The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack: Anthology Part 49

He paused for a little, and stared with dreary, desolate eyes at the floor. Then: "It was awful, Philip, and I'll never forgive myself for having anything to do with those monsters. I must have been a little mad, but I've always had a strong ambition to create some real stuff in the field of the grotesque and visionary and macabre. I don't suppose you ever suspected, back in my stodgy phase, that I had a veritable appetence for such things. I wanted to do in sculpture what Poe and Lovecraft and Baudelaire have done in literature, what Rops and Goya did in pictorial art.

"That was what led me into the occult, when I realized my limitations. I knew that I had to see the dwellers of the invisible worlds before I could depict them. I wanted to do it. I longed for this power of vision and representation more than anything else. And then, all at once, I found that I had the power of summoning the unseen....

"There was no magic involved, in the usual sense of the word-no spells and circles, no pentacles and burning gums from old sorcery books. At bottom, it was just will power, I guess-a will to divine the satanic, to summon the innumerable malignities and grotesqueries that people other planes than ours, or mingled unperceived with humanity.

"You've no idea what I have beheld, Philip. These statues of mine-these devils, vampires, lamias, satyrs-were all done from life, or, at least from recent memory. The originals are what the occultists would call elementals, I suppose. There are endless worlds, contiguous to our own, or coexisting with it, that such beings inhabit. All the creations of myth and fantasy, all the familiar spirits that sorcerers have evoked, are resident in these worlds.

"I made myself their master, I levied upon them at will. Then, from a dimension that must be a little lower than all others, a little nearer the ultimate nadir of h.e.l.l, I called the innominate beings who posed for this new figure-piece.

"I don't know what they are," but I have surmised a good deal. They are hateful as the worms of the Pit, they are malevolent as harpies, they drool with a poisonous hunger not to be named or imagined. But I believed that they were powerless to do anything outside their own sphere, and I've always laughed at them when they tried to entice me-even though that snakish mental pull of theirs was rather creepy at times. It was as if soft, invisible, gelatinous arms were trying to drag you down from the firm sh.o.r.e into a bottomless bog.

"They are hunters-I am sure of that-the hunters from Beyond. G.o.d knows what they will do to Marta now that they have her at their mercy. That vast, viscid, miasma-haunted place to which they took her is awful beyond the imagining of a Satan. Perhaps-even there-they couldn't harm her body. But bodies aren't what they want-it isn't for human flesh that they grope with those ghoulish claws, and gape and slaver with those gangrenous mouths. The brain itself-and the soul, too-is their food: they are the creatures who prey on the minds of madmen and madwomen, who devour the disembodied spirits that have fallen from the cycles of incarnation, have gone down beyond the possibility of rebirth.

"To think of Marta in their power-it is worse than h.e.l.l or madness. Marta loved me, and I loved her, too, though I didn't have the sense to realize it, wrapped as I was in my dark, baleful ambition and impious egotism. She was afraid for me, and I believe she surrendered voluntarily to the Things. She must have thought that they would leave me alone if they secured another victim in my place."

He ceased, and began to pace idly and feverishly about, I saw that his hollow eyes were alight with torment, as if the mechanical telling of his horrible story had in some manner served to requicken his crushed mind. Utterly and starkly appalled by his hideous revelations, I could say nothing, but could only stand and watch his torture-twisted face.

Incredibly, his expression changed, with a wild, startled look that was instantly transfigured into joy. Turning to follow his gaze, I saw that Marta was standing in the center of the room. She was nude, except for a Spanish shawl that she must have worn while posing. Her face was bloodless as the marble of a tomb, and her eyes were wide and blank, as if she had been drained of all life, of all thought or emotion or memory, as if even the knowledge of horror had been taken away from her. It was the face of the living dead, and the soulless mask of ultimate idiocy; and the joy faded from Cypian's eyes as he stepped toward her.

He took her in his arms, he spoke to her with a desperate, loving tenderness, with cajoling and caressing words. She made no answer, however, no movement of recognition or awareness, but stared beyond him with her blank eyes, to which the daylight and the darkness, the void air and her lover's face, would henceforward be the same. He and I both knew, in that instant, that she would never again respond to any human voice, or to human love or terror; that she was like an empty cerement, retaining the outward form of that which the worms have eaten in their mausolean darkness. Of the noisome pits wherein she had been, of that bournless realm and its pullulating phantoms, she could tell us nothing: her agony had ended with the terrible mercy of complete forgetfulness.

