by Joshi, S. T
“I’ll give you a hundred for your friend,” Bartholomew Parrish brayed, interrupting our commiseration with his usual patrician bluster, to the brutish delight of his hooting yahoo chorus of sculling chums.
“Mr. Balfour is not for sale,” I retorted.
“I wasn’t talking to you, Lennox.” Turning to my friend, Parrish pressed his idiotic jape too far by producing a billfold and pinching my shoulder like a greedy stockman. “I don’t fancy such a stringy specimen. Something corn-fed and country-dumb for my table. How much’ll you take for him?”
Augustus Balfour said nothing, but only leered at me like a prize calf.
Perhaps taking me for a soft touch because I came from the Territories, Augustus had entrusted me with the secret of his true name and heritage, a scandalized local line about which even I had heard many wild, sordid stories. With his eerily fuliginous, close-set eyes, scalpel nose, and fine complexion the color of sour milk, Augustus easily passed for a scion of fugitive French aristocracy, but I could not suppress a chill as he looked me over, for he was, in fact, an Odum—the great-grandson of Ichabod Odum, the infamous whaler and pirate whose name is a local curse that demands spit at the imprudent speaker’s feet, from Dunwich to the Innsmouth shore.
Bart Parrish’s father owned half the mills on the Miskatonic, and Bart had bragged that his father would arrange an “accident” to supply his and his cronies’ test materials, but he liked to throw his weighted wallet around. If he and his crass ilk were not so frightened of Augustus, I don’t know if I would have become so close to my friend, and so trusted him with my life.
Finally, he answered. “Flesh is priceless, my dear Mr. Parrish. Even worms pay dearly for it. How foolish of you to buy him from me now, when I might have yours for free, on Monday?”
Parrish stormed off with his lackeys in tow. Augustus called after him, “Give my regards to your father!”
* * *
And so, on a balmy June night in 18—, Augustus and I, accompanied by Linus Keebler, another unpopular student whom Augustus had taken under his wing, set out to rob graves.
My heart is heavy with the memory of those days, but we were blinded to the morbid and criminal nature of our quest by our noble ideals and boyish camaraderie, and hardened to it by the gallows humor that every student of medicine must assume. My own zeal to learn the forbidden secrets of the human body were not so fanatical as my friend’s, but I was no less adamantine in my resolve to become a doctor.
When I was only twelve, an outbreak of cholera decimated my town, killing my mother and leaving my father unfit for work. He was only one of many who sought respite in patent medicines of the sort sold by traveling quacks in the Territories, and he died sicker than the ones laid low by the bad water. My tuition at a series of boarding schools, and then at Miskatonic, was paid for by the good people of our town, a gesture of their dedication to protect their communities from the twofold threats of disease and snake oil that killed rather than cured. To return the good faith of the town that had taken me into its bosom when my home was rent asunder, I would rob graves, and worse. To save the living, I truly believed, there was no sin in disturbing the dead.
While our fellow students had fanned out to Kingsport, Dunwich, and elsewhere outside Essex County, in search of materials no one would recognize, Augustus had insisted on going to the potter’s field at the edge of the cemetery at Sentinel Hill, where Arkham’s working poor and the unaffiliated country folk were buried.
We saw the lamps and torches of a sizeable brigade of concerned citizens gathered at the gates, and prudently ambled round to the back. Climbing a willow tree just outside the wrought-iron fence, we scaled its drooping branches and dropped our rude tools on hallowed ground.
Keebler had to be hushed constantly, for his nerves made him burst into hymns in his stuttering, soapy voice. A lily-livered parson’s son from some New Hampshire burg that made Arkham look like Paris, Keebler was useful to Augustus because he agreed to finish any irksome assignment that Augustus tired of completing. Tonight, he carried all our tools.
From somewhere deep in the cemetery’s remotest precincts, we heard the braying laughter of Bart Parrish and the sculling crew. Parrish must have tendered a bribe that soothed the vigilantes’ outraged piety, and he was making a garden party of it.
