Searchers After Horror

by S. T. Joshi

  Ribbons of sunlight poured in between the askew planks. Sam’s gaze followed them as they seemed to spotlight the coating of dust that covered the mattress, the rodent droppings that littered the brownish pillow. The table reposed under streamers of cobweb and the titles on the book spines were occulted by dirt. A bedroom or squatter’s den it might have been, but no longer. Sam exhaled loudly with relief.

  After three or four shots of the room he indulged himself by stealing a few pictures of the neglected items: first the grubby bed, then the desk, and finally the items that lined the bowing shelf.

  He regretted blowing on the row of books once the dust mushroomed up, flinging grit into his eyes and choking him. When the cloud settled Sam squinted his runny eyes at the spines: The Egyptian Book of the Dead, De Vermis Mysteriis, The Trail of the Many-Footed One. Leaning against these clothbound books was what looked to be a photo album or scrapbook. Sam carefully shifted this volume to face him and pulled back its plain brown leather cover.

  Photographs that appeared to have been torn from entomology textbooks were sloppily pasted next to Egyptian papyri that, if the ugly handwritten footnotes were to be trusted, all dealt with an Egyptian funerary god named Sepa. There were also sepia-toned photographs of tiny churchyards. Some of the graves appeared upset. Repeated misspelled notes praised the Guardian of the Larvae of the Dead. Upon one of the pages was a poem in faded pencil scrawling:

  Arise O Lord of the Larvae of the Dead!

  Burrow! Race! Appear!

  Your tendrils drip with dew from the caverns of Hades,

  the jewelled filth from Catacombs of Ptolemais,

  & the great silent dark that holds fast between the worlds.

  Glut on the meat of the temporal realm so that I may gain yet

  one more day of life above the tombs!

  Sam closed the cover and wiped his fingers on his jacket. His attempt to return the scrapbook to its perch was made sloppy by his unsteady hand. Something fell from the shelf and landed on the table with a clunk. Not wanting to touch anything else in the room, Sam tugged his jacket sleeve down to protect his hand while he lifted the Mason jar from the tabletop. Whatever the brownish substance was inside, it certainly had heft. Sam rotated the jar slowly, trying to discern its contents without truly wanting the answer. He took a step toward the window. Through the boards he could see the capped well, looking much like an ugly coin lying within the weedy lawn.

  Holding the jar up to the light, Sam saw enough to suggest that what it held was indeed a wad of centipedes preserved in some sludgy liquid. His stomach turned, and he quickly returned the jar to the shelf. Next to it Sam noticed the wooden phallus. But this sexual aid was spiked with a number of toothpick-like legs. He did not bother to count them.

  Shock was the only force that retarded Sam. Had his brain not registered the sight of the closet door opening, had his eyes not caught the suggestion of the shape in the darkened alcove, he would have run wildly, been out of this house, been racing through the sunlit woods, his car keys in his fist.

  But the image of the seated cadaver was strange enough, stunning enough, to momentarily stifle Sam’s instinct to flee. Its flesh was the color of fresh concrete, causing it to glow like greying embers within the lightless closet. The legs were spindle- thin and the chest was sunken. Its head was obscured by a cowl of some kind.

  What an awful way to be interred, Sam thought. He marveled at how the mind almost short-circuits when its limitations are exposed.

  When the figure suddenly rose and bounded into the room it was clear it had not been left to rot in some locked farmhouse room. It had been waiting in the closet, like an ascetic in a confessional. Its face was shaded by what resembled a flowing habit of fringed brown leather that crackled as the figure advanced, sounding like something dry, something moulted.

  Sam wondered if he had stumbled into one of the improved scenes he’d been imagining.

  But in the movies the dead do not move this quickly.

  In a swift and seamless motion the monkish figure reached into one of the piled trash bags, causing it to tip. The bones it held clattered out onto the dusty floor like queerly shaped dice. The skulls stared with grinning indifference as the figure clutched Sam with one hand, while the other raised the chunky femur and brought it down like a primitive club. Sam never even had time to scream.