Like one who confronts the Gorgon, I was frozen by her wide and sightless gaze. Then, behind her, where stood an array of carven Satans and lamias, the room seemed to recede, the walls and floors dissolved in a seething, unfathomable gulf, amid whose pestilential vapors the statues were mingled in momentary and loathsome ambiguity with the ravening faces, the hunger-contorted forms that swirled toward us from their ultra-dimensional limbo like a devil-laden hurricane from Malebolge. Outlined against that boiling, measureless cauldron of malignant storm, Marta stood like an image of glacial death and silence in the arms of Cyprian. Then, once more, after a little, the abhorrent vision faded, leaving only the diabolic statuary.

I think that I alone had beheld it; that Cyprian had seen nothing but the dead face of Marta. He drew her close, he repeated his hopeless words of tenderness and cajolery. Then, suddenly, he released her with a vehement sob of despair. Turning away, while she stood and still looked on with unseeing eyes, he s.n.a.t.c.hed a heavy sculptor's mallet from the table on which it was lying, and proceeded to smash with furious blows the newly-modeled group of gargoyles, till nothing was left but the figure of the terror-maddened girl, crouching above a ma.s.s of cloddish fragments and formless, half-dried clay.

GHOULMASTER.

by Brian McNaughton.

Finding gifts to please my baby sister wasn't easy. She was married to J. Carter Hazard and lived in a mansion on Zaman's Hill, while I had rooms on the raffish side of the Miskatonic. I brought some flowers I'd picked and a bottle of wine when I came to dinner.

"Felix!" She was delighted to see me, but strangely surprised. After our fond embrace, she held me at arms' length and stared. "What happened to you?"

I examined my new cashmere topcoat. It displayed no ghastly stains. My stomach thwarted an attempt to examine my shoes, but I was ninety per cent certain I was wearing them. I said, "When?"

"Last night. Dinner?"

"Oh. I thought...."

"Yes, obviously, but how could you confuse the date of your own birth?"

"It is?" I could have sworn my latest birthday had been celebrated only last week, when she had given me this very coat. I had thought to please her by wearing her gift so soon.

"It was. Yesterday. We sent more than once to remind you, since you refuse to have a telephone, but that infuriating servant of yours only answers the door when it suits him."

"I often sleep at my office...."

"Which no one can find. Are you sure you have an office at the Old Lecture Hall? Well, there's no harm done. I had run out of Aubrey stories, and they're wildly popular. The Senator always asks about you."

"That's not a bad thing at all, you know," said my brother-in-law. We had walked through the atrium while we talked and entered the dining room, where he was well into his meal. "Half the time he can't recall my name, and I'm his cousin." For a wealthy and well-connected man, he worried a lot about such slights. "But he certainly knows you, Doctor. Belated best wishes, by the way."

I was curious to know how old I was, but I didn't want to improve their newest "Aubrey story" by asking.

"What's this?" Carter examined the bottle Sarah had handed him through a servant. "I didn't know they made wine in El Salvador."

"The bartender at Kinsella's recommended it highly," I said.

"Oh. That place by the tannery?" He returned the bottle to the maid and waved her off. "We'll have to try it some day."

"The flowers are lovely," Sarah said, primping them in a vase. "I'm sure few people have the unspoiled eye to see that goldenrod is beautiful."

I admired the elegant tact of that compliment, but she spoiled it by sneezing. Anxious to divert their attention from my sorry gifts, I said, "Where are Susan and-?" To my chagrin, I had forgotten my nephew's name.

"Frederick, of course, has been with that Chicago law firm for the past two years." Most fathers would have used his tone to confess that a son was riding with h.e.l.l's Angels. "Susan...." Saying nothing more about her, he brooded darkly. I had fond memories of Susan scrambling over me like a little monkey to discover gifts I would hide about my person. As she was only a year younger than Frederick, she would be less than enraptured with the rag doll in my pocket. I dimly recalled an embarra.s.sment last year, or perhaps the year before, when a handsome young lady had ransacked my garments and feigned delight with the bird-shaped whistle she had found.

