I pursed my lips. “It’s an agreeable enough suggestion, and I’d be glad to spend a day or two at it. Especially with a bottle from your cellar to lay the dust at lunchtime. But what about Binet? Won’t he resent my poaching on his territory?”
John instantly showed his true colours. “Binet be damned. He’s a servant in this house, and he’ll do what he’s told. The fact is, we none of us trust him. Maddy thinks he was trying to set the old man against us. However, it’s over now, before any harm of that kind could be done. I’ve already seen the will, though we have to wait for the formal reading tomorrow.” He collected himself and looked a little sheepish. “I say, I’m delighted you’ll help us. Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer a proper business arrangement?”
I shook my head. “Your first suggestion will be fine, and I promise not to cheat. Five volumes of my choice, to a total not exceeding five hundred pounds.”
I came back next morning at ten, only to learn that the family lawyer had been delayed in Milan by some urgent court case, so the family mourners had to hang on and were clearly not happy about it. Nor was I, as it meant we’d all have to lunch together. John wasn’t in, so the butler showed me straight to the library, a tall musty room with a richly ornamented ceiling. Its walls were crammed with decorated oak shelving, two banks of which projected into the centre to be joined by an ornamental arch. Left alone with a flask of coffee, I opened some windows and set to work. Of the seven thousand odd books in the room, I quickly calculated that more than half were too modern to have any significant value; so I noted the position of the rest and got busy on them. Despite a certain orderliness—in some sections the Dewey system had been adopted—some sections seemed very curiously classified. Suddenly my attention was drawn by three bulky unabridged copies of Frazer’s The Golden Bough, in different ornamental editions. I stepped into the alcove which housed them, and found myself surrounded by a vast number of volumes on the occult, constituting in total so great a proportion of the library as to overbalance it completely. They ranged from paper-covered how-to-do-it manuals of conjuring tricks to a few privately printed volumes of black magic rituals, including an item which totally took my breath away, a complete seventeenth-century rubric for the black mass. There were books about spirit-raising, zombies and voodoo, human sacrifice, witchcraft through the ages, and every other aspect of the supernatural you might think of in a nightmare. An odd collection indeed to find in the house of a man just buried, who presumably might have gleaned from his library enough skills to transcend the barrier of death.
My attention was suddenly distracted by a light slapping or clapping noise. I was so concealed by the alcove that I might have been hiding there. I stepped out to find Binet standing at one of the open windows which surveyed the terrace. He had his long tapering hands half stretched out before him, almost as though he was applauding. I couldn’t see any sense in the action at first, then I realized what he was doing. I have mentioned the very furry insects which banged and squashed themselves against the windshield of my car on my first arrival. It seemed now that there was a small swarm of them outside the window, and Binet was catching them in his hands! Not killing them with a clap, but capturing them in his deft long fingers, cupping them carefully one at a time, and transferring them to a kind of glass case which stood on a nearby desk, opening and closing it while he inserted the struggling insect with a stylish flick of his supple fingers. As I moved closer I could see fluttering inside the case half a dozen of the unpleasant creatures, and a couple more dead on the bottom. Suddenly he became aware of my presence and was so startled that he let his last captive free. It flew off into a dark green bush.
“What on earth do you want those things for?” I asked almost involuntarily.
His eyes rolled a little, his mouth opened silently, and he shook his head from side to side. “It is nothing,” he murmured. “An experiment, only an experiment. And you? You were . . . looking for something?”