  The pain in the back of his skull woke Sam and also played havoc with his perceptions. What else could explain the presence of the moon or the fact that everything else around him had been swallowed by darkness? He pressed his hands down on the cushiony surface beneath him and slowly, achingly, pushed himself upright before slumping right back down again. The air was frigid and damp. He could see his breath forming ghosts on the blackness. Confusion over where he was gave way to a sharp panic as memories of the farmhouse shuffled their way back into Sam’s consciousness like cards being dealt: the tomes and the symbols and the grey attacker…

  With an unsteady hand Sam prodded his trouser pockets, pleading silently that his smartphone was still there. It was, though its screen was cracked. He mashed at it with bloodless fingers, trying to connect with the world by any means possible. But the device’s only use was as a source of weak glowing light. Its graphics were but a smear of color. Sam waved the phone about like a torch. What it illuminated was an upright tunnel of textured wood. Grubs and clumped soil dangled here and there. The atmosphere was uncomfortably moist.

  The well . . .

  Craning his aching head, Sam watched as clouds scuttled across the moon’s face and he wondered how long he had been down here. The light on his smartphone began to flicker like a guttering candle. Another shadow suddenly blocked the moon. This one did not pass but instead stretched across the crude mouth of the well.

  The figure that was bent over the rim then made a gesture.

  Only after Sam had screamed out “Help me! Please!” did he conclude that this shadowy visitor must be the man who’d attacked him.

  Words came down the chute, ricocheting off the wooden walls. They were indecipherable, guttural, almost inhuman. Whether there was meaning to them or whether it was merely the vibration of the alien voice, the ground began to shift in response to the stimuli. And soon Sam felt himself being flung as the cushioned base upon which he’d been lying began to rise and scale the side of its den.

  It was immense. Sam foolishly wondered how long it must have taken his attacker to find a log large enough to shelter such a creature. By the moon’s pallor-glow Sam could just see the man raising his arms to imitate the flailing mandibles of the great scuttling thing that bucked its head in mirror-perfect mimicry of these gestures. The barbarous words were now being bellowed in a near-euphoric tone. Their rhythm matched the clacking of the thick stingers that parted and shut on the insect’s rump.

  Horror and irony besieged Sam in a great steely wave. He could only listen to the sound he’d so longed to hear: the patter of tiny feet. Only this time they were multiplied a hundredfold.

  Sam almost laughed, and a second later his light went out.

  At Lorn Hall

  Ramsey Campbell

  Randolph hadn’t expected the map to misrepresent the route to the motorway quite so much. The roads were considerably straighter on the page. At least it was preferable to being a directed by a machine on the dashboard, which would have reminded him of being told by Harriet that he’d gone wrong yet again, even when he knew where he was going. Although it oughtn’t to be dark for hours, the April sky beyond a line of lurid hills had begun to resemble a charcoal slab. He was braking as the road meandered between sullen fields of rape when he had to switch the headlights on. The high beams roused swarms of shadows in the hedges and glinted on elongated warnings of bends ahead, and then the light found a signpost. It pointed down a lane to somewhere called Lorn Hall.

  He stopped the Volvo and turned on the hazard lights. The sign looked neglect
ed except by birds, which had left traces of their visits, but Lorn Hall sounded like the kind of place he liked to wander around. The children never did, complaining to Harriet if he even tried to take them anywhere like that on the days he had them. They loved being driven in the rain— the stormier the better, however nearly blind it made him feel—and so he couldn’t help feeling relieved that they weren’t with him to insist. He could shelter in the mansion until the storm passed over. He quelled the twitching of the lights and drove along the lane.

  Five minutes’ worth of bends enclosed by hulking spiky hedges brought him to a wider stretch of road. As it grew straight he glimpsed railings embedded in the left-hand hedge, rusting the leaves. Over the thorns and metal spikes surrounded by barbs he saw sections of an irregular roof patrolled by crows. Another minute brought him to the gateway of Lorn Hall.

