by Harvey Click
But then he heard his girlfriend shouting his name somewhere way back down there in the dark tunnel behind him calling, “Help me, Mark, please help me, I’m in trouble!” and the golden light told him not to look back but Linda’s voice was so desperate that he did, and he saw purple fire burning in the darkness down there sucking him down toward it like a whirlpool tugging him away from the light, gravity growing heavier as he fell faster and faster through empty space toward an ugly pit of deep purple flames burning icy cold howling in a frenzied chorus of rage and terror that drowned out Linda’s cries for help, and he knew this flaming pit was the place called Hell called Pandemonium called Nightmare, and then panic and a sharp shock in his chest snapped him back to his body thrashing alive again in the parking lot back in the world of ordinary pain.
Chapter Four
After dinner the family retired to the rear parlor to begin the Talking Ceremony. Spouses were allowed to attend but not participate. Mary was exiled to her room. A Victorian armchair near the fireplace creaked as Winston fell into it, his fat face crimson and his eyes blazing like the fire in the hearth.
“Good hell, it’s cold in here,” Ellery said. With each glass of claret, his ersatz English accent grew more outlandish. Gin and tonics had deepened Gilbert’s sullen pout, while mint juleps had hardened Edlyn’s eyes to chunks of smoldering coal.
Miss Barkley placed Naomi’s wheelchair behind a table at the head of the room and trudged out. The old woman surveyed her relatives with undisguised disgust.
“Before we begin, I have an announcement,” she boomed. “I’ve negotiated an arrangement with the historic preservation society. I intend to bequeath the house and part of the ground to the state of New York. In exchange, the society will immediately assume responsibility for repairs and upkeep.”
A murmur passed around the room. “Bloody rubbish,” Ellery muttered. Even Winston emerged momentarily from his trance, with the help of his wife’s sharp elbow.
“Some of you appear to be disappointed by my plan,” Naomi continued, “but my decision is irrevocable. The west tower is collapsing, the roof is a sieve, the foundation is caving in, and innumerable other repairs are essential. Some of you no doubt believe I should dig into my purse for the incalculable dollars these repairs will cost, but the truth is, my purse is empty. Perhaps that, too, comes as an unhappy surprise to some of you.”
The cousins squirmed in their seats and conferred in harsh whispers. Dexter stared at his hands, embarrassed and annoyed.
“Silence!” Naomi barked. “You’ll have ample time to express your sympathies to me later. It’s past time for the Ceremony to begin. Tonight will likely be the last one that we all celebrate together, as I suspect my ultimate birthday has passed. This is my doctor’s opinion, not merely an old woman’s hypochondria. According to the terms I’ve negotiated with the preservation society, the cemetery shall be left undisturbed, and each year the family may gather here privately to observe the Ceremony. This assurance should quell the grumblings I heard a moment ago.
“I confess I worry about the future of the family and its traditions,” she added less loudly. She looked them in the eyes one by one, saving Dexter for last, and he held her gaze with discomfort. The black shawl draped over her shoulders made her look all of her ninety years. The grandfather clock ticked out a long minute before she continued.
“I suspect tonight’s Ceremony will be unusual in other ways as well,” she said. “Tonight is the harvest moon and, as you know, it is eclipsing while we speak. At the time of the Talking, the eclipse will be total. I’m aware it’s no longer fashionable to believe in omens, but as the property passes out of our hands, and the keeping of the Ceremony passes from my hands to yours, it’s tempting to read augury in the blotting of the moon. ‘When the dark of my death-hour devours the harvest moon, then an era shall end and a hellish battle rage soon.’ That is a prophecy from Ebenezer’s journal. So let us put aside our petty concerns and begin the Ceremony. First we shall attend the words of Rayburn Winthrop Radcliff, son of our ancestor Ebenezer.”
Naomi opened a leather-bound book on the table in front of her and began to read in the manner of a priest intoning liturgy.
