by S. T. Joshi
He imagined himself dialing 911 for a sinus infection, then sitting in an ER waiting room for six hours. Urgent Care, then. He blinked stupidly at his phone. What was the number?
And then everything went gray and spun away into darkness.
* * *
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
Hot. He was hot, his lips dry, his throat scalding. He pried open one crusted eye just enough to see his living-room furniture looming over him at crazy angles. His head lay on the hardwood floor.
Hot. He was sure the skin of his face was going to start blistering at any moment. He was lying on his side in a fetal position, and the bridge of his nose felt as though it were the size of a softball.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
The blows rang through his mind. He couldn’t even think, they were so strong. As he swam up closer to consciousness he realized that the thudding was his heart, pounding blood with urgent force through his swollen, feverous head.
“Mishquèsand auntau.”
The voice was coming from over his head somewhere. He turned his head, blinking feebly.
“Abbomocho auntau.”
“Wha—what?” he mumbled.
“The wind is from the northeast,” said the voice, “but the storm is not yet come.”
There was an old man’s face over his. The old man was so out of context, Jim couldn’t place him for a moment; then suddenly the memory fell into place. It was the old man from the state park, in worn jeans and a flannel shirt. How had he got into the apartment?
“Robbins,” Jim managed to whisper.
“Tekeli-li, Tuppaûntash, Yeush nokkóneyeuukish!” the old man intoned at him. Jim had no reply.
“Come out, little one. Come out, nuttaunes. Pauwau auntau. Maunêtu auntau. Come out,” the old man chanted.
“What are you talking about?” Jim finally croaked. He was still lying on the floor, staring up at the old man looming over him. He could tell by the light coming in the windows that it was almost dawn.
“Kutulu . . . wunneechauog. They are his children.” Suddenly the old man waved a hand at Jim’s head and barked “Maunêtu auntau! COME!”
A blinding slash of pain knifed through Jim’s face. He thrashed and screamed, and as he screamed he felt a muscular writhing in his sinuses. An impossible pressure was moving, shifting, driving from chamber to chamber in his swollen, fevered skull. The clot that had scabbed over his right nostril burst outward, and his head snapped back. With a horrible burning sensation Jim felt something squirm out of his face and onto the floor. It landed with a soft plopping sound, as though someone had dropped a chunk of stew beef on the floor. He turned his tear-filled eyes to the thing that had fallen.
My God, he thought. That did not come out of me. But he could feel a piece of his mind break loose and run mad, yammering.
The thing on the floor looked at first glance like a slug. It was gray, a full four inches long, and it was wet with pus, blood, and slime.
The head is wrong, Jim thought. Wrongwrongwrongwrongwrong, the demented part of him chanted.
The head was eyeless, round, and dominated by a broad mouth. The thing snapped its jaw two or three times, showing interlocking pointed teeth like a piranha. It had no lips, only teeth, and two vestigial little arms like a salamander’s legs, but with hooked claws on the three tiny digits.
“You’re lucky,” the old man said, kneeling down. He took the creature in his hands and cradled it lovingly. “She hasn’t laid her eggs yet.”
Oh my God my God my God my God, Jim thought, and he could feel the rest of his mind being tempted to join in the yammering.
“It’s a good thing I found you,” the old man said.
Jim struggled up onto his elbows and then sat up. His nose was bleeding freely; he pinched it shut and held his hand there.
“But—why did you come looking for me?” he said. “And how did you get into the apartment?”
“I had to,” the old man said simply. “I had to get the nuttaunes back.” He slipped the slug-thing into a pocket of his windbreaker, as if it were some sort of pet.
“But why?” asked Jim, feeling stupid.
The old man looked at him with grave eyes and did not smile.
“Because it isn’t time yet,” he said, and walked out.
