…if only he could stay awake till near dawn, he knew there would wheel into the sky from below the eastern horizon new and fantastically wonderful constellations he had never seen before and which were only guessed at by astrologers. From what dim recess of memory came this certain knowledge, he knew not. Insistent sleep, drugging his mind with fatigue poisons, kept that recollection elusively just out of reach.
Fighting his grogginess, trying to keep his eyes open, Reily was rewarded by seeing such a strange, new constellation creeping imperceptibly up from the nether spaces of the eastern rim of the world. The stars silhouetted the gigantic head of the fantastic creature of no known myth, its colossal body still beneath the horizon, its eldritch stars burning with a nebulous incandescence like no other stars.
There came over him an unblinking fascination with the bizarre, monstrous Zodiacal configuration; a fascination akin to the enslavement opium had once shackled upon him one time in his life, causing him to stare, he recalled, with mesmerized eyes in frozen minutes?—hours?—at the geometric patterns in a Persian rug.
There came a lessening of the darkness as the shadows of night slowly shrank back into their hiding place of trees and the earth.
Dawn was coming with its song of mystical exaltation…
* * * *
…He knew not how long he had been walking across that endless waste of sand under the graying sky, over all of which terrible antiquity clung like an invisible cobweb. Behind him his stumbling footprints stretched into the infinite distance. As he climbed a sand dune he spied ahead the shadowy outline of a motionless, gigantic head, leaning slightly, rearing up from the ancient sands. He heard the sand crunch underfoot, all too real, and knew this was no dream. Around it to the front he hurried.
It was the Great Sphinx! A whisper of dawn breeze gathered around it. Though the greater bulk of its grotesque body was buried beneath the scorched desert, there was no mistaking those empty eye sockets staring into eternity; that corpse-like, wasted face eaten away by time and the elements; and that ruinous nose, which stirred nightmarish memories of IVth Dynasty mummies whose noses were similarly broken by priestly embalmers to allow the ka to escape after burial.
A glimmering of the secret of the Sphinx palsied Reily—and he awoke, his fingers digging convulsively into a sandy patch on the parade ground of Fort Carroll, his eyes staring up at two twinkling stars in the graying heavens where before had gaped back at him the blind eyes of the Sphinx.
The whisper of dawn breeze came again and metamorphosed into a boat whistle. Reily was suddenly on the fort’s parapet, waving his shirt. It was the coast guard boat leaving Fort McHenry for its early morning harbor patrol. They saw him—signaled several short whistle blasts—and sharply turned in his direction.
Reily looked around the old fort with a feeling of nostalgia. It was built on ship ballast from many distant lands; ballast infused by some outré alchemy with alien memories that fashioned dreams. Several meteors made brief fiery arcs from outer space, some falling with a hiss into the harbor waters, others burning out just as they dropped into the old fort. What dreams, he mused, would they bring, those cinders from another world?
POISON PEN
Originally published in From Beyond the Dark Gateway (1974)
Finn did not fit the British stereotype of an Irishman, for he was both a teetotaler and faint-hearted; and that is what caused all the trouble, leading to the exposure of certain macabre goings on.
When the Irishman rented the room from the Highlander, Dunham, he reluctantly gave his name: Pisces J. Finn. To which Dunham sourly remarked, “That sounds fishy. What’s your real name?” Without waiting for an answer, the Scotchman continued sarcastically that the present wave of Irish immigrants meant Ireland must be having another potato famine, caused no doubt by the overproduction of Irish (potato) whiskey.
A tyrannical harangue on Irish insobriety followed, ending with an officious suggestion that Finn join Alcoholics Anonymous. With a sly expression, Dunham asked Finn his present state of health, a concern out of character with the preceding bluster. As the Irishman diffidently retreated to his room, he noted that the other resumed reading of a book with a red cover, its title engraved in the florid manner of old Victorian era books, of which he saw one word—“Edinburgh.”
In the morning Finn began the running of the other end of the gauntlet. Waiting for his bus, he peered into the shop window of “Guy Fawlkes, Welsh Butcher,” a fat and jovial man resembling the John Bull caricature. As the butcher chopped meat on his block, a queer “Jack the Ripper” expression came into his face, making Finn uneasy.
Hearing Finn’s Irish brogue as he inquired of another in the queue about the bus, the Welshman came to the door; and began to regale him with the latest drunken Irishman joke, to Finn’s obvious discomfiture. This went on morning after morning for weeks, this sadistic parade of Irish jokes; while every evening there was to be endured a minuscule temperance lecture.
For many days Finn had brooded as he mixed mud and carried “Irish confetti” for the masons.
“What are you in a blue funk about?” sympathetically asked the carpenter, Harrigan.
“If I only knew how to fight,” Finn said wistfully; and told of his tormentors.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” swore the carpenter. “Don’t you know that the poison pen is mightier than the sword? If you can’t beat hell outta them, send them a poison pen letter.”
Finn looked horrified. “But that’s murder—to send a letter written in poison ink and they touch it and die.”
“You dumb Irishman,” cried Harrigan, “a poison pen letter is full of nasty insults, not poison ink.”
