The Throne of Bones

by Brian McNaughton

  It was hopeless. Perhaps I should have been a soldier, for my strength had driven the sword into the massive table beyond extrication. I was about to reach for my rapier, as useful against the monster as a pin against a whale, when swells that resembled enormous buttocks, but patterned like the skin of the worm, gripped the table in their cleft and crushed it to powder.

  The manqueller was free, and I used it with a will.

  Toward the very end of my orgy of slashing and hacking, a bit of the worm metamorphosed into a perfect replica of my mother’s head. Sobbing, I picked it up in my stained hands with some vague thought of giving it funeral honors, but it spat in my face before melting into a foul jelly that slipped through my fingers.

  * * * *

  The barrier of former servants had shrunken and dried. I could pass through it to tear down torches and cast them into the twitching horror. Much of the hall was made of wood. It would burn well. With luck, the stone walls would collapse upon themselves and leave no clue for the curious.

  Everyone, but him so fortunate as to die first, loses his mother. It is a hard fact that unites me with every idiot who ever wandered into my office, with men so different from me as Akilleus Bloodglutter and Reverend Lord Commander Cluddax Umbren. You can imagine some of my feelings. I daresay you cannot imagine them all.

  What had she meant, that I should shed my ugly guise? The worm dwelled in others, in that demon-masked intruder, in the strangers who followed me.

  It dwelled within the man I now saw fleeing before me as I staggered from the burning home of my childhood.

  All of my grief and anger and frustration condensed to a murderous core. He was the one who hounded me. He was the extension that held my hereditary evil, the Vendren Worm.

  The chase continued on foot, on stolen horses. The questions that tumbled through my head were enough to drive me mad, and perhaps they already had. What was I? Was I a sensory organ of the worm, a tentacle-tip sent out in the guise of a man to find victims through my habit of lurking and spying? Had I, through my dedication to art, created a self more powerful than the monster’s own?

  Out in the thorny desert of Hogman’s Plain that surrounds Fandragord, his mount snagged its hoof and collapsed.

  “Die, worm!” I cried, hoisting the manqueller athwart the rotting face of Ashtareeta, our moon-mother.

  “It is a wise hero,” he said, with a suggestion of a smirk, “who knows the worm from himself.”

  This gave me pause. While I pondered, I hardly noticed the transformation that came over me, no more difficult or memorable than peeling off a glove; or than shedding silk bonds, as I had seemed to do in Vulnaveila’s room. Thinking back on that moment of double vision, I realized that the man who became the worm had worn the black garments and heraldic symbols of the Vendrens. The other, the masked intruder, had not been so dressed. What I witnessed had been my own change, through the eyes of the shadow-self who followed me.

  As my abstraction continued I devoured him, and both our horses.

  * * * *

  Since then he has come back, or someone like him, and is with me always. He no longer trails me at a distance. Whenever rage overcomes me and I turn on him and eat him, he returns as a closer shadow. I try to restrain myself, but now he stands at my side.

  When I grow older and stronger, I suppose I shall be surrounded by a ring of such creatures, as was my mother. Were they mindless organs in human form, or did they embody aspects of herself that she could not contain? Whatever they were, she seemed able to control them, and I have no power over mine. Not just for sentimental reasons, I often wish that I had not killed her.

  The discovery that I am not human, you might think, would be shattering, but it brings consolations. I understand now why I feel so different from the common run of men, a difference that used to trouble me. I no longer lose consciousness during my transformations, I no longer fret about Frothard’s Debility: whatever I am, I am not ill.

  One of my hopes has been blighted. I cannot win the love of a good woman, which might heal me, when a man is always beside me. Everyone assumes he is my lover.

  I tell them that he is my son.

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  Meryphillia

  “For a ghoul is a ghoul, and at best an unpleasant companion for man.”

  —H.P. Lovecraft,

  The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath

  Meryphillia was the least typical ghoul in the graveyard. No man would ever have called her a beauty, but her emaciation was less extreme, her pallor less ghastly, and her gait less grotesque than those of her sisters.

