Tales of the Grotesque: A Collection of Uneasy Tales

by L. A. Lewis

  'No, laddie,’ he replied firmly, ‘I shall not sleep there. You yourself seem to realise the exceedingly narrow escape you have had by doing just that thing, and, for a man who hasn’t studied spiritualism, your summing up just now was astounding.

  ‘Probably,’ he went on dreamily, 'it is on account of sleeping here. Your “subconscious” knows all about it. What I will do’ - he straightened up in his chair - Is this. We’ll clear off now in the dinghy, motor to the nearest ‘pub’ and stay the night. Tomorrow - I won’t promise, but I think - we may perhaps settle the business.’

  Cary demurred at first, insisting that they should pass the night in the houseboat, taking alternate watches, pleading for a seance to attempt communication with the missing girl, almost accusing his friend of cowardice. But Eyston was obdurate.

  ‘Natural sleep or mediumistic trance would be equally dangerous,’ he affirmed, ‘if indulged in at this precise spot. How do you suppose the girl disappeared in the first place?’ Then, at his host’s mystified stare, ‘Never mind that now. Call it a dimensional overlap - and trust me till tomorrow.’

  It was nearly two hours later before Eyston succeeded in shaking off the importunate Cary, and finally reaching the sanctuary of his bed' room at one of the waterside inns. There, having locked the door, he moved over to the window and stood for some minutes gazing into the misty gloom.

  ‘It’s queer,’ he mused aloud, ‘how the man in the street always regards an occultist as a sort of case-hardened miracle-man. He is expected to go out into the most horror-haunted regions and hobnob with the Powers of Darkness as though they were a bunch of lawyers’ clerks... Animated corpses, indeed! Fish-mangled, posturing cadavers! Ugh! Beastly! And I’m expected to sleep on that infernal houseboat

  where even a materialist like Raymond maintains he can’t wake up... Still’ - his voice grew sad - “if what he thinks is true, I suppose I must do what’s in my power. Poor child! Poor child!’

  He sat on the bed, slipped on to his right index-finger a ring of peculiar design, and, closing his eyes, concentrated hard on visualising the houseboat’s lighted interior. Gradually, painted as it were, on the lining of his eye-lids, the picture took form. There was the oblong trestle-legged table in the centre of the cabin, bearing the remains of their impromptu meal - a half-filled whisky bottle, a jug of beer, glasses, a plate of sandwiches. To the right a matchboard wall, relieved by a few quite good etchings, mounted with passe-partout. Opposite, the glass-panelled door giving access to the stairs leading up on deck. On the far side, the two built-in berths, the upper one still with its blankets in disarray as Cary had left them at the time of his fear-impelled exit.

  Eyston stretched out a hand - the one bearing the strangely-wrought ring - and touched the table. It felt solid - real. He rapped on its surface, and the rough-cut deal responded with the sound of the knocks. The stone in his ring caught the light of the hanging lamp, and reflected it with a queer brownish glow, half lucent, half opaque.

  Eyston seated himself in one of the thrust back chairs and riveted his eyes on the ring, deliberately forcing from his mind all thoughts except his concentration upon it. The stone seemed to swell as surrounding objects grew less distinct until it occupied the entire range of his vision. He unconsciously lowered his head, bringing his eyes still closer to it. The stone began to change colour. It darkened, glowed again, and slowly turned from the brown opacity of dried blood to a shimmering milky green. The diaphanous luminescence of it spread about him, accompanied by a sensation of semi-tangibility that was neither wet nor dry, warm nor cold. He merged into it, hung floating in it with a novel buoyancy that kept him suspended, though unable to move about. The medium in which he thus hung was like water, in that it upheld him from sinking, yet it was not water, for it offered no resistance to the movement of his limbs, and so afforded no purchase to propel himself. Its stillness and utter silence were unreal, unworldly. He felt himself drugged to a state of arrested animation that was neither life nor death, but he remained fully, keenly, conscious.

