“You’re right,” he said. “But all you can do is what you can do. And this time, we saved somebody.
“For now, for tonight, that’s enough.”
A Chilling Excerpt from
Litany of Dreams
by Ari Marmell
The aromas of life, rich and cloying and congealing in the back of his throat, danced arm in arm with the stink of putrefaction and death.
Wilmott Polaski, a pale and scrawny figure whose element included musty books and dusty shelves, jabbering students and bickering academics – and most assuredly did not include copses of thick boughs, glittering eyes peering from the shadows, swarms of insects and waterlogged socks – found himself uncertain as to which collection of scents was worse.
The boots he had hurriedly purchased for this sojourn fit poorly, and his coat was woefully inadequate. Mosquitoes, for which he would have thought the lingering winter chill would be too cold, hovered in thick clouds over the languid waters. Strange birds, or what he assumed to be birds, called in the distance. Ragged moss sagged from tired branches that always seemed to be reaching his way, perhaps attracted to his warmth in lieu of a spring thaw that refused to come.
Did Hockomock have alligators? He didn’t think so, couldn’t recall ever hearing of such creatures here. With every glance toward the dark and rippling surface, always lapping uncomfortably close to the roadway, however, he grew less and less confident.
In short, the good professor deeply did not wish to be here. With any luck, he wouldn’t have to be for long.
Another twenty minutes’ walk produced nothing akin to an alligator, nor anything more hostile than those mosquitoes, but it did – finally! – bring into view the community he’d caught the train down from Arkham to find.
If, he observed with some disdain, one could even dignify it with the term.
It had no name, so far as he knew. No fixed borders, no shops, no municipal center or identity. Just a collection of scattered homes and tiny farms huddled on the edge of the Hockomock Swamp, a “community” only in the sense that the several dozen families who lived in these ramshackle domiciles interacted with one another on a somewhat regular basis, and seldomly with anyone else.
The houses were old, rickety, shingles and walls beginning to rot, the supports that held them above the muddy flats and potential floods bowing like the legs of a tired grandfather. While Wilmott heard sporadic sounds of labor in the distance, the striking of tools on wood or wet soil, he saw no one.
Nervously, he dug into his coat pocket, once more checking a bundle of handwritten notes and a hastily sketched diagram. He’d anticipated an unfriendly reception – from Henry Armitage and other fellow academics, he’d heard many a report of just how mistrustful some of these insular Massachusetts communities could be – but somehow the total absence of reception was more disturbing still.
According to his haphazard little map, however, he was still on course. With a sigh he returned the papers to his pocket and continued.
The water of the swamp puddled before him, occupying a shallow dip in the roadway. Mud squelched under his steps, threatening to yank the ill-fitting boots from his blistering feet. Wilmott swallowed a stream of profanity. Damn the useless Arkham police, damn Chester and damn himself for getting caught up in the young fool’s endeavors!
He glanced skyward, hoping to estimate the time of day, how long he had to accomplish his self-assigned mission before he had to turn back if he wanted to beat the sunset. The sun, however, skulking behind layers of white cedar branches and fat, ponderous clouds, told him nothing. With more silent cursing, he turned his gaze once again to the path ahead…
Was that it? That house there, hunkered at the very edges of the deeper waters? Its wood sagging, windows sloping like sleep-heavy eyelids?
It could be. To judge by his last look at the map, it should be. Defying the nervous agitation in his gut and drawing himself up to his full, impressive – if woefully spindly – height, Wilmott marched forward and pounded his knuckles on the door.
It shuddered. Paint flecks snowed down to his feet. Nothing more.
Wilmott waited what he judged a polite interval, then knocked again, harder still.
And again.
What to do if nobody was home? Somehow, in all his deliberations about whether to even come, all the time it took him to pinpoint and then reach his destination, he’d failed to consider so basic a hurdle. Perhaps this sort of thing was more complicated than he’d given–
The door finally swung open, with less a creaking than an angry and fiercely startling crack, as he raised his fist to try once more. Wilmott found himself staring at a yellowed shirt under frayed denim overalls.
He craned his head upward. An angry, reddened face, covered in the thick stubble of untended weeks, glared down at him.
“What?” The man’s voice was as coarse as his chin and cheeks.
Wilmott removed his hat – as much to give himself a second to recover as out of courtesy. “Afternoon. Are you Woodrow Hennessy?”
“Who’s askin’?” He spoke with a near-impenetrable drawl; Wilmott, for all his efforts to be kind, couldn’t come up with a better term than backwoods.
“My name is Professor Wilmott Polaski, from Miskatonic University. I–”
“Got no use for university folk. If you’re lookin’ for a guide, go back’n ask over in Taunton.” The door began to shut.
“No, you don’t understand. I’m searching for a missing student. Chester Hennessy.”
The door halted.
Taking that as an invitation to continue, Wilmott bulled on. “Chester’s been gone for several weeks now, and I’m afraid the authorities have been stymied. I recalled that he’d mentioned you on occasion, and I thought perhaps–”
“Ain’t talked to Chester in years. He an’ his don’t have truck with our side of the family.”
