V.
I awakened, alone, in a pool of sunlight that spread across the bed. A warm breeze sailed into the room from where the window had been opened, and I drank in the sweet elixir that was Sesqua Valley’s atmosphere. It was an air that enticed me out of the comfortable bed and into my clothes, out of the house and into woodland. The mountain served as guide, and I walked toward it, deep into the growth of trees and shrubs. Here and there I passed occasional specimens of sculpture, strange works that looked like denizens of macabre dreaming. They were usually quite small and rested on short stone pillars or altars made of wood.
I entered a darker part of the woods, and the path that I followed became narrow and partially overgrown, as if I had found a trail not often trod. The trees grew closer to each other, blocking out all light. At times I imagined that I could detect small and nebulous shapes that followed behind the clustered trees, shapes that made no sound. I have been, with St. John, to many places that have felt haunted – but never had I felt such a spectral sensation as I did in that dark place. It was odd. I no longer felt human; rather, I seemed to be a thing of shadow that drifted through a demesne of audient gloaming. It was a realm that was very aware of my presence, that seemed to harken to my labored breathing.
I scanned the area just ahead of me, the place where the trail came to an abrupt end. I could not at first make out the bulky thing that was definitely not a tree, deformed as some of Sesqua’s trees had been. Gradually I began to see that it was a squat totem some nine feet in height. Something in its shaped seemed disturbingly familiar, and when I stood directly in front of it, I swooned and dropped to my knees. It was in many ways a close replica of St. John’s jadeite statue in the secret room deep beneath our manor-house, but with some few differences. Although the place wherein I knelt was very dark, yet I could discern that the daemon before me was composed of smooth wood that was of a lighter shade than the surrounding trees, of a timber not indigenous to the valley. I touched my hand to the sculpted hoofs, which was one of the aspects with which this image differed with St. John’s, who has given his beast hound-like paws. The memory of my friend overwhelmed me with sudden woe, and thus I parted my lips and softly spoke a ritual in the Naacal tongue that he had taught me from the Necronomicon.
Close behind me, another voice accompanied my chanting. My heart quickened. Yes, in this place of eerie magick, I could conjure forth with alchemy the eidolon of my lost companion. I turned to greet St. John, in whatever form he had chosen to issue forth. But the person near to me was not my friend. “Simon?” I asked, for indeed the fellow looked exactly like the beast of Sesqua Valley, although he wore no hat, and his long hair fell to his shoulders.
“No,” he said, reaching out and taking hold of both my hands. “William Davis Manly, your servant. How clever of you to find this shunned place. How cleverer still for you to know so intimately that rare passage from Alhazred. So, you’re a friend of my elder brother’s.”
I gazed at his hands and saw, as my eyes grew more accustomed to the darkness of the place, that his flesh was of a lighter shade than that of the other children of the valley I had met. But his face was almost identical to that of Simon’s, lacking only the sardonic cruelty that always seemed to gloat in Simon’s eyes. This creature’s eyes were different, too – they were silver-white, like liquid mercury, and they contained an aspect that was utterly other-worldly.
“I’ve come for Simon’s assistance. He visited my friend and me once, three years ago in the winter of 1920. He helped us to locate a tattered copy of the Necronomicon.”
“Ah – you are Christina Sturhman, of England. Yes, he’s spoken of you and St. John. He was quite impressed with what was growing into a choice collection of relics and tomes. But he often complained that you were mere collectors of arcane things, rather than practitioners of the thaumaturgy to which such tomes were devoted. I think he regretted having left that copy of Al-Azif with you. Have you brought it to him now?”
“I destroyed it, with most of the other things in our collection, after St. John’s destruction by the thing we had unconsciously evoked by the stealing of an amulet that is similar in aspect to this totem.”
He looked up at the canine countenance, with its mop of ropy hair and high tapered ears. “She is lovely, isn’t she?”
“She?”
He smiled as he gazed into my eyes. “Most sphinxes are female. I constructed this one of teak that Simon had imported from Burma.”
“Ah! She’s yours. I think your copy is slightly flawed – you’ve given her hoofs instead of paws.”
