Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales

by Orrin Grey

  “You’re too late,” he said, raising his arms in welcome. “You were born too late. My father made me the man I am today more than a hundred years ago, and I unmade him. He taught me everything he knew, and I fed his heart to the devil. Do you think I’m afraid of your gun? Your masters are greedy tyrants who seek to insulate themselves with worldly power. I have seen farther than all of them. No bullet can kill me now.”

  Caroline raised the gun, but she didn’t pull the trigger. Somehow she knew that he wasn’t wrong. She could feel the heat draining out of the room, in spite of the fire from up above. She could feel the thrum of buried engines, feel the world turning, feel it hurtling through empty space. She knew that something was happening here that was bigger and stronger than bullets and guns, but still she held onto the pistol, because she had learned over the years to put her trust in steel and in her own aim, and because she didn’t know what else to do.

  “The ring on his finger,” a voice said in Jasper’s ear. He didn’t have to turn his head to look to know that it was no human voice, and in the sound of the words he could see the face of an enormous owl, a crown on its head. “He took it from a man who took it from one of us. Without it, he is vulnerable.”

  Jasper remembered his mother’s stories about the devil, he remembered the preacher’s talk of fire and brimstone, but he also knew that there were worse things than devils in this world, and more than one way to damn yourself. “The ring,” he said to the woman beside him, and she raised the gun without questioning him. Solomon King laughed, and she pulled the trigger and two of his fingers were suddenly gone from his hand, and a silver ring struck the cave floor with the sound of a bell, bounced once, and rolled into the oily black pool at the back of the room.

  There was no more preamble. From every dark line etched in the floor, from every fold of shadow, figures stepped as if from doorways. A winged thing with the head of a deer, a naked woman astride a camel, a hunter surrounded by horns. They enveloped Solomon King like a flock of crows descending on carrion, and then the cave was empty.

  Closing Time

  Stories don’t ever have endings, not really. They never come together in a way that ties everything up, they never resolve. No wedding, no kiss, not even death ever stops things in their tracks completely. There’s no iris out, like in the moving picture theatres. Things just go on, and some things never make sense. Some questions are never answered.

  Solomon King’s Mine burned to the ground that night. Dozens of bodies were found in the wreckage. Some were identified, some never were. Nine police officers died in the blaze, and no one ever knew how many patrons. In the aftermath, a special detachment explored the catacombs that were found beneath the building. There they uncovered all manner of strange things, including a room full of oblong cabinets, in which reposed the preserved bodies of various well-known and influential individuals, among them Magda Gilman. The county coroner determined that most of the bodies had been dead for years, in spite of the fact that many of the individuals had been seen in recent months, out and about, and that Magda Gilman had been heard to perform in Solomon King’s Mine the night before. If anything else was found in those caves, it was never reported, and anything that was recovered was placed in underground storage deep beneath the city and forgotten.

  Caroline Bloom and Jasper deWitt wandered out of a cave entrance nearly three miles away at half-past-four the following afternoon. They were never connected in any official way with the events at Solomon King’s Mine, and neither one of them ever spoke of it, not even to one another. They never revealed what they talked about during their walk through the caves, but it was obvious that some kind of deep connection had been forged in a very short time. They left Kansas City together that night, in Caroline Bloom’s sedan. When Caroline returned home she waited the requisite amount of time and then had her brother declared dead in absentia. She hired Jasper as her personal valet, though it was known among those close to her that he rarely did much in the way of work, and that he often advised her in matters of business. She provided him a house of his own near the Bloom estate, and he lived there for the rest of this life.

  At first, he spent a lot of sleepless nights worrying about Gerald Tyson’s wrath, but that wrath never came. What Jasper didn’t know was that, on the very night that Solomon King’s burned down, Gerald Tyson awoke from a dream in a cold sweat. He dismissed his bodyguards, then killed his mistress with a shotgun and slit his own wrists. He left no explanation behind.

  Jasper deWitt’s life improved in Caroline Bloom’s employ, but he never slept well again. He married eventually, had children and grandchildren, and got to watch them all grow up. He lived to be a very old man. But sometimes at night he would dream, and in his dreams he would rise from his bed and look out the window. On the hilltop outside, he would see the figure of a huge owl with legs like a stork, and on its head was perched a crown. It stared at him with familiar golden eyes, and when he walked out to meet it he heard its voice in his ear again. It told him things that he was pretty sure people weren’t meant to know, and he profited by them, but at the end of each dream it would always say the same words to him, and though his life was rich and long, those words would never leave him.

  “You will never be rid of us now.”

  Author’s Notes: Originally written for Jazz Age Cthulhu, a collection of novelettes and novellas set in the 1920s and edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, “The Lesser Keys” may be the most heavily-researched story I have ever written. When the invitation came in, I knew that I wanted to do something based in Kansas City, back when it was still the “Paris of the Plains.” To do that, though, I had to learn a lot of details about the city’s history, including a few that I didn’t get to use in the story.

