by S. T. Joshi
“And when was that?” Edith was surprisingly naive to expect a straightforward answer from Castro now after so many deflected questions. Her hands were wrapped around the upright bottle of Edmundo Dantes in her lap, as they had been since she’d sat down.
“To have your nice bottle of rum, or any fermented beverage, would have been illegal then,” Castro disclosed.
“You mean to say you were alive in the 1920s?” How could he lie so blithely? How many years past a hundred would that make him?
Castro’s frown may have directed disappointment or condescension, but not sympathy, at Dwight’s dull wits.
“How long ago did you live in this house?” asked Edith when it became clear that Castro would not honor Dwight with a reply. Her tone was incurious, as if she spoke only to keep other questions at bay. Was her mind a scary leap or two ahead of Dwight’s?
“I have never lived in this house.”
To go by Edith’s blanching complexion, Castro, in that skewed way of his, had answered a question other than the one she had asked, one that she was afraid of asking. Nor did Castro’s hands relax in their manic, unseemly choreography. Why didn’t Edith prevail on Castro to leave off, as Dwight would have, had he been less preoccupied trying to concentrate?
“Let me get this straight,” Edith slowly enunciated. “You started referring to yourself, in this epic account of yours, as one of the fugitives from this swamp you alleged was here. You’re implying, in other words, that you’re more than four hundred years old?”
“No, not four hundred years, no.”
Petty or not, Dwight disliked how Castro was far more mild-mannered when “pretty” Edith guessed incorrectly. And since Castro liked her so much, why, he railed inwardly again, didn’t she insist he stop futzing with his hands?
Copper eyes grew brighter as if Dwight’s mute, unbecoming resentment were amusing. “During my sojourn in Cathay, I rambled among the Sichuan mountains and contemplated the archaic dawn sequoias there.” Castro had broken into a singsong chant, at a tenuous volume that obliged Dwight to lean forward, ears straining. Was this somehow Castro’s roundabout approach to revealing his age? “Those trees offered me food for thought on the origins of predacious flora. Sometimes I observed that flies and bees resting on the soft green platform of a frond had adhered to it, and then fused with it, dissolving into a wingless, glossy husk. Some enzymes in the needles, I inferred, had served inadvertently to trap and digest the insects. The chemical makeup of these trees, and the insects’ susceptibility to it, had conspired to make a carnivore of the sequoia, which benefited from this intake of animal protein.”
Dwight could do nothing but sit flummoxed, struggling to follow the breathy lecture. Deranged cultist was effectively impersonating a botanist, whatever the validity of his science. Moreover, his accent waned as his eloquence expanded. Curb a couple of diphthongs, and he could have anchored the evening news.
“Reproductive fitness, I realized, favored those individual plants that derived extra nutrients from prey, within those species endowed with the appropriate enzymes. Therefore certain species would exploit carnivory more and more, to the exclusion of their conspecifics that did not.”
Who or what, Dwight puzzled, was the real Castro? That was one riddle Edith couldn’t solve any better than he could, though between the extremes of rampant insanity and erratic brilliance, Dwight had to go with the first option, to label Castro a hopeless sociopath who talked a fantastically elaborate game. Trusting first impressions had always steered him safely away from troublesome characters before, and what was this scholarly discourse but a loony departure from equally loony historical fantasy?
“In common with spiders and many another predator, the earliest carnivorous plants needed a means of immobilizing victims while remaining passive themselves.” Castro fell silent as if his recital had reached its fit conclusion, and his hands, which had persevered in their enthralling, unwholesome gyrations, dropped limply to his lap.
The gleam in Castro’s eyes had subtly ignited along the ridges of his face until an exultant mask leered at Dwight and Edith. In conjunction, a musk had been invading Dwight’s nostrils, as if Castro, still dry as petrified wood, had been exuding a malodor of disguised excitement through channels other than atrophied sweat glands. It was acrid with longstanding piss and entrenched fungus, and with a whiff of partial spoilage, of arrested decay, like that of an elderly neighbor’s corpse he’d once had to ID at the chilly morgue. Dwight tried to slide back across the sofa, to withdraw a little from that nastiness, but he couldn’t budge. Stuck like a fly on a sequoia frond, as if subject to oblique power of suggestion, or was it something more, something in those weaving hands?
