At the sound of his words, Amina Nadil turned pale, her eyes blazed, and she shook with fury, but she made no reply and stalked off in silence. She locked herself in a guest room and refused to come out or even talk through the door, no matter how urgently he entreated her, or how furiously he pounded upon the door. Finally, his rage kindled, Sidney Hardon ordered her to leave the house by morning. He then retired to their room. However, suspecting that she might try to do him harm in the night, he took a pistol and hid it under his pillow, and again he feigned sleep.
Sure enough, about midnight, when she thought that her husband was fast asleep, Amina Nadil stole into their bedroom. She was unclothed, and at first he thought she would try to seduce him as a way to gain his forgiveness. Instead, once she had straddled his prostrate form she bent low over him and, again fooled by his act, then whispered: "Now will you receive your due reward for your curiosity." At the same moment she set one hand firmly on his chest and seized him by the throat with the other. Before he could react, she pulled him up to her mouth, tore open a vein with her sharp teeth, and began to greedily suck his blood. On the verge of panic, he reached behind his pillow and took hold of the gun, brought it forth and, placing the muzzle against her own neck, pulled the trigger. She jerked awhile from him and released him; as he fell back she stared at him as if in disbelief, her mouth covered with his blood. She then slumped to one side of the bed and did not move. He called for help then, and his majordomo came and dressed the wound in his throat. They then examined the body of the monster that had been his wife. It did not breath and they could feel no heartbeat. Relieved, the following day the two of them took the remains of the ghoul-woman to the vault where she had partaken of her nightly repasts, and laid her on the "table" for her dining companions to find.
However, three nights later, though the doors were locked and the windows barred, Amina Nadil appeared exactly at midnight in her husband's room and attacked him with superhuman strength and ferocity, tearing at his throat. His gun proved useless now and he ran from her in sheer terror. He escaped only by fleeing the house and running off into town. He did not even attempt to return until well after dawn, and when he did he discovered that his majordomo had been killed, torn to pieces and devoured like the corpse he had seen that previous night. On the floor around what was left were numerous bloody
footprints, most resembling cloven hoofs, but some being delicately feminine human feet. Sidney Hardon then fled once again, but this time leaving the house and his possessions, the city and his businesses, and even his sanity, behind.
To this day no one knows the fate of Sidney Hardon. Though the police sought him for the murder of his manservant and the disappearance of his wife, though the FBI searched for him for a year or more, he was never found. So it is unknown whether he finally escaped his wife, perhaps by finding shelter as a John Doe in a mental hospital, or if she found him and took him in one final embrace.
The Last Horror Out of Arkham
by Darrel Schweitzer
Professor Latham Knucklebury was a bent, grey-haired little man with a penchant for bizarre theories, and a tendency to lecture on them, as if he were in front of a class, to anyone he could corner. I shared an office with him at U. Mass. (pronounced You-Mass by its denizens) and I suppose I heard more of his ideas than anyone else in those days. His arguments were uniformly as strange, incredible, and seemingly ridiculous on the surface as they were, if you stopped to listen to all the reasoning behind them, logical, brilliant, and backed by evidence overlooked by everyone else. Knucklebury often compared himself to Copernicus, Galileo, and other persecuted scientific greats of the past, and perhaps this wasn't entirely inappropriate, because his mind was undeniably first rate, but in the end that didn't save him. He had no tact at all, and thumbed his nose at the Chairman of the Anthropology Department visibly, publicly and with a personal vindictiveness matched only by that directed against him by the late Professor Chambers.
