Lovecraft Ezine Mega-Issue 4 Rev1
Page 56
The pale monk motioned for Winter to follow him up the stairs. When Winter remained motionless, the monk frowned. “Is there anything else, detective?”
“At the trial, why was there no mention of Hughes being a member of your order? It seems a convenient omission, given your testimony.”
The pale monk eyed him steadily. “There were… political considerations. It wouldn’t reflect well upon us for our reputation to be stained by a rogue member among our ranks.”
“I expected as much.” Winter’s mouth suddenly felt too dry. “How then, do you explain the illicit deliveries to the sewers behind the cemetery?”
What little color there was in the pale monk’s face drained, lending his skin a translucent appearance. Before Winter could stop him, the monk turned and ran up the stairs.
“Seal the door!” The monk cried, and the heavy door slammed shut in Winter’s face before he could reach it.
He jiggled the handle, but found it locked.
“Open the door, or so help me!” He beat on the door with his fists. In response, there came a sound that chilled his very marrow: a horn. He’d recognized the sound from his time in the sewers. The sound echoed throughout the small chamber, bouncing off the walls and generating an unbearable cacophony.
Winter took his revolver from its holster, stood back, and fired into the door. Even as his ears rang from the deafening report, he fired again. The door splintered slightly, yet remained stubbornly intact.
“Damn it!” He holstered his revolver and considered his options.
At the head of the altar he saw a selection of cruel embalming implements. He took the longest of these, a metal pole with a hook on the end, and swiped at one of the torches overhead. It wobbled briefly, then fell to the floor.
Winter snatched up the torch, ready to proceed into the dark tunnel, when he heard something approaching. He paused, head cocked. There were clomping hooves, followed by noisy chomping and slurping. A goat?
He recalled the organs the monk had taken down the tunnel, and felt his stomach clench. Did goats eat offal? He didn’t think so, but couldn’t say for sure.
Moments passed, and the eating sounds trailed off. His traitorous legs kept him firmly rooted in place.
He listened intently for further movement. A barely audible sigh drifted out of the tunnel, followed by hooves clacking on the cobbled stone floor. Winter took an involuntary step backward, bumping into the edge of the altar.
He jumped when a loud bleat came from within the tunnel. The sound was both reassuring and somehow terrifying. It was clearly that of a goat, yet it carried an undertone of menace.
Simultaneously, the torchlight overhead flickered before being entirely extinguished, filling the air with acrid smoke. The torch in his hand thankfully remained lit.
Heart thumping, he used the feeble torch glow to find his way back to the foot of the stairs. The hooves came closer, accompanied by ragged breathing. He sensed movement at the mouth of the tunnel, but couldn’t quite make out more than a rough shape in the darkness.
The clacking hooves entered the chamber, pausing at the head of the altar. The creature sniffed and bent forward over the body.
It was then that Winter felt his mind unhinge, for the thing before him could not possibly exist. This was no mere goat. The thing was the height of a man, its body draped in furs. Its face was long, with watery black eyes peering at him through a nightmarish mask of skin and horns fitted tautly over some hidden bone structure. A fetid reek of carrion filled the chamber.
The thing seemed to grin, its mouth a yawning void ringed with daggers of bone. It eyed Winter briefly before plunging its jaws into the corpse.
Winter reached for his revolver with shaking hands. Taking careful aim, he fired. Only then did the creature turn its attention from the mutilated body to Winter.
It leapt upon the altar on all fours, opening its mouth wide. Winter felt a tightness in his chest and fought for breath. A million yellow sparks appeared in his vision, and he dropped the torch.
He fumbled for the trigger of his revolver and fired again and again. The thing appeared closer with each muzzle flash.
His finger reflexively squeezed the trigger even after the revolver gave a dry click.
Wet claws gripped his head, and Winter screamed. As those horrible inky eyes peered into his, he felt the last shreds of sanity depart. Consciousness fled soon thereafter.