Ex Libris
CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN
Caitlín R. Kiernan has been hailed by the New York Times as “one of our essential authors of dark fiction.” A two-time winner of both the World Fantasy and Bram Stoker awards, she has published ten novels, including The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. She is also the recipient of the Locus and James Tiptree, Jr. awards. Her short fiction has been collected in thirteen volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder, The Ammonite Violin & Others, A Is for Alien, and The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories. Subterranean Press released a two-volume set collecting the best of her short fiction, Two Worlds and In Between and Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea. She is currently writing her next novel, The Starkeeper, and has recently published two short story collections, Dear Sweet Filthy World (Subterranean Press, 2017) and Houses under the Sea: Mythos Tales (Centipede Press, 2018).
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
—OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray
1
I DIDN’T FIND THE BOOKS. YES, HAD I BEEN THE ONE who found them, it’s likely I would have paid what the estate sale in Newport was asking, but that doesn’t change the fact, simple and irrelevant as it may be, that I am not the one who bought the books. Can a woman be deemed guilty of sins she only might have committed, if she’d had the opportunity? Idiotic choice of words, sin. Or, for that matter, peccancy. In all the world there is no sin, and I doubt if in all the cosmos there is sin, as antiquated and useless a concept as is a flat earth and a six-day creation. In his biography of Aleister Crowley, Perdurabo (Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2002, 2010), Richard Kaczynski writes of that self-proclaimed bête noire, “If everybody was so mistaken about God, they could also be wrong about sin. Thus he decided to become a sinner. But not just any sinner: with the same zeal he showed over the theological poser of Christ’s three days in the grave, Alec decided to become the world’s best sinner.” He was then, I think, fifteen, and so can be forgiven for believing in such a foolish notion. I can hardly say the same for me, who would not come to understand this fundamental amorality until I was nearing the end of my thirties. Thirty-eight, to be precise, two days after Maggie brought the cardboard box of books to me from the aforementioned estate sale. You think, for what she’d paid, they’d have placed them in something more durable and dignified than an old Campbell’s Tomato Soup box. Then again, perhaps nothing would have suited them more.
“I’d rather you not keep them here,” I told her, and she looked taken aback.
“I didn’t say I was going to leave them here.”
“I just don’t want them around,” I said, and went back to watching the rain pattering against the bedroom window. It was May, though it was the sort of May that still felt like March. I’ve lived in Providence for twelve years, and I still cannot get used to the protracted springs.
“It’s only a box of books,” Maggie said, almost whispering. She took a cigarette from the pack on the nightstand and lit it. The air smelled a little less like sex and rain and mold. It’s a nice enough apartment (ought to be, for what I pay), but in wet weather the stink of mold seeps up from the basement.
“I’m taking them home with me,” she said. “I never planned to do anything else with them.” Her nostrils leaked grey smoke. I wanted to ask her for a cigarette, but I didn’t. It seemed, in that moment, as if the request would constitute some manner of apology or change of heart.
“When did shit like old books start to bother you?” she asked and stared down at her naked breasts. “Did you become superstitious behind my back? Is this some cryptic religiosity I’v
e not been privy to, or is it something else entirely?”
The rain looked cold enough to freeze a person alive. I’d only have to open the window to prove that suspicion.
“Hell, I’ll get a mint for those things on eBay,” she added. “It’s not like we couldn’t use the money. When’s the last time you—”
I’ve skipped ahead. I’m rushing the narrative probably, which I know, already, will come out in disconnected portions, episodes, dollops, globs. Dollops seems like the most appropriate word, knowing now what I know. No, wrong. Beginning to suspect now what I only just begin to suspect. But knowing of a certain, there is no knowing.