Well, that wasn’t right, not based on what Chester had said. “Mr Hennessy, perhaps if I might come in, we could discuss–”
“I said I don’t know. Leave.”
And now Wilmott was growing irate, not merely at the constant interruptions but the man’s entire attitude. Did he not recognize the seriousness of the circumstances? Was he not concerned for his kin?
Perhaps the man somehow failed to understand. He was, after all, but an uneducated yokel.
“Mr Hennessy, I think perhaps I’ve failed to make myself clear. Chester is–”
The door opened all the way once more, and while Wilmott might not have been clear, the message conveyed by the pair of steel barrels that now hovered mere inches from his suddenly pallid face was unmistakable.
“Leave!”
Hands rising in sudden terror, one of them still clutching his hat, Wilmott backed away from the shotgun. Sheer luck prevented him from tripping over his own heels, or the rickety steps, as he retreated from the porch. He’d barely reached the roadway when the door slammed, hiding Hennessy – and his weapon – from view. The professor barely even heard it over his pounding heart.
He released a long, shaking breath.
“Well,” he muttered. “That could certainly have gone better.”
Instinct and rationality both urged him to turn around and leave, to head back to Taunton, check into a hotel for the night and hop aboard the first train back to Arkham in the morning. He’d already gone above and beyond the call of any duty owed a student by his professor.
But the project…
Nor was it merely his own ambitions that made Wilmott hesitate. He knew, absolutely knew as surely as if he’d read it in one of his own textbooks, that Woodrow Hennessy was lying to him.
It wasn’t merely the man’s behavior, though that, even for so isolated and unfriendly a community as this one, was certainly suspicious enough. It was Chester himself. On one of the rare occasions his relations had come
up in conversation at all, Chester had specifically told him that he got on much better with the low side of the family than his parents did.
While “better” didn’t necessarily mean “close,” it certainly implied a stronger relationship than Woodrow claimed.
Although he turned and walked away from the Hennessy house, although it ran counter to his better judgment, Wilmott Polaski had already made a decision.
•••
He didn’t go far. Perhaps a mile at most, distant enough that Hennessy should think him gone, that no random member of the community – not that he’d seen any – would connect the stranger with that particular house.
And there, sitting upon a log at least marginally free of mildews or fungi or other swamp substances, he waited.
He knew the delay would mean stumbling his way back to civilization in the dark of night, at best; and at worst, genuine bodily harm. He deliberately shunted those thoughts aside. He felt himself on the verge of answers, possibly of saving not only his prize student but the project that would cement his own name in the textbooks he so valued.
Night fell, the avian and insectile songs of the Hockomock changed from one chorus to another and Wilmott Polaski shuffled his way back toward the crooked house.
He approached at an angle, wincing as he deliberately set his path through the cold waters, soaked almost to his knees. Should Hennessy open the front door and gaze out through the curtained, drooping windows, he ought to notice nothing amiss. And thankfully the sodden earth rose again around the house proper, if only just, so Wilmott shouldn’t have to remain long within the muck.
The back of the place was, if anything, even more dilapidated than the front, whole sections softened with moisture and inner rot. The good professor had to remind himself more than once that such disrepair didn’t necessarily reflect a slovenly nature on the part of the inhabitants, that the environment might well seep into the wood, strip the paint, bestow a patina of filth, regardless of all efforts to hold it at bay.
Not that he was too terribly inclined to give Hennessy the benefit of any doubt.
Lamplight leaking out from the ill-fitting shutters, and a bright moon glowing through the clouds that had grown thinner as dusk fell, provided just enough illumination for him to get by. Enough to note details of the house that he’d failed to observe earlier, when his focus has been entirely on the front door and the man within.
The most salient of those details was the lower level, beneath the house proper.
It had, perhaps, been constructed at a time when the surrounding waters were a bit lower than today. Standing mostly above ground, it couldn’t rightly be called a basement, yet it was too large and structurally sound to be simply an under-floor hollow someone had bricked up. Whether it had existed since the structure was built, or whether someone had added it later, Wilmott wasn’t architect enough to say.
Neither could he say with certainty why that lowest level didn’t fully match the width of the rest of the house, creating a peculiar combination of partial cellar, partial crawlspace. It wasn’t unique to the Hennessy place, either, as he’d seen similar construction on some other homes he’d passed. Perhaps it was to do with the inconsistent earth here at the swamp’s edges, with portions solid enough to support construction standing adjacent to others that were far too soft? He didn’t know.
He knew only that, beneath the sagging floor and between the wooden supports, stood walls of uneven stones and thick mortar.
A half-sunken cellar certainly felt like a good place for Hennessy to hide his secrets, and, if nothing else, one of its own narrow windows might provide ingress. Crouching low, shuddering at the slick mud beneath his fingers as he scrabbled for balance, Wilmott slid beneath the house’s outer edges.
Picking his way between puddles and discarded, rusted tools, biting his lip to keep from exclaiming his revulsion at the cobwebs and skittering bugs, he neared the first of those windows…
“Isslaach thkulkris, isslaach cheoshash… Vnoktu vshuru shelosht escruatha…”
It might have been five voices or fifty; he knew only it was more than one. Resonating off one another, echoing in brick-walled rooms, filtered through cracked wood and the natural songs of the swamp, it seemed somehow more than the foreign tongue – or perhaps simple gibberish – that reached his ears.
