Nine Horrors and a Dream

by Brennan, Joseph Payne;

  “But I’ve got to go back. I’ve got to figure the thing out. There’s something out there that defies the laws of earthly nature as we know them. I mean to find out what it is. I think I have a plan and I mean to put it into practice.”

  His words stirred me strangely and when I uneasily recalled my own experience at the window that afternoon, I found it difficult to dismiss his story as sheer nonsense. I did—halfheartedly—try to dissuade him from entering the yard again, but I knew even as I spoke that I was wasting my breath.

  I left the shop that afternoon with a feeling of oppression and foreboding which nothing could remove.

  When I called several days later, my worst fears were realized—Canavan was missing. The front door of the shop was unlatched, as usual, but Canavan was not in the house. I looked in every room. Finally, with a feeling of infinite dread, I opened the back door and looked out toward the yard.

  The long stalks of brown grass slid against each other in the slight breeze with dry sibilant whispers. The dead trees reared black and motionless. Although it was late summer, I could hear neither the chirp of a bird nor the chirr of a single insect. The yard itself seemed to be listening.

  Feeling something against my foot, I glanced down and saw a thick twine stretching from inside the door, across the scant cleared space immediately adjacent to the house and thence into the wavering wall of grass. Instantly I recalled Canavan’s mention of a “plan.” His plan, I realized immediately, was to enter the yard trailing a stout cord behind him. No matter how he twisted and turned, he must have reasoned, he could always find his way out by following back along the cord.

  It seemed like a workable scheme and I felt relieved. Probably Canavan was still in the yard. I decided I would wait for him to come out. Perhaps if he were permitted to roam around in the yard long enough, without interruption, the place would lose its evil fascination for him, and he would forget about it.

  I went back into the shop and browsed among the books. At the end of an hour I became uneasy again. I wondered how long Canavan had been in the yard. When I began reflecting on the old man’s uncertain health, I felt a sense of responsibility.

  I finally returned to the back door, saw that he was nowhere in sight, and called out his name. I experienced the disquieting sensation that my shout carried no further than the very edge of that whispering fringe of grass. It was as if the sound had been smothered, deadened, nullified as soon as the vibrations of it reached the border of that overgrown yard.

  I called again, and again, but there was no reply. At length I decided to go in after him. I would follow along the cord, I thought, and I would be sure to locate him. I told myself that the thick grass undoubtedly did stifle my shout and possibly in any case Canavan might be growing slightly deaf.

  Just inside the door, the cord was tied securely around the leg of a heavy table. Taking hold of the twine, I crossed the cleared area back of the house and slipped into the rustling expanse of grass.

  The going was easy at first, and I made good progress. As I advanced, however, the grass stems became thicker, and grew closer together, and I was forced to shove my way through them.

  When I was no more than a few yards inside the tangle, I was overwhelmed with the same bottomless sense of desolation which I had experienced before. There was certainly something uncanny about the place. I felt as if I had suddenly veered into another world—a world of briars and brindle grass whose ceaseless half-heard whisperings were somehow alive with evil.

  As I pushed along, the cord abruptly came to an end. Glancing down, I saw that it had caught against a thorn bush, abraded itself and subsequently broken. Although I bent down and poked in the area for several minutes, I was unable to locate the piece from which it had parted. Probably Canavan was unaware that the cord had broken and was now pulling it along with him.

  I straightened up, cupped my hands to my mouth and shouted. My shout seemed to be all but drowned in my throat by that dismal wall of grass. I felt as if I were down at the bottom of a well, shouting up.

  Frowning with growing uneasiness, I tramped ahead. The grass stalks kept getting thicker and tougher and at length I needed both hands to propel myself through the matted growth.

  I began to sweat profusely; my head started to ache, and I imagined that my vision was beginning to blur. I felt the same tense, almost unbearable oppression which one experiences on a stifling summer’s day when a storm is brewing and the atmosphere is charged with static electricity.

  Also, I realized with a slight qualm of fear that I had got turned around and didn’t know which part of the yard I was in. During an objective half-minute in which I reflected that I was actually worried about getting lost in someone’s back yard, I almost laughed—almost. But there was something about the place which didn’t permit laughter. I plodded ahead with a sober face.

  Presently I began to feel that I was not alone. I had a sudden hair-raising conviction that someone—or something—was creeping along in the grass behind me. I cannot say with certainty that I heard anything, although I may have, but all at once I was firmly convinced that some creature was crawling or wriggling a short distance in my rear.

  I felt that I was being watched and that the watcher was wholly malignant.

  For a wild instant I considered headlong flight. Then, unaccountably, rage took possession of me. I was suddenly furious with Canavan, furious with the yard, furious with myself. All my pent-up tension exploded in a gust of rage which swept away fear. Now, I vowed, I would get to the root of the weird business. I would be tormented and frustrated by it no longer.

  I whirled without warning and lunged into the grass where I believe my stealthy pursuer might be hiding.

  I stopped abruptly; my savage anger melted into inexpressible horror.