How queerly he smiled at me. “This is how I saw her, when she came to me in dreaming.” His soft wide hand brushed against my cheek and through my hair. “Something in you reminds me of her.”
I laughed. “My large ears, no doubt!” His smile was kind, so unlike Simon’s sneer. I found myself drawn to him and returned his touch. His long hair was soft and fine. “Well, I should return to town. Simon will have deciphered the insignia I brought to him by now.”
“What insignia is that?” he quietly asked.
“It was on the base of a jade amulet that was a replica of this creature, or something like it. It had been carved from a small piece of jade, in what I can only describe as a kind of Oriental fashion. There was an insignia around the base which we studied by aid of a magnifying lens.”
He tilted his eyes and glanced at his creation. “I should like very much to see such an amulet. I have read of such a thing – it has an ancient and diseased history. It is highly sought by sorcerers.” He chuckled. “You’ve probably drawn Simon to distraction to have told him of this. He’ll be restless until he has it. Or did you destroy it as well?” A chill ran through my flesh, and I shuddered. He saw my distress and leaned closer so as to take me in his arms. “I’m sorry to have aroused unhappy memories. And I am sorry for the destruction of your friend. Come, on your feet. You have wandered into one of my secret places, and I must now escort you out.”
“Do you live here, in this lonesome place?”
“I do, in a sequestered hut nearby. How remarkable of you to have found the path. You are the first mortal to have done so, in my century of existence.”
I stood, but I resisted his attempt to take me from the totem. I stared at the daemon’s canine face, the mouth stretched wide with bestial hunger, at the stretch of what looked like reptilian wings. Yes, she was a nightmarish composite of creatures, and she was magnificent. I could easily have worshipped her with rituals of blood and smoke. I stared, entranced.
William Davis Manly stood suddenly before me, his eyes very bright. He brought his curiously-shaped mouth to my face and kissed my eyes. With that kiss the ghastly enchantment that had seduced me spilled from my brain and out of my eyes. I did not resist as this secret child of Sesqua’s haunted woodland turned me away from his creature and guided me from that secluded spot.
VI.
Simon had left a note at my rooming establishment. I was to meet him at dusk, at some tower in the woods. Marceline would come to fetch me. I bathed and napped, for the events of the past hours had exhausted me emotionally. Strangely, I did not dream, except to fancy that I could hear, just beyond the wall of sleep, small padded footsteps dancing near my cot. A rapping on my chamber door awakened me, and I called from bed for the woman to enter my room. She wore a simple gown of yellow gingham, which complimented her dark skin. Her long red hair was worn loose, and it whirled in the wind as she led me out of the building and into the woods to a tall round tower of brick. As I walked beside her up the small winding steps I took in the scent of her flesh, and thought how like the aether of the valley it smelled, as if both were composed of similar substance.
We reached a spacious circular chamber that was crowded with shelves of books and tables on which more books were heaped among scrolls and manuscripts of various age. Simon sat on a throne in the light of many candles and the shafts on moonlight that spilled through small windows carved into the b
rick wall. With my copy of the queer inscription in his hand, he did not deign to acknowledge our presence for some few minutes. When at last he looked up at me he did not smile.
“I am annoyed that you destroyed that incomplete copy of the Necronomicon that I obtained for you and St. John. The more I think on your destruction of his remarkable occult library, the less inclined I am to assist you. It is the one unpardonable transgression – the wreck of magical tools.”
His condescending tone angered me, and I marched to where he sat. “I had suffered a mental and emotional collapse. My dearest companion had been ripped to death by some foul thing that had haunted us and is now hunting me. I grow weary of your airs, Simon. I have not forgotten the way you treated us as school children when you came to instruct us of arcane lore. Perhaps I was foolish to come to you now. You have no interest in anyone but yourself. Give me my inscription and I shall leave.”
He pointed a tapered finger to a stone bench near me. “You will sit there and stop behaving like an infantile bore.” He looked at Marceline and grinned. “Great Yuggoth, the creature has gumption! Perhaps that is why she has escaped daemonic destruction as of yet.” He studied me with mocking eyes as I stood my ground.
