The Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK™ Vol 2: George T. Wetzel

by George T. Wetzel

  What partial power he held over me seemed to vanish when my despair caused me to cry out. The whole chamber twisted and spiraled, blurred and was gone in a twinkling; and I returned to a mindless oblivion. Eventually I crept up through a graying void and awoke. The usual nausea, debility of the limbs, and deadened senses were at once experienced. This Teotihuacan adventure frightens me in many ways; and there is a new physical sensation I now feel that I have never before had as an after-effect. Must cut down the cauldron’s strength—but I have a terrible presentiment it may be due to another reason…”

  The crazy, over-large script began to falter near its termination and at the end of the last sentence it expired into an ominous illegibility, with a smudge or claw-like mark at the bottom that exuded a faint and unpleasant fetidness.

  When I reached this part of the book—there was no more writing in it—and smelled the faint fetid reek on its page, I became aware that similar fetidness was in the room and had been there when I first entered the building, but the mouldy timbers had fooled me into thinking it part of their odour of decay. The fetid smell grew stronger near the doorway into the blackened hallway and I tracked it to a stronger place near the door into the opposite wing. Against murky lighted windows of that room was silhouetted chemical apparatus and along the walls the dull glint of glassware. A scuffling movement came from a darkened corner and I watched it, thinking a rodent would emerge. But at my height I saw a pair of watery eyes shine and the fetid reek grew overwhelming. The inhabitant of the gloom stumbled forward in the lesser dark.

  It was a horrible travesty of the human form yet I knew at once what had happened—the notebook gave me the clue—and felt a compassion for this presence. But as it shambled closer, revulsion overpowered me and I backed out and shrank along the hall passageway, still too shocked to run. But it still groped closer and I stepped out into the driving rain. Whatever motive impelled the thing, I do not know, but it had no knowledge of what the rain would do to its already precarious hold on life, if such animation can be called life. The driving rain pelted and tore at its substance, unmercifully revealing white bones and washing the blotches of rot from its form. I could not watch the terrible sight any longer but turned and hid my face… Who knows what crumbling, fleshy abode may await the dream-soul of a living sleeper when that soul has tarried elsewhere, too long and too far?

  THE GOTHIC HORROR

  Originally published in The Gothic Horror and Other Weird Tales (1978).

  Quite often Penhryn had puzzled over the fact that Gothic art was made so hideous.

  Every cathedral he had ever visited, every Gothic MS. read, even Medieval tapestry—like the Todtentanz theme—was cursed with this ubiquitous grotesqueness. Once a Medieval archaeologist had told him it perhaps was the soul—ugly and deformed—of the age that tolerated it. Perhaps so. But more logically there was a provoking parallel between it and the practices of the witch covens of the period, who in order to assert their opposition to the Church and goodness, deliberately inverted the symbols and rituals of Christianity in their blasphemous Black Mass; a parallel that ominously suggested that many hidden Satanists had infiltrated among the craftsmen and engineers ornamenting and erecting the cathedrals of Northern Europe. Less than subtle proof had existed for centuries in front of men’s eyes in the irreverent gargoyles leering triumphantly atop church parapets; for were they not originally a Satan image, carried in a “tarasque” procession and ceremonially exercised before the church during the Medieval ages?

  There were other historic examples—like that of the impious humorist of Teutonic “Ulm cathedral” who carved the statue of the prophet Moses, in the tabernacle, with a pair of horns not unlike those given in contemporaneous depictions of Satan. Then there was the evil engineer who in strengthening the central tower of British “Wells cathedral” in 1330 used inverted Gothic arches beneath it—and since Gothic geometry was imbued with religious mysticism, and inverted symbolism the heart of Satan worship, the idea behind these inverted arches was obvious to Penhryn.

  Even now, the tympanum Penhryn studied was such an example of that blasphemy. A sly, cynical hint of bigotry, it seemed, was intended in the too closely crowded group of saints and reveling demons. Another infamy like this present symbolism of the Elect and the Damned, he recalled, once carved on the tympanum of Rheims cathedral, so shocked its 18th century French clergy that they had it chiseled out.

