The Strange Dark One

by W. H. Pugmire

  The wailing of the pipes was very close. Lowering her eyes, she saw the flutist at her foot. She felt his storm of song push as tendrils into her mouth, her cunt. Moaning like some deranged strumpet, she reached for the sleek black instrument, wrapped her hungry hand around it and pushed it deep inside.

  III.

  He leaned against a tree in Copp’s Hill Burying Ground and looked out to Boston Harbor. The old city, and especially this portion of it, gave him peace of mind. Here he could taste the beloved past, of which he was intimately a part. He remembered a summer in 1923 when he had been entertained in the secret North End studio of a notorious Boston artist; and he recalled his bitter disappointment, a few years later, when he had returned to find the studio and even the alley in which the crumbling old house had stood demolished. Simon sucked in the New England air, and as he sniffed he could detect an odor of the tunnels beneath this plot of cemetery sod -- and the things that slept within those tunnels. This was still a realm of secrets. He turned to watch the woman who followed the path to where he stood and took in her amazing beauty. The coffee-colored skin was flawless, and the long red hair swayed in late-afternoon wind. He noticed the look of inexplicable confusion in her remarkable eyes, and sensed that beneath her cool exterior she was a thing of chaos incarnate. Her gait was unsteady, and he knew that she had been trying to calm herself with wine. She held a burlap bag to her chest

  “Are you a devil out to claim my soul?”

  “Tosh, something far more intoxicating has claimed thee. Tell me your dream.” He listened intently as she spoke of her vision.

  It was as he suspected it would be; but there was something she wasn’t telling him, something that had completely bewildered her. The vitreous luster of her jadeite eyes was not dimmed by her slight inebriation, and he peered into those eyes as if by doing so he could unlock her secret. Seeming to comprehend his tactic, she clutched the bag closer to her breasts. “And what, my dear Charmian, is in your sack of jute?” She did not protest as he reached into it and pulled out the long and narrow teakwood box that had intrigued him when first he saw it in her apartment. It was slightly heavier now. Opening it, he gasped at the beauty of the black flute that lay within.

  “Perhaps you can explain, Mr. Trickster, how I came to find that in my hand when I awakened from diabolic dreaming. Were you in my room? Did you plant that in my grasp after hypnotizing me with whatever power it is that you possess?”

  “Nay, child. This exquisite wonder is none of mine.” Playfully, he smiled. “Not yet.”

  “Then how else could I have it? What, I pulled it from my dream?” Crazily, Simon smiled, and his alabaster eyes flashed in the growing darkness of descending twilight.

  “The sky begins to change, and sunless day goes down over the waste of water, if I may paraphrase Byron. And you, Charmian, are changing, becoming heir of your ancestry. You’re discovering that the world of dream is indeed a demesne of thy possession. You would have found it on your own, eventually, as I suspect your granddame did before you; but I am here to assist delicious fate. I’ll claim this piece of eldritch phantasy, this other-worldly recorder, as my reward.” He returned the flute to its teakwood box and, taking her trembling hand, guided her from the place of death. They found the gallery that housed her exhibition locked, and Simon winked at her as he produced a key-ring and slipped a thin implement into the lock, which released. Solemnly, the couple wandered to the spacious room that housed her work, and Simon stopped to touch the glyphs on one of the papier-mâché pillars. Charmian gasped when he turned to glance at her, for his eyes gleamed with weird luster, and his face seemed to have subtly changed, appearing more bestial than before. He walked to her and ran his large hands through her soft hair, and then he bent to kiss the charm at her throat.

  “What are you, Simon Williams?”

  “I am the spawn of shadow, and I exist in a realm between dreaming and cumbersome ‘reality’. I am converse with the between-realms, and I have the art with which those thresholds dissolve, allowing passage. Your mortal kind has known of these things for all your numbered centuries, but you dismiss them as phantasy and myth. The select few, such as you and your matrons, have awakened deep pockets of memory with ritual and ancestry. Your art has been clumsy and haphazard. I will make it clean and keen.”