As Augustus had scouted the cemetery and seemed to know its intimate workings, we deferred to his authority. The worn wooden markers around us were antique, the only legible carvings on them merely noting dates decades gone by. He assured us, however, that the gravediggers still used these rows, merely opening up old plots and dumping the anonymous departed into the holes, which were ever found to be vacant—and not always, he added with a wink, due to rapacious medical students.
“The earth under Arkham is as restless as the sea,” he said. “It sucks the interred coffins down into itself with the same glacial vigor that constantly thrusts stones up out of the uneasy soil of farmers’ fields.”
At some length we selected a likely plot, which we found quite yielding to our shovels, as it was recently turned. Linus and I took our turns first while Augustus stood lookout, puffing his perverse pipe carved from the bones of some unlikely sea creature.
The overripe summer air was still and feverish with damp, and even the antiseptic-soaked handkerchiefs over our mouths could not stifle the stench rising from the fetid earth. By the sickly silver light of the stars and the waxing gibbous moon, we began our ghastly work.
Though Linus Keebler proved a less than ideal partner, spending more of his breath on his gusty hymns than digging, we succeeded in half an hour in discovering the lid of a plain pine box, four feet beneath the surface. After winning a coin toss, I climbed out to make room for Linus, offering him a short iron prybar to do the honors. I offered a pointed suggestion to Augustus that we might conclude our business quicker, if he were to begin disinterring the next grave. To my surprise, he offered no dissembling, but took up a shovel and set to on the grave beside the one we’d excavated.
Just then, Keebler succeeded in prying the last nails from the coffin’s lid and, with his boots dug into the crumbling walls of the gaping grave, wrenched open the door of his fate.
“Good lord above, Balfour!” Keebler moaned, as loudly as his exhausted lungs could bear. “Someone’s beaten us to it!”
I shone my bull’s-eye lantern into the grave and confirmed his breathless verdict. The coffin was indeed empty. In fact, it appeared to have no bottom at all. The ray of light pouring into the hole beneath Keebler’s feet went down into pure darkness.
The floor of the coffin had rotted away, I told myself; but the evidence spoke plainly of something having burrowed into the fresh pine box from underneath and removed its occupant in some gruesome inverse mimicry of what we ourselves were about. I reached for Keebler’s hand to pull him out of the hole a moment before he himself recognized his precarious position. But I was too late.
Like a canoe in rough water, the coffin subsided in the hole. Keebler lost his footing, grabbing for the turf around the grave to keep from falling into the pit. His chin rested on the edge of the grave for just a moment, his eyes bulging against his spectacles, his red, bulbous face a perfect mask of terror. He screamed so high and so loudly that I could not at first make out any words, but through his pain and breathless fear he tried to tell us, “It’s got me! Help me, boys, the devil’s got me!”
Augustus had said he was a poor hand with a shovel, and we should have taken him at his word. Startled by the sound of my shout for help, Augustus threw out his shovel, and poor Linus caught it. Unfortunately, as his hands were engaged in clinging to the turf, he had the bad luck to catch it with his mouth. The blunt blade widened his screaming mouth past his ears and cut his unlucky head halfway off.
I could not summon words to express my shock, but only turned to cast a baleful eye on my reckless colleague, who returned my accusatory glare with a sanguine shrug.
“Well, I suppose one of us
can stop digging,” he said.
Linus Keebler’s corpse sank into the bottomless grave. In the creeping silence, we both heard the unmistakable sound of something in the grave pawing at the earth and the ragged hole in the coffin, in order to drag our ill-starred colleague down into the earth.
At last, Augustus sprang into something resembling alertness. Leaping to the edge and taking Keebler’s corpse by the collar, he shrieked, “Grab him, before they do!”
“Who in hell are they?”
A grisly game of tug-of-war ensued, and for what seemed like forever, we thought we were winning. With Keebler’s arms in mine and Augustus hauling on his shirt, we had nearly dragged our colleague’s remains out of the hole, when the moonlight afforded me a glimpse of our rival.
It had the snarling face of a frightful hound, with a protruding muzzle caked in grave-mold and black, coagulated blood, but it was no simple beast. Those lambent yellow eyes betrayed an unfathomable cunning, while the taloned forelimbs that ripped and tore at our disputed prize were all too much like the arms of a man, though rippling with iron muscle and terminating in crude, bestial paws.