“At present,” Castro resumed, “I should think I need merely reaffirm the truth that has dawned upon you. In that benighted age before your streets and houses, this place was mine, and a sacred object of mine had to be concealed in haste beneath the water and mud of Cat Swamp. The followers and victims here were mine, the rituals were carried out under my guidance, and when those almighty powers that ravened among men before history return among them to end history, the triumph will be mine. I will be much greater in the future when the stars are right, but in that olden time, I was the King of Cat Swamp.”
“But what about us?” Edith’s formerly low, sultry drawl had coarsened, thickened, as if airways were clogged with swollen, uncooperative vocal muscles. “Why can’t we move?”
Castro bounced implausibly to his feet, brushed invisible specks off his shirtfront, and shrugged. Not a twinge of osteoporosis in his posture. “You are here where you say you belong. Why should you want to move ever again?” His placid smile was at odds with his pitiless copper focus.
“But what did we do to you?” Dwight also had to invest stubborn effort into eking out words, and they emerged malformed, gurgling.
“Mr. and Mrs. Nickerson, you are both proud of your distinguished ancestry, are you not? Of those who carved your towns from wilderness, as you like to put it, as if they simply daubed upon blank canvas? You are not, to look at you, different from your forebears who dispossessed the native peoples, and who dispossessed us. You might say that I am here to retrieve but a single token of what I have lost to you.”
“But how could we help whatever it was they did?” Dwight was nearly choking on each syllable. Uncanny that Castro understood him.
“Regardless of that, you are the beneficiaries of what they did, yes or no?” Castro’s smile had hardened to the grimness of his eyes. “Can you deny it? Can you stand up and dispute it? No? I thought not.”
“Please, we can help you. Whatever it is you’re after, let us get it for you.” The urgency in Edith’s strangled plea implied that she and Dwight were of one panicky mind: Castro meant for their paralysis to be terminal. “There must be something we can give you!”
“The devil has a hand in all bargains,” Castro admonished. “Let us not complicate this and involve him. I deal with someone else.”
Castro ambled over to Edith and twisted the bottle of Edmundo Dantes up and out of her two-handed grip, as if unscrewing a threaded stopper. Her fingers persisted in enclosing nothing. “My thanks to you once more, humoring an old man his taste. I never did say ‘when,’ you may recall. For nice rum like this you have no further use.”
Dwight heard Castro’s sandals cross the kitchen linoleum, and then the door to the back hall creaked wide, and then the sticky back door burst open, causing the whole house to tremble. Dwight next picked up Castro’s trail in the back yard, as framed by the picture window. Castro had a long-handled shovel from the garage and was digging in the shade, by amazing coincidence, of a young dawn sequoia, a housewarming present from his boss. With a flash of insight that passed just as readily for psychosis, Dwight pondered how well he really knew the boss. What was his religious affiliation, for instance?
Castro was laboring steadily in the terrific heat like an ox in its prime. Every so often he’d lodge Dwight’s s
hovel in the turf and savor a swig of rum, smacking his leathery lips. Not too late for the joke to be on Castro maybe. Dwight might have smirked had it not been such a chore. An hour ago the landscaping guys had sprayed the grass with chemicals that stayed toxic for three days. Too much to ask for a dose of modern suburbia to be this ancient fiend’s undoing? If the fiend’s unflagging vitality were any indication, then yes, it definitely was. Dwight watched and watched, with consistently sinking spirits. A gallon of pesticide might not faze Castro. But maybe he wasn’t even digging in the right spot. Yeah, that would serve him right. What had made him so cocksure about destroying that portion of Dwight’s cherished lawn, anyway?