  He couldn’t have given a name to the style of the high broad house. Perhaps the stone was darkened by the approaching storm, but he thought it would have looked leaden even in sunlight. At the right-hand end of the building a three-storey barrel put him in mind of a clenched fist with bricks for grey knuckles. Far less than halfway from it on the unadorned frontage, a door twice as tall as a man stood beneath a pointed arch reminiscent of a mausoleum. Five sets of windows each grew smaller as they mounted to the roofs, where chimneys towered among an assortment of slate peaks. Even the largest of the ground-floor windows were enmeshed with lattices, and every window was draped with curtains that the gloom lent the look of dusty cobwebs. Apart from an unmarked whitish van parked near the front door there was no sign of life.

  The signpost had surely been addressed to sightseers, and the formidable iron gates were bolted open, staining the weedy gravel of the drive. One of the gateposts in the clutch of the hedge had lost its stone globe, which poked its dome bewigged with lichen out of the untended lawn. Ivy overgrew sections of the lawn and spilled onto the drive. The shapes the topiary bushes had been meant to keep were beyond guessing; they looked fattened and deformed by age. If Harriet had been with him she would have insisted on leaving by now, not to mention protesting that the detour was a waste of time. This was another reason he drove up to the house.

  Did the curtains stir as he drew up beside the van? He must have seen shadows cast by the headlamps, because the movements at all three windows to the left of the front door had been identical. Nobody had ducked out of sight in the van either.

  Randolph turned off the lights and the engine, pocketing his keys as he turned to face the mansion. The sky had grown so stuffed with darkness that he didn’t immediately see the front door was ajar.

  To its left, where he might have looked for a doorbell, a tarnished blotchy plaque said LORN HALL. The door displayed no bell or knocker, just a greenish plaque that bore the legend RESIDENCE OF CROWCROSS. “Lord Crowcross,” Randolph murmured as though it might gain some significance for him if not summon its owner to the door. As he tried to recall ever having previously heard the name he felt a chill touch as thin as a fingernail on the back of his neck. It was a raindrop, which sent him to push the heavy door wide.

  The door had lumbered just a few inches across the stone flags when it met an obstruction. Randolph might have fancied that somebody determined but enfeebled was bent on shutting him out, perhaps having dropped to all fours. The hindrance proved to be a greyish walking boot that had toppled over from its place against the wall. Several pairs grey with a mixture of dried mud and dust stood in the gloomy porch. “Don’t go any further,” Harriet would have been saying by now, “you don’t know if you’re invited,” but Randolph struggled around the door and kicked the boot against the wall. As he made for the archway on the far side of the porch, light greeted him.

  Little else did. His approach had triggered a single yellowish bulb that strove to illuminate a large room. Opposite the arch an empty chair upholstered in a pattern so faded it wasn’t worth distinguishing stood behind a bulky desk. Apart from a blotter like a plot of moss and earth, the desk was occupied by a pair of cardboard boxes and scattered with a few crumpled pamphlets for local attractions. The box that was inscribed HONESTY in an extravagantly cursive script contained three coins adding up to five pounds and so thoroughly stuck to the bottom that they were framed by glue. The carton marked TOUR in the same handwriting was cluttered with half a dozen sets of headphones. As Randolph dug in his pockets for change, his host watched him.

  The man was in a portrait, which hung on the grey stone wall behind the desk it dwarfed. He stood in tweed and jodhpurs on a hill. With one hand flattened on his hip he seemed less to be surveying the landscape in the foreground of the picture than to be making his claim on it clear. The wide fields scattered with trees led to Lorn Hall. Although his fleshy face looked satisfied in every way, the full almost pouting lips apparently found it redundant to smile. His eyes were as blue as the summer sky above him, and included the viewer in their gaze. Was he less of an artist than he thought, or was he meant to tower over the foreshortened perspective? Randolph had guessed who he was, since the C that signed the lower left-hand corner of the canvas was in the familiar handwriting. “My lord,” Randolph murmured as he dropped coins in the box.