  A movement in the filmy half-light near him drew his eyes to a second figure sluggishly writhing at his side. He beheld the haunter of Raymond’s dreams and thanked God that his friend’s description had partly prepared him for it. He had seen dead men on battlefields, and the bodies of the long-drowned salvaged from the sea, and was thus inured to mutilation in the physical flesh; but, just as Cary had said, the frightfulness of this thing lay in its persistent hold upon life when, by medical standards, life must have been unthinkable for weeks, for months! The emaciated sodden legs beat a ceaseless march on the unresisting veil, like those of a gallows victim marking time in air. The battered, half-eaten arms clawed blindly at nothing. The eyes were gone, and within their ragged-edged hollows was manifest the coiling purposeful movement of reptilian life.

  About rents in the tattered clothing that still hung upon the decayed body darted shoals of wierdly-shaped, unearthly fish - the only natural seeming things in that unholy realm. They circled the corroded face, tugging playfully at wispy strands of flesh as will minnows at an angler’s bait.

  Eyston, mastering the strong revulsion that held him, spoke and found that his words came audibly - even clearly - in the stillness.

  Tell me your dream,’ he suggested gently, and turned his eyes resolutely away. A loathsome, bubbling groan answered him, and then, after a pause, a broken, distorted voice as the lungs strove to operate.

  ‘Oh, God! Did - someone speak?’

  ‘Yes, tell me your dream,’ Eyston repeated, ‘and lie quite still while you tell me, or you will make yourself worse.’ His tones were soothing, caressing, like those of a bedside physician. ‘You’ve been very ill, you know,’ he added, then steeled himself for the burst of hysteria that followed, steeled himself against the gurgling articulation of organs that had no right to be exercised.

  ‘Lie still,' said that awful voice. ‘How can I lie when I always float upright with the fish and worms eating me - eating forever more and more away, till at last there shall be an end! Last week or was it last year? - they took my eyes, when I grew too tired to move the lids and so I frighten them. Lie still! When the flesh off my back is gone, and only the bared bones stand between my heart and the water. Look, if you can see. I am not dreaming. I can feel - and I know?’

  The figure thrust a long-taloned hand among its shredded raiment and drew forth a writhing eel.

  ‘That - that was eating my stomach. Look if you have eyes left to you. They have taken mine. I am blind, I tell you - blind!'

  Eyston shuddered as though ice filled his spine. Never in his long and varied career had he met - or imagined - a haunting like this! And Cary, and the rest of them, expected him to treat such matters with the calm assurance of a skilled surgeon - brought him the cases which threatened their own sanity, and believed that, to him, they

  were just matter-of-fact happenings - that he could walk immune among things that the world could not comprehend, and of which he himself understood but the outside fringe. Why, in God’s name, had he ever probed into ghostlore, and why, above all, had he ever made the fact public?... Still, sometimes people - and things - needed help...

  This thing, for instance, had it been man or woman when it was recognizable? - needed it... he would do what he could.

  He waited for the paroxysm to subside, and forced himself once more into the role of practitioner.

  ‘You must be calm,’ he insisted, ‘or your recovery will be retarded. While your body is safe in hospital, your mind remains in some nightmare you have experienced.. As for thinking that fish have eaten your eyes, it is simply part of your delusion. Your treatment requires us to keep you for the present in a dark room.’ The positive assurance in his voice was not without effect upon the tormented, riddled corpse floating beside him.

  ‘Thank you, Doctor. I - I believe you,’ it managed with a hideous effort, ‘and I will try to tell you - but oh! This horrible feeling of fishes - inside me.’
<
br />   ‘Never mind the fishes,’ Eyston replied in soothing tones, marvelling at his own control of speech, as he watched the foul things swim past, mouthing the fragments of their meal.

  ‘Well,’ began the corpse, ‘Florrie and I went to sleep on the skiff. Oh!’ - interrupting itself - ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘Certainly. She will be allowed to see you tomorrow,’ lied Eyston. ‘And then - I don’t know how soon - I began to dream, and I thought I had stepped out of the boat, not into the rushes where we had moored, but up some worn, water dogged steps into a sort of empty house. There was a big central hall with sort of doorless wooden archways leading off into different rooms, all very cobwebby, and quite empty of furniture. One archway opened on to a flight of stone steps leading down to still green water like a - a sort of Roman bath, you know?’

  Eyston nodded before he remembered the futility of it. Yes? he put in quietly.

