* * * *
Karpis and I separated after that, I returning to Europe and he presumably back to that habitation of his on the Bosporus. Some months later I was surprised to receive a large envelope from that area. Inside was a brief note from a local coroner, informing me Karpis had committed suicide and had left a sealed letter with my name and address on it which the coroner had enclosed. I tore open the second envelope and read:
I never told you the purpose for which I carried away charnel clay from that Egyptian burial place. You suspected, rightly so, that I also dug earth from an Aegean tomb the night Dago died; but you never knew I have for years obtained grave dirt from centuried sepulchers like Mitla in Mexico, Celtic long burrows in Ireland—the list is extensive.
You see, I always sculpted my bogus ancient figurines from the very native earth their culture springs from, thus doubly outwitting the so-called art experts.
On returning here to the Bosporus, I began modeling a copy of that Setekh image in that tomb and, acting on an aberrant impulse, began mixing with its charnel clay other clays and earths from ancient graves all over the world.
The last few nights while I worked on the figurine there would come from its mouth a soft whisper as of a zephyr; a whisper that swelled until it spoke like a multitude of dead voices in strange tongues…ghosts.
What does it mean—these haunting voices that flow nightly from the lips of that half-made shape? Their tone is accusatory.
I sit now with a gun for protection against what I don’t know…a judgment is coming…perhaps there is an escape.
Karpis
* * * *
As I have often said I am coarse-fibred where the so called supernatural is concerned. But the slow accumulation of preternatural hints in this whole Egyptian venture reached a climax with Karpis’ letter (which I purposefully refrain from commenting upon) and caused such a reaction that I sought to hide in pursuits and thoughts of dull mediocrity and grey prosaicness—anything sterilely unimaginative or drearily humdrum. But it was no use.
In the beginning my nightmares were not of visions but of odors and foetors. Nightly I would sink into dreamless sleep but with a conscious awareness of a musty, ancient dust and bat dung; sometimes the nightmare was of a different odor the putrescent stench as of a charnel house.
Imperceptibly, these nightmares were replaced by dreams of many dim-litten places and a compulsion to crawl worm-like ever upward, companioned by a shadowy presence which instructed me in certain awesome deeds.
While some of these dreams were agonizingly recurrent, there were others that were episodic, mercifully never repeated: like the one in which an abhorrent horror found my dream-self more frightening than I found it. Only a fragment comes to memory, of some grayish underground room with a gothic rib-vault ceiling. In a wall niche squatted a stony, dwarf simulacrum, the wings on its shoulders hunched around and folded to conceal its head and face, as if in slumber. At some slight sound I made, its stony wings trembled into life, exposing a face not to be described. It flew off into the gloom, uttering a weird, squeaking cry.
Disturbed as I was by these dreams, there was one worse matter. I began to find in the mornings, occasionally, dried mud upon my bedclothes and my pajamas and dirt under my fingernails. The suspicion I was sleepwalking during these nightmares insinuated itself. And then came that appalling terminal revelation, when dreaming of a subterranean region, I awoke in the dawn—not in my bed but crawling upward from a tunneled grave.
Some blind nemesis or ancient curse (it matters little which, anymore) has visited a terrible poetic justice or judgment upon me. These many years before I had been a modern ghoul, robbing graves for jewelry or medical specimens. A ghoul in the ancient sense I had become now: a necrophagi, an Eater of the Dead, and my mentor—Ammit, scavenger of Nilotic catacombs.
NIGHTMARE HOUSE
Originally published in The Gothic Horror and Other Weird Tales.
Out of what scum and up from what abyss
Had they arrived—these rags of memory?
—Edwin Arlington Robinson
TUESDAY APRIL 11
When Dr. Clark first spied the house he was not too sure it was vacant, despite the wormy shutters being closed all the way around and the fact that the yard was an agricultural ruin—littered with ancient overgrown weeds, now long dead and surrounding a stagnant goldfish pond—until he found the FOR RENT sign.
