by Don Webb
One foggy night about two years into Emily’s ill-fated life, something remarkable was seen. The two brothers Ephraim and William began to enjoy each other’s company at the White Ship. They would be heard singing rather disreputable and archaic ballads, consuming heroic quantities of rum, and loudly expressing their borderline fascist politics at the TV. We were curious that Ephraim, who had turned his back on us in high school, had any normal habits like cussing and drinking. Ephraim had intended to be a literary man and had sought out Princeton to learn creative writing. He had always thought we were too common, and Kingsport too provincial.
Rumor had it that Ephraim and his brother had taken up whoring as well. One night, and I heard this from the bartender himself, Ephraim and William had taken a back booth and were irritating other customers with loudly spoken dirty jokes. The bartender had been about to throw them out when they grew hushed. Ephraim had opened a small, long box, the sort that holds necklaces, and was indeed showing his brother a strange rose quartz medallion. As the bartender walked up, Ephraim snapped the case shut and winked at his brother.
The strange medallion was seen soon after—around the throat of nineteen-year-old Suzie Reiman, the achingly beautiful daughter of the bank president. After her mother’s death when she was twelve, Suzie had been the apple of Albert’s eye. William lacked the discretion even to try and keep the affair secret. Even the gossip column of the Kingsport Chronicle made remarks much more transparent than Ephraim’s freaky window. Albert Reiman tried shipping his daughter off to Milan “to study art.” Suzie responded in great Gothic fashion and attempted to cut off her head with an electric carving knife, which heretofore had only been useful in mangling Thanksgiving turkeys.
William had lost his position at the bank and fell to drink. His brother seemed to have deserted him. William stopped his patronage of the White Ship, a rather well-known Kingsport landmark, and instead began drinking boilermakers at Pete’s. Marie struggled to keep her head up. But as money played out and her employment solution as an aide at Kinder Kare failed to pay for Emily’s needs, she divorced William and headed toward warmer climes.
William’s demise was without drama although not without pathos. One drunken night he declared to the patrons of Pete’s that he knew something. He stumbled out into the dark snow at closing time. The next morning when his car was found on Pete’s lot the police were called. They found him frozen in the same alley Marie had turned up in seven years before.
Ephraim paid for a fabulous funeral. He sat alone stroking the rose quartz amulet that had last been Suzie’s. Rumor had it that she had been buried with it, but I think that was an exaggeration. People loved to do that with Ephraim.
After that day we never saw Ephraim. He paid his cook and his butler well. They weren’t the sort to talk about anything; they weren’t even New Englanders. He had female visitors from time to time, usually at the end of October and April; you can imagine the sort of rumors that started. We all watched the rose window those nights. Sometimes there appeared to be flashes of light within as though some sort of signaling were taking place, but most of the time there was simply that murky opalescence that made you think if you just kept watching something would be seen. I confess to have bought a pair of binoculars to gaze upon its eldritch surface.
Then Emily was sighted. She was in college in Arkham. She had been reshaped by who knows how many surgeries. Her head was as upright as her mother’s, no longer permanently cocked as though listening to a secret. Her skin had a much healthier hue. She was not what you would call a pretty woman, but she was not the ugly crying child that had driven her weak father away. We hoped that she would come to town, but if she did what could we say to her? “You sure don’t look as ugly as you used to. How does your poor mama send you to a fancy school? Why this one?” So although it would have eased our curiosities, it may be better that she didn’t run into us.
On the other hand, if we had got those answers maybe we could have told some stories.
Ephraim died. He did not die at a greatly advanced age, nor were there any omens of his passing. No ravens or whippoorwills or earthquakes. Just his cook dialing 911. He had died in the oak-paneled library having fallen from the built-in ladder. His funeral had been paid for in advance. The funeral home was to hire an actor to read his service. We all went, of course, with that same rubbernecking we give a horrible accident on the freeway. Emily sat by herself, just where Ephraim had sat at her father’s funeral. She wore the rose quartz medallion. We got a good look at it that last day. It was a stylized octopus as well, probably linked to the rose window in some manner.