  ‘Well, it looked ever so attractive, and somehow I didn’t think it would be cold, although it was all built inside the house and the sun couldn’t have got at it - so I just walked down the steps. I was still wearing some of my clothes, but it didn’t seem to matter in the dream. And then I jumped in and - it wasn’t water at all, but this green stuff we’re floating in now - ’ The voice rose shrilly, hysterically again.

  Remember I can’t see it,’ Eyston said sharply, and forgave himself this second lie as he uttered it.

  ‘No! Oh, no. I’d forgotten that,’ the voice replied in puzzled accents. ‘Well, then, doctor, I suddenly realised that I must be dreaming and I naturally expected to wake up - but I just didn’t - I couldn't. I tried ever so hard, and kept shutting my eyes and imagining the skiff with Florrie asleep at the other end, and then opening them once more. And all I could see was this green stuff, so I closed my eyes again and tried to feel for my electric torch - but all I could touch was fishes - wriggling.

  ‘Then I thought I could get back the way I’d come, but somehow I couldn’t find the steps. And then I found I couldn’t move at all - at least I could move my limbs, but they didn’t get me anywhere. I tried to swim and just Hung suspended in this stuff that isn’t water. I’ve been here ever since. It seems - oh! - years and years...

  ‘First I got hungry and had nothing to eat, and then it was thirst - such awful thirst, and I tried to swallow the green stuff, but it did no good because it wasn’t really liquid. I was breathing it, anyway! And then the fishes began on me - not all together at first, but singly, swimming by me and snapping at me as they passed.

  ‘After a while they grew bolder and came for me in shoals. I tried to beat them away with my hands, but they were too many. They came from all sides and bit and tore pieces out of my body. It was a long time before they ate any parts of my limbs because I kept moving them. And all the time I was trying to remember it was just a dream - that it must be a dream because I did not die. But it went on - and on - and on. I couldn’t wake up! I still can’t wake. Oh! doctor, open the shutters and let me look at the daylight again! Then I shall see my way back to wakefulness, and this horrible pool and the fishes will fade at last!’

  ‘I cannot have the shutters drawn before tomorrow,’ Eyston answered. ‘You are undergoing very' special pathological treatment which you would not understand. Now I must leave you for a little while, but first I want to place on your finger a ring. You won’t be able to see it in the dark, but you can feel it; and I want you to concentrate all your attention on it until I come back. It will help, because it is something that comes from your dream. Try to ignore the fishes which seem to be attacking you, and think hard about the ring.’

  While speaking, Eyston pressed a catch in the stone of his own ring, which at once divided itself laterally into two thin halves. The upper one he took off, and, conquering an overwhelming sensation of physical sickness, passed it over the flaccid forefinger of the corpse’s right hand.

  ‘Thank you, doctor,’ came the gurgling voice, ‘I will try to forget the fishes - Ugh!’

  Eyston shivered afresh as he saw a snakelike head force wider the struggling lips. Then he closed his eyes and strove intently to visualise the details of his room at the inn, and particularly those of the open suitcase on his bed where reposed a third joint of the strange jewel.

  Raymond Can' was in no very amiable mood on the following morning. He had, for one thing, taken too much whisky overnight and was irritable in spite of a dreamless sleep. He groused at the breakfast, the weather - for an annoying drizzle had now set in - and blamed Eyston for being a late riser.

  ‘And now you've had time to deliberate,’ he concluded, ‘what arc you going to do? I can’t live on that houseboat as things stand, and I don’t feel like moving it and leaving that poor, horrible, earthbound thing to its fate. Can you lay it or exorcise it - or whatever you people call the process - or must I call in the whole Psychic Research Society?’

  Something in the grave regard he encountered quelled the outburst.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Eyston calmly, ‘I can lay it, and in a more material practical manner than you probably expect. All I require is a powerful motor-launch with someone to operate it, a medium-sized dragnet, and your co-operation.’

  ‘But,’ Cary expostulated, the dragging’s been done already! It’s impossible they missed the body. Big as it is, the whole Broad was worked. It took ’em weeks.'

  Eyston raised a commanding hand. ‘You’ve asked my help,’ he said authoritatively, ‘now accept it in my way - and don’t raise objections - or - ’

  ‘Sorry,’ his friend returned. ‘You win. The proprietor has a speedboat. I’ll see about getting it.’