"We fear Susan has fallen in with evil companions," Sarah said. "Do you know of Mrs. Kilpatrick?"

"I know who she is. There was some unpleasantness...?"

"Very good!" Hazard laughed without humor. "'Unpleasantness,' indeed! A couple of years ago, her son, Roger, disappeared after killing his bride. But since the lady is the only one left on the scene, I should put her on my list of suspects, wouldn't you, Doctor?"

"What's she got to do with little Susan? The woman must be my age."

"Sixty, actually, though she looks absurdly younger," Sarah said, denying me any clue I might have used. But she sensed my confusion and kindly added, "You're fifty, Felix."

"And a day," I said, and this pleasantry lifted some of the gloom from the table; though not all of it.

They didn't ask for my help, but I was uniquely placed to give it. Through the window of my office that faced Mt. Tabor Cemetery, after I had removed a clutter of papers and bones, I could look down on the home of Mrs. Kilpatrick. An unhealthy place to live, I thought, with its unkempt grounds blending into the necropolis.

Now you may think from my account of my birthday party that I am a dunce. If my own word counts for anything, I'm not, but my mind keeps different time from others'. Not until a full day after Carter mentioned those murders, when I looked on the Kilpatrick home and thought of its unhealthiness, did I connect the scandal with a girl I'd known, Amy Winfield.

Among the follies of my youth had been an ill-advised book that elaborated on certain queer local folktales about ghouls. Folklore was not my specialty. I am a physician, and was at that time working toward a second doctorate in comparative anatomy. But some imp of the perverse prompted me to relax from my studies by writing that stupid book. It was printed in a small edition by Derby & Son, a local firm notorious for publis.h.i.+ng anything about the history, real or imagined, of Arkham.

Why legends of ghouls should have taken such firm root in New England as early as the seventeenth century was a mystery, but H.P. Lovecraft had not been wrong in tracing hints of this myth back to Puritan times in his disturbing story, "Pickman's Model." This tale had given me nightmares as a boy and later impelled me to an ill-advised midnight ramble through Boston's North End, in search of the approximate locale of Pickman's studio, when I was a Harvard undergraduate. Fortunately I was a large and rather mad-looking undergraduate, and the knots of ducktailed thugs who cl.u.s.tered at every other street-corner let me pa.s.s without drawing their switchblades. Even they avoided some of the darker and twistier alleys, and I suspected I might be onto something as I threaded my way through the slum, but I only succeeded in getting myself braced and frisked by a couple of suspicious police officers and giving myself a few more nightmares.

The legend of the ghoul and the word itself are of Arabic origin, so one wonders how they could have impinged upon the consciousness of our earlier settlers, when the Arabian Nights had not been available in popular translation, and when Puritans would have abhorred it if it had, but a 1680 entry in the journal of my ancestor, Preserved Aubrey, speaks of "ye foule Gowles that maketh a mockerie of Christian burial in ye Precincts of Mt. Tabor cemetery." I must admit that he tended to be a ranter, never entirely coherent, and he may have been writing figuratively in connection with one of the many religious disputes that all too often seized his attention.

I had found some highly suggestive material in references to Mrs. Kilpatrick's earliest traceable ancestor, Sidney Newman, who had immigrated to our sh.o.r.es in 1674 from the Levant. He was apparently an Arab, an odd addition to the Anglo-Saxon population that then prevailed, but he was by all accounts a charming and articulate gentleman; more importantly to his Yankee neighbors, he was a hard-headed businessman who achieved extraordinary success in all his enterprises. He was a scholar of obscure lore, too, and later laid the foundations for Miskatonic's unique collection of "forbidden" books with a handsome bequest. Although the wildest rumors circulated for years after, no one ever determined whether his murder, in 1715, at the hands of unknown intruders had been triggered by his business practices or his reputed demonolatry. The gruesome nature of his murder, by dismemberment and cremation in his domestic hearth, had kept all the rumors alive in any number of compilations of New England mysteries.

I toyed with the idea of proposing that Newman had originated our New England ghoul legends by speaking of Arabic myths to his neighbors, but I decided against it. I had no proof. His descendants still existed and might be offended by idle speculation about their unfortunate ancestor. Talk of supernatural connections might expecially offend them, since Newman had traveled to Salem in 1692 to testify as a character-witness for a defendant in the witch-trials, and had narrowly escaped being hanged himself.

