Terror Incognita

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “Especially with my face, huh?” Dean joked. His laugh trembled a little.

  “Right. Uh, what was it happened in 1890 that you wanted to look up? I’m a walking encyclopedia on Bluedale. Often thought of writing a town history like they’ve published for Eastborough. Nice book like that.”

  “I’m sure you wouldn’t know. A mental patient died that year. She’s buried over in Elysium Fields...”

  “Pretty Betty,” the man said, with strange fondness, as if he had known her personally. “Yeah, she’s buried in Elysium Fields. She was also killed in Elysium Fields. In fact, almost right there where her grave is.”

  Dean was too fascinated now to be resentful toward the man. “She was killed? Murdered, you mean?”

  “They found her floating at the water’s edge. Face down, naked. She’d been drowned. Of course they couldn’t test a body then like they can now, but it was clear enough she’d been raped. She’d been punched a few times and all.”

  “God...that’s terrible.”

  “She was always escaping from the hospital. As often as not she’d return on her own. But it’s funny that someone would’ve raped Betty, because she’d give herself to you readily enough. They say half the young men in Bluedale had her at one time or another. She gave the clap to half of the ones she went with, too. I’ve never seen a picture of her, if there ever was one, but they say she had the face of an angel.”

  “No killer was ever found?”

  “A drunk, maybe. Some boys who got too rough. Someone out for revenge because he’d already caught the clap off her. We’ll never know. You sure aren’t from Bluedale, my boy, not to have heard about the Green Ghost.”

  “Green...”

  “The kids say they’ve seen a ghost in the graveyard at night. Supposed to be Pretty Betty, waiting for all her dead lovers to rise up and join her. Or maybe looking for more young men to seduce amongst the living.” The old man was grinning. “If she’s still as pretty as they said, I’d go down there and wait for her myself.”

  “Wow. That’s really interesting. Thanks. I saw the grave and I was curious...”

  “You like exploring graveyards, huh?”

  “Well...sometimes.”

  “Well, if you ever run into Betty down there, give her my regards.”

  * * *

  That night, as he often did, Dean lay watching his television for hours. It was the only light in his apartment, its bluish colors flickering on the glass of his framed headstone photographs.

  He was watching an insipid soft-core movie on Cinemax, foreign and poorly dubbed. A portly man was chasing a giggling blond around and around a bed until the film kicked into comical high speed, so that the bouncing of her profound bosom became freakish. The film then went to slow motion, the flopping of her great orbs even more surreal.

  But however fast or slow they moved, Dean kept his glassy eyes on them. Dean had only ever seen breasts like this or in magazines; in the second dimension. He had never felt the pliant weight of breasts such as these, their warmth, the silkiness of their skin and the greater silkiness of their aureoles.

  There was a faint scratching at the mesh of his window screen. A rose chapper or Japanese beetle, no doubt, plucking at the wire like the strings of a harp...but it was too dark out there for him to see anything on the screen.

  A very slight breeze stirred the sultry air, stirred his gauzy curtains, and brushed the skin of his face.

  * * *

  It was eleven at night, and Dean was mounting the steps of the hill at the heart of Elysium Fields...as though he were climbing the stairs of his church, his temple. As if there would be some ritual in that church tonight. A wedding, or a funeral.

  And Dean was as nervous as a groom. He looked to left and right as he mounted the stone flight, expecting to see some apparition standing off amongst the stones, its green glow reflected softly on marble. Or some furtive green figure ducking behind a monument. She needn’t be afraid of him. He only wanted what she wanted. To haunt this lonely place, free of tormentors. They were kindred spirits.

  Some said ghosts wouldn’t linger in graveyards because they had no personal attachments to such spots, and the husks of their bodies contained therein were of no more importance to them. They were more apt to haunt the places where they’d lived or died. Well, Pretty Betty had died here. And she had imprinted her life here, in the gasp of orgasm. For Dean knew intuitively that this was where she had brought most of her admirers. Down by the water.

