by Gafford, Sam
“‘By reviewing your ledgers, perhaps I can identify the object that enables those fiends to remain in our world,’ I rejoined. ‘We must destroy that object, or else the foulness in your store will continue to suck light and life from our world as a leech drinks blood, until it has grown too powerful to dispel.’
“He came around to my argument, and at high noon we returned to the shop, I first performing some appropriate ceremonies and bringing with us a certain electrical apparatus that I have found useful in similar situations. I positioned the apparatus in the office so that the vibrations that it emitted formed an ethereal barrier between Kronstein and me on one side, and the door to the storeroom on the other.
“I pored for hours through the ledgers, where the merchant had recorded the suppliers from whom he had purchased the merchandise in his store. For each item, he had meticulously listed the name of the supplier and whence in turn the supplier had come into possession of the item. At last I gave a cry of recognition.
“‘Here,‘ I said, ‘do you remember this purchase? On May 5 last, 19—, such-and-such price for a ship’s spar, substantially intact, bought from W. Concannon, agent for Marine Trust Insurers. Said spar catalogued among debris recovered as salvage from the sinking of the cargo packet Mortzestus on her last voyage from San Francisco, U.S.A.’
“You should remember the name of that ship, Dodgson. Your colleague wrote an account of it, which he marketed as fiction under the fanciful title The Ghost Pirates. Yet there truly was a cursed ship called the Mortzestus: it suffered an invasion of hellish beings from Outside on its final voyage and sank in the Pacific Ocean as your friend described—all faithfully transcribed from official records and testimony, and presented as fiction because it would hardly be accepted by the public as fact.
“The rest is quickly summarised. I dared not go into the storeroom unprotected, so Kronstein and I left the establishment, and I returned with a battery of portable vacuum lights and with a box of cotton balls soaked in mint oil. I strung the lights in a protective double row, walking between the rows to the place in the storeroom where the spar from the unfortunate Mortzestus lay. As it was, I could sense shadowy movement beyond the purple glow of the lights, the watchful attention of those cursed wraiths of darkness. I stuffed the cotton balls in my nostrils, the mint oil deadening my sense of smell against the onslaught of the awful stench.
“I dragged the spar out of the store and had it carried to a nearby place where I doused it with kerosene and burned it to ashes. I mixed the ashes with salt, bagged the lot, and finding an empty area of the docks where no one would see me, I tossed the bag into the Thames. Sigsand says that fire and salt will cleanse unholy objects and sever the invisible bonds that hold unnatural things to the earth. Devoutly, I hope that is the case with the spar from the Mortzestus and the fiends that had attached themselves to it.
“Kronstein sold out his business and retired to the Continent. Someone else bought the store and took over the enterprise. Nothing remarkable has happened in the building since.”
We were silent. Taylor said thoughtfully, “If the spar was salvaged, might not other objects from the Mortzestus have also been recovered? May other horrors be waiting to manifest themselves in other places and other cities?”
“Yes, that is entirely possible,” Carnacki affirmed. And we all were grimly silent as we left our host and followed our various paths home.
The Braes of the Blackstarr
Robert E. Jefferson
I had no reason to doubt the veracity of Carnacki’s stories, but I admit that it was the hearty suppers, unusual tobaccos, and bracing company that drew me to his Cheyne Walk drawing room rather than his sometimes unbelievable repartee.
Besides, my wife was a harridan and any opportunity to escape her vacuous women’s talk and partake of our manly intellectual roughhousing was a boon for my constitution. We were still waiting, however, for the arm-wrestling competition Dodgson had promised Jessop, Taylor, and me. Dodgson himself had always seemed rather too enthralled by our host’s cogitations than I found healthy, and unlike him I always took them with a whole scuttle of salt, rather than just a pinch.
After all, I am not Dodgson. I am Arkright.
