by Pete Rawlik
By the time I was ready to leave, the rain had turned the road into a shallow stream with rivulets running around gravel and rocks, turning potholes and depressions into murky pools. It took me twice as long as it should have to get out of the backwoods and onto a main road. The old map which I had liberated from the library in Arkham showed the road to the forgotten cemetery that Megan had discovered, but even then the origins of those graves were unknown, and the place appeared simply as an untitled area marked with a headstone. Knowing where it was made it easy to find, though the drive was neither easy nor quick, and at one point I was forced to abandon the car and begin sloshing through the pools and rain, walking through the wilderness, through the brush-covered hills and tree-filled hollows. It took me more than an hour to finally reach the gates of the graveyard. You could still see the ruts where a truck had once torn up the dirt and then cut cross-country back to the road. There were drag marks as well; they led inside the gates and to a number of the mausoleums and crypts. I had brought a crowbar with me, but I didn’t need it; the locks had all been broken out long before.
Inside each tomb the expected contents had been rearranged; the houses of the dead had been used as quarters for the living, or at least the not-so-dead. Broken furniture, old bedding, rotting books and newspapers dominated the evidence that people once lived here. There wasn’t much in the way of personal effects. The only thing that seemed out of place was a hand-drawn map of the area with the town and various landmarks marked. Indicated as well were the major roads and footpaths. All of these had been labeled in a small but neat script, but there was another set of marks, unnamed, in a different colored ink. These consisted of small circles scattered across the landscape north of the river—of what they were meant to represent there was no indication. I took the yellowed page, folded it, and put it in my shirt pocket.
I had been hours exploring the necropolis and all I had found was a map of a town I couldn’t figure out. The rain was getting worse, and if I was going to spend any time at the Whateley farm I was going to have to get moving. It was as I was leaving that I saw the handprint in the dust. It wasn’t fresh; in fact, it was probably months old, but compared to the years of grime that had accumulated it told its own story. The size, the shape, it was a woman’s hand, I had no proof of it, no evidence to speak of, but I knew that it was hers. I knew without a doubt that that handprint belonged to Megan Halsey. I knew it in my heart. I reached out and put my hand where hers once had been. I let it rest there for a moment, and then I wiped it away.
I was across the river and heading toward the farm just as the sun was setting, though frankly, given the rain it was hard to tell. I followed the directions that Megan had left in her diary—well, at least some of them. Megan had described something strange residing at the Whateley farm, something that had presumably destroyed the ghoulish things that had pursued her and Lavinia. According to the map, the farm wasn’t far, and so with little hesitation I decided to make the trek. I had not intended to actually enter the farmhouse or even the property, but rather observe it from the road. It was, I suppose, a sort of reconnaissance mission. A chance to see what it was exactly that was going on in that farmhouse.
I never made it.
The storm intensified quickly. First there was the wind that whipped through the trees, tossing their branches to and fro, whipping the farm fields into frenzy as if they were the open sea itself. I pulled off the side of the road and watched as the rain swept across the hills and valley like a wall of darkness. With the sudden torrential downpour came the lightning, which split the sky and dispelled the shadow that had enveloped the region. It was a queer kind of storm, for the rain seemed unnaturally heavy, each drop a huge globule, the very impact of which was jarring, pinging against the car like a hail of rocks. What was even odder was the silence that came after each bolt of lightning. Instead of there being a great rolling bass of thunder, there was a crashing wave of silence that seemed to draw sound out of the very air, out of the valley itself. Yet despite how strange and terrifying that eerie thundering was, it wasn’t that which frightened me. It was instead the tableau that each bolt of lightning revealed as it lit up the side of Sentinel Hill and let me see the figure that was standing there.
