by S. T. Joshi
It was only by the utmost effort, drawing on all the power of her many dreams, her prior adventures, what had been called her witchcrafts, on all the secrets and spells and powers she had learned or gained on other worlds among eternal stone gods, that she almost got things under control, and once more the walls and all else were covered only with the faint, unburning, tiny flames that she had spread with her touch. She actually managed to eat some of her dinner. The turkey was especially good, and the sweet potatoes, but she didn’t have much appetite, because her parents and her brother sat there like smoldering corpses and the curtain was still burning slowly. She felt her hold slipping, and the flames raced up the curtain again, blackening the ceiling.
She began to sob softly.
That was when someone placed a hand on her shoulder and said, “Come away. You know you can’t stay here.” She heard her secret name spoken, the name from her dreams. By that name was she addressed by the two chief men of Chorazin, by Elder Abraham and his assistant, Brother Azrael. She turned in her chair and beheld them. Of course she knew them both. She had known them all her life and had been told that Elder Abraham, the founder of Chorazin and father of the people, was a thousand years old. She believed it. She had no reason to doubt. She knew how time in Chorazin could slip like someone trying to climb a muddy slope. Now the two of them stood before her. The Elder wore a black robe and carried a staff with a glowing stone on the end of it. The Brother wore a suit of an unfamiliar cut.
“I don’t want to leave,” she said.
“I want to stay home.” “You can’t,” said the Elder gently. “You know how this has to end.”
“Yes, I do,” she said at last.
The whole house shook as part of the roof must have collapsed into the second story.
“That being the case,” said Brother Azrael, “we’d better go.”
She let them lead her out of the house. They let her stand for a while, weeping, as it burned and collapsed into rubble.
Then, part way down the path to the main road, they met a boy who looked to be in his middle teens—starting to get tall, no beard yet. She could see him clearly by the glare of the fire. He was naked but for a very short pair of cut-offs, as if he were planning to go swimming, and she could tell that he was also very dirty, streaked with mud. He looked cold. He was hugging his shoulders. She did not know him. She had never seen this particular boy before, but she knew exactly what he was. Always in Chorazin there is one called the Muddy Man or the One Who Goes Below or by various other names, who swims through the earth as if through water, as witches do, who can go deep down into the darkness to converse with buried ancestors or with gods, and bring up treasures. But the Muddy Man she was used to was a long-limbed, gnarled fellow named Enoch, in his sixties or seventies, with wild hair and matted beard, who favored a leather loincloth.
This had to be the latest of his successors. Of his many successors.
She understood that in the actual life she had lived, in her girlhood, this boy and she had never been contemporaries. Of course she didn’t know him. Time was tricky like that, in Chorazin.
They all walked a ways in silence, through the graveyard, past where bones dangled from trees and rattled in the wind, to that place of standing stones and a stone altar. There the Elder removed his robe and placed it on the altar, and stood naked but for a leather loincloth. Marie remained as she was. Her clothes would be ruined, no doubt, but it didn’t matter. She wasn’t coming back. She understood that much.
His staff in his left hand, Elder Abraham took the boy by the hand with his right. The boy in turn took Marie-who-had-another-name by the hand, and as Brother Azrael chanted slowly, invoking the Hidden Gods Below, the three of them, the Elder, the boy, and Marie, sank down into the ground, the mud closing over them like quicksand. The Brother’s voice followed them for a long time. She was not afraid. She had known too many miracles to be surprised that they could somehow breathe, or that they didn’t have to breathe, even as the boy led them, as all three of them swam, hand-in-hand, down and down into the darkness, until the dead of many generations surrounded them like curious fishes, and she met her mother and father again, and even her brother John, who, she learned, had lived to be seventy-four, until a mule kicked him in the face and he died, in 1917. It was an intense, sweet reunion, as they tried to share all their lives, all their dreams, and there was even laughter, then sadness, and she knew she had to go on.
Down they went, again, until things like skeletal whales rose up out of the earth and swarmed around them. Down, until the solidity of matter itself became as tenuous as smoke, and she saw stars, and a blackness before them, opening up. Shapes loomed before them, speaking with voices deeper than thunder, in words no human tongue had ever formed, and they called out her secret name.
