Foundations of Fear

by David G. Hartwell

  Ahead of me lay the Long Gallery in soft velvety darkness, as anonymous as a mole’s burrow. I stepped inside the door and the candle flames rocked and twisted on the ends of the candles, flapping the shadows like black funeral pennants on the floor and walls. I walked a little way into the room peering at the far end of the gallery, which was too far away to be illuminated by my candles, but it seemed to me that all the mirrors were intact. Hastily I placed the candelabra on a table and turned to the long row of mirrors. At that moment a sudden loud crash and tinkle sent my heart into my mouth, and it was a moment or so before I realized, with sick relief, that it was not the sound of a breaking mirror I heard but the noise of a great icicle that had broken loose from one of the windows and had fallen, with a sound like breaking glass, into the courtyard below.

  I knew I had to act swiftly before that shuffling, limping monstrosity reached the Long Gallery and broke through. Taking a grip on the axe, I hurried from mirror to mirror, creating wreckage that no delinquent schoolboy could have rivalled. Again and again I smashed the head of the axe into the smooth surface like a man clearing ice from a lake, and the surface would star and whiten and then slip, the pieces chiming musically as they fell, to crash on the ground. The noise, in that silence, was extraordinarily loud. I reached the last mirror but one, and as my axe head splintered it, the one next door cracked and broke and the ebony stick, held in the awful hand, came through. Dropping the axe in my fright, I turned and fled, pausing only to snatch up the candelabra. As I slammed the door shut and locked it, I caught a glimpse of something white struggling to disentangle itself from the furthest mirror in the Gallery. I leaned against the door, shaking with fright, my heart hammering, listening. Dimly, through the locked door, I could hear faint sounds of tinkling glass and then there was silence. I strained my ears but could hear no more. Then, against my back, I could feel the handle of the door being slowly turned. Cold with fear, I leapt away and, fascinated, watched the handle move round until the creature realized that the door was locked. Then there came such an appalling scream of frustrated rage, shrill, raw and indescribably evil and menacing, that I almost dropped the candelabra in my fright. I leaned against the wall, shaking, wiping the sweat from my face but limp with relief. Now all the mirrors in the house were broken and the only two rooms that thing had access to were securely locked. For the first time in twenty-four hours, I felt safe. Inside the Long Gallery the creature was snuffling round the door like a pig in a trough. Then it gave another blood-curdling scream of frustrated rage and then there was silence. I listened for a few minutes but I could hear nothing so, taking up my candelabra, I started to make my way downstairs.

  I paused frequently to listen. I moved slowly so that the tiny scraping noises of my sleeve against my coat would not distract my hearing. I held my breath. All I could hear was my heart, hammering against my ribs like a desperate hand, and the very faint rustle and flap of the candle flames as they danced to my movement. Thus, slowly, every sense alert, I made my way down to the lower floor of that gaunt, cold, empty house. It was not until I reached the bend in the staircase that led down into the hall that I realized I had made a grave mistake.

  I paused at the bend to listen and I stood so still that even the candle flames stood upright, like a little grove of orange cypress trees. I could hear nothing. I let my breath out slowly in a sigh of relief and then I rounded the corner and saw the one thing I had forgotten, the tall pier glass that hung at the foot of the stairs.

  In my horror I nearly dropped the candelabra. I gripped it more firmly in my sweating hands. The mirror hung there, innocently on the wall, reflecting nothing more alarming than the flight of steps I was about to descend. All was quiet. I prayed the thing was still upstairs snuffling around in the wreckage of a dozen broken mirrors. Slowly I started to descend the stairs.

  Then halfway down, I stopped suddenly, paralyzed with fear, for reflected in the top of the mirror, descending as I was towards the hall, appeared the bare, misshapen feet of the creature.

