Lovecraft Ezine Mega-Issue 4 Rev1

by Price, Robert M.

  The priest lifted the candlestick above his head.

  “No!”

  Megan tried to hold him in place with an almost super-human grip. Adrenaline coursed through his veins and Donald found the strength to pull free. The candlestick crunched against the altar, just below where his head had been. Sparks flew, and the priest raised the candlestick again. The man’s expression did not change.

  Megan grabbed Donald’s arm again and tried to grapple him. Donald’s elbow connected with her jaw, knocking her back. Her head hit the altar with a sickening crack. She sprawled on the floor like a puppet with cut strings. A small trail of blood trickled from her nose.

  Donald had no more time to think before the priest swung the candlestick again. Donald dodged, and the heavy brass candlestick thudded into his collarbone. Pain shot through every nerve in his upper body. The priest prepared to attack again.

  Donald heard the doors at the rear of the chapel creak open, and he turned to call for help. A dozen men and women came through the door. They were all in their Sunday best.

  “Help me!” Donald said. “He’s trying to kill me!” He stepped away from the priest, who now stood stock still. “He already killed that girl.”

  The crowd moved towards him, without stopping or even so much as listening to his words. Donald could not make out their faces, but he could see their bared white teeth. They were smiling.

  The priest stepped towards him again. Donald made a fist and punched him in the jaw, as hard as he could. He felt a jolt of energy run up his arm and his injured shoulder burned with pain. It took all his self-control not to collapse. But the priest went down.

  The smiling parishioners slowed their approach, but did not stop. Donald pulled the candlestick from the unconscious (dead? Don’t think of that now) priest and swung it wildly at the advancing mob. They danced out of the way of his blows, but they gave him space.

  He swung again and they moved back again. With his third swing, he struck the fleshy arm of a middle-aged woman in a floral print dress. He heard the crack of fractured bone, but her expression did not change. She led with her good arm, but did not back up far.

  The mob now surrounded him on all sides, but a few more swings gave him an opening out to the aisle. His arms were now aching from the weight of the brass, and a burst of pain traveled up his collarbone with each swing.

  He ran up the aisle, still clutching the candlestick tight in his hand. The parishioners tore at his clothes, but were unable to hold him. He pushed through the doors in the back of the chapel.

  He stood in the atrium of the cathedral, leaning back against the doors. They were too big and too heavy for him alone to block. He could see no furniture big enough or heavy enough to block the door. He might be able to reach his car if he ran…

  At that moment, the cathedral’s front door started to open. He could see a glimpse of another well-dressed parishioner and he ran for the stairwell to the tower. He shut the door to the stairwell behind him, just as two heavyset men in glasses reached it. There was a lock on the door and he turned it. Even so, he could hear the door rattling in its hinges as the parishioners pounded on it.

  He ran up the first flight of stairs and looked for a trap door that he could cover the stairs with. There was nothing there.

  Who had built this cathedral? What had turned these people into animals? He stood there for a moment, hoping for an answer or a sign. All he could feel was the adrenaline seeping away and burning pain in his arms and shoulders.

  He could hear the door below him cracking. He cursed himself, he cursed Megan, he cursed God. He started to run up the stairs.

  He was halfway up the tower stairs when the door finally broke. The stairs were wider and higher than a normal step and there was no railing. Donald tripped several times, bruising his shins again and again against the stone. His hands were covered with cuts, where he had caught himself on the edge of a step. His lungs burned and sweat dripped into his eyes. Somehow, he had held onto the candlestick.

  He looked below him and saw the mad parishioners. He wanted nothing more than to lie down on the cold stone and wait for them. He kept stumbling up the steps.

  When he reached the top, his whole body burned with pain. His leg muscles and his sides ached. His shoulders and arms were on fire with pain from several hairline fractures that any movement worsened. The hand that held the candlestick was bloody and swollen. But he was now ahead of the parishioners. It would take them a good ten minutes to reach him. He had time to prepare.

  And do what?

  He had bought himself time. But what to do with it?

