The rental agent had steered clear of the basement during his initial tour. She’d simply pointed to the door of the basement, which was set by the kitchen. The key was in place on top of the heater. He scooped it up and fumbled it into the lock. The lock turned with a creak of protest, and he eased the door open slowly. Light from the kitchen stabbed feebly down into a yawning pit of darkness. The steps descended for about three feet and were swallowed by blackness.
And the dark, pulsing, foreboding feeling ebbed out from the basement, washing over him. Stronger than ever before.
His heart thumped hard in his chest as he grabbed a flashlight from the kitchen counter and flicked it on. The beam stabbed into the darkness, making the downward trek less hazardous.
He descended slowly, the ominous feeling growing heavier on his shoulders. He couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something wrong with this house, with the basement. And despite that feeling, he denied that it had anything to do with the supernatural. He wrote about it, dealt with it in his fiction, but he never believed in it. He refused to believe in it now.
He tried to deny that there was something wrong. But his heart told him otherwise.
He explored the basement that afternoon with the nervousness and fear of a child in an amusement park house of horrors. The feeling dwindled as the beam from his light began flashing on normal looking objects, and it soon subsided. A stack of boxes in the corner yielded moldering, ancient Penny Dreadfuls and turn of the century pulps. Another crate revealed back issues of Harper’s and Blackwood’s Magazine, more gems.
Justin spent that afternoon leafing through them, transferring them to a pile on the floor to be taken upstairs for cataloguing into his own collection. When he was finished, he cast the beam of light around the shabby basement. There were a few chairs, a makeshift table with a layer of dust on it, an ancient stone fireplace that sat cold and empty, and a door set against the far wall. It was locked.
Justin trundled his catch of the day up the stairs to his library. He spent the rest of the evening sorting through the ancient pulps. He couldn’t help but think of the day his wanderings through the closets of the house the week before yielded a similar find. Beneath a pile of old blankets in his study closet was a box of vintage pulps: early copies of Weird Tales (some with his own published work!), Strange Tales, and others. There was Arthur Machen’s The House of Souls, Robert W. Chambers The King in Yellow, the infernal book of Magic and Supernatural The Golden Bough, and a book he had never heard of, From Beyond by James Smith Long. He flipped open the cover of the latter; a collection of short fiction by a forgotten writer.
Stacked in a heap with the pulps and books were notebooks filled with spidery handwriting. Justin had dragged the stuff out and spent the afternoon sifting through it. Most of the notes were scholarly in nature, depicting thematic structure and symbolism of the fiction in Long’s book, but there was a good deal of personal criticism as well. One of the journal entries stated “…am getting closer to what they’re hinting at. Even the newer crop of writers like Lovecraft hint at the same thing, yet I’m not so sure. Either way, I know I must do more research before I am absolutely sure of my theory.” Other books found in the stack were volumes on psychology, astronomy, anthropology, philosophy, history, theology, the occult, and archeology. There weren’t enough hours in the day to sift through all of them, so Justin gave up after a few hours and called it a night.
And now he’d found more of the former occupant’s belongings. And things were getting weirder by the minute. He didn’t know much of anything about the former occupant, just that he’d simply “disappeared” after not paying the rent for the last two months. The landlord came to collect the rent last month and found that he’d simply left, with no forewarning. The landlord cleared out the furniture and put the residence up for lease again.
The following day brought no new lightning bolt revelations for story ideas, so he tramped down the stairs to investigate the basement further.
He stood in the center of the room, trying to figure out what to hit next. A box of magazines sat by the far wall and he inspected them. He pulled the top magazine off the pile and flipped it open. His eyes widened in shock at the vile, perverted images. He’d seen pornography once on a trip to visit his agent in New York, and the graphic images had shocked him. They shocked him now, and he flung the periodical to the floor in disgust.
He sifted through the rest of the magazines with bated breath. They were all of the same ilk; their sexual perversions spiked through his brain, creating images that were sickening and repulsive. He moved the stack to the center of the room, making a mental note to burn them in the fireplace that evening.