Because of its drawn shutters, he came to refer to it as “the shuttered house” in a momentary spirit of romanticizing. So when he phoned Dr. Phillips, the recently retired general practitioner in East Providence, Rhode Island, whose practice he had just bought, he advised the elderly man to start his former patients into the new doctor’s office the coming Monday, as he, Dr. Clark, had just leased “the shuttered house.”
THURSDAY APRIL 20
Dr. Clark checked the woman’s blood pressure twice just to be sure since it registered so high.
“Do you ever take an occasional nip?” he bluntly asked her.
The jolly old Irish woman looked startled.
“And I thought I hid the bottle so good this time in the bottom of the dirty clothes box! I know my daughter told you. But how did she ever find it?”
Obviously embarrassed, she sought to change the subject.
“This is the first time I’ve been in this house, doctor,” she scrutinized the room in a nosy manner. “When my distant cousin, Mrs. Wells, lived here, she and her nephew never asked anyone in. They were always suspicious of people. Hardly ever went out in the daytime—even in the yard. And they always kept the blinds pulled down. Mrs. Wells told me her nephew, Henry, did it in the daytime to create the feeling of night in which he wrote his thrillers. But all over the house? Every room? And even on cloudy days? People like that are odd.”
“Didn’t you like Mrs. Wells?” he asked.
“No. I can’t stand to be around old people. They’re too damn grouchy.”
Dr. Clark surveyed the 70-year-old woman before him and choked back his amusement. Ordinarily he would have sought an early end to his polite conversation with his patient—the clinical tests usually took but about five minutes—because such garrulousness would have become excessive. But something about her idle chatter drew his curiosity. And he found himself encouraging her conversation with questions whenever she would lapse into silence.
Henry Paget-Lowe had made a queer impression on the neighborhood. For a start, he was a solitary who buried himself in a living grave; a writer of thrillers; a brooding recluse weakened by the chronic ingrowth of his own thoughts a bachelor fussed over by an overly protective aunt.
Then there was a certain question with alternate answers, each equally damaging: was he a creature of nocturnal habits or a somnambulist? (He had been observed, said the patient, prowling the yard or house in the dead of night.)
Dr. Clark waited until she had gotten out of the reception room door before he gave vent to his smothered laughter. No doubt it was all true to some unexaggerated degree, but Henry Paget-Lowe was absolutely caricatured by the old woman’s gossip.
Still, there were some matters that were strange either way you looked at them; and he grew sober. For one, there was the evidence of the blinds drawn day and night—was it to keep secret some diabolical goings-on or was it because of a paranoiac delusion that neighbors would peek through the windows into the privacy of Lowe’s home?
After the last of his patients had gone, Dr. Clark fastidiously gathered up from a closet where they had put it the debris left by the painters who had renovated his reception room, office, and dispensary; debris consisting of empty paint cans and newspapers used in lieu of a dropcloth.
In the twilight beams he discerned on the cellar floor some odd markings. Snapping on the light, he saw something that made him pause. The cellar floor and walls were scrawled profusely with what in the dim light
he thought nonsensical graffiti made by some maniac. That is, until he found sprinkled sparingly amidst it bits of abbreviated Latin phrases, some of which were indecipherable due to their extreme bastard form. The former he translated into both blasphemous and evil expressions.
And scrutinizing the rest of the graffiti, he saw cabalistic drawings and magic circles, in places even something queerly like mathematical hieroglyphics.
His immediate response, since he felt abhorrence, was to look about in a floundering manner for a means to eradicate the display. But a conflicting response—to leave it—arose, and he wavered in confusion between the two choices. This second response was imperfectly crystallized in his mind as a kind of illogical argument that to eradicate the markings would be giving in to superstition. He was literally of two minds (he thought the choice of the phrase was curious) and utterly in a dilemma. Well, he would hold his final decision in abeyance and think about it later.
