“Arnold told me it was beautiful and awful all at the same time, and quite a difficult piece even from my point of view, which I presume must be taken as a compliment. I don't mind admitting I'm keen to play it.”
Arnold grunted his disapproval from behind the thick clay pipe he always smoked, and I felt a guilty qualm in my mind that for some reason made me hesitate. As Ian looked a little surprised, I overcame my reluctance and, taking up the old manuscript, handed it to him. He looked at it carefully for several minutes without uttering a word, then he handed back the piano and violin parts, keeping the cello part, and remarked, ‘It ought to be deuced good, you know. Yes, that is quite a find you've made there, Greville, quite a find. But what an unpleasant little picture that is at the top. It is quite out of keeping with the music, I've a feeling.”
“I don't know about that,” Arnold murmured. “I can't say that I agree.”
Ian looked up in some surprise, and I, sensing some embarrassing question concerning the music, rose to my feet and said, “Well, since we are all ready, there's no sense in wasting time talking. Let's get to work.”
There was little time wasted in preparing our instruments for the trio. Ian was eager and in some excitement; I was, for some strange reason, peculiarly nervous; Arnold, I noticed with a little irritation, was moody, and placed himself at the piano with a good deal of ill grace. Why did he accept to play his part so grudgingly, I wondered as I tuned my fiddle. After all, this was just a piece of music like any other. In fact, it was more beautiful than many I had heard and played myself. Surely his musician's enthusiasm would be fired at being given such scope to express itself! For this trio, in its way, was a masterpiece.
I ran a scale and looked at the little man; the name Paymon in that neat, precise hand danced before my eyes and made me blink. I would have to stop my eyes wandering to the picture if I wanted to play my part properly. But wherever I looked, the man on his dromedary seemed to follow me and leer at my futile efforts to evade him. I glanced at Ian and noticed that he was looking a little annoyed.
“This damn little picture is blurring my eyes,” he complained rather crossly. “It seems to be everywhere!”
“I noticed that myself,” I admitted.
“I can't get it out of the way: the best thing to do is to cover it up.” I gave them a small sheet of paper each and we all three pinned the sheets down upon our respective pictures. I felt a certain amount of relief at not seeing that ugly face and, tapping my stand with my fiddle bow, said, “Are you fellows ready?” Two silent nods, and we began.
And now, how can I describe what happened, or how it happened? It is fixed in my mind and yet I cannot find words suitable to impart to you the horror of our experience. I think the music was the worst part of it all. As we played, I could hardly believe that this… this hellish sound was really being created by our own fingers. Hellish. Demonic. Those are the only words for it, and yet in itself, it was none of those things. But there was something about it that conveyed that ghastly impression, as though the author had composed it with the wish to convey profane emotions to its executants. I confess that I was frightened—really and truly afraid—possessed of such fear as I have never experienced before or since: fear of something awful and all-powerful which I did not understand. I played on, struggling to drop my fiddle and stop, but compelled by some force to continue.
And then, when we were half-way through, a strangled cry from Ian broke the horrible spell. “Oh God, stop it, stop it! This is awful!”
I seemed to wake as from a dream. I lowered my violin and looked at the young man. He was as white and trembling, with dilated eyes staring at the music before him. He looked, with his thin face and yellow hair, like a corpse.
I murmured hoarsely, “Ian, what is the matter?”
He did not answer me. With one hand, he still held his cello; with the other—the right one—he made a sign of the cross and murmured, “Christ—oh, Christ, have mercy on us!” and sank in a dead faint onto the carpet.
In two seconds, galvanised into action, we were beside him and, Arnold supporting his head and shoulders, I administered what aid I could to him, though my intense excitement made me of little use. He was very far gone, and it took us nearly twenty minutes to revive him. When he opened his eyes, he looked at us both, a prey to abject terror, then, clutching at my coat in fear, he murmured, “The music… the music… it's possessed. You must destroy it at once!”
We exchanged glances, Arnold and I. Arnold seemed to say, “I told you so” and I accepted the rebuke meekly. But I obeyed.