  He reached the top of the plateau. Already mosquitoes bred of the marshy pond were buzzing around his head, but he didn’t resent them. Their life in this dead place was oddly comforting. It was like they were excitedly greeting him.

  And now he reached the point where the slope angled down toward the pond, which was a black expanse through its border of trees, like a crater filled not with water but with nothingness. A void.

  Dean had half expected to see her there, down by the water. Down by her marker. The Green Ghost. Pretty Betty. Elizabeth. But she wasn’t there. Both disappointed and relieved, he started down the slope nonetheless.

  Had he really expected to find her here? Had he really believed that she haunted this place...or that somehow she had summoned him here tonight? Summoned him to this cemetery in the first place?

  He squatted by the grave, stared at the inscription there until he could begin to make it out. Carven words filled with green stain. These symbols were all that was left of her sad life. They could not portray the loveliness of her face. The torment of her heart.

  Whatever lay below the headstone had rotted, or drained into the pond as had the others ranked unevenly along the slope. Fertilizer for mosquito eggs...nourishment for the dark things which lived in that water beneath its noxious green skin.

  He was a fool. A pathetic fool, he thought. Crouching here at a gravestone, mooning over some insane woman who had died a hundred years ago. What was he doing here? Could he really blame others for driving him to this humiliation, or was it all some flaw, some deficiency in his own being? How sane could he himself be?

  She hadn’t summoned him. There was no kindred spirit or any other kind of spirit here, but for those minute and mindless souls of the mosquitoes. He was alone. Ever alone. How could he have thought it would be otherwise, tonight? Or any other night to come?

  Heavy tears of self-pity and self-loathing wound down his face, fell to the overgrown, matted grass of her plot.

  He could see her inscription more clearly now, even through his tears. The green stain in the letters seemed more vivid; the stone seemed to be reflecting the glow of the moon...

  But tonight there was but the thinnest white smile of a moon.

  Still hunkered low to the ground, Dean turned around to look out on the water, one hand curled in the grass and the other holding onto Elizabeth’s stone for support. Both hands tightened their grip when he had turned himself fully.

  There was the hum of thousands of voices in the air. Low, and yet terrifying for their multitudes...as if all the souls in this graveyard were moaning softly in unison. And yet this sound was subliminal, a background for what Dean was seeing.

  The scum of the pond was swelling upwards, ballooning at its center, as if a great bubble were forming there. And the sick green matter which composed that skin was giving off a luminosity even more sickly green in color, a glow so subtle it almost didn’t exist. But undeniable, also.

  Dean was flushed cold with fear. And awe. Gas from the decomposing dead, he told himself, swamp gas rising up. That huge bubble would burst, any moment now. He told himself this. But he knew better. And when the head came clear of the pond, and the shoulders followed, he could no longer deny what he was seeing.

  The Green Ghost rose to her full height from the pond. She towered there in the night.

  She was so faint, she would no doubt not be seen by anyone outside the graveyard’s borders, despite her great size. One driving by the front of the cemetery might see a vague mi
st against the black sky. It was good that the phosphorescence was so dim, considering her immensity.

  The rim of the pond formed the hem of her gown. She loomed above Dean, who felt tiny huddled by her grave, fragile compared to the apparition despite his more fleshy existence. Vulnerable, so near to the edge of the pond, from which she had drawn the elements of her manifestation.

  The scum of the pond was her skin, and her gently blowing garment. Was it water or a mist of moisture inside that green skin, supporting it? Air, or swamp gas? She had sculpted herself of all these things. Her hair blew sideways in the air, like seaweed rippling in a current. Her features were indistinct. He could still not discern her loveliness, despite her majestic efforts, but her breasts were distinct swells. Huge, maternal, those of a fertility goddess.

  Why had she made herself so great? Was it her insanity, obliterating perspective? Was she glutted on the liquefied souls of those drained into the pond, the fetid semen of her many buried lovers? Was she showing him the enormity of her power?