That night as Finn passed the butcher shop he paid little attention to Fawlkes’ pathological pleasure in bloodying his chopping block; nor did he get too upset over the hypocritical inquiries over his health by Dunham who was reading that strange red covered book again.
For Finn’s mind was working over the contents of two poison pen letters, which he intended sending simultaneously to Dunham and Fawlkes, signed with each other’s name. Sitting on his bed, he composed the first:
Dear Guy Fookes:
I have told the Peelers you are storing 5th of November fireworks under Parliament… And what is this I hear? Tahat in order to charge a half-pence more, you weigh the butcher paper along with the meat cuts. If I ever catch you on this side of the street, I will break both your Goddamn legs.
Truly yours,
Robert Dunham, Landlord.
Thinking a while, he finally began to write the second letter:
Dear Robert Dumb-ham:
You ignorant Scotchman, a bath tub is not meant for a coal scuttle. As for my charging for the butcher paper, why you Scotchmen make even Jews and Chinamen look like spendthrifts! If I ever find you on my side of the street, I will beat the living hell out of you.
Respectfully,
Guy Fawlkes, Welsh Butcher
Finishing both, he now went out and mailed them.
The following morning he was awakened by the postman’s whistle. In minutes he heard the front door slam roughly. Quickly getting dressed, he hurried to the window. What had first transpired he did not know. But now Dunham and Fawlkes were glaring at one another across the street and observed both by some loafing Irishmen and several police with suspicious looks.
Dunham was shouting, “You needn’t had signed the letter. A certain type of illiteracy is good as a signature any day.”
Fawlkes was too busy with his own shouting to heed this: “Dung-ham, you’re no better than Burke and Hare. What about your roomer who died this year? The one whose corpse you sold to a medical school. What was it—Scotch thrift or did he selfishly die, owing you rent? Do your present tenants know of it?”
“Body-snatcher?! Call me a body-snatcher?! What about your meat block, scavenged from a blitzed museum—an old
headman’s block used in the Tower.”
“Uncivilized Scotch barbarian!” yelled Fawlkes, shaking his fist and rushing into the street.
“Den Sassenach!” screamed Dunham, and ran to meet him with waving cane.
With a “hoorah,” the neighborhood Irish, who had been expectantly awaiting this development, rushed also from both sides of the street (trapping a frightened dustman in the middle), one faction nonsensically shouting “New Market” and the other “Bullseye.” The dustman began to cry “Help, murder, police.”
“But it seems to me,” thought Finn, observing the police bludgeoning all without prejudice to race, religion or national origin, “that the police are doing most of the murdering.”
But the smile froze on his face. He thought of Fawlkes obsessed with some sort of psychic residue from that meat block; and the revelation that Dunham dealt with medical schools. Finn quickly went downstairs and found the red-cover book that Dunham often studied. Its title chilled him: History of Burke and Hare: the Edinburgh Body-snatchers.
Hurriedly Finn packed his belongings and left through the back way, taking the nearest road out of town.
THE ADVENTURE OF GOSNELL
Originally published in The Gothic Horror and Other Weird Tales (1978).
The incident which Charles Gosnell came to investigate was an odd one. An ancient Norman church outside the small town of Norshire had burnt down not long before; and a few nights later persons unknown, using a crowbar, had pried loose the church’s corner stone from the debris and presumably carried off something secreted beneath. A lot of errant nonsense had been printed about it by Punch; so the British Antiquarian magazine sent a staff writer, Charles Gosnell, to obtain the story.
Needing direction on how to find the burnt church, Gosnell pedaled his bicycle into Norshire, straight to its single tavern before which swung the fair warning, the sign of THE COCK AND THE BULL. Within he found the usual collection of eccentric rustics peculiar to an English country village. Their conversation seemed to consist of incoherent grunts, blasphemous utterances, and occasionally something which, though understandable as being in the English language, was a terrible elongation of the truth.
The tavern keeper, whom he sought out, obliged him with directions to the burnt church, and added, “A don’t think much o’ them parts down yonder; and if a twe’ee udn’t ha’ bid ther altergither not fur wahtever.”
“You wouldn’t go there if you were me? Why?”
“Fur one, the vicar’s tetched.”
A pompous minor canon, obviously just down from Oxford, since he had been taking every opportunity to quote Latin to display his erudition in that musty language, turned from a bleary-eyed companion and said to Gosnell, “If you are interested in that thief of what was under the corner stone, I can tell you. They were numismatists or bibliophiles after old coins or Bibles put there during cornerstone ceremonies several hundred years ago.”
A young squire on Gosnell’s other side, who had been liquorishly raving about a new hunting rifle and against blood sport opponents, looked at the canon rudely and interrupted. “Pshaw! They wanted no books or ruddy pence. They pinched the bloody bones under the stone to make a ‘Glory Hand.’”
“Magic?” sneered the minor canon. “Nonsense. Besides, it is my duty not to pass on or promote superstitious beliefs that give credence to unseen forces other than those from Heaven. All such things are of an anti-Christian nature and are the propaganda of the Devil.”
The squire sniffed, arching his eyebrows superciliously.