Castro was chest-deep in his pit, surrounded by mounds of mingled sand and loam. He bent from view and straightened up, dammit, with something in his arms, something the girth of a hassock, and he hoisted it with tender care onto grass already smothering under loose soil. Whatever had led him to the front door had performed unerringly up to the last square foot. He reverently wiped clods and smears of dirt off his artifact with a handkerchief, which allowed Dwight to see it was made of greenish stone, though he couldn’t otherwise make head or tail of it. And to think, it had been under his lawn almost four hundred years.
Castro flattened his palms on the grassy perimeter, hoisted himself out of the hole, clapped his hands free of grime and ineffectual lawn poisons, drained and chucked the Edmundo Dantes, and, incredibly, hefted and hugged his prize to his chest with one spindly arm. With no intention, evidently, of tidying up over there. He hove toward the back door and out of sight again, to reenter Dwight’s field of vision in the living room. The greenish bulk and Castro’s white sleeve bisecting it were briefly all that Dwight could see, but proximity afforded no aid to comprehension. Here was a block of masonry or a squat statue, but of what? There were wings and claws and tentacles and eyes, disjointed, asymmetrical, out of proportion to each other, like an optical illusion set in some unfamiliar mineral, or like a mess on the floor at closing time in a sinister butcher’s shop.
After Castro had exited, Dwight spent a futile while fixated on reconciling those disparate body parts to each other. He didn’t snap out of it till a car door slammed in front of the house and an engine revved and soon receded. Shit, it sounded like his boss’s Explorer. He then belatedly glimpsed in peripheral vision that Edith was gone.
Dwight was reminded of a laughable scene in a movie back at college. An old movie, nowhere as old as Castro, but old enough to be silent, and it was German. In that memorably funny scene, a vampire picks up his own coffin and strolls around with it on one shoulder. Ridiculously or not, Castro had gone that German vampire one better, toting off a boulder plus Dwight’s wife. He would have felt more angst about her fate, had his own not been much closer at hand.
He and Edith were supposed to be on vacation. Mail and newspaper delivery had been canceled, the oblivious yard crew would come and go, and the Nickersons had warned friends and coworkers they’d be incommunicado for two weeks in paradise. Nobody would miss them. Nobody would ring the doorbell and worry.
Days and nights inched glacially by, in which Dwight soiled himself and then no longer soiled himself, hungered and thirsted and then no longer hungered and thirsted, shivered in the drafty central air and then went forever numb. Pangs and aches and every sensation wore out, just as Castro’s glands had done centuries ago. So did Dwight’s spite and indignation at being singled out, at the unfairness of Castro tracing that block of masonry to his backyard among all the equally deserving candidates for slow death in former Cat Swamp. He gradually gave up despising Edith, too, for making him let Castro inside in the first place. At last Dwight was down to one coherent nagging thought, recurring to him more and more rarely, that after a certain unremembered number of days, the ravages of starvation were irreversible.
He was in no shape to acknowledge, or to appreciate the aptness of it, when a scruffy feral tom stole in through the back door Castro had carelessly left open, and began spraying the drapes and scratching up the upholstery, and in general behaving like one more previous owner come home. Dwight didn’t even hear the crash when the cat bumped the Erté bust off its pedestal.
* * *
Dead Media
NICK MAMATAS
Nick Mamatas is the author of a number of novels, including the pseudo-Lovecraftian Move Under Ground (Night Shade Books, 2004) and, with Brian Keene, The Damned Highway (Dark Horse, 2011). With Ellen Datlow, he coedited the ghost story anthology Haunted Legends (Tor, 2010), and he has also published more than sixty short stories in magazines and anthologies such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lovecraft Unbound, Long Island Noir, and the Mississippi Review. A native New Yorker, Mamatas spent some time in creepy old Brattleboro, Vermont, before settling in California.
* * *
AT MISKATONIC, LIKE MOST LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGES, nothing is ever thrown away, but almost everything is misfiled. Lenore Reichl was a junior and knew her way around, but she needed help for what she wanted this time—an actual Dictaphone. For that she had to appeal to Walt McDonald, the ever-present work-study student in the A/V office. The trick was to figure out whether Walt was unwilling to leave his seat or just really too stupid to know what a Dictaphone was. Lenore tried bending over the desk, just showing a little bit of cleavage and most of her teeth. Her piercings glinted. She tapped the toe of her stompy boot. That got Walt away from Facebook for two seconds.