  I was panic-stricken, did not know what to do. I knew that I should break the mirror before the creature descended to the level where it could see me. But to do this I would have to throw the candelabra at the mirror to shatter it and this would then leave me in the dark. And supposing I missed? To be trapped on the stairs, in the dark, by that monstrous thing was more than I could bear. I hesitated, and hesitated too long. For with surprising speed the limping creature descended the stairs, using the stick in one hand to support it while the other ghastly hand clasped the bannister rail, the opal ring glinting as it moved. Its head and decaying face came into view and it glared through the mirror at me and snarled. Still I could do nothing. I stood rooted to the spot, holding the candles high, unable to move.

  It seemed to me more important that I should have light so that I could see what the thing was doing than that I should use the candelabra to break the mirror. But I hesitated too long. The creature drew back its emaciated arm, lifted the stick high and brought it down. There was a splintering crash; the mirror splinters became opaque, and through the falling glass the creature’s arm appeared. More glass fell until it was all on the floor and the frame was clear. The creature, snuffling and whining eagerly, like a dog that has been shown a plate of food, stepped through the mirror and, its feet scrunching and squeaking, trod on the broken glass. Its blazing eyes fixed upon me, it opened its mouth and uttered a shrill, gurgling cry of triumph; the saliva flowed out of its decomposing ruins of cheeks, and I could hear its teeth squeak together as it ground them. It was such a fearful sight I was panicked into making a move. Praying that my aim would be sure, I raised the heavy candelabra and hurled it down at the creature. For a moment it seemed as though the candelabra hung in midair, the flames still on the candles, the creature standing in the wreckage of the mirror, glaring up at me, and then the heavy ornate weapon struck it. As the candles went out I heard the soggy thud and the grunt the creature gave, followed by the sound of the candelabra hitting the marble floor and the sound of a body falling. Then there was complete darkness and complete silence. I could not move. I was shaking with fear and at any minute I expected to feel those hideous white hands fasten around my throat or round my ankles, but nothing happened. How many minutes I stood there I do not know. At length I heard a faint, gurgling sigh and then there was silence again. I waited, immobile in the darkness, and still nothing happened. Taking courage I felt in my pocket for the matches. My hands were shaking so much that I could hardly strike one, but at length I succeeded. The feeble light it threw was not enough for me to discern anything except that the creature lay huddled below the mirror, a hunched heap that looked very dark in the flickering light. It was either unconscious or dead, I thought, and then cursed as the match burnt my hand and I dropped it. I lit another and made my way cautiously down the stairs. Again the match went out before I reached the bottom and I was forced to pause and light another. I bent over the thing, holding out the match and then recoiled at what I saw:

  Lying with his head in a pool of blood was Gideon.

  I stared down at his face in the flickering light of the match, my senses reeling. He was dressed as I had last seen him. His astrakhan hat had fallen from his head and the blood had gushed from his temple where the candelabra had hit him. I felt for his heartbeat and his pulse, but he was quite dead. His eyes, now lacking the fire of his personality, gazed blankly up at me. I relit the candles and then sat on the stairs and tried to work it out. I am still trying to work it out today.

  I will spare the reader the details of my subsequent arrest and trial. All those who read newspapers will remember my humiliation, how they would not believe me (particularly as they found the strangled and half-eaten corpses of the dog, the cat and the birds) that after the creature appeared we had merely become the reflections in its mirror. If I was baffled to find an explanation, you may imagine how the police treated the whole affair. The newspapers called me the “Monster of the Gorge” and
were shrill in calling for my blood. The police, dismissing my story of the creature, felt they had enough evidence in the fact that Gideon had left me a large sum of money in his will. In vain I protested that it was I, at God knows what cost to myself, who had fought my way through the snow to summon help. For the police, disbelievers in witchcraft (as indeed I had been before this), the answer was simple: I had killed my friend for money and then made up this tarradiddle of the creature in the mirror. The evidence was too strongly against me and the uproar of the Press, fanning the flames of public opinion, sealed my fate. I was a monster and must be punished. So I was sentenced to death, sentenced to die beneath the blade of the guillotine. Dawn is not far away, and it is then that I am to die. So I have whiled away the time writing down this story in the hopes that anyone who reads it might believe me. I have never fancied death by the guillotine; it has always seemed to me to be a most barbarous means of putting a man to death. I am watched, of course, so I cannot cheat what the French call “the widow,” with macabre sense of humor. But I have been asked if I have a last request, and they have agreed to let me have a full-length mirror to dress myself for the occasion. I shall be interested to see what will happen.