But before leaving the cellar, he took another look. The remainder of the graffiti could have been Arabic and Greek letters (he did not read either language but could recognize their characters), a pentacle, signs of the Zodiac, and alchemical symbols; but a thin film of dust on the floor layered over portions making identification difficult while grimy cobwebs similarly obscured graffiti segments on the walls. There was more than a faint aura of demonology about it all, which made the hair on the back of his neck rise.
FRIDAY APRIL 28
In the morning he had to look in on a couple of patients committed for care to the Jane Brown Memorial Hospital. The visit over, he drove his car along Weybossett Street towards East Providence and his office. Dr. Clark, being a connoisseur of old architecture, often rode this way just so he could admire the ancient houses the street contained.
Then he saw something on a building’s cornice, something that was new to his previous antiquarian passes through this neighborhood. He stopped his car and got out, making a mental note of the location—Weybossett between Claverish and Foster streets. He saw peering down at him from that cornice a stone face, just as a gargoyle peers over the parapets of Notre Dame Cathedral.
“Pretty, aren’t they?” spoke a voice at his elbow.
Turning to see who had made this curious remark, he was confronted by an ascetic looking man with oriental eyes, whose head was habitually tipped backwards, giving him an aristocratic if not haughty manner. Behind him was the outdoor browser’s stall of a bookstore named “Danti’s Old Books and Curios.”
“That sort of arcana fascinates me—including the architectural ruins on this street. I rented my medical office in East Providence for the same reason—that section is full of 18th century houses. Especially around my office in Angell Street.”
“Yes, that is an interesting old neighborhood. I used to have a friend there—he’s deceased now—who lived at number 598.”
Dr. Clark knitted his brows in puzzlement.
“This is an odd coincidence. I live there now, the very address, in the old ‘shuttered house.’”
The stranger now was startled. “Yes? You must have moved in not long after HPL moved out…”
“Who?”
“Henry Paget-Lowe… He was born there, I think, in 1890. He never gave a reason for suddenly moving. Just packed in a hurry one day and left. Moved to a place on Barnes Street where he died last year. He used to write for Weird Tales magazine. Know of him?”
“Not really.”
“Won’t you come in a moment? I’m Doughlas Danti, the owner. I’ll tell you more, if you’re interested.”
They entered the shop through a basement doorway in pseudo-Romanesque style, over which lintel the proprietor had lettered in mock-serious expression: “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here—Danti’s Infernal Bookstore and Curios.”
Despite wall shelves packed with books, the shop at first had the atmosphere of an old fashioned museum, which Dr. Clark attributed mostly to scattered specimens of the taxidermist’s art: the embalmed corpses of small birds, raccoons, and owls, eviscerated and stuffed to simulate life-likeness. But instead of life, those poor, motionless animals entombed in glass bell-jars diffused an overwhelming and depressing aura of death; the entire room was literally a dismal mausoleum, giving rise to all manner of morbid and funereal associations. Dr. Clark felt unaccountably uneasy.
Danti began to talk. “I went to the Barnes Street address a few days after Henry’s will was probated, to see if anything of value had been overlooked by his executor. You see, the inventory of the estate neglected to include a number of things—for he had accumulated a library of unusual items, like his file of the Old Farmer’s Almanack. You can imagine my surprise and consternation to see that his first cousin, Phillip Gambrill, having finished with disposing of the furniture, had dumped in a large pile in front of the fireplace a pile of books, papers and manuscripts which he was about to commit to the flames. Gambrill didn’t want the stuff but wouldn’t give it to me, either. I offered him $75.00 for it all on the spot, only a few items looked at. And he accepted. I was hoping to find something unpublished of HPL’s among those manuscripts but no luck—they were copies of things he’d already had published in Weird Tales. I was looking particularly for an unfinished novel he’d talked about, a Poe-esque thing he called ‘The House of the Worm’… Not all that stuff Gambrill sold me was trash. For instance, this was among it.”
