The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  There were low-life doings at the big house on Harrow Street. The four Penandrew males each seemed to bring in seven cronies worse than himself. There were riotous doings there and the black maria was a frequent visitor to those doors. There was the aroma of stale evil in all this and John hadn’t used to be a bad sort of man.

  John Penandrew talked rationally but sadly whenever we came across him.

  “I should never have taken the thing,” he said. “I knew before I finally seized it that it was wrong and unnatural. And, having taken it, I should have been willing to let it go easier when I found what deformity it really was. ‘The corruption of the best is the worst –’ do you remember when we were taught that? This excellent gift was taken away from us long ago, and for a reason. I had it as a tainted and forbidden remnant, and I held onto it like a snake in the hand. But I will not easily give up any strong idea that I have held. I have an intransigent mind. Do you remember when we were taught to have that? I held it too tight, and it shattered me.”

  And in fact John Penandrew was a shattered man now – or a splattered one. The sap had been all drained out of him, as though the nephews were sapsuckers or bloodsuckers who preyed on him. He weathered badly. Now he looked older than he was and he no longer looked all ages at once. He aged monstrously – he leered and lolled. He seemed to be returning to most unaromatic dust.

  He had given up his chairmanships of the boards and his associations with the banks. It was their loss. He had always been very smart in matters of business and policy. He knew that that was finished with him now. He took his money and went home.

  And that home was a shipwreck. The middle nephew was as queer as a glass-egg goose. He had a stack of morals charges against him and John Penandrew had thousands of dollars of bond out on him. He was an almost personable fellow, but he was slanted – how he was slanted!

  The youngest nephew was no more than a boy – a cat-killing, window-breaking, arsonous vandal who led a wild pack and always left a trail right up to the Harrow Street house. What things he got away with because he was not yet adult! And him much more intricate than the adults who had to deal with him and much more deadly – it is pretty certain that he killed larger and higher things than cats and broke more fragile things than windows.

  The oldest nephew, a twisted humorist, an almost good fellow, was the instigator of the endless series of sick parties held in the big house, the procurer of the dozen or so florid witches who always came with the dark. He was an experimenter in the vices, an innovator of reputation.

  John Penandrew had become an old and dirty caricature of himself. There was something artificial about him now, as though he were no more than a mask and effigy propped up on a display float at some garish carnival. The shape he was in, John Penandrew surely could not go on forever and he didn’t.

  After about three years of cohabitation with the nephews, John Penandrew died. That should have wrecked the legend. Maybe not, though. Well, it really seemed that he did not die in the natural course of things. There was something most unnatural about the course of his dying, as though he had turned to dust before he died; as though what died was not himself at all; as though the dying were an incident, almost an afterthought.

  He wasn’t much more than fifty years old. He looked ninety. Zoe didn’t come to the funeral.

  “He isn’t in very good shape right now,” she said. “I’ll wait a few months, and then go back to him when things are looking a little better with him.” She wasn’t at all distraught; she was just not making sense. She left the country the night before the funeral.

  After the funeral mass, after the Zecharih Canticle when the body is taken out from the church, Barnaby Sheen whispered to the priest in the vestibule:

  “I don’t believe you’ve got him all there.”

  “I don’t believe so either,” the priest whispered back.

  Zoe inherited.

  The nephews? No, they didn’t get anything.

  There was something a little bit loose about those nephews. They weren’t – ah – seen again. No trace was found of them, either backward or forward. They simply hadn’t been. In the legal and recorded sense, at least, John Penandrew hadn’t had any nephews. He had had attributes, we suppose, but not nephews. Well, peace to the pieces of the poor rich man!

  It’s a moral paradigm, really, of a man who reached for too much and was shattered by it. It’s a neat instance of final moral compensation and seemliness. Yes, except that it wasn’t near; that this wasn’t the final part of it; and that the compensation was not particularly moral.

  It was not neat because there were pieces left sticking out of it – a primordial brass horn that surely wasn’t Gabriel’s; and three, at least, noisy persons in the house on Harrow Street.

  But it was not stated that the nephews were not heard from again. They were heard. Oh how they were heard! They were the noisiest unbodied bodies that ever assaulted honest ears. They and their florid witches (unseen also) made the nights – well – interesting for quite some months in that long block on Harrow Street.

  This was the first phase of the Haunted House in Harrow Street. It was featured in Sunday supplements everywhere, likely in your own town paper. It was included in books like Beyond the Strange. It became a classic instance.

  And that was only the first phase of the Haunted House episode. The next phase was not so loudly trumpeted (don’t use that word in this case) to the world. There was a tendency to play it down. It was too hell-fire hot to handle.

  Zoe came back to town, bright and big and brassy as ever. A classic personage. Zoe. How the classic has been underestimated and misunderstood! But she came in almost silently, muted brass with only a hint of the dazzle and blare.

  “I believe that things will be looking a little better with my husband John now,” she said. “He should be better composed by this time. I am his wife. I will just move in with him again and be the proper wife to him.”

  “Move in where?” Harry O’Donovan asked aghast, “into the grave?”