  He searched his thoughts for an idea. He thought back over himself, Megan, the car, the cathedral for something that would explain this madness. Was this punishment for one of his many sins? Had he or Megan awakened something? Was this some symptom of biological warfare?

  Or had he left a rational world behind? Was this all that was left?

  These thoughts and pain tore at his mind, over and over again. There was nothing to do except to think and feel and wait. The ten minutes were longer than hours.

  By the time the parishioners reached him, he was smiling, with reason gone from his eyes. And as they tore him to pieces, his screams no longer sounded human.

  And the white cathedral stood on the red raw clay as night fell.

  Robby Karol lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife and his dog. He is a graduate of Northwestern University. You can find his other work and links to his short films at his blog: http://geekcornucopia.blogspot.com/

  Story illustration by Dave Felton.

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  All Within The Tender Bones

  by Jason E. Rolfe

  I stood beside the open grave smoking a cigarette. Not a good cigarette, mind you, but an old one, made stale by the passage of time. I gave up smoking months ago, and while the urge had finally caught up with me it had not overpowered my general laziness. Rather than investing in a fresh pack, I found the cigarettes I’d hidden behind the mouthwash in my medicine cabinet.

  The cigarette tasted bad but it filled a need I’d almost forgotten. I savored the staleness because, if anything, it masked the rot wafting up from the ruined earth below. Elmwood was the oldest non-denominational cemetery in the city of Detroit. There were older cemeteries, lost and forgotten beneath the Babylon towers of development and decline. There were secrets buried beneath the concrete foundations of cities like Detroit. If you went digging long enough and deep enough those secrets were invariably uncovered.

  My name is Daniel Blackwood. I’m a writer. At least I used to be. The publishers stopped calling when the words stopped flowing and past glories only last so long. I was never an artist but I was not a hack. Sloth became my agent, Pride my blinding better half. Once paired with ‘up and coming’ and ‘promising,’ the name Blackwood now found frequent affiliation with ‘whatever happened to’ and ‘wasted potential.’ I found it slightly ironic that the short story collection so enamored by my critics had been called Nothing of Consequence.

  I knelt beside the grave, contrary dirt staining the silent snow. Indiscriminate piles framed the gaping wound like blood, brown and dark and kissed by the very death it embraced. The coffin sat silently still, seemingly undisturbed by the commotion my shovel had caused. I slid into the grave, found my footing on the smooth cherry surface and pulled the dead cigarette from between my dry lips. I buried it in the mud-stained snow and sighed.

  Her name was Olivia. She was a goddess – not in the clichéd romantic sense but in the other, more literal sense of the word. After my creativity died, after my wife’s murder, I became a cryptotheologist. Don’t bother looking it up, I coined the phrase. Standing atop Olivia’s coffin, I suddenly wished to God I hadn’t.

  I felt the book in my breast pocket, the words warm against my skin, tattooed there by conscience and constant memory. They were the words of the Psychomachia, words Prudentius wrote centuries before the surroundi
ng soil saw the Sulpician likes of François Dollier de Casson and René Bréhant de Galinée.

  I slipped the crowbar’s flat edge beneath the coffin lid. “Bastards,” I said. Casson and Galinée began everything when they found and destroyed a stone idol venerated by local natives.

  Detroit was first mentioned by name in sixteen seventy when French Sulpician missionaries stopped at the site on their way to the mission at Sault Sainte Marie. Galinée’s journal noted that near the site of present-day Detroit they found and destroyed a stone idol venerated by the Indians, dropping its remnants in the river. French settlers later planted twelve missionary pear trees named after the twelve Apostles on the grounds of what was now Waterworks Park.

  I cracked open the coffin, raised the lid and braced myself for the sickening scent of dampness and decay. It never came. The coffin lay empty at my feet. Silk, stained by seepage and soil seemed bereft of human remains. I found a small journal within the rotting folds of fabric. It was a leather-bound book wrapped in heavy cloth and written in French. With the book I found the stem of an old pipe upon which the name ‘Montreal’ had been stamped in black ink.

