by Orrin Grey
“I don’t think that either of you should be in a hurry to be going anywhere,” Irving’s voice said from the doorway. But was it Irving’s voice? It sounded different—like maybe it was coming from someplace farther away. But it was definitely Irving who stood in the doorway, a pistol dark in his hand. Or, again, was it? Had Irving been using his free time to work out? That would perhaps explain his broadened chest, which strained the buttons of his striped dress shirt. “Sir Drake doesn’t look so well just at the moment. I think he should stay sitting right there.”
“Irving,” Kirby said, starting to take a step forward, and then remembering the black barrel of the gun trained on his chest, “what the hell are you playing at?”
“It was supposed to be you, Mr. Marsh,” said another voice, this one from behind him, in the other doorway. The voice was familiar, so Kirby wasn’t surprised when he half-turned to see the Professor standing there, his waxy flesh turned marble in the moonlight. “We thought that you would have more influence over young Master Drake here. But then that actress saw and heard things she shouldn’t have, and you went running off down to London. Plans had already been put into motion, it was too late to call them off, and so Mr. Drayvon had to do.”
“I don’t know what you’re into,” Kirby said, his hands held up at about the height of his shoulders, his eyes sliding from one man to the other. “Communism, free love, some kind of cult. But I can tell you that swordpoint—or gun point, as the case may be—conversions went out of fashion ages ago. You get more devotees with honey than you do with bullets. Now, I can’t speak for Drake here, but I’m not opposed to secret societies or political movements, not as a rule, and not if there’s something in it for me. So let’s put the pistol away and talk about whatever it is that’s on your minds, gentlemen.”
The Professor laughed, and it wasn’t a human sound. A ratcheting cough, like the sound that he had made at dinner that first night. “A cult? Yes, I suppose that is how you would see it, given your limited understanding. ‘The Cult of Headless Men,’ eh? How little you know, and how much you could have been.” The old man shook his head sadly. “But perhaps it’s not too late. If the exchange hasn’t taken hold too strongly, perhaps Mr. Drayvon could still be traded for you. Master Drake, you’re being awfully quiet. Please speak up. Ultimately, it will be your decision that determines your friend’s fate.”
Kirby’s eyes went now to Drake, where he sat still on the couch. The glass of brandy had fallen from his fingers and what was left in it was now a spreading stain on the upholstery. Drake’s eyes were invisible in the dim light of the room, cast in pools of shadow by his heavy brows. “You’re a monster,” he said, the words falling from his mouth like food that he couldn’t bring himself to swallow.
“Now Drake,” Kirby said, taking a step, only to have the pistol raise a few inches, stopping him in his tracks, “let’s not lose our heads.”
At that, Irving—if it really was Irving, didn’t the Professor imply that they had replaced him somehow, Kirby’s thoughts turning to Invasion of the Body Snatchers—let out a laugh of his own, high pitched and somehow wrong, like a wild animal trying to learn to mimic human sounds.
“What did you do with my father?” Drake asked, starting to rise. His gaze was still on the Professor, ignoring Irving now. Something inside him seemed to have snapped, and Kirby was afraid that he would do something that would get them both shot. “What did your expeditions turn you into?”
The Professor laughed again, and when he spoke, it was as if his voice was gradually changing with each syllable. Like a recording that was breaking down. “You think it was always me,” he said, and Kirby realized that his lips weren’t moving. Ventriloquism? “Professor Mosby was in your father’s platoon during the war. It was Lord Whitley who ordered the expedition to that island, to find the idol before it sank into the sea. But we were already here long before that. There are no Tcho-Tcho peoples, there never have been. It has always been us. The Headless Men, the Anthropophagi, whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders, they—we—are where we have always been. Here. Right here. In your cities, at the heads of your tables. Dig into your family’s crypt, Master Drake, ransack their tombs, and tell me what you find. How many are missing their heads? How many had already been laid away for years before their funerals, before they were no longer of any use to us, and we abandoned their disguises to take on another. Just as I will soon shed Mosby’s disguise. We have been with your family since the beginning. It wasn’t I who initiated your father into the Cult, my boy. He initiated me.”