  The innkeeper, a youngish, retired fisherman, not without intelligence, was very willing to offer his boat and his own services as pilot when the intention of his two guests had been explained.

  ‘Mind you, gentlemen,’ was his immediate comment, ‘I don’t think we’ve the least chance of finding the girl’s body after the search that’s already been made, nor do I see the need to use two hundred horse-power for moving the houseboat, but, if we don’t succeed, I’ll only charge you the price of the petrol - and, if we do, why, I’ll just feel proud to have helped.’

  Eyston nodded his thanks. ‘Good,’ he returned with a smile. ‘Then we’ll start at once, and I want you to follow my directions closely. When we get there Mr. Cary and I will board the houseboat and secure it to your craft with towing hawsers. We shall then unlash it from its mooring-posts, and, in the meantime, you must keep your bows pointing to the open water and your engine idling. Watch me over your shoulder, and, as soon as you see my left hand go up, push your throttle wide open and keep flat out for about a hundred yards. You can then decelerate and stop in your own time.’

  ‘Right, sir,’ the landlord replied briefly, and led the way down to his private wharf.

  A few minutes later they were roaring up the dyke at forty knots, twin waves a good eight feet high trailing like wings at the stern.

  ‘There’s one more job for you,’ Eyston shouted in Cary’s ear. ‘When we go aboard I want you to take the dragnet and secure it aft of the houseboat while I’m fixing the towing cable to the opposite end. As soon as that’s done give me the wire, and then hang on to the rail like grim death.’

  At the speed of which the motorboat was capable it was not long before their destination hove in sight, and soon the owner had brought them skillfully alongside.

  They vaulted to the houseboat’s lower deck, and the preparations went forward as Eyston had planned.

  His face looked worn and strained in the watery sunlight as he finally took his position in the cabin doorway awaiting Cary’s signal that the dragnet was fixed. His right hand gripped a door-post with all the strength at his command, and Cary noticed, as he turned to give the all clear, two sections of his friend’s peculiar ring gleaming on the tense, white forefinger.

  ‘Now!’ shouted Eyston, and flung up his free left hand.

  Cary remembered to cling hard to the rail, b
ut, even so, he was not fully prepared for the terrific jerk that followed the tightening of the hawsers. His abdomen was brought into violent contact with the steel bar, and for a few seconds he hung over it completely winded and more than half stunned. But, even in that instant of pain and confusion, above the roar of the speed-boat’s engine, his ears seemed to catch the sound of two heavy thuds in the cabin behind him - the first loud and definite as if caused by the fall of a heavy man, the second ill-defined and somehow, he thought with a shiver, squelchy! ‘Yes,’ he whispered to himself as, still doubled up with pain, he slowly turned from the rail, ‘it sounded like a sack of wet meal falling from - the top bunk.'

  The innkeeper was now slowing his engine, and its exhaust died to a gentle purr. Cary staggered towards the open door and gasped out: ‘Eyston! Are you all right?’ But there was no response.

  It was then that a nauseating stench of decay swept out of the cabin and seemed to strike him like a solid mass. Coming on top of the blow he had received, it was beyond his endurance. He was instantly and violently sick.

  Presently, the landlord’s voice from the now stationary speed-boat penetrated his dulled senses, and he dimly saw him jump the rail and hurry across the deck. He had fallen on hands and knees when the nausea attacked him, and he now rolled over on his back. His halfclosed eyes took in an expression of amazed horror on the man’s face as he halted by the open doorway, and he managed to articulate, ‘Where’s Eyston?’

  ‘I’ll look, sir,’ the other replied shakily. ‘Lie there till you feel better.’ And he walked, with compressed lips, into the cabin. Coming out again after a very short interval and looking nearly as sick as he himself felt, Cary saw him lock the door and put the key in his pocket. He also noticed that he was carrying what looked like a letter.

  ‘Mr. Eyston is dead,’ he announced abruptly, ‘seems to have fallen and broke his neck. No heartbeat. I found this in his hand. It’s addressed to you.’

  ‘I must go and make sure,’ Cary answered, struggling to sit up. ‘Old Eyston dead! I can’t believe it.’