It was obvious that Latham wouldn't last long at the University and it came as no surprise when the axe finally fell. The immediate cause was the publication of his article, Evidence of Fungoid Phallic Worship Among the Early Fire Islanders, despite statements of disapproval and outright threats from Chambers in the Spring 1978 issue of the Squammous Review. It made a laughing stock out of the department as I had feared it would, and when it appeared the Chairman consulted with the President of the Board of Directors, and it was agreed that my colleague had to go. He did. The next morning Latham found a note of dismissal in his mailbox and, true to his nature, his first impulse was to rush into the Chairman's office, interrupt a long-distance phone call and demand an explanation. Now the Anthropology Department's office consisted of a large centre room with the individual offices of the chairman and the various teachers opening into it, and this meant that anything said in a loud voice behind one door could be heard behind all the others. I was at my desk that morning grading some exams, so I heard the whole thing. Before long Chambers was shouting like a barrage of cannon fire, and Knucklebury had degenerated into a shrill screech. Latham sounded hurt, indignant, and furious all at the same time, as if the most cowardly and treacherous thing imaginable had been done to him. He played the martyr-to-science role well.
"I don't need to remind you," he said, "that when I was teaching at Miskatonic they never treated me like this. There I was given respect!"
"And that's why they closed the place down!" retorted Chambers. "Nobody wanted to go to a place filled with lunatics like you!"
"That's not true! They lost a government grant!"
"Hallelujah! Maybe Nixon was a good guy after all!"
"Just because your own curiosity has dried up, because you haven't functioned as a scientist in decades, because your sterile little mind can't appreciate anything new -"
"You ought to be locked up, Knucklebury. You might be dangerous. Delusions of grandeur, hallucinations, I don't know what. But in the meantime, get out of here.
The matter is settled. You're fired. Talk it out with the Board or the President, but leave me alone. I never want to see your face in here again!" With that Professor Chambers broke into a stream of language unbefitting a scholar speaking to another scholar. Latham realized that there was nothing he could do and left the room. He came over to my office and I dropped the test paper I had been hiding behind during the battle.
"Jesus Christ, what brought that on?"
"Just make sure that you don't rock the boat around here Richard," he said. "If you write anything more than stale rehash you won't have your job very long."
"Anything I can do for you, Latham?”
"No. Just watch and wait. I swear to you that I’ll vindicate myself. I'll prove every one of my hypotheses to be a fact, not just conjecture. Watch and wait, and I promise you, unusual things will begin to happen."
He refused to explain what he meant while he packed a few papers into his briefcase. He left the office and that was the last I saw of him for months.
***
An unsusual thing did happen almost immediately, within a week in fact, but at the time there was no way I could connect it with Latham Knucklebury.
Even though anthropology is ray profession, I have always maintained an avid interest in literature. It was my undergraduate minor and my wife Peg teaches English, so between the two of us ours is a very literary household. Both of us are incurable bibliophiles. We collect rare editions, old periodicals, and publishing oddities, so we were both fully equipped to appreciate the uniqueness of the volume that came in the mail the following Saturday morning, four days after my friend's dismissal.
I was sitting at the table finishing my coffee while Peg tidied up the kitchen, when the doorbell rang and the mailman left off a large parcel marked "fourth class-book." When I picked it up I was surprised, the thing must have weighed a good fifteen pounds. I looked for a return address but there wasn't any, and the stamps were obscured by a black smear of a postmark.
"What wa
s that?" Peg called.
"A package."
"What is it?"
"A book, but I don't know who it's from. You didn't order anything, did you?"
"No. It might be freebies from some textbook company.”
"I don't think so," I said as I began to unwrap it. "No, it's an old book, a very old book - God'.”
She dropped something and came running.
"Well? What is it?"
I showed her the title page:
Mr. William
SHAKESPEARE'S
Comedies Histories & Tragedies.
Published according to the True Original Copies
((an engraved portrait here))
London
Printed by Isaac Jaggard and
Ed. Blount, 1623
"It's got to be a fake," I said. "It must be a fake."
Peg picked up the book gingerly, with a half religious awe. She paged through it, checking certain points, then sniffed the binding.
"No," she said. "I think it's the real thing. This is a genuine First Folio. The paper's old enough. Smell it."