  Raising his hand to the painted sky scene, Simon made the Voorish Sign. Softly, he uttered the name of threshold. “Yog-Sothoth.” Falling to his knees, he placed the teakwood casket on the floor, opened it and took from it the otherworldly flute. He placed the thing at his inhuman mouth. Hearing the song that issued from that sleek black instrument, Charmian fell into dreaming. Smoothly, she removed her clothing and stepped close to the kneeling figure, before which she swayed. The beast of Sesqua Valley snuffled at her moist genitals as his wide mouth continued to push air into the daemon-flute. The woman’s hot hands fondled her breasts as she looked above her, at the red sky and its obsidian stars. She heard the buzzing wind that accompanied the falling of the stars, those black gems that splintered into grains of ancient desert sand. She followed the flow of drifting sand to the figures who bowed before the Lord of Crawling Chaos, those sneering crocs that turned to greet her.

  Simon Gregory Williams watched as the antediluvian storm thickened with darkness, into which the figures were swallowed. He gasped as that blackness fractured and melted from view. All dreaming died, and he was alone in the spacious room. But how joyous he was to see that the realm of dream had not claimed the thing that he still held in sallow hand. Smiling, he placed the cosmic flute to his mouth and played a paean to a Faceless God.

  To See Beyond

  I.

  The writer laid down his pen and glanced over the handwriting on the pages spread before him. His script was large and curved, easily deciphered. He traced with his finger the last word on the final page: finis. He should have felt elated, but Sebastian Grimm merely stared with unemotional eyes at the manuscript of his first and only novel. The real ending to the story was not one that would be written down by him; it would be recorded in some small space in the next day’s newspaper, how the horror writer had been found dead in his library with a single bullet in his head and a revolver in his hand. Well, he thought, the sensational nature of his death would certainly bring attention to his novel. Who knows, perhaps in death he would find the success that had eluded him in life.

  Sebastian reached to the left side of the desk and pushed the queer face that had been carved into the wood. A panel opened, revealing a small drawer; and he hesitated for a moment, dreading the task before him, not wanting to touch the spectacles in the drawer, yet knowing that he could not resist their allure. Finally, he reached into the drawer and pulled out the spectacles, shuddering at the touch of their metal frames. He stared at the word that had been inscribed upon the bridge of the spectacles: “Veritas.” It was a word that had started him on a journey, and how strange, to find himself moving through what felt like one of his weird tales. He wanted to learn the secret history of Dirk Van Prinn, the warlock who had fashioned the spectral spectacles. He had learned of another dark sorcerer, Ludwig Prinn, who had authored the alchemical De Vermis Mysteriis in 1540 while imprisoned by the Roman Inquisition on charges of sorcery; but Grimm could not find any familial connection between the two warlocks. He had located, easily, the crumbling residence wherein Dirk Van Prinn had worked his magick, but the library was nought but books that had crumbled into dust at the touch of human hand.

  Grimm could discover nothing solid except for the desk in which Van Prinn had sequestered his satanic spectacles, and so he had hired a lad to help him steal the solid mahogany antique and take it to his home, and it was on this desk that Sebastian Grimm had found, somehow, the inner mental discipline with which to complete his one and only novel. His imagination worked furiously as he leaned against the ancient wood and pressed his pen to paper; he had fancied that Van Prinn had also leaned against the desk as he scribbled his arcane lore so many d
ecades ago. That lore had been lost or destroyed, and all that remained of Van Prinn’s sorcery were the glasses that Sebastian held, the spectacles with their thin lenses of yellow glass and little designs in the temples that teased the brain with the suggestive shape of their engravings. Opening the metal frames, Sebastian Grimm put on the spectacles with shaky hands. He had worn them but once before, and had forgotten the initial sensation of pain behind his eyes, as if an unused portion of his brain had been violently awakened. Everything before him seemed to flee from sight, and then slowly crept back in altered form. Grimm glanced down at the last page of his manuscript and saw its final word: finis. Yes, this was the end. A chill ran down his spine as he reached for the revolver that sat upon the desk, the metal of which was so horridly frigid to the touch. His fingers raised the tip of the barrel to one of the lenses as the author sought the courage needed to pull the trigger.