The Elder and the boy—whose name was Jerry, Jeroboam, actually—could proceed no further. The rest of the journey was for her alone. She took her leave of them. At the very end the Elder said to her, in the wisdom of his thousand years, “All these things have been only a gestation. It is nearly complete. Go.”
All these necessary things. Everything she had lost.
* * *
Then her eyes were fully opened and her mind cleared, and she remembered, not as if awakening from a dream, but as if she were living it again right now, how when she was thirteen years old her parents had taken her out into the night and held her naked on the stone altar like a sheep to be slaughtered. Elder Abraham and the Brother were there, and many others, chanting until their voices were drowned out by thunder and a band of light stretched down from the sky, all the way to this infinite abyss which she now confronted, where even Elder Abraham had not been able to follow. It touched her inside, filling her, burning. She screamed. She wept. She struggled to get away. But they held her fast.
“Take it,” her father and mother had shouted to her. “Take the flame inside you.”
She felt none of their love now. At that last Thanksgiving, they had loved her. Now their faces and their hearts were hard, as if she had been reduced to the status of a thing—indeed, like a sheep to be slaughtered and as routine as that.
Burning, raging, she broke away, fleeing, to haunt the hills around Chorazin for a century and more.
But even that was only part of the process. The Gestation. Now she entered into the completion of her great task, into her kingdom, to reign as queen.
* * *
These things are true. They are written in the prophetic books Brother Azrael keeps in the locked room in the back of the Chorazin general store. Marie’s other name is written there by no human hand, in no human tongue. The Gestation is described. Therefore we worship her, as Queen of the Sky, and as Mother of Those Who Are to Come.
The Once and Future Waite
JONATHAN THOMAS
Providence native Thomas has persisted in writing weird fiction amidst (or despite) such diverse livelihoods as postal clerk, artist’s model, and percussionist. His titles include Stories from the Big Black House (Radio Void), Midnight Call, Tempting Providence, Thirteen Conjurations, Dreams of Ys and Other Invisible Worlds (all from Hippocampus Press), and The Color Over Occam (DarkFuse). His work has also appeared in Vampirella (Warren), A Mountain Walked (Centipede Press), Innsmouth Nightmares (PS Publishing), and A Darke Phantastique (Cycatrix Press). Naked Revenants and Other Fables of Old and New England appeared in 2017 from Hippocampus Press.
AS IT WAS IN ’33, SO IT IS IN ’83, UP IN CELL 44 FOR starters, Meg observed ruefully. And our Gothic gingerbread façade has gone decades longer without a facelift, fooling more than one carload of tourists into mistaking the sanitarium for a grand Victorian resort. Well, as “image problems” went, it was unique. Less droll, and much deeper-rooted than quaint brownstone trim, was the Board’s Victorian attitude, but that was a tangent for later.
Cell 44 was the more pressing issue. She wrinkled her nose and shoved her hands into labcoat pockets, as if that would spare them contagion. The wr
eckage of furniture was gone, the holes in the wall replastered, the fecal smears bleached out, but oh, to open the dormer skylight way up in the steeply slanted ceiling, create a draft, dispel the ambience that transcended mere lingering funk.
The cell’s third patient in as many weeks had spiraled into worse condition than at commitment, suddenly prone to delusions, hallucinations, self-harm, uncannily like his counterparts of fifty years ago. Meg knew what she’d do if she ran the zoo: reseal the cell, stop chucking good money after bad. We were talking single occupancy, one measly bed, and apropos patient outcomes and repair costs, miles past the point of diminishing returns. Better to call it quits, write off the costs of remodeling, updating, swapping out a radiator for baseboard heating.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t her zoo. Should have been, but wasn’t, so the future of Cell 44 wasn’t up to her. The director was the gutless yes-man of new owners, corporate bozos who’d relieved the state of a “money pit” that sank further into the red the more overcrowded it got. And privatization’s cure for fiscal ills? Cram in more beds! Hence Cell 44 was 8 × 10 feet the institute didn’t have before, the overriding priority in the bean-counters’ “big picture.”