I had long since forsaken John Silence’s raconteurs; he was no match for Carnacki’s direct manner and no-nonsense occultism. Silence always seemed to take so very long to get to the point, stopping and starting his stories along stuttering lines of ponderous circumlocution and—let’s call it without any more prevarication—a kind of anticipatory puppetry of his rapt listeners.
Thomas Carnacki, despite his other flaws, was like a torpedo.
I had no reason to question him this evening, as the sun sunk into the brass-coloured smog of the Embankment, but this story of the Hickey Mausoleum would even challenge my own reticence to question our modern magus.
Carnacki was mercurial tonight, his warhead was primed, and he begun. He hadn’t even lit his pipe for fear he might incandesce.
“I despise fox hunting,” he bellowed quietly. “Or rather, I despise those who fox hunt. The hunt itself has a mythic quality not entirely alien to my esoteric sensibilities.” We all murmured agreement, as we were every one of us, in our own minds, intellectuals with a cosmopolitan outlook befitting any London gentlemen of the new millennium. None of us were opposed to a bit of adventure and blood sport when it came down to it, though, and we would have jumped at the chance given the appropriate invitation.
“I travelled to the braes of the Blackstarr Hunt on the request of my former colleague, Randolph Ridley, a minor whipper-in living on the harsh periphery of Northumberland. It is in that land, I believe, that the entrance to the secret places beneath the surface will be discovered, as it is switched with the deepest coal mines on Earth. Their tunnels even spread out like rhizomes under the bed of the North Sea towards sunken Doggerland. But that’s another story.
“I had never cared for Ridley, and always expected him to return to hunting or become a slaughterman again after the expedition he accompanied me on. He was, after all, a horsing north man and only good for out-of-doors husbandry or flesh houses. But I owed him a favour, and on his request I journeyed to that arcane valley in the North Pennines. Ridley had suggested I bring my gear with me without explanation, and for my own amusement I took my most recent technological plaything from the USA, Edison’s version of the office Dictaphone audio recording machine, the Ediphone, which was significantly more portable. It fitted into the case I had made for the electric pentacle.
“When I arrived in the North Country I was dismayed to find that exactly half of the wax cylinders were broken, leaving only three tubes for any experimentation I may have undertaken, and that my lodgings were in that shop floor of the Blackstarr Hunt, the kennels themselves, where Ridley lived alone with his bald face and curmudgeonly demeanour, not to mention sixty baying foxhounds who loudly announced my arrival to the echoing gullies of the valley.
“Ridley did not greet me, and I had to find him in the kennel abattoir manhandling fallen stock onto a gantry meat hook. He apologised for his diffidence, saying he had been busy with an escaped dam, proclaiming ‘The Blue Madonna snuck under the flesh house ramp.’ When talking of the hounds his squinting eyes, the size of an owl’s in his sun-burnished face, fired up in a way that was totally absent in his common parlance.
“A fellow after my own heart in one regard, he began to explain why he had summoned me to what seemed like the very edge of England, if not the world. I had neither unpacked nor been shown where I was to sleep during my stay, and we stood in the flesh house with a pregnant dam circling us.
“He told me about the disappearance, and how he believed the supernatural was somehow an ebon factor in the uncanny episode.
“An academic from the university had lodged at the kennels with the intention of photographing the nearby Hickey Mausoleum, a strange folly annexing a one-room church on the moor above the valley. Crossland, the academic, had immediately ru
bbed Ridley up the wrong way, which wasn’t hard to do. The Master of the Hunt, one Humphrey Popper, had delivered the fellow to the kennels personally and, as a close friend of the college dean, had expressed to Ridley that he look after this fop on his research trip. He was, it seemed, a respected ecclesiastical archaeologist but had been sequestered to this work because of an unnamed indiscretion at the college. Someone had misjudged the effect this wilderness would have on a nervous disposition.
“A sour note was set upon his very arrival as Crossland had complained about the baying of the hounds, much to Ridley’s annoyance. I made a note not to do so, no matter how disturbing the beasts became.