  In the faint brassy sunlight which filtered down through the towering stalks of brindle grass, Canavan crouched on all fours like a beast about to spring. His glasses were gone, his clothes were in shreds and his mouth was twisted into an insane grimace, half smirk, half snarl.

  I stood petrified, staring at him. His eyes, queerly out of focus, glared at me with concentrated hatred and without any faint glimmer of recognition. His grey hair was matted with grass and small sticks; his entire body, in fact, including the tattered remains of his clothing, was covered with them, as if he had grovelled or rolled on the ground like a wild animal.

  After the first throat-freezing shock, I finally found my tongue.

  “Canavan!” I screamed at him. “Canavan, for God’s sake, don’t you know me?”

  His answer was a low throaty snarl. His lips twisted back from his yellowish teeth and his crouching body tensed for a spring.

  Pure terror took possession of me. I leaped aside and flung myself into that infernal wall of grass an instant before he lunged.

  The intensity of my terror must have given me added strength. I rammed headlong through those twisted stalks which before I had laboriously pulled aside. I could hear the grass and briar bushes crashing behind me and I know that I was running for my life.

  I pounded on as in a nightmare. Grass stalks snapped against my face like whips and thorns gashed me like razors but I felt nothing. All my physical and mental resources were concentrated in one frenzied resolve: I must get out of that devil’s field of grass and away from the monstrous thing which followed swiftly in my wake.

  My breath began coming in great shuddering sobs. My legs felt weak and I seemed to be looking through spinning saucers of light. But I ran on.

  The thing behind me was gaining. I could hear it growling and I could feel it lunge against the earth only inches back of my flying feet. And all the time I had the maddening conviction that I was actually running in circles.

  At last when I felt that I must surely collapse in another second, I plunged through a final brindle thicket into the open sunlight. Ahead of me lay the cleared area at the rear of Canavan’s shop. Just beyond was the house itself.

  Gasping an
d fighting for breath, I dragged myself toward the door. For no reason that I could explain, then or afterwards, I felt absolutely certain that the horror at my heels would not venture into the open area. I didn’t even turn around to make sure.

  Inside the house I fell weakly into a chair. My strained breathing slowly returned to normal, but my mind remained caught up in a whirlwind of sheer horror and hideous conjecture.

  Canavan, I realized, had gone completely mad. Some ghastly shock had turned him into a ravening bestial lunatic thirsting for the savage destruction of any living thing that crossed his path. Remembering the oddly-focused eyes which had glared at me with a glaze of animal ferocity, I knew that his mind had not been merely unhinged—it had been totally destroyed. Death could be the only possible release.

  But Canavan was still at least the shell of a human being, and he had been my friend. I could not take the law into my own hands.

  With many misgivings I called the police and an ambulance.

  What followed was more madness, plus an inquisitorial session of questions and demands which left me in a state of near nervous collapse.

  A half dozen burly policemen spent the better part of an hour tramping through that wavering brindle grass without locating any trace of Canavan. They came out cursing, rubbing their eyes and shaking their heads. They were flushed, furious—and ill at ease. They announced that they had seen nothing, and heard nothing except some sneaking dog which stayed always out of sight and growled at them at intervals.

  When they mentioned the growling dog, I opened my mouth to speak, but thought better of it and said nothing. They were already regarding me with open suspicion, as if they believed my own mind might be breaking.

  I repeated my story at least twenty times and still they were not satisfied. They ransacked the entire house. They inspected Canavan’s files. They even removed some loose boards in one of the rooms and searched underneath.

  At length they grudgingly concluded that Canavan had suffered total loss of memory after experiencing some kind of shock and that he had wandered off the premises in a state of amnesia shortly after I had encountered him in the yard. My own description of his appearance and actions they discounted as lurid exaggeration. After warning me that I would probably be questioned further and that my own premises might be inspected, they reluctantly permitted me to leave.

  Their subsequent searches and investigations revealed nothing new and Canavan was put down as a missing person, probably afflicted with acute amnesia.

  But I was not satisfied, and I could not rest.

  Six months of patient, painstaking, tedious research in the files and stacks of the local University Library finally yielded something which I do not offer as an explanation, nor even as a definite clue, but only as a fantastic near-impossibility which I ask no one to believe.

  One afternoon, after my extended research over a period of months had produced nothing of significance, the Keeper of Rare Books at the University Library triumphantly bore to my study niche a tiny, crumbling pamphlet which had been printed in New Haven in 1695. It mentioned no author and carried the stark title, Deathe of Goodie Larkins, Witche.

  Several years before, it revealed, an ancient crone, one Goodie Larkins, had been accused by neighbors of turning a missing child into a wild dog. The Salem madness was raging at the time and Goodie Larkins had been summarily condemned to death. Instead of being burned, she had been driven into a marsh deep in the woods where seven savage dogs, starved for a fortnight, had been turned loose on her trail. Apparently her accusers felt that this was a touch of truly poetic justice.

  As the ravening dogs closed in on her, she was heard by her retreating neighbors to utter a frightful curse: “Let this lande I fall upon lye alle the way to Hell!” she had screamed. “And they who tarry here be as these beastes that rende me dead!”