  Untypically tender-hearted, she would sometimes shed a tear for a dead infant that her nature compelled her to devour. She was considerate of her fellows, too, and her feeding habits were all but mannerly. Least typical of all, for ghouls love to laugh, was her inextinguishable sorrow for the world of sunlight and human warmth she had lost.

  * * * *

  Traditional wisdom holds that ghouls bring their condition upon themselves by indulging morbid interests in adolescence. Gluttriel, God of Death, takes note of such youngsters and offers them the knowledge of the corpses they will eat in return for their lives.

  Others assert that ghoulism is a disease, called Porfat’s distemper after the physician who described it, and who later vanished under circumstances of suggestive peculiarity. Before the transformation becomes obvious to those grieving at the sickbed, their grief compounded by the loved one’s growing taste for perverse wit and unseemly laughter, a hunger for dead flesh impels the victim to the nearest burial ground. The first meal induces physical changes that destroy all hope of return to human society.

  Either explanation might apply in Meryphillia’s case. As a girl nearing womanhood in Crotalorn, she knew the necropolis called Dreamers’ Hill better than the malls and ballrooms where her peers flocked. She wandered among the tombs of the rich and the ditches of the poor in all weathers. Her clothing, lacking style to begin with, suffered from these rambles, and it never quite fit: perhaps because a pocket would always be weighted down with a volume of Asteriel Vendren’s tales, malign carbuncles of that madman’s diseased fancy.

  Perched on some collapsed slab that might well have capped a ghoul-pit, innocently ascribing the scratches and titters she heard to the creak of trees and rustle of weeds, she would play an air of Umbriel Fronn on her recorder, a cherished gift from her late mother. Often she would pause to ponder questions that the healthy young person is well advised to leave to priests and philosophers.

  Her father strove to cure her moping and put some meat on her bones in the hope of marrying her into one of the Great Houses. He would regularly purge her library, castigating her preference for tales of terror to worthwhile literature, for Umbriel’s cerebral nocturnes to the cheery ditties of the day. He would pinch her cheeks into smiles as he bellowed for food, wine and happy tunes. Unfortunately his business as a timber-merchant kept him often from the city and their home on Hound Square, and Meryphillia would resume her unhealthy habits as soon as he had breezed out the door.

  When he held up her stepmother as an example to emulate in his absence, she would only hang her head and mumble. A giddy Frotherine not much older than the girl herself, she filled the house with robust athletes and ditty-strummers in what she claimed was an effort to cheer her daughter up. She never seemed to notice when Meryphillia fled to the nearby cemetery to escape their din and their importunities.

  Whether she fled into the arms of Gluttriel, or whether vapors of the corpse-crammed and claw-mined earth afflicted her with Porfat’s distemper, the result was the same: shortly before her eighteenth birthday, she vanished irretrievably into the burrows of the ghouls.

  * * * *

  For all their laughter, ghouls are a dull lot. Hunger is the fire in which they burn, and it burns hotter than the hunger for power over men or for knowledge of the gods in a crazed mortal. It vaporizes delicacy and leaves behind only a slag of anger and lust. They see t
heir fellows as impediments to feeding, to be mauled and shrieked at when the mourners go home. They are seldom alone, not through love of one another’s company, but because a lone ghoul is suspected of concealing food. Their copulation is so hasty that distinctions of sex and identity are often ignored.

  Just as she had once yearned to know the secrets of the grave, Meryphillia now longed to penetrate the mysteries of friendship and love. Mostly she wanted to know about love. She believed that it must transcend her bony collisions with Arthrax, least unfeeling of all the male ghouls, whom she untypically clove to.

  “Why are you crying?” he once asked while their coupling rattled the slats of a newly emptied coffin.

  “It’s nothing. Dust in my eyes.”

  “That happens.”

  His question and comment were the nearest a ghoul could come to sympathy, but it fell so far short of the standard she imagined to be human that she wept all the more.