“Svist ch’shultva ulveshtha ikravis… Isslaach ikravis vuloshku dlachvuul loshaa… Ulveshtha schlachtli vrulosht chevkuthaansa…”
On it went, intertwining until he couldn’t tell one phrase from the next, and then repeating once more from the beginning.
Over and over as he sat and listened, trying and failing to make the slightest sense of it, growing somehow heavier with each repetition even though it never varied in volume. Something about the litany was… off. Unclean. He felt violated, as though something slick had wiggled on the back of his tongue as he swallowed a bite of what should have been a mundane meal. He found himself lightheaded and nauseated, staggering back a few steps from the window as he struggled to restrain his rising gorge.
The handle of the old shovel on which he stepped was rotten most of the way through, but with enough of a solid center to resound like a gunshot when it snapped beneath his foot. Disoriented and now terrified of being discovered, the professor turned and fled, splashing through the swampy waters and into the night, leaving the Hennessy house behind.
The house, but not the ghastly phrases, which now seemed determined to dog his every step.
“Isslaach thkulkris, isslaach cheoshash… Vnoktu vshuru shelosht escruatha…”
•••
Two nights later, he returned yet again.
As before, he’d initially intended to flee, and found himself unable. Thoughts of Chester Hennessy and their shared endeavors occupied his waking hours, most of which he spent staring at the walls of his rented room or aimlessly wandering about town. When sleep had finally claimed him, he’d tossed in the grip of horrific nightmares, shivering so violently he’d bolted awake from vistas of frigid ice… howling winds… endless shadow… something reaching out for him, stretching, grasping…
And always, asleep or awake, nesting at the back of his mind, winding and twisting and coiling around itself over and over, that abhorrent, damnable verse. Had he been honest with himself, Wilmott would have admitted there was something to the mantra itself, far more than his concern for his missing student or even their endeavors, that kept him here.
Even when preparing his return to the house, however, he never allowed himself to consider it.
This time, thanks to a quick trip to Taunton’s shops, he came prepared. A set of screwdrivers and miniature blades sat tucked in a bag at his belt, and he clutched a small lantern in one fist, an iron prybar in the other. Flimsy as the wood was, the last was almost overkill. The window frame scooped away like oatmeal; he could practically have made entry with his bare hands.
Wiggling, grunting, he wormed his way through the window and flopped to the mildewed stone floor, flinching from both the impact and the choking scent.
Only as he picked himself up did he realize that the odd recitation continued, that the people down here, whoever they were, were still repeating their mindless refrain. Up to that point he’d thought the words were merely in his head, as they had been for the past days.
That realization brought with it another wave of disorientation, as if the thought itself made him more susceptible. The hallway tilted around him, splintered in a kaleidoscope of fragments, before pulling itself back together and leaving only dizziness in its wake.
Wilmott staggered forward, one hand on the wall while the other clutched the lantern that now seemed a woefully insufficient source of light. The uneven floor made the vertigo harder to deal with, as broken stones reached up to trip him or sudden dips threatened to topple him. More than once the swamp crept in between the stones at the lowest points
, resulting in puddles to splash or, on one or two occasions, even wade through.
Surely the passageway couldn’t be this long? It must be his own confusion that had him nigh convinced he’d taken scores of steps already, rather than a mere handful.
When he stumbled yet again, glancing down angrily at his traitorous feet, he discovered it hadn’t been the floor that tripped him this time.
The blue-gray of a Postal Service uniform, now tattered, hid most, but unfortunately not all, of the half-stripped skeleton beneath. Nor had it been time, the waters, nor even vermin that had torn away the flesh and tissue. Even through his disorientation, his horror, Wilmott clearly saw the jagged indentations on the bone that could only have been left by human jaws.
He found himself continuing, with only the faintest memory of clambering back to his feet. He couldn’t remember at precisely what point he’d collapsed, nor did he recall vomiting, though the acrid taste on his tongue suggested he had.
He thought, too, that he might have seen the remains of other savaged corpses beyond that of the unfortunate postman, had flashing, sporadic images of additional limbs, additional skulls, but once more his memory refused to cling to them well enough to be sure it was anything more than overwrought imagination.
His head ached, the skin uncomfortably tight around his skull. By the time the obvious notion of “Turn back! Get out!” penetrated his feverish mind, he’d already reached the end of the hall.
A cage of some sort, or a makeshift cell. He couldn’t seem to focus on it clearly, or at least only bits and pieces stuck in his memory. He recalled stone walls and haphazard iron bars.
He recalled the stench of old sweat, of human filth.
Recalled not the one young man he sought but a small collection of faces, caked in mud and spit and blood and worse, some merely soiled but others subtly misshapen. If Chester had been among them, Wilmott never saw him.
It was from them, from chapped lips and ragged throats, that the alien chorus emerged. Over and over, almost but not entirely in unison so that the words seemed to vibrate in the ear.
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