When the Darkness Falls

by Gonzalez, J. F.

  There were other items scattered about the small room. A two-by-three foot cedar chest lay in a corner, padlocked shut. More notebooks slid in the shelves like books. Weird, symmetrical drawings and patterns were drawn with what looked like blood on one of the walls. He reached for the crowbar he had left in the doorway of the room, and turned its blunt edge to the padlock on the cedar chest. Three hard blows snapped the lock, and he flipped the lid of the chest open.

  All that was inside the chest was an old leather bound book.

  He was barely aware he was holding his breath as he bent down and picked the book up gingerly. The leather was old and cracked. Actually, it didn’t feel like leather at all, at least not the leather he was used to. This leather was smooth, thinner than normal, and had a distinct look to it. He examined the back and front covers, noting the thickness of the volume–it was at least 900 pages–then he flipped open the cover and stared at the title page.

  The Necronomicon.

  That weird hieroglyph symbol again. And then the name of the author.

  Abdul Alhazred.

  Now Justin began to smile. Surely this had to be a fake! Howard himself had revealed to him in a letter that he’d invented the name The Necronomicon and Abdul Alhazred many years ago, when he was a mere child. Howard was amused of the fans that had written in to Weird Tales asking where they could find a copy of the famed book of black magic that was apparently kept under lock and key at the Miskatonic University Library in the town of Arkham, Massachusetts. Yet another phony town and a phony university that so many gullible fans thought were real. They were all props to aid in Howard’s and others stories of a cosmic race of monsters known as “The Old Ones” who were waiting to once again reclaim the earth. Justin had written three similar stories himself, all of which had been very well received by Weird Tales readers. Howard had praised one of them, “The Whispering Thing in the Cellar”, as a fine piece of work.

  But if the Necronomicon and everything that went with it were fake, how did that explain the book he now held in his hands?

  He examined it more carefully. It was carefully bound, as if by hand. The pages were old and felt like parchment. Almost like papyrus. The writing in the book was obviously English, and appeared to have been hand written directly on the pages. He turned the book over and examined the cover, his fingers skimming across the surface. The binding was smooth and dry, grayish in color. There were splotches of pink in it here and there, and some of the gray appeared mottled. There also appeared to be tiny hairs jutting out of it, and–

  Justin took a closer look and promptly dropped the book on the floor, his hair standing on end.

  The book was bound in human skin!

  That decided it. Now he was calling the authorities. The book itself, while odd, wouldn’t catch the attention of law enforcement, but the evidence of homicide in the room would interest them plenty.

  Justin pulled himself away from the grisly scene and turned to move out of the room. He got no further than the threshold when a wet, rotted hand gripped his arm.

  His heart flew in his throat and he choked back a scream. The thing standing beside the doorway was emaciated, scarecrow-like in its visage. It held Justin’s upper arm in one bony grasp, its grinning caricature leering at him through broken, rotting teeth. Twin orbs burned insanely in hollowed eye sockets. Wild, white hair sprouted from the skullcap like honey suckle blowing in the wind. It took a shambling step forward, its other arm reaching out to grab Justin by the throat, when he suddenly broke free and started running toward the stairs.

  Blind fear raced through him as he stumbled over the box of pornographic magazines in the center of the room. He hit the ground on his hands and knees and was back on his feet in a flash, racing towards the stairs. Behind him he could hear the thing that grabbed his arm giving pursuit. Its labored breath wheezed behind him. Justin banged into a bookcase as he rounded a corner of the basement, nearly stumbled over a chair, and was almost to the stairs when he tripped over something else that pitched him forward. The bridge of his nose smacked the fifth stair with a hearty crack. He yelped at the impact, blood spattering the stairs and the front of his shirt. Fogginess clouded his brain and he pulled himself up only to be pushed down by the thing, which was now leering over him.

  Justin felt his bladder give way. It was the last thing he remembered before the thing flipped him over and moved its hungry mouth toward his blood-ravaged face.