  “Oh no, I’ll move back into the house on Harrow Street and live there with my husband.”

  “Zoe, did you take the, well, thing from John?” Barney Sheen asked curiously.

  “Yes, I took it, Barney, but only for this short while. I’ll give it back to him now. He may be able to cope with it this time. I don’t need such things for myself. This time I am certain that we will have a long and entertaining life together. All things coalesce for us now.”

  “Zoe, you’re not making sense. John Penandrew is dead!” Cris Benedetti shouted.

  “Who isn’t?” she asked simply. “I’ll be you though, Cris…” (raucous horn blowing in the far distance) “that he’s more alive than you are at this minute. Or you or you or you or you. If any of you were as alive as he is, I’d have you.”

  “You’re out of your wits, Zoe,” George Drakos said and blinked. There was something the matter with Drakos’ eyes, with all of our eyes. Somewhere a brassy shimmer of the second brightest light that human eyes will ever see. The four men who knew everything did not know Zoe Archikos: much less did I.

  Zoe moved back into the house on Harrow Street. And how was it with her there? Noisy, noisy. Some things at least coalesced for her or into her: among these, the florid witches who used to come with the dark. Their voices had been so jangling because they were broken voices, part voices. Now they were together in that dozen-toned instrument, the red-brass, the flesh-brass. They had never been anything other than wraiths of her. Now she was all one again.

  There was some evidence also (shouting, grisly evidence) that the aeons or nephews or attributes had all coalesced into John Penandrew again.

  Well, that is the sort of thing that a town must live with, or die with; but it will not live on a normal course.

  Listen. No, not with your ears! Listen to your crawling flesh! Did you yourself ever meet a man after you had seen him dead? It does give you a dread, does it now? There was no need of elabor
ation. John Penandrew was a humorist but by the time he had become a little edgy of horror humor. There was none of that coming through the walls business. He came in normally by the door and sat down.

  “Jesus Christ!” Barney Sheen moaned. “Are you a ghost, John?”

  “The very opposite,” Penandrew said softly. “In fact, I had to give up the ghost.” Penandrew was that kind of humorist, but even bad jokes are shocking from a man who’s supposed to be dead.

  “It wasn’t all of you in the coffin was it, John?” Barney asked in wonder.

  “No. Only my older aspect went over the edge. I once thought that this would give me a foot in each world and I was curious about it. It didn’t work that way. I have no consciousness of that aspect now; nor, I suppose, has he of me. I shuffled off the mortal coil there. I’ve won. That’s something. Nobody else ever won at it, except those like Zoe who were already preternatural.”

  “You’re a damned zombie, Penandrew!” Harry O’Donovan cried in shrill anger.

  “Can a zombie be damned?” Penandrew asked. “I don’t know. Tell me, Cris. You were the theology student. For damnation is there not required a nature of a certain moment? But I’m of another moment now. Momentum, I am saying, which means a movement and a power and a weight; and moment of time’ is only part of its meaning and only part of mine.”

  “Damn your Latin! You’re a deformity,” O’Donovan cried.

  “Yes, I’m a deformed curve, the one that never closes on itself,” Penandrew said with his lopsided smile. “Barney Sheen’s ‘In the Beginning’ bit left something out. There was what might have been a perfect sphere, yes. There was, possibly, an exterior speck for contrast. I say that there was something else, one curve that would not close when everything else closed into the rather neat package that called itself The Cosmos, the Beauty. There was one shape left over. I am part of that other shape. Try being a little lopsided sometimes, men. You’ll live longer by it.”

  That was the last real talk that we ever had with John Penandrew. He never sought our company again and we sure never sought his.

  Nobody else lives in that long block on Harrow Street now, but the noises are over-riding in that whole part of town. There is nothing the law can do. It is always that beautifully brassy woman there when they call and always with her artless answers:

  “It is only myself and my husband together here,” Zoe says, “and we taking our simple pleasures together. Is that so wrong?” Even coppers get that funny look in their eyes when they have been hexed by the prevading sound of the brass winds.

  Old boys and young men often gather near that house at night and howl like wolves from the glandular ghosts that the strange flesh calls up in them. But even the most aroused of them will not attempt the house or the doors.

  The Penandrews are a unique couple taking their pleasures together all at once forever, and so violently as to drive the whole town stone-deaf- like those old stone-deaf statues, their only real kindred? For these two will not die, in any natural course of things, not with that big loud bright brassy horn blowing in a distance, and at absolute close range, all at once, everywhere, unclosed, lopsided. It’s the ending that hasn’t any end. The Stone is found, and it’s an older texture than the philosophers believed. The transmutation is accomplished, into brass. Classic and koine: this is the Zoe who dies hardly forever; this is the Penandrew, the man of the wrong shape.

  The four men who know everything understand it now.

  And I do not.

  ELOI ELOI LAMA

  SABACHTHANI

  William Hope Hodgson

  This is the one classic story I chose to include because despite its age it remains a remarkable story. What’s more, its author, William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918), who was killed in the First World War, was a writer of extraordinary gifts and produced what might well be classified as the most extreme fantasy ever written, The Night Land (1912) set in an unimaginably distant future of perpetual darkness on an Earth inhabited by bizarre monsters.