Elliot Winter heard voices. They were indistinct at first, but as he listened, one voice in particular sounded familiar. One of the men from the station, wasn’t it? Younger fellow. He was arguing with two or three others. They said he wasn’t in a good way. Maybe needed medical attention.
His head throbbed, and he felt something hard against his back. Soft fibers brushed his cheek, and there was an odd metallic smell in the air. Thunder crashed in the distance. Where was he? He’d had the most awful nightmare.
The voices droned on and on. He wished they’d all just shut up and leave him in peace so he could wake up in his own good time.
He tried to focus on the figures, but they were all a blur. He seemed to be outside, judging by the pleasant wind blowing past his face. It was dark, but not quite so dark as that horrible dank dungeon from his nightmare.
He cleared his throat. “‘Scuse me?”
The voices stopped their infernal nattering, and the young lad spoke. “Elliot, you’re alive!”
Winter tried to respond, but all he could manage was a dry croak.
“Get him some water,” the lad said. “My God, Elliot, you had me worried. They dragged you out of there on a stretcher. You’re covered in blood. Nobody seems to know what’s going on.”
He rubbed at his eyes. The face above him became clearer. It was Martin, his partner from the station. The lad looked pale, as if he’d just had a terrible fright. His forehead was creased with concern. Behind Martin, wooden crosses and headstones stretched off into the distance.
“Anyhow, we’ll get you off to the hospital and set you right. I’ll handle the captain. He’ll be none too happy with your exploits, but I’m sure there’s a good reason for all this.”
Another figure appeared, bearing a water jug. This one wore a brown robe and hood. He bent over Winter and held the jug to his lips. Winter drank greedily.
“Thank you,” he managed, wiping water from his mouth. The man said something in response, and it was then that Winter noticed the fellow had no lips.
He jerked upright. “What’s wrong with his face?”
“What do you mean?” Martin said. “He looks fine to me.”
The man flicked back his hood.
“No… no… this can’t be…” Winter clutched at the canvas stretcher, as if to regain his balance.
“What is it?” Martin looked from the monk to Winter.
“Can’t you see?” It was all coming back to him now. A monk had led him into the catacombs, and on the way he’d seen some of the dead in alcoves. They were just like this man, with his dusty skull and skeletal grin.
Winter felt for his holster and noticed it missing. “My gun, where’s my goddamned gun!”
Martin licked his lips. “Calm down, Elliot. You don’t need your gun right now. You’re not thinking straight.”
“I’m fine!” Winter snapped. “Get my gun. Now!”
Martin waved toward the cemetery gate. “Look, the hospital carriage is waiting. We’ll get you patched up, and then we can talk more about what happened.”
“You. And you.” Winter gestured toward the other two monks. “Remove your hoods.”
“I hardly think…” Martin began.
“Do it!”
They threw back their hoods, and it was as Winter suspected: another pair of grinning skulls. The dead had risen, and had cast some glamor over his partner so he couldn’t see it. Everything was all starting to make sense. The show trial with Hughes, the evasive monks, the thing in the catacombs. All of it.
If no one else could see it, he’d ha
ve to take matters into his own hands.
One of the monks said something, but it sounded to Winter like total gibberish.
Martin nodded and turned to the monk. “Yes, you’re probably right.”
Winter scanned the ground by the canvas stretcher and spotted a jagged rock embedded in the loose soil. When Martin’s back was turned, he wiggled the rock free and tucked it into his pocket.
He stood unsteadily. “All right, off we go. I won’t be needing this stretcher.”
Martin led the way back to the cemetery gate and the waiting carriage, followed close behind by the three monks. Winter reached into his pocket and waited for his chance.
He managed to smash in one of their skulls before Martin and the others could subdue him.
They never saw it coming.
On the morning of his hanging, Elliot Winter sat alone in his cell, glazed eyes fixed on the bars. A half-eaten rat lay on the floor beside him. The warden would be here soon, and it would all be over.