That sight terrified me—I don’t know why, but it did. It was just a lone figure standing on the summit, the rain showering down upon it in great torrents. He held a rope in one hand, and seemed to be using it to perform tricks like those I’ve seen in rodeo shows. But this was different, somehow; the rope was too thick, like those used on ocean liners, and the lasso impossibly large—the strength it would have taken to maintain such a thing was beyond the realm of possibility. It terrified me, straight down to the core, and I turned the car around and careened down the muddy road to the sound of great rains pinging against its body. I drove like a madman, not understanding what I had seen, but some part of my mind had. My subconscious knew something I didn’t, it recognized something and in doing so that ancient reptilian portion of my brain told me to run. It wasn’t long until I was back on the main road to Arkham, still driving like the devil himself was after me, and I didn’t slow down until I was almost halfway back home.
You would think that the backwoods roads would have been empty at that time of night, but as we crossed the river and crawled back onto the main road I saw a man there, walking along the pike—but he wasn’t alone, and his companion made me understand. It was then that the last barrier between what my subconscious had recognized and my conscious mind finally fell. The man on the road was holding a rope, a smaller rope, and with a smaller loop for sure, but the image was so similar to that which I had seen on Sentinel Hill. It all made sense now, terrible, horrifying sense. The man on the road, that traveling vagabond, wasn’t alone. There, running at his side, with its head in the rope loop, was a dog.
He was nothing more than a man, a man walking his pet with a leash, in the rain.
I pulled off to the side of the road as the realization of things washed over me. I hope the rain drowned out the sound of my screams.
CHAPTER 23
“The Violation of Anne Newman”
From the Journal of Robert Peaslee June 16 1928
We would like to think that madness is confined to places like Sefton Asylum, or in the remote and forgotten places like darkest Africa or the frozen Antarctic. We don’t think that such things can exist in the heart of our own neighborhoods, our own towns, even in the institutions that we have created to serve us. We don’t want such things to be true, but the crawling corruption seeds terror and madness in the most unlikely of places. One only has to look for it, or refuse to ignore it when it comes, even when that call is in the wee hours of a Sunday morning.
Spool House is located on the far side of Aylesbury on the grounds of what was once the Spool family farm. Sometime in the nineteenth century, Anthony Spool had lost his wife and two daughters to a fever and in their memory converted the once-magnificent home into a residence for young women. His son, Hammond, continued the institution, and it was now run by the widow Ada Spool, née Armitage, and her two daughters, Norma and Emma. Spool House had, over the years, become an institution in the valley, and the locals had learned not to bother with the house of wayward women, or else feel the wrath of the Spool family. In turn, what the Spool women had learned was that young ladies who find themselves in the way are often ashamed of their condition, and it takes a supreme effort for them to confide in the staff of Spool House. They needed privacy and seclusion to deal with the things they had done, and come to terms with it, one way or another. Consequently, Spool House and all who worked there discouraged visitors, particularly those with any official capacity. So when one of Mrs. Spool’s daughters called and requested an officer of some discretion be sent, it was I that was dispatched and forced to traverse the darkness and solitude of the Aylesbury Pike.
It was just after dawn when I reached the estate that now served as the temporary residence for so many need
y girls. In the morning sun the place looked respectable enough, framed with shrubbery and flowers that highlighted the manicured lawn. Paths of crushed rock led to the white columns of a neoclassical house that had been fashionable during the founding of the Republic. Mrs. Spool was a domineering, gray-haired dowager built low to the ground with a wide base, as some women tend to in their age. She offered me coffee and something to eat, mostly because it was the expected thing to do. I declined, for the same reason.
She nodded, and with a kind of finality led me down the halls and stairs of the old house into the lower levels. It was not an uncomfortable place, still warm and clean, but quiet, isolated from the rest of the house and residents. Mrs. Spool led me to a door with a window embedded in it, not unlike those I had seen in the asylums and prisons. She slid back the window and stepped back. With some hesitation I moved forward and then pressed my face to the window. I was unprepared for what I saw.