“ ‘Let it hereby be set down for all future generations to know that my beloved father, Ebenezer Kenway Radcliff, a man of Godly habits and pious ways, did in the year of our Lord 1830 demonstrate surpassing courage and Christian virtue by bravely rescuing, at risk of life and limb, five heathen savages, to wit, Fallen Crow of the Cayuga tribe and his squaw and children; and that in gratitude for this charitable feat, Fallen Crow did bequeath to my father a curious artifact of pagan superstition called the Talking Horn; and that my father did study this instrument for the glory of God and did make use of it according to the teachings of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, solely and expressly for the greater good of his family and his community, and with no unwholesome intentions; and that my father in his elder years did decree that on the date and exact hour of his death, for each and every year following his death, a direct blood descendant, chosen by lot each year according to the rules described below, shall carry the Talking Horn to the vault wherein the corporal remains of Ebenezer Radcliff do lie, and shall place the smaller end of the instrument against his tomb and speak into the mouth of it, calling out the name Ebenezer Radcliff three times in a loud voice, and the Chosen Listener shall thereupon say:
As the rivers flow unto the sea,
even so doth your blood flow in me,
and lest the sea forget whence it came,
kneel I by the tomb with your name.
“ ‘The Listener shall then declare his own name and his relation to my father, and shall then place his ear against the mouth and harken, piously and with pure heart, to the voice of his ancestor through the Talking Horn, and if asked to speak in reply, he shall utter his honest response through said Horn, and this shall be done to honor Ebenezer Radcliff and to enrich the souls, lives, and intellects of his descendants each and every year so long as his descendants dwell on this earth.’ ”
While Naomi enumerated the rules of the Lottery, Dexter stared at a dusty painting behind her, a stormy landscape by Martin Johnson Heade. The clouds brooding above the gnarled bluffs seemed to swell, flexing fists of darkness to threaten the valley below. Mary’s strange words had troubled him all evening, and now his anxiety was deepened by Naomi’s assertion that she wouldn’t live much longer. This would be the final Ceremony, he believed. The cousins assembled each year merely to maintain their grasp on Heathenhead. Upon her death, they would bicker for possession of the Horn, hoping it would whisper winning lottery numbers or stock market premonitions. Ebenezer’s prophecy was true: as the moon disappeared, an era was dying.
Dexter would miss his aunt.
Naomi shut the book and untied the drawstring of a deerskin bag. “Make haste,” she said, glancing at the grandfather clock. “Ebenezer’s death-hour draws near.”
The cousins got up, Winston’s wife helping him totter to his feet, and lined up at the table.
“There’s scarcely any point, is there?” Gilbert said as he reached into the bag. “We all know who the lucky one will be.”
He removed a tear-shaped black stone with a leather loop tied through a hole in the small end. The number three was carved in the stone, so he hung it on the third wooden peg jutting from the fireplace mantle. Each cousin did likewise. Dexter went last and drew the stone numbered seven. He hung it on the seventh peg and returned to his chair.
They sat and watched the stones, the room silent except for the ticking of the clock and the crackle of the fireplace. A green branch sputtered, and the seventh stone began to swing like a pendulum.
“It’s bloody well rigged,” Ellery muttered.
“What did I tell you?” Gilbert said. “Every year it’s Dexter.”
“It’s hardly worth the drive,” Edlyn said. “Just one time I’d like to be Listener, if that’s not asking too much.”
Dexter stared at the stones, trying to will a different one to move. “I’ll tell you every word I hear,” he said. “I always do.”
“Sure you do,” Edlyn said. “A lot of incoherent gibberish.”
“Hear, hear,” Ellery said. “A lot of twaddle and rot!”
Gilbert snickered. “Yes, this year why don’t you spare us the mystic mumbo-jumbo and just tell us where the Dow is headed.”
“Maybe it tells him how to rig the bloody stones,” Ellery said.