Now his curiosity was more piqued than ever. He still couldn’t shake his mind of the images. What kind of person could keep such literature and photos in his home? It was obvious that whoever possessed them had enjoyed them by evidence of their condition, which showed a sign of careful handling. It was this which turned his attention to the locked door set against the far wall.
He tried the knob again; it was locked firmly. He began hunting around the basement until he found a crowbar on top of a pile of tools and debris by the fireplace. He hefted the tool in his hand and inserted its slim end into the crack of the door. Heaving with all his strength, he began prying the door open with the strain and groan of splintering wood.
When the lock snapped, the door flew open and banged against the wall. Justin stood panting in the cold basement, his nostrils suddenly tracking a damp smell that issued from the tiny room he had just unearthed. He stabbed the beam of his flashlight in the room, revealing a dusty piece of string that hung from the ceiling. A light fixture.
He reached inside the room and clicked on the light.
The room was bathed instantly in light and Justin blinked. Black spots danced in his vision and he blinked them away as his eyes adjusted. When he finally saw what was displayed against the far wall of the room he had to put his hand to his mouth to hold back the scream that threatened to issue forth. As it was, the shock of the gruesome sight pitched him on his butt while the back of his head thunked softly against the wall. The pain from the bump failed to supersede the shock of what he was seeing.
What looked to be a makeshift altar stood at the far end of the little room. It was constructed of large blocks of stone, about six feet by three feet. Running along both sides were what appeared to be gutters with drains that fed into two funnels that dripped into two buckets. The smell that came from the room was one of death and blood. Heart thumping hard in his chest, Justin took a step closer and peered into the buckets. They were empty, but it was obvious what they had once contained judging by the dried crimson that stained their steel surface.
Justin felt his gorge rise as he looked around the tiny room. Above the makeshift altar was a strange symbol, part pentagram, part some other hieroglyph that he didn’t recognize. It appeared to have been drawn in blood. Dusty black, white, and red candles sat at various positions around the altar, and on his right, sitting on a makeshift ledge, was what appeared to be a human skull. Heart beating harder now, Justin approached the loathsome object for a closer inspection. It was a skull! But it looked strangely…unhuman.
He didn’t know how long he sat there staring numbly at the scene. But when he finally came to his senses he heard the dull chimes of the grandfather clock upstairs in the entry hall tolling six p.m. His eyes widened in surprise. Five hours had elapsed since he trekked downstairs to investigate the basement. He shook his head to clear the shock and cobwebs from his mind. Where had his mind gone in that time?
As if in answer to his question a vision rose in his mind, as if he were remembering a dream. It was a vision of an endless plane, a wide gulf beyond time and space. He felt himself floating in this dream, drifting among various shaped objects and shadowy figures. He heard droning, monotone voices calling out and he closed his eyes and drifted through the flow. He drifted onward through the vast gulf of this
curious dimension, and then before he knew it he was back in the little cellar room and the clock was tolling.
His mind was racing with a million questions and thoughts. He looked at the bloodstained altar, dismissing the dream as mere fantasy brought on by exhaustion. The important thing was dealing with what he’d found in his basement. The bloodstained altar only meant one thing: a crime had once been committed at this house, maybe the very same crime that had led to the disappearance of the former tenant. He needed to find more evidence before he decided what to do next.
It was obvious that Justin had stumbled upon an amazing discovery. He was standing in what was very likely a private ritual chamber. The vile pornographic literature in the box outside had probably been the former resident’s, as well as the books and magazines upstairs. The maroon stains on the makeshift altar, and in the buckets were now easily explainable, as were the strange symbols drawn on the walls. All of which explained the weird feeling he got when he first set foot inside.