Most irksomely, Meg had been tapped to diagnose 44’s unwholesomeness and fix it, whereas to anyone who could see beyond short-term windfalls, room for one more, or a dozen more, hadn’t a snowball’s chance of compensating for federal cuts that forced state governments, already strapped, to foot the care for their psychiatric populations. Fucking Reaganomics!
And lest we forget the patients, bless ’em, what about their quality of life? If indignation had to stand in for compassion— and that was the best Meg could offer—it still counted as patient advocacy, absolutely. The poor souls bunking in 44 had jabbered of harassment by horseflies and yellowjackets that suspiciously vanished whenever staff rushed in. Yet insects had been legion, via the vents or a loose sill around the skylight, on first accessing the room, warranting same-day service from the exterminators.
Mold in those same vents, or fumes from a leaky flue, may have been responsible for crawly figments, and for their conflation into the night-terror described as Rasputin or Svengali or Ayatollah Khomeini, who’d “rejected” the inmates and threatened murder because their brains were “wrong” somehow. At that juncture, middle management ceased shillyshallying and wrangled each inmate space in one of the wards.
Then Meg was lolling in the doorway, with an impression blank-slate minutes had elapsed. She’d zoned out like a senile geezer, might have toppled backward if the doorjamb hadn’t stopped her: mold or fumes acting up on cue, as it were. Something noxious was happening in here all right.
The director, whom Meg hated dignifying with so much as a personal name, couldn’t even stay off this islet of autonomy, of exile. The cell’s air tested negative for spores, carbon monoxide, sundry psychoactive agents, and since 44’s influence boiled down to “one of those things” beyond current powers of analysis, she intrepidly argued that official policy was misguided, that reclaiming meager square footage might soon become the institute’s own quagmire à la Vietnam.
But no, the director, practically flaunting New Agey tendencies he must have muzzled during his recruitment, exhorted her to delve past the strictly scientific, into anecdotal accounts of 44 and its occupants, into causations more “intangible or oneiric,” whatever that meant. She did note that the newspaper on his desk was folded over to the page with the daily horoscope.
Meg chafed at squandering energy on a fool’s errand, but did prefer the paper chase, immersion in research, to interacting with oft-incurable patients. From that angle, she’d be saddled with one fool’s errand or another. Still, simply because she lacked the saintliness of Mother Teresa, was she automatically Lucrezia Borgia? How could she help what her forte was?
The director’s iffy allegiance to rationalism made it decidedly more galling for the Board to pass her over and hire him “off the street” despite her decade climbing the managerial ladder. Sexism had to be a factor, how onerous in her enlightened field, in these postfeminist ’80s! And for bureaucrats bent on pinching pennies, they’d stupidly missed a trick: though discussing salaries was taboo, everyone knew women earned less; promoting her should have been an economic no-brainer. She’d have bowed gladly to the chauvinistic double-standard for the prestige of a directorate.
But seeing as her involvement with 44 might drag on indefinitely, what a godsend she could keep it at arm’s length! On numerous occasions he’d sent her to establish “everything was okay” in the cell, without defining “okay.” She always spaced out across the threshold, to the extent most recently of an out-of-body experience, snapping out of nothingness to gape at kaleidoscopic mayhem, till a will to focus reduced a hundredfold overlapping honeycomb views to a singular vantage from the skylight down onto 44 and the top of her own twitching head.
Shock zapped her back into herself; for want of objective findings she didn’t bother reporting to him, nor did he, out of forgetfulness maybe, follow up with her. Soon afterward she wondered if she’d looked as disheveled exiting the cell as he did when their paths crossed several doors down from 44, his breathing labored, pupils dilated, sweat trickling from blond pompadour. Was his own research into the 8 × 10 mystery taking its toll, or was he nursing a fern-bar hangover? In any event, served the damn arriviste right.
Meg’s first stop on her furlough from hands-on therapy was the basement’s “records annex,” a parade of green steel filing cabinets probably too close to the steamy boiler room. Down among the dead men, that was about the size of it, combing the oubliette of a more primitive science’s treatment failures. Case histories of 44’s last three guests for fifty years substantiated urban legends of a “cursed” asylum cell, as durable locally as the rhyme about Lizzie Borden’s “forty whacks.” Yesteryear’s alienists had concocted a deplorably glib excuse to mothball 44; otherwise, yellowing typescripts accorded ominously with modern circumstances.