  No one else shared Penhryn’s conclusions as to subversive Satanist influences behind Gothic grotesqueness. To them his theory was the mouthing of a scholarly crackpot. Only by gathering an overwhelming mass of proofs from Gothic cathedrals, like the one he now was in, could he hope to convince others.

  His reflections induced by the tympanum were disrupted by the verger commenting about some LX Century Saxon brickwork on the inside wall, and Penhryn trailed him inside.

  The inside of this and other Gothic cathedrals in many ways imitated a forest. The pilastered columns carrying the entire weight of the roof resembled the sinewed trunks of ancient oak trees, and the vault arches springing from the columns and meeting one another in the groined ceiling compared to branching boughs curving up to a forested gloom; the oak and maple leaves and acorns carved realistically on the capitals of the columns furthered this illusion. But the similarity did not end there, because pew boards, corbel-tables and mouldings, the stonework and wood screens, were all sculptured with leaf and vine forms of such minute detail and complexity as to seem alive. All these vegetable forms seemed the work of nature but now frozen by some Gorgon glance. It was, mused Penhryn, just like a Druidic grove of old where Odhinn, the wind-god, was invoked by Celt and Teuton alike.

  He gave a start, for a supernatural wind did sigh melodiously down through that vista of endless stony trees. The sound faltered and stopped after an indefinite interval of time. In a moment it resumed but the spell was broken; and he recognized that the organist secreted in some remote corner of the cathedral was practicing part of Cesar Franck’s tone poem “Les Eclides,” the ethereal harmony of which was curiously like the sighing of a zephyr through forest leaves.

  In truth there did seem to be the elder temple of a heathenist faith embodied within Gothic cathedrals. And he remembered the Medieval belief that the Devil, in order to gain power over men, would enter into the grass of the field, which was fed to oxen; and when in turn men ate of that ox beef, the Devil was thus able to enter the beings of men and corrupt them. Penhryn wondered if such a “sacrament in reverse” had not culminated within Gothic architecture; there was a wrongness in the atmosphere of such places, a genius loci that nothing could drive away.

  The organist had stopped his playing and quiet reigned for a long while. Then Penhryn was conscious that the verger was remarking on the misfortunes of the west tower which had fallen four times in the last 800 years and of part of the gallery where one of the many fires had broken out, the last in 1668, endangering the chapter house and the library. And Penhryn thought it odd such an uncommon number of disasters had befallen this cathedral.

  Beneath tons of stone they passed, whose enormous weight elfin Plantagenet-ribbed vaults appeared incapable of supporting. Reaching the Reliquary in the gloom of the west transept arm, the verger unlocked the iron gate before it and brought out of a chest therein the cathedral’s mortuary wealth—the remains of illustrious prelates and canonized saints—that reposed in bejeweled, golden urns and containers. Drily, the verger spoke of dull-some abbots and obscure martyrs, until—”this particular urn,” he said, picking up one manifestly no greatly different from the others save for an indecipherable inscription in Hellenistic Greek on it, “whose osseous contents are reputedly those of an early saint, has a quaint story attached to it. In 1163 the Popish monks here gathered some henbane found growing in their garden, mistaking it for a kind of parsley.”

  Unimaginatively he related how those monks who had not eaten of it were wakened that same mi
dnight by the Matins bell. And coming into the cathedral read scrawled across the sacred books what was never originally written there, saw scribbled in chalk on the walls blasphemy, and heard profane things uttered by those who had awakened them.

  “The archives,” explained the verger, “are not too explicit on the outrage; though they did say by circumlocution how the drugged monks made a mockery of Christian ritual by making obeisance to each other and to this particular urn.”

  The incident somehow seemed to fit in with the suspicion in Penhryn’s mind regarding the Gothic Age. Could not the henbane seeds have been purposely planted in that cathedral garden to make possible both its misidentification and inevitable misuse?

  “...there was a great traffic in such relics during Medieval times,” the verger was saying. “Monstrous incongruities existed—it was not unusual for three thigh bones of a saint to be in the Reliquaries of three separate churches. And of course there was the monkish pilfering of relics from rival monasteries—a ghastly business for sure.”