Naomi silenced them with a baleful glare. “I’m ashamed of you, baying like a pack of hyenas,” she said. “If you want investment advice, I suggest you phone your stockbroker. As for the selection of the Listener, the Stones decide, and we all abide. You have sullied the last Ceremony I shall see. Come here, Dexter, and receive the Talking Horn.”
Dexter got up reluctantly. His interest in the occult was a scholar’s, not a practitioner’s. He disliked the task that fell to him every year, the eerie coldness of the Horn and the chill of the burial vault, though in the months that followed he would scrutinize each strange utterance like a rabbi studying the Talmud.
Naomi opened the mahogany box and lifted the Talking Horn from its bed of faded red velvet. Resembling a powder horn, it was made from a buffalo horn studded with dark blue stones. Dexter leaned down so she could hang it over his neck by its leather sling.
“Quickly to your work, the hour is nigh,” Naomi commanded, pressing the vault key into his hand.
Miss Barkley waited at the front door with a flashlight and Dexter’s leather jacket. He put it on and stepped out into the cold.
The moon was extinguished now—the death hour had come—and the flashlight beam seemed to flutter like candlelight in the sharp wind wailing through the trees. Soon thick branches swallowed the yellow glow of the house windows, and Dexter lost his bearings.
He stopped and stared. Though he had lived here for nearly four years and had explored every acre many times, he felt he was in a foreign land. Darkness and weeds obliterated the path to the family cemetery, but more than darkness it was Naomi’s forecast of her own death that transformed the place. His childhood had ended with his parents’ murder, but he wasn’t truly an orphan so long as his aunt and this crumbling estate remained. Soon he would be.
He pressed on, feeling his way through the trees, and he banged his shin against something: the wrought-iron fence that had seemed so tall and mighty when he was a boy had fallen to its final rusting place. What looked like crooked gray teeth beyond it were gravestones, and past them the black face of the vault peered out of the hill. He waded carefully through the cemetery weeds. These teeth were old and rotten, but they were practically all that remained of his family, and he didn’t want to knock one loose from its grassy gum.
Last year’s dead leaves fluttered against his pants legs while he tried to turn the key in the massive door of the vault. An owl swooped up with an animal screeching in its talons, and the noise seemed to jar some rust loose from the lock. As the door groaned open, the vault belched moldy air like a sick old man waking from a long sleep.
He stepped into the dank stench and aimed his weak flashlight beam around the narrow cavern extending deep into the hill. Like a patriarch seated at the head of the table, Ebenezer’s remains resided at the far end, the bones of his descendants occupying humbler niches in the sides of the tunnel. Dexter hurried to the stone tomb and unslung the Horn.
Opening it was never easy; the cap seemed to be magnetically fixed to the metal that lined the interior. Obviously the metal contained iron, though it didn’t rust. He hoped someday to have it analyzed. Each year Naomi recited the complicated procedure for opening the Horn, and each year Dexter followed the steps carefully, as absurd as they sounded. He touched the blue gemstones and rotated the top until a triangle of stones aligned with the tip and the cap fell off.
A frigid purple glow streamed out of the mouth, a kind of anti-light darker and colder than the air of the vault.
He had to kneel. No doubt the placement of Ebenezer’s tomb was calculated to force the Listener into a reverent position. Even the requirement of entering the vault was probably to appease Ebenezer’s appetite for being worshipped. Surely the Horn would work as well anywhere else; these moldering bones weren’t necessary. Like many other religious rituals, the Ceremony was humiliating, ridiculous, and somehow essential.
Dexter touched the small end against the tomb, spoke the ritual greeting, and pressed his ear to the purple mouth. The anti-light penetrated his skull and flooded his brain with pulsating darkness. The radiation always left him with headache and nausea, and he wondered if it was planting seeds of cancer.
He listened. At first nothing, only the moaning of wind past the open door far behind him. Then a voice.
