, the hunt-thrill is in me. The flint is sharp on my spear.
Again the mammoth-sound! The women will cook the red flesh on skewers. Death will flee from our caves.
Like the stain of sin, red ochre is devilishly hard to wash out. In the lectures I attended over the following weeks I cut a ragged figure, swaddled in unseasonal layers to hide my nightly experiments. I’m sure my lecturer saw enough though—he that had poured such scorn on W. F. Hermann’s great work—saw the earthy pigmentation around my eyes, saw how my fair hair was turned russet at the roots, saw the redness beneath my nails which no amount of scrubbing would shift. Saw these things and logged them.
Once all the Rousillon ochre was gone, I progressed to the South African. By now my bedsheets and mattress were utterly dyed, but the effect only served to please me; every night I climbed into my own red-stained grave pit, alike to those photographed in Hermann. I was one with the red skeletons and walked on higher planes.
The fighting is done, the savage ones are beaten off, laid low. My heavy club did well, broke many heads. The quick ones ran like scared gazelles, back across the savannah, to tell why so few return.
Gom is dead though. I saw them open his ribs with their hunt sticks. I will dig him the best of beds, high in the hills the giants made. He will sleep with his favourite stone axe and our best foraging pots. We will throw the red ochre on him, and he will wake up in the Sky Land. I will meet Gom again.
By day I was a thoughtless drone, trudging along furrows ploughed by countless miserable beasts before me. At night I was free to stoke the fires in my soul, to see through the eyes of the dead and walk in their footprints. I came to understand the allure of the opium dens, and found a fresh respect for those who would dream their lives away at the expense of earthly achievement. For what are a few years of wealth and status against even one glimpse of the divine?
My lecturer had no right to doubt the findings of Hermann! The way he glared at me each day, saw the giveaway stains… such scepticism always gets engulfed by greater events and forgotten. No one remembers the last leaf of autumn; we say only that winter has come.
Next I wore Mexico. I opened the Mexican parcel to find a vivid ochre looking and smelling every bit like the holy ointment it was. It was darker than the French and South African batches, and needed more water to be spread evenly across the skin, but soon I wore it all over. I stood in front of my mirror for many minutes, admiring the high priest I had become, face blood-red and fearsome, eyes like sharpest obsidian slicing through the gloom. A deathless power was unearthed, reborn. Only sleep would wake it.
The Moon lights my way, knows my purpose, kisses the keen blades of my mace. I know my foe sleeps in the vast jungle, somewhere beyond the grey rivers, up in the canopy he has built himself a nest. The Moon is with me, the gods are with me… I can already taste his blood. I will rub the red soil on his body and offer it to the mountains. The rains will follow.
The papers have called me a mad servant of nightmares. They have dubbed me the Nightwalker, the Dreaming Killer. If such is true, then I would rather dwell in the land of dream than remain in this colourless kingdom of toil. Professor Hermann has shown us that there is a means of lifting the veil, known to all peoples in the happier times of the ancients, and cruelly hidden from us by the fog of centuries. Yes, red ochre strips the waking world away, and lifts the curtain on a land of infinite possibility.
It is small wonder that our forefathers coated their deceased with the pigment, knowing that they bought them safe passage to a blessed otherworld, starlit and peaceful, where Death never treads. For the same reason I rubbed my lecturer’s still warm flesh with the fine Mexican ochre, shortly after finishing my priestly task, so that he might enjoy eternal life in the realm he disavowed.
Tomorrow I will hang, and I can only hope that enough of the ochre has settled in my pores and follicles to evade the mandatory bathing that will come first. The noose shall set me free, and I will return finally to that oldest and purest of heavens, once known and loved by all.
Darke Manor
By Jaron Evil
“One man enters, naught but his shadow emerges….” It was these cryptic words of warning that drew my morbid curiosity to that run-down dwelling. Wretched it was, dilapidated and crude, high atop a blighted hill, within the town limits of Autarch. A mansion of sorts, though it is doubtful that many desired to take up residence within its walls. It was the thrill of impossible possibility that lured me, one rainy and fateful autumn noonday, to brave its darkened corridors. Who I am, where I have been, and what things I have seen before coming to this particular moment in my life are inconsequential and have no bearing on my tale. For what seems forever, my name has been of little interest to anyone. For this reason above all, I am simply known as Traveler.
So where should my story begin? Perhaps first I should mention the conditions under which I labored when I stumbled into what had long since become known to the locals as Darke Manor.
Of the ecstasies and tribulations of hallucinogenic narcotics, much has been written. One may learn extensively about the immediate and protracted effects of such substances, though eloquent descriptions—whether structured by the essayist or painted by the poet—hardly come close to conveying the horrors and majesties of the murky realms into which the inspired and oft melancholic dreamer is transported. To this day, I could tell neither what possessed me to indulge in such dubious activity, nor what thoughts drove me to indulge my dark habit before entering… the house. That bleakest house.
I am a hapless individual, and I suffer deeply from ennui. Apart from some unwanted internal residue of an instinctual need for survival, which need is only human in nature, I feared neither phantasm nor death. Truth be told, I think the greater part of my being would have welcomed the latter, rather than fearing it. Perhaps only a traveler such as I, a bleak man, might find what I seek in Darke Manor… or so was my thinking at the time.