  “The Lesser Keys” just always struck me as a good name for a band, and, from there, the idea of using music to perform Goetic demonology and magic was just a short hop.

  Guignol

  The house was big and dark and old. It had stood in the same place on the same land since Archibald Patton had it built way back in the day, and every child in the Patton family had been born within its walls. Behind it hung the looming gray shape of the old Patton’s Leather Shoes factory, like a mountain rising out of mist. Once, it was the only job in Bowden, and everyone in town had worked there, and every son in the Patton line had taken his turn first as floor manager, and then eventually as owner. Now the factory was closed, sold off to some bigger company that had transferred manufacture to facilities in Thailand.

  Donald Patton didn’t care, or tried not to. As he drove through town, he tried not to see the shuttered storefronts or the little houses sitting empty, tried not to think about the people who had once lived and worked there. He’d hated Bowden growing up, hated the factory, hated the old house. He still hated it, all of it, a bile in his stomach that time and distance hadn’t muted. He tried to believe that everyone else must have hated it all just as much; that he was doing them a favor by selling off the business. That he wasn’t killing the town, just putting it out of its misery.

  The truth was, he didn’t really feel like he had a choice. His legacy was destroying him. The town, the house, the business, all of it. Suffocating him like some ancient and overlarge sweater hauled out of some moldering attic, sweltering and stinking of neglect. Selling the business was a matter of self-preservation, not preference. If it didn’t die, then he would.

  From the day he had first left home to go to school, every trip back had been a slow death. It reminded him of the feeling he got when he walked into nursing homes and certain wards of certain hospitals. A sense of becoming ossified, of being trapped in amber. The feeling that the next time he walked back out those doors it might somehow already be too late.

  He hadn’t been back to Bowden since his father’s funeral. He’d sold the business remotely, relying on email messages and phone calls and the intercession of a team of attorneys. During his three months as owner of Patton’s Leather Shoes—Archiba
ld’s idea of humor, and these days largely a misnomer, as only a few of the shoes still used any actual leather—he had never once set foot inside the city limits, let alone the factory walls.

  He had hoped to never come back, but now here he was, driving his Lexus through the dreary streets and pulling into the weed-clotted drive of the big, dark house. Elaine had made it sound important in her voice message, saying that she’d found things in the house that might be “of interest to the family.” She’d told him that she’d feel more comfortable if he could come back to sign off on their disposition.

  Donald had almost told her that he was all that was left of the family, and he didn’t care, but he thought better of it. The attorneys of Landau & Clark had been representing the Patton family interests since Archibald hired the original Mr. Clark almost a century ago. Elaine had been with the firm for five years, had been handling the sale of the house and all its contents, and something in the way she had said “of interest” made Donald think that maybe she’d found something more delicate than just a valuable old painting in an upstairs storage space. Like any wealthy and powerful family, Donald knew that his forebears had secrets that were better off being kept, even now that he was the last of the line. So here he was.

  The house had always looked to him like a prison or an asylum, all flat walls and narrow windows, and his neglect had done nothing to improve the façade. Though Elaine had kept a few people on the payroll to help keep the place up until it sold, the grounds hadn’t been well maintained since before his father’s last days and they had gone to riot with almost preternatural speed, as though nature, too long held at bay, was eager to reclaim the house and grounds. The plants along the side of the circle drive were as tall as his waist, huge purple thistle heads nodding lazily as he passed, and the fountain he parked beside was choked with weeds.

  Elaine’s car was sitting by the front steps, but of her there was no sign. Already inside, he guessed, but when he got out and tried the front door he found it locked. The key was still on his key ring—not for much longer, he promised himself—and so he let himself in, calling her name as he went.

  He’d met her a few times when she drove up to the city with paperwork for him to sign, had talked to her on the phone more often. He remembered her as a petite woman in her young-looking late thirties, blond hair shot through with brown, wearing glasses with a wide enough rim to make her look serious without appearing too studious.

  Inside, the house looked even worse than it had from without. The day was overcast and sinking on toward night, and what little light did manage to seep in through the dusty, thick-paned windows just served to lend the dark interior a submarine quality, making him feel as if he was trapped inside a sinking ship. The outside seemed to press in on the walls with oceanic force, doubling the already claustrophobic atmosphere.

  He was reminded instantly of why he hated this place, and he called Elaine’s name again, louder and more shrilly than he would have liked, anxious to see whatever he needed to see so that he could get back out to his car and get back on the road, get away from this town and this place and this life that was still clinging to him, still sucking him down like thick mud. But he got no answer, save for the muffled echo of his own voice off the dark wood.