“Great trouble,” it said. “Great trouble like no . . . “ The words were drowned by a sharp hiss.
Dexter put his mouth to the Horn and said, “What trouble, Ebenezer? I can’t hear you.”
“Great trouble in the land of the living. Great trouble in the land of the dead. In a cistern of sentience shall he knead his orifice from fungus. So it is written and so it shall be, unless the earthside medium is destroyed. Time is short. Even as we speak, Zyx quakes the dirt of hell with the rumble of his burrowing.”
Zyx. It sounded more like a rasp of static than a word, but Ebenezer had uttered the same sound the previous year.
“What is Zyx?” Dexter asked.
“The alphabet of time turned backward, the twisting serpent of chaos, that which was and is and is yet to come. The primordial past shall devour the future unless you find . . .” The distant voice was lost in hiss.
Dexter tried to commit Ebenezer’s words to memory, but he wasn’t sure which were real and which were just noises shaped by his imagination. The cousins weren’t going to be pleased.
“Naomi says she’s dying,” he shouted into the mouth of the Horn. “She’s giving Heathenhead to the state. Is there anything you want me to tell her?”
“Are you not listening?” Ebenezer replied. “The house shall fall to worms, and ruin shall rear its head from the toadstool that lives in the cellar. The Lord of Worms shall establish his domain on earth unless you heed me well. The earthside aperture twists into a fold of space that turns on itself like a serpent, and the solid fold consists of all line segments joining points in a plane region to fourteen points not in that plane, but the number of points on Cypher’s side is unknown. It is written in the margins . . .”
A harsh roar rasped Dexter’s eardrum. He dropped the Horn, and it vibrated against the floor, vomiting out jagged static along with its purple light. Something was wrong this year: there’d never been a noise like this. The buzzing hiss was broken into distinct, clattering syllables like some strange language hewn from cosmic radiation.
Then the noise faded, and he faintly heard Ebenezer’s voice. He reluctantly picked up the Horn and listened.
“ . . . has prepared you these many years, so I trust you understand your task,” Ebenezer was saying. “To create the beast within, the beast must destroy the man. Therefore, you must find the one who has been eaten. Seek him in the house of worms and kill him there. Cypher has traced my code, I can speak no longer. Farewell, good Listener. This is the last time we shall talk together.”
The Horn fell silent. Dexter groped for the metal cap and was about to seal the purple mouth when he saw a pale spot squirming inside. He aimed the flashlight into the metal-lined throat.
It was a tiny worm, just larger than a maggot, wriggling its way out of the Horn.
Chapter Five
Dexter dreamt he had returned to Heathenhead for yet another Ceremony and found the house in ruins, its towers collapsed and its roof-rafters exposed like bones. He entered through the gaping front doorway and made his way past broken chairs and torn paintings to the rear parlor. The grandfather clock had stopped, and Naomi’s wheelchair sat empty behind the table where the mahogany box rested. Dexter li
fted its lid and found his aunt’s head rotting inside it, her decaying eyes staring up at him like gelatinous puddles. Her mouth sagged open and putrid breath belched out a warning: “Great trouble in the land of the dead.” A pale maggot wriggled out of her swollen black tongue.
He dreamt he was lying beneath Heathenhead Cliff with Mary, but when he touched her hair he realized she was merely a pile of dead leaves. A sad wind came moaning through the pines, and though he tried desperately to hold onto the leaves, the wind swept them away. The cliff face opened its mouth, a burial cavern with tombstones for teeth, and words poured out like cold purple water: “Great trouble in the land of the living.”
He awoke with a groan a little before 6:00. He showered and shaved, and when he came downstairs he heard Miss Barkley wheeling his aunt out of her bedroom. It was adjacent to the study so she could guard the Talking Horn locked in the wall safe behind the portrait of Ebenezer. No doubt Naomi slept each night with ears alert to druids and wizards and thieves; such had been her life.