The tale I am now about to impart is true. This I swear by whatever God resides in the heavens. Could the sum of my terrifying experiences be the result of my hallucinatory habit?
Perhaps.
Only perhaps.
The door slammed behind me with an echoing crack that shook the cobwebbed walls. For a moment, my surroundings seemed mystifying, as if my vision were utterly out of focus; but slowly I realized my lone presence in a long-abandoned room lit by numerous windows, many with cracked or absent panes. Of the exact nature of the room I could not say, for my mind raced with both unsettled thoughts and the dark influence of foreign substances. There was a mangy bearskin rug, a rotting wooden rocking chair, and a fireplace with a stag’s antlered head mounted above it. The drab wallpaper had been torn in places, and water coupled with mold stained it near the tears and in the corners of the room. Of these things I was aware, though they were not uppermost in my thoughts. Rising above every other impression in my mind came an increasing fear of the unknown—a fear that was alien to me, but that nonetheless gnawed at my brain, sending chills down my spine to a greater and greater degree because I could not analyze its source. I breathed in deeply to calm myself. The air was thin and musty, smelling faintly of mildew.
All was still, silent, save for the relentless beating of rain through the gaping windows. Gathering my wits, I let my eyes scan the room a second time, noticing more detail than in my initial glance. The eyes in the head of the bearskin rug, disturbingly lifelike, were staring directly into mine, with what seemed d
ire intent. My mind told me, logically, that the bear was not alive. All my instincts, however, told me in spite of this, it was aware of my presence. The stag’s head above the fireplace had its mouth slightly agape, revealing yellowed teeth. To my disgust, a spider crawled out of its mouth and into its nose. There was a closed door on the far wall, and although this was not immediately relevant to me, it soon would become so.
The room was cold from the wind gusting in through the broken windows, carrying leaves and other debris, and spreading the bits about the rotten hardwood floor. I approached the fireplace and found it already stocked with fresh wood. I paused, distracted—yet as odd as this was, it failed to stop me from fishing the matches out of my pocket and lighting the fire. Orange flames flickered and began to warm the room. Turning my attention to the rocking chair, I chose to make myself comfortable. As I moved, I noticed, suddenly, the eyes of the skinned bear on the floor following me!
Anyone else might have fled in terror; however, I was in such a state that I was unable to trust my eyes, as I knew all too well the tricks they could play upon an intoxicated mind. I chose to ignore the rug, and instead turned my gaze back to the closed door on the far wall. I stared intently at the crack between the door and the floor. All I saw was the blackest darkness, though I swore I could hear whispering emanating from behind the door. At first, I thought it was merely the fire crackling over the constant thrumming of the rain and the wind’s whistling, playing more tricks on my excited imagination, but the longer I sat in the rocking chair, the more I became convinced it was two voices whispering back and forth, and definitely coming from behind the door.
I stood up and tiptoed across creaking floorboards towards the door. Kneeling down, I placed my ear next to it in silent eagerness. As I did, the whispering ceased immediately. I glanced back to the opposing wall and realized I was now in a room with only the one door! The door through which I had entered the house was gone, as if it had never been there. The gnawing fear I had felt before returned, this time to raise the hairs on the back of my neck. I ran to where the front door had been, and felt the wall in its place. My mind swam, the metallic taste of fear sour in my mouth, until I convinced myself aloud that it was the drugs playing with my perception. To this day, I’m not sure if I truly believed my own words, but I managed to calm myself and allowed my breathing to return to normal. I approached the closed door once again, this time reaching out to grasp the doorknob. It was now the only exit from the room, so it would be only a matter of time before I would be forced to go through it in any event. Perhaps it was an inner need to be in control of my own fate, or possibly a readiness to welcome my own death, that caused me to open the door at that moment. It mattered not. I eased it open with a loud creak and found myself at the foot of a long and precarious stairwell leading upwards into darkness.
For a long moment, I simply stood there and stared upward, as strange and terrible shadows, whose very presence was inexplicable in the already black stairwell, crept menacingly downward toward me. To my dazed and drug-induced vision, the shadows seemed to coalesce into nightmare shapes with long arms and ragged claws, eager to grasp my person. They swarmed about me, drenching me in darkness, and then flowed around and past me into the room, casting out the waning light from the windows and snuffing out the fire. I waited another short moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, which they eventually did. It was then that I chose to brave the stairs.
Step after step led me upward in a seemingly endless ascent. I climbed forever, turning back only once to see how far I had come. The door was naught but a faint and tiny dot at the base of a myriad of never-ending stairs. I could not correctly sense the passage of time, for it seemed to me hours since I had begun the journey up the mountain of steps. More time passed, slower than ever it had, or so it seemed. Several times within the passing hours, I had to pause to catch my breath. Eventually, at long last, I could see the top step in the far distance. My legs ached madly, and my heart was pounding—not from fear, but exhaustion. Time seemed to stand still, and after an indeterminate period (it might have been moments or hours), I finally reached the summit of the stairwell, only to collapse, my legs refusing to work for a second longer. My feet felt blistered inside my shoes, and the sweat soaked all my clothes. Glancing down the stairs brought me to tears, for I saw then, and only then, that I had climbed thirteen steps to the second floor of the house. The door below was shut once again.
