Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales

by Orrin Grey

  There may have been a moment, while my fingertips rested on the cover of the binder, when I considered walking away. Calling the police, perhaps, or at least Mr. Beaumont. Letting this all become someone else’s problem. But I had to know, so I opened the cover.

  Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve had a habit of opening books to the back pages first. I don’t know why I developed it, but it has stuck with me most of my life, so when I opened the scrapbook, it was to the last page onto which anything had been pasted. The date was only a few weeks before, on my birthday. It started with the words, “Sorry, Emmy, but I’m beginning to wear thin.”

  I called the binder a scrapbook, and so it was. Newspaper clippings, photographs, and meticulous notes recorded in purple pen in my dad’s handwriting. Not the grim trophies of a serial killer, but the careful records of a man who can’t afford to make a mistake. One entry a year, going back twenty-eight years. Each one of them the same. A picture of a girl beside a set of vital statistics: approximate height and weight, eye color, hair color, age. Twenty-eight, then twenty-seven, twenty-six, twenty-five. The first entry in the book was a photograph of a newborn, the kind that they stick up in maternity wards. It was dated twenty-eight years ago, on my birthday.

  Never having been in the house before, I nonetheless remembered seeing a back door that opened off the kitchen, and that was where I stumbled then, the shock and nausea that should have overwhelmed me before suddenly welling up inside, as I remembered birthdays that my dad had missed, arrived at late, left early. One girl a year, one girl my age, every year for my entire life.

  I thought that I might be sick, that I might vomit up what little food I’d managed to eat in the last twenty-four hours out behind the house, but somehow, once the damp air hit my lungs, I seemed to calm down. Still, I wasn’t ready to go back into that house, so I stood in the back yard and looked up the hill, past the old cattle pens, to the well and the bent tree.

  It was a cold October day, getting on toward evening, and though it was no longer raining, fog hung thick over everything. The grass of the back yard looked jewel-green, and the fog closed everything in, so that the hill was the most distant thing I could see. It felt as if I had stumbled out of the house and into a different world, for more reasons than one. Without thinking, I started to climb.

  By the time I had reached the lip of the old stone well, I knew, with a knowledge that went beyond fact, that this was where he had put them. I pictured them wrapped in canvas, tied with sturdy ropes. A slightly bigger bundle each year. Were they still alive as they went down, struggling and squirming? Did they scream as they fell?

  I half expected to be hit with a fetid stench as I reached the mouth of the well, the odor of almost three decades of decay. But the only smell that came from the dark hole was damp stone. What I found instead was a series of metal rungs set into the side of the well, a ladder descending down into darkness. Was it some fatalism, some sense of assumed guilt that drove my actions as I gripped the first of those iron rungs and started down into the pit? What did I think to find down there, without even a light to guide me?

  When I was still in high school, I had a boyfriend who abandoned me at the county fair. After he had gone and left me with no ride home, I wandered the midway in my bare feet—maybe my shoes were still in the car; I can’t remember why I didn’t have them, any more than I can remember why he left—until I came to a tent, far out on the edge of the fairgrounds. The sign above the entrance to the tent didn’t have any words on it, just an enormous violet eye painted on a white banner, with lines coming off it that could have been lashes but that I saw then as beams or rays of some kind.

  It was a fortune teller’s booth. The woman inside looked as old as sand, though there was enough light getting in from outside to let me know that at least some of it was pancake makeup applied to add years. I had been crying, I think, and my own makeup had run down my face, but she didn’t make any mention of it, just accepted my crumpled five-dollar bill and proceeded to read my fortune.

  The darkness of the tent flickered with light from outside, blinking on and off, first illuminated, then in shadow. The fortune teller laid down a card with a picture of a wheel, marked with symbols I didn’t recognize, held up by a red devil and mounted by a blue sphinx. It said, “La Roue.” Over it, at a ninety-degree angle, she laid another. A picture of a naked woman surrounded by some kind of wreath, flanked by stylized drawings of a lion, a cow, a bird, and a golden face: “Le Monde.”