  Trudging through the house, passing from room to dim, cobwebbed room like a restless ghost, brought back memories that he’d rather have kept buried. Memories of the last time he had been here, for his father’s funeral. His recollections of that day were hazy and scattered already, although only a few months had passed. Mostly, he remembered having to school his features into a furrowed look of grief, to make sure the happiness that he felt stayed off his face as strangers came by to offer him their condolences. It wasn’t that he was happy his father was dead, exactly. He hadn’t really even known his father, and remembered him primarily as a sort of distant figure, more symbolic than real. He’d been raised mostly by his mother and by a succession of nannies and servants, his father always busy in the factory, or in his workshop up in the attic. At best, his father had been a distant figure seated at the far end of the dining room table at special dinners.

  His pleasure at his father’s demise had nothing to do with the man himself, and everything to do with what it meant for his future. With the old man’s passing, he had felt the last of the fetters that bound him to Bowden and the factory and the house and the family dissolving.

  The service had been held in a chapel off the funeral home. It had seemed small to him then, dark and claustrophobic, like the house, like everything in his life. He remembered sitting in the front row, pressed in by black-clad mourners. He remembered the way the wood of the coffin had looked cold to him, sitting in the midst of its bed of flowers, not warm, as the undertaker had described it. Though his father had died in his bed, attended by the best physicians money could summon, the lid of the casket had been closed. There had been no viewing of the corpse; Donald hadn’t even seen his father, per some odd stipulation in his will. It made it difficult for the reality of things to sink in. It wasn’t until after the burial, when Donald came back to the big house and watched the people covering the furniture in sheets, that he truly felt like his father was gone.

  Caught up in the past, it wasn’t until he’d already traversed most of the ground floor with no sign of Elaine that he thought to try calling her cell phone. He pulled his own phone out of the pocket of his coat and hit the button to return her call. No one had ever gotten very good reception inside the house, for whatever reason. Something about the pipes, maybe, or was it the wiring? Regardless, all he heard when he held the phone up to his ear was a distant ringing that broke off abruptly with a silly tone and a message of “no signal.”

  He went upstairs, continuing to occasionally call out Elaine’s name, though he felt more and more foolish each time he did so. She was nowhere to be found. He tried her phone a few more times, but none of the calls ever went through. More than once, he considered turning around and leaving, but he remembered her car in the drive, so she must be here, somewhere. He thought about going out to his car to wait, but he knew that he’d feel even more foolish sitting out there, especially as night had fallen beyond the trees. At least he’d kept the electricity to the house turned on, so he didn’t have to search in the dark.

  By the time the sun was completely gone, he had searched the entire house, except for the attic. He stood at the bottom of the narrow stairs and stared up, delaying his trip. The rest of the house was familiar to him, but the attic was a place he’d virtually never gone. When his father had still been alive it had been off limits, and the couple of times he’d been caught sneaking up the punishments had been severe enough to discourage further attempts.

  The attic had been his father’s workshop, and where he kept his collection, just as it had been for his father and his father’s father before him. It seemed that each of the patriarchs of the Patton family had sported an unusual hobby, and the attic had always been the private museum of their obsessions. Each new owner added his own wing to the black museum, and left his predecessor’s contributions intact.

  There was no light at the top of the stairs, only a small door of dark wood, almost invisible in the gloom; and locked, though the key to it now hung on his key ring as well. He turned it, heard the lock click, and felt a shiver run down his back. Less of what he might find on the other side of the door—he had been in the room a couple of times, he knew more-or-less what to expect—and more the childish frisson that came with doing something that he knew was forbidden.

  He pushed the door open and groped in the darkness for a light switch. His hand brushed fabric and what felt like bundles of sticks, and then he found the switch and the bulbs in the ceiling fluttered to life, and he had to stifle a gasp.

  He’d thought that he had known what to expect, but he’d imagined his father’s interest in his peculiar hobby trailing off in his later years, while it looked as if the opposite were true. The room into which he stared w
as filled with puppets. A forest of puppets, dozens and dozens, hanging from the ceiling and walls in such profusion that he had to push them aside to cross the room. An old king in a fur-lined cloak. A blank-eyed nun in her habit. A skeleton in black armor and a red-painted devil. A magician, his robes embroidered with moons and stars.

  Donald’s father had collected them since he was a boy, most of them shipped over from Prague and other far-off places. He’d also built them himself, and a few still sat, half-completed, on his workbench on the far side of the room, next to the door. The ones he had collected came in all shapes and sizes, but the ones he built were inevitably marionettes, crudely carved and painted by hand. The tools and supplies for crafting and painting the puppets still lay out on the bench, as if his father had stopped in the midst of work and planned to come back one day, which maybe he had. One jar of paint—deep red, Donald saw—had the lid off and a brush still lying in it, a pool nearby where it had dripped on the table.

  Beyond the workbench was another door, and beyond it another room in darkness. Even as he opened the door, Donald knew that Elaine must not be up here, or the door would have been unlocked, the lights turned on. He moved ahead anyway, as if sleepwalking, driven forward by something, maybe just by the lingering remnants of a childhood curiosity to examine the contents of the attic at his leisure. His hand found the switch, and the long, low room flooded with illumination.