Something about the way he looked up at me suggested a dog which knows it is about to be beaten; something else suggested a dangerous animal about to spring in its own defense. In that second Binet’s whole personality seemed to be exposed. I knew that I could never forget the slightly hunched shoulders, the crew cut hair, the sallow complexion, the suspicion of an accent in his otherwise impeccable English diction. I judged him to be in his mid-forties, though there were aspects which might have made him twenty years younger or ten years older. I was repelled by the hatred which clearly seethed in his pale eyes. Yet I had no doubt whatever that he had cared more than any member of the family for the well being of old Emmanuel. He had that distrust of outsiders which is the hallmark of the perfect servant. Blood may be thicker than water, but love is thicker than either, and devotion to duty is a kind of love. So I admired him; yet there was something unsettling about him. I feared him; yet I understood him. The truth is perhaps that I instinctively sensed between us a kind of empathy despite the fact that it would have been difficult to find two human beings more outwardly different. I stress the word empathy rather than sympathy. My feeling was only that somehow Binet and I were on the same plane. We would understand each other yet not necessarily agree. This feeling of mine, after only a few seconds of conversation, seems more than a little related to the curious events which followed.
I quickly discovered that even though John may have mentioned my likely presence in the library, he had not explained it. Privately cursing my college friend, I spun Binet a yarn about John’s wanting to make use of the presence of an alleged expert to give a general view on the interest of the collection. Binet listened attentively but was clearly not convinced. He shrugged politely at my apology for trespassing on his preserves, and finally shook his head. “It is not your fault. Not at all. I am aware that they do not trust me.” His eyes opened wider in private amusement, and the pupils gleamed. “But they may find that there is a small surprise waiting for them. And then the world will know whom Emmanuel really trusted.”
There seemed no answer to so naive a threat. The words had been delivered lightly, yet they chilled and silenced me. I thought afterward that perhaps he had not intended me to hear them. Perhaps the truth was that he did not care whether I heard them or not. Abruptly he turned from me and left the room, making no more noise than the breeze which whistled outside among the cypresses. As the door closed behind him, my eyes fell to the strange little glass case in which a few insects still struggled while five now lay dead. I forced myself to examine the species more closely. Horrible things they were, something over an inch long, with long jointed flea-like legs, a furry abdomen and wavering antennae. What could be Binet’s purpose in collecting such revolting objects? Deciding that more prolonged study of them would spoil my appetite for lunch, I made to return to my task. As I did so, my hand touched a book which was lying open on the corner of Binet’s desk. It was in French. The title was La Transference du Mort.
The funeral had been on a Wednesday. I worked on the library throughout Thursday and the first part of Friday. It was toward lunchtime on that day the bombshell dropped. I was aware that the lawyer from Milan had arrived, and that he was in conclave with the family. It had just occurred to me to wonder whether the will had contained any surprises when I heard the scrape of several chairs on the parquet floor upstairs. As I crossed the hall with the intention of washing my hands and taking a stroll before lunch, John came running down the staircase in an excess of bad temper. His face was like a thunderstorm. He had to say something as I innocently confronted him. What he said he was: “Binet’s got it! The whole damn lot! May the old man rot in hell!”
I never sought the whys and wherefores of the business. There was no putting up with the gloomy vindictiveness of the family any more than with the gleeful triumph of Binet. As I packed up, taking with me only two books instead of the five agreed, John told me merely that two wills had been found. The first gave the house to John and divided the fortune fairly evenly between him and the rest
of the family, with a decent but not overwhelming bequest for Binet. The second and later document, lodged with the lawyer only weeks before the old man’s death, left everything, apart from small gifts and charitable donations, unconditionally to Binet. Not only did the family fail to get what they expected; none of them was even mentioned.
For the next month or more my literary researches took me only briefly to London; then I was off again to Liechtenstein, San Marino, and finally Copenhagen. Occasional phone calls to friends kept me current with what was happening in the Binet affair. Predictably, the will was being contested by the family on the grounds that the old man was of unsound mind when he made it. I passed through Florence in early December, and once drove past the old house, but it seemed empty, though the old padre whom I met in the street told me that so far as he knew Binet was still in residence. Just in time for Christmas I flew home. Among the letters awaiting me was a note from John to let me know that the second will had been successfully revoked, and that Binet had been given notice to quit.