  She must have told me something, to accompany that cryptic action. For it to have been a proper Tarot reading, she should have put down more cards. But I don’t remember any of that. I don’t remember her saying a single word. Maybe I wouldn’t have remembered it, even if she did. What I wanted to know, in that moment, was about the boy who had just ditched me, about how I was going to do in school, about when I was going to get my own car, be able to get away. This fortune had nothing to do with my heartbreak, with my troubles, and so I’m sure that I blanked it out. All I remember are those two cards, the wheel and the world, in the blinking light of the midway. That’s what I think about, as I descend the cold rungs of the ladder into the well.

  How far down do I go, into that damp darkness? Far enough that what light remains in the gray sky above disappears, and I should be climbing in blackness, but I’m not. Far enough that I begin to think about theories of the hollow earth, of dinosaurs and ancient civilizations and inner suns. Far enough that my arms and legs begin to ache, and I should worry about how I’m going to climb back to the surface, but I don’t.

  When my foot finally touches the ground, I expect it to crunch among old bones, or to sink into icy water, but the floor of the well isn’t even damp or muddy. It feels solid and dry. It should be dark, but I can see the stone wall in front of me, see the last few rungs of the ladder that I’ve been climbing down. I can feel the light against my back, and I can feel that which makes the light, waiting for me to turn and face it.

  What is it that I see, when I turn around? Another world in the heart of this one, spinning clockwise? A nuclear flame, burning fetid green? A congeries of iridescent spheres? A formless mass, as big as the universe, fit inside a globe of finite space? Any of that, or none of it?

  I’ll tell you what I see. I see a fortune teller, in the blinking darkness of her tent, laying down first one card and then another. The wheel, and then the world. It’s tempting to take the easy way out, to say that I hear the voice in my head, but that’s a lie. I feel its longing inside my brain and my bones, just as I know what it wants, what it has always wanted, without the need for words. It wants me. It has wanted me for twenty-eight years.

  The wheel knew me on the day that I came into this world, knew who and what I was, knew me better than I have ever known myself, just as my father knew his duty, and his father before him, and his father before him. Was it love of me that made my dad defy this calling? How could such a love kindle so quickly? Whatever drove his decision, he had found another way to do what he must. Year after year, another girl to take my place. Not what the wheel wanted, but enough to keep it spinning, year after year. Until he had grown too old. Until, as his note had said, he had worn thin.

  And now, at last, I am here, where I was always meant to be. At the bottom of the darkness, with the wheel that turns the world.

  Author’s Notes: Tarot imagery makes its triumphant thematic return in “The Well and the Wheel,” a story that I originally wrote for Autumn Cthulhu, edited by Mike Davis, and one that probably started with the title. Looking back, I imagine that title probably came about because of Fritz Leiber’s story “The Hill and the Hole,” though I didn’t realize it at the time.

  Haruspicate or Scry

  Dr. Hartledge was my faculty advisor back in college, not to mention the university’s only professor of philosophy, tucked away in a tiny office taller than it was wide in the basement of Wolfram Hall. I met him in my philosophy of religion class freshmen year, back when I was
still majoring in English, and he convinced me to double-major, which was convenient enough, since Wolfram Hall also housed the English department up on the third floor. He had a quotation from Bertrand Russell taped to his windowless office door, “From a scientific point of view, we can make no distinction between the man who eats little and sees heaven and the man who drinks much and sees snakes.”

  As one of only four students in the entire school majoring in either philosophy or religion—the sole religion professor, Dr. Mead, occupied a much more spacious office down the hall—I got a lot of individual attention. Mostly, Dr. Hartledge tried to talk me out of majoring in English in favor of focusing exclusively on philosophy. He had an anecdote that he liked to tell, about an English class he’d taken when he was in college, where he had written a story featuring a lengthy description of a pear. While workshopping the story the next day, the professor and the other students had praised highly his imagery, drawing parallels between the pear and the womb. “I didn’t mean any of that stuff,” Dr. Hartledge told me more than once. “I was just writing about a damn pear.”