  “That won’t be required, Grimm,” spoke a soft voice near his ear. A large hand wrapped its talons around the revolver’s barrel. “It would be a crime to destroy those so amusing spectacles. Here, let me take them from your face. My, what expressions swim within your wide eyes! How wonderful a thing is fear. It teaches us so many new things, don’t you find? Ah! Is that the skull that Van Prinn used to hold his goose-quill pen? Yes, I see the top is bored. Here, let’s rest the bridge of these cheaters

  over the gap where once this fellow wore a nose. Will it stay? Charming.”

  Grimm watched the solid back of the figure who leaned past him to the skull on top of the antique desk, studying the old-fashioned jacket and flat round hat that covered a large head. When the head turned to face him, the candle burning in its sconce on a far wall would not reveal the features of the stranger’s face. The hat’s rim had been pulled down so that the eyes were almost covered – but there was something in those eyes that was caught by candlelight, a pale silvery shimmer. How queerly the shadows of the dusky room played upon the stranger’s face, especially the mouth. Grimm watched those lips curl into a diabolic grin. He watched the nostrils sniff the wood with which the antique desk had been composed.

  “How clever of you to locate old Van Prinn’s escritoire! Can you smell it – the ink of antique alchemy that has spilt into the grain of this fine wood, as that enchanting death’s head looked out while wearing its cynical grin? What delicious madness! Ah – and there is the secret panel in which the perverse old thing hid those implements of spectral amber glass, eyeglasses that he had fashioned with his own hand so as to learn an inner truth.”

  The strange man smiled and, finding a matchbox, lit the candle that tilted in its holder on the desk. The flare of tiny flame revealed the gentleman’s outlandish face, and Sebastian Grimm knew what it was to be afraid. “But how remiss of me not to introduce myself. Simon Gregory Williams, of Sesqua Valley. You see, I have many connections, and I learned from some friends of your investigation into the history of Dirk Van Prinn. I suspected that you had discovered the legend of the spectacles, and I noticed that those of your letters I was shown were postmarked from the same city from which Van Prinn wrote to me – so many decades ago. I imagined, from the account of his self-destruction, that he had also destroyed those spectacles – and how happy I am to find myself mistaken. But why on earth were you prepared to destroy them? Because they revealed to you your paltry human worthlessness? Really, did you need a pair of haunted eyeglasses to tell you that? One need merely look around at the folly of your human race. Look at the inane manner with which you thought to destroy those spectacles. Your unsteady hand may have moved as, in delirium, you squeezed the trigger, raising the revolver so that the bullet missed your eye and pierced your little brain. Or perhaps you would have shattered but one of the lenses – leaving the other intact and thus arousing curiosity as to why you would do something so outlandish as to shoot yourself while wearing them.”

  “No one would have realized their purpose,” Grimm finally whispered.

  “Ah, you see,” said the other, laughing. “There is your stupidity fully revealed. One need merely peruse these final pages of your novel, which I’ve been scanning as we speak, to see their connection with the spectacles – for here you tell a little of their tale, so suggestively. Really, Grimm, you’re not very bright. No matter, you’ve been clever enough to find this antique bureau with its secret compartment. It would never have occurred to me that Van Prinn constructed this desk, or had it made for him, so as to conceal his fabulous goggles. And now, let us endeavor to locate the other pair.”

  Grimm’s eyes grew wide. “What?”

  Simon Gregory Williams shrugged. “It’s mere supposition – but I think I’m right, from poring over my correspondence with Van Prinn after your own enquiries aroused my curiosity. How does this work, the mechanism that reveals the secret compartment?”

  The writer stood and stepped beside the desk, closed the panel of the compartment and stood a little ways away from the desk. “You see that gargoyle face that is larger than the others, within the fancy design of scrollwork? You push it, and it triggers the mechanism that opens the drawer – like so.” He touched his fingers to the chiseled face, which sank inward to the pressure of his hand. The compartment’s door swung out.