This music was evil, and had to be destroyed. I rose to my feet and went to the music stand. Then I suddenly felt the blood draining from my face and leaving my lips dry. For the music lay on the carpet—clawed to pieces. Only the grinning man on his dromedary was intact…
It was some weeks later, when we had somewhat recovered from our experience, that I ventured to open the book I had recently bought and which had been the cause of so much trouble. I had the name Paymon on the brain, and quite by chance, I opened the Infernal Dictionary at the letter P. I had no intention of looking for the name Paymon. I did not, of course, think it existed in any dictionary. I merely turned the pages over and looked at the illustrations. At the sixth or seventh page of that letter, my attention was attracted by the only picture in the column—that of a hideous little man, seated on the back of a dromedary. The name Paymon was written beneath it, along with a small article, concerning the illustration.
I read avidly. ‘Paymon: one of the gods of Hell. Appears to exorcists in the shape of a man seated on the back of a dromedary. May be summoned by libations or human sacrifices. Is very partial to music.’
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
Nugent Barker
“AND now,” said Harlock solemnly, pushing back his chair, “and now to business.”
We rose to our feet at the far end of the studio, and watched him delicately pinching out the half-burnt candles on the shining dinner table. It was a scene that we had all been waiting for, from past experience—a transformation from the choice and orderly to the grotesque, for it left us standing in the large and leaping firelight.
Sitting at the chimney-side, ready to have our breaths caught by Harlock while we filled our chairs with comfort, we were in another room altogether. Witticisms lay behind us, arguments had been thrashed out and buried, the bowl, for the time being, had flowed; and towering shadows, the perfect background for ghost-stories, had taken their place.
We waited for our host's thin, fire-crimsoned face to reveal to us that his mounting list of horrors was about to be capped by an effort supremely terrifying for a Christmas occasion… but the slow, grim smile never came. He kicked the pine logs into a fiercer blaze; then fell to groping in the remotest corner of his studio.
When he returned, bringing from the shadows an unframed canvas, we supposed that the supreme effort had surely arrived: the story was to be too disturbing for even the remotest of smiles. He stood the canvas on a chair at one end of the fireplace, so that we all had a fairly good view of it. The quality of the painting and the subject of the picture appeared to give to each other a dark and sinister life under the shifting light of the flames; but it was not until the clock had struck, bringing him up with a start, that Harlock began to tell us the following story:
“I found it in a corner of a shop in Fulham Road. It's a good piece of painting, as you can see—even by firelight; but that was not the reason why I bought it. The reason was not so—so aesthetic as that. I bought it because I knew the subject, and because I knew why the painter had painted it. His reason was not aesthetic, either—the man is quite unknown to me, by the way—and I don't expect he cared how little he got for his picture. He wanted to thrust it out of his sight… and he got rid of it because it had served its turn—the painting of it had prevented him from going mad.”
Harlock put his finger-tips together.
“I myself had done the same thing
, you see. But I never sold my picture. I never tried. Perhaps my professional instinct is not so developed as his. As soon as I had painted it, from memory, putting in that finishing touch, that pinpoint of light in the landscape, I took a knife, and slashed the thing to pieces.
“No doubt,” he continued, hesitatingly, looking round briefly at our row of faces, “you are wondering why, having got rid of it in such a deliberate manner, I bought its counterpart the moment I saw one in a shop. The reason is very simple. I was overjoyed at finding that another person besides myself had been to the place… I always think of it as the loneliest inhabited house in England. The atrocious puffball weed told me that the house was indeed the very same. Without doubt, he had tasted the cheese and cider there… had stayed there half the night… had handled the same set of instruments…”
Harlock stared into the heart of the fire.
“Very vividly,” he continued, in a thoughtful voice, “I remember that slow and oddly clear September evening when, having walked for the better part of a day, I found myself, with the sea waves at my back, staying inland at a house, a cottage, a habitation—call it what you like—that sprawled beneath a thin protection of stunted and ragged trees at the back of a field of washed-out poppies, under a rising moon. A solitary light was shining below the thatched eaves, and I walked towards it over the poppy field.