After a week in the cell, Winter congratulated himself on successfully abstaining from the food and drink his jailers delivered twice a day. It was most definitely poisoned. They wouldn’t be tossing him into the catacombs now, would they? Unlike poor Mr. Hughes who couldn’t resist the temptation of sustenance.
The trial had been swift and damning. His lawyer had suggested an insanity plea, but Winter had dismissed the idea. He was the sanest person in the room. This absolute conviction, together with the testimony from Martin regarding Winter’s vendetta against the monks, had sealed his fate. In the opinion of the judge, the hangman’s noose would be a fair trade for the cold-blooded murder of a peaceful monk. Winter couldn’t disagree.
The warden appeared and unlocked his cell, accompanied by two guards. They led him down the hallway and past the other prisoners who jeered and clapped as he passed. Then it was a short journey up the stairs, out onto the cobbled square behind the prison, and up a final set of steps to the gallows.
He’d expected a large crowd, but nothing like this. Winter felt tendrils of terror wrap around his heart. Below him, filling the prison square to capacity, a sea of upturned faces stared at him with blank eyes in skeletal faces. They gibbered excitedly in a long forgotten language.
And there was someone–or something–else, wasn’t there? Up in the large oak tree in the corner, a lone horned figure sat, its bony limbs draped over the branches in a relaxed posture.
The warden gibbered briefly to the assembled masses, then turned to him and intoned gravely, “Any last words, Mr. Winter?”
His final words had seemed so important and meaningful when contemplated in his cell, yet now they seemed pointless. This audience couldn’t be made to listen to reason.
The warden waited as Winter’s silence stretched out. When it was clear he had nothing to say, the warden motioned for the hangman to step forward.
As the hangman tightened the noose around his neck, Winter scanned the faces in the crowd. He noticed at least a few among them had not yet succumbed to the undead plague afflicting their fellows.
Just before the platform dropped away beneath his feet, his perspective shifted yet again, and the assembled throng seemed to transform before his eyes.
There wasn’t a skeletal face among them.
Andrew Nicolle is an Australian expat, now living in the USA. He works as a software engineer by day, and writes fiction and apps by night. His short fiction has appeared in Pseudopod, Lovecraft eZine, Spacesuits and Sixguns, and A Field Guide to Surreal Botany. Follow his adventures online at andrewnicolle.com.
Story illustration by Dominic Black.
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The Pnakotic Puzzle
by Josh Reynolds
“Well, this a bit of a rum do, and no mistake,” Charles St. Cyprian said. The cigarette he had just gotten lit burned forgotten between his fingers, and his hands were raised, his elbows planted on the armrests of his chair. In the chair opposite, a man with a gun sat, his waxy face betraying no expression.
“Rum do, yes,” the gunman said in his peculiar voice. To St. Cyprian, it sounded like a nest of wasps trapped in a wet gunny-sack. The pistol his guest held was an American automatic, a Colt. “An appropriate colloquialism, yes,” the man continued. “Where is it, Mr. St. Cyprian?”
“Where is what?” St. Cyprian said as he eyed the cherry tip of his cigarette. The line of char crawled towards his fingers. He was a slim man of Mediterranean complexion and he was dressed in one of the finest sartorial creations to ever leave a Savile Row tailors’ shop and deign to live in man’s closet. He had been preparing for an evening out, when his gun-toting guest had arrived and insisted on speaking, despite the lack of appointment or even basic civility. It wasn’t an unexpected visit, but that made it no less unpleasant.
“Where is the cipher, Mr. St. Cyprian?” The gunman’s pallid cheek twitched, and for a moment, St. Cyprian was inexplicably reminded of the evening he’d seen rats crawling in the belly of a dead horse in No Man’s Land not four years before.
“Oh that,” St. Cyprian said. “I have no idea, old boy. Not a clue what you’re prattling on about, I must confess.” He bent towards his cigarette and took an awkward drag. Expelling thin streams of smoke from his nostrils, he continued, “Are you quite certain you’ve broken into the right house? All these Cheyne Walk flats do like alike, I’m told.”
