Hyacinth was standing in wait between two towers of stacked plastic bins, an unnerving smile staining her face. She turned and wriggled herself down the tiny row, then crouched down, her shadow now stretching amongst those flickering trails of multicoloured light.
Rhiannon manoeuvred through the maze of detritus to find her hostess squatting before a tiny hatch door that was set into the wall just above floor-level.
“Come see,” cooed Hyacinth. Politeness (and, if she was being honest, the curiosity of the unknown) moved Rhiannon toward the open doorway, but as soon as she was able to see the room and what it contained, this curiosity instantly twisted into fear.
The illumination guttered from a lanky strand of Christmas lights, which had been wound about the beams that served as the thick bones of the house itself. Insulation bulged between the wooden beams; pink as lung tissue, fluffy as candy floss. The floor of the crawlspace was but a single board that stretched from the doorway to the far end of the hatch like a ship’s fatal plank.
And it was there, upon that long runner of unsanded pine, that Rhiannon saw the body. It was as large as life and its presence among the festive bulbs was confusing, uncanny, terrible, and yet, irrefutably, shockingly, just…there.
The figure was slumped at the back of the room. Its head was swollen, and its eyes were shimmering, bulbous things. The mouth was gaping but expressionless. It was dressed in a dingy leotard that lent its body the lumpy, colourless appearance of bagged flour.
Hyacinth pulled herself through the crawlspace opening and proceeded to slither across the long plank, toward the crumpled form.
“My grandfather built him,” she explained. “He helped my family flourish during the Great Depression. We’ve looked to him ever since.” Hyacinth fussed with the figure while she talked, adjusting its posture like a fretting mother would with her child, pushing the cobwebs from its head using the heel of her longish hand. “I’d be lying if I told you that we’ve always benefited from his words, but really, it’s a matter of interpretation. That’s the art of it. Are you familiar with Sortes Sanctorum? It’s divining one’s fortune through a seemingly random flip of the Bible page. Great-grandfather was a believer and he taught my grandfather. But grandfather took it beyond the gospels. He felt that the great pattern was everywhere, in all things at all times. So he devised this.”
Rhiannon watched as Hyacinth reached around to the back of the figure’s plaster head. Its mouth began to glow with faint amber light, which revealed the too-wide grin of the dummy to be a fabric-covered speaker, the kind that might bring one feelings of nostalgia if one had memories of wartime gatherings around a cathedral radio to listen to melodramatic plays. Rhiannon had no such memories and therefore the mouth was horrible.
Static gushed from the dummy’s speaker/mouth. Underneath this incessant whir Rhiannon could hear faint strains of music and distant voices all struggling to be heard, to emerge from the static like fish breaking the surface of deep water.
The great lidless eyes began to spin. They were twin plastic discs, each bearing a spiral pattern. They glowed as they spun around and around and again. Was Hyacinth attempting to hypnotize her?
No, this effigy was a radio receiver, its dial-eyes prowled the bandwidths in search of transmissions.
Hyacinth nestled close to the thing and whispered something into where its ear should be.
Rhiannon had already begun backing away from the colourful crawlspace, but when she heard the doll speak as if in response to Hyacinth’s question, Rhiannon turned and ran.
On hands and knees she scaled the wooden steps, dragging herself toward the landing.
Her hands had managed to slap down on the linoleum of the kitchen floor when Rhiannon felt something grip her ankles. She screamed and tried to kick, but Hyacinth was unnaturally strong for so slight a person. She scrabbled upon Rhiannon’s prostrate form, looped her wiry arms around Rhiannon’s waist and heaved her clean off the stairs.
“Shhh,” she cooed, “shhh…shhh. It’s fate, darling. It’s not about you or me.”
Swiftly and inexorably, Rhiannon was being pulled back toward the hatch in the wall.
“All we ask is that you listen, just listen.”
Rhiannon was thrust through the square aperture. The wooden lane was filthy and rough. The blinking lights made her nauseous. And the sight of the horrible mannequin reduced her backbone to putty.