  She was a vision. A goddess of nature.

  Her arms lifted higher, as if to embrace the sky. Her soft blur of a face inclined down toward him more...and he could see a darkness there lengthening. It was her mouth, he realized. Opening wide.

  The humming grew louder, and a dark exhalation came from her mouth. A black cloud of humming souls.

  “Elizabeth,” Dean breathed. Tears were running down his face again. He was too frightened to let go of her grave and the grass of her plot, too humbled to rise to his feet. He began to sob. And yet he was smiling.

  The cloud of mosquitoes drifted down at him. Became a thick mass around his head, a living nimbus. They settled thickly on his face, and covered the stain there in a mask of their bodies. They covered the white half of his face as well. They had made him a new face. Dean did not brush them away.

  He was, like a saint, transfigured.

  * * *

  There are some teenagers who are not dissuaded by even the creepiest local legends, and yet there are still few who care to party at night in the graveyard called Elysium Fields. Fewer now even than there were before, when there was much talk of the Green Ghost. The story of the man found dead in Elysium Fields last summer is still too fresh in their minds. This man died only a year ago, not a hundred. And yet, his body was found in the same place Elizabeth Rising’s body was found all those years ago; floating face down in the water at the edge of the green-scummed pond.

  Most of the people of Bluedale don’t know whether it is true or merely the embellishment of legend, that somehow the man was drained of most of his blood, and his features nibbled away by fish or whatever else lives in those dark waters, so that he was rendered unrecognizable.

  And yet however disfigured, when they fished the corpse out, it’s said that he was smiling in that mysterious and knowing way that corpses seem to smile.

  But who can believe these stories, these folktales in the making? Stories related by those few drunken teenagers brave enough to venture into that place at night? Stories such as the twin greenish will-o’-the-wisps that are said to flit along the surface of the pond, as if chasing one-another? Stories such as the two greenish figures who are said to mount the granite steps at the center of Elysium Fields nightly, walking hand-in-hand?

  THE HOUSE ON THE PLAIN

  The black ship lay steaming on the plain, more a globe than a ship, like a great spherical meteor which had magnetized to it a thousand odd-matched fragments of machinery, all of it now scorched black by the hurtling speeds which had dropped it here. But the ship was made more of ceramics than metal, and the baroque details of its shell all served their practical functions. Probes extended to sniff the air, to test the temperature, camera eyes panned, skeletal arms unfolded to dig into the bland colorless soil.

  For it was a boring enough planet. The sky was a dull, heavy platinum. The horizon was as flat as an ocean’s, though there were no oceans on this unnamed world. While in orbit, the ship had scanned no life.

  The temperature was moderate and the gravity Earthlike, but the air was thoroughly unbreathable, so the three humans who set out from the globe wore full protective suits and helmets, their suits uniformly black but the helmets individually colored—neon green, orange and yellow—to make the explorers identifiable to each other and to the other two who remained aboard, should communications fail. These three were the most vital instruments the globe had extended.

  It was a drab landscape, as stated. There was barely even a breeze to stir the bone dust grit beneath their boots. It was this chilling salt-flat emptiness, in addition to the mind-shaking incongruity itself, that made the old wooden house looming before them all the more startling.

  “It’s a Victorian, I think,” said J’nette over her helmet mike. She tipped her head back to gaze up at the third floor, evidently an attic level. The house seemed taller than it might have in a less desolate setting.

  “It can’t be Terran,” chuckled Dennis, wagging his head. “It can’t be. Seth, man, let’s go back in and get some guns, huh?”

  “No way, I told you.”

  “This could be a trap! Who knows what built this place! Somebody wants to entice us inside...”

  “They’d fabricate a space craft or at least a contemporary structure.”

  “Not if they were observing Earth through a time lapse. Could be they think this is contemporary.”

  “Could be they built it as a trap back when it was contemporary,” mused J’nette.