  During gap periods between classes I would clear the piles of books off the narrow wooden chair beside his desk and spend my time debating philosophical points with him, or, if he wasn’t in, reading books from his teetering shelves. He gave me a hardcover copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra and a battered old paperback of Four Quartets. Over time, he gradually came to replace the figure of my father, who had died when I was young and who had, in my memory, become little more than a stern black cloud “that took the form of a demon in my view.”

  When I married Gavin during my senior year, I cemented Dr. Hartledge’s place as my substitute father by asking him to walk me down the aisle, which he consented to do, even though he didn’t much approve of weddings, seeing in them, “Little more than sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

  He dressed much as he did when he was lecturing, though the suit he wore was darker and his bowtie more subdued. I would have asked for nothing different, and Gavin understood my attachment to the old professor, and deflected his family’s objections. We got married in the school chapel, though neither of us was very religious; Gavin a lapsed Catholic, myself a skeptic from a young age, gradually being groomed into atheism by Dr. Hartledge’s example.

  For all his gruff dismissal of the frippery of weddings, when Dr. Hartledge turned me over to Gavin at the altar he was smiling, and his eyes shone. It meant almost as much to me as when Gavin said, “I do.”

  I spent the remainder of my senior year as Dr. Hartledge’s office assistant, which meant that I had a key to his coat closet of an office, and also to the storeroom down the hall where the philosophy and religion department records were kept. Gavin and I moved into an old three-story house that was entirely too big for us, but the down-payment on it was a wedding present from his parents, along with the money he needed to start up a graphic design business, which he ran out of the back half of the first floor, with little parking spaces off the alley for when the occasional client came for a meeting.

  Gavin’s parents were both still alive and still together after thirty-five years, his father an architect who wore navy blue suits to work at an office that had his name on the outside of the building. He had designed the new city hall in town. When Gavin wasn’t doing graphic design work, he sometimes assisted his father, helping to bring the firm into the twentieth century with more green-friendly buildings.

  This meant that there was always plenty of money, even if it came tangled in the strings of Gavin’s extensive and demanding family. We spent every holiday with them, my mother invited for the first few years, but gradually demurring and fading away, becoming thinner and grayer like a ghost. Intimidated by them, I think, like I was, but better able to slip away unnoticed.

  After graduation, I started taking classes at a bigger university in the city, working toward my master’s degrees in both English and philosophy, much to Dr. Hartledge’s consternation. He lived in the city, too, in a big dark house filled with wood paneling and old books and framed posters from old magic acts. “Do the dead materialize?” the posters demanded to know. “Do the spirits come back?”

  He was a widower, his wife having died years ago, long before I ever met him. There were photographs of the two of them together in his house, Dr. Hartledge a young man, impossible to reconcile with the person I knew.

  Some nights, when I didn’t feel like making the drive back to Barnett, I slept at his place, in the guest bedroom that was decorated in a much more modern style than the rest of the house. We would stay up late drinking decent Scotch and talking about his current crop of students. Looking back, I wonder now how many people thought we were sleeping together, then and when he had been my advisor. I wonder why Gavin never thought so?

  I was, after all, a young woman, and while I kept my hair cut “short like a boy’s,” as my mom said, and dressed in jeans and faded T-shirts emblazoned with the covers of famous books, and still “had a little baby fat,” my mom’s words again, I wasn’t altogether unattractive, and I obviously had a bad case of hero worship where Dr. Hartledge was concerned. Did he ever consider it? Was our entire relationship an elaborate courtship on his part, trying to work up the nerve, waiting for me to instigate a kiss or a touch? If so, it never came.

