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

by George T. Wetzel

  …the pain made him cry out.

  “Oh no. Not another live one,” came a petulant, gibbering voice.

  At first he could not see the figure of the person who had aroused him, but he felt both its icy coldness and the fierceness of its grip. As if by rigor mortis reflex, the doctor sat up erect. Peering down at him was a hooded figure with a face like those of gargoyles that peer over the parapet of Notre Dame.

  “Who are you?” the doctor demanded falteringly.

  “I have no name in the regions which I inhabit.”

  The doctor had an awesome suspicion. “What are you?”

  “I was mortal but am fiend,” it confessed, and smiling gruesomely seized the doctor’s arm with an obvious sinister intention.

  There was a strange static quality about the whole situation, as if it were a moment frozen in time, a demonic tableau, an evil-painted picture into which he had stepped from the world of reality and become instantly immobilized in midstride. He did then what many a nightmare-trapped dreamer does to escape. He tried to convince himself of its illusion: “This is not real. It is a dream. I am asleep.”

  “Sleep? Sleep?” mocked the creature. “There is no sleep here. Behold! The House of the Worm!”

  The thing pointed a cadaverous finger to where the phosphorescence of decay glowed within the earth’s necrophagous bowels. And within that glow were shrouded, motionless bodies of the dead. But not all slept tranquilly. A vast number had changed, in a greater or lesser degree, the rigid position in which they had originally been entombed. Horror was how heaped upon horror. In those maggoty depths he sensed the arrival of a wriggling, vermiform abomination, the unseen but palpable presence of the Conqueror Worm. The agonizing scream, arising from his throat, never emerged but was strangled by the cold hand of terror.

  “Out of the grave’s corruption springs life,” jeered the ghoul, “and mankind’s life itself is so short.” And it burst into gales of maniacal tittering that echoed and reverberated and repercussed as if down endless, cyclopean halls of marble.

  With that hollow, mocking sound ringing in his ears, Dr. Clark made the transition from sleep to real wakefulness—this time, he hoped. The pain he felt in his arm during the dream had migrated to his head and throbbed so piercingly he thought his head would burst; and he alternated between shaking violently with freezing chills and feverish sweats, causing him to wonder of possible changes in the blood vessels in his head as the cause.

  He was not quite sure what to make of the phantasm as he never had any phobias about premature burial. But it undoubtedly grew from a kaleidoscope of phrases his subconscious mind had plagiarized from Poe. That, plus memories of the Pike portfolio and what Danti had said of HPL’s fiction.

  But there was also a feeling that such fantastic and imaginative notions were alien to his own unimaginative nature; that it was rather like reading another’s ideas or thinking another’s thoughts, however chaotic and aberrant they were—almost, he continued, as if he and the other had temporarily shared a common soul.

  The headache was so intense now he spent the rest of the night sitting upright in bed in a darkened room, trying to avoid unnecessary movements which seemed to stir up the pain.

  WEDNESDAY MAY 10

  After supper Dr. Clark heard a knock on the front door. Outside was the florid-faced Dr. Phillips, a man of 67 years and a widower. His apoplectic manner showed why he had been forced to retire.

  “Don’t just stand there, doctor!” he blustered. “Invite me in.”

  Dr. Clark did so and the two sat down, eyeing each other expectantly.

  “Well, how’s the practice?” The visitor brusquely launched into the reason for his visit. “Any problems with my old patients?”

  The discussion was not so much medical as it was psychological—the personalities as well as the physical bodies of the patients. Eventually Dr. Clark got around to the mystery of the cellar graffiti.

  “Damned peculiar,” Dr. Phillips mused, then thundered, “You sure it wasn’t a Halloween prank from last year? You removed the ridiculous trash, of course?”