  A subsequent inspection of old maps and land deeds satisfied me that the marsh in which Goodie Larkins was torn to pieces by the dogs after uttering her awful curse originally occupied the same lot or square which now enclosed Canavan’s hellish back yard!

  I say no more. I returned only once to that devilish spot. It was a cold desolate autumn day and a keening wind rattled the brindle stalks in that unholy acre. I cannot say what urged me back; perhaps it was some lingering feeling of loyalty toward the Canavan I had known. Perhaps it was even some last shred of hope. But as soon as I entered the cleared area behind Canavan’s boarded-up house, I knew I had made a mistake.

  As I stared at the stiff waving grass, the bare trees and the black ragged briar bushes, I felt as if I, in turn, were being watched. I felt as if something alien and wholly evil were observing me, and though I was terrified, I experienced a perverse, insane impulse to rush headlong into that whispering expanse. Again I imagined I saw that monstrous landscape subtly alter its dimensions and perspectives until I was staring toward a stretch of blowing brindle grass and rotted trees which ran for miles. Something urged me to enter, to lose myself in the lovely grass, to roll and grovel at its roots, to rip off the foolish encumbrances of cloth which covered me and run howling and ravenous, on and on, on and on. . . .

  Instead, I turned and rushed away. I ran through the windy autumn streets like a madman. I lurched into my rooms and bolted the door.

  I have never gone back since. And I never shall.

  I’M MURDERING MR. MASSINGTON

  HE WAS ONE of the saddest-looking men I have ever seen. I met him quite casually in a bar in Boston; after a few drinks he began to talk.

  Aside from the expression of ineffable melancholy which marked his features, there was nothing impressive about his appearance. He was short and stocky, with a round face which looked fuller than it was, due to his small eyes and somewhat receding chin. Occasionally he manifested certain nervous little mannerisms, such as looking quickly over his shoulder, or suddenly clasping his hands together. He was plainly dressed in a brown suit which was neither new nor neatly pressed.

  As he talked, I learned that his name was Henry Standish Massington and that he was ridden by a single, overwhelming obsession: he could not bear the thought that he would probably soon die and that thereafter no single trace of him would remain on the earth. The thought that both he and his name would be obliterated he found intolerable.

  He had no heirs, no relatives at all, and he had never accumulated anything of consequence. He had no talent of any type and he did not have money enough to erect himself a monument.

  He told me that at one time he was partially consoled by the thought that he could at least buy himself a modest headstone and have his name chiseled into it. But now he was convinced that the next war, with its appalling weapons of wholesale destruction, would pulverize even the granite gravestones in the city cemeteries.

  He had, he admitted, considered performing some spectacular crime of violence in order to perpetuate his name, but he had finally realized that he could not bear to injure any of his fellow men. He was an atheist apparently, but a gentle one. He told me that he would like to believe in a future life, but he found himself unable to do so.

  When I pointed out that his probable fate was no different from that of millions of other people who lived, died and were quickly forgotten, he only shrugged. Most of them abhorred death, he agreed, but very few seemed to care that the fact of their existence would soon be forgotten. He found it intolerable. It was useless for him to attempt to rationalize his obsession. There it was, and he could not rid himself of it.

  At length the conversation shifted to me. When he learned that I was a writer, his interest quickened. He questioned me closely. Finally he asked if he could see some of my published work. I told him that a book of my poems was at the local public library, and that I’d gladly send him magazines which contained some of my stories, if he’d promise to return them.

  He copied down my address, swore that he’d return the magazines, solemnly shook my hand and departed.

  Somewhat reluctantly, I sent him the ma
gazines as I had promised, and after a week or so he began to recede from my mind. I realized it was highly unlikely that the magazines would be returned, but since I had duplicate copies, it would be of no great consequence.

  Then one evening, quite unannounced, he appeared at my apartment bearing the magazines.

  I invited him in and he accepted a drink. He had, he said, read my book of poems and the magazine stories very carefully, and he was convinced that I had genuine talent. He said he was sure that a handful of the poems would survive; the stories he found uneven, but he felt that some day I would publish the best of them in a collection. At the least, he predicted, a half dozen of them would pass into anthologies.

  I was pleased with his verdict and offered him another drink. He finished that and then, much to my astonishment, revealed the real reason for his interest in my work: he wanted me to write and publish a little story about him and thus preserve his name as well as some record of his personality. He was not joking; I have never seen a man more deadly in earnest.

  When I told him that in spite of his opinion of my work, I was, after all, a relatively unknown writer, that he would do better to take his case to a Maugham, a Hemingway, or a Wilbur Daniel Steele, he only shrugged. He had little chance of ever meeting anyone like that, he said, and even if he did, there was no assurance that a really famous writer would cooperate with him. People who were well known, he argued, were bothered by all sorts of cranks. They had to be brushed off. He’d probably be put in the same category and never get to first base.

  When I explained that even if I wrote a story I could not guarantee that it would ever be published, he shrugged again. He realized that; he was willing to take the chance, if I was. He had nothing to lose, and I would be gambling only a few hours of my time. If the story sold, I’d get some kind of a check—and he would be consoled by the thought that his name might be preserved.