Closer to it now, closer than she would have ever wanted to be to such a thing, Rhiannon could see that the effigy’s body was nothing more than a hollow frame of chicken wire wrapped in a cheap white leotard. The pattern of the wire mesh was pushed firmly into the fabric, creating the illusion of reticulated flesh. And yet the gardener’s gloves that capped the hands betrayed the thing’s true nature: it was nothing but a pathetic scarecrow, without so much as a post to perch upon.
But scarecrows with their heads of straw and sackcloth cannot speak as this thing spoke. Its voice was as ugly as its shell. The spiral eyes spun around and again, pulling in random fragments from countless broadcasts. Hyacinth’s advisor was a child of Babel.
Time seemed to halt for Rhiannon as she faced the thing and planned her escape. The angled beams forced her to crawl like a slug. She tried to push herself back toward the hatch.
She felt the draft and heard the slam of the hatch door as Hyacinth sealed her in. There was the recognizable clunk of a lock being fastened, followed by the roar of heavy things being dragged, both of which rendered the crawlspace door immovable.
She kicked at it, hammered at it until the heels of her hands began to swell. All the while the cheery lights continued to flash, and the endless babble of Hyacinth’s advisor mounted.
Rhiannon’s joyous moment of inspiration that came when she thought of using her cellphone to call 911 turned black and came crashing down around her when she realized that her purse had slipped off her shoulder during her struggle on the stairs.
Her screams shredded her throat but roused not so much as a sound from beyond the door.
Some time later, the Christmas lights went out and the only the illumination that remained was the mannequin’s endlessly spinning eyes and the amber glow of its fabric mouth.
*
Three days and three nights passed before Hyacinth finally deemed to unlatch the crawlspace door. But by then Rhiannon had shed all conceptions of time and lost every ounce of will, strength, resistance. Like Lazarus, she slinked, broken but alive, out of the open hatch door, a living creature from a stifling crypt. Some Logos, some obscure alchemy of sound and isolation, had altered her world. It was powerful enough to transform Rhiannon’s tomb to womb, potent enough to spore her back among the living, her head brimming with messages. She felt as though her skull was on the verge of cracking, erupting like a volcano, so gigantic was this fresh knowledge.
Hyacinth had been keeping vigil. Her tiny form was propped upon a scuffed wooden stool and she held a burning white taper in her hands. The melted wax ran down in rivulets, splattering upon the already waxy skin of Hyacinth’s unsteady hands. Rhiannon looked at her face, so ghastly in the candlelight.
She looked past Rhiannon. The sight of the effigy lying broken and silent inside the crawlspace did not faze her. She returned her gaze to Rhiannon.
“Yes?” she whispered. “Yes, please…speak.”
Speaking just might relieve some of the unbearable pressure in her head. Rhiannon opened her mouth, but for what purpose? Was she going to scream? To beg for pity?
She heard a voice resounding in her skull, could feel words shaking over her palate, but the statements she was making bore no resemblance to the ones she was trying to make. Many of the words were from languages of which Rhiannon had no knowledge. Some of the sounds were not even words but were instead almost musical: the blurt of a trumpet, the pluck of a cello string.
Hyacinth’s face became a mask of delight. She puffed out the candle and sat it smoking upon a stack of old books. She advanced to Rhiannon, wrap
ped a switch-thin arm around her back and guided her toward the basement steps.
The climb was almost impossible for Rhiannon, whose ankles buckled with each footfall. By the time they reached the kitchen she had lost all feeling in her legs.
She was frightened to discover that the main floor of the house was not appreciably brighter than the crawlspace, for the windows had been sheathed in tarpaper and every lamp she passed had its lightbulb purposely smashed.
With care, Hyacinth guided her form, which grew weaker with each tick of the clock, into the living room and sat her in the folding chair Rhiannon had spotted on the way in.