  Here the manuscript ended. Written underneath, in a different hand, was the simple statement: the prisoner was found dead in front of the mirror. Death was due to heart failure. Dr. Lepitre.

  The thunder outside was still tumultuous and the lightning still lit up the room at intervals. I am not ashamed to say I went and hung a towel over the mirror on the dressing table and then, picking up the bulldog, I got back into bed and snuggled down with him.

  Scott Baker

  The Lurking Duck

  Scott Baker, originally from the American midwest, is the author of the subtle and startling horror novels Webs and Dhampire and a number of disturbing and original horror stories, of which “Nesting Instinct” won the World Fantasy Award for 1988. He is also the winner of the Prix Apollo, the distinguished French Award for science fiction. Characteristically, Baker works with the subtle accumulation of detail and atmosphere to create progressively more disturbing revelations. He has lived for many years in Paris with his wife, Suzy, who is a translator. This story first appeared in France, in a French collection of Baker’s stories never published in English. A substantially shorter form appeared in Omni in 1987, and was a World Fantasy Award nominee, but the unabridged version, too short to be published as a full-length book, and too long for most magazines and anthologies, remained unpublished in English until now. When I asked Baker why he had chosen this particular title, he replied that he wanted that old Lovecraftian feel. Beware of Baker’s deadpan humor, which underpins some of the finest moments of this piece. Here, for the first time, in the unabridged version is “The Lurking Duck.”

  Julie: 1981

  It was Tuesday evening, just before dark, a few weeks after my birthday. I was four years old. Mother and Daddy had just had another fight. Daddy used to be a policeman before he got paralyzed all below the neck but Mother was still a policewoman and she was very strong and every now and then she lost control and knocked him around a little. That’s what she called it and that’s what happened this time, but even after she got him to shut up they were still both really mad at each other, so she took me down to El Estero Lake to watch the ducks and the swans while she ran around the lake to make herself calm down. The swans were mean but I liked the ducks a lot.

  She put me on one of the concrete benches and got out the piece of string she always kept in her pocket when she was with me, then made a circle around the bench with it. The piece of string was about ten feet long but the circle it made was a lot smaller and I had to stay inside it. Then she went off to do her jogging.

  After a while I noticed that there was an old green car with no one in it, one of those big bump-shaped cars like the ones you see in the black-and-white movies on TV, parked a little ways away from me on the gravel, up under a tree where it was pretty close to the water. The sun was already gone and it was almost dark but I could still see that every now and then one of the ducks would get curious about the car and waddle up to it and stick its head underneath to look at something, then sort of squeeze down and push itself the rest of the way under the car. I couldn’t see what happened to the ducks under the car but none of them ever came out again. I saw two of the ducks with the bright green heads—mallards—and one brown duck go under the car before Mother came back to do her jump-roping.

  When I told her about the ducks she got real mad again. At first I thought she was mad at me but then she went and found a man hiding in the car under an old blanket and she arrested him. He was all dirty and ragged and skinny and he smelled bad. His hands were all big and red. Mother said that he was a drunk and that he was sick in the head but he wasn’t very old. He’d made a hole in the bottom of his car and put a lot of duck food on the ground beneath it so the ducks would come underneath where he could grab them by the neck and kill them without anybody being able to see what he was doing. Mother said that Daddy’d arrested him for doing the same thing once back before the accident. She found five dead mallards and seven of the brown ducks and two white ducks under the blanket with him but they were all already dead.