  Simon nodded. “Very clever. But, look, there is no larger face on this other side. I know that I am not mistaken about a second pair. Move aside, let me examine that hiding place.” The strange one

  fell to his knees beside the desk and gazed at the compartment, and then he leaned closer to the desk and inhaled through wide nostrils. “Can you sense it – the residue of alchemy? What a delicious scent! Why do wizards destroy themselves? It makes no sense. We have the power to peer into the unseen realm, the immundane dimension – and our rapt souls should relish such a sight! Madness borne of such revelation – that I can understand; but to extinguish oneself because one has glanced into the dark glass of space and time and seen unholy sight! It’s too absurd.”

  Sebastian could smell something indeed; but it seemed to be a scent that emanated from Williams himself, a kind of earthy sweetness. He watched as the stranger moved his tapered fingers within the hidden compartment, studying again the old-fashioned garb with which the man was attired. The clothes looked like they had been stage props for a production set thirty years ago. It struck him as very queer, the movements of this odd fellow – like the movements of some bestial thing that was pretending to be human. A snapping sound came from within the compartment, and Williams softly laughed. Carefully, he pried loose the lower piece of wood, which proved to be a false bottom. Sebastian watched excitedly as Simon handed him the small layer of wood, reached once more into the compartment and brought forth an object wrapped in foolscap. With deliberate calmness, Simon unwrapped the old paper and let it drop onto the wooden surface. As he held up the second pair of spectacles, the candle on the desk dimmed in luster.

  “Isn’t it wonderful, Grimm, the way that dark magick can debauch natural reality? I’ve never liked the word ‘supernatural,’ for alchemy isn’t a higher order of nature; it’s a deeper instinct, hatched in darkness. It lies beneath the mortal world, hidden in realms of darkness and of dreams. And these spectacles with their dark lenses are a product of it – far more so than the other pair.” He stood and held the glasses near Sebastian’s face. “You see, the frames are composed of a similar kind of metal, but the lenses are black as pitch. What kind of realm could one possibly view with glass that is so opaque?

  The answer, of course, has been delicately inscribed across the bridge – ‘Arcanum’ – the hidden world, a world of tantalizing mystery. Ludwig Prinn scribbled of such a world in his hysterical De Vermis Mysteriis – and Van Prinn fashioned these so as to peer into that occult realm. I knew I was right!”

  Sebastian picked up the large sheet of foolscap from where it lay on the desk, and Simon glanced at it briefly. “Can you read Latin, Grimm? No, I thought not. Human education is so paltry in this neoteric age. The diagram is from the 1809 edit
ion of The Mysteries of the Worm, which suggests that Van Prinn was certainly curious about some ancestral ties to the Flemish warlock. Fascinating. The diagram is from the chapter on Divination – but that doesn’t explain where Van Prinn located the formulae with which to compose the glass of his magnificent lenses. I suspect he found it in his dreams. You should be able to appreciate that, Grimm – isn’t that where you located the ideas that were spun into your unpopular collection of weird fiction? Sad about your little book – we rather enjoyed it.”

  The writer frowned. “We?”

  “We children of the vale. I know that means nothing to you now, but things are about to change for you. I have made arrangements. Shall we go?”

  II.

  An elderly gentleman sat in his dusky room by a small window, through which he gazed at the silent surrounding woodland and the arched peaks of the white mountain. A sliver of gentle moon hanged in moody sky, and the fellow watched the clouds that congregated and swarmed above the trees that bent to gathering tempest. The old man reached for the tea cup and sipped its steaming liquid, a tea composed of the seeds of poppy that had been cultivated by a resident warlock; and he sighed as the brew did its work and soothed his aching throat. Setting down the cup, he took up his violin and positioned it, and then he began to hum a quiet tune, weaving music into the song of surging storm. The stars that were bold enough to pierce through heaven’s gathered darkness shimmered their little light on the gentleman’s watery eyes as his lips parted and he began to sing an odd and ancient chant in his high cracked voice, accompanying himself on the violin. It rose, his enchanted noise, toward Mount Selta, stirring its denizens, they who raised their snouts as accolade. But then there was another sound, blending its sinister force with the old man’s music, tainting it. This other vibration issued from a flute – black and lean and polished – that was pressed to the lips of an inhuman mouth.