  “The scans show no life,” Seth, the expedition leader, reminded them both. “Not even inside.”

  “No life that our scans can recognize,” Dennis advised.

  “Whatever it is,” J’nette commented, “it could use a paint job.” She moved forward toward the dilapidated structure but Seth caught her lightly by the elbow. She looked to him puzzledly.

  “Denny,” he muttered, “go back in the ship and bring me one handgun.”

  * * *

  J’nette was running her hand along the clapboards of the house, once apparently painted white but the wood now as bone-bare as the plain the house rested on like some great many-eyed cattle skull. “It isn’t an illusion,” she said. “Or else it’s a better illusion than we thought.”

  Dennis was holding a device against the outside of the house, watching the small screen set into it. “My scan isn’t hallucinating. It’s real. And it’s real wood.” He turned his head to Seth. “There are no trees on this planet, boss.”

  Seth had been gazing in through a window. The glass of every window seemed intact but the shades were drawn in all the ground-floor windows except for this one. Too gloomy inside to see much; indistinct shadows, presumably furniture. He had been afraid, perhaps irrationally, that he would see one of the hunched shadows suddenly move. At Dennis’ words he nodded as if distracted by other thoughts. The pistol was clipped on his belt and now he unsnapped the holster. “Let’s go inside.”

  * * *

  J’nette went about the spacious living room raising the shades, letting in the lifeless silvery light, while Dennis lifted a TV Guide from the cheap pressed-wood coffee table. Seth had picked up a remote control device and pointed it toward the blank screen of a television set. Nothing happened. Dennis glanced over. “No electricity, chief. They didn’t own individual power cells then, but were all linked up to a municipal utility system.”

  Seth noticed the electrical cords snaking from the TV and ancient videotape recorder into a wall outlet. A lamp was plugged into this outlet also but nothing happened when he tried its switch. He wasn’t surprised.

  “Well, the house was already old before these things were added,” J’nette observed, her pretty brown face pinched with intensity. She moved to a built-in bookcase, and checked the copyright or printing date in the front of each. The most recent book she found was one from 1992, and most of them were older. Some much older. Titles in English, Latin and German. There were books on non-Euclidean geometry, “rubber-she
et” geometry, Klein bottles and Moebius strips and the studies that had made possible at last the traversal warpage that had brought their ship here through compressed folds of space, crossing distances that otherwise would be impossible for them to cover in mortal life spans.

  But in addition to these scientific volumes there were those quite old books with odd titles, all of them apparently studies of mysticism and magic, witchcraft or something much darker. J’nette hefted one heavy tome and it fell open to a page where a sheet had been inserted as a bookmark. Seth drew closer to look over her shoulder.

  “Weird,” he said, reading the scribbled incantations the owner of the book, of this house, had copied from the discolored pages. The incantations were modified, however, on the notebook sheet – altered and with new sections inserted. Geometric figures had also been inserted as illustrations, and some resembled the simplified diagrams of Klein bottles and wormholes Seth had studied in his academy days.

  The book was replaced, the three drifted on into other rooms, pointing their flashlights and lifting shades. In the kitchen, J’nette knelt by a dog dish and a water bowl, the water long since evaporated.

  Dennis gestured to the two doors in here. One, with lacy curtains over a window, obviously was a back way leading outside. The other probably led into the basement. He moved toward this one.

  J’nette rose, approached Seth to show him something she had gathered from the floor. “Dog hairs, sir. We could make up a clone when we get back to base.”

  “We’d have a dog, all right, J’nette. But I don’t think it could tell us much. Even if we find a hair from a human...we can’t clone its memories.”

  “We could at least prove that he or she was a human. A human being from Earth.”

  “J’nette,” Seth said, “I don’t think that needs to be proven any more.”

  “Look,” called Dennis, and the other two rushed to his side at the tone of his voice.

  The cellar stairs seemed to disappear into the ash-like dirt of the plain after only several steps. As if the basement had flooded in sand.