I freely admit that, when our rival bared its fangs like ten-penny nails and let loose a gibbering cry such as the coyotes of the desert plains make, I lost my nerve. Any devotion I might have had to my colleague’s remains, or to the salvation of mankind through medicine, was rudely overrun by love of my own yellow skin.
I let go of Keebler’s arms, but Augustus acted without hesitation … indeed, with such presence of wit that I would only later come to wonder how much, if any, of our misfortunes were not minutely plotted points of some elaborate strategy.
Like a veteran hangman, Augustus threw a knotted noose of rope round the neck of the monster and hauled on it brutally, choking off its infernal caterwauling but destabilizing the coffin upon which the scavenger stood.
In the blink of an eye, both our deceased friend and the creature had vanished down the hole. The rope raced through Augustus’s burning hands, whipping him off balance. When I sought to reach out and catch him, I only entangled our limbs and added my own weight to the chain of fools plummeting into the yawning mouth of the nameless grave.
We fell in a screaming, battling tangle and landed in an insensate pile. When I reclaimed such of my senses as to take stock of our surroundings, I found Augustus already in command of the situation.
We lay on the floor of a tunnel like a mineshaft, but the prospectors here were not hungry for gold. Above our heads, the root-choked roof of the tunnel was pocked with vertical shafts that terminated in the broken coffins of the nameless dead of Arkham. Hardly the final resting place the townsfolk pretended, the graveyard was but the portal to a hideous netherworld, and death but a feast for life, in a grotesque parody of the natural order, above.
The repulsive grave-dweller lay prone in canine submission before Augustus, who kept the rope wrapped in one fist and a revolver in the other.
A pitiful meeping came from the creature’s slavering jaws, but Augustus only tightened the noose. “Take me to the one who knows,” he repeatedly demanded, in between fits of guttural growling, which the monster seemed to understand, and to which it replied in kind.
Presently, the cowering creature relented and crept off down the tunnel, with Augustus holding its leash. At a loss, I attempted to take up the inert form of our colleague.
“Leave him,” Augustus snapped. “We’re after bigger game.”
“Off to where?” I demanded. “We’ve got to climb out the way we came. Mr. Keebler can’t be left here to the tender mercies of these—”
“Ghouls, Mr. Lennox.” Augustus followed his tethered monstrosity, lecturing all the while, as if on a bit of trivia about pygmies in darkest Africa. “That is what they are called, but have a care you don’t judge them too puritanically. If all men are brothers, then these are our unacknowledged cousins. Their nature might seem unsavory to you, but they only feed on that which men offer them. Indeed, in our dim past, the origin of burial rites must lie in some kind of pact with the ghouls … but even d’Erlette did not speak to it, in the expurgated version. It matters not, for we’re bound to find the truth at its wellspring.”
All my pleas, commands, and threats went unheeded. In his own time, he explained what he thought would bind me to this mad misadventure, and I—as much bewitched by the promise of wisdom as I was unhinged by the shocking twists of fate that had brought us to a subterranean highway beneath the graveyard—followed, as meekly as the subdued corpse-eater on Augustus Balfour’s leash.
“But d’Erlette was most forceful about one thing, Lennox,” he went on. “Ghouls do not age. Steeped in filth, yet they are immune to disease. Except by starvation or extreme violence, they don’t die.”
He turned to look me in the eye. “Think about that for a moment, Lennox. These eaters of death are immortal.”
“If it’s eating the flesh of the dead that makes them so, then let the devil have them!” I replied, nauseated by his manifest eagerness.
Augustus shook his head and let the straining tomb-hound drag us down the charnel path. “Mere cannibalism does not make one a ghoul,” he chided, “any more than having fleas makes one a dog. But they have other properties—the knack for replacing lost limbs and organs, for resisting plague and bacterial infection—that it would be pure stupidity to ignore. No, to leave such revelations unturned would condemn millions to unnecessary death. It would, then, also be cowardly and evil, would it not?”