Reasonable readers would have accepted my book about ghouls as a work of fiction, but such readers are rare, and most condemned it as a hoax. Even worse, totally unreasonable readers took it for a scientific treatise. I soon abandoned the hopeless task of trying to convince my detractors that I was a fiction-writer and my admirers that I was a liar. When anyone mentioned ghouls to me, I would usually flee.

Amy Winfield was one of the morbid eccentrics the subject attracts. She was an art student, and ghouls-drawn solely from her imagination, of course-were the sole subject of her art. Flippantly, one of her instructors told her I was the only person who could verify the anatomical correctness of her drawings, and I gave her the benefit of my best guesses.

She married Roger Kilpatrick, and within a few months, as my brother-in-law had reminded me, he murdered her. Or his mother had. I had been fond of Amy, even if she had been a bit strange. I was much fonder of my niece, Susan. Whether my help was needed or not, I resolved to give it.

Until the disappearance of her son, I learned, Mrs. Kilpatrick had been jealous of her privacy. Those who strayed onto her grounds were apt to be set upon by dogs and lawyers. But after lamenting Roger's flight and the death of his bride for a year, she changed her ways. She welcomed students and social b.u.t.terflies to her salon to meet hypnotists, swamis, gurus, necromancers, oracles, faddists and the less reputable sort of artists. Such companions may not have been evil, as Sarah averred, but they sounded criminally frivolous.

Those who had visited her salon told me that no one needed an invitation, especially not I-because of my scholarly distinction, they hastened to add, in case I thought they meant I should fit right in, the ninny everyone called "Ghoulmaster" behind his back.

To avoid confusion with charlatans and lunatics, I dressed formally for the second time that week, which laid me open to no end of sarcastic sallies from my servant, Ramon. He affected to believe that I meant to cut a figure before Niobe, a young woman who had lately won vulgar adulation by performing a salacious dance on the back of an elephant at the Dunwich Fair.

"For defend the lady if the tiger escape?" he gasped between giggles when I asked him to sharpen and polish the sword-stick I had bought years ago in preparation for a trip to New York City that I later managed to avoid.

As often happens in my social life, I miscalculated. The large, noisy room I entered a.s.saulted me with the impression of a Hallowe'en party in a bagnio, with Marlene Dietrich and Heinrich Himmler as guests of honor. Anyone asked to pick out the charlatan in that gathering would surely have chosen me.

I was wondering how to be inconspicuous in my tuxedo when the crowd perfected my humiliation by applauding, as if I were an entertainer who had lumbered onstage to lampoon Fred Astaire. I waited for the applause to end so I could be plainly heard, but as I opened my mouth to d.a.m.n them all for impudent swine, a young woman dashed up to me and cried: "Uncle Felix! Did my mother send you to spy on me?"

I had been reminded that Susan was no longer a toddler, and her costume left me in no doubt that she was a grown woman. She seemed to have forgotten to put on a dress over the black undergarments and mesh stockings that she wore, incredibly, with hiking-boots. For the first time in years, I felt my face burn. She blushed, too, to her credit, all the way down to her pretty little b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"He's certainly dressed for spying, isn't he? Mr. James Bond, I presume." I was calmer now, but unable to speak with much coherence, so I was grateful when this woman continued, "After he ignored my fifth or sixth invitation, I all but gave up on our ill.u.s.trious Dr. Aubrey. Whatever did I say, Doctor, that finally tempted you away from your far more interesting tibias and fibias and infundibulums?"

This was Mrs. Kilpatrick, then, and my first impression was of her eyes. They were incredibly large, their hue was a glowing topaz, and their effect was startling. Beautiful, yes, but they were the sort of beautiful eyes one saw in a zoo, and the absence of intervening bars unsettled me.

"Um," I believe I replied to her question, and, "Ah."

"Uncle, forgive me!" Susan said. "I had no idea you'd been invited."

Neither did I, and I somehow doubted that I had been, but I said, "I try to open my mail at least once a year, but sometimes I neglect it."