  When Dr. Phillips asked the question, Dr. Clark found his mind in an extraordinary struggle as he could not explain to himself, let alone another, his reluctance—no, rather his inability—to overcome an obscure resistance in some remote corner of his mind to the destruction of the graffiti. It was as if there were two separate volitional systems inside his skull, each wanting its own way which was opposite to the other. This led to a meditation on the body plan of mammals providing for two lungs, two kidneys and paired organs such as eyes, ears and limbs; in structural detail the two halves of the mammalian brain were also mirror twins. Could not a normal brain be sometimes subject to such conflicts because of its double structure? He seemed to recall a basis for such an idea in something he had read in Scientific American, something about commissurotomy. He could not place it all but resolved to look it up sometime.

  Though all of the foregoing went through his mind in seconds, he still stammered a lie, out of perplexity: “I thought it artistic in a macabre sort of way, so left it.”

  “Stuff and nonsense, man! Art is one thing. But this is gibberish. Just as well canvas the madhouses for art masterpieces.”

  “Want to see it?”

  “Won’t waste my time. You think Paget-Lowe did it?”

  “Certainly.”

  “For what purpose?”

  Dr. Clark was stumped for an immediate answer, so Dr. Phillips supplied it himself:

  “Then I’ll tell you. He was a psycho with crazy delusions. Dabbled in occult humbug. Probably believed in the Devil, too.”

  “Come now, doctor.” Dr. Clark sounded slightly sarcastic. “That’s mere opinion. Was he ever a patient of yours? What do you really know about him?”

  “Paget-Lowe was a wind-bag who made a pretentious display of his learning. A man who, fearing marriage meant giving up his large collection of old magazines, stayed single—couldn’t sever the spiritual umbilical cord, looked starved to death all the time, terribly gaunt face. Never would eat a proper meal. Had a pathological aversion to meat; a vegetarian. Heard he wrote this phobia into a story about cannibalism. I’ll give him this—was a gentleman of the old school. Never without a tie, clean white shirt, clothes always pressed. Medically, I treated him for ichthyosis; and migraine—it gave him whoppers of nightmares.”

  When his colleague mentioned migraine, Dr. Clark gave an involuntary jump. Reflecting upon his recent curious dream, Dr. Clark now played with the theory that both it and its aftermath had been due to a migraine attack, even to the warning sign of euphoria before its onset. But he himself had never had a history of that illness, nor was it ever known in his family.

  SATURDAY MAY 20

  When he retired, late Friday evening, he was cursed with a nervous restlessness, tossing and turning in a fit of insomnia before falling into a fatigued sleep. But sleep likewise was restive and febrile, for there came elusive dreams from which he constantly kept awakening; dreams in which his eyes were afflicted with an anomalous condition, akin to glaucoma, which hindered focused vision so that he appeared to view some scenes through blurred and watery light. And he heard the sound of his own voice senselessly mumbling these lines from Robinson:

  And over the forgotten place there clings the strange and unrememberable light that is in dreams.

  With it all was a hyperacuity of the sense of smell and a delicious fragrance that was…the sea!…with all its mysterious pungencies of saltiness, piscean aromas and acrid sea-grass. Intuitively, he knew this excessive stimulation of his senses would soon demand an agonizing payment.

  He sensed a nebulous pulsation as of elemental tidal surges beating in consonance, not under any lunar influence, but with some drowned, oceanic heart. (Or was it all some abnormal awareness of the pumping of his own heart and blood pounding in his ears?) An i
rregular fibrillation in the sound, as if it were ebbing, followed, accompanied by a nausea—as of sea-sickness.

  He next experienced an irrational phenomenon of awaking to awareness within a dream. What stirred him to sentience was an insidious rhythm of ocean tides which then blended with a poetic rhyme beating in waves upon his thoughts:

  For every sound that floats

  From the rust within their throats

  Is a groan

  And the people—ah, the people—

  They that dwell up in the steeple,

  All alone.

  His presence was in a weird midnight landscape—the jagged white shafts around him he guessed were the spires and pinnacles of funeral shafts, weathered down by salt-corrosive rains, festooned with a curious vegetable growth that shook in time with a pulse in the atmosphere. In the shadowy gloom he could neither see the church nor its melancholic tolling bell, but he could both hear and curiously feel the metallic reverberations of the latter.