There were other items scattered about the small room. A two-by-three foot cedar chest lay in a corner, padlocked shut. More notebooks slid in the shelves like books. Weird, symmetrical drawings and patterns were drawn with what looked like blood on one of the walls. He reached for the crowbar he had left in the doorway of the room, and turned its blunt edge to the padlock on the cedar chest. Three hard blows snapped the lock, and he flipped the lid of the chest open.
All that was inside the chest was an old leather bound book.
He was barely aware he was holding his breath as he bent down and picked the book up gingerly. The leather was old and cracked. Actually, it didn’t feel like leather at all, at least not the leather he was used to. This leather was smooth, thinner than normal, and had a distinct look to it. He examined the back and front covers, noting the thickness of the volume—it was at least 900 pages—then he flipped open the cover and stared at the title page.
The Necronomicon.
That weird hieroglyph symbol again. And then the name of the author.
Abdul Alhazred.
Now Justin began to smile. Surely this had to be a fake! Howard himself had revealed to him in a letter that he’d invented the name The Necronomicon and Abdul Alhazred many years ago, when he was a mere child. Howard was amused by the fans that had written in to Weird Tales asking where they could find a copy of the famed book of black magic that was apparently kept under lock and key at the Miskatonic University Library in the town of Arkham, Massachusetts. Yet another phony town and a phony university that so many gullible fans thought were real. They were all props to aid in Howard’s and others’ stories of a cosmic race of monsters known as “The Old Ones” who were waiting to once again reclaim the earth. Justin had written three similar stories himself, all of which had been very well received by Weird Tales readers. Howard had praised one of them, “The Whispering Thing in the Cellar,” as a fine piece of work.
But if the Necronomicon and everything that went with it were fake, how did that explain the book he now held in his hands?
He examined it more closely. It was carefully bound, as if by hand. The pages were old and felt like parchment. Almost like papyrus. The writing in the book was obviously English, and appeared to have been hand written directly on the pages. He turned the book over and examined the cover, his fingers skimming across the surface. The binding was smooth and dry, grayish in color. There were splotches of pink in it here and there, and some of the gray appeared mottled. There also appeared to be tiny hairs jutting out of it, and—
Justin took a closer look and promptly dropped the book on the floor, his hair standing on end.
The book was bound in human skin!
That decided it. Now he was calling the authorities. The book itself, while odd, wouldn’t catch the attention of law enforcement, but the evidence of homicide in the room would interest them plenty.
Justin pulled himself away from the grisly scene and turned to move out of the room. He got no farther than the threshold when a wet, rotted hand gripped his arm.
His heart flew in his throat and he choked back a scream. The thing standing beside the doorway was emaciated, scarecrow-like in its visage. It held Justin’s upper arm in one bony grasp, its grinning caricature leering at him through broken, rotting teeth. Twin orbs burned insanely in hollowed eye sockets. Wild, white hair sprouted from the skullcap like honeysuckle blowing in the wind. It took a shambling step forward, its other arm reaching out to grab Justin by the throat, when he suddenly broke free and started running toward the stairs.
Blind fear raced through him as he stumbled over the box of pornographic magazines in the center of the room. He hit the ground on his hands and knees and was back on his feet in a flash, racing towards the stairs. Behind him he could hear the thing that grabbed his arm giving pursuit. Its labored breath wheezed behind him. Justin banged into a bookcase as he rounded a corner of the basement, nearly stumbled over a chair, and was almost to the stairs when he tripped over something else that pitched him forward. The bridge of his nose smacked the fifth stair with a hearty crack. He yelped at the impact, blood spattering the stairs and the front of his shirt. Fogginess clouded his brain and he pulled himself up only to be pushed down by the thing, which was now leering over him.
Justin felt his bladder give way. It was the last thing he remembered before the thing flipped him over and moved its hungry mouth toward his blood-ravaged face.
II
The latest issue of Nightshades magazine was at the printer when its owner and Editor-in-Chief, David Corban, received a call from his editor at the monthly trade publication Horror Scene. “Justin Grave just passed away this morning,” Mike Ashbury’s tired voice issued over the phone. “Heart attack. Sorry about springing bad news on you like this.”