  I tucked both the book and the pipe beneath my coat and crawled from the grave, cold and muddy and with an insatiable curiosity. The aging grave, marked only by a number on an antiquated cemetery map had allegedly housed the remains of Olivia Maloney. The daughter of Irish immigrants, Olivia lived and died in Detroit’s Corktown district more than a century ago. Rumors about the restless dead persisted in Corktown well into the twentieth century. Most died with the generations that spawned them, but stories about Olivia Maloney remained, albeit lost amidst the rubble of a neighborhood all but murdered by Progress.

  The most importunate tales proclaimed her a banshee. According to Yeats, banshees were attendant spirits whose wailing lamentations preceded impending death. In a book on Irish fairies and folktales Yeats claimed these spirits followed the old families, ‘and none but them.’ If you bought into the local legends, these spirits followed families like the Maloneys from the old world to the new. The Irish were the first immigrants to reach Detroit en masse, escaping the poverty and oppression of the old world for the poverty and promise of the new. Olivia grew up in a row house on Howard, living the entirety of her brief life somewhere in or between the Trinity School for Girls on Porter Street and her uncle’s grocery store on Fort.

  They tore the century-old Girl’s School down in the nineteen-fifties, erasing the past in order to pencil in a future that excluded Corktown. But it was there that she died, and there that the rumored hauntings began.

  I left the empty grave and returned to my car. I dropped the shovel in the trunk and stopped to light another stale cigarette. I pulled the old journal and the accompanying pipe stem from my coat and placed them on the passenger’s seat before slipping back behind the wheel. The illegal excavation had exhausted me.

  The bodiless grave was no surprise. Had there been a body, had that body irrefutably been Olivia Maloney’s, I would be hunting a ghost. I hadn’t come here searching for ghosts, at least not in the literal sense. As I told you before, I’m a cryptotheologist. I came here searching for a god – an old god – a god Casson, Galinée and the Sulpicians tried hiding centuries ago beneath the now murky waters of the Detroit River.

  I brought the journal to a friend of mine. Although born in Quebec City he taught French at the University of Windsor. An avid bibliophile, Charles studied the crumbling journal over lunch at an artificially Irish pub on Chatham Street in Windsor.

  He ran his finger through a name that bled watered sepia stains onto the heavyweight paper beneath it. “François Dollier de Casson,” he said. “The journal did not belong to Casson, but it was dedicated to him.”

  He sipped his Heineken thoughtfully before reading the hand-written dedication. “François Dollier de Casson. ‘Que Dieu nous délivre du souvenir de ces visions.’ May God save us from all that we have seen.”

  He gently turned the page. It was a simple, subtle act that revealed his reverence for the book itself, if not the words it contained. “Odd,” he mused. “The book is written entirely in French.”

  “They were French.”

  “Yes, but they were priests. I’d have expected Latin.”

  If it seemed strange to Charles, it seemed strange to me. He had a knack for knowledge others could only shake their heads at. The obscure and the esoteric were as common to Charles as breath. “Any reason it wouldn’t be in Latin?” I asked.

  Charles shrugged. He sipped his beer solicitously before adding, “It could be fraudulent.”

  “A hoax,” I mused. “An odd place to find a practical joke, don’t you think?”

  “If the Sulpicians considered Latin to be a holy language,” Charles suggested, “perhaps the journal’s author chose a more common language because he deemed the book’s contents unworthy of it.”

  “Have you seen that before?”

  Charles shook his head. “Can you leave the book with me?”

  I smiled. I knew I had intrigued him, and given Charles’ bibliophilic curiosity I knew the book would be back in my hands sooner rather than later. “Take it,” I told him. “Call me when you’ve finished with it. Maybe we can meet at King’s.”

  “Ah, good idea,” Charles replied. “We haven’t been there in months.”

