by S. T. Joshi
“And what do you imagine I have summoned?”
His laughter was a cruel sound, and his expression suggested that he thought himself speaking to one who was still a child. “You knew it in childhood, although it remained unnamable. It is the occult essence of Sesqua Valley, the core of which can be sensed in certain tainted places in the valley, such as the Hungry Place. Actually, William Davis Manly has written some few lines that sing of it splendidly, here in his book of verse. Mark his words, Stanton:
“It whispers to me in the midnight zone.
The phantom voice, like product of some dream;
And I converse, although I’m quite alone,
And push my voice into the moonlight’s stream
Of phantom rays in which I seem to see
A silhouette, a dark fantastic form,
A thing that shudders in an ecstasy
That indicates a kind of mental storm.
I speak and tell the silhouette my name;
I listen as it signifies its own.
I look to where its spark blooms into flame,
A holocaust that will become my home.
I drift like smoke into the firelight,
Where all my fears and fantasies ignite.
“Do not such lines speak to you, intimately, Stanton? Can you deny that they name the thing you and your sister knew in childhood, the thing that has whispered to you yet again? How your lips ache to name it, however much your heart shrinks at the idea of so doing.”
Demurely, he tilted his head and grinned at me; and then he shut his little book and continued down the road. Returning to the house, I found my own copy of Manly’s poems and read over them, relishing how they suggested the secrets that were especial to my valley. Leaning back into my recliner, I shut my eyes, intending to rest and think; but soon I sank into slumber, and the dreams that had eluded me the night before found me, although they were nonsensical. I awakened to the storm that rattled window panes; and pushing out of my chair, I walked outside and watched the twisting trees as they danced in the night-wind. My nostrils took in the smells of autumn, and in the moonlight I espied a small cyclone of wind that lifted leaves into the air. The wind was a furious force, and walking into it I raised my arms as if defying the gale to topple me onto the ground. I heard, then, a subtle moaning beneath the rush of wind, a kind of whimper that reminded me of the sounds my sister would often make as she slept in the room that we had shared as children.
The wind lifted leaves that spun before me in the air, and I stalked through this kaleidoscope of motion and moved toward the grove of oaks. Approaching our altar, I suspected that I was still at home, dreaming; for how could the solid limbs of olden oaks stir so sensuously, as if coaxing me into their embrace? And what was the object that flamed atop the altar stone, that expanded so impossibly as I approached it? How could an antique doll take on the ruined features of my beloved sibling?
She reached out to me with blazing arms, and I found myself wound within her infernal embrace. “Do you remember how we wished to call to the essence of place, my brother?—how we tried to give name to the unnamable? Let us try again.”
She pressed her blackening mouth against my own, and our conjoined lips moved together. From some place very near I could hear the sound of flute music, and as I pushed my face from hers I imagined that black particles of ash circled all around us. I wanted so to speak the unknown name; but that appellation continued to evade me, and thus I spoke the name that burned inside my brain.
“Catherine!” I cried. She laughed and kissed my mouth again. The inferno of that kiss sizzled on my lips, my tongue. I spoke her name one final time, in that place of unholy ritual, as our burning essence broke apart and joined the particles of ash that coiled around us.
Mister Ainsley
STEVE RASNIC TEM
Steve Rasnic Tem’s last novel, Blood Kin (Solaris, 2014), won the Bram Stoker Award. His new novel, UBO (Solaris, January 2017), is a dark science fiction tale about violence and its origins, featuring such historical viewpoint characters as Jack the Ripper, Stalin, and Heinrich Himmler. He is also a past winner of the World Fantasy and British Fantasy Awards. Recently a collection of the best of his uncollected horror tales— Out of the Dark: A Storybook of Horrors—was published by Centipede Press. A handbook on writing, Yours to Tell: Dialogues on the Art and Practice of Fiction, written with his late wife Melanie, appeared in 2017 from Apex Books.
HE’D BEEN ALONE FOR ALMOST TEN YEARS. IT FELT A great deal longer. He’d almost forgotten what it had been like living with his wife, all the small kindnesses she had done for him which had made him feel like a member of the human race. But now that she’d been gone a decade it was easy to think of that period as a very lucky dream he once had, from which he would wake up filled with optimism, until he remembered that it had in fact been only a dream.
Now he spent his time in solitary activity or, when necessary, in a series of actions meant to limit human contact. It was unfortunate that he had to waste his energy with this. Active avoidance meant ignoring, or turning away as quickly as possible, the random people who came to his door. It meant spending too much time studying his caller identification display to determine whether he should answer the phone or not. It meant for the most part avoiding all forms of social media, even though he used his computer as his chief source of information on current events and societal trends. The nation was entering the end of an election cycle, a risky time both for the country and his notions of well-being.
Mister Ainsley had no more interest in politics than he did in religion. The results were always based on wishes and lies, it seemed. Political questions were rarely resolved, and became an excuse for an endless recycling of grudges. His rare peeks into social media to take the temperature of the culture revealed a cesspool of inconsequential resentments and confusion. People could be so dismissive, so cruel to one another. They clung to their fleeting hatreds as if their lives depended on them. He supposed this was inevitable: the true consequences of actions rarely revealed themselves during a single person’s lifetime. Human beings, by nature, lacked perspective.