“Look, I don’t know,” he said. “I did all the tagging here last year. Everything has a barcode now, and there’s no code for a Dictaphone.”
“Just because there’s no code for something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” Lenore said. She and Walt had shared a class last semester—Semiology, which involved watching lots of television commercials. They weren’t friends. The mildest of acquaintances, really. They didn’t even nod to each other when they passed on the quad, but Lenore did feel comfortable using Walt’s name. “Walt,” she continued, “just because there’s no signifier doesn’t mean there’s no referent.” Walt had been in charge of the video projection unit and had saved the day more than once in Semiology. “C’mon,” Lenore said. She licked her lips. Not too flirty, just, more like anxious.
Walt glanced back at the screen, looking at his reflection rather than the status updates of his online friends. He didn’t have too many friends here in Arkham. Not a lot of black kids made it to Miskatonic, and those who did were often subtly abused and often suspected of such crimes as petty theft, Affirmative Action status, and facility with a basketball. Walt was too fat for basketball, too fat for Lenore. Not so fat that he had to go around doing pretty girls with purple hair special favors for no reason, though. “What do you even need a Dictaphone for?” he asked, more to himself than to Lenore.
“I’m glad you asked,” she said, and reached into her shoulder bag. It was an Emily the Strange thing, and what came from it was pretty strange itself. A small cylinder wrapped in yellowing paper.
“Is that what I think it is?” Walt asked.
“Yes!” Lenore said. “It’s a cylinder, the Wilmarth cylinder. Brattleboro. The mysterious recording of the so-called ‘Bostonian’ and the Mi-Go. And I need a Dictaphone to play it, to hear the voices. This is primary source material.”
“Oh,” Walt said. He glanced at his monitor again. “I thought it was something else. Anyway, yeah, that’s cool, but we have mp3s of everything, so why bother?”
“We have mp3s of DAT tapes of a cassette of reel-to-reel tapes of a 78 record of this cylinder. Luckily, I’m into vinyl, so I managed to work my way back through the dead media—stuff is definitely dropping out with every generation. It’s like oral folklore, what’s on here. It’s been, you know, changed.”
Now Walt was interested. He shifted in the chair, held out his hand for the tube, then carefully undid some of the paper and uncapped it to peer at the wax cylinder within. “All right, but you’re coming with me. Four eyes are better than two.”
The A/V archive was in a dusty Quonset hut off the library, and it was stuffed with dead and dying machines: VHS players and overhead projectors—the old analog kind with Cyclopean lenses atop craning necks—shelves of slide projectors, and that just on either side of the large entrance. Walt clicked on the light, and Lenore saw the problem. Floor to ceiling, desks and blown-out televisions and snake-coils of coaxial cables spilling from ruined cardboard boxes. The dust was oppressive, and if there was any rhyme or reason to the storage at all it was simple—oldest stuff in the back. “The Dictaphones, if we even have any, are on the other side of this. So let’s start moving stuff out of the way. There’s a dolly in that corner and we can use a few of the TV carts that still have four wheels to move shit outside.”
Lenore wasn’t much help. She had on the sort of long lace dress Walt would call “kooky,” and needed to hold up the hem with one hand at all times. But boy, did she talk. “I know; it’s all basic term paper stuff. Is the so-called ‘black goat of the woods’ a separate figure from Shub-Niggurath or not?”
Walt shoved some old monochrome computer monitors out of the aisle he was making and leaned in close to Lenore, just so that she could see his eyes roll. “C’mon,” he said. “Nobody knows. That’s why it’s a term paper topic—you can argue pro or con, and everyone knows the arguments and rejoinders and whatnot. It’s a religious argument, not a real research question at this point. Not for undergrads, anyway. Wilmarth couldn’t comprehend what he got on wax, so I can’t imagine what sort of research you have planned to find out… eighty years later.”