  The organist had descended and was making for the front door when the verger spied him; and, breaking off his lengthy discourse, excused himself and indicated that Penhryn could have free run of the place for a while, as he had to discuss the coming Sunday service with the organist. Penhryn watched the two of them disappear out the door. Then breathing a sigh of relief, for the verger was an erudite bore, Penhryn ascended the triforium gallery.

  Sunlight glorified the mosaic panes up here; and alternately, where no window pierced the stone wall, a chill darkness lurked. Thrusting up its ornate spires and pipes in Perpendicular Gothic style—almost a miniature of a cathedral—was the organ case, beneath the oculus window, the so-called eye of the cathedral.

  Dry dust assailed his nose as he crawled behind the organ to examine its private, geometric world of square and round pipes—a sight that could have been a “Forest” wrought by a cubist sculptor. Coming out after a time, he paused to look over the balustrade into the hollowed out nave below, and was seized with awed admiration of the craftsman who had carved such intricate foliations on the pinnacles over a Piscina niche, the geometric lines in a cinquefoil window.

  Penhryn felt an oppressive sense of heat, and, looking up, saw last, lingering sunlight burning through a stained glass window. And the sainted figure that looked down at him seemed to be twisting agonizingly in pain, as though its abode there were the fiery Hell of the damned; heated air before the window caused the image to waver with this disconcerting mobility. The window frames themselves were wrought in shapes deliberately resembling flame tongues—the so called French Flamboyant Gothic style—which furthered this peculiar illusion of fire.

  And he made a mental note to check on the possibility that flame tracery might be intentionally and mockingly fashioned as were other aspects of Gothic grotesqueness, that imitative magic was hinted at, to show saintliness was cynically rewarded by fiery torture. Quite suddenly he realized there was more than normal summer’s blistering warmth emanating from that window, too much for comfort, and he retired into the cool gloom.

  Raising his eyes upwards to the shadowy clerestory regions, he noted the irregular alignment of the longitudinal axis of the roof, proof that a later repair had been incorrectly engineered. While he studied this mistake, the shifting sunlight retreated roofwards as darkness flowed into the vacuum it left below; and he grew aware of the long time he had browsed up here alone, and suddenly hoped that the verger had not forgotten his presence and locked him in. The thought worried Penhryn, the spending of a cold solitary night in this cheerless edifice.

  Hastening downwards, he found his apprehension to be an actuality: the entrance door had been locked by the absent-minded verger. Possibly there might be other means of escape—the door in the vestry or a window or even a trap door opening out onto the church roof from whence he could climb down one of the spiked buttresses. The last turned out to be the only remaining escape route as all others were impossible. So he started up the fathomless dark of the aisle, feeling his way with a hand against the side wall. After a measureless interval—for in the dark there is no visible change of surroundings to judge time’s passage—his questing hand lost the touch of the clammy wall and a blind emptiness yawned under it. It was like stepping off into a bottomless abyss—that falling away of the wall—and he flinched momentarily. But a groping foot banged against the first step. Despite all his cautious ascent, his feet constantly struck painfully the invisible stone, and before he was aware of it, he stumbled out upon the tri-forium gallery where a ghost of illumination remained.

  For hours, he thought, he searched the rambling galleries, poking into a multitude of recesses that undoubtedly were not noticeable in daylight; the exhumation of these archaic and odd nooks might well have delighted and surprised the pedantic verger. But Penhryn found no joy in such discoveries, only a curious wonder that they should be so readily encountered in the absence of light.

  The impenetrable murk, however, was welcome in another sense, for it obscured those Gothic grotesques on the corbel stones he passed. Even so, he wished he could forget completely for the present time all his past sinister speculations about Gothic art, because in this weird place they gave rise to all sorts of wild and unpleasant fancies.

  In this nighted domain where little was seen to help in orientation, he nevertheless had a growing suspicion that he had several times retraced his path and the knowledge alarmed him.