He had sympathy for the outsiders in such a system, whether due to gender, or race, or some combination of traits that shoved them outside the parameters of the favored class. He, too, was an outsider. But he had no desire to participate.
The current autumn had been more depressing than usual. The trees were apparently reluctant to compensate with their customary colorful display, with more grays and dying browns and surrendering blacks than he could remember from previous seasons. Several early snows had suffocated any struggling green, melting only for the annoying scatter of campaigners for the various contenders and causes stopping by his home several times daily: ringing his bell, beating his door, interrupting his thoughts concerning more enduring dilemmas.
If ensconced in his too-hot study he could ignore them until they went away. If passing through the house on a quest for tea or to relieve a buildup of agitation he might stop and answer the door.
This young man wore a cinnamon-colored sweater vest festooned with buttons and ribbons signifying a variety of positions and proposals. He was also very pale and had red hair and freckles. Mister Ainsley could not remember the last time he had talked to someone with red hair and freckles. Intrigued, he stood and listened, even though the glare of sun, and this young man’s scarlet mane, hurt his eyes.
“I won’t take up much of your time, sir. Are you a registered voter?” Mister Ainsley was not and never had been, but he must have nodded distractedly, because the young man continued. “I just wanted to know if you’d heard the good news about . . .”
After a moment’s confusion—was this a religious spiel or a political one?—Mister Ainsley allowed the words to pass around him, the repetition of key adjectives occasionally stirring his ragged sideburns or the hair dangling over his collar. It had been awhile since he’d been out for a haircut, but he couldn’t decide if he could still tolera
te a human being’s nervous fingers on his scalp. He made an effort to focus on the pale boy’s watery eyes, the soft lines of the face wobbling and losing definition, the freckles beginning to wander off the skin. Before Mister Ainsley could react appropriately the young man had fainted part way into his entrance hall. Not sure what to do now, a stranger having entered his home for the first time in years, he dragged the figure the rest of the way in and shut the door. He slapped the lock lever into place with belated anger.
He did not think of himself as particularly strong, but his muscles had rarely been tested. He felt uncomfortable leaving this earnest young man lying on the floor. He stooped and grabbed him beneath the armpits and lifted. Mister Ainsley could feel some irregularities in his pelvic region as he began to move with his burden, some gravitational shifts as his spine attempted to alter its alignment in response to the unaccustomed stress. He considered it fortunate that the young man was unconscious and unable to witness as Mister Ainsley, by means of a few dozen backwards waddling steps, got first the fellow’s shoulders and buttocks, then his feet, up on the couch. He examined the shoes now propped up on the antique cushion—his guest had stepped in something creamy and fibrous and unidentifiable. Mister Ainsley pulled a rag from his coat pocket and used that to remove the shoes.
The campaign worker was very still, but not dead. Mister Ainsley stared at the freckled face, almost expecting those freckles to shift position, to take up residence in another region of the young man’s face, but they did not. He could see the shallow rise of the chest, the intermittent flare of nostrils, sometimes accompanied by a sudden, deeper inhalation, as if the young man were smelling something. Of course. It had been so long since he had entertained visitors he had forgotten how certain scents affected people. He had a spray he could use. It wasn’t particularly effective, but it might do.
He glanced around the room looking for elements that might disturb. He could only guess, of course: although he tried to keep up with trends in sensitivities, it was difficult to decide what might be deemed unacceptable when he himself accepted it on a daily basis very well. Was it the specimens? Taxidermy was a great deal less popular than it once had been, but it wasn’t unheard of. The gray glops of half-digested paper? He retrieved a trash bag from the closet and scraped up the more obvious bits.
As an afterthought he grabbed any potentially trypophobic-inducing objects—of which he had quite a few—and hid them. In deference to his late wife he’d never displayed them, but since her passing they’d naturally crept into his furnishings and decoration, along with certain long-standing biological stress relievers. He’d always found a wide variety of hole patterns to be soothing.
The young man stirred, groaned. He would have to wrap things up, but he hated being rushed. No doubt this young man’s world was a world of rushing, but Mister Ainsley was physiologically incapable of this trending pace. He went into the kitchen and grabbed the spray, a gray liquid in a clouded plastic bottle. He misted some into the air around the living room as he moved, finally stopping over the couch and spraying an extra amount there. The young man’s freckles looked darker, like tiny insects or flecks of dirt. Mister Ainsley resisted the urge to reach out and touch them. Going back into the kitchen, he spritzed a copious amount onto his own chest and into his hair before returning the bottle to its hiding place.
“Hello?” The voice sounded both groggy and panicked. He returned to the living room just as his guest was sitting up, shaking his head. “How . . . how did I get here?”
“You fainted, I’m afraid. Have you eaten today? Or perhaps you’re exhausted from the day’s labors. When was the last time you slept?”
“I—” The young man’s mouth hung open, languid and wet. Mister Ainsley paused a moment and stared.