“This is only temporary,” Hyacinth purred, her tone maternal and assuring. “We’ll get you a chair befitting a woman of your stature as soon as we’re able to understand your message. Can you hear what I’ve been saying to you? No, no, don’t try to speak. Just blink your eyes once for yes and twice for no. That’s it. Good. And can you understand what I’ve been saying to you? Very good. Do you know what it is that has happened to you? No. Well, that’s to be expected, my dear. Don’t let it alarm you. It will take time.”
Hyacinth moved around to the front of the chair, hunched slightly to level her eyes with Rhiannon’s.
“There are some people outside, some really lovely people. They’ve been waiting a long time to see you. May I send them in?”
Rhiannon’s arms felt like concrete. Unable to lift them, she closed her eyes to press away the tears that were welling up and blurring her vision. Hyacinth took this to be an affirmative answer and squealed with delight before rushing to the front door.
The first pair to make the hesitant entry into the living room were the men Rhiannon had seen laughing on the street the night of her arrival, the men who’d loitered in the pooled light of the streetlamp, the men who’d scared her. They held hands as they approached her. They asked about the nature of their father’s illness.
Rhiannon’s cry for help translated into a staccato message, something in Spanish or perhaps Portuguese.
The men sighed and shed tears and blessed her for this message. Before they exited, they handed a small and crumpled envelope to Hyacinth, who was already greeting the next visitant.
Iain was the sixth or seventh to approach. The sight of him brought Rhiannon a relief that bordered on bliss. She tried in vain to rise. Crying out his name yielded only static. She felt trapped in a nightmare, the kind where she would try to scream but found she had no voice, and all the while the danger—calmly and with notable relish—would close in upon her, mangling her body with a weapon or forcing something thick and fibrous deep inside her mouth, her cleft.
But dear Iain did no such thing. His assault was something far more insidious.
He wrapped his arms around her momentarily, kissed her oily brow.
In her ear he whispered, “Will we be successful?”
Rhiannon’s reply was instant, confusing, and delivered wholly without her consent.
Never had her mate appeared so pleased.
This would be the only memory of his face that Rhiannon would have to cling to over the next three years, the first of which was spent solely in that horrid folding chair, meeting with an endless procession of guests.
Hyacinth kept the tarpaper on her windows and succoured her new doll with her choicest teas and macrobiotic delicacies. She cleaned her bucket twice daily without complaint and washed her with a loofah sponge soaked in tepid rosewater.
Iain made good on his promise to Hyacinth. He procured for them a handsome and firm stone cottage in the city’s historic district. Gardeners and contractors were hired to see that the house and its humble grounds were kept in good repair. The windows were two-way smoked glass, which assured privacy while not depriving the occupants a view of the elegant street.
Rhiannon was given a chair befitting her at last; a throne-like apparatus of sand-coloured plush and a white lacquered Hepplewhite frame. She was stationed in the bedroom at the top of the stairs (the master bedroom went to Hyacinth). A second chair, comfortable looking but not as regal, was placed before Rhiannon so that her visitants would feel more at ease during consultations.
A year or so later, Iain finally made his return. Though he still managed the books for this little soothsaying enterprise, this was the first time he’d made a pilgrimage to its source.
Rhiannon’s recollection of him was faint, dulled by exhaustion and trauma and time. The young woman who clung to him was wholly unfamiliar to her. The twins who cowered behind Iain had grown immensely during her absence.
“Hello, Rhiannon,” Iain said weakly. Then he turned to the young girl at his side. “Sit,” he bade her. “Ask.” He then instructed the twins to go outside and play.
The young woman was reluctant to obey, and once she found herself facing the glassy-eyed hag with her tea-stained teeth, her marionette-like body, her frumpy floral gown, her black-soled feet with their thick yellow toenails, her voice refused to come. Rhiannon knew the feeling well. Seeing the girl in this familiar helpless state, that of nightmare, that of her very existence since the night in the crawlspace, made Rhiannon pity the girl. She did her best to show empathy through her unfailingly vacant gaze.