I was pretending to work on a painting when Maggie showed up with the cardboard box. She let herself in, as always, but I’d set my brush and palette aside as soon as I’d heard her at the door. It’s not as though she was actually interrupting me, was it? In truth, I was thankful for the distraction. She came into my studio, and there was a kiss, and the usual casual bits of conversation that are necessary, integral to all relationships, and yet never actually add up to anything. Then I noticed the box. No, that’s a lie. I’d noticed the box immediately; so, rather, that’s when I chose to broach the subject of the battered Campbell’s Tomato Soup box. Maggie was always a sucker for estate sales, and both our places were chockablock with the junk she brought home from them. She had a whole ceramic bowl of skeleton keys, another of typewriter keys, and every windowsill was lined with ancient doorknobs. She frequently talked about selling off some of the shit on eBay or to antique dealers, but she never managed to part with anything she brought home. So, that day in May, I figured the cardboard box contained nothing more remarkable than more of the same. I asked her what she’d scrounged this time, not really wanting to know, the question filled with even less enthusiasm than I had that day for the painting on my easel.
“Books,” she said, and I was surprised, because books were not on her usual bill of fare. Perhaps, I thought, they were books about skeleton keys, typewriter keys, or old doorknobs. “I don’t know bupkis about books, but, right off, I knew there was something unusual about this lot, so . . . you know how it is.”
I knew exactly how it was. I know, now, had it only been a matter of lugging home stray kittens, she’d still be here.
Maggie set the box on the floor between us, then stood up, staring down at it. I glanced at it, then stared at her.
She said, “I almost didn’t buy them, but I remembered how you took that history of book binding class at RISD, so I thought you might know whether they’re worth anything or not.”
“Maggie, I took that class seven years ago,” I told her.
“Well, yeah. But it won’t hurt you to have a look, will it?”
I imagine people say shit like that all the time, believing it to be true.
“Well, I can’t see anything through a closed box.” I was beginning to get annoyed with her, though I couldn’t then say why. I’m not even sure I know why now, after everything that has (and will yet) transpire. But it was me who sat down by the legs of my stool and opened the box. It was me who played Pandora.
And people, I have found, even scholars, are quite entirely divided on the subject of Pandora (Πανδώρα). Popular view, she opened a box and released evil into the world. See, of course, Eve (, Ḥawwâh), who ate of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and so heralded the fall of mankind. But Pandora, also the first woman (no doubt men wrote these myths, if they were written and are not history, in which case women may not be as benign as we wish to imagine ourselves). But Pandora, who, like Eve, was the first woman. Return to the matter of her, and to confusion surrounding her fabled deed. More precisely, what was contained in the fabled box, or jar (see Hesiod). One thing remained in the jar, according to some. And it is called by Hēsíodos elpis— proper translation a matter of some contention—and ignoring the warnings of Prometheus, Epimetheus accepts the jar (or box) as a gift from Pandora, and, in so doing, he scatters the contents, and thus “the earth and sea are full of evils,” excepting elpis, which was not released. But there is much disagreement, as I have indicated already, as to the proper rendering of elpis: maybe “hope,” or maybe the “expectation of evil” (vel sim). And is the jar a prison for hope (or the expectation of evil), or is it a vessel holding it safe for humanity? And I have digressed, and this is mere rambling, whether or not it will prove to be relevant. No— it will prove to be relevant, because, at the behest of Maggie, I did play Pandora. But, still, I am rambling.
Some of what is to follow may seem . . . extravagant in speech. Surely exaggerated, surely. But I won’t make an apology for that. These are honest recollections. You’ll make of all this whatever you will; apologia would hardly change that.
I sat down beside my stool and opened the box.
“I only paid thirty dollars,” she said. “Thirty bucks for eleven books. They were asking forty-five, but I haggled.”
Maggie was known far and wide as an infamous estate-sale haggler.
I opened the box, which wasn’t taped shut, but only kept closed by the overlapping of the lid’s four cardboard flaps. At first, there were only the smells one would expect from eleven very old books held inside a Campbell’s Tomato Soup box. The musty smell of old paper, mostly, but under that, a subtler hint of equally aged leather. And a peculiar sourness I was unable to identify. These were my first impressions. Olfactory.