I remember the funeral. First some awful music was played. I don’t know anything about music theory, but I read in the paper the next day that it was—hmm, let me see—Fandefen’s Atonal Hymn to the Seventh Dimension. Not something you’re going to walk out humming, if you know what I mean. Then the actor read a little speech by Ephraim. It was open casket, did I mention that? The speech went like this, although you’ll have to forgive my memory for the foreign names. “Elizar Na Reten was the greatest rake and jokester of Ool Athag. He said that he learned the biggest joke of world, and he had sought high and low for it. He even called demons from the seventh hell and learned their jokes and paid necromancers to call up the ancient Kings of Ool Athag from their essential salts to learn their jests. Elizar believed that all human life was some sort of jest by Something. On the day of his death his poor relatives—for Elizar Na Reten was great of gold—had gathered. After the priests had closed his cold dead eyes, Elizar shocked them all by winking at them. Then Elizar’s corpse began to chuckle. It was a low laugh at first, then a louder one and finally a guffaw that so startled his grieving family that they rushed out into the night and never came to Elizar’s tower again.” So help me God, we all started staring at Ephraim’s corpse, because we thought he was going to start laughing. But that was the whole of the service.
The next week Emily was seen moving into Ephraim’s house. So we went up in a delegation from the Lodge with our wives carrying casseroles and cakes. On the way we speculated that Ephraim’s will had stated that she had to spend time in the house—the tired movie plot of the haunted home.
No.
It was none of that. Emily had been his heir for some time. She had had an impoverished childhood with her mother dying when she entered high school. She was living with her aunt when the checks and letters began arriving from Uncle Ephraim. How he knew that her mother had died or where to send the checks, she did not know. But Ephraim claimed guilt for having broken up his brother’s marriage. He did not expect her to forgive him, but he would see to it that she was cared for for the rest of her life.
Ephraim was rich. Very rich. Who knew? We knew he did nothing but read his strange books and entertain his out-of-town guests and occasionally give people things. People who went to bad ends. Emily had moved in because the house was hers.
Yes, she would get rid of the octopus head and the weird rose window. They were hideous. No, she had no problem showing us the library. The glass looked murky; cleaning we found out did no good. I looked at the books. I suppose if my Latin or Greek were better I would have been shocked. We guessed they were black magic or pornography or blasphemy, but they could have been studies of how wax melts for all I know.
We burned them anyway. I felt like a Nazi burning books, but we had read her diary.
Here’s what happened after she moved in.
The light—a real light, not that ghostly glow—shone from the rose window most nights. Emily seemed to spend hours there. Often very late at night or early in morning. I had a friend in the registrar’s office over at Miskatonic. I asked about Emily Bishop. I doubt that he should have told me, but anyway she dropped her classes the semester her uncle died. She was smart, not a genius or anything, but smart and aiming at a biology degree with the strong smell of pre-med. Pre-meds are driven students of normal things, not what lay in Ephraim’s library.
At first we—those of us who had been her father’s Lodge brothers—tried to be close to Emily, but she had friends her age in Arkham; and she had little love for a father that had abandoned her. So we watched the light in her rose window, and the novelty of her being there faded. As the spring semester unfolded her college friends came less and less and we forgot about her as well. It was in the second year of her stay in the house on Central Hill that things became a source of gossip again. One day she drove into town to see Albert Reiman at his bank. She was carrying a thick envelope with her, and he was said to be quite upset after her visit.