“Can you tell us,” the girl began pausing to clear her throat, “will our baby be a healthy one?”
The power inside Rhiannon, over which she had no agency, shared its prophecy.
Iain smiled. His young lover began to cry. He helped her to her feet, and they escaped the room together, like some awkward three-legged hybrid joined at the hip.
Twenty-three weeks after their consultation in the stone cottage, the last of which were filled with punishing nausea, the word was made flesh.
Wriggling, its tiny limbs twitching as though being prodded with an electrical charge, the child’s first mewling cry was distorted from the mucous that sealed its mouth like fine stretched fabric. Iain swaddled its body, still greasy with the fluids of the womb, and carefully lifted it from the bed. The cord was still connecting the baby to its host. Iain could feel the lump growing in his throat, could feel himself tearing up, yet he still managed a smile. For and from this child, great things had been predicted.
After the Final
Are you out there, Professor Nobody?
I’m hopeful that these words will somehow reach you, wherever you might be, whatever you might be.
In my starker moments I find myself questioning whether you were ever really here at all, whether those sermons that spilled from your dusty throat were not simply the vestiges of one of my lavish nightmares.
But if you did truly grace a classroom with your singular presence, if the trances you evoked were indeed real, then I cannot help but cling to the hope that you might return to your most dedicated pupil, one who you left behind on this shadow-encrusted planet.
Do your thoughts ever stray to me, Professor? Rarely, I would wager; rarely, if at all.
I have roamed many roads, exhausted so many different methods, all in the hope of finding you. Every one of my efforts has come to nothing. But how could it be otherwise? After all, how does one even begin questing after a man known only as Nobody, a man whose vocation is that of a secret shepherd to what he calls “the true macabrists”?
Macabrist. It was your phrase, yet it rang so true to me that I cannot help but regard it as a grand truth, every bit as immutable as love or fear or pain.
I shall never forget that first after-hours lecture when you defined a macabrist as “a person whose dreams are as a great charnel ground, one that is dimmed by personal eclipses and slaked by a private Styx.” I remember how you stated that the macabrist is free of faith, strictly speaking, but that if they were to invent a religion it would be based not on the supernatural, but rather on the “grubby subnatural; the Underworld. Indeed, we trawl up our philosophies from our unconscious, and they emerge dripping with abjection.”
I remain determined to gain full admittance to the great subnature, Professor, if only to prove to y
ou that I am worthy of seeing the darkness, that I am truly of the darkness.
Do you see how assimilated your teachings have become with me? Your “little lectures on supernatural horror,” as you somewhat dismissively called them, made me feel as though I had been granted admittance to a buried sphere from which I’d been wrongly banished before being condemned to being born into this world.
I’d always thought I was the only one who longed for some grue-dimmed subnature, a grimy cosmic cellar. But in you I had, at long last, found one who understood. You voiced things which had always felt like shameful intuitions to me, impulses that I had to keep pent at the back of my mind, perennially praying that they would not leak out to condemn me among the Normals. But you uttered your bent observations plainly, with a boldness that could only have stemmed from experiential knowledge. You exuded a confidence I could never possess.
You taught us that the Horror toward existence is not only real but is in fact more real than we are, that it is the boundless gory foam upon which all things, known and unknown, merely bob like so much flotsam.
I was the best pupil you could ever hope for, Professor. If only you would return to experience the fruits of your teachings. I can still see you creeping toward the classroom door on that last night; can still hear your parting words echoing through the halls of my brain: “Good luck on the final.”
I waited for that final examination, waited an unmentionable span of time. After more anguished nights than I care to recall, I came to suspect that the final was not to be held in the cozy confines of your classroom, but in the world at large.
And then it all became so obvious. For what were your lectures if not impressions of life beyond the theoretical, echoes of the palpable nightmare that succors us all?
So I began to prepare for the final.
My preparations were unique and rigorous. I used the Earth as my reference material. I tested myself in a variety of ways.
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