I did. Every book collector knows what musty old books smell like, and very old ones, prior to the invention of wood pulp paper, have an odour all their own, and you get to recognize it after a while. This one smelled right.
"Isn't there any way you could fake it?"
"Have you got any idea how much trouble it would take to forge a book of this size? You'd have to make all the plates, get specially aged paper, get the watermarks right, get the typoes right, the corrupt lines, the smears, the wormholes, everything accurate enough to fool an expert. The expense wouldn’t be worth it. You could only make one or two copies without raising suspicion, and this book isn't all that rare. A hundred and fifty copies are known to exist, and that's pretty good for an Elizabethan book that isn't a bible."
"How much do you think it's worth?"
"A lot. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars maybe. But wouldn't it be easier to rob a bank than to counterfeit something like this? And then why would anyone send it to you anonymously in the mail, real or fake?"
"I don't know. Maybe they'll come to collect a pound of flesh later, but when they do I'll make them explain that inscription first."
"What inscription?"
I pointed out the handwriting in the upper right corner of the title page, in a nearly illegible hand and faded ink. It read:
To my dear friend, R. B.
-William Shakespeare.
"Your initials," Peg said.
"Isn't that funny. But wait a minute, didn't Shakespeare die in 1616, and wasn't the first edition of his plays posthumous?"
"Touche! Now you see why it can't possibly be real. Shakespeare couldn't have autographed it if he was already dead,"
"One minute. Let me check something." She left the room and came back a minute later with a book on Shakespeare, in which were reproduced the four extant signatures of the Bard. Ours matched one of them almost exactly.
"Somebody is one hell of a good forger," I said.
We kept the book as a curiosity. I took it to a rare book dealer once when the lure of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars became too much for me, and he went over it carefully. He asked me how I had come across it, and when I couldn't tell him he became very suspicious. Books like that don't drop out of the blue. Usually an individual copy has a known history with a long line of owners who can be traced. Eventually he refused to even make an offer on it, convinced that I was some sort of crook, and the book rested on our shelves ever after.
I took it down to glance through occasionally, and that was how I chanced to notice something written in quite modern ballpoint on the blank page following Troilus and Cressida. The handwriting was not my wife's, but it looked somehow familiar. The message was:
TEST RUN. ONLY THE BEGINNING.
***
That summer Peg and I went on vacation for all three months.
One of the wonderful things about teaching is that if you live modestly, hoard your money, are married to another teacher, and don't have any kids, you can afford to take the entire summer off sometimes and travel. That year we drove west to California, up through Oregon and Washington, then all the way across to Canada and down into Maine. When we got there we indulged in one of our quaint hobbies of dubious legality.
The backwoods areas of northern New England were cleared and farmed once, but the principle crop turned out to be rocks and the farmers went broke. They left their land and moved away, the result was a region of declining population scattered with empty farmhouses and barns, many half in ruins among overgrown fields and re-encroaching forests. Many of these were left partially furnished, filled with whatever the owners thought not worth taking or couldn't carry. Values change over the years, and what was junk in 1890 is often today a much sought after antique.
So what Peg and I have done more than once is find a particularly isolated abandoned house, break in and help ourselves. Sheriffs frown on it, but I don't think there's an antique dealer in the business who doesn't do the same. They don't see anything wrong with taking old books, plates, and furniture that have been left to the elements and neither do I. Call it an informal type of archeology.
We went treasure hunting in our station wagon at a place called Appleton Hidge which is off Route 1 near Rockland, atop miniature mountains. The view is spectacular on a clear day, and where the cliffs drop away you can see for miles across a wide green valley to the opposite slopes where another row of hills rise. Roads wind in long dusty lines, occasionally stirred by the speck of a car; houses are white matchboxes, and the cows in their pastures look like ants.
We spent a lot of time bouncing along the narrow rocky path that was the local excuse for a road.