It was during that night that the dream came to me. I would have attributed it to tiredness, over-eating or incipient influenza had it not been so very vivid, like a beautifully photographed film. It began with Binet’s face, in what I suppose I have to call close-up. Heavily shadowed, malign, evil. He was saying something which I could not quite catch, but then the “camera” drew back and there was I, with my back to it, listening to him. We were in the library of the Villa Fabricotti, standing near his desk by the window. He wore what appeared to be the same black suit, the one with no lapels, and rather to my surprise he seemed to be drunk. With the curious certainty of dreamers I ascribed his condition, for some unknown reason, to the effects of calvados. Some of the shelves were empty, but the occult section was undiminished. Most of the furniture was thick with dust. Even in my dream the atmosphere was unbearably claustrophobic: I longed to get out into the fresh air. A small bed in the corner had been slept in but not made up.
“You live very simply,” I said, my voice echoing around the room.
Now I could hear him. “Simply, my friend?” he hissed. “It is the others who are simple. Binet won before, and he will win again. You know my plan. Now I shall carry it out!”
“Plan?” I said vaguely. “What plan do you mean?” But he had already turned away to the desk, and when he faced me again his hands held the wooden box with glass panels in which I had seen him trap the gray insects. I took a step backwards in revulsion, but it was full of the damned things still.
“I shall show you, my friend,” said Binet almost maniacally, “what good friends these creatures are, how they help to ensure that justice is done. The Hilarys think they have won, but my reach is longer than they can imagine. Watch!”
I can’t remember exactly how he did it without freeing all the insects, but suddenly he selected one and held it by the wings, so it struggled between the fingers of his left hand. A truly monstrous sight in the precise detail now afforded to me. With his free hand Binet drew from some part of his clothing a long pin.
“What the devil . . .” I exclaimed.
Binet smiled, almost sweetly. “Precisely,” he said, driving the pin through the body of the insect, which reacted violently before shuddering into lifelessness. “You see before you the remains of Mr John Hilary!”
I was truly shocked. “You raving lunatic!” I said viciously.
Binet grinned foolishly at me, sweat standing out on his forehead as he held aloft on its pin his little victim. “We shall see,” he murmured with a sudden appearance of exhaustion. “And now, my friend, I think you had better leave . . .”
Suddenly I was running in fear down the overgrown drive, and behind me I heard insane, helpless, convulsive laughter which I knew to be Binet’s. In my mind’s eye I saw him opening a drawer in which, carefully laid out on white silk, were six small circles of coloured material, edged with darker thread. On one of these he laid the insect he had killed, and closed the drawer. Superimposed on this image there faded in an old-fashioned newsboy walking quickly through the streets, waving at passersby and shouting: “JOHN HILARY DEAD! JOHN HILARY DEAD!”
I woke up at this point, and hurried for a bath as hot as I could stand it. Anything to wipe away the memory of that dream. I took my long-suffering wife, who had by agreement retired before my midnight arrival, a cup of tea. She promised breakfast in thirty minutes. Meanwhile, still obsessed by the dream, I felt that I must try to contact John Hilary and see that he was in good health. It worried me that much. I had his Haywards Heath number in my book, and dialed it twice, but there was no reply. I looked up the London phone book but there were five John Hilarys. By the time breakfast was ready I was feeling somewhat calmer, but as my wife poured the tea she remarked, after asking about my trip home:
“By the way, didn’t you say something last time you were home about meeting some people called Hilary? John and Madeleine?”
I nearly burned my mouth on the tea. “Yes. I went to his father’s funeral. What about them?”
“I’m sorry to say they were killed in an air crash. It was in yesterday’s paper. I kept it for you.”
I grabbed the newspaper with an apparent rudeness which astonished my wife. There indeed were their names, among thirty-eight victims of the Paris air crash I’d heard about, with enough further detail to identify them beyond doubt.