  His other novels were The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” (1907), The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Ghost Pirates (1909). He wrote many short stories, including a series featuring the investigations of an occult detective, Carnacki the Ghost Finder (1913). He had been a merchant seaman in the 1890s and produced many atmospheric strange stories of the sea, some collected as Men of the Deep Waters (1914).

  Almost all of his work has been reprinted in recent years, including a five-volume definitive series from Night Shade Books, and a volume of miscellaneous items, The Wandering Soul (2005). Amongst the websites devoted to Hodgson and his work is www.thenightland.co.uk

  The following, apart from some slight comparison with the Carnacki stories, is unlike anything else Hodgson wrote. He completed the story in January 1912 but was unable to find a market. That’s not too surprising, considering the subject matter, which some may have regarded as blasphemous. It was not until after his death that his widow, Betty, who meticulously kept track of Hodgson’s writings and continued to try and sell them after the War, managed to place it with Nash’s Illustrated Weekly. It appeared there in the issue for 17 September 1919 under the title “The Baumoff Experiment”.

  The story is reprinted here under Hodgson’s original working title, which were amongst the last words Christ spoke on the cross, and translate as “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?”

  Dally, Whitlaw and I were discussing the recent stupendous explosion which had occurred in the vicinity of Berlin. We were marvelling concerning the extraordinary period of darkness that had followed, and which had aroused so much newspaper comment, with theories galore.

  The papers had got hold of the fact that the War Authorities had been experimenting with a new explosive, invented by a certain chemist, named Baumoff, and they referred to it constantly as “The New Baumoff Explosive”.

  We were in the Club, and the fourth man at our table was John Stafford, who was professionally a medical man, but privately in the Intelligence Department. Once or twice, as we talked, I had glanced at Stafford, wishing to fire a question at him; for he had been acquainted with Baumoff. But I managed to hold my tongue; for I knew that if I asked out pointblank, Stafford (who’s a good sort, but a bit of an ass as regards his almost ponderous code-of-silence) would be just as like as not to say that it was a subject upon which he felt he was not entitled to speak.

  Oh, I know the old donkey’s way; and when he had once said that, we might just make up our minds never to get another word out of him on the matter as long as we lived. Yet, I was satisfied to notice that he seemed a bit restless, as if he were on the itch to shove in his oar; by which I guessed that the papers we were quoting had got things very badly muddled indeed, in some way or other, at least as regarded his friend Baumoff Suddenly, he spoke:

  “What unmitigated, wicked piffle!” said Stafford, quite warm. “I tell you it is wicked, this associating of Baumoff’s name with war inventions and such horrors. He was the most intensely poetical and earnest follower of the Christ that I have ever met; and it is just the brutal Irony of Circumstance that has attempted to use one of the products of his genius for a purpose of Destruction. But you’ll find they won’t be able to use it, in spite of their having got hold of Baumoff’s formula. As an explosive it is not practicable. It is, shall I say, too impartial; there is no way of controlling it.

  “I know more about it, perhaps, than any man alive; for I was Baumoff’s greatest friend, and when he died, I lost the best comrade a man ever had. I need make no secret about it to you chaps. I was on duty’ in Berlin, and I was deputed to get in touch with Baumoff. The government had long had an eye on him; he was an Experimental Chemist, you know, and altogether too jolly clever to ignore. But there was no need to worry about him. I got to know him, and we became enormous friends, for I soon found that he would never turn his abilities towards any new war-contrivance, and so, you see, I was able to enjoy my friendship with him, with a comfy conscience – a thing our c
haps are not always able to do in their friendships. Oh, I tell you, it’s a mean, sneaking, treacherous sort of business, ours, though it’s necessary; just as some odd man, or other, has to be a hangsman. There’s a number of unclean jobs to be done to keep the Social Machine running!

  “I think Baumoff was the most enthusiastic intelligent believer in Christ that it will be ever possible to produce. I learned that he was compiling and evolving a treatise of most extraordinary and convincing proofs in support of the more inexplicable things concerning the life and death of Christ. He was, when I became acquainted with him, concentrating his attention particularly upon endeavouring to show that the Darkness of the Cross, between the sixth and the ninth hours, was a very real thing, possessing a tremendous significance. He intended at one sweep to smash utterly all talk of a timely thunderstorm or any of the other more or less inefficient theories which have been brought forward from time to time to explain the occurrence away as being a thing of no particular significance.

  “Baumoff had a pet aversion, an atheistic Professor of Physics, named Hautch, who – using the “marvellous” element of the life and death of Christ, as a fulcrum from which to attack Baumoff’s theories – smashed at him constantly, both in his lectures and in print. Particularly did he pour bitter unbelief upon Baumoff”s upholding that the Darkness of the Cross was anything more than a gloomy hour or two, magnified into blackness by the emotional inaccuracy of the Eastern mind and tongue.