That seemed to me a reasonable practice, but from the way they laughed, I suspected that I'd just started another Aubrey story on its rounds.

It was easier to believe that my hostess had killed off her family than that she was sixty. The black dress that matched her long, straight hair was not just diaphanous, it was transparent. Most of the older guests had the sense to eschew a fas.h.i.+on more suited to girls like Susan, but Mrs. Kilpatrick flaunted it in triumph. Lithe as a panther, bright as a bird, she confounded any notion that her skin might be less taut or more freckled than that of the young persons who vied for her attention.

More than once, as I perambulated the salon like the overdressed ghost of somebody's grandfather, she caught me staring at her and pierced me over the rim of a j.a.panese fan with her thoroughly unnerving eyes. I wasn't sure if she was threatening or flirting, but those signals are often flown on the same banner. I tried to stop looking her way.

The room was large, open on two sides to the summer airs of a garden, and to its innumerable moths and beetles. Perhaps my nose was influenced by my awareness that so many ancient dead lay so close by, but the night breeze seemed less fragrant than moldy. The decor was a queasy mix of American decadence and exotic barbarism, most of the latter souvenirs of the swashbuckling Isaac Newman, who had parlayed his stewards.h.i.+p of some South Seas whaling-stations into a petty kingdom in the 1820's. Savage spears flanked effete watercolors, clay gnomes ogled crystal fairies, a marble nude bemused an octopoid demon hacked from basalt.

Some local primitive had been responsible for the most truly barbarous artifact, an old mural that depicted Isaac meting out justice to the heathen. I tried to keep my back to this horror, but I kept forgetting it, so that I was often startled by fresh aspects of its grisliness.

By strolling here or there, I could sample the flagrant abuse of instruments intended for music, of language intended for poetry, of minds intended for thought. By publicizing and sensationalizing the university's unfortunate collection of crackpot books, the late H.P. Lovecraft has a lot to answer for. Each year, it seems, draws a larger and stranger agglomeration of Lovecraftian lunatics, students and street-people, to Miskatonic, and this year's crop was richly represented in the self-styled artists and philosophers who had flocked to Mrs. Kilpatrick's salon.

It embarra.s.sed me acutely that I could cut a figure in such an intellectual vacuum. I could have stolen all the mountebanks' admirers away if I had chosen to rap my stick and announce that I would now speak of ghouls. Incredibly, the applause had not satirized my costume, which many a.s.sured me was downright squalid; it had meant they were glad to see me. While the university establishment traded Aubrey stories about a dimwit who forgot to wear his false teeth or his trousers to cla.s.s, this crowd had been telling each other tales of a mystery-man who trafficked with ghouls and demons. I wasn't sure which cycle of slanderous myths I liked least. I know I didn't like it at all when people called me, with respectful intent, "Ghoulmaster."

Most of the questions with which they vexed me were foolish or incomprehensible, and I would either stare down my questioner in heavy silence or mumble something abstruse. Most vexing of all were the pathetic morons who believed that ghoulism was a desirable state, and who wanted me to help them attain it. I tried to convince them in their own slang that no such perversion was squalid, but they took this for an enigmatic joke.

While I was trying to elude an immoderately graceful young man in a motorcycle jacket and sequined athletic-supporter who desired my opinion of a poem that began, I think, "My love and the worms are on intimate terms," something caught my eye. I should say, rather, what caught my eye was its absence: the smallest toe on the foot of a pa.s.sing woman.

When I notice minor disfigurements, I try to put them out of my mind, and I realized that I had already tried to put too many out of my mind that night. In a gathering of a hundred or so, it seemed unlikely that so many as half a dozen would be missing toes, fingers or earlobes, but I had already seen that many, and I had hardly examined the whole crowd.

The last verse had jingled away, and the poet yearned toward me with hound's eyes. I said, "That is without a doubt, sir, the most squalid effusion to which I have ever been subjected."

"Ghoulmaster!" he cried. Before I had any idea what he intended, he dropped to his knee, seized my hand and kissed it.

"Get up, get up," I muttered, scrubbing my hand vigorously with my handkerchief and trying to edge away. To divert him from his art and his adoration alike, I said, "Why are there so many severed fingers?"