  A reasonless panic assailed him, forcing him to admit finally that he was marooned on the gallery level, for he could neither locate a roof door nor find the stairs going below—though he had no real desire at all to return down there. The eerie hush made the place seem a hideous mausoleum dreamt of in some nightmare; then he recalled the transept Reliquary with its ancient dead interred in urns and jeweled boxes and a shudder went through his body.

  Hitherto all was a canvas of dead silence, but after he shuddered a sound was brushed across it. From the direction of that mortuary transept it had come; and as he peered nearly sightlessly he sensed, then saw a stirring in the Egyptian darkness. His fear alone had called up that presence.

  More than panic overwhelmed him and he ran with the hopelessness of the trapped down the gallery aisle, blundering into a walled surface which nearly catapulted him over the balustrade. Whatever the presence was, it made faltering sounds on the stone stairs, sending him into new depths of terror. His perception grew more nightmarish as he halted, petrified, knowing not where to turn.

  A blur of light, from the oculus window, lessened the gallery’s gloom where he cowered, and the presence stalked nearer this grey fringe. Intense terror can carry a person past the realm of feeling, and Penhryn was now an emotionless entity intent only on flight and self preservation.

  When the other halted, momentarily, its blind quest, as if making more certain of his whereabouts, Penhryn shrank backwards—and fell in to a lightless window that crashed from his weight, tumbling the now petrified man amidst a debris of shattered glass and leaded mullions upon the outside roof.

  * * * *

  The verger, realizing he had locked Penhryn in, found him wandering on the grounds, babbling of a “face eaten away by darkness,” and gibberish about an unhallowed relic in the urn scribed with undecipherable Hellenistic Greek words. But those scholars, who knew of Penhryn’s theory of Gothic grotesques, asked what he had gibbered; and hearing, wondered if that relic were not the dark apotheosis of his theory, that the machinations of mocking, hidden Satanists were not behind this final discovery.

  Because they examined the urn and were surprised at its osseous contents. Monstrous incongruities occurred in relic worship, but so did a traffic in spurious relics. These bones were non-human.

  CAER SIDHI

  Originally published in Dark Mind, Dark Heart (1962).

  DOCUMENTS IN THE CASE OF THE SHOAL LIGHT

  I. O’Malley’s Journal />
  November 6, 1799.

  Awoke this morning from another nightmare. Neal also had such disturbed slumber. He has unusual views regarding them—describes them as accompanied by a “whirling around without motion”—which seems to me pure Celtic superstition. But the real cause of the dreams is probably not his imagination—he seems to think some baneful influence is at work!—but rather the difficulty we have been having with the villagers. It is this concern that gives us both bad dreams. He disagrees.

  This forenoon several of the village fishermen rowed out to our lighthouse to remonstrate with us. The Shoal Light “took God’s grace away” from them, they claimed. What blasphemy!—to think that shipwrecks and the drowning of poor sailors are a special mark of God’s favor to gain them the spoils of salvage! They are as bad as the Cornishmen who have lured ships to their doom with false lights!

  November 7, 1799.

  Brian Mackenzie rowed out unobtrusively this morning with a letter left for us at the Turk’s Head Tavern by the post rider. It had been sent by the Trinity House of Navigation to tell us an inspector is on his way, no doubt to check our logbook, for this Light has been reported unfavorably by several ship captains, who claim its beacon operated oddly when sighted. Neal and I have been very attentive to our watches. It seems very strange that such reports should have been made, and neither of us can understand it.

  Mackenzie warned us of trouble—perhaps this evening. The fishermen are speaking against the Light and met last night at the Turk’s Head, where they roused themselves to fury against the Light. We primed and loaded our fowling piece and our three pistols. Neither of us is alarmed, but we cannot help being uneasy, and being sleep-weary does not help. Sleep last night was full of illogical nightmares—of confused ideas, alien visions, a dreadful sense of vertigo. I did not rest much and I have been tired all day, yet I will need sharp ears and eyes which are already heavy with fatigue. Neal is in the same condition, having had worse dreams than I. His recurrent dream came back—the anomalous nightmare of a “whirling around without motion,” which, he thinks, must have some connection—however obscure—with our Light.