There in that room was a thing that was only remotely related to humanity. The body was immense, perhaps the size of two heifers, and covered with a dozen or so pairs of fat, pendulous teats. From this grotesque core the shriveled twig-like things that I recognized as limbs waved uselessly in the air; there was no way in which these could be used for locomotion. A head vaguely topped the body, but this, too, was only barely human. There were only wisps of greasy hair, hints of ears, and pale sunken eyes that stared blindly at the door. The mouth was round, and as it opened up in a queer sucking motion I could see that it had no teeth. It opened wide and screamed out in a kind of throaty, bestial voice, “Ia, Ia Shub-Niggurath! Ia Thaquallah! Ia Ia!” As the screams echoed down the hall I slammed the window shut and stepped back in revulsion.
Mrs. Spool led me away in silence and when we finally reached her office offered me something more than coffee. I had not expected her to make such an offer—she had, after all, seemed a teetotaler to me. This time I accepted her offer and carefully nursed the small glass of scotch, hoping it would calm my nerves. When I had finished about half the glass, Mrs. Spool began to speak.
“Anne Newman came to us back in June of last year. She had been a student nurse at Miskatonic University and had traveled out to Dean’s Corners in May to visit family. While on her way back her bus had broken down, and she had been forced to either walk back to the town or make her way back to Arkham. A dedicated employee, Miss Newman had no desire to miss her shift at the hospital and instead of joining the other passengers on the trek back to Dean’s Corners she walked alone down that deserted road. She made it to the hospital, but not in time for her shift. She was brought in the back of a farmer’s truck. She had been attacked, assaulted the police said, violated said the doctors. She had little memory of her attacker, only a shadowy image of someone impossibly large with hairy arms and a beard like a goat. There were bite marks on her legs, round ones, as if she had been attacked by dozens of hagfish.”
“She came to us a few weeks after the attack. We listened to her story, and I must admit we didn’t believe her. She bore the signs of being pregnant; a woman’s body changes, Detective Peaslee, it transforms, readies itself to give birth and nurse the child it will bring into this world. Anne Newman’s hips had widened, her breasts grown full, and her belly distended so much that I would have sworn that she was more than six months pregnant, not the six weeks she claimed. We didn’t believe her story, but that didn’t matter. We took her in and gave her a place to live while she had her baby. Three days later, when I saw her again, I was amazed, for Anne no longer looked six months pregnant. Instead, she was nine months along, and I no longer doubted what she said.”
She paused and seemed to gird herself for what came next. “Seven days after she came to us, seven weeks after she had been attacked, Anne Newman went into labor. It was perhaps the most difficult birth I had ever seen. It lasted eighteen hours, during which Anne screamed the entire time. It wasn’t only the pain of labor; as we watched, her body continued to change, to make itself ready for the birth. By the end I think she went mad from the pain. All the agony she had suffered and endured, all that fear had finally accumulated and struck at her psyche in yet another kind of violation. That she went mad was probably for the best. When her child came the midwife ran from the room in terror. I was left alone to deal with the thing that she gave birth to. It was a bloated, tick-like thing, with a miniscule head and thin, goat-like arms and legs. It screamed in agony and in a shrill voice called out that horrific chant you heard downstairs, ‘Ia, Ia Shub-Niggurath! Ia Thaquallah! Ia Ia!’ I took that thing and with the metal basin I smashed at it until it ceased its foul and incessant bleating.”
“I wish it all had ended there, but as the thing Anne Newman had given birth to drew its final breath the mother screamed once more and a second of the things crawled its way out from between her legs. It called out in that horrific bleating and was joined by another one of its brood, and then another, and then another. Twelve things in all wormed their way out of Anne Newman’s bloated womb. Twelve mewling, bleating things that called out to some blasphemous parent in an inhuman language crawled out of that poor girl and I lifted up my weapon, the steel basin that had already killed, and I brought it down again and again and again. Eight of those things fell before my wrath that day. Three escaped. The last we captured and imprisoned. It grew at a startling rate, one that required massive quantities of nourishment. In mere days it was larger than a cow.”