Before the Professor could utter another word—if, in fact, he had been going to—Drake lunged at him, over the back of the couch that stood between them. Kirby, who had been waiting for just such a moment, dropped to a crouch and wrapped his fist around the handle of one of the fireplace pokers as a bullet buried itself in the mantel beside his head. Then he was up and swinging, expecting every moment to feel a hot bloom in his chest, but Irving didn’t get off another shot before the poker took him in the temple, where it did something that Kirby hadn’t expected. It knocked the young writer’s head clean off.
What was left behind was the stump of a neck, almost smooth but not completely. Tendrils, like the hyphae of a fungus, strained up from the stump, wavering in the flickering light from the fireplace. The pistol swung toward Kirby again, and another shot rang out, this one burning across his bicep. Kirby brought the poker down on the hand that held the pistol, and found himself less surprised than he would otherwise have been when the hand came off like the hand of a mannequin. At the wrist, five questing tendrils quivered, their tips ending in snapping pincers.
Putting his palm against the back of the handle, Kirby drove the poker into the chest of Irving’s body—or whatever it actually was—as hard as he could. He felt the poker bite against flesh and sink in, felt the weight of the body against him, felt it give back. And then he dropped the poker and dove for the pistol, putting two bullets square into the center of that striped dress shirt. The body stumbled once more, knocking into an end table and sending a lamp to shatter on the wood floor, before finally collapsing in a spreading red pool.
The Professor was kneeling atop Drake now, those pale hands around his throat. “Don’t worry,” he whispered, “not all of you will die. The rest will join your father, will join with me, with all of us.”
Kirby didn’t bother pressing the pistol to the back of the Professor’s head—he wasn’t certain at all that doing so would have much effect—and instead emptied everything that was left into the old man’s broad back. For a moment, he feared that it hadn’t accomplished anything. The two figures remained locked in their danse macabre, but then the Professor’s body collapsed to the side and Drake pushed him away, coughing, dragging ragged breaths into his lungs.
“Thanks,” he croaked, as Kirby extended a hand to help him to his feet.
“Don’t mention it,” Kirby replied. “Now who, or what, did I just kill?”
Without further preamble or explanation, Drake rolled the Professor’s body onto its back, and tore open his shirt. Beneath was not the chest of an old man, or a young man, or anything human at all. It had the same basic outlines as a human torso, to be sure, but in place of ribs or pectoral or abdominal muscles were two eyes, vertical slits for a nose, and an almost round mouth filled with rasping teeth, like the maw of a leech.
“The Anthropophagi,” Kirby murmured.
“Whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders,” Drake finished. Perhaps they would both have laughed then, that strained, half-mad laughter that comes when terrible tension is terribly broken, but instead another sound stopped them. A deep rumble, the sound of stone grinding on stone, and it was coming from the graveyard out behind the house.
Without speaking a word, they followed the noise. The rumble was replaced with a rhythmic banging, a reverberating sound like the one that had interrupted their first dinner with the Professor. Only now was Kirby able to place what it had
reminded him of all those nights ago, the sound from Poe’s “House of Usher.” He was not at all surprised that it was coming from within the crypt.
Side by side, the two men walked out into the moonlight, until they were standing in front of the tomb, their breath steaming in the cold night air. Kirby still held the pistol limply in his hand, though even had it still been loaded, he doubted that it would do him any good. With each new bang the crypt door shook, and gray dust trickled down from the stone walls around it.
The massive crypt door fell from its hinges with a resounding clang, and they saw what the Professor had brought back with him him from the island. At the time he had carried it in a crate no bigger than a bread box, but it had grown in the years since. As it rolled forth from the tomb, it looked at first like a giant boulder—maybe one of the papier mâché boulders that decorated Kirby’s sets. But then as it came to a stop they could make out its features and they recognized it for what it was: a mummified human head, albeit one the size of a camera truck.