All shocks fade. I had ceased to think very much about the event, and had almost forgotten my dream, when in mid-January I noticed in the Times obituaries the rather unusual name of Eleanor Cavendish-Warren. There was no doubt that she was the Hilary I had met; though seventy-eight, she had died suddenly and unaccountably while wintering on Cap Ferrat. Later in the month I read casually of a fatal car accident involving one Henry Marling and his wife. It took me a whole afternoon to remember where I had heard the name before. I felt like a man trapped in a recurring nightmare. Of all the beneficiaries under old Emmanuel’s will, only one was still alive: Reginald Bell. I had to warn him, yet I knew almost nothing about him. Remembering, I thought, his saying that he was an architect, I finally tracked him down to an office in the city. His secretary when she answered was reserved, sorrowful, and proper. She was sorry to tell me that only two days ago her employer had succumbed to a heart attack while holidaying on a Nile cruise.
I was afraid to go back to Florence. I was afraid of meeting Binet. It was the end of May before I made the journey, on account of a final piece of research which could only be achieved there. My wife came with me: not exactly for protection, but because I didn’t want even to think about my previous visit. On arrival, however, the city and countryside seemed so serene that my fears vanished, and two days later I was recklessly driving along the main street of Monte Pareto, approaching the gateway to the Villa Fabricotti. My sensitive stomach rumbled distinctly as I pulled up near a sign informing me that the place was to let or for sale.
I asked some nearby workmen if they knew what had happened to Paul Binet. Yes, they said, he was dead. Found in the grounds on the morning he was due to pack up and go. Stiff as a board, with a purple face and a terrible expression on it. They didn’t know what happened to the books, but a lot of the articles from the house, apart from the very valuable ones which had been taken away, had been put up by the lawyers for sale through a local merchant.
I found the shop without difficulty, and wandered uneasily around it. I recognized odd pieces of occasional furniture, including a wrought-iron standard lamp which had been in the hall. I was about to leave when in a corner, resting on the second shelf of a whatnot, I glimpsed an object which riveted me to the spot. Despite my revulsion I had to walk over and pick it up. It was a glass dome about six inches high, and its contents had last been seen in my dream. Sticking up from the base on a wire frame were arranged what might have been six tiny, grotesque dolls. They wore gaily coloured capes, and looked as though they were about to play ring-a-ring-a-roses. At first and even second glance it was possible not to not
ice that the dolls were really insects.
Weird Tales by Fred Chappell
Fred Chappell was born in Canton, North Carolina in 1936. He took degrees in English literature at Duke University, and he currently teaches science fiction and other subjects at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. To date Chappell has published eight volumes of poetry, five novels, and Moments of Light, a collection of short stories which includes one about Franz Joseph Haydn as a space traveler. Formerly quite active in science fiction (he wrote for Robert Silverberg’s Spaceship and Harlan Ellison’s Dimensions), Chappell is now far better known (and widely respected) in literary circles.
His novel, Dagon, although totally overlooked by fantasy/horror fans in the United States, was a critical success in literary circles and highly regarded in its French translation. Dagon is a rendering of the Cthulhu Mythos in modern literary terms. It is also the best novel ever written in this subgenre. Bar none. Fred Chappell’s story “Weird Tales” is an homage to two of the writers he most admires. It is also an uncanny blending of fact, supposition, and paranoia. This is not the usual Cthulhu Mythos tale, despite the use of Lovecraft and others of his circle as actual characters. Don’t read it if you’re feeling depressed.
The visionary poet Hart Crane and the equally visionary horror story writer H.P. Lovecraft met four times. The first time was in Cleveland on August 19, 1922, in the apartment of a mutual acquaintance, the mincing poetaster Samuel Loveman.
It was an awkward encounter. Loveman and four of his idle friends had departed around eleven o’clock to go in search of a late supper. Lovecraft was sitting in an armchair under the lamp, a calico kitten asleep in his lap. He declined the invitation to accompany the others because he would not disturb the kitten; cats were one of his numerous manias. Shortly before midnight, Crane blundered into the room. He was enjoying this night one of his regular fits of debauchery and was quite drunk. “ ‘Lo,” he said, “I’m Crane. Where’s Sam?” He took no notice of Lovecraft’s puzzled stare, but raked a half-dozen volumes of Rimbaud from the sofa, lay down and passed out.
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