  The clink of metal didn’t bring anyone to explain the state of the headphones. They weren’t just dusty; as he rummaged through them, a leggy denizen scrabbled out of the box and fell off the desk to scuttle into the shadows. “That’s very much more than enough,” Harriet would have said to him in the way she did not much more often to their children. If you weren’t adventurous you weren’t much at all, and the gust of wind that slammed the front door helped Randolph stick to his decision. Having wiped the least dusty set of headphones with a pamphlet for a penal museum, he turned them over in his hands but couldn’t find a switch. As he fitted them gingerly over his ears a voice said “You’ll excuse my greeting you in person.”

  Nobody was visible beyond the open door beside the painting, only darkness. The voice seemed close yet oddly distant, pronouncing every consonant but so modulated it implied the speaker hardly cared if he was heard. “Do move on once you’ve taken in my portrait,” he said. “There may be others awaiting their turn.”

  “There’s only me,” Randolph pointed out and stared with some defiance at the portrait. If Lord Crowcross had taught himself to paint, he wasn’t the ideal choice of teacher. The landscape was a not especially able sketch that might have been copied from a photograph, and the figure was unjustifiably large. The artist appeared to have spent most time on the face, and Randolph was returning its gaze when Crowcross said “Do move on once you’ve taken in my portrait. There may be others awaiting their turn.”

  “I already told you I’m on my own,” Randolph protested. The headphones must be geared to the listener’s position in the house, but the technology seemed incongruous, as out of place as Randolph was determined not to let the commentary make him feel. “I’m on my way,” he said and headed for the next room.

  He’d barely stepped over the stone threshold when the light went out behind him. “Saving on the bills, are we?” he muttered as he was left in the dark. In another second his arrival roused more lights—one in each corner of an extensive high-ceilinged room. “This is where the family would gather of an evening,” Crowcross said in both his ears. “We might entertain our peers here, such as were left. I am afraid our way of life lost favour in my lifetime, and the country is much poorer.”

  The room was furnished with senile obese sofas and equally faded overweight armchairs, all patterned with swarms of letters like the initial on the portrait. A tapestry depicting a hunt occupied most of the wall opposite the windows, which Randolph might have thought were curtained so as to hide the dilapidation from the world. Several decanters close to opaque with dust stood on a sideboard near a massive fireplace, where cobwebbed lumps of coal were piled in the iron cage of the hearth. Had the place been left in this state to remind visitors it had fallen on hard times?
Everyone Randolph knew would be ashamed to go in for that trick, whatever their circumstances. Quite a few were desperate to sell their homes, but all his efforts as an estate agent were in vain just now. He turned to find his way out of the room and saw Lord Crowcross watching him.

  This time his host was in a painting of the room, though this was clearer from the positions of the furniture than from any care in the depiction. Sketchy figures sat in chairs or sprawled languidly on the couches. Just enough detail had been added to their faces—numerous wrinkles, grey hair—to signify that every one was older than the figure in the middle of the room. He was standing taller than he should in proportion to the others, and his obsessively rendered face appeared to be ignoring them. “Do make your way onwards whenever you’re ready,” he said without moving his petulant lips. “I fear there are no servants to show you around.”

  “No wonder the place is in such a state”—or rather the absence of servants was the excuse, and Randolph was tempted to say so. By now Harriet would have been accusing him of risking the children’s health. He loitered to make the voice repeat its message, but this wasn’t as amusing as he’d expected; he could almost have fancied it was hiding impatience if not contempt. “Let’s see what else you’ve got to show me,” he said and tramped out of the room.

  All the lights were extinguished at once. He was just able to see that he’d emerged into a broad hallway leading to a staircase wider than his arms could stretch. He smelled damp on stone or wood. By the dim choked glow through doorways on three sides of the hall he made out that the posts at the foot of the steep banisters were carved with cherubs. In the gloom the eyes resembled ebony jewels, but the expressions on the chubby wooden faces were unreadable. “Do continue to the next exhibit,” Crowcross prompted him.

  Presumably this meant the nearest room. Randolph paced to the left-hand doorway and planted a foot on the threshold, but had to take several steps forward before the light acknowledged him. Fewer than half the bulbs in the elaborate chandelier above the long table lit up. “This is where the family would dine in style,” Crowcross said, “apart from the youngest member.”