“A nice sort of place to come upon when you're tired and hungry and have lost your way! Look for yourselves. Did you ever see a more god-forsaken spot, such ragged trees, such a sprawling and shapeless dwelling? And yet, you know, because of its very shapelessness it had a shape—the picture has caught it perfectly, and so did mine. Can you imagine such a ridiculous combination of things as a bloated pancake with a blanket of heavy thatch on the top of it? That's how it looked, in detail, when I was right up to it. All the straw colour had been soaked out by the sea-wind. And look at that feathery, puff-ball weed! It shows like a ground-mist in the picture, doesn't it? Up to the thatched eaves in many places; even higher. Heaven knows how I found the door at last, and the courage to thump it. I shall never forget that dead and dismal thumping on the door. Then I tried the latch, and found myself at once in a room that seemed to spread over the whole house. For all I knew, it was the house. The endless sagging beams helped to make it look like that, I think. And at first I could see nothing else in particular—nothing but the lamp on the huge round table, and a multitude of tiny windows with that weed shining beyond them. Then I saw some plates and dishes on the wall, the swinging of a pendulum—and after that… I always wish I had never seen the large and pale and flabby woman who was moving towards me from the far end of the room. She was unspeakably large. I stood my ground, staring, and I believe I counted the thumping clicks of the pendulum clock; they must have been, at any rate, the only links between myself and the busy world outside. They pulled me together at last, I suppose, for suddenly I blurted out that I had lost my way and had seen her light; and as she approached the table, smiling at me enormously, she sucked in her tiny lips until they almost disappeared. But the horridest thing about her was that she seemed to have earth in her hair.”
Here Harlock paused; but only a stranger would have broken the silence. “I have never seen a fatter woman,” our host continued. “She panted at the slightest exertion—gently enough—it was the only sound that ever came from her—but sufficiently to show me that she was certainly flesh and blood. Otherwise I might have had my doubts about her. For even at a distance the house had looked haunted. Something in the very set of the trees—the flock of feathers on the evening light—and the soughing of the sea… And because of her shortness of breath I began to suspect that her fatness was constitutional. Oh, you mustn't think that I was working it out as clearly as this! It was merely a matter of instinct, I suppose, roused by my hopes of a good square meal. And in the end, of course, I found I was right: my spirits had risen too high. Risen at the prospect of a well-stocked larder, I mean. For she motioned me up to the table, and I sat on a stool, an antique thing, hollowed and polished with years of sitting; and then she took a loaf of bread and half a cheese from a cupboard, and poured me out a bowl of cider, and I wanted to cry. Or very nearly.
“She sat there facing me across the table, large and still and silent in her wan, robe-like dress, while in my hunger I tried to swallow my tough bread and crumbly cheese and to wash them down with hurried gulps of cider from the bowl; and whenever I glanced at her over the rim I saw her horrid smile. My hostess sat with her clasped plump hands on the table, smiling at unknown things. Hostess? What a funny word to use! I watched her get up noiselessly, and then—I wish I could make you hear the sound that followed. She went round the room, swishing the little window-curtains on their metal rings and rods: swish, swish, swish, swish, a ripple passing round the room, blotting out the moonlight, blotting out those pictures of feathery, puff-ball weed.