  I. From the SAND CITY SHORELINE RAG AND TATTLESHEET, May 22, 1981:

  JAMES PATRICK DUBIC

  DUCKNAPPER NABBED YET AGAIN!

  by RAG Staff Writer Thom Homart

  The RAG learned yesterday that twenty-nine year old aerospace heir James Patrick Dubic, a former part-time instructor in the department of computer sciences at Monterey Peninsula and Chapman Colleges, was arrested Monday evening by Police Officer Mrs. Virginia Matson on multiple charges stemming from the alleged theft and slaughter of fourteen ducks from El Estero Park in downtown Monterey.

  Officer Matson, who was recently promoted to the head of the Monterey Municipal Police Tac Squad (where she replaces her husband, Thomas Philip Matson, paralyzed in a tragic skateboard accident during the Parent-Teacher Day celebrations at Monterey High School last fall), was off duty at the time of the arrest. She had taken her daughter Julie, four, to the lake to “get her out of the house for a while” when Julie noticed that there were a lot of ducks going under an old car parked near them but that none of the ducks that went under the car ever came out again! She told her mother and Officer Matson investigated, only to find James Patrick Dubic hidden under a blanket in the backseat. With him under the blanket she found a cloth sack labeled Dewer’s Duckfood containing fourteen recently killed ducks. The floorboards of the car had been removed and duck pellets scattered on the ground beneath it to attract the birds.

  Dubic is currently out on bail on previous charges stemming from the alleged sale of a large number of sea gulls and a smaller number of cats to five ethnic restaurants here on the Peninsula and in Salinas. The restaurants in question—Casa Miguel, La Poubelle de Luxe, The Ivory Pagoda, Shanghai Express, and Ho’s Terrace Café—have been charged with serving the sea gulls, which are protected by state, federal, county and city law, as duck and chicken in a variety of dishes such as Cantonese duck, Polio Mole, and Duck à l’orange. The cats are alleged to have served as the basis for a number of beef and rabbit dishes.

  Dubic, furthermore, has not only been convicted on three previous misdemeanor charges involving what might be termed violence against domestic birds and wildfowl but is also the man whom Monterey County Prosecutor Florio Volpone attempted last year to prove was the actual head of the dognapping ring that in the last five years has been responsible for the deaths of thousands of Central California Irish Setters and Afghans sold to the Mexican fur industry for their beautiful “pelts.” Though we here at the RAG cannot disagree with Judge Hapgood’s ruling to the effect that the evidence Prosecutor Volpone produced was insufficient to prove Dubic guilty before the law of the dognapping and related conspiracy charges—which is to say, guilty of them beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt—yet we cannot help but feel that there is
something at the very least quite suggestive about the fact that Dubic has been arrested and charged with similar crimes on at least forty other occasions in the recent past. Though it is not perhaps completely fair for those of us here at the RAG, in our capacity of armchair quarterbacks, to suggest that, as the saying goes, there’s no smoke without fire and that there must have been some compelling reason for not just one but all of our local police forces to keep on arresting Dubic again and again for the same kind of alleged crime . . .

  II. The Trial

  “Objection sustained,” Hapgood said but it was already too late. Volpone’d been able to get the jury thinking about the dognapping charges again, with that bit about Mexico thrown in to appeal to their racism. The bastard. He knew as well as I did that that was all bullshit, that I’d never had anything against dogs. Or cats either, and he was trying to get them to believe I’d been killing cats too, and that wasn’t true. I’d always loved cats, I’d even had one of my own for a while and he knew it, but it didn’t make any difference to Volpone, he was going to try to get me for the cats anyway.

  “. . . a rubber duck,” Wibsome was saying the next time I bothered to tune in to him. I hadn’t been missing anything. I’d heard it all before time after time and anyway he was even clumsier than usual today. Probably because he knew there was no way his particular brand of rhetoric was going to get me out of anything this time, no matter how hard he tried, so he wasn’t even trying.