  But wait! What were those bloated shapes haunting the pitch-blackness near that steepled sound? Were they the swollen ghosts of the dead lying impaled beneath the grave shafts, answering some ghastly evocation of that bell?

  More of the Poe poem chanted itself within his conscience with an ominous significance:

  They are neither brute nor human—

  They are Ghouls:

  And their king it is who tolls.

  With revulsion he realized he witnessed a nauseous Judgment Day-like tableau, for the people floating up in that steeple were putrescent, animated corpses in rags of grave clothes and shreds of bloated flesh on skeletal silhouettes, rising up in the currents from the slimy abysses of elder Oceans, obeying a necromantic summons of some ghoul-king to resurrect from their graves. And the crumbling grave markers were in reality a rocky reef of shark-toothed ferocity, and the steepled tocsin, now seen, was but a bell-buoy shaken and rolled by the monstrous surges of midnight tides.

  This revelation brought a return to the real world, the dream disappearing in a haze of images. His head was feverish and burning with pain, yet he was cold. Getting up, he took his temperature, finding it had dropped a degree, which was the cause of the discomfort of coldness. Perhaps it was his grogginess or again the various unpleasantnesses of headache, nausea and being chilled, but it impaired his ability to make an objective diagnosis of his symptoms. He returned to bed with a heat pad, instinctively knowing it would counter his chills by producing the warmth his body was losing. Soon he found a sort of temporary oblivion from pain as deep, dreamless sleep blotted out all.

  MONDAY JUNE 5

  In his morning’s mail Dr. Clark found a letter from Klein, to whom he had penned a number of questions about Paget-Lowe. Tearing it open, he read:

  Dear Dr. Clark—

  You inquire what I know about the late Henry Paget-Lowe of East Providence? Volumes to be exact, for we lived in letters to each other for many years.

  He was a very frugal correspondent when it came to paper but not to words—of the latter he could write several thousand in a letter any time. Of the former: when he finished what you and I would consider a normal letter with blank spaces left, he would continue to affix postscripts, marginalia, superscripts, interlineations, deletions. With Scottish thrift he made any odd scrap of paper serve for his communications: a blank frontispiece torn from an old book, the empty reverse side of my last letter to him. A penny postcard from him could be a positive horror as he economically crammed it full by writing in the smallest script possible.

  And his signature! He often fantasized with some of the quaintest pseudonymous autographs conceivable. I was told he got them reading the odd names on tombstones in old graveyards. His usual one to me was a pretentious pose, ‘Ibid,’ an aged Latin school master, who he said supposedly authored a magnum opus much quoted by authorities and scholars as their references to ‘see ibid’ proved. In fact so well impersonated was this alter ego I thought HPL was an elderly man until I finally met him.

  You asked me why he drew the graffiti, if responsible? As you mentioned, his skepticism towards the supernatural was known. Doesn’t this element of a lack of credulity or faith in it prove it could not have been a real ceremony but something else?

  He once wrote me that believability in any type of story could be achieved only by realistic details; so that when the fantastic element made its appearance, as in a supernatural story, the foregoing realistic atmosphere had lulled away the reader’s skepticism.

  The graffiti then was a stage-setting for his writer’s imagination; ‘theatre’ was being created for a realistic scene. (Angell Street? Call it better ‘Devill Street.’)

  Is there any precedent for such a wild story? I think so. He once spent a night in a Providence graveyard, trying to scare the hell out of me with ghost stories. Later on, I discovered he did the whole thing purposely; to witness my reactions, in order to depict them realistically in a spooky tale he wrote.

  You next asked me about his lost novel, House of the Worm. From this am I to infer you think the graffiti had some connection with it? The title itself is very suggestive of Edgar Allen Poe. The ‘worm’ as used by Poe was a repeated symbol of charnel decay; and the (narrow) ‘house’ was unequivocally the grave in Poe’s bizarre world. And as HPL confessed to a literal imitation of Poe, what more interpretation is needed?