  II

  The latest issue of Nightshades magazine was at the printer when its owner and Editor-in-Chief, David Corban, received a call from his editor at the monthly trade publication Horror Scene. “Justin Grave just passed away this morning,” Mike Ashbury’s tired voice issued over the phone. “Heart attack. Sorry about springing bad news on you like this.”

  David had been expecting the news. Justin had fallen ill in recent years, and informed David only two weeks ago that he wanted him to be his literary executor. David cradled the receiver on his shoulder and kicked his feet up on the window ledge overlooking Raymond Avenue. “Thanks for telling me. You’re the only guy I know that can bring bad news and still manage to keep me in a cheery mood.”

  “Well, I’m not trying to make his death sound like it’s good news,” Mike said. “Justin lived the kind of life I hope to someday live. He lived his life to the fullest.”

  David snorted. “You can say that again. The guy was almost ninety years old!”

  “And he was still writing up until the time of his illness,” Mike interjected. “Mythos Books is putting out the last two novels he turned in to them, and if you were smart you’d get a collection out of his recent short stories.”

  “We’d been talking about it before he got ill,” David said. “I suppose now that I’m his literary executor I can issue the stuff to myself for free.”

  The conversation drifted a bit and eventually came back to Justin Grave’s short fiction again. “You really might want to consider a collection of his recent stuff,” Mike reiterated.

  “Mythos put out a volume last year,” David said, musing the subject over. “It was a sixty year retrospective. Come to think of it, it didn’t include that much of his recent fiction.”

  “There you go then,” Mike said. “At the very least you should consider an omnibus or something.”

  David laughed. “It would take five volumes to showcase Justin Grave’s horror and dark fiction in an omnibus.” Still, Mike was thinking in the right direction. A collection of Grave’s horror, mystery, suspense, and dark fantasy fiction—most of it long out of print—could kick start Nightshades Publishing back into high gear. Presently there were two volumes of Grave’s short fiction in print from Mythos: Death Cry in the Night, a collection of weird menace stories from the shudder pulps of the 1930’s, and In the Depths, the retrospective that contained work from the late 20’s through the 90’s. David owned the seminal Cloak of Darkness and Others, which had been published in 1977 by a noted small press. It largely contained the more well known of his horror stories from the pulp era and beyond, and was now a highly sought after collectors item. With the recent trend in horror fiction toward the extreme end and the noir, Justin Grave’s work was receiving an almost rediscovered flavor. Anthologists were mining his work from the pulps for a wider audience, and most of the novels he wrote when he came out of retirement in 1973 were now being reissued. David leaned back in his chair, eyeing the late afternoon traffic along Raymond Avenue. “It’s a great idea. I just wish there was something we could mine that’s really rare...you know, something nobody has collected yet.”

  “Have you thought about tracking down The Watcher from the Grave for reprint rights?”

  The title drew a blank in David’s mind. Mike was a literary bibliophile, one of the three most well read people David knew. David’s interest was piqued. “I’ve never heard of it. What is it?”

  “I’ve never read it,” Mike admitted. “From what I understand, it was published in late 1939 and early 1940 in ser
ialized form in Shudder Magazine. It supposedly started some kind of controversy when it appeared.”

  Now David’s interest was really piqued. “That’s pretty amazing. You wouldn’t happen to know what kind of controversy? “

  “No. I really don’t know any more about it.” Mike added a short pregnant pause. “If you could dig it up somewhere I’d love to see what it was that caused folks in rural America to heave their cookies.”

  “Well, I’ll try to track it down.” The conversation ended with a promise for David to get the bi-monthly column he wrote for Horror Scene in to Mike by the first of the week. David hung up the phone, his gaze still trained out the window. Justin had placed no less than ten stories with Nightshades during the magazine’s eighteen-year history, the last one presently at the printer to appear in the latest issue. The new story was sure to go over big with Nightshades readers. The tale concerned the rumor of a ghoul-like god that feasted on the flesh of the living. A small, yet fanatical cult devoted to the ghoul devotes itself to appeasing the god. Extreme sexual favors in the form of succubi and incubi are the return for devotion. It was a story that straddled the traditional mode of the Cthulhu Mythos with the new erotic noir of Lucy Taylor and Edward Lee. Pure pulp for the masses.