“Perhaps,” Marceline answered, and the beasts exchanged a look, as if sharing some secret from which I was excluded. I turned to leave, but the woman’s grip on my arm was like a vice. “Do sit down, Christina. We’ve many questions to ask you, and some information to offer. Isn’t that what you came to the valley for – answers to your enigma?”
The beast of Sesqua Valley rose from his throne and guiding me onto the stone bench, sitting beside me. “You will tell me of the amulet, and of the place where you located it. I have read of this green jade toy in Alhazred, where it is linked to the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia. Alhazred tells that it has oft been buried with dead sorcerers, yet finds itself inevitably once more within a wizard’s hand. I shall be its final procurer. But how did St. John know where to locate it? Al Azif tells no such knowledge.”
My weird laughter echoed in the enclosed space. “He knew it from me, fool. The story of its final owner is family legend. I supplied St. John with the codex in which my ancestors recorded the amulet’s legend and its link with our antecessors. Do you imagine that there was no foundation of interest in arcane lore that led me to my friend? It wasn’t mere fate that brought us together – I sought him out, hungry for his joy of that which was unusual, morbid and forbidden. Pah, this prosaic world! With his help, I was led to a delicious underworld, to the enigmas of the Symbolists and the ecstasies of the Pre-Raphaelites. But mostly it was him – his sense of adventurous expectancy, the fever that burned in his eyes when we unearthed some foul new thing. And so I supplied the codex, not mentioning that it was a family heirloom. He did not seem to notice that the name of the book’s scribe was similar to my own, although we radically altered its spelling once we settled in Great Britain.”
The beast’s eyes smolder like liquid zinc oxide. “And where is this family heirloom, my child? This codex?”
Oh, my laughter was delicious. “Destroyed, with all of the rest. What good was any of it without my friend? But hark, beast, I’ll whisper the name of the crumbling church wherein the Dutch churchyard may be found. Then you can go seek your treasure, and may it damn you as it has condemned me.” I pressed my mouth against his soft large ear and heaved a Holland name, and then I pushed him roughly from me so that he slipped from the bench and fell onto the round wooden floor. From somewhere atop the twin-peaked mountain, things wailed to lunar light. And from some other distant place I heard another sound, like unto the baying of a gigantic hound.
Marceline reached for me as I stood, and I realized that I was weeping. “Fie, wretch, don’t touch me. I have no more need of thee and thine. I have lost the one soul I needed in my life. St. John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why!” I swept from them, raced down the winding steps and plunged into moonlight. I hissed at trees, and they moved as if in fear so that I could bathe more fully in the lunatic light. I saw the horde of bats that were silhouetted against that radiant globe, the moon. I beheld the nebulous shape that followed that chittering throng, the vague cloudy thing silhouetted against lunar phosphorescence. Beneath my mortal foot I could feel a throbbing pulse that emanated from some dungeon beneath the sod where dwelt the cursed valley’s heart. My human hands stretched to the sky and made strange signals to the nimbus shape that fell from heaven, onto me, and that covered my being like a gauze of smog.
My only friend was dead. I remembered his destruction, the taste of rent flesh and spilled blood. It was the thing of ancestry that we had released when we opened a wizard’s tomb in a neglected Holland churchyard, a wizard of mine own lineage. Oh, we had lived for the pleasures of horror, those very gratifications that had moved St. John to ecstasy! I shall know such ecstasy again. Come, hither, all ye shadow of ancestral memory. Sink into the tissue of my transmigrated flesh. Help me stretch and shape and rise — a new entity, a creature of birthright.
I laughed at the tiny creatures that rushed out of the stone tower and praised me with their silver eyes. I stretched my wings and snapped my mammoth jaws as the fellow took out his flute and played a song in honor of my ghastliness. I watched as the woman in her gown of yellow gingham writhed in danse before me. The ground shook beneath my transformed feet as the titanic white mountain moved so as to stretch its peaks, as if in genuflection to my monstrosity. I stretched my reptilian wings and cackled with pleasure. From the corners of my eyes I espied the small shapeless gnomes that scuttled from behind the trees and danced about me on their tiny paws.