The operations began after that. There weren’t fine enough surgeons in Kingsport; even the medical school at Miskatonic didn’t have first-rate plastic surgeons. So Emily went to Boston. She had money, lots of money. Until Albert Reiman shot himself we thought it was just Ephraim’s money, and we had no idea why he had so much. She got lots of work done—most of it was the standard packet of work that models get—breast augmentations, veneers for her teeth, lower rib removed. Some of her needs were more specialized—clearing up some of the lingering defects that her birth had brought. We all thought that Emily surely was her mother’s child and was looking for a husband. Suitors did show up from the ranks of the good-looking and the rich and especially the good-looking rich. Emily allowed herself to be taken out in Boston and Arkham and Kingsport, but nothing ever came of it and we noticed none of the swains seemed to spend a night in Emily’s haunted mansion.
When she had finished her series of surgeries and dentistry and even wardrobe buying she was amazingly beautiful. She was the sort of beauty that stopped talk in a restaurant and made people stare along boulevards. We all assumed that the expensively bought beauty was expensively bought self-esteem. She had seemingly only one hobby, unless spending time in Ephraim’s library was a hobby. She loved photography and spent a small fortune on cameras and other equipment. We all thought: Good for Emily.
But she began going out less and less and spending more and more time in her house on the hill. Even with her beauty we forgot about her. By the time of her fourth year in Ephraim’s house no one saw or thought of her.
Then one fine day in July the SEC investigated Albert Reiman’s bank and he shot himself, bringing an end to a tragic line. It seems large sums of money were missing. We gossiped about this and remembered Suzie, and we remembered her mother Miriam who had that bad car accident out on the Miskatonic Turnpike. There had certainly been a cloud on them, we said; even the rich have their crosses to bear, we agreed. It was our local version of the Kennedy saga.
Then in August for the first time in nearly three hundred years there was a small earthquake in Kingsport. Pictures fell from walls, a few plate-glass windows in the malls shattered, and Emily’s rose window broke into fragments. The newspaper duly noted that similar earthquakes had occurred in 1692, which were attributed by the pious New Englanders to witchcraft. In fact, Edward Crane had laid the foundations of his house the day after the quake.
However, the spectacular death of Emily Bishop grabbed the headlines that day.
We were able to cover up some of the details out of respect for her father and the sadness of her life. If you read the paper, you will read that falling glass killed her. The servants had actually found her body hours before the quake, her throat slashed by her own hand. We paid the servants for her diary and, after we had read it, visited the house and gathered the books and the photos. Some of us kept some of the glass. I kept several pieces. I even had it analyzed at Yale and Miskatonic. It was just silica colored with a few metallic salts. I had suspected that the reports would tell me wonders.
I’ll tell you about the diary. When I am gone, I will even let it be published. Most people will think it is a sad tale of madness; only a few old-timers like myself that remember Ephraim Bishop may think otherwise.
Emily began the diary as a sort of lab book. Ephraim had left her a remarkable letter in which he had told her that Edward Crane had finished out the house on Central Hill as a sort of magical observatory. The rose window had been brought from Tibet or, as he wrote, “Leng.” It had the power when used in conjunction with the amulet and certain incantations to show a variety of scenes from the past, far away, or even other worlds. However, the makers of the window, a group of wizards (or perhaps extra-terrestrials) called the Zenobar, extracted an “ironic” price for its use. Ephraim said that he had discovered the incantations when as a young man he had fancied writing a book on Edward Crane, who had been something of a rake, and a scientist and a sorcerer to boot. Ephraim had found Crane’s diary hidden behind a bookcase in the library when he was in his twenties. The diary had been written in a script unknown to Ephraim, but then he discovered that certain manuscripts at Miskatonic were written in the same script, an alchemist’s cipher invented by Dr. John Dee. Once the cipher was known the novel-in-progress changed from a sexual picaresque headed toward Grove Press into a novel of the occult. Then one drunken night Ephraim tried the invocation:
Daoloth v’ren viaxul cronree zothotha
Daoloth nec’q’ss Rlim Shagiloth zenobar
Daoloth zazzas nasethanda neblod zin
Daoloth nec’qss Rlim Sagoloth zeonbar Xul!
The house shook, the wooden wall Ephraim’s umpteenth grandpa had placed over the rose window fell, and Ephraim saw what he was later to call “My Golgotha,” a hill on the world of Zenobar.