  David grinned as he leaned back in his chair. Justin Grave’s first posthumous piece was going to be his epitaph; his small, but fanatical audience was surely going to love it.

  III

  David made a trip to The Hollywood Book and Magazine Store that evening after closing down business for the day.

  David’s favorite clerk, Brian Eaton, was seated on a chair, leafing through a recent issue of Fangoria. Brian was medium built, in his late twenties. The sides of his head were shaved down to the skull, wild hair sprouting from the top to cascade down to his shoulders. His left ear was pierced with six earrings. He played bass guitar in a local alternative band called Evil Offspring, and was a walking encyclopedia when it came to pulp trivia. The Hollywood Book and Magazine store itself was the kind of place that pulp fans in the Los Angeles area flocked to. The entire second floor of the place was devoted entirely to pulps—everything from Famous Fantastic Mysteries and Amazing Stories, to rare pulps like Strange Tales. David heard that the owners of the store sold the extremely rare second issue of Weird Tales a few months back for a tad over ten grand to a collector who’d been searching for it for the past five years.

  Brian looked up from his early evening reading and grinned as David walked in. “Yo, Dave. New issue at the printer?”

  “You bet.” Dave sidled up to the counter as Brian put the magazine down and approached, grinning wide.

  “So what can I do for you this evening?”

  “You know anything about a pulp magazine called Shudder?”

  Brian nodded. “Sure do. It came out right around the time Unknown made its debut. It didn’t last long though. Why?”

  “Well, I’m looking for a novel that was serialized in Shudder. A Justin Grave piece. The Watcher from the Grave.” He waited to see if recognition set in. It did.

  Brian’s face lit up, excitement in his eyes. “Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. That’s the story that caused some major editorial freak out. There were even Senate subcommittee hearings over the contents of pulp magazines being too damaging for kids.”

  Wow! Pre-McCarthyism thirteen years before the infamous Congressman set up the witch hunt that ultimately killed EC Comics and black-listed several Hollywood screenwriters and actors for their supposed communist ties. “Tell me about it,” David asked.

  Brian shrugged. “Not much to tell. Shudder only published seven issues, with The Watcher from the Grave appearing in serialized form in each issue. It caused an uproar by the third installment and by issue five the shit hit the fan. The hearings were already in place. Ironically, the novel concluded in issue seven, the same issue the publisher decided to abort his publishing career by killing off the magazine. He ultimately sued Grave for an unspecified amount of damages and eventually went bankrupt.”

  This was all news to David. “What was it that freaked everybody out so bad?”

  “The story itself,” Brian explained, not breaking stride as the history lesson continued. “It had something to do with cult killings, was Lovecraftian in nature but incredibly sexual as well, way ahead of its time. It combined the cosmos of Lovecraft with a hint of Clark Ashton Smith, along with the ghoulishness of Hugh B. Cave and Robert Bloch. It had ghouls, sex, death, and a race of creatures that wait in the outer spheres of space and time, ready to plunder the human race. Like I said, it was kinda Lovecraftian in theme and tone—it talked about another sphere where the gods came from, spoke of R’lyeh and Shub-Nigguroth, but then at the same time it wasn’t.” He chuckled. “Justin Grave was something of a trendsetter anyway—I mean, some of the stuff he was doing in the early thirties makes stuff that’s out now tame by comparison. Know what I mean?”

  David nodded. Grave was downplayed as a hack writer for much of his career, and was ultimately forgotten in the field of horror for thirty years until an enterprising small press publisher issued Cloak of Darkness and Others in hardcover. The collection went on to win several awards, and a year later Grave’s first horror novel in over thirty-years, The Ritual, appeared in paperback from Lion Books. It still took ten years after that for his work to be taken seriously as important contributions to fantasy literature.