  For my part, I truly did see him as a father, and nothing more. The idea of any romantic relationship didn’t even occur to me until years after it would have been too late to do anything about it, long after I probably should have been concerned about my reputation. Did that explain the hostility that Gavin’s parents always seemed to have toward me, a blind spot I had never thought to shine a light upon? I guess I may never know.

  It is perhaps just as well, as a sexual relationship would have been incredibly awkward, our significant age difference notwithstanding. Though his first name was Roland, I could only ever call him Dr. Hartledge, a habit ingrained in me by my undergraduate days and one I was never able to shake. Not very sexy during the act.

  By the time Nathanial—a family name, and not one that I would have chosen—was born, Dr. Hartledge was already in the ground. “Food for the worms,” as he would have called it, though perhaps not so much these days, with modern advances in embalming and virtually impregnable caskets. But before that ever happened, he began what would prove to be the last leg of his career.

  “My semi-retirement,” was his wording. He had tenure at the university, so he didn’t quit teaching entirely, but there hadn’t been anything like a philosophy department there for years, even during my time, so while he was still on the payroll and still had that tiny office, he reduced his course load to a handful of hours per week.

  The rest of the time he embarked upon a project that he had been planning for years, something that he had been interested in since his own undergraduate days. In one room of his house was a library full of books on stage magic, illusion, prestidigitation. He was fascinated by the magicians of the past who had worked as tireless skeptics, debunking fraudulent spiritualists. Some of his favorites were those he called “the three Harrys;” Houdini, Price, and Kellar.

  Finally, with the advent of reality TV and the resultant popularity of “ghost hunting” shows, his hour had come ’round at last. There weren’t many spiritualists or séances anymore, but now there were plenty of haunted houses for Dr. Hartledge to debunk, and in my spare time I became his assistant once more, traipsing out to abandoned asylums—most of which had actually been schools and not asylums at all—or spending the frigid night in some unheated old pile that had supposedly been the site of one brutal slaying or another.

  It was not an enterprise calculated to make him very popular, as the market for paranormal investigators at the time favored a more credulous approach, and had little room for Dr. Hartledge’s indefatigable skepticism. Still, he had a weekly radio show debunking paranormal phenomena on the college radio station of the larger university in the city, the one where I was doing my graduate wo
rk. He named it after an unfinished manuscript that Houdini had commissioned H. P. Lovecraft and C. M. Eddy to write before his death, The Cancer of Superstition.

  It was on an episode of Cancer that he once said, “There is nothing waiting for us on the other side of the grave but ashes and dust, of that I am certain. One need not look far to see that we are not beautiful spirits. We are a collection of chemical and electrical impulses, animating a mannequin of rotting meat. When those impulses cease, then we cease.”

  Dr. Hartledge was particularly fascinated by the pact that Houdini had made with his widow, that if there were any way to communicate with the living from whatever waited on the other side, then he would reach out to her.

  A séance was held every Halloween, and Houdini was supposed to communicate the code “Rosabelle believe” if there truly was any existence from beyond. After the tenth unsuccessful séance, held on the roof of Knickerbocker Hotel, Houdini’s wife concluded that there was no way for the dead to contact the living, and put out the candle that she had kept burning beside his picture since his death, saying that “ten years is long enough to wait for any man.”

  It was Dr. Hartledge’s favorite story, and he repeated it time and again, adding that even after Bess Houdini gave up, annual Houdini séances continued to be held by other magicians up to the present day, to no avail. So it should have come as no surprise to me when, called to his hospital bed as he lay dying of leukemia, he asked me to perform one last favor for him, for old time’s sake.

  When he was gone, he said, his house would sit empty for some time before it was sold. He had stipulated it in his will, and apparently had gone through a number of lawyers to ensure that it was ironclad. During that time, he wanted me to go there once a week, and hold every kind of séance that I could think of, try every form of divination that I could muster, to attempt to reach his wayward spirit. “If I can be reached anywhere, it will be there.”