Our descent had taken us beneath the rust-red clay of the hill, and deep into the limestone bed of the Miskatonic river valley. Water seeped from groaning fissures in the walls, but we had left the graveyard far behind—or above—us.
I asked Augustus why we did not return with our captive, to dissect him at our leisure. I had no scruples about executing such vermin, made all the more blasphemous by its bedeviling kinship to humankind. But his answer was so cryptic as to stifle all further attempts at conversation, for no matter how edifying I might find the revelations of the world beneath the graveyard, I was traveling alone with a madman.
“We would cut quite a spectacle, trying to subdue this poor beast long enough to vivisect him in the operating theater. Aldwych would expel us, if he didn’t suffer a stroke first. But this one knows nothing. There are deeper secrets, of which the Cultes des Goules treats in oblique riddles, but which are kept in a cache of obsidian tablets by the One Who Knows. The Judge of the Dead, grandsire of ghouls, touched by the Unbegotten One, ha! See how it cowers in fear I’ll speak the name. But you’ll take us to him, won’t you?”
I would have turned and found my own way back, but we had passed so many branches in that labyrinthine warren that I despaired of returning alone. Every intersecting tunnel seemed to glitter with constellations of yellow eyes, and always at our heels was the diabolical din of baying dogs—though their chaotic barking seemed to strive to imitate Keebler’s woefully off-key rendition of “Shall We Gather in the Garden.”
Perhaps Augustus hoped to win my sundered confidence with his lectures. I had no knowledge of, and even less use for, the perverse royalist naturalism of the Old World, and told him so. But Augustus only cackled, “Old World! There is nothing new in this world, but eternally born-again ignorance! Do you know, Lennox, about the books of witchcraft and antediluvian folklore, kept under lock and key in the library? Why would such books remain closely guarded, when all the other secrets of the ancients have been stripped from their tombs and displayed in museums and world’s fairs, to amuse modern fools? They speak of the Old Ones as those from Outside, but their occulted mummeries hide a wondrous truth. Our smug science is a flimsy garment of wishes and lies, while the unspeakable truth they hide is a roaring wind.
“The secret that puts the lie to all we think we know is that there is but one ancestral organism, of which all living things on earth are descended. The Old Ones are but the veiled true face of nature … the blind, fumbling authors of our flesh.”
We emerged from the tunnel and found ourselves in a cavern so vast that, at first, I mistook the distant roof for the night sky.
Relief turned to disappointment, then to awe, as I discovered the dimensions of the cavern we had entered. In diameter, it could not have been less than two hundred leagues, and almost perfectly cylindrical, as if we had stumbled upon the path of some enormous, boring worm, devouring the deep foundations of the earth as a maggot gnaws dead flesh.
A sluggish river of black, oily water burbled down the gently descending course of the vast grotto. A clipper ship could have handily navigated it. When I remarked upon this, Augustus smiled and asked me if I’d ever heard of the Dhol Chants.
“When the New England colonies grew into cities, and the Indians of the Miskatonic valley began to die off from massacres and disease, the desperate medicine men called the Dholes to reclaim their stolen lands. And yet, when they bore witness to the Dholes’ terrible appetite, they repented and banished them to the White Void from whence they came, but the sacrifice was too costly. The Miskatonic tribes faded away, and the world they saved is only food for the most ravenous worms that walk … Americans.”
Augustus’s raving echoed above our heads, as in a train station or a cathedral. The worm-gnawed walls and remote ceiling glistered with the eerie green glow of false stars and meteor showers made by luminous cave flora.
Our captive led us down a treacherous slope of fossilized skulls to the water’s edge, where a long, low boat lay beached with its oars shipped as if the rowers had only just left them, its prow painted with the colors and crest of our proud university.
Augustus posted the ghoul in the bow and took out a length of sturdy chain from his capacious overcoat. Slipping it through the oarlocks, he clapped a pair of shackles on the prisoner’s bandy forelegs. He took the middle bench, bidding me shove us into the current, and lit his noisome pipe.
I recoiled at the unwholesome chill and viscosity of the water and had to brace myself with a muttered prayer before I could wade into the slithering river after my friend.