“I thought about stopping by Myopic Books on the way home,” she said, “but decided I’d get better prices from eBay.”
For you who do not live in Providence, Myopic Books is a used bookshop at Wayland Square, east of College Hill. I will never cease to wish she’d unloaded her windfall on those unsuspecting booksellers. When I’m not wishing she’d never gone to that estate sale. When I’m not wishing . . . never mind. This way lies infinite fucking regression.
I looked into the box, expecting to see only worn cloth and leather covers. That should have been my second and visual impression. But what I saw instead was a darkness so profound that for a fleeting moment I entertained two equally absurd possibilities: 1) that light had never entered that box, and 2) that whatever lay within the box was, like the singularity at the core of a black hole, devouring any light that might enter the box. I actually shuddered, but I didn’t look away. I started to say something. I still wonder what, if anything, Maggie might have seen on my face. But then the darkness was gone, and I was only gazing at two neat stacks of old books.
“Most of them are in superb condition,” she said, a suggestion of pride in her voice. It’s her voice I still miss most of all.
I removed them one by one, examined each in turn, then carefully set them on the floor beside me. Sorry, Mags, but the books were, for the most part, in pretty poor condition. But books were not her forté (as I’ve noted), so I can’t really blame her for misjudging their general state of preservation. All appeared to retain their original covers, the original bindings. Five had the titles impressed or printed on the spines and/or covers; it was necessary for me to open the remaining six to learn the titles, titles and subtitles and authors and years of first publication or reissue. At times, I was unable to open the covers more than a few centimeters before leather, leather-covered paste board, or cloth began to flake or crack, bits of binding falling to the hardwood and eliciting winces from Maggie. I didn’t have to tell her she’d been wrong about the shape they were in. She could clearly see that much for herself.
I’d never heard of even a single one of these volumes, but that was hardly a surprise. All of them were devoted to various occult subjects, near as I could tell. Some seemed to be actual grimoires. Not my forté. Only a couple were in English. But I’ll come to all these particulars a little farther along, to the particulars of each one.
“So what do you think?” Maggie asked hesitantly. I stared up at her for a moment, then glanced back to the book, the last one from the box, a thick bradel-bound affair in German. The title was embossed in Deutsch Got
hic—Von unaussprechlichen Kulten—and the author listed below (in the same gaudy typeface) that as one Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt. Both were printed in a red so deep I’d call it claret.
“I think I’m not the person to appraise these things,” I replied. The word things seemed very apt, for reasons I did not then understand.
“Oh,” she said, and looked a little disappointed. Obviously, taking them to a professional appraiser was going to cut into her profits. I set the German book aside with the others. I didn’t like the way it felt. There, my third (and extremely vague) impression: tactile. It might only have been mold rubbing off onto my fingertips, some combination of mold and dust, only the book had felt oily, though I could plainly see it wasn’t.
I wanted to go to the bathroom sink and wash my hands, but I resisted the urge.
“So who do you think could tell me?”
Off the top of my head, I could only think of the Brattle Bookshop in Boston.
“There must be something closer than that,” she frowned.
“Probably. I just don’t know, Mags. How about you try looking on the Internet, or maybe calling someone at the Athenaeum. Or, better yet, RISD.”
She said yeah, that was probably the best course of action, and then she put the books back into the box. I looked down at my hands, which still felt oily, and it suddenly occurred to me that, if I’d been more conscientious, I’d have washed my hands before handling Maggie’s estate score. There were green and blue smears of dry acrylic paint on my hands, some not even quite dry, smears which might easily have rubbed off on the antiques. I apologized, showed her my palms, but when she hurriedly checked the covers of the books there weren’t any stains.
“Lucky,” she sighed, relieved and managing a smile.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” I said. “Very lucky.” Then I rubbed my palms against my overalls, trying to rub away that oily sensation, just as I was trying not to think about the black hole I’d thought I saw when I opened the box.