  Good things happened at King’s Bookstore. I perused a first edition of Dickens’s ‘Tale of Two Cities’ in the rare book annex. I met Paul Feig and Alice Cooper there, found a signed copy of Ginsberg’s poetry and spent an afternoon researching Olivia Maloney with the last remaining Maloney descendant living in Detroit.

  Crepes and coffee were a Blackwood tradition. My wife and I attended Holy Trinity every Sunday. Amanda was Catholic, I was ambivalent, but the crepes at Le Petit Zinc were undeniably divine. We always went there after church. Our lives were so frantic just sitting down for crepes and coffee and normal human conversation felt like forbidden fruit. Our best and last conversations took place at Le Petit Zinc.

  I stopped going soon after Amanda’s murder. The memories lingering there still burned my tender heart. Besides, I couldn’t get drunk on crepes and coffee. I’d traded in Le Petit Zinc for stools at P.J.’s Lager House and the Corktown Tavern. I would say Rachel saved me, but she wasn’t the one who had dragged me from the bottom of the bottle. I owed that to Olivia Maloney, and possibly Aurelius Prudentius Clemens, the Roman Christian poet who penned the Psychomachia. Olivia sang me songs on cold and sour nights, sweet and sorrowful laments that mixed with liquor and left me longing for the past. Rachel simply drove me home one night after I, having been kicked out of the Corktown Tavern, stumbled into the path of her eighty-seven Ford Tempo singing The Dead Weather’s ‘Die by the Drop.’

  I don’t remember the sex, but the photographs lining her living room wall had stunned me into sobriety. There, amongst the strange and unfamiliar faces I presumed belonged to Rachel’s ancestors, were Olivia’s dark and deliberate eyes. I didn’t know her name at the time, just her face and flawless voice. I told Rachel about the dreams, about the woman who sang my lament while I slept in soiled clothes and self-pity on my bedroom floor.

  Olivia had dragged me back from the brink of self-extinction. Rachel had dragged me back to Le Petit Zinc. We went there for breakfast the morning after our first encounter, and Rachel told me everything she knew about the banshee and the dullahan and the keening cry that served as death’s sad harbinger. She’d delved into Olivia Maloney’s strange and troubled past, revealing family secrets few alive remembered, and fewer still dared believe.

  I met Rachel at the corner of Porter and Seventh, the memory of our first encounter still fresh in my mind.

  “The Trinity School for Girls stood here,” she said. “They tore it down in the nineteen-fifties, part of their urban renewal program. During the demolition workers found human remains – a single skeleton in a kneeling position. The artifacts found with the body suggested they were Native
American in nature and so professional archeologists were called in to do some digging – literally and figuratively.”

  “What did they find?”

  “Nobody knows for sure,” she said, “at least not anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everyone associated with the dig died within the year. The bones and the artifacts disappeared. There were rumors the remains were simply left where they were, buried beneath half a century of urban evolution, but they eventually turned up in the hands of a private collector in Montreal. He donated everything to a museum in Quebec City late last year. It turns out they were Indian after all; seventeenth century.”

  “What does that have to do with Olivia?”

  “She attended Trinity School between eighteen fifty-eight and eighteen seventy,” Rachel explained. “She was sixteen when she died, still a child when they found her bruised and battered body hanging in a utility closet on the building’s second floor.”

  She gave me a copy of the official death certificate. According to the Wayne County coroner Olivia accidentally hanged herself while playing a prank on her classmates. The unofficial records, the urban legends and local lore living and breathing in the fading remains of the old neighborhood suggested she’d died during a botched exorcism, and that the coroner simply covered up the ineptness of the priest at Holy Trinity.

  “The two men were childhood friends,” Rachel explained.

  I discovered something on the report that startled me. “Her mother’s maiden name was Charbonneau.”

  “So?”

  “So she was French?”

  “French Canadian, Indian, Irish,” Rachel replied. “We’re a mixed bag, we Maloneys.”

  When I told her about the journal and the empty grave she hardly seemed surprised.

  “If Olivia died during a botched exorcism, those responsible for the cover-up likely buried the body elsewhere. The proof the corpse contained could potentially put them all behind bars.”