  * * * *

  She sought answers from the dead, for the ghoul acquires the memories of what it feeds upon, but her strength was no match for the giants of the underground in the battle for mnemonic bits. Studying human experience from the scraps she got was like learning about painting by spinning on her toes through a museum. She hugged vivid glimpses: the smell of orange spice-cake and a childish song that evoked a long-gone celebration of Polliel’s Birthday; the creaking leather and muscular embrace of someone’s beloved brother, home safe at last from a forgotten war; a shrine ablaze with stolen candles, a wan face among borrowed blankets, the words, “The fever has broken.”

  Others did far better. Feeding lustily, they would recall great chunks of lives. For a while they would assume a likeness to their meal and give those satiric impersonations of human beings that are a favorite entertainment of their kind. Even Meryphillia screamed with laughter when Lupox and Glottard disputed which of them was Zuleriel Vogg, the notorious grave-robber, whose execution the ghouls had cheered only less gleefully than the disposal of his pieces in an unguarded pit.

  Scroffard once wolfed down an old beggar woman so completely that his performance lost its satirical edge. He alternately whined for spare coins, complained of the dark and damp and smell, and quavered, “Who is that? Who’s there?” at every furtive patter and stifled giggle.

  Most shunned the mock woman, hoping that Scroffard, when he recovered and found no one else on whom to exercise his temper, would tear off his own head for a change; but Meryphillia, who would formerly have crossed the street to avoid such a wretch, was drawn to caress the fragile face. She seemed beautiful, not least of all for her intensely feeling eyes.

  Handicapped with human vision, Scroffard was at first unable to make out the young ghoul by the glow of the niter-crusted tunnel. When he saw what pawed his human face, he screamed his way to the surface, where he was battered about the head by the shovels of two grave-robbers. To their dismay, for they thought they were dealing with the routine nuisance of a prematurely buried hag, the beating restored the most irascible of ghouls to his roaring self. He wrenched from the luckless men the vengeance he might otherwise have wrested from Meryphillia.

  * * * *

  She treasured what happy moments she could retrieve, but murder, disease and madness were the staples of her diet, with the manifold agonies of death for dessert. The fond memories of the rich were locked away in tombs of marble and bronze, while souvenirs of poverty and despair lay everywhere for the taking. The very poorest corpses, unloved, unmourned, unwanted by either medical students or necrophiliacs, were thrown directly into a riddled pit that the gravediggers called Gluttriel’s Lunch-Bucket. No matter how full the hole was filled by nightfall, by morning its rocky bottom would be licked clean as a dutiful child’s porridge-bowl.

  One day word chattered through the mines that a man of substance, sleek as a pig and skewered cleanly in a duel, had just been laid in a plain grave. His widow, no native of Crotalorn, had conceived the notion that its ghouls were a myth. As the box dropped into the earth of an unfashionable quarter, she was overheard to assure the attentive victor in the duel that bronze-bound tombs of stone were vulgar.

  No ghoul resumed his sleep that day. The ground of the thrilling burial was too quaggy for tunneling; the meat must be extracted from above. Digging should begin at the first blink of darkness, before human thieves could cheat the underground of its due. As the watchmen would still be reasonably sober, as mourners might be dawdling, the daring of the raiders would set new limits for legend. Debate over tactics grew so heated that the crows of the necropolis took wing and blackened the dome of Ashtareeta’s temple, which was seen as a fearful omen by her clergy, and cause for an emergency collection.

  Meryphillia knew the debate was a farce. Plans would be trampled in a general stampede for the grave. Her own best hope was to creep out at twilight and work her way among the hedges and headstones until she had found a hiding place near the target. Her intention was not to get there first: whoever claimed that honor would be run over by a monster like Glottard or Lupox. She would wait for one of them to make his dash and cling to the bristles of his dorsal ridge while he punished the early starters. Sticking close as the warts on his rump, she would snatch what scraps she could.

  When the moment came, Clamythia, wiliest of ghouls, usurped the shadow of Lupox. It pained Meryphillia to trip her sister and emboss the mud with her venerable muzzle, but protocol had foundered in howling chaos. Lupox savaged the first arrivals like a fighting-dog set on rats, uncaring that two of the obstructions he flung from his path were human watchmen. Whimpering mindlessly, they left their broken bills where they lay and staggered to the safety of their lodge.