“‘I told him the first night they would disturb his sleep, and the second night also. By the third night he would no longer notice their night song, and by the time he returned to Rutherford he would positively miss the sound,’ said Ridley. ‘I also warned him that it was easy to get lost between the braes of the Blackstarr and the plateau of the moor, even though you could plainly see the mausoleum and the church from the window of his lodgings. There is the black gulf of the scar between our steading and the heather banks where the Scots Pines gnarl and thin out.’ While he described it I could define the geography of the upper valley, but the moor was draped in a fog that truly accentuated the edge-of-the-world quality of the place. In my mind’s eye I could imagine the desolate church and its lych-house, and the shroud of mist patinating its lonely stone in black spatters gave me a shiver.
“‘As instructed, I took Crossland up the short but arduous journey to the mausoleum. The church of St. Martin’s was built on the site of an earlier building destroyed by fire in the sixteenth century, and before that in the centre of a forgotten ring of pagan Neolithic markers half hidden beneath the sphagnum and heather weft. The church has long since fallen out of use because of its location and the drain of country folk to the brickworks in Newcastle. And I, as you know, Carnacki, am not a religious man. Not many are out here, not in that sense.’ The dam nuzzled him with her scar-crossed snout. Her aroma was rather piquant. Ridley vigorously petted the fat scruff of her neck and, as a way to disarm my apparent wariness of the huge beast, branched off at a tangent.
“‘I can see this one’s grandmother in the way she walks, and this blue mottle has come on down at least two hundred years, a blue pelt strain started by a bitch called Glaug and a dog called Nimrod.’
“The stinking thing did indeed have a bluish cast to her pelt.
“Ridley continued. ‘The hounds made the fellow nervous. He wasn’t here to record the dimensions of the church, but to scrutinise the mausoleum that stands beside it. I know less about that than the church, so don’t ask.’
“‘But what of Crossland ?’ I asked. ‘You say he disappeared without trace?’
“‘He left a trace all right. I helped him hulk his camera and theodolite up there, and he stored them in the church. You will see that they are still there. On the way up he was struck by the waterfall at the head of the valley, which is the source of the Blackstarr Burn as it spouts out of the rock from its subterranean course.
“‘It is by no means a waterfall of any note, and like so many others it is known as the Grey Mare’s Tail. Crossland thought it was worthwhile photographing it and took the time to set his kit up on the path to the hill, so much so that time was getting on when we got to the church and its spartan cemetery. It was good weather, with a low-tide moon reaching fulness. I let him get on with it. But the pheasants were clucking and preparing to roost.
“‘When he found his way back on the first night, just on the wrong side of sunset, he was most disturbed. I put it down to the scares of darkness falling in the pines, which can be awfully sinister to a Southerner. Or perhaps it was the baying, which drifts across the gloaming like a settled cloak. The sound would have brought him back here even in the night, for it continues unabated when the moon is up.’”
At this point Carnacki settled back into his chair and lit his pipe. He had been ‘up north’ for some time, and while Dodgson had done his fair share of Blackburn time, I found the notion of the uncouth place particularly unpalatable. I admit that might have been inherited from my father, who had got out the minute he made his fortune from brickmaking, and my father painted an unsavoury picture that had rather coloured my view.
“My dear Arkright,” said Carnacki, “this was not my only investigation in the borders. You must also hear the stories of the Knock Rock Devil and the Warlocks of Spadeadam. I dare say they will put this trifle in the shade! I do not wish to and cannot devalue my current ejaculation, however, for there is a note of dread and mystery that even I cannot decipher . . . all about to be revealed to you now.
“That evening over a rather pallid two-day-old pot of hamhock stew and a slab of pease pudding (which I have to say was better than it sounds, no doubt because of the oil-black porter Ridley uncharacteristically shared with me), he continued his tale.