  However, I’ll add that I really know little of his planned novel. He wrote me of it in general fashion, stating it was a ghoulish idea long simmering in his brain. When he died, neither MS. nor notes for the opus was ever found. As you noted for me, other hands disturbed the near perfect order in which he kept his papers.

  Sincerely,

  Ron Hart Klein

  Klein’s letter was a catalyst sending Dr. Clark’s inventions scurrying in many new directions. There was the enigma of HPL’s unaccountable departure—or flight—from a residence of some 34 years. (Unquestionably he had experimentally drawn the graffiti for the purpose that Klein had theorized.) But on the other hand, could there have been an accidental but ritualistic opening of some shadowy threshold between our world and the outside? Did something then transpire that drove HPL to seek the safety of other lodgings?—Still leaving incautiously ajar a mystic opening through which crawled only God knows what disembodied nightmares of fantastic dreamers and the grisly phantasms of the insane? Conversely, could he have rashly and blindly unlatched a portal yawning darksomely in the opposite direction into realms beyond the edge of the mechanistic universe, through which the unwary might be sucked as if by a vacuum? This improvising of chimeras by Dr. Clark drew a weak laugh from him, and feeling slightly foolish, he directed his thoughts onto his professional business.

  But he now had developed an extreme reluctance to descend into the cellar for any reason.

  THURSDAY JUNE 8

  During the morning Dr. Clark observed an abrupt change in the barometric pressure and increased humidity as measured by the two weather instruments atop his desk, and knew a thunderstorm was imminent. Simultaneously, he detected several symptoms in himself that theoretically could be associated with the onset of a migraine attack: an erratic excess of mental energy followed by the start of a sick headache.

  In an impersonal manner, he studied his flushed reflection in the glass of the surgical instrument cabinet. Particularly he examined the depression in his skull over his right eye—the result of a childhood accident—and saw it was now filled as the blood vessels swelled.

  The point was, did he have migraine? In a patient it was an academic question and chemical allergy tests would have to be made. But he could medicate himself on a gamble and mitigate the migraine if it were on its way.

  He now asked himself a second question: did he possess the characteristic migraine personality? He thought not. Because of the many clustered traits that identified the migraine personality he possessed but one—fastidious
ness.

  Delaying his next patient even longer, he rummaged in his dispensary refrigerator until he found an ampoule of Gynergen and drew it up into a hypodermic needle, but hesitated at the injection of it. The two prior migraines, if that was what they were, had brought troubling eldritch visions, but in sleep. What if he let nature take its course and did not inject the drug into his bloodstream? Would he then witness not just the visual hallucinations of a conscious migraine but the more phantasmagorical of his nightmares?

  Several times in the past he had experienced the phenomenon of simultaneous but conflicting points of view, as if his will and another’s were in opposition. The unique circumstances resembled—he remembered—those attending the split brains of former epileptics, surgically severed at the great cerebral commissure to stop the seizures spreading from one brain hemisphere to the other.

  This cutting of the corpus callosum produced little disturbance of ordinary behavior. However, each of the divided hemispheres now had its own independent mental sphere, each unaware of what went on in the other; it was as if such subjects had two separate brains. Yet paradoxically enough there was indirect communication between the split halves of the brain through feedback through the unsevered lower brain stem, which feedback might be greater in sleep when the attention was not distracted or preoccupied by incoming sensory and motor impressions. But as he had neither undergone commissurotomy nor had a congenital lack of the corpus callosum, how to explain this phenomenon? Psychic possession?

  Common sense finally broke through the morbid attraction of these fancies and he made an intravenous injection of the drug into his upper thigh. In about half an hour it constricted his arterial blood vessels, the ones in his head, enough to decrease the throbbing pain. But not without exacting its due in side effects—a feeling as if his limbs were leaden weights or had all the energy sucked out of them.

  FRIDAY JUNE 9