  The grave erupted in a fountain of dirt, pumped pluming into the twilight by a frenzy of ghoulish talons. The geyser soon began to spray crushed flowers, splinters of wood, then tattered silk and trinkets of gold that a robber would have wept to see so treated. Without undue effort, Meryphillia found herself hugging a whole quarter of a head, with the coveted eye adhering.

  This was the ghoulish equivalent to a delicacy that a banquet-guest would have exclaimed over before daintily sampling; but Meryphillia, with claws scraping her back, elbows gouging her ribs and jaws stretching over her shoulder to seize her prize, could only stuff it into her mouth, grind it hastily, and gulp it down.

  Hunched between Lupox’s gnarly knees, she then beheld the strangest vision: of herself, standing up straight, as her father had so often told her to; with her hair pushed out of her eyes, as he had so often pushed it; and with an unlikely smile dimpling cheeks not nearly so gaunt as they had been. The vision glowed with love, tinged only slightly by the acid of vexation and fixed forever beneath a glaze of sorrow.

  She realized whose grave she crouched in, but, being what she was, could only scrabble for more and leave her feelings to sort themselves out. Her next find was a hand, one that held a far clearer imprint of her stepmother’s buttocks. It proved a timely antidote to the first course.

  * * * *

  In her preoccupation with life, Meryphillia relapsed into her solitary ways. She was allowed to. No one suspected her of hiding food. The ghouls thought her as odd as humans once had. Like them, her new companions were grateful for a respite from her brooding silences, her inappropriate observations and her reluctance to join in a good laugh.

  Lurching one night along a path she used to glide with her recorder, she nearly stumbled over a man who had come neither to loot tombs nor kill himself. He was declaiming verses to the full moon with such rapt fervor that he failed to notice her slip hastily into the tent of a willow’s branches.

  This was the poet Fragador, which she learned from his own lips, for he gave himself credit for each poem as if afraid the moon would confuse him with someone else: “On the Hands of Therissa Sleith, a sonnet by Fragador of Fandragord,” he would announce, or, “For Therissa Sleith on Her Birthday, an ode by Fragador, poet and tragedian, lately of Fandragord.”

  It would be an inconstant
moon indeed, she thought, that would forget his name. He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen; but she viewed him with the eyes of a ghoul, unaware that many people thought him ghoulishly pale and thin. Her heart, so still even before her present state, startled her like a hammering visitor at her breast.

  His subject pleased less than his voice. Therissa Sleith was the darling of Crotalorn, and had often been held up to her as an example of what she was not. Fragador desired her as ardently, though perhaps not quite so hopelessly, as Meryphillia desired him.

  He visited the graveyard as often as she used to, and always with a new batch of poems praising the wit, grace and beauty of the same unsuitable person. When the moon had other obligations, he would recite his verses to a statue of Filloweela that reclined complaisantly on one of her cleric’s tombs, unaware that the lavish form of the Goddess hid a quivering horror that yearned to give him everything Therissa withheld.

  How she loathed that name! It figured in every verse he wrote, and his voice would falter and throb on its snaky nastiness. She learned to anticipate its occurrence, and she would whisper her own name just loudly enough to bar the syllables from her ears, even though this lamed his elegant scansion. Sometimes she would speak too vehemently, and he would clear his throat, clean his ear, or peer uneasily into the shadows.

  His heart heard her name, however imperfectly, for one night he thrilled her by declaiming a poem to “Morthylla,” whom his poetic intuition identified as a lurking spirit of night and death, and whose help he invoked in softening Therissa before her lithe limbs should go to feed the ghouls. Meryphillia would recite the lines to herself while wishing that those limbs were in fact within reach of her coffin-cracking jaws.

  They were so alike, or had been, she and Fragador, with their delight in horror, their flirtation with death, their love of shadow and solitude. If only she had met him—but she withered her wish: even if she had stood up straight and combed her hair, even if she had twittered pleasantries and smiled now and then, no man drawn to the pert face and nubile form of Therissa Sleith would have spared her a glance.