“We are in the sitting room of No. 427 Cheyne Walk, Victoria Embankment—residence of the Royal Occultist since 1874,” the gunman said. “You are Charles St. Cyprian, formerly assistant to Thomas Carnacki, himself formerly the assistant of Sir Edwin Drood, who was in turn the assistant to Aylmer Beamish; you are the current holder of the offices of Royal Occultist. Where is it, Mr. St. Cyprian?”
“Somebody has been peeking at my journal,” St. Cyprian said, sneaking another surreptitious puff from his cigarette. He expelled smoke from the corner of his mouth. Formed during the reign of Elizabeth the First, the office of Royal Occultist (or the Queen’s Conjurer, as it had been known) had started with the diligent amateur Dr. John Dee, and passed through a succession of hands since. The list was a long one, weaving in and out of the margins of British history, and culminating, for the moment, in Charles St. Cyprian, who was wishing that he were anyone else and someplace other than where he was at the moment.
“Where is the cipher?” the gunman said. St. Cyprian examined him through the haze of cigarette smoke. He was a thin man, almost brittle looking, like a scarecrow wearing out-of-fashion Savile Row. He wore leather gloves and a high collar of archaic cut. His face gleamed in the firelight, once again putting St. Cyprian in mind of wax. Spectacles with smoked lenses rested over his eyes, and his hair did not look natural and all at once, St. Cyprian felt a thrill of primitive fear as he realized for the first time what sat across from him, pointing a .45 automatic at his belly.
He licked his lips, and, feigning the blasé indifference he no longer felt, said, “There is no cipher. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You are lying,” the gunman—the thing—said. It tilted its head, and the wax face squirmed.
“Who are you,” St. Cyprian countered.
“You know who I am.”
“I know what you are,” St. Cyprian said softly. “I would like a name to attach to the classification.”
“Cold,” the gunman said. “I am Indrid Cold.”
“The last I heard, there was a fellow by that name working for our American cousins across the sea,” St. Cyprian said. He lowered his hands, tapping ash from his cigarette into the tray balanced on his armrest. He let his eyes rove over the room, in order to give them some respite from the peculiar angles of Cold’s not-quite-right features.
No. 427 had been a perk of the office since 1874, when a spectral entity of one sort or another had spoken to Aylmer Beamish and convinced him that the house was a necessary addition to the tools of the trade. It had cellars that went deeper than any other in Chelsea an
d access to the Thames, if one were willing to get a bit mucky. It was from those cellars that Beamish had led the disastrous sortie of 1881 into the dark beneath London, where he’d met his death at the claws and fangs of the Very Old Folk.
Pictures of former bearers of the office lined the walls of the sitting room, jostling for space with fetish masks and lurid artworks by Goya, Blake and Pickman. Great bookshelves groaned beneath a library of occult works, as well as a century’s worth of accumulated bric-a-brac. The closest wall was occupied by the cavernous Restoration era fireplace and its heavy mantle, and the fire that burned in its belly. Over the fireplace hung a xiphos—a double-edged, single-handed sword with a leaf-shaped blade. It was a family heirloom, brought over with Brutus and his Trojans, and St. Cyprian had used it more than once. He looked at it longingly now, though he doubted that it would do much good.
Cold inclined his head. “We are all Indrid Cold, when we must be,” he said in reply.
“That’s not an answer,” St. Cyprian said, frowning.
“You did not ask a question.”
“It doesn’t matter, I suppose,” St. Cyprian said. His eyes flickered to a point just over Cold’s shoulder, where something moved in the shadows. He brought his gaze back to the intruder quickly. “You’re not here on behalf of the Americans are you?”
“No,” Cold said. “I am here at the request of…an older firm.”
St. Cyprian grunted and sucked meditatively on his cigarette. “Could I convince you to put your weapon down, so that we might discuss this as gentlemen?”