He looked stricken. His lip trembled. He said, "Master, forgive me, I don't know! But I'll think on it constantly, I swear, and when we next meet, I hope I'll have a worthy answer."

I realized, as he danced away to blither of his epiphany, that he had mistaken a plain question for a cosmic riddle.

I found myself confronting the ghastly mural yet again. It would have been an unfit backdrop for any activity, but behind this mob of fetis.h.i.+sts and posers and smatterers, it seemed-if I may be permitted the detestable word-ghoulish. Either the artist had never seen a real Polynesian, or else he had tried to legitimize the atrocities by presenting the natives as subhumans whose evolution had been diverted toward the model of the baboon. What particularly appalled me, however illogically, was seeing the machines and victims of hidden torture-chambers arrayed on an idyllic beach in broad daylight.

"Their cannibalism drove my ancestor wild," Mrs. Kilpatrick said at my elbow, and she smiled to observe its convulsive jerk, "but they saw it as a sacrament."

"Knocking that idea out of their heads was surely no crime," I said, leaving my further thoughts unspoken.

Her right hand rested companionably on my arm. As I watched the hummingbird-flicker of the fan in her left, I conceived the notion that she contrived to hide the smallest finger of that hand from my view. I wondered if it was missing. I grew obsessed with this question, but her adroit maneuvers and the shadows of moths that danced around the hanging lamps combined to baffle me.

"They believed they gained the wisdom and experience of their sacrificial victims by eating them," she said. "Could that idea have any truth in it?"

"If it did, it might spare my students the boredom of my lectures."

She smiled: not at my poor joke, but in lofty tolerance of my flippancy. Such a fine distinction could she convey quite plainly with the tilt of her chin, the flex of her eyebrow, but most of all with the gleam of her disturbing eyes.

"Am I wrong, Doctor, in believing that a body remembers its missing limb? Who then can say that the limb holds no memory of the missing body and the contents of the brain?"

Even from so fascinating a woman, such nonsense bored me. I answered, "That well may be, but it doesn't follow that I can a.s.sume those memories by consuming the limb. If that were so-" here I popped down a tidbit from a sideboard-"I could now recall the life and opinions of a shrimp."

"How do you know you can't," she laughed, "unless you know the language of shrimp?"

We had continued our game with the fan, and now I knew she had been playing the game, for as she skewered me with that reply, she reached up and scratched my nose: with the little finger of her left hand. I took no offense at this liberty, as I told myself I should have, and discovered a foolish grin on my face after she had swayed away, fluttering, shooting a parting flash of topaz through untidy bangs over her shoulder.

Her admirers swarmed around her again before she had crossed the room, my niece among them. I hurried to extract Susan and propelled her nearly into the garden, where the light was less revealing. She seemed to have grown comfortable with her shameless display, but I hadn't.

"Uncle, I had no idea you were such a...." Words failed her, but her eyes sparkled.

"Such a deep s.h.i.+fter?" I filled in, showing off more of my new vocabulary.

"Exactly!" she laughed. "Everyone's in absolute awe of you. I mean, to hear Father talk-" She broke off in confusion.

I diverted her from the slip: "Why are there so many severed fingers here?"

"Oh, that. That's just-sort of like fortune-telling, you know, only deeper. Mrs. Kilpatrick can tell you just everything about yourself, who your real friends are, what you should do to be happy, things like that."

This appalling revelation actually cheered me up. Here was clearly a matter for the police: physical mutilation in aid of fortune-telling. I would report her, Mrs. Kilpatrick would be packed off to a prison or a madhouse, and Susan would be freed from her influence. Mission accomplished.

But I kept my plans to myself as I took both of her hands in mine and examined them. I pushed back her soft hair to check her ears. Not foreseeing how odd it would sound, I said, "Take off your boots."

She giggled, but she complied. I glanced down at her pretty toes. I found that I could look at her directly without shame or, what I suppose had secretly shamed me, improper urges. As forcefully and earnestly as I could, I said, "Dearest girl, one thing we must all do to be happy is to keep our bodies in one piece. That isn't always easy. We're soft creatures in a hard world. When you've outgrown this crowd-and you will, believe me-you'll regret it bitterly if you've mutilated your perfect body for their sake."

"Uncle, I wouldn't do that! Do you think I'm crazy?"