He handed the doctor a black-covered portfolio whose vellum pages were lithographic copies of oil canvasses painted by an unfamiliar, minor artist (to the doctor) named Raleigh Innes Pike. The artwork fell into two distinct creative periods. The first showed a morbid preoccupation in the illustrating of the more brooding of Poe’s prose and poetry, and best described as decadent or following the French Symbolists movement. They were reveries of death, a typical example being a morose picture titled “Night Thoughts” which he struggled to forget.
The second period was of repulsive, ghoulish themes and conceived in such painstaking details that their realism left the viewer no peace of mind afterwards. He wondered if it were a glimpse of this leprous portfolio that motivated Phillip Gambrill to ready for the furnace not only it but other unexamined MSS. effects of HPL’s on the premise they must be equally unwholesome. Pike was lucky, thought the doctor, he did not live in 1692, as portfolio and artist would have been burnt.
Another ex-libris of HPL’s was a work translated from the French, entitled “Memoirs of M. Valdemar;” an incredible book, he saw as he leafed through it, that would easily have certified the author’s insanity without two doctors’ opinions. For it was an alleged glimpse into the subterranean world of the dead by the coercive questioning of a corpse through the art of necromancy. The author’s delusion obviously arose over the confusion copied from the ancient Greeks of alternate renderings of “hell” and “grave” from the word “sheol.”
Next, Danti picked up a small stone fragment. “This piece of gravestone was pilfered from a Boston burying ground. HPL told me a ghoul did it. It came with the pile of junk Gambrill sold me. Would you like to buy it? HPL used it as a paper weight for manuscripts atop his writing desk.”
Was the “authentic” paper weight one of a fraudulent multitude, the doctor cynically observed to himself, just as there are hawked about a thousand pieces of the “true” cross?
“I used to kid him that it caused all the nightmares he wrote up as stories,” Danti was saying. “But HPL said headaches caused his nightmares.”
Dr Clark studied the sepulchral paperweight. It was lozenge-shaped, of sandstone, and had an unintelligible snippet of an epitaph:
embr
er ft
The doctor silently considered his question before he asked it. “Did he have any children?”
“No. Henry was a bachelor.”
“When I moved in there, some fool—or child—had marked up the entire cellar with crazy drawings, which I think are witchcr
aft symbols.”
“HPL could never have done it.”
“Why?”
“Because he didn’t believe in the supernatural. He often made a point of it.”
But if he hadn’t, thought Dr. Clark, who did compose the graffiti? The aunt? Hardly likely. What would have been her motivation? But this author, now, he was the best, if not only, suspect. Didn’t he write supernatural stories, despite his disavowal of them otherwise?
“I can’t tell you any more about him, doctor,” Danti seemed to have tired of their conversation. “You might try an old friend of his—Ron Hart Klein—here’s his address. Also talk to Lewis Theobald, an old gentleman who’s a reference assistant at the Providence Public Library.”
Dr. Clark thanked him and left.
SUNDAY MAY 7.
On this evening Dr. Clark felt such an abnormal mental activity and general heightening of his intellectual powers that he half jocularly checked the calendar to see if the moon were waxing full.
“What the moon brings—is murder,” he chuckled to himself, thinking of the lunar madness theory of the Jack the Ripper murders, “but I feel no homicidal or paranoiac rages. In fact, I feel such a grandiose expansion of my mind that I’d suspect myself of taking drugs if I didn’t know better.”
In spite of this aberrant awareness, he soon prepared for bed; and soon was deep in slumber. He knew he had gone to sleep in his own bed that evening, but now he abruptly awoke elsewhere, stung into life by a fierce pain in his arm. Around him a cobwebby blackness reeked with the fumes of moist earth.
From the confining narrowness of his new resting place, he had an inkling of what had happened. He had had a dread since childhood—or was it some imaginary dream-memory?—that sometime he might fall into a cataleptic trance, be taken for dead, be prematurely buried, and later open his eyes in a grave. And he had another memory—again he had a doubt about its reality—that because of his dread he nightly had diseased reveries of charnel worms, mortuary urns and vaults, and black, funeral crepe…
The Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK™ Vol 2: George T. Wetzel Page 6