“She left me abruptly after that—abruptly for her, I mean— and I wondered, with rather mixed feelings, whether she had gone to prepare a room for me—a bed. Perhaps it was because of her unbroken silence, and the even flow of her movements, that I took her hospitality, such as it was, as a matter of course. I don't remember asking myself whether she would expect to be paid for my night's lodging; she and money seemed so utterly unrelated to each other, I suppose. But I do remember that this sudden and welcome change in the evening's entertainment left me somewhat breathless—a bit frightened. Should I run away? While there was time? The same old situation that you come across in books. Such nonsense! But that's exactly how I felt, just then. The cider didn't help me. The cheese was appalling. Dry, crumbly stuff. Sour, too. Tasting rather of earth. “I was to get many things into my head that night, but never the cider. This woman's flowing bowl was not of that kind. I could have shattered the silence without an effort, if it had been. In the end I made my effort, and succeeded—but what a fool I felt! ‘I must do my best,’ I thought, ‘to keep my spirits up. I shall see it out!’—and the sudden sound of my voice startled me and made me laugh. I began at once to examine the room with deep interest. Here and there the ceiling bulged to such an extent that I knew I would bump my head against it sooner or later—running from the house in a moment of panic, for instance—it's funny what nerves will do! I liked the clock high up on the wall—and that was scarcely higher than head-level. It was one of those ancient timepieces built when time was really slow, with a round, brass face, a leisurely pendulum, and two brass weights on chains—by which I gathered that the clock would strike at any moment now—it was nearly nine—and I was curious to hear its voice. The plates and dishes on the cloudy dresser gave out a sort of phosphorescent light. They had no other use, I thought, but to be seen and wondered at; for a large oak chest was standing in front of the range. The mouth of the chimney above the chest was hollow, dark, and dead. There was no fireside. No chimney corner. Nowhere to sit and tell stories…
“I never heard it strike,” he said, with a kind of regret. “She came back before that happened. I heard the last of its loud ticks as she closed the door upon them; and I felt quite lonely then, lonely and rather bewildered, for while I was following her along the countless passages and ups and downs of her strange residence she looked like a thick mist rolling in front of me… if you can imagine such a silly thing as a solid mist panting for breath.”
Harlock turned, and gazed for several moments—with a certain look of distress, I thought—at the picture in the chair. “I want you,” he said, “I want you to get the hang of that room she took me to. I mean especially the feeling of it. But to begin with, it was a very big room, and she had lighted it with six or seven candles. Quite a showy display! Three of them were standing on a large, square table in the middle of the floor. The floor itself was covered with some kind of cork matting. She had stood two candles on a chest of drawers. She had even placed a candle on a chair in one of the corners, near the huge, painted, wooden bed. All the furniture was very massive, and painted. Aft
er the candles, it was the colour of the room that I noticed chiefly. The walls were panelled—shallow panels from wainscot to cornice—and painted a bluish green—I may as well call it viridian; a very light and faded but still rather shiny viridian. The furniture was of the same colour; so was the bed-linen, and the billowy eiderdown; so were the heavy, shallow window-curtains; and because of this prevalent colouring, and in spite of the size of the furniture, the room looked empty and asleep. I sat on the edge of the high bed, on the top of the thick eiderdown, with the toes of my shoes just touching the floor. My mind was all on the room in which I was sitting. I was trying to get the feeling of it. And do you know what it was? You can't. It was children.
“It had been a nursery. But whose children, whose nursery, how can we ever know? Hers? That would be the most natural thing in the world… and the most horrible. And in any case,” said Harlock thoughtfully, after a pause, “the question didn't seem to matter very much to me then, and I don't know that it does now. The feeling was there—the feeling of the nursery itself, I mean, of—merely of children long departed. And that also—I remember thinking to myself after a time—didn't matter any longer. The history of the room was over. Over and done with. Or was it, perhaps, only ‘over’, and not yet ‘done with’?
“At this point in my speculations I took off my heavy walking-shoes, and lay flat on the bed, under the thick eiderdown, which I pulled up to my chin. I had left all the candles burning, for I was afraid to sleep. I spent some time tracing with my eyes the very faded pattern on the ceiling, pretending that the pattern was a maze and that I was walking about in it, a game that I never get tired of; but even if I had gone to sleep I suppose the little bell would have woken me.You know how it is, in a strange room—things are watching you all the night, and you awaken early, suddenly, all alert: you wake up to listen for something that you have just heard. For some time I had been listening to the far off flump of the slow waves on the shore; and suddenly I heard the tinkle of a bell on the beach. They had washed up a bell? In a few moments, of course, I knew that it had tinkled in the room. I let the thought sink in. Then I threw off the eiderdown!
There Is a Graveyard That Dwells in Man Page 16