That would have been enough, of course. To freeze their blood, to send them running, but it wasn’t the end. For a moment the grisly thing just sat there, resting on the place where its bottom jaw should have been, and they were allowed the blissful illusion that its movement had been a natural occurrence, the result of it becoming unsettled within the tomb. But then they saw one horrid eye peer at them from a gaping socket, and then retreat on some kind of stalk, as though it was not the eye of the head at all, but of some creature that dwelled within.
With a sound like the grinding of giant teeth, the skull began to rock back and forth, and they saw masses of human arms—of normal size, but as mummified as the head—scrabbling at the ground from beneath it. One by one, the gnarled hands found purchase, and then the head began to lurch toward them, pulled along by a tide of arms, like a hermit crab dragging its shell.
The thing, the idol of the Headless Men, the spider the size of a horse—grown even bigger now—that Drake had thought he dreamed, came toward them through the graveyard like a bulldozer, pushing tombstones aside as it advanced. Kirby raised the pistol in his hand, which he knew would have been a futile gesture, even had there been any bullets left in the chamber, but doing it felt better than doing nothing, better than collapsing to the dirt and clawing at it, better than going mad.
But then there was another sound, another rumble, larger and louder than the one that had come before. Off in the distance, a red glow, the bloom of a luminous rose the size of the moon, like a bomb had gone off somewhere out over the ocean. The ground beneath their feet shook and heaved, and Kirby imagined some even larger horror, one the size of Godzilla, pushing itself up from beneath the earth.
Instead, a fissure cracked the cemetery in two. Kirby could see coffins dropping out of the dirt and tumbling into the darkness as the chasm split open the ground. The crevice swallowed up the giant head, its numberless arms clawing at the air as it fell into the abyss. For years after, Kirby would have dreams in which he watched the thing tumble. In those dreams, there were always other hands down there in the dark. Grasping hands, blacker than the shadows from which they groped. He could never be sure if they had actually been there that night, or if his mind had conjured them later. Worse, he could never decide if they had been dragging the abomination down, or welcoming it home.
When they walked back into the house, both of the bodies they had left there were gone, as well as one of the cars from out front. Neither was terribly surprised. Drake never told Kirby what had happened to him in the carriage house, though Kirby had his suspicions. “It must have been what they brought back from that island,” was all Drake said on the matter. “The one that sank into the sea. Whatever it was, I think they must have worshipped it.”
“Made sacrifices to it,” Kirby added, thinking back to the wriggling burlap sack.
In the days that followed, Kirby read an article in the newspaper while he was waiting for the plane that would take him back to America. It talked about a volcanic eruption that had occurred on that night of horror, more than a thousand miles away from where he and Drake had been standing. An eruption that was slowly forming an island. Too far away to have produced any seismic activity in the cemetery behind Whitley Manor, too far away for its blossom of fire to be seen in the sky, and yet…
Author’s Note: Originally published by Jordan Krall as a chapbook for Dunhams Manor Press, this one got its start as a project I did with Michael Bukowski. He was illustrating avatars of Nyarlathotep, and he had asked a handful of contemporary writers—including yours truly—to contribute their own original versions. Mine was a couple of paragraphs from what would become the climactic creature reveal of this story.
But really, it had started long before that, when I first saw the movie The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake. While ostensibly a fairly pedestrian 1959 drawing room shocker of the creaky old house variety, Jonathan Drake had a particularly weird turnaround in its final reel that helped inspire “The Cult of Headless Men,” though it took years—and Michael’s invitation—for the seed to bear fruit.
Even then, several more years passed between when I wrote the fragment for Michael’s project—featuring one of my weirder monsters to date—and the actual completion of the novelette. When Dunhams Manor put the chapbook out, my only condition was that they get Michael to do the cover, bringing the whole thing full circle.