At first Ephraim thought of the fame that such a discovery could bring him. He could see himself on the Tonight Show: “Yes, Johnny, I have established or should I say re-established communication with an extraterrestrial race that gave mankind many scientific advantages in the early sixteenth century. I suppose I am a sort of genius.”
The Zenobar showed him many things, and he learned to direct the lens elsewhere. Scenes from human and pre-human history were his to view. He saw George Washington drunk and afraid, Lincoln cheating on his wife, how the Great Pyramid was really built. He saw races and beings that came to Earth before mankind, saw the casual mistake that created life as we know it on this planet. He saw secret meetings at the Kremlin and watched celebrities showering. He saw human cruelty and stupidity one night and then cosmic wonder the next. He knew Truth with a capital T and Disgust with a capital D. Then one day he realized that he had stopped interacting with the world for so long that he had exhausted his bank account. The NEA grant that was supposed to pay for his writing Crane: The Rake’s Regress was gone and power was shut off the next day at the ancestral home.
But he had a Polaroid.
In twelve hours he was a blackmailer. In three months he was a very good blackmailer. No piece of human infamy could escape him. He could make money whenever he wished. Cheating spouse, industrial espionage, finding hidden treasures—all were child’s play. The Zenobar did want something from him, but he didn’t spell it out in his letter to Emily. It had something to do with women. Beautiful women. Ephraim learned things, things that humans can’t know and still love their fellow humans. Dark knowledge and gold and women—who would have thought that Faust lived in the late twentieth century in Kingsport?
Uncle Ephraim had given her one proof. He had taken a Polaroid picture of her the day she had locked herself by accident in her grandmother’s storm cellar in Savannah. It was a picture that no one could have made by normal means.
So Emily asked certain professors at Miskatonic. She found out that Edward Crane did have a mysterious source of income after he had had the glass from Leng installed in his home. She discovered that certain ancient books kept under lock and key suggested that there were other worlds that were at times accessible to humans. She couldn’t get the library to lend her the volumes and she lacked Greek and Latin and Pali and Arabic anyway. But she did have the magical quatrain. So she began experiments. She tried uttering the phrases at different times. She tried when well rested and when she had sleep deprivation. She tried saying the words while taking certain drugs or saying them during sexual experiments. S
he read Crowley and Waite and LaVey and tons of anthropology. After six months of effort the glass began to glow. Then after a few more times she could see.
At first she could see a green gray mountain littered with what she thought were small shells with three unblinking eyes. The eyes seemed to see her. In fact, they were so positioned that they must watch her. Eventually she decided they were skulls of some sort, hence “Golgotha” = “Hill of the Skull.” After weeks of practice she could make the glass show her other things. This was when she stopped having friends. The temptation to watch them all the time removed her comfort at knowing them. She had an affinity for seeing them—for seeing all humans at their worst moments. She saw her friend Kelly abusing her little boy, she saw Mark cheating on Polly, she saw her favorite professor downloading child porn. She never got the knack of finding great moments of human history, but even the most casual thoughts about her friends would cause the glass to show her what they would least like anyone to see.
But mainly she watched the world of Zenobar. Then one day she saw two Zenobar carrying one of the living skulls to the mountain. They looked up and saw her. Emily did not describe them in her diary save only to say that the first few times she saw them, she became so frightened that she fled the room. But her fear was dissolved in her wonder like sugar in tea. She found that she would rather watch them than her own species. Who can blame her?
Eventually after months she could sense their thoughts. They wanted her to expose herself to them. They wanted to see her beauty. The viewing was central to their religion in some fashion. They brought the living skulls to this hill so that they might look upon beautiful human women.
The Zenobar rewarded the operator of the lens with views of many different worlds. Scenes of unimaginable beauty and terror would be shown. This was why Edward Crane developed the reputation as a rake. This explained the beautiful women that Uncle Ephraim always had with him. The image of the women was the price for cosmic wonder.