“In my observation politicians, preachers—notice how the lips come together in those words, as if the mouth wants to push them away—they take advantage of young people. You are their source of free labor. For the cause, they say. Causing irreparable harm, I suspect.”
The young man stared at Mister Ainsley as if too exhausted to blink. But the blood was easing back into his face, flushing the paleness from his neck and ears. “I smelled something.” He raised his chin, but instead of sniffing the air he awkwardly stuck out his tongue. “Tasted it, too. But I don’t now. I’m sorry, but it was awful, I think. I can’t really remember what it was like, but I know it was awful, and then everything was gone.”
“So terrible it was for you, you left the world. Is that what you’re saying?”
The young man finally blinked. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to be rude.”
“Of course not. But when something in our environment goes awry, when we’re introduced into the alien, a shutdown can sometimes occur. Purely involuntary. I sympathize. I would say you were fortunate. Some might sleep for days after such an encounter. Some might even die.”
The poor fellow shook his head in response. “Wait, wait. What are you saying to me? Just please stop, until I catch up. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I just can’t quite catch up.” He tried to stand, and immediately sat down again.
“Take your time—you’ve had a bit of a shock,” Mister Ainsley said. He genuinely understood how the young man felt. After all, hadn’t he been there himself? A fish out of water? Yes—that was the expression, and so he said, “It’s the fish-out-of-water phenomenon. As if you might drown in my air. There’s no hurry about this. You can leave when it’s time, but not before. You mustn’t. I can’t let you. I—it wouldn’t be correct.”
“I have a lot of houses to get to today.”
“Your campaigning? Yes. I understand that you are quite dedicated to this nonsense. Sorry, I do not intentionally offend. But politics? All this spouting off about things they have no intention of fixing anyway? All this upset about some condition that will have changed in a few years, if not in a few months? Humanity lacks patience—that’s your real problem.”
“It’s—it’s important.” The young man looked around. “Like Wilson for governor. You’ve heard of him? He’ll restore things to what they once were. Surely someone like you, you must admire his . . . his conservatism.”
“You believe I am conservative?” Mister Ainsley took a step closer to the couch and the young man drew back, pressing himself into the cushions, looking pale again. “I do not even understand what you people mean by that word. Perhaps, perhaps, but I assure you I am capable of the most radical behavior.”
The campaign volunteer struggled for words, eventually making a surprising barking noise. It was a kind of self-defensive gesture, apparently, against Mister Ainsley’s approach. The young man opened his mouth and started again. “This house, the way you dress . . .” He looked around and stopped speaking, as if trying to reinterpret what he saw.
Mister Ainsley glanced down at his outfit. Like most days, he was wearing one of his deceased father-in-law’s old suits. He’d never met him, but his wife had kept a closet full of the dead man’s clothing. In all likelihood it was an old-fashioned look— perhaps even antique—but Mister Ainsley did not think in those terms. The suits kept him warm, which was better than the alternative. As he had aged he had grown sensitive to the cold, as he had to heat, and to many common household chemicals.
The house was a collection of antiques: wall-to-wall bookshelves filled with fine old hardbacks, art works from the Victorian era, the occasional small-scale replica of some bit of classical sculpture. All that had been his wife’s, accumulated over the decades of her spinsterhood. His contributions were the artifacts, the found objects (from beaches and trash heaps, midnight wanderings through the town) and the specimens— in jars, or mounted on boards using his primitive taxidermy skills, triggers for old memories and forgotten instincts.
The young man had managed to stand, and was desperately gripping the back of an old chair, but at least he wasn’t teetering. He was looking at some of the portraits hung up on the wall behind the couch.
; “Generations of Ainsleys,” he told the lad. “Some of them quite important, I gather. My wife came from an extensive family.”
The young man turned, closed his eyes, opened them again. He was frowning. “Your wife’s family? Then you—”
“I took my wife’s last name. I know it isn’t customary. But we all do what we have to, and sometimes only one option is available.”
“I knew a friend of a friend,” the young man said. “He did that, but he was much younger. I think it was a political thing, a statement. But I’ve never heard of, well, someone from your generation . . .”
“My generation, yes. The word lacks precision, don’t you think? I mean it’s all so relative. Most of what you see here— anything of measurable value—belonged to my late wife. She had a large collection of books, a few of which I have learned to read, as I have learned to read newspapers, magazines, Internet text—although the many visual cues have helped me. My wife taught me a great deal—she once taught children. She was quite good at it, always generous with her time. I have learned a great deal in her house, although now I suppose it is technically my own—but I don’t believe it will ever be fully mine.”
“She sounds—you know, I really must be going—she sounds like a very fine lady.”
“Oh, she was. Although underappreciated by your lot, certainly. It used to make me quite angry, in our early days together. I think you people thought she was quite plain, but then you are obsessed with appearances, aren’t you? To your own detriment, I’m afraid. You completely misread both the beauty and the danger.”
“I think, I think . . .” The young man appeared to be determined, but he was “losing the thread,” as people now were prone to say. Mister Ainsley liked the expression, but thought it a shade optimistic. After all, it assumed there was an identifiable thread to be lost. “I’m ready to go. I want to go now.”