David had been expecting the news. Justin had fallen ill in recent years, and informed David only two weeks ago that he wanted him to be his literary executor. David cradled the receiver on his shoulder and kicked his feet up on the window ledge overlooking Raymond Avenue. “Thanks for telling me. You’re the only guy I know that can bring bad news and still manage to keep me in a cheery mood.”
“Well, I’m not trying to make his death sound like it’s good news,” Mike said. “Justin lived the kind of life I hope to someday live. He lived his life to the fullest.”
David snorted. “You can say that again. The guy was almost ninety years old!”
“And he was still writing up until the time of his illness,” Mike interjected. “Mythos Books is putting out the last two novels he turned in to them, and if you were smart you’d get a collection out of his recent short stories.”
“We’d been talking about it before he got ill,” David said. “I suppose now that I’m his literary executor I can issue the stuff to myself for free.”
The conversation drifted a bit and eventually came back to Justin Grave’s short fiction again. “You really might want to consider a collection of his recent stuff,” Mike reiterated.
“Mythos put out a volume last year,” David said, musing the subject over. “It was a sixty year retrospective. Come to think of it, it didn’t include that much of his recent fiction.”
“There you go then,” Mike said. “At the very least you should consider an omnibus or something.”
David laughed. “It would take five volumes to showcase Justin Grave’s horror and dark fiction in an omnibus.” Still, Mike was thinking in the right direction. A collection of Grave’s horror, mystery, suspense, and dark fantasy fiction—most of it long out of print—could kick start Nightshades Publishing back into high gear. Presently there were two volumes of Grave’s short fiction in print from Mythos: Death Cry in the Night, a collection of weird menace stories from the shudder pulps of the 1930’s, and In the Depths, the retrospective that contained work from the late 20’s through the 90’s. David owned the seminal Cloak of Darkness and Others, which had been published in 1977 by a noted small press. It largely contained the more well known of
his horror stories from the pulp era and beyond, and was now a highly sought after collector’s item. With the recent trend in horror fiction toward the extreme end and the noir, Justin Grave’s work was receiving an almost rediscovered flavor. Anthologists were mining his work from the pulps for a wider audience, and most of the novels he wrote when he came out of retirement in 1973 were now being reissued. David leaned back in his chair, eyeing the late afternoon traffic along Raymond Avenue. “It’s a great idea. I just wish there was something we could mine that’s really rare…you know, something nobody has collected yet.”
“Have you thought about tracking down The Watcher from the Grave for reprint rights?”
The title drew a blank in David’s mind. Mike was a literary bibliophile, one of the three most well-read people David knew. David’s interest was piqued. “I’ve never heard of it. What is it?”
“I’ve never read it,” Mike admitted. “From what I understand, it was published in late 1939 and early 1940 in serialized form in Shudder Magazine. It supposedly started some kind of controversy when it appeared.”
Now David’s interest was really piqued. “That’s pretty amazing. You wouldn’t happen to know what kind of controversy? “
“No. I really don’t know any more about it.” Mike added a short pregnant pause. “If you could dig it up somewhere I’d love to see what it was that caused folks in rural America to heave their cookies.”
“Well, I’ll try to track it down.” The conversation ended with a promise for David to get the bi-monthly column he wrote for Horror Scene in to Mike by the first of the week. David hung up the phone, his gaze still trained out the window. Justin had placed no less than ten stories with Nightshades during the magazine’s eighteen-year history, the last one presently at the printer to appear in the latest issue. The new story was sure to go over big with Nightshades readers. The tale concerned the rumor of a ghoul-like god that feasted on the flesh of the living. A small, yet fanatical cult dedicated to the ghoul devotes itself to appeasing the god. Extreme sexual favors in the form of succubi and incubi are the return for devotion. It was a story that straddled the traditional mode of the Cthulhu Mythos with the new erotic noir of Lucy Taylor and Edward Lee. Pure pulp for the masses.
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