I rolled onto my back, sweating madly, refusing stubbornly to accept my experience as reality. For a moment, I thought myself crazy. What spectral jest was this that would void the mind of reason in such a manner? Whatever the main cause, I was now certain that the mind-altering substances I had so unwisely consumed were not the only elements present to work their deviltry on me.
The gnawing fear returned.
I was no longer buried in blackness. With a quick glance around the shadowed and ruined room that lay at the top of the stairs, I immediately noticed the large mirror hanging on the closest wall. Weird symbols had been scribed crudely upon it, but it was not until I struggled to my feet and approached more closely that I was struck by two undeniable facts that shocked me to immobility. The symbols had been written in blood, and what had been written was, in fact, in English—save that the message was backwards, down to the letter, as if it had been written by someone on the other side of the mirror. Nothing, however, worked more negatively on my fevered imagination than the import of the message itself. Spelt backwards: “MOTHER, HELP ME. I CAN’T GET OUT. PLEASE HURRY, HE IS COMING BACK.”
How was it possible that my brain could conjure such a fantastical thing? Despite the lies I told myself to remain calm, deep down I knew it could not, not of itself. Was I dreaming? Was this whole experience a nightmare? If I had not but barely survived to recount my tale, I might well have ascribed it at the time to the fevered actions of a troubled but sleeping mind.
I stared at my reflection, obscured by the chilling backwards message. My eyes revealed the fear I had tried so hard to suppress. I reached towards the reflective glass, touching it lightly. It was cold as ice, and to my astonishment, not solid! My arm disappeared into the mirror as if I had dipped it into a pool of reflective liquid. A numbing sensation crept up my arm and into my shoulder, causing me to convulse with a sudden burst of panic. I attempted to withdraw my arm from the looking glass, but could not. On the other side, something gripped me by the wrist and would not release me. Its visage did not appear in the mirror, but whatever thing it was, I could feel the grasp of a hand too large to be human.
The sense of dread I had felt earlier, which for so long had been foreign to me, became a harsh reality, deepening on the instant to a mortal terror. I began to scream as I struggled violently to free my arm from the mirror of peril. I could not free myself, despite the fear-inspired strength with which I tried—but suddenly, that which held me released its numbing and unseen grip on my arm, sending me stumbling backwards. I would have fallen abruptly, but for a small writing desk that shuddered awkwardly as I backed into it. Out of sheer panic, I reached for the first solid object I could find, a large leather-bound book on the desk’s surface, and violently threw it at the mirror, which in turn shattered into a thousand pieces.
My heart pounding, I leaned on the desk, struggling to slow my racing pulse. Gradually regaining my composure, I inspected my arm carefully. It seemed unscathed on cursory inspection, and the numbing pain of the monstrous grip was fading quickly. I wasted no more time in returning my attention to the shattered mirror and to the book itself, which lay among the shards of leaded glass.
The book had fallen open to a random page where it lay in the midst of the mirror’s fragments. Picking up the book, I read the page, and discovered that what I held in my hands had long ago been someone’s diary.
August 21st, 1832
My son Nathaniel is missing, though I can still hear his faint screams from somewhere within the house! Oh dear lord, please let me find him. I
have searched every inch of this damned household to no avail. Where is my son?
August 22nd, 1832
Screams awoke me in the very earliest hours last night. I leapt from my bed and followed them all the way to the stairs, where they stopped. I broke down into tears and went back to bed. I turn all my devotions to my beloved Nathaniel, praying that he is safe from harm and that he will return…
August 23rd, 1832
I think I am going mad. I saw Nathaniel today, staring at me from within the hallway mirror. He did not say a word; he simply stared back at me as I wept…
My reading was interrupted by the sudden sound of footfalls. I gasped involuntarily; then, glaring wildly around my dim surroundings, I held my breath, not wishing to make a sound. The sweat on my brow stung as it ran into my widened eyes. I could now make out that the room connected on its far side to a hallway adorned with various portraits that lined its walls. At the far end a figure stood, though I could not tell if it were man or woman. The figure seemed to glide, though the sound of footsteps still echoed down the hallway towards me, growing louder with each pace. I became too petrified to move, and grasped the diary in my arms tightly, not knowing what else I might do. The figure stopped five feet before me. It was only now I could make out in the dimness the visage of a middle-aged woman, whose face seemed locked in a perpetual, unblinking stare. Wide-eyed and silent, her eyes burned into mine.
“Who are you?” I asked the woman. A short silence passed between us before I received an answer. When I did, the voice was low and coarse, as if she were ill.
“I am the lady of the house, Mistress Isabelle Gaffney,” she said. In such a terrifying predicament, for which I may affix blame only upon myself, or rather upon the wicked curiosity that compelled me to enter the house in the event, one might find comfort in regaining some human contact. I found none in this grim meeting. I was not certain that the contact was indeed human.
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