From mid-March through April 1933, three consecutive neurasthenics, upper-crust scions who could afford “rest cures” in private quarters, wound up caterwauling deliriously about horseflies and hornets that plunged into their hair, biting and stinging to the death. The patients improved upon relocation, and their doctors never termed the attackers imaginary. Rather, the cell underwent repeated fumigations, back when pest control equaled a spray-pump of Flit.
Official speculation blamed a vagary of the heating system for warm pockets between the joists where vermin spawned or thawed out of season. The same clinicians attributed the escalations from neurosis to mania to those literal gadflies, conceded this front in the war against nature, and walled off the victors. Rasputin and Svengali scored nary a mention, surprisingly.
Further digging revealed a month’s vacancy in 44 preceding the neurasthenic trio. And before then? The damp air stuck in her throat and her stomach knotted at an intake of revelation she felt ill-equipped to digest. Since late 1932, 44 had contained another blueblood, Edward Derby, whose brains had been blown out on Groundhog Day 1933. Yes, right in the cell. By a fellow patrician and so-called pal.
Suddenly she had to quash her own lurking irrationality, reject the premise that 44 was haunted or accursed. Shades of Amityville Horror, and shopworn ones at that, between assaultive flies and a brutal murder! She reproached herself for adolescent jitters at such B-movie hokum, only to wax emotional again, incensed at the director. No doubt the damn charlatan was exploiting her to confirm, to build upon, his suspicions of 44’s occult infestation.
His misuse of her time, of a strapped facility’s resources, might already qualify as grounds for dismissal, but let’s give him some more rope, make it open-and-shut he was paying her to play ghostbuster. She initiated a detailed log of her excursions in company vehicle plus associated expenses. If anything, the fun of entrapping the boss made her a more enthusiastic delver, and the lurid spectacle of 44 did exert an undeniable fascination.
The notes on
Derby read more like a riddle. His killer, Daniel Upton, was also the prime mover pushing for his committal. Professional consensus had deemed Derby a danger to himself and others, a catatonic depressive prone to violent episodes. Insofar as his ravings were decipherable, he’d suffered delusions his wife was out to enslave or destroy him. After a straitjacketed fortnight, his symptoms went into abrupt remission, and no less baffling, it was on the eve of his release that Upton, his devoted friend and sole visitor, gained after-hours admittance to his cell and murdered him.
Based on these dramatis personae, Meg toyed with rivalry over Derby’s wife as Upton’s motivation. But how did that jibe with the hospital’s inability to contact her, the “popular rumor” that the wife, Asenath, had deserted Derby in October and was incommunicado in New York or California? Wherever she was, she clearly wasn’t around to “enslave or destroy” him.
Regrettably, case notes didn’t provide the background of relationships, the context of crimes, minus which 44 would remain a frustrating puzzle. Assuming Derby and Upton came of newsworthy dynasties, she logged in the hours and mileage for an afternoon at the Arkham Advertiser, requesting access at the front desk to the newspaper’s morgue. The receptionist, a feathered and frosted ’70s holdover, squinched at Meg’s workplace ID but still addressed her as “Ms. Kilduff.”
“It’s ‘Doctor,’” Meg patiently corrected, and yes, she did know how to operate a microfiche reader, she’d been to college. The receptionist recommended somewhat tartly she keep her coat on. The morgue was in a backroom festooned with cobwebs. The radiators were cold, though the windows shook with December gusts. The staff left her on her own: the honor system, or the apathy of world-weary hacks?
The more she unearthed, the more her confusion mounted. Derby’s homicide was duly bruited, but not as front-page headlines, which were split between Hitler flouting the Treaty of Versailles and carnage at another asylum, outside Cleveland, where nine inmates, rescued from a burning structure, sprinted back inside to self-immolation. Whether cronyism, solicitude, or incompetence consigned hometown drama to page 5, Meg transcribed plenty to whet the director’s appetite for weirdness.