We stopped and looked at the scenery, picked blueberries where they grew wild among barren slabs of boulder, and finally we found the house. It stood alone with weeds up to the windowsills facing a barn on the other side of the way with its roof fallen in. I knew there would be nothing in the barn that the wind and rain hadn't ruined long ago, but the house appeared to be in good shape. I parked the car out of sight behind the wreckage of the barn, perilously close to the edge of a cliff, and then Peg and I went around to the back of the house, found an open window, and climbed in.
The place had been looted before. Most of the furniture was gone or smashed, and there were empty liquor bottles scattered about, left by passing derelicts or the local teenagers. Broken glass was everywhere, and in many places plaster had fallen from the ceiling in heaps. We dug around in what must have been the kitchen looking for china plates - the kind they used to use as ballast on clipper ships and now sell for two and three figures - but came up with nothing.
It was only when we got upstairs that the pickings got any better. There we found a laboratory the vandals never touched.
All the upstairs rooms were empty save for one, which was locked, but it wasn't hard for me to break the door in. The first thing we noticed was that there was a statue in the middle of the room, a huge, extremely crude man-like figure with bat wings on its back and the trunk of an elephant for a face. Two deep holes represented eyesockets. Whoever made it hadn't been much of a sculptor, obviously.
Around on tables were pieces of chemical equipment, glassware, tubing, beakers with a gummy residue in them. These I passed over quickly, and forgot them entirely when I noticed what books were on the shelves that lined the walls.
"Peg! Look at this! It's impossible!"
The shelves were packed with crumbling leatherbound volumes. I picked one up and the spine left a brown smear on the palm of my hand.
I opened the book and it cracked. When I saw the title page I couldn't believe my eyes. It was a book of magic, the Grimoire of the sorcerer Honorius, and it was one of the most sought after books in the occult field. It was worth a fortune. Peg opened another at random, and it was something similar. "The guy must have been a wizard," I said. "And I halfway believe the lump of rock o
ver there is in fact the original Golem, brought from de ghetto of Prague to... vork new ewils in dis land."
"The what? What are you talking about?"
"The Golem, dear, is, or maybe I should say was, a stone robot built by Rabbi Loew in medieval Prague to protect his people from persecution. He wrote the word for "life" on its forehead and that turned it on, and the only way to stop it was to erase the word. Unfortunately the thing didn't like having its word erased, so it got loose. Like Frankenstein's monster.
"I hope you're not serious about this. Besides, this writing doesn't look Jewish." She handed me a thick, squat volume in black leather.
"Hebrew, dear, and no I'm not serious. As for this book, it's in Latin, and it's a copy of Alhazred's screwy gibberings, collectively known as the Necronomicon. It's worth a mint, and I'm quite serious about that. We're rich, you know, and maybe sometime we can come back and have the statue made into a birdbath for the lawn of our estate I mean, look at these books!"
And look we did. There was another copy of the Necronomicon,
John Dee's English version, carefully sewn into what looked like late 18th century deluxe leather. The original was just unbound sheets, you recall. Also stuffed on those shelves, covered with cobwebs and filled with worm tooth-marks were such rarities as Ferdinand de Schertz's Magia Posthuma, Morryster's wild Marvels of Science the mind blasting Sonnets on Time by the crazed medieval monk Donaldius of Garthstead, Borellus' De Motu Animalium, The Book of Eibon bound in some sort of reptile hide, the Complete Works of Scott Edelstein, Magia Naturalis by Della Porta, the 1720 edition of Mason's Observations on Superhuman Natures, The Stone from Mnar undated, and perhaps five hundred more.
As we were carrying the books out of the house I remarked, "You know Peg, the guy who lived here must have found the philosopher's stone. Where else would he have gotten the gold to buy all these? This house hasn't been abandoned for more than fifty or sixty years. Necronomicon's didn't come cheap even then."
"Your friend Latham was interested in this sort of thing, wasn't he?"
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