When a Beast Looks Up at the Stars
“What’s the earliest memory you have of your father?” my therapist is asking. Such a tired line, something that a therapist would ask in a movie. I don’t tell him the truth, of course. I cast around for an easy lie, the same one that I would give to Kenzie if she asked, though she never does. Tell him something about my dad wrapping Christmas presents in old shoe boxes, packing them in socks, a twenty-dollar bill stuck between two bricks, wrapped in faded paper. Something that could be cute but always felt mean-spirited.
My laptop case is lying on the floor of the office. In it is a letter on stationery from the Seldon Civics Committee or somesuch, a clipping from the Seldon Herald, complete with a grainy newsprint photo of the old Gorka Theatre, with its marquee like an art deco wave. I’m driving there from here, in a rented black Accord, but I thought it would be a good idea to get one last therapy session in before I go.
No, let me stop. That’s a lie, and I know it. Kenzie thought it would be a good idea, and she’s right, but I knew it would be a waste of time, and it is. I talk about Seldon, about my childhood, about my dad, but I skim over the surface, like I’ve taught myself to do. A rock skipping across a deep, black pond, never touching the water long enough to attract the attention of the beasts that circle below.
I had written a book; nothing actually very respectable, one of those “100 Films to See Before You Shuffle Off This Filthy Coil” jobs, but it made it into the Library Journal, found its way onto B&N shelves, and something of that must have been enough to attract the attention of someone at the Seldon Public Library. I learned, from the letter and then the phone call, that it was still in the same place it had always been—an old bank building, across the street from what used to be the drug store—kept alive thanks to the efforts of the same civics committee that was on the letterhead.
They were trying to save the Gorka Theatre and so were hosting a local film festival for charity. Obviously not big enough to draw in any actual celebrities, they had reached out to me and asked me to host a few screenings, maybe even write a piece about it for the Herald. Local boy makes good, that sort of thing.
So why did I say yes? Did I want out of the apartment, which seemed too claustrophobic now, as I tried to navigate around the not-quite-fight I seemed to be perpetually having with Kenzie, who, bless her, just wanted to help me, but I didn’t want to be better just yet? Did I think it was finally time to confront Seldon, maybe drive by the house where I grew up, or that other house, out on the long dirt roads that criss-crossed each other like gridlines of orange clay? Did I really ca
re about saving the Gorka?
I remembered it from my boyhood. I had watched Tremors there and the Tim Burton Batman. I remembered the big pickles that they sold out of a jar on the counter, the Mountain Dews full of crushed ice, a flavor that I still mentally associated with monster movies on the big screen, even though I hadn’t had a Mountain Dew in probably fifteen years. According to the voice of the lady on the phone, the one-screen theatre was no longer privately owned, was instead kept limping along by the same civics committee that propped up the library, now dedicated to revival showings of The Wizard of Oz and the like.
Did I think, as I told my therapist, as I intimated to Kenzie, that maybe I could get another book out of this experience? If I was a film writer, after all, then the Gorka was my ground zero, wasn’t it? I had memories of my parents dropping me off, the truck idling in the grocery store parking lot across the street as my mom pressed a few crumpled bills and pocket-warmed coins into my hands while my dad wasn’t looking.
The marquee was lit with neon pink, which spilled out onto the sidewalk around it. I remembered the strange tingly feeling I got when I saw older kids making out in the shadows of the alley next to the theatre. I remembered the way that the guy behind the counter—Sam Gorka, I know now, but didn’t know or care then—always knew my name, handing me my pickle or my Mountain Dew and smiling at me beneath his paper cap.
There had to be a story here, right? About my going back to the place where I learned to love movies, to love that tingle of expectation that crackled through the theatre like static electricity when the house lights went down. About the long walks home through the small town dark, hugging the middle of the side-streets rather than the sidewalks, because the sidewalks were full of shadows that suddenly loomed up tall. About sitting next to Stormy Willis in those ratty theatre seats, letting my knee brush against hers. About my own first kiss in that darkened alleyway, all hot and sudden and confusing.