“Crossland spent the next two days to and fro from the kennels to St. Martin’s, barely speaking to my host, always more haunted than he was the night before; he had not stuck Ridley as anything other than the most sensible of prigs. He became unkempt, almost delirious, and when the two did communicate with any coherence, the academic revealed he had been much disturbed by the ‘howling of the dogs’ and the brightness of the full moon.
“He confessed to Ridley that he had awoken after midnight when the baying had momentarily turned into strangled barks as two dogs mithered in the night. Facing away from the bright square of the window towards the interior wall to help him sleep, he saw the shadow of the window frame and thin curtains clearly projected before him. The full moon hung so low and large on the horizon that the adumbrated mausoleum was cast like a puppet theatre proscenium on the wall.
“Crossland says he raised his arm from under the covers and watched his own shadow moving in and out of the lunar spotlight. He says he made childish shadow puppets; the universal shape of a swan made by opposing the thumb with the straightened beak of fingers and a crone, made from a fist and a crooked index finger projected, and hooked.
“‘So what?’ I said to him. Ridley of course had been turning his nose up at the weird anecdote, firstly put out by the description of baying hounds as ‘howling dogs’ and secondly by the personal nature of the description of Crossland’s private bedroom. ‘The strange thing was this, Carnacki . . .’ Ridley uttered with a troubled inflection.
“‘Crossland proceeded to make his shadow hand knock upon the shadow panes of the window, uttering ‘knock . . . knock . . . knock . . .’ in a stultified monotone, and then to try and grasp the plainly visible shadow of the handle that secured the window closed, which of course was something like attempting mirror writing.
“‘To his disquiet, he succeeded in opening the shadow window, and immediately a cold blast of night air flooded the room, making the shadows of the curtains billow and flap like tattered flags in a storm. It was impossible, and he bolted out of the bed to close the culprit window, only to see that it was closed, and the curtains were hanging flat in a dead doldrum, glowing in golden innocence of the moons beams.
“‘The chill remained.
“‘What had driven him to distraction was that when his eyes returned to the cast shadow, the curtains continued to blow, but the window was shut.
“‘Steeling himself, he got out of bed and went to the window to double-check, all the while the shadow image a-raging while the curtains hung still.
“‘He turned the handle with some difficulty (I had not opened that room’s windows for some time, it being spare) and opened the window ajar.
“‘There was nothing but a light breeze drifting through the gap.
“‘He closed the window, an awful spirit of perturbation wringing through his nerves, and he faced the shadow once more. But just at that moment a cloud passed before the moon’s face and all the shadows bolted beneath weak umbrations until the darkness engulfed everything.
“‘When the cloud passed, the shadow only showed the square of the window and the motionless curtains. Crossland’s own shadow filled the frame, his arms braced and head rigid.’
“‘Is this the room you have prepared for me tonight, Randy, my old mucker?’ I asked, already suspecting the answer.
“‘Oh, yes. But its malfeasance is nothing you haven’t sniffed at a thousandfold. And it’s not that room that you need to worry about; it’s the mausoleum.’
“There was no moon that night. And the darkness of Northumberland is like nothing you could imagine in this Chelsea playground.”
Outside of Carnacki’s drawing room we all felt the flickering glow of a million oil lamps and the hiss of the gaslight droning like an incandescent machine in which we were all coddled. We could feel the static of the electric light raising the hairs on the backs of our necks. The smog was so alive with light that it was impossible to look up and see stars.
“When I saw the stars above Blackstarr Burn I almost fell over in a cosmic funk, they were so clear and plentiful,” said Carnacki.
“The next day Ridley took me to the mausoleum. I dragged my kit there with the north man’s help, down into the crevasse of the upper burn, up through the twisted Scots pines where some hardy cattle grazed in muddy clumps, high above the very nearly but not quite spectacular force of the Blackstarr source, hardly gushing in a waterfall but more than trickling down the rock, and finally onto the lip of the hill and over the desolate moor to the humble church of St. Martin’s.
“The church was nothing to write home about. In fact, I won’t bore you with a description, but the mausoleum was a one-off.