  “The story never appeared anywhere else,” Brian continued. “During the commotion, an aspiring film maker optioned it from Grave, but nothing happened. Ten years later another producer bought the rights and made it into a low budget feature starring Bela Lugosi.”

  David’s eyebrows shot up. He was supposed to be the film buff. “I never knew that!”

  “Don’t feel so bad,” Brian said. “It was one of the endless stream of low budget films Lugosi did toward the end of his career. The film itself was largely confined to art houses and special midnight screenings in a few major cities. It came and disappeared and now it’s one of Lugosi’s lost films.”

  David’s entrepreneurial mind was racing. If he could secure reprint rights for Watcher and resurrect the film on video (that is, if he could find it) he could make a small fortune. “Do you have any copies of Shudder in stock?”

  David grinned wide. “You’ve come to the right place. I’ve got all seven issues in very good condition. They’re pricey, though.”

  “How much?”

  Brian named the price and David winced. It was enough to meet his monthly living expenses. David pulled his daytimer out of his black leather satchel and opened it up to his vast array of plastic. He pulled out an American Express card. No revolving debt.

  “Couldn’t you just see if you can get a copy of the original manuscript from Justin himself?” Brian had just returned from the storeroom where he laid out all seven issues of Shudder in their protective plastic covers on the counter. David examined them carefully.

  “I would, but the man passed away this morning,” David said.

  Brian looked bummed. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  David relayed his conversation with Mike Asbury earlier that afternoon. Brian listened intently. “Justin told me once that back in the sixties, a fire broke out in his house and he lost everything. Every pulp he had ever appeared in, along with the original manuscripts to all his published works. He’s been able to get copies of some of the pulps through the years, but he never did get all of them. I’m not sure he had any copies of Shudder.” David looked into Brian’s pensive features. “So, I don’t think that would work. Besides, I want these now. It’ll make a great tax-write off as well.”

  Brian rang the transaction up. “Not only that, but you will be the proud owner of a sought after collectors item. Now that he’s passed, these are going to be worth a lot more money. Count yourself lucky.”

  “I do.” David placed the fragile pulps in his satchel and bade Brian goodbye as he left the shop. His excitement and adrenaline
spurned him on to what he knew he had to do in order to break his mini-publishing empire wide open.

  IV

  The hardcover first edition of The Watcher from the Grave sold out in two weeks.

  David was prepared for the reaction to the advertising he put out, and he quickly ordered a second printing before the ink dried on the first. Six months later, The Watcher from the Grave had gone through four printings and a bidding war had started between four major paperback houses for reprint rights. Justin Grave’s literary agent, and Nightshades Publishing, had set up an estate for the deceased writer which was going to reap huge financial rewards in the months to come.

  During the book’s production, David was able to scare up the original print of the cinematic version of The Watcher from the Grave. It was found moldering away in a warehouse near downtown Los Angeles. Hard detective work uncovered the print and once viewed, David realized he had to scare up some investors and do some legal checking to make sure the marketing rights to the film were clear. His main concern was that Lugosi’s estate would holler blue murder when word leaked out about the print. A referral through a mutual business associate put him in touch with a legal shark by the name of Daniel Walters, of Walters, Lowell and Zuckerman. Daniel navigated the choppy legal seas, and within two months the contracts were signed, sealed and delivered. Lugosi had signed a one-shot deal with the producer of Watcher for a flat fee of two thousand dollars. His biographers surely hadn’t been able to point out why Lugosi allowed himself to be ripped off. Different theories had been tossed out in explanation, but they were useless to David; the forty-eight year old document between the actors and the producer/holders of the film guaranteed no future royalties to Lugosi’s estate should the film ever be resurrected. Thus guaranteeing the future of Nightshade Publishing.