I saw it billow from behind the trees – a thick mauve mist. It was an effluvium that pulsed in time to the beating of Sesqua Valley’s witchery. I sucked in the sweet enchanted air as the thick mist moved through the trees, toward me. Within that sentient haze I saw another form. He stepped into the moonlight, the child of valley shadow who, I realized, could be a new-found friend, a real companion such as I had lost with the demise of St. John. William Davis Manly raised his hand to the moon and made to that yellow orb an elder sign. He opened his mouth and spoke words to me in a Dutch dialect, and I knew that it was a translation of the inscription that had been etched around the base of a small jade amulet. My black eyes raised to the majestic moon. My mouth stretched with baying as the poet of Sesqua’s shadowland kissed my cloven hoof.
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Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire is a writer of horror fiction based in Seattle, Washington. His adopted middle name derives from the story of the same title by Edgar Allan Poe. Strongly influenced by the works of H. P. Lovecraft, many of Pugmire’s stories directly reference “Lovecraftian” elements (such as Yog-Sothoth of the Cthulhu Mythos). Pugmire’s major original contribution to the Cthulhu Mythos is the Sesqua Valley, a fictional location in the Pacific Northwest of the United States that serves as the primary locale for much of his fiction. According to his official biography, his “goal as an author is to dwell forevermore within Lovecraft’s titan shadow.” Pugmire is a self-proclaimed eccentric recluse as well as “the Queen of Eldritch Horror.” His stories have appeared in major horror anthologies, and collections of his fiction and poetry have appeared under small press imprints such as Necropolitan Press, Mythos Books, Delirium Books, and Hippocampus Press.
Visit W.H. Pugmire’s page at Amazon.com to buy his books!
Story art by mimulux.
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NOTE: Images contained in this Lovecraft eZine are Copyright ©2006-2012 art-by-mimulux. All rights reserved. All the images contained in this Lovecraft eZine may not be reproduced, copied, edited, published, transmitted, borrowed, duplicated, printed, downloaded, or uploaded in any way without my express written permission. These images do not belong to the public domain. All stories in Lovecraft eZine may not be reproduced, copied, edited, published, transmitted, borrowed, duplicated, printed, downloaded
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A Different Morecambe
by Simon Kurt Unsworth
Huw’s hangover was pulsing.
It had been a late night; another long talk with Ro about their future, another discussion about fault and no-fault, blame and responsibility. Another too-large quantity of wine gone and another hangover sweating itself out through his pores. But, illness or not, Huw had promised Lennie a morning trip to Morecambe and Lennie would not be denied and so to Morecambe they were going.
Every bump in the road sent queasy ripples around Huw’s stomach and made the blood slither in his ears. Even with the car window open the cold autumn air, just picking up the first scents of the sea and tightening his scalp, refused to help his head to clear. When Lennie spoke he missed it at first.
“Pardon?” he asked, not liking the way his voice wavered as it emerged and wondering if Lennie could tell how rough both he and Ro had felt that morning when he burst into their bedroom with a three year old’s wild, joyful abandon. Or, worse, whether he could tell how rough Huw still felt.
“I don’t want to go to this Morecambe. I want to go to a different Morecambe.”
Momentarily, Huw was stumped. His brain, still coasting on the sour after-effects of alcohol and a miserable, late night, refused to process what his son was saying to him. “A different Morecambe?” he repeated, looking at Lennie in the rearview mirror. The car jolted again and Huw swallowed down an acidic, burning throat of dead wine. Just visible at edge of the reflection in the mirror, his son stared solemnly at him and said again, “I want to go to a different Morecambe.”
“Well,” said Huw, “there’s only this Morecambe to go to, Lennie. You like Morecambe, don’t you?”
“Yes. I just want to go to a different one today.”
Huw didn’t respond immediately. Lennie, named after his paternal grandfather, shared more with the old man than just his name; they were both given to flights of fancy and, rather more annoyingly, tantrums when they didn’t get their way. This bore the hallmarks of a tantrum’s beginning, and Huw wasn’t sure he could cope with a full-on Lennie rage now.
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