The fat man hastened out, bumping into the town constable who was entering. Gosnell mounted his bicycle and quickly exited by the town’s dusty street. By then he noted he had taken the constable’s bicycle by mistake. Well, he could return it when he came back.
Though he had followed the tavern keeper’s directions faithfully for over fifteen minutes, Gosnell began to worry if he were still on the right road; while he pondered what to do, he spied a farm boy walking the road ahead of him, and he pulled up to the boy and said to him, “I’m lost. Do you know if I am on the right way to vicarage—the one with the burnt church?”
An expression of awe crossed the boy’s face. “Tis not a ter’able way off. You’re not afeard?”
“Need I be?”
“Summat sims ter’bale wi’t church and vicar.”
“Suppose I give you thrupence, would you walk ahead to show me the way?”
“A wun’t be boughten off.”
“Well, am I on the right road?”
“Oo, aye, you can get there by this year road, but tis a fairish twisty ‘un. It med be two miles or it med be a bit furder.”
The fat man speedily left his reluctant informant behind and was overjoyed to spot the vicarage after five minutes of travel. Beside it stood the ruined church, now partially restored. Leaning his bicycle against the roadside fence, Gosnell proceeded to puff across an unkempt lawn. Halfway to the vicarage were two groups of piled stones called rude stone monuments by British antiquarians.
From one came grunts and squeals; and entering it, he saw that the vicar had turned it into a pig sty. The inquisitive fat man walked into the other one and felt his foot sink. Lifting up the edge of a piece of heather there, he found beneath it an excavation filled with soaking barley.
“What do you think of my brewery?”
The question startled Gosnell. The man who came up behind him so silently and spoke was obviously the vicar. Gosnell stammered a greeting and then explained his purpose. The vicar suggested they have their interview in the house, over a glass of home brew.
While his host went for the beer, the fat man nosed about the bookshelves, finding standard classics and some scholarly works on the occult, which he thought a little odd for a cleric.
Over the beer, Gosnell opened the interview. “What did the vandals pinch from under your cornerstone?”
“You’ve heard the usual false stories?—coins, books, bones for a Glory Hand—who really knows.”
“Bones—what would they be doing there?”
“Perhaps living entombment, to create a Kyrkogrim.”
“By Jove!”
“Oh yes. A hundred years ago was the last known historical case here in Britain, in Rospordon. You have a decadent form of it today when new banks place coins and papers under cornerstones. It occurs in literature too. You’ve read Poe?”
Gosnell nodded, studying the vicar. The other’s face had a curious mobile quality as emotions and thoughts quickly succeeded one another; just now there flickered first an expression of fanaticism and then casualness over it.
“Critics,” continued the vicar, “have missed many subtleties in him. As in The House of Usher, Usher’s fear of grave robbing by his sister’s physicians (the only notice Poe gave to bodysnatching, by the way). And in The Cask of Amontillado the living entombment of Fortunato was a typical foundation sacrifice.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes. Montresor’s enmity was only coincidental. Where he fettered Fortunato there were unexplained bones—bones from which the magical efficacy had gone. A fresh sacrifice was needed.”
“The beer,” complained Gosnell, “has made me very drowsy. Can we see the scene of the crime?”
The vicar smiled slyly at something and led the fat man outside and across charred timbers and down into the church’s crypt. An unpleasant smell, as found in a potato cellar, assailed their nostrils. In the flickering candle light Gosnell could see remote underground voids, stretching ahead, whose low vaulted ceilings were encrusted with nitre.
“This is where I should let my home brew ferment,” said the vicar, and seemed to be acting pretentiously, as if in a play, “because it is my vintage that should be your interest.”
By a wall were the carelessly dropped tools of a mason-trowel, maul, etc. Several courses of fresh brick had been laid
before a dark recess.
“Looks like your workmen quit in the middle of the job.”
“Only because I lacked certain materials which are now available.”
There came a blinding flash before his eyes and Gosnell went down into darkness. When he returned to consciousness, it was to find himself fettered in the recess and the vicar humming as he bricked it up.
“What are you doing?” demanded Gosnell.
“What did you put into my beer?”
“I say, Fortunato, has the home brew made you drowsy?”
“I am Gosnell!”
“Drowsy you say? Like Rip van Winkle, you too shall soon have forty winks. Or should I say, Mein Herr Rip, Requiscat im Pace?”
The vicar gave a hysterical, insane laugh at the puns. Suddenly his mood grew serious and he added, “I believe Montresor said that to Fortunato as he walled him up, too.”
Gosnell cursed and begged the vicar to set him free, ceasing only to catch his breath. In that interval someone appeared behind the vicar.
“War’s thet fat man?” questioned the newcomer.
For reply the vicar turned and attacked the other with the trowel. But the vicar’s opponent rendered the holy man unconscious with a sharp sock on the jaw. Gosnell saw it was the constable.
“Oh, it’s yuh, is it?” said the constable. “Thought you could git away wid my bicycle, but I followed yuh.”
JUMBEE
Originally published in Weirdbook 11 (1977).
The Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK™ Vol 2: George T. Wetzel Page 10