She paused there, and it was plain that she had reached a point in her tale that she was no longer comfortable with. Though how she had endured the tale to this point I could not say, but I didn’t wish for her to suffer anymore. “That thing in the basement,” I said, “that thing you’ve brought me out here to see, the last of the spawn that Anne Newman was cursed with, it has grown too big for you to contain. Is that why I am here, Mrs. Spool? Is that why you’ve finally called the authorities? Am I here to kill the last of these monsters, the one you couldn’t kill yourself?”
It was then that I learned the truth, for Mrs. Spool did finally speak and told me what she had been so reluctant to reveal previously. She told me and then I went down the stairs and into that room. I cradled that thing, that monstrous tick-like thing, as best I could. I sang to it, and I think perhaps for a moment it sang back to me. I like to think I gave it some comfort before I took my revolver and shot it in the back of the head. I like to think that for a moment, it remembered what it was like to be human.
I can still hear Mrs. Spool’s voice as she told me the truth, the truth that I had so obviously tried to avoid. “That last spawn died weeks ago, Mr. Peaslee. We couldn’t feed it enough of what it needed, it cried constantly, it screamed for its mother. My daughter, Emma, took a knife and stabbed at it until it, too, ceased to move. We had no problem killing those things, Mr. Peaslee. We burned it like the rest of the brood that had come out of poor Anne Newman. Anne Newman, whose body had transformed itself, had changed, had become something inhuman so as to nurse the things that had violated her womb. Anne Newman, who had gone mad, and had ever since ranted and screamed from a mouth that was no longer human the first words she had next heard, the words her horrific children had spoken as they broke free of her gravid body. ‘Ia, Ia Shub-Niggurath! Ia Thaquallah! Ia Ia!’ Mr. Peaslee, that thing in the basement isn’t one of Anne Newman’s spawn, it is what she became to give birth and suckle them. That’s why we couldn’t kill it. That thing is, or at least was, Anne Newman herself!”
CHAPTER 24
“The Transmogrification of Llewelyn Barrass”
From the Journal of Robert Peaslee July 18 1928
I. What Dr. Willett Didn’t Say
It has been five days since I first heard of Corvin Farm. Five days which have led me into yet another case of the madness that haunts Arkham and her environs. I wonder if this town has always been witch-haunted or if the source of all its troubles can be traced to an event that forever altered its character. In the meantime, I find myself embroiled in an event that must
be hidden from public scrutiny. It was six days ago that the local authorities were called to the old Corvin farm in Witches’ Hollow. There was an odor, a stench that, despite the distances between properties, the locals could tolerate no longer. What the locals found was beyond their capabilities, and thus the State Police were called and took control the next day. Under normal circumstances I would have been dispatched to such a scene, but on that particular day I was already too far to be of assistance, at least directly. I was at the Biltmore Hotel in Providence when the call came in. I had spent the night after concluding my business with the local authorities concerning the death a few years back of Professor Angell. The call came in before I had finished breakfast, and I was ordered to travel to Conanicut Island to research the history of the current occupant of Corvin Farm, a man named Llewelyn Barrass.
It was in late April that Barrass had presented himself to the Permanent Assurance Company with documents establishing his right to the Corvin farm. The papers that Barrass bore were of no particular age, and the man admitted they had been produced just a few weeks before, but something about their content matched instructions held within the ancient files of the firm, and although the staff was momentarily stunned, they turned over the keys to the property forthwith, and quickly typed up letters of credit for him to use at the local bank. When Llewelyn Barrass left Arkham and made the short trip to Witches’ Hollow he was, by all accounts, a very wealthy man.
Mail at the farm suggested that prior to coming to Witches’ Hollow Barrass had been employed by the Whitmarsh Institute, a private hospital on Conanicut Island. It was to this place that Chief Nichols ordered me in a desperate attempt to gather some information about Barrass and how he came to be at Corvin Farm, and perhaps gain a clue as to what precipitated the events that led to the horrors in Witches’ Hollow. What those horrors were, I, at this point, hadn’t been told. Nichols hadn’t been explicit about what had occurred at the farm, but from his tone I knew it was bad